That second freak out March 3, 1986
I talked about Mone yesterday and how she saved me when I
freaked out on acid.
But she did not long remain our friend,
While my drug of choice was LSD, hers was cocaine, and she
had more than one freak out of her own -once, when Hank and Bill Capella (the
lone survivor of the building the Weather Underground blew up by accident) came
visiting.
Louise was pregnant,
Bill was already nervous because the FBI was looking for
him, wanting him to identify those who were in the building when it blew up.
He would have hid out in New Jersey, but business forced him
to come into Manhattan.
Bill was a trooper who had been part of a number of merry
Garleyland adventures, including the infamous trip to the shore in 1969. He had
not wanted to go into the Weatherman’s building, but a friend and grabbed his
hand and practically dragged him up the stairs. When he got there, he saw
people sitting around a table full of bombs, and they were smoking pot. He
decided it was not healthy for him to remain there and hoofed it back down the
stairs, propelled down the last flight by the explosion.
Even six months after the fact, his ribs hurt from being
flung out onto the street.
In summer of 1969, it was his red convertible that we took
to the shore, the steering wheel of which we later pulled off in a dispute over
whether to go to Stokes Forest after our ride back north or to return home to
sleep off the drugs and alcohol.
He eventually took up back to Little Falls, where Alf – who was
driving at the time – parked the car in the middle of Main Street in a hissy
fit at Pauly. The churches were just letting out, and cars were honking for us
to move. Officer Capalbo convinced Alf to pull the car to the side, where everybody
by Bill got out.
He liked me, since I had become something of a legend for
the crimes I had committed, and he came to visit our East Sixth Street
apartment, where he, Hank and I played cards on the floor, in a room we had
painted completely red at Louise’s insistence.
We almost didn’t hear the knocking on the door until it
became pounding, and Mone barged in enraged at our sleeping arrangements.
We only had one single bed, which Louise and I usually slept
in, but let Hank use it while we rolled out extra blankets on the floor for
Bill, and another set for me and Louise.
Monee screamed at us – especially at Hank – for letting the
pregnant Louise sleep on the cold floor.
Hank later told me had had put a hammer under the pillow and
would have used it, had Monee not stormed out.
“I would have smashed her purple toes,” he told me.
Bill looked as if he was reliving the explosion all over again
and started to shake.
He would not come back again.
There was something sad in that moment as if symbolic of the
end of an era, we inheriting mean streets rather than those we had envisioned during
the Summer of Love.
Later when Mike Day brought me Orange Sunshine, which I took
assuming I could handle it, even though it was one of the most powerful kinds
of LSD at the time.
The freak out came quickly, and I found myself standing in
our kitchen with a bunch of pills in the palm of my hand, which Monee had
procured from her dealer the last time I freaked out. I started popping them
into my mouth, one after the other, until Louise grabbed my arm, panicking,
saying “What if they don’t work?”
“Then, I’ll keep on taking them until they do,” I said, at
which point I realized I was in deep, deep shit. By the time I got to Belleview
I was out of my mind, experiencing first hand the crazy world my crazy mother
had known. I spent three days in the looney bin, coming down, which turned out
to be too much for my rich boss, who told Louise – when she went to get my
paycheck – that I should not come back.
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