The House On Divisadero Street (Part 4 of 6)

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

To begin at Part 1, click here.

Gerald Keil’s Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Loren Means remembers the neighborhood differently.

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

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

NEXT: EDMUND THE MAD MAGICIAN

To continue to Part 5, click here.

The House On Divisadero Street (Part 1 of 6)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: LOREN MEANS’ STORY

To Go to Part 2, click here.

The Story Of An Early Haight-Ashbury Commune

857 Divisadero Street

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

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

Keep your eye out.  Should be up soon.

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.

The Baby Beat Photographer

In the summer of 1962 I took a course in photography at San Francisco State from Jack Welpott, a modernist photographer of renown.  He said my stuff was sentimental.

His words cut like a knife.  Me?  Sentimental?  No way!  I was bad as they come.  Look at this guy!  That’s me, the very summer of my mortal wound.  I knew the streets.  I knew grifters.  And I knew what sentimental meant.  It meant cheap emotion manufactured to give the viewer a cheap thrill.  Oh, look at the cute little kitten and the big dog is carrying it so gently.  Isn’t that sweet?  Pictures like that were sentimental and I had nothing to do with sentimentality.

Could I help it if every time I looked through my viewfinder there was a sad-eyed vulnerable waif looking lost and forlorn?

I wasn’t taking pictures for a cheap thrill.  I was taking pictures of my friends,  the girl variety to be exact.  That’s how they looked.  So beautiful my heart ached and I wanted to give them to the world forever.  Which I now do.

I wasn’t sentimental like that Walter Keane, the laughing stock of the baby beatnik world.  He and his wife ran an art gallery on Broadway above a topless bar, and sold his  sadeyed waifs with huge eyes to tipsy tourists who stood in line to see.

Bleaah!  Sickening!  Me and Linda Lovely and Sheila Clark and Sneaky Pete and all my way out friends laughed cynically as we passed the Keane-bound crowds on our way to an important meeting standing outside the Jazz Workshop to listen to John Coltrane because they wouldn’t let us through the door.  Tourists!  My pictures were nothing like his paintings.

Oh why, ye gods?  I go forth to capture the true nature of the human heart, and, in particular the true heart of my various girl friends and what do I get?  Your stuff is sentimental!  By a big time modernist like Jack Welpott who must know.  I was crushed.

Even when I went forth to shoot approved modernist subjects like severe nudes with no heads, weathered barns in the gold rush country or Edward Weston barnacled rocks looming out of Pacific tidepools, I got ruined castles, I got broken dreams, I got enchanted princesses in long gowns and wimples sleepwalking though haunted landscapes.

Botheration!  I give up!  I’m a stoopid romantic!  I’d better not tell anybody.

Of course what I didn’t know is that the modernist fever was breaking.  Within a couple years young barbarians would be ransacking junk stores looking for Maxfield Parrish prints, and new poster art would be created by artists who cut their teeth flame-painting ‘49 Mercs.  And not a minute too soon for me.  Eat your heart out, Jack Welpott.

Leslie In The Crystalline Night

One night in December 1961, Leslie Hipshman and I were driving across the city at the rainbow’s end in my beat-up Studebaker Lark. We weren’t on a date of course. Dates were uncool. It was just an ordinary Wednesday night in San Francisco and for some reason lost in the mist we were hanging together.

The night was cold and crisp – not crisp like eastern autumn nights when the leaves are falling, but crisp in clarity, the light exact, deep-focus, like it gets in San Francisco after a December rain and a windy afternoon. There was nothing left in the sky but clear sea air flowing over the downtown stockbroker’s offices, the Fillmore conk salons, and the desolate streetcar tracks of the Sunset.

We weren’t supposed to be together. Leslie was going with Don Auclair, the leader of our peacenik brotherhood. Against my will, I was ending a painful love affair with a seventeen year old beauty from Riverside, Carmen O’Shaugnessy. But neither of them were in the car. There was just Leslie and me cruising through the clear eternal night at the rainbow’s end listening to somebody singing how he didn’t like his mother-in-law and wondering what to do with ourselves.

I knew what I wanted to do, of course. I wanted to park somewhere and hold Leslie tight. Leslie waves beat against me like radio signals. They came in clear as the air: “I’m young, I’m beautiful, my skin is like satin and my hair is shiny black. I’m very, very delicious. And I like you too.”

But…you had to let these things take their course. Forcing yourself on someone was uncool and could lead to an unfortunate outcome. Besides, I didn’t have designs on Leslie. We were just together, that’s all. She couldn’t help owning a powerful radio transmitter any more than I could help having a receiver that worked really well.

Leslie and I had never spent time alone with each other before. Once we’d walked to the corner store together to buy Bugler cigarette tobacco. That was all. So we did what self-respecting young freaks did in the winter of 1961 when they weren’t on a date – we headed for the wasted remains of North Beach. The era of the beatniks was over and the era of the hippies hadn’t begun, yet we knew we were as happening as the beats had been. We just hadn’t had a chance to show it yet. We were drawn like moths to the flame. But the flame had burned out.

