Dust on the Stupid Roses – A Ponderpig Classic

Originally published March 22, 2006

You know what burns me up about life? That we get old and die, that’s what. I’m ready for eternity right now!

I’m ready to go hang out with my Dad some more. I’m NOT ready to go visit his stupid grave. I want to have more fun watching him do his soft shoe routine and hear him grumbling behind the typewriter in a hurry to get his newspaper column out before the deadline. Dad was lively! You know what I mean?

Here I just discovered this great singer, Ivie Anderson, bursting with life and youth and exuberance and great chops and I want to go see her and tell her how great she is. But you know where she is? In the ground somewhere. Dust and ashes.

Do you think this is fair?

If I tell you she sang lead with Duke Ellington’s orchestra back in the Thirties, you’ll go, “Oh, some boring old singer. Let’s go see The Buggers instead.” And her youth and talent and wonderfulness is invalidated because she’s in the ground and forgotten like dust on my living room floor that I ought to sweep up.

I don’t like this!

I want to go to heaven right now, please! This is not a death wish, by the way. The world is full of cool people I love now. And I’m ready for more adventures. It’s just that I want to hang with Ivie Anderson and my Dad. And my pal Rodney Albin who died of stomach cancer in the Eighties and my brother Noel who turned me on to rhythm and blues before he got smashed at the age of 19. I want us all to be together NOW!

Botheration!

Luminaries of the Haight-Ashbury: Good-bye To All That

Big Brother guitarist James Gurley’s demise in mid-December got me thinking about the Haight-Ashbury again, that world that so dominated my early life and still follows me today like a puppy that refuses to become a dog.  What gets me, when I let my mind roll back, is not the music, not the LSD, not the teenyboppers dancing topless in the Panhandle, no – it’s my horrible optimism, the shiny beckoning utopian vision grinning like The Joker.  I believed a new age was coming where we would live in love, in harmony, in peace, in the country.  No one would have to work unless they wanted to, and there’d be apples cheery red in every orchard.

I wasn’t the only fool on the hill.  Remember the Beatles?

All you need is love.  Love is all you need.

In the beginning I misunderstood, but now I’ve got it – the Word is good.  Say the Word and you’ll be free.

You think they wrote that with cynical commercialism?  They didn’t.  They picked it up out of the zeitgeist, just like I did.

Here’s a page from my address book of those days.  See the guy on the bottom left under the green ink smear?  Jerry Sealund.

Jerry was a go getter.  A high energy guy.  Had a vision for the future and got the bread together to open the first health food store in the Haight-Ashbury.  I forget the store’s name because we all called called it Blind Jerry’s.

Yeah, Jerry and his wife Ethel were born both blind.  That’s how I got to know Jerry in 1963.  San Francisco State hired readers for their blind students and I got the gig for Jerry.  I used to go over to their house off Market Street, read Albert Camus out loud for a few chapters, then Jerry and I would drive around and get stoned.  Jerry didn’t want Ethel to know about his pot smoking activities.  It was still the early days.

Jerry was an optimist, you know?  It didn’t occur to him that being the blind proprietor of a retail establishment might present problems of a shoplifting nature.  We original hippie were all friends, we had high ideals, no one would rip off a blind guy, right?  Did anybody notice the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem?  I didn’t.

How could we be so naive?  We weren’t in a cult, we had no charismatic leader.  Tim Leary was good for a laugh, that’s all.  If there were enemies, they came from the straight world — the fuzz, LBJ, television.  Acid had opened the frontiers of our consciousness and let in the white light that would guide us to bliss and the knowledge of how to truly love each other.

But Blind Jerry’s health food store got nibbled and chewed and shoplifted into oblivion in three years.  In his history of the Haight-Ashbury, Charles Perry says Jerry was robbed twelve times in eleven months.

Are we humans inherently good until civilization corrupts us, like the Romantics thought?  Or are we inherently evil, as Christianity teaches?

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

That’s what it comes down to, and I’m voting with the Christians.  We see our best chance and take it.  Raping the weak, robbing blind guys, smacking little kids around, punching and bleeding and stealing from people who can’t fight back, that’s the human way, that’s our potential and I wish it wasn’t.  It makes my stomach hurt.

We’re smart, but not smart enough.  We love but we don’t love enough. We hate terrorists and child molesters and Republicans and Obama and Sarah Palin and climate deniers and global warming kooks and we never notice they are just us in another form, with another history.

