Before the winter was over in 1970 my grand affair with Kay came to an end. I loved her desperately, but began to realize—at the same time she was beginning to realize—that she hadn’t the same feelings for me. One night while walking down a sidewalk with her previous beaux Blake I saw how she let me fall behind while she stuck by his side. It made me realize how much more important Blake was to her than me. He was a good-looking guy, the son of Ohio State professors, and the product of a bohemian intellectual environment I could only envy from a distance. He was impossibly cool and I felt I couldn’t compete.

Kay was also the child of a university professor. She was surprised and appalled by the racial panic—Blake was black—in the extreme reaction of her father when her parents found her diary. Her father nailed shut the bedroom windows. She’d been climbing out of them for months then somehow making her way down to OSU. Blake lived in one of the old three-story houses provided for long-time faculty there, in an attic room on the top floor. She climbed up the outside of the house in the dark to join him. She pursued her love with the same intensity she brought to everything. I thought she was so courageous!

I think the suddenness of the ending made her relationship to Blake even more important to her. She attempted suicide by impulsively swallowing the contents of a bottle of aspirin. Her parents were relieved when I appeared: I’d take her mind off him, I was white, cautious, safe. But I was also a way for her to see him again; we spent a lot of time on campus in those days.

After weeks of agony in my basement bedroom—more tears were to follow—I called her and told her that I couldn’t continue. I couldn’t handle being in second place. She was surprised, I remember, but didn’t plead, didn’t try to hold on, which had the effect of confirming my suspicions.

At the time of the call I didn’t know that there was yet another guy in her life. He was an archetypal 60s bad boy who called himself Tink; he appeared on a motorcycle like someone from a Shangri-las tune. It was set up by a girlfriend of Kay’s who was playing matchmaker; maybe she thought I wasn’t exciting enough for someone so extraordinary. I didn’t find out about him till weeks after we’d broken up. They stayed together for years until he died, beheaded in a motorcycle accident. Kay died of a stroke a year or two later; I’m sure booze and drugs helped to bring that on. Kathy told me that Kay would call her, drunk, from the house trailer where she was living.

I’d never be quite so tragically in love again. Something about being sixteen made it all so intense.

I had stopped going out with Kathy the moment Kay gave me her telephone number; it’s a weak defense but I was swept off my feet. Kathy was a pragmatist, however, and began dating one of my best friends. His mother was opposed and found many ways of making his life difficult. Finally he gave in and broke it off with Kathy; it was the only way to get things back to normal.

He worked in a laundromat at the Graceland shopping center and sometimes Kathy and I would stop by. I would cruise for 45s at Woolco while the two of them hung out at the laundry. I was there the day he ended things with her, the day the pictures included in this item were taken. And so Kathy found herself without a relationship at nearly the same moment I broke up with Kay.

We consoled each other but Kathy’s mom had issues with me. I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t like me; I was polite and certainly looked the part of a good boy. Dad had fled the chaos she caused at some point; I met him a few times and Kathy was still close to him. After the divorce mom had to work as a cocktail waitress; maybe all this had an effect on her opinion about men. She was under intense financial pressure; the family was poor and lived in a rental in a tougher part of the West Side. Kathy’s beloved older brother, the only son, died in Vietnam just a year or two before I met her.

Later in the year I asked Kathy to go with me to the Junior Prom. She made her own dress and we talked about the evening for weeks. Then one might Mom said the prom wasn’t happening. Kathy told her she was going anyway. After she left with me her mother reacted by putting all of Kathy’s stuff in a pile on the floor and setting it on fire.

Proms always arrange for a photo of the couple as they enter the room. Here Kathy and I stand together at the entrance to the Valley Dale ballroom, me in my rented tux and her in the homemade dress. There was a touch of irony to everything we did that night; we so thoroughly identified with the contemporary counterculture that we felt like anthropologists observing a tribal ritual that had nothing at all to do with us. Maybe everyone felt that way. We were determined to have a nice time and we did.

