After finishing high school at the Palfrey Street school in Watertown Massachusetts, I tried going to Argentina having always thought that I would do so once my studies were finished in the US.  I had finished high school in 1970. At the time Kent State had just taken place and I had jumped fully into changing the world.  I had never been much of a student to begin with watching the minute hands pass as I sat in 10th grade geometry class.  Richards political science class was definitely a step up, and my favorite had been the photography class that Ross had led.  In it I was able to get hands-on experience in the darkroom and I had even spent a summer working in a photography studio darkroom.  I also got some pictures published in the local Watertown publication.

Just before leaving for Argentina I got arrested for driving my best friend’s Glenn motorcycle with only a learner’s permit at night, trying to out run the policeman and running a red light in the process.  Glenn’s dad, Irving, whose house I had just passed before the motorcycle conked out in the policeman caught up to me screaming at me to “freeze”-one move and I’ll shoot-he said-put your hands up in the air; called me that night after I called home and told my mother not to bail me out because I wanted to experience being in jail so I could see what my father had experienced when he had been jailed under the Peronist rule in Argentina.  Irving asked me if I wanted him to represent me in front of the judge tomorrow.  I consented and it turned out that he was a personal friend of the judge having been a Massachusetts state senator in the past, and he told the judge to please release me under my own reconnaissance since I was leaving the country.

Argentina on the other hand was a poor copy of what was going on in the states.  In the streets of  Buenos Aires the hippies seemed a bad copy of what was going on in the US.   They were trying to imitate in language and fashion what they were seeing on their television screens in their bourgeois homes.  It was very different than living the struggle against “the man” like we were living in the United States.  In Argentina there was no Vietnam War raging, no draftees dying, no police shooting at the students, at least not yet!

My grandfather Gregorio was still alive and I got a chance to hang out with a friend if this that took a liking to me. Her name was Maria Rosa Oliver, she was in her 70s in a wheelchair but she invited me over to her home and we listened to music of Bob Dylan and talked about what was happening in the states.  Around that time I went to see Woodstock, remembering when my friend Bob had just returned from the event it really made me long for what I had left behind.  The second movie I went to see was “Alice’s restaurant, and that one brought me really close to home as I watched Arlo Guthrie  drive his Volkswagen bus with his commune friends in the vicinity of Boston.

It wasn’t long after these movies that my longing to return to my adoptive country got the better of me and I caught a flight home.

Upon returning to the United States my best friend Glenn had been institutionalized.  As it turns out he had taken some mescaline and flipped out. His dad decided to do an intervention and I went to visit him at McLean’s hospital. He was on Thorazine and Stella-zine and even though he was all doped up he asked me to steal him away so we could both drive to California. And yet it was a completely crazy idea and I did not do it.

Instead, I found myself trying to re-integrate into life in the States after High School.

All my friends and peers had pretty-much disappeared and moved-on to College.  Past all the rhetoric about how bad the system was, etc., the reality was that they were, as my sister once tried framing into that mold “petit-burgeois with a well-assured future, and I was basically left to hang on my own…

At first, I took a job in a machine-shop located not too far from where I lived at my parents’, but it wasn’t long before my mother figured-out that the combination of chemicals they were using, when combined, would come to create something like phosgene gas, something  used in W.W. I to kill soldiers with, had the place investigated by an occupational hazards team, and the next day Lenny fired me.  I got a job as a Hospital Security guard, which is pretty depressing, and when I made an illegal U-turn one time on the main drag, someone hit me broad ways right by my door, I suppose I was lucky not to get hurt!  Finally, the car died when I was driving in Belmont, I pulled-over, took all the worth-while parts, and called a Junk-yard to have them tow it.

After that I took a job as a mechanic out towards the airport, toward the end of Storrow Drive.  I was on like a minimal stand-bye wage, but if they had me do some work, they were to supplement my wages with whatever I earned.  They had me remove a V.W.  Bus transmission, it was Boston Winter, in like a semi-enclosed parking-lot, so it was very cold, and when it came time to pay me, they explained that the minimum wage thing dropped-out when you actually did work, so I was only paid $75 and I quit right then.

I suppose my Mom felt guilty for what I was going through, and she got me a temporary job through an associate, Sandip Basu.  The job was to answer phones at a Savin Business machine office in Newton.  I suppose it must’ve been to cover for a colleague of his that had gone to India for a month.  When the month was up, he got me another job around the corner, working at a gas station in Newton Corner for a cranky old fart, pumping gas.

A planet where people are unaware of their origin, destiny or even who they are does seem rather strange. we know more about he ephemeral things than the very core of who we are.

Does it seem strange to you? Ever ponder these questions, or r u satisfied to have Oprah and Dr. Phil provide u all the answers?