It was a dark early morning with only a little pale blue daylight in the east when I showed up at the post office parking lot. I was waiting for the bus to take me to my draft physical at the Veterans Administration hospital in our state capital. There was a chilly breeze that went through my wind breaker and the red shirt with the green and blue cacti. There were about thirty other young men waiting for the bus. I was one of the oldest. Some of the others were joking, but I didn’t feel like saying anything. 
    Finally the bus came and we got on. The bus drove to the VA hospital and parked in front. We went in and stood around and waited in the lobby and then a sergeant led us down a corridor to stand around and wait in a dingy green lobby. The main think I noticed was how shabby the VA hospital was compared to others I had seen. Even the long rubber mats in the hallway were ragged in places. 
    We took our turns going through eye and ear examinations and then they had us strip and go through in a line to be poked by the army doctors like we were slaves on auction. Finally a short dark haired moon-faced doctor in glasses handed me a white, enamel vessel with a spout and said in a soft gentle sing-song, "Now this is what we call the duck and we want you to pee in it and return it to us." 
    I peed into the duck and then I lifted the spout to my mouth and swallowed down as much as I could in one gulp. It tasted warm. 
    "Put down that ducky!" the doctor screamed, "put on your cloths right now and come with me!" 
     I put down the duck and ran past a line of staring young men and put my clothes back on. Then I ran back to the doctor, who led me to a psychiatrist’s office. Inside the office, a tall slender man with a mustache was sitting behind a desk. 
    "This guy must think he’s funny!" the short doctor shrilled, "he drank his urine specimen!" 
    The tall doctor had his teeth showing under his bushy orange-brown mustache in a smile that was slightly amused and above all curious. 
    "Why did you do that?" the doctor asked in a voice that was deeper and calmer than the short doctor’s voice had become. 
    "Well," I said, "a couple of nights ago I took a whole lot of acid - that’s LSD." 
    The tall doctor nodded. 
    "And a couple of weeks earlier I had been taking acid with a bunch of other people and one of them told about this tribe in Siberia - the Chuckchees, I believe. They eat hallucinogenic mushrooms and when they run out of mushrooms, they drink their own urine and get just as high as they originally got from the mushrooms. I wanted to see if you could do the same thing with two hits of acid." 
    "What’s your name?" the tall doctor asked. 
    "Dale Fields," I said. "And I already went through a physical once before back in 1965." 
    "You did?" he said with an up and down glide. "How were you classified?" 
    "1-Y," I said, pulling out my draft card. "In case of National Emergency." 
    "Oh," the doctor’s mouth made a perfect O. "Then there should be a file on you here." 
    He picked up a phone on his desk and mumbled into it. All I could catch was "Dale Fields" and "1965". He motioned to me to sit down in a chair in the corner. The short doctor left. I sat there for about half an hour while the tall doctor made some phone calls, apparently to friends in other parts of the hospital, mostly joking around about me - "You won’t believe this, some guy who swallowed his piss sample! Yeah! No shit!" 
    Finally a man came in with my life from my 1965 physical. The doctor flipped through it to the psychological section, "An acute situational displacement, it says here," he mused. "I don’t think we can have that. Just sign these papers here," he said, pulling some sheets of closely printed material out of a stack. "And you can go. I think you still have your 1-Y." 
    I signed and walked out of his office and down several hallways until I came to the dingy green lobby where the other young men were standing around with their clothes on. 
    "What did it taste like?" a couple of them asked. 
    "It tasted just like the army," I said. 
    A pot bellied middle-aged sergeant came into the lobby and said, "Y’all have to follow me down this hall to the back entrance. The bus is parked there now cause there’s protesters out in front." 
    As I followed in the group, my heart jumped with pride. We got in the bus and it pulled out from in back of the VA hospital and turned the corner and drove by the front. I could see Clu and Terry and a bunch of other Committee and Organization people all holding up their signs and chanting: END THE WAR IN VIETNAM! BRING THE TROOPS HOME!" 
    I waved and made a V-sign and they cheered and waved back. 
    "What’s all that shit about?" an intelligent looking young man in a brown cowboy style jacket asked. 