Kathy and I went to this venerable Columbus prime rib place after the prom. We sat in one of the booths on the left in the center frame above and tried to order drinks, probably Mai Tais or Grasshoppers or something fancy. The old and experienced waiter asked for IDs and we withdrew the request. We certainly weren't drinkers; we spent a lot of time laughing at ourselves and enjoying the meal. A particularly good feature of a Jai-Lai dinner was chive butter with fresh rolls; I always looked forward to that. I'd been there many times with my grandparents—in Columbus it meant class.

I don't really dance anymore. Years later I took lessons with Carolyn at a Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Manhattan. We did a nice foxtrot to Billy Eckstine's "Green Dolphin Street" (and that was fun) but my feelings had changed; I began to feel stupid and exposed on a dance floor. I have forgotten whatever I did back in high school to make these events fun.

Even a typically narcissitic teenager like myself, obesessed with my love life and my band, was vaguely aware of the student protests at Ohio State that built momentum through the last part of April. I only happened to see some of it by chance. It ended up as one of the biggest student protests in the country.

There were so many thousands of kids at OSU! It was a huge community, and they were pissed. Failing grades meant an end to one’s student deferment, and the drug-fueled exuberance of the era was not especially conducive to study. The country had already lost almost thirty-thousand soldiers; more were on the way. Nixon’s “secret plan to end Johnson’s war was to bomb the fuck out of everybody—including Laos and Cambodia—while Kissinger pursued clandestine peace talks in Paris. Even nuclear weapons were considered; Kissinger (channeling George III) said I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point.

I knew a college-age guy named Dan—not a student—who was seeing a friend of mine. Kathy and I had been spending a lot of time at his Chittenden Avenue apartment, one half of a dilapidated duplex in a series of dilapidated duplexes between Pearl Alley and Indianola. It was a few steps off-campus. He offered us a room whenever we wanted, and we took him up on the offer. Dan was a hustler; he was putting his energy into a music promotion outfit he called C.A.M.S. Enterprises. He got my then-current band into a Music For A Better World fund-raising concert for the ACLU only a few weeks after these events. (Years later when I met Dave at A7—see 1981—he reminded me very much of Danny.)

It was afternoon. We saw people running past and I went outside to see what was happening. There were students all over High Street, lots of them, crowds all the way up a sloping lawn to the left that fronted the Student Union. Around me the more experienced of the protestors were soaking rags and bandanas in water buckets. Further north on High Street, several blocks from where we were, a line of police advanced south in our direction. People threw things at them, whatever was on hand. Then a cloud of tear gas started forming between the cops and us. I smelled something acrid and ran like hell.

This part of the riot, the only part I saw, happened on April 29th. There had been smaller, occasionally violent protests all over the campus in the days leading up to the climactic explosion. The President of OSU, who claimed the protestors represent less than 1 percent of the student body, found himself under siege by that one-percent, at least until the cops got him out later that evening. (We’re still hearing about “outside agitators; the mayor of New York used the phrase to describe Gaza protestors at Columbia a few weeks ago.)

Mayor Sensenbrenner put the campus area under curfew for the next three days, and the University shut down for three weeks. The drummer in my band, a guy named Nick, lived just off campus; he came back with me to my house and stayed till the curfew was lifted. My mom was not happy about having a guest but was gracious. Nickie was a good drummer, accurate and powerful. I heard he got into some bad trouble years later—a murder—but I’ve never been able to find out any details.

Sensenbrenner was an archetypal politico, a real-life version of an actor from Preston Sturges' repertory group in The Great McGinty. I remember him visiting my high school during a pep rally; I thought he looked like Lon Chaney Sr. He was an extremely popular maverick Democrat and a conservative mayor (every politician was a conservative in 1970 Ohio). My dad was a skilled GOP campaign manager; he was asked to take one for the team and manage the doomed campaign of an unknown candidate—a funeral-home director named Jerry Spears—against Sensenbrenner. Dad did the best he could but it was a suicide mission, and Spears was too much the Brahmin for rough and tumble electioneering. I'm sure it helped my father with the local Republican party officials, though the experience was depressing. To my knowledge it was the only campaign he ever lost.

