I crossed into New Mexico in late afternoon. Rain slapped the windshield, and the temperature dropped.  The late afternoon wind kept spitting rain in the cold as I entered Albuquerque.  I wanted dinner, a place to sleep, and a morning train to Santa Fe, place I visited before my stroke. I planned to stay for two nights, registered at the park, drove to my campsite and planned to browse the work of Navajo and Hopi artisans without my wife to question my purchases.

With Arizona behind me, the rearview mirror reflected a poorly shaved and toothless old man. I wore a ball cap embroidered with “Bite Me Bait” over sparse gray hair. I could groom myself better, but what was the point? I was traveling alone. My time in junior high poisoned my attitude toward fashion and popularity.  My wife cared about my appearance. She would have been embarrassed.  Without her on the ride, I cared little. For over 50 years, I dressed and groomed inoffensively.  Customer expectations needed satisfaction in order to pay bills and put children through college.  Wages and commissions never made me rich.  Financial speculation generated the wealth needed for this joyride. I acquired peculiar skills, made money in financial markets and quit taking risks when I no longer needed rewards.

The RV park’s sand and dirt lot was full.  Tumbleweeds blew beneath my trailer.  They impeded multiple attempts to level my rig on the uneven ground.  Relentless wind and dust left me belligerent. Frustrated, I walked to the park registrar and told her I was lopsided and wanted another space.  April and May were busy months, and no other spots were available.  I scrapped my plans for Santa Fe and canceled my second night’s reservation.

On my way to the park, I noticed the neon sign of an Indian casino and decided to have dinner there. Its parking lot was brightly lit, numbered lettered like a shopping mall.

Inside, a chaos of pings, sirens, and bells assaulted my senses.  Flashing lights danced across gamblers perched on stools,  slot machines and video poker screens. Players fed bills into the machines for the chance of spilled coins or a printed winning slips.  Rotating lights atop machines summoned attendants to validate jackpots. It was Saturday night.

A swarm of people waited in line outside the dining hall. The queue moved steady.  I didn’t wait long.  Buffet waiters wore  red jackets and black toreador pants.  They cleared dishes, wiped tables, and signaled to hostesses when tables were ready.  Chefs in white coats and tall hats stood at counters heaped with food spaced so that diners could shuffle through with empty plates, load them up,  and dine on piles of shrimp and roast beef. Gluttony demanded more than one plateful.  I ate fast and far too well.

Gaming tables and neon slots called to me, but I cancelled my second night in Albuquerque and needed to rethink my journey.  I found my way back to the park in the mid-April dark to the tilted bed of my cockeyed trailer.  I negotiated the parking lot without damage. I had ample room in a well-lit area. Tall bright lamps lit the way to entrances and exits. I needed the extra care. Parking lots and large areas full of cars are difficult for me. I have nightmares about losing my car and can get lost in a parking lot while sober.  Leaving one is a personal hazard.  Automobile culture demands competence which I have learned through experience.

An absurd instance of parking lot trouble happened when I was a junior enlisted, military intelligence interrogator stationed in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp.  I was stopped and reprimanded for improper driving by a random lieutenant. I drove a jeep too fast through the PX lot on a diagonal path across empty striped spaces rather than taking the longer slower drive between them to an exit.  I was in uniform, in a military vehicle and there during duty hours because a staff sergeant told me, “If you don’t have anything to do, don’t do it here.”  I was certified to drive military vehicles. Hell, the motor pool sergeant assigned me as the primary driver on a six-wheeled vehicle, a monster amphibious truck suitable for Georgia’s swampland.

The lieutenant waited for me to respond to his reprimand.  I said, “Yes, sir,” and spoke no more. That left him speechless.  The guardian of military protocol had me dead to rights:  I failed to follow the prescribed path and went sideways across empty spaces; my driving was hazardous.  His rank entitled him to be offended.  In his world, he was obliged to dress me down. My “Yes, sir” neither questioned his authority nor offered excuse.   I was married with children.  This was a foolish battle in which to engage so I said “Yes, sir,”to him and “fuck him” to myself.  He could do what he willed, and this time a warning was enough.

Lieutenants, captains, warrant officers, and sergeants were people in a job I could not quit. Demotion, punishment by fine, stockade time, or worse could be levied. I kowtowed daily during the absurdity of my army enlistment. I served as a Russian linguist, an interrogator attached to an infantry division, in a Georgia swamp. I spent days playing Russian Scrabble with a fellow Russian linguist. It was our pretense for “language maintenance.”

