Skinny Dipping in Reality: The Great Hippy LSD Enlightenment Search Party

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted March 25, 2009.

Given that I openly advocated LSD and psychedelics, my uh, notoriety, grew, resulting in becoming the town's first pot bust. Titillating as it was for the readers of the Winchester Star, the regular fare of which featured such things as potatoes that looked like Bob Hope and large unidentified bugs brought into its offices by local farmers, the trial itself was a dismal little thing, completely uninteresting in retrospect, even to the arrestee, despite that I was facing 15 years.

Anyway, several months later I was acquitted, partly for the fact that it was one of the few pot sales I didn't make around town, but mostly because of a hard boozing old Southern attorney named Massey, who sported white linen suits and carried a load of buckshot in his ass acquired while climbing out the window after screwing some guy's wife years before. Ever savvy, he selected blacks for the jury, people who for good reasons had no fondness for Winchester's lily white judicial system and law enforcement. Massey personally did not have much use for "cullids," and believed, as we were taught in schools then, that blacks were lazy and inferior because their culture evolved in a warm climate where fruit fell out of the trees and in the absence of the need for work, they just fucked all day. At the same time he understood that "the sight of cullids in the jury box is unnerving as hell for any prosecutor, the way they sit there blinkin' so inscrutable and all. You never know what they are thinking, but you know it ain't good for the prosecution. And besides, the commonwealth's prosecuting attorney is gonna have his hands full just keeping his daughter's name from coming up in your marijuana adventures. Nachully, you are gonna mention it every chance you get, and I'm gonna give you plenty. And we're lucky as hell, boy, that he's incompetent to boot." This all turned out to be sheer prophecy.

The verdict was "not guilty." Still, there was no living in Winchester after being all over the front pages of the paper. In fact, there was no living there during the long wait for the trial anyway because waiting for anything is boring as hell in an already boring place. So I moved to a tent in Resurrection City, the Poor People's Campaign camp on Washington's national mall, to wait for the trial.

After acquittal of the charge, I was gassed up, greased and ready to hit the road. I knew there was a big-time counter-culture out there somewhere, thanks to regular trips to D.C. to get publications such as Paul Krassner's The Realist, and by damned my wife and infant child and I were going to join them for good. Several months later, after a stint in New Orleans' French Quarter at the invitation of a junkie jazz man named Ed, who'd blown through Winchester earlier with his hooker wife, Kathy, after being released from Leavenworth. N'awlins was a scene in itself, given that we lived across the street from a hippie storefront church whose sole ritual was dropping acid.

Later, while headed for San Francisco, I found myself and my little family in Boulder, Colorado. Definitely this was a culture counter to the rest of America. Hell, they were hawking LSD out loud and openly on the streets! At least a dozen of them looked at us and asked, "Do you need a place to crash brother?" Or call out, "Brother and sister, come share food with us." We wanted for very little as we worked toward buying the old psychedelic school bus, a 1947 Dodge, that became our home. Not that we lounged about in drugged out ecstasy (though there was some of that involved too). I was working at a car wash from the first week there. Also beginning a serious attempt at writing -- at first for the small alternative weeklies, dealing a little dope now and then, but increasingly I got assignments from the larger slick magazines as years went by.

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Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website.

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