I, Dynamo

A Review

Cherry Vanilla

Lick Me:  How I Became Cherry Vanilla

by

R.E. Prindle

II

Living In The System

     Kathy was born in 1943 so as she left high school the sixties were emerging.  Everybody talks about the sixties but nobody does anything about them.  The sixties didn’t just happen, they erupted, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable as Warhol put it.  Andy was right.  The reason no one can remember the sixties is because so much was going on all anyone could see was their little fragment, that includes the so-called taste makers.  All that crap you get from the sixties politicos glorifying themselves and their exploits is just crap.  They were performing their act in a small little corner or the room pretending it was the whole stage.  They were just a bunch of hard core losers anyway.  Abbie Hoffman! Excuse me! Jerry Rubin, get out of my way.  Allen Ginsburg?  Pardon me while I puke.

No, no.  The sixties were a happening no matter where you were.  I’ve already touched on the drugs in Part One.  Trust me, everyone but we happy few was on drugs whether prescription or street.  I mean, Valium, my god!  Straights ‘needed’ it to get through the day.

As I touched on in my Edie Sedgwick series the sixties were ushered in by the big 707 flying non-stop between NY and Europe beginning in 1959.  That created the Jet Set who were the envy of all.  Airports were small and intimate at the beginning of the decade burgeoning into the behemoths they have become as the airlines reduced prices and seduced people to fly.  Not that I was, I didn’t get into the air until the seventies but as soon as I could I emulated the Jet Set flying to Europe and back three times in my best year.

So there were drugs and the Jet Set and the Kennedies.  The Kennedies were the worst thing that ever

John F. Kennedy

happened to the country.  Of course in pedigree sensitive USA we are all conditioned to ignore national, religious and racial origins as if they don’t count but, let me tell you, they do.  John F. Kennedy began the decade in 1960 replacing the vacated spot of Dwight David Eisenhower.  The change was not nominal.  Eisenhower knew what he was doing, Kennedy didn’t.  Ike, as he was affectionately known,  engineered the victory in Europe in WWII.  He’d done a stellar job from ‘52 to ‘60.  Knowing the devastation of war he resisted the hawks to keep the peace, and we hawks were quite vocal.   Having inherited the Viet Nam situation from the French and FFL collapse he had contention in Indo-China under control which Nixon, had he been elected, was pledged to honor, if he could have executed.

Like I said, we’re not supposed to think, much less talk about, race, religion and nationality but the Kennedies were Irish Catholics who finally won the triumph over the Anglo-Saxon Protestants in America.  The war between the Irish and English was hundreds of years old in 1923 when the Irish freed themselves from the English yoke.  The Irish and Anglo-Saxon war in America had only been going on since the 1840s when the potato famine drove the Celtic lads to our shores at which time, in reaction, the so-called Know Nothing Party was created.  In 1928 the Irish put Al Smith up as the Irish attempt to capture the New Island after De Valera’s 1923 success on the Ould Sod.

Times were not propitious for an Irish Catholic and Al was soundly defeated.  But a gentleman named Joseph P. Kennedy, accruing a bootleg fortune with solid connections to Organized Crime was about to engineer the election of one of his sons to the highest office in the land.  God only knows what goes on behind the scenes but his first choice, Joe Jr., was blown up flying over the channel.  His second son John F. was given one of the most dangerous posts in the Navy, commanding a PT boat.  It’s hard to believe that whoever it was that got Joe Jr. didn’t want  him dead but John survived the war and began the corruption of the land from the highest office in 1960.

Kenney with amphetamines coursing through his veins and a mind centered on sex, which is to say fucking, was clueless along with his brother Bobby and his other nitwit sibling, Teddy.  Within a matter of months he had us involved in a shooting war in Viet Nam, threatened by Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis, after he had taken the drug addicts measure at the summit, and then aborting the reconquest of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.  Is it any wonder the magnificent crew Ike had assembled offed him.  Regardless of how history has been revised their were a great many us who sighed and said:  Good riddance.

