Back from Toronto errr… Scarborough: Summer of ’87 I went from Orem (and surrounding areas), Utah to spend a couple of months working in Toronto, well Scarborough and surrounding areas, working as a window washer (had no idea what I was doing) including doing sales door-to-door, doing telephone sales for furnace cleaning (in the middle of a blistering hot summer), and cleaning up industrial baking trays at a German bakery
Toronto was its own adventure (so many bands, so much working, so many letters, somehow messed up the savings but hey… another time), but eventually, coming back to family in Utah (after an ill-fated flight meant meandering to Newark, Atlanta and elsewhere before SLC) meant I missed the Grateful Dead shows at Park West, and my chance to get cosy with a girl I had a crush on who is on her way to France), to find they’d moved house again. {Our split-up family was doing this vacant home staging deal, where they’d set up big houses for sale to look “lived-in,” meaning we’d have to pack up and move out every time one sold.}
BOREM high school: So back in Orem, I rolled into high school which to me felt like an Archie comic book with more focus on hep rallies, assemblies, and clicks than actually doing anything substantial, but just a couple of weeks in, I realized I didn’t fit there anymore. I’d started 10th grade in a daze, but by 11th, I was deep into activist projects – to make MLK Day a holiday, raising AIDS awareness, protesting some of BYU’s student teachers running classes, and even running a rogue candidate for student president using guerilla campaign tactics from screening Pink Floyd’s “the wall” to putting sandwich bags of treats on all the cars’ windshields… The candidate was disqualified.
Gotta have a ride: I’d skip the optional LDS seminary class to nap in my VW bus (without a driver’s license, though I still drove it everywhere, indeed: drove to the drivers license bureau, failed the task, drove away anyway), and my friends and I would throw parking lot campouts at the high school where we would set up a projector and watch the good the bad and the ugly dressed up as old time cowboys, making popcorn on the stove of this bus and would drive around in throwing water balloons at unsuspecting cars next to us through a hatch in the top of the dome and look around we had no idea what was going on – oh and roman candles out the back, gosh such foolishness!
Somehow, my mom had even scored a well-used Cadillac limo which we ran as a “semi legit” service for b-list celebs (actual guests included Mr. T, Mickey Mouse, Johnny Whitaker and various Osmonds) and rollers coming from airport and occasionally cke’d up wingnut wanting to go to Wendover or Vegas,… so when my an caught fire coming back from Canada and was out of commission and Bob’s Pontiac Phoenix we switched over, showing up to school in style, picking up friends along the way for fast-food runs. We were a spectacle, like 16-year-old outlaws in a limo, cruising the suburbs with total abandon.
Also, despite getting fantastic grades on tests at some of the classes (where I really learned that I was solid at English, history, geography, social studies, civics etc., but was not so adapted at math, chemistry, biology) oh and i had a class about “death” really – I would get failing grades because of being docked for being late/tardy, or absent as I took a lot of time off let’s say and rolled at my own pace getting in in the morning.
Swim like a sperm: I had tried out and “made” (basically by virtue of being able to swim a couple of laps) the swim team which filled my PE credit rather than having to do the usual Jock o’ rama sports class with a bunch of aggressive dudes playing sports I was not confident in anyway (football, baseball, basketball)) without depth perception and being 115 pounds or so, hard pass on that – instead, rolled to various regional schools, hanging out with the other dudes in our speedos, watching the girls’ teams compete. {Our school had a strong girls team and our boys team was well, we simply existed, we had a good time, made up our own cheers, secret handshakes, special high-fives and brought some good joviality and camaraderie to the shockingly serious events spread around several counties. The bus trips back-and-forth were kind of fun and it gave something to do.}
Anyhow this is a long way of saying: I came back from Canada and after two weeks realized I had no interest in being in high school. Brother Bob had graduated and some friendships and relationships just didn’t feel the same anymore. I was not enjoying any of the classes as I didn’t feel challenged or like I had my path. And that point you were either a “total slacker” or a keener taking AP classes” or a jock/preppy and I was my own vibe.
Adult High School at the Slacker College: So, enter Utah Technical College which has just expanded from a trades-only program on a dusty oily campus in Provo to a purpose-built architecturally-rather-interesting-concrete-complex just off the freeway in Orem and was filled with an interesting mix of: former workers at the pre-World War II Geneva steel plant which was laying off workers in droves and some program was sending these tough old gents back to be “retrained” into something else (yes, it was as dastardly as it sounds); another cohort which really wanted to go to BYU and were Mormon kids from elsewhere who didn’t get into BYU but parents wanted to say “oh Gary is off to school in Provo” as he was… basically going to the school to boost up GPA to make another run getting into the “school that people always try to say was the Harvard of the West or the Stanford of the mountains but no one else outside of their ever said”; then a mix of people like my dear Mom who were going back as older single ladies to get trained up to do something more than being a secretary or a waitress which was the pigeonhole for their cohort in Utah where misogyny was rampant; and then my cohort: high school dropout kids who weren’t about to hit the skids but needed a place to re-group and go through an Adult High School program which was away for the local school districts to keep their graduation rates looking artificially high by sending you to this program if you took an English credit and a math credit (or my case, challenged and got through), they would give you a certificate.
