Fast Eddy
Eddy was short, wiry, high strung, belligerent … a real outlaw in a community where people played at being outlaws. He had served time for armed robbery in New Mexico State prison. Eddy’s latest gig was hustling illegal Mexicans immigrants – most people called them “wetbacks” in those days – to work for U.S. Forest Service contractors who had been given jobs in the extensive national forests of the Southwest. His last group of illegals had walked off a job in Utah and Eddie needed to put together a new team. He stopped by Llano on the off chance that hippies would be dumb enough to take the job.
You could make $5.00 an hour around Llano in those days, but work was scarce. I worked at the Picuris Pueblo and helped make mud bricks and did some plastering, but it was intermittent, and the Picuris tribe resented us and the kind of houses we were building. The job Eddie was offering would last until fall, guaranteed $5.00 an hour for a full day’s work and room and board would be covered. My farm was in ruins. My marriage was more pain than pleasure. Working in Utah was a chance to get away from Llano and make some money.
All the families we knew without trust funds were desperate for cash, and two of my friends quickly to go with me. Brad, in his early twenties with a young wife and baby, a sweet tempered, good natured very large guy, Scott was my age, a former physicist who had worked in research for a big company, a remarkable lead guitarist and a real intellectual. And there was Fast Eddy.
We drove up in a Volkswagen bus stuffed with bags of food and camping gear. When we stopped for gas in the small town of Monticello, Utah, just across the border from Colorado, the attendant didn’t like hippies and refused to let Eddie use the men’s room. Eddie whipped out his prick and peed against the side of the gas station. The attendant called the cops who threw Eddie in jail and ran a check on him, discovering he was an ex-con. We got him out of jail only after much pleading, the expectation of our job in the Wasatch Mountains and the promise that we would never again stop in Monticello.
Further up the road, in Moab, Eddie almost got us into the poolroom brawl. He’d picked the wrong place to do it. We had come through a long narrow bar room that opened into another long narrow room with two pool tables. We were at the far end and Eddie was getting drunk. We’d played every song on the jukebox and racked up too many games of pool, pissed out too many bottles of some unknown beer. We all felt lousy.
Eddie was winning his game with one of the locals. The bar room and pool hall had filled up by then, and the game had attracted some interest. The local turned to the crowd and said, “God dam, now, you watch that little fella, ‘cause he’s gonna tighten’ up.”
There was silence in the room as Eddie tried to concentrate on the shot.
The local continued, “That’s the thing about these little guys. They always blow it in the end. Can’t take the pressure.”
More silence as Eddie steadied his shot.
“Oh! Oh! Don’t get rattled now Shorts.”
Eddie missed the shot and the local went on to win. Eddie, in a black rage, accused him of changing the position of the cue ball on the last shot. Cue sticks started flying. Brad, Scott and I grabbed sticks and Brad, our jolly green giant, led us back through both rooms with a disarming smile and a poised cue stick, Scott and I close behind to defend his sides while Eddie scooted in behind us and backed up wildly swinging his cue and catching an occasional wack as we stepped into the Utah night and ran for it, leaping into our bus and roaring away.
We came into the contractor’s camp the next morning. His name was Destry Trainham, “But you can call me ‘Boog’ as in ‘old booger,’” he said with a heavy West Texas accent. Boog was huge, six foot six, buff as a body builder; his fore arms the size of my thighs. He was the Marlborough Man, the archetype western cowboy, with a deeply tanned face as craggy as the desert mountains.
As we walked down the hill toward his trailer, Boog looked up and saw to his astonishment four long haired, bearded hippies instead of the five wetbacks Eddie had promised. He looked dubious and said, “You boys gonna’ be double tough before this summer is over.” He was right about that.
We quickly learned that it was Boog’s work rules that drove the illegals off the job. The routine was inflexible. Before dawn Boog would stick his head in our tent and yell at the top of his voice, "Up an’ at 'em." I would try to wake up just before him, but Boog would fool me by coming in either earlier or later than I expected. It was a moment of delight for him.
