Since he got out of the army, my friend Tony has been getting by wheeling vats of boiling liquid from one tank to another in a plastics factory in Long Island’s Denton Avenue industrial park. He played drums with the New Generation, in high school, where he usually slept before leaving early for his job at the Big Apple supermarket on Hillside Avenue. Tony was a pretty neat guy, even if his grades weren’t so hot. By mid-October of any given school year, his locker was so filled with empty terpinhydrate bottles there was no room for books.

A few weeks ago Tony was driving home from a party in his green 1963 Ford Falcon, tires bald, brakes sometimes. He had taken two reds and a sopor, a pretty regular dose for a weekend night. Then, the way he tells it, “that fuckin’ caveman song came on the radio.” He grunts out the words — “gottafindawoman, gottafindawoman” — like a baboon in heat.

“I hate that fucker,” says Tony. “But do you know what it’s like driving wrecked late at night when that song comes on? It’s like insane man. You just go screeching into turns, even if there ain’t any turns to make.”

The turn Tony made that wasn’t quite there was where Southern State Parkway connects with the Meadowbrook. He spun off the ramp, the Falcon doing a marvelous figure-8 pirouette before landing safely on the fawri between parkways. Stuck in the muck and completely fucked at a quarter to three.

Tony had a choice. He could either nod out and wait for the parkway police to wake him (he was holding). Or, he could blow Vh days pay on a tow truck, because even if he could push it out of the ditch, the thing wouldn’t have turned over if he’d shoved a spoon of meth in the starter. He chose the latter.

“You know,” he said to me a few days later, “there oughta be some way to keep from getting fucked-over like that. Bummers always seem to happen when you’re on downs.”

Ron is a clean looking, blue-eyed Ohio State freshman with clear features and sandy hair. He’s a friend of my brother, and a nice kid; cheerful, easy-going, and like virtually every person he knows in Columbus, Ohio, he is a stone sopor freak.

When I met him he was wearing bluejeans, ratty sneakers, and an orange t-shirt with the letters AS on the front, with two half circles divided by a line on the back. For those who’ve never seen one, that t-shirt is a precise representation of young america’s favorite new obliterator: the sopor.

“You see these t-shirts all around Columbus, the sopor capital of the world,” says Ron. The company that produces sopors is based in Columbus. “Once somebody in the dorm came up with a handful of sopors and they were actually warm — hot off the line at the pill factory.” In spite of their ready availability, the price per hit is relatively high, usually ranging from fifty to sixty cents.

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As if to prove that the quaalude generation has finally come into its own, Bantam released a 75c novel last August, which, when we found it, had gone into its 4th printing.

It’s called “reds” and it is written by the author of Turn Me On!, Jack W. Thomas. We’ve never read Turn Me On!, but even the jacket synopses for “reds” fails to convey what a trash classic this is.

It begins with marijuana, and then it runs into Mommy’s medicine cabinet-*. and then there are LSD and hatchet murders. Well, not really hatchet murder, but guns and knives abound. It’s disgusting; one person we know got violently ill when he read it, put it down, had a terrifying dream, picked it up a few weeks later to finish and repeated the same cycle of symptoms. “It makes Charles Manson seem like St. Francis,” he says.

Unfortunately, unless you’re into playing cause-and-effect games, "reds” doesn’t have much to do with sopors. It’s just one ugly incident after another, and speed and acid and heroin play just as large a part. The point is made at any rate: '‘reds” are culturally confirmed.

It’s such a heavy scene in Columbus, according to Ron, that the Free Press started an anti-sopor campaign. One cartoon showed a guy with an empty bird cage for a head. The caption read “sopors: the chickenshit’s heroin.” They even got Ohio citizen Jerry Rubin back to town, and he made a “sopors keep you fucked up so you can’t fight the revolution” speech.

He does have a point, of course, as do those who believe that the easy availability of downers is aided by agents of repression from Nixon and the CIA on down. They pose the question: how many people do you know who were ever busted solely for possession or even sale of barbituates?

Sopors would be the perfect tool for that kind of diffuse-the-revolution-withdowns conspiracy. Compared to reds, which can make you nasty, and which people drink with cheap wine to get psychopathic, sopors are the-definitive pacifiers. The name itself is a contraction for “soporific,” or sleep inducer.

Ron got busted on sopors in Kent, Ohio, where the pills are less a diversion than a way of life. While visiting a friend who went to Kent State, they did up quaaludes, which are white tab sopors that take a good deal longer to come on than the preferred AS oranges. Ron didn’t know that. He took two, which was plenty, then took two more when he hadn’t gotten off after an hour. Naturally, the first two hit about three minutes later.

“We were in somebody’s house and I completely lost my memory. I was talking absolute gibberish. The only coherent words that came out of me were an occasional ‘man, I’m really high.' "

“We walked towards the door and I was the last one out. I was stuck at the door .. . couldn’t think of how to open it. Somebody finally called to my friends — ‘hey, you forgot something.’ They were already halfway down the block.”

