Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The years go by as quickly as a wink,
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”---Carl Sigman
When we’re very young, the notion of death is a preposterous fraud foisted upon us by catechisms desperate for obedient believers. We are young and immortal and the years go by like ponderous steam engines pulling a hundred boxcars. There is no time to be wasted on some vague notion thousands of years in the future, we have important matters to attend to, like making sure the foul line between home and first is neatly drawn; like coming up with a clever plan to attract some notice from the blonde bombshell, Mary Beth LeBreque; like getting enough change together to go see Abbott & Costello Meet The Wolfman at the Palace Theater. Who has time to contemplate events barely visible over the horizon? Besides, didn’t some guy named Ponce de Leon discover the Fountain of Youth?
Approaching age 12, we have become moderately acquainted with the Grim Reaper. A grandparent has been stolen. The ambulance came for besotted old Dan Twomey and he never returned. One of the kids in the seventh grade drowned fishing in the Shawsheen River. Monsignor Daley says if you die with a mortal sin on your soul you’re going directly to Hell without passing Go and collecting $200. We became adept at looking the other way.
The teen years and the twenties are extremely busy times. It’s finally time to decide what we want to be when we grow up. Are we going to college and if so, where? What kind of job will we get and how long can we delay it? How many toes do we have to shoot off to avoid going to Vietnam? And we know this seems ridiculous, but if we wind up there could we actually (gulp) die?
When we reach age 30, we go from being us to them. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” the hippies say. “Anybody important in your life?” your parents want to know. “You’d better take that shitty job now while it’s still available,” our friends advise. Wait a minute! When do I get to hitchhike across the United States, living off the land? When will I drive a sports car through the streets of Paris with the soft wind in my hair? Climb Mount Everest? Climb Mount Anything? The time is flying by. I’m not ready for this. More than one-third of my life has passed and I still haven’t done anything! And I found out yesterday the Fountain of Youth was just a third-rate tourist attraction in Florida.
And finally, inevitably, we are old. We have lost parents, girlfriends, husbands and wives, and we are incredulous. They are often here one minute and gone the next, the Fates as calloused as Nero, uncaring while Rome burns. We know all about Death now and we cross the street when we see it coming, dab ourselves with esoteric ointments to ward it off, attach implements to our body to battle the oncoming tide. A few of us are satisfied to pass in the night, the rest of us will only leave kicking and screaming.
We remember our families and friends. We like to recall them at their peaks, when they were strong and beautiful, brimming with plans and ideas and their own peculiar talents, dressed in fancy regalia, baying at the moon, laughing at mortality. The optimists among us are preparing to see them again. The rest of us are grateful to live in the soft embrace of their memories.
Long Time Passing….
The first time I ever saw Pamme Brewer, she was walking south on SW 13th Street in Gainesville, carrying an armload of books. Her posture was exceedingly correct and she seemed to float along the sidewalk with her feet barely touching the ground, unlike mortal beings. I felt I had to know her and I pulled into an illegal parking spot and jogged off to catch her.
Pamme had just arrived for her freshman year at UF, traveling in from Jamaica where her father was a U.S. State Department employee. She was an Art major quick with a friendly smile, trusting, compassionate but nobody’s fool. She looked at me with curiosity but not alarm. “I know I haven’t been here long enough to do anything wrong yet,” she said.” I asked her to pose for a Honda motorcycle ad for the Charlatan and she agreed. That was the beginning of an interesting relationship.
Before long, Pamme was working on the magazine staff and was a regular visitor at its infamous headquarters, The House on Sixth Street. When a girl named Susan Smith showed off a little too much flesh in the Charlatan, the University called her on the carpet and promised mayhem for future offenses. “So much for Feature Girls in the magazine,” I told the crew. “No, I’ll do it,” protested Pamme. “We can’t let them get away with that.”
I had a long talk with her, mentioned her parents, told her she might be expelled and would certainly be exposed to a ton of criticism and nasty innuendos. She looked back at me with her pixie smile and said, “So it’s alright if this happens to some woman you don’t know, but it’s NOT alright when it happens to your girlfriend?” The die was cast. Gerald Jones polished off his camera and the deed was done.
