As the title suggests, this post is the first of a three-part series about places I have known and loved well. To truly be in a place means that one’s senses are alert to the present moment. In turn, this means we can later - perhaps many years later - appreciate the gifts that specific places have given us only by recalling them well, vividly, and with the perspective that time affords. This is what I have tried to do here.
The Plaza of the Americas
(Gainesville, Florida)
I enrolled at the University of Florida as a sophomore in the spring of 1978. It was my first time on a big college campus in a real college town, and in my mind and memory, the Plaza of the Americas - a large, grassy area that fronted the main library - was the heart of the university. I saw many things there, some of them inspiring and others quite ugly, and still others just plain weird, but in all, it seemed the headwaters of the wild currents that flowed outward and through the veins of the entire community of scholars, hippies, park-bench evangelists, musicians, vagabonds, political firebrands, doomsayers, and through my own veins as well.
I confess that as a young man of twenty, inexperienced, awkward, and with raw and un-sanitized thinking, the girls were the first attraction that drew my gaze in that wonderful and vibrant world. Now, I will say that in those days I was still extraordinarily idealistic in all things, so I was not necessarily “on the hunt” for pretty faces and tanned, lithe bodies (though they were plentiful). After having come fresh from small, private school campuses with their wool-skirted and collared coteries, I was seeking to know many kinds of people; I was more interested in the human character and in encountering different views of the world than I have been at any other time in my life, but naturally, that is what a university should be. If I happened to meet a free-spirited and intelligent woman who was also beautiful, so much the better, but it didn’t really matter that much. I did meet a few, in fact, but suffice it to say that those intrigues were not often mutual.
The Plaza of the Americas was a people-watcher’s paradise, and I knew of nothing quite so satisfying as lying on the grass on a warm and breezy April afternoon, watching the human parade. Aside from the eager young academics bustling to class in their shorts and sleeveless tee shirts, gripping the straps of their backpacks as though they were stuffed with gold, and aside from the rumpled, often wild-haired professors ambling along the walkways, there was an odd cast of characters about whose connections to the university I was unclear. Were they homeless? Were they exiled radicals? Escapees from the local psyche ward? Were they art students? In any case, they were on the Plaza every day, these stringy, bare-chested, barefooted insurgents who danced and sang the day away, seemingly without a care in the world.
There was one fellow in particular, perhaps in his mid-thirties, whose only opportunities for bathing seemed to be those spring and early-summer afternoons when the skies would fill with bulbous purple clouds and then dump steady troughs of water over the plaza, where he would stand in his shorts with his face upturned. Much to his credit, he was a decent guitar player (yes, he would even play in the rain) and seemed to know the words to every song Bob Dylan had written up to that point in his career. I never knew his name, but I heard rumors (possibly started by himself) that he had once been a nuclear physicist but had experimented a bit too daringly with hard drugs.
Then there were the true revolutionaries, those bearded, intrepid political extremists who were not kidding around. They railed against the system and against convention, handing out socialist pamphlets, harassing the frat boys in their Izod shirts, expensive sandals, and crew cuts, and seeking to lure the most naive girls into their outlaws’ clan with pot and quaaludes and wine. But aside from these kinds of annoyances, they were harmless; they were peace-niks, really, and we knew them by nicknames such as Reprobate and Radical Joe. None of them ever bothered me, except for one or two of them who would routinely ask me if I would give them half of whatever I had just bought from the vending machine under the library archway, in the interest of brotherly love, they said. Usually I would comply.
When an evangelical Christian preacher named Jed Smock would show up on the plaza, the stage was set for some grand entertainment. He and the socialists were meant for each other, as they played into one another’s hands like well-rehearsed professional wrestlers, and their arguments, while not always eloquent, were vehement and laced with insults, and they would typically attract a crowd of fifty to a hundred or so onlookers, kids on their way to class who could not resist an old-fashioned knockdown between a crowd of atheists and a hardline, grim-faced character straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story. It was not just fire and brimstone versus cold unbelief: it was the sulfurous furies of hell and damnation thrashing in the smoldering ditches and rank waters with the blunt trauma of death as master. It was some of the finest showmanship you were likely to see anyplace.
Jed was a sweaty, hyped-up version of those horribly mean, judgmental, accusatory “Christians” you run across once in a while, especially in the south, and he had a gift for looking you in the eye, probing your soul, and then loudly identifying your most shameful sin:
“SO, you like those freshman girls, I see. You will rot in hell with your genitals in your mouth.”
Or…
“I can spot a masturbator from a mile away, young man. Go wash yourself and ask God for forgiveness.”
Despite that, good old Reprobate was a fair match for Jed, circling him like a hungry wolf waiting for a chance at the bare haunches, distracting him with barbs from Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and daring him to call down the thunderous wrath of God upon him at that very instant, at which Jed would simply laugh and say, “Oh, it won’t be God you’ll be meeting at the end. The Devil is preparing a special rotisserie just for you.”
Perhaps ironically, Jed eventually married a UF coed, Cindy Lasseter, a skeletal, self-proclaimed disco queen whom he had called out in the crowd as a “wicked woman.” Then the two of them would double-team their audience of skeptics and cynics, Cindy pacing about and waving the Good Book on high as Jed unlocked his word hoard.
