15- A trip to the shore (August 1969)

At some point in early August while I was on pass from the army, I got a call from Jimmy at my family’s house asking me if I wanted to go to the seashore.

“This isn’t going to be another one of those strange parties of yours is it?” I asked, little realizing just how strange it would get before it was over, even as Jimmy assured me it would be nothing like the affair with the caviar at Ann’s house.

He said Frank and Lori had rented a bungalow for the week and it only made sense that the rest of us should go south and help them enjoy it.

The next morning, Saturday, Jimmy Bill Capella, Bob and Alf pulled up in front of my house is a huge, bright red Cadillac convertible, so new the sun glinted off its fresh polish.

When I reached the car, everybody in it was talking so fast I could not keep up with what they were saying – stoned on speed, Jimmy eventually told me, to keep them awake for the arduous trip down the Garden State Parkway, a car full of stoned out hippie freaks that I should not have risked my life driving around the block let alone down the shore.

Jimmy assured me he would never let anyone drive him around stoned on LSD or Pot (a promise he later modified when we actually got there and which I learned later he had engaged in previously for trips in and out of New York City.)

“We just took a little speed,” he said.

Since I was still relatively naïve except for that incident with Chris Andreas and the little white pills, I climbed into the back seat between Bob and Alf assuming myself safe.

Never have I made such a wrong assumption, not merely because of the trip down with this pack of yammering freaks, but a more seriously dangerous trip back that put to lie Jimmy’s claim of innocence.

Everything was on fast forward, and I got a headache trying to keep up with what was said.

Yet even if I could have kept all the words straight, they talked in a code I could not possibly have understood because it relied on references to people, places and things that they knew about and I did not, part of that old school Passaic Valley network to which I was not apart, party of that Garley Gang gossip I would also be on the edges of, even later, when Garrick was its chief source.

The prattle eventually had a soothing effect on me, a stream of manic rhetoric I couldn’t and didn’t need to keep up with, unlike the shouting of my DI who I’d put up with for the previous eight weeks, rhetoric that seemed to blend in with the music when Jimmy turned on the AM radio, he and the others singing along to AM oldies, a sound track to our fantastic voyage south.

But there were particular songs by particular groups that set them off the most, such as the Stones, the Beatles, the Monkees, Buffalo Springfield and others, with each person in the car singing lead or harmony, or call and response, filling my head with a contact high I would get again in other venues when Jimmy led such sing alongs, and in thinking back, this became one of the most peaceful experiences of my life – something that would radically change within a few hours.

Jimmy’s choice of music differed from Frank’s, louder, faster, more intense than the peace and love folk stuff Frank sang most of the time.

When the radio flaked out – New York City stations reaching their limit – Jimmy worked the dial to find stations in Philadelphia playing similar tunes. When that failed, he started a game of making up meanings to the random letters on other people’s license plates or to guess the ages of girls in the other cars.

Bill flirted with the pretty girls (many of them jailbait) in the other cars against the warnings by Jimmy that their fathers would kill us. Some of the girls giggled and gave us the peace signs. Some of the red necks in other cars gave us the finger.

Naturally, we got stuck in the traffic jam headed towards the shore – although eventually we reached Seaside Heights – the icon of teen beach culture on the East Coast.

Seaside Heights police were notoriously brutal – not the year round cops, but the seasonal cops who had a fixation on power, and whom Jimmy kept warning us to watch out for – the thing with Charlie near the Agora still had him on edge.

Like most young men who came here, Alf and Bill came for the girls, and gawked at every underclad girl we passed on the road. Jimmy looked, but it was clear that like Bob, he had come here to score drugs.

The fact that Frank had decided to vacation here surprised me because he had pontificated anti-establishment stuff for years – but draw of this place was just too much and he would return here and again for years to come, looking for something even he didn’t know what it was he expected to find.

Frank and Lori – with Lori holding the baby – were waiting on the front porch of the bungalow when we arrived. Frank looked less like a hippie than he did a hillbilly. They greeted us as if they hadn’t seen any of us in months or years and motioned us inside out of the sun.

The bungalow stank of baby poop, cigarette smoke and rancid potato sticks (the last of which Frank ate by the can full).

Since the baby could not go to the beach, someone had to stay behind and care for it, while the others did.

I got selected for the first chore as babysitter and was assured the baby would not act up, and if he did, I should pay a Bob Dylan record.