Two of us would start breakfast over an open fire while the other two rounded up the mules, led them to camp and put on their packsaddles. We ate breakfast, cleaned up the camp, loaded the twelve inch spikes, sledge hammers, chain saws, gasoline and oil, sharpening jigs, rags and lunch and headed off to the fence line before dawn, following the path of the worm fence across the high meadow, then sloping down to the canyons for which the Wasatch Mountains are famous.
Once in the trees, the fence plunged precipitously down a timbered slope of loose soil with a few bushes and rock out cropping. We hung onto the mules to help control their descent to the roaring stream below. There we unloaded the mules, switched the pack saddles for dragging chains, sharpened the chain saws and fired them up. When the last chain saw was roaring Boog would call out, "Start time, and let’s move it!" We didn’t get paid for any of the prep or cleanup time. When the fence was furthest from the camp, it took an hour in prep and cleanup, so an eight-hour day stretched to 10 hours of brutally hard, dangerous work.
We complained about the start time but Boog just came back with a rejoinder of some kind. His favorite, "If you boys don't want to work, you can just stay home, jerk off and shit in a bucket," pretty much summing up what money was all about for Boog.
The exploitation was aggravating but the work was gratifying. We cut down six-to-eight-inch diameter trees with chain saws, stripped them of their branches and cut them into 16-foot lengths. We used the mules to drag the trees to the fence line, then lifted them into position, and beat the spikes in with sledgehammers. I aimed for 85 trees a day cut into three sections each and I hit 105 on my best day.
For food, Boog gave us canned meals featuring “Beanie Wieners.” We saw the cowboys who worked with Boog eating steak and barbecued chickens at the trailer where they all slept in some comfort. We confronted Boog on the food issue. It was a nasty fight, but he reluctantly agreed to give us the money he spent on canned goods and let us do our own buying and cooking.
We had one day off a week, Monday, which gave us Sunday as our night out, when nothing was happening in the nearest town, Price. Boog explained that if he gave us Friday or Saturday night off we'd be useless the next day. “You can’t get in much trouble on Sunday night in Utah,” he told us, and he was right about that.
Well, not entirely.
Utah Cops
Our weekly trip to Price took us down off the high plateau just south of Wellington, on what is now called Dinosaur Diamond Prehistoric Highway, which in those says was simply Highway 191. Price was a small town of immaculate, substantial brick houses and hardworking people, most of them blond haired, blue eyed Scandinavian. Their valley was lush, neat farmland. They were not exactly unfriendly, but they were wary. We were, after all, four longhaired, bearded freaks and there were no freaks in Utah in those days, except those hiding out in the relative anonymity of Salt Lake City.
We found one bar in Price, across the railroad tracks, in a small wooden building sitting by itself with a small neon sign that read simply “Bar.” It might as well have read “Sin.” A couple of booths, six stools in front of a small bar, and on Sunday nights it was invariably empty. We drank the tiny bottles they serve on airplanes, sold one at a time. We still managed to get a bit tipsy and bitched a lot about Utah and the fact that we were horny and out of dope.
For horny, the bartender suggested we drive up the road to Helper, a railroad town he said. It was at the end of the spur and a railroad collection point so a lot of workers ended up in Helper, which explained why it had the region’s biggest or at least most public whorehouse. We drove up. It was a large, white, unmarked Victorian house with a wraparound porch. The only whore available had twenty years on us, and Scott, Eddy and I waited on the porch while Brad went upstairs. We never went back to Helper.
One night in Price when we came to settle up, the bartender said our drinking that night would be on him. “I don’t want you to think that everyone in Utah is an asshole,” he said.
Word about four free spending young men in town looking for action must have gotten out, because on our next venture into Price we ran into a couple of cute girls and spent a promising evening with them. Brad fell heavily for the prettiest, and she seemed to reciprocate, so the next weekend looked promising. They even said they’d see if they could find us any dope.
We were back in the bar the next Sunday night, and Brad’s new flame said we could score. We set up the buy at a local motel.
