The Silver Roof
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The Silver Roof

(uh! -- what next?)

It was a dark, hot Chicago night. Ha, ha. Aren't you glad that's not a part of this story?

Maybe there was something to that Jacob's Ladder movie after all. Maybe they did put hallucinogens in our food at the mess hall. I used to call it the secret weapon. The guided mess hall. Heck, in the winter the birds flew overhead and you had to watch out for the icy b.m.'s.

Maybe Uncle Sam did actually visit Alice's Restaurant after all and maybe they did actually have that talk with Arlow Guthrie, Woody's son. Maybe they did buy that rainbow roach after all. Because, though I can't confirm it with some hard evidence -- nothing good enough for a class action lawsuit like those mentally handicapped folks did when they found out they were used as guinea pigs for government experiments -- but I can tell you all about the bizarre behavior of the men.

And that wasn't because we were the baby boomers, drafted hippies or anything else. Nothing could have explained it. Living in a barracks with my fellow G.I.'s was a kind of hell. First there was the cacophony of amplified rock music coming from each of the bays. We didn't have sealed rooms, but we did have partitioned cubicles until the time I was promoted to spec five and moved into the private room at the end of the hall with a couple of other spec fives, Air and Orosz.

By some coincidence we all were artists. I with my interrupted schooling at the School of Visual Arts of New York City, Orosz from the Art Institute of Chicago, and Air -- nobody asked him. I think he was a Cooper-Union guy. One day Air showed up with a floor fan that he had bought at the P.X. He put it at the head end of his bunk and tucked his olive drab army blanket on the handle.

That was the first time anyone got a good night's sleep. He explained his invention to us the next day and we got our fans. We had a little fan club going. Our bunks looked like three giant olive drab grubs from a class z space movie. We used the fans as a "white sound", a nearby sound that makes a constant, uninterrupted noise that drowns the other farther noises out. It only took a little while to get used to the sound of the fan near your head and then you got a good night's sleep.

One guy downstairs didn't do so well. The decibel rating drove him mad and he barricaded himself behind an overturned double bunk until the guys in white jackets came and took him away. Then there was the kid that got drunk every night and would, as he put it, "fall up the stairs", screaming and laughing. Then he'd do it again several times.

Some guys had huge full length posters in their cubicles of Ho Chi Minh, Joseph Stalin, Marx, Lenin and so on and so forth. In '68 when the hippies had their march on the Pentagon (they were going to try to hold hands and make a human ring around the Pentagon to levitate it out of it's foundations and then drop it into the Potomac River), the army sent in an airborne division (or at least a large part of one).

At night during the episode, they (the airborne troops) would assemble on the street behind our row of barracks, and I was walking back from pulling guard duty at T-7 (the temporary building from the World War Two Era that housed the Army Materiel Command where I worked) with my gas mask and over night kit and there were the boys on the steps with a platoon of airborne paratroopers facing them (must have been prima facie). The guys had tacked the poster of Ho on the exterior wall and put the loudspeakers of a stereo 33rpm record player and it was blaring out the march music "76 Trombones" from the musical "The Music Man".

About twenty of our guys were sitting on the steps and one of the paratroopers, in full gear, jumped onto the hood of an army truck parked and waiting to take them out, snapped to attention and gave the Nazi Salute to ol' Ho's poster. I mean, YOU KNOW those guys had to have been stoned! At the very least they had to have been having flashbacks or something. What I'm saying is that straits wouldn't do something like that. No way.

Now, there I was stuck in the middle of all this. All I was trying to do was finish my tour of duty and get back to my art career. I was never personally interested in drugs. I was convinced they would interfere with my creativity. I know they did with those who experimented with them in the hippy world around me. Those people became incapable of doing anything significant or following through on things they were interested in because they were always getting "tripped off" on things like a few cigarette ashes in a sink of water or something. All those people were doing was encroaching on the life style we artists had to use because of the poverty we had to usually endure.

Now you might think that the top brass runs the army. Think again. It's run by the corporals and the privates. The officers are scared of them. There is a kind of detente going on between the brass and the bottom and if that line is crossed, things can happen.