As centerfolds go, the spread in Charlatan was tame, with breasts exposed and the lower part of Pamme’s anatomy carefully secluded in the magazine’s crease. But in those days, college girls simply did not do these things, despite Playboy’s declarations to the contrary. The University of Florida went nuts and set up a kangaroo court in the administration building, Tigert Hall. Promptly, SDS and hundreds of independent protestors said, “Not so fast, my friends!” invading the building and banging on the walls of the hearing room. Wisely, the administrators moved the affair to the Law School Auditorium where everyone could watch. The place was so crowded I had to find a spot on a windowsill. Pamme Brewer entered to uproarious applause.
By this time, the affair was a nationwide sensation with articles in newspapers coast to coast. CBS sent Walter Cronkite and a news crew to Gainesville to cover the action and the American Civil Liberties Union financed Pamme’s legal team, headed by a young and cocky Selig Goldin. The University argued that it was enforcing a time-honored practice called en loco parentis, giving it the equivalent of parental rights concerning students. Goldin cited chapter and verse why this was invalid, routing the opposition and winning the day. Pamme would receive no punishment.
What she did receive was hundreds of letters daily from fans and lunatics from across the country, some of them written in crayon. At first, she was stunned and a little depressed by the volume of sheer hate and madness in some of the missives, but came around when she saw Dick North and I laughing like fools at the stupidity of the attackers. “This stuff is priceless,” I told her. “We’re going to put these letters in the magazine,” and we did. The next day, Pamme called at mail time and started reading me the worst of them. By then, she was laughing her head off.
Pamme Brewer was featured on “I’ve Got A Secret,” where nobody on the panel guessed her identity. She was offered hundreds of dubious modeling jobs and responded to none. She had said her piece and took her stand, a gentle warrior with no taste for enduring fame. Eventually, she married a fine fellow named Tom Fristoe, moved to California and had a good life. She was always proud of herself for having the gumption to put a match to the farce that was en loco parentis. After Pamme’s victory in Gainesville, universities across the country backed off the practice once and for all. In an era when the old rules were finally being tested, the good guys won a ringing victory.
Many years later, I received a call from an old friend in California: “If you’d like one more chance to speak with Pamme, call this number. She’s dying of uterine cancer and there’s not much time left.” How could that be, I wondered, Pamme was only in her forties? I called immediately and got her on the line. She was a little woozy, sounded tired, but brightened up and started talking about old times. I got a few laughs out of her even though it was impossible to laugh much myself. I told her I was sorry to have put her through such a meat-grinder.
“Hey, it was my idea,” she said. “And I’ve never regretted a minute of it. I even kept a few of the crazier letters. I read them when I need a good laugh.” Then she slowed a little, wearing down, her voice weaker. “Thank you so much for calling. I still love you. We showed ‘em, didn’t we, Bill?” And gone.
No, Pamme, you showed ‘em. I was just your helpful valet. One day later, Pamme Brewer was gone. Fifty-five years later we continue to remember her beauty, her charm and her courage. Good job, Pamela. I still love you, too.
The Manchurian Candidate
His eyes was his tools and his smile was his gun, But all that he came for was having some fun.”
One minute there was no Dick North, the next there was. He must have arrived in Waldo on the midnight train from Georgia and tiptoed into town so as not to awaken anyone. Next thing we knew, he was sitting on a tall bar stool, twirling his dense Fu Manchu mustache with a forefinger and dispensing knowledge. Dick favored the eastern religions, knew all their secret handshakes and arcane chants. He adopted a bemused tolerance for non-believers, greeted everyone with a Dalai Lama smile, had a laugh at the ready for any occasion.
Dick North did not believe in wasting a day of his life. He attacked his work vigorously, mastered one project and was on to the next. His eyes danced at the sight of pretty girls, many of whom were not adverse to taking up with a short, ponytailed fellow of limited means. Dick crafted fine sandals and anything else made of leather he could sell. He hammered out hundreds of brass peace symbol necklaces, each a little different than the one before, then put his talents toward exceptional belt buckles. All of his work was fussed over, edited and unique. He had no shortage of customers.
