Where Are the Liverpool Invasion Three?

Sorry I haven’t been around today. I’ve been out shopping. Up and down Main Street with my shopping bag looking for a skull. I needed one so I can go up in my pear tree and meditate on the transitoriness of life. St. Francis thought highly of the practice so I thought I should try it.

Well, I finally found one and it’s pretty nice. It was in the back at the Dollar Store. In fact, there was a whole box of them. I think the Pirates of the Caribbean ride must have been overstocked. But I like it fine. It glows in the dark too, which could come in handy in the pear tree if I’m up there at night or if I want to play a joke on the neighbors. And it has a lid I can take off and put things inside.

So far it hasn’t worked out too well though. I try to meditate on memento mori, like my blogger friend Paula says, but my visions come out more like besame mucho. Instead of the yawning pit, I keep having visions of tiny Snickers bars. And little Butterfingers.

Anyway, while I was out shopping, I got to thinking about the Liverpool Invasion Three. You might not remember them but they were pretty big in 1965. They even played my high school once. I still have Nigel Twist’s autograph somewhere.

Those guys had some interesting songs. Of course there was their big hit, Just A Bit of Fun, but in a way their famous “answer songs” were even more interesting. Like when the Righteous Brothers had their hit, You Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, the LI3 came out with Hey, I Found Your Lovin’ Feeling (You Left It On The Counter At The Market.)

Come to think of it, I guess it wasn’t as clever as I thought it was at the time.

Maybe they were more of a cult thing. They never got really big, like, say, Herman’s Hermits or Freddy And The Dreamers. But they were big in San Mateo, where I grew up. With their high pointy collars and skinny black ties and winklepicker boots — it was like they brought Carnaby Street right to my hometown. Ziggy, Ignatz and Nigel - I wonder where you are today?

At the time I actually had a friend Ignatz who lived down the street from me. It was uncanny how much he looked like Ignatz Loverman from the Liverpool Invasion Three. But he was a San Mateo kid like me. Plain old Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki. Kids made fun of him on the schoolbus. But sometimes when he’d been using his pimple cream, in a certain light with a Beatle wig on he could almost be one of them. It made me wonder but I never asked him about it. I think he must have wanted to be just like Iggy though, cause sometimes I would catch him practicing talking with a Liverpool accent. And he would go in his garage for hours and practice all Iggy’s famous bass runs. It’s too bad that when the LI3 played our Grad Night, poor Ignatz didn’t show up. He was so shy.

Well, life is strange, eh? Today Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki owns the Family Pharmacy at 3rd and B Streets. He’s real big in the Rotary Club too. As for Iggy Loverman, he just disappeared forever like so many great musicians of the past. Someday I’d like to find those guys but I guess it’ll never happen. The good die young, they say…

Baby Beatniks Go To College

In September 1959 it was still hot in San Jose, like it is everywhere across California that time of year. I was eating lunch at Walgreen’s Drugs with Louise Picchi, a luscious brunette from San Mateo High, same as me (I was from San Mateo High, not a luscious brunette. Thought I should make that clear). In those late days of summer all the freshmen kids from San Mateo huddled together for a few weeks, like polliwogs in an eddy of the creek that ran through the culvert. Louie was going to be a drama major and I knew her through my actor pal Ricky Shapero. We had almost nothing in common except familiarity and comfort, and that was plenty. Besides, from my side, she was a major fox. Normally not in my baby faced league.

Hey Louie. I can see your face so clear. Are you still eighteen somewhere in this universe? Still so killer beautiful, still so full of high spirits and joy?

We sat side by side at Walgreen’s steaming lunch counter perspiring and laughing about our horrible registration experiences. Root beer in Coke glasses with two straws and tuna fish sandwiches with a little scoop of potato salad on half a lettuce leaf. I wasn’t feeling beat today, I was trying out Joe College.

San Jose State was great for trying out that role. It had its share of concrete buildings designed by the Corps of Engineers for maximum boxy cheapness, but it also had, so unusual for a California state college campus – Tower Hall, a vine encrusted brick building from seventy years before. It was right out of a nineteen thirties hubba hubba college movie. To my eager young eyes it breathed a perfume of another world I wanted to be a part of. Poetry and great novels and people devoting their minds to thinking about big important things. You could walk down the ivy crawling cloister in the heat and hear droning professor flies lecturing on aerodynamics or Virgil or bonehead English grammar like it was still the 1920s and I could be wearing a tight sweater and bell-bottom pants and be the cat’s meow. That was me, creating the universe around me as I walked through it, but most guys preferred to wear Butchwax flattops, chinos, little plastic pocket protectors in their madras shirts and slide rules in their pocket protectors and walk down Seventh Street to the cafeteria in tough engineering student gangs.

It was a different time, the fall of 1959 – for one thing, girls still went to college to get their MRS degree. They didn’t think it was a joke. They majored in Home Ec or PE or possibly Elementary Ed and waited for the magic to happen and good luck and God bless ‘em.

There’s a gaggle of college girls coming now. Note their tight plaid skirts and white blouses, and one is wearing a sleeveless dress with petticoats underneath in spite of the heat. Actually, they’re kind of cute. And is their lipstick red! They’re on their way to the cafeteria to listen to ‘Running Bear loved little White Dove’ on the juke box. Then Paul Anka is going to sing ‘Hold me in your arms Bay-bey Maybe you and I will fall in love.’ Or some other song that would send me running for the door.

The cafeteria was much better about 4:00 PM when it was nearly empty. Then I could put on Oscar Peterson playing ‘Round About Midnight. Yes, one cool thing about 1959 was that jazz and rock and roll could share the jukebox comfortably together. Like inside my head. And I could drink coffee and read poetry and feel cool.

