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1. 2. EARLY PLASTIC by BILL REED Cellar Door Books, LosAngeles 3. @ 2000 by Bill Reed All rights reserved Second edition, First Printing October 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review or article, without permission of the publisher. Published by: Cellar Door Press Los Angeles, CA90035 e-mail: [email protected] 4. TO: David Ehrenstein and The Memory of Charles Walters & Kuro For reading my "life" line by line---infinitely more slowly than I lived it---much appreciation to Recinda Jeannine. Gratitude to Wil Haygood whose book, The Haygoods of Columbus, inspired me to pick up and complete an abandoned manuscript. And to David Ehrenstein, with whom I share my life, thanks for more useful suggestions than there are pages here. 5. "When you come to a fork in the road. .take it." — Yogi Berra 6. Contents PROLOGUE............................................................................................. 7 1.Beans and Kool-Aid............................................................................. .9 2. Kancer Kapital of the World................................................................ 18 3. It's the Cathode Ray Tube Show.......................................................... 34 4. Confessions of a Voluntary Negro....................................................... 41 5. Randy and the Romilars.......................................................................49 6. With No Mother to Guide Him............................................................58 7.Carnal Interface.....................................................................................77 8. "The Beast of Everything"...................................................................83 9. Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes..............................................................................91 10. Public Displays of Rhythm................................................................97 11. The Lower (East) Side Depths............................................................106 12. The Eighth Street Follies....................................................................116 13. Warning! I Brake for Hallucinations..................................................130 14. The City and the Pillow Biter.............................................................135 15. Fire Island, Island of Romance..........................................................150 16. (Not So) Gone With the Draft............................................................157 17. Freak F1ags at Half Staff....................................................................162 18. Lemons in the Gutter..........................................................................174 19. Woodshuck.........................................................................................191 20. The Big Sledgehammer of 1969.........................................................200 21. Life in the Off-Ramp..........................................................................206 22. Sex!.....................................................................................................219 23. You Can Go Home Again, But. …..................................................227 24. That's Where We Came In...................................................................246 AFTERWORD..........................................................................................248 7. PROLOGUE Recent years have seen the publication of a wide variety of memoirs in the form of everything from self-help manuals to 12-step recovery sagas; standard show biz bios like Lauren Bacall's, to the writings of disgruntled ex-mates of the rich and famous, etc. Early Plastic isn't like any of these. I have no "raised consciousness" axe to grind and there is not one ounce of self-pity or trendy disfunctionalese contained herein; still, if the odds stacked against me in childhood had toppled over, you could have heard the crash from here to Zaire. I lost my father when I was four, my mother had a serious drinking problem, I was sadistically beaten up by my much older brother on a fairly regular basis, and I could barely pass a test in school. I was poor and for the better part of my life have managed to stay that way. (Ah! la vie de la Boheme.) Before biting the reality bullet in my mid-thirties, my life was out of control; I was even reduced to sleeping in my car on occasion. But with the exception of a couple of bad drug episodes, I have pretty much remained my usual sunny Candide incarnate. As to why I sat down to write this book? There's no simple answer. My life hasn't been all that exceptional, but it's been far from ordinary. The thing that did occur to me as I began trying to put the pieces of it together on paper is that, either by accident or design of the fates, I've been witness to some of the most interesting social phenomena of the last half-century: particularly the 1950s, growing up, and the 1960s, during which I reached adulthood. One reason increasing numbers are writing and reading memoirs nowadays is because the official histories of certain periods and events are so inadequate and misleading. I find this especially true of the Fifties and Sixties in which fads, fashions and important social movements tend to be collapsed into one another to form a kind of nostalgic stew. As if liking the Beatles and opposing the war in Vietnam were exactly the 8. same thing. The end of the so-called "Summer of Love" and the rise of Charles Manson were not as radically opposed to one another as some of us might have been led to believe. I was there from beginning to end, and the Sixties weren't the way they've usually been represented in print up to now. It was much less romantic, far scarier and not nearly as ingenuous as some are prone to remember. Nearly three decades ago an urban morality fable appeared in the New York Times about a woman awaiting her turn on free appraisal day at Sotheby's. Ahead of her stood dozens of others also queued up and clutching the requisite mooseheads, kitschy paintings and antique snuff cans, etc. from grandma's attic. Unlike most of the others' would-be treasures, however, hers was a small one in the form of an unassuming piece of jewelry. Upon reaching the front of the line—which stretched out the door and part of the way down New York's Fifth A venue— she proffered the item to the auction house official seated at the table in front of her. He examined it for a second or two, then gasped, "But madame, this is plastic!" Without missing so much as a beat (and as if any further proof were needed that hope does indeed spring eternal in the human breast) the undaunted woman immediately, ingenuously, and hopefully replied: "Early plastic?" I know the feeling. 9. CHAPTER ONE: Beans and Kool-Aid My father, Tom Reed, traveled out of the state of West Virginia only twice in his life: once during a brief stint in the service in World War I, and a few years later to Staunton, Virginia. Reading my parents' love letters sent back and forth in 1918, when he was a student at West Virginia University and she was enrolled at Mary Baldwin Seminary, the pent-up passions between the lines makes it clear they couldn't wait any longer. So when she was sixteen and he twenty-two, my dad hopped a bus to Staunton, where the pricey girls' school was located, and they eloped. The next night found them blissfully back in West Virginia standing before a Justice of the Peace in whose chambers they wed in a double ceremony along with another couple. But the next normative step, settled domesticity, was a long time coming. My parents did pretty much everything they could as members of the local fast set to avoid the reality principle, including commission of the Big Three No-No's: partying, drinking and smoking (in public yet!), with a possible fourth social transgression, my mother's bobbed hair. These Scott and Zeldas of the Hills were probably as responsible as anyone for what little of the Roaring Twenties that made its way to the medium-sized Bible Belt city of Charleston, West Virginia, where they set up housekeeping. Their unconventional behavior continued on well past the early 1920s with the birth of their first child, my oldest sister Ruth Dolores, and didn't stop with the arrival, a few years later, of my only brother, Tom, Jr. When I came along in 1941, more than twenty years down the line, it was an unexpected and apparently painful birth for a woman entering her forties. Later my mother appeared to revel in telling what seemed like rooms full of strangers how my breach birth had nearly killed her. I squirmed and felt guilty (and later angry) but eventually decided, in fashionable dysfunctionalese, to "forgive" this overwhelmed and overworked woman. My mother would end up having minors in her charge for forty years plus: four kids whose 10. births were evenly spaced out over slightly more than a twenty- year period. I find it a chore to care for a child more than a few hours at a stretch. As people once put such things, my mother, Mary Shelton, came "from money," but thanks to a combination of the Depression, thieving relatives, bad marriages, and terrible investments, by the time I came along the family's oil and gas empire had all but vanished. Anyone on my mother's side who had barely escaped "relief"-as welfare was once called- was considered fortunate. One of my mother's brothers, John, hacked and hewed away in area coal mines all his adult life only to expire poor of black lung in