Upper Grant Avenue, scene of epic cultural battles when Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books stood trial for publishing a dirty poem called Howl, where Officer Bigarini had arrested beatnik chicks for wearing sandals in public, where poets like Bob Kaufman and Gregory Corso and of course Ginsberg had broken free from writing airy martini-driven university puzzles like professors required me to study in English 101 and instead shouted visions of backyard greentree cemetery dawns on street corners or riding the Muni or standing in the smoke filled Coffee Gallery declaiming while Jack Kerouac ran to the deli for more dago red. Upper Grant Avenue in its quiet desolation was our link to the mighty heroes of old, whom we would never admit we sought to emulate. We were just going to get something to eat and look for our friend George The Beast.

George was the biggest beatnik we knew. Of course, since I was nineteen and Leslie was seventeen, we didn’t know too many. I was pretending to go to college at San Francisco State and Leslie was still at Lowell High School, but George – George was living the full-bore life. With his army fatigue jacket and single gold earring, his hypothetical parrot on his shoulder, and his magic to make everybody laugh with joy at anything, George was the dog who trotted freely in the streets. Maybe he wasn’t up there with Ginsberg and Corso yet, but hey, those guys were in their thirties already and George hadn’t hit twenty. Meanwhile, he slept where he could and cultivated acquaintance with the rotters, pimps, poets and crystal merchants who congregated in the Hot Dog Palace after midnight.

We found a place to park on Commercial Street jammed between a vegetable truck and a red zone. Out the door lay the land of tong wars and Fu Man Chu, of sweat shop lights glimmering behind curtains in the night, of dripping dried chickens and squirming fish in the butcher shop windows – Chinatown, the penultimate scene for San Francisco romance and I was walking though it with a beautiful unknown continent beside me. Before us lay the tiled stairs that lead to the coolest of Chinatown’s cheapest restaurants, Huey Gooey Looey, where the beat elite meet to eat.

Ah, where are the cheap Chinese restaurants of yesteryear? While you’re looking it up, I’ll tell you where Hooey Gooey Looie is. It’s buried under the weight of Chinatown international credit. It’s a bank. Even the steps leading to its florescent lit, subterranean depths are gone. Like George Bailey had never been born. Like Mister Potter had won. Like I imagined the whole thing. (Don’t worry too much about it – there are plenty of new ones.)

But in the winter of 1961 and for many years thereafter, Huey Gooey Louie’s was the restaurant of choice. Nowhere were the waiters as surly and the chances of meeting someone you knew as likely as at Huey Dewey Louie.

We slid into a red vinyl booth, ordered fried wontons with sweet and sour sauce, and leaned back, maybe wondering who that person was sitting across the table. I’d moved into the peacenik flat at 311 Judah Street a month before to live at the nerve center of our scene, and Leslie had come with the territory. Leslie was involved in some minor way with Don Auclair, the big dog of our little scene. Don was a couple years older than me, he was tall, he was brave and bold, he rode a Triumph Bonneville, he’d walked from LA to San Francisco on a famous peace march and been arrested for it. He knew all kind of ways to get high using legal substances like lighter fluid. He was a player and I was a beginner. It didn’t matter that he had a gentle spirit and a sweet smile, he still intimidated me. But I would never let it show, of course. To see Leslie and her pals Riley and Teresa ensconced on Don’s mattress playing guitar, listening to Joan Baez or Ray Charles, was as normal as looking to see if anyone had done the dishes yet.

One other thing I should mention about Leslie. She happened to have IT, as they used to say about twenties movie star Clara Bow. She wasn’t exceptionally beautiful. She didn’t attempt to be sexy or provocative. But something about her made young guys like me turn their heads to see her walk by. Perfume emanated from her that you couldn’t smell, but it smelled good anyway.

Now here we were at Huey Louie Gooey’s, leaning back, waiting for the wontons, waiting for the world to end, waiting for our lives to begin, and talking about the inconsequentialities of the day. Some friends in the peace movement were going to drive across the country over Christmas break. We were going to march in front of the White House waving placards and chanting and not eating anything for twenty-four hours and being non-violent about it but still making a little mark against death from the skies. We knew it was hopeless. But we couldn’t just sit there.

Leslie couldn’t go but I thought I would. Then we moved on to Joanie Baez, whom we loved, and Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Her father collected jazz records; she’d grown up listening to the greats. She even knew about the Dixieland guys from long ago. That was cool. I liked a girl who stood up for something, even if it only Dixieland jazz.

I don’t think I had noticed before how intelligent she was, how full of brimming life, eager to experience the full range of human possibility. Restless, reckless, a little crazy. I just took it for granted — we were all like that. We didn’t talk about it. And of course I noticed her shining black hair cut in a dutch boy bob. Of course I noticed how she filled her bulky-knit blue sweater against the booth’s red vinyl. Her easy laugh. Even her slightly crooked teeth were cute. Why couldn’t I be in love with her instead of the braided, insane wild child who teased and tortured me, driving me insane too, but my craziness was to want her more and more. Leslie was reckless, but in a different way – I felt easy and comfortable with her.

