It was the sixties, that’s probably all that needs to be said. My involvement with drugs, however, began long before the sixties. My father was an alcoholic—that alone could have set the stage. He had ready access to Milltown and Phenobarbital, schedule four barbiturates, and whenever I … being somewhat high-strung … became a little more than he could handle, he’d give me a pill. At a very early age I had my own supply of Dad‘s sedatives. I do not think that is responsible parenting, but nowadays doctors and schools seem very quick with the medicinal fix, when it comes to handling children that they diagnose with ADD and ADHD.
Despite my early introduction to an altered state of mind thanks to Dad’s pills, it wasn’t until my senior year at Newington High School in Connecticut that I had my first encounter with marijuana. Having recently moved from the Rhode Island school system where I had spent eleven years, without all of the preconceptions that had haunted me since the first grade, this virgin environment provided instant popularity and I ended up hanging out with the cool kids, the avant-garde. The ones at the center of school society, the ones most academically advanced … the ones smoking pot.
That spring we’d frequently go to a place called Beckley’s, an old quarry about a mile’s trek into the woods. There we’d lay in the sun on the grassy bank that hung over the edge of the seemingly bottomless water filled pit—swimming, drinking beer, smoking English Ovals and weed. Sometimes a couple of the guys would climb through the woods to the cliff on the other side, where they would slide down a steep ten foot high embankment to the edge about twenty-five feet or so above the water. Once on the ledge there was no way to climb back up, the only option was to jump.
One day I must have had too much brew or smoke, or both, because I decided to give it a try, not realizing that it was a mistake until I had reached the point of no return. With nowhere to go but down, I jumped! When I regained consciousness I found myself draped over a big log which was being towed to shore. They told me that I had hit the water more or less butt first, went under, came up once, and then went back down, at which time the teenage pot heads came to my rescue.
My involvement with pot ended when I graduated from Newington, and then I went to Cheshire Academy for a year, to get my grades up so that I could get into college. The fall of 1964 I enrolled at Boston University, majoring in acting in the Theater Department of The School of Fine and Applied Arts. On my own in Boston I was immediately entrenched in the ‘gay’ scene, but still there was no drug involvement except for my roommate, Vern, who was a graduate student at MIT and an IV amphetamine junkie—which I never realized at the time, I just thought that he was naturally intense.
The spring of 1965 I dropped out of college and returned to Connecticut, where I met Bobby Holcomb with whom I would be partnered for about four years. The end of 1966 we moved to Peacedale, Rhode Island, and became friendly with Doctor Thomas Gale, who had his offices in one of the huge weathered shingle “cottages” left over from Narragansett Pier’s heyday as a playground for the rich and famous. He lived in the upper level of the splendidly converted carriage house in back, complete with fireplaces and vaulted beamed ceilings. That was the location of many a wild weekend party, some starting Friday evening and lasting through Sunday, as the booze and drugs flowed freely.
After leaving Boston in 1965 I had stayed in touch with Nelson, a former lover, and never missed his parties of which there were plenty. Before one such affair Nelson had discovered pot, and the weed was available in ample supply—with a classy touch, of course, sterling silver cigarette boxes full of joints. I had not touched the stuff since high school in Newington, a few years earlier, and Nelson’s offering was one hell of a lot more potent than my previous indulgences. In a word, I got wasted. To this day most of what I remember of that party is having a ravenous interlude with a tuna/macaroni salad shaped like a big fish. I had the munchies!
Dr Gale dispensed diet pills quite indiscriminately, and when I decided that I wanted to lose some weight he gave me a supply, which he continued to replenish whenever I asked. In 1967 my grandmother died, and I bought her house in the Norwood section of Warwick, where I had lived until age five. There was a four room flat on the second floor, which I rented to two friends of John, Wayne and David ... Wayne a short ex-Marine with a butch complex, David a lanky long-haired blond fem who thought he was the white incarnation of Diana Ross. The friendships intertwined and John usually had an entourage of younger ‘queens’ that he would drag by the house on a regular basis. With something almost always going on either upstairs or down, frequently both, #190 became known as a major party destination.
We were all going out to a drag show one night at a roadhouse in North Smithfield, but due to some recurring stomach problems I was not able to drink. In lieu of booze, John suggested that I take two or three of my diet pills, and give him some while I was at it. Well, what a buzz that was. When I drove John to his house after the bar closed, I kept him in the car until almost dawn, I couldn’t stop talking. From that point on I had a completely different relationship with Dr Gale’s freely dispensed diet pills.