When Bobby stuck his head up from under his rock in 1968 there was no doubt he’d get it blown off, and he did.  If you think the two assassinations aren’t connected, think again.  So ’63 and ’68 were big years of a decade of big years.  Teddy kept his head down after that but gained a measure of revenge by sponsoring the 1965 immigration bill.

In far off Africa a gentleman by the name of Barack Obama Sr. was leaving for Hawaii to get a college degree and beget the future President of the United States on a little simple minded White girl.  It was in 1957 when the African colonies renounced their allegiance to their European overlords that Ghana proclaimed independence from Britain.  Thus the complexion of the United Nations was changed overnight as colony after colony of a congeries of warring tribes, now known as countries, declared independence and sent emissaries to the UN.  Thus the balance of power was shifted from the capable to the incapable in that momentous decade.

It should be noticed that Marcus Garvey began the coordination of the African peoples of the world a

Marcus Garvey

few decades before independence was achieved by Africans and not improbably Garvey also furthered the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement in the US, thus the African independence movement and the Civil Rights Movement were occurring simultaneously and I suspect coordinated.  Thus the African presence in the UN complemented the enormous Black riots that began in LA in ‘65 and reached their apex through ‘67, ‘68 and ‘69.  The fabric of the country was rent and torn.  The future of the country became increasingly ugly.

It’s difficult to say but after the double whammy of the movies The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without A Cause of the mid-50s a new tone emerged in which the youthful violence came to the fore and not just lower class kids.  This senseless rebellion without a cause represented a change in outlook occurring in the mid-fifties perhaps aggravated by Elia Kazan’s influential movie.  Gangs of young rich guys terrorized the well to do sections of LA in ways that were inexplicable.   The graduating classes of ‘53, ‘54 and ‘55 belonged to the previous era while 1956, the year I graduated, was the swing year between what was and what would be that began with the class of ‘57.  About half the class of ‘56 looked backward and half, maybe less, faced forward toward the future.  I was in the latter half.

Then in 1958, a twenty year old, class of ‘56 actually inspired by Rebel Without A Cause and James

James Dean- Rebel Without A Cause

Dean, so it was said, by the name of Charlie Starkweather went on a murderous rampage in Nebraska murdering several people simply for the sadistic thrills.  It was bone chilling, perhaps the first of its kind.  Charlie was quickly apprehended and executed in 1959.

Also in the fifties the homosexual, William Inge, wrote and produced the play Bus Stop, turned into a movie starring Marilyn Monroe and Don Murray in 1956.   From those emerged the astonishingly violent TV series of one year only, Bus Stop, the production of which was supervised by Inge.  That TV series transcended by miles any sadism and violence seen as yet in either TV or the movies.  It even made the comic book Tales From The Crypt look tame by comparison.

Perhaps the most sickening episode in a season of sickening episodes was the one starring the teen idol Fabian as a sadistic murderous thrill killer  who was obviously based on Charlie Starkweather.   The episode by Altman was ambiguously titled:  A Lion Walks Among Us.  So the sadist was compared to a lion.  The episode altered the direction of TV drama breaking down the doors for whatever followed and you know what that’s like.  The impact was so strong that a Congressional hearing was called immediately to denounce it.

Already in an excited delirium young people were shown a new direction that was seized.  Serial murderers that were unheard of during the early and mid-fifties became commonplace escalating, so it seemed, year by year.

Thus the scene in New York where Kathy was living her life became more violent by the month until after 1969 and the liberation of the homosexual psyche by the Stonewall Riot, when the crime became ultra sadistic and unbearable.

By the early seventies Dirty Harry and Death Wish symbolized the era moving well beyond Rebel Without A Cause or even Bus Stop as sadistic sick, sick violence.  Insanity, really, and it characterized the country in the coming decades.

