From the Archives: California Dreamin’, Part II

Goodbye and Hello

Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider.” Photo: Columbia Pictures / 1969

And I wave goodbye to America
And smile hello to the world

Read part 1, “Why Don’t We Sing This Song All Together,” here:

California Dreamin’ [From the Archives]

Many songs evoke the counterculture 60s, famously for those who’ve learned of the era through historical lore, more personally for those who lived through them. For me, even as I was relishing and surviving those years, none captured their sweet promise and foolish bluster more poignantly than Tim Buckley and Larry Becket’s Goodbye and Hello, with its marriage of folk lyricism to Kurt Weill, Weimar theatricality.

O the new children dance ------ I am young
All around the balloons ------ I will live
Swaying by chance ------ I am strong
To the breeze from the moon ------ I can give
Painting the sky ------ You the strange
With the colors of sun ------ Seed of day
Freely they fly ------ Feel the change
As all become one ------ Know the Way Know the Way

Did Arnie and I feel like new children seated in the dirt listening to Blind Faith among the thousands crowded into the middle of a small outdoor stadium in Santa Barbara? Probably not. We did have strong political views. In the spring of 1968, I had canvassed the brownstones of Washington Square in Manhattan for Bobby Kennedy, then listened on my transistor-radio ear-jack all through classes at Far Rockaway High School the day after the California primary, anxious for news from the hospital that he was still alive after the shooting the night before. Stood in line for six hours days later at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to view his casket before I was later strong-armed out of a Nixon campaign event at Madison Square Garden. But Arnie’s and my reputations, such as they were, as of most of our close friends, were as pot and acid heads, diggers of our own trips, not serious politicos out to forge a new world for everyone else. We were riding the wave for all it was worth, ten toes hung from the lip — we weren’t devoted to making the waves themselves, and I’d sensed a slight undercurrent of grumbling when I was named to the Far Rockaway High School mobilization committee against the Vietnam War.

Back across the country at Woodstock at that moment, the historical record tells us, young people were feeling like new children. But Arnie and I didn’t know about that yet.

What this evening in Santa Barbara meant to us was a second chance to see Blind Faith, just after Madison Square Garden in New York the month before. We didn’t know then it was the only tour the rock super group, formed from members of the dissolved bands Cream and Traffic, would ever do before its own early dissolution. For Arnie especially, who had introduced me to the amplified, bluesy pleasures of Cream, to hear Clapton and Ginger Baker live yet again was a grand reward for the effort of getting there. So, certainly, we were in our hazy drug-rocked groove when from out of the crowd of blankets and coolers and swaying hairy flower bodies wandered a pretty teenage girl, blonde and lithe and completely naked, who proceeded woozily to drop directly into both our laps.

Pretty naked blonde girl was clearly tripping on acid. It didn’t seem a bad trip, but she was completely gone — incoherent, if happy enough, and unconscious of any intention or volition. Amid laughter all about us at our predicament, Arnie and I, neither predators nor parents, searched and called around but couldn’t locate anyone to own and take the girl off our hands. No one ever arrived in search of her. Our nearest neighbors sympathetically offered a few pieces of clothing and a blanket to cover the girl, but they didn’t offer to share responsibility for her, so we two boy-teens watched the remainder of the concert with our childlike, girl-teen and charge lolling dopily in our laps. When the show was over, the ritual rock transport having reached its destination deep into the evening, any figures of authority to assume custody were as typically absent from the scene as a sense of order. Bound for good times though we were, we were stuck with the care of a virtual child.

As it happened, Santa Barbara was one of only two occasions we shelled out dear funds for a motel room, so we walked the girl back with us, a long way. We placed her in the bed that would have been ours to share and rolled out our sleeping bags on the floor at its feet. We slept the sleep of drugged out, wasted new-children-in-waiting.

In the morning, the three of us slowly come awake, our nameless girl was coherent again, and reasonably disoriented. No doubt she told us her name then, though I don’t remember it. I’m sure, though, that she remembers ours. When we asked what her night of sleep had been like, she said it had been all right – except for one recurring nightmare: that she was destined to spend all of eternity in a motel room with two guys named Arnie.

