The Hippie Cult

By

Len Thomas Cabela

Copyright © 2023 Len Thomas Cabela

All Rights Reserved

Contents

Preface:

Chapter One, Coaxis:

Chapter Two, Hideous House:

Chapter Three, Cultic Studies:

Chapter Four, Forever Band:

Chapter Five, The Clubhouse:

Chapter Six, A Cult for One:

Chapter Seven, Revenge:

Chapter Eight, Gurus Galore:

Chapter Nine, When God Bought Me a Coke:

Chapter Ten, Miracles:

Chapter Eleven, The Argument:

Chapter Twelve, Bad People:

Appendix:

Preface:

To God, Wordsmith of the Utmost Order. May Every Word Be the Perfect Word. In Jesus’ Precious Name. Amen.

For my beautiful wife Jessica, my family and friends, neighbors, acquaintances, anybody who ever believed in me, even when I didn’t, and everyone who purchases or reads this entire book or book series.

To say this work has been almost 50 years in the making would not be too much of an exaggeration. Mom would read me Little House on the Prairie, Curious George, and Dr. Seuss books. I always loved to read, before I even started school, Mom taught me simple two and three-letter words and I tried reading some in children’s books and the Bible. Even so, my brothers warned me repeatedly that I would hate school. Grandpa Boes, however, always told us school was fun, every chance he got. My mother said I might have butterflies in my stomach, and that described how I was feeling on my first day of kindergarten. It was a unique feeling that I hadn’t had before or since that year. I had to remember to take in milk money. I cried my eyes out after school that day and ate almost a whole bottle of chewable vitamin C. At Ida Elementary School, my kindergarten teacher was Mrs. Spots, and the teaching assistant was Ms. Ringle. Mom was insistent they did not enroll me in ITA, the Initial Teaching Alphabet, and true to her notion I turned out fine, unlike the others in the ITA program who were so confused when they actually had to learn words the right way. I stayed with phonics. For First, Second, and Third Grade, my teacher was Mrs. Luft. Besides Mom, it was her I probably owe the biggest debt of gratitude to for a literary or artistic career, (and Mr. Strickland in college). She always encouraged me, was loving, and never gave up on me. In fact, she believed so much in her class students, that she insisted on keeping us as long as possible. When the school board wouldn’t let her keep us again for Fourth Grade, she discussed it with her husband and retired that very year.

I awoke early one morning at 4 AM. I walked out into the living room and picked up my youngest older brother’s copy of Animal Farm by George Orwell. I read most of it by the time he woke up and had to take it to school for a book report that was due. He said he would let me finish reading it soon when he was done with it, but for now, he would give me Lad, A Dog, by Albert Payson Terhune. I read it cover to cover. The book my sister brought home, Hiroshima by John Hersey, I didn’t get to read until more recently by buying through eBay. I remember thinking that the mushroom cloud on the cover looked like a wicked old lady cackling with an ugly necklace and a big bouffant hairdo. But as I tried to write my own little book to take into school, I came up with the idea for Funny Farm, a little more than a pamphlet with a few of my drawings added to it, the little book with laminated construction paper cover told my fictional story of being mistakenly imprisoned in a lunatic asylum for being sane, and my inevitable escape and exile. Mrs. Luft had me read it in front of the class. Everyone loved it. She said she would bring in a thing called the Young Author’s competition. My fellow students requested me to read it again and again. Later on, I suspect, to take up more time so they wouldn’t have to do other school activities, as days went on. I went on to get the blue ribbon for my school, and I think at least one more blue ribbon for regional participation. Mrs. Luft also read us books like All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum.

As I was achieving a near cultlike status with my writing, a group of schoolmates asked if I wanted to hold a little symposium during recess to figure out how to write better. I supposed it would be a welcome break from the usual game of Tag-Tackle-and-Pummel in which we would form a line, where I always ended up in the front, and they would all chase me around the playground. It was during one of these early chases that I wound up unwittingly in a bit of trouble, as the playground aide, who happened to be the boss’s wife later when I worked at Carl’s Hideaway as a dishwasher, grabbed me and said, Here he is! She asked if I was the one who had splashed mud on a little girl’s dress. I said no because I had no recollection of doing such a horrendous thing. I looked over at a little girl who had been crying and she pointed at me identifying me as the one. Then I had to stand in the corner of the playground alone, while the others were beckoning me from a few yards off on the next chase. I just shook my head because I didn’t want to get in trouble again.

