Bobby Mountain

so... here i am... it's 1970 and i'm just finished with school... working weird hours at the newspaper... basically some nights I get out at 11pm and others at 1:30 in the morning... My days off are Thursday and Friday... so, essentially, Wednesday night is my Friday night... Thursday is my Saturday... and Friday is my Sunday... and, get this... because the Sunday paper is published early on Saturday night, i only worked from 4PM-8PM on Saturdays... Sunday was a light news day so there wasn't much to do on Sundays either. So what's a guy to do in Manhattan after midnight? This is about Bobby Mountain but bear with me while I explain what happened here...

My best friend growing up (you can find him on the list) was Mel M. Now Mel went into the garment industry and wound up hanging out with a whole other circle of friends and associates. But, as was the case so often in those days, we did have one thing in common.... We both enjoyed a good smoke... And, while I was moving in a college/intellectual mode, Mel was rolling with the down and dirty. So one day, Mel and I met up and sat down to toke a bit, comparing who had the better what... Anyhow, in the course of the conversation, Mel is talking about the garment industry and how everybody is getting totally wasted. I'm talking about my roommate (who worked for Time Magazine) and his crowd getting just as wasted... Eventually, I tell Mel that I have only half a life because of my work hours... So he tells me to go meet this chick Brandy who is hanging out down in Soho at a Franklin Street loft scene. And I, still accumulating connections and customers, am more than happy to go see who Brandy is and what this scene is about...

And then I wind up calling her and getting invited downtown to the loft... When I tell a few 'connected' friends that I got an invite to a Franklin Street loft scene, they're like all 'wow!' and start telling me about rumors going around that half the best smoking dope in town is moving through a loft building on Franklin Street. So a few days go by and I head down to meet Brandy... She tells me to meet her after midnight the next day when I get out of work... and we can head down so I can meet her guy, who, it turns out, is a perversely brilliant guy that took a few dozen too many acid trips and is into believing that he's not only seen god but that god is speaking through his mouth. I end up in this loft building with three floors... and I'm only allowed onto the first floor since there is kind of a pecking order as to who makes it to the next level... something like one of today's video games... It turns out that they deal grass on the first floor, hash on two and the heavier stuff is apparently moving only on three.

Since this is about Bobby, I'll leave out the months of challenges and tests and happenings and skip on up to the third floor... and who lived there...

The first time I met Bobby, he was coming off a two week coke binge... which is what happened about every second week. and we got real close as the weeks and months went by. Bobby was an original thinker. He didn't have the major educational creds that were moving on the first floor, but he had the ability to see through everybody's bullshit. And he wound up at the top of the Franklin Street Mountain, moving pounds of coke and harder stuff... I remember one time we were cooking up some acid... Bobby went and got a little mold that was used for pills... and started fabricating his own pharmaceuticals... the ultimate generic drugs... lol

So he makes up the base... and sets out the molds... and actually manufactures the pills... and then, while they were still in the mold, he cooks up a batch of acid, and, with an eye dropper, begins dosing out the pills... one by one... and, in my best imitation of Tom Sawyer, I jump in and start squeezing out the drops... we're getting blitzed as the stuff is pretty much everywhere... it's in the air we're breathing... and I remember we're counting together... one... two... three... four... five... etc etc until we've let drops into each pill of each row... and how, occasionally, the phone would ring... and we'd look at each other... one... one... one... one... and then two... two... two... and then break up because we had just ODed some poor fucker on LSD... which was pretty fucking funny since we firmly believed there was no such thing with acid.

Bobby played a dynamite soprano saxophone that you could hear most any night... and the longer the coke binge went on, the crazier the jazz sound became... and in those days, in that place, every loft building had a coked up musician playing straight ahead until the drugs ran out...

He also had a really amazing lady... who became quite famous later on... Bobby ultimately got popped for dealing coke to a fed... did his time... came out and moved out to God's Country in the great northwest.... where he lives today...