Fish Family

Myself:

After I graduated Highschool in 1967, I went to Ohio State University for one year. Following my first year at OSU, I moved back to the East Coast into the city where I went to Long Island University, Brooklyn campus. Shortly after this was when I met Lawrence, Luke, Joel, Nancy, & Joeann. We all lived in the same building on the upper west side of Manhatten. I was 19 years old then.

My mother and father were from the city but moved out to the countryside in NJ after my father graduated from NYU. They became egg farmers. I was born on an egg farm many years later and my father ran that farm until I was seven. My mother helped with the farm work, collecting eggs etc. After my father gave up the farm he went into the trucking business. As part of the business, he drove his own trucks. He gave up the trucking business to work at General Motors in Elizabeth. While he was working the graveyard shift there he went to Rutgers University during the day where he earned his Masters degree in Guidance. Eventually he became a teacher. He and my mother lived together many years before they got married. They met when my father was 18 and my mother was 16.

My Moms worked in a clock factory to supplement our income when I got older. I have a sister who is 3 and 1/2 years older than me.

 

back to the Family proper.

the nite of the day that Lyoid put the STP in our tuna sandwiches I was mad, glad, & happy & sad plus a hundred zillion other things, and I was already plotting my revenge while I was still high
on Lyoid, and the rest of the Family for letting him put the STP in our sandwhiches without telling me.

To this day I don't know if I was the only one who didn't know the tuna was drugged, or whether some of us knew and some of us didn't or whether no one knew but Lyoid. As the nite wore on though, I at any rate (the rest as I have said may have known from the start) became aware in stages as it were that I was not only tripping but that I was tripping on STP.

Barbara knew before she told me. Barbara was the only one of the Family who didn't live with us and I think I was the only one who didn't live in the loft on 3rd street with the STPers afterward. Lyoid might not have lived there either, not sure. At some point later on, after the blow up, while I was living on the street, the other Barbara told me that Lyoid had taken up residence somewhere in the hills of Berkeley, Ca. I was actually on my way there (never made it though) to apologize to him when I left NYC on my 22nd birthday.

 

Lyoid was from Bayone (sp). Everyone from New Jersey has heard of it. It's pronounced Bay Own. Lyoid had been a Merry Prankster and he also traveled with the Greatful Dead. At nineteen, when I first met him, he had already done somewhere between 300 and 500 hits of acid. He could roll a joint with one hand. His mother was a Bohemian and he was either Native American or had some Native American blood in him.

 

While the Fish Family was going thru its birth and early infancy, there was some question as to whose apartment it was in which we lived. I payed the rent but while the Family lived together, the apartment was everyones'. Technically the landlord owned the apartment and the superintendent collected the rent, but the Family lived there and while we were there we considered the apartment ours.

However, there was a great deal of confusion developing among us. Our goings on became very chaotic, largely because they could not be contained within such a small living space nor by the community surrounding us. Our survival became incumbent on the need to restore some modicum of order. We needed to seperate and spread out, or at the least to devise a way to make more room for ourselves.

Along those lines we began to think collectively about work. The concept of work developed, due to a large degree to my efforts. The idea was that if we could all go to work, we could save up money and have the means to obtain our own apartments.

The plan failed but not before the concept of work took hold in eveyones' minds. In fact the other Barbara, Lyoid's girlfriend, actually did go to work, and we all rejoiced at it. Unfortunately, all eight of us visited her one day at her job in attempt to show our love and support for our sister and because she was our sister, the thought never crossed our minds that we were not entitled to freebees.

 

If anyone recognizes themselves or recognizes someone else, or remembers any of the people I am describing, please post to this thread and say something.

The following are some of the People who were closest to the family but were not actually inside it, except for Barbara, who was in the family.

The three people that I am going to mention were people who played key roles in our development largely because they lived closest to us.

First a little bit about the building we lived in. It was a six story tub in the kitchen tenemant walk-up, on 11th street in the East Village. The East Village was better known as the lower east side to the older residents of its environs. Of course it was Manhatten.

