In 1947 or 1948, Lee Quarnstrom somehow got his hands on one of my leather shoes as we were walking home from school. He of course threw it into the nearest dense growth of blackberry brambles -- not out of malice, but simply because it seemed on impulse to be the thing to do. We joked about it for the next seventy-plus years, with never an apology from Lee, despite my explaining how my mother and I had spent an hour among the blackberries, trying to find the errant shoe.
The joking has finally ended, however. Lee passed away quietly, early yesterday morning, at his home in La Habra, California.
The obituaries are now appearing. They'll tell you how Lee was part of that group of followers of author Ken Kesey, called the "Merry Pranksters." The Pranksters toured the country in a beat up bus, from which came Kesey's cryptic saying, "You're either on the bus or off the bus." When not bussing the country, they were holed up in a rustic cabin in the mountains above Santa Cruz, sampling the various drugs that were becoming popular with the sixties generation.
Lee is credited as one of the originators of Kesey's "Acid Tests," and he readily conceded that, in his day, he had departed on roughly 150 acid trips -- until a final unnerving trip suggested to him that he'd had enough. The group's experimentation with LSD was the subject of Tom Wolfe's best-selling book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Inescapably, Lee was eventually the victim of a Bay Area drug bust in 1965, along with Kesey and Neal Cassady.
Lee more or less settled down with age, as most of us do, becoming first an executive editor of Larry Flynt's Hustler Magazine, and then -- more prosaically -- an editor and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.
In 2014, Lee looked back on his chaotic career in his memoir entitled, When I Was a Dynamiter! Or How a Nice Catholic Boy Became a Merry Prankster, a Pornographer and a Bridegroom Seven Times. His magnum opus not only was a memoir but has already become an original source material for research into the late 1960s sub-culture. The title pretty well sums it all up, although it ignores what became a rather solid and respectable journalistic career, as well as a very close and loving marriage -- yes, his seventh -- to his wife Chris for the last twenty years or so of his life.
It's all there -- in his memoir, in his writings, and in the obituaries that will be forthcoming. But beneath all the sensationalism, all the historical interest, lived a highly intelligent, witty, and thoughtful human being. After being out of touch for decades, Lee and I re-established our friendship at a gathering in our home town in 2008, after which we emailed each other two or more times a week throughout his final thirteen years.
A classmate who had known us both in elementary school commented to me recently that he couldn't imagine a friendship between two more disparate human beings. But I suppose he didn't know either of us well enough.
To me, Lee was never -- and never will be -- simply the wild guy of the legends, although he certainly was that, too. He and I were best friends from first grade through sixth grade, when his family moved back to the Washington, D.C., area. And we renewed our friendship each summer for another three years when he returned -- either with his family for the summer, or for a stay at my own family's house. When I was 14, I memorably traveled alone by train to his new home in a north Chicago suburb for a three-week visit -- the first blossoming, perhaps, of my lifetime love of travel.
During those years, through ninth grade, we spent hours poring over our stamp collections, sorting through our piles of comic books, playing lengthy and complex variations of Monopoly (did we invent hedge funds? I'm not sure), and talking endlessly about politics, philosophy, religion, and our dreams for the future. And joking hysterically about everything, as only kids of that age can.
As I've mentioned in an earlier post, we seemed to live in each other's houses and shared each other's families. He was one person around whom I never felt any social discomfort. I could discuss any subject with him, argue any point of view, indulge in any fantasy -- as could he with me -- without worrying that I sounded crazy or "weird" or uncool. We rarely reached rational conclusions, eventually piling onto our arguments increasingly baroque embellishments that led us both into some crazy joint fantasy.
Meeting him sixty years later -- after all his acid trips, journalism awards, successful career moves, and numerous marriages -- we found that little had changed. Our conversations took off from where they had trailed off, back when we were a couple of 15-year-olds.
Lee will be justifiably praised and celebrated for his amazing life. I remember him best, however, as the close boyhood friend who -- I'm convinced -- cheated routinely at Monopoly.
And we never found that damn shoe! Never mind, Lee. Keep it to remember me by, buddy.
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