The House On Divisadero Street (Part 6 of 6)

Later on, the media distilled my generation of San Francisco-bred, disaffiliated young people into a mess of love beads, LSD and free sex in Golden Gate Park.  It wasn’t like that, not at all.  This installment concludes the story of a student co-op in San Francisco’s Fillmore District in the years 1962-64, told in the words of three survivors, Gerald Keil, Loren Means, and Nathan Zakheim.

To begin at Part 1, click here.

 

Nathan Zakheim

LOREN MEANS: Nathan Zakheim’s father, Bernard Baruch Zakheim, was a painter, muralist, and sculptor who had been a peer of Marc Chagall in Germany and a collaborator with Diego Rivera in the US and Mexico, working on murals at Coit Tower and UC Medical Center. Nathan’s mother, Phyllis, was the last of the line of a family that had come to America shortly after the Mayflower and had owned a large portion of downtown Santa Barbara and Montecito. According to Nathan, they introduced oranges and bananas to southern California. She and Bernard had met when she was researching his UC Med Center mural, which had been wallpapered over by on the order of a professor who considered the murals a distraction to his students.

Nathan stomped around with a full beard and a sheepskin vest, with a guitar strapped to his back. I heard Nathan say to my girlfriend Kit, “Aren’t you even partly Jewish? How do you stand it?” He worked in a kosher delicatessen in the Fillmore District, and at one point he offered me some wizened lamb chop from his backpack. I ate what I could of it, but when I tried to throw away the bone, he snatched it from me and ate some more of it. “Mr. Means,” he said, “you eat like a millionaire.”

GERALD KEIL: Nathan became the backbone of our domestic community. He knew the best places to shop cheaply, and brought home quantities of chicken backs and bacon ends which cost us practically nothing.  Chicken backs could be reduced to gelatin for soups and sauces. Bacon ends were considered industrial waste, but were far more substantial than those pricey strips of bacon which were mostly fat – a befitting token of the society from whose irrational consuming habits we profited.

NATHAN ZAKHEIM: From my father, I learned how to find food with no commercial value but huge flavor value: chicken backs to make soup, and fish heads to make chowder. The fish heads were full of gelatin, and were actually tastier and more nutritious than the sought after fillets of the fish.

At the time, I was driving a delivery truck all over the city, so I had prime opportunity to find bargains. I would spend a few minutes each in about ten shops per day. Each shop had a super special to lead in shoppers, so I would only buy that bargain and nothing else. Or I would take my 1945 military issue Harley Davidson down to the Farmer’s Market on Alemany Blvd, and load up duffel bags with produce, bargaining fanatically with the farmers, and getting super low prices. Then I would load as much as I could on the back of the ‘cycle, and put a huge duffel bag over the handle bars, where it protruded as I rode home on the Skyway at 60 mph or more, in a manner I can only describe as phallic.

GERALD: But Nathan’s greatest revelation was kasha – whole-grained buckwheat. Nathan, who, despite the bacon ends, was a self-professed Ashkenazi, explained that the Polish army marched on kasha, which contained more protein than any other cereal; and since meat was a rare commodity for us, we ate kasha with eggs and bacon ends mornings, and in the evening, kasha with vegetables, especially onions, and the occasional meat scraps. Takes getting used to, but I came to like it. I still make a kasha dish every once in a while, and each time I do I picture Nathan, with his dark brown curly locks and ample full beard, looking as if he had just arrived fresh from the shtetl.

NATHAN: I wanted to experiment with a notion that we could live communally, sharing all food and communally purchased items. We created the idea of purchasing separately, cooking communally, and then dividing the receipts later and paying up until everyone had paid the same amount. My father was an avowed Marxist, and idealized the idea of "From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need." I had a burning desire for this "communism experiment" to actually occur among a likely group of SF State students who had much to gain and little to lose by such an experiment.

GERALD: All in all, we lived cheaply. We pooled expenses, and receipts for everything landed in a cardboard box. I distinctly remember, at the end of one six-week period, we opened the box, checked the balance, and discovered that we had only paid out some $35.00 in all.

NATHAN: My mother, who was a genius at frugality, was horrified that we were living on twelve dollars per month. She cried out with motherly outrage, "You should be spending twelve dollars per WEEK!” My mother knew how to stretch dollars in ways that truly boggled the mind. She could not imagine that I, in San Francisco, was able to find ultra-bargains and wholesale items that, when bought in bulk, were practically non-existent in cost per person.

Rodney Albin

GERALD: The final member of our community was Rodney Albin. He must have joined us around June 1963, after the close of the Spring semester. At that time I had a job downtown, and when I returned one evening, there was Rodney, fully installed. His room was full to overflowing. The most conspicuous item was a huge, self-made harpsichord which straddled the bed so only its upper half was free. This was a space-saving measure, since Rodney’s room, like the others in the corridor, would have otherwise been too small to accommodate both bed and harpsichord. At the foot of this bed-harpsichord arrangement was a chest of drawers, and strewed around the room were string instruments of all sorts, and piles of books. Rodney was not the orderly sort.

It was a unique scene; this oversized harpsichord with a geared tuning peg on each string, and Rodney, sitting upright in bed, legs stretched out beneath the harpsichord, apparently exhausted from the effort of moving all his stuff, quietly frailing a banjo. He was even thinner than I was, and pale as a Norwegian in mid-winter. He looked to be in his early twenties, yet his hair was already thinning, accentuating a high round forehead which contrasted with his meager, somewhat sunken cheeks. His mustache was not immediately evident in the pallid light, even though he wore it untrimmed, since his hair was almost skin-colored. But what most caught my attention was his gaze: warm, kind, good-natured, submerged in music, at perfect ease despite all these new faces around him.

It wasn’t long – a few days at most – before Nathan took the initiative and brought a degree of order into Rodney’s domain. Using planks and bricks from somewhere, Nathan fashioned bookshelves which stretched from just inside the door down to the end of the corridor wall, continuing at right angles along the adjoining wall almost to the corner of Rodney’s bed. Nathan took great pride in the fact that the bookshelves were of cantilever construction, the plank ends hanging free in the air. From now on, Rodney had a modicum of order and a maximum of cantilever.