If you’re a cynic, congratulations.  I wish my skin was a little thicker.

*    *    *    *    *

My archivist assistant, The Pondering Chicken, asked me to put in a little note about the other names in the address book scan.  For the record, Jim Smirchich was a photographer in those days.  Later he moved to Oregon where he learned to make the most beautiful handmade beads you ever saw.  http://www.smircich.com/index.html

Melinda Scotten, Melinda Scotten.  Hmm, did I meet her at a party?  Must have been a short friendship.

Stephany Sunshine of Cosmos City blew in and out of my life like the original flower child.  I wrote a song about her that began

“Pretty little, pretty little Stephany,
Now your head’s been opened and it’s my oh my,
The thought’s you’re thinkin’ seem mighty strange to me…”

She deserves a post of her own.

Skip Shimmin eventually became a recording engineer and worked for Fantasy records, I think.  Maybe Skip is out there somewhere and can tell us.

My New Year’s resolution was if I can’t say anything nice, then I won’t say anything at all.  But don’t worry, I’ll be back one of these days, more fun than a barrel of monkeys!

Philippa Pearce or How I Became A Talking Pig

OR
Revenge of The Spotted Gypsy King

I’ve always thought Victorians had the best names for their novels, don’t you?  Why have only one name for a story, when you can have two or three or however many you like.  A reader might think, hmm, Philippa Pearce, probably about a poor but noble nurse who has to go to the North to care  for a rich mine owner with gout and she marries him at the end and gets rich as pigs.  Not my cuppa tea…WAIT, Or How I Became A Talking Pig. Now, that’s more like it!  I’ll have a go.

So our reader opens to the first page.

"I have not always been as I am today. (the author begins) Once I was a man like any other.  Well, not just like any other.  Actually, just like any other chubby fellow with long floppy ears.”

Well, this sounds promising, thinks our prospective reader, but where’s the part about Nurse Pearce and her noble mission to help shell-shocked soldiers recover their sexual appetites?"

So that’s where the Spotted Gypsy King, comes in, see? He’s been in the War and he’s come out all in spots.

Oh, maybe I’d just better start over.

I really did start out as a normal, although strange, kid.  There was nothing piggish bout me.  I flew my balsa wood glider into the telephone lines just like any other all-American boy.  But, when I was seven, I got rheumatic fever and it messed my aortic heart valve so bad that, by the time I was in my thirties, I needed heart surgery to replace my leaky valve with a…proper pig valve! This was not merely a name.  This was the valve from the heart of a living, breathing, dreaming, pondering pig.  Soon I began to have thoughts of becoming a detective.  I found myself craving Freddy The Pig stories. Worse yet, I discovered The Adventures of Pigling Bland and realized if I could only get to England I would find a world with talking pigs like me wearing proper coats and no pants.  I could rescue a pretty pig girl from an evil farmer like Pigling Bland did and then I’d be happy forever like they were.

Oh, you’ll never believe this.  Maybe I should start over.

Scratch the part about turning into a pig.  I was still an ordinary guy; I just had a pig valve where you have a human heart valve. I wasn’t turning bionic, but something else.

OK, the years roll by. My power trio, The Three Pigs, has made it to the top.  Then, one night it happens, my regular, not-bionic pig valve starts to leak.  I go into heart failure.  We’re putting the final touches on our debut album, The Revenge of The Spotty Gypsy King and I can’t finish the mix.  I’m in the hospital fighting for my life while the hard-hearted record executives gnash their teeth and throw out the master.  The surgeons replace my leaky valve with a new improved pig valve they found at the Saturday market, but this one, unbeknownst to them, is not a regular pig valve, it’s a magical pig valve.  It lets me see things that aren’t really there.

OK? Got it so far?  Now listen up.  This is where Philippa Pearce comes in.  One night after I get out of intensive care, I’m lying in my hospital bed and looking out the plate glass window at the owl flitting across the moon like you see sometimes when you’re loaded up on Percodan.  I’m wondering when that pretty night nurse will come in for my back rub when suddenly I see a vision!

Laugh if you want to.  Mock me. But I must tell what I have seen no matter how late you’ll be for the wedding.

