MOO U, EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN 1962 PARADISE LOST My parents sent me to Michigan State University to get me away from all the bad influences in New York City. However, what they failed to realize, was that transplanted in a less sophisticated environment, I became like a major bad influence on the other students around me. When I entered Emmons Hall dormitory the first thing I did was play the bongo drums. This brought every kid on our floor to my room. Like my first roommates were Jewish. The authorities at MSU lumped all the New York and Detroit Jews together. I think my first roommate was Lyle Victor. I heard from Lyle Victor a few weeks ago. He is now a doctor who specializes in curing people who snore. I am trying to get him to help me with my pug, Hector, who snores like a motherfucker. Hector is no pug, he's a homo thug. He seems to prefer young male dogs. I made him watch the reenactment of the Michael Jackson trial but it had no effect. I would hate to have him as a cellmate. When it comes to bitches his motto is "Jump 'em, Hump 'em and Dump 'em." Lyle had a brother, Rick Victor, who could fart voluntarily and was my roommate at the smoke shop. He was good people and would split when my lover Debra Dixon would show up. Hey, you only get one chance in life for love man, and if you blow it, than you are fucked for the rest of your life. I realized this in prison and a lot of the prisoners agreed, for whatever that is worth. Rick was amazing. He had control over his involuntary muscular system. You could say like, "Rick would you please fart" and Rick would blow one anytime, anyplace. He is now a 3rd degree black belt in Shorin Ryu Karate-do and can not only fart anytime he wants but he can fart anywhere he wants. Don't fuckin tell me that this degree of mental control did not play a part in his becoming a marital artist! Fuckin Rick is kewl. Click to see Rick!
My room at Emmons Hall looked out on a polluted stream but I soon learned that beyond that barrier was beer store that accepted my altered New York State learners permit as valid ID. I removed my bongo drums from my luggage and began to bang out some primal beats and soon every kid on the floor came to see what was happening. Some kids there had never seen a Jew before and thought they had horns. They had never seen a beatnik either so they quickly forgot the Jew part and they all dug the beatnik shit, they were friendly, receptive and some of the best people I would ever meet. The next thing I did was remove the frame from the bed and put my mattress on the floor. Like I didn’t want no dorm room, I wanted a beatnik pad on 11th Street and Avenue B. The Resident Advisor freaked. I explained that I often fell out of bed and the college would be libel for any injury I sustained if I had to sleep in a normal bed. They let it slide. Hey, guys, did anyone here every take Romilar Cough Syrup to get high? Its dextromorphanine hydobromide, get it , MORPHANAN, and if you take it it makes you say GEEEEeeeeee!!! I hit the local pharmacy and bought a bunch of bottles turned everyone on to this drugstore high. Everybody was fucking wasted. But I took too much of the shit and began to suffer from Brominism, a disease that old English ladies' would get from taking too many bromides as sedatives. I checked the Lancet and found that the cure for Brominism (I had a rash on my chest) was to drink salt water, which I did, in huge quantities. Sure enough the rash went away but somehow got replaced with ringworm, or the ringworm resurfaced. Every pharmacy in town sold out of Romilar. Kids were making runs to Detroit to get the stuff. Then the East Lansing City Council passed a law banning the sale of Romilar in East Lansing, Michigan. I was prouder than shit to have a law named after me, the WEBERMAN ROMILAR LAW, I figured they called it. If you kids who read this stuff are in college right now, let me tell you that you are experiencing the best days of your life, and it will be all downhill afterwards. They say that youth is wasted on the young, I say the young are wasted on youth but dont know it. I got a job in the cafeteria working the garborator, a fitting job for someone who would later invent the science of garbology. This job entailed scrapping the uneaten food from the kids plates into a garbage shredding device. Everything was going fine and I was collecting my paychecks until I grew a beard. The Health Department Rules forbid people with beards to work in the cafeteria. I pleaded with my boss: "I work the garborator. I dont come into contact with anything but garbage. What's the difference if some facial hair gets in the garbage." But rules were rules and it was either shave the beard or get fired. I quit. I had a very high grade point average at MSU because there was very little competition. When I got the highest grade in the school on an American Thought and Language test the authorities called me into a room and examined my paper in relation to those sitting near me to see if I had copied from them. They wanted to know why I erased so many answers. They thought I had cheated because they figured beatniks had to be dumb. You could not win with these fucks.