In the course of time Rodney taught me fingerpicking – both bluegrass and frailing. I had my father’s plectrum banjo with me, but with its four strings it wasn’t suited for fingerpicking. Rather than permanently altering Dad’s instrument, I fashioned a wooden add-on held in place by the combined force of the tightened G string and a specially fashioned clip.. Rodney contributed by installing a banjo tuning peg. The contraption worked like a charm; and, through building it, we discovered a mutual and lasting affinity.

Rodney and I had complementary talents: he could pick anything which had strings, and I could blow just about anything which had holes in it. In time I picked up enough banjo technique to make an agreeable noise, but I never even remotely approached the proficiency of Rodney Kent Albin.

 Late 1967.  Rodney and Ponderpig on boat somewhere in space.

In the early summer of 1964, Big Dave, the owner of 857 Divisadero St., decided to remodel his property. He gave his tenants thirty days notice. Rodney Albin paid a visit to his uncle, Henry Arian, whose company had just purchased a Victorian mansion at the corner of Page and Broderick Streets. It had most recently been used as a boarding house for Irish immigrants. Arian needed time to arrange financing to pull it down and replace it with new Redevelopment units, and Rodney made him an offer, "Rent it to me, and I will sublet the rooms to San Francisco State students. You won’t have a thing to worry about." They settled on $600 a month rent. And thus was born the most famous hippie rooming house in the world, 1090 Page Street.

The End of 857 Divisadero

NATHAN: I was the last tenant in 857 Divisadero St. I had fallen ill with a very bad case of flu after everyone else moved out, and I remained in my room unable to move. The owner had already turned off the power, water and gas. Since I was unable to leave, I had to make a temporary light by pouring cooking oil into a bowl and draping pieces of sweatshirt over the edge as wicks to make an oil lamp. The only water in the building was in the toilet tank, so that was all I had to drink while judiciously resisting the temptation to flush the toilet. I remember a basically hallucinatory Rodney Albin looking in my door at my comatose body and asking me , "Are you going to be all right"? before closing the door and leaving for the last time. He did not realize that I was that sick, and I was too sick to be able to communicate it to him!

GERALD: I departed 857 Divisadero at the beginning of December, 1963 to study abroad. Upon my return from Europe at the end of August, 1964 I learned that everyone had moved to 1090 Page Street, and I followed, sharing the front room with Rodney until getting married in mid-1965.

We were a highly divergent configuration of individuals, each with his own particular interests, yet, as a group, harmonious. With the exception of the rifle incident with Edmund, I can’t remember a cross word being spoken. We were certainly Bohemians, but essentially that just means being poor, young and literate. We didn’t really fit the labels of the time – neither Beatnik nor Hippie. You might say we were post-Beatniks and pre-Hippies – image-neutral, sporting the mannerisms and wearing the uniforms of neither.

LOREN: We were a transitional group, between the conformity of the ’50s and a different kind of conformity in the ’60s, and we didn’t fit into either. I came to San Francisco for the Beat movement, but it had been replaced by Carol Doda and topless dancing. I lived in the Haight-Ashbury during the Hippie era, and one of my roommates was an organizer of the San Francisco State student strike. I was friends with the founders of the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and with filmmakers who did light shows, but I wasn’t interested in any of that. Buck Moon once told me that I was in the midst of all the movements in San Francisco, but not a participant in any of them.

But in the late ’60s, a concept of “underground” expression emerged in San Francisco that I did identify with and participate in. The avant-garde art, science, and culture scene in San Francisco has grown to outshine even New York and London. When we started making avant-garde art in the ’60s and ’70s, there was no tradition for us to emulate. Now those of us who are still manifesting this expression are the tradition, and younger people joining us are participating in that expression. I recently played a concert where the age range was from 75 to early 20s, and we all celebrated the unique cultural environment that the San Francisco Bay Area has become.

PONDERPIG: As I walked around the City in those days. I met interesting guys like Loren and Gerry and Nathan and Rodney. I also met freaks and potheads, poets and folkies, Fidelistas and mystics, junkies, conscientious objectors, meth freaks, super-8 filmmakers, actors, painters and assorted crazies. But I never met one person who came to San Francisco to join the hippies. Man or woman, boy or girl, the people I met were pursuing their boho destiny on their own terms. As Gerald says, they were a ‘divergent configuration’ tied together by some unspoken fraternal force. Maybe we felt the turning and turning in the widening gyre, the blood-dimmed tide unloosed and the earth quaking already beneath us.

Or maybe not. Maybe we just preferred strolling along, a bit out of step with the straight world busy marching somewhere we didn’t want to go. It was our preference. We gave each other permission to be different in any damn way we pleased. And that, my friends, is the quality (along with psychedelic drugs) that led to the flowering of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1966.

NOTE: The next chapter in the ongoing story can be found here: Luminaries of the Haight #4: 1090 Page Street.  More on Rodney Albin may be found here: Luminaries of the Haight-Ashbury: Rodney Albin.

Vintage San Francisco photos: SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY.

The House On Divisadero Street (Part 5 of 6)

Continuing the story of a student co-op in San Francisco’s Fillmore District in the years 1962-64.

To begin at Part 1, click here.

Edmund The Mad Magician

LOREN: One evening when I was returning from visiting my new girlfriend Kit at Stanford, I noticed a pale fellow sitting on the bus with a portable TV set in his lap. When I got off, the guy also got off and followed me to the entrance to 857. I unlocked the door, got in, then tried to shut it behind me, but the guy wedged it open with his TV.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“I live here,” he told me.

“You don’t live here,” I said, “I’ve never seen you before.”

“I’m just moving in,” he insisted. “I can’t get my key right now.”

So I let him come up the stairs with me. It turned out he was a colleague of Willie’s named Edmund Robere. They had a mail-order business making chemical potions for magicians. But Edmund and Willie constantly shouted at each other, and Edmund didn’t seem to get along with anybody except me. I found him affable but creepy, and I kept my distance from him.

GERALD: Edmund Robere was a magician; but whereas magic was a lucrative hobby for Willie, for Edmund the Mad Magician it was his life and soul. Edmund was much older than the rest of us; he wasn’t a student, and to the best of my knowledge he had never been one. Edmund kept his own company, and not only because of the age gap. He maintained unusual waking hours.

