BY KAREN SAMPLES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
COVINGTON -- He's never taken Prozac or owned a sport utility vehicle. Heck, he hasn't even had a driver's license in 15 years.
He thinks happiness is just a word used by advertisers to sell stuff.
Albert Camus is his favorite existentialist. We can't print what he says about Jean-Paul Sartre.
Last year, his daughter gave him a bookstore certificate for Christmas. Months later, he picked up Pooh and the Philosophers, which he keeps on his nightstand.
You wouldn't guess all this by looking at Brad Sandy.
He has that tremulous quality of a man with many years of all-nighters and beer behind him. His hands shake sometimes. He takes long seconds to process questions.
Once they're in, though, the replies come back with wit, style and a certain sense of what's really important.
Brad Sandy, after all, is history come to life.
beat generation, the. Term applied to artists and writers of the 1950s who encouraged anarchy and rejection of mainstream values. See Brad Sandy, Covington, Ky., 1998.
hippie. Young person of the '60s who defied convention by experimenting with Eastern philosophy, drugs, group living, free love, etc. See Brad Sandy, Covington, Ky., 1998.
He may not be young anymore, but he's a hippie for life.
Life on the edge
Mr. Sandy hangs out at a bar called Kelly's Stables on Madison Avenue. This is the kind of dark little place where he's most at home. He likes living on the edge, listening quietly to men who may have knives in their pockets or women who may be prostitutes.
"There's an honesty," he says. "You can't lie. Your own being explains who you are, and there'll be somebody there who's perceptive enough to know if you're not being real. And they'll come down on you."
You like that, I say.
"I live that."
He's 60 now. For years he roamed his home state of California, hanging out in coffeehouses, writing poetry, reading philosophy and picking up his mail at a place called the Existential Bagel Shop. At one point, he and some friends ran an informal shelter for kids lost in the drug culture. He was a young beatnik but an old hippie, and others looked up to him, says his ex-wife, Nancy Carver.
In the true spirit of that age, they remain friends. Both live in Covington. Sometimes they end up together at events like the annual flea market and muzzle-loading extravaganza in Friendship, Ind.
This is where I caught up with them last week, hanging out in a tepee with their daughter, Corinne, and grandchild Erie.
The Friendship flea market is Mr. Sandy's kind of happening. People sell beads and feathers, raccoon teeth on a string, Homer Simpson bendable action figures and lotions to cure every -itis. Next to the tepee, a sign on a tent says "goose outfits for sale." These turn out to be tiny dresses for concrete lawn birds.
Mr. Sandy has washed his bandana for the Friendship occasion. At one point it falls off his head, and he chuckles. It's so clean that it's still getting adjusted, he says.
"He's one of those people who has a real high IQ," says Ms. Carver, the ex-wife. "You either go into Mensa or a think tank, or you just don't fit in anywhere."
Mr. Sandy is a card-carrying member of the latter group.
The two met in California. She'd grown up in Cincinnati, with Ozzie and Harriet for parents. She's grateful for that, she says, but at 20 she had to run away.
"I was raised on a diet of classical music and show tunes," Ms. Carver says. In California, she waitressed at a restaurant where Mr. Sandy hung out. He introduced her to her generation.
They moved to Ohio in 1972 and lived in a commune in Clermont County. "The candle farm," people called it, because that's what it produced. "Many people liked the idea but wouldn't do it themselves," Ms. Carver says. "So they'd just come out and visit. We'd go out on a weekend and come back and there'd be 10 people sitting in our kitchen, asking who we were."
The couple divorced in 1981. Ms. Carver was ready to move on; Mr. Sandy knew he never would.
Today he lives with his oldest daughter, Corinne, near Wallace Woods in Covington. He and Ms. Carver have two other children: David, 27, and Christina, 19.
As a teen-ager, Corinne was the one who "made him be my dad," as she puts it. This involved tracking him down at the bars in Clifton, doing her schoolwork while he read and drank.
She wanted a relationship with this strange and carefree man. Now she thinks: If I hadn't persisted, he might have simply floated away.
Not burdened
Possessions mean little to Mr. Sandy, so he's always misplacing things.
He makes beautiful, intricate wall hangings out of pheasant feathers, but he can't take them out anymore because he's already lost so many.
His poetry is scattered around Greater Cincinnati, although he knows much of it by heart.
He refuses to share this work in legitimate situations. Catch him with his elbows on a bar, though, and you just might get lucky. "In a foolish game of words," he'll say, "we call today a lie, and cheat tomorrow of its yesterday."
This is his motto, really -- an endorsement of honesty.
Here's another:
Words,
spun webwise
between us
bridge the void,
and you and I,
in the fortress of ourselves,
pluck the telegraphy
of our abstractions
and warily dance wordwise
towards one another.
None of this has been published before, but Mr. Sandy surprises me by producing a copyright agreement, written in his shaky hand on a piece of notebook paper.
Here's another surprise: For the first time in years, he's holding down a tax-paying job, as a prep cook at Fort Mitchell's Greyhound Tavern.
So perhaps Brad Sandy is gravitating toward legitimacy after all.
Then again, maybe not.
In 1996, he was at Murphy's Pub in Clifton Heights when somebody mentioned Guinness Stout was sponsoring a contest. Write a slogan about beer, win a trip to Jamaica.
What the heck. He dashed off a clever phrase. Later he misplaced it, of course, but not before winning the finals at Hap's Old Irish Pub in Hyde Park.
Mr. Sandy never made it to Jamaica, though.
You can't get a passport without ID.
Karen Samples is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. She can be reached at 578-5584 or email
her at ksamples@enquirer.com
SAMPLES ARCHIVE