My mother sent me a letter about dope. This was my freshman year of college. The fifth floor of my dorm was called the “dope floor.” You name it, we had it: heroin (“scag”); marijuana (“grass”); and cocaine. Some guys even sniffed gasoline from cars at the nearby parking structure. That was called “hitting the tank.” Many of the heavy dopers eventually dropped out. This was at the University of Michigan, where the Hash Bash – a celebration of marijuana – started.
I got harassed for non-toking by my dormmates. I was a mama’s boy. The boys on my floor couldn’t believe I didn’t partake. Two inner-city Detroit boys, in particular, were quite often amused by me, calling me “Expletive-deleted Bert!” and ”Bert be trippin’. That Expletive-deleted be trippin’. You be trippin’, Expletive-deleted!”
The Detroit boys were charismatic. They wore berets and used a lot of Black slang. They wore silky colored underwear and put Vaseline on their skin in the winter. This was all new to me – a white kid from South Euclid. The Detroit boys were from Cass Tech, a Detroit science-magnet high school. They were pre-med, like almost everybody on our dorm floor. The Cass boys aced inorganic chemistry that freshman year. But they did too much dope. That was a problem. The Cass guys were gone by sophomore year.
Tune in, turn on, drop out. Many did. The Jewish boy from New Jersey stopped studying altogether and giggled a lot. It seemed like he was high almost every waking moment. He dropped out and drove a cab around Ann Arbor. The Italian boy from Chicago dropped acid, dropped out and became a brakeman in Chicago, in imitation of Jack Kerouac. I saw the Chicago boy a couple times after college. His primary concern was passing the periodic railroad-mandated drug tests…