You can imagine what it was like back when a body had neither. In 1963, Gainesville was a small southern college town with a minuscule population of very straight people. The college kids shopped at Donigan’s on University Avenue for striped Sego shirts and proper frilly dresses. For fun, they drank alcohol to excess in their dorm rooms, fraternity houses or in one of the handful of small, unexciting bars near campus. On Sundays, the party moved over the Marion County line to Ruby’s since Alachua County honored the Lord’s Day. The highlight of the year was the University of Florida’s homecoming parade in any year the Florida A&M Marching 100 deigned to show up.
It was cause for celebration when Alan’s Cubana, a tiny sandwich shop next to the Seagle Building, became the first local entity to actually deliver food to campus dorms and people’s homes. Pizza? Forget it. There wasn’t a pizza joint in town. Music? A little better. By 1966, you could go to the Bent Card coffee house and listen to Gail Gillespie sing Amelia Earhardt’s Last Flight. There were also occasional Bernie Leadon sightings at the same address. All was quiet on the southern front but there were rumblings in the distance.
Then, in September of 1967, the Subterranean Circus opened and so did the floodgates. If it hadn’t been us, it would have been someone else. The wave was impossible to resist. The human earthquake which began in San Francisco rose eight miles high and the tidal wave rolled east, covering the land. Colorful art flourished. The music changed radically. People began wearing funny clothes. Political causes brought about protests in the streets. Everybody, but everybody, made love, not war. And floating above it all was the fragrance of the once demon-weed, the elixir of youth, your friendly neighborhood cloud of a magic dust called marijuana.
Leaves Of Grass
You can imagine how a product relatively unknown a couple of years previous and then suddenly desired by everyone might cause a few problems. First of all, there wasn’t nearly enough of it. Second, it was illegal. Third, there were hardly any accoutrements to facilitate its use. People were rolling gross-looking cigarettes in completely unsuitable paper until one day someone discovered the Zig Zag man. It wasn’t long before dozens of rolling paper brands began to fall from the skies and fill up head shop counters. Where once there was nothing, now there were Strawberry Lemonade double-wide papers and sophisticated alternatives which played Ode to Joy when opened.
But what to do when those papers burned down to the very ends and your fingers got singed? Why, then it was time for a handy-dandy roach clip to hold the shriveled joint and a whole new industry was born. Sophisticated smokers had their choice of an endless variety of pipes, from a cheap two-inch lamp-parts special to the ingenious Proto Pipe to the celebrated water-based Toker II to the full-blown, six-hosed hookahs or colossal glass and ceramic bongs, upscale imitations of the bamboo originals brought back from Vietnam by fortunate friends returning from the fray. All well and good, but a dope smoker still needed product.
Turns out the area surrounding Gainesville is just the bee’s knees for growing pot. Marijuana famers in small adjacent rural towns like Melrose, Keystone Heights, Alachua and Micanopy quickly learned the agricultural ropes and a dynamic hidden industry was born and promptly thrived. Where once most of the pot we smoked arrived from Mexico, now the locals were creating a finer Gainesville Green, constantly refining and improving their product, experimenting with new ideas, employing hydroponics for indoor growing, all competing for that grand blue ribbon at the county fair.
Occasionally, there were difficulties, reversals of form, but who ever said a farmer’s life is void of woe? Inexperienced growers had to learn the basics, made mistakes, had to start over. Thievery was an issue, often just before harvest time when the pirate ships would sail in and make off with the goods. Law enforcement was an everpresent menace, as a corps of nosy narcs was set loose from their cages to busily sniff out unwary farmers and seize their precious life’s work. Bad luck was often an enemy as in the case of a leading cultivator whose crop was discovered by an unsuspecting highway patrolman who had wandered into the woods to take a leak. Alas, one minute you live in a homey cabin on Wacahoota Road, the next minute you have fled to the forests of Yeehaw Junction. Some days are diamonds, some days are stones, but a country boy will survive.
