But Now We Are Sixty-Six

Oh boy, 1948, the year I turned six. First of all, for my birthday I got a pull-dachshund on a string whose legs moved as I pulled him along. And it got even better! We went to the Russian River for a week that summer and my brother showed me how to play Cruisin’ Down The River On A Sunday Afternoon on his uke. I got to go down the dusty road to the general store all by myself and I could buy any funny book I wanted. Except no horror or crime comics. But that was okay – I could read those on the comic book stand until the owner got wise.

Now I’m sixty-six, and what do I get? I get to chop ice all day. Shovel snow. Oh well, I shouldn’t complain. For birthday dinner my German mother-in-law made her famous beef roladen, red cabbage, mashed potatoes and gravy, and for dessert my favorite home-made creme caramel as only my mother-in-law knows how to make it. Smooth, creamy and wonderful with that rich burnt sugar syrup slooshing down its sides to make a little lake in the bottom of the bowl. And we polished off a bottle of top-notch Cabernet, grown in my current home state of Washington. Then we watched a French movie called A Very Long Engagement. It stars Audrey Tautou, the actress who played Amelie.

You probably won’t like it. It’s relentlessly melancholy, like me. About a young woman who, also like me, knows to the depths of her being that love is forever. She refuses in the face of all evidence to believe her lover was killed in the Great War. For the Pig Of The Grey Skies And Rain, her performance and her character provides the penultimate revelation of a true heart. In fact, I’ve got to go watch it again right now.

(Two hours later) Where was I? Oh yes, I was about to start complaining.

You know me, the Complaining Pig. I’ve made a career out of never being satisfied. So here’s what I’d really like for my birthday. I’d like to know what happened to all the loved friends and befriended lovers of my youth. All the kiddos who are wrapped in gold in my heart and whom I can never and will never forget. Here, for the third year, is my birthday roll call, with updates since last year…

Was Anyone Left Alive?

Bess Farr, AKA Lisa Farr, AKA Lisa McFadden. Dear friend and troublemaker, we were friends throughout the Sixties. The last time I saw her, she dosed me with MDA at a party. I wasn’t mad at her – she just made made me realize how fed up I was with the life I was leading. But I’ve always felt like I deserted her when she was in trouble. And I wish I hadn’t. You okay, Bess? 2008 update: Eva Wilson told me Bess died of ovarian cancer about 1992. I never got to see her again. I always thought one day we would have lunch together and she’d tell me her life had turned out okay. Bye, Bess. I wrote about you in It’s Too Late, She’s Gone…

Bob Gill – brother beatnik, peyote brother and card carrying YPSL. In my mind’s eye, he’s up on the barricades somewhere waving his ancient rifle defiantly and the Nationalists are closing in.

Bob Kaffke – diabetic Communist who rode horseback through Mexico. News: Bob is gone. Died of pneumonia in 1983 on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay. Leo Sadorf found this link put up by his son. 2008 Update: I wrote about Bob in Kaffke of the Comsymps.

Bob Kuehn – Another of the SF State peace warriors. Ban the Bomb!

Danny Rifkin – So funny and creative. The first on our scene besides me to notice the Beatles were Something New. And he laughed at my poetry (that was good, not bad). News: Danny’s still out there hitting it. I found this article about him in the San Francisco Chronicle.

David Miller – Carpenter of Walrus and Carpenter. My singing partner and best friend until I betrayed him. Last time I talked to him he called to say good-bye. He was moving to Tennessee. Funny how I still miss him after all these years.

Don Auclaire – leader of our pack, the Dirty Peaceniks, 311 Judah Street, San Francisco. 2008 Update: Solveig told me she visited him in the Mexico City jail in 1963. George Howell told me he was living in the Haight-Ashbury with Teresa Sweeney in the spring of 1964. After that he fades from view like dust on cracking film emulsion.

Donna Conroy – Tom Conroy’s beautiful beat street wife from the Delaware horse country. Tom spent half his time fighting off the pimps who wanted to sign her up. Last time I saw here she was great with child.

Ed Ginsberg – comic peyote brother, photographer and a great heart. News: Someone told me last year he is living in Budapest.

Eva Bessie – Bess’ best friend, daughter of Hollywood Ten screenwriter Alvah Bessie. She was immortalized on two Fillmore posters done by her husband Wes. Still living in the Ozarks somewhere last I heard. 2008 Update: Eva is a psychologist in Missouri. Happily married these long years and now with grandchildren on her knee. We’ve talked and corresponded several times. God bless that little piglet who made a success of her life.

