We took our turns going through eye and ear examinations and then they
had us strip and go through in a line to be poked by the army doctors like
we were slaves on auction. Finally a short dark haired moon-faced doctor
in glasses handed me a white, enamel vessel with a spout and said in a
soft gentle sing-song, "Now this is what we call the duck and we want you
to pee in it and return it to us."
I peed into the duck and then I lifted the spout to my mouth and swallowed
down as much as I could in one gulp. It tasted warm. "Put down that ducky!"
the doctor screamed, "put on your cloths right now and come with me!"
I put down the duck and ran past a line of staring young men and put my
clothes back on. Then I ran back to the doctor, who led me to a psychiatrist’s
office. Inside the office, a tall slender man with a mustache was sitting
behind a desk.
"This guy must think he’s funny!" the short doctor shrilled, "he drank
his urine specimen!"
The tall doctor had his teeth showing under his bushy orange-brown mustache
in a smile that was slightly amused and above all curious.
"Why did you do that?" the doctor asked in a voice that was deeper and
calmer than the short doctor’s voice had become.
"Well," I said, "a couple of nights ago I took a whole lot of acid - that’s
LSD."
The tall doctor nodded.
"And a couple of weeks earlier I had been taking acid with a bunch of other
people and one of them told about this tribe in Siberia - the Chuckchees,
I believe. They eat hallucinogenic mushrooms and when they run out of mushrooms,
they drink their own urine and get just as high as they originally got
from the mushrooms. I wanted to see if you could do the same thing with
two hits of acid."
"What’s your name?" the tall doctor asked.
"Dale Fields," I said. "And I already went through a physical once before
back in 1965."
"You did?" he said with an up and down glide. "How were you classified?"
"1-Y," I said, pulling out my draft card. "In case of National Emergency."
"Oh,"
the doctor’s mouth made a perfect O. "Then there should be a file on you
here."
He picked up a phone on his desk and mumbled into it. All I could catch
was "Dale Fields" and "1965". He motioned to me to sit down in a chair
in the corner. The short doctor left. I sat there for about half an hour
while the tall doctor made some phone calls, apparently to friends in other
parts of the hospital, mostly joking around about me - "You won’t believe
this, some guy who swallowed his piss sample! Yeah! No shit!"
Finally a man came in with my life from my 1965 physical. The doctor flipped
through it to the psychological section, "An acute situational displacement,
it says here," he mused. "I don’t think we can have that. Just sign these
papers here," he said, pulling some sheets of closely printed material
out of a stack. "And you can go. I think you still have your 1-Y."
I signed and walked out of his office and down several hallways until I
came to the dingy green lobby where the other young men were standing around
with their clothes on.
"What did it taste like?" a couple of them asked.
"It tasted just like the army," I said.
A pot bellied middle-aged sergeant came into the lobby and said, "Y’all
have to follow me down this hall to the back entrance. The bus is parked
there now cause there’s protesters out in front."
As I followed in the group, my heart jumped with pride. We got in the bus
and it pulled out from in back of the VA hospital and turned the corner
and drove by the front. I could see Clu and Terry and a bunch of other
Committee and Organization people all holding up their signs and chanting:
END THE WAR IN VIETNAM! BRING THE TROOPS HOME!"
I waved and made a V-sign and they cheered and waved back.
"What’s all that shit about?" an intelligent looking young man in a brown
cowboy style jacket asked.
Like many leftists would, I had a few leaflets on my person, folded up
in my wind breaker’s pocket. I handed them to the young man in the brown
cowboy jacket and his neighbors. "This may explain," I said.
"Why should I believe what a piss-drinker has to say?" the young man sneered.
Some of the others laughed.
"Just read and see what the people who wrote the leaflets have to say,"
I answered. "Some of them are so smart, they don’t have to drink piss."
There was more laughter. Some bored young men actually read the leaflets.
Some of the others were Indians. They were eager to go to Vietnam. Their
warrior societies would give them a few moments of their lives of poverty
when they returned. They would lose an arm or a leg for an eagle feather.
When we got back, I went to the post office. My $10 weekly staff pay was
there. I hurried to Brady’s Grocery and cashed it and bought a king size
Coke to kill the taste of my physical. Then I went by Terry and Sally’s
apartment where they were having the grand opening of their head store,
the Prairie Fire, in their living room.
There were tables filling most of the room, covered with strangely formed
pipes of clay and wood and roach clips with all kinds of ornaments. Crystals
and strings of beads hung from the ceiling. On the walls around the room
paintings were hanging, a lot of them by Naldo. His paintings were not
in the vague dreamy style, so popular with hippie artists then. He used
solid shapes and bright, contrasting colors like Diego Rivera. Around
the tables were crowded people from the Organization, the Committee and
all the hippie sympathizers - all but Hope, that is. I’m sure she wasn’t
there for Naldo’s sake and my sake both. I raised my hand in the V-sign
and hollered, "I made it! I don’t go!"
Soon Clu and Terry and Sally and a bunch of other people were hanging from
my neck. Naldo came up. I got my right hand loose from somebody’s shoulder
and he shook it hard. "I got out today and Will got out yesterday!" I shouted
to everybody.
"We know," a voice said from behind me. "Will is coming here to see us
tonight."
As soon as the hands of my friends let my neck and shoulders go, I turned
around and saw one of the Wallenberg twins - Martin I believe - a pot smuggler,
but tall and solemn like the Baptist junior deacon he had once been.
It was only a short time later I heard the whoom! - of Jim Ed’s well tuned
well-oiled motor out in the driveway. I went downstairs. Jim Ed and Lou,
Will and Jan piled out of the car.
"Will’s here!" I called out. People ran downstairs into the chilly November
evening. Will was wearing ragged jeans and a cowboy hat and his army field
jacket. He waved his cowboy hat and shouted, "Black Hill Forever!"
How can I tell you about the next few minutes? It was like the reunion
beyond death in Heaven, only it was here on earth. Everybody was jumping
around hugging. Sally tried to get everybody singing the ‘Internationale’
only most of the people didn’t know the words so everybody started singing:
"We all live in a yellow submarine!
A yellow submarine!
A yellow submarine!"