We at the Circus, however, barely survived an afternoon with the ingestible form of marijuana, an infrequent treat. Before she worked at the store, the lovely Sheila Johnson, a regular customer, arrived one day with a nice tray of brownies for Bill and countermate Bob Sturm. A kind gesture, we thought, never suspecting the truth. Now, these were particularly tasty brownies, fine of texture with just the proper amount of walnuts, the sort of brownies a fellow might find himself eating too many of.
After a while, a mellowness chariot seemed to arrive on velvet wheels. I found it oddly difficult to make the correct change, and so did Bob. After a few minutes of this bungling, I looked at him and asked, “You don’t suppose….”
“No doubt about it,” he answered with a silly grin. We telephoned for early replacements and went off to appreciate the afternoon. I think I saw bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover but a girlfriend promised me it was just the sun hitting the west wall of the Seagle Building. I gave her a brownie. “We’ll see about that,” I said.
Lucy In The Sky With Sleep Deprivation
Now, some people will tell you marijuana is a gateway drug. First it’s pot, then LSD, after that cocaine, heroin and Pecan Sandies. There’s no end to it. We at the Pie factory disagree. We think the culprit is milk. All junkies at one time ingested milk, then marijuana, acid and etcetera. Despite that fact, you don’t see politicians picking on the dairies. Wisconsin, the obvious bane of civilization, is even considered an All-American place to live, filled with rosy-cheeked youngsters, contented cows and perfectly sane adults wandering around happily with giant cheese wedges on their heads. That’s what happens when you have a good P.R. man.
Marijuana might have been a gateway drug for Stuart Bentler, though. A fairly conservative man of intelligence and good taste, Bentler fell in with Subterranean Circus riffraff and was exposed to The Weed just about the time he was getting his Architecture degree from UF. He thought it great fun and soon decided to graduate to Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, which looked like a barrel of laughs when you were on the outside looking in. And it was, for a while. After a suitable period of merriment and mirth, however, Stuart started looking for the turnoff switch. “Okay, I’m ready for it to be over,” he announced to a few non-partaking friends inured in the ways of rookie trippers.
“You just have to wait it out,” one of them told him. “It’s not like there’s a cable you can pull to stop the train.”
This was a totally unacceptable answer to Bentler, who advised everyone he wanted to go to sleep now. The acid we enjoyed in Gainesville in those days was far from pure and often contained an irksome amount of speed, so the patient was unlikely to be nodding off anytime soon. As his mind raced in uncontrollable directions, Stuart became increasingly alarmed.
“I’m going crazy,” he decided, unable to rein in his thoughts. “I have to go to the hospital before it’s too late.” Everybody feels that way the first time, we lied. At the time, taking an LSD imbiber to the hospital was not a wise option. You couldn’t just tell the ER staff your friend came home from school like normal, took off his clothes and started baying at the moon for no reason at all. They’d never believe you if you told them he’d had too much milk.
Eventually, of course, the acid ran its course and Stuart calmed down and went to sleep just before dawn. The rest of us crashed in place, rose early and went off to open the store the next day. Sometime around noon, a small sports car careened around the corner and screeched to a stop outside. Stuart Bentler bounced up the steps like a high jumper, his eyes agog, a big smile lighting his face. “That was FUN!” he roared. “When do we get to do it AGAIN?”
Soon, Stuart, soon. But don’t call us, we’ll call you.
Nose Candy
“Cocaine’s for horses and it’s not for men, doctors says it kills you but he don’t say when….”---Woody Guthrie
Out of the night, when the full moon was bright came the horsewoman known as Cocaine. Despite her spiffy price, the lady was an instant hit, a snowball rolling downhill, a must-have for every party. Not to mention, a boon for the economy. The Circus must have sold thirty million of those little bottles with the overlong spoons dangling from the top. And since every dealer had to step on his product just a bit, we obligingly sold various forms of cut. Before you start scolding us, we should tell you it’s better you ingested what we were selling than what would have been in there without us.
