In case you are interested in reading it..............
I decided that since you had sent such a nice long reply I would fill you in on all the details! So this will be rather long, but I hope at east, interesting. I believe the last time I saw you I was sick in Seattle, and I wasn't very good company so I will start at that point, I believe 1971 or '72. I will try to spare you too much detail. Wow, I still can't believe how long it has been.................
THE 'LONGHAIRED'-BACK-TO-NATURE-WANDERING YEARS....
I met my first love, Carol in OKC and after awhile we started living together. I think you spent the night in her house once and came by and saw me with Cathy when we were living together in Seattle once too. I believe that was the last time I saw you.
At the age of 19, I thought the world was passing me by! I wanted to do everything and experience it all. It is sometimes hard to think back when you were a youth. We do silly stupid things sometimes.
I lived in Seattle for awhile, played around alot and had bought some property north of Spokane and eventually planned moving there. Yes I had tried to make it as a musician/songwritier with a band I was with but there was just no money in it at all. I had bought the property with my first business, making incense, and it was only 20 or maybe 40 acres. I eventually, did move there discovering that Seattle's dampness was giving me chronic bronchitis.
I made a living there growing pot and working in the woods cutting down trees for lumber. Didn't do too bad for those days. I didn't have to have a real job so to speak. There I learned how to hunt, backpack, camp in the winter, build a log cabin, dig wells, met some native americans that taught me lots of interesting, weird, mystical things, and avoided getting busted and how it ultimately was too much work!. A bunch of us lived communally and shared everything.
All the 'hippie' experiences you have ever been horrified in hearing, I probably lived at one time or another. The only exception was that I didn't end up dead from a drug overdose[was never that crazy!]. The main drugs I did do were pot, mushrooms, and peyote. For the most part I left the rest of it alone. I was into the 'spiritual' aspects of it. So I spent several years growing pot, getting stoned, and being with whichever sweet lady would have me. Looking back at those years, seems like another person in many ways. Too many adventures during those years but the 'best' was yet to come.
During that time I bounced back between the NW and Ok. spending one winter living in a '54 Ford station wagon on the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean on the Olympic Peninsula. If I remember I was rather bummed out during that winter and I said 'NO MORE' and left Washington state for good. I sold my property to a friend and headed back to OK. and ended up in Norman. and later OK City, in 1973.
There I got a job working in a factory for 12 hours a day and I saved up alot of and learned how to be a mechanic and bought my first vehicle--YES a Volkswagen bus!. Then the 'energy crisis' hit.
Remember that?
In '73 I was tired of working in a factory, and decided to discover America. So me and a friend, John Langford, started hitchiking all over Western US. During my off time working at the factory, He taught me falconry. We trapped and trained a couple of prairie falcons one year and let them go in the Spring.
Not long after that me and him took off across America with our thumbs out on a trip of discovery. I was reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and Dharma Bums, and Mexico City Blues at the time, as you can imagine. Our destination at the time was the Cypress Hills Provencial Park in Alberta, CA. That was the place where Sitting Bull went when he ran from the American Gov't. Geez , it was a
beautiful place. Along the way, we went to the Calgary Stampede. The two years I hitchhiked across the western US, I kept a journal. I occaisionally get that out and read it. It is something to read that is in thing for certain. ....a young man on an adventure......
I ended up staying with the people I had sold my property to when that winter started moving in and stayed again in Spokane that fall. Eventaully, I ended up with a friend and his wife in Seattle. We started a business, insulating houses. Made tons of money and I blew it all eventually. That was a strange period in my life. I got involved with his wife, she got pregnant with his kid, and it got real crazy, I sold my part of the business and again moved back to Oklahoma. It was fun while it lasted.
It was the early spring of 75 and I stayed with a friend whose wife was a call girl and owned a brothel and he didn't have to work at all, she made 1000's of dollars a week. He was/is the oldest friend I have, Larry Turner. He didn't have to work at all, we could buy anything we wanted and go anywhere we wanted. So we sat around all day listening to music, reading, sleeping and eating! hahahaha.
But it was during that time that I decided that I wanted more out of life and decided to go to college. So with the money I had from the business, I knew I could put myself through college, so I decided that I would get a degree from OU. In the fall of 1975, I began my 'college' journey.
A HOUSE ON A HILL......
