We ended up at 1800 R St because they would allow dogs of which we had a very long and aggressive winter dog from Iowa befriended with a piece of roast beef in previous winters. Friendly was his name. We would walk him to Dupont Circle nights after the day, she at NASA me at the Folger, riding up and down in the elevator, from the 6th fl. among the colorful transvestites there, who must have been ashamed to ride in the same elevator as my wife who was statuesque at 5' 10" and noble and beautiful without anything to change her. So Friendly came with us everywhere. He had been to New England the previous summer when we drove the coast from Philly to Maine, eating Portuguese bread and staying in resorts cheap for the off season, but that was before I had learned the know now about transcendent peripherals so my stories were prosaic with slights of irony. After we came back to Philly in Nov 66 we soon heard of the apps to teach at FSC starting in Jan 67 where we went late Dec to get a place, but couldn't get one in that part of town, too white for that, so had to live a little away on Mcgilvery St. Walking those nights in Fayetteville on Fri and Sat night we learned not to do from all the drunk boots raving on the ground. One kept following us, pestering my wife over and over until, remember, I'm an athlete and also can be sudden, I was literally in the next step going to knee him in the balls and kill him, which would not have been good because of all the soldiers around, when he must have sensed it in his stupor and broke off. I played some tennis there too, with Charlie Brown Asst to the Pres. and became his friend, played in the city against a guy who took lessons from a pro with a serve and volley game and had some fun matches. At the end though I arranged him to play on the hard courts at the college, to an audience of my students and crushed him badly. He was white. Many of the students then had not known a caucasoid, as the Dean Malvin E Moore called us, and were welcomed at the first registration esp. by Archie and Wesley who called themselves Home and Rome. We made so much money with two salaries at 6500 each that I bought a white MGB that could run good. We used it to tow the NSU Prinz I bought stupidly in Iowa after its seals blew out and the repair showed a used piston in a new car. So we towed it at night, without plates, to the bank in Iowa city and gave it back. That was a placid time compared to later, although they made my wife teach accounting, which she hated. It was drug free, open, enthused, not like the next year after they hired 5 more caucasoids and got Marxists, hashists, loonies, etc. and then revolution. But for the summer of 67' Dr. Moore rec'd apps for jobs in DC for faculty to work for NASA, so we applied for fun and then went, me to digest a room full of contracts for the previous 10 years, my wife to something I forget, but i had no idea and quit in a week, walked over to the Folger to see if I could read and, this is the way of that time, not privilege, but something. I got admitted on the spot for the summer without prior app because I knew Rhodes Dunlap's name. [pic of choclate covered hunky bar] It''s audacity. I walked on at he Writer's workshop by passing a sheaf of poems to Starbuck and getting a note, drew Justice with the lot! I walked on at the LAM on a moment some years before. All this because "my soul boasts in the Lord' as the psalm says, o/w not of this had happened and I had been untutored, for that had been a walk on too, or a walk up the sawdust aisle of a tent under the prickling affronts of the Holy Spirit and knelt in the back when OH! My soul does rejoice in you Lord let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Easily the most powerful experience I have ever known and one that radiates the joints and marrow.
So I had a desk and a pipe and read Marprelate tracts and grammars, sat across form Thomas Mish of 17th cent porn fame, who downed Sterge O'Dell at my undergrad for softness, but he got to wear the scarlet gown and got us into Iowa in the first place. I became a bouncing humanist at the Folger at lunch with Gerogetownites and Roy Flannigan of the Milton news letter. There was a blonde in her 20's from Harvard reading the alchemists there. There were clay tennis courts in front of the capitol then where we went for fun to walk and watch, but one night was asked by a congress rep to play him, so I took off my shoes and played a set in my socks. He was most frutstrated when I beat him at 3. I had played my last year, and had taken the 6th man of Iowa to 4 and 5 in a loss, with no prep. His coach congratulated me on the loss. At the Circle nights there were congo drums pounding and people milling. Leaning up against the fountain a guy asked me if I knew where he could get some lettuce. Another narc, narcs galore. But when we walked Friendly back and forth people would cross the street to avoid passing him. After we moved to the Texas hill country outside town the first night we left him out to prove himself. Five dogs of the landlord came for him and he left two on the ground and the others ran. Next day they brought the big dog a German shepherd husky mix magnificent, Charley Brown, and Friendly and he met halfway between the houses, maybe 200 ft. and circled each other sniffing and that was it. Friendly was a third his size but had a big mojo of respect. Charley was kept in a pen on a rope on a wire and some time later, trying to jump the fence hung himself. Friendly would roam, being whole. In Iowa he would be gone for days, sighted miles away, but here one day he never returned. I saw him dead in the back of a rancher's pickup in a dream. We took up then with another dog Scorpio, named for the heavens an emaciated thing with a mashed foot the other neighbor starved until he got so thin he slipped his collar. He stayed for a year until the guy saw him and took him back. Scorpio jumped up on him in welcome, then back to the cage. We had Fox, a border collie too, a fine dog who went swimming with us at Lake Travis, laying on the rocks swimming in clean water. He took off for better climes. When we got back to FSC in fall an influx of northern scholarship B ballers from Bed Sty and others from Newark and DC enrolled and began the black rev for real. They took my lit class and wrote the assigned paper on writing their own Notes from the Underground. Most of them got A and the ladies of the Dept thought I was trouble, and showed it. When the time came in few months and they took over the Admin Bldg it was just a moment before grad and most of the caucasoids were let go, which saved us from going with the hashishim to Germany, which my gut opposed. Saved by hemorrhoids I convalesced in Philly, she went to art school and we went to Texas because the app was free.