The good doctor was playing fast and loose with those pills though, as one day he got a call from the police in Pawtucket. They had apprehended a fellow who was in possession of the pills, and said he had gotten them from Dr Gale. When asked, the good doctor confirmed that he had indeed given the pills, and when asked why he said to help the fellow lose weight. Lose weight?! The police responded. Are you aware that this fellow is 6’2” and weighs only 130 pounds? Dr Gale did help me out quite professionally with a couple of health emergencies, but for the most part I think he was pretty much just nuts!
It wasn’t long before pot became a regular substance at #190, and not long thereafter John and the boys upstairs started taking LSD. They spoke of their “trips” fondly, and I was developing a very serious curiosity. Finally I gave them five dollars to get me a tab, but for one reason or another I never took it, and someone else did. Then one Saturday afternoon I visited upstairs, and Wayne handed me a tab and said, “Here’s the one we owe you, take it.” So I did, and then didn’t think much about it, until an hour or so later when Bobby, who didn’t know what I had done, and I were at the grocery store. Oops! I couldn’t get home and up to Wayne and David’s fast enough.
For a while we were dropping acid just about every weekend, and smoking pot (and for me taking diet pills) during the week. One weekend John, his friend Mark, and I wanted to do some acid, but our regular source was out, so we went up to Boston to see what we could score. The scene at the Public Gardens was surreal, like a flea market for drugs, and as we traversed the walkways the various vendors would call out what they had. We scored some acid but I was never comfortable about it, because it was the first time that I had taken any from a source that I didn’t know. When we took it I said we were probably taking rat poison, and as we started to get off I said that we thought we were tripping, but we were really dying. Not a good beginning.
In the middle of it Wayne and David showed up with nylon stockings over their heads, making them look very strange and like strangers to me. That freaked me out completely and, while Led Zeppelin was playing something that sounded like fire truck sirens, they set off a smoke bomb … I thought my house was on fire. Wayne felt so badly that he stayed with me for the rest of the trip, and got me fixated on some squeaky rubber baby toys (from where I don’t have a clue) which helped to bring me back from wherever I had gone. Later they took me to a bar, but I would only go if I could bring two of the rubber toys. At the bar I’d ask people of they wanted a psychedelic experience, at which time I would put a toy up to each of their ears and squeeze. I think I got kicked out.
While living at #190 with Bobby I was involved in two ongoing affairs, one with an artist from Woonsocket named Richard. We went to Provincetown one weekend, and dropped acid. This was Richard’s first trip, so we stayed in our room for a while to see how he‘d handle it. I knew I was getting off when a little green farm scene on a ceramic lamp base started coming to life. The little green chickens and green cows and green people were all moving about, it was like watching a strange little green television show. Richard said that he wasn’t feeling anything, so we decided to go out, and I caught him as he tried to leave by the window, we were on the second floor. Not getting off, is it? We then left via the stairway and through the lobby; although Richard stopped at reception and complained that the wall paper in our room was no good for getting off on. You go Richard!
Richard and I had another interesting incident some time later. I had really gotten strung out on the diet pills, and after not sleeping for a few days I knew I had to quit cold turkey, so I did. Yet before I could get any healing sleep, we had a date to see “You Know I Can’t Hear You When The Water’s Running” with Imogene Coca and King Donavan at the Memorial Theater in Providence. It was quite stuffy in the upper balcony where we were seated, but I was maintaining, and then when the show was over we started the long slow descent to the lobby.
There were two main staircases from the second floor down to a landing midway, where they merged into one grand double-wide staircase. The crowd was overwhelming and progress was very slow. About halfway down to the landing I went out like a light and fell down a few steps. Although I had actually fallen asleep, when I awoke and found all of these well-dressed society dames hovering around me, I said, “Oh, sorry, I’m okay, I must have slipped.” Back at #190 we were always rating “nods” as in “nod out” and mine got a “5” the highest score yet bestowed.
One day I discovered Wayne and David’s little pot garden in the backyard, and I told them to move the plants over to my father’s yard next-door. He still owned the house that he had built there, which had been vacant for a while. When John saw the plants he studied them closely, and said they looked just like the big bushes that he had been parking his car under at work. At the time he was working at a factory in the Olneyville Square section of Providence, an old mill area. Sure enough the bushes turned out to be pot … or at least hemp. Under the cloak of darkness the three of them went to harvest the bushes, each of the five was over five feet tall. Back home David took the biggest and set it up in their living room with Christmas lights, used some in a salad, and dried a lot for smoking. It was fun while it lasted, but it wasn’t any good. Unless we wanted to make rope, there was no point in keeping it
When my father came to visit at #190 he was always annoyed, because I never answered the door without checking first from the bathroom window, to see who was there. He was convinced that I was hiding from bill collectors, which, considering what I was hiding, was just as well. One time he showed up when I was tripping with John, Wayne and David, and it was a major hoot. He was about as high on booze as we were on acid, and he became completely enamored with David. He tried to “mug-her-up” (Dad’s term) and no matter how we tried to convince him, he wouldn’t believe that David was a boy. Fortunately he left before David was compelled to show the ultimate proof, which was, from what I had heard, substantial.
