Posted to the large Facebook group Merry Pranksters

Marsha Smith. I remembered her full name just now so now I have to tell this story.  Marsha told me that she had been on a Hog Farm bus. She told me she’s gotten kicked off that bus in someplace like Afghanistan, or in that part of the world. Marsha Smith. Short, dark hair, talkative, vivacious, extremely extroverted.

I believed her when she said she had been on the Hog Farm bus because she was a close friend of Paul Foster. He would know. Marsha knew we were close friends with Paul Foster. For a few months somewhere in 1967 and Marshall lived with us as part of our extended family in Santa Monica. I remember this well because she typed up a couple of my homework assignments for me.

Here is a really cool side story here about a homework assignment that my teacher refused to believe I wrote. I had spent the first half of the semester not doing anything except reading science fiction books when he wasn’t looking at me. He gave an assignment to write a descriptive paper. That was something I felt I wanted to do. I rummaged around in my mother’s desk drawer till I found the joint that I knew would be in there somewhere, smoked it, and wrote a really cool story describing in great detail a room. I described everything in the room, what was hanging on the walls ad what was out the window. Marsha typed it and corrected the spelling.  My teacher knew I couldn’t spell. He gave me an F on it and accused me of plagiarism. He wrote on the paper “If you can write like this you should be teaching the class not me.” I got kicked out of his class for calling him an asshole.

In the fall of 1968 my mother moved me and my two brothers to the itty, bitty, tiny, almost ghost town of Eureka, Nevada, population 400. Several hundred miles east of Carson City. Over 90 miles to the nearest supermarket grocery store, in Elko, NV. At that time Eureka, Nevada had one grocery store, several gas stations and about 5 bars.

My mother, Marge King, had been experiencing health problems living in the smog in Los Angeles. She wanted to make a career change, from working as a research librarian in the aerospace industry to being a high-school teacher. In California you had to have 2 years practice teaching to be a public school teacher. My mother did not have the luxury to take 2 years off from providing for us as a single parent to ‘practice’ teaching. But she found out that in these extremely small, very rural towns out in the middle of nowhere they don’t care if you have had any practice teaching. As long as you have a 4 year degree they will hire you. As a sophomore in the school district in Santa Monica I had attended a high school that had three thousand students in 3 grades. The next year, as a junior in high school in Eureka, Nevada, there were 80 students in six different grades. And my mother was my math teacher.

My older sister stayed behind in Santa Monica because she had graduated highschool and was working and taking college classes. That Thanksgiving holiday we spent a few days with her. Now this is where the story gets a little tricky for me to tell. It is kind of personal. My birthday is in November so I was a few weeks away from turning 15. We had been full-blown hippies for a few years at that point. That all started for me just before I turn 12. We had just moved to Venice, California and my mother gave me a healthy dose of very pure LSD. I don’t remember a whole lot about that first trip except that we lived a few blocks from the beach and we spent some of it wandering in the fog, listening to the waves.

By Thanksgiving of 1968 I had been right in the middle of the ‘free love’ movement for a few years, but I had still not gotten laid. Apparently my mother was aware of this and decided to do something about it. This is where Marsha Smith comes back into the story. Yes, you read that right, my mother arranged for me to lose my virginity to Marsha Smith. I will spare you the details. LOL. Suffice it to say that her plan worked just fine.

Fast forward to the fall of 1973. I had had a ‘terrible, horrible, no good, very bad’ year, starting in the fall of 1972. I had been suffering from a thought disorder. I was quite literally crazy for about one whole year. In and out of psychiatric hospitals, hearing voices, doing what the voices told me to do. This was not drug related. It is also a separate story that I’m sure I will till someday. For the purposes of this story about Marsha Smith all you need to know is that by the fall of 1973 I had come completely out of it. I was turning 20 that fall. I had a job, I had my own apartment. In Sacramento, my home town. I’m extremely fortunate to be in the very rare category of people who met all of the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia at some point and then never, ever had any symptoms of that disease again for the rest of their life.

So who shows up on my doorstep but Marsha Smith. Naturally I moved her right in because, you know, sex. She convinced me to go with her to Mexico so we could live off of her social security disability check high on the hog. But first we had to travel to Oregon so she could retrieve some of her stuff that was being held for her by Paul Foster, one of the original Merry Pranksters and a friend of my mothers. I quit my job and we hit the road, hitchhiking vagabonds, doing our best to be free spirits.

When we got to Paul Foster’s house he pulled me aside and he gave me a very long, intense lecture about who Marsha Smith really was and what would happen to me if I continued to hitch my wagon to hers. I was very taken aback by this. He was very, very serious, in a way I’ve never seen him be before. I think he told me stories of her behavior that got her kicked off the bus but my memory is a bit hazy on what he actually said. From the way our conversation went down I could tell that he had completely arranged it with his wife or partner at the time. For her to keep Marsha occupied so that he could have a long, private conversation with me. I was convinced by what he said. I told Marsha that I was going north to visit one of my uncles in Washington State, that she could not come with me, and that she would have to go on to Mexico without me.

Note: I don’t want anyone to get the impression from this that I am saying that I was ever a really close friend of Paul Foster. This was one of only a handful of interactions I had with him in my entire life. The most memorable one, by far. He and my mother were very close, at different times, for a short while.

The last I heard about Marsha Smith was a few decades later. My mother told me she had heard that Marsha was living in San Francisco. That Marsha had elected to undergo a gender reassignment surgery. She was now a he.

Here is a comment on this facebook post from Erin Sullivan, used here with her permission. 

“I remember Marsha very VERY well . . . she hung out periodically at the Sunland Tujunga Hog Farm – vis. Paul Foster . . . . then she ended up going to India and riding a Harley all around the continent . . . she was quite mad, but not in a horrible way, just nuts tho!
Fun to have around on occasion at dinners on the Farm.
She was also busted with all of us Hog Farm Haight peeps and Merry ones and the bands, everyone was part of the “clean up” of the Haight!
The south San Francisco jail was FULL of us, freaks and the Dead and a couple other bands were also in the sweep of the Haight by the cops!
It was a phenomenon! Amazing, two days and our particular mutual lawyer got us all out!?”

I commented that I was grateful for my wild ride with Marsha.

“I’ll BET it was a ride! tornado and truly ‘wild’ in the true sense of the world. Paul Fffff-oster coudn’t even come up to that level of craziness and vigour she exuded! ? And that is saying something for sure!!!”

Peace, love and may the force be with you.

Storm