Drop back again

Let's back up to around 1974. Setting: Crestline ultra-hip bohemian pad with assorted characters and misfits, intelligentsia and academics, dead-heads, pot-heads and pin-heads, and just plain Heads.

One of the nicest and most talented people I ever met was Howard Cruse, the cartoonist, who was from Birmingham (later moved to New York). Howard was just publishing his Barefootz comic books. He was a starving artist at the time, so I gave him $50.00 to do a large piece of cartoon art. It was splendid. It had a strange conglomerate creature looking rather bewildered at the top of an existential staircase that opened up into a universe of everything imaginable and then some. I managed to hold on to that maserpiece all these years until my son begged it from me to put on his wall in his own Southside apartment. That was the last it was seen. I guess it is only fitting that it has disappeared on the Southside. I can only hope that it is still hanging on the wall in some ultra-hip bohemian pad being admired by various characters and misfits that one always finds, even to this day, on the Southside of Birmingham.

From the Ashes

The timeline is a bit fuzzy now. Somehow, I have reported on 1973-75, and am now heading into 1976- 77. I am getting into the glory days (for me) of Southside.

I went back to work, and moved into a very nice one-bedroom apartment on Highland Avenue.

I remember that it had one black wall that I hung my large vanity lights on, with posters underneath. I put my 50's style chaise in front. It was kind of glamorous.

I was getting better physically and mentally. My own rehabilitation coincided with the rehabilitation nursing I was doing at the University of Alabama's Spain Rehabilitation Center. I worked on the spinal cord unit and found that I enjoyed the pace of rehab much better than the crisis-like atmosphere of intensive care. I was still in my early twenties so I could relate to the mostly young guys with injuries suffered as a result of car, motorcycle and diving accidents. They were the risk takers and the partiers that weren't so lucky. In those days, patients could stay at the hospital for months, so we had long term relationships with them and their families. It was all about teaching and creating independence- what a far cry from today's insensible medical "care".

One day near the hospital after work I ran into a friend's younger brother that used to come by the enclave in Crestline. He was working in the pharmacy at UAB as a tech. We started hanging out a lot and decided to go in together on a large apartment near one of the parks further down Highland Avenue. It was the top half of a big house, and it included a large attic that could be used as a room as well- later the site of many late night jam sessions.

In the back of the house was a large concrete courtyard that backed up to the side of the steep hill behind us. The hill was covered with gorgeous 60 foot tulip poplars. Sitting in the kitchen looking out the back of the apartment, all you saw was trees and a small cottage that housed an older man who had lived there for many years- he was a holdover from when his family took care of the house and grounds that we were renting. He had a hat collection and he rode a bicycle. He was very quaint but very quiet. We were respectful of him and his little house. God only knows what he thought about us and our raucous parties. I guess we were somewhat acceptable- we both had good jobs and were not dealing drugs!

The house was great, and just called out for parties and gatherings. We had them a lot. We would have double keggers- one would be out back in the courtyard and one on the first floor of the house. I can't remember any of the crowds of people that came to those parties other than my close friends. I had acquired so many record albums that we got several large heavy duty plastic tubs. I could stand the records up in the tubs, and then could easily flip through them to find what I was looking for. Unfortunately, when we had parties and guests over, they must have helped themselves to my records, because many went missing.

The place also had a claw foot bathtub. I loved getting in there and soaking.

Sometimes things were rather straightforward, sometimes things were crazy. In that one location, upstairs and downstairs, with all the people who were in and out, there were enough stories to fill several volumes. Two of the more endearing and interesting roommates we had were Ananda Marga devotees. One gave me a cookbook called Cooking for Consciousness. He saw more potential in me than I was showing at the time I am sure. He was raising his little girl, Angel, and she lived in the house, too. The next door neighbor worked in nuclear medicine but he knew everything about plants and had tons of them. It was a renaissance kind of culture and we were in the middle of it all.

I bought a Chevrolet pick-up truck with a camper top. We outfitted it with everything we could- carpet, curtains, and electrical outlet, speakers, a porta potty, and all our camping gear. We went camping and hiking everywhere within a days ride. I bought a raft and we started going white water rafting on the Chatooga, the Nantahala and the Ocoee Rivers. No guides, no lessons- we just started riding the rivers. We hiked the Appalachian trail.

