The Summer of Love
Sometimes crazy things just happen without explanation. I have absolutely no idea how an aroma can materialize out of a dream — a dream of all things — and somehow grab me by the brain, the repository of all my memories. Maybe you are different, but this is the only time I can remember that I’ve had a dream that was permeated with a distinct smell.
Doubtless there are many great smells. Consider turkey dinner at grandma’s house. Or newly mown grass on a summer night. Or pine needles underfoot on a forest trail. But in my dream it was the wind off the ocean, and last night as I lay in bed, dead to the world, this wind swept over me. Rapt in this heady fragrance, a veritable dramatis personae paraded across the dusty hallways of my mind — characters from a brief but remarkably influential moment in my youth, back so long ago when I was seventeen and at large for the first time.
It was Ocean City, Maryland, in the summer of 1967. That year I was brazenly attempting to define my function on the planet. At that juncture I regarded myself as a revolutionary man-child, and I did what all revolutionaries do — I fled the normalcy of the middle class. I split for the coast. In this case, the East Coast. I ran away from home.
This was the summer after my junior year in high school. Little did I know at the time that it would become fabled as the “Summer of Love.”
* * *
Hitchhiking to The Beach
On an already sweltering morning in August of 1967, I stood on the shoulder of the eastbound lane of US Route 50 in Falls Church, Virginia, and I stuck out my thumb. So did Jack, and so did Wynn. I’m referring to Jack Moore and Wynn Thompson, two friends from high school. There we stood, the three of us, thumbs out. The world lay before us.
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Truth be told, I had a lot of friends in high school, and I infiltrated many cliques. There were the preppies, the jocks, the intellectuals, the regular folks, and the thespians. However, there was one particular group that I gravitated toward, and they seemed destined for nothing but trouble. This group included Jack and Wynn.
Both of these fellows were quite stout, each around 5’10” and 200 pounds, but when it came to demeanor and appearance, they were as different as night and day. Jolly Jack, as he was known, was as solid as a pile of cinderblocks and strong as an ape, sporting a broad freckled face behind thick glasses with a perennial stupid grin, except when he got mad, and you never wanted to see that. Jack had a lot of trouble with booze, which he consumed greedily. He was from what might be regarded as a redneck background — a run-down house in the woods, junk in the yard, a dog chained to a tree, you get the idea — but Jack was also a surprising intellect. He fervently studied ancient mythology, he often spent his lunch money on the Washington Post, and he introduced me to Hunter S. Thompson’s book on the Hell’s Angels. Jack was the first guy I ever knew to wear an earring.
Wynn, on the other hand, lived in a subdivision and his dad had a good job, although I don’t remember what it was. Whereas Jack was “butt-ugly,” as he himself would say, Wynn was pleasantly blond, benignly handsome, and in general cut a good figure. He never seemed to have an ill thought about anybody — he was just a regular guy heading down the wrong highway. When Wynn got drunk, he’d just sit quietly and smile.
* * *
Sleeping Underneath the House on 4th Street
Eventually we got a ride. I can’t remember much about the car or the driver, but three hours later we were dumped off at Ocean City. It was late in the day, the traffic on the strip was slowing down, and the driver didn’t bother saying goodbye.
That evening, as we strolled along the boardwalk, we had our initial encounter with the omnipresent scrutiny of the cops. They seemed to relish telling us to keep moving lest they would arrest us for vagrancy. It was a bad scene. From some hippies we met, we learned that people weren’t allowed to crash on the beach at night, and it was a really bad idea anyway because there was a big-ass machine that ran up and down the beach after dark to sift the sand for trash, and you could get shredded.
So, that first night, we kept marching. Up and down the boardwalk. When the sun finally rose in the east, across the Atlantic Ocean, we crashed on the beach. We got badly sunburned. Then, that evening we split up, but late that night we all ended up together hunkering down beneath a house that we had heard about from a guy we met on the boardwalk. It was built on cinderblock pillars and you could crawl underneath and try to sleep in the sand, which was teeming with sand fleas. For two nights we snuck underneath that house, but The Man was ever vigilant, always searching for us dirtballs, and soon their flashlights got too close and we had to make alternative plans.
