Memories of Anne – Part 3

by FernandoPoo

Posted to Stories on 2002-03-09 13:05:00

Memories of Anne – Chapter 3

————————————————————

West End Follies

West End is sort of Long Branch’s version of Greenwich Village, loosely organized around The Inkwell coffeehouse. It was also a great place to score acid. Since it was only about 5 minutes from Asbury Park by car (15 minutes hitchhiking), we kind of annexed it. Some days/nights we would go back and forth a dozen times or more.

The Rumpus Room was a pinball and foosball parlor on Second Avenue in West End. They had a jukebox with “Mississippi Queen” by Leslie West and Mountain, which was one of Anne’s favorite songs. I still remember the letter/number combination for it was ‘F3’ which was the same as my apartment number. If we were in West End peaking on acid we had to go to the Rumpus Room and play “Mississippi Queen” so Anne could dance.

One night we were tripping in West End and we decided to check out the beach. Across Ocean Avenue from the Windmill was a small rocky/sandy area overlooking the beach from about 10 feet up. It was a beautiful night, with a huge full moon recently risen and reflecting on the water. We were sitting there peaking and soaking up the view when this guy comes up from behind us and sits down and starts talking. I don’t remember all of what he talked about (Anne wrote down some stuff in the morning but that is almost certainly gone) but I do remember him talking about the full moon and Panama. He had either just come from Panama or he was leaving soon for Panama, or both. Anyway, he told us some weird stuff that kinda freaked us out, got up and stepped off the 10-foot drop to the beach. When we looked down we saw him walking southwards down the beach. I don’t think we had a good idea, even then, of what he had said, but we both seemed to think it was important.

Another time we bought some acid from Turtle and he asked if we wanted to come to his house and trip with him. He lived near the beach in North Long Branch, maybe in the area they cleared out for Seven President’s Park. We decided to go, but Anne wanted to give Turtle the idea that we were together so he wouldn’t try to hit on her. It was really hot and the acid was not that great. We watched his little black and white TV all night, old Marx Brothers movies and god knows what else. The great part was that I got to lay on a bed with Anne all night with my head on her chest. She was wearing a dark green t-shirt and I kept brushing my lips on her nipple on and off for hours (hey, it was her idea to play this game). Actually I probably drooled a big wet spot on her shirt. Talk about your Tantric, unspent sexual energy! We waited for sunrise to leave, and then hitched back to Asbury Park.


————————————————————

Strawberry Fields Forever



Let me take you down
‘cause I’m going to
Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
-John Lennon, Strawberry Fields 1966


In August of 1970, we heard about a Canadian rock festival called Strawberry Fields. It was to be held in Moncton, New Brunswick. Rumor had it that one of the organizers was none other than Dr. Winston O Boogie himself, John Lennon. Scheduled to appear were:

Procol Harum

Mountain

Jethro Tull

Jose Feliciano

Ten Years After

Sly and the Family Stone

Grand Funk Railroad

Alice Cooper (must be some female folk singer, eh?)

This could make up for missing Woodstock, just about a year earlier. By this time the “Asbury Street People” were fully organized and we were not about to miss this one. I will attempt a listing of those who were there, in no particular order:

Anne Furlong

Keith S.

Curtis W.

Brian “Captain America” P.

Gary “Koko” C.

Billy G.

Katie F.

Nancy F.

Freddie S.

Twiggy

We set out hitchhiking in small groups on Tuesday or Wednesday, to give us plenty of time to get there for the start on Friday. My traveling companion for this trip was Keith S. from good old First Baptist Church. We were all supposed to meet at Lake George, spend the night, and head out again for Moncton, but Keith and I got a good ride that went way past Lake George. We figured that we would probably get there kinda early, but that was OK with us. What we did not know was that the festival had been moved from Moncton to Mosport, Ontario, about 800 miles west!

The ear infection that I had picked up at Powder Ridge was in full bloom by now. I remember waking up in a ditch by the side of the road somewhere in Maine, shivering with a raging fever, and not believing how cold it was in August. We were almost to the Canadian border in Maine when some guy in a blue pickup truck (Stephen King, maybe?) picked us up and told us about the festival being moved. We decided that before we could hitch another 800 miles, we had to do something about my ear infection. Someone told us that the nearest hospital was in Quebec City, so that’s where we headed off to. In Quebec I got a shot of penicillin and some eardrops for free. God bless socialized medicine!