Louie wasn’t a gumsnapper like those girls walking down the street. She was my friend and those other girls weren’t, so even if she didn’t really like jazz or know anything about Jack Kerouac, she was still cool.

Yesterday we both stood in snaky lines in the headache sun for hours waiting to get our registration packets after all the sophomores, juniors and seniors were handed theirs. They were already inside the gym having fun racing from table to table signing up for classes. Once all the classes were full, then they let the freshmen in.

But we had won out in the end. We had some classes, even if they were not exactly what we had in mind. I had even got into English Comp 3A, required of and dreaded by freshman English majors. We were registered college students.

We had new homes too. Louie moved into the girl’s dorms and I checked into a boarding house on South Twelfth. Of course we would never see each other’s rooms. She could welcome me into her dorm lobby with all the other girls and their dates but not one step further. And Mrs. O’Reilly would have had a heart attack if a girl had knocked on her front door asking to see one of the guys. Unheard of. The adult world knew what young people would get up to if they ever had a chance to be alone and they were going to make damn sure they never were!

Of course no one considered what two guys might get up to if left alone in their rooms. This was 1959! ‘Gay’ meant ‘cheerful’. Of course there were homos and queers out there somewhere, but they didn’t go to San Jose State. I thought they were probably all middle aged guys who lived in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch.

My roomie was a big older guy who was majoring in Police Science. He didn’t smile much. His Dad was chief of police of one of the San Joaquin Valley farm towns. I might creep back at three a.m. from some horrible drunken debauch to find him still up studying. We didn’t have much to talk about but one Sunday he invited me to go with him to a Baptist church he attended way out in Los Gatos. And I, with great nonchalance, thought “what the hell…”

I didn’t know what to expect. My parents, when they went to church at all, were more of the polite and proper Episcopal persuasion. For me, church happened in gothic stone buildings that should be in an Agatha Christie mystery, with bald guys in white surplices who handed out the communion wafer at the altar rail with real wine in a little shot glass, and it was all steeped in a thousand years of ritual and was peaceful and soothing and kind of spiritual in a funny way. I’d never been to a Baptist church.

Not that I wasn’t worldly. By seventeen I was pretty damn sophisticated. I knew the score, man. Why, in high school I had written a poem that began:

Man is lost on a moor
Blind and deaf and lost on a moor.

ha ha! Let us laugh and be gay in the face of this bitter, tragic joke of life! Then I would light my pipe and stride gloomily into the mist. Keeping careful watch out for the Hound of the Baskervilles.

But I’d never been to a Baptist church. So we drove out to Los Gatos and before I knew it the preacher had launched into his sermon about why Caryl Chessman should be executed. This was a major case at the time and awareness of it had even dribbled down to apolitical seventeen year old kids like me. Chessman was supposedly the notorious “Red Light Bandit” who had robbed and raped women in LA many years before. After eleven years, he was still on Death Row in San Quentin but time was running out for him. Even for proponents of capital punishment the case was unsettling because Chessman hadn’t actually killed anyone. Read the Wikipedia article here if you’re interested.

I gathered that the preacher thought Chessman should be executed because he had violated God’s law and God was a real stickler for punishing anybody who disobeyed him. The pastor went right through the Old Testament pointing our how this kind of miscreant was stoned and this other kind was supposed to be because she helped her husband in a fight by grabbing the bad guy’s balls and squeezing real hard. Well, maybe he didn’t actually mention that one. Not proper. Even young guys like me who disobeyed their parents were stoned and pretty soon my blood was running cold and I was getting mad. What kind of God did these people believe in? And how can I get out of here without causing a scene?

I figured, “Well this guy is a preacher so he must know what he’s talking about. But if the Bible really says things like that than it’s just one more proof that God isn’t real because if there really is a God no way would he say things like that.”

We drove home in cool silence.

It didn’t take too long for the Joe College thing to wear off. The kids I was meeting were so square! There must be some cool people here somewhere! At breakfast in the boarding house I shared the table with a history major who smoked a pipe, an accounting guy who took electric guitar lessons, an engineering major who made jokes about the way I ate my fried egg, a business guy who was pledging a frat, and, one bright light — a coolguy from the San Fernando Valley who just wanted to get back to LA as soon as he could and marry his girl friend.

Dick would tell us hilarious stories about his high school scene at San Fernando Valley High and how he had taken Annette Funicello to his prom and I never could tell what was true and what he was making up but he made me laugh my head off and, unfortunately, that has always been my key criteria for people I want to hang out with.

Dick was from a show business family. His father wrote “You Never Miss Your Water Till The Well Runs Dry”. He said it as if I should be impressed. He was engaged to a honey blonde he talked to in the phone booth up at the corner every night. I used to walk up with him and watch him through the glass and wish I had a girl friend.

Once afterwards we walked downtown to see the new Sandra Dee flick “Gidget.” Dick claimed he knew most of the surfer actors in the flick, and maybe he did. Dick wasn’t a pathological liar - he was a great story-teller and he never let truth get in the way of a good story. I learned a lot from him! And besides, what did I care if he knew all those guys. I knew Moondoggie himself. (For anybody younger than 64 - Moondoggie was the surfer dude that Gidget falls in love with in the movie of the same name.) He was played by Jimmy Darren and Jimmy Darren had performed at San Mateo High’s 1959 Grad Night. And I’d said “Hi Jimmy!” So there.

