I woke up, reached into my treasure trove of moldy manuscripts and pulled out a doozy titled “Nothing is Everything” set in my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1977.
These stories have been compiled into one volume titled 1966.
The first in this autobiographical series is a black comedy titled East Village that involves Bugsy and Maarten traveling to New York City at the end of the summer in 1966 and landing in a crash pad in the East Village terrorized by a speed freak named Yukyuk.
The second, titled The Steam Tunnels, is a tragedy that takes place around the same time only set underneath Champaign-Urbana in a world that still exists today.
The third is The Stockholm Manifesto and involves my scheme to avoid the Vietnam War by relocating to Sweden for a few months.
And now we have the fourth, which takes place several years later.
After graduation from art school, Bugsy drifted around North America for a few years working odd jobs, while I went back to school and ended up with a masters in journalism. Right after I graduated, life in C-U, once a hotbed of counterculture activity, turned sour as the counterculture headshops and hangouts had already been displaced by chain stores.
My cynicism may have hit rock bottom around this time. The story about the girl-friend is 100 percent Bugsy though. I’d already written about my first real girl friend in The Stockholm Manifesto. Many of these stories can be read for free on my Smashwords site.