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[the Drop City contest]

i n   n o   p a r t i c u l a r   o r d e r :

"Drop City" by Hairy Rainbow

Drop City

The old Indian Chief left me on the Pan American highway stuck in blissful solitude in the wilderness of Alaska. I had escaped Drop City tipi town soon after the raids and I found out that a cup of goulash a dude offered to members of the tribe and me, a vegetarian, contained the remains of his Swiss girl friend, now cooked in a big pot. She had wanted a divorce.

I reached the destiny of my pilgrimage after a hike through mosquito infested swamps.

Stepping through the Rainbow Gates of the Refugium, I went to a bar called Ventilators Lounge.

Except for an old Eskimo and the barmaid, an angel of a woman who, instead of civilizations' left over change accepted my ginseng for two beers, the place was empty.

The Eskimo, hair down to his belt, appreciated the drink asking for a quarter to play Jukebox. He played his song.

"How's Life, Grandfather?"
"Glad you asked, son. Let me tell you this joke about an old Eskimo renting the basement of the outhouse he is living in, to a Hippie..."

I knew I had arrived and the music began to play.

"untitiled" by Lester T. Longlocks

The officer swings a thick leg up over the edge. His faded blue eyes blink up at me, little specks of gray inside laughing at my ridiculous perch. He thinks I'm crazy, of course. He steps away from the borrowed wooden ladder, out onto the slanted roof where I sit fiercely cross-legged, a roach clutched between my cold fingers. It has gone out, of course. The Men From the Bank are inside, lifting up pillows and emptying drawers, looking for money. Jeffery and Axel and Sandra all lit out the second the Authority got too close, because they don't have causes like I do. My causes are being high up in the air, breathing in cool breezes down from the mountain, and looking down at Mary who is lying in the grass out by our tall Oak, rubbing her legs together like a cricket. Oh, what I would give to scratch out a song with her.

"You'll have to come down from there, son," he says to me, scared as a little boy up in his first airplane. "You can't stay up here forever."

And then I jump, landing in a bed of flowers and grabbing Mary by a tender wrist, running with her out to the road, lifting up an arm for any driver to see, long hair and medallions dancing in the wind.

From the journal of Lester T. Longlocks
Former resident of Lake View House of Tricks
Now on the run.

"untitled" by Moses McQueen

January, 1970
Cub Scout Troop 421
Can Tho, Vietnam

Snakes everywhere. No sleep. No hamburgers at the PX. Fish sauce and cobra corpuscle soup, morning noon and night. Nerves raw and pustular, teddy bear limp with putrid sweat. Thousand-tentacled land eels suckling heat from the sun like a malarial Romanov cure. Vichy-era air conditioners rusting in the rice paddys, a hundred deleterious fever hatchlings indifferently mothered over by water buffaloes. Inconsolable humidity.

Charlie in the wire. Charlie at the market with opium-soaked Thai stick. Charlie shimmering through the monsoon rain, each droplet a shard of multi-hued cunning and intent. Two years since Tet in '68, Fat Billy bawling for his momma, Go-Cart Joey impailed on his own bayonet, same blank grin as back in t-ball. Strike three, buddy. Fourteen months since we fragged Mr. Crane, the troop leader who got us into this sick shit. "Build more character than a hundred jamborees," he promised. We were nine then, thought wasting him would solve something.

Now we're ten. Webelos, almost. Fuck it. Don't mean nothin'.

Two and a wake-up, that's all I got left. Takin' that freedom bird straight to one more drop zone. Drop City. I'm comin' home.

"Why I subscribed" by Zoyd Wheeler

My first year at Rutgers, I wanted nothing more than to walk the streets of New Brunswick with a pretty young woman on my arm, to feed each other at ethnic restaurants and learn French together from within the tangles of my bedsheets. But I was a virgin, and women reacted to my glances like a short-stop to a throw from center field; they were all instinct and motion, turning as if to fire and catch a runner going for home.

I suspected this was because I was not a hippy, a word which, by 1970, three years after the televised Summer of Love, had arrived even in New Jersey, though not yet in my dictionary. A growing number of my peers let their sideburns go long and bushy, their hair shaggy. The more brazen women on campus went without bras, even burning them at vaguely pagan events that drew more spectators than participants. But I went in for none of this, and so I stood in clear-eyed wonder as other young men conjured sex from nothing more than the words "free love" and a harsh rebuke of Nixon.

I subscribed to Playboy magazine until the age of 23.

"untitled" by sobriquette

We tackled the institutions of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll backwards: mastered the music and illegal substance scenes first, and collected impressive troves of their respective paraphernalia. Well-versed in the lyrics and culture of leading groups, we rolled tight joints, carved neat lines and epitomized the dress code: torn jeans, Indian shirts, mirrored shades, silver and turquoise everywhere.

Pleased with our progress, the three of us perched on the edge of Bethesda Fountain that balmy May afternoon, drank Coke laced with Southern Comfort and blew practiced Marlboro smoke rings. Only sex, the final frontier of adulthood remained. We made a pact that one way or another, we'd begin eleventh grade in the fall, devoid of our collective virginity.

While there'd be no peer review of our performances, we shared a vague notion that choosing an accomplice to launch our careers as real women merited serious consideration. Exhilarated by the idea of flying solo, we giggled as we surveyed the prospects at the park. The choices were mind-boggling; hair color, physique, boy, man, single, married, hip, straight? Fifteen, full of ourselves and intent on our mission, thoughts that our advances might not be welcomed or reciprocated never entered our minds.