Dick lasted one semester. He just wanted to get home to that honey babe as fast as he could. Sometimes I wonder if he got into show business like his father. I looked his name up on IMDB the other day. There is a guy with his name who directed porn movies in the seventies. Could it be him? Did he stay married to the beautiful honey blonde girl he was so in love with? Did they live in a big house in the San Fernando Valley and did he go off to work directing hot sex scenes all day? Then come home and read his kids a bedtime story? It’s slightly possible.

The Bus Ride Home

In September 1959, seventeen years old, I said goodbye to Ma and my beatnik friends back home and left San Mateo for the carefree life of an English major at San Jose State College. I was going to be a writer when I grew up. A novelist, like Jack Kerouac. My plan was to hitchhike everywhere, love all the longhaired beatnik girls, grow up, live in Greenwich Village and write about everything that happened to me. You must admit it’s not a bad plan. I’d do what I wanted to do anyway and make a living from my pen.

I never wondered if I’d be happy. Happiness was impossible. Not part of the equation.

One cold night on the Greyhound heading back up the Peninsula to San Mateo for the weekend, I was thinking about my friend Way Out Willy, who was sleeping in Bear Mattson’s car because he got into a shouting match with his parents and they threw him out.

I wanted to write about stuff like that too. Where is the love? What if I was on a long bus journey – like this creeping thirty miles up the El Camino to San Mateo, but I’d been on the road for weeks and weeks and I was burnt out, gone, exhausted in heart and soul. What if I was dragging my weary ass back to my home town even though my parents were dead or something, but a heartsick homesickness compelled me across the snowy continent. I knew when I got to my best friend Way Out’s house (hmm, I’d have to call him something else) I would be welcomed like a son, received into the warmth of his family, be fed and a have real bed to sleep in. I’d be home again and safe to heal.

So, in my story dream the Greyhound grumbled to a stop at the little B Street bus depot on that rainy Christmas night and I limped through darkened and shuttered downtown streets. Just the odd Santa Claus statuette in a shop window illuminating my backpack and my worn beat seventeen year old face. I stumbled up through the shuttered mansions of Hillsborough and on into the redwood subdivisions high on the jolly Christmas rainy hillside. And there were the diamond pinpoints of the Peninsula below. I hobbled up Crestview Drive and just as I approached, still hidden by the night, I hear angry voices. There’s Way Out’s father at the front door and he’s shouting at Willy and Willy is just standing there taking it. He heaves Willy’s paintings and sculptures into the rain and keeps shouting and there they lie in the wet grass with little drips from the acacia tree onto his portrait of our friend Gypsy Girl. Little rain drips on her dark cheeks. The door slams shut, leaving Way Out standing in the rain in his Levis and red windbreaker. In the rain night ice night Rebel Without A Cause night star-filled air.

“Hey man.”

“Hey Pig.”

That was the real truth. I had to tell that story. Just the kids. Lost and loose on the suburban sorrowful Crestview Drive of time. I thought I could write stories like that.

************************************************************************

The only trouble with writing was you had to sit at a typewriter for a long time every day. How fun is that? And then you had to sweat and sweat until you got an idea. And then you actually had to write sentences that communicated something more than ‘cats ate rats’. And then words on the page sounded stupid when you read it to yourself out loud and you had to throw the whole thing out and start over. All that work for nothing.

I wasn’t really reconciled to it. Then there was the part where you walked around and wouldn’t talk to anybody and people thought you were sulking but you were just trying to get it together in your mind. The right place in my head. Where is it? It was there yesterday!

Writing is still like that. When the spirit is in me, writing is the funnest thing. I make myself laugh and I work myself up into fits and I am amazed to see little scenes come to life. Wow! And then there’s the part where you groan and have to chain yourself to the seat because nothing will come. At least in the days of typewriters you had to work for your distractions. Now the whole Internet is out there to distract us hapless writers.

But you know what? For better or worse, I was made and molded and formed to do this. It’s in my blood. Funny. Now I’m 64. And this is still what I want to do when I grow up. I hope I get to.

James Dean’s Jeans

Oh no - not this again! Yes, friends, Jimmy’s trousers sold so well that now someone is putting up his jeans and his teeshirt too. Estimated value at auction: $15,000. To anyone of my generation, that’s cheap. And, astounding to say - Jim Stark, Dean’s character in Rebel Without A Cause, wore Lee’s jeans! In my high school, only Levis were cool. All other brands were worn only by dorks. That singular prejudice has lasted to this day and, after nearly fifty years, I still only wear Levis. I still don’t want to be a dork!

Labels: James Dean

How I Rode Away

When I was fifteen lying in bed in horrible death San Mateo California with its muddy raw streets and brine shrimp puddle salt flats stretching out to the Bayshore freeway and beyond to further grim striver subdivisions, I would lay in bed and listen to a singer named Gogi Grant on the radio singing

“In a lonely shack by a railroad track
He spent his younger days
And I guess the sound of the outward-bound
Made him a slave to his wand’rin ways

And the wayward wind is a restless wind
A restless wind that yearns to wander
And he was born the next of kin
The next of kin to the wayward wind…”

and I would think, yeah, that’s how I’m going to be when I grow up. Free. Next of kin to the wayward wind. Just me and my horse. I’ll ride into town and a beautiful girl will fall in love with me but then I’ll feel that urge to get on my horse and ride on, following the railroad tracks on to the purple horizon. Like Shane.

No subdivisions, no desert schoolbuses, but free forever to ride away from the ugliness and stench and mud and suffering and crewcut guys wearing button down plaid shirts and chinos with little belts on the back - San Mateo High School with its burning questions — will Kathy Cullinan smile at me today when she walks down my aisle in Freshman Algebra? And how come she gets A’s and I get F’s and will never understand algebra no matter how hard I try? What if she finds out?