My family also had a personal connection with James A. Rhodes, the man who was governor of Ohio during this period. Rhodes was old friends with my grandfather Joe who’d been working as a bailiff, finally a chief bailiff, during the entire time Rhodes had been clawing his way to the top. He operated a numbers joint across the street from OSU and I strongly suspect my grandpa was placing bets there for the judges. During his deathbed delirium, I heard about bets again and again. I probed but couldn't understand his responses. Grandpa was a worldy guy, a realistic man who had been at the center of local politics for most of his life. He was in the trenches of WWI (where his brother was blown to pieces) and survived the torpedoing of his troop ship off the Irish coast, but for some reason placing bets was on his mind as he lay dying.

Rhodes was also a pal of my Uncle Johnny, who was a highly placed manager at Gooding Amusements, the outfit that ran most of the carnival rides in the Midwest. There is a picture of Rhodes with Johnny when he was being awarded Showman of the Year; it hung on the wall of my grandpa's cottage for years. I don't think I ever met Rhodes, though I certainly saw those signed pictures around the house. I know that he also made appearances at some backyard rallies for my dad’s candidates. This is what he said on May 3rd in the wake of the OSU riot:

They're worse than the brownshirts, and the communist element, and also the night riders, and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.

Time has not been kind to this view of events. A few days later he called in the National Guard at Kent State and carved his niche in history. I couldn’t believe we knew the guy. Knowing that we did made me feel alienated from my family.

Early in the summer of 1970 I bought tickets to something called the Cincinnati Pop Festival. Woodstock had happened just a few months before and every concert promoter in the country was anxious to cash in on all that peace and love. In this case it was a couple of guys out of Detroit who booked a lot of Michigan acts, which is how The Stooges, The Bob Seeger System, and Alice Cooper made it into the lineup. Though Seeger played Columbus frequently (at a club called The Sugar Shack) I’d never heard of the other two acts. In hindsight I’m surprised the MC5 weren’t booked, too.

The Pop Festival turned out to be the site one of rock’s iconic moments, when Iggy Pop walked out over the crowd held up by their outstretched arms. It was like Jesus walking over the water, if Jesus had dropped acid and smeared peanut butter over his naked chest. Lo, a new Messiah walked among us.

Tickets cost me seven dollars; I bought two, one for me and one for my friend Kathy. We saw many shows together around this time. I particularly remember seeing Janis Joplin and later Donovan at Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium, and a Chairman of the Board show at the Ohio State Fair. Most of the acts that made it onto a label eventually played Columbus.

The show was at Crosley Field, the soon-to-be-closed home of the Cincinnati Reds. Though there were only two more home games to play before the place was permanently shut down, Redlegs management was intensely concerned with protecting a few square yards of their infield grass. Since the stage was out at second base, a very long way from the crowd, there was a lot of turf to protect. The hundred or so cops assigned to the show had a hopeless and unrealistic job. They put up an improvised fence along the first and third base lines and stationed a few guys there; that would surely stop anyone from climbing over the barricade and getting closer to the musicians. This is where the trouble started.

Before describing what went wrong one must understand the deep suspicion the crowd had for the cops and the absolute hatred the cops had for us. I suppose I shared the audience view of the cops; we'd seen a lot of pictures from Selma and so many other places. Complicating our stance was the fact the most of us were law-breakers: we had a fondness for weed. Indeed all those drugs we were doing were illegal. Youth in the eyes of the law equalled dirty and shirtless long-haired guy with a joint; cop in the eyes of the youth equalled goon with gun, dog, and big stick.

Michigan trio Grand Funk Railroad tore the place apart. I wasn’t particularly interested in the band but they were obviously putting on a great show. (Homer Simpson says they are his favorite band.) Shirtless Mark Farner, the lead guitarist, was being rock star incarnate. They didn’t call it shredding back then but that’s what he was doing, really fast blues-based riffing over a loud and powerful beat. At some point the band began gesturing to the crowd to come closer. There had been sporadic solo attempts to jump the fence throughout the afternoon followed by sometimes brutal police reaction. Come on! the band yelled, or something very much like that.

