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On November 22nd, John F. Kennedy was shot.
I was attending The McBurney School on that day,
one of the many schools I would attend and abandon
along the road to a High School diploma.

The first I heard of the Kennedy assasination
was when I walked out of the school doors,
and a group of kids were standing around
holding little transistor radios to their ears
and listening to the news.
Usually they would be tuned to WINS or WABC,
the popular teen stations of the day,
and rock music would be coming forth
from the tiny tinny sounding speakers.
This day it was different.
Some of the boys had tears streaming down their faces.

When I learned that Kennedy had been shot,
I thought surely he'll be fine.
He's the president, and he'll get the best care.
I was wrong. By the time I got home it was all over the streets,
in late edition newspapers, on TV, and of course radio.
Kennedy had died.

My mother got very upset about the whole thing,
she knew Ted Kennedy well and had met John,
so when her friend Peggy Hitchcock called her up
and invited us to Millbrook, she lept at the chance.
We left the next morning by train from Manhattan's
Grand Central Station for Millbrook, November 23rd 1963.

Millbrook is a small town near Poughkeepsie,
in New York state.
My mother's friend, Peggy, and her brothers Tommy and Billy,
owned a huge group of mansions
on the sprawling grounds of their estate.
The three are part of the Mellon family,
who are one of the wealthiest families in the United States,
maybe the world.
Peggy is one of my mother's best friends,
so we would often go up to her estate in Millbrook
for time away from the city.

(The Millbrook house- for image click below url-)
http://www.alanmerrill.com/odds/millbrook/millbrook.jpg

The first night I arrived I was situated in a bedroom
as big as a library, which were to be my quarters.
There were three other kids around my age group there as well.
Susan and Jackie Leary, and Kimberly Ferguson
(daughter of jazz great Maynard), who was there with her parents.

As I tried to sleep the first night, I heard a loud hum
coming from the next room, a large study room
the size of a restaurant dining area.
I tossed and turned, but couldn't sleep.
The hum got louder and louder, then it would stop,
then it would start up again. It sounded a bit like voices.

I went to investigate, and poked my head in to the room.
There were about 15 adults sitting in a circle
humming, or chanting.
I didn't know it at the time, but they were trying a drug called LSD,
and Tim Leary was guiding their trip and monitoring the effects.
There was a reel to reel tape machine in the middle of the room
and everthing was being documented.
Someone looked up, noticed me and waved me away from the doorway
of the room where the chanting had been coming from.
I went back to my quarters. The chanting and humming
kept me awake all night long.
Finally, the sun came up and it stopped,
and I got a few hours sleep.

In the morning, Susan Leary woke me up by shaking my bed.
The first thing I noticed was that she was dressed
in in a tight black ballet leotard.
She danced around the house most of the time I was there.
Prancing and happy as a lark, a pretty girl with long dark hair.
Susan was about 15 or 16 I guess, and the oldest teen there.
She was in charge of the kids, and was the elder at our meals,
supervising. Her brother Jackie was a few years younger,
roughly my age, and Kimby Ferguson was the youngest at 12.

The adult closest in age to us was Bob Thurman,
in his mid 20s I guess. Bob was the most attentive adult there
to the small teen group at Millbrook.
His daughter, the beautiful Uma, not yet born,
would become one of the biggest film stars in Hollywood,
but for that moment in time, Bob showed us all stars
of a different nature with a telescope on the roof.
He explained some facts about astronomy we queried,
and was generally very patient with us,
a learned and kind young man.

The next day, we were all in the TV room
watching a pop music show.
Tommy Roe was on the screen singing "Sheila",
and a couple of the black maids were watching the show
with us in the TV room. One of the maids,
a sexy young dark skinned lady about 19 years old,
kept saying "Oooh that boy's fine".
She liked Tommy Roe.
I was paying attention: Sing and the girls will flock.

This was the maid that was always teasing me.
She'd invite me to visit the maid's rooms
at the back of the mansion to listen to R&B music.
She was always saying that she wanted to seduce me.
She had a tiny upturned nose, and a curvy figure
that filled out her jeans and tee shirt to near bursting,
but in the elegant and graceful way
that is so often the priviledge of youth.
I wish that she had succeeded in seducing me,
but she would only tease, and then say no.
She said she was afraid of being fired,
and would roll her big eyes
as she bent over the record player
to put on another Little Richard LP.
She would, of course, bend in such a way
that she would display her impossibly round bottom to me,
and at the most provocative angle.
It was a game of sorts, frustrating for me, fun for her.
A pattern that would follow me through life.

