Interesting People on the Fringe: This Week - John Otterson!

The rust-colored, steel-plated dragon roared by, a foot or so from my face, cutting through the cold, foggy Sunday morning air as it blasted me back to some sense of “reality”. Dangerous. This thing would kill me in a second, I thought, as I watched the beast rage at a mile a minute eastward. Still, it took almost two minutes to pass. Seemed like a lifetime. My companions on each side of me were laughing uncontrollably, which made me rather uneasy, as I hoped they weren’t mocking the creature, for the dragon would turn on us in an instant. An extended claw or turned wing would decapitate us like lightning, so quickly that our detached heads would probably watch and comprehend the whole episode in slow motion, as our bodies, blood spurting out of the neck as an sacrificial offering to the monster, crumpled and hit the volcanic ground. I turned my head slowly toward the west and could see the tail of the creature approaching. It looked like we would come out of this okay, as the worm finally slithered away. A final roar and a last blast of bone-chilling air, and he was gone. Stillness returned to this otherwise quiet April morning. I look at John and finally started to laugh. This time it was I who couldn’t stop laughing.

I liked John Otterson. I first met him in the fall of 1987 when I was residing in the Fortress. A lot of my friends derided him as “Friendless John”, but I always liked the guy. For one, he was always up for a good time. And he was an object-oriented person. John was interested, as the German’s say, in das Ding an sich, the thing in itself, an object as a work of art, its mere existence as justification of its existence. I guess that is why, although he was a metallurgical engineering student, that his real passion lied in creating interesting pieces of jewelry, intricate objects of beauty. He once showed me some very well done rings and pendants he had created in silver. You could show up at his basement apartment on Lincoln Way, and John would always have some new and interesting object to display. A salt-water aquarium with one, beautiful, highly poisonous lionfish dominated his flat. This fish, dazzling in the artificial light of the tank, reminded me of a samurai warrior in full-armor, beautiful in contemplation, deadly in interaction. His walls were decorated with a large, orange and yellow tie-dyed print, which in my mind complemented the proud, feathery animal in the water very well.

John’s interest in our doings at Fortress Immacula was connected to Wayne-O’s Cannabis sativa stash. Probably that is why guys like Wayne weren’t too hip on him. But like Wayne, John also dabbled in retail sales. Dealing sounds too much like a Turkish bazaar or a back-alley thing. “Pssst, kid, come here, I’ve got something I want to show ya.” But in similar fashion, I think both weren’t out to become rich doing it. It was more of a support the personal usage and keep supplied with a few nice toys type of thing. Loren was never too keen on John, either. “I hate having to play all his games just to get high,” he said. It never bothered me, though. You have to enjoy the experience. It is more than just getting stoned. At John’s place, you came in, sat down, shot the shit, sampled the wares, checked out the latest in cool music he had discovered (it was he who first turned me on to Laibach and their Let It Be album), and later made your way back to wherever it was you were to be. That being said, I never had to purchase much of anything for myself, as most of the time guys like Loren were always up for getting high with me, which I think was pretty entertaining for all involved. Loren’s paranoia was, and probably is to this day, legend, and getting fucked up with him was basically this: Go for a drive, either to an old, abandoned railhead south of Ames, or just to the next adjoining parking lot. You see, where we lived at Adelante Fraternity, possessing pot was grounds for eviction (funny, no one really considered that it was damn illegal as well), but only if you were confronted with the stuff on the property. We would often go down to his black Ford Escort, drive into the adjacent parking lot to the east, after a symbolic crossing of the border, complete with German-speaking border guard, and park his car, actually in view of Adelante, but no longer on the property. From there, we would blast off. Or we would journey to the old railhead south of town, which wasn’t as secure, as it involved an approximately 8 minute drive back to safety. Loren could somehow manage to drive on the stuff, something I could NEVER do, as my attention span reduces to about half a second when stoned. So it was either an anxious drive on the back streets to the haven of Adelante, or just another border crossing with a suspicious Nazi. Either way, once back at “The House”, we would literally run to safety, that is, Loren’s room, or “suite” in the euphemism of the times. I remember sprinting full speed through the door and up the stairway, disturbing those poor chaps who actually had to study to pass their classes in the living room and nearly bowling over loudmouth Mike Siebert on the way up to sanctuary. Once in the room, Loren would lock the door, pull the shades, and we would revel in the high, which was probably given quite a boost by sprinting the THC through our bloodstream. That is why Loren couldn’t stand the slower, more casual rituals of John’s place. I often remember sitting at John’s place with him as he nervously looked out the basement windows, and kept pressing me to go, which got a bit annoying, as I enjoyed just hanging out in John’s bunker. Chill out, man! Relax!