Edmund was taller than everyone other than myself – and athletic in build. He had dark brown hair, a full, dark mustache and Zorro-like sideburns. He always dressed in black. We were never certain whether his appearance reflected his stage image, his self-image, or his genuine personality. Willie said that, before moving in with us, he had lived in a basement and slept in a coffin. I never witnessed Edmund turning into a bat, and it never occurred to me to confront him with a crucifix, but an ordinary guy was he not.

Edmund was a nocturnal creature. At least in the evening, when we were most likely to be together and making noise, he was up and about, but during the day, Edmund’s unconventional sleeping habits became a source of friction.

One day Willie came back with his microbus loaded with carpets. His mother had bought new ones, and we intended to replace our threadbare carpets which had, by all appearance, been there since before the Great Earthquake and Fire.

Edmund, however, was disturbed by the racket. Since my room was right across the corridor from his, I was his first victim. He ripped my door open, poked a rifle in my face and proclaimed his intention to fire point blank at the next sound which emanated from my room. That was at least final proof that Edmund was not a vampire; otherwise, it would have been the end of him, since it was broad daylight at the time.

On the other hand, he could be amiable, even convivial. On numerous occasions he demonstrated to us his cunning as a magician. He was a master of sleight-of-hand, producing cigarettes, coins or playing cards out of nowhere. I have seen this sort of thing often enough as a stage or television performance, but Edmund was standing mere inches away from us, and the effect was none the less convincing

But his real forte was pyrotechnics, with which he would sometimes overwhelm us. On one occasion, Edmund suddenly pulled out what looked like a pistol and fired it at Willie, who happened to be standing at the opposite end of the corridor. A fireball speeded towards Willie’s solar plexus. But instead of hitting him and frying him alive, it disappeared – puff – mere inches short of its apparent target.

Pyrotechnics was also the cause Edmund’s sudden demise…

LOREN: One day in June, 1964, I was downtown and heard an explosion. I read in the paper the next day that one Robert Hammersley had blown himself up in his mother’s apartment in the Tenderloin. The accompanying picture revealed that this Robert Hammersley was in fact Edmund. He had been trying to fill an order for some magic supply, and had blown himself through the wall of his mother’s kitchen and into her sitting room.

GERALD: His mother, who was in the adjacent room, remained miraculously uninjured – fragments of kitchen utensils were embedded deep in the wooden frame of the sofa she had been sitting on – but Edmund himself took the full force and was killed instantly. Upon examination, according to Willie, they discovered the explosion had been so powerful that it shifted the entire building several inches on its foundation.

LOREN: Later Rodney Albin took me to meet Anton La Vey, before he started the Church of Satan. La Vey was trying to write a book about Edmund, and knew more about him than we did. La Vey told us that Edmund had been arrested for sleeping in a coffin in somebody’s basement. He showed us Edmund’s watch from the explosion, and there was still skin clinging to it. LaVey said he had a journal of Edmund’s that kept track of the times he’d drunk blood, and what kind of blood it was.

Eventually I persuaded my girlfriend Kit to leave Stanford, and matriculate to San Francisco State College. We moved together to an apartment on the corner of Clay and Baker streets, one room with a kitchen and bath down the hall. The bed was a Murphy bed that pulled down from the wall by a metal rod that clanged against the metal bed frame when we made love.

With Loren’s departure, there was once again a room for rent at 857 Divisadero, but it wasn’t empty long. Enter radical folksinger Nathan Zakheim, who had been sleeping on a couch in a kosher butcher shop on McAllister Street.

NEXT: NATHAN ZAKHEIM

The House On Divisadero Street (Part 4 of 6)

Continuing the story of a student co-op in San Francisco’s Fillmore District in the years 1962-64.

To begin at Part 1, click here.

Gerald Keil’s Story

My childhood was fashioned by two directly opposing forces. On one side was the oppressive conformity of the fifties in suburbia. McCarthy’s witch-hunts were major events in my hometown of Hayward, California, and their aftermath lived on into the sixties. Even as children we knew Commies were to be chased out of town, and anything foreign was likely to be communist-tainted. Every kid wanted a Davy Crockett coonskin cap and to be a man who stood on his own two feet, not waiting for government handouts like those loafers did.

The other force came from outside this closed world. My father’s entire family in the USA and in Denmark had remained close-knit over generations. Continuous contact had been interrupted only during the war years.

My immediate society taught me that Socialist was another word for Commie and all Communists wanted to bore us through with their bayonets, starting with the babies. At the same time, half my family lived in a country with a socialist government and not a single one of them had ever expressed a craving for a bayonet, let alone a desire to perforate anyone.

In school, our teachers would tell us how everyone in the rest of the world was envious of our good fortune. But in the letters from my Danish family I read accounts of pleasurable events, holidays in Italy, and family celebrations – no word of envy, no accusations that we were well out of it, safe in America, while they had to make the best of their dismal life in Denmark. Even in the early years after the war, no-one in Denmark ever complained of serious want or beseeched us for financial support.

Where other kids swallowed the "God’s Own Country" dogma whole, I longed to escape the stifling air of self-congratulation. I needed to escape the morass of suburbia and seek more open-minded company.

High-school graduation in 1960 was like freedom from chains. I could go to college, which meant getting out of Hayward, and live with people who had a positive attitude toward learning.

I spent my first two years at San Jose State. It was my parent’s choice. I lived in a boarding-house about eight blocks from campus, with a muscular landlady who watched over our virtues. But, after two years, I had had more than enough of this extended childhood. I moved to San Francisco, where I could finally live on my own. Technically, I was now a college drop-out.

One thing was clear: any further studies would have to be paid out of my own pocket.

Once I learned the tricks, I found I could live at a fraction of the cost of a ’straight’ life style and save much of the money I earned packing luggage at the Greyhound depot. I re-matriculated for the Spring Semester 1963, this time at San Francisco State College, confident I could pull it off with no further financial support from home.

As the semester began, however, I was living again in Hayward, and commuting in a car pool. One day at school I overheard Loren Means mention there were vacancies where he was living and wondered if anyone might be interested. ‘Yeah, I am,’ I jumped in, as if Loren had been talking expressly to me. I didn’t know what it was or where it was, but, judging from Loren, I guessed the windows weren’t hung with lace curtains. I’d be free at last from suburbia.

