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

It’s Too Late, She’s Gone

Yesterday I learned Beth died. The beautiful girl whose strings are tied into my heart as fast today as they were the last time I saw her in 1968. My sad girl, my wicked girl, a friend who was a lot like me. Somehow I always thought I’d see her again one day and she’d tell me she was all right. She had come through. But she never did.

I first met Beth at San Francisco State in the fall of 1961. I was new on the scene and didn’t know anybody yet. I’d just transferred to State after a season of traveling in Mexico and New York. One night in October or thereabouts I went to an all-night vigil for peace outside the Commons, the schools’ poor attempt at a student union. I brought my Mexican guitar and sang Pretty Polly and We Shall Overcome and There Once Was A Union Maid through the night as the frat boys taunted us and threw eggs. By morning I knew all the peaceniks, the people who became my comrades for next few years, Solveig Otvos, Don Auclaire, Peter Weiss, Bob Kuehn, Eva Bessie, Peter Kraemer, Margarita Bates…and Beth.

Beth didn’t notice I existed, of course. Isn’t that how these stories start? Maybe she smiled at me once, I’m not sure. It wasn’t till months later I realized she was nearly blind without her glasses, which she refused to wear and she probably couldn’t see me.

Somebody invited me to a party on Clayton Steet that weekend, and Beth was there. Some haunting quality in her face drew me towards her. It must been her face because we’d never spoken. To me she was a charming, Audrey Hepburned sort of long-haired, brunette, eighteen or nineteen, mildly pre-Raphaelite, the kind of girl we called ‘woodsie-nymphsie.’ She had a big crush on a pink-cheeked, black bearded young radical named Steve something. She looked longingly at him, I looked longingly at her, and I sang “Oh my love, I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time” with great feeling. The party got real quiet. I had a good voice in those days and I knew how to sing.

Well, Beth and I never got together in the way you’re expecting, because Margarita got in the way. Margarita Bates. For now, let me just say she was peerless, I hungered for her magical presence, and Beth disappeared in her shadow – except she didn’t really. Instead, the oddest thing happened. Beth and I became friends.

As my love affair with Margarita proceeded from horror to horror, I found solace with Beth. She understood. She listened. She cared about me. As we got to know each other better, I discovered we also shared sensibilities. We both liked the same books, the same films, the same foggy streets, and we shared the same sliced up feeling inside.

As the sixties slowly burned down to the stub, I was never far from Beth. We spent days together wandering North Beach, drinking coffee in The Enigma or The Hot Dog Palace, playing Desafinado over and over on the juke box, sharing intimate secrets or just gossiping about mutual friends. I called her Ivich, after the character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads To Freedom trilogy.

Late one afternoon in 1962 we were hanging out in Solveig’s place on Page Street. Solveig wasn’t home from work yet and there were just the two of us, listening to the Modern Jazz Quartet on Solveig’s record player. The late afternoon light faded away until there was only the light spreading from the little kitchen. You can guess what happened. Our buried longing for each other took over, and we lay together on the couch in the darkness until Solveig got home.

I felt horribly guilty, because I was married to somebody else, who was pregnant with my child. Cheating on my wife was the last thing I wanted to do, I thought. Turned out I was wrong. We never touched each other again. But I couldn’t keep away from Beth. I loved her.

Funny, I never considered that spending so much time with another woman was a form of cheating.

Beth was never cool, never a freak. She got her BA in English in the requisite four years, married an earnest young carpenter, settled down in an apartment on Downey Street and got a big dumb Afghan dog. She grew fat. She was unhappy. She was a bore. She didn’t go to the concerts or listen to the bands. But I couldn’t keep away from here for long, she was too deep a part of my life. Their apartment was a regular stop on my rounds of the Haight-Ashbury. Her husband got me work on his remodeling crew. By 1967 though, we had lost touch. Our lives had finally diverged too far. It was around then they moved home to Marin County.

OK, my first wife and I eventually split up and by mid-1968 I was living in the Eureka Valley neighborhood. The Haight had become a threadbare circus. The Hell’s Angels and meth freaks were taking over and the original hippies had mostly moved on.

But one morning I was over there for some reason, and standing and laughing on the street with a group of freaks I’d never seen before – I saw Beth. She was thin again. She was extroverted. She was merry. She was delighted to see me. She introduced me to her new friends and I was polite but I could see right away they were creeps, and they gave me the creeps. OK, I admit it. I was a complete snob in those days. Only the original hippies were cool. Everyone else please show your hip credentials before I’ll speak to you. But I knew a creep when I saw one, and they looked like creeps to me. Speed freaks.

We exchanged phone numbers and Beth (who by now was calling herself Lenore) invited me to a party at her house in Marin that weekend. I was playing guitar and singing with Hugh Harris at the time and suggested he come with me so we could try out our new set at the party. Saturday night we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge in Hugh’s VW bug, and soon we were somewhere deep in the redwood sided streets of Corte Madera.

‘Lenore’ met me at the door in a transparent gown with a drink in her hand. Her new friends were eating and drinking and grinning at me, showing off their missing teeth. Scott, Lenore’s husband, was kept busy running out for more beer. While he was gone, Lenore made laughing, snide comments about him. His earnest, straight-forward self was comedy material to her new crowd. There were no other women at the party.

I got the creeps big time and withdrew into myself. Hugh and I played some tunes, I talked with Scott a little bit, and we left early. On the drive back to the City, I realized we’d been dosed with MDA, the “love drug”. It must have been in the punch.

The high itself was nice, pleasant. It wasn’t that. It’s that she hadn’t told me. It was her little joke, a mischievous joke on me.

That was it. I wrote Beth out of life. She shouldn’t have done that. She broke my trust. And I didn’t dig her new friends.

I’ve never forgotten that night, and the knowledge I knew my dear girl was in trouble and I just wrote her off. Why didn’t I say something? Beat her up? Ask her what the fuck she was doing? Listen to her like she’d listened to me. Cared about her. Been there for her.

I was such a hippie. No interference. That’s cool, man. Good-bye.

I looked for her half-heartedly over the years. She’d moved. Changed her name. Who knew? But I always thought one day I’d see her again. And her face has haunted me these long years.

The other day Greg Hoffman mentioned he was going to interview Wes Wilson for his new book. Wes is the artist who basically created the psychedelic dance poster in his early work for the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms. I remembered his wife had been Beth’s best friend in those early days at State, so I asked Greg to see if Eva knew what become of her. Last night Greg called me. She’s laying in the ground these fifteen years. From uterine cancer. I’ll never see her no more. It’s too late, she’s gone.

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