They say the Midwestern accent is the real American one because Amerika's heartland had not been affected by immigration. Well the Midwest turned out to be part of Amerika's heartless land when it came to sex. I became friendly with a lot of divergent people, some of whom were athlete's - a major pursuit at Moo U, where the only distinguished part of the school was the School of Veterinary Medicine. One morning a member of the basketball team told me that his teammates had gang-banged a coed whose name escapes and while they were in the process all she talked about was me. I was flattered. Then there was my buddy Bill Janeck, from Hamtramok, Michigan. Bill and his buddy Jim were tough Catholic School boys from a very ethnic part of Michigan who took a liking to me, the first Jew they had ever met. Janeck's father was an ex-con and his mother had given birth to a half brother who was black. You get the idea. Yet Janeck possessed a certain sensitivity that transcended his past. Late at night he would come into my dorm room and tell me stories of how the kids would tie the nun's rosary's to a desk so when the nun tried to walk she tripped. Janeck told me about the time he set up a girl for a gang rape. He took the girl out on a date and suggested they take a walk through a park. Janek's friends were waiting for him there and jumped the girl and held her down and removed her clothes. The way Janek described it his friends were more anxious to do violence to her cunt than to fuck her. He said: "There were more hands in her pussy than pricks". This only reinforced my belief that I had been born into a sick culture and that religion, especially the Catholic Church, was behind a lot of this shit. See I didn't know too much about Fundamentalist Protestants at the time, because there was a shortage of Protestants in Brooklyn at the time. When my buddies at Erasmus Hall High School introduced me to Richard Johnson, a part time soda jerk, for the first time, they told me he was a rarity in this part of America - a genuine washed out Protestant. I figured that the Church had twisted these kids heads around when it came to sex. What kind of bullshit is it that the holiest dudes dont fuck. Bertrand Russell once said that celibacy was the weirdest of all perversions. I got to admit I would later kind of dig Pope John Paul because he fought the Nazis, was almost killed by an Islamist asswipe and was kewl with the Jews. On the other hand telling his co-religionists in Africa not use condoms when Africa is experiencing the worst AIDS epidemic in its history is like a form of mass murder. But the new pope, Pope Benedict Arnold, oh man, this dude was a like a Nazi, and like a child molester, once a Nazi, always a Nazi. It is said he was forced into the Nazi Youth Movement. No was forced to kill Jews, Goldhaggen revealed that in his books on Nazism. You just could not speak out against this shit. Then the part about him not firing a gun during the war because he suffered from an infected finger? Lying motherfucker. How did he get it infected? From sticking it up his ass? Oh yeah, he deserted in April 1945. Guess what sports fans, the war was over by then and there was no German Army to desert from. Then he was locked up by the Allies...they knew what they were doing. But before you think I just hate Catholicism, I don't, I was locked up with Father Berrigan and respected him, and I gave up the Jewish religion after having a dream that I orally raped the Rabbi's daughter in front of the entire congregation. I long for that old time Judaism where Temple Virgins got diddled. Give me that old time Judaism, Give me that old time Judaism, if it was good enough for the pagans, then it is good enough for me. When I told my buddy and fellow prisoner Ari Unger about this dream he asked, "Was she pretty?" When I told him that she was he said it was okay.
There were a lot of good people back there at Michigan State and I will never forgive the pigs for arresting me and sending me back to New York City. Before I got popped I had set up a date with two Amazon twin sisters to trip on morning glory seeds with both of them, to put the make on both of them and be in some pornographic psychedelic paradise of images unknown to Brooklyn asswipes. Color and smells and flesh already unreal made more so by the seeds, which did not have strychnine back then. Then they came to my pad, caught me when I was drunk, and busted my ass.