I remember my first headless chicken. Elegiac sentiments fouled the lazy sluicing movement I'd practiced, dividing forests of oak into meals for the cook stove. But then I was using both hands. And that was before Sunshine split with Tadpole, Rainboe, Kat and Moonglow, their ideological fingers unstained by blood.

We met regularly for Sunday morning problem-solving. Group-dialog. Everyone on the floor together, inhaled commitment to painful honesty; exhaled bourgeois prejudice. But then, Sunshine stood, pointing at me. She would not share a yurt with a murderer. She would dissolve our poly-fidelitous safe group, taking the other 4 with her. Everyone was angry with me.

"This do-your-jobism isn't feeding ME!" She punched herself between breasts that swung with the weighty righteousness of homemade tofu in cheesecloth sacks. Tadpole shook his head, a stray bit of straw strafing me from the end of his beard, as he glared, echoing her gesture - the same gesture she practiced compulsively in a mirror for her one act play entitled, "Public Notary." But that was years before I followed her onto the chopping block of the SeedTribe Intentional Community, to have my middle class impulses severed at the neck, in messy, insistent, poorly planned strokes.

"Regression" by Ottimo Massimo

Regression: movement backward to a previous condition

Sitting in the corner of the Lowell bar he was making hand gestures in the air and mumbling gummy sounds:
"gah nyah, dah"

"I'm just learning pool," he said showing me 75 cents.

Bruce was his name but "Baby" was stitched on his gas station shirt and "Baby" was tattooed on his forearm. Baby wavered toward the table rolled his stick then made me roll mine, too. Baby was in love with the game. Before he could've felt his hand touching the table, his left arm jerked and the balls broke like slats in a wooden fence.

"I'm just 7 years old," he said and sank 4 straight. Well, he was an older baby.

He kept telling me the table's size in inches and pulling up his pants but he danced as he yanked. Then, a statement slipped from his soft mouth as simply as if he were calling his pocket, "sodomy isn't good," he said, "don't do sodomy, my father stuck his dick in my mouth when I was 7."

Baby was just learning the game only 7, and starting over. He latched on to his stick, and he latched on hard.

North Carolina was poultry country, right? So we'd stand near the mound of garbage and junk at the Pittsboro dump until we heard peeping, then we'd reach in and pull out the sticky little peeps. (The fertile eggs in there would hatch from the heat.)

We'd suspended a light bulb in a greenhouse enclosure off the side of our log cabin--which we rented for $25 a month from the blacks in the Big House up the road--and we used that as an incubator, moving the bulb around to adjust the temperature for the peeps. Maybe we weren't making it warm enough, because the peeps kept dying. We'd replace them with a new batch from the Pittsboro dump; we did that about four times.

But one cracking cold day, the South be damned, I couldn't stand it. I pulled off my beautiful black fur hat, which had come from Lord & Taylor in Boston, and I stuck it inside the incubator to give the peeps a warm nest. I knew right then that I'd crossed the road in terms of commitment to the simple life.

Title:

The Day Some of Our Sons and Daughters Stopped Being Our Children and Sojourned to Alaska, Where There Was No Vietnam, During the Year in Which We Shot Ourselves at Kent State And the Chicago Seven Were Saved from the Gallows but Found Guilty Five Times Over for Crossing the Boarder to Disrupt the Peaceful Melting Pot We Were Protecting by Painting Yellow Skins Orange and the Gangreen Hue of Napalm (Reds or Not), at Which Time Tricky Dick "Equal Opportunity"Nixon Gave Gold Stars to a Pair of White Broads and Made the Momentous Achievement of Leasing Eighteen Year Olds the Right to Vote (Even If They Were Black), Because If You Can Be Forced to Go to a Foreign Jungle and Get Your Legs Blown Off in the Name of Freedom then the Least We Can Do is Wheel You into a Booth to Cast a Ballot and Let You Decide.

By Brutus Judas Montgomery Jr.

"They left, and some never ever ever came back, until the Eighties, when everybody was happy again, as happy as we all were during the glorious Fifties. Amen."

He was no connoisseur, and in fact had done nothing in his life nearing aficionado similitude, but one sultry afternoon in 1970 proved to be the exception. Ben squatted with his friend Norman in an apricot grove in Ojai, California, inhaling the sweet cannabis that momentarily patched borings, caused by life's injustices, in the fabric of plain existence. Their minds were suspended over the dark loam of the earth as the musty scent of the milieu held their bodies in a fecund embrace. The dusky afternoon sunlight sieved through the trees like miniature spotlights always seeming to miss the cavorting shadow dancers. Then the idea came: they were going to pick apricots and make wine. They gathered and cleaned the fruit with purposeful exploit as the afternoon softened into a crepuscular trance. They weren't just a couple of stoned hippies squishing fruit that didn't belong to them. They were artists holding the budding of life in their hands and squeezing the fertile nectar into virginal, sterile bottles. When they had finished, they buried the bottles and would decide to return some other day. 32 years later, as Ben lay in bed stiff from age, the memory returned to him of that Dionysian commemoration. He drove out to that same grove, dug up the 25 bottles of what was now apricot liqueur, and smiled because he had been too stoned to remember until now.