When summer came on and the second semester would draw to a close, Jed and Cindy would pack up their Bibles and head off to scout out other colleges, promising all of us that he would return in the fall, seeing as how Gainesville and the University of Florida was the most sinful place he’d ever been called upon to minister to.
If you had seen what I saw on Halloween nights on the Plaza of the Americas, you might be inclined to agree with Jed. In 1970, the university began hosting the infamous Halloween Ball, little suspecting the sort of debauchery that would ensue, and finally nixing the party in 1983 because of ongoing illicit behavior by student participants. I was attending UF in the ball’s heyday, and I can attest to the unfettered wildness of the occasion. The costumes themselves were provocative enough: for instance, 1978 was “the year of three popes” because of the untimely deaths of Paul VI and John Paul I and the resulting election of John Paul II, and one group of merry pranksters commemorated those events by dressing as bishops carrying a dead pope atop a funeral bier for all to see. I’ll never know where they found such authentic-looking costumes. In consideration of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a friend of mine dressed as “an abortion,” wearing a hospital gown with a huge blood stain on its lower half (I know - very poor taste no matter what your opinions are). Of course, there were giant penis and breast costumes, and the obligatory werewolves and vampires with blood draining from their fangs, but as for me, I went as Hawkeye Pierce from the TV show MASH, which meant that all I had to do was don a bathrobe and a cowboy hat and carry a martini around.
Drugs were by no means in short supply at the Halloween Ball. It was open carry season for marijuana, and I suspect that far more dangerous substances were also being ingested. I remember seeing one young man taken away on a gurney from the first aid station; it was very frightening, he was pale and absolutely unconscious, unmoving, eyes open and glazed over, and I recall someone saying, “Whoa, that guy’s dead.” Another year - maybe it was ’79, when I was living in the area near campus called the Student Ghetto (no explanation necessary) - I was sitting with some neighbors in the apartment building’s courtyard when a slim young woman wandered in from the street. I had to look twice - she was completely naked but had spray-painted herself from her neck to her toes with neon-green paint, and she was…well, let’s just say she was not at all sober. She stood there silently for a few minutes listening to our beer-stoked conversation, and then someone gave her a couple of pills, and she toddled off into the night.
There was usually good music, too, to soothe or further stimulate the crowd, surging from stacks of amps and speakers on a stage erected in front of the library. My favorite was the high-energy band the Dixie Dregs, with guitarist Steve Morris’s note-crammed solos and technical fluidity. It all made for a surreal experience - the air thick with marijuana smoke and electric guitars, the kids writhing weirdly in their weird costumes, all surrounded by the stately academic buildings where, during the day, none of this had even been conceivable.
Alas, with ever-spiraling madness and reports of spontaneous sexual orgies (none of which I ever witnessed) and heavy drug use, UF wisely decided bring an end to the Halloween Ball, probably more to avoid the inevitable lawsuit than to protect student safety. I really cannot imagine what administrators thought would happen when they originally allowed the event to be held on campus, but for the anarchists, it had been a great success. I think the fact that in 2016 the university began offering round-the-clock counseling for any student offended by another’s halloween costume tells us everything we need to know about recent changes in our public education system.
In sharp contrast, one of the most peaceful groups ever to set up camp on the Plaza of the Americas has been the Hare Krishnas. The Hindu devotees have been serving a cheap lunch on campus since 1971, and when I was there, they still wore chiffon robes and shaved their heads, and they intoned their hypnotic chant with percussive accompaniment. The chant continues, apparently, but I’m told that the Krishnas now dress conventionally. I admit that when I was a UF student, I thought they were simply another sideshow in the Plaza Carnival, and their food did not appeal to me, but it seems they have stood the test of time, feeding millions of broke young people over the decades. Besides, given the ever-loudening media bombardments and distractions that students contend with today, meditation seems like a pretty good idea.
Of the many noteworthy, quirky individuals who frequented the Plaza in those days, perhaps the quirkiest was Gator Man. His real name was Curtis Read, and he possessed two very unusual talents: he could commune with the alligators in their natural habitat at Lake Alice, on campus near the agricultural complex, even getting in the water, cavorting with them, and riding on their leathery backs. On the Plaza of the Americas, he had a meager income as a live mannequin. He would often stand near the library’s entrance, or perhaps with one foot up on a bench along the sidewalk, utterly still, reputedly not even blinking for as long as three hours at a time. It may seem odd that passersby would lay coins and dollar bills at his feet for doing absolutely nothing at all, but I suppose that given the typically frenetic pace of life on campus, total inertia was deemed a genuine gift.
In summary, I find that I cannot say that the Plaza was a microcosm, or any of that kind of nonsense, but I will say that it was (and to a great extent still is, I’m sure) a very real place whose faces live in full color in my memory. I hear the voices of youth there, and the smells of marijuana and of the Krishnas’ Indian dishes return to me sometimes, and I long to go back there and do it all over again, paying more attention to everything this time. I often wonder what I might have missed, but I do not wonder what happened to them all. I prefer them just as they are - as sharp as glass figures in the living museum of my brain.