Once up and around, there wasn’t any reason to linger, and she had explaining to her parents to do, so it was time to get her home and continue our odyssey up the coast. We packed up and headed out to catch a ride, which we did, in a local funeral home hearse. (The driver had some dead time.) We dropped Santa Barbara girl about a block from her home and caught another ride for ourselves.

The antique people are down in the dungeons
Run by machines and afraid of the tax

Their heads in the grave and their hands on their eyes
Hauling their hearts around circular tracks
Pretending forever their masquerade towers
Are not really riddled with widening cracks

We took that second motel room on the San Simeon coast, for our visit to Hearst Castle, then followed word of mouth to crash the next night in a densely wooded Big Sur forestland. Word of mouth had reached the forest rangers too, though, so, as warned, we were rousted at 5 a.m. along with our brief companions and sent scurrying. We bore no ill will. It is a law of human development and social arrangement that if you are young and adventurous, with disobedience to the rules the draft brew of every escapade, emissaries from the masquerade towers will rise up obstacles before you, like figures to be shot down in a video game. It’s just part of the adventure.

We landed in San Francisco off a bus from Monterey, when another newspaper drawn from a vending machine offered our first image of what was going on and coming down in the mud of Woodstock, where we knew Jerry and other friends to have headed.

But the ultimate destination of our trip had always been Berkeley, by that time, a cauldron of youthful intellectual challenge and social change for nearly a decade. Though Arnie and I were too young for Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement to be recalled as anything other than hallowed history, the People’s Park protests, with National Guard troops in the streets, had roiled the city only months before. That was the tumultuous atmosphere into which we arrived. However, Arnie and I weren’t bound for Berkeley on any political mission. We carried with us that pencil-scrawled “letter of introduction” on copy paper directing its recipients to provide these two young New Yorkers with “refreshments for the mind,” by which was meant Purple Owsley, Orange Sunshine or any potent facsimile. Jerry had scratched it out after his own trip to Berkeley a few months before us. He’d returned to New York with a thousand does of LSD to sell. That plan went as well as most of Jerry’s commercial schemes, which in this case failed on account of his consuming much of the acid himself, while generously dropping the remainder of the doses into friends’ mouths for free – probably the last of it at Woodstock.

Arnie and I crashed for nearly two weeks in a Berkeley student dorm, the same in which Jerry had stayed and left behind his literal fat cat, Herman, born in Rockaway Beach and now permanently high from the ambient pot smoke. We searched out our acid contact and after some misdirection, found him. We took in the proclamatory bombast of Sproul Plaza’s political debates. We wandered Telegraph Avenue, which, absent the Sunset Strip’s Hollywood rocker glitz, was ungoverned by a more politically committed street and drug culture, downer, dirtier, more raw, more dangerous to mental and physical health. We saw Jeff some, but he was busy cruising the avenue for chicks, taking them back to his hotel room, and coming down with the crabs. Younger brother and friend pursued in contrast the more intellectual and spiritual liberations of lysergic acid diethylamide.

One particular afternoon, we dropped our doses just before searching the halls of an instructional building for a bathroom in which to do our business. I was sitting in a stall when I spied for the first, or maybe only most memorable time, scratched into its painted metal wall the now infamously proud and affrontive confession, “We are the people our parents warned us against.” I contemplated this profundity from my perch on the pot while turning attention to my hands, the pulsing colors of whose veins and the skeletal structure of which I now noted I could see through my skin. Oh, I thought suddenly, the acid has come on. What a day it would be.

