Victor Burgandy
A Victor Burgandy Story…
‘I was never good or bad, I just wanted experience. If I thought it would get me high, I ingested it. If I thought it would feel good, I ingested it. By age 11 in 1962 all I could do was make ‘mini bikes’. We would mount an old lawnmower engine bolted onto a 1×1 sqaure piece of plywood on a bicycle. With a centrifugal clutch and a tractor engine belt wrapped on a rear wheel pully, we were good, off to the races. For braking, feet and pedals some.
Everyday my buddy Joe Powers and I would ride our mini bikes to Saint Josephs Catholic School, just a few blocks from were the Chicago L train stops at Howard.
Most days, I would cut class and go hang out with my buddy Leo who owned the newspaper stand at Linden Station. Leo was from Skokie, a holocaust survivor. I could buy illegal fire crackers from him. He learned to hustle some in Auswitz. He would collect coins for papers all day long, (hunched, starved by the Nazis). Leo would say hello to all the ‘suits’ getting on the electric train. Leo and I were like shadows to the suits.
I dropped out of high school in 1966, my sophomore year. My pal Tommy Sprague (a 15 year old varsity basketball star at New Trier High School) was already shooting speed in his bedroom at his parents house . He invited me over to listen to the new Rolling Stones album one day. We had a little taste, shot up some cookies as ‘Light Years’ was screaming out the box. Tommy had a set of head phones, we would pass them back and forth. I think Tommy and I were shooting up before Keith Richards. Tommy died in 1967 of a drug overdose.
One night three of us ‘hoods’ were out drinking and driving. Dickey Roberts, Mark Fishel, and yours truly. Mark at 15 was a blues drummer who had already jammed with Paul Butterfield at the Chess Club. Dickey was beyond wild, we were cruising the village, I was riding shot gun, Mark was in the back seat. Dickey was driving his old man’s Rambler Station Wagon. We were blind drunk, young and fearless. At the Northwestern train intersection the Milwaukee Union was coming through. Dickey decided to play chicken with the train and we lost. Dickey almost beat the train, the Rambler made it half way out. But Mark Fishel was instantly killed. It was one of those experiences that happens very fast and slow at the same time. Mark Fishel if he had lived would have been a famous blues and rock drummer for sure. RIP my pals, Mark Fishel and Tommy Sprague.
In the summer of 1968 my parents eighty-sixed me from our small track house in Wilmette, Illinois. I was 16 years old. The beatific exit was like, imagine listening to ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. Then, my mother Pauli Mae looks her only son in the eyes and says “Victor your father and I think you are very different, we don’t really know you anymore?”
I threw a bundle of dirty clothes in a Boy Scout duffel bag. On the way to Linden Street L Station, I stopped by Tommy Sprague’s house to talk to his mother, Emma, about Tommy’s death a few months earlier. She was brave in the face of fire. We turned on and listened to Edith Piaf and Woody Guthrie. She seduced me and we ended up in her bathtub together. Today you would call sweet Emma Sprague, MILF.
Libido in pulse over drive, I made it to the Linden platform at 9 pm. Leo had closed the paper stand already and it was Friday Sabbath. I had a few bucks and some traveler checks Pauli Mae stuffed in my pocket under Pop’s nose. Friday night, summer time in Chicago circa 1968. I knew what had to be done. I got on the train, choosing to ride between cars. Sitting down on the stainless steel bridge, with my feet and legs swinging side car in the breeze. Knowing late trains didn’t have signal men, I could get away with it.
I was hopped up blind, white bread visionary, riding the CTA Red Line. By the time we (VB and Ray Charles) made it to Howard Station we had to switch trains. I wanted to get off. Howard divided Evanston and Chicago. We called the divide ‘ no man’s land’. It didn’t belong to the knobbish whites of Evanston or to the black folks of Chicago. But one thing for sure, you could get a taste of brown Mex heroin here. Tommy Sprague could smell dope out in any grocery, laundry or car wash.
Perched like a nut bolt, riding between cars and onwards, outwards and through the Yangtze River delta. I left temptation on Howard, I had a taste for something different.
I got off at Cermack-Chinatown, CTA Red Line, midnight 1968. It was 10 am. A China Town funeral was in full roar, dragons on the fly, weaving in, out and around, flying like bats, lighting up Cermack in sepia light. And always, fireworks.
I was White Bread, a 16 year old junky circa 68, who like most junks could telepathically produce radar waves, like a blood hound with night vision.
As I beamed in making my way through the ‘festival of death’ I could see a beacon that looked like a Chinese antique store. Why was it open so late? In the front window display on a Boxer era soap box, was a opium pipe, not a antique. I picked it up and walked in through a Burmese teak door with the pipe in tow. I saw a Chinamen in black, skeletal, sipping tea smoking a Sherman.
I walked to the desk and asked him to wrap up the pipe. He looked at me with yellow eyes and said “Victor, do you have something to smoke in the pipe? I didn’t remember telling the man my name. I said , “man I can buy Prince Albert at the drug store.” He raised a curled finger nail and pointed it, motion was suspended for a second.
The Chinamen wanted to sell dope. He produced what looked like a bar of jasmine soap. Opened the wrapper, it was black tar opium. I gave him 45 dollars and walked out with the prize.
It was 1 am by now so I took a taxi to the the Lawson YMCA. There was a late crowd from Oklahoma dressed like shit kickers. They had come to Chicago for the Beef Producers of America convention at the stock yards. Talk about yokels, od a lay he hoo, dumb fucked drunk and yapping nonsense.
While I sat and waited to check in the Y in a mildewed stuffed chair. I noticed a Venus De Marlo shaped black girl waiting to check in. She looked as though she worked on the railroad. She wore stripped overalls and carried a lunch bucket. We were at the front desk together. We made eye contact.
Her name was Honey Flower. We agreed to meet up in my room and party some. When Honey showed up, she was naked underneath her kimono. She was twenty, older than me by four years. I was hardly a virgin and had fucked my dead friends mother earlier in the day. Honey was off from her job on the Milwaukee Union line for a few days.
When she took out the braids her hair expanded into a huge Afro. I got lost in it. We pushed towels in door, and started puffing opium and blowing huge smoke rings into the air. The smoke rings would expand and break, leaving Honey Flower and I in the most beautiful opium hazes. Expanding and pulsating vast jungle scenarios.
Epilogue
Honey Flower never made it back to work. We both lost our way for awhile and ended up hustling to survive for a period. But, the day Pauli Mae and Pops kicked VB out of the house was a great day. The whole universe opened up for Victor Burgundy and he was free form to explore what he damn well wanted. VB is a man in the most true sense, he has never wore a suit or sold out.
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