So the massed youth behind the fence broke over the barricade like the ocean breaking over rocks on a shoreline. There was a stampede and the infield grass became invisible under a sea of midwestern teens; the hippies danced on the pitcher’s mound. I think both sides saw the breakthrough as an act loaded with youth-revolt symbolism. For the rest of the set the crowd danced where they were and the cops did nothing.

I was sitting in the stands with Kathy watching this all from uncomfortable baseball stadium seats. It was an ideal place to observe the ebbing and the flowing. For the rest of the afternoon and the evening, the show would come to a temporary halt between sets and the crowd would be cleared out with the announced threat of stopping the show. Then during the following set, particularly if it was a hard-rocking band, the crowd would break through again. (They didn’t bother when it was Traffic doing The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.)

I made my own way down to the front of the stage during the Mountain set, the band I’d come to see. I got pretty close to the band. After a while I got tired of the sun and the standing and made my way back to the seats. The concert was locally televised and years later sold as a VHS called Midsummer Rock. I picked up a copy and was surprised to see my high-school-self grooving to Leslie West.

After each of these interruptions the police presence would become more obvious, until finally there was a solid line of cops lining the base paths. They held that position until the very end of the show. From the crowd came bottles, cups, hot dogs, hard-boiled eggs—whatever else could be found in the cooler. It became tense. One thing that has been forgotten about the 60s was how rock could feel dangerous; I didn’t get that feeling again until punk broke out.

Finally the show was over and we all began to head for the exit corridors beneath the stands. I’m not sure exactly when or where it started but all of a sudden the cops seemed to feel it was payback time. Police riot is the phrase I would use. There was chaos and panic in the concrete tunnels as we ran for the exits. People a little slower than us were thrown to the ground and beaten with billy clubs.

Seventy-four arrests were made. According to the official report. Police had to use force to control youths who hurled bottles and rocks. Twelve rock fans that resisted arrest were given hospital treatment. A number of police were injured. Nine required hospital treatment. As we ran into the parking lot, there were indeed bottles flying over our heads, aimed at the cops behind us. It was surreal—a bad dream, a war movie.

A minute later and much further into the parking lot there were no more police; I'm guessing they were too busy working on the heads of those back near the stadium. I’ll bet the cops were praised at length in the Enquirer; Cincinnati heroes, no doubt. A year or so later I moved to the town myself and read that paper every day. I never believed police accounts about anything after the Pop Festival.

It’s a good policy to never bet your life on eye-witness testimony—from anybody—but that’s how I thought it went down. A few days later and the Reds left Crosley Field forever.

In senior year I dated a cheerleader (though not one of the girls here). Occasionally there would be a brief connection between the freak world I inhabited and the high-school status quo, though most of these connections didn't last long. After all these years Martie on the bottom-right remains a FB friend.

We moved into a smaller apartment earlier this year and have been attempting Swedish death cleaning in the process. The idea is to get rid of all the crap you accumulate in your lifetime, so as not to burden your descendants when you Exeunt, pursued by a bear. In contrast to my partner I have accumulated more than many, most particularly LPs, 45s, books, photos, audio equipment, and miscellanies. I have been world class with the miscellanies; now I try to photograph any that might be useful here and then stick them in a box and forget them.

Or in this case, present them. The picture above is page one of my notes on an assignment in a biology class. As much as I am infatuated by science, I am incompetent in the nuts and bolts of theory, particularly when translated into mathematics. For me even arithmetic is challenging; I’ve come to accept the obvious concept that rote learning and memorization are essential to fluency in math. I am not fluent; I did not memorize. A good example: I was the last in my grade school class to establish a firm syntactic structure for the times tables.

In the 80s and 90s I consulted with a talk therapist so that I might find my way to a happier life. Depression had followed me from my early years. My mother was often depressed and there is undoubtedly a genetic component; my father self-medicated to the point of alcoholism.