After Quebec City we headed west towards Mosport Racetrack near Toronto. I had a raging fever and was sleeping a lot, so Keith was doing most of the hitching with me lying on the shoulder of the road. Must have been quite a sight! I woke up once on the side of a busy highway near Montreal and found that we had company, a hooker on the run from the Mafia who had gotten dropped off on the same ramp as us.

We finally arrived at the festival on Saturday afternoon (so much for being early) and snuck in though a well used break in the fence. The first person from Asbury Park that we met there was Anne. We were playing Frisbee while “Strawberry Fields Forever” was playing over the stage sound system. Curtis was traveling with Anne, but Frisbee was a little too physical for his condition, and I’m not sure he was even with us. Anne filled us in on who was there, the acts we had missed the previous night, (Jethro Tull, Mountain…) and how they had found out about the change of venue when they regrouped in Lake George. We set about finding some refreshments for the nights festivities. I think what I wound up with was Psilocybin and LSD, but do you ever really know?

The performers for the night were Jose Feliciano, Procol Harum, and Alice Cooper.

I think that the Psilocybin was just about kicking in when Feliciano took the stage, and I am sure that I was peaking when he launched into an amazing version of “Hey Jude”. I was lying on my back, watching the stars. It seemed that the sky was an immense multidimensional polyhedron with a different colored star at each vertex. I thought back to the other times I had listened to that song, the night before high school started, Menlo Park, and my first psychedelic Romilar experience. I took stock of my situation, in this beautiful place with Anne at my side, and I decided that “Yes indeed, Mr. McCartney, I remembered to let her under my skin, and we are beginning to make it better.”

At this point I think that Anne, Brian P., and I were the only one’s left awake from our group, since there were some folks selling sleeping pills as Psychedelics (wonder where the Kilpatricks were). We were waking people up to point out high points of the show, but they would be up for a song or two, and then fall back to sleep.

Procol Harum were next, and they were great. “Whiskey Train” rocked, and they finished with “A Salty Dog”. That was one of my favorite songs at the time, and I think that Anne may have first developed a taste for those guys after hearing it under those conditions.

Next up was Alice Cooper.

Definitely not a female folk singer.

After the peacefulness of Jose Feliciano and Procol Harum, Alice Cooper was a shock to all systems. He was a crazed, demonic presence on the stage. He was doing things with screen doors and rubber chickens, and the sound was phenomenal!! We watched him raise the dead with “Black Juju”, and then came “Fields of Regret”.

The main part of the crowd was in a valley with the campers spread out over the hills on either side. We were watching from the hill on stage right, about a quarter of the way back. The valley was full of smoke from campfires, cigarettes, etc., and the lighting guys were having a great time with it. At one point during the song they turned the entire valley a deep crimson red, and with all of the people dancing, it looked like a vision of the inner circle of Hell, complete with bodies writhing in the Lake of Fire.

All in all, a pretty intense religious experience (give me that old time religion).


————————————————————

Montreal



It means Mount Royal.

Anne told me that.

More than once

Still not sure what that means

Missed opportunities…

Learning French, Asbury Park High School

Anne knew what electives we needed to take.

French and Typing.

The French would have come in handy in Montreal

The typing would be nice right about now.

I don’t seem to recall going home from Strawberry Fields, but I must have?

I think at some point, we realized, that in addition to seeing a really cool concert, we were in Canada. Which meant that we were no longer draftable, “eeeeeeeeee haa”.

They must have made sure we went back.

We would have stayed.

Tripping. That weird synthetic mescaline. Working at restaurant called ‘The Marlin Tuna’ as a dishwasher. Al Mott must have gotten me this job. I am washing pots by hand in a big sink, when they come over with a big tray of what are about to become, broiled lobster. They are just plain old garden-variety lobsters, looking at you, until Mr. Chef takes a meat cleaver and chops off all of their appendages, and shoves them into the broiler with their stumps wriggling. I am not liking work yet.

Summer is over.

There is going to be a big party in Loch Arbor. Butchie’s grandmother (not Felicia, this was the guy with big, bushy sideburns) had died and left him a house in Loch Arbor, on Deal Lake.

Keith and Sam (Kathy), Anne and Curtis, and Billy C. have gone back to Canada, and rented an apartment in Montreal. I figure Anne has enough company and stay behind, “Maybe in the second wave”, I say. They are supposed to call the party; to let us know everything is OK, sort of like ‘Mission Control’, and “The Eagle has landed”, and all that.