So, I started with a rigorous series of classes including: ceramics, photography, mountaineering (two of each of those), plus a class something about “range management” because the professor was a odd character well, most of the classes were taught by very interesting characters who themselves is sort of slipped through the cracks of academia… Later I also took an honors Geology class (where the Grand Canyon story comes in), plus Geography (this coulda ben my career!), and had signed up for an Ethics class which I don’t remember signing up for and somehow caused a conundrum with an accidental failing grade.
Sidenote: in amongst all of this, was the terrible drive back-and-forth from BC to Utah this time in a Chevy Blazer with four-wheel-drive which resulted in a crash on Jerome Idaho (briefly detailed elsewhere) and followed up with a prescription of painkillers which would tranquilize a rhinoceros and so was my first experience being really “checked out” and had a brutally hard time getting up in the morning, falling asleep at night, thinking during the day etc. etc.
So this preamble is about to tell you the things that happened Utah Technical College which, after my first year changed its name to Utah Valley Community College (later it became Utah Valley State College, and now Utah Valley University and, as I understand it, the largest secondary educational institution in Utah but have not fact-checked)
First, Larry Sensei: I met Larry Harper. First was in a “Introduction to Literature” class and later he invited me to be in his honors creative writing program which was starting the next semester (as I had written a decent paper about the Grapes of Wrath scene about the iguana clamping onto your ankle and just won’t let go). The first time was during that “lost semester” after the car wreck and ‘scrip sitch and I did not perform well at all, I have very little recollection but I was determined to make amends and I demanded (asked) that I be allowed back in, I was denied, but signed up anyway and just kept showing up and I did my best work – truly. I was an active participant but most importantly Larry has become my sensei and my friend for life
It’s a bit fuzzy but anyway, dear Larry took “class photos” and, while he was recently moving house to a custom-built earth-house in southern Utah, he found a few and sent pictures of the pictures of me and my buddy Brandon and a few other characters in these mugshots.
I produced loads of poetry, short stories, and all kinds of other experimental writing to his class requirements which also included doing a “final project” which resulted in my book which accidentally foretold my future and gave me my nickname – “Uncle Weed’s Red Rock Adventure” – unsurprisingly available in this archive complete with the illustrations by Brandon Kiggins, my conspirator on so many projects… He was doing more film related classes and I helped out by “assistant producing” and acting in his films which i hope surface one of these years. Anyhow, with Uncle Weed book, i said wanted to “write a book to corrupt the youth” and the project continued my love of mixed media, chapbooks and folios, which had started back in the 70s and continues now.
[Larry Harper appears frequently in this archive with his musical recordings, a podcast about his book “70”, copy of his book “70”, his auto-harp performance at Creepers and Chums and more more more]
[note to self: more to say about all of this sometime as during this time I also was introduced to Edward Abbey and got to meet the great man but I’ve said enough for now]
Side Gigs: During this time I was also getting college credit through some scheme by doing crappy jobs where I worked at a terrible telephone marketing and political research center which gave me a fear of telephone phones which lasted for 30 years as well as a disturbing insight into the American public mindset which surfaces again about every four years but I met another lifelong friend, we’ve been friends on and off as our orbits intersect but I thought she was the coolest from the get-go and still do as she had a cat named Elvis (Costello, not Presley) and a VW bug, red hair and great handwriting <3
Also, for some sort of student funding, did a campus job and managed one of the coolest jobs in my entire life which was working at the library – after some training, hit the shift from something like 6 PM to 11 PM where I was the only one there. There’s so much I loved about this job and still have the “how may I help you” name pin… Although I was gone from the job, the ladies – who really encouraged and supported kid in his cut off jeans shorts and tie-dye T-shirt – kindly asked me to return all the Ed Abbey books I had pilfered from the library with “nobody had checked these out so seemed sad” not being an adequate excuse.
PS Larry had assigned Abbey’s Desert Solitaire for reading and become one of the important books of my life.
Second, The Long Hair Club: What came as a ridic idea to get access to school resources, chance to meet girls (yup), get a desk in the student union office room, subvert the systems/hierarchies, and just to have some fun, quickly became the Long Hair Club (long hair not required but was instead a jab at the LDS Institute club which required short hair) and with that began a roller coaster of hi-jinks, manufacture of rituals, organizational missteps, and lessons in media subterfuge.