If we we’re going to help the dealer in this little game of seller vs. customer, it’s only fair we rendered aid to the other side, thus the arrival of the prized melting-point-test units. When Sheila the Dealer offered you a little bag of product, you could immediately spoon a tad onto the MPT and watch the mannitol melt away. “Oh Sheila, you’re such a NAUGHTY girl, how about a 30% discount?”
Naturally, the melting-point-tests were soon enough countered by sophisticated cuts which had the same melting point as cocaine. All part of a constant chess game between buyer and seller, a contest like Spy vs. Spy, a game which only ended when a customer found a respectable provider or shot the cheater. If you, a mere babe in the woods, think the store should have taken the buyer’s side, you are not giving ample consideration to the hazardous life of a dealer, which occasionally results in death or prison. Where the customer might lose a few dollars, the IRS never comes by to seize his house.
Besides, most of the major dealers had huge personalities and great swashbuckling stories of success and failure. Like clinging to a large dufflebag of coke while hiding under a car as your partners above are beat up and robbed. Not so bad unless you’re laying on a large mound of red ants for ten minutes. One or our regulars who could never seem to get arrested finally confessed he was a small part of the government’s Iran-Contra deal and was given carte blanche on his other illicit activities.
Some purveyors were just lucky. A pair of our lady friends who wish to remain anonymous pulled up at their rented house one day to find the Drug Enforcement Boys riffling through their LSD inventory. They casually asked an agent what was going on and he told them. “And who are you girls, anyway?” he asked. “We’re the neighbors,” one of them answered, “and we’re very disappointed this sort of thing is going on in our neighborhood. Thank God you boys are on the job!” Bye now. And gone.
Those Were The Days, My Friends….
Eventually, of course, the fun, fun, fun ends and someone takes your T-bird away. Crack cocaine knocked on the door one day and far too many people let her in. People were suddenly getting knocked on the head for a lousy five dollars and scrawny malnourished addicts started popping up like Wac-A-Moles.
Heroin, always lurking in the vicinity, snagged its share of adventurers, risk-takers and fools. The trade in big-money drugs was perilous for dealer and customer alike, brought home to the Circus one day when one of our allies was found handcuffed to a tree with a bullet in his head.
The Day of The Hippie plateaued, regressed and disappeared. All those naive hopes and dreams of Free Love, self-sustaining communes, a warless planet and Enlightenment via psychedelics and other party favors were crushed on the rocks of Reality. People wandered off the tracks, fell in with varlets, lost their way and became Republicans. Turned out, “all you need is love” was a tale told by poets and good-hearted optimists.
We remember, though. We’ll never forget our first joint, our initial acid trip, our first musical experience under the influence. Who would want to forfeit the closeness of the Free Love Era, the cameraderie of the Atlanta Pop Festivals, Woodstock, the others. Time was, we had to dress in uniforms with sensible shoes, dance to the tune of someone else’s drummer, grow up to be something we abhorred. The Sixties and Seventies changed all that for the better and we’ll never go all the way back to perdition. They held an election a couple years back in wayward Florida, a state with its fair share of religious zealots, Trumpophiles and simpletons, yet 70% of them voted for the legalization of medical marijuana. Some of them remembered The Day, there’s still a little bit of hippie hiding away in the recesses of compromised brain cells, and that’s to be celebrated.
There remain places today which sell bongs and rolling papers and funny little pipes, and God bless them. But there will be no more Subterranean Circuses, where spirits ran impossibly high, where we perceived no limits on our possibilities, where Music was Truth. On May 7, 2022 in Florida, we will gather to remember those times and the people we shared them with. There has never been a gathering quite like it. The Last Tango in Gainesville is our one final Fountain of Youth. Come and drink from The Cup.
That’s all, folks….