“He always goes to sleep when he hears Bob Dylan,” Lori assured me.

When the baby woke, it wailed. I gave her a bottle; she spit out the nipple and wailed even louder. Finally, I put on a Dylan record and to my surprise, she nodded off.

Eventually, Bob – feeling guilty about leaving me alone – wandered back early to help me with the chore of changing the baby’s diaper, a task he complained to Jimmy about when Jimmy and the others arrived, and Jimmy told him to “shut the fuck up. We have other things to think about.”

By which, he meant drugs.

Frank had a little bit of hash and a joint or two, but not nearly enough to get Jimmy and the boys in the condition they wanted.

Lori refused to let them bring any dealers back to the bungalow, convinced that this might be a narc and an arrest could result in the state taking away her baby.

Jimmy, still fearing a repeat of his bust in Charlie’s VW in Montclair, agreed with Lori.

Lori also refused to allow Frank to go on this quest for drugs, even though Frank pleaded with her to let him go.

But the quest would have to wait until after dark and so Jimmy decided to lead the troop back to the beach, leaving Lori to take care of the baby at the bungalow.

Someone found a guitar which Jimmy took along with us which he intended to play with the ocean as his backdrop.

Jimmy had charisma I barely understood. When he started to play the guitar on the beach, kids – thousands of them coming from all over the beach – rushed to where he was. When he saw them, he started to play Yellow Submarine. And many of them began to sing along with him.

This startled me and made me realize for the first time that I was part of something far bigger than I ever expected, and that Jimmy was something far more important than just the leader of a gang of kids from West Paterson and Little Falls.

While the kids loved Jimmy and his music, their parents did not – perhaps sensing a loss of control. They marched towards us like the U.S. Marines, a full-scale invasion designed to rescue their kids from some kind of cult.

If Jimmy feared for his life, he showed no sign of it. He just played on as the parents dragged their screaming kids away.

The rest of us remained wary, and when we finally made our retreat, Alf served as rear guard with Bill and me on either flank, Frank, Bob and Jimmy striding ahead to get back to the car.

Twilight came and by the time we reached the bungalow again, Jimmy became obsessed with scoring dope, and requested the use of Frank’s family car (which he and Lori had driven to the shore in) so that would could have two search parties rather than just one.

The idea was to find one of the many beach parties that went on over summer weekends and to ask discretely as to where we might score. This, of course, meant talking to strangers, something Jimmy and the others rarely did when seeking to buy dope up north. Most often, the gang dealt with people they knew, allowing intermediates such as Chris Andreas and others to take the chances in places like Paterson or New York.

Because the only two people in this little group of ours that Jimmy trusted with instinct not to get us busted was himself and Bill.

Bill would lead one search party; Jimmy would lead the other.

Since Jimmy didn’t drive and Frank didn’t trust Alf to drive his family car, Jimmy drafted Frank to drive the second car leaving Bill with Alf as his companion.

. Bob and I accompanied Jimmy and Frank. And Jimmy would have the chore of explaining what a shaven-headed military-type character like me was doing hanging out with long-haired hippies.

Jimmy was very concerned about the prospects of being pulled over by summer cops – especially when the three of us kept stopping at every group of kids we saw asking if they knew where we could find a party.

Jimmy suggested both search parties report back at the bungalow if they came up with a lead so that we all could go to these parties together.

Bill and Alf also aspired to find sex, something Jimmy warned them against.

“Girls down here are different than up north, and most likely already have boyfriends,” he said. “You two start hitting on them, you’re going to get yourselves beat up or busted or both.”

From the start of this, I had made up my mind not to ingest any drugs beyond the occasional toke of pot someone passed around in the car. But I didn’t feel completely comfortable being the only straight in the middle of this madness.

Jimmy suggested we stop at a liquor store where I might buy booze – since I had already accomplished that buying wine for Ann’s brunch.

“That was wine,” I said. “Nobody gets high on wine, and I don’t think the store owner would be comfortable selling me anything stronger.”

“Just buy a lot of wine,” Jimmy said. “Something the guy will think you’re buying to have with dinner.”

I went in, found a gallon jug of something red, went to the register, handed the man my money, he looked at the bottle, at the cash and then at my short hair.

“When are you shipping out, son?” he asked.

