never let an empty touch the floor

1969, Lawrence, Kansas. The summer of love has passed and the fall of society has begun. Lawrence was a pretty town of about 35,000 people back then, including masses of students at the university, which stood on a hill, above it all. This hill had been blessed by an Indian healer a century before, and ever since then tornadoes had spun around it, never over it. Now it was the crossroads of drugs and revolution, exactly halfway between San Francisco and New York, epicenter of rumbling chaos. Think of it.

Or of me, 11 years old – what to make of that? Little boy smoking a cigarette at the wheel of his dad’s 48 International Harvester pickup, friend Richie at my side helping me manage the gears as we drive the “borrowed” vehicle into the hills outside of town. My father wouldn’t notice – he was away getting treated, his first attempt. We careen through wheatfields on narrow dirt roads, barely tall enough to see above the dash and keeping my father’s cardinal impaired driving rule ever in mind: line the hood ornament up with the right edge of the road and you’ll never go wrong. I slam the brakes to avoid a stray cow and one of Dad’s old bottles of Almaden rolls out from under the seat and lodges beneath the brake pedal. I hit the brakes again and nothing happens. Richie dives over and jerks the bottle out, freeing the pedal. Another valuable lesson I’ve kept to this day: never let an empty touch the driver’s side floor. 

Peace

It was November, and I bought a peace symbol necklace in a head shop downtown, because peace was contrary back then. Peace was wrong. Peace was foreign. Peace would undermine our nation. It was what you asked for when you wanted to cause trouble. Peace was the ideal way to pick and poke at society from the outside.

My peace symbol the size a silver dollar hung round my neck on a leather shoelace, a big piece of jewelry for a kid like me. I wore it to school the next morning, much to the irritation of Principal Johnson, whose stuttering expression told me she was afraid that the insurrection (against war, racism, The Pigs) which had spread violence and marijuana from the university to Lawrence High, and was trickling down into the junior high schools, would leak from my hippie medallion to stain the floors of Hillcrest Elementary with the wild behavior of fifth grade Marxists, sixth grade advocates of free love, protesters of homework. She had to protect us from peace, now.

Or at least she had to protect all the other students from me and my ilk. In sixth grade I already represented an ilk.

“You can’t wear that here,” the principal said.

She wore church lady glasses, a blue skirt and jacket, reminded me of the lady who looked puzzled on the car insurance ads that came on during prime time, after the war news.

“Free speech,” I told her, confirming her worst suspicions. (I’d heard the Black Panthers demanding their first amendment rights on TV, and I figured if it worked for them…) And even though I wasn’t sure what free speech meant – and in fact, didn’t really know what anything meant yet (as if I ever would), I got a good taste of the power of the idea when the principal backed down, and let me wear my medallion to school.

“But don’t wear it on the playground, or you might get hurt,” she said.

The only sport I played was Kill the Dictator, a game we’d made up where one kid stood against the brick wall while the other kids threw dimpled red school balls at him as hard as they could, trying to drive him from power.

Mussolini bit his weanie now it doesn’t work, we’d chant.

We always fought over who would be the dictator. I had no problem with the idea of putting my peace symbol in my pocket for that.

“And don’t try to make anyone else wear one, either.”

Good old Stalin went a ballin’ till his wife found out.

Peace, such a subversive thought.

Chairman Mao, he squeezed a cow, he thought it was his wife

The medallion was about four inches across, way to big for me, and banged against my chest when I moved. But I felt its heft way beyond its weight.