Early Tucson Days

  On my way home the other day, after walking the dogs with a friend, I pulled into a nearby Circle K to fill up and get some water. Then it hit me, THIS was the same Circle K where my roommate picked me up after the accident.

  How many years ago? Wow; let me see, it was 1972, so 54 to be exact; that is as long as some people’s lifetime. I had recently arrived in Tucson from my only other home in the San Francisco Bay Area. My friend from high school days had come to Tucson himself a year or two earlier, and suggested that I come out too. “You’ll love it here” he said, “it’s beautiful, and the school would be great for you.” We had been roommates at Berkeley a couple of years before; he went to Cal and I went to art school in Oakland. What a crazy good time it was to be alive there and then.

  It didn’t take us long to get settled in Tucson and party like before. He was a Chemical Engineering major and had access to the lab in the Engineering Building basement on campus. We talked one of his classmates who had a home with a high wall into helping us grow some pot in his back yard. We told his naive wife that I was a Horticulture major and this was a crop of ‘fruitless tomatoes’, at least that’s how I remember it. We grew it up right. Before long the plants were reaching near the top of the wall. One day we made the move; hacked it all down and brought it back to our place. We used a dryer in the lab to get rid of the moisture, and rolled up boxes of one ounce lids, giddy with our accomplishment. He took the leftover leaf matter and boiled it in alcohol to remove the resin and synthesized it into a very potent drink we called ‘the Green Death’. We were such bad boys.

  It was potent too. Just a little bit of that mixed with coke or other soda, and you had killer cocktail. Well now, back to the accident.

  I was dating a coed I had met down in Rocky Point, Mexico, and she had a night gig taking care of learning disabled people out on the road to Gates Pass. That night, my roommate and others were partying with the green death and I got it in my head that I wanted to see her that night. I got into my ’62 Corvair and headed out, full of expectations. Thinking I was driving some kind of race car which the Corvair certainly was not, I recklessly barreled out curvy West Speedway to her. Well, it didn’t take long before I took one curve a little too fast. All I remember is that everything was spinning. The car left the road, flipped over, and landed upside down in an adjacent wash. Miraculously, I was unscathed. I guess being that out of it made me loose and I just bounced around and ended up in the back seat. I crawled out and felt SO happy to be alive!

I scurried up to the road and stuck out my thumb. In no time a truck came by picked me up. I remember climbing into the truck bed and sitting up on the railing. The wind that night never felt so good.

  The driver dropped me off at THAT SAME Circle K and I headed to the pay phone and called my roommate. The memory of me laying on the top of the ice storage locker waiting for him sticks in my brain. I got in and we headed straight home pronto.

  The next day we went out to see if we could recover the car. A Tucson police officer was there presumably looking for a victim when we pulled up. He said there was 60 feet of sideways skid on the road. I don’t remember the exact details, but he cited me for speeding. The car was totaled. I think what I got for it paid for the ticket. Those were the days of simple fines and a slap on the wrist. Today I would be in jail and much, much worse.

  So buying some gas and bottled water brought back those crazy times over a half century ago.

  One more crazy story:

My roommate was in the U of A Student Union just before I was going to come out. He spotted a briefcase sitting at a nearby table. Realizing someone must have left it, he rifled through it and found a name. It belong to a Dean. He took it over to the Admin building and rode the elevator up to the floor on the ID. He told the secretary and she brought him into his office. Needless to say, he was VERY happy to see the briefcase. My roommate said he exclaimed, “Thank you so much! If there is anything I can do for you, just let me know.”