 From now on our mutual home was a boarding house in the Fillmore District – one building down from the south-west corner of Divisadero and McAllister Street. The ground floor of the building, once a grocery store, was boarded up. A few unkempt old men lived on the second floor. Above them was our domain: four rooms on both sides of a full-length corridor. At the end of the corridor a door led to an unusable fire escape. Good thing we never had a fire.

The landlord lived on the second floor, but I rarely saw him. He was relatively young, though a generation older than we were, crew-cut, heavy-set, a guy you wouldn’t want to get into an argument with. Rumor – I think of his own making – had it that he was known and feared throughout the Fillmore and since we stood under his protection, we would not be harassed by militant residents with a grudge against whites.

My experience was that blacks had a grudge against whites who had a grudge against blacks. We were tolerated in the neighborhood because we were demonstrably not of that sort. I would go into coffee shops in the Fillmore at weird hours of the night, and at 2:00 every Saturday morning, after an evening playing bagpipe at the Edinburgh Castle, my main source of income at the time –, I would stroll home through the middle of the Fillmore, still wearing my kilt. I was never assaulted, and I was accosted only once – by a white, very insistent homosexual who thought my legs were just too sweet.

But Loren Means remembers the neighborhood differently.

Loren: The thing that was hard for us to understand was the hostility of our black neighbors. We held it obvious that we weren’t prejudiced, or we wouldn’t be there. The people on the street who shouted at us to get out of their neighborhood obviously didn’t see it that way. Once I was walking down McAllister Street with a group of guys, including Buck. We ran into a group of very young black kids. They started shouting at us, and suddenly one of them hit Buck in the face, just below his left eye. Just then a police car appeared on the street next to us, and escorted us to the nearest bus stop. We got on a bus, and Buck sat there bleeding. I said “Buck, remind me to take you with me wherever I go. You’re the perfect target, the only guy I know smaller than me.” He didn’t appreciate that.

One weekend Dave Johnson showed up at 857 with his girlfriend, Kit Brahtin. Kit was from Santa Barbara, and was attending Stanford on a National Merit Scholarship, having achieved the highest scores possible on her SAT tests. Dave passed out, and Kit and I spent the evening together. Shortly after that, Kit broke up with Dave and she and I started commuting on the Greyhound bus to see each other.

NEXT: EDMUND THE MAD MAGICIAN

To continue to Part 5, click here.

The House on Divisadero Street (Part 3 of 6)

Continuing the story of a student co-op in San Francisco’s Fillmore District in the years 1962-64.

To begin at Part 1, click here.

Willie The Wizard

Gerald Keil (whose story is coming up) remembers the young William Dahlgren.

GERALD: Willie Dahlgren couldn’t have been more than 18 years of age when I first met him, and he still had braces on his teeth. Despite his youthful appearance, he was perhaps the most independent and single-minded of us all. He occupied the front room, the choicest and largest room on the floor. He needed the extra space to manufacture magic tricks, both for sale and for his own use. For, when he wasn’t being a student, Willie was a magician, going by the name of Willie the Wizard and earning his living performing at parties and cafés around the Bay Area.

He knew just about everyone involved with magic – including those who misused it. There was, for example, a woman who operated a spiritualist church. Willie coaxed us into attending one of her services. Participants would write down questions for their deceased loved ones, sealing them in envelopes provided by the organizers. After delivering a sermon extolling spiritualism, Madame apparently read the letters’ contents and received answers from the Beyond, without needing to open the envelopes first.

There were gasps of awe, rapturous applause, testimonies of fulfilled hopes, and outbursts of unrestrained thankfulness from the audience. Their gratitude was duly reflected in their generosity when collection time came.

Upon our return to Divisadero we gathered in Willie’s room to discuss what we had just experienced. Naturally, we were all dumbfounded, ready to maintain an open mind in the light of what we had witnessed. Willie broke out in that misleadingly boyish smile of his, and then explained the trick with which we had been so successfully hoodwinked.

Willie reminded us how Madame sat down with the basket of sealed envelopes, shuffled them, and balanced them neatly on her lap. For good measure, she bound a bandanna around her head, appearing to cover her eyes, although in reality she could still peek out the bottom. Next, she held up an unopened envelope from the top of the pile. The congregation didn’t know that, while stage furniture was being rearranged, Madame had managed to open one envelope and hide its message up her sleeve. While she was busy calling up the spirits, she slipped it out of her sleeve onto her lap (behind the stack of envelopes) and perused it. Now she was able to address every concern the letter raised. The congregation, of course, thought she was mystically reading through the unopened envelope. Finally, she opened the envelope, extracted the letter within, smoothed it on her lap, switched it with the letter she had just read, held up the first message, and asked something like, “Mabel dear, is this your letter?” Of course it was. And now she had the next letter on her lap, ready for the next round.

The trick was repeated with each envelope, until the final envelope (which was of course a fake) had been opened.

In addition to his magic performances, Willie delivered morning newspapers for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was an early riser, so that job was right up his alley. On occasion, though, I would have to substitute for him. Willie owned a Volkswagen Microbus which was generally jam packed with magic tricks and accessories, plus, in the early morning, stacks of newspapers. San Francisco’s many parking restrictions were no impediment to Willie – you can’t show up late for a gig simply because of some red lines on the curb – so he accumulated parking tickets at a steady trickle. Instead of paying the fines, however, he would wait until he was summoned to appear in court. He would generally be given the choice of either coughing up or spending the night in jail. For Willie that was a pretty good deal, and the next day he would describe in juicy detail all that he had experienced overnight. Whenever Willie lodged at the state’s expense, I got up at 4:00 in the morning to deliver newspapers in his microbus. It was sheer hell.

Nine-Fingered Walt and Buck Moon

LOREN: The other guy who moved in was Walt Curtis, who was older than us and was missing part of one of his fingers. He said people called him Nine-Fingered Walt, and he was working on a novel.

Walt grabbed the large front room under ours. We could hear him typing at all hours, then cursing and a bang as he flung the portable typewriter against the wall. At one point, he put a sign in the grocery store on the corner saying, “Typewriter for sale. I can’t use it—I only have nine fingers.” Nobody bought it.

