Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie – The Biggest Party Ever

This is McLeod House. In 1971 it was called the Singles’ Co-op.

It was also called Speed City and/or VD City. I called it Second Home ‘cause, though I lived on York Street with a guitar I didn’t know how to play and a basement full of homemade wine, the Co-op was the place to party on the weekends. The drunks, acid heads, hippies, draft dodgers, transients, dealers, bootleggers and radicals lived and crashed mostly the third and fifth floors. In 1971, they had the biggest party the campus had ever seen and likely ever would.

We got there about ten. That night, the elevator was run by two tall men wearing turbins. I think their names were Bob. They had dark serious eyes and when they found we were going to the third floor, they asked if we wanted some acid. We smiled widely and said we already had some. It was in us. They asked if we wanted more. “Sure,” we said. “Why not?”

Remember, it was around this time that the vice president of the Co-op was quoted in the Bruns saying “…we have no desire to ban the use of drugs but where there is use, there are sales …” and he asked for “more discreet usage.”

Try that today.

We de-boarded the elevator into air so thick with cigarette and pot smoke that we had to push hard to walk forward, tripping and stumbling over bodies sprawled on the hallway floor. It was Freak City. The Lair of the Long Hairs. In some groups, it was impossible to tell which head belonged to which arm or leg and I swear some people were talking to the backs of other people’s heads and the backs of their heads were listening!

Somehow we found Rob and Steve’s room. They were our friends and bootleggers. We bought a few quarts of beer and Rob showed us the new sound system he’d build from scratch. It pumped out a hundred watts (real watts, deafening watts, teeth-rattling-mind-numbing-bladder-slamming watts). He had speakers set up in his room and the next room pointed towards the door, in effect turning each room in to a speaker and then he cranked it up.

In the hall between the two rooms, Paul – one of the first hippies in Fredericton – shit his pants. He spent hours trying to explain this to the people around him. It was a tough concept. If you ever have cause to listen to a sound system that throws out a genuine 100 watts, ease into it. Or wear a diaper.

Somehow, I ended up with a couple of deserters from the American army who didn’t want to fight in the American War anymore. At this time, it was in Vietnam. I think their names were Bob. One of them kept saying something about shooting their lieutenant and the other one kept telling him to shut up and then spinning off all sorts of jungle wisdom.

One of those jungle tidbits has had an effect on the way I pee for over thirty years.

Bob told me that his sergeant told him to piss quietly in the night when they were on patrols. Bob thought this sounded nuts but somebody had told him to listen to his sergeant if he wanted to stay alive, so he made a point of aiming the stream on a slant down the trunks of trees so that it barely made a muffled trickling.

One night when he was practicing the art of Stealth Pissing, he noticed movement a few yards ahead of him. He froze, yellow falls and all, and picked out the silhouette of a Viet Cong soldier moving through the jungle.

He swore that if he’d been practicing his pre-war pissing style, he probably would have had his dick shot off. Ever since hearing Bob’s story, I pee with the aplomb of a firefly while Viet Cong storm troopers lurk just outside my bathroom window.

Sometime around the middle of the night, we walked, staggered, crawled, rolled, and stumbled into the elevator where the two Bobs in turbins were still operating the elevator and handing out acid and they read our minds: “Fifth floor?”

The fifth floor was just like the third floor … wall-to-wall freaks, smoke-filled air, and music exploding out of every room. We passed out some of the quarts of beer we’d bought downstairs and found ourselves holding other stimulants. Everyone was hugging and talking and some were even dancing with others or by themselves. One group was trying to build a human pyramid to the ceiling. I sat down beside a beautiful blonde lady named Bob. Unfortunately, Bob actually turned out to be Bob, and he started telling me stories about the early days of the Singles’ Co-op … like, the year before or something like that.

Seems a biker spent the entire winter building a chopper on the top floor. When spring arrived, he tried to take it downstairs to drive it, but it wouldn’t fit into the elevator. He had to tear it apart in the hall and put it back together again downstairs. He got on his chopper and drove off and was never seen again.

Another guy (probably Bob who was confused about what he did to his lieutenant in Vietnam) went over the top one day just before exams and piled everybody’s books onto the floor and shot them to death with a machine gun.

Toward morning – early morning, like, when the sun is just starting to come up – most people were asleep, wound around each other, some having virtually motionless sex and others whispering and giggling. Only a few stereos were still on, playing mostly folk music. My friends found me still listening to Bob, who was telling me about the guy on the third floor who shot a hole in the wall with a shotgun trying to kill a mandala poster that was attacking him.

As I lopped away, I noticed that he was still telling stories and didn’t seem to notice that everybody around him was either asleep or doing things of a sexual nature under the cover of coats and sleeping bags.

The elevator was empty and we were faced with the prospect of having to figure out which buttons to use to make it function … if only those damn buttons would stop floating all over all walls and floor and ceiling, and I think one of them tried to roost on my forehead. Somehow, we got the elevator working enough to get us to the bottom floor where we wandered out into a world where the sun was just beginning to peak over the horizon and we made our way to a wooded area behind the Co-op.

We sat in a circle in a small clearing in the woods and watched bugs flying around us and talked about life, the universe and everything in it. Eventually, the sun was fully up and somewhere right over our heads meaning that it was probably around noon. Somehow, we’d all kind of worked our way into bushes and the boles of trees and we blended right into the woods. As we stood to go home, shaking pine needles, leaves and other forest stuff from our clothing, we had this strange feeling of being born out of the woods.

Or maybe it was just the party.

Next: Poems, love unrequited, and losing a flat of beer.