I received a scholarship to go to college so I really only had to pay for my first year. The first semester I met my ex in English Lit. class. She had flaming orange-red hair and was well built. It was a hot and torrid romance during most of my college years. She was one wild lady, a very notty girl indeed.. Describing THAT relationship would take a book! Looking back on it, I should have thought twice about marrying her! Oh well! fools rush in, where wise men fear to tread.!
My father died at the age of 56 in 1977 of a heart attack. Dropped dead before he hit the floor. We had become great friends and we had reconciled all our differences. His biggest dream was for me
to be in college and to get a degree. I was on the honor roll every semester and it got printed in the paper in Enid so he was very proud of me I wish he had lived long enough to see me graduate... my biggest regret in life.
Me and Eve moved in together after our first year in college. After my dad died, we got a chance to move onto a brood mare ranch outside of Norman, OK. Actually, I think the 'brood mare' was Eve but I didn't quite realize it at the time. Dumb me! Lots of stories there too!
The deal was that we would run the ranch and get free rent. Since I am allergic to horses, I mended fences, did lawn work, cleaned horse stalls, and dog runs and was a general fix-it man and I still went full time to school and made straight A's.!
During this time the friend that I hitchhiked with moved to the most wonderful place I have ever lived and eventually ended up living there much later... Alpine, TX. He worked at the Chihuahuan
Desert Research Institute. That summer Eve and I took off to visit him and to go to Chiapas, MX and get some falcons to stock the Aplomado falcon breeding project at the institute. Well, we ended up for the next couple of years making a monthly trip to Chiapas and started smuggling birds back to the US.! Geez .... the things you do when you are young and stupid. Again, those trips are a book in themselves and needless to say, my bird smuggling days were short-lived. We made decent money at it too. Bought our books for the next year each year we did that. We moved back into town our senior year.
Finally, in the Spring of '79 ...My mom got married to the love of her life, a wonderful man and then six months later he had the forshadowing of a stroke in the making. The Dr.s told him he could go ahead and have the stroke or they could operate and he could live, but that he would have mild effects similar to having a stroke. He chose the operation but he was never the same after that. She cared for him and loved him dearly until he died in 1991. She had met him in Monterrey CA where she lived for a time. But moved back to Enid in the late 80's.
Eve and got married in Dec of '78 in Henrietta OK. Just drove down and did it. What a hoot too! Ugh! if ya only knew! That following spring of '79 we graduated. What next? What do I do now?
... GET YOUR KICKS ON ROUTE 66! ...
i graduated with a degree in Geography and one in Human Relations [ I went to school year round , took LOTS of classes ]. And I was married to an uncontrolable but fun wife. We thought about joining the peace corp but they wanted us to go to South Africa to help relocate blacks to the homelands and townships. No way!
So Eve wanted to go hitchiking for crying out loud! I said ' no way' and she quickly pointed out that if I didn't go with her she would go by herself. I couldn't do that so, we made preparations for spending the summer hitchiking. The ultimate destination was Seattle WA. to visit my friend Larry. We kept a journal but when we divorced she took that so unfortanately I don't have a copy of it. At any rate that was one wild summer and she was getting wilder! Unbelievable.
We returned to stay with her her crazy family for awhile and tried to decide what to do next. We decided to move to Albuquerque NM and see what we could do there. So off we went ... another
adventure. Our plan was for both of us to look for work and the first one that got a job, would give the other one the opportunity to look for their career job. Well, my first job was an adult bookstore
owned by the mafia! It didnt last long though and we both got jobs as therapists working with emotionally disturbed adolescents. It was an interesting job but it burned Eve out and she quit and started working for a TV station.
Remember Bobby Steele? Him and his second wife moved to Albuquerque at this time and while they were there THEY got a divorce, she being every bit as wild as Eve.
Anyway, Robert was drinking very heavily and was seeing a friend destroying himself, So Eve and I invited him to move in with us. At least we could then keep an eye on him! I was working a graveyard shift and I started noticing as I was came home that my bed hadn't been slept in but that his bedroom looked like it had an orgy in there! So I decided to cut my loses and moved out.
I soon got a girlfriend that was a friend for a couple of years. I told her "I am gonna drink for six months and on this date, if I haven't stopped I want you to throw me into a treatment center." Well she didn't have to do that and I had quit drinking before the six months were up.