John, too, was always up for a bit of adventure in the outside world. Kurt Eckstrom, Loren, John and I were celebrating my 20^th birthday on the night of April 11/12^th, 1988 at the Iowa State Arboretum’s sundial circle, where the sundial no longer existed, but the pillars and the benches were still there. This hidden place behind the hedges was another choice area to blast off. We pyschonauts assembled there that evening and started our journey. After entering orbit, we were accompanied to the edge of the sea by a group of little blue gnomes. Loren got an intense fear of the water, however, which under normal situations was merely a lush, green lawn, and refused to cross in the boat, which we were offered. John, Kurt and I decided to go for it, leaving Loren cursing on the shore. We called out to him and told him to swim to us, but he was freaked, and made his way back to his personal sanctuary. “Come on, Loren!” we called. “Fuck you guys!” was his answer. One we reached the other side, our journey took us through a forest, and then into a barren wasteland. There we found something that jolted us back to "reality". I found a ripped sweatshirt, emblazoned with a Hard Rock café – like logo, only saying “Hawk Rock” for the Kansas State Jayhawks. The tattered sweatshirt was covered in dried blood. “What crime had recently transpired here?“ we all wondered. Freaky. I took the sweatshirt with me, as proof of a weird evening, along with a giant metal pipe in the shape and size of what I imagined to be Fred Flintstone’s 5-iron.

The Iowa State Arboretum was always a good place to enter what the Norse would call Utgard, the Outland. As such, it was a fitting place for the Freak Week celebrations of the late 1980’s, until the authorities, in their never-ending search to destroy fun, forbid them. Freak Week was an alternative celebration to the more staid Greek Week, where the fraternities and sororities vied for the chance to show each other just how beautiful, smart and talented they were. Freak Week instead featured some groovy bands in the spring sunshine, as everyone chilled out on the natural amphitheater of the Arboretum’s grassy hillside. Another Arboretum adventure with John Otterson happened one fine evening. John and I were hanging out with Larissa, a blond chick who could best be described as hot in an ugly sort of way, kind of like a blond Sandra Bernhard. It was probably her prominent proboscis that solidified this impression. We decided, after a round of partying, to head for the Arboretum. The pine trees on the north side of the Arboretum, lining the street, called to us, and we proceeded to climb them. Like true night owls, we perched in these trees, remaining still and silent until a few unwitting passersby came along on the sidewalk. John and I then startled them with a couple of “Who cooks for you! Who cooks for you, all” hoots like a barred owl. The couple jumped a bit, okay a lot, looked around quite shaken, finally looked up and then started laughing as they saw us three crouched on our respective limbs looking at them quizzically like winged creatures of the night. Later that night, John piloted my Viper 6000 Shuttlecraft westward on Highway 30, as for some reason we wanted to check out the Des Moines River. Why I really don’t know. But what stands out in my mind from the return trip was the fact that as John flew the Viper 6000, and I rode shotgun, we chatted along about whatever while the entire time I reached back to Larissa in the back seat with my hand down her pants. Whatever, indeed! Let the good times roll!

John Otterson once provided me with ammunition so-to-speak for an Architecture 401 trip to Chicago in the fall of 1989. Wearing my battered fedora, The Hat of Evil, I stopped by his basement abode on the Friday afternoon before the bus was to depart at 2:30 or so and got pleasantly baked before the trip. And I brought a super Sherman Hemsley joint along for the journey. As my roommate Guy and I theorized, if a Bob Marley joint was a big joint, then a Sherman Hemsley, named after the actor who played George Jefferson on that 70’s multi-culti classic, The Jeffersons, was a truly mega joint. I can just about visualize old Bentley, the stuffy Englishman, stopping by and quipping, “I say, Mr. J, that is indeed a monster joint you’re smoking!” “Get your own stash, Bentley, and get out of my face!” My colleagues Brian Polaski and John Jordan were thus pleasantly surprised as we partied in the Palmer House on Saturday night when I revealed the secret of Sherman Hemsley’s voodoo-like power.