There were a lot of tub in the kitchen tenements in the area in which we lived. Originally they had been the home to immigrants from another, earlier ira. We lived on the 5th floor and there were 4 apartments on each floor. There was a sky light on the roof and an airshaft seperating us from the building adjacent to us. Part of the infra structure of the building consisted of steel.

Now I'll say a little about the three people who were closest to the family, the three people who lived on the same floor as us, and then I'll say a little about Barbara who was "in" the family.

First there was Ray who lived directly across from us. Ray was a Viet Nam vet, who came back from the war and made a committment to lend his hand to the peace movement. Polly who had crashed with us several nites at one point, moved in with Ray across the hall afterwards, and then left the city with him to get married. Ray, if I'm not mistaken, was originally from Ohio and I think an earlier generation of some of his relatives had immigrated from the other side to the lower east side.

A lot of young people living on the lower east side at that time had relatives from previous generations that had settled on the lower east side when they immigrated to America from Europe, including me. Many were looking for their roots.

Mike lived down the hall and across from us. Mike was from a farming family in Kansas. He had moved to the city from Kansas and had lived in the city for some time, before he quit his job as a technical writer to move to the East Village. He was still pursuing his dream of becoming a novelist when we parted company sometime later.

Mike had a girlfriend named Gretchen. I spent many pleasurable hours listening to him talk about her. I only mention her because Joel had a girlfriend named Gretchen too, and the coincidence used to confound me.

Mike was older than us, exactly 30 at the time. He had boxed in the ring in the army and he knew how to fight. Before I left the city Mike turned some of his attention from creative writing, to photography. He took his own pictures and developed them too.

Then there was John. He lived directly down the hall from us. John was going to the New School of Social Research where he eventually earned his Masters degree in political science. John was from Ohio too , but he and Ray had not known each other before they moved to the city.

Barbara who was part of the family went to live with John for a short time, after the family fanned out, and across the entire lower east side.

Phil and Sunday moved in across the hall after Ray and Polly left for Ohio to get married and Barbara, who as I already mentioned was part of the family, went to live with them after she left John's apartment.

 

I spoke of peace and love, and human understanding and how it pertained to the Fish Family but I think the word that best describes what we were about is acceptance. We were about accepting each other and everyone else around us, just because we were human. That's what we were striving for in our collective conscience.

However, there was that ugly thing called survival that hung over our heads.

Lyoid and I were both draft age, and Paul was coming up on it, while Timmy and Steve weren't far behind Paul. Because of the war and what we all felt was our responsibility to stop it, we were faced by the menace of the majority of Americans who threatened us because we chose to fight for peace rather than for them. This atmosphere of violence and hate surrounding us, turned inward on the Family and fighting broke out at times.

Lyoid and I were the oldest, so we both thought we had to take more responsibility for the Family then the others. Each of us thought it was our job to protect the rest of the Family. At times, neither of us thought the other was doing a good enough job. We were competing to see who could do a better job of protecting the Family. So when we both felt inadequate with regard to how well we could take care of the Family, we wound up fighting. We were just expressing a part of what we thought was our own nature.

 

As ridiculous as this sounds, the idea occured to me that none of u even have a computer of your own, or if you do, you don't know how to use it, or possibly if you do know how to use one, you don't even know anyone who would let you use theirs. Maybe you just don't know anyone, period.

It's possible, because there is even a precedent for it, if you prefer to draw analogies; back in the day, none of you even had a place to live. Who would've believed that!

I've been living under the delusion most of my life that I was the one who brought the Family together, but it's not true; I did not! I just happened to have the roof over my head that the Family came to share with me. I was just one link in the chain, everyone brought something to the Family that was just as valuable as anything everyone else brought to it. The link in the chain that I was part of was no bigger or stronger or better than any of the other links. Nor was it smaller or weaker, or less important than any of the others.