After I moved in to 857, I contacted a high school buddy, Dave Johnson, who had matriculated to Stanford. My brother told me that when Dave was accepted to Stanford, his high school chemistry class suspended its regular curriculum to stage a debate as to whether Stanford was in the pay of the Russian government, or whether its faculty was just a bunch of Communists. The South Dakota rednecks assumed that any school in California was Communist. Little did they know that Stanford was a training school for corporate lawyers, with a quota for Jewish applicants, and that much of California was as virulently right-wing as South Dakota. That was certainly a shock for poor Dave, who set about trying to organize a branch of the Young People’s Socialist League

Dave would visit us on weekends, and he, Buck, Walt and I would get roaring drunk on an incredibly cheap wine called Old Chateau. Buck had painted an abstract-expressionist masterpiece on a large piece of wood, and I would have to protect it from him when he was drunk, as he would throw wine at it. (I still have this painting hanging in my house—later on Buck told me he didn’t know how he did it, and couldn’t do anything like it again.) Buck would then throw up on himself, tear off his shirt, buttons flying in all directions, and stagger across the street to the Laundromat, wearing a pith helmet and shouting “pith on you!” at the top of his lungs. At one point I went out looking for Buck and found him lying passed out in the middle of Divisadero Street, usually a very busy four-lane road.

When he came back, Walt would declaim Beat poetry and dirty limericks which I realized later had gay overtones. (Later I found out that Walt’s novel, Mala Noche, about a guy in love with a young Mexican boy, became the source of Gus Van Sant’s first film.)

I told Walt something about growing up in Yankton, and he said, “You gotta write it, man . You gotta call it A South Dakota of the Mind.”

When I first moved in with Buck, he was managing to eat on fifty cents a day, by downing the same canned fruit cocktail and soup over and over. I persuaded him to vary his diet, but we still were constrained to eat as cheaply as possible. We found that we could buy bags of dry beans, soak them overnight, then make them into a soup with barley and lamb’s breasts. Ghastly stuff. To make matters worse, when Dave came to visit us from Stanford, he would expect us to feed him. He once complained bitterly that the pancakes I served were mixed so haphazardly he could still see the baking powder.

One afternoon Dave, Walt and I went downtown to Union Square. Dave bought a bag of popcorn on the way, and the saleswoman told him, “Don’t you feed those stinking pigeons!” But when we got there, Dave started throwing popcorn at them anyway, while Walt and I picked up the popcorn and devoured it.

We heard a commotion, and there was a guy with a huge bag slung over his shoulder, throwing handfuls of something to the pigeons, which were perched all over him. Then another guy started shouting at the pigeon feeder: “Don’t you feet those nasty pigeons! They’re rats with wings!” while trying to stomp on the pigeons on the ground. Finally, the shouting guy turned toward us and said, “Why don’t you feed these young people instead? They look like they’re starving!” The pigeon feeder turned to us. “You boys aren’t starving, are you?” he asked. “As a matter of fact, we are, sir,” Walt replied. Then the pigeon feeder noticed that Walt had stuffed a pigeon into Dave’s empty popcorn bag, and was trying to stuff the bag into his pocket.

“What are you doing with that pigeon?” the guy demanded. “Squab for dinner,” Walt replied slyly. Finally we convinced him to let the pigeon go.

The last person I recruited to 857 Divisadero was a music student named Gerry Keil…Gerry was tall, skinny, and reminded me of the actor James Arness. He loved everything British, and sometimes affected an umbrella and an English accent. He played the bagpipe at the Edinburgh Castle pub in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, and used to ride the bus or walk through the Fillmore District in his kilt. He had a knife in his long stocking, and told me that if anyone laughed at a Scotsman’s kilt, that person must die. Apparently nobody laughed.

NEXT: GERALD KIEL’S STORY

Click here to go to Part 4

The House On Divisadero Street (Part 2 of 6)

Continuing the story of a student co-op in San Francisco’s Fillmore District in the years 1962-64.

To begin at Part 1, click here.

Loren Means’ Story

I graduated from high school in Yankton, South Dakota in 1961. Although I had worked in a record store after school and weekends for several years, I was never able to save money. My father lost his business that summer, so he was broke too, but adamant that I had to go to college. So I was at a loss as the summer progressed.

One day, as I was coming out of my parents’ garage, I looked across the alley and spotted my lovely young neighbor sunning herself in her back yard. I asked her what she’d been up to. She told me that she’d just returned from California, where people could go to college for free—all you had to do was establish California residency.

So I moved in with relatives in Long Beach for the month of August, then went to register for classes at Long Beach State College, saying that I was a resident. The college said no, as long as my parents were living in South Dakota and I was under 21, I had to pay out-of-state tuition, which l was something like $180 a semester. Somehow my father scraped up that and dorm fees, and I went to Long Beach State for two semesters.

I was amazed at the diversity of creative people I met—actors, painters, jazz musicians, writers, even a filmmaker. And somebody from each of these groups eventually told me that I shouldn’t waste my time in Southern California, that I should move to San Francisco, “the only real city in California.” So I looked up San Francisco State, and found out they had a film major there, a concept that fascinated me.

Among the people I met at Long Beach State were some dorm residents who were members of a Christian fraternity. They were affable fellows, so I went to some parties with them, and at end of the spring semester found out the fraternity was affiliated with a Christian group that was putting together a commune for the summer in—San Francisco.

So I hopped a bus and headed for The City, as San Francisco tends to be called. It turned out the commune was lodged in a fraternity house for students at the nearby University of California Medical Center. It was vacant during the summer. There were about seven people living there, all a bit older than I, and mostly straight, with full-time jobs, except for a guy named Paul Mucci, who was a beatnik. He walked around wearing a torn t-shirt and manifesting a negative disposition. Nobody in the house seemed religious except for the organizers, a Native American couple. The people didn’t relate to each other much, but we did eat communally, with each person cooking in rotation, a real problem when it was my turn. Eventually I was excused from cooking, I was so lame at it.

