I wish Johnathon Richter was here to tell you the fascinating tale of the early days of his life, before he landed with his wife and kid at the Hillcroft Manor and turned my life upside down. See, John's a great storyteller. Way better than me. But time has rolled on since those days, and I'm not sure he's too interested in reminiscing. He never has been one to dwell much in the past, he always just moved on to the next big thing, no looking back. That's really the story of his life, even in his early days. Always moving on to the next big thing.

Richter was raised on a ranch just outside of a town called Nowhere. Okay, not literally, but close enough. The 1950s were a good time to be in the ranching business--America's love affair with the hamburger was in full swing, and there was plenty of post-war money flowing, and procreation happening, which of course meant more and more hamburger eaters, every day. So Richter's family was important, at least by small-town mid-America standards. They were indeed one of the most prominent families in their little town, and especially at the local church. This was also the time of rising fundamentalism in America-- televangelists were all the rage, and the Richters were true believers.

John Richter's life was laid out for him in what many of us would consider a dull black and white: upon graduating high school, he was the most eligible bachelor in town, and all he had to do was select one of the girls from church, marry her, and start producing babies. Then wait until his dad retired and he inherited the ranch.

The girl he selected was Emily, a pretty little thing only sixteen years old. Her parents were fine with the arrangement, and she dropped out of school to be his bride. Less than two months after their wedding night, they announced that Emily was pregnant. And so it was that Richter was still only eighteen years old when his young wife gave birth to a little baby girl, and they named her Rachel after the lady in the Bible. He took a job at the local truck repair shop to feed his family, helping his dad out at the ranch when he wasn't working at the shop and waiting until it was his turn to take over as the most important man in town.

But, as I'm sure you all know, the Fates have a way of throwing wrenches in our plans, and for Richter, this involved a big A-frame contraption that the repair shop used to hoist engines out of trucks, which collapsed one day and left him with a broken back and a body that was useless from the waist down.

By any reasonable reckoning, this was an immense tragedy, but to hear Richter tell the story, it was the best thing that ever could have happened to him. Ninteen years old now, he had a wife and a six month old daughter and no prospects at all. But his father hired a fancy lawyer from the big city, and they sued the equipment manufacturer, who settled out of court for a handsome sum. And suddenly young Richter was quite wealthy. With no chance now to be the one who takes over the ranch from his father when he retires, it was decided that the best thing he could do with his life was to go to the university and study agribusiness. And so Richter took his little wife and daughter to the city, where he enrolled in the state university.

After a year of agribusiness studies, he decided that his real interests lay in chemistry. At the time, turning petrochemicals into fertilizer was a burgeoning business, and this was how Richter envisioned his future. He was an amazingly intelligent young man, and chemistry proved to be his true forte. But along the way, he also happened to take a class in religion, as a required elective. He figured it'd be easy, what with his fundamentalist upbringing--surely he knew more about God than just about anyone on campus. It turned out, though, that it wasn't quite what he expected. Turned out to be a survey course of world religions. And this is where he was first exposed to Eastern traditions-- Buddhism, Hinduism, even Christian mysticism.

At this point, still not yet twenty-one years old, he hadn't entirely abandoned his fundamentalist upbringing, but the cracks were starting to show. He was beginning to learn that there was a whole lot out there in the world that he knew nothing about. This started him on a personal odyssey from the confines of his wheelchair, with his wife and daughter along for the ride. Upon receiving his bachelor degree, he traveled to India, discovered a whole existence that he had never imagined before, found enlightenment, and returned home to enroll in graduate school at UC Berkeley.

Now, this was 1967, and Berkeley at the time was about as far from small town mid-America as India had been; his studies still involved petrochemical fertilizers, but his heart wasn't in it anymore.

And then he dropped acid for the first time.

Now, you probably know Timothy Leary's famous line about "tune in, turn on, and drop out," and that's exactly what Richter did. He left Berkeley to hang out with the hippies in Haight-Ashbury, and became a certifiable acid freak. His sweet little wife Emily was herself 100% behind this; turns out, she enjoyed dropping acid as much as her husband. It was a crazy time in America, and the idea that a couple of young fundamentalist Christians might abandon their upbringing for something so altogether different wasn't actually that hard to believe. So now the Richters went on another journey, searching to recapture that sense of Enlightenment that they had found in India, and to find a place where he could set up a little chemistry shop to brew the best LSD that the world has ever seen. That's how they wound up at the Hillcroft Manor. And that's how they wound up in my life.