Just be campin out with my bedroll and coffee pot. Free as a bee. Maybe ride around the world and see faraway places like England and France.

What happened was when I was twenty I got a girl I didn’t know very well pregnant and we got married because only a rat would run out on a girl when he got her pregnant and the thought of a Tijuana abortion made my blood run cold. I was no death dealer and neither was she. Our time together was turbulent and lasted until 1967. Then a couple years later I fell in love with my twenty-two year old beautiful blonde Patrushka with her little black Volkswagon and her big black dog and we have been together ever since.

I still wanted to see what was on the other side of the mountains. But usually Patrushka wanted to see it too. And I found out what I had not suspected when I was fourteen: that love forever is the solid rock of our lives. Nothing else.

Baby Beatniks in North Beach (where there isn’t any water and Big Daddy ain’t your fadder)

So, anyway, one Sunday afternoon in the Summer of 1959 the Baby Beatniks are heading for The City, twenty miles up the Bayshore Freeway. They were living big already, just blowin’ out of the suburbs and into that town of a million lost hearts’ dreams. At the moment they’re managing an off-key rendition of the gospel song Twelve Gates To the City: “Oh what a beautiful city, Oh what a beautiful city, Oh what a beautiful city, San Francisco is.” Man, it was going to be a good day. North Beach, here we come.

Rick found a place to park on one of Telegraph Hill’s steep side streets and the three cut down to upper Grant Avenue, as it was in the last golden light of the beatnik media frenzy. When City Lights Books published Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl three years before and they were busted on obscenity charges, the trial put North Beach on the map — the center of the whole new bohemian, beat generation poetry and jazz extravaganza of sinful wonderfulness. Then Kerouac arrived along with rest of the beat poets and it seemed like by 1959 everybody who ever read Time Magazine knew North Beach was the place to go to catch a glimpse of those crazy, cool free spirits known as beatniks as they played their bongo drums and smoked tea and grew beards. And wrote their obscene poems. City Lights Bookstore was on the tour bus map — and that’s where we were headed today, to the world just three more high school tourists.

First we stood outside the Coffee Gallery to hear Pony Poindexter blow alto at the Sunday afternoon jam session. The sidewalk was the place for teenagers who wanted to hear jazz, and a small group had already gathered. Teenaged beatniks were considered a low life form on the Beach and our flip-flops (“satori slippers”), sweatshirts and incipient goatees gave us right way. Fortunately, Grant Ave was not like the nightclub scene on Broadway around the corner. The bouncers would card you but they wouldn’t shoo you away unless you were keeping the paying traffic from coming in.

Actually, my partner Ricky didn’t really like jazz that much; he was an actor, jazz left no room for his expansive personality. Cool poetry was more his style, especially if he could declaim it to peals of laughter. And we were always ready to laugh at Rick.

My other main man, Dave Parma, was silent, but you could tell from his eyes he was thinking, “yeah yeah go man!” as we whirled our eyes up and down the street watching to see how the big cats portrayed coolness. To me, jazz was the sound of hipness. I loved music in all forms from Little Richard to Prokofieff, but jazz was the key to the future I wanted to be part of and I needed to fill up my head with as much of it as I could.

Narrow Grant Ave was crowded with happy people heading down to the clubs of Broadway or up to their cars. Obvious tourists, usually two sets of couples chatting excitedly to each other. There was Paddy O’Sullivan down on the corner, hawking his poetry book, dressed like one of the Three Musketeers in boots and floppy black hat with a big plumy feather. He had a group of visitors surrounding him – it was a good day for the trade.

Oh Upper Grant Ave of 1959, street of wondrous delight, street of swimming crowds and cool daddy-ohs and remittance men in abstract residence hotels and little dusty Figoni’s Hardware store next to the Italian-French Bakery of anise bread delight. The beats and the tourists and the elderly Italian men walking out to play bocce ball and smoke evil-smelling (and tasting) rope cigars, and the dog trotting freely in the street and the pigeons waiting to be marked, and the Chinese ladies off to work at the sweat shop and Mimi and Rudolfo falling in love in their starvation garret out the window of the apartment above all on a sunny Sunday before school started up again and I went off to San Jose State to start college.

We ducked across the street and hustled up a block to The Scene, an art gallery next to the beatnik gift shop. We liked to go in there because, first they had no good reason to keep us out.

In Cafe Trieste, the coolest coffee house on the Beach, we could stand by the counter for hours, but good luck getting served. Good businesspeople, they had a vested interest in keeping suburban seventeen year old riffraff thinned out. (Actually, I did successfully purchase an orgeat soda there once, but I was twenty by then and a big well-traveled college student beatnik).

No chance to get into hip Vesuvio’s (the bar with Booths for Psychiatrists) - nope, it was a bar, a beatnik bar (actually, they would have screeched to be so characterized). Mike’s Pool Hall? The worldly streetly denizens would have had a good laugh if we penniless innocents had tried racking up the balls. After the laugh, we would have gotten bounced. Still, even though we were admittedly fleas and disease – teenagers from the suburbs – hey, WE WERE THE FUTURE and you can’t stop us!

The Italian deli at Broadway and Kearney treated us fair. Our money was always good there for French rolls and salami.

The bookstores – New Discovery, Logos, and above all City Lights, the literary center of the universe – let us in but watched us for they knew our hearts were larcenous. Also our fingers. But The Scene, the art gallery…it represented everything we aspired to be.

There were art galleries in our town, San Mateo, of course. Their windows featured scenes of waves breaking at twilight with the night approaching and glimmers of green and a little duck – perfect for that empty spot over the mantel of your upper-middle class living room .