Like the time the new sergeant-major took over the company on south base. He got right in there and started to straighten up the men and impose a reasonable sort of discipline among the ranks. A couple of spec fours (corporals) got together over there at the Pentagon and loaded a program in the computer and six weeks later, the sergeant-major was shipped off to Viet Nam. Just because you've got an army don't think you're going to get by, because all kinds of things can happen. I tell you, the officers were scared of those guys.

It's never going to go smoothly. That's why history is fraught with so much failure. Remember that speck four, or corporal, that ended up causing all that trouble in Europe, Napoleon? Or another corporal who got his start during the first world war, Hitler? Boy, that describes the guys in my barracks to a tee: a bunch of little Hitlers that history was passing by. Just remember, all it takes is one.

Finally the day came. I had been accepted in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, and was at the airport, in the plane, my three years of army service over. Sitting in my window seat. I fought the disbelief. Any moment, I felt like a bunch of M.P.'s would barge in and cart me back to the south base for another few years on some clause of some article of the Uniform Code or something! But, of course, it didn't happen. Just my imagination. Had to be something in the food.

The jet took off and circled the Pentagon before heading west. I remember the sight of that building twisting in the distance and disappearing from view. I breathed a sigh of relief so big I began to wonder where all the air came from. What's for lungs? That plane got me to O'Hare in Chicago and then the next plane went on to Oakland. Because we were headed west, the sunset lasted about four hours. It was beautiful. I was glued to the window most of the way. It would have been all of the way except that was the 1960's before they had super glue.

The next morning, after a fitful night's sleep, I walked up Broadway from downtown to the school campus. Then I looked around trying to snoop for digs; some place to stay. I picked a road. College Avenue. And started walking.

After a couple of miles, I noticed a Texaco Gasoline Station. It was a real gas. Shades of Hopper sixties style. Then something told me to look across the street. There it was. Apartment for rent. I wasn't in the mood to be looking all day. After all I was much too busy to take a centi-rental journey. So I walked into the office.

Oddly enough, it was a local Ice Cream company who made their own product on the premises. I took the place and that afternoon I was moving in. That was one thing I was good at. All my life I had been moving from one place to another. I had my first birthday on the Pacific Ocean somewhere, on my way to Japan, back in '47. Yup, I'm really good at moving in; I'm in experienced.

The next day I went to the storage at the air port and got my bicycle. It was a French Gitanne ten speed derailleur touring bike I bought from Mel Pinto in Arlington. Mel was one of the best bicycle dealers in town. I moonlighted at his shop on weekends when I was at the south base until I got out. The Gitanne was a reasonably priced bike the latest for it's day.

As I was setting up in the kitchen (not very interesting, where there's a kitch, there's a yawn), I glanced out the window, It was the second floor and there, just outside was a huge avocado tree. As I peered between the branches I could see the trucks rolling into the yard of the ice cream factory. It was the end of their day, and as I looked I saw the drivers open the backs of the freezer trucks, take the boxed ice cream for that day and toss it into a dumpster at the entrance to the back alley way.

The next day I asked one of the drivers about that and discovered that they only stocked absolutely fresh ice cream at their vendors. Then they allowed me to help myself to all the left over stock that they didn't use that day. So late each afternoon, I met the trucks to get my latest stock of ice cream. My favorite was rocky road, although most of the time I had to settle for parson's delight. Somebody musta turned out de lights.

If you're ever going to go to art school, don't go riding down the street on a bicycle, no hands, holding an artist's easel like a lance and singing the "Don Quixote" song from the Sixties musical "The Man of La Mancha". That's what I did. Man you think Cervantes was kidding? Let me tell you, those windmills are really out there. Kid, I don't care how much you work out, you'll never be ready for what's out there and it seems like they don't like artists.

That reminds me of the time I went to art school in New York just after I got started and I tried to jump the raised island walkway in the middle of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-third Street while playing my harmonica. I made a hit on Broadway, but the wrong kind, crawling across Broadway before the oncoming traffic got there held back only by the timed traffic lights.

I sprained both ankles. Then, when they healed, I sprained my left ankle again. I missed three days of classes at art school crawling from bed to bathroom.

Then in Australia the "windmill" got the other one (actually a pothole in Concord, a suburb of Sydney). That was the twist from down under. Must have been the under toe.

