Gateway First Four Years and More - 1969 and onward

A beautiful summer day in June, and I'm getting ready to swim out to a dead body in a lake in an abandoned sand quarry somewhere near Millville or Vineland.
A dead body?
What am I doing here?
I'm pretty tired from swimming out there and back from before, so I decide to take a small inflatable raft, you know, the little ones you use in swimming pools.
Sherri Ehlers says she'll go with me for support.

No one believed me. Not John or Keith or Lynette or even Sherri.
"He's pulling our leg," one of them said.
"Yeah, you're just trying to prove what a good actor you are."
"You just want somebody to swim out there and make a fool of himself."
"It's just a log with some moss on it."
"Yeah, or just a turtle or something."

"I tell you it's a body," I said. "I don't know for sure if it's real or not, but that's a body out there."

So I'm swimming across this lake, and it's a lot farther to this thing floating in the water than I thought, so my arms are getting tired. I'm getting closer to it, but I still can't make out what it is.
It's round and dark, and it sure looks like moss of some kind in strands floating off of it.
My arms are tired, and I'm tired, but I'm determined to see what it is. Good thing the water isn't very cold or else I'd never have made it this far. They're calling out to me from the shore, asking if I can tell what it is yet.

We found a lake that had a relatively flat beach area, and a level enough spot to park our cars. The lake was pretty big, and the opposite shore from us rose up in a steep incline. The volley ball net was set up, the grill was ready to be fired up, and some of us were thinking about testing the waters of the lake.
The water was clear, with that tint of cedar so common here in South Jersey.

As we were playing volleyball, I kept noticing something bobbing up and down in the water way out past the middle of the lake, somewhat closer to the farther bank.

Two young boys walked out of a sand quarry on a moon-lit night in June. What did they talk about? How did they feel about what had taken place? What was on their minds as they headed for home? Only they knew what happened and what they had done, and what they had left behind.

Three carloads of teenagers entered the sand quarry on a beautiful day in June.
"Man, you were right, John," one of them said. " It's the perfect place. Yeah, it's the perfect place."
"Now let's get goin'!"

It was hot, too hot for June, and humid too. Down in the woods and sands of Millville three young boys were talking in the glow of a full moon.
The oldest of the three was doing most of the talking. He was telling his two friends what his future was to be and how they could help him achieve it.
Who knows what they were thinking as their friend explained what it was he wanted them to do.
How convincing he must have been to get them to go along so willingly.
Who knows how long it took to put his plan in motion.

Sex, drugs and rock n' roll. The mantra of our generation. Truth was, for me anyway, no sex, some drugs-mainly alcohol, and plenty of rock n' roll. This party John Marcone was putting together might mean I'd experience some of the sex I'd been missing. Wishful thinking, but one must always have a positive attitude, musn't one?

John Marcone had a plan. He knew of an abandoned sand quarry down near Vineland and Millville, and he wanted to get those of us who hung out together and go down there for a cookout and a day of swimming and volleyball. He also alluded to the privacy the area afforded for the possibility of "romantic interludes" for those among us who had female company.
"It's the perfect place for us," he said. "The perfect place for us, if you know what I mean."

It was April and I was warm and working inside. A shift in the dish washing room in the kitchen of Underwood-Memorial hospital went like this:

So there I was unloading tractor trailer loads of magazines at the Philadelphia Post Office. Heavy, heavy mailbags full of magazines. You opened the trailer and there before you was a mountain that you pulled down by hand. If I was lucky, I mean really lucky, the Post Office guys didn't have much on their plate, and I could use more than one of the portable conveyor belts. Some days I couldn't even use one of them, so I had to drag the sacks of magazines from the truck to the hole in the dock that the bags were dropped down into.

I didn't like college. I decided early on that I wasn't going to complete my first semester. The only class I enjoyed was my acting class, and I even cut that one a lot. I auditioned for the college theatre production, a serious work by Henrik Ibsen, called An Enemy of the People. I managed to get a strong supporting role, and that's all I lived for. My classes meant nothing for me, all I cared about was my performance in the play. I completely stopped going to gym class, which was mandatory at Rutgers Camden, and I was called into the Dean's office to explain my behavior.