Dead Kennedy Day
What were you doing?
Happy Dead Kennedy Day, everybody! Hard to believe that another fun-filled year has passed, isn’t it? But, it’s November 22, 2000-Something, already. Time just flies when you’re sucking eggs!
What amazes me most is that my borderline-senile, sincerely-warped, questionably-motivated brain can always come up with yet another thought-provoking (?) tale that somehow ties us all to what some call “America’s High Water Mark”, November 22, 1963, the day John Kennedy died.
Have you ever had one of those things where somebody from your past just gets in your mind, and you keep thinkin’ about ‘em, and thinkin’ about ‘em? Well, I’ve been thinkin’ about this old girlfriend of mine. Actually, she was my first real girlfriend. I mean, I was really smitten with her, and all that good stuff.
Her name was Monica Jeckle. Monica was a lovely, young fraulein from Berlin.
Actually all the guys in the University of Texas at Austin (Right where it’s always been.) Art Department were smitten with Monica (All the straight guys, that is.). We also had Farrah Fawcett to ogle at. But, Farrah though she was a movie star, or somethin’, and didn’t respond often (Besides, she preferred older men.). We’d all be oglin’ Farrah, till Monica’s tall frame came through the door, nose high in the air. Then, we’d quickly forget Farrah and start oglin’ Monica. Actually, I ended up marryin’ the very best lookin’ woman in the University of Texas at Austin Art Department, Cissy Bond (Really!), a long time later. But, that’s quite a whole, long other story.
Monica, as I said, was a foreigner. Her mother was a German Jew, and her father was a Nazi SS Trooper. ‘Kind of dysfunctional family. We shot her daddy in the war, and her mother escaped with Monica, to the American lines. Later, her mom married an American army sergeant, and lived unhappily ever after, on the outskirts of south Austin.
Monica was a Textbook 10 – a tall, gorgeous Prussian, with long black hair. Her only demerits were: She was really weird lookin’, especially for early ‘60s Texas. She had a predominant widow’s peak in the middle of her forehead (Which, of course, allowed her to claim she was a witch.). And then, there were the braided armpits. Still, all in all, Monica was a real traffic stopper!
Fortunately for me, she had a big, big thing for Irish guys, with lots of hair, which is, I suppose, the reason for this story.
She, of course, thought that John F. Kennedy was the hottest thing that God ever bestowed upon this poor, backward, miserable, little planet; as did many women of her era. Monica absolutely loved JFK!
She was an outstanding artist. Really superb talent. In fact, Monica was really good at quite a number of things. But, she did, unfortunately, have one bad habit.
Back in those ancient times, you could legally buy LSD from a pharmaceutical (?) company with an ad in the Psychedelic Review, a magazine which was published in … Germany (See, it was all a subversive plot!). And, that’s what Monica did. She bought acid, from Germany, and rather often. Well, some girls like M&Ms …
I really didn’t pay much attention to what she was munchin’, as we drove around Austin. And, I certainly didn’t understand all the weird things she’d say at times, or all the things that made her laugh (Well, who understands what women are interested in, anyway?). She’d suddenly blurt out that people, especially Americans, were not really evil. We were all just amazingly stupid. And, she’d suddenly say that rednecks look like fat, little pigs. Hey, I coulda told her that!
Anyway, back to our noble theme: Now, I know for all you youngsters out there, this has little meaning. But, for any American over fifty, the question, “What were you doing the day Kennedy got shot?” brings an immediate quite to our agitated minds. We see the whole day in slow motion. Then, a long, detailed description of every agonizing moment slowly falls from our lips. No matter how cool and safe we may think we now are, no one forgets that day. We are all, for a moment, once again, fragile children, frozen in terror.
And, Monica Jeckle is the only person I know that was, very unfortunately, completely ripped out of her mind on acid, when she heard the news on November 22, 1963.
I didn’t see her much, for a while after that. She withdrew. She, somehow, finally escaped from her family in south Austin, including the clutches of her drunken, redneck stepfather. And, she was even able to find a basement apartment that she could afford.
She took to wearing black. She painted everything in the apartment black - the walls, the ceiling, the refrigerator, the bed, the floor. She had black drapes and black chairs, a black sink and black dinner plates.
She got heavily into black magic. She adopted a black cat.
I ran into her in December of that long, dark year. It had snowed a rare, heavy snow in Austin. We drove out to West Cave. It was absolutely radiant. I had never seen that much white before! We climbed up to the waterfalls, and danced under huge ice cycles. She cut quite a figure in black, against the falling snow. We screwed our brains out in the back of my Dad’s old Cadillac. There were guys, dressed like Indians, with war paint, going through the caves with torches. They were chanting. It was cold.
Then, she took me back to her new, dark life. The cat hissed at me. I stared at the apartment, knowing that I had to ask why she had painted everything black, even though I didn’t want to ask why she had painted everything black, and even though there was no need at all to ask why she had painted everything black.
But, I asked.
“It’s for him,” she said. “We should all know that we are over. Our hopes are gone. The dream, the good dream for all of us, is gone. Only Evil will survive.”
I don’t know what happened to Monica. I saw her again in the ‘70s. She was with a friend of mine. He’s an artist too. She had become a fairly well-known artist, by then. Her widow’s peak was gone.
I heard once that she has two kids; that she got straight – well, straighter; and that she moved back east somewhere, or back to Germany, maybe.
You know what has torn at me all these years. Well, was she right about the dream being gone and Evil winning, and all that? Monica didn’t ever say much. But, what she did say was usually pretty amazing. Was November 22, 1963 the high water mark, the peak of American history? Well, it has been a fairly rapid downhill sloop every since - LBJ-‘Nam-MLK-Bobby-Tricky Dick-Watergate-Iranian Hostage Crisis-Reagan-Nicaragua-Daddy Bush and the CIA-Bill and Monica (!)-9/11-Somalia-Florida-Dubya and the Neocons-Afghanistan-Iraq-Lebanon … Basically, we lost ‘em all; while America, concurrently, lost its soul.
It ain’t been a hell of a lot of fun, like I thought it would be. It’s cost each of us a lot more than money. I think it’s cost us more than we can even know, in many ways. And, though too few of us would admit it, America has done more than its fair share in making life on Earth (including America) a paranoid hell. Evil ain’t cheap.
War, fear and surveillance have taken a lion’s share of the gross national product of this country, everyday, ever since. And these days, it’s rapidly getting worse.
Maybe the death of hope is what happens to all countries, in their youth and innocence. Maybe that’s just history. Maybe that’s just life. Or, maybe that’s just what “modern” life is supposed to be like. Or, then again, maybe it’s always been dangerous to think that we can help the world at all.
Have a great day!
