I sat there shocked for a moment. Was that really it? We were selling our young men, sending them off to die, to “keep the economy going”? I felt my whole world suddenly turning upside-down. Then everything I had believed was, indeed, an enormous lie.
And so I rebelled. In seventh grade my rebellion became too much for even Michael to accompany. I joined an eighth grade group of Southern hoodlums who combed their hair back “greaser” style, wore the collars of their shirts turned up, taps on their shoes, and smoked Marlboros out behind the bathrooms. I did all that in perfect imitation, following them the next year into eighth grade where I was able to sit in the same classes with most of them who had, fittingly, failed the grade.
But already, unbeknownst to me, another path of rebellion was opening in the great world beyond my own little Cherryvale. With the magic of television, the big cultural changes of the moment were coming, even to Sumter, South Carolina. The Beatles were the major point of departure in the culture, although it would be a couple more years before we fully grasped what we had departed into. The counterculture that had been seething in the subterranean realm of the collective unconscious of the US was preparing to explode into public view with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Randy Gossett was another friend who lived down the road from me. Together we’d started smoking cigarettes and drinking on the weekends. Randy’s older brothers, Gary and Jeff, were beginning to listen to strange music and wear odd clothes and grow their hair over their ears. Jeff, the oldest, one night ended up in the hospital for from a strange new drug known as “LSD.” It was the first known incident of such a thing in Sumter County, and Sherriff Byrd Parnell, a reputed member of the KKK and future president of the National Sheriffs’ Association (1973–1974), and his entire force decided they were going to have to watch the Gossett boys, including Randy who was, at that time, passing through his second year in the sixth grade and waiting on his “social promotion” to seventh.
I was in the eighth grade and at school I found a copy of Life magazine dedicated to a strange group of people in California called “hippies” who believed in free love and took LSD and other drugs. Gary Gossett, the middle brother, began wearing blue tinted glasses and playing drums in a rock band that Jeff had named “White Light.” Unlike the numerous local Motown covers bands (most of them named “The Tempests” or something like that) White Light played psychedelic music. Gary drove the school bus and seemed to manage to live in both the straight and hippie worlds quite well, but Jeff was another matter.
Jeff, I knew, “knew.” Jeff didn’t fit, by any stretch of the imagination, in the “straight” world. He was a “head”; his hair was growing longer and longer, and he wore a leather fringe jacket, and he became my hero. That presented a real problem for my father because Jeff was not only a hippie, and a drug user, but my very perceptive father was also quite clear that Jeff was not “straight” in another way: he was a homosexual.
One day a friend a couple years older than me invited me into his garage. He had something he wanted to tell me about. We went into the garage and he looked around to make sure we were alone. Then he put on a record. It was Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women.” I’d never heard Bob Dylan before, and I didn’t much care for the song. Then he pulled out a bag and asked me if I’d ever sniffed paint. I shook my head. He pulled a can of spray paint off the shelf, sprayed into the bag, then covered his face with the bag and began breathing deeply. Soon his eyes glazed over and he handed me the bag. I took a few deep breaths and then my head began buzzing and the music changed and I remember very little else, except that I liked it. This incident led to a small group of us, Randy, his friend Chuck, and one or two others, gathering in the woods near our old fort so we could sniff glue, or glue and lighter fluid.
Fortunately, this was a “stage” most of us passed through quickly, although one of the gang stayed there a little too long and became a rather demented character that eventually had to be withdrawn from seventh grade.
Soon our little gang was raiding the parents’ liquor and medicine cabinets, the latter containing a wealth of inconceivably diverse treasures as only exist in military families, since military doctors were renowned above all others for their free dispensing of prescriptions.
We were a ragtag bunch, although Michael had a definite style, perhaps due to his earlier long sojourn among Martians and his work with his father. Through his father’s antique business he managed to pull together a consummate wardrobe of a top hat, a tuxedo and a cane. He would often be seen in this outfit, wearing blue or black jeans, and tennis shoes, or just going barefoot. But he was the exception. The rest of us dressed in some hippie fashion that was more down at the heels, and we thus earned the disdain and opprobrium of the culture we rejected, which in this case was the good folks of Sumter.
The young Southern gentry of Sumter called us “Shaw Trash” and we called them “Grits.” They dressed in tasseled loafers, dress pants, double-stitched shirts with button down collars and London Fogs and wore their hair short, or in bangs, discreetly cut in a perfectly straight line above the eyebrows. They cruised the streets of Sumter in their Mustangs, listening to Motown, but hating blacks and always looking for someone to beat up on.
We lived up to our names, wearing long hair, patched faded and holey blue jeans and often going barefoot or, when the sand was too hot, in tennis shoes. We listened to Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Steppenwolf, and anything rock, and believed in peace and unity of all people. They drank beer and liquor; we smoked pot and took LSD. To them we were the reincarnation of the Yankee Army, and to us, they were redneck racists. Perhaps both sides were right.
I suspect that Project MK Ultra was responsible for the fact that so much LSD was floating around Shaw Air Base, and I took as much of it as I could, sometimes for days on end. I know for a fact that our little group was under surveillance because I saw the men in the black Galaxy 500 wearing black suits and dark sunglasses who would often show up at the Piggly Wiggly where we congregated. They would sit there, taking notes, and occasionally taking photos. Once I had a bad LSD trip and was picked up walking through the base and taken into the Air Police (AP) station for questioning. A man who identified himself as being from the Office of Strategic Intelligence came in during the interrogation and he described to me everything I’d done that day, down to conversations I’d had.
And the more drugs I took, the crazier I naturally got. Those days, my father would later tell me, he slept with a pistol under his pillow, wondering when or if he might need it to protect himself from me. At some point in the middle of these insane few years, I suspect just to be able to sleep again, my father brought home a storage shed he’d bought from Shaw Air Force Base surplus, and put it in the backyard. He told me he didn’t want me living in the house, but he was willing to continue feeding me, as he was legally obligated to do, as long as I lived in the shed.
I didn’t take the offer amiss: I was quite happy since now, at the age of sixteen, I would have my own space to take whatever drugs came my way and quietly travel astral planes in the safety of my military surplus shed. My friends and I named my shed “The Time Machine” and I decorated it with a black light and posters that Randy drew for the space. Randy, Michael, and I spent our evenings there, drinking or using drugs and listening to music. I remember one night in particular we listened to the title cut of Steppenwolf’s new album, Monster, over and over. The song explained all US history and its beautiful chorus to this day brings tears to my eyes: “America, where are you now? Don’t you care about your sons and daughters? Don’t you know, we need you now; we can’t fight alone against the Monster.”
But I knew my search was coming to an end as I found myself veering closer to self-destruction than I’d ever been before. My life was disintegrating and I felt lost, confused, and out of control. My father was going through his own crisis and in 1970 he bought a farm in Oklahoma and within a few months we moved back to the community he’d grown up in. But before we moved back to Oklahoma I had an experience that changed my life.