Читать книгу Hollywood to Vienna - Donald Ellis Rothenberg - Страница 14

Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where I was born, is now owned by Scientologists, and the Hari Krishna people used to have a place in Culver City where we went to get free dinners. O.J. Simpson used to play volleyball on the beach in Venice, right in front of where we lived. We had a place right on the beach, before the bike path made it chic and then became somewhat grungy. Gypsy Boots used to work out in front of the house, and the bikers used to have fights around at the corner bar. Running on the sand, the waves lapping at the feet in the early seventies. It was hip, you know what I mean? There were the jazz and Beat poetry hangouts down there, also. This Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, changed the frontiers of consciousness, altering our conscious states forever. Of course, psilocybin mushrooms have about the same chemical makeup as acid, I hear. It’s really been going on for thousands of years.

We used to throw oranges and eggs, and whatever, at cars, when we were first young teenage pseudo-punks. We even made dummies that looked like real people and had them run-over, or fall off of ladders, with the recorded sounds of real people screaming in alarm when cars screeched to a halt. One mother thought we were carrying away her son in the market. This was innocent fun, wasn’t it? One night, in West Hollywood, L.A., which is now mostly gay, I drove my white ’68 Chevrolet convertible with the red leather interior up onto the train tracks and got stuck, in the middle of Santa Monica Blvd. How embarrassing! I was trying to impress my buddies.

One late August night, Jimmy, Sue, and I decided we would rob this Seven Eleven of some candy and Seven-Up. We had planned to distract the cashier, and since it was so bright inside at night and no one was around, we decided to make some noise and start laughing and pretend to tell a joke, a Polish joke or a Jewish joke or some ethnic joke. And then we were too loud, and the manager started to get upset and asked us to leave, so we didn’t get a chance to take any bubble gum or Mars bars or M&M’s, or anything, maybe a Three Musketeers. We ran out of there and hopped onto our Flexi’s and didn’t stop till we were home. We climbed up into our treehouse the next day and had some potato chips up there, looking out onto the neighborhood below. We were only thirteen and exploring the excitement and limits of life, ever so innocently. It was after the war, the Eisenhower fifties, living the good life, trying to “keep up with the Joneses.”