Our dog JC (Joe Cool) was as much a Southsider as any of us. He was part collie, part border collie and part Gordon setter. He was beautiful and just the right size. He was so friendly and smart that he was genuinely loved by all, so he could go anywhere he wanted to. I imagine he fathered some Southside puppies, too.

We started having regular musical gatherings that would last for hours into the night. We would sing John Prine songs, Neil Young songs, Crosby Stills and Nash songs. Once a week we had craft night, and my girlfriends would come over and do macrame and needlework. See the twin peacocks shirt embroidery that I did during this time. I started listening to reggae music. We would put on Bob Marley or Toots and play their music all day. Katy Lied by Steely Dan and Sweet Forgiveness by Bonnie Raitt also stand out from that time.

Our neighborhood was a succession of parks so we could walk down on Sunday afternoon and play volleyball or play with the dog or go for a stroll. It was a relatively safe and pretty serene scene (discounting the night we had a party that got so wild that everyone started howling like wolves).

The trees, the people, the times were wonderful, but the times they were a-changin.

Mostly Madness - The L& N Cafe

I am sure there are people with unclouded memories who can say a lot more about the L&N- who owned it, who worked there, when it opened and closed. I keep hoping that these folks with find my blog and fill in some of the details someday. I will keep plugging away meanwhile with what few fragments I have remaining of a very fragmentary time of my life.

It is hard to describe a dreamscape. Having just seen Avatar, I realize that words on a page are hardly adequate. I am going to try.

Playing in the background are leftover riffs and phrases- Al Kooper, Staple Singers - and I am jamming with Electric Ladyland on the piccolo. The telephone and all the telephone wiring is flung into the frontyard. The sound of napalm bombings and cries of wounded soldiers and Vietnamese on the television provides the drone sound. I remember the exotic feel of the cassette tape spoken tour of American Samoa that John sent.

I tried to reconnect with some of my friends who had scattered, running from the craziness that I had fallen into. They had also descended into their own madness. Everyone was wasted. I think that is why the L&N was so appealing. It was the most "anything goes" place at the time. So I started going regularly with Caveman and friends. His household included his very smart artsy girlfriend, his roomate and my best drinking and hanging out buddy Bobby, some monkeys and other assorted creatures. He was actually an intelligent guy who went on to get several degrees-don't know where he is now. We payed Go and Mastermind and listened to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker when we weren't at the L&N.

At the L&N we would get a booth and start drinking huge mugs of beer that soon slopped all over the table. Each table had a large candle. We started a tradition of making melted wax art on the table top that was easily picked up and then plastered on the wall. After a while we could sit at our favorite booth with our own wax artwork surrounding us. That was carousing at its finest. How I drove after that is a miracle and something that still sends shivers down my spine. I was in a blackout most of the time. I do remember looking up at the bar one night just before closing, and a la Ugly Coyote, there were dancers up there, but all guys, who suddenly as a group- mooned us all.

I don't know why I quit going, or if the bar just closed. The curious thing is that I cannot recall a single memory of music from the L&N. It remains a dark and mysterious chapter in my life.

Creativity and Madness

During the strange time period I have just described, I became exposed to many ideas and issues. We interfaced with the Birmingham Reporter, later the Paperman. I wrote a music review of a Jerry Garcia album that was published. I started reading Chomsky and Foucault, became engrossed with semiotics and other exotic subjects.

I also started reading Southern Exposure and fell in love with its oral storytelling journalistic style-it was folk history combined with stories about the real players in power politics- an early version of Rachel Maddow. I read Global Reach and was introduced to globalization and its consequences.

After it got so intense that I quit my job, we left Birmingham to move to Victoria, British Columbia and got as far as San Francisco- at least my horizons were broadened somewhat. That was a crazy trip! We came back to Alabama when we ran out of money.

I am afraid that after this all ended so tragically, I did not know much what to do with myself. I started hanging out at the L&N Cafe downtown. That place should have been preserved as a museum. There never has nor never will be such a place as that again in Birmingham. I will describe it in detail in my next post.

Nexus

It was 1973 and all things seemed possible. I bought a Subaru that year, but first I have to tell you how I came to buy it.

