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TO: Sparrow
FR: Mike Topp
RE: My Latest Thing

Hi Sparrow,

When are you coming to town again? Let me know. My latest thing is to write really long bad stories about all-true experiences I had in the seventies. They're easy, since I don't need to make anything up.

There are two new Webzines that are fun to look at:

minustimes.com (Hunter Kennedy)
dairyaire.com (Jeff Johnson & friend)

What's new with you? How's the upstate life? Does it snow tons up there?

--King Vidor


MY ACID TRIP WITH ARTHUR GODFREY

I’m looking at an old black-and-white photo of me and four friends dressed in hospital scrubs grouped around a grand piano. We were all on acid and hanging out with Arthur Godfrey.

I dropped a lot of acid in college during the seventies. Blotter and microdot. Microdot was also called “blue barrels,” short for blowing your brains out with chemical daydreams. I started doing drugs years ago and now I have tripped quite a few times, perhaps a zillion.

LSD’s romantic ambience for me stemmed from the nostalgia then sweeping the University of Illinois for any decade but the one we were living in. In 1977, punk was in and people dressed fifties. Hippies were also cool and people wore long hair and painted their faces. Food co-ops with names like Strawberry Fields appeared, selling crappy-tasting organic peanut butter. Sixties revivalists read Steal This Book, The Whole Earth Catalog, and most importantly, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Male hippies still drank coffee and ate bacon and eggs then, while female hippies wore peasant dresses, no underwear, and slept with guys who never used condoms. Patchouli was important. Girls smoked and were on the pill. There were no ATMs, no PCs, no email, no pagers, no cell phones. On Fridays people went to the bank to make sure they had enough cash to get through the weekend. Reefer was $35 an ounce. “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” was a top ten hit. On TV actor Ricardo Montalban touted the “Coreentheean leather” of the Chrysler Cordoba.

I enjoyed acid because I was so messed up from my dad dying when I was fourteen and I liked anything that kept me apart from my feelings. I especially prized the Eadweard Muybridge effect of stroboscopic Frisbees and the Huxley-like aura of mutating doorknobs. With LSD, time became elaborately elastic. Seventies acid was liberally laced with speed, giving weight to underground comix hero Fat Freddy’s contention that he wasn’t an alcoholic: “I don’t have a drinking problem -- I can drink 36 cans of beer without barfing.” The acid we took was so speedy you could easily drink a case of beer in eight hours, and you could enjoy alcohol’s sister vice, cigarettes, in much the same way. In fact, it was not uncommon to smoke a pack or two in an afternoon, and if you found yourself buttless in Gaza you could just as well smoke the remainder of your spent cigs down to the nubbins with roach clips.

Acid made you dumb as a soap dish of course. Although I carefully ran pre-flight checks prior to all my trips, reality always had a way of proving too thorny for my great personality. I might be walking along Main Street when a bus would send a nine-foot wave of filthy rainwater crashing over me or else, after a particularly sad viewing of “Dumbo” at the local revival house(this is pre-VCR, pre-video), some poor bleeding unfortunate might pull up to the curb in his car and ask if I could tell him which way to the local hospital. Normally, it would be no problem to give proper directions, but for some reason confusion, and later guilt, would set in. “Sorry pal, can’t help you.”

Drugs were confusing for another reason. Before I smoked reefer, I was a B student in college. Once I began smoking pot, I became an honor roll student. Then, after I began dropping acid, I started to get straight A’s and made dean’s list. The more drugs I took, apparently, the smarter I got. Very disconcerting, especially when life proved the opposite.

Example. Once a friend and I were tripping in the woods and feeling weary. We walked and walked, and came upon a lovely mossy grotto. We lay out our sleeping bags and were awakened the next morning by some irate golfers. We had fallen asleep on a putting green.

My acid trip with Arthur Godfrey began innocently enough. I’d gotten hold of some blotter and called up Grant Runge, Tim Vavra, Tim Kenwick and Chris Bolta. We set aside a Saturday afternoon in April for our trip, and decided it should start in Giant State Park, near Carbondale. Grant fitted us out with hospital scrubs for our adventure. He’d procured them from the hospital where he worked part-time, and we all found the scrubs quite comfy. Several hours into our trip, we hiked around and took photos of each other posing on cliffs, hanging about in fissures, etc. The mood was rock music album cover art -- you know, wacky guys whacked on acid, dressed in hospital scrubs and posing as we imagined the Kinks or the Who might have, had they lived in southern Illinois in 1977.

It was a bit chilly, and after traipsing around a while, we came upon an old rustic inn complete with grand stone fireplace and haunting native taxidermy: deer, moose, caribou, and a particularly lifelike owl. It looked like a hunting lodge I’d once seen in Maine, near Lake Mooselookmeguntic. We tiptoed quietly around the place at first, grooving on sunlight cascading through tall windows. We spotted a grand piano in one room, set the self-timer on my camera, and snapped a photo of the five of us tickling the ivories. Then, rounding a corner, we came upon Arthur Godfrey and a friend eating lunch at a long wooden table.

For those of you too young to remember, Arthur Godfrey’s countenance beamed its way into millions of American homes during TV’s infancy. His cheerfully bulbous features -- the features of a middle-aged cherub -- conveyed a benevolence that surpassed understanding. In the late forties and fifties, Arthur Godfrey was one of the biggest stars on radio and TV. His “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends” and “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” topped the TV ratings week after week. The man known as “the old redhead” was an impresario whose shows led to stardom for the likes of Pat Boone, the McGuire Sisters, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Connie Francis, Steve Lawrence, Leslie Uggams and Roy Clark. Crotchety 60 Minutes star Andy Rooney recalls getting his start by meeting Arthur Godfrey by chance in an elevator. Rooney said, “Gee, I’d love to write something for you.” And Arthur Godfrey said, “Well, come on in and see me.” So Rooney did, and he got a job writing for Arthur Godfrey for five years. Patsy Cline debuted on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” Ironically, Elvis Presley auditioned for the program but was not selected.

I can see by the looks on your faces that some of you are still unimpressed. How do I know that? I don’t have to lift the lid to know what’s in the pot. But here’s something that should make you sit up and take notice. Let’s go back again. It’s still 1977, and some people believed that God himself looked like Arthur Godfrey. It’s true. I’ve read since that some people thought God was simply a more distant relation of Arthur Godfrey. The names were similar; maybe they were cousins. I will return to this subject later.

The early spring sun cast a pleasing golden-yellow patchwork deep in the bowels of the inn, while outside thrushes warbled from the cool green of the trees. It was as nearly perfect a scene of earthly contentment as we could hope to see.

We looked across the room, where the sun’s rays danced about the long wooden table -- a calm, benevolent, cherubic sun. Could it be? There, amid stuffed deer and moose, the unmistakable countenance of Arthur Godfrey beamed. We looked at him and he beckoned us to approach. He autographed some placemats for us without batting an eye. Arthur Godfrey couldn’t sing, dance, or act. He wasn’t even a good ad-libber. But for one shining moment, he made all of us feel very special. Arthur Godfrey lived another seven years. He died in 1983.

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