George “The Beast” Howell. A legend in his own time. A friend ran into him ten or fifteen years ago in the rugged mountains of Northern California up by the Oregon border. He was on a buying trip looking for high quality virgin wool. Something about Persian rugs. He’d picked it up living in Asia. 2008 Update: Peter Albin gave me his phone number. With awe and trepidation I called George just before Christmas. To hear again after so long that voice of legend, my North Beach comrade George the Beast, King of the Baby Beatniks…it was like watching ice melt around a mammoth frozen aeons ago with daisies still hanging from his mouth and waiting for him to trumpet once more. George lives with his sister near Clear Lake, California. He’s got emphysema and can’t get out much. Still appraises rare and valuable carpets. But he is still here, still on the ground, not in it. God bless you forever, brother. I wrote about George in Famous People I Never Knew #1: Neal Cassady.

Joe Novakovich – Fingerless Joe himself. He had warped fingers due to a birth defect, yet became a masterful autoharp player and stalwart of the San Francisco folk scene. 2008 Update: I’ve heard sad stories about Joe I will not relate until I know if they’re true.

Johnny Chance – Saintly drummer for The Final Solution and first guy on our scene to notice the Beach Boys were cool. Funnier and smarter than anyone, yet he dressed like a Catholic schoolboy. He joined the Moonies and I never saw him no more. I miss his goofy smile and cracked sense of humor and Petaluma intelligence.

Laurie Sarlat – with the Long Island accent, thick black hair and blue-green eyes, she was poet Allen Cohen’s consort and Wendy to this lost boy. She left town with a guy I didn’t know and I never saw her again. Allen told me years later she’d joined a Christian cult. 2008 Update: She’s living in Arizona. I don’t know where.

Leslie Hipshmann AKA Leslie Van Gelder. Most beautiful and sweetest of the teenaged hangers-on at 311 Judah Street (funny, I was a teenager myself!). She split for New York and I never saw her again. Leslie, I still have the letters you wrote me from the East Village.

Margarita Bates AKA The Bitch. Unforgettable. News: An anonymous tipster wrote to tell me she is alive and where she is living. Thank you. 2008 Update: I wrote about Margarita in Chet Helms, Margarita And Me

Melanie Kinkead AKA Lanie da Kink – as dear a girl as I ever knew. I wrote about her in Famous People I Never Knew #2: Janis Joplin. I am back in touch with Mel thanks to the blog and she is still just as funny as ever, and still the best. 2008 Update: I visited Mel in Sacramento last summer and it was like we had been apart for five minutes. What a pal!

Michael Rachoff – Page Street friend of years but we lost touch in my wanderings. 2008 Update: I’ve talked to Michael on the phone several times and hope to see him in a few weeks. He still lives in San Francisco.

Peter Kraemer – Virgina City filmmaker and leader of the Sopwith Camel – the first San Francisco band to hit the charts. 2008 Update: I recently heard Peter is living in Mexico and planning another reunion of the Sopwith Camel.

Peter Walters – my boyhood best friend who lived at 47th and Balboa. Peter didn’t care if I was sick in bed much of my childhood. He’d always come by and play games and make puzzles and draw battleships with me in bed and him sitting in a chair beside me. What a great kid!

Peter Weiss –tough kid from the Bronx who danced with Ann Halprin’s Dancer’s Workshop. Last time I saw Peter he and his girlfriend were heading for Japan.

Riley Turner – holy tennies street kid from Lowell High School. I wrote about him in Song For Relay Tornfoot.

Solveig Otvos, AKA Solveig Rimkeit, AKA Ruth Weissinger – the beautiful Latvian. Where are you, Solveig? I still hear you laugh in my dreams. 2008 Update: I’ve talked to Solveig, now known as Rochanah at her home in Chico, California. She claims she remembers nothing but she remembers everything. Her laughter still brings joy to ice.

Tom Conroy – the North Beach street kid cartoonist who got me busted in Oakland. Tom dealt in Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon comic strips and could spot newspaper insulation in every blowndown ghetto redevelopment Victorian we broke and entered. 2008 Update: George Howell told me Tom lives in New Mexico and has a successful business running a stock photo archive.

I know where too many of my early friends are today though – in the ground.
Here’s to you, Rodney Albin and Chet Helms and Allen Cohen and Wendy Norins and Tom Hobson and Bess Farr and all the rest of you – friends forever.

I have a lifetime of stories to tell just about these guys. There they are through my window: young and sunburnt and storm-tossed – the best of the best, the San Francisco kiddos of the pre-invasion Sixties – my generation.