But The Scene’s window presented other kinds of paintings – grey and mauve paint slathered on canvas with a palatte knife, the colors sliding into each other so you couldn’t see where they met. And a strange robot shape in tan outlined in black stranded frozen in the greymauve fog gloom. That was cool.

And inside there were paintings like psychotics make in art therapy with deep symbolism known only to the artist – like a guy roped to a tombstone (well, that’s kind of obvious), or maybe a huge guy squashed in a claustrophobic room with daggers raining down – stuff even I at 17 could recognize were great personal nightmares but terrible art, yet hung on the same wall with the cool grey-mauve palette knife stuff.

The yet greater attraction of The Scene was the way-out chick sitting bored at the counter. Man, she was beat! Thick black hair with bangs and a ponytail or falling down loose, and caked on mascara, layered eyeshadow, eyeliner — all that wonderful drama that made her look Egyptian, exotic and beyond all reach forever, wearing a loose dark sweater and tight skirt with black tights. She stood out from the paintings like a Leonardo amongst the psychotics. Me and Parm and Shapero studied the pictures while stealing looks at this goddess of the Lower East Side come to our own Grant Avenue North Beach. We never spoke, but there she is today emerging clear on my eyelid screen still perched on a stool behind the glass counter bored out of her mind with dark red lipstick on her Winston.

But you know where we were welcome in spite of our itchy, poetry-stealing fingers? City Lights, the legendary bookstore and meeting place for the Beat Generation at the corner or Broadway and Columbus.

City Lights had everything we needed to prepare for our journey to hipness – the passage that would get us a table at the Cafe Trieste and Vesuvio’s and The Place and maybe even the Coexistence Bagel Shop. They carried Celine (Journey to the End of Night), Jean-Paul Sartre – the cool French existentialists, and the nineteenth century guys you couldn’t find in paperback anywhere else, like Flaubert and Balzac. The Brits too – Down and Out in Paris and London, Absolute Beginners, Lucky Jim plus leftist history and politics, anthropology, psychology, Alan Watts’ books The Way of Zen and Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen– and all in paperback. Plus all of the Henry Miller and Djuna Barnes that wasn’t outlawed for obscenity.

I loved going down the narrow winding stairs into the poetry cellar because Shig Murao, the manager, or maybe Ferlinghetti himself had put up a bulletin board there that was like the Craig’s List of North Beach. Reading the scrawled notices on notebook scraps from hipsters looking for rides back to New York City or wanting to share expenses for an apartment on Russian Hill or about a poetry reading coming next week somewhere, it was heady – a window out which I could see real people actually living the life Jack Kerouac encouraged them to live through his books (That was actually the last thing on his mind, but he wrote about his time and place too well)

Continuing down the stairs you emerged into the poetry cellar, the unique collection of poetry books and magazines and literary journals from around the world — Big Table, Evergreen Review, Chicago Review, Partisan Review, and our own local poetry magazine — the hottest item on my list, Beatitude. Browsing in the poetry cellar was like walking into a great conversation between all the hippest, most creative people you could never meet in ordinary teenage life. And you could just sit there as long as you wanted, you and your pals, browsing, checking them out, and if you found something you really liked, stealing it!

What brats! Why did you do that? Why did you bite the hand that fed you?

We would never steal from a friend – but Lawrence Ferlinghetti? No problem! Yet if I had been caught and eighty-sixed from the store – or worse - I would have been devastated. The truth is, we didn’t think more than a minute ahead and…our ethics sucked.

I wanted the poetry and I wanted to steal it! Made it tastier. And then I got to read Gregory Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death or Bob Kaufman’s broadside The Abomunist Manifesto.

The funny thing is the poetry itself kind of encouraged the thief’s stance – sliding by, staying under the world’s radar, romantic yet cynical, the hipster thief. But were the Babies cynical hipster thieves? No way! Maybe they were thrill-seeking — no different than any other shoplifter who can afford to buy the product. They saw it, they wanted it, they figured they could get away with it. Simple and ugly. No different than any other sin. Seventeen or any age of our lives - the motivation to evil remains the same. (The trouble with all this pondering is now I have to go write a check to City Lights for poetry thefts forty-five years ago! Fair is fair.)

Night is falling as the Babies emerge from City Lights, head up Broadway to the delicatessen and emerge with a beat supper of French rolls, Italian dry salami, and a quart of milk. They’re walking past Mike’s Pool Hall in jubilant spirits and agreeing amongst themselves that “someday this will all be ours!” If I live long enough (this could take a while!) and we don’t get bored first - you’ll be able to decide for yourselves how true their prophecy was.

For now, let’s leave them sitting on the concrete balustrade at the end of Vallejo Street, high on Russian Hill, gnawing on French bread and looking down over their future empire. The neon lights of Broadway are switching on, the girl who dances in the cage above “Goman’s Gay Nineties” is just getting to work, the bouncers are sweeping the sidewalks, beyond the steets the Bay Bridge is glowing in the fading sunset light. Oh, what a beautiful City San Francisco is.

Note: Special thanks to Carioca for her trip to the San Francisco Public Library to check my facts.

Terrible Truth About Beatniks

While the Baby Beatniks are heading up the Bayshore Freeway towards the City of Gold, the fabulous Don’t Call It Frisco mighty night beacon signaling to freaks and rebels and adventurers everywhere, let us stop to consider exactly what was this thing they weren’t?

The first, essential thing to know about beatniks is this: there was no such thing as a beatnik. Beatniks were a newspaper and television invention just like flower power and, I don’t know, fill in the media hype for your own generation here. And hopeful wannabe teenagers like us rushed in to fill the void. And eventually became somebody real.

