Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie - Living in the SUB

I wasn’t always as normal as I am today. What I am today, I arrived at through a twisted series of paths in the Valley of Trial & Error, most of them Error. Through an alternate reality experiment in 1969, I erased most of what I recalled of The Journey So Far, and rendered what was left irrelevant, making 1970 effectively the year I stepped onto the first path.

It was an exciting time to be stepping onto paths. We were just emerging from the complacency and scholastic tyranny of the 50s and it was dawning on people, especially young people, that the world might become a better place if we all just loved each other a little more. There was even a feeling that if we all joined together we could create a collective voice that would change the world. We all wanted to be different, so we all dressed the same, spoke the same, and listened to the same music. But hell, it was different than what our parents expected of us and they hated it, so for us, it was different. And it really fucked up the rednecks.

The American War was farther away than it is today but people seemed to object to it on a grander scale, especially in America. There were a few objections in Canada, but the loudest were right here in Fredericton, right here on the campus of the University of New Brunswick. That made for some colorful times on the grounds of the old Red and Black, but that was just before 1970. I arrived when things were slightly calmer, when the noise and babble of the 60s were beginning to translate into a shift in perspective for everybody, around the time when drug dealers were less into turning on the world and more into making money and all the rock stars were dying from the times a changin’.

My student ID for the 1970-71 year was stolen by orange penguins one night, but I did manage to save my ID for the following year. Here’s what it looked like:

Yep, I was a pot smokin’ bead-wearin’ long-haired dirty hippie, but it was the 70s, I was young, and orange penguins were stealing my life.

It all started here, in the SUB. It was different then.

It was a great place to be cool in the evenings. The raised stage wasn’t there. What was there … was a completely separate fast food area. An entire kitchen right before the stage. In back of the restaurant was pretty much the same as today, big, impersonal.

But the fast food section was where it was all happening. It was small, compact, tight and personal. They played music … the Beatles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin … and most of these people were still alive then and still putting out albums (not as frequently as they are today, though, all these years after they went to Jesus).

In the evenings, most were tripping on acid. There was this sense, then, that acid was a fast path to expanded consciousness and a means to wipe the psychic slate clean and start all over again. And again. And again. Like …

Like, we were all doing California Sunshine one night and one of my roommates went into his room and we didn’t see him for nearly two hours, but we could hear him grunting and giggling and laughing and talking to himself and saying things like, “Yeah, that’s it! That’s it!” and a lot of other stuff we couldn’t understand. He finally came out, in this pajamas, all excited and almost jumping up and down and saying, “Come on and see it! Come on and see it!” and we went into his room and looked around and there was nothing to see. He pointed at the bed. There was nothing on it. He pulled down the blankets with this big smile that wound itself twice around his head and pointed right at the center of the bed and said, “I did that!”

Right in the center of the white sheets was a little brown ball of shit.

Some trips were less enlightening.

But nobody shit in the seats at the fast food section of the SUB. We just talked and stared and talked and stared and listened to the music. The ones who were mostly drunk played cards. The game of the day was Hearts. I think I saw somebody studying there one evening, but I can’t be sure. It might have been in the day. A lot of people read books there in the day. In the light.

In the daytime, the party was upstairs … in the SUB lobby.

There were chairs (in fact, the ones in this picture look exactly like those chairs, expect they were pastel green in 1970), but mostly we sat or lay on the floor, usually slumped in groups up against the walls smoking cigarettes. Sometimes the smell of pot mingled with the smell of patchouli.

The north entrance to the SUB was really fucked up with the protesters and the left wingers.

They could really get in your face and mess up your head for people who wanted to save the world and make it a better place. One of them – I think his name was Bob – stuck his face into mine one day and said that he wanted to kill Nixon and kill Nixon’s family and kill Nixon’s dog and kill Nixon’s friends and kill anybody who didn’t want to kill Nixon. I threw my binder and books in his face and ran upstairs to the sanity of the people bunched up in corners and smoking cigarettes and pot.

But the north entrance to the SUB was usually a cool place with serious looking people who were flunking all their courses because they spend all their time passing out FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION posters and yelling “STOP THE WAR!” People with guitars and beards sang folk and anti-war songs on the stairway.

When the weather was OK, people gathered in the green area below the SUB.

Lots of people did their first trips here. I know a few women who lost their virginity here (a couple in broad daylight), and anybody with a guitar, whether they knew how to play it or not, was out here strumming chords and just being cool. These were times when anybody could be cool if they wanted. Sometimes bands would play in this area. I don’t know where they got the electricity, but they drew some pretty big crowds.

This place was called the Drop In Center.

It was where you went when your acid trip was getting out of hand and you were thinking about walking off a roof or hiding under the bed because a thousand police were on the other side of your door and hiding under your bed and your desk and in the bottom of your coffee cup.

When things got that fucked up, you went to the Drop In Center and really cool people with long hair and beads and round eye glasses said cool things to you and made you feel like you were having a good time and that the world was a nice place to be in 1970.

The only time I really needed to go to the Drop In Center (though later I went there to help someone on a bum trip), it was too far away and it was too cold out and I was too out of it by the time I realized that things were just a tad out of hand. It was Christmas and all my roommates had left for the holidays and I was home alone. I found what looked like a hit of Clear Light acid in my desk. I figured probably not, but I swallowed it anyway. During the ensuring trip, I confirmed Heidegger’s theories, hand an interesting conversation with Christ, solved the mind-body problem, and decided that I didn’t want tot do acid anymore.

The next morning as I was drifting slowly back to earth, I wrote this poem (which was published a couple of times in the Bruns):

thoughts after

yeah, you did it again
took that stuff
so
a few hours of crazy patterns
time
slowed down so that you could almost
step outside yourself and watch yourself
then, speeded up so that everything seemed
rushing past you at crazy angles, people
talking in blurbs, your head
swimming in a whirlpool of sensory
fragments, spinning so fast that
you instinctively grip the arms of your chair, hoping
that after this rush you’ll feel that gentle leveling, that
relieving awareness of normality restoring itself

it levels
you can feel it, almost
like gliding slowly down into the world
back to familiar surroundings that were
there all the time, but different, somehow
you breathe easier now, talk a bit wearily, but
in longer more confident sentences
you know what you’re saying now, you’re
not sidetracked as easily
a flickering cigarette doesn’t distract you now
that same flick that, an hour earlier
would have been a somersaulting ball of flame
not now
you’re leveling
coming down

you can feel it in your gut
that pain is sure now (but hell nothing’s pure)
maybe it’s that pain that makes you think
nagging
your head is still a bit fuzzy, your bowels sore
your eyes ache from the light filtering
through the windows
they’re still a bit big
sensitive
your nerves jangle easily

and you think
what happened?
nothing really, but a couple of times
you nearly lost your mind, nearly
got sucked into that whirlpool
but you knew that before you took it
maybe that’s what you’re trying to think about now
and what you might think about next time
after

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