My misspent military years resulted from choices I made after I graduated college. As a college graduate, I worked for a weekly newspaper and quit after an impoverished year in a small town Alabama culture foreign to my world view.  As we  were between wars, I enlisted, went home to Virginia, stayed drunk for a month, then caught a flight from Richmond to Fort Ord, California. My basic training took an inordinate amount of time for me to adjust physically and mentally to the United States Army. I spent six weeks in a “Special Training Company” before I began basic training.  I completed that ordeal because I could not quit. My army enlistment lasted four years, longer than any previous employment. I spent over a year at Monterey’s Defense Language Institute and tasted a good life: drinking in saloons, strolling Cannery Row, and weekends in San Francisco. The Defense Language Institute included all branches of the U.S. military, civil service, and foreign allies as well.  My fellow language students were the brightest people I ever met. It was challenging to match wits with them in chess or compete with them for grades. Foreign nationals taught us language. Our first sergeant told us, “Don’t trust any of them.” His second order was, “If you get in trouble, shut the fuck up and call me.” He never told us wrong.

Time spent in Monterey made the military bearable. Career soldiers bounced back to language school for refresher courses or to learn a new language.  Attnending Monterey’s language school was almost a sabbatical reward for them.

However, such pleasurable cycles were not for me. Defense Department investigators found me untrustworthy. I failed the standards for a security clearance necessary to perform highly sensitive tasks.  Following the map of places lived and  jobs held,  investigators talked to people, found I wrote bad checks and published editorials at odds with established views.  I wronged people who denigrated my character and could not be trusted with information considered “Top Secret.”

If that was all they found, so be it. They missed behavior that I considered worse. I knew what I did and roughly when I did it. I kept much hidden and didn’t dispute what was found. The Department of Defense, however, had already expended vast sums on me, and as I was  more than midway through my Russian language courses.  Rather than write off the cost,  I was allowed to finish, achieved a Certificate of Completion, then trained to be a Russian linguist interrogator assigned to an infantry division in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, a place where my job did not jeopardize our national defense.

Failure to qualify for “Top Secret” security clearance was providential.  I hated separation from classmates with whom I bonded, but I spent additional months in Monterey auditing language classes without worrisome grades to achieve.  I was a graduate of sorts. My friends went to Texas and Europe for “top secret” assignments, and I stayed in Monterey with time to play.  I thought I’d tour Europe with my friends, but that was fantasy. I didn’t know anything about “the real army.”

Instead, I met, loved and married a woman in SantaCruz and moved to Georgia after my interrogator course at the Army Intelligence Center and School in Arizona.   The marriage included wife, children, and dogs. We lived in Georgia, added another child, and lost a dog before my discharge. Four years in the army taught me lessons. Threats of stockade, extra duty, demotion and fines guaranteed my silence and compliance with orders given to me regardless the absurdity.   Re enlistment, however, was not an option. When the time came for that talk with my company’s first sergeant, both of us agreed the army was not a good choice.

Drive-in theaters were like parking lots before population densities escalated real estate prices and turned them into more profitable enterprises.  They were cheap entertainment for dating teenagers and parents with children.  The stars aligned one August night at a Norfolk drive-in. It was the first anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival an “Woodstock, the Movie” was the featured presentation,

Mike was there on one of the many leaves the army granted him. Whenever he returned home, he lusted for his former life.  He hated military grooming.  His transformation from hippie to soldier would have been easier if he had abandoned us.  He excelled in basic training developing strength and posture that surpassed ours.  He aced his tank recovery specialty, but life with the ‘Big Red One’ in the Kansas wastelands was cruel departure from where he wanted to be.  He floundered in a caste system of ‘lifers’ with higher rank and draftees in uniform only because of the confused circumstances of the decade. Lifers commanded those who counted their days until discharge, and Mike was a draftee with an extra year because he chose to learn a skill rather than carry a rifle in Vietnam.  In Norfolk’s small hippie community, Mike had status.  He attended concerts, listened to the right music, marched in protests, got high whenever he wanted, went to fun bars and clubs.  He fit seamlessly into his trusted crowd–all of us united in paranoia because we used recreational drugs.

