"There's No Place Like. . . ?"

Woodstock.  Suddenly everybody wanted to be a hippie.  At least after the movie.  Kids who never knew suddenly found there was a revolution going on.  Power to the people!  

My junior year was ending with me in the crossfire.  At the trailer park, things had gotten weird.  Donny was bringing in a lot of strange people.  He was dealing drugs and the new guys were older and even more violent.  Some of them were Vietnam vets and they carried guns.  There were two gay guys who lived in a trailer near the entrance to the park, and one night a guy I stayed away from shot his pistol through their trailer.  They moved out within days.  I think it was the acid that was making everyone so crazy.  God knows what Donny was selling as drugs.

I was in a car with Donny and the vet one night downtown.  Donny was trying to hook up some drugs with a black guy he knew.  We were all sitting in the car when the vet got weird and pulled his gun.  The black guy got out of the car and started to go, but he said something that got him into trouble.  The vet leveled the pistol and took aim.  That is when the black guy started running.  The vet raised the gun a little and popped off a round a little bit above him.  I was in way over my head.  I kept thinking about Dorothy clicking her heels together and repeating her mantra, but I wasn't sure where I wanted to get to.  I just wanted to get out.  

Tommy's sister's boyfriend had joined the Army Reserve and had to go to training for six weeks.  When he came back, he knew how to make pipe bombs.  At first they were small, but they kept getting bigger and bigger.  One night he brought a big pipe stuffed with gun powder and rags. We all looked at it with fear and wonder.  It was too big.  We all knew that.  Russell laughed, but I could tell he was unsure about this one, too.  That night, he took it to the woods.  Tommy and I did not go with him.  We sat, though, in anticipation just to see what it would do.  When it went off, it rocked the whole park like an A bomb.  Russell came running and we all jumped in the car and left for the night.  There was sure to be police for this one.  There was sure to be trouble.  

One day, Russell showed up with a handful of military IDs.  He had slipped into an office at the Reserve center and pinched them.  He was taking photos and making IDs for anyone who had some money.  Suddenly, everyone was going to bars.  While the drinking age was twenty-one, members of the military only had to be eighteen.  If they were old enough to serve their country, the logic went, they were certainly old enough to drink.  

There were two gay bars in town.  The big one was downtown.  It wasn't advertised or anything, for it was illegal to be "queer."  But it was there in the bar of an old hotel and Russell and Donny had gone.  They had devised a scheme.  As soon as they walked in, guys were buying them drinks, they said, and one of the fellows had invited them back to his house.  Donny and Russell went, and when they got there, they had another drink and then robbed the fellow's house.  What was he going to do, they asked?  He couldn't call the cops.  

This went on from time to time, this "rolling of queers," as Donny called it.  But of course, it led to big trouble.  One night, Russell was alone with a fellow and was going to rob him, but the fellow resisted.  Russell had him on the floor and he put a knife to the poor guys throat, but the fellow wouldn't quit fighting and the blade went in a bit so that there was blood.  It was too much.  There were police, an arrest, and then a lawyer.  It was going to cost Russell a lot of money.  

When it was over, Russell went into the service for two years.  He would be a "regular" now.  Tommy's sister would wait for him.  

And that's the way it went.  Woodstock at school, Vietnam in the trailer park.  And I knew which way I was leaning.  All that time that Tommy and I had spent learning to pick guitars, all those hours spent with Tommy's father playing country music, the learning to sing harmonies, it was all coming together.  Crosby, Stills, and Nash had made it cool.  And suddenly, people wanted to hear us play.