[Also not “Long Hair’s” nor “Long Hairs” – we tried to be precise for no reason really]
Co-conspirators in the Presidancy (sic) were new buddy Dane, a dropout from nearby Mountain View high school who looked like he could be cousin, a week older then me, and was instant great friends – we met when he was performing with the band “Trees” at an all-ages, burger joint Broderick’s downtown Provo, with Brandon, his cousin Kreg, and some other pals, and I was chatting up (one of his) girlfriends N.) as we both loved drumming, goofing off adventures, and never taking “no sorry you can’t do that” as an answer and I’m still friends), and brother Bob came on board – both Bob and Dane were a wee bit handsome and me, vaguely charming :) and with assistance from a few others we learned the parameters for becoming an official school club.
So we got forms to fill out, found a sponsor (again, Larry Harper who you met above), got a petition with a certain amount of names signed on, us three student members to service executive or whatever, and we were “chartered” with some raised eyebrows of consternation from the school administration who were really trying to make this into a “real serious college and didn’t want any trouble” – oh heaven…
Aside: at the time, there was basically the LDS Institute club in which everyone in the church classes was automatically a member of them by far the largest – and same with the high schools in Utah, the LDS church has a church building school on the campus but *technically separate* but embedded like some kind of imperial enclave, and then there were a few clubs related to different trades organizations as the technical part of the school still existed in Provo (which reminds me to tell you the story of Jay Deuel running/winning school president so he could get access to school facilities (cause he lived in his truck) which was a large part of the inspiration for this project)
We quickly set up a table in the hallway, and with help from Brandon and the machine at the library (which, now that the statute of limitations is over, I can say I abused liberally making copies), we made an oversize ledger application form that looks like a declaration or oath of some kind with a tear off receipt at the bottom which declared the initiates paid three dollars to join. They’d sign their name into the book, sign the certificate and then, importantly, do a very important ritual in which we would whack them on each shoulder with a handful of horse mane we bought from leather shop and offer with some incantation and then give them their “long hair beads” which were made from Tandy leather shop leather lacing with red, yellow, and green beads (inspired by reggae culture which was surprisingly prevalent in Utah and contrary to the schools official colors) with a couple knots tied in it and stow this holy necklace around them.
Within a week we had 300 members, our registration book had annotations by all the cute girls (yeah I know this makes sound like creeps but anyway…) And it started a rolling few months of fun at the college as we attempted to wrangle activities without doing any kind of real work and just inviting people along with stuff we were doing anyway but also, hustling our part-time jobs, living at home, and being well, 17–19 year-old fellas bouncing against conservative walls of local society.
Right away, we rallied up friends at the newspaper, (Brother Bob had a sales job of some kind for the paper though I’m not sure if he actually ever did anything because I remember doing his sales calls for him), and the newspaper was eager for any kind of content so we obliged starting our own legend, publishing articles with various synonyms, spoon, feeding our own quotes and generally goofing around by attaching ourselves to 70s culture which a lot of the old timers would come from the Geneva steel plant as well as some former military dudes really got behind.
At our booth we’d play music by America and Brewer and Shipley and other “laid-back” acts and rather than “stoner hippies” we were about corduroy and elbow patches, metal framed backpacks and Pendleton shirts. “Live free and easy” keeping it together keeping it tidy and keeping it weird – as usual, a vernacular developed around us
Importantly, many, if not, most of the members of the club were cool outdoorsy-minded and music-loving ladies at the college who were looking for something fun to do and get a stepper two away from the wannabe frat boys (which also had the benefit of driving these wannabe boys into rages of confusion and jealousy, seriously), and one in particular, MW, assigned herself to be the secretary and organized our fumbling books and try to keep us on course (spectacular failure) but, again this makes me sound like a jerk: if there are cool girls in your club, then all the boys want to join the club too.
In particular, we started a “feud” with the LDS Institute in which we were constantly reaching out to them with overtures to hold joint activities which were always re-buffed and mocked, and then bubbled into the school newspaper as we’d quickly learned the power of letters to the editor and started a media campaign back-and-forth writing letters with the institute and articles in the newspaper and so on
After a batch of easy good time activities, i.e.: we took some of the funds to have a party up in Park City at someone’s timeshare which we invited a select subset of the club, and outing to Hot Springs, climbing Mt Timpanogos, and then an “semi-official” trip to Banff, and a few trips to Moab (where the nekkid tubing and bike rides came in and Fat Tire Festival but that’s yet another sidebar).
Oh & to the free Sunday night vegetarian feast and chanting at the Hare Krishna Temple in nearby Spanish Fork (at the time was a newly built log cabin of sorts with an a.m. radio station, llamas and maybe six devotes living there including Charu Das who turned out to be a very renowned Harikrishna / I seem to recall something else with the Hare Krishna punk rock band Shelter around this time but I might be conflating stories)
Yup, no problem spreading the legend of the club but also super hard to organize and disseminate information especially as some people realllly wanted to be our friends all the time waaaay too much, and oh yeah, all by telephones at parents houses and handbills.