I saw a late afternoon in midwinter.  The canal before my eyes was frozen solid.  Trees and withered sedge stood petrified by the frost. A grey leaden sky spread its headache light.  Then a young woman and a boy skated into view, down the canal right past me and skated on until they disappeared in the distance.  They had said no word.  They knew not I was there.  The boy was wearing pajamas.

Aficionados of English children’s books will recognize this as a scene from Philippa Pearce’s 1958 novel, Tom’s Midnight Garden.  But, at that time I had never read or even heard of Tom’s Midnight Garden.  When the book first came out, I was sixteen.  I was planning on becoming Elvis Presley or James Dean, not reading children’s books.

So, one night two or three years later, I pick up my daughter’s copy of Tom’s Midnight Garden and I’m leafing through it.  I think, hmm, time travel.  I love time travel.  I think I’ll just glance through this.  So I’m sitting in the living room by the fire reading and loving this book when I come across the scene.  The pajamas, the skates, the ice, Tom’s little girl friend who has grown into a young woman while he has remained a little boy.  The leaden wintry sky.  The sense of endings and forlorn emptiness inside.  The whole deal.

All joking aside, folks, this is the strangest damn thing that has ever happened to me.  No author has, or could ever, affect me like Philippa Pearce did.  I must have a connection with her that goes far beyond books, that’s all I can think.  I found out today she died three years ago.  Which is why I wrote this post.

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.

Lucy Lewis

I dreamed I saw Lucy Lewis last night,
alive as you and me.
“Lucy, I hardly knew yuh”, I said.
“I came to your dream anyway,” said she.

She smiled, but vague. I dreamed I said…

“I see you, Lucy. I see you walking across the San Francisco State commons in the fog with your dark-haired clone Lenore.

“Why, Lucy, you’re still wearing your black leotards, you’re still wearing your black tights you’re still exhaling coolness like rose perfume, you still even have acne!

“You and George Hunter are still producing the Happening in the Gallery Lounge Spring 1964. You choreographing it, George is making space music for it at the Tape Music Center and it sounds like a snowy midnight somewhere in 1840 or 2140 or out in the galaxy far past the farthest comet.

“I’m still holding your robe! What kind of dream is this anyway? I see black lights, strobe lights every kind of night light.

“You are unearthly and George’s gold front tooth is glistening wet and insane in the black light midnight.

“Who is carrying your crystal coffin? Why, it’s four Rodney Albins all wearing swallowtail coats and stovepipe hats and emanating theatrical gloom! I see. They’re marching the dead march for you until Lenore rises from her coffin like a ghost of love lost and dances a sad waltz in her diaphanous gown with the spotlight reflecting off cases filled with basketball trophies from 1948, 1949, 1956 and your well-trained raven and Edgar Allen Poe candles

burning my heart and fingers and then

your raven flew down from the trophy case and quoth ‘Nevermore’ no more.”

But you said,

“Who is George Hunter? Who is Lenore? Why am I in your dream?”

And I knew for certainty you lost your memory in sorrow that will never end in this life.

Because we were standing on the fifth floor of the Hearst Building at Third and Market in San Francisco waiting for the elevator and we were saying goodbye because we would never come here no more and I was grieving too.

I was grieving for my tough newspaperman father who had his office on this very floor where he smoked Chesterfields and Camels and bashed out a daily column and put on his fedora and hiked to the Nugget to interview Lola Albright. And I will never see him no more in this life no matter how much I miss him and Lucy Lewis was come to sorrow with me

because she was the angel of grief.

But she had lost her memory.

Photo by Patrushka

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.

Wendy’s Garden

I’m not sure poetry and blogging mix. I know when I’m reading other people’s blogs they have about fifteen seconds to grab me. Hey, I’m a busy man. You’ve got to rivet me to my chair or I’ll be running off to see what Aprilbaby said today.

But poetry doesn’t work that way. Oh, I know – there’s the occasional Milk of the Bayou, a poem that smacks you in the face like a cold fish (think Sylvester the Cat here) and there you are, transported into a Roadrunner cartoon when you meant to spend quality time catching up on the G8 conference.

But regular poetry works slower. She’s shy. You’ve got to court her. You’ve got to print out that poem and take it into the garden and sit under a tree with a glass of lemonade and all the time in the world. Let the words trickle down like beads of moisture on your lemonade glass until they start to mean something.