But one thing I do know. Although I wasn't the one who brought the Family together, I was the one who broke the Family apart. Yes, if you remember, I kicked every last one of you out from under the roof that was over my head.

If one of the people who I have previously mentioned, (who was either part of the outer circle or the inner circle of the Family), doesn't post to this thread very soon, this time I will not disassociate you from me, or kick you out of my home, but I'm will kick you out of my mind and life forever.

 

Well! I guess that ploy in my last post to get Fish Family members to rear their ugly heads didn't work, so on I go.

The STPers are up to their old shennanigans again trying to sucker me (maybe because they I know I'm a little down) into their thread so they can use me as their patsy. Most of them will rarely stoop low enough to post to a Fish thread though, so it's a good bet I'm safe here for the time being.

It's just like back in the day, you wouldn't catch an STPer stooping low enough to accept the hospitality of a Fish, but they on the other hand were just spreading their hospitality and good will to us and everyone else.

I met Paul around September of 1970 when I was 20 and he was 17. Paul was homeless and almost every nite someone new took him in to crash with them. He'd meet people on the street, befriend them and wind up with a place to stay for the nite. I guess somewhere along the line he met Casey on the street, and came back to stay with her. While he was staying with her, he came down to my apartment and wound up crashing with me on and off for a while. We became friends.

In January I dropped out of college for the last time. Paul had told me about a place in Miami where some hippies hung out and wanting to see if I could be like like him, I decided to hitch hike to Florida. Couldn't even come close to living like Paul. Took me 3 days to get down to Miami, 3 days to get back, and I slept on the beach one nite.

Miraculously, when I got to Miami, I found the place that Paul had told me about and I screwed up enough courage to ask this dude for a place to sleep for the nite. He was considering it too, but then he changed his mind.

I believe everyone in the Family panhandled at one time or another and Paul was skilled at it. He made u feel like he had given u something when he took your money. Isn't that the art of panhandling?

 

Now I'm going to make an attempt to put the Fish Family to rest. I'll try to do it in the most honest possible way that I can, so that anyone reading this thread will have the best idea of what the Fish Family really is.

There was a group of people who all lived together for a very short time, and we were all hippies of one sort or another, or if we weren't hippies we had thoughts of being one.

All of us were familiar with at least some of the radical groups in the East Village. I can't speak with authority about any of the others but I think, they as I, thought those groups were plastic.

Loid, one of the people who was living together with the rest of us, dosed some tuna fish salad that we were making with STP. As a joke and a spoof on one of the radical groups living on the lower east side, that called themselves a family, Loid declared that we would call ourselves a family too, the Fish Family.

Probably everyone, except me, took it as the joke it was meant to be and forgot about it then and there.

About two years later I had the missfortune to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Because of the nature of schizophrenia I began to develop psychotic ways of thinking. I developed the psychotic thought that, that little insignificant joke that Loid had made two years previous to the time I got sick, about the people who were living together being called the Fish Family was of tremendous importance.

That little joke and the events, along with the final event when everyone was tripping on STP had no significance to anybody but me, but that little joke and those little events that led to Loid declaring a small group of people the Fish Family, assumed more importance in my life than anything else ever did.

If I can't put the Fish Family to sleep properly, which amounts to the same thing as removing that particular psychotic thought process that made me attach so much importance to nothing at all, and which has rattled my brain for 37 years, at least I will give the Family/my psychosis some time to nap.

Pleasant dreams, Fish Family and my psychotic thoughts. Good night.

Peter

 

Hope you got a good nap!

Now I'd like to say a word about Barbara. Well, I've never had such good luck before or since the time I met Barbara, and it was such good luck that I never even yearned to be that lucky again. With that kind of luck, having it once is enough to satisfy you for a life time.

Barbara was the prettiest woman I had ever seen in my life! She was so pretty that when she walked into the room the first time I saw her, the whole room lit up like sunshine. You couldn't take your eyes off her she was so pretty.

It was very fortunate that Barbara was with me the same time I was tripping on the STP.