    Like many leftists would, I had a few leaflets on my person, folded up in my wind breaker’s pocket. I handed them to the young man in the brown cowboy jacket and his neighbors. "This may explain," I said. 
    "Why should I believe what a piss-drinker has to say?" the young man sneered. Some of the others laughed. 
    "Just read and see what the people who wrote the leaflets have to say," I answered. "Some of them are so smart, they don’t have to drink piss." 
    There was more laughter. Some bored young men actually read the leaflets. Some of the others were Indians. They were eager to go to Vietnam. Their warrior societies would give them a few moments of glory in their lives of poverty when they returned. They would lose an arm or a leg for an eagle feather. 
    When we got back, I went to the post office. My $10 weekly staff pay was there. I hurried to Brady’s Grocery and cashed it and bought a king size Coke to kill the taste of my physical. Then I went by Terry and Sally’s apartment where they were having the grand opening of their head store, the Prairie Fire, in their living room. 
    There were tables filling most of the room, covered with strangely formed pipes of clay and wood and roach clips with all kinds of ornaments. Crystals and strings of beads hung from the ceiling. On the walls around the room paintings were hanging, a lot of them by Naldo. His paintings were not in the vague dreamy style, so popular with hippie artists then. He used solid shapes and bright, contrasting colors like Diego Rivera. 
    Around the tables were crowded people from the Organization, the Committee and all the hippie sympathizers - all but Hope, that is. I’m sure she wasn’t there for Naldo’s sake and my sake both. I raised my hand in the V-sign and hollered, "I made it! I don’t go!" 
    Soon Clu and Terry and Sally and a bunch of other people were hanging from my neck. Naldo came up. I got my right hand loose from somebody’s shoulder and he shook it hard. "I got out today and Will got out yesterday1" I shouted to everybody. 
    "We know," a voice said from behind me. "Will is coming here to see us tonight." 
    As soon as the hands of my friends let my neck and shoulders go, I turned around and saw one of the Wallenberg twins - Martin I believe - a pot smuggler, but tall and solemn like the Baptist junior deacon he had once been. 
    It was only a short time later I heard the whoom! - of Jim Ed’s well tuned well-oiled motor out in the driveway. I went downstairs. Jim Ed and Lou, Will and Jan piled out of the car. 
    "Will’s here!" I called out. People ran downstairs into the chilly November evening. Will was wearing ragged jeans and a cowboy hat and his army field jacket. He waved his cowboy hat and shouted, "Black Hill Forever!" 
    How can I tell you about the next few minutes? It was like the reunion beyond death in Heaven, only it was here on earth. Everybody was jumping around hugging. Sally tried to get everybody singing the ‘Internationale’ only most of the people didn’t know the words so everybody started singing: 
            We all live in a yellow submarine! a yellow submarine! 
            A yellow submarine!" 
    Clu walked slowly up smiling wide and clasping Will’s hands. Then she hugged Jan. When Clu walked past me, I whispered, "I didn’t know how you were going to take seeing Will again." 
    "I didn’t know either," she whispered back. "When we came back from picketing your physical, I took a hit of acid I got from the Wallenberg brothers." 
    I could see both Wallenberg twins talking with Will and Jim Ed. I knew what was going on. Will had told me after the acid party that since Harry Holtzenheimer was going out of the pot business, the Wallenbergs were going to bring up loads from Mexico for Will and Jim Ed to sell to G.I.’s around Pronghorn. That way, Will and Jan would be able to move out of Jim Ed’s store room and rent a house of their own - and have some money left over to do anti-war stuff. 
    As soon as I could tell that the important part of the discussion was over, I walked over to them. Jim Ed was laughing. "We need guys like y’all," he told the Wallenbergs. "I got hair shorter than either one of y’all, but I just don’t look as straight. I could never make it traveling around with a load of pot. The last time I went to Mexico, I was just going over the border for a bottle of Tequila, but when I cam back through customs, they stripped me naked and flattened me against the wall and looked up my asshole for pot. But you all are naturals!" And he laughed and clapped Lyndell Wallenberg on the shoulder. "It’s what comes of clean living," Lyndell intoned in his deep voice. 