The drug dealer’s motel room was dark and dingy. He was a small, sharp looking young man in a leather jacket who sat on the edge of his chair across the room. His partner stood near the door, his hands crossed in front of him and never said a word. The dealer pulled out a small baggie of dope and said he’d like us to have a taste before we did the deal. He rolled a joint and passed it to me. I took one hit and almost vomited; it had a chemical taste like poison. “What the hell is this?” I asked. “We always spray it with Raid (an insect repellent) to give it a bigger kick.” No one else tasted it and we left without making a deal.
The girl who set up the buy finally went to bed with Brad that night. In the throws of new romance, she confessed that she was a drug enforcement informer. She had been busted herself, and as part of her deal she had agreed to work for them as an informer. The police had planted her in the bar to set up the purchase. They had their own fantasy going, convinced we were big drug dealers, looking to move into the Price market. In their story, our “buy” was simply an attempt to find out who the small dealers were, so we could sell to them. This tearful confession led to still more passionate lovemaking and a great night for Brad, he said.
Utah Escape
Scott’s wife, Tania, arrived shortly after we began buying our own food, and she took over cooking. We ate well. Scott and I stopped going down to Price. On our days off, I walked back along the fence line and down to the stream with a fly-fishing rig that Tania brought from Llano. That remote stretch of the river, so inaccessible to the outside world, was some of the best fishing I’ve ever had, and we dined on trout Monday nights after Tania got there.
The summer was soon over, and we were into the fall. The fence was far up the other side of the Canyon and we’d moved our base camp to the North rim. The fence was constructed to separate Forest Service land from the Ute Indian reservation, so the government could lease the land to Texas cattlemen for summer forage. Keeping the Ute’s large horse herds off government land was essential to the leases. The Ute came down to watch us work from time to time, highly amused by the enormous effort being put into the worm fence. "We'll just take down one section in about thirty seconds and all the ponies will find it. This fence ain't no damn good” they laughed.
Boog told us to cut corners wherever possible. "Use rotten trees and put dirt in the holes," he ordered. "Skip every other spike deep in the woods, but put them all in near the road heads."
In any small group of men undergoing an intense, physically demanding job with a share of danger, power games are inevitable. The leader remains the leader through a combination of subtle or not so subtle intimidation and accommodation, and he has his allies and rivals. Boog had his two cowboys. We were the opposition. There had been lots of talk around the campfire at the beginning of the gig. Boog couldn’t understand why college educated men in their late thirties would be doing this kind of manual labor. He couldn’t understand why we didn’t shave and cut our hair like other people. “Why make trouble for yourself?”
Working the fence line, however, Boog noticed that we not only worked hard but with intelligence and planning, so he gradually turned the cutting and dragging job over to us and kept his cowboys doing the lifting and spiking while he cleared the path ahead of the line. He began spending his time getting the cowboys to pull their weight and gave up goading us to work harder.
The workdays seemed to grow longer as the days grew shorter. We had become so physically tough and coordinated, that the chain saws and 12-pound hammers were like toys. Boog’s huge frame no longer intimidated us. His two young sidekicks, once tough guys, eventually seemed immature and unformed.
By then snow flurries drifted into camp in the early morning and it so cold we needed to work with gloves. Then one morning, for no particular reason except boredom, we dropped acid before we went to work. Wielding a chain saw and cutting down forty-foot trees high on acid is something I’m glad I lived through once but would never want to do again. Wood chips flying from the tree trunks were galaxies of stars, puked from the heart of the cosmos. Fallen trees were bulls in a Spanish corrida, to be narrowly dodged with the flick of a cape, chain saw whirring wildly in the air like a bullfighter’s sword.
Boog looked worried. “Something different about you boys today.” We stopped for a moment as we all realized for the first time that the four hippies were at that moment at least totally in control and could do anything we wanted, wreck whatever vengeance we liked for a summer of exploitation and humiliation. We were Charles Manson, but instead of perpetrating a chainsaw massacre, we laughed and went back to work.
That night the cowboys went into town and we broke into Boog’s trailer. It was sure one big step up from a tent and air mattresses in late October as the snows were beginning to settle in. We were looking for his financial records, the ledger book we saw him consult on payday. We found three of them. One for us that demonstrated what a big part of the contract went to our wages and food; one for the forest service to show how Boog was actually losing money on the gig; and one for himself where he could track of his considerable profit.