“Soon,” I said, choosing to perpetuate the same illusion Jimmy had created for me previously, knowing that I was already doing my best to discourage the army from sending me to Vietnam.

“Good luck,” the clerk said, handing me my change and the bottle, which I promptly took out to the car where Jimmy and Bob waited.

Seeing the bottle as too much for any one person to handle, I offered the others some. Jimmy refused. Bob, who refused nothing, took a few swigs, and then gave the bottle back to me, after which we kept passing the bottle back and forth, just low enough so that a passing cop didn’t see us doing so.

Outside, the streets were alive with the ranting and raving of party people, but since Jimmy already had a particular kind of party in mind, he avoided the most obnoxious, looking for kids with long hair and who would most likely attend a party where we could find the kind of dope Jimmy wanted.

When he had collected enough information, Jimmy insisted we go back and meet up with the others so that we didn’t wind separated later.

Then as a group we set out for a party where Jimmy assumed, we could score, Bob and I both so drunk by that time, we didn’t care. Frank was upset by the fact Lori would not let him come. Bill and Alf kept mumbling something about finding girls.

Frank, who later retold this story from start to finish, even though he did not witness most of it himself, claims he went to the party with us, when he did not. Lori would not let him. So, we all piled into Bill’s car and set off to find the party Jimmy had found for us.

When we got there, I knew – even as drunk as I was – that we didn’t fit in, short hair or long, drawing odd looks from the assortment of college kids we knew didn’t want us there. Many of the guys were jocks and clearly jealous at the attention their girls were paying to us, much the way the parents were about how attractive Jimmy’s singing had been to their kids.

While the party had live music, the band was made up of dweebs playing music already more than a decade out of date – with some Beach Boys songs thrown in, and not the good ones.

Jimmy cringed, and then eyed Bill, Bob and Alf, and all four mounted the stage telling the performers to get lost. Bob and I leaned against the wall and continued to pass our bottle as Jimmy began to sing, at one point reaching back to pull the plug to the bass guitar Alf was playing.

The jocks grumbled as the girls eased closer to the stage, Jimmy someone drawing all of them to him. Bob and I giggled, too drunk to realize the danger we were all in, as if this all was some act being put on for our amusement.

At some point, Bill motioned to Jimmy, and both looked at someone who had just eased in from the street, and the original musicians retook the stage.

I don’t know exactly what kind of drug Jimmy came looking for, but he ended up with four capsules containing what powder I later learned was mescaline – which we brought back to the bungalow to divide among five people: Jimmy, Bill, Alf, Frank and Bob.

Once Jimmy ingested his he insisted we head back north before we all got off.

“We don’t want to be driving on this shit,” he said, predicting it would take an hour for the stuff to have an effect, more than enough time for us to get home.

As I would later learn in future adventures, Jimmy miscalculated. While they didn’t get off right away, the effects started early and came on gradually, and fooled all of them so that they did not quite realize how bad things were until way too late, growing on us as we drove like twilight arriving before an eventual dark.

For a while everybody chatted in much the way they had on the way down, but instead of being superfast and filled with code words Garley Gang members would recognize, the speech became slurred and incomprehensible, bits of lyric or condensed sentences even the speaker was not certain the meaning of.

Because I was drunk, I thought all of this extremely funny and giggled in much the same way as I had at the party.

Bob who was drunk as well as tripping didn’t giggle at all. Instead, he mumbled about our dying.

This was partly due to the fact that Bill and Alf, who took turns driving, kept losing the lane lines and blamed someone for stealing the road.

Jimmy for some reason was more self-aware than the others. He had been through all this death and dying stuff with Bob before so when Bob’s shrill voice reached its crescendo, Jimmy calmly turned around in the passenger seat and said to me, “You’d better hold on to Bob before he does something stupid.”

At this point, Bob rose up and tried to jump at the open window of the car – which was traveling about 60 miles per hour.

I grabbed his legs just as the rest of him vanished and managed to pull him back into the car.

Not long later, Jimmy and Bill realized Alf – then behind the wheel – had lost control, a fact that became clear when we pulled into the toll booth, paid the toll, and then discovered he had somehow lost the keys.

Somehow Alf, when reaching into his pocket for change to pay the toll, had pulled out the keys from the ignition and these had fallen to the floor, and could not immediately find them.