Another year I wrote another story for Young Authors, this time School Days. I only got the Second-Place red ribbon for that, and it was downhill from there, but I had by then learned to flesh it out to more pages, using more descriptive words, such as adjectives. I also learned not to use cuss or swear words, instead putting a box with ‘Censored’ in it, or symbols such as @#$%*. I understand the advocacy of free speech by Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, who my brother loved. However, any moron with two brain cells to rub together can use cuss or swear words for emphasis, but I wanted to make my literature accessible, friendly, and available to all audiences. Plus, I rather came to realize as time went on that besides differentiating my writing from all the rest who do use expletives, I could make more of an impact with more selective choices of words, sort of like when Charles Manson used the menacing snarling, AWE HECK! in a song. It was much more expressive than any bad words.

I later gave up on those book concepts when the movies Funny Farm with Chevy Chase, and Spike Lee’s School Daze came out in 1988. That is when I should’ve originally graduated from high school, had I not dropped out, opting for the GED, Adult Education, and dropping back into school at Clintondale High School, Mount Clemens, Michigan instead. But back in Mrs. Luft’s classroom, she had us learn to write haikus. I had written and rewritten what I’d begun to call Morning Haiku or Twilight Haiku. It was chosen to be published in the Monroe Evening News paper sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s. I was not able to find it as an adult at the gigantic Monroe County Library System’s Ellis Reference and Information Center on microfiche, but I suppose it went like this; Cold dew on the grass/Light breaks on dawn’s horizon/Hear faint sounds of birds. I learned from this to be brief and concise, rather than longwinded. I also learned that I could do better within the confines of definitive restrictive parameters because I would uncover solutions to make great work while following rules and laws, even up to later work of driving a truck in the city, one of the choices of career day at school. (Monster truck, too).

The library was a great influence. I remember the sound my shoes made climbing up to the second floor on the metal steps and the buzz of the fluorescent lights. It was just like the library scene in Something Wicked This Way Comes, by one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury. I remember my neighbor friend inviting me to take my stash of library books out to his backyard shed to read them. The sound of the rain pouring down on the metal roof, as I took out a book about dog breeds with plenty of pictures and excitedly examined and read through it. The school library was one of a series of single-wide trailers set up on blocks, with skirting all around, behind the school. I remember climbing up the steps and finding a few good books. They enrolled me in the speed-reading program that year. It utilized a viewer machine that was on a little desk. There were a bunch of them in a row. I sat on a chair and placed my eyes up to the viewer's lens. Each line flashed as my eyes zipped across left to right trying to absorb the information before the next line appeared. At the end, I had a short comprehension test to see how well I did. If I did well, I could advance next time to a slightly higher rate. If not, I would go slower again. My chart looked like mountains with many peaks and valleys, sometimes growing to new heights, (before diagnoses of ADHD, OCD, and dyslexia were even considered), I thrived despite all this.

Mrs. Luft had printed out tons of sheets of paper with fun learning activities for over the summer vacation months, probably wearing out the school’s Xerox machine, giving us each a huge stack of papers about ten inches high. When it was her last year teaching us, there was a farewell card going around and all the students were writing a little note, like thank you for helping me with this and with that. I started writing, Thanks for… I hesitated, trying to think of the perfect things to say but was being rushed. Kids were saying, Hurry up, she’s coming! and Just write something. So, I just scribbled ‘nothing’ and signed my first name. As soon as she looked at it, she called me up to her desk, asking me why I wrote that. I was so embarrassed, saying Just an extra thank you in case…uh… Words failed me. She said to me, You cross that out and write something nice. This time I had more time to think about it in depth before writing some very specific things she had helped me personally with. Unfortunately, I had written it in pen, which we were so used to using a pencil that we often wore out the eraser right away. One memorable learning experience was when the teacher brought a small pencil with an extra-long eraser on the end.

My brothers had warned me of a strict mean teacher they had, named Mrs. Mathis. But instead of her, I got Mrs. Cronenwett, for Fourth Grade, who didn’t seem that bad, but a little bit stern. Later in middle school, I had Mr. Jones who was in a wheelchair, but my brother had said he was his favorite teacher. When I was able to have typing class in school there was a classroom full of old clunky typewriters. The teacher there was an older lady like Mrs. Cronenwett, but I’m not sure if this was her. She said to everyone, Don’t crack your knuckles, they’ll get big as a barn! Everyone laughed. I eventually got an electric typewriter at home. For the report on caffeine, I did mostly on articles dug out of filing cabinets in the middle school library, I edited by literally copying by hand or cutting with scissors and pasting them back into the right section of blank notebook paper in the upstairs of my sister’s rented house in Dundee, Michigan. This was before home computers became common in the early 80s, and the only computers they did have out were maybe the Apple 2e which I wasn’t even interested in having at that point. I got an A+.