It was maybe April, 1973. I was weeks from graduation from nursing school. I decided one evening to visit a friend and I brought along a new album to share and listen to. It was Fragile by Yes. A new horizon was barely visible and Yes music was perfect. This friend was someone I had met through my ex. He worked at the only computer business in Birmingham at the time, so I was impressed with his knowledge and cutting edge-iness. When he answered the door and I showed him the album, he pulled out the same album from his collection- Yes met Yes. It was an Event.

It turns out the this person I will call D was a frickin genious. The real thing. I could relate to him in some ways, but mostly I felt that I was learning at an accelerated rate. Remember the movie with John Travolta where he starts learning languages, learning everything, faster and faster. It was like that. The atmosphere was rarified with energy and real knowledge- not just philosophy and conjecture but actual stuff- mathematics, physics, biological sciences, architecture, music, acoustics, art, history, politics. He was talking about getting a personal computer. People did not have personal computers in 1973.

We ended up setting up house in Crestline Village. His parents owned the house. I finished nursing school and started work at the VA. For some reason he quit working and just stayed home. I made enough money to live on and then some, and it was fun to have someone take an interest in me. I was pretty much on my own in the world, not much in the way of family, so I enjoyed being taken in. I failed to notice that I was the only one working. I worked hard, and then had lots of time off to go on short trips, go to the beach, whatever. D held court all the time at the house in Crestline. We had all sorts of people dropping by to take part in the scene there and it was quite a scene. I was educated, but my folks were like the best of the hillbillies. D's family was well off, and well connected. I guess they tried to accept me- I was never treated unfairly by them at all. Everything was so loose back then, it was hard to know what the "norm" was.

We traded in D's van and I sold my Opal. I bought the Subaru. The subaru had an "airplane engine"- the newest thing. And it was lime green. Too bad we burned up the engine.

One of the most astonishing things I remember about that time was a trip to see the Grateful Dead in Indianapolis. We went with a strange group of unlikely people in a van. We all took some kind of acid and D drove without any problem. It did not seem to affect him at all. We were incapacitated for hours, some people worse than others- I mean really nonfunctional- and he just drove on, talked with me, in the most nonplussed fashion. It was like riding the jet stream. I knew then something was very different about D. It was a great trip, and the show in Indianapolis was fantastic in every way.

Initially then, everything was fun and very stimulating. I met some wonderful people who are still good friends today.

I will never forget our house. On the wall behind the sofa was a huge color graphic painted on the wall by one of D's friends who was an artist. We had orange plasic parson's tables with small orange plastic lights. At the time, it was ultra hip in a kind of futuristic way- not the hippy stuff I was used to. The house was in a small village so I could walk to the grocery store or library. It was a nice change from Southside, although most everyone who came over was living on Southside. We were just sightly removed and safe there, ie I did not feel like the police might bust in at any moment!

I made elaborate macrame plant holders and we bought huge lovely plants for the porch. It was the nicest place I had lived in thus far. We talked about everything, especially politics. I started reading the New York Review of Books.

We started a company to do software. We went to Atlanta and finally acquired something like a prototype of a computer. We could run it by connecting by modem to the main frame at the University. Just as that started to take off our partner the software writer moved to California. That was the end of the company.

Then other things started to shift. Our newspaper friend, J, moved to American Samoa to work for a paper there, and to have a South Sea adventure. D had started becoming more vociferous about various events. Of course we all were more and more concerned with the Vietnam war and the horrible things we saw on tv on a daily basis. It was a paranoid time, a time for paranoids. It was hard to separate things out.

The first strangeness was American Samoa. Coincidentally, Doonesbury was all about American Samoa at the same time- not before-at the same time that our friend arrived there. I cannot describe what was happening in my head then. It was all aswirl. The best analogy is Apocolypse Now! I was losing my footing in reality, and it was not from too many drugs. I rarely did anything at that point except smoke pot. Everything was too real- I did not need anything "recreational" to enhance what was going on.

So, to this day, I have no explanation for the things that happened in 1973 and 1974. I wish I did. From then on, things got crazier. There were more unexplained connections and coincidences. D was getting more manic. It became, and indeed was, just like A Beautiful Mind. None of us knew it, but D was descinding into Schizophrenia. It was tragic.

There was an intervention eventually, and more strange events that included Humphrey Osmond. What he was doing in Alabama at Bryce Hospital I will never understand. I survived somehow and had to remove myself. I moved back to Southside.

Early 1973

Life was happening fast. I could see the end of school coming. I was single and directionless, unless you count as a direction the direction of whatever fun was going on.