Traffic backing up behind us began to beep. We searched high and low, in likely and unlikely places in the ash tray, glove compartment, each other’s pockets, and finally when Jimmy found them and snatched them up and pushed them back into the ignition, he screamed “Drive!”

I think at that point Jimmy realized that our getting home in one piece in our condition would take a miracle.

His idea was to get to a rest area where we could wait out the worst of the trip before getting back out onto the road again.

But getting there proved disastrous since after the toll booth the serious hallucinations began, colors spilling across the highway like multi-colored desert sand.

Alf complained he could barely see the road for all of zoo of animals parading across it –more than just pink elephants, pink and blue zebras, as well as silver and gold creatures he could describe but could not name.

He claimed bugs splattering on the windshield cause webs of cracks to appear, threatening to have the glass implode in on us at any moment.

Jimmy kept mumbling around the police as he looked around – he apparently seeing their spray of lights coming after us when they were not.

He decided Alf needed help to steer and slid across the seat to grip the wheel with him, playing a game with Alf called “catch that line,” meaning the lane line that for some reason kept trying to jerk away from us.

By this time, I had a contact high and kept seeing snake-like shapes slithering at us from under the front seat.

Why we didn’t die then or later during that weekend remains one of the great mysteries of the universe.

I’m not even sure how we managed to spot the big blue rest area sign or chase the white lines that led to it, down a ramp, then into a parking lot where a few campers sat, an eerie world illuminated by inadequate street lamp, our car coming to a halt right in the middle of it.

For a long time, nothing moved.

The only sound was the clicking from the cooling engine.

After a while, Jimmy got nervous again. We were just too obvious sitting there in a parked car in the middle of the mostly empty parking lot. A cop would certainly see us as suspicious.

Jimmy wanted us to get back on the road as soon as we had pulled ourselves together, and when everybody had calmed down – especially Bob who continued to moan about death and dying – we started out again, slowly.

Jimmy encouraged us to sing, and when this fell flat, he took on the chore himself as an entertainer might, trying to keep distract us from the hallucinations and yet not so distracted as to lose track of the road.

I don’t know what the others saw, but Jimmy’s songs produced visions in my head, pleasant scenes that seemed to keep me calm, and reduce the tedium of what seemed like an endless journey.

Then, seeing the turn off for Little Falls, I felt a little like a man might have seeing land after many weeks at sea.

I assumed the worst was over when we reached the relative safety of Bob’s father’s house in the Great Notch section. We pulled it, stopped the car, turned off the engine and sat. No one said a word. I could hear crickets.

After a while, Jimmy perked up and suggested we go into Bob’s basement and smoke some pot.

Bob often grew pot of his own near lovers’ lane at the top of the hill – something the cops sometimes found before he could harvest it. Not good pot most of the time, but enough to keep a buzz going.

Just as we got to the foot of the stairs, Jimmy stopped suddenly.

“Do you see that?” Jimmy asked us. “Do you see what I see?”

He stared at the house and so we stared, too, and then in a gesture straight out of prime-time Star Trek, he flipped open the top of his Marlboro box and started talking into it. Across the lawn – maybe 20 feet away – Bill had his Marlboro box open, too, saying, “Yeah, I see it, too.”

What they saw we all saw – the house was smoking at the bottom, fumes coming out of it as if it was a rocket getting ready to take off from Cape Canaveral.

And then it started to rise, and kept rising, until it became a red glare in the sky, slowly fading into the darkness above, leaving behind the charred remains of the basement.

We all saw it, and I wasn’t tripping like they were.

With no house left to go into, we all turned back to Bill’s car – only we didn’t climb in it, we climbed on the front hood.

Alf rolled the car back onto the street for the monstrously steep hill that led down towards the center of town and the park with the WW I tank. He did not start the engine. He simply tried to steer, unable most of the time to see passed our bodies sprawled on the hood and in front of the windshield. The momentum carried us forward with Alf struggling to hold the car straight to a car with power steering, but no power.

Bill, who had not climbed in or onto the car, ran after us, pleading with us not to destroy his car, and just managed to grab and fall into the back seat at the car began to move too fast for him to keep up with.

The car also had power brakes, which meant without engine on, Alf might pound on day on the brake peddle and not be able to stop. The most he could do was keep the car centered in the middle of the road until we reached the bottom.

Why we did this, nobody knew.

We must have believed we were invulnerable after all we had already gone through and we were determined to test how far we could go before we expired.

