Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
with flair. Ted was married and had a kid and taught to buy time to finish his current book.
And he could drink and carouse with us young'uns.
Creative Writing 404 with Professor Peden, on the other hand, was dry as toast, a humor-
less exercise in witless rhapsody on the famous people he had known as prelude to promoting
the pHd and its vast benefits. Or was that the PhD?
The difference between those who can and those who teach wasn't new. But the 60s
rendered many who thought they could as campus captives. At least an art form helped re-
move the onus of both worlds, one at war, the other at school. Ted Schaeffer warned us against
the PhD. But Professor Peden advised in favor of it: 90% of all National Book Award authors
held the PhD. Ted Schaefer said, “Yeah, and look at the topics they write. hey're shit! It's
political. Do you really want to spend your life writing like that?” Ted had a point, and he
risked his job assuring that prime years were best spent on adventures to feed our fiction. Fuck
a bunch of bookworms.
Would we get high and laid as frequently in the outside world? We hoped we would and
couldn't really see why we wouldn't. We felt late in making our way. We felt slighted, not as
short-changed as the poor stiffs dying in the mud, but trapped in the egghead bunker. The
place was stifling, except for the demonstrations.
Ah, well. Campus schedules, rigors and requirements were easily ignored. Wearing funny
clothes, taking drugs and hanging out with a lovely, lively crowd was a blessed distraction. The
jungle war would not go away but loomed nearer, with June graduation hardly nine months
away.
We repress in the short term in order to move ahead, so we can process later with greater
method what was repressed earlier by necessity. That was college think for never mind, I got
other things to do. The sentiment hadn't changed from the junior, sophomore or freshmen
years, but things changed over many motorcycle miles, adding nuance and a certain mystique.
Unique boots helped, and so did two uncommonly cool leather jackets from the Florence flea
market. The first was dark leather in a sport cut with lapels, probably a Gestapo model. The
second was a flyboy number with a fleece collar, likely salvaged from a downed flyboy, likely
one of ours. Oh, the coeds saw, the coeds cooed, the coeds circled.
Youthful days passed in oblivion. Death was among us, and we rolled the bones with aban-
don in a world of delusion. The romp seemed urgent, free and necessary, given the rip of the
times. The sexual revolution merely responded to the greater struggle. Freedom of the flesh
demonstrated other freedoms too, and the kids were eager. Bio-function was common, repeat
as necessary—or available.
About that time a batch of Stanford clinical acid arrived from Charles Silverberg just a few
months before he killed himself with a shotgun at age twenty-two when his girlfriend called
off the romance. She was forty-two, so the romance was mostly his. She showed him a few
things he'd never imagined much less seen with a coed. He was in love. She was more practic-