Well, who has time for that? Might not hurt to try, though.

Hey, stay with me another twenty seconds already. I rummaged around and found Allen Cohen’s memorial poem for Wendy Norins, the girl who was the inspiration for Sylvie Potemkin in my novel-in-progress, The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship….

I got a funny feeling this morning, finding it in my back files and looking back towards the San Francisco of my youth – those years that created me. Am I the only one of my time and place left with memory intact? Why am I still here when so many who shared that youth have gone down to Davy Jones’ Locker? There must be others left – but where are they? I want to call Allen Cohen to talk about 1736 Page and after — but he’s nowhere to be found. He’s down waiting for the Ferryman.

Sometimes I feel like I’m marooned on a distant planet somewhere at the edge of the Milky Way – sending out little digital signals. Is anybody there? Is there anybody else out there? Oh well, guess I’d better go build up the fire…

THE GARDEN
Elegy for Wendy Norins, August 26, 1994
by Allen Cohen

It is the hot night of our lives.
Our bodies limp in their misuse.
Our souls though, that inner body,
statelier than mansions, gardens
lush and orderly with serene ponds
and tropical thickets.

Many beings and so much bitterness and beauty
inhabit our labyrinthine souls.
We have tended and grown each plant.
Nurtured each being that has entered there.
There are many secret places
that no one has yet seen,
some we have yet to explore.
Everyday we are adding
gorgeous flowering plants
and making new paths
and silent spaces.

And I think of you dear heart
and your wondrous pained soul.
How it ached and yet made room
for so many to find nourishment there!
In my memory I see you at 16 or 17
with an unearthly beauty, as if there
were four or five angels within you,
each pulling and lifting you
in a different direction
with each awkward breathless step.
It was a deep and mournful joyousness
that lived within you, strange
(I don’t think I romanticize here)
how every man wanted you
in order to heal their broken souls.

And you were a hippie maiden of the wind
until you finally settled in your body
and it began to corrupt your innocence
and the pain and the escape from pain
drove the angels of youth out
leaving you alone and empty.
Your destiny to reinvent your soul
To climb the ladder of light again
to let the air and rain
water the growing Eden within you.
With each act and thought
a deep compassion grew.
When such beauty born
and beauty reborn
departs our shattered world,
a vast mysterious crater
is created in the mind.
We look down into it
remembering you, looking
for the gardens of you,
stretching to reach across
the mystery of your departure.

Photos by Patrushka, except the fish.

Badfinger

You know what I hate? Wondering what happened to everybody. Cause usually what happened is that everybody died. Or went south in some other way. Or ended up in a skid row hotel in Palm Springs looking out at the golf courses across the street.

The new member, apparently, of our little Pondering Pig entourage, Jinx the Cat, mentioned Badfinger in one of his ringing declamations last night and I thought, “Geez, I haven’t thought about Badfinger in over one million years. I wonder what happened to those guys?” So I looked them up.

For those of you who came in late, power pop forbears Badfinger came to fleeting fame in the late Sixties and early Seventies. They were the first in a line of many bands who were supposed to be “the next Beatles.” Paul MacCartney discovered them and Apple backed them big time. They had one or two hits but then quickly disappeared. Into cultdom, I suppose. But not my cult. I just forgot about them.

What happened to the guys in Badfinger? Did they go back to dentist school? Become traveling preachers? Head for the south of France to write novels, each with his own villa? So I looked them up.

Peter Ham: hanged himself. Age 27.
Tom Evans: hanged himself. Age 36.
Mike Gibbins: moved to Florida. Died in his sleep in 2005. Age 56.
Joey Molland: still a working musician. Mainly touring with pickup musicians under the Badfinger name.

Crikey. Where’s the part where they all live happily ever after?

Right now on my Itunes, the rock singer with the most melancholy rock voice in known history — Chrissie Hynde — is asking me the musical question “Why look so sad? Tears are in your eyes.”

Chrissie, hang in there, girl. I don’t know what your lifestyle is like but I pray it’s filled with joy and love and health and some form of performer’s inner peace.

For now, I think I have to go back up in my pear tree with a skull and meditate on it like St. Francis did.

When The Candy Was Free

You know what I hate? People who hardly know each other jumping into bed together. I’m not against it for religious reasons. In fact, I’m not even sure what family values are — but I think they have something to do with the Care Bears. No, it’s because of my best friend John T.