I did graduate in the spring, and took a job in the Intensive Care unit at the Veteran's Hospital in Birmingham. I was making big bucks, had 4 weeks of vacation yearly, and had nice benefits, none of which meant a thing to me. I was suprised to find that I was good at nursing, and did well on the job. I do have some funny stories about working there- and it was intense to say the least! The medical center is part of the Southside so I was right in my element.

We did everything as nurses at the VA- the more experienced nurses ran the place-instructing the docs (they were all Residents from the University of Alabama medical school) who were always just passing through. We had male "orderlies", there were no techs. We did our own respiratory therapy, were our own pharmacists, made up all the IV's, peritoneal dialysis, etc. We had people on drips with no IV pumps at all, ventilators, cardiac monitors- we did it all. We even had a lab on the unit for putting in transvenous pacemakers. Have you ever sat and twiddled a knob to capture a heartbeat or run a dopamine drip rate up and down to keep someone alive? I scare myself when I think of what I was doing at 21 years old.

I loved the nurses there- they were such great role models for me. They were confident, well educated and kind to me. Firm, and kind. That is, the nurses I worked with were kind- not the administrative nurses. They were a whole 'nother animal.

One story involves a young guy that was in a coma. One day he was on a gurney coming back from a test and as I was wheeling him back on the unit he opened his eyes, looked up at me and said "kiss me"! In my astonishment and youthful enthusiasm I gave him a kiss on the cheek. I was of course immediately called in and given a lecture, and written up. Another time I slept late. I was called within minutes of not showing up, again lectured up one side and down the other. Nurses don't just not show up. I learned that lesson really well that day. Another evening our usually horribly busy unit just emptied out. We had three stable patients. In those days they did not send nurses home if "overstaffed". The young doc that was on the unit said "let's play some cards". Next day we all got lectured and written up.

One day we had 4 Code Blues at the same time. Another evening, I was the lone nurse in the MICU with 9 patients, 2 orderlies and had to prepare and administer 4 peritoneal dialyses at the same time. If anyone reads this that knows what I am talking about- is that even humanly possible? In spite of all that, I did learn a lot there, and the things I got to do were exciting. I worked back and forth in the CCU and the MICU so I did get a lot of training that always served me well.

So I was working. And at the same time I guess I needed a little more excitement in my social life so I started seeing someone that I had met through my ex-husband that had piqued my curiosity. That is the beginning of a story of epic proportions. It will take a while to figure out how to tell that story. So much of it is ineffable. to be continued

The Ladies

I yam who i yam, but would not be so yammin' if it were not for the influential women in my life.

I guess I was just going along, listening to the Supremes and the Chiffon's and others. Aretha Franklin hit the scene and blew me away. So funky, so 150% emotion. I think she woke me out of the slumber of the sweet and nicely packaged music. Another great was Carla Thomas. I love her voice. I was kind of afraid of Nina Simone, did not appreciate her until later on- she is one of the great greats.

Joan Baez, Dusty Springfield, Marianne Faithful gave me a taste of another world- where women were talented, forthright, fragile and kind. They weren't afraid to sing it out for everyone to know.

On the teen scene sprang Janis Ian singing " I learned the truth at 17" and it was so cold, so real. She was our Alanis Morrisette. Carlie Simon was also real- real, but more sophisticated and cool. Carole King was inspiring. Her music was very accessible and made me think I could write songs like she did.

I think the greatest influences came from Grace Slick, Jonie Mitchell (in a class by herself), Linda Ronstadt and Janis Joplin. I could listen to their songs over and over, sing along, and FEEL along with them. They were women- gutsy, outstanding, no holds barred, and I was paying attention. I started listening to Bonnie Raitt much later, only discovering Sweet Forgiveness in 1975. And when I saw Donna Godchaux singing with the Dead, I thought she was a Goddess!

My inspiration to play guitar came from Joan Armitrading. I will never forget listening to her first album. Somehow around 1975 I decided that I wanted to learn the bass.

Remember that at this time there were no role models. These were the originals, and I looked at them and took them in for what they were. There was no cynicism at the time as far as music went. I am grateful for that.

So looking back at 1972 now I feel much better about it all. It was not such a bad time after all. I was impressionable, open minded, directionless, but kind of grounded in a funny way. I attribute my sanity to music and the musicians that played for me.