After our fun day disrupting Nazis what’s a young punk band to do?
Take acid of course.
Then we drove out to South County to a favorite outdoors party place. This was located on… wait for it… Grimsley Station Road. We would go there frequently as youths. Unable to go to bars we used the outdoors as our nightclubs. Grimsley was particularly interesting because there was an abandoned church and further down from there, on a Mississippi river bluff was a double decker concrete patio built into the bluff.
This place was custom made for teenage parties. And because of that it was also custom made for police raids. On a previous visit a bunch of friends went and there were already a number of other people there. Well, the more the merrier. I had just acquired a bag of what was marketed to me as Panama Gold. It had the taste of hashish in it so it was potent.
A group of people that were there ahead of us departed towards their cars. Shortly afterwards one of the group came running back telling us there were police in the area you would park to walk into this area. Ot Oh! What to do? Well I had already been frisked enough in my young life to know that it would be hard to conceal a bag a brand new full bag of weed. So, I gave it a toss into the woods from the lower section of the patio. Then we waited for the inevitable police presence. They came and they were happy that they had caught some of the first group holding weed. So they were anticipating adding to their haul and started frisking all of us. Then DAMN IT! one of them started looking in the woods. It is as if he knew being the little weed smoking punks we were that we’d throw our our weed to avoid having it on us.
Maybe if I had more time I would have done a better job of concealing, but as it was it was not too hard for him to spot my precious. He went over and picked it up and held it in front of all of us and said, “who’s is this?” No one said a word. In my mind I was screaming, “it’s mine give it back you fucking pig!” but fortunately it didn’t go from my mind to my lips. He made a number of threats about taking us all in but no one broke. The end result is they had no choice but to tell us to get the hell out of there.
Well some years later here I was back. Older but apparently not wiser. But it was just the band members. Chuck, Kevin, Bob and myself. By this time the abandoned church had collapsed in on itself. Bob had brought along a Ouija board to call upon the spirts of Grimsley Station. He elected Chuck to go into the collapsed church with him to summon the sprits. Kevin and I stood outside of the building thinking the whole thing was hysterical. Unfortunately Chuck was generally freaked out. Not by spirits of the underworld but by the maniacal conjuring of Bob who bore a passing resemblance to Charles Manson if Charlie was more unhinged than he already was. Outside of that nothing of consequence occurred there that evening. Which in and of itself was a surprise since 50% of Grimsley Station adventures tended to end with the police showing up.
We drove back to the city. After a day of fighting Nazis and conjuring ghosts you would think that would be a full day but you’d be wrong. Bob had a his car at a auto service place on Kingshighway, a block or so from Chippewa which was only about two miles west from our earlier adventure of harassing Nazis. Bob wanted us to take him by there. He wanted to push his car out from the repair shop and jump start it because he was in price dispute with the service provider over his repair bill. This would be a way of winning that dispute. I was the one driving and in yet another poor decision I agreed to drop him off to do this.
At this time I can’t recall if it was Kevin or Chuck or all three that went to attempt this crime but there was a car that was positioned in such a way that only a mind deluded on acid would think it could be done, so Bob would not readily submit to the laws a physics and matter and give up and get in the car and leave. I was yelling from the car, “Bob, it won’t work let’s go”. “No we’ll get it,” he said. This exchange went on for a minute or so and then from behind the flashing lights of a police car pulled up behind me.
The police took an assessment of the scene and proclaimed, “it looks like we to a midnight requisition, here.” Bob comes out with a jacket in his hand telling the officers he was just getting it out of his car and that was all. For whatever reason.. maybe because I was peaking from my trip, the police told me to get out my car and go to the back seat of their car.
Oh this was not good. One thing to get arrested, but an entirely whole different type of bummer to get arrested while tripping. And being a good boy 😉 to this point I had at this point never been arrested although by this times the number of close calls was epic. They grilled me in the car. I did my best to answer in ways that would not lead to a felony charge all the while looking at all the pretty colors flashing around me on the roof of the patrol car.
Here was the good thing about being a near’do well in the city at that time. No matter what kind of mischief we were up to you could guarantee that before long someone not too far a way would be doing something far more heinous and so it was that another call came in and they elected to let us go to move on to more serious matters.
Being released we went back to Bob’s place and yucked it up it up about the incredibly stupid day that we had.
Because that was the way, in the rock and roll days.