Sylvia was my therapist; I met her one night in my cab when I drove her to the home of all therapists in New York, the Upper West Side, She gave me her card. She also gave me the gift of a sliding-scale for payment; I always gave her something but particularly in the early years it was a very modest amount. I’m not sure we ever solved anything, if that’s even the goal of talk therapy. It’s not like the end of Spellbound or Marnie; there is usually no repressed memory to recover. Traumatic memories are hard to repress; people spend their lives wishing they could do so.

I did find it gratifying to spend hours and hours talking about myself; if you’ve read any of the other items in this project you know how much I enjoy my own past. The selfish joys of the examined life!

Sylvia helped me get out of the taxi business. With her common-sense advice I found my way to a temporary per diem teaching certificate (the TPD) and a job at a junior high school two blocks from where I lived. Every step of the process was terrifying—particularly those first days in the classroom with a bunch of kids from the projects—but she never stopped encouraging me. I think it saved my life. I was one step away from slipping into some sort of addiction; my financials were incomprehensible; my mental stability was as insecure as my balance in the senior years I am enjoying now.

There is no such thing as laziness, Sylvia insisted: it was resistance. It’s a useful way of looking at things one can’t bring oneself to do. Instead of just calling myself lazy, and then feeling the accompanying shame and guilt, I would try to discover why I didn’t want to do whatever it was I was putting off and then find some way of doing it. Paying bills, for instance, or writing letters, or looking for a job, or seeing a dentist. Later when I was a consultant with clients, sending an invoice.

Which brings me back to arithmetic. Why was I so resistant to the times tables? I have a theory which some find laughable, particularly those who don’t have the same trouble. I think I have a neurological problem with numbers. Not the concepts behind the numbers; when I took the SATs I got a decent math score by drawing all the elements of a word problem on a scrap of paper. It’s not a very efficient technique and takes longer, but the reasoning is sound and I eventually arrived at a correct answer.

Later in life I became a decent programmer, and programming problems are like algebra problems and require the same type of logic. In a black-box situation—you have the input numbers and you need the black box to do something with those numbers and spit out the results—I would explain the issue to Carolyn (who is brilliant at this, by the way) and she would supply an equation. I’d stick the equation into the black box and everything worked. I knew exactly what I needed but didn’t have the arithmetical skills to build the equation.

Somehow it was the numbers themselves, or their algebraic equivalents—as soon as I encountered a number, my consciousness went elsewhere. I read a lot of hard science-fiction, much of it written by working scientists, and if an equation enters the paragraph I examine it briefly and move on, confident the following text will tell me what the equation might have.

(I am reminded of the interminable passages of poetry in an otherwise excellent book, A.S. Byatt’s Possession. By the end of the novel I was skipping most of long poems she had devised; her renditions of Victorian poetry were so accurate that I found myself reacting the same way I had to Byron.)

This has all been a windy explantation for the picture you’ve seen at the top of this item. I was faced with a biology assignment that required me to deal with probability. It had something to do with genetics and the likelihood of inherited traits. I loved learning about this stuff; the mechanics of evolution immediately made sense to me. I thought to myself that god didn’t play dice with the universe; god played poker. (Thinking about it now I realize dice would have worked just as well.)

There are probability tables stored in the easy-access parts of the brain of any good poker player. Professionals follow these tables and win. My thought was to prove empirically that the tables were real. I would deal myself a thousand hands of poker and tabulate the results. With a thousand hands it worked; it has to be a least a thousand hands for the odds to conform to the predictions. The results of each hand were recorded: three of a kind, straight, flush, etc. Final results can be seen in the crude table below. (If you have a way to increase the contrast on the image you might also observe, unfortunately, scrawled beneath the table in pencil, the lyrics to a song I was working on for months that year. They embarrass me; I've done better since.)

That’s how a relatively clever but limited brain ends up passing a high-school biology class. It didn’t work with Latin; I had to cheat to get through Latin.

Weekend fun was haunting Columbus yard sales where I found this image and its naked counterpart, revealed only when one lifted the transparent plastic. Click the image to experience “the thrill I once enjoyed…” it's been hanging on one wall or another for over fifty years. I look at it and think of a barber shop or a plumbing supply store.

Another major yard sale find is on a shelf across the room as I type: this Carmen Miranda “head vase."