* * *
The Parachute and the Fenwick Towers
While hanging out on the beach during the daytime, Jack, Wynn, and I would set up shop (such as it was) a short stroll to the public bathroom at Ninth Street so we could relieve ourselves without getting arrested. We had arrived with minimal accouterments — nary a beach towel nor swimming trunks, only the clothes on our back, which were cut-off jeans, tee-shirts, and sandals. And thus we sat in the sand. And it was while sitting in the sand at Ninth Street that we became introduced into the Knights of the Sacred Order of the Parachute.
Here I am referring to some guys from Michigan. They had a big parachute, made of silk, which they spread out on the beach, hoping to attract other folks, particularly girls, but what they got was mostly guys like us. The main man, the nominal owner of the parachute, was a dude named Dave Dascoli. He was older than the rest of us, he sported a weirdly manicured beard, and he unabashedly aspired to “represent the benevolent side of the devil.” His two Michigan chums were quiet youngsters without much to say, but generally pleasant and earnest. There were also three street-cats from Baltimore who were along for the ride. These guys played it close to the vest and I never knew how to figure them. And there were countless other folks who wandered in and out of our scene, but truth be told, I don’t remember squat about them.
But I certainly remember the parachute. Every day on the parachute, Dave held court with extemporized lectures on how to live life to the hippest. The subject might be karma one day, dharma the next. I was never sure what he was talking about, but it really didn’t matter. As Dave would say, “All minds are welcome!”
More importantly, from the parachute’s primo location I could scope out dozens of cute chicks in their new two-piece bathing suits. Sometimes they would smile back. I would flex my skinny muscles at the girls, and they would laugh and we all had a great time. The parachute was totally far out and it became quite the groovy scene as our band of dudes coalesced. However, all of us guys had the same problem. We had nowhere to go when the sun went down.
But then, out of the blue, one of the Baltimore boys heard a tale of a semi-mythical refuge for beach bums, to the north in the barrens along the State Line between Maryland and Delaware, in a no-man’s-land known as the Fenwick Towers.
That evening we hitchhiked up the highway, our whole contingent. It was ludicrously ambitious, but miraculously a stake-body truck stopped and we all piled on. I rode in the cab with Dave and the driver. As the sun was sinking we arrived at a lonely strip along the coastal road where the driver said that he had heard of old, deserted concrete buildings nearby. We disembarked and headed over the dunes with our parachute and all our youthful, rebellious thoughts.
We soon found ourselves wandering through a ghostly labyrinth of abandoned concrete fortifications — remnants of World War II, when German submarines we prowling off the coast and our parents feared an amphibious invasion. We stumbled our way through the sand in the moonlight, past half-buried, bone-white bunkers, their vacant gun-slits peering blankly into the distance. We spotted the gloomy silhouette of a large tower and headed in that direction. At the tower we found an open doorway and cautiously crept inside.
This place was absolutely right-on! No sand fleas and no cops. We made a driftwood fire on the concrete floor, and relaxed and told stories. That night everyone got a good night’s sleep as the fire cast shadows on the walls. Dave said it was like the cave in Plato’s Republic, but I didn’t know what he was talking about.
Well, Plato or Pluto, we certainly thought we had it all figured out. But, sure as hell, on our second night at the tower we got busted. The heat showed up and we had to scramble into the night, barely escaping with the parachute.
* * *
The Boardwalk
Perhaps this is a good place to discuss the boardwalk. The boardwalk was where we spent a major chunk of our time, and it was where we made our living. We were panhandlers. In former generations we would have been called beggars. We called ourselves dirtballs.
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According to the tourist brochures, the boardwalk at Ocean City has been around since the early 1900s, and it was one of the first oceanfront boardwalks in America. The original section ran only a few blocks, but by 1967, when I was hanging out there, it stretched all the way up to 27th Street, which we dirtballs regarded as the end of the world. All-in-all, to me the most interesting characteristic of the boardwalk was that a good panhandler could know where he was based upon his nose.
I’ll explain.
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At the boardwalk’s southern-most terminus was a fishing wharf. This place reeked of fish scales and rotting bait, but I loved wandering out there. I never panhandled on the wharf —I’d just ask what they were angling for, and what bait they were using.
A few hundred yards north of the fishing pier and adjacent to the old part of the town was the original section of the boardwalk, built in conjunction with a short pier that extended out beyond the surf. This place was like a carnival — there were rides, games, and funhouses with street barkers. The air was redolent with French fries, cotton candy, and caramel corn, and at night it was a fantasy world of bright spinning lights and delightful squeals. This part of the boardwalk offered a great opportunity to score a nice handout. People who are having a good time can be blindly generous.
