30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Fourteen: Sarge

Time out for a character bio...

Let's get to know Kim a little better, because he's about to get a nickname (or "Prankster" name as we call them up here in Kesey Country).

I'd known Kim for probably seven or eight years. When I actually think about it, I don't know that he ever attended my high school, or had transferred out sometime before graduation. Possibly, he was a friend of TMAX and Stu, who I did attend school with.

At any rate Kim had always been an interesting character. Possessed with a dry sense of humor, appreciative of the cartoons of Ghan Wilson, completely enamored of any music that Frank Zappa made, and fond of being a little wild in his own way. Never one to shirk from a challenge of any sort, he pulled off some nutty pranks.

Like the time one of his friends took his new girlfriend to the Torrance Drive In Theatre. Kim assembled eight or ten friends (including me), and BS'ed our way past the ticket takers to pull a "commando raid" on the movie-going couple. After locating their VW bug in the lot, we converged on it from all different directions at an arranged signal, grabbing the car and tossing it around violently while Kim hopped on the hood, stripped to the waist holding a machete between his teeth.

His favorite pastime when new visitors to his home came calling was to show them his parents "Custom, stock-from-the-factory dog" (a dachshund with one testicle).

One time, he talked me into climbing down a sheer cliff to the Pacific Ocean because someone had stolen a new Ford Mustang and driven it off the cliff. It was laying upside down in about two feet of water, and he wanted to see if it had any salvageable parts. It didn't, but so that the trip wouldn't be wasted, he collected about half a dozen Abalone (still in the shell), and a huge, heavy packing crate that he wanted to use as a cabinet for his stereo. Dragging all that crap back up the cliff wasn't my idea of recreation.

In the early 1970's Kim found that he was about 100% sure to get conscripted into the armed services and sent to Vietnam. Instead, he enlisted in the Army for four years and entered the medic corps. First stationed in El Paso, Texas, I sent him some custom cassette tapes of music, news and skits that those of us with high lottery numbers back at home would perform. I did this for a number of years, sending tapes to friends in the service stationed all over the world. Kim was the only one to ever send tapes back, filled with wit and his own selections of music (mostly Zappa). It was through these tapes that we formed the idea of creating a cooperative living situation in Oregon.

Back in the present (1975), Woodley and I found that Kim had positioned himself as the "alpha male", the boss, the "big cheese" and given that we were dependent upon him and his parents for a place to live, we were pretty much under his thumb.

At some point, I decided that he needed a more appropriate moniker. Since his military background was obvious, and because he liked barking orders at us, we christened him "Sarge", which suited him just fine. Terri didn't care for our choice at all, but Sarge would respond to our calling him by that name, so we continued.

Just so you can see how fitting this name was, here's a photo of "Sarge" at Christmas, 1973:

What Woodley and I were finding that instead of a cooperative living situation, we were more like hired hands, without the benefit of being paid or having days off. Pretty much any time we planned to take a day off, go somewhere, work on our trucks, or just read a book, Sarge or Jeep would find something for us to do, and we'd be forced to cancel our plans. It wasn't even possible for us to retreat to the tree house to practice duets on our recorders, as Sarge would hear the woodwind instruments through the trees and either yell for us, or, if we didn't respond, come up the hill and rout us from our time together.

Sarge was very contemptuous of our desire to maintain a vegetarian diet, equating it with "stump-breaking cows". I didn't then, and never have understood how not eating meat is associated with having sex with farm animals, but that's what he was inferring.

He also took to using his pellet rifle to get our attention. If we slept too late in the morning, he'd stand on the deck outside the trailer and pepper the walls of our trucks with BB's. He even shot Woodley's oversized black Labrador, Zeus in the ass a couple of times, lodging lead pellets in his skin.

No, things weren't turning out to be too terribly cooperative after all.