Peace, Brother

I could blame it on growing old, but I know it’s not, not really. I’ve seen them all my life, seen these ghosts. Not jumping out to spook me, just watching me like children in the corner. I think I left San Francisco because I was tired of their shenanigans. I wanted to be someplace new and clean and free of ghosts. Now they haunt my second home New Jersey, too.

Some places are more ghostly than others though, like the corner of Seventh and Judah Street in San Francisco. I cannot walk past that corner without seeing Solveig coming out the door with ‘Ban The Bomb’ placards and banners for the demonstration. She might as well wave at me, but she never does. Or seeing Peter Weiss swinging over the rail of the entry stairs onto the shoulders of one of the teenagers who are crashing our big peacenik party. And whomping on him in peacenik joy. Or seeing Margarita emerge from the front archway wearing long braids, my Mexican chaleca and her brassy confident smile.

Who were these people, man? Were they always ghosts? Were they really real once? Is this all a dream?

I wish it wasn’t so gray in Spokane. Grey skies, gray ice down the sidewalk, gray homeless hearts standing aimless forever in the skid row doorways on Third Avenue.

What Happened To Playland-at-the-Beach?

Is it true all good things must finally come to an end? It was certainly true for Playland at the Beach, the great amusement park that once promenaded along the western coast of San Francisco, out by the edge of Golden Gate Park. In its heyday in the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, even into the late Fifties, the place rocked with kids and young people and sailors and fun – and they measured their cost in nickels. San Franciscans didn’t need a car to get there because Playland was at the end of a couple of streetcar lines, as amusement parks usually were in the early twentieth century.

A traveler climbing aboard the B car heading downtown late on a weekend afternoon in the 1950s might find himself surrounded by packed-in black families from the Fillmore District. They were heading home tired, cranky and sandyfooted after a terrific cotton candy and enchiladas day. Latino families from the Mission, Irish and Italian families from the Richmond and Sunset districts, city teenagers mixed with teens from San Bruno all the way to San Mateo twenty miles down the brand new Bayshore Freeway, they were were hotfooting down the Midway, looking for fun, looking for thrills, looking for girls. On sunny days in September, Ocean Beach itself, across the Great Highway, was packed with families on blankets listening to big black portable radios or dabbling their toes in the ferociously cold surf. As Bugsy said to Shifty back in 1957, “I want to stick around while I get my kicks!”

I don’t know what happened, but parks like Playland were closing all over the country. Perhaps the opening of the original Disneyland in 1955 had something to do with it. Week after week Walt Disney used his television show, conveniently named Disneyland, to flog the wonders and delights of his new Magic Kingdom. Maybe the traditional family-oriented park at the edge of the big city was looking a little tawdry and old fashioned. Most young people had access to cars now. They could drive to big modern theme parks like Great America, the Bay Area’s first. It was (and is) just off the Bayshore Freeway, and, unlike Playland way out at the edge of a labyrinthine city, is easily accessible by millions of Bay Area families.

Besides, by the 1950s, the blue collar and middle-class families that formed Playland’s primary market were leaving the City in droves, off to their new martinis and togetherness playgrounds in the suburbs. But let’s not talk about that sorrowful day in 1954 when the moving van arrived at our beautiful San Francisco house on 47th Avenue two blocks from the vast, fogbound, eternal Pacific ocean and trucked the furniture to our new, open floor plan, wall to wall windows and a patio, subdivision miracle stranded on a mudflat on the San Francisco Bay. It’s too traumatic. I think I’ve been trying to get back home my whole life.

The young urban professionals who took their places, filling the swinging Tony Bennett bars on Union Street, were not likely to suggest a date night at Playland riding the Wild Mouse.

More tomorrow.
Photo of Playland, 1958 by my brother Gary.

History of San Francisco Underground 1961- 65

All the famous hippies emerged from Woody Guthrie workshirts like butterflies on May 14, 1965.

Except of course for one who
saw the old sun rising
golden gleaming intriguing from the
freight car door. He stepped out
of the box car
into the light,
and
wished all the rest of us
a merry good night.

R.I.P.
Gary Marxon
1943-1963

Photo by permission Cyberhobo

Reprise: We Shall Not Be Moved

Still looking at this picture. The guy with the intense expression and Buddy Holly glasses is me, Christopher Newton. I’m playing the Spanish guitar Don Auclair gave me because he felt bad about sleeping with my ex-girlfriend before she was an ex. Today it’s sitting in my daughter’s closet gathering dust but with every molecule in its cracked sounding board and warped neck still charged with power.

My current girlfriend Linda Lovely – she’s sitting behind me. Linda at 20 is a true innocent heart in her own way, but not very happy today – she just found out she’s going to have a beautiful baby who has given both of us joy ever since – but it’s a bit unexpected, and she’s not used to the idea.