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Rambling further northward along the boardwalk, just past the old section, there was an enormous beer hall, easily the largest drinking establishment in town, which if I recollect correctly was called the Purple Moose. We were too young to get in, but I remember that, night or day, ambling past this joint you would smell stale beer and the faint odor of vomit.
Further north the air was much more pleasant. For the next half-dozen blocks, all the way up to Ninth Street, it was simply boardwalk tar, ocean spray, and suntan lotion. This was where a lot of the cool chicks hung out on the beach.
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But approaching Ninth Street things got somewhat funky. Here was the public bathroom with its accompanying stench. This was THEcentral facility for Ocean City’s assorted vagrants, and it stank of crap, urine, B.O., and patchouli. The ventilator blew the odor into the air outside, and if the wind was onshore you could smell it up and down the boardwalk. This, by necessity, was where we hung out.
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North from Ninth Street for several blocks was a zone of 1950s motels, with some cool neon. Here you whiffed the redolence of automobiles, asphalt, and air conditioning. Even further north was recent construction and things got quickly sterile. I can’t recall what this place smelled like. Truth be told, the boardwalk north of Fifteenth Street was worthless to panhandlers — motels with cordoned-off beach access equated to a piddling few pedestrians on the stroll, and not much else. Certainly no friendly faces flipping us the peace sign! The only cool people that I met who ventured up that way were surfers, and they went well beyond the reach of the boardwalk to catch their waves.
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Aromas are certainly among the things that a panhandler might notice — ordinary things that might be overlooked by people who are otherwise preoccupied. After all, at its simplest, a true beggar has no agenda other than to hold out a hand in the position of alms. And thus I was free to observe the world around me, unfettered. All things considered, it wasn’t so bad and I didn’t starve. Moreover, I was reassured by the fact that often the most unlikely people were the kindest.
Ultimately, the boardwalk was an exceptional arena for people-watching, observing idiosyncrasies, and so forth. It was also an excellent setting for grooving with strangers. A perfect example: One day Jack found a dried and shellacked souvenir blowfish discarded in a trashcan. (He was looking, as we often were, for uneaten food, usually French fries. Me, I would dig out newspapers to find the baseball scores). So Jack put a string leash on the blowfish and paraded it up and down the boardwalk like a spaniel puppy. All sorts of people came up to talk to him, including some very cute chicks, which I think was a new experience for Jack.
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Despite our collective charm, the locals were not thrilled by the influx of characters like us. Some residents along the boardwalk had gone so far as to imbed broken glass into the top of their front walls, so that no undesirables would sit there. And the fuzz repeatedly told us to keep moving, or else they would haul us in for loitering or vagrancy. Furthermore, if they deemed our actions to be sufficiently subversive, we could be arrested under a vaguely defined charge with the catch-all title of “Habits and Behavior.”
* * *
The Trailer
In the face of this persecution, an ad hoccommittee formed on the beach, a consortium of fellows who regularly congregated around the parachute. After getting run out of the Fenwick Towers, we decided it was time to secure a legitimate place of our own, where we could hang out without being hassled. One day we held a big pow-wow on the parachute, and we forged a commune. We all agreed to pool our panhandling money in order to get a place, a base of operations, somewhere we could sleep without being hassled. A crash pad. And, also, we needed to think about food.
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As it turned out, I held some sway in this pack. First of all, I was tribally aligned with the two hefty dudes from Falls Church. Furthermore, although I was skinny, I was tall and cunning and capable of mixing it up, and I understood math, so I sold this idea. And, more importantly, I could cook. When it came to a vote, I was elected to control the purse strings for our commune.
Our fledgling organization included nine of us: Jack, Wynn, and myself from Virginia; Dave Dascoli and his two young chums from Michigan; and the three guys from Baltimore. So this was our deal: every day all comrades were to give me what they had recently panhandled. I was to pool these resources and secure a place for us to crash, with the additional hope of providing regular meals.
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To be honest, I’m not sure why they bought into the program. Especially the part about beans and rice. By and large, most of these cats didn’t know me from Adam, yet they somehow trusted me. I could have strolled with our capital at any time and left them on the lurch. But I didn’t.