Noone remembers how he came to live at the Charlatan House on Sixth Street with Bill Killeen, Gerald Jones and Newt Simmons. One day, he was just there, honing the vibe. When it came time to open the Subterranean Circus, it was Dick North and a party of two running the place. It was The Manchurian Candidate’s idea to make marijuana pipes out of lamp parts, take the show on the road to the Atlanta Pop Festivals and start a leather shop in the back of the store.
Dick’s face was often the first one seen when a customer entered the shop. His was a welcoming presence, a guru whose opinion was valued and any rare critique which passed from his lips was seriously considered. Though the Circus was notorious for letting people hang around and express their profundities, Dick was easily the most tolerant of all. “Everybody has a story to tell,” he would often say, “so what’s the hurry?” He even tolerated a lollygagging teenage Marty Jourard, who cleverly figured out that even eastern holy men were suckers for a boxful of doughnuts.
When the time came, Dick moved across the street and opened up a brass and leather shop called the Apollonian Alternative in a little house, drawing Circus customers and sandal purists alike. Things hummed along at the new enterprise expeditiously and Mr. North relished the role of entrepreneur. But then, as quickly as he appeared, the MC was gone, irretrievably lost to the winds. Turns out even eastern wise men have a foolish side.
Dick had taken up with a bright and pretty high school girl named Honey. He’d had many a girlfriend, but never a steady one until Honey came along, and he held her in highest esteem. Where earlier women joined Dick on his social jaunts around town, he and Honey withdrew a bit from the madness, began spending more time at home. His sweetie told him more than once that when the time came, she would be heading to college in Atlanta, but Dick laughed and thought “we’ll see.”
As always, the Time does come and when it did Dick was unusually distraught. On Honey’s last visit to the Apollonian Alternative to say goodbye, Dick’s protests expanded exponentially. He picked up a pistol and held it to his head while Honey feverishly called her parents. A shot went off during the conversation and Honey dropped the phone. Her parents, suddenly on a call with nobody, raced to their car and careened through Gainesville to Dick’s shop. When they arrived, Honey was sitting in front, crushed and crying. Dick was inside, his brains splattered on the wall. When we ran across the street from the Circus, the cops were already taping off the place. Dick North, the Prince of Fun, was demolished by his own hand.
Theories abounded. The pistol involved was a hair-trigger gun which could be set off with a moderate hiccup. Many of us had held it in our hands and knew of its precocity. Perhaps Dick was using it as a ploy, a last-ditch desperate attempt to hold onto his girl when it sprang to life and exploded in his face. If not, why such finality? After all, college girls can be visited, relationships continued at a distance. Three hundred miles of separation is not Timbuktu.
No one really knows what went through Dick North’s mind just before the bell rang. Maybe an inadvertent tic brought about his demise. Perhaps the separation was really a bridge too far for his fickle emotions. The dissolution of Young Love has brought about surly fates for the most classical of lovers. And while we labor over the death of an ally, consider the imposition on the sad young Honey, who must carry around this burden for eternity.
Whatever dimension the Subterranean Circus lies in today---and we’re certain there is one---an older and wiser Dick North is still sitting high and mighty in his chair, smiling, twirling that mustache and dispensing knowledge. We’re pretty sure that one of the pearls he delivers is simply this: Beware of high-school girls bearing gifts. If you slip up and fall for one, that first step down can be a lulu.
Tales Of The Roadrunner
Despite the long hair and mustache, Ted Hansen was the kind of guy a girl could bring home to Mother. Mild-mannered, soft-spoken, easygoing, exceedingly polite, Ted was the obvious product of what we used to call a good home. If an argument arose, Hansen’s tack was to question his opponent into submission rather than to scold. “Well, Harry, did you ever consider the possibility that…”
Ted was a local boy, a football player and music lover, big on family, an “aw, shucks” kind of fellow who preferred the background to the spotlight. If an image appeared of Ted standing in a creek with a fishing rod in a Norman Rockwell painting on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, noone would have been surprised. He looked like the ultimate homeboy.
