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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.

Maybe  truth is what is.

Not what we hope for,

Not what we fear,

Not what we believe,

Not what we refuse to believe,

I think the truth is…what is.

Then he ate that carrot and smacked his lips and looked if there was another.

(P.S. That pig is really Bailey, borrowed from one of my favorite personal blogs, Bring Me Sunshine.)

You remember Edmund Robere, the Mad Magician of 857 Divisadero Street?  We sketched a brief portrait of him in Part 5 of The House On Divisadero Street.   Here, thanks to the miracle of inter-library microfilm loans, is an addendum to his story: the San Francisco Chronicle’s story as it appeared on June 11, 1964.

This is from the Chron in its racy heyday. You’d think they could have thrown in a  little more showbiz.  His full story remains to be told.

I honor my father’s generation, the guys who dragged the Nazis, the Fascists, and the Imperial Japanese Empire down to destruction,

and I bear no ill will towards the guys of the current generation who are fighting for something – who knows what – in Afghanistan (someone knows!).

But on this Veterans’ Day, I particularly want to remember the brave G.I.’s of my own generation, the guys who refused to kill women and children in Viet Nam and went to prison for their belief in what was right.  They refused to pull the trigger on babies and old ladies to up the week’s body count, they saw for themselves how wrong the war in Viet Nam was, and they fought to tell America what we should have known all along.  Today I want to honor those brave G.I.s.

I can’t think of a better way to honor veterans today than to sit home and watch the 2006 documentary ‘Sir!  No Sir!’ If you’re in my generation, you’ll remember what really went down before terminal amnesia sets in.  If you’re younger, you can be inspired to mobilize against the power even if you feel powerless.  If you’ve been brought up to believe America is always right, always brave, always the good guys – like I was raised – you can honor the vets by growing up.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.