They were a great British rock group and I got the chance to see their show at Leicester College in England in 1968.
Well I did and I didn’t.
My friend from high school and I hitchhiked the 90 miles from Aylesbury, Bucks and we were picked up in short order by a fish’n chips vendor and his wife.
Lovely couple, they gave us a ride just south of Coventry. Henry was a small, but muscular man of thirty or so I thought, and his wife Tara was smokin’ hot.
The vendor was the most popular guy in every town outside the pubs at closing time. In a box with only enough space for a deep fryer, a breading pan, and a batter pan, a cutting board the size of a laptop, these guys would sell two battered fillets of Plaice (from the North Sea mind you) and a large scoop of hand-cut chips. Wrapped in a newspaper and served with malt vinegar, it was a closing time ritual.
We passed the time by smoking hashish out of a fluted glass pipe and singing Time of the Season before jumping out of their Fiat and looking to go north a few more miles.
An older gent in a lorry gave us a lift to Leicester Square where we filed into the Three Swans Pub and started drinking pints before making the very mature and astute choice to switch to Tanqueray and tonics.
Fourteen years old.
We had three hours before the show started.
Big mistake in timing logistics.
Way too much time at the pace we were going.
Why do all the zombies in video games have no fat zombies? It’s all skinny crazies trying to scale the walls or eat the human.
Long story short, we were barely able to get to the auditorium to see the show, and I was on the verge of passing out and getting sick before I finally stumbled down the long steps and onto the street. My head was spinning and I had just smoked more pot than I had ever smoked before in my young life and I got bombed.
A Bobby approached me and was cool and I thought I was able to communicate that I was waiting on the bench for a friend from the concert and not being a vagrant.
In spite of my efforts, he appeared to shake his head, laughed, and walked away, distracted because the concert crowd was departing and flowing down the steps.
The world is a big enough place that there will always be groups of individuals whose beliefs are based on the weirdest shit.
Some people really believe in zombies.
Get real.
Regular humans are fucked up, so you know some aberration of zombie proportions won’t be pretty.
I’d rather not be around on earth anymore if it breaks down to the point of Lord of the Flies. (Thank you very much).
I felt like a total zombie when I woke up, seventy miles from my condo in Las Vegas, in a house with a family, kids running around, and absolutely no idea where I was, how I got there, or who these people were!
But that’s a story for a different day.
Stay well.