BEAL GARDENS WHERE I HARVESTED POT
There is no doubt that I was on the road to getting popped long before it happened. My buddy Neil Hickey mailed pot to Emmons Hall. I turned a bunch of kids on the someone gave me the word that my room was going to be searched. I flushed the stuff down the toilet. When one of my roommates switched rooms they tried to put in a police administration major as my roommate. A fucking spy. I transferred out. Having gotten paranoid about having the stuff mailed to me I found another source for pot - BEAL GARDEN. In the pharmaceutical herbs department there grew cannabis sativa. I waited until it flowered then picked it in broad daylight, dried it and turned the entire gymnastic team on to reefer. Michigan State University had a policy of in loco parentis, that it they took over where your parents left off. You had to live in supervised and approved housing which meant no alcohol and no chicks. I wanted my freedom so I rented a room above a clothing store at 211 1/2 East Grand River Avenue, the main drag of East Lansing Michigan. Before Dwight Martin owned the store, it was an establishment known as the "Smoke Shop" so the rooms above the clothing store were known as "The Smoke Shop." Dwight used one of the room for fuck fests - even though he was married but he assured, me "Don't worry about my wife, she's not underfucked." "Underfucked" that word has stuck in my brain for forty years. When I rented the room, which had only a skylight for a window, blacks including Earl Latimer and other football players rented the eight of the
10 rooms. In fact I think this is how I discovered the smoke shop. Earl could get booze and one night I had to track him down to cop so I was sent to the Smoke Shop. Earl later became an all-American. There was no animosity between blacks and Jews at the time, in fact I remember sitting around with a bunch of blacks when the Civil Rights Bill was defeated. One of them was Gerry Bray, whose father was a public school principal in Detroit. I think Bray's sister had jumped out a window after snorting cocaine.
HAROLD HENKEL'S WINDOW
The last room in the Smoke Shop was rented by one Harold Henkel, a white haired hunched over old man who looked a lot like Howard Hunt. Henkel worked in Kewpee's cafeteria as a busboy and audited various classes at MSU. There were all kinds of rumors circulating about Henkel, but none of them proved true. I dont think Henkel liked blacks all that much, although he was forced, through economic circumstance to live there. We all shared a common bathroom. Although the blacks used depilatory to shave, they took the stuff off their faces with a straight edged razor. There was talk that one day that razor might be used to castrate Harold Henkel. At one point Larry Mervis and myself broke into his room and went through his possessions. I guess I was on a break-in kick at the time and I broke into an Indian dudes pad when I heard he had hash. The dude later put out a political newsletter. I was crazy back then. All that we found in Henkel's trunk were pictures of him skating in Detroit. Emptiness, nothing but emptiness. The room next to Henkel was rented by Bill Armstead. This tall handsome looking dude's father was head of the Veterinary College at MSU, a most prestigious position. How did Armstead end up at the Smoke Shop among misfits, shoplifters and fences (me)? Armstead was a Marine and was taught to kill. One night he was in a bar and some dude came on to his old lady and he killed the man with his bare hands. Armstead became revolted by what America had turned him into. More emptiness, more sorrow. So I rented a room and got some paint and painted the words "SEX DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL" on the door. The first chick I got up there was a girl who had been expelled from Michigan State for not stating that she was an epileptic on her admission application. I had fantasy that she would start undulating like a motherfucker while we were making it but nothing happened.
SUICIDE ATTEMPT In 1962, when Dylan thought he wasn't going to make it in NYC the crazy motherfucker decided to at least go in traditional NYC Style, off the motherfucking Brooklyn Bridge. Hey, I can dig it, suicide attempts were popular around this time. I tried to hang myself after I broke up with my first fuck at Michigan State University. I took a rope, went next to the Beal Tower in the middle of the campus, slung the rope across a tree, put a noose around my neck and tried to hoist myself up. I didn't even know how to fucking hang myself. DO YOU ATTEND MICHIGAN STATE 2005? DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO LARRY MERVIS? CLICK HERE TO EMAIL ME.