I once had a buddy I called Crazy John. He came from a dinky town in Nebraska— Holdrege—a place where they made cloth labels for shirts on giant looms. He never wanted to go back. He was half-blind and way too tall. C J majored in political science at Kansas State and was all about revolutions.

One day I join him on a two-person protest of a Kansas State University ROTC parade and probably get photographed by the FBI.

On a Friday afternoon in ’67, I hear on the radio that Chicago is getting hammered with three feet of snow. Crazy John says “Let’s go. My first time ever to Illinois.” We hop in his old Plymouth Valiant with three-on-the-tree and we’re off. We stop in Lincoln, Nebraska for gas and a couple six packs and head east.

We get off track in Iowa, on a two-lane road—I don’t know how—I am sleeping at the time, all that beer made me sleepy. I open my eyes in the middle of the night just in time to see that it is snowing like a mother and the car is spinning around. I pull on the wheel one way while Crazy John pulls the other way. We end up in a ditch at a curve in the road, the car still running with the headlights aiming up like a rocket ship. The front hubcaps are long gone.

Every now and again another car stops and asks if we need help, maybe it’s an Iowa state law that they have to stop. One guy offers to drive Crazy John to the sheriff who has a tow truck. His office is in the middle of the next little town. C J isn’t crazy about doing it, ‘cause one more ticket and his driver’s license is gone, but he doesn’t know what else to do, so he goes.

I think it is really cool to slump over the steering wheel and play dead to spook do-gooders as they stop and trudge up to the Valiant slow and scared. A dude with a truck and chains yanks the car out. I drive it to town, and there’s Crazy John on the inside of a picture window at the sheriff’s department. The lawman has his feet propped up on the desk, his hat down over his face, just like in the movies, snoring. My buddy, standing there looking down on him, afraid to wake him up.

I motion for him to ditch the place, and he hobbles out of the office like a freshly oiled tin woodsman. We get to the windy city by morning. The driving is okay until we can see the skyscrapers ahead. Then there’s a shitload of snow. People just leave their cars right on the Dan Ryan Expressway. It’s hardly two lanes wide where it’s supposed to be seven. We hang out on the South Side for a few days, shoveling out cars and checking out the stuff that is open. Crazy John has never been to any big city before and he loves the place.

Next thing I know, he gets his master’s degree in poly sci at Southern Illinois, the biggest party school. Then he’s living in Chi-Town, paying rent and substitute teaching in inner-city public schools. It’s the summer of ’68. I room with him and another guy a couple blocks from Old Town. I round up a job working the night shift at the seventh largest bank in the country, Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company. I’m typing names and numbers on stock certificates and tearing up the old ones in advance of a merger of two big corporations. I think about getting rich quick by typing my own name on one. My better plan is to type my boss’s name and see if he was still working there the next night. I chicken out, but it doesn’t matter— after I’m back in school, I hear that the merger never goes through. The stock certificate thing is a waste of everybody’s time and the bank has to hire more typists to undo the darn thing.

Crazy John hangs out at the anarchist bookstore a lot. He thinks that’s the way things should be. He’s driving a banged up old Mercury big as a honey wagon. The Democratic National Convention is coming to town and there’s lots going on. Mobs of people who are tired of wars and killing come to Chicago to change things, hoping their man McCarthy gets nominated. I go with C J to marches. We follow Dick Gregory down State Street. We crowd into a white carpeted living room in a fancy South Side home and smell Joan Baez’s pickle breath as she sings “We Shall Overcome” a cappella a few feet in front of us with a determined look in her eyes. Mace and tear gas are our enemies. The news says don’t go outside without a football helmet or a motorcycle helmet. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are already in the ground. My girl, Anita, comes to visit me in Chicago. It gets too scary for us and we fly the coop. We go back to school in Kansas and dodge all the Chicago nastiness.

John lets lots of out-of-towners crash at his pad after I’m gone. The landlord tacks eviction notices on the front door of his overcrowded apartment every day. After the convention, John bails out and scores another place a couple blocks away. A few moochers follow him. One is a paranoiac drug dealer who sometimes thinks John is a narc. He wakes John up at four a.m. and shoots him up to make sure he isn’t. John drives to his subbing assignments in the ghetto. He’s all drugged up. He thinks the cops are on his tail.

Then Crazy John gets drafted. I don’t know how he passed the physical. He’s blind as a worm. His one-man protest gets picked up by Channel 9, WGN TV, but it doesn’t help. The army puts him into a unit of lifers in Oklahoma. He clams up and doesn’t talk to the other soldiers. Who knows how he makes it through?

I haven’t heard from Crazy John for years. I get his address from K-State and send him a holiday card with a letter about Anita and our kids. He writes back about his long and stable career employed by the United States Internal Revenue Service as a tax collector in New Jersey.

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