Bully Pulpit: Transformation


The transformation began without my knowing it — smoking pot now and then and watching from afar as the hippies on campus passed out leaflets: legalize nudity, legalize cunnilingus, legalize acid, legalize stupidity. But inwardly I said to myself: These people are outright freaks.

I took an interest in a poetry class taught by a long-haired professor who supported all the leaflet causes. One day I was riding in an elevator with him. I could see blades of grass hanging off his back and smell his body odor. His pupils were huge and glassy and he was smiling to himself. So this is what a real hippie looks and smells like. I would never want to be like this.

Then the Beatles came out with their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album and the earth tilted a few more degrees. The Fab Four had transformed into long-haired hippies with mustaches. One morning I looked in the mirror and was surprised to find hair growing over my ears and on my upper lip. A sorority girl said to me in class, “Are you growing a mustache?” She said it with a sneer in her voice, as if to say,  “You’re not turning into one of them, are you?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “I would never do that.”

I began to empathize with werewolves. The transformation seemed to be happening on its own. I was becoming the very thing that I despised, and I seemed powerless to stop it.

I attended a few parties in Venice Beach, Los Angeles’ answer to Haight-Ashbury at the time. The party house was owned by two hippie bi-girls who cooked brownies laced with weed and passed around acid in a serving bowl. That summer the girls moved to Boulder, Colo., and opened up a store called The Laughing Panda Tea Company and Psychedelic Shop. Somehow I found myself traveling east with a short-haired man in a nondescript Chevy Nova who dropped me off in Boulder and continued on to Yazoo City, Miss., where no hippie dared set foot.

That night I stayed with my two girlfriends, ate brownies and swallowed some funny-looking candies. A week passed and I woke up at the Denver Airport. Stardust, the pretty one with the long blonde hair and the John Lennon glasses, was putting a bead necklace around my neck and crowning me with a plantation owner’s hat. “There,” she said, “I dub thee hippie,” and gave me a peck on the check.

When my flight landed in San Francisco the crew forgot about my wheelchair. The plane emptied. I sat there waiting with a vague look on my face, the only one on the plane. An older black man boarded and began cleaning up, occasionally glancing at me. Ten minutes passed, or maybe it was 10 years. I sat there, waiting, with my long hair, my hippie hat, a bead necklace, and by now, a full beard.

Finally the man stopped cleaning and spoke his mind. “Hey, man,” he said. “The plane done landed. You ain’t up in the air no more.”

How can you be so sure? I thought.


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