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Well, ideals are just that — ideals — and I’m not so sure what actual percentage of the panhandling pie I actually received. I am ashamed to confess that on one occasion,and only one, I snuck off to devour an illicit hamburger in selfish solitude. Anyway, quite astonishingly, I was soon able to cobble together sufficient cash to rent a house-trailer just a few blocks off the beach, behind Browns Gift Shop, on the corner of Caroline and Philadelphia, in the old part of the town.
The rent was ridiculously cheap, and with good reason. This place was what you might
call Early Spartan — a meager living room/kitchenette, one tiny bedroom, and a bathroom. No closets and just two cabinets. The only pieces of furniture were a dilapidated twin bed, a ratty couch, a chair, and a small kitchen table. However, that was all we needed.
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We disassembled the bed frame and laid the box springs and mattress on the floor side-by-side, turning the bedroom into a “community” in the words of Dave. The B-Town boys and the Michigan kids slept in there in a pile. Meanwhile, in the living room, Dave controlled the couch, Wynn slept in the chair, and Jack crashed on the floor. I slept in the bathtub. I was a big dog in this organization so I had a private room. Well, semi-private.
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As fate would have it, there was an unexpected bonus to this enterprise. A beautiful woman lived above us in the apartment over the gift shop. Her name was Carol Ennis and she was svelte, sexy, and sweet — a college chick from Salisbury, Maryland, just up the road. For reasons I never fully understood, Carol thought that we young reprobates were irresistiblycute, and she took us under her wing. Although she was not much of a drinker, Carol became our booze agent, going to the store for us and buying big jugs of wine for our parties. Dave was old enough, but he didn’t have an ID and the authorities were pretty uptight about such things in OC.
We threw parties every night. We invited all the beach bums and every stray chick we met. We somehow (I still have no idea) acquired a portable record player and three albums: the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, the Doors’ first album, and Trini Lopez’s La Bamba. We played them over and over and nobody seemed to object.
* * *
Girls
One of the chicks I met on the beach became the first girl I ever groped. I’d kissed a few girls before, but I never really…, well, you know what I mean.
It went down in a strange way. One afternoon, while strolling the beach, I met a preppie chick, a real fox named Laurie Taylor (it’s odd how you remember such things). I really dug her, but she made it clear that she was not into a dirtball such as me. However, her best friend certainly had other ideas. Her name was Allison, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember of her last name.
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Allison was ungainly. Like me, she was tall and skinny. In her bathing suit she looked gawky, maybe because she had big feet. But, all things considered, she was really okay. I guess I liked her because she liked me. And, all things considered, she was really sweet. One night, at one of our parties we rolled around in the far back corner of the bedroom and we had a fine old time. She was in Ocean City only for the weekend and I never saw her again.
There were so many girls on the beach. Some of them were in OC with their parents, some were here in a group of girls away from home for the first time, and some were here on their own. Not that it mattered to us.
For us dirtballs, it was all party, parachute, and paradise. Dave, our resident cosmic guru, would preach to spellbound acolytes gathered at his feet on the scroungy rug on the floor of the trailer, and as the night evolved, guys and gals would get into a groove and slip into darkened corners. And when folks were getting good and toasted, Jack would rowdily wrangle everyone out into the alley and lead us all in a rousing chorus of his Beatles parody, “We All Live in a Yellow Crock of Shit!”
Truth be told, I stood back in amazement and observed. Indeed, the whole scene was absurdly fabulous and wonderful. For about two weeks. Then everything went to hell.
* * *
Parties
Certainly, for a couple of weeks life was great. Imagine this. After you spend a day inhaling the bracing aroma of salt air and suntan lotion, while reclining on the parachute (the hippest spot on the strip) and dozing beneath the warm sun, all the while casually scoping out beautiful chicks (I love sunglasses), you head home to the trailer behind Brown’s Gift Shop. On the stove is a large pot of rice and beans, and on the kitchen table are several big jugs of wine. As the night descends, the groovy people you met that day show up, including the hot chick you talked to on the boardwalk!
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It was heaven.
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Our parties were regularly chaperoned by our upstairs angel, Carol. She was a bit of a teetotaler, which allowed her to keep an eye on us, making sure that nobody got too far out of control. Dave was always coming on to her, but she had nothing to do with his thick rap. Carol had a well-established, gone-for-the-summer boyfriend, and she was as faithful as the sunrise.