Hillcroft Manor was country estate in the Catskills in upstate New York that had been converted at some point into a little hotel. My parents purchased the Manor when I was young, with money my mother had inherited from her father's estate, and because my father was a professor in Buffalo, my mom was mostly in charge of running the hotel. For the early years of my life, this worked out quite splendidly; summers spent in the Catskills, the off-season in Buffalo. The hotel never made much money, but that was okay. They weren't in it for the money anyway.

But then, the Fates had a nasty turn in store for my family as well. My mother was diagnosed with MS, and in only a few short years, her body had failed her. Fortuitously for the story I'm telling here, they did install an elevator in the Manor so that she could get around in her wheelchair, which would later serve John Richter well with his basement chemistry lab. But, unfortunately for my parents, if not for me and the Richters and a whole lot of acid freak hippies, my mother was no longer able to keep up with the hard work required to run a hotel. They never had any intention of selling the place, since she couldn't give up on her dream of retiring to the mountains when their time had come, but hiring a professional management company would have consumed all the profit. So instead, they turned to their unemployed bum of a son.

Despite a profound disinterest in being a hotelier, I did my best to run the place, and actually made a decent go of it for a couple years. But it soon became clear that my parents were paying no attention whatsoever, and my commitment waned. Around the same time, a couple of my high school buddies came home from Vietnam, and Jesus Christ, they were fucked up. They'd seen things they'd never talk about, and took a hell of a lot of drugs to compensate. As a result of all this, they found it impossible to function in polite society, and I had the perfect solution: Come on out to the Manor, and you can stay as long as you want, free of charge.

Eventually, the same offer went out to a bunch of other drifters and free-loaders, and the word spread, and the Hotel Hillcroft Manor became a certifiable hippy commune--the complete package: freaky people everywhere, acid, pot, clothing-optional, free love. It was pretty much an endless party, which was exactly what my buddies needed right then, and I was happy with it, too.

When the Richters pulled up in an old Ford sedan, we all figured it was another family of vacationers looking for a place to spend the night. Sometimes we'd rent a room to families like this, just for kicks. They'd be gone the next morning before sunrise--can't have little Tiffy and Brandon watching hippies dancing naked under the light of the moon! But as the Richters unloaded their belongings from the car, it quickly became quite clear that they belonged at the Manor as much as any of us. That night, John and Emily told us their story around the bonfire while everyone sampled his wares; acid was never my thing--too much of a square I guess--but the word was, it was fantastic. Richter explained that he was looking for a place to brew his specialty. He wanted to turn the whole world on.

The Richters fit in just perfect at our little commune. John would give us fantastic lectures, him and most of his audience tripping out of their minds, about Eastern religions, Native dream quests, esoteric philosophies. He also played a mean keyboards and quickly weaseled his way into the house band (I was the guitarist and lead singer). John and I were instant friends. One of those "I feel like I've known him my whole life" sort of friendships.

Emily, Richter's wife, took to the community just as enthusiastically as her husband, especially to the "clothing optional" part. Like I said before, she was a petite little thing--5' 2" on her tip-toes, which was funny, 'cause Richter was quite tall, or would be, if he weren't stuck in a wheelchair--but she was one of those girls with the delightful combination of a small stature and a nice plump bosom. Not the biggest breasts on the dance floor, I suppose, but more than a handful, and I was hooked from the first time she took her clothes off to dance naked to the band. I just watched those pretty breasts shimmy and bounce.

Emily showed plenty of signs of being interested in me, too, but despite the "free love" ethos of the commune, I had no intention of acting upon my--or our--desires. Something about sex with the wife of a man in a wheelchair just didn't seem right to me, and I definitely didn't want to offend the bloke who was quickly becoming my best friend. Besides, it's not like I wasn't getting plenty of pussy. A guy could pretty much get laid every night at the Hillcroft Manor.

Then late one evening, about a week after their arrival, Richter and I were enjoying a bottle of scotch on the Manor's expansive front porch, and he says, "I notice that you like looking at Emily."

Feeling embarrassed, all I could manage in reply was, "She's a fine woman, isn't she?"

He nodded. "The two of us are very much in love."

I nodded, too, and was about to blurt out that I had no intention of touching her, when he added,

"We have a pretty good sex life. I mean, I do what I can for her, but..."

"Good," I said, and I meant it. I liked the Richters a lot and I was glad that they'd managed to find happiness out of their tragedy.

"...there's one thing I can't do. Probably the most important thing."

I nodded, fully understanding.

"It's been ten years since she's gotten a proper fucking," he said.

"That sucks."

"She and I talked this through--we've talked about it before, but we just hadn't ever met anyone that we thought would work. But... well, we both really like you, and..."

Well, damn.

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For the next chapter in this story, see Chapter Two: Guitar Lessons.

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