It would really pay to read his book. He only intended to write the first half, but after quite a few counterfeits came out as a result of it's popularity, Cervantes decided to write the sequel, which is why the book, "Don Quixote", is so large. It's really two books in one. Whereas in Washington, they pass the buck, in this case, they pass the book. The last time I was in the Carlsbad library, I told a librarian, "watch your shirt, this is a bookie joint...". I'm going to read it myself some day. As a dyslexic, it takes me months to read a book so I keep putting it off. Maybe if I take up the clarinet. That's a read instrument.

You must remember that Cervantes was an ex-soldier as well. When he wrote the sequence about Alonzo Cehannie, Don Quixote, a fictitious character springing from the subconscious of this brilliant man, that what was intended was a quite cryptic representation of the real causes of the world's problems and the futility of one individual setting out to right all wrongs. Which reminds me, someone asked me if I write my own jokes, to which I replied that I have to, they keep capsizing.

I have attempted to address that topic more directly in my less cryptic paper, which is in this over-one-thousand-eight-hundred-page website, called "The Predators of Man". (Click to go there).

So there I was riding down the road on my bicycle, ostentatious as usual. Oblivious to the adventures that lay before me and my two trips around the world in a late twentieth century takeoff on the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. So if you're starting art school, kid, my advise is go incognito; be as unobtrusive as you possibly can. But as I later found out, even that can backfire on you. If you try to blend in, you might just tend to stand out all the more.

Soon I met an ex-marine, also going to C.C.A.C, that was looking for a place so I took him as a room-mate. Then Todd needed a place to stay, so we took him in, too. Then I found about ten other guys that were going to school but had no place to stay, so we took them in, too.

Now with the place getting a little bit crowded I began to do what I usually did whenever I moved to a new place as a kid, I found a way of getting on to the roof and also climbed every tree in the yard. In this case I left the avocado tree alone, but I did get up to the roof of the apartment building. I had even slept up there a couple of times, because something told me I was going to have a difficult life, so I didn't want to get too soft.

So now, all the guys except Todd and the ex-marine had to follow me to the roof where we all slept on the tiny white pebbles in the tar. I showed them the route. By no means must they ever tread on the roof of the ice cream factory, because I didn't want to damage it and I was also afraid there would be footprints.

It was silver. That's right, the entire roof was painted silver. It was quite a sight. The way to the other roof was out the bathroom window and then traversing a tarred ledge. It was easier to just clamber down to the next step below, the ice cream factory roof, and then just walk around to the apartment roof. But that was my rule. The Silver Roof was out of bounds. But try telling that to all the homeless guys going through my bathroom window.

Things were getting more and more difficult. Before I went into the military, back in New York, I was used to the privacy of my own rented apartment where I got a lot of artwork done. Here I wasn't getting a thing done.

Finally one day I laid down the law. This was my place and everyone had to straighten their mess up before they left. Nobody did. The laughed and went off to the park. So I opened the window, and just chucked everyone's stuff out. It was all mostly clothes and when I looked outside, and saw everything strewn on the lawn below, I thought better of it and was going to go down and bring it all back in, but the job was too much for me.

I took off for my various errands, I now forgot what they were, and came back to find my gray snap-brim hat to greet me outside the door, with a big dusty boot print in the middle of it, squashing it flat. and a knife stuck in the drawing I had put on the door a month earlier.

I was faster on my feet than I thought. I didn't have to slug anyone but after a couple of blows on my head from a beer mug, Todd had managed to get the ex-marine to cool down. Then we became the best of friends. Don't ask me how that works. But soon we were all laughing about it and I was drinking one of the ex-marine's beers. I hate beer. But I was so thirsty I drank it anyway. They say you have to acquire a taste for the stuff. I don't know. I sang in a choir when I was a kid and I never got to like the taste of beer.

Not long thereafter, I was called into the ice cream factory office, as they were the ones that owned the apartment building. They were investigating leaks in the roof and found the footprints emanating from the bathroom window. I resolved the problem quickly for them, I moved out, leaving the place to Todd, the ex-marine and whomever else.

Click the thumbnail to see the digital art used in the background. Digital art is used as the background for text to give the reader the greater advantage of intellectual stimulus in the visual areas of the brain and not just the left hemisphere or sympathetic nervous system.