According to the media, you could tell a beatnik because beatniks wore berets and dark glasses and goatees and snapped their fingers a lot. In fact, they looked just like Dizzy Gillespie, the great bop trumpeter who had nothing whatsoever to do with the beat generation, except they probably listened to his records.

There was a beatnik spider in the newspaper comic strips who looked a spider version of Dizzy Gillespie, except he was a beatnik. Who knew why? Maybe he spun psychedelic spider webs.

The Hearst comic strip Jiggs and Maggie suddenly gained a beatnik nephew who was beat because he hung around their house all day, ate sandwiches and wouldn’t work. Day after day, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip savagely satirized beatniks and peaceniks as stupid but dangerous comsymps (communist sympathizers) out to destroy America for their kicks.

Television offered Maynard G. Krebs, a beatnik comic sidekick who looked and acted just Archie’s pal Jughead, including the sandwiches and fear of girls.

Hollywood churned out an epic supposedly based on Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans, but only the title remained when they finished their own story about crooks invading the coffee houses of Upper Grant Avenue. Mardou Fox, the novel’s black heroine from the Oakland slums was played by Leslie Caron looking so French and waif-like in sadeyed beret and little goatee. Kerouac’s character and Leslie Caron were turned into proto-flower power beatnik lovers who in their big scene bought all the balloons from a wise old balloon salesman and set them free to soar lyrically past Coit Tower as Andre Previn’s score soared lyrically too — free as a discarded sad-eyed waif painting left on a rainy San Mateo sidewalk.

Then the crooks came to the big poetry and jazz reading with guys snapping their fingers instead of clapping and Roddy McDowell, who they thought was a big beatnik turned out to be a crook and tried to blame his crimes on Jack Kerouac who fought it out with him in the alley while pretty French Mardou looked on in her beret. “Oh Jack, my hero!” Then they got married and went off to live in a subdivision in San Mateo.

Back in the suburbs, high school kids put on beatnik parties where you could tell they were beatniks because they came wearing sweatshirts and flip-flops.

Gypsy Girl (authentic sixteen year old San Mateo Baby Beatnik) in conversation, Spring 1960: “It’s a joke, man.”

Gary Cooper in unmade for television movie: “Smile when you call me a beatnik, or I’ll know you are the Enemy and I will be forced to fill you full of lead.”

We were forced to watch while the media trivialized, superficialized, and sucked the life from everything we stood for. Except we didn’t know what we stood for. But not that!

Actually, the whole sad beatnik circus was good for us. Exercised our ‘Us versus Them’ mentality. Taught us not to trust the media. If they could do this to poor harmless beats, then who else could they suck the life from to sell papers or commercials?

And it was good for the media too — a handy dress rehearsal for their assault on the hippies seven years later.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!
Jack Kerouac, On The Road

When in doubt, jump and swing.
Gypsy Girl, Spring 1960

Dig? The Baby Beats weren’t real beatniks. But there were no real beatniks, so who cared? What we could do and wanted to do and did do was burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles. This is not a beatnik aspiration but a human aspiration. Is this all there is? Not if we could help it!

Note: The happy beatnik is Maynard G. Krebs, goofy sidekick of teenager Dobie Gillis on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, sitcom which ran from 1959-63.

Howl of the Baby Beatniks

One summer afternoon in 1959, the Baby Beatniks were heading for the City in Ricky Shapero’s beat up ‘56 Chevy. They weren’t real beatniks, you understand. They were mutant-hybrids, the same breed that was hatching all across America that summer — seventeen year old kids, still living at home in the suburbs, out hunting for something real. They had heard it was running loose in the world, the legacy of some guys who had lived up in San Francisco just a few years before, some guys who allied themselves against the silent Fifties world the Baby Beatniks were supposedly poised to enter, and they wanted to find that real thing, if they could.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

Those are the opening lines to Allen Ginsberg’s world-shaking poem Howl. The Babies didn’t know what that meant. I, for one, just knew it was true.

I knew nothing of Ginsberg’s Manhattan hipster-junkie world, but I knew a lot about white middle class suburban dumb numb streets. All us mutant-hybrids did. And it wasn’t that hard to make the connection.

I thought of Sal Mineo in Rebel Without A Cause, running crazed holding his mother’s pistol as hopeless defense against the adult policed world poised to gun him down for the crime of being broken and hurting, hysterical, naked, dead on the planetarium entryway.

Heck, I thought of my friend Way Out, thrown out of his house on Christmas night, and sleeping in Bear Matson’s car.

I remembered the time I knocked over the sculpture Way Out had been creating for weeks. It shattered on the floor but he didn’t react – at all. Just cool. Like nothing had happened . I admired his coolness. One cool hipster cat. But it was uncanny somehow. I would have been shouting like Rumpelstiltskin.

Or the overwhelming sadness that would creep up on me sometimes, at a party, or in Shapero’s Chevy with the guys or just walking down dumb numb tree-shaded Delaware Street. It wasn’t exactly the same but it was close enough.

There was something gone wrong in the world. Or was it me? I could not have vocalized my turmoil. But the Holy Trinity - me and Dave Parma and Ricky Shapero - struggled to try, using all the normal teenage methods available - We wrote poetry. We drove screaming up Hayne Road past the dark mansions before dawn. Got angelheaded drunk and staggering from cheap red wine in a boda bag.

There was a kind of a disease inside me that couldn’t express itself. Rage and sorrow…aw, you’ve heard this all before. I don’t know what Parm and Shapero were feeling, my two main men. We never talked about it. But I think I was looking for the same ancient heavenly connection Ginsberg’s Manhattan beats were looking for as I dragged myself

through the silent midnight streets of San Mateo
walking to Parma’s pad to get an angry fix of poetry and jazz
because I couldn’t use the car tonight.