Meanwhile, my brother had bought a business in Meriden, Connecticut, and made a trip to San Francisco regarding a Coit drapery cleaning franchise. While there he was wined and dined and turned on to pot. It was then that he figured out what was going on at #190. When he returned he paid me a visit, and to break the ice gave me a souvenir from San Francisco … a brass roach clip with a peace insignia at one end. Sometime later he was having his annual birthday party. At the time he owned a home on ten acres, which included a big pond, and every year for his birthday he had a big frogs leg party, where everyone would get smashed, and then go out in the skiff and catch frogs. Gross!
Well, Jay called to see if I could get him some pot for the party, as he wanted to turn on his friends. I was a tad reluctant at first, because I knew the guest list usually included a mayor and other government officials, as well as some state and local police. He insisted that it would be cool, so next we had to figure out how to get the pot to Connecticut. Then it dawned on me. Dad would be going to Connecticut, so I wrapped up an extra “gift” in birthday paper, which Dad delivered to Jay along with the others. We never stopped chuckling about that one.
During our acid era we would always trip on Halloween Eve, and goof on the trick-or-treaters as they came to the door for candy. My eighteen month relationship with Hal spanned two Halloweens, and when we bought the LSD for our first Halloween trip together, we bought two extra doses to save for later. One thing with acid is that at some point we’d always want to get higher, or make it last long, so somewhere during the trip we’d drop another tab. Before we got to that point that Halloween, we hid the two extra tabs so that we wouldn’t take them.
The following year we weren’t able to score any acid for Halloween, and we were quite disappointed. Being that the front door of the house was never used, I decided to put two lights on the driveway side of the house, to make it more apparent to the trick-or-treaters that they were supposed to come to the back. At the time I had matching carriage lanterns on each side of my closet door, to which I had never run the electricity, and probably never would. So I moved the two exterior light fixtures that were at the top and bottom of the interior stairway to the side of the house, and then moved the two carriage lanterns to the back stairs.
Everything went well except for the light at the top of the stairs, which would not go on. I tested the bulb and the connections, all of which were fine, so I removed the fixture to see if anything was wrong with the socket. There was. Some paper was wadded up and stuffed into the bottom of it. I pulled it out and was going to throw it away, but something made me open it and there I found the two tabs of LSD that we had hidden the previous Halloween. Obviously we had completely forgotten about them, and that Halloween was trippy after all.
Moving to Meriden, Connecticut, in the early seventies was the end of my drug involvement for a while but, although I stayed away from LSD and diet pills, it wasn’t long before I found a source for pot … which I indulged in on a rather regular basis once I left the Victorian with Jay and Gailyn, and moved to my own apartment in Hartford. It seems that no matter where I have lived, it has never difficult to quickly encounter a source for pot, whether I was looking for it or not.
Other than pot, for the rest of my life I have only had two other experiences with drugs (that I am willing to admit) and that was LSD. While living on Wood Street in Fall River, one weekend Billy and I dropped acid with Bob and Deb, Charlotte and Dale, although I was reluctant from the get go. I had never really wanted to do it again, but there I was. While waiting to get off we made drinks, and then started playing badminton in the backyard. But once the giggling started we retreated indoors.
Later they all wanted to take a walk down to the lake, and we took our drinks with us. Along the way, as the ice cubes clinked in our glasses, Charlotte said, “Listen to the tinkling of the ice cubes in the glasses of the eccentric alcoholics.” I lost it, and had to return to the house where I curled up on the sofa, waiting for them to return. Later the two gals said they were going to leave, and when they were half way out the door they asked if I thought they were okay to drive. I told them that I certainly wouldn’t drive in my present condition, so they came back in. That scenario repeated itself a few times before they finally left.
My last experience with LSD was early 1983, after Vince and I started going together, but before we were living together. We went for a weekend up to Rio Nido, on the Russian River near Guerneville, to stay with friends of his, another Wayne and David couple (not the Rhode Island ones), from whom we bought our pot. Vince’s friend Phil went with us, a burdensome alcoholic who wasn’t on my list of favorite people.
We drove up in my Datsun pickup, the one I drove cross country in, so all three of us were sitting in the front seat. Nonetheless, Phil started whispering to Vince. I went ballistic! I mean really, how rude and stupid was that? In any event, Phil had been talking about dropping acid, and when we arrived in Rio Nido the three of us did. Vince and I went off for a hike in the woods, and found a nice private spot where we had the best sex that we had ever had, or ever would have again during the ensuing ten years of our relationship.
Thus ends the drug use exposé in the chronicle of this “child of the sixties!”
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