It was a weekend night for the Woodstock movie which guaranteed a crowd of hippies.  Mike, Rick, Scott, Carter—all of us flying on LSD—crammed into my Mustang.  Our Woodstock Nation was a utopia of peace, love, and psychedelic music. We arrived before dark. The lot was full. Cars, vans, vehicles of every sort tilted skyward on ramps tilted upward to the large outdoor screen that characterized drive-in parking.  We were staggered in ripples that flowed backward from the screen to the cinder block concession stand and bathrooms located in the middle of the lot.  We spread blankets and visited with friends. We were a small element of Tidewater society, but that night we felt like a great nation.  We shared LSD-spiked lemonade.

The Woodstock festival imprinted our culture. The unprecedented crush of thousands rain soaked people in a sea of mud became utopia in our drug-induced fantasies.  It was the evolution of humankind into harmonious existence driven by love proclaimed by rebellious music. Both Mike and I knew the story; we played the LP, read magazines, and watched TV news.  Neither of us attended. Scott was there. He was 15. He hitchhiked to New York and back to Norfolk. He talked about it daily. He said he woke in morning mud to a performance by Sha Na Na and thought it was Frank Zappa. It was his favorite story.

It was a stupid world back then.

Mike stood out from the rest of us. His short hair bothered him.  Long hair united us as iconoclasts. His freak flag waved but would not fly as high as he supposed it should. That night his hair was barbered into a red fuzz. He was costumed like a rock star in Rolling Stone magazine: shirtless, wearing an open leather vest,  He painted a green circle painted around his navel. His dress contrasted with the ‘high and tight’ military cut

The movie began. Electric guitars began to play. Narrators told the story of hippies united for three days of mud and music. We sat stoned, enthralled, and ingested more psychedelics. Higher than the drive-in’s screen, we transported ourselves to the rain, mud, and music of Yasgur’s farm.

That’s when Mike lost his mind.  He stood up and announced, “I was there. I was at Woodstock.” But he was not. Neither of us were.   I lay on a blanket, tripping without anguish, while he was in a false reality, tottering distraught in a psychosis of unbearable insanity. Acid can turn the mind into a suffering place, and he was there. There was little we could do other than listen to him rant, wait for his trip to subside and hope to forego a hospital visit for sedatives.

All the metal speakers were turned to maximum volume. They sprouted from cylinder pipes and separated blankets of disgorged car passengers sitting in the night’s summer air. Wires connected then to the poles between cars and blankets. With our heads stuffed with hallucinogens our walks to the concession stand and bathrooms was adventurous.  Our shaman, Carter, spoke to him in a quiet way, “Calm down, Mike. It’s going to be OK.”  Mike listened, calmed and sat down.

Carter spoke with assurance when we needed guidance. Though high as the rest of us, he led us to safety more than once. I knew the fear that a bad trip could bring.  I once ater two hits of acid and smoked a block of hash.  The hash kicked the LSD to a place I had never been.  I jolted up, said I was electrified and scared as hell said I thought an emergency room visit was in order.   Carter said, “You’re OK. You’ll dig it.”  I sat down.

“Woodstock, the Movie” ended as our trips peaked.   We loaded into the car.  A vast ocean of moving vehicles attempted escape through designated exits,  Nobody in my car offered coherent directions.  In a sea of parking mounds, I crested endless troughs until large red letters pointed to an ‘EXIT.’   We drove onto a highway lit with shooting stars.

Scott wanted to drive to New York that night. I drove us as far as Rick’s backyard. We sobered. Rick had merged easily into our tribe. From Oklahoma via New York City, he once played drums in a garage band.  We became friends when I worked in a silverware factory.   Thousands of knives, forks, and spoons spewed from the factory each day.  Rick stacked felt wheels onto spindles.  He danced and sang while doing so.  Silverware polishers used his wheels to buff  tableware that was collected in trays and given to me to spray clean with a chemical wash. I had a job nobody wanted.  At the time, though, washing residue was the type of employment for which I was suited. The place reeked. Grime lay on the floor thick enough to stick a butter knife upright.  We were both fired shortly after I was hired. If I was an evil influence that caused his termination, I shoulder that guilt knowing our dismissal was a blessing. Both of us are still alive, and longevity wasn’t part of that factory’s employment package.  No one wore respirators.  Safety precautions and protective equipment weren’t part of the manufacturing process. Chemical fumes from the acid wash mixed with smoke from,buffing wheels that periodically ignited from the friction of the polishing process, and no one wore respirators. Without safety precautions and protective equipment, we were lucky to be fired sooner rather than later.

When my life as ‘Wally’ emerged soon after, Rick got hepatitus.  I took him to the hospital.

I made it back to my tilted trailer.  In the wind and drizzle of an Albuquerque night, I lay awake digesting too much food.