The Last Black Hippie in Connecticut
The characters in The Last Black Hippie in Connecticut are tethered to a world by the pink umbilical cord tightened around the neck of a newborn. The birthplace is prison. The damned angel of the military and corporate flies above. She is a sky pilot releasing witless seed over the earth. The anti-capital-punishment/anti-war thread shows its terror and absurdity. The novel is set in a time and place where being born is a form of capital punishment. Ben Cocoa, the lead, is punished for being workingclass, tracked in a public school and marked a special student with low intelligence. Nothing can save him. The school called him a juvenile delinquent. The military calls him a bullet-catcher. Neighbors nickname him T. Rex. On a Sunday, he is arrested for smoking weed behind a dairy. He's given a choice: join the Army or prison. He joins the Army but refuses to go to Vietnam, drops chocolate mescaline, slips on ice in front of a bowling alley and breaks his neck. He goes AWOL. He's arrested while dancing at what he calls Viagra Falls. They drive him to a small prison in a small Ohio town. The fingerprints he tried to burn out of the golden snap of his thumb identify him as one of the thieves who broke into the root cellar of the Pentagon and defused atomic bombs. He was given a ten-year sentence until he beheaded a prison guard who called his father a motherfucker. He's placed inside an iron lung on death row. The state argues the method of execution. Can they electrify the iron lung? Can they attach a hose and spew poison gas into the lung? Can they drown him by filling it with ice water? Can they have a firing squad fire hollow point bullets into it? Can they use a guillotine? Ben's head sticks out like a small hungry bird.
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