I would drink cognac every night and write in a journal I still have. I worked 3 jobs, two during the day and one on weekends. One night that I will never forget, I was watching Monday night football, drinking cognac and writing endlessly in my journal. Howard Cosell came on and announced John Lennon's assasination. I knew then I was no longer a kid anymore. I suppose that hits us all at some point, Lennon's death was that point with me, it was and end of an era.
...OOOH MAMA, CAN THIS REALLY BE THE END TO BE STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE WITH THE MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN.........
About that same time, 1981, I woke up one morining and drove to work and kept driving. That led me to quit all my jobs and to move West Texas, the most lovely place in the world. It is also one of the most remote places in the lower 48...I liked that. Mountains all around and the desert only a hundred miles away. The most mysterious place I have ever lived. It is a place to go to if you don't want anyone to easily find you.
Here I became deputy administrator of a residential treatment facility for emotionally disturbed adolescents. I became a licensed child care administrator. What a trip. You know the type of kid, kids with really messed up lives abused thrown out. There is a university there Sul Ross State University. I also learned accounting while there. I eventually got burned out on that job. It was a sea of kids so messed up you wouldn't believe. The problem was I could see what was coming and could not do much about it. But I did the best I could for those kids and for the most part it was very rewarding and quite an adventure as well. It was here I met some really wild ladies, one of which was VERY interesting.
I called her 'habanera loco', crazy havanan. She was from Havana Cuba. She was fifteen years older than me and worked as a counselor where I worked. We got together one night at a party and that started quite a torrid affair as well. She was crazy but it had been quite awhile since I had a lover and she was wonderful. She had quite a life.
As a young girl she married quite young and 3 months after she got married her husband was in a car wreck and go killed. She left the country side of Cuba and moved to Havana. There she learned to dance and became a show girl at the famous Copacabana night club.
A man out in the crowd saw her and only her one night and decided that she was it. He asked her to marry him and she did. He was the ambassador to Cuba from Mexico and had lots of money. He covered her with riches. This was 1959.
Bautista was the president but shortly after her husband and her were married, Castro came into power. She and her husband were invited to a dinner with him one night in which, Castro proposed to her hubby that he defect to Cuba and be the ambassador to China. Her husband was half Chinese and knew the Chinese language. He declined and they left the next day.
She discovered that she was to become just a 'show wife' as he was queer as a football bat! He needed a pretty wife for dinners and parties for emmisaries of foreign countries. They were stationed in France, and China and finally the United States. She got to do what ever she wanted. He always lived in one wing of the embassy and she in the other. She would take trips all over the world and became quite a party girl. Long nights on the beaches, orgies, you name it!
In China she received many beautiful gifts. The most amazing gifts were the chinese furniture she had and the antique vases. She had also accumulated quite a closet full of furs that me and her would spread out on the floor of her house and have fun on.
Finally, he got to beating her and she said no more. They were stationed in California. She decided to stay in the states. She worked as a waitress in resturaunt and there she met Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assasinated Robert Kennedy. She married again to an entreprenuer in Salt Lake and made a fortune. They divorced eventually and she move to Marfa Texas and that is where I met her.
I couldn't handle her either and we only lasted about 6 months. I met another red head [ I must have a thing for redheads ! ] in 1983 and we lived together quite a number of years. We almost got married here in El Paso but it was not to be.
By this time I had a nice house up in the remote mountains outside Fort Davis, TX. At night you could here the cougars and see an endless stream of stars off the porch. Going to and from work was a trip. It was so desolate you could fall asleep at the wheel driving home from work, and not worry about hitting anything. I mean anything, no fences, no cars , maybe cattle if you were unlucky.
They wanted me to go to Fort Worth and open up another facility and run it. Well, I wrote the grant, got the money purchased a facility, and hated Fort Worth, TX. I lasted the summer and that and politics made me decide to quit and move to where I live today-El Paso, in 1985. I sure miss Alpine and would move there in a minute. This period in my life was ho-hum and my wild days were coming to an end somewhat. Long gone [ thank gawd ] were those hippie days. I now longer did anything stronger than an occaisional beer.
"....WHEN YOU ARE LOST IN JUAREZ, IN THE RAIN, AND IT'S EASTER TIME TOO..."