I got to be friends with one person in the house, a blonde named Carol who worked as an administrator at SF State. One night she came home with a guy she’d met in a bar, a little blonde fellow (anybody smaller than I am is automatically endeared to me) named Buck Moon. I took Carol aside and told her I was surprised that Buck was her type. She said he wasn’t, that she’d brought him home to meet me. Buck wasn’t too happy when he found this out, but he and I hit it off. He was a poet, a painter, and a folk singer. He had just moved to San Francisco from Paso Robles, and was living with his aunt in an apartment building that Dashiell Hammet had lived in.

I took a job at Woolworth’s in Palo Alto, got fired, and accepted my parents’ offer to live with them in Denver, where my father had found a job. I saved some money to go back to San Francisco. Shortly before I did, I got a letter from Carol saying that a guy named John Handy at SF State was asking her out, and was he really the famous jazz musician he claimed he was? I assured her that he was, and encouraged her to marry him if he asked her. I never heard from her again.

I nearly froze to death in one of the worst winters in the Denver’s history. I vowed never to go near snow again and headed back to San Francisco in the spring of 1963. I called Buck’s number when I got to town, and his aunt gave me his new address—857 Divisadero. I went to visit Buck, and found him living in a gloomy, empty rooming house. He offered to let me room with him and split the ridiculously cheap rent $35 a month for a big room on the third floor, with a separate bath down the long hall. He explained to me that the building had been inherited by the current landlord, Big Dave, a redneck. Most of the rooming house’s tenants had died off, but there were still a couple of codgers on the second floor. Buck said Big Dave offered a rent discount if we could bring in other tenants.

Shortly after, I went out to San Francisco State College for an orientation for the Creative Writing program. There I chatted up an attractive blonde. I told her how cheap the rents were, and invited her to move in. She said she wasn’t interested, then the guys sitting on each side of us told me they wanted to move in. One of them was a film major who said he was a professional magician calling himself Willie the Wizard.

NEXT: WILLIE THE WIZARD

Click here to go to Part 3, Willie The Wizard.

The House On Divisadero Street (Part 1 of 6)

Here begins, in six parts, the story of the rise and fall of a small student community in San Francisco’s Fillmore District in the years 1962-64. It will be told by three people who lived there, in their own words. However, this installment begins with The Pondering Pig’s own ruminations on those lost years in that lost world…

When I finally made it to San Francisco in the summer of 1961, I moved into a boarding house on Twenty-Sixth Street between Castro and Noe. In those days, Noe Valley was a forgotten blue-collar neighborhood at the end of the 24 Divisadero bus line: mostly white, mostly respectable, mostly peaceful. Cats yowled in the backyard outside my window in the night, and that was about it. In those days, old bohemian North Beach had fallen on hard times, but it was still the only cool place to breathe. Twenty-sixth Street was about as far away from the Beach as an aspiring beat poet such as myself could get, and still live in the City.

I was nineteen. I’d traveled through Mexico during the spring. I was too gone to move home. I needed a cheap place. My best friend’s girl, Susan Haylock, had moved in too. We were going to go to summer session at San Francisco State. We were two flecks in an immigrant stream heading towards the Haight-Ashbury of the Sixties and beyond to today.

A frazzled-looking Negro woman (In 1961, Negro was still the term of respect) named Louise Amos ran the house. Her hipster husband had run off with a longhaired blonde the year before, and left her to lurch through life on her own. She kept up the best front she could, and was raising their two kids to be friendly and polite. The people at the much larger Fulton Street commune helped her get her own pad up and running.

The Fulton Street People lived in a turreted Queen Anne a couple blocks west of Divisadero Street. They shared everything, except each other, as far as I knew. They shopped, cooked, cleaned house, paid bills communally. I didn’t understand their lifestyle, it just was. Sue and I showed up once or twice a week to take bread with them.

They were mostly in their mid-twenties, already formed people. They weren’t beat. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone in the City who copped to being beat. I learned what I didn’t know I knew: people who have found themselves object to being assigned a title of any kind. The Fulton Street people lived together for fun and cheapness.

I learned there were other communes in their network: the Central Street House, the O’Farrell Street House. It was at one of those communes, the O’Farrell Street House, that I scored peyote for my first psychedelic excursion: little green cacti, legally mailed from Rose’s Cactus Garden in Laredo, Texas.

When school started for real in the Fall, I learned that communities like these were peppered across the Fillmore District and Potrero Hill. There were student communes and student co-ops and plain old flats where people shared the rent and that’s it. There were peacenik communes and folknik co-ops and drugnik flats. There were Wobbly communes and Trotskyite co-ops and grungy flats inhabited by people who liked to drink coke laced with cherry-flavored codeine cough syrup and nobody paid the rent. (Look, I’m assigning them titles. But how else can we talk?) All were inhabited by young Bohemians who lived together by mutual interest or by chance. None were as organized as the Fulton Street House, but they didn’t need to be. They were following a well worn path.

What follows is the story of one such community, the 857 Divisadero Street group, important to the little history of my time and place as predecessor to the famous boho rooming house, 1090 Page Street. Which was, in turn, the match to the Haight-Ashbury flash that briefly illuminated the world in 1966-67.

857 Divisadero was inhabited from late 1962 to the summer of 1964 by at least ten young bohemians. People moved in and out, of course, but the mainstays were stage magician and inventor William Dahlgren, avant-garde filmmaker Loren Means, sorcerer Edmund Robere, computational linguist Gerald Keil, art conservator Nathan Zakheim, and the folk musician/ craftsman Rodney Albin. None of them knew then they would have descriptions tacked in front of their names. In those days, they were all, except for Edmund the Mad Magician, kids going to school at San Francisco State.

Rodney Albin, William Dahgren and Edmund Robere aren’t around any more, so I asked three of the survivors to write down their memories of those days. Here’s their story, told in their own words, beginning as Loren Means graduates from high school in Yankton, South Dakota.

NEXT: LOREN MEANS’ STORY

To Go to Part 2, click here.

The Terrible Truth About Beatniks

I wrote this a while ago, and for some crazy reason removed it from the Pigsty.  Now it seems the time is right to post it again.  I’d just been rambling along about life as a teenaged suburban beatnik in the Bay Area in 1959, the high water mark of Beatnikdom…

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.

