17- The end of the sixties

I was supposed to meet up with Hank and possibly Jimmy in New York at the Jerry Lewis telethon on Labor Day three weeks after Woodstock.

I made arrangements with Frank on 42nd Street when he was going down into a subway back to Lori’s place in the East Village. He had taken acid and was getting off, asking me to take him home so he wouldn’t get lost.

I was already late to meet Vinnie for the ride back to Fort Dix. We were both AWOL and I did not want to miss bed check.

I couldn’t find them in the crowd – and much later learned Jimmy never came.

I assumed Frank might have forgotten in the haze of his acid trip, but I waited for him, accidentally bumping into Soupy Sales on the sidewalk before I gave up.

I did not realize that this would be the last chance I would see any of them for a whole year – even though I got discharged from the Army at the end of October.

Frank called it a weird dream, me leaving him tripping and then finding out in mid-November that I had taken off somewhere after stealing a bunch of my uncle’s money (another run away attempt, but this time with a bundle of cash) only to have my uncles set up outside the Little Falls Laundry to follow him and my other friends around, my family assuming Jimmy or Frank or Alf or Bob were hiding me out just the way they did the last time.

They were like undercover cops waiting outside Lori’s apartment, watching my friends come and go, following each of them on the assumption one of them would lead me to where I was hiding out.

“They were armed to the teeth,” Jimmy recalled. “They had those World War II rifles with them, and they scared the living daylights out of me.”

Then, on the block where Lori lived my uncles saw someone who looked like me and the chase began. The poor fool thought they were the police, but didn’t wait around to make sure, he started to run, and my uncles ran after him, waving their guns.

A brief report of this later appeared in the East Village Other although no names were used, and no one was arrested.

The guy must have been on speed because he gave a good account for himself running through the East Village and into the West Village, my uncles falling back one by one until Ritchie finally tackled him in Washington Square Park where he discovered the mistake and let him go.

I tried to write Frank from the West Coast but put Lori’s real name instead of the name she was using to collect welfare on, and the letter came back. So, Frank didn’t know where I was until I tried another letter, which amazed Jimmy.

“You put Frank’s name on it, no street number, and somehow he got it,” Jimmy later recalled. “Strange.”

Life in the Garley Gang went on without me, of course, everybody doing a lot of drugs, highlighted by a New Year’s Eve bash at the Filmore East on Dec. 31, 1969.

If I hadn’t been on the run from the police at the time, I would have likely jointed them in their caravan to Manhattan to see Jimi Hendrix perform.

Frank had missed Hendrix at Woodstock after coming down with pneumonia while also tripping on LSD and was flown out clutching the arm of the media, pleading to remain until Hendrix played.

He vowed not to miss him again.

“He started taking drugs before he went,” Jimmy told me later. “All kinds of different drugs. One drug after another, saying he wasn’t getting off. We kept telling him to stop taking the stuff until he was sure, then suddenly he’s off his rocker. He was ok at the concert. But when we got back to his and Lori’s apartment on East 5th Street he was off his rocker. He just bounced up and down and all around, bouncing off the walls, then out the door into the hall. He was naked except for his socks. We started to go downstairs, but when we blocked him, he ran to the roof instead. There is was naked in the cold running from snow-covered roof to snow covered roof until we tackled him and dragged him back to the apartment, keeping guard on him until he started to come down.”

This incent followed by a few other incidents involving LSD convinced Jimmy that Frank would not live to see 25 years old, and the five-dollar bet with Frank that he wouldn’t.