| Furthir Tales |
Doin' the Kingman, AZ, Shuffle |
"When I Paint My Masterpiece" |
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Furthir Tales of an intrepid Spirit
 UKE wasn't his real name. I met many Rabbits, Wolves, Sunshines, and
Moonbeams, too. But, for our purposes, I need not tell you his family name here.
If you're still alive, Luke, Bless you. If, not, may you be Blessed of
Memory. In the summer of 1967, after I withdrew from Seton Hall University, I left South Orange, NJ, and returned home to Rockaway, NJ. Staying there with my family was
dependent on employment. There was none for me. So, on Memorial Day, I took a bus
to NYC. and went to the East Village. Exactly, how I managed to find a place to
stay, I don't remember, but I did not ride the "D" train all night and I didn't
sleep in a doorway. In fact, I do remember staying in a "crash" pad where one of
the guys there was the Co-captain of the Seton Hall Basketball team, who had also
"dropped out" around the same time as me. We had partied with the same crew of
track team mates that winter previous, so I wasn't too surprised to see the
fellow. Never have seen the man since though. Soon, I found a ZEN MACROBIOTIC restaurant - The PARADOX - that appealed to me. Brown rice, sea weed - no "dirty hot dogs" though, Mr. Dylan...(chuckle) only shrimp, lotsa jumbo shrimp.I met a woman my age there, whom I will call Ursala. Ursala was kind and I felt an immediate bond with her. We didn't talk much, but she remembered me next time I
saw her at the Paradox. (Many interesting things happened that summer, as I
Yo-Yoed back'n'forth between New York and Boston, with a few visits to the village
of Woodstock tossed in, but this is an episode in the life of Luke and me, so I
will save those tales of ledgerdemain for another time.) Come the fall, I
hitch-hiked to San Francisco.Rather than staying in the City, I called a person I had met in the East Village that summer, who was from Santa Clara, California, down the peninsula a-ways. She
invited me down to Santa Clara, introduced me to some good friends of hers, who
got me set up with a room and a job in the cafeteria at Santa Clara University, a
Catholic private school, there. One of the circle of friends was a good guitarist.
He had been taught "Embryonic Journey" the acoustic solo guitar piece on an early
Jefferson Airplane album, by its author, Jorma Kaukonen. Jorma taught guitar in
Palo Alto, near Santa Clara, before joining the Airplane.Things were shaping up. BUT - that previous summer, I had gone to the Newport Jazz festival, back east in Rhode Island. While running in a sudden thunderstorm for shelter, I had slipped, flipped over completely, and landed on my rump. I was ok, but when I opened my hard-shell case, the new Ephiphone guitar I'd bought to replace a nylon string model, was broken - just above the nut on the neck. I was heart-broken. Before I went to the west coast, I'd left the epiphone in a repair shop back in South Orange, retrieved the nylon string from Rockaway, and used it while the other was in the shop. How I figured I'd get back to Jersey for the repaired steel string model was not a priority when I headed west - youthful optimistism? Musta been...anyway, things were going so well in Santa Clara, that I called the repair shop in S. Orange, NJ, and told them I would be back within a week or so to get my epiphone. The ride back east to Chicago was not without surprises, some of which are still worth relating, BUT, AGAIN, this is an episode in the life of Luke and me. Details of how I got from Wyoming to New Jersey, after my arranged ride from San Francisco to Chicago crapped out, will have to wait for an auto-bio graphical novel, or something like that...(Gentle reader. Let me know if you are interested in such a tome). So, November 67 found me back in the East Village. I go back to the Paradox restaurant, and who should I meet, but URSALA! She tells me she's met some neat
people who have spent some time living at Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert's set
up in Millbrook, New York. Would I? Sure, Ursala! Within two weeks, I had moved in
with a crew that called themselves Tipi-town Tribe. Four of them, two couples, had
been singled out of the crowd, at a Central Park Be-in, and offered a chance to be
extras in a movie a production company would film at the Millbrook, estate that
Leary and Alpert had rented for their League for Spiritual Discovery group. The
estate had been developed by a 19th century cattle baron, who ended up going to
India, getting into aspects of India's culture, coming back and laying out a
mandala system of paths through the woods. There was a gazebo at the
center.Anyhow, the movie was to have the extras including Jeni, Tomahawk, and Sally and Steve (I've changed names, here) play "Indians" - American indigenous folk. They
got to live in teepees and dress the part, the way the director wanted them to
look. The story I was told was people got to take as much Sandoz pharmaceutical
LSD as they could eat in front of the person at the "dispensary" handing out daily
alotments, but no one was supposed to take 4 "hits" and palm 2 for later. (This
was before LSD was made illegal, I'm almost sure. I will correct this detail if my
recollection is not accurate.) Well, the people started to tell the director
how they thought a scene should go, and when the producer came back to check out
the project he looked at the footage, and saw "A movie being made about a movie
being made..." and suspended production. This is what I was told by the Tipi-town
Tribe. Was it an accurate depiction? I can't really say. I haven't seen any of
those people since the early 70s.Dr. Timothy Leary, called Did you feel that? The preceding details will give you, the gentle reader, some sense of the group
cohesion in the Tipi-town mind-set, when I met them. Before the movie filming
could pick back up, the Milbrook estate was busted by the authorities for various
substance violations. Everyone of the people in the film company had to leave.