At the same time beginning in the early sixties pornography began its rise into the mainstream.  While it was a good sized underground business before, in 1953 Hugh Heffner began publication of Playboy Magazine which brought porn into the mainstream.  Playboy was followed by a host of ‘men’s’ magazines that got raunchier and raunchier.  In the early sixties in San Francisco  I noticed for the first time open advertisements in the Chronicle of porn films.  There was a very active push to further pornography which was participated in by Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey and the Factory.   In 1968 I Am

Curious: Yellow Poster

Curious: Yellow and Curious Blue were released.  I Am Curious: Yellow was very influential  in loosening sexual mores.  Blue and Yellow were the colors of the Swedish flag.  A Swedish pervert made the movie.  This all led up to 1972’s Deep Throat which for all practical purpose shot porn into the mainstream.   Porn and the so-called Sexual Revolution went hand in hand.

Since sex had been practiced the same ways since the origin of mankind the real sexual revolution was whether you could say ‘fuck’ in public.   The pervert Lenny Bruce led that charge followed by George Carlin and certainly by the mid-seventies few movies were made where the word didn’t constitute 20% or so of the dialogue.

And then, of course there was the Viet Nam war.  This effort was hampered in the US by the Judaeo-Communist allies of the Viet Namese.  Naturally the US Communists said that there was no reason for the US to be involved blithely ignoring the history of the situation.  Actually the war was part of the US-Soviet confrontation in which the US had made several mutual defense pacts with countries on the Communist borders in an effort to contain it.  South Viet Nam which came into existence when the French Foreign Legion forsook their reputation  was part of a mutual defense pack called SEATO- South East Asian Treaty Organization.  When they were attacked by North Viet nam, of which there an be no doubt they were, the clause of the treaty was invoked involving the US in the defense of South Viet Nam.  So, the US was legitimate if foolish in going to the defense of South Viet Nam.

Now, because of the seeming passiveness of the Jews during the so-called holocaust the Jews had acquired a reputation for being a weak ineffective people.  The skullduggery that established the State of Israel in 1948 did nothing for their pride but the seemingly easy triumph of 1956 against the Egyptians through which war Israel purloined the Negev Desert Jewish pride of prowess began to blossom.  You started seeing identifying marks like gold Stars of David necklaces appearing on bosoms of Jewish men with wide open shirt collars unbuttoned to the penis.  Little different than Nazi insignia they were now worn with pride.

The 1967 war against the allied Arab States completed the transformation of Israel into the Neighborhood Bully.  Jews now began to strut down the streets virtually knocking people out of the way with the Stars of David dangling everywhere.  The Jewish Defense League followed in 1968 soon splitting into an even more violent Jewish Defense Organization.  Under their leader Rabbi Kahane a war not too different from the Jabotinsky days in Palestine ensued with the ubiquitous bomb exploding in NYC instead of Jerusalem.

Now, as has recently emerged, the crucial years for Jews in the United States, which had nothing to do with any so-called holocaust, were the years between 1933 and the accession of Wolf Hitler in German and the US entry into WWII in 1942.  Before the war in the ‘30s the Jews called opponents to their machinations, Fascists.  The name included anyone from Henry Ford to Charles Lindbergh.  A marginalization campaign was begun against all American nationalists that largely succeeded.  In that period the Jews created the notion in their minds that they were the true Americans who had created this near-perfect democracy and the Anglo-Saxons who had preceded them were out to destroy the country and turn it into a Nazi satrapy.

Philip Roth commemorated this attitude in his novel back dated to this period, The Plot To Destroy

Philip Roth- The Plotter

America.  Thus through the fifties and sixties  the Jews conspired to dispossess the ‘New Nazis’, that is non-Jewish White Americans.  The war of ‘56 emboldened them so that by 1964 they were encouraged to seize the university system of the US.  The first front opened  was the so-called Free Speech Movement on the UC Berkeley campus whose real purpose was to displace Free Speech with Jewish controlled speech.

This was successful and when the dust had settled the Jews were in control of the campus stifling the free speech that had been the ostensible reason for the battle.  As Mark Rudd would later say:  The issue is not the issue.  Jewish commissars set up tables at the Sather Gate to which students were demanded to submit to Jewish governance or else.

From Berkeley the battles strung out to other campuses, the most notable being Columbia in NYC while the other Ivy League campuses fell in line.  Freedom of speech was the last thing on their mind.