I kind of lost contact with John after he moved out of his basement on the old Lincoln Highway. Perhaps he was lying low for a while, as is sometimes the case with folks in his line of work. I remember linking up with him on campus one day in the ISU Design Center, however. Loren and Guy were looking to score, and I arranged for them to meet with John on a Tuesday afternoon. Loren drove us there in his Ford Escort, and we hung out with John at his new place in West Ames, this time south of Lincoln Way, for as long as it took Loren to get paranoid. So we departed for our Exile on Main Street flat. I threw an empty bottle of Bud that I just finished out of Loren’s car as we drove down Lincoln Way, of course checking first for any sign of the law (Loren didn’t know this, though), and getting the expected reaction of Mr. Paranoid as well. Freak out! Le Freak! C’est chic!

The last time I saw John Otterson was probably the weirdest, in that this time it involved the Swiss chemist, Albert Hofmann’s, 1943 discovery, lysergic acid diethylamide. I can’t recall how I got invited to this final meeting in April of 1992. Loren was now out of the picture, having gotten married the previous summer and then going through the indoctrination of basic training in the United States Air Force. John was living in Ontario. No, not the Canadian province, but the extreme northwest corner of Ames. There still was a defunct grain elevator along the train tracks there in those days, which I doubt is still standing. It was doubtless the reason for Ontario's coming into being way back when. Again, John had a basement apartment, and we settled in on a Saturday night for what would turn out to be an interesting evening. There was another dude there, and a cute blonde, Deadhead chick. John had really gotten into the Grateful Dead in the meantime, and he introduced me to them in the course of the evening. Of course, I was aware of the Grateful Dead before then, mainly that their songs often consist of a 27-minute drum solo, but I learned a lot more about the entire Deadhead subculture that evening. All three of my companions had followed the band around the country the previous summer and were fully committed to the cause. After we all had dosed, it was time to sit back and let the fun begin. This was not my first experience with psychedelics, but it would end up being my last, more due to lack of opportunity rather than any kind of abhorrence on my part. I always had a positive experience on the stuff. But the experience is co-relational to what you bring with you. If you bring fear, you will experience fear in Technicolor. If you bring paranoia, you will be scared out of your wits. If you, however, bring an open mind and gentle understanding, the world will open up to you as well. Many of my friends were reluctant to have me experience it, however, as I had a reputation for being violent. But that is a reaction to alcohol, not to this stuff. They found that their fears were unjustified. That Saturday evening started off as usual, as John displayed his latest toys to his guests. This time, it was a sort of multi-colored disco light, which we discovered, when you shook your hand very rapidly back and forth over the light, it appeared to change your hands into the colorful plumage of some tropical bird. “Show us your colors!” I cried out, as all four of us squatted like cavemen around the very first campfire, each displaying their colorful feathers for all to see. The evening progressed with typical weirdness, of which probably the strangest was the appearance of eggs dripping from the ceiling. To this day, I am not sure if this was merely a hallucination, or if we, someone, or I had managed to throw an entire case of eggs at the ceiling of John’s apartment. I do remember John kind of briefly flipping out about it, but as I recall, the furor quickly died down and the dripping eggs disappeared, either on their own or through some cleaning action of which I was not aware. Then, shortly before six in the morning, an unseemly howl rang throughout the apartment and jarred us from our lethargy. John said, “Come one, let’s go!” and we three males ran at top speed toward the Ontario train tracks, as a monster freight train headed up from the west, wailing like some ancient worm awakened from its century-long slumber.

John accompanied me back to above Olive’s on Main that Sunday morning, where we regaled a groggy Guy with our stories dripping with acidic weirdness. That is the last I ever saw of John.

To John, wherever you are…Ride the Dragon!