Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie – Freak Outs and Something Magical

One night we ate these cute little button things from Mexico and, after puking our guts up, we turned into coyotes. We grabbed the remaining buttons and set off to spread coyote-ism around the world. This is where we ended up:

They have another name for it now, but back then we just called it The Women’s Residence. It was Halloween. And we were coyotes. The inside of the building was dressed in webs, streamers and cardboard cutouts of skeletons, ghosts and witches. We felt right at home. And there were women everywhere. At least, we hoped they were women. They were in costume. One of them was dressed as a belly dancer. She was definitely a woman. I think her name was Bob. I asked her if she would like to become a coyote. She said she’d been waiting all her life to be a coyote. I gave her a button and spent the next hour watching an Exit sign transform. I’m not sure how that happened.

BIFF’S WARNING TO ANYONE CONTEMPLATING THE DANGEROUS ACT OF EATING BUTTONS: Avoid exit signs.

This building was called the Drop In Center.

It had hippie-like signs and drawings all around it that were drawn by bona fide hippie artists (i.e., anyone with long hair and crayons who referred to everybody as “Man”). It was where you went when you were freaking out on acid that was either too strong or too fucked up. A friend of mine spent three days curled up behind a bush in a park downtown. We had to visit him each day to change his pants and clean him up. He never made it to the Drop In Center.

I spent an evening there once talking a young coyote down from a bum trip on Green Monster, a particularly powerful acid. I was doing it myself at the time. I distracted her from her fixation on death and dismemberment by writing a poem about the acid and reciting each letter to her as I wrote it … a difficult operation considering that the letters kept trying to drip off the paper as I was writing them. It took the better part of the night to write the poem. I can’t recall if it was published in the Bruns, but this is what Green Monster was like:

Green Monster

Paling minds
And sunshine
And lemon rinds
Are here

I touch my face
My foamy head
Is here
My body sinks
Into the slosh of the room
That cannot be

Did I mention that my poetry is why I write prose?

This is the elevator in Head Hall.

I lived off-campus, on York Street with three hippie business students, a flat full of transients, Free Wheelin’ Franklin the motorcycle thief, and Miska the witch. A one point, we had a skull in the basement overseeing our homemade wine. I never saw the skull, but I’m certain that none of our wine ever went missing.

We walked along the train tracks to get to the campus because back then Canada had trains in that time before Brian Mulroney set out to dismantle the only symbol of a united country that ever existed in Canada. When we reached the campus, we went into the doors at the bottom of Head Hall and took the elevator up. It was an old creaky metal box that shook disturbingly as it climbed floors. We were always in fear of it. We were certain that it was possessed and that it would one day take us to the top of the building and then plummet with satanic speed.

But that never happened. What did happen was … it stopped. One morning between floors, it just stopped. My roommate and I were still half in the bag from experiments in alternate realities the night before and this didn’t seem like an appropriate time to be trapped between two floors in a satanic metal box. But the neon light in the ceiling was interesting. It was very interesting. Light seemed to emanate from it like bright smoke. We followed the bright smoke to the walls and floors and the certificate of elevator wellness posted on one wall. We remarked on the vibrancy of the bright smoke and its remarkable ability to shed light.

About forty-five minutes passed and the elevator started up again for no apparent reason right when we realized that we were both still in our pajamas. We thought about this until the elevator reached our floor and decided to go to classes anyway and just keep our winter coats on.

I don’t think anybody in any of my classes realized that I was wearing pajamas. And I'm not sure if that's a comment about them, or about me.

And now for something completely magical. This is the hill in front of Mem Hall.

See the manhole cover jutting out from the hill about the center of the photo? In the early 70s that was a spring. The coldest, clearest, best-tasting water in the world bubbled up from it. We used to go there when the ground wasn’t covered in snow and drink the water. It was beautiful. It was magical. It came from the earth and it was free. It was just there for the taking by those who wanted it.

Drinking that water from the ground below Mem Hall was probably the best thing that happened to me in the early 70s. Sometimes I dream of cold water flowing all over my body while it regenerates my spirit and body and I know where that water is coming from.

Have a good year. Make lots of notes for no other reason than they are proof you were in class. And … you may run out of beer and need to sell them to someone who wasn’t in class. Life is balance.