A Path in the Wilderness

In 1963, a year or so after I graduated from high school, we moved back to Kentucky. I got a job as a car hop at a Frisch’s restaurant across the street from our house. I made a friend there who introduced me to the music of the Beatles. Then, when a Food Mart opened in our town, I worked for a few months as a clerk, operating a cash register. I lost that job when my skills on the cash register were revealed to be less satisfactory. Then I got a job as a clerk in the drug department of a chain store called Chinatown. For a while, I dated a young man who had introduced me to Bob Dylan, whose music made a deep and lasting impression on me. During all this time (from 1963 and 1964), I was visiting my cousin, Sue, who lived in Cincinnati. When my boss at Chinatown started offering me sexual favors, I quit the job at Chinatown and landed a seasonal job as a salesclerk in the toy department at Pogue’s in Cincinnati. There, I met a young woman who introduced me to Barbra Streisand and a young gay man who introduced me to his friends and the culture of a drag queen fashion show called the Downstairs Club in Newport, Kentucky. When my Christmas job at Pogue’s ended, I moved to Cincinnati, another big step on my spiritual path. I met Steve at Jill and Pete’s house that winter and we started an affair that lasted two years. Steve was a jazz drummer, who had served in Viet Nam. I was woefully unaware of the psychological damage he had sustained in that war. I loved him deeply and we were blissfully happy at the beginning of our relationship. I became entranced with jazz, especially the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The group with which I traveled this path became another spiritual family, with whom I grew and bonded. Some of the members of the group were, as was Steve, jazz musicians. We frequented jazz clubs such as Blind Lemon, Mahogany Hall, Blue Wisp, Dee Felice’s, and Babe Baker’s where we were privileged to witness a live performance by Miles Davis. We had been studying many types of religions, philosophies, spiritual and psychological disciplines, and occult studies. Our group activities included imbibing psychedelic drugs and Timothy Leary’s psychospiritual consciousness expansion and ego transcending program. The discipline into which we delved most deeply was that of G.I. Gurdjieff, a Greek scholar of Eastern religions and psychological disciplines. When some really unsavory elements, totally unrelated to spiritual development entered the group’s venue, I became disillusioned and left the group, broken-hearted. I did not quit visiting Jill and Pete, though. After a while, Pete left the group, too, and began investigating an international spiritual brotherhood called Subud. One day, he asked me if I would like to meet some of the members of the Subud group in Columbus, Ohio. I said I would, as I was missing the spirituality and comradeship. I had known in the Gurdjieff group. This was the beginning of my true path.