the house on Healey Avenue

Once the lease was taken care of I was off to California.  It turned out that just because my ex-girlfriend was tired of her new boyfriend that didn't mean that she wanted her old boyfriend, me  Or as she put it succinctly when I arrived on her doorstep, "I don't know how to tell you this, but Bob is in the bedroom."

I was back in Champaign in four months, just as all my buddies including Steve were moving into a new hippie house on Healey Avenue and there was a room in it for me.  It was an excellent house, two stories and a basement with one room that was a tiny studio apartment and one big empty space that could be a bedroom if you didn't mind the gloom and mold.  There were two bathrooms, though if you wanted to take a bath in the downstairs one you had to sneak down into the basement and relight the pilot light every time..

Back to tending that same bar at minimum wage I was the second most responsible member of the house.  Steve, with his job at the University grounds crew was the money man of the house.  Music was important, it accompanied the dope which was blended with copious amounts of beer.  Every Friday several of us accompanied Steve to the record store where he took what was left of his salary after rent and loaning to us deadbeats and we pored over the new arrivals.  "Buy this one Steve."  "No buy this one."  I remember one by Wild Man Fischer which we induced Steve to buy because it was endorsed by Frank Zappa.  When we bought it one of the songs had the memorable line, "In 1962 I was committed to the insane asylum," but other than that one line there wasn't much else in it.

Steve had the only record player in the house, and all those albums, and always plenty of dope and we spent a lot of time in his room.  Another thing he had was he was a Vietnam veteran and as such he wrote a lot of letters for those of us who wanted to be CO's.  Personally I believe this is a just war, but I have known name for many years and he has a sterling character and I can assure you that his beliefs are long-held and sincere.   I still have the one he wrote for me.  Actually rereading it lately I'm pretty sure I wrote the whole thing, but he did sign it, and I did get my CO..

One of the guys had a part time job at the animal labs where the kibble came in huge plastic bags which were just the right size to tape into a window after the glass had been broken out by some stumbling drunken hippie, and that's the way the house was when I got my sendoff to do my CO in September.  The bathtubs and sinks were all full of ice and quarts of Drewery's Draft.  There were waterfights between outdoors and inside involving garden hoses and pails of water from the melting ice in the bathtub, and in the morning I was driving down to Herrin to start my CO.


I know Beagles joined the army at the first chance after graduating from Gage Park and I believe he meant it to be his career.  Was this his first hint that maybe it wasn't the stalwart institution that he expected it to be?

And where is Old Dog's remembrance of basic training? I am especially interested in how he felt about the goings on.