Back in the late Seventies, John and I were “writer-producer-directors” for a big public relations firm in San Francisco. And over time we grew to be tight friends. We shared a lot of interests. He was a wonderful photographer and a classically trained pianist. He was gentle and funny and he had a warm heart. Truth is, over the years we worked together I came to love him like a brother.

John and his boy friend Todd were regular dinner guests at our big old house on Seventeenth Avenue and the evening always ended around the piano howling out Beatles songs or Cole Porter ballads or Christmas carols if the season was right. I won’t forget the time Patrushka attempted Creme Brulee for dessert, but the melted sugar topping got way too sticky and glued John’s mouth shut. The table fell apart from laughter.

John was a pal, and pals are hard to some by and I still miss him. Love is forever.

All because John couldn’t pass up a good orgy. He used to regale me with his sexual exploits. I learned a lot about the San Francisco gay community and its bathhouse, gloryhole culture. He once said living in San Francisco was like being a kid in a candy store and all the candy was free.

We used to go on the road together and I was amazed at his ability to spot and meet and pick up a gay cashier or waiter at the hotel – all with a look, a glance. He told me once he had been driving down Highway 101 up in the country somewhere and he had sex with a guy who passed him on the highway. They just exchanged looks and that’s all it took. They both pulled over and jumped out and got it on in the field and then jumped back in their little sports cars and off they went. Yahoo! Life in the free candy store.

He laughed about it and I laughed too. I guess I could have gotten all moralistic with him but I never thought of it, and it probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. That was the way it was in the gay world in San Francisco. Nobody had ever heard of AIDS.

Actually, the word was starting to get around. I remember one bluesky Saturday morning in 1982. We took the kids over to John and Todd’s Potrero Hill flat and jumped into their hot tub in the backyard. We had a great time as usual, but underneath I worried. Could AIDS get passed on through water in a hot tub? Should the girls be in here? Looking back, I’m glad I ignored the thought. Those guys weren’t long for this world and I’m glad for every moment we had together.

So, the next year I took a job on the east coast and, after that, I only saw John and Todd when I flew back to the City on business. I’d always drop by their flat to see what was up, and John wasn’t looking so good. He never would cop to having HIV, but I saw him preparing little vitamin protein supplements to spread on his cracker. We never really got down to what mattered – we’d just talk about business and trade east coast vs west coast work stories and talk about if the multi-image slide show business would survive.

John and Todd usually stayed with us when they were on the east coast and we managed to stay in touch, but less and less. Then one evening Todd called to tell us John was dead. He caught pneumonia and died quite quickly.

The fuck.

John’s parents came out from Pittsburgh. I guess the flat was in John’s name because they sold it and evicted Todd. They blamed Todd for everything. After a few months, he left the City. There was someone in Long Beach who said he’d take care of him.

God bless those guys. They’re both dead now because John couldn’t keep it zipped. Why couldn’t he just stay home with Todd? Was it really that hard to do? Excuse me, gentle reader. But do you see why I have a personal dislike of promiscuity?

Instead of a dear friend I get to see whenever I go to San Francisco, I just get another stupid fucking grave to put flowers on. I’ll just have to miss his sweet smile and gentle ways till I get to heaven. I wouldn’t want to go to any heaven that didn’t include John T.

So while we’re changing the world around here today could we please eliminate AIDS too?

So Much Trouble In The World

Don’t come round here no more if you’re looking for knowledge. Or wisdom. Cause I don’t have any. Looking for some myself. The trouble with all this pondering is the more I learn, the less I know. The more I ponder, the more confused I get.

I envy my brother Action Pig – he never wonders why humans are so screwy. He doesn’t walk around the duck pond all afternoon trying to puzzle out why kids in Sweden get to all grow up healthy and strong. But kids in Sierra Leone have to die before they’re five (untold thousands of them). And life goes on anyway. And the Swedes and Americans and Brits and Canadians all just get up and go to work like the whole world has medicine as good as theirs. Action Pig just gets on board the train and starts shooting out the window.

Me, I’m the Pondering Pig. I wish I wasn’t. There’s tears rolling down my ignorant piggie snout at the injustice in this world. I can’t see to aim the trigger.

Image Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Labels: Meaning of Things, Simple Justice, Sorrow of Life