We wandered through the Berkely campus in divine reception of embodied transmissions. With our heightened perceptual clarity and intensified sensuous acuity, the transcendent wonder of the physical world, with the connective relation of one thing to another, and one’s own inseparable immersion in it all, were once again revealed to us in all their simplicity and splendor. Coming upon a sloping triangle of grass that banked on a brook running beneath a small stone bridge, we dropped down and sat there in the warmth of a brilliant and benevolent sun. Soon, we were observing – both of us together, as if a single eye – a very handsome, lean young man, older than we, in blue bell-bottom jeans and a long-sleeved, collarless polo shirt of broad blue and white horizonal stripes. With his long straight black hair falling straight to his shoulders around his black, closely groomed beard, he looked like a kind of pirate, and the handsome young pirate amused himself playing on the lawn with a black puppy, who repeatedly ran for and retrieved a stick which he then would hold determinedly, in his fierce little refusal, against the pirate’s gentle efforts to withdraw it. They romped thus playfully over the grass, as behind them a young female, as if posed, sat atop the slope with her fine blonde hair lightly lifting in the breeze, like so many sails catching the beams of the sun playing lightly in our eyes and lifting us beyond the bounds of ourselves. The three figures, striking young male, lovely female, perfect puppy, were married in our sight.

By Georges Seurat

Arnie and I sat transfixed. It was our own Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and we had painted it together.

O the new children buy ------ I am young
All the world for a song ------ I will live
Without a dime ------ I am strong
To which they belong ------ I can give
Nobody owns ------ You the strange
Anything anywhere ------ Seed of day
Everyone's grown ------ Feel the change
Up so big they can share ------ Know the Way

The end of our odyssey approaching, we two New York teens made a couple of day trips to San Francisco to see its sights, and we walked the city for miles. Since I had worked for a while, courtesy of Jerry, as an usher at the Fillmore East in New York’s East Village, and we had both seen many shows there, we journeyed to the city’s oceanside to get a glimpse of the Fillmore West. On the final full day of our stay, we walked the length of Golden Gate Park.

For me, as much as our California adventure had been a journey, in the words of James Joyce, “to encounter the reality of experience,” it was also a flight from heartbreak. The previous winter, months before my seventeenth birthday, I had fallen in love, for the first time, with an exceedingly precocious, but complex and indecipherable girl who had seemed as enchanted with me as I had been beguiled by her. I could, however, never make sense of what she wanted, if she wanted anything at all, and after much bewilderment and yearning, I’d had to accept an inexplicable loss. But the grief of it was deep and lingered a long time. That last day, in Golden Gate Park, I tried to overcome it.

Via Golden Gate Park

On entering the park, Arnie and I dropped capsules of THC, the active ingredient of cannabis. It came on quickly, providing its usual light and buoyant high, and we floated through the park on feet like balloons. Soon, in our meandering, we entered a large meadow. Across the length of it, a group of young men and women were playing frisbee. It was a lovely, carefree sight and we sank from our airy perambulation down to the grass to enjoy the scene. After a time, my eyes wandered up into the deepness of the blue sky, and it was then and there that I saw it. In the depths of the blue, I saw before me the openness of the rest of my life. I saw beyond loss and the limitations of youth. Yes, I told myself, I had experienced this grief, but I had the rest — very nearly all — of my life to come. So much possibility. So much opportunity for fulfillment. It was all there waiting for me. My heart leaped with joy. It leaped not so much to imagine the joy, but to recognize rather that I could not imagine it. It was unforetold and unforeseeable, and not already written in a single heartbreak. It hardly mattered what artificial stimulus had helped this moment, with its understanding, to arrive. It had arrived. How many young men and women in the life of this world have had such a moment, staring into the horizon, of their singular, open, and unknowable futures?

We arrived back in New York more mundanely.

Arnie and I were so sick of each other’s company, and the daily irritations of it, that we didn’t speak to each other for a month. Even during a subsequent acid trip with a score of other teens, in the dark of a basement apartment, listening in almost religious, uninterrupted silence to the chords and choruses of the Who’s Tommy, we barely acknowledged the other’s presence. By then, too, the lore of Woodstock already had been written, of Buckley and Beckett’s “new children” who “are so proud to learn,” but who also, alas, “can’t …Tell a foe from a friend.” Then, in December, at the Rolling Stone’s infamous Altamont, California concert, the Hell’s Angel’s were foolishly employed as “security,” which led to a murder at the foot of the stage, and a new, facile script was written, of how Altamont killed Woodstock, as if Charles Manson, with all that had enabled him, even before Woodstock, had never done his work.