However, I do believe that she liked me, if only in a pat-on-the-head way. She once gave me a piece of “Spin Art” that she bought in a gift shop on the boardwalk — nobody else got one — and I was the only dirtball who she ever invited into her apartment, even though this might have been because I was carrying her groceries. Also, I was the only one who ever saw her in her bathing suit, but that was quite by accident.
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Okay, back to the parties. In our Bohemian world, we became notorious — we were the Dirtballs with a capitol D. As our reputation spread, visitors from Falls Church began to arrive. I have no idea how they found us; we didn’t have a telephone, so it was all word of mouth. Cool guys like Michael Hanratty showed up. And Jimmy Triplet, who brought a bag of weed and turned me on to pot. And we added a new member to the Dirtballs of the Parachute, Steve Tinkle. He was a jolly, moon-faced fellow who had a unique skill that was quite handy for a vagrant — he could sit at the counter of an air-conditioned restaurant and nurse a Coke for hours.
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We were the Dirtballs. We would lounge all day on the beach on the parachute, and party all night at the trailer. We drank wine and listened to the Beatles and the Doors, and discussed all sorts of heady topics — we debated the existence of God and the purpose of law and the definition of mankind. We conjectured on the primacy of music, and why sex should be shared, all punctuated with Dave’s spontaneous lectures on the best way to do your own thing.
These were good times.
* * *
A Bad Night
One night Jack got really drunk. This was exactly the catastrophe that Wynn and I had feared. On occasions back in Falls Church, at field parties in the woods as well as suburban parties when the parents were away, we had witnessed Jack become uncontrollable and unstoppable, but this time it was exceptionably bad. He stormed though the party, violently knocking everyone aside — friends and strangers — while bellowing, “I’m just a bull in a China shop!” He ripped off a piece of a cardboard box and scrawled a sign that read “North Woods,” then he burst out the door.
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About this time Carol came downstairs. She was also drunk. And I mean drunk, as in really drunk, as in falling all over the place. None of us had ever seen her even slightly buzzed. And, to turn matters upside down, she was throwing herself at anyone and everyone, indiscriminately. It was like she was determined to screw all comers.
Her boyfriend had left her for another woman.
We were all stunned, like animals caught in the headlights. There was no doubt that every one of us, on multiple occasions, had felt uncontrollable desires to ball with Carol. We all wanted her, so cool and sexy, but now we were paralyzed. Even Dave was speechless.
Suddenly Carol’s eyes rolled back in her head and she began to stagger blindly. Wynn and I caught her as she collapsed. We carried her upstairs to her apartment and laid her down unconscious on her couch. I kissed her on the forehead before going downstairs and getting raging drunk.
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The next afternoon I went up to her apartment and knocked on the door. I was greeted by the landlord, who was in the process of cleaning out the refrigerator. He said that Carol had packed up and she was gone. That was all he knew.
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The following morning, while standing knee-deep in the lapping waves beneath the carnival pier, I decided that I should probably finish high school. Looking back, perhaps I should have said goodbye to the other Knights of the Dirtballs, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Anyway, I figured that I would see Jack and Wynn back in Falls Church. So I walked up to the Route 50 bridge over the inlet and stuck out my thumb.
* * *
Final Thoughts
All of these events occurred a long time ago and the images in my mind are worn and faded, particularly around the edges. But I remember that back then, during the Summer of Love, when I needed to get away from the overwhelming and intoxicating experience of living in a pile of hippies, my favorite thing to do was to go out walking by myself.
Shortly after nightfall I would amble down Philadelphia Street to the old section of the boardwalk, the carnival part, and I would wander around — simply another tramp on the stroll with the glitzy world spinning all around me. Then I would descend the wooden stairs to the beach below. There I’d kick off my sandals and wade out into the dark, subdued waves beneath the wharf. It would be just me in the darkness. No one else. No tourists, and none of my lunatic clan. No one but me.
There I would stand in the shadows, knee-deep in the lapping surf. Stretching before me was the midnight blackness of the forbidding ocean, like the oblivion of my own death. Overhead, peering through the cracks in the boardwalk, were blazing lights and spiraling wheels of fire.
In my dream I breathe deep. I inhale the air off the raw ocean on the incoming tide. Then, my nostrils fill with a creole of French fries, cotton candy, spent fireworks, boardwalk tar, and sea spray.
Fifty years later, I’ve yet to find an aroma that can compare.
- 30 -
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