Letter from Leslie in the East Village - 1963

Put on some Miles before you start reading. Maybe Generique, or Blue In Green. Whatever it is, make sure it’s about neon cities late at night, cold coffee, looking backwards at your mistakes and, well, melancholy. Leslie’s letter lays on the desk before me like a French new wave movie starring Jean-Paul Leaud and Anna Karina, black and white and in slow motion. It was a dark time. Acid rock and the Summer of Love were a long ways away. Leslie is purely natural, purely herself, purely her persona, but all the star-crossed young bo and beat lovers of a hundred years illuminate her pink pages. I can feel the intense drama of being eighteen and pregnant, poor and beat in a unknown, uncaring city as written down by a self-aware eighteen-year-old young woman, burgeoning into a remarkable life. I like this Leslie so much. And I haven’t seen her since 1963…

chris–

it’s still right now and now is rainy east side sunday. it has come to the point where rainy days are almost my favorites–i feel so comfortable and i can open our kitchen window and smell everything clean and cold.

how wonderful to get your letter. i am almost scared to answer because you are still thinking of me as i was over a year ago and i have changed i am much deader inside–almost never do i run down hills now. there are none in ny. i am somewhat disillusioned now about things–i had thought that to hitch hike three thousand miles of the united states would be very exciting (i’m afraid i thought of it in kerouacian terms) and i found out that kerouac’s innocence and wonder approached that of a mentally deficient and that i have lost all the innocence and wonderment that once ruled my existence. and now i sound phoney and i hunt for words.

how awful ny is! the first week we were here, i was depressed and sick and cried and bitched. i hated everything about new york–especially the filth and squalor and smells of the lower east side. it did not seem worth the struggle to try and live here. but now i have come to almost like our life.

we have a two room place on e. 12th st. it is in a building behind the one opening on the street, so that we look out on the buildings opposite (from the back they all look like they are made of crumbling adobe brick and i can almost imagine paris) and the wash hanging frozen from the clothesline. our place is very small–one of the rooms is big enough to hold our two mattresses one cardboard carton of over-flowing books and our hi-fi stuff. the other room contains the bathtub, a trunk, the refrigerator (surprisingly new and roomy), the stove (surprisingly free of roaches), two wooden box chairs, the sink, various kitchen materials, and the top of an old captains chair mounted on a wooden box.

this place has become almost the entire center of my existence. i stay in here almost all day except when peter drags me out to get a beer or shop or try to score. i have decorated the walls with pictures and i cook and read and listen to the fm and most important i write letters–the letters i get and write occupy my attention the greater part of everyday.

when we do go out, we usually have no money to spend and so sometimes we just walk–along the edge of the east river and look at the dirty red factories and smokestacks that is brooklyn or up 2nd avenue and look at the antiques shops or through the unbelievably tall buildings and hustle that is uptown (grand central station is a wonderland of towering ceilings and marble pillars) or we walk down avenue c past 7th street and look at the fruit and vegetables and kosher foods of the street vendors or 14th st., a market street that stretches forever with countless discount places selling cheap perfume and scarves–woolworth’s run off on a monstrous mimeo machine.

and even greenwich village, looking so much like north beach only even more vulgar and without the charm of hills and alleys and coit tower. no italians–just millions of frustrated teenagers and stereotyped girls with long hair pierced ears and capezio boots. angry young negroes dykes with italian cut trousers and so many 15 year old girls high on amphedamine and sitting in basement folk singing places.

and i am with child–gloriously pregnant–and happy about it even, afraid of becoming an example of maternal docility. i am reading have read summerhill and i am full of hopes of raising a beautiful brilliant nuerosis free child. and ever peter is beginning to enjoy the idea. pregnant women are almost morbidly depressing.

and so–perhaps a mistake–i (and peter) will be coming back to sf in early march, if possible. i miss everything so much. there are a million things for me to do and a million places to see again. so many hills to run down and hills to sit on.

please tell me how your life is. i love you still.

leslie

Chet Helms, Margarita and Me

Let me start by saying Chet had his moment of glory - a long, extended moment - as proprietor and maitre’d of the San Francisco Sound. Along with Bill Graham, he made sure the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Big Brother and the Holding Company and, of course, Janis Joplin got right to the front tables and smoked the best dope in America.

I knew Chet pretty well in the Haight-Ashbury days, and we stayed in touch for a long time after. Here’s a story about what manner of man he was.

At nineteen I fell in love with a beautiful and cruel seventeen year old named Margarita. On our first date she danced naked in the rain. I thought this stuff only happened in books! I’d never met someone up to her style before and I fell hard and passionately. We traveled across America together and when she’d had enough, she just hitched a ride with a trucker to her home town of San Bernadino.

Not to put too fine a point it, Margarita ripped my heart open and drove me insane. But she was worth it! What a girl!

OK, fast forward twenty-eight years. I’m happily married, a salaryman with a big New York career, living in a heartwarming but drafty Victorian in an country-quaint New Jersey town, watching old Bob Hope movies on TV with my daughter Kirstie and generally having a pretty good time of it.

Then, suddenly, I came down with a high fever. A very high fever. My doctor slammed me in the hospital and I began to get delirious. Fever visions. In the night, tossing on my perspiration bed I suddenly found myself to be nineteen years old again. I was standing under a street light across from Margarita’s aunt’s house on Effie Street in Silver Lake. I saw lights in the house but I was alone and I began to howl. They were long agonizing pain-wracked cries of grief for Margarita, the lost one. I howled to the full silver moon like a broken wolf or a starving coyote. I was astonished to find a gaping wound in my heart covered with the finest of skins. Not one drop of hurt had evaporated in all those twenty-eight years. And I hadn’t even noticed it.

When I got to feeling better, I wrote to Chet about my strange experience. He had been around in those days and knew the players. I never heard back from him, but about three weeks later, I did get a letter - from Margarita!

She was a grown up too. Lived up in the Rockies somewhere. Had kids. Still played her flute in the moonlight. She was sorry she had hurt me so bad. She was ashamed of her seventeen year old self.

I was surprised to get her letter. But not all that surprised - I recognized her handwriting right away on the envelope. And I was glad too, because somehow the letter brought some closure that I didn’t know I needed.

Margarita had been in San Francisco for the first time in years and she just happened to run into Chet on Market Street and he just happened to have my address in his pocket. So he told her about my letter and gave her my address.

That was Chet through and through. Always right where he needed to be. Always knowing what was going down in all the flats in the Haight. Just had his finger on it. And he still did.

Borrowed the pic of young Chet from Jim McCulloch’s blog Stone Bridge. Hope he don’t mind.

Labels: Chet Helms, Looking Into The Past, San Francisco