Hill House Chronicles–exerpts

by Lightning Rod

Posted to Stories on 2004-02-28 05:36:00

The Hill House sat on the highest place in Denton County, and if it wasn’t the highest place…we knew how to make it the highest place. The second floor balcony gave you a view of all the architecture below. The court-house, the Pilgrim Flour silos. The Universities twinkling in the distance. Trees. The tops of houses. The most significant was the court-house. It stood down there at the other end of Elm St. with its glowing orange neon silhouette. We stuck out like an Aquarian Age Frankenstein’s castle above the burg and it’s constituents. Like two medieval kings at opposite ends of the chessboard. The Hill House and the Court House. Twin icons to their respective ideologies. We painted it yellow. Couldn’t think of a brighter color. 

 Dan and I had hitchhiked to New York. By the time we got there John had succeeded in getting our entire load of marijuana ripped off. We were supposed to go ahead of him, secure the New York markets for the product and then call him to fly it up. But John, being the know-it-all he is, flew up ahead of our arrival there. He was gonna be the hero and have it all sold by the time we got there. I don’t think he got much past the Port Authority bus station. Some con spied he and Ren and figured them for the drive-ups that they were and promptly relieved them of their luggage. And our load. And our entire bankroll. 

 I remember how terrified we were as we came to the surface from the subway tunnel in Brooklyn. We hadn’t seen daylight since somewhere in New Jersey where the tunnels began. We were supposed to tie up with the Zig Zag String Quartet and stay with a member in Brooklyn named Slim. We called and were told by Slim’s mother that the band had just the day before left for Upstate. So, we were abandoned with no place to stay in New York City like a couple of yokels from Texas who didn’t have a clue about the ocean of humanity we were about to encounter. 

          We asked somebody how to get to Greeeenwitch Villiage. It was the only thing we knew to do–after all, it was mentioned in Bob Dylan songs. And Bob Dylan songs were about all we knew on the subject of New York. We came up again on the other side of the river and soon were walking down St. Marks Place in the village. We felt very vulnerable — nearly penniless, holding our little traveling stash of Mexican pot, walking aimlessly in the carnival that was the East Village in the summer of 1968.
We had been walking for about ten minutes after emerging from the subway. My eyes fixed on the bobbing ass of a girl in blue jeans who was walking just ahead of us. Gosh, that ass looks familiar. I would swear it was Debbie Gorman’s ass. An admirable ass. I looked to see the owner of this fine posterior and sure enough it WAS Debbie Gorman and walking beside her was Norb, her husband. We had been classmates at NTSU in our just finished freshman year. Norb and I had been strangely linked because of our mutual obsessions with poetry. And because we had both lived in Abilene, Tex before going to North Texas. So, here Dan and I were, like scared rabbits just out of our holes for ten minutes and in a city of eight million people we run into a couple that we know from Denton. And they have a hotel room. Salvation. Also synchronicity. You can’t avoid those with which you are karmically linked. Norb had a strong jaw and was the same sort of manic hero-type as Neil Cassidy. We had spent the previous semester swappin verse in the Student Union basement and smoking as much pot as we could fit between classes. But now, he had shelter; we had herb. Survival in the sixties. We stayed with Norb and Debbie for a week or so until we discerned the details of the pot-deal debacle.
 After that, broke and in the Woody Guthrie mood we were prone to, we spent a while knocking around Woodstock and Boston and finally Chicago on the big night in August of 68. Five days later with the tear-gas still stinging our nostrils we were back in Denton. A new semester was about to start. We had no place to stay. Have you seen that House on the Hill? . . .

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