It was time to get out of there, whether the fence was finished or not. We didn’t think Boog had earned our loyalty, and we slipped away after the next payday.
Scott and Tania headed back to Llano to prepare for the winter. Brad’s Price interlude was over, and he went back to his wife and child along with Fast Eddy. The news from Llano for me was not good and I wasn’t ready to go back.
They dropped me off at the Greyhound bus station in Green River, Utah, on Interstate 70 in the middle of absolutely nowhere, the end of a huge high desert basin near the southern end of the Wasatch Mountains. Almost nowhere. Green River is just up the road from the White Sand Missile Testing range, where the Americans took German scientist Dr. Werner Von Braun at the end of World War II. Von Braun had been a member of the Waffen SS, a Nazi Party member, and his V2 rockets were built with slave labor. In fact, more slaves died building his rockets than died in Great Britain because of their attacks. But the Americans wanted Von Braun’s rocket expertise, and they snatched him and 120 other German scientists from the hands of the Russians in 1945 in Operation Paperclip and brought them to Utah to continue development of the V-2 rockets. The first American launch took place in April of 1946.
I read the commemorative notes in the bus station to kill time, having absolutely no idea whether I should take a bus east to New York or west to San Francisco. My romance with self-sufficient rural living was over and my marriage seemed doomed. I couldn’t face going back to Llano, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a plan. I sat in the bus station coffee shop drinking coffee. I suppose I was as "free" as I have ever been. My next decision would be based entirely on whim. Is this what Chris Kristofferson meant when he wrote, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose?” My heart began to beat faster, and I felt a kind of buzzing in my ears. I had only fainted once before in my life, but just before collapsing I had had similar physical sensations. I knew this would not be a good place or time to pass out, which made me even more anxious.
Someone played Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ by the Dock of the Bay” on the jukebox and a clarity set in that allowed me to breath again. I bought a ticket for San Francisco. I’s sent money home to Alexa throughout the summer, but I had my last summer wages in my pocket along with a small knapsack with a set of clean clothes and a huge peyote button on top. When I went to the toilet in Las Vegas after sleeping most of the way there, I thoughtlessly left my knapsack on the bus, and it was gone when I returned. I had been wiped clean. I had been reduced to nothing but the money in my pocket and the cloths on my back. I had become the ultimate “Beat” hero I had always wanted to be.
Back to New York
When I got to San Francisco I went to Fisherman’s wharf and sat at the end of longest dock with Redding’s forlorn voice resonating in my brain, reminding me, “I got nothin’ to live for, looks like nothin’s coming my way, so I’ll just sit here by the dock of the bay, wasting my time.” I was forty years old. I had four children to take care of and two broken marriages to repent. It was easy to feel sorry for myself and guilty for the pain I’d put others through. I needed to win back my self-respect.
The Hog Farm had a commune in Berkeley, and they quickly embraced me as a member of their furniture moving team, one of the Hog Farm’s money-making ventures at the time. I moved in with a pretty young woman with a bed surrounded by a mosaic of broken mirrors and colored glass. Moving furniture was easy. In fact, what I remember most from those first days in Berkeley was my sense of being physically invulnerable. I had always been almost six feet tall, with broad shoulders and long arms, but I was slim. I was told in my teens that I had the perfect physique for a light weight boxer.
After the summer swinging chain saws, I was muscled up and hard as nails. With my long hair and beard, an earring and a swagger, people on the street gave way to me with a shudder of fear and a shadow of disgust. A certain kind of pretty girl who never would have given me a second look, became flirtatious.
I had spent my adolescence in Berkeley, learned my craft of journalism and I still had family and friends there, but I could not face them. I hung out with my new friends at the Hog Farm. I was making enough money to send some home, but it wasn’t enough. I was simply drifting. I needed something bigger to restore myself. I thought about New York City. It was a place where nobody cared what you had done before, where you could become whomever you wanted. You could re-invent yourself. It was the site of my halcyon days, the heady years of running WBAI when we were building a better world. New York a town a town full of old friends and admirers.