Ball-busted: Anyhow, we tried to build up to the ‘Long Hair Ball” to be a big party dance at the college multi-purpose room – but things went terribly wrong, I won’t get into all the details and assigning blame here but we attracted some unsavory elements and we monkey wrenches got a little bit wrenched.
{OK a couple jerk-offs (E & J) sat outside, out of line of sight, offering to sell pills outta paper lunch bags to some of the folks coming, and telling other excited folks to “efF off” and “you’re not allowed in here”, and blah blah blah, they thought it was hilarious, but I was just kind of felt lousy move, yup we got punked when we thought we were punks – we had actually put some work into the event and it could’ve been fantastic but instead it was like 20 of us “where is everyone” till we figured it out – I’m still a little bit bitter :|
But then Dane kind of went sideways and disappeared for weeks/months at a time and Bob put in his mission papers, and then every girl I was interested in and started “sorta dating” then put in their LDS mission papers, seriously it happened several times in a row – as such, fun over had to gracefully wind the club down, so we (me & a few other sidekicks at this point) went back to our letters to the editor strategy of sending letters under pseudonyms to ask “what happened to those Long Hairs?” and “we thought for three dollars we would have fun every day for the rest of our lives” and so on.
As always there’s so much more to say about all of these topics – not to mention more details about the trip to Banff, the parties in Park City, and another trip to Baja Mexico which sort of accidentally grew out of the Long Hairs Club a little bit.
Of course other people’s memories will differ from mine and maybe there’s some more artifacts, incidents and anecdotes floating out there. More likely no one else remembers much of this sideshow. Please do add your remarks as desired.
{either way, please do zoom in and read the newspaper articles above, it’s all just so remarkable}
Other bits I meant to tell you: characters like “Big Jer”, and James in the creepy van, and the ole goldminer who wanted me to go to Chicken, Alaska to pan gold with him, and all the memories of dear Mom flourishing there (Yeah me Bob and Mom all went to school same place, time and it was awsum) and my Pals Gary and Jared (trips to Banff and Baja) and Gary’s incredible swoony aunt, and then doing the crappy temp work jobs around that time, and I haven’t even got into the outdoor recreation trips riding mountain bikes on white rim trail/dead horse point/slickrock, or climbing Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National monument (at the time), and did I mention the Grand Canyon? I think I did – so many outings!
Moving up the road: I soon left the college and moved up to Salt Lake City to go to University of Utah and the legend just sort of faded. Lived in a rented basement place with Brandon and others for a while but then got the money together to fix my VW bus which meant I couldn’t pay rent so moved into the bus, and began another series of ridiculous side jobs including working for Deuel rip (mentioned above) and now living in his university “office” keeping his sleeping kit in a file cabinet drawer) teaching word processor classes and working for Dane’s dad, the legendary land surveyor Bing rip, I was not good at this job either, plus delivering flyers and program guides for the local underground arts cinema house to bar, bookstore, café, record shop in the Salt Lake Valley and, I was fantastic at this job with my fake ID and all.
I still wore my long hair beads and once in a while I would run into someone at concerts at Park West or Triad center or maybe even Broderick’s back down in Provo would recognize or were still sporting theirs as a bracelet or something and we had some laughs.
Anyhow, in my archive are many artifacts remaining from these times including certificates, the membership notebook, and most importantly, the letters from the editor and articles in the school newspaper. I’ve included above but will continue to add as other items appear.
However, all the dangling Storey trails in mind, the critical bits i learned are:
- Learn how to utilize/manipulate organizational institutional structures
- Learn how to use the media in any form to your advantage
- “people always want to be part of something bigger than themselves, especially if it’s fun”
- Living cheap is its own reward, because:
- Jobs are usually not great, call-center jobs are the worst
- Always trust a long hair, never trust long hair
- Have a fake ID, or several, as possible (not legal advice)
- and the best thing ever is the friends we met along the way (yes, you’ve heard this before)
Addendums
Creative Writing chapbook: this publication may appear elsewhere in this archive, but in brief: this is the book made in Larry Harper’s 201H honors, creative writing program (“mud” with some acronym for something at the school). I produced this at the library with Larry’s allotted copy counter, laid it out, double-sided, folded and stapled. Larry, who was a typist in the US Army (at a base in Germany which kept him out of Vietnam), typed at lightning speed at the library to lay this out, a super fun night!
The images below show the cover, the autograph page, the back cover (both covers designed by Brandon and i) and instead of author bios, were obituaries – hilarious!
what further amendments and annotations do you have for this round up?