The Dregs of Aquarius by Rick Dewhurst

When Tom Pollard’s knee injury ends his promising basketball career and his older brother Bob is killed in Vietnam, he drops out, rejecting his Berkeley education and traditional 60’s society and slums as a bartender in a hippie haunt on Vancouver Island.

His conservative girlfriend Ruby, in an attempt to rescue him, takes a job teaching school there, but she soon becomes weary of Tom’s lost soul routine, and when summer arrives she returns home to Anaheim, not certain if she will be back in the fall.

Left alone without restraints, Tom searches for some meaning to his life, as he trips through the subculture, where an Acid-induced discovery that he is God adds variety to the encounter group he lands himself in. To add to the chaos, Tom’s developing and invisible Third Side-Eye peers randomly into the spiritual realm, where the fiendish Burnt Eagle persistently plagues his fragmenting reality.

Fresh, insightful, and often hilarious, The Dregs of Aquarius is a counter-culture Catcher in the Rye that speaks to the generation coming of age now, as well as to those Baby Boomers who can't remember much about the whole scene and might want a refresher. And for those who might simply want to get away to another time and place that is authentically portrayed, The Dregs of Aquarius is the perfect trip.