The Story Of An Early Haight-Ashbury Commune

857 Divisadero Street

In case you’re wondering what’s become of the Pontificating Pig, I have been working on a new piece about one of the earliest communal boarding houses in prehistoric Haight-Ashbury — 857 Divisadero Street. (Not literally in the H-A, it was located off McAllister Street in the Fillmore, but that’s close enough for me.)   The house lasted from late 1962 to mid-1964, and disappeared into legend long before the world had heard of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. It was the immediate predecessor and parent of the famous 1090 Page Street (documented elsewhere on this blog).

I have located three survivors of 857 Divisadero whose hearts and minds are still intact, and I hope to tell its story using their own words.

Keep your eye out.  Should be up soon.

Luminaries of the Haight-Ashbury: Rodney Albin

Part I: The Folk Years

I guess of all the friends I had back then, in the halcyon days of my hippie youth,  Rodney Albin is the guy I miss the most.  When he died of stomach cancer in 1984, still a young  man, I felt like I was losing my brother all over again.

He was a pal, you know? Guys like him are hard to come by.

Well, so tell us about him, Pig.

Like so many of my erstwhile folknik hippie commie friends of the early sixties, I met Rodney kind of like this…

Late one morning in, I suppose, the Fall of 1962, I exited San Francisco State’s HLL building, where the boring part of my initiation into high Western culture took place, and ambled across the lawn towards the  Commons to get coffee and see what was up.  Despite its medieval sounding name, four legged sheep were not pastured in the Commons, nor did peasants, other than us, trudge there every morning to work their land.  The Commons was a big cafeteria in the center of campus, and everything of consequence that happened to me in those years took place inside its doors at the second table on the left.  Or on the lawn directly in front.  That’s it in the center of the picture, as it looked in 1960.  Who could guess a square building like that would become a cauldron of sixties counterculture?

On this particular morning, I happened to notice a new folkie sitting cross-legged on the lawn, surrounded by the regulars and passing around a dulcimer he had just built.  He was a tall gangly kind of folknik, just transferred in from the College of San Mateo, a junior college on the Peninsula.  He was wearing bright red trousers, a stove-piped hat and tails, and he was playing The Battle of New Orleans on his fiddle.  No.  Wait a minute.  That’s got to be my imagination.  The top hat and tails didn’t come until later.  OK, he was dressed like a normal person.  It was his dulcimer that was extraordinary.

Interested in dulcimers myself, I forgot about the coffee (never easy to do)  and squeezed into the circle.  That dulcimer was pretty cool, all right.  Shaped like Jayne Mansfield with soft flowing curves and strummed with a sea gull feather, you could tune it to any interesting modal scale you might be in the mood for, brush its strings with that quill, and there you were,  mournful and lost in the holler, sounding like you’d been born in Viper, Kentucky instead of San Francisco.  I started in on an improvised, sea gull strummed Pretty Polly, and pretty soon I was hooked.  The Commons fled and there I was in some longago fog shrouded mountain glen, watching some no-goodnik do in Pretty Polly while the pretty little birdies mourned.  It sounded like magic, and Rodney had created the damn thing out of a piece of spruce.

I got to know Rodney after a while and discovered he was from the next holler over.  My holler was called San Mateo and his they called Belmont.  He and his younger brother Peter were still living with their parents in an upper middle class shack in the Belmont hills.  I also discovered that Rodney wasn’t the new guy – I was.  He was well-known in folk circles up and down the Peninsula and across the Bay in Berkeley.  He’d masterminded the folk music festival at the College of San Mateo where young Jerry Garcia made his debut to an unappreciative audience of frat rats.  Rodney and George ‘The Beast’ Howell had opened the Boar’s Head the preceding summer, a folk-oriented coffeehouse in the loft above the book store in San Carlos where George worked.  Garcia and the other Palo Alto folkniks regularly showed up there to jam into the weekend nights.

I started dropping in to see Rodney when I was down that way.  On my first visit, he showed me the six string balalaika he’d built out of orange crate wood.   It was his first sort of crude try at building an instrument.  He was way beyond now of course. He’d already finished a viol de gamba, and now he was building a harpsichord on his bedroom floor.  Its parts spread hither and thither across the  carpet; tools, a reel to reel tape recorder and an unmade bed filled the rest.  He used the tape machine to record performances at the Boar’s Head.  Apparently some of these tapes still exist and are passed from hand to hand in Deadhead circles.   They would include: Garcia, Ron McKernan, David Nelson, Rodneys’s brother Peter of course, and other less talented performers who went on to become teachers and bureaucrats and accountants – but still played pretty good.

Rodney opened a whole new world to me.  Before Rod, folk music meant Joan Baez manning the barricades while Pete Seeger fired his musket at the Pentagon.  It meant peace marches, sit-ins and and drinking cheap dago red at parties while somebody plunked out ‘Twelve Gates To the City, Hallelujah’ on a nylon string guitar.  But these friends of Rodney’s were…dedicated.  They played bluegrass and old-timey stuff, They listened to Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers on scratchy 78s.  Was Charlie from Greenwich Village or Boston?  I wasn’t sure.  They sang about chickens loose in the barnyard squawk squawk and subjects like that.  Who could figure?  But, hey – I liked Rodney so I listened and tried to understand.  I just didn’t see how “Boil That Cabbage Down” would save the world from nuclear destruction.

Peter Albin was already a more accomplished musician, although still in high school.  He could wail on Bile That Cabbage Down but he could also play Mississippi Delta slide guitar riffs, and,  what really impressed me — he knew some Chuck Berry stuff.  I know I was supposed to have outgrown this teenaged foolishness, but tell my ears that!

There was something about Rodney, his gentle spirit, his brilliant mind and his dry sense of humor, that drew me to him.  I liked hanging out with him, and so did most everyone else in our circle. Later I learned there were circles like that all up and down the Peninsula.

Rodney was kind of funny looking.  He had a classic beanpole shape, gawky you might say, you might even say gawky and sniffy.  He was born to play comedy roles, and he worked it.  The first time I saw him (as opposed to meeting him) was the preceding spring when he was still attending the College of San Mateo.  I knew some CSM kids in a school production of Twelfth Night, and I went see one of them, Dick Shapero,  play Malvolio.  Dick was an experienced actor and knew how to get laughs,  but when Rodney as Sir Andrew Aguecheek entered stage right, Dick had to give up.   Rodney didn’t say anything.  He just stood there in his Elizabethan get-up, awkward, gawky, rubbing his nose, looking around as if he couldn’t quite remember his lines. The audience slowly began to titter and he built the moment into a the play’s biggest laugh.  He worked that role successfully for the next twenty years.