Before that happened, though, by October, Arnie and I had overcome our mutual fatigue of one another and were happily friends again. We were together with Jerry and a few scores of others one Saturday night — the day I took my SATs for college, in fact — at a huge party in the home of some friends’ vacationing parents, when I freaked out on acid.

When I arrived in the emergency room of Peninsula General Hospital, in Rockaway Beach, New York, strapped to a gurney and soaked in my own urine, the doctors there agreed with the 20 remaining partygoers arrested with me that it was the worst bad trip on LSD they had seen in all the 60s drug years.

I had struggled for about an hour by myself to maintain control over a trip that came on lighting fast and that I later likened to a space vehicle re-entering the atmosphere at too shallow an angle and bouncing off it. The acid just hit me the wrong way. My brain hurt. Everything was weirding me out. On the porch of the house, I finally acknowledged to Arnie and Jerry that I wasn’t doing well, and they quickly led me, along with the home’s teen host, to a bedroom on the top floor and tried calmly to talk me down. At one point, the frightened child to which I was regressing asked for his mother and father, his sister and brother. I tried to be better. When I said that I was, I was okay now, I was, they walked me downstairs to the first floor living room to rejoin everyone. By the time I got there, taking those last steps off the wooden stairway onto the carpeted floor, my conscious mind had slipped from me, along with my self-control, and I had entered an hours-long nightmare of terror and extinction.

Amid my cries and wild flailing, I had to be held down on the sofa among the many partiers coming and going. The well-intentioned companions around me attempted to feed me the sedatives I fearfully refused as the vitamin pills I had been too scared to swallow as a little boy. In that way, I proceeded to relive the greater and lesser fears of my childhood, in vivid, virtual reality, projected onto those surrounding me, who I often took for people other than they were and even as symbolic objects. I called the name of the love that I had lost. I spewed the language of the astrophysics I’d been studying, including the cosmic Big Bang then theorized as possible, as well as its almost Nietzschean “eternal return,” gravitational fallback and Big Crunch. I experienced, actually, mentally, that self-same physical contraction of the universe, in the conjectured reversal of time and space back upon itself, and the further regression of that contraction now enveloping and closing around my own body, which proceeded, horrifically, to devolve to its fetal and then embryonic form, until I, and the universe around me, diminished together into a dark knot, spot, dot of nothingness.

When I came too on the gurney in the emergency room, with my brother beside me – emissary from my parents to a world too foreign to them for travel – I said, glancing back from my stomach to his comforting hand on my shoulder, as Peter Fonda had in Easy Rider, “I blew it.” I was escorted, after, by patrol car and companion cops, into New York’s 101^st Police Precinct, where the remaining partygoers arrested with me waited in a holding cell. Still soaked in sweat and pee, I was greeted by a chorus of “Alice’s Restaurant.” It was a good joke, my last for a long time.

O the new children kiss ------ I am young
They are so proud to learn ------ I will live
Womanhood bliss ------ I am strong
And the manfire that burns ------ I can give
Knowing no fear ------ You the strange
They take off their clothes ------ Seed of day
Honest and clear ------ Feel the change
As a river that flows ------ Know the Way Know the Way

What followed was a decade, on occasion, of near suicidal flashbacks and clinical depression and anxiety attacks, unacknowledged to any around me, on the street or in a subway car or among my friends, when I would struggle for self-possession against the fear that I was about to lose control of my mind. During that time, Jerry became a heroin addict, though he would finally enter treatment and overcome it, and even marry and raise three children. Arnie, who never dropped acid again after that night, also married. By that time, the flashbacks, first, then the anxiety attacks, would cease, and I would overcome the depression and truly begin my adult life, a life filled with contradictions.

But you have been wondering about the neutral B-meson particle.

I’ll tell you.

