Dark Side of the 60's Moon, Mike Marino [list of ebook readers TXT] 📗
- Author: Mike Marino
Book online «Dark Side of the 60's Moon, Mike Marino [list of ebook readers TXT] 📗». Author Mike Marino
Prey Lewd -
Chapter 1 Bowls of Rice and Hash
Chapter 2 Counter Culture
Chapter 4 Cheap Wine Nights
Chapter 5 Hipster Highway
Chapter 6 The Blue Coyote
Chapter 7 City of Angels
Chapter 8 Saigon Dazed
Chapter 9 The Acid Aphrodite of the Sunset Strip
Chapter 10 "I buy, you, pay, G.I."
Chapter 11 Sunset Stripped
Chapter 12 White Rabbits & Purple Haze
Chapter 13 Body Counts
Chapter 14 Age of Aquarius
Chapter 15 The Psychedelic Shop
Chapter 16 War, Peace & Narcotics
Chapter 17 The Death of Hip
Chapter 18 Bombed in Berkeley
Chapter 19 Death of Hip
Chapter 20 The Clown Princess
Chapter 21 On the Road
Chapter 22 Canada, Oh Canada!
Chapter 23 The Commune of Hobbits
Chapter 24 Thus Spake Zarathustra
Chapter 25 The Wolverine and Beaver
Chapter 26 My Lai Massacre
Chapter 27 You Don't Need A Weatherman
Chapter 28 Bend Over America
Chapter 29 Chicago: Takin' It To The Streets
Chapter 30 NewYork Pizza and Heroin
Chapter 31 Leave the Guns, Take the Eggrolls
Chapter 32 In the Vortex of Violence
Chapter 33 Bong Time In Canada
Chapter 34 Folk Fest on the Island of Mu
Chapter 35 Spaced Out in Canada
Chapter 36 The Darkside of the Sixties Moon
Chapter 37 Acid, Mud and Rock and Roll
Chapter 38 Body Bags & Rolling Papers
Chapter 39 We Blew It
Chapter 40 Body Bags
Chapter 41 J. Edgar & The Hooverettes
Chapter 42 Pest Control
Chapter 43 From Sea to Shining Sea
Chapter 44 We Have a War to End
Chapter 45 The Moratorium March
Chapter 46 We Blew It
Chapter 47 Kids Do the Damndest Things
Chapter 48 The Road to Alcatraz
Chapter 49 Toronto Gives Peace a Chance
Chapter 50 Broken Treaties & Altered States
Chapter 51 The Village Massacre
Chapter 52 Sex and the Occupation of Alcatraz
Chapter 53 Vietnam to Altamont
Chapter 53 Kent State: Get Out of Dodge
Chapter 55 The Windy City and the Kill Zone
Chapter 56 Murder At Christmas
Chapter 57 When Irish Eyes Are Smiling
Chapter 58 The Hit Squad
Chapter 59 All Roads Lead to Detroit
Chapter 60 You Can Go Home Again
Chapter 61 The Fall of Saigon
Chapter 62 Mellow Brick Road to Sanity
Prey Lewd
Prey Lewd - 1967
Joey Russo, all of 21, had arrived in the 95 degree heat and humidity of sexy Saigon at Tan Son Nhat a month before South Vietnam’s National holiday to celebrate the anniversary of the overthrow and assassination of former Prime Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem. The Diem regime not exactly a poster child for the democracy we were trying to sell by rammng it down the throat of this small Asian nation at the point of a bayonet.
Joey enlisted in Detroit, basic trained at Fort Knox and was an expert marksman with an M-16...perfect fodder for the Fun, Travel and Adventure the U.S. Army was offering as a door prize to all young Americans who were of draft age and unlucky enough to have their number called. Time to choose your prize boys….a body bag behind door number one or Canada behind door number two or prison behind door number 3 on cell block C in federal prison. No help from our studio audience please!
Joey however wasn’t drafted. He enlisted. He was spinning the military wheel of fortune hoping to get stationed in sexy Germany or romantic France or swim among the Mod hipsters of jolly old England. Anywhere but up country in Vietnam’s bush where the rice paddy’s ran red with the red, white and blue blood of American soldiers. The blood would mix with the similarly red blood of both North & South Vietnamese in body count battle after battle. Strange how Vietnamese blood is also red. Hard to distinguish which blood belonged to which prostrate body or the irrational rationale for the killings over some Pentagon penchant to play a deadly game of napalm + agent orange = freedom. Tag you’re it!
Joey hadn’t seen any action yet, but was enjoying getting acclimated to life in Saigon. The language, the chaos of the crowded clogged streets with motor scooters and cabs, the noise and rock music or country music blasting from inside the GI bars and of course, the bar girls, massage parlors and hookers. Most of all enjoying the bounty of goods available on a thriving black market. American dollars were the Holy Grail of currency.