During the time I would remain with these folks, they kept talking about getting
to Tucson, Arizona, where the movie was supposed to be finished at the Old Tucson
film-set studio. This did lead to the whole group staging an exodus to Tucson in
the early part of 1968. From Day One I lived with them, they talked glowingly of a
fellow known to them only as LUKE...What will follow are a number of
episodes of my days with this remarkable human being - STAY TUNED, gentle
reader. The Tipi-town crew would inject Luke said, or Luke would, alot. Quickly, I asked who's Luke. I was told Luke stayed in our Tipi at Millbrook. He'd had a very
visible effect on everyone in the Tipi-town apartment. "Where is he now?" I
asked. "He's in a Veterans Hospital over in NJ, we're going to see him on
Saturday, wanna go, too?"One look at the fellow, once we were in his room in the hospital, and I, myself, interrupt the greetings between deep old friends, and say, "Luke, were you a seminary student back at Seton Hall University, over in South Orange (The Vets hospital being near there, in East Orange...), around '64?" He replied, "Why, yes. Why do you ask?" I laughed the belly laugh I've since become famous for in succeeding moments like this one, and said, "I was at Seton Hall then too!" (Right here, in Synchronicity Strokes Surround Sound, strains of Dylan's "IT'S ALL OVER, NOW BABY BLUE" bubble-up, as we reach the lines: "...the highway is for gamblers, better use your sense, take what you have gathered from co-incidence..." - your humble cyber-raconteur, here, hadn't learned to speak of these moments as synchronicity strokes, yet. That slip of the tongue didn't occur until one fine day in the spring of 1993...) Luke wanted to know how I could recall him at all. He said he didn't remember anyone who wasn't in the seminary classes with him. I said, "Luke, that's easy.
You were the one Black seminarian, remember?" He laughed the inimitable soft
chuckle I would become quite familiar with and said, "Guess I did stand out in
that crowd, didn't I?"Soon afterwards, Luke was released from the Vets Hospital, and moved into the Tipi-town flat with us. He told me of enlisting in the Air Force. By the time of
his discharge, he had become a physical therapist at a facility the military
maintained in Montana for officers above a certain rank who really did go bonkers
like the guy in the Stanley Kubrick film - starring Peter Sellars - "Dr.
Strangelove". (I never have had time to locate this base and verify his
story, so if any of you gentle readers know about the "ranch" Luke was assigned
to, please email me) So, I thought to myself, here's why everyone speaks of
the man so affectionately - he's given them all backrubs! I would soon learn
myself. His terms were simple: "Sure, be happy to give you a backrub, but
somebody's gotta give me one." So I learned his professional techniques.
Simple. No frills, no fuss, no muss. Capable of making even paranoid Strategic Air
Command pilots feel a bit relaxed...Sometimes, instead of the minimum of 3 folks
it would take, the backrub would cycle through the whole crew. There were cold
winter nights when the Van Morrison album that has "Brown-Eyed Girl" on it
would go on the turntable, with the reject mechanism disengaged, and the one side
would play over and over again for 3 hours...Did that crew have much money to
pursue the multifarious diversions NYC offers? No. Did we care, or feel deprived?
NO!! We had Brother Luke, one of the truly remarkable people I've ever
known!!! |
