A Long Strange Trip by Dennis Mcnally Read Free Book Online Page B

attributes to nature again.’ ” Hunter laughed. “He busted me on the pathetic fallacy, which is the absolute sine qua non of the poor writer.” The short-term result of his improved writing was an F on a book report because the teacher said it was far too good for a seventh grader. Mr. Hunter had edited William Saroyan and could recall seeing T. S. Eliot in the office, and he brought to Robert’s life not only stability but a stimulating intellectual atmosphere. When McGraw-Hill considered putting out
Animal Farm
in a children’s series, Robert was asked to read it to see if he could comprehend it. With a little help—he was told that Snowball the Pig represented Trotsky—he did fine. Though Mr. Hunter was conservative in his private life, the political atmosphere at home was liberal.
    They settled first in San Francisco and then in Palo Alto, where Robert attended Wilbur Junior High and then Cubberly High School for the tenth and eleventh grades. Slowly, he began to fit in, joining the band and orchestra, and the Free Thinkers Club. It was “the first I’d heard of atheism,” and it gave him a fascinating new idea to play with. Even better for a young man wanting to be accepted, he discovered that he was a good wrestler and got some peer “credit for being an okay guy at that point, maybe the first time that ever happened to me.” Then his world turned upside down again, as he and his family moved to Stamford, Connecticut, and he went from Palo Alto’s superb and liberal school system to “conservative Connecticut, where you learned everything by rote and wore suits and ties to school.” An outsider once more, he passed a dismally unhappy senior year, ameliorated only by being able to play trumpet in his first band, the Crescents. It was a rather old-fashioned combination of Dixieland and rock and roll, and Hunter’s trumpet models were Harry James, Ray Anthony, and Louis Armstrong—he’d yet to hear of Miles Davis.
    Graduating in June 1958, he went off to the University of Connecticut, where he joined the Folk Music Club and became a Pete Seeger fan. College did not engage him, and in his second semester he drifted away. He worked for a while and then decided to return to Palo Alto, largely because of an old flame from high school days. He considered taking the bus, then flew, dreaming of plane crashes all the way to the West Coast. Back in his old hometown, he found and soon left his no-longer-true love, and fell in with a fairly dubious lot of old friends. He felt himself sinking into potentially serious trouble, and escaped by enlisting in the National Guard, where he spent six months training at Fort Ord and then Fort Sill, first in the artillery and then as a Teletype operator. In March 1961, about ten days after Paul Speegle’s death, he completed his initial six-month tour of duty and returned to Palo Alto.
    In the course of their first conversation at St. Michael’s Alley, Garcia and Trist learned that Hunter had a functioning car, and the next morning they were
bangbangbang
on his hotel room door. The ’40 Chrysler took them to Berkeley, where they searched for the animated film
Animal
Farm.
They never did find the movie, but it mattered not at all. Not long after, the Chrysler came to rest next to Garcia’s Cadillac, and for a time that spring, they shared the same vacant lot in East Palo Alto. Hunter had liberated several enormous tins of crushed pineapple from the National Guard, while Garcia’s car was stuffed—in the glove compartment, under the seats, everywhere—with plastic forks and spoons. As though from an O. Henry story, but for real, spoon met pineapple and helped the two young men bond. Along with Alan Trist, they became inseparable.
    “Like any proper Englishman,” Trist later observed, “I was a bit of a renegade.” A bohemian literary intellectual who was up on Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas and had not only read the Beat bible, Don Allen’s
New
American Poetry,
but had