One of my new teachers in English literature class had us do an initial writing assignment on a topic we picked. I chose to write a paper on conscientiously objecting to the use of blood transfusions and abstaining from blood on religious grounds versus the possibility of saving lives. The day after grading them she talked to the entire class raving about how one of us in the classroom had done such an excellent job as to warrant a higher grade than she had ever been able to give in her entire career, an A+. She said she would not reveal who it was to the entire class but would after class was dismissed for the day. While everybody was walking out, she motioned for me to stay behind. She let me know that I had achieved the highest grade and congratulated me on my fine work. She hoped I would keep it up, but the very next paper I did was a bomb, and I got a terrible grade. She asked me what had happened because we both thought I would do better. I learned that if I wrote what God wanted me to write I would be successful. If it wasn’t what God wanted me to write, it wouldn’t be successful. In an English Literature class in middle school, or maybe even high school, we did a collaborative writing exercise called Ad Libs, which in my family as I grew up mom called Consequences. Somebody wrote a slightly funny beginning, I wrote the middle portion, and everyone laughed a bit, reading that, another kid wrote a hilarious ending, which made everyone laugh uncontrollably and hysterically! I mean we had tears running out of our eyes, and we couldn’t stop. I learned if you aren’t willing to take it just one step further, the next person who tries will. For another class I took at some point, I wrote about all the possible different dimensions I could conceive of. The teacher said he was fascinated by the topic and would like to read more on the subject.

All of us in the family had a penchant for words, and art class was one of my favorite classes in school, although I could do math, but was better in Social Studies classes. I will see if I can add some samples of my cartoon drawings at the end of this book, the ones that I saved. But I didn’t apply myself and missed a lot of school telling my mom I was sick. I would be absent at least one day a week, most weeks. Eventually, in middle school, they allowed me to go into the gifted class, but there were a lot of kids who weren’t doing as well, and they had hoped I would rub off on them. So, they’d have a spelling test with simple words for them. I made up a story of why I was late again, telling Mr. Donaldson I had been hitchhiking and was almost abducted. I thought it was so funny that it was obvious that I was joking, but others were telling me I was taking it too far. When he wrote it up and sent me to the principal’s office, I had to relent and tell them it was all made up to get out of that class, which was essentially another boring study hall, because he was about to contact the police.

Later on, when I found out I was successful at college; in one of my introductory Psychology classes I kept falling asleep during the lecture and since they jumped around for the weekly tests, I often studied the wrong chapters but passed it with the minimum of a C anyhow. I remember thinking this was for me! I had always thought it was ridiculous for people to go to college and study when I was younger. My personal college experience made the basis for much of the inspiration for this book. I even wrote an article that was published in the Florida Villager, whose editor contacted me first to ask. I also studied Journalism for a work-study program in community college. I didn’t have to pay for it, but it was not for credit either. They published one of my articles in the school paper, The Agora. It was about the modern music scene going into the turn of the millennium. However, the next paper I was invited to write about the various plants in the college greenhouse was a wild goose chase. I spent a lot of time photographing them with a digital camera only to find out that it was never published.

I had a capstone paper published online on the website: academia.edu. I admired my favorite authors and was inspired to write by the work of James Patterson. Also, Stephen King who was such a prolific writer; he seemed to crank out a new thick book every few months, and when I read about J.K. Rowling becoming the first billionaire author to write fantasy fiction, starting out as a broke housewife, and becoming legendary with the Harry Potter series, I had this as my goal too. Although I had the concepts, and initial characters started to develop in my head, and I began to write it during a difficult career transitional period, I couldn’t have written it years ago. I wish I could have, but the ideas just weren’t all there yet. It lacked much direction. I enjoyed reading the book The Giver, recommended by a close friend, in the hammock in the side row of trees in the front yard one summer before I moved and noticed two more books by her formed a trilogy. That’s when I seriously considered making this into a trilogy series. Since then, she made another book, and it became a quartet of books. I recently read the second one, Gathering Blue. I wanted to write a book that I, myself, would want to read if I were the reader, in effect following the Golden Rule. When 2019 rolled around and they started controlling the public with the pandemic, I had it stored away on my computer, not knowing where to go with it due to writer’s block. This worked in my favor, like the example of Stephen King writing vigorously for about three months, and then putting it away in the drawer for a few months while it ferments in his mind, then he comes back with a fresher perspective. And I had a few poems I put up on poetry.com over the years.

As I was browsing YouTube, earlier this year, I was contemplating the band’s material for the CA Quintet’s A Trip Through Hell. I contacted a surviving member, Ken. I asked if he’d like me to write their story for them, he asked at first if I had anything to send him as an example of my work. I hadn’t even completed the first three chapters yet. He said he was thinking about continuing the story he had begun himself, but that it might be nice to send each other our completed works so that we could compare. I felt as if dark forces were trying to get me to give up on the