Man, we wanted to be part of that other, bigger world. But we weren’t ready. We had to cook some more. Meanwhile, we could go to North Beach on a summer afternoon.

Continued when I put the next one up.

Baby Beatniks On Dead Man’s Curve

One night in June of 1959 Eddie Tanaka asks me if I want to go to a beach party after graduation practice. Eddie lived across the street. He was from San Francisco’s Richmond District, the same neighborhood I grew up in; we had that same hatred of the suburb we were stranded in, the same longing for the foggy city streets.

So I invited a girl I knew slightly from school named Janie, Eddie took the girl he was going out with and after practice we took our caps and gowns off, got into Eddie’s parents’ new 1959 Chevy Impala and headed over the mountains to the coastside.

Quick geography lesson: The San Francisco Peninsula is divided into three long thin strips. On the San Francisco Bay side is the airport and all the suburbs that bang into one another from San Francisco to San Jose. West of the burbs is a long wooded ridge, the Skyline, running north-south. It’s still wild even today because Crystal Springs Reservoir is there and the Water Department has fenced off the hills around it since the beginning of time. You have to drive right over that ridge to get to the third strip, we called it the Coastside – Half Moon Bay, the beaches along the Pacific and, in those days, artichoke and Brussels sprouts fields spreading for miles on the bluffs above the ocean. It was a long drive from San Mateo on a windy two lane road usually enveloped in thick fog. Later, whenever I heard that Jan and Dean song “You won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve”, I thought of that road. Kids barreled over it all weekend, passing on curves, and long traffic pileups because of a wreck ahead were the norm.

The beach party was kind of a bust. Just a dozen or so kids sat huddled around a fire glowing in the chill June night fog. One guy had a Japanese guitar (in 1959 Japanese still meant ‘crummy’) and was demonstrating his mastery of “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley, poor boy you’re bound to die…” We hung around for half an hour or so, then headed back over the mountain to San Mateo.

Fog drifted across the winding two lane road from Half Moon Bay up over the the Skyline. The eighteen year old guy behind the wheel, Eddie, was driving his Daddy’s big new overpowered Impala and he had his chick beside him. I guess you know what I’m leading up to. The Impala didn’t have seat belts.

We crossed over the ridge okay. But coming down the hill towards Crystal Springs Reservoir, Eddie lost control going around a bend and me and Eddie and Janie and Eddie’s girl and the big green Impala went over a cliff and tumbled end over end over end ca-lump ca-lump down toward a big pile of rocks at the bottom.

Fortunately, I couldn’t see the rocks. I was too busy not getting killed. I felt a terrific determination rising up in me. I WILL NOT DIE! Just try it, death! Get out of my face! Not this time! I gritted my teeth and tumbled from the floor to the roof, over the front seat and back into the back seat and into Janie’s flouncy skirt and I bounced against the rear window and we landed upside down at the bottom of the cliff. I was still alive.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Janie’s bottom. It was framed by her skirt and petticoats – of course she had underwear on! What are you thinking of? This is 1959!. Janie had landed on her hands and knees in front of me and her skirt had flipped up over her waist in the fall.

Ordinarily I would have been struck by such an unexpected sight. And I guess I WAS struck by it since I can still see her clearly in my mind’s eye, petticoats and the rest. But, for once, I was more interested in getting the hell out of that Impala before it exploded or something.

Miraculously, all four of us were alive, not even seriously hurt. We slithered out of the now-glassless rear window and scrambled and crawled up the cliff face holding onto clumps of coyote bush and sagebrush. (it was not a sheer cliff but rather a very, very steep slope).

Above us, cars had pulled off the road to see what had happened and we could see headlights glaring into the fog. We scrambled the last fifty feet and some guys were waiting at the top to give us a hand and go find a blanket.

The highway patrol finally showed and called an ambulance and we were taken to the emergency hospital in Redwood City. I didn’t realize till we got there that I had two crushed vertebrae in my spine. The whole ride in the ambulance I wasn’t thinking about my back. I was thinking how was I going to tell my mother I was just almost killed in a car wreck. My brother was one year dead. Killed driving to work work one morning.

“Mom, I’m OK! OK? I’m just in the Emergency hospital. Eddie had a little accident. But we’re all OK! Could you come and get me?”

I had to wear a back brace for six months. Those vertebrae still bother me if I don’t watch my posture. I limp.

Funny thing is — the same thing happened again the next year.

It was the winter of 1960-61. This time Parma  (see Baby Beatniks) was driving his parent’s overpowered 1960 De Soto. We were heading back to San Mateo after some Saturday night non-event, wondering what to do next. It was raining. Ricky Shapero was riding shotgun. I was in sitting in back next to Bear Matson. Parm roared down Black Mountain Road though the rainy winter night and – bam, he missed the curve too.

Sometimes I wonder why the tribal elders allow any male under the age of, say, fifty to have a driver’s license. We guys are terrible drivers! We kill people. We get drunk and drive too fast. We stay sober and drive too fast. We take stupid risks just to prove nothing to noone. Could you please just give us bows and arrows and tell us to bring back a mountain lion? I was just as bad as Eddie Tanaka or Dave Parma. One time…well…

So Parm misses the curve, we plow into a telephone pole at 45 miles an hour, and we come to a very sudden stop. Ricky smashes his head into the windshield and I break my nose on the back of the front seat and we both are bleeding all over the place. Bear, unscathed, looks around and pokerfaced he says - “Hey Parm, you missed the curve.”