Still, a seasoned observer might spot a hint of mischief in Hansen’s smiling eyes, might possibly detect an almost-under-his-breath reaction to the comments of a fool. Ted could read people well, knew quickly which ones to charm and which to ignore. Distasteful as it was, he also knew who to confront.
Ted had a wry sense of humor and he appreciated The Jest. He was the first of us to discover Saturday Night Live and would never miss a program. He was extremely adept at put-ons, speaking in a very serious manner to his mark while not meaning a word of it, interested in seeing how outrageous he had to get for his deserving victim to catch on. But most of all, he was a colossal fan of the Roadrunner cartoons in which Wile E. Coyote is always outfoxed by the clever bird despite the coyote’s endless array of traps purchased from the ubiquitous Acme Company. When Ted went to Bill Killeen one day with a plan to open a record store in the back of the Subterranean Circus, there was no doubt about what the title of the shop would be. Inevitably, it was Acme Records.
Ted Hansen was an adept shopkeeper. People instantly took to him and his knowledge of music, his ability to get records far faster than any of his competitors, his solicitous appreciation for his customers’ business despite the usual complement of idiots. “I smoke a couple of joints on the way to work,” he told Bill. “Nothing bothers me after that.”
Acme Records was a smash hit, originally funneling most of its customers through the Circus but eventually finding its own large clientele. There were days when the store in front benefited more from the people passing through to the back than vice-versa. Alas, in the record business there is often the potential for thievery. One afternoon, three black kids, mid-teens, went fleeing from the store with Ted Hansen right behind them. Three to one is bad odds any day of the week, so you can’t let a home boy down. Bill Killeen joined in the chase.
Ted might be a gentle man, but don’t steal his inventory. He grabbed the leader of the band in the old Central Florida Office Supply parking lot, the criminal only escaping by ditching his coat, which conveniently held all of his ID. It looked like a rout when Bill tossed a second varmint into a cluster of newspaper machines, which promptly fell all over him. Just then, however, the third member of the trio sneaked back and clobbered BK with an unknown object which left three small dents in his skull. The gang got away but Hansen kept his records. Back in the store, Ted assessed his bloody partner with a modest grin. “You look like that picture of Jesus crowned with thorns,” he said. “But thanks for the help.”
Ted might be with us today but for an unhelpful appetite for the hard stuff. Introduced to heroin late in high school, he struggled with the habit before beating back its onslaught. He was free for years, operated a successful enterprise and found a high-spirited wife named Marcia. The two of them, aided by Ted’s brother Rick and sister Laura, made Acme Records a landmark business, a fun place to go, a local institution. Then one day, a wicked witch from the West returned to Gainesville and sprinkled tempting Dilaudids throughout the town. Ted Hansen was hooked again, and this time there was no escape.
Ted grew dispirited, let his appearance suffer, didn’t tend to business. If he showed up at all, it was never on time. One day, he didn’t show up at all. Suddenly, there was a bad scent in the air, the clouds covered the sun, a nervous tingle rose up one’s spine. Something awful had happened, but you didn’t know what.
Soon enough came news that our lad Ted, once full of life and optimism and all that one aspires to, had been found bound to a tree in his backyard, a bullet in his head. His faithful dog was staked out several yards away. It was the loudest thunderclap most of us had ever experienced. It sent us reeling. No more Ted Hansen? You might as well have told us the bridge was out on the way to tomorrow.
One of the very few cops I trusted said verbatim, “We’re sure it was a couple of morphine dealers from Miami, a drug deal gone bad,” but many others suspected local involvement. Conspiracy theorists abounded, but in the long run it made no difference. There were never any charges brought and the truth is out there riding a wild horse across the prairie. As for Ted, there’s no doubt he knew the risks and accepted the possibilities. Wherever he is, he’s wearing an almost smile and dealing with his fate. Ted Hansen has always known that while the roadrunner most often has the last laugh, every now and then the battle goes to the coyote. Rest easy, big fella.
That’s all, folks….
