Three Bad Trips, 1968–1977

Nixon Nixon bush league President
this is a populous hymn to you and yours
And I begin with your face and come back to your face

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Boy Reporter

Around the time Richard Nixon won the White House with a secret plan to end the war, I was entering high school, about four years away from hearing my own draft number called. In Mark Kristof's dingy garage, someone handed me my first joint.

Nixon's trip to power started off well but soon unraveled like a Greek drama, with covert bombings, steady leaks, and inept plumbers. By the time the Watergate scandal came to dominate the nation's airwaves, I had found my calling.

Woodward and Bernstein, rebellious sons in khaki pants and rumpled Brooks Brothers shirts, rolled up their sleeves and took on the potent patriarch. The symbolism was too strong for me to resist, and in my second year of college, I threw myself headlong into reporting for the campus news-paper. Right across from the newsroom was the office of the College Young Republicans, and they were so shifty, so smug, so thin-lipped and acned, it was obvious they were up to no good.

The budding Bernsteins of The Pitt News would sneer at the wannabe Haldemans each time we passed in the narrow third-floor hallway, and in my mind, every one of my scornful expressions, every haircut missed, every joint rolled and savored, was a blow against Nixon, Rebozo, Agnew, and all that gang.

Soon I fell into a double life of sorts—wearing rumpled pinstriped shirts as editor-in-chief of the campus newsroom, sending freshman reporters off to cover the latest student government scandal, penning scathing editorials about fraternity hypocrisy or Marxist professors denied tenure, while at the same time growing increasingly dependent on grass and speed, sleeping through my morning classes, eventually my afternoon classes, and spending whatever free time I could carve out of this schedule engaged in late night, chemically altered card games hosted by my new best buddies, Hagen and DiBartello.

DiBartello dealt more than cards. At times, when he or Hagen thought the cops were onto them, one or the other would show up on my apartment doorstep with a steamer trunk. "Here, hide this for me." Then a laugh. "No one's ever going to suspect you."

The World Trade Center

On the morning of my college graduation, I overslept by about three hours and missed the ceremony, but later in the month two old friends, Mac and Jim, met me in New York City to celebrate.

We dropped acid, strolled through Chinatown around dinnertime, gawked at pallets of wide-eyed carp, broad mouths gaping for a last breath. A caged chicken on Mott Street kick-boxed for kernels of corn. I dropped dimes into a slot, and the chicken started again. We marveled at the glazed ducklings crucified in restaurant windows. Slithering tubs of iced eels. The white knight was talking backwards. Alice was ten feet tall.

The sky above lower Manhattan seemed pea green, and as we traveled farther down the island, the streets grew more narrow, otherworldly. New York was unaware of who we were, but in our minds we owned the island, and as dusk fell, our world seemed indescribably alive.

And then we turned a corner.

In front of us stood the World Trade Center, perhaps a quarter mile off. Somehow I had forgotten it would be there. The twin towers climbed into the pea-green sky as if by magic, and the three young Jacks knew at once that we had to ascend the glimmering beanstalks, toward whatever destiny.

We stumbled into an elevator, giggled like odd little monkeys as the floor went soft beneath our feet. We were airborne.

Moments later we gazed over the edge of the observation deck, as wide-eyed and gape-mouthed as Chinatown fish. Our sensations were on the very edge of tolerable; color, sound, the cold metal of the railings, all manner of odors blowing over from Hackensack, the sense of being so high, literally...