    For the next three weeks I hitched around the region to visit Organization chapters and our contact people on the small campuses where we didn’t have formal chapters. It was kind of cold. I wore all three of my shirts under my wind breaker and I was still chilly out on the road. Finally, the night before Thanksgiving I ended up in Pronghorn at the house Will and Jan were renting. They had just bought a turkey and I was invited to help them finish it off. The last time I had had turkey was at my mother’s a couple of years before, when I was still in college. 
    G.I.’s were crowding into the place that night to visit with Will and Jan. We all sat around in the living room and from time to time a G.I. would come in and go off into another room with Will to give him his share of money from selling the pot. 
    A Chicano G.I. brought his guitar. He sang a few songs and asked me if I knew the words to ‘La Llorona’ - "The Cry Baby." It was a song form far to the south of the village in Mexico that his parents came from, so he only learned a few liens from them, but he loved the beautiful minor tune. He handed me his guitar and I was able to get through most of it. 
        "If anyone asks you who’s singing, cry-baby 
        Tell them it was a deserter 
        Who came away from the battle, cry-baby 
        Looking for someone to love." 
    Right then, the telephone rang. Will picked up the receiver. I cut the song off. "Jan, it’s your mom," he called out. Jan came walking across the room slowly. Her face had gone from happiness to fear. She picked up the receiver nervously. 
    "Hello, mother?" she said in a high, faint voice, like she was a child again, caught stealing cookies. "Yes, I dropped out of school. Yes - yes - what?" I could hear her mother’s voice on the phone, but I couldn’t tell what she was saying. 
    "OK, mother," Jan said. "I’ll be there." She put the receiver down and turned to Will. 
    "The college wrote her that I’m not in school anymore," Jan said. "She drove here from Florida and she’s at a motel and she wants me there at once." 
    "Will," she said, "I think I know now how you felt about the army. I’ve done all this stuff and I’ve never really stood up to my own mother before. I’m scared to go to that motel to see her, like you were scared to go to your court-martial." 
    "I’ll be there," he said, putting his arm around her shoulder. 
    "Dale," she said. "Can you come too, please? You’re a friend and I need all the friends I can get." 
    So Will drove us to the motel, Jan walked up and knocked on the door of her mother’s room. 
    "Jan? Is that you!" her mother’s voice called. "Come in, it’s unlocked." 
    Jan opened the door and walked in. She motioned to Will and me to follow her. Her mother was sitting in a chair with a cigarette in her hand. She was wearing a night gown and a housecoat. Although she was overweight, she had traces of a great beauty. 
    "You didn’t even give me your number," she said in a husky voice of a heavy smoker. "The college got me the number from the police department. And who are these people?" she ended on a high pitched harsh note. 
    "Mother, this is Will," Jan said in as low and calm a voice as she could manage. "I live with him. We love each other. And this is my friend Dale. He’s visiting us." 
    All of a sudden Jan’s mother dropped her cigarette. Her breast began to heave and she started gasping and coughing and her hands flew up to cover her heart. 
    "You mean you’re sleeping with..." and she threw herself onto the floor coughing violently. "I don’t know if my heart can take this!" 
    "I haven’t done anything wrong!" Jan said, quietly, trembling all over. 
    "You’ve got to stay here with me Jan!" her mother said. "Come back with me to Florida or I may die of a heart attack!" 
    Jan squeezed Will’s fingers tightly for a second. Then she stepped forward slowly as in a dream and put her arms around her mother’s neck. 
    "Mother, mother!" she sobbed. "You’re not going to die!" 
    "You two guys!" Jan’s mother said to Will and me with the cigarette growl in her throat. "Just go away! I need to be alone with my daughter." 
    Jan gave Will a lost look like she was begging for something. Will shot back the same look and said, "I love you!" 
    Then Will and I turned around and walked out the door and closed it behind us. I remembered the last lines of the Mexican song that Jan’s mother’s telephone call had cut off: 
         "The light that lit my life, cry baby 
         Has left me in darkness."