(I KNOW this isn’t Twelfth night, ok?  I don’t have a photo of Twelfth Night and I need a photo here.  So here is the same company’s Pygmalion, produced a few months later)

A few days after Rodney passed his dulcimer around, I was sitting on the grass trying to impress some proto-hippie chicks by  playing “I’m a  whinin’ Boy, don’t deny my name” on my Mexican folk guitar.  I was using a two-fingered picking style I’d made up.  Like crab pincers, my thumb kept the rhythm while my index finger picked out the melody.  It was pretty primitive.  If I hadn’t been a soulful singer, the chicks would have walked.  As it was, they were listening all right, but they weren’t idolizing me like they should.  What could I do?

When it was Rodney’s turn to do a song, he launched into ‘Freight Train, Freight Train Going So Fast’, singing in a thin nasal voice like an elderly gent from Viper, Kentucky.  I thought his singing could use some help, but, man, he had that Elizabeth Cotton style finger-picking right down!  His thumb was rocking between the bass strings and he syncopated the melody just like the old girl herself!  Actually, I’d never heard of Elizabeth Cotton before, but whoever she was, I wanted to play like that too.  But three fingers!  How could anybody ever make so many fingers work together?  Maybe I should stick to my authentically primitive crabstyle.

But Rodney encouraged me.  He showed me the moves over and over till I started to get them.  I went back to my apartment and drove my wife mad singing the silly holy thing over and over with my thumb rocking and fingers trying to syncopate it right, “Please don’t tell them what train I’m on so they won’t know where I’ve gone.”

Linda was thinking, ‘When’s that train leaving?”

Come Christmas, Linda, in a moment of madness, gave me a mandolin.  She’d found it in a Third Street pawn shop and bought it for $20.  I was thrilled.  It’s just – how did you play one of these things?  I loved messing around with instruments and could sort of play a lot them, all by ear and without much skill.  I asked Rodney if he knew how to play one and it turned out he did.  He showed me how to hold a pick and how to play a simple tune called Liberty.  After I mastered that he taught me a more complicated minstrel song called “Colored Aristocracy.” After that, I didn’t need any more lessons.  I knew four chords and could pick two songs.  I was ready to roll!

I didn’t know it yet but I was about to take my place in the Albin Brothers’ amorphous shape-shifting band, The Liberty Hill Aristocrats.  One night, Rodney said they were going to play the Top of The Tangent in Palo Alto and they needed somebody on mandolin.  I was a mandolin player!  So next night, with some trepidation,  I got up on the little stage, playing with the likes of Jerry Garcia and Peter Albin and David Nelson – real masters of their instruments.  Rodney didn’t care if I only knew four chords.  He even let me sing one, I think it was Little Birdie.  – he liked to include people, and that included The Pondering Pig.  You had to love a guy like that.  I did.

That was Rodney, he got people going, he included them, even if it affected the professionalism of the music.   He had his priority list, and friends were higher up than professionalism.  Me too.

COMING SOON: THE  STORY OF 1090 PAGE STREET

Photo credits: Rodney, CSM Play: Pig’s files – photographer unknown, SF State campus: SF Pub Lib

George The Beast Is Gone

That’s George.  George the Beast Howell, King of the Baby Beatniks, Roarer of Upper Grant Avenue, the Great Yawp, friend of my North Beach youth – he died at a quarter to six this morning in an intensive care unit at West Anaheim Medical Center in Anaheim, California.  I was always going to get down to see him at his sister’s place in Clear Lake.  But I never did.

It’s the only picture I have of George.  I took it in Gary and Sue Parma’s living room, 3265 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, California, in July 1962.  I didn’t think the portrait quite worked and never printed it.  But I kept the test strip, and here it is, still good forty-six years later, preserved by that good San Francisco State photo lab fix.  But I feel like a part of me is fading this morning.

His body was shot.  He had a lot of adventures, did a lot of drugs.  And smoked a lot of Camels.

He wasn’t a Luminary of the Haight-Ashbury.  By the time that scene gelled, George had already found his calling.  He was living in a village in Mexico learning to be a weaver.  Eventually, weaving evolved into dealing – finding , restoring and selling fine antique rugs.  He got rich.  He had his own shop in a fashionable San Francisco neighborhood.  He had a driver.  His profits, most of them, went right up his nose or into his arm.  He was a man of big hungers and little caution.  He went bankrupt, fled to Hawaii to clean up.

I don’t know his whole story, just bits and pieces he told me during our long conversations over the phone during the last six months after we reconnected again.  I thought there was plenty of time.  We’d get together and hang out and talk for days until I had his whole story.  That was my plan.

His sister Sue cared for him besides holding down her day job, and bless you for it, Sue.  He didn’t like being dependent on her.  He was dependent on an oxygen tank.  He didn’t like that either. He had diverticulitis and couldn’t eat.  He was down to 130 pounds. He walked his dogs in their garden when he could.  He grew his own vegetables until it got to be too much for him.

George was a hero to me, although we were the same age.  His character was bigger than his body and spilled into the streets around him.  We spent long foggy nights walking from Mike’s Pool Hall to the Hot Dog Palace and back, looking for friends, finding them and standing on the corner together till Officer Bigarini walked by and told us to beat it.  We were in love with the same girl.  We laughed about it.  We were both nineteen, then twenty, then twenty-one and we wanted to be beatniks.  It seemed like the only sensible career, and still does.  George turned me on to The Outsider by Colin Wilson. The book puts an intellectual structure around how we felt, it justified and clarified our inchoate feelings of being completely alienated from the larger society around us.  I read it, thought about it, and moved on.  But George kept it nearby.  For him, it was the book that made sense. He was rereading it again this summer just before he hit his final bump in the road.

George, how can I come see you now?

People I loved have been dying on me my whole life and it’s a dirty trick.  I still want to go see everybody.  I don’t really care about this world any more.  It will never compare.  I’m left here to walk down the beach in my overcoat at the end of time.  And write it all down for no one.  So that’s what I’ll do.

Everyone’s leaving.

But Sunny Skies has to stay behind.