busted in grenada: the janeen
1970. learning to act at the Yale Drama School (same time Meryll was there). starting to hate it. the perpetual ‘one’s body and one’s self is one’s ‘instrument’ and one needs to practice ‘it’ all the time’ was turning me inside out: ‘practicing’ accents, facial tics, postures. my friends wondered what the fuck was going on with Kinscherf? why does he seem so fake? when i heard that an friend of a friend of mine, a pot dealer from Amherst College, was shooting a movie in the West Indies and that i could have a part, it was the nudge i needed. i dropped out of Yale, got my pal Francesca to hop on the bus, bounce outa New Haven and fly on Amherst’s dime to the Caribbean. tough call, right? we taxied cross-island to one of several pink bungalow beach houses, were given our own rooms, our own Vespa scooters, our own cars to share and all the food, booze and drugs we could foie gras choke down. our homework, the first week? ‘familiarize’ ourselves with the island. this meant getting stoned drunk tripped out and pirate tanned on our own private post card perfect beach. two crescent halves forming a white sand/black sand middle finger insinuating out into the Gulf with a chubby lighthouse at the fingernail tip. it’s beacon — a favorite LSD drop spot where kaleidoscopic film clips spit fired out of gonzo foreheads. deep in the jungle we skinny dipped waterfalls, parrots swooping overhead, banana clusters plopping like puppies into our sated laps. seafood spreads and rum cocktails paraded on the cheap in open air St Georges casbahs. natives laughing (at us? with us?). this was paradise and it was all ours all the time. one week in and against the inky blue black of a starry starry night a sailboat, our sailboat, the schooner Janeen (re-named and re-painted The Sad-Eyed Lady) edged past the psychedelic lighthouse and dropped anchor in our tiny personal bay. a two-masted monster, tip top lights winking, full crew in dress whites, galley with a chef from Paris, lobster, steak and champagne on ice — the works. we were oared out to eat drink smoke fart, whatever, not caring whatthefuck this movie was about or when we would begin to shoot it. we were surfing an infinity rainbow. be here now was an induced reality. one night our main man from Amherst gathered us round and story-told, obliquely and slo-mo stoned, the plot: we were 21st Century pirates chasing leftover refugees after an earth kill nuclear freeze. our orders: seize any ship or person caught in the crosshairs. that was it?! who cared? we were down for the count. i became ‘Lookout’, awarded an all brass telescope which i polished obsessively and had macramed by a Grenadian hippie so that i could wear it like cutlass. arrgh! i loved the thing. wore it all over the place, ‘getting into character’ drug induced Actor’s Studio style. the first shot the first day was of me, naked, at the top of the mid-mast spyglass spotting a mom n dad sloop who’s teenage daughter was booty bounty. that girl, Janie, was (not certain about this) the girlfriend of our benefactor and possibly the muse for his film-to-be. but who knew about anything for sure? i can’t emphasize enough that we were, most of us most of the time, sky high on vitamin LSD. that first day of the shoot i saw below my dangling legs, a deck so miniaturized it looked like a toy boat bobbing in a bathtub. when we cut through a 50 yard diameter dart board oil slick so astonishingly beautiful my eyeballs hurt. i wanted to dive into the shimmering bull’s eye and shape-shift onto a mountaintop in Nepal. seriously. at night we skinny dipped into a phosphorescent sea so manifest that swimming felt like flying. or like finger painting. we’d anchor in St. George’s harbor, motor a dingy into town and get more fucked up and more outrageous by the minute. we set up a full band on deck and blasted endless iterations of Satisfaction cross town, our girls topless. usually topless. all this behavior occurring without complaint. case in point: a young chiquita, a Grenadian, had herself rowed out to The Sad-Eyed Lady to see what was happening. just a kid, no more than 16 wearing a sequined Carmen Miranda pineapple turban with three rattlesnake maracas in each tight fist, eyes flashing. her name, i kid you not, Helen Of Troy Eleanor Roosevelt Nielson. her mom, a Grenadian, her dad a shipping baron from across the pond in Holland. Helen glommed onto us like a starfish, flitting in and out of our orbit and adjusting to our weirdness as best she could. as did handsome Australian sailor boys who, like us, wanted to gulp down the full feast of booze weed acid and hash that was all over the compound. 20th century world weary refugees who pulled into Port Wherever, worked partied fucked and then, after they had enough, hired onto a new rig, a new ocean, a new port. round and round the globe — a moveable feast, Aussie style. as much as anytime in our lives this was heaven on earth, wild heart throbbing freedom all too soon to end. around the third/fourth day of the filming as i was monkey-ing about in the rigging, the one boat Grenadian ‘Navy’ putt-putted into our slip stream, armed and megaphoned. the charges: drugs and nudity. both true. we were whisked off the Janeen, driven to a dank up-island prison (nerves on edge now that the drugs and booze had worn off) and dumped into a two room cinder block jailhouse. boys in one hole, girls in the other. tin buckets to piss and shit in. the trial set for the next day. one minute, sky high in our pre-fab Nirvana, the next, incarcerated. and the next? court. would we be trapped and raped here for life? not to be: lucky result. Helen Of Troy Eleanor Roosevelt Neilson’s cousin, a guy named Maurice, signed on as our defense. he painted us unwitting victims from good American homes having innocent fun and who had been caught at an awkward unguarded moment. we were on a plane early the next morning. Helen came along for ride. she got married in Boston a few weeks later and became Helen Of Troy Eleanor Roosevelt Nielson Parker. my dad, Dick, her best man. the rest of us fled to a house by a river in Greenfield, MA, paid for and outfitted, again, by our pirate king. the plan: start a band and get famous fast. more acid, more weed, more insanity until one night, driving back from Janie’s house, i saw flames roman candling the night sky. Plan 2, a one and done. coda: our lawyer, Maurice, was elected Prime Minister of Grenada. in 1983, the island was invaded by Castro Cubans and Maurice was assassinated. Reagan sent in the Marines making tiny war history. i moved to Somerville, started my first band, Orchestra Luna and wound up living in one town for the next 40 plus. no more Kerouac road trips. coup de gras? Helen is now Helen Of Troy Eleanor Roosevelt Nielson Parker Spielman and lives in Hawaii. the movie? atrophying in a freezer somewhere in Brooklyn.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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