Having achieved their goal at Berkeley the next step was to escalate the resistance to the Viet Nam war hence shielding their Communist allies in Hanoi.  This was furthered significantly by the 1968 world wide offensive led by Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution so that by the time of Nixon’s reelection in 1972 the country was in a State of near revolution although it wasn’t that apparent on the street.  I was amazed just before the election to see truckloads of soldiers brought into Eugene where I was living  and a revolutionary hotbed, to be secreted in the hills in the event of an insurrection.

I have no idea if John Lennon and Yoko Ono knew how close they were to the edge but in retrospect they were not only lucky to be allowed to stay in the country let alone avoid imprisonment.  If they hadn’t been so high profile I’m sure they would have been arrested.  They were committing some pretty provocative acts.  I’m sure that the money they gave to the movement through A.J. Weberman found its way into bombs.

Back in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson had inherited the White House after John F. Kennedy had escalated the war so that there was no way out but to go forward, Johnson was presented with the choice of guns or butter.  Would there be a period of austerity as in WWII  when the choice had been guns or butter.  Between those two choices Lyndon chose a third- guns and butter.  Things would go on as close to normal as possible.  It was weird.  His administration occupied the center years of the decade while the Judaeo-Communists would give him no peace.  I mean, you know, the hundreds of bombings went on with no qualms on the part of the domestic terrorists.

And lastly, while all previous generation had been known by their literature the current generation, my generation, was known by its song writers and music.  Everyone picked up a guitar and wrote songs.  This essentially came in two, maybe, three waves.  The first was spearheaded by Elvis Presley, the second by the British Invasion from 1964 to 1966 and the possible third from 1966 to 1974 after which the generation exhausted itself.  It was along about 1966 that Kathy made the fateful decision to become a groupie and this would define her life until her mental breakdown in the late seventies.

When the Beatles and the Stones hit these shores they were just singers and bandsmen, popular, but nothing more.  The notion of the Group began to be deified in San Francisco after Ken Kesey’s Acid Test.  The group members were suddenly invested with nearly superhuman powers and wisdom.  All you had to do to become a Holy Guru was stand up on stage, hit a couple of chords,  and shout out ‘Mercy, mercy me, the ecology.’ with a raised fist.  The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother And The Holding Company, people of questionable character all became secular saints.  One grows faint thinking it but, yea verily, gods.  And this only from playing the guitar badly and voicing universal popular sentiments.  Don’t trust anyone over thirty said a twenty-nine year old and immediately thirty-somethings were posing as teenagers.  Too late now, isn’t it?

If you break down the ages, the first wave was born sometime in the early to mid-thirties, Presley was born in ‘35, Little Richard in ‘32.

The first wave of Rockers was spent by the late fifties succeeded by an interim group of nondescripts like Bobby Vee and Bobby Vinton.  Nice enough but not essential or memorable.  The Beach Boys were the top American group from 1960-64.  Then came the second wave, these were men born from 1938 to 1945- Lennon ‘40, Dylan ‘41, Jagger ‘43 and this was the core age through the sixties.  So the second wave, the true Rock phenomenon was a product of people born from 1938 to 1945.  In the seventies Bowie ‘47, Billy Joel ‘49, those of the fifties came to fore as the generational impetus sputtered out.  The Bowies and Joels were of a different sensibility than the main second wave.  They grew up under different circumstances.

As the second wave gathered strength not as mere entertainers but as potent pop culture figures, adoring young girls emerged as groupies.  Their sexual excesses were scandals although the concept of groupie was nothing new.  Anywhere there are glamorous or powerful men accessible women will appear as well as, one might add, homosexuals.  There are literary groupies and business groupies, etc.  However Rock groupies tended toward being under aged jail bait not infrequently barely out of puberty and unconcerned for any consequences, indeed, not knowing of any.

So when Kathy discovered groupies  she determined to become one although incongruously as old as the musicians themselves as she had been born in ‘43.  It was kind of like somebody’s mother turning groupie.  As she said of her groupie career she wanted a band to offer her a job.  Finally David Bowie did.

This was the world in which Kathy Dorrotie was making her way.