In hindsight, it seems like madness. At my age, with three blank years on my resume, long hair a beard and earrings this was me again, leaping into the water with no real for how to swim. I had a half-finished novel called "Fast Eddy and the Acid Banditos," the story of a collection of hippies based on the Llano outlaws. They take over a mountain resort during an Aspen-like conference of America's power elite. I thought I could sell the novel and use the advance to get started on a comeback. That was the extent of my plan.
I had a box in Llano I needed to pick up. It was called Chris’ disguises and contained a dark brown suite, several dress shirts and ties, black socks, a pair of polished black shoes and an American Express credit card that no one else knew about. It was my old business outfit, and I wore it occasionally at hippy parties as a kind of bad joke.
I took a train to Lamy, New Mexico, half an hour south of Santa Fe where Pam and Allen picked me up and I stayed with therm. I got my box of disguises from Alexa. She urged me to stay. Don’t give up the dream. But I no longer saw how I could make it work, how I could earn the money to support it all. That night I sat around in Pam and Allen’s new, big circular adobe room playing music, my heart torn apart. For better or worse, Alexa and I were soul mates. No one had ever known me better. I said goodbye to my kids and the next morning Scott drove me back to Lamy for the train trip East.
The train rolled across the mountain foothills still shrouded in clouds to Las Vegas, then clanked across the great rolling plains of Eastern New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas. I shared the coach car with an old couple holding hands and bickering, a professor talking earnestly to a student, and retired railroad men dribbling into two-day old stubble on their chins.
The air became denser the further east we went, feeling heavy with wetness despites the marginal air conditioning. The high ground along the tracks was saturated; the low ground was flooded, until we were finally reached farm country, where fields ran fence to fence with a few small stands of trees, an endless flat patchwork of right angles. No place to ride a horse but on the roads.
I finished reading my second novel before we reached Chicago. By then, everyone knew each other, and we were friendly and relaxed. The crew was helpful without being obsequious.
I was hoping two friends would meet me at the train in Chicago, but there wasn’t a friendly face in the place. I drank two beers, stole 2 paperbacks for the run to New York, and paid $.32 for a cup of coffee. I felt weak and dizzy from a lack of sleep.
From Chicago on it was solid rain, the air like a soaked blanket. The temperature in the car was 80 degrees. The car had a whole new set of people, and social sniffing began all over again.
All I’d eaten since Albuquerque was breakfast and a handful of peanuts. I took tugs off a pint of Jim Bean hidden in a paper bag that I pulled from my coat pocket. I got up and went to the club car for a beer. Saving my pennies, I didn’t eat. Feeling nauseous I tipped heavily for the beers and looked a table, ending up with three strangers: an Irish CIA man who had taken part in the Bay of Pigs and was currently working as an auxiliary Philadelphia cop, a bachelor and trolley car buff; a young guitar player whose wife kicked him out so he had re-enlisted in the Marines (which automatically deducted $200 a month in child support from his paycheck), and me. Despite our radical differences, we had a grand time sharing stories about our various adventures.
Back in my coach car, I fell in with a partially disguised hippie from Boulder. She was the only girl without a bra that I’d seen since leaving New Mexico. I felt a kind of hopeless, powerful lust and we flirted until we both fell asleep at about 2:00 am. It was still raining
I got up at first light and drank coffee in the club car while the kitchen crew cleaned up. I looked out the window at swollen rivers and overflowing brooks. It continued to rain hard, and after the dry West, there seemed to be more water than earth. I developed an unavoidable fear of suffocating. There were factories and freeways and crisscrossing railroad tracks. By Harrisburg, Pennsylvania the urban outweighed the rural. After Trenton it was all belching smoke, garbage dumps, high-rises, tarpaper and concrete, until we plunged into the tunnel under the Hudson River and emerged at Penn Station in the terrible heart of it all.
My first impression of New York in the subways, which cost 50 cents and were covered with graffiti, was of mad people who talked vacantly to no one.