Down, down the hill we sped, going faster and faster, Alf yelling “I can’t see! I can’t see!” while Bill groaned, “Don’t destroy my car.”

But to me, the world seemed in motion, not us, sidewalks and houses and trees rushing passed us, as if the universe was determined to leave us behind, we caught up in the vacuum of its fight, clinging to the hood of the car to keep from behind sucked up into it along with everything else.

Bill pleaded with Alf to stop the car, Alf telling him could not, with Bill desperately trying to climb out of the back seat into the front in order to do what Alf was unable, and when he finally did, the two of them struggled with the steering wheel so that neither one had control.

We bounced over the railroad tracks that marked the halfway point in the lone decent, a brief equilibrium that quickly vanished behind us as our speed once more increased. The bump actually detached some of our grips so for that brief moment we were in mid-air.

Alf and Bill then lost control of the steering wheel, causing Bill to scream and pound the brake peddle while Alf’s foot happened to be on it, and so Alf began to scream in pain, somehow the brakes connecting and we reaching the bottom as the car spun around and came to a halt at the side of the road.

Remarkably, nobody was hurt – except Alf’s foot.

After some moments, Jimmy perked up and suggested we should all go to West’s Diner to discus what we should do next over coffee.

This was Saturday night, a busy night at the diner situation on the south side of Route 46 not far from the intersection with Route 3.

Even though it had been hours since my last sip of wine, I still felt drunk.

The others seemed similarly inebriated, and Jimmy kept us from plunging headlong into the diner until we could calm down. Inspired by my military service, I supposed, Jimmy decided to hold close order drill, and when he saw Bob headed towards the highway in yet another suicide attempt, Jimmy ordered me to go rescue him, and I did.

Several of the others, inspired by the name of the diner, decided to reenact the shoot out at the OK Corral, during which Mr. West made an appearance and told us, “Not here, boys.”

We got back into the car and drove off before he could call the police, and decided The Golden Star near Great Eastern Mills might make a better destination, only when we marched in, we were confronted by that owner and several waitresses with arms folded, telling us to get lost.

Jimmy ordered an about face and we marched back out to the car.

At this point, we were divided on what to do next.

Jimmy wanted to continue the adventure and proposed we go up to Stokes Forest.

Bob and Alf wanted no part of this and said we should all go home.

Bill apparently was willing to go along with Jimmy at least for the moment. I had no say in the matter.

So, we started in that direction with dawn finally bursting over us, all of us nodding in need of sleep.

Then the argument started, Alf or Bob grabbing for the steering wheel when we reached a point where we could turn around. When the wheel came off in their hands, Bill slammed on the brakes.

We all stared at the wheel. Alf reattached it. We silently agreed we needed to go back and did, even though Jimmy kept coming up with new suggestions as to where we might go closer to home.

Alf, who was behind the wheel at this time, slammed on the brakes in the middle of Main Street, Little Falls, threw the keys out of the car.

Cars lined up behind us, churchgoers beeping their horns until Officer Capalbo showed up and demanded to know what was going on.

Alf said he didn’t want to drive any more. Capalbo told Alf he couldn’t keep the car where it was. Alf said he didn’t care besides he didn’t have the keys. Capalbo fetched them, shoved them back into Alf’s hands and told him to drive or he would arrest him.

Alf started the engine, pulled the car into the first parking spot, and climbed out, casting a few curse words at the rest of us as he started up the long walk to his house.

At this point, Bill took charge the car and told the rest of us to get the fuck out and we did, he is taking off leaving us standing on the sidewalk. Jimmy, Bob and I started up the hill for the even longer walk to Bob’s house.

We found Bob’s father seated in the living room reading the newspaper.

Jimmy fell into an armed chair; I sprawled on the couch. Bob disappeared into his bedroom and slammed the door.

I don’t remember falling asleep, merely waking up to slanted sunlight that suggested most of the day was over.

Jimmy and I rose, as stiff as old men, then made our way out of the house again, and down the hill to the park with the World War I tank, where Jimmy sat with me to wait for the bus that would take me home.

We looked at each other, still too weary to laugh.

Yet I knew at that moment, we had shared something important, and this was the beginning of a greater journey that would take us the rest of our lives to finish.

When the bus came, I climbed aboard and then watched out the back window, Jimmy still seated on the bench, fading as if through time.

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