Synopsis

In pursuit of a meaningful life, Jeff Richards and his friend Rick Sager decide to start a commune out in the Rocky Mountains. It doesn’t go as planned. Instead of the self-sufficient ranch they envision, they can only afford a crumbling crash pad in Denver; half their friends who agreed to join them (including most of the women) decide to move to Boulder instead; romantic entanglements between group members cause disarray; drug-addicted drifters steal their record collections; and though Rick and Jeff fall in love with every hippie chick that crosses their paths, they rarely fall in love back. Through it all, they learn you don’t always accomplish what you set out to do, but you can still take pride in the attempt.

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Excerpt

Rick and I had totally devoted ourselves to smoking dope every day since we initially turned on in October of my senior year. We turned on our friends: Jim Behringer or J. B., as we called him, because of his close-cropped hair and businesslike demeanor. He carried a pocket-size notebook around in which he scribbled down notes, things such as the origin of the universe, model rocketry (his hobby), the stock market, and the various types of buzzes he attained from a joint of marijuana. He was very serious, never laughed at all. Unlike Hank Hipple, our skinny, goggle-eyed friend, who laughed all the time, especially when stoned. He bent over double, his eyes popping out of his head, his face turning beet red, tiny gasps escaping from his mouth. Sometimes he’d roll on the floor in silent laughter. Other times, Hank would rock back and forth in a chair, nodding in affirmation while we spouted out stoned ideas, one after another, until we realized Hank didn’t hear us. He was sleeping with his eyes open. He was peculiar. So was Baby Huey, as we called him because he reminded us of the comic strip character, who was also easygoing enough to join into any mischief we might have had in mind.

One of the things we kicked around in our stoned-out reverie was what we were going to do after college. This was mostly my concern since I was the one facing the music. Rick and the others were juniors. They didn’t have to worry as much about the draft. I had a plan for how to flunk my draft physical, but if this didn’t work out, I thought maybe I’d hide out in the mountains in a commune or something. We all read about communes in The Whole Earth Catalog. Maybe our own commune in the Rocky Mountains? Timothy Leary said, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” We were coming to that realization. We would drop out. We would aim to be self-sufficient. That was the plan, like mountain men in the old days. Live off the land, though in the modern sense. We threw out ideas. We could live somewhere in the Rockies near Denver—in the hills outside the mining towns: Idaho Springs, Cripple Creek, Central City. Bob Dylan had spent some time in Central City. That could be an ideal place. Or maybe Boulder. A college town. We could hire out as truck drivers and write novels on the side. (I was busily reading On the Road for one of my classes.) One of us would drive the truck while the other wrote the novel in the back. Then we’d change places. We’d finish our run, and another two guys would take over. Or maybe a guy and a gal. Then we could do more than write novels in the back of the truck. Another idea we kicked around was that we could write a syndicated column like Nicholas von Hoffman in
The Washington Post, only more radical. Or invent a board game and make a million dollars. That was Nat’s idea. We even went down to the theater workshop to design the board. Or we could farm the land of our commune. Sell vegetables at local farmers’ markets. We didn’t want to sell meat, though none of us were vegetarians. The idea of killing and cutting up an animal we raised was too much for us. The fact was we didn’t want to be cogs in the big capitalist wheel. We didn’t want to slog to work at eight in the morning, spend our days in meaningless, redundant work, and slog home at six at night too tired to play with the kids. We didn’t even want kids. Well, maybe later, after we became self-sufficient.

But these brilliant thoughts of ours would have to wait, because right after we got back from Christmas break, the whole campus ran out of reefer. We pooled our resources—Rick, Nat, Baby Huey, J. B., Hank, and I. Rick and I hopped in the Mustang, a Christmas gift from my parents a year ago, and drove seventy miles southwest to Antioch College to meet a high school friend, Brinton Rowdybush. The school’s front quad was covered in plywood boardwalks. It had been raining for about a week, and the grass was soaked and mostly mud, though it was cold as shit and the forecast called for snow. The main building reminded me of the Cinderella Castle at Disney World, only the roofs of the towers were green not blue. The other buildings were standard Ohio college brick, though a few long, low-slung ones were multicolored metal siding.

At the end of one of these latter types in a glassed-in area a band of long-hairs played drums while their friends danced in a haphazard way, bumping into each other. Two men wearing Red Army caps were attempting the Russian squat dance. The women were dressed in various costumes: granny dresses, jeans like the men, one in cowboy boots, another in a muumuu waving a feather boa, and a very pretty dark-haired lady in starburst glasses and a miniskirt that showed her red underwear. She saw us staring and crooked her finger for us to come over.

Rick was tempted—he always was by the opposite sex—but I held him back. We were here on business. Seven hundred bucks burned a hole in my pocket. We climbed the stairs in the library and found Brinton sitting at a table surrounded by books that he was going through assiduously. He seemed tired, barely tolerating us. His smirk turned into a frown. It could have easily turned into a smile, and he could start laughing, but I sensed he wanted to get back to work, so I asked him where I could find some marijuana.

“Ask someone in Hashish Hall.” He was looking at Rick, who was dressed in ridiculous orange bell-bottoms with holes in the knees, a white Mexican wedding shirt, and an orange scarf with red stripes.

“This is my friend, Rick Sager,” I said. They shook hands. Rick had a far-off, goofy grin as if he were hatching a plan.

“Hey, man,” Rick said in a whisper since this was a library, “why don’t we go out to lunch after we finish here? You must have a union. This is such a funky college. I’d like to meet some of the
students.”

I knew what was on his mind: women. Rick’s libido, I think, was supercharged.

About the Author

Jeff Richards is a native Washingtonian who moved to Denver recently with his wife and dog, Billy Bones, and near his two children. His memoir of the sixties, Nothing Left to Lose: or How Not to Start a Commune, will debut in April 2025. He has two novels and one short story collection under his belt. Richards loves the past because it does not go anywhere unlike the present which is as slippery as a greased pig. He is also an ancestor worshipper.

Richards’ fiction, essays, and cowboy poetry have appeared in over 30 publications and four anthologies. He was the fiction editor and board member of the washington review, a college teacher for many years principally at George Washington University and has also taught at the high school and elementary level. He has worked as a dishwasher, door-to-door salesmen, farm worker, wilderness counselor, newspaper carrier, radio reporter, and busboy. He has hitchhiked across the country five times, but that was a while back. He is a graduate of the Hollins Writing Program.

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