He had gotten settled in and went with some friends to the A-OK club that afternoon, a favorite watering hole he had discovered by accident. Today was National Day...celebrations, firecrackers, singing, and a parade Joey & Company could view from the bars street front patio while enjoying rounds of 33 Beer, a popular brand for GI’s also called Ba Muoi Ba. The jukebox was loud and the music of the Byrds flew gently outside to the filling streets while next door, at the Blue Moon bar, the Okie’s and the southern boys in khaki were fired up on a Bakersfield high as Buck Owens “A-11” was competing on the invisible outdoor beer soaked patio stage with Roger McQuinn’s 12 - string mastery.
Today a parade, beer and a quick trip to Mama San’s later to enjoy the carnal hospitality of her go go go girls who could make love seem like Celestial heaven on earth. Small framed bodies, pert little breasts and enough sexual action to make any man feel “Numbah One GI” for a short time at least.
As “Mr. Tambourine Man” invited Joey to “take a trip upon his magic swirlin' ship”
the first explosion from North Vietnamese artillery rocked the street in front the A-OK Club and elsewhere in the city just as the parade was getting ready to get underway.
The VC where in the jungles three miles out from city center. The accuracy of their aim was frightening and admirable at the same time. People scattered in all directions as over two dozen shells pelted Saigon with hot metal and shrapnel. As a bonus for the North Vietnamese, an American minesweeper on the Saigon River was sunk … by a mine that missed detection.
The streets were filled with the acrid smell of gunpowder and the cacophony of shrill screams of people trying to avoid death at any cost. By the time the smoke cleared….numerous South Vietnamese and five Americans were dead including one officer, not that many grunts would care if a 90 day OCS wonder 2nd Louie bit the dust. Enough of them were fragged in the bush anyway, the folks back home were not notified that they died of “friendly fire”.
Joey and his friends suffered only confusion and spilled beer. They were lucky that day. Because of this unprecedented attack this far south into the heart of Saigon, LBJ called for more troops to be sent to hurry the end of this quicksand nightmare. “We need to end this war, NOW!” former President and hero of Normandy, Dwight Eisenhower told the media.
As for Joey and his platoon….they were already jungle boots on the ground. Within two days he would leave Saigon. Reality was about to bushwhack Joey as he would now go upcountry...all this in the midst of the attack, a growing national Buddhist uprising, and growing protest against the war back in the states.
He dashed off a letter that night to his best friend, Mickey Cusmano in New York City. They went to school together back in Detroit, Mickey, a member of the SDS which he had joined in Ann Arbor, Michigan before his move to New York, now was living in Greenwich Village as a journalism student attending classes at Columbia University by day and organizing against the war at night at the various coffee houses along with his girlfriend, Myrika Christie, an artist and folksinger/songwriter when she performed at the Gaslight Cafe.
Mickey read Joey’s letter with alarm. This was his first personal contact with someone in Vietnam who had just experienced the horror of this so called war. Joey was his best friend and Mickey had tried to talk him out of enlisting, but Joey was stubborn and believed in the cause.
Now the shit was about to hit the fan in a way that would take four young Americans on a road and moral journey into the abyss of protest. “What would Thoreau do under the circumstances?” he questioned silently. He knew the answer and quickly wrote back to Joey.
The times would force them to go on the run through the turmoil of the Sixties, to Haight Ashbury, Chicago and Canada, as now Mickey had also that day received his draft notice. He wanted no part of Vietnam. Nor did he want any part of prison for failure to report. His moral compass was being challenged….now he had to find his true moral direction.
Chapter 2 Greenwich Village: Bowls of Rice & Bowls of Hash
I read Joey’s letter over and over. As a journalism student in NYC I became acutely aware of the horrors of the war in Vietnam, but with Joey’s letter it came crashing home with a fury. It wasn’t just some film footage on the evening news anymore. It was now real. My best friend was in the mire of the quicksand caused by politics in the Beltway of D.C. I started keeping a journal from that day forward. Today also contained another element that was to change my life forever. My parents back in Detroit had received my draft notice. I hadn’t bothered to leave my forwarding address with the draft board.
It read in part TO: Mickey Cusamano 3484 Three Mile Drive, Detroit, Michigan. You are hereby directed to present yourself for Armed Forces Physical Examination...blah, blah, blah.”
I was living in an old loft apartment in the Village, close to campus with my girlfriend, Myrika Christie, a young German immigrant student, artist and musician who in addition to being a songwriter, also sang at the various coffee houses on MacDougal Street which was the Bohemian center of the folk music scene in New York and the epicenter of the cities left wing politics. It’s also where we saw Lenny Bruce perform on one of his last “concerts” before he OD’d and crashed dead onto the bathroom floor
The Cafe Wha was her favorite showcase as it was the folk Fort Knox of the folk music scene at the time. On Sunday’s we would spend time at Washington Square where all the budding musicians and poets and bards and artists
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