I Pay A Visit To Chet Helms
July 22, 2008
When I was in San Francisco the other day, I dropped by to visit my old friend Chet Helms. I knew right where to find him thanks to Greg Hoffman, who is writing Chet’s biography and makes it his business to check on Chet’s whereabouts.
The job’s not too time-consuming. In fact, for the foreseeable future, Chet will be residing with the artists, musicians, bankers, captains of industry and possibly Emperor Norton at a swank retirement getaway in the Richmond District known as the San Francisco Columbarium. Except no one gets away.
I stopped at the reception desk to see if Chet was in. He was. The receptionist was new and couldn’t tell me his apartment number, but the manager came out of her office when she heard Chet’s name.
“Are you here to see Chet?”, she asked, implying a certain intimacy. “You can go right up.” She rattled off Chet’s rather involved address on the third floor and I pawed for my notebook to jot it down. She had it memorized.
As I walked up the stairs, I could hear workers below pushing a scaffold across the marble floor below and shouting to each other something about Carlos Santana. I thought, “Oh no, what new bad news haven’t I heard?” But I checked when I got home later that day and Carlos is doing fine. I guess they just liked Carlos Santana. I kept climbing.
Chet’s keeping a low profile these days. All boxed in, you might say. Not so long and tall as the day I met him in the summer of 1962…(picture gets all misty and we dissolve through to a busy downtown street filled with gigantic cars and buses all spewing exhaust fumes into the bright air)…
That day I was hanging out at a protest on the steps of the main post office at Seventh and Mission in downtown San Francisco, tuning my Mexican guitar and entertaining the picket line with my faultless impersonation of Joan Baez singing I Am A Rake And A Rambling Boy.
I had nothing against the mail being delivered, you understand. It’s just that the Federal District court was on an upper floor and the judge was hearing the case against the crew of the Everyman, a trimaran that had sailed into waters scheduled for atomic detonations. Ka-Boom and all the little fishies were to receive their first dose of strontium-90. It was the age of “atmospheric testing”, and apparently someone still wasn’t sure if H-bombs worked or not, because they kept testing them and testing them. I thought it was a bad idea.
The story of that protest deserves to be told in detail – it foreshadows all the demonstrations and sit-ins and eventually the mass student strikes that characterized my you
th. But at the moment I’m looking across the street at the Greyhound Bus Station, watching a tall, skinny young guy with lank hair and black-rimmed glasses come out of the depot, see the demonstration, and hop over to see what’s up. And, well, look at that, he’s sporting a peace button. Yeah, it was Chet, fresh off the bus from Austin, Texas. I had the fortune to meet him on his first hour in San Francisco, scene of so many destinies, including Chet’s and my own.
I hate to admit it but in those days I only associated with people who passed the coolness test, and was quite ready to snub any impostor with a Texas accent, but I could not snub this cat. Chet’s ingratiating smile, his little heh-heh laugh, his unfeigned interest in everyone – within an hour he’d made the acquaintance of most of San Francisco’s peacenik community – I liked him immediately. And he was back the next day, don’t know where he slept. He was standing right in front that night when the real Joanie Baez showed up and sang on the post office steps to encourage us. Maybe he tried to sign her for a gig at the Avalon, I get mixed up sometimes.
Funny – all those years ahead of him, full of friends and rock and roll and great parties and fame of a sort, but now they’re over. Now Chet’s residing in a vase, a big doorstop. Dust, our common fate. To quote the prince of Denmark,
“Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
Oh dear, am I growing grave? At least Chet has his own apartment, not far from Harvey Milk’s place. And he’ll never have to leave San Francisco again .
Naturally I read this one with a great deal of interest and, of course, my usual sense of awe at your seemingly effortless ability to write so effectively and evocatively.
You chose the perfect tone for the piece – a modified, cool, be-bop hipness with a nod towards the ultimate fate. (To be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no idea what the hell that means.)
I’m glad you got a chance to drop in on Chet and I’m glad you told us about it.
Ditto to the above comment! What a sweet private reminiscence!
Chester – he wasn’t Chet yet – and I were best friends in high school, “true blue,” he wrote in my yearbook in 1959. I lost touch with him for years. The last time I saw him, sitting together in Atelier Dore, two years before he died, I asked, “Hey Chester, how did you get from my front porch and june bugs in Texas nights to here?”
In the tale he spun of his progress from Ft. Worth to legend, he spoke of getting off the Greyhound, walking up the hill listening to some chick singing protest songs – “you know, I was really interested in social issues….” – sleeping outside a government building in his sleeping bag that night (your question answerered), holding close the feeling he had walking up the hill to the sounds of the song. “Emily,” he said, his soft Texas drawl still coloring his words, “I felt like I’d come home.”
We laughed together over that one. I’d felt the same thing the night I drove into Berkeley, encircled by lights on the Berleley hills. Although it is a long time since I’ve been gone from there, it was the only place I ever felt at home. Two Texas misfits, Chester and me.
I may not get to San Francisco for a long time. If you have occasion to visit your old friend again, please tell him that this old friend thinks about him and misses him.
peace
I used to call him Chester too sometimes, and he never minded. I do remember back in the Fifties there was an insanely popular tv show called Gunsmoke, and the sheriff’s comic relief deputy was named Chester. So Chester’ had become quaint and country sounding, while ‘Chet’ sounded sharp, decisive,and no nonsense. So maybe that’s why he adopted the change. He fit it, except for the ‘no nonsense’ part.
You’ve given us a lovely reminiscence Emily, and I will definitely pass the word along.
That is a great picture of the Chet window!
That picture of Chet is exactly the way I remember him!! Since my accent at that time was probably worse than his and I knew no one from Texas, to me he sounded just like a very sweet beatnik.
Days of Not Wine and Roses, but Wine and Pot, and much showing off of our “intelligent minds”; then hitch hiking to Mexico, parting in Pacific Grove and reuniting in the Mexican mountains for our first (and my last) Magic Mushroom trip. Thanks for the memories Chet, and Mr. Pondering Pig. If it wasn’t for you (P.P.) I would have not remembered that sweet man.