Arrival in New York
March 7th, 1976, a sunny Sunday afternoon, the Twentieth Century Limited crawled out its tunnel under the Hudson River and pulled into Penn Station. I slung my backpack over my shoulder and stumbled up the narrow, dirty stairs into a utilitarian clearing room, low ceilings, cluttered with fast food shops and newsstands, candy stores, cheap electronics and shady characters lurking in the shadows. The old Penn stations, one of the glorious masterpieces of the Industrial age, had been pulled down and replaced with a utilitarian stadium while I was in New York running WBAI. The new Penn Station made a depressing impression on me, but I wondered how I looked to New Yorkers with my jeans and work jacket, long hair, beard and a gold band in my left ear. What the hell did I think I was doing?
My 1960’s WBAI buddy Richard Elman had offered to put me up. I took the subway to 110th Street and Broadway and walked to Richard’s apartment on West End.
Richard hadn’t changed. Tall, lanky, slightly stooped to minimize his height, hair receding, a massive grin, a deep, smoker’s voice. Richard was living alone in a two-bedroom apartment. He had cleaned out his back room for me. He was separated from his wife and seemed glad to see me but was bemused by my intentions in coming to New York.
I dropped my backpack on the shag rug and sat down on a white sofa in front of a glass coffee table littered with literary magazines and books, worrying that any dirt on my pants would transfer to the sofa. Richard’s apartment windows looked out over West End Avenue at the apartment houses across the street. It was now dusk, and the living room was bathed in eerie shadows. I had a feeling of complete unreality, as if I had suddenly been set down in a stage set without knowing my lines.
Richard filled an awkward pause by offering, in honor of the endless Martinis we had downed during WBAI’s intense dramas a decade before, to make authentic martinis from the Fifties, 1/3rd dry Vermouth, 2/3rd gin, stirred very cold with a twist, and he went into the kitchen for his preparations.
I picked up the April copy of The Nation Magazine but couldn’t’ read it in the dim light. I put it down and looked at my backpack. Inside, my dark brown suit, a couple of dress shirts, a tie and an unfinished manuscript of my novel Fast Eddy and the Acid Bandidos. It was in the spirit of … but not, I fear, in the quality of … The Monkey House Gang by Edward Abbey, which had come out in 1975. My plan was to get an advance to finish the novel and then establish myself as an up and coming New York writer.
That’s what I told Richard over our first Martini. I had nothing else to fuel my success but frightening obligations and balls, or as Richard put it, “chutzpa,” with his characteristic guffaw.
My case was not unique although I felt very much alone at the time. In fact, I was one of many “dropouts” returning to the mainstream after a few years outside. We came back to a changed America, the idealism of the Sixties smashed by drugs, police suppression and a grueling economic recession.
When I dropped out in 1972, Richard Nixon had just overwhelmed George McGovern, who only managed to get 67 electoral votes. McGovern was a weak candidate, but he represented the values that Sixties progressives had fought for and young people worked their hearts out for him. Nixon’s victory felt like a rejection by America of everything the young progressives stood for.
Nixon said America was at a historic moment that called for “two-fisted” types, blue-collar working-class men. His base would be “Catholics, Poles, Italians, Irish. No promise with Jews and Negroes.” It was a big part of Roosevelt’s old working-class coalition. Nixon called them “the Silent Majority” adding them to the white Southerners who had fled the Democratic party after Lyndon Johnson passed a Civil Rights Bill.
Republicans called Nixon’s win “a victory of ‘the New American Majority … a victory of traditional American values and beliefs over the claims of the counter-culture, a victory of Middle America over the celebrants of Woodstock Nation.” Pat Buchanan said it was the beginning of a new realignment of parties’ and Richard Nixon would be the “successor to the Roosevelt coalition.” Attorney General Mitchell said, “This country is going so far right you won’t recognize it.”
"Okie from Muskogee.” released in September of 1969, became the country’s anthem.
We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee;
e don't take no trips on LSD
We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin' right, and bein' free.
Muskogee was a place “where even squares can have a ball,” and “white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all.” It’s a place where sartorial conformity is still enforced, where people don’t let their hair “grow long and shaggy, like the hippies out in San Francisco do.” And “leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen. … Football's still the roughest thing on campus, and the kids here still respect the college dean.”
That’s when I had decided leave town in 1972.
Much had changed by the time I returned in 1976.