So once again I found myself in the Emergency Room calling my parents. “Mom, I’m okay, really. I just broke my nose is all.”

I don’t know. It was funny. I’d made it through another night. And we were laughing. But death was in the air. First my brother, then James Dean, then that girl in U.S. History who’d been killed on the Skyline in her boyfriend’s sports car. He was a football hero but he couldn’t hold it off. My brother was tough - a hood, nobody messed with him. (except his girlfriend Margaret) But he couldn’t hold it off either. Death nailed him on North Delaware Street, floating by like Strontium-90. So far I’d beat it. But I didn’t think I’d make it to thirty. Like the saying said, scrawled on blackboards all around San Mateo High that spring: “Live fast, love hard, die young.”

Photo “Red Fog” by dnik at Flikr. Rights reserved.

Rage of the Baby Beatnik

It’s the winter of 1958 and here I am in the bathroom locking my D.A. into place with large quantities of Wildroot Cream Oil, walking down the street of our new Fifties subdivision on the way to the school bus — past the tricky-sticky upside down fruit crate houses, the scrawny flowering plum trees planted in the mud in front of each house…
Eating my brown bag lunch, trading dirty jokes with Les and Archie, doing chemistry homework with the guy in back of me but not understanding it or caring…
Coming home and watching Topper reruns, putting ketchup on my hamburger patty, playing poker with the neighborhood guys — like I wasn’t in a real place, but a pretend place.

Eating dinner with Mom and Dad but not my brother at our little Formica built-in dinner table — Where was I? In a dream. There must be a real world out there. There HAD to be or I was sunk. I couldn’t explain it, because I’d had no other experiences yet, but I was suffocating.

I daydreamed of riding across France on a Lambretta motorscooter with a cool French girl behind me and the sparkling ocean beside us. Sharing a loaf of sparkling French bread and sparkling wine on the sparkling French beach and being in love.

I daydreamed how I could get Tammy across the street to take off her clothes. Or maybe she’d let me put on her baby oil for her again when she was sunbathing in her backyard. Tammy was a couple years older than me, already out of high school, and she put up with me with much grace. When my brother got smashed she took me for a long ride in the hills in her baby blue 1951 Ford convertible with the top down and the radio on and it was the only time I was ever comforted. I nearly cried but I didn’t. Instead we listened to “It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple people eater”…as Tammy drove through the redwoods and over the green hills of springtime on the Peninsula. We didn’t talk much. Tammy knew what I was going through. I depended on her as an older and wiser but still very cool friend. Even as I schemed how to get her clothes off. (Aside to Tammy across the street: Bless you, girl, and thank you forever)

Basketball games on Friday night in the rain watching from the bleachers and “Wear White Tonight”” and goofy Steve the cheerleader doing backflips during intermission rah rah - Was this all? This life I had to live - there must be more!
I longed for something real, but I didn’t know what real was.
I was living in a dream, a really boring dream. – I’ll bet you were too.

I knew some stuff about God: When I went into the fifth grade my folks sent me to Catholic School although they weren’t church goers, certainly not Catholics. They just thought the public school was getting too tough for a little kid with a heart murmur. I liked going to Mass with the other kids all lined up in our little white shirts and blue button up sweaters.
I liked the priests in their white surplices walking around swinging the censers. It smelled good and it smelled like holiness and I liked that.
And I liked hearing all about the saints from the sisters. The miracles they did and God speaking to them.
I liked God and I liked Jesus and I liked Mary. I made a little shrine to her out of eucalyptus bark on the top of the bookcase in my room. I was glad they were in my life. I prayed to Jesus at night before I fell asleep when I remembered. He was a real, shining, actual presence in my life like never again.

That was in beautiful San Francisco where the ocean fog mingles with incense and seagulls screech over the school lunchyard. Then we moved to horrible San Mateo. Where Ozzie and Harriet lived.

My folks started going to the local Episcopal church. I don’t know why. My Dad was a tough newspaper guy, not religious. My Mom was a solitary believer. She meditated. She read books about Cosmic Consciousness. And how since God is Love there is no evil in the world, just wonderful Love. When I looked through her books, the word that came to my mind was goush. I didn’t agree with Dad on much, but on religion we stood together. What I wanted in my deepest heart was not sweet gushing love, but WAR!

Yet I liked the Episcopal church all right for the same reasons as before, just less of them. It was peaceful to sit in the old pew in my blue blazer and tie and watch the priest and the choir members come down the aisle in their white surplices holding the big gold cross. I liked the old hymns and the old wood smell and the stained glass. It was ritual and I liked it, but it wasn’t solid beneath my feet.

I began to question if any of it was true. I was a modernist kid. The virgin birth? Didn’t make sense. Turning water into wine? How do you do that? Water is hydrogen and oxygen. Coming back to life after you’re dead? I wish! Life! Stupid fucking life! (Here it comes…) Stupid fucking world killed my brother! Then nothing is true! It’s all a fraud, a fake. Fake Fake FAKE!!! I want my brother back but he’s dead. If my brother can get killed in a car crash then the whole world can go jump. Fuck off!

Somewhere that year I declared war on the world. It was too fucked up and I wanted nothing to do with their religion and their politics and their anti-communist crusade and their race to space and their fucking success mentality and get a good job and live in a mansion in Hillsborough. I’m walking! And Religion was part of the whole package I hereby rejected.

All this was hatching in my sixteen year old heart but I still went to the basketball game and teased Susan Hammond and thought how I could get Tammy to take her clothes off. And I buried my rage behind a laugh and a happy-go-lucky smile. I was a torch just waiting for a match and the match was Dharma Bums. Thank you Jack forever and flowers on your grave.