Eddie Woods - Early To Middle Years

Early To Middle Years

After not quite finishing high school (he later took a number of university credit courses, but is essentially an autodidact), Woods worked for two years in Manhattan as a first-generation computer programmer, until in 1960 ("Didn't want to get my fingernails dirty as an Army draftee," but also to finally see Europe) he joined the U.S. Air Force for a four-year stint, three years of which were spent in Germany. Honorably discharged following a tour in Wyoming ("It was four years of guerrilla warfare, me against them, ending in a draw"), he returned to Germany, where he married twice, fathered two daughters, and successfully sold encyclopedias to US military personnel for five years, the entire time continuing to write poems, essays and short stories (a calling he first discovered at age 15).

In late 1968, Woods made his first journey to the East, remaining there until early 1973. During that time he was variously a restaurant manager in Hong Kong, a kept man in Singapore (by a Chinese drag-queen prostitute), a features writer for the Bangkok Post (Tennessee Williams, with whom Woods hung out and traveled, through Malaysia to Singapore and back, was but one of many celebrated personalities he encountered at that time), a stringer for both The New York Times and ABC Radio News, a disc jockey (Radio Thailand English-language service), owner of a gay bar (in Pattaya, Thailand) and the managing director of Dateline Asia (a Bangkok-based features service he launched with three other journalists). In Bali, where he stayed for six months, he was known as "Durian Ed" and "Mushroom Ed" (having developed a unique method of liquefying psilocybin mushrooms and rendering them toxin-free). He was additionally in Laos, Okinawa, the Philippines, Macao, Java and Japan. Before returning to Europe, he explored much of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and spent several months as a lay devotee at the Theravada Buddhist Island Hermitage.

In June 1973, in London, he met Jane Harvey, with whom he would years later start Ins & Outs magazine. Shortly thereafter, in the midst of doing a variety of odd jobs for Gentle Ghost, an alternative work agency, Woods authored nearly 30 articles for Edward de Bono's Eureka! An Illustrated History of Inventions from the Wheel to the Computer. He and Harvey then traveled overland to Asia, cycled across large stretches of India, were journalists for the Tehran Journal (Woods as sports and night editor, Harvey as business and local news editor), and crisscrossed much of the sub-continent and beyond. In 1976, Woods visited the United States for the first time in 12 years, where he wrote articles for the Berkeley Barb, published stories and poems in The Bystander, Odalisque, etc., and then hitchhiked across the South and up to New York. A two-year stretch back in London was exceptionally prolific: numerous poems and short stories, publication in Libertine, Iron magazine and other literary periodicals, as well as a series of personality profiles and features pieces for the International Times, an underground newspaper whose Amsterdam editor he would become during the early 1980s.