I went to the party, and there was mostly a bunch of crazy people, trying to get ‘fucked up’, pretty much any way they can. We found some paregoric that the grandmother had in the house and were trying to extract the opium from it, when the phone rang.

The phone got passed around (probably on both ends), and eventually I was talking to Keith.

“How soon can you make it up here”, he said.

“I was going to work a couple more weeks, save some money, and then come up, I replied.

“Money is not so big a problem, why don’t you come up now”, he got in before Anne took the phone from him.

“Come up here now”, she said.

For some reason, on big decisions I never questioned her. I agreed to come.

We chatted a little about the Expo, (which was Expo ’67 extended out into 1970) and how they were furnishing the apartment with things lifted from there, and she gave me detailed instructions, as to what bus tickets I needed, directions from the bus station to their place, and tips on getting around in Port Authority.

The next day I quit my job, collected my pay, packed up my stereo (which consisted of a turntable, two speakers, and a big wooden radio that it all plugged into); and headed north.

Definitely not a WalkmanÔ .

When I arrived I found that Keith had purchased a half-pound of Lebanese hashish, which we were supposed to sell on the street, when we weren’t panhandling or shoplifting at the food market. Somehow this did not seem like a good long-term plan to me.

Curtis had found a source of acid, and so was basically a tower of protoplasm to be dealt with accordingly.

Billy was mainly interested in shoplifting steaks and getting into Anne’s pants.

Keith had big plans to become a major drug dealer up here.

Sam was happy now that Keith was finally happy.

That left Anne and I walking the streets of Montreal and trying to figure out what the fuck we were going to do.

Separating Curtis from the acid seemed like a good place to start, and if we had been successful, things might have turned out differently.

I bought my first Alice Cooper albums here.

There were these little banana-flavored cakes that we would panhandle until we had enough money for. ‘Avez vous changement pour moi’ was an incorrect and incomplete French translation for, ‘Have you any change for me?’

We were doomed.

Somewhere along here Keith decides to go back to the USA to empty out his bank accounts. He returns with a bunch of cash, Katie Ferris, and a story about how they got off the bus at the last US stop and crossed the border through some farmer’s field, because Katie was 13, and Keith was 17, and they didn’t want to get hung up explaining that to anyone.

Around this time the landlady came around and did a head count. She came up with 11. We must have had some of the locals over, but she asked us if we had ever heard of the Vice Squad. That was her way of saying that she thought we should rent another room.

I had $115 left.

I rented another room for $15/week. Katie had the flu or something. We put her in my room on one of the beds. Katie and I were always sleeping together anyway, no sex, just sleep.

Oh yeah, Jimi Hendrix just died; I heard it on the radio.

Now people are starting to go missing.

The first we notice is Sam, because she is always around, and suddenly, she isn’t.

Next, we notice that Anne has been gone for longer than usual, although Curtis is missing too, so maybe that explains it.

We wait.

We hide the hash in my speakers.

Keith is freaking out, worrying about Sam.

Katie is burning up in my room.

And now, I’m starting to worry about Anne.

Finally, I go out alone and when I come back I find that everyone, even Katie is gone.

Before I have a chance to panic, Billy arrives and gives me the scoop


It seems that Curtis was tripping quite heavily, and tried to ‘spare change’ a couple of RCMP agents (Royal Canadian Mounted Police – their version of the FBI). When they asked where he lived he said, “3430 Hutchison Street”, and that’s where they went.

When they got there, only Anne and Sam were home, so they scooped them up.

After about a day of interrogation, they came back and got Keith, Billy, and Katie, and they would have got me too if I hadn’t just stepped out for something.

Billy told them he was staying with me, and that I was a Canadian citizen, and they let him go

We quickly got the hash out of the speakers, found the guy who sold it to Keith and offered to sell it back to him for the price of two bus tickets to New Jersey. It was a great deal for him, and soon Billy and I were on a Trailways bus to New York City, and I was watching the moonrise and wondering when I would ever see Anne again.

Keith and Curtis got their heads shaved before being shipped back to the US.

Anne and Katie each spent 30 days in Menlo Park Diagnostic Center when they got back.

I think Sam was just returned to her parents.



To be continued…


The Literary Kicks message boards were active from 2001 to 2004.