B-bar oscillations detected via their respective D meson and Pion decays as seen by the LHCb in 2021

According to the Standard Model of physics — the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics — the Big Bang should have produced matter and antimatter in equal amounts, which then would have annihilated each other, leading to, well, nothing. It was Russian physicist, anti-Soviet hero Andrei Sakharov who first theorized how it could be, nonetheless, that matter, in the earliest conditions just after the universe-creating cosmic explosion, might have come to predominate over antimatter. As it turns out, collisions of protons and antiprotons in the experimental miniature universe of Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator produce pairs of subatomic muons slightly more often than they do antimuons — about 1 percent, or less, of the time. This is because of the behavior of neutral B-mesons, which are famous in particle -physics-world for oscillating back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular, matter and antimatter states. Trillions of times a second, for reasons researchers have yet to uncover, this strange particle vacillates between matter and antimatter, thesis and antithesis, yes and no — and the nothing that is neither in equal balance.

To be or not be.

And one percent more often than not, the Big Bang Bodhisattva pauses on “to be.”

And we exist.

So it was that on August 4, 2019, leaving his wife in New Jersey and two healthy, grown, and successful children, Arnie flew to Los Angeles, where I have lived now for most of the past thirty-one years. I don’t spend much time on the Sunset Strip, but I have lived near the Pacific Coast Highway, and it still runs through me like a silk road. Arnie and I shared a Sunday evening dinner at home with my partner, Julia, who saw us off the next day as we loaded our bags into my car and headed out for one more journey together up the Pacific Coast Highway, this time with thumbs on the steering wheel. We gave, as we passed, a nod to the intersection of Chautauqua Boulevard and the PCH and aimed the car toward our first stop, Santa Barbara.

Over the years, we had ceased to recall where in the city Blind Faith had played, but I had discovered by the time of our trip that the site was the Earl Warren Showground, in the north of the city. We took a motel about a mile away, left our bags, and we walked.

It was the kind of white hot, unshaded sunny day one can experience in the high and low deserts and along the coast of California, and we walked in it, on quiet, near empty streets, with thoughtful anticipation.

The showground soon appeared on our right. Entering its grounds on a Monday, we found it inactive, void, it might have been, of life. We never saw another person. We walked uncertainly, immediately trying to recall anything that came into view. What we saw were some apparently administrative or operational buildings and a huge, empty parking lot to our left – nothing that looked like it would have been the site of our concert, which, I said to Arnie, I recalled not being entirely on open grounds, but in a small stadium. We saw none. We continued to walk, to our left, making our way around the largest building, when the shape of a small one-story stadium began slowly to reveal itself. That’s it, that must be it, that has to be it, we kept repeating to each other in muted excitement. We pulled out our smart phones to search for information even as we continued our approach. It was the Kramer Arena, constructed in 1957, and, indeed, had been the site of rock concerts throughout the 60’s, including, on August 16, 1969, that of Blind Faith.

We hadn’t actually anticipated anything so complete. The structure hardly looked improved upon since its early days. This was it. This was the arena, as it had taken us in that evening of youthful adventure and musical celebration so long ago.

We entered through the usual stadium passageway, advancing into a long rectangular funnel toward the open light. The stadium was empty. The central grounds were brightly sunlit. No one shared the space with us. There was the refuse of a recent event scattered over the floors and left on some seats, but otherwise, no life but our own. Though the arena was circled by grandstands, we had sat with a few thousand others in the middle of the field. Middle in every direction, we both agreed. There is where the stage must have been set up, we said. Who knew where the girl had come from.

We took some photos, walking and talking quietly, sharing our thoughts. Slowly, we made our way to the arena’s opposite end. We stopped there and stood in the deep silence of the afternoon and the surrounding stands. The stadium was ours. Beneath the brilliant California sun and the shadows of the eaves, Arnie sat and stared out at the center field, the field before us, the field of memory. I remained on my feet, at a concrete wall rising above one of the entrance ways through which streams of fans would have entered the small stadium for the much-anticipated night of music. I found on my phone a recording, on YouTube, of that night’s show – the very show – the space and time of the Kramer Arena on August 16, 1969 — with Blind Faith and two Arnies in it, dreaming of the future — tape recoded and digitally preserved in all their ambient reality. I chose the tune and placed the phone on the sloping ridge of the wall. We listened, just we two, as Steve Winwood sang,

Come down on your own and leave your body alone

Somebody must change

You are the reason I've been waiting all these years

Somebody holds the key

AJA

Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.

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