Suddenly there was a break in the TV pop show
we had all been watching, and an announcer
said that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot,
and then they went to the clip of the killing,
caught on tape.
They showed the clip again and again.
Jack Ruby casually and confidently walking up to Oswald,
and shooting him in the stomach.
It was live televised brutality.
We were all stunned. It was November 24th, 1963.
There was a long brush stroke of sadness
that coloured the days that followed.

It was around this time my mother asked Tim Leary and Richard Alpert
(who later re-named himself Ram Daas) if they would give me
a letter of recommendation to the nearby Friends School.
My mom had some idea of putting me in the Friends boarding school
in Poughkeepsie.
They wrote letters and we all went to the school
and had a look around.
Me, my mom and the two Harvard professors.
At the time Tim was not yet a media celebrity.
He and Alpert were known only as two respected and dignified
Harvard professors, and the letter was a guarantee
that I'd get in to the school.

A year or two later, they would have run us off the grounds.
I didn't go to the school, for one reason or another.
I'd like a copy of that letter of recommendation, though.

It followed that we would have Thanksgiving there at Millbrook.
An odd Thanksgiving holiday, because of the televised killings,
one after the other it seemed, shown again and again.
Thanksgiving. I think it was the only time the adults
and the kids dined together as one large group.
There were a few more adults there, living at the mansion.
I remember a doctor named Ralph Metzner, as well as Richard Alpert,
the Learys, the Fergusons, Bob Thurman, of course Peggy,
my mom and I, who were all staying at the country estate.
It was a grand Thanksgiving dinner, and fun.
The teens rarely saw the adults who were staying at the house,
so it was unique in that respect.

On a regular day at the mansion, Susan Leary cooked for us.
The maid would have done it, but Suzy enjoyed it.
She was a good cook, and she liked putting it all together.
However, she began to dose us nearly daily in our food with LSD.
With her cheshire cat grin, she enjoyed watching us eat it all down,
right to the last strand of spaghetti.
Her very "special" spaghetti al dente.
One time after dinner, I played middle C on the grand piano
there in the living room, and colours flew off of the keyboard.
I played middle C for hours. An adult came up to me and asked me
what I heard. I repied "it's the colours, can't you see them?".

There was another time when Jackie Leary, I suppose caught
in the spell of the guns and assasination all over television,
was inspired to bring a real and loaded rifle in to the TV room.
I was watching a show and he aimed it at my head
and said "I hold your life in my hands, how does it feel?"
I said "it feels pretty strange, why don't you lower that thing?".
I got up and started to slowly back out of the large glass doors
at the back of the room that led to the garden area,
talking calmly to him all the time.
He was stalking me. Pointing the rifle at me, and lowering it, again and again.
I knew he was high, and I didn't like the feeling
that he might pull the trigger.

I made it out of the glass doors and started to run.
He wasn't following.
There was a bowling alley on the property nearby,
and it was deserted. It looked like a church inside, all stone, echoes,
and cobwebs.
I had gone bowling there earlier during the day with Kimberly,
and knew it well enough to find my way around,
even though it was getting dark.
There were no lights in the bowling alley.
I stayed there for a couple of hours silently,
waiting for Jackie to come down, or calm down. Both.
I have no idea what madness possesed him,
but I didn't want to know either.

(The bowling alley- for image click below)
http://www.alanmerrill.com/odds/millbrook/thebowlalley.jpg

After a few hours, I went back to the house
and after finding her in the enourmous mansion,
I told my mother I wanted to leave Millbrook.
She said she wanted to stay, and that I was over-reacting.
I said fine, you can stay, I am leaving.
Guns everywhere. On TV. In the TV room! Pointed at me now,
at my head ! I packed my bag, and had someone call me a taxi.

It was December 1963, and a light snow was starting to fall
as I waited for the New York City-bound train at Poughkeepsie Station.

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