“We’re walking down the main street of Kent. I’m still walking a few steps behing the others, flapping my arms like an airplane and making engine noises with my mouth. This cop grabs me by the arm, and doesn’t say a word. I don’t know what I was thinking, whether we were playing a game or I was on a TV show. I turned around and saw the police car, so I walked over, leaned my body up against it and put my arms on the roof, just like on TV, virtually demanding to be frisked.”

“And nobody had said anything?”

“The cops just looked at me, opened the door. I crawled in. Then my friend comes over and mumbles ‘heyyy, whuttz goin’ awnnn ...” They put him in the car too.

At the police station Ron says the cops were real chummy. “It was like moving from one scene to the other, like it didn’t make any difference.” One of the cops smiled. ‘Okay, how many sopors did you take?’

“ ‘We didn’t take sopors,’ they lied, ‘we drank tequila.’ ” -

The police filmed them walking a straight line and everyone, cops and kids, cracked up laughing. Ron and his friend were put in a cell and released an hour later on $50 bond, which they forfeited to avoid trial. They were charged with public intoxication, a municipal offense that rates in severity somewhere near jaywalking.

Ron got off lucky (or was it luck?) but still he complained. “You know, there should be some kind of set-up where people shouldn’t have to hassle with bail and getting booked and all that. Like, it was fun, but next time probably won’t be. And stuff like that always happens when you’re on sopors.”

The Sopor Liberation Front (SLF) got its start after Ron met Tony in Hempstead, L.I., in June, when some college kids from Boulder, a major pivot on the sopor axis, brought back that town’s unique contribution to the downer movement: the sopor party. The idea is to get say 50 people in a room with at least 100 sopors.

“What happens then?” asks L. Bangs of Walled Lake, Mich.

“Not much. They wait till morning to see what happened.”

“What a culture!” exclaimed Mr. Bangs.

Actually, sopors are to the seventies what mescaline and mateus were to the sixties, what beer and Spanish fly were to the fifties — the leading aphrodisiac of the self-destruct generation.

“For chicks it’s better than booze for getting uninhibited. Something just clicks and you’ve got all this energy says Boulder Judy, a badass ms. known to Coloradans as the “sopor queen.”

“It does the same thing for guys, except sometimes they get so loose they can’t get it up. I guess it depends on how many you take. The thing about sopors is that nobody gives a shit about anything,” says the queen.

Anyway, the Sopor Liberation Front will be having its first open convention this fall, possibly in Disneyland. “Imagine, man, We’ll all get haircuts, right? So we won’t have any trouble gettin in. We’ll have 5,000 kids on downs taking over the park. It’ll be the biggest sopor party ever!”

Delegations from major sopor centers will meet in caucuses to put together a platform with a list of demands. What exactly will be presented remains to be seen. Tony began to tell me some of his ideas, but he passed out in the middle of a particularly unintelligible stream of syllables. His friend Freddie, who everybody calls the Phenobarbitol Kid, was there and mentioned some ideas, some that made sense and others which seemed to be the words of a man in the latter stages of barbituate toxicity. Freddie’s list included:

“Quaalude is only the newest drug used by the Amerikan control addicts in their attempts to destroy the energy and life of our newly emerging rainbow culture!” (Reprinted from the Ann Arbor Sun.)

* 24-hour free towing service.

* no fault auto insurance. “If there’s no fault, they can’t fuck you for plowing into a block of parked cars.”

Freddie said it happened to him last summer on Second Avenue. He was driving a cab. He’d taken seven nembutols. He lost his job.

* foam rubber sidewalks in downtown areas of all majors cities and campus towns.

* tent camps, mattresses, and first aid stations placed strategically along every American highway, which could develop into a system of sopor youth hostels.

* credit at all bastions of Sopor International Youth such as Holiday Inns, jai alai frontons and water bed stores.

* sopor dispensors in sdl bus and gas station restrooms, all-nite diners and lack-in-the-Box drive-ins.

* banning of compulsory English and gym courses in high school.

* creation of a Sopor Free State, either on Levittown, Long Island, in Boulder, Colorado, Miami Beach or the exurbs of Detroit.

* replacing the stars on the 13 .S. flag, which the SLF considers “psychedelic revisionism” with 51 pill capsules to reflect a truer, more modern national consciousness.

These and other matters will be taken up at what promises to be, as Tony says, “the counter-culture’s greatest moment since Altamont.” Entertainment lined up includes filmed highlights from sopor TV shows like “McHales Navy,” “Superman,” “Edge of Night,” “American Bandstand” and “Let’s Make a Deal.” The late Zita Johann, star of “Terror in A Girls Dormitory,” will deliver the keynote address. And sopor-rock acts like the Astronauts, Flash Cadillac, Yoko Oneo, Charley Pride, the Sha-Weez, Vito and the Salutations and Johnny Paycheck are being contacted to provide entertainment.

Whether all this will really come oi is anybody’s guess. Your local sopor-e out FM rock non-personality shou have access to more specific informatv as to time and place within the next f weeks. The one thing that seems to definite now is the catch phrase for movement, which 1 hear more and n everyday. (“Right on is dead,” Tony.) Now it’s a powershake “Learn to Forget.”