Part 4: Arrival in our nation’s capital

dc1“Completely freaked out” accurately describes my state-of -mind in three words as I arrived to no fanfare whatsoever in The Capital of the Free World.

Americanos had been told over and over by our Commander in Chief and military advisers like General William C. Westmoreland that “the free world” definitely didn’t include “commie” countries like North Vietnam. They apparently operated on a different plane altogether, under the hammer and sickle of a great menace to the freedoms we took for granted, “The Russkies.”

Commie menace or not, a resilient army of Vietcong was somehow holding off ever-escalating numbers of American invaders troops, war machines, and chemical weapons. Any way you looked at it, the “third world” jungle nation’s resistance against the Red, White and Blue was impressive.

I’d only been in DC for five minutes: the Vietnam War vibe was already palpable.

My spirits deteriorated further after we arrived at indoctrination. I had two pressing questions: “Where’s my dorm room?” and “How many of the classes offered that enticed me to go to American University was I actually registered for?”

It turned out that my dorm room was nowhere. They’d run out of dorm rooms. The supply was probably exhausted while I was out clamming to buy nickel bags.

It hadn’t occurred to me that dorm rooms are generally allotted on a first-come-first-served basis.

My jaw dropped at the news. My brains about blew out my ears when the matronly lady manning the check-in table added, “But there’s a fraternity house that has a room you can rent.”

I attempted to process this new information. I failed. It simply did not compute.

“No! Not that!” Alarm shot through my nervous system.

Any card-carrying hippy worth his salt would bunk down in a meat locker before a frat house.

The way this day was going, I already knew how many of the classes that had lured me to AU I was actually enrolled in. The answer was, of course, “none of them.”

After dropping off what was left of me at the frat house, Mom took off to visit cousin Roberta, the perfect one, an overachieving interior designer who lived in a brick manse she was perpetually remodeling in Chevy Chase, MD.

Left to my own devices, I was about to curl into a fetal position and play dead when it occurred to me that the first housemates I’d met weren’t all that bad. There really wasn’t a dick in the bunch. In fact they were kind of OK. I’d been anticipating complete ostracization, not frat boys being all buddy-buddy. Weird.

Something else didn’t jibe with the straight-laced fraternity stereotype implanted in my mind.

Carlos across the hall was a Venezuelan ambassador’s son, which meant he had two thing no one else did. The first was diplomatic immunity. The second — the most dazzling stash of exotic buds I’d ever eyeballed — was a direct consequence of the first.

Carlos’ buds weren’t anything at all like the typical smallish clumps of reddish brown matter that were around at the time, specifically Colombian or Jamaican weed that had been pressed into a couple of “keys” [kilos] (as in “Arlo Guthrie’s poetic “Coming in from Los Angeles … bringing in a couple of keys”) or “bricks.” His buds were thumb-sized and predominantly green, with tiny red/orange hairs protruding here and there, poking out from some sort of resinous, crystalline substance resembling tree sap.

The blonde Venezuelan frat boy broke open a bud to roll when a funny thing didn’t happen: seeds weren’t falling out all over his rolling tray. In fact, there were none of them at all. I was astonished, like I would have been if I sliced open a cantaloupe and didn’t find any seeds to scrape out.

Carlos’ told me that his stash was sensimilla. I presumed that was a “Venezuelan” term used by only a few aficionados at the time. Pot without seeds was pretty much unheard of. Ferreting out the seeds, perhaps performing the ceremony on a special rolling tray which you shook lightly causing the seeds to roll to the bottom of the tray, was a fundamental step in the joint-rolling rituals of the day.

The pride of Venezuelan came provided some desperately-needed mood alteration.

Thus sedated, I took inventory from my single bed in a tiny room where a mute, six-foot-six-inch roommate wriggled around, valiantly attempting to fit his elongated extremities onto the single bed opposite mine. Outside the window, up a slight hill from the frat house, stood Hughes Hall, a huge seven-story girl’s dormitory. It’s surprising how many coeds neglect to draw their curtains before performing their nightly grooming regimens.

hughes hall au

Hughes Hall, the henhouse across the way.

Still just 17, I found myself in the nerve center of our nation, racked out on an urban campus 10 times bigger than Southampton College, and, oh by the way, living not in a summer house on Peconic Bay but in a frat house of all places. Barring a miracle, I wouldn’t be getting into any of the classes that drew me to AU.

Thank God for the sinsemilla.

A frat house with benefits

Now that I’d had an entire year away from home to hone my previously nonexistent “socials kills,” I was poised to exploit any unanticipated frat house benefits which came my way. It turned out that the brothers loved throwing parties, lots of parties, lots of parties with lots of horny chicks and surprising amounts of “primo” weed to get them in the mood.

The surprisingly friendly frat house president told me I was invited to all of their public parties, although my presence at the secret ceremonies where they put their pledges through a Marquis de Sade-ish series of imaginative humiliations would not be required.

Fair enough. That was an arrangement that I could live with. Frat house life could have been so much worse.

Although I’d pine away for Carole most of the semester, I wasn’t about to turn down any strange that fell into my lap courtesy of being a token stoner an honorary brother.

One of my first days in DC I ventured into trendy Georgetown. After checking out the sights and sounds for a few hours in ninety-degree heat and eighty-percent humidity, I spotted an ice cream parlor. Standing in line at the oasis I found myself directly behind two fellow students whose names were Allison and Meredith. They were roommates in — surprise — Hughes Hall, the girls dorm that I stared at when I gazed out my window. No sooner had I set foot in there than the witty verbal repartee started flowing with Meredith who had the better figure. Blame it on the French Vanilla, but within thirty seconds we were sprinkling bon mots and sparkling double entendrès in with our creamy confections.

Meredith had her positive attributes and I undoubtedly would have pursued her if she wasn’t guilty of a horrific crime: not being Carole.

That thought was running through my mind as the steamy conversation ran its course and we went our separate ways.

A few hours later the brothers kicked off the semester with, you guess it, a kegger. While I can’t quite elevate this gathering to the status of Bud’s getting-to-know-you clambake at the campus windmill, I suppose it had a sudsy je ne sais quoi of its own. I was watching the revelers arrive out my window when who do I see hanging off the arm of some goofus than Meredith, the flirty cone-licker who still had her better figure.

Aha!

Casually, I dropped in on the “beer blast.” A quick look around told me I was the only longhair present. By some odd chance, I just happened to bump into Meredith and her beau. Replying to her predictable question, “What are you doing here?” I mentioned the funny coincidence that I just happened to live upstairs. Then I disappeared. Keggers never did anything for me and it never hurts to be mysterious.

Not long afterwards, there was a knock on my door. The night was about to become more interesting.

Displaying good etiquette, as Washingtonian socialite Emily Post would have urged, I fired up a joint of Venezuelan sensimilla my good buddy Carlos had “laid on me” and passed it to my new pal, Meredith. That’s what good hosts are supposed to do, isn’t it?

Continuing in the host-with-the-most vein I switched on a “hifi” clock radio, just in time to catch The Beatles’ debut single from Abbey Road:

Here come old flattop he come grooving up slowly
He got juju eyeball he one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please

Come together right now over me

Presently we were rolling in the hay, my lengthy stablemate snoring away in time with the beat.

The next day, I wasn’t dwelling on our little interlude. Carole was the moon, the sun, and the stars. Anyone else was just another free love female in the waning months of the swinging sixties.

Next: reconnoitering the area.