The soulful intellectual pondering my kazoo is Joe Pratt, subject of a lost short story Joe Pratt at Stinson Beach. The hair in the foreground belongs to Solveig Otvos, nee’ Rimkeit, and as good a friend as I ever had. We are sitting in Golden Gate Park’s Rose Garden on a foggy day in the summer of 1962, four friends and a nameless photographer.

Linda and I are still tight and see each other several times a year. Joe wandered off into another life as friends of our youth tend to do. Perhaps he became a wandering kazooist. Solveig followed a spiritual path, Subud, and changed her name to Ruth. We lost touch as I got deeper into it and she climbed further out. She’s the one I miss most — sensitive, loyal, able to see bullshit for what it was and laugh it away. And that sexy Latvian accent!

We’d all met through the San Francisco State Student Peace Union. It’s hard to remember now just how imminent the end of the world seemed in those Cold War years. But it just absolutely freaked my generation (this was a couple of years before Viet Nam). Russia and the US were playing a galactic game of poker called brinkmanship and the whole world could explode in cosmic fury at any time. Hey – we were young. We didn’t want to die in flaming fission because one player called the other’s bluff. Would you?

The Peace Movement at San Francisco State coalesced around the immediate issue of atmospheric testing of H-Bombs, which had started up again in 1961, the year I transferred to State. The Air Force was exploding them in the Nevada desert to learn how to kill more people and the fallout was drifting across the desert into California and eastward into Utah. The breeze was full of a radioactive substance call Strontium-90 that was getting into mother’s milk among other places. (Where is this stuff today? Has it decayed by now?)

And it made me mad. That was my politics. Still pretty much is, I’m afraid. It was just one more, but the worst example yet, of an adult world I wanted no part of running amok and preparing to cremate the world to make it safe for freedom or something. But to me and Joe and Solveig it was just cold death leering at us in an unpleasant way.

The FBI thought we were all working for Nikita Khrushchev, or else Communist dupes. The best thinking of the era had decided that Communists were like demons and had supernatural powers over the minds of all young people who didn’t prefer nuclear destruction.

I’m not saying the Commies weren’t trying to use us to their strategic advantage – but I had met members of the San Francisco Communist party and they were tired, worn-out. Their time has passed. In our snotty youth we thought them laughable and knew nothing of their struggles in the hunger-wracked Thirties.

There was a song we used to sing at demonstrations. The chorus ran “Just like a tree, standing by the water, we shall not be moved” and we would make up the first line. The head local Commie was a guy named Archie Brown, and we used to sing “Archie is our leader; we shall not be moved” just to bug the FBI guys who were usually wandering harrumph with little cameras at the demonstrations.

For Joe and Solveig and Don Auclair and my ex-girlfriend Margarita at least this was not a political issue – demonstrating was an existential fist in the face of our imminent demise. Maybe there was nothing we could do to stop it – but we weren’t going to go peacefully. To the barricades!

When I Was Twenty in San Francisco

Golden Gate Park.
August, 1962

There’s a guy going to interview me tonight for his book on San Francisco rock impresario Chet Helms. I think the main reason he wants to talk with me is that I’m still here with memory intact. And I knew Chet back at the beginning – 1962, 1963.

So I’ve been digging around in the backfiles of my mind today turning over events of forty years ago when I was twenty years old in North Beach, twenty-two years old in the Haight-Ashbury, married to Linda Lovely, baby on the way and in my arms.

I can walk down the hallways – look in every room. I can tell you what Allen Cohen was wearing the day Laurie Sarlat blew through the front door of 1736 Page Street into our lives – but I can’t tell anyone what any of it meant. Just a collection of images in my mind, some clear, some fuzzy.

Why do I bother? Because I gotta pay my debts, I guess. I wish I knew.

The writer will be calling from California at 7:30 tonight. I’ll let you know.

Pigs Gotta Dance

Been trying to write more about my Dad. There he comes before me in joie de vie vision doing a soft shoe in our living room in San Mateo, California to Toot Toot Toosie Goodbye. Then Mom comes into my vision and they spin a smart fox trot around the living room.

Here’s what Dad taught me:
A dancing pig always always beats a philosopher.
Work should be fun even though it is work.
It’s fun being famous and we should all strive for it.
Trivial, inconsequential, who cares? The thing is to get out tomorrow’s column (I never believed him on this point.)
Here’s what’s important: to dance and sing and play a squawky violin and write and tell stories and laugh in great snoots and spill your glass of wine with every sweeping gesture at the dinner table.
And I know it’s true.
But I find tears falling on my keyboard and I can’t write anymore.

Why do we grieve?