You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

A B A D T R I P

After graduating from Oregon, in 1965, I spent the summer, hitchhiking across the county. I was looking for a city in which I wanted to live. I settled on New York City. My first apartment was in was in Greenwich Village. My walk there to work took me past a rundown building where a group of hip young adults, associated with Timothy Leary, had a bookshop and meditation room. On occasion, I would stop there to browse. In this way, I became acquainted with some of the folks who worked there. When they learned that I was an apprentice architect, they asked me to help in solving a space problem. I agreed to look at it. Later that week, I stopped by the shop after work. I was greeted by Berney, the bookshop “manager”. Berney was a slender man, of average height. He was possibly two years my senior. Like the others in the shop, he was outgoing and gregarious. I quickly felt a connection with him. He was one of those people who knew how to bring you in with a little information about himself and an interest in what you had to say. He listened well and remembered what I said.

Berney was a PhD Psychologist who was doing research on dreams at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn. His work was at night, in the day he kept watch over the operation of the bookstore. Their space problem was a result of their success. The bookstore had grown and taken over the space used for the evening meditation group. Interest in meditation had also grown. I sat in on a meditation and came up with a plan. I proposed that they build a circle of bookcases. These cases were to be suspended from the high ceiling on heavy hinges. The bookcases were just long enough to reach the floor. Each bookcase was to be fixed to a system of small pulleys and ropes. In preparation for their evening meditation, the bottoms of the cases would be raised to a 30 degree angle with the floor. The elevated bookcases form a large umbrella over the meditation space. It formed an intimate, inward-focused space, just right for a group of people sitting in a circle on the floor in meditation. The staff and volunteers built the cases and were delighted with the results. My reward was that Timothy Leary took Bernie and me to dinner at a nice French restaurant in The Village.

Weeks later, on a Thursday in September, I stopped at the shop on my way home from work. Bernie asked me to join him and others for a weekend party away from the city. He was very enthusiastic about having lined up some especially good acid and assured me it would be a most memorable weekend. I was tempted. It sounded like fun and a good way to meet people. However I was not interested drugs, other than an occasional toke of marijuana. So I declined.

The following Friday I stopped by the bookstore to ask about the prior weekend acid trip. Bernie was out sick. No one mentioned anything about the nature of his illness. A week later he was still out. This time I was told that he had a bad trip. I decided to visit him to see if there was anything I could do to help. Berney lived in Lower East Side near 17th Street and First Avenue. His tenement was a four-story “walk up”. I walked to his building in the warm afternoon sunshine. It was Friday. The people I encountered seemed to be happy to be heading home for the weekend. I found his building, opened the heavy steel door, and stepped into the dingy narrow foyer. It was lit by an inadequate single light bulb dangling from the ceiling on a twisted pair of wires. A row of mailboxes lined one wall. I found Bernie’s name. He was in Apartment B on the third floor. I started up the worn wooden staircase. It wound upward through the center of the building. There were four apartments on each floor. As I approached the third floor I could hear someone mumbling. The noise was coming from a door which was partially open. It was apartment B. I knocked, there was no answer. The mumbling continued. I pushed the door open. There I found Bernie, alone, sitting on a carpet in the center of the room. He was wearing white brief underwear and nothing else. Half-empty cans of food were scattered around him. He vaguely acknowledged my presence. I tried to talk with him. He responded with incoherent babble. I asked if he needed anything. He acknowledged my question with an awkward shake of his head. This was terrible. I didn’t know what to do so I started to put some of the refuse in the garbage, but the garbage can was overflowing. I felt exceedingly uncomfortable seeing him in this condition. It was a shocking and depressing scene made worse by knowing the kind of vivacious and outgoing person that he had been. I wished him well and excused myself. As I went heavily down the dark staircase, I was shaken, thinking that If I had accepted his invitation to join him for “an unforgettable weekend”, I likely would have wound up like Berney.

Weeks later when I inquired at the shop, I learned that he had not improved much. “He got into a bad batch” someone explained again, in a nonchalant way, “Hey shit happens”. As a consequence of his condition, he lost his position in dream research.

A month later I left Greenwich Village. I was put off by the homosexual advances of a man in the next apartment and revolted by the dog shit which I had to avoid on my walk to work. I moved across Manhattan to the Lower East Side where people were too poor to have dogs and where children played in the pocket park across 5th street from the apartment I rented. The bookstore was no longer on my route to work, so I never stopped there again.