Like every other restaurant in Chinatown in 1961, Huey specialized in Cantonese delicacies. Besides fried wontons they offered pork fried rice, cashew chicken, seaweed soup with little pink shrimps swimming through kelp beds in the bowl. I’m sure they had more authentic food over on the Chinese side of the menu, but for for Leslie and me, fried wontons were still pretty exotic. After the meal, I splurged and treated her to Hooey Dewey Gooie’s signature culinary delight: shivering, quivering, glistening almond pudding with a nut in the center and a canned mandarin orange slice and a fortune cookie on the side. We took bites from the gelatinous, translucent substance in our bowls as Leslie told me about her life as a hip high school kid. It wasn’t a lot different than my own life as a high school hippie in San Mateo, the suburb where I’d learned to hate suburbs.

On weekend nights, Leslie told me she’d get home by curfew, make a show of going to bed early, brush her teeth, flush the toilet, yawn, then make a body shape from pillows under the blankets and quietly sneak out to meet her beat wannabe friends. No one had a car – so they walked through the city, down to Market Street, or over Russian Hill to North Beach. There they patrolled its back allies to see if any big beat parties were still going on. Maybe one day they’d catch Jack Kerouac running out to the late night deli on Broadway for even more dago red. But they never saw him. Maybe they saw his shadow once.

We were all under his shadow.

Next we headed for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s great information station for the underground world – City Lights Books. By now we were comfortable with each other and enjoying the night. Finding George the Beast became a handy reason for wandering around the best neighborhood in the best city on the best coast.

Shig was at the counter as usual, leafing doubtfully through some baggy poet’s self-published tome. We checked for George upstairs and down, and poked around the poetry section. I leafed through the new issue of Sing Out! to see if it had the plastic record to hear how the songs sounded if you couldn’t read music. Two months before, high on peyote, I had listened to Joanie Baez sing The Great Silkie on one of those acetate pull-outs, listened to her over and over until it was inscribed in my consciousness. I wanted another one of those little records if I could find it.

George wasn’t anywhere around, so we browsed until we were bored, then crossed Broadway to check the Hot Dog Palace.

The Hog Dog Palace, fabled hangout for meth freaks, junkies, beat wannabes, angel-headed hipsters, posers and hosers, also known as the Ant Palace or the Meth Palace – maybe it was grim, cold, florescent, unsanitary, but it was really really cheap. From its fly-specked windows you could see everything and everybody making it down Columbus Avenue or even Upper Grant if you snuck up the back stairs and peered through the glass door. The Hot Dog Palace stood on the site of Pandora’s Box, which in its day had been a genuine pseudo-beatnik sandwich shop where they served Zen Soup to sip while wearing zen slippers and pretending to read Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. It was kicks, man, kicks! And they kept getting harder to find.

George wasn’t there either, but I saw Pat Lofthouse scribbling cartoons in his sketchbook with a Rapidograph like he always did. And I saw Gypsy Boots, a street hustler who made his living doing things with other men I didn’t want to imagine. Gypsy was shoveling quarters into the jukebox like they were slugs. Maybe they were. I guess he was in the mood for Bright Lights, Big City, because we heard it three times in the ten minutes we strolled from table to table.

Looking for George was getting boring. We decided to walk on up Grant Avenue. There were no more hangouts up that way unless you were over twenty-one. I wondered if Bria was in the Anxious Asp. She was the first Lesbian kid I knew I knew, and she could pass for twenty-one. She was usually drinking in the gay Asp or somewhere nearby.

The question in my mind was – should I take Leslie’s hand? Were we at that point? I wanted to. I liked her. But…well…I didn’t want to look uncool in her eyes. Cool people didn’t hold hands while they walked along. That was it. Unfair, but true. The rules were the rules.

The moon rose, silvery and full, its mysterious light rolling past us as we hiked towards Greenwich Street. At the corner we passed the laundromat that had been Pierre DeLattre’s Bread and Wine Mission, where poetry and bongos and Jesus and hipsters, made for each other really, had touched and kissed and sadly parted. The moonlight glimmered on the laundromat’s red neon sign 15 CENTS WASH. 10 CENTS DRY. We kept going. Pierre didn’t live there any more.

Such a beautiful night. Why not walk on up the hill, all the way to Coit Tower, the floodlit phallus that pierces the skyline for fifty miles on a night like this. None of the city’s Manhattan style high-rises had been built yet and the City still looked Renaissance, magical, from up there. Let’s go look again.

We turned right up Greenwich. The street was lined with pastel colored narrow flats climbing in the moonlight like in some Italian hilltown, Verona maybe, where Mercutio was stabbed by the Jets while Romeo screamed. Maybe Mardou Fox had lived in one of those flats when Kerouac mourned for her in The Subterraneans. Years later I learned Jack moved his story from Greenwich Village to North Beach because his publisher said it would sell better. Oh, protect yourself, angel of no harm, you who’ve never and could never harm and crack another innocent in its shell and thin veiled pain…the inventor of spontaneous bop prosody had shifted locales at the advice of his marketing director. He’d done it so smoothly I never even wondered.

At the top of Greenwich a narrow staircase leads into the trees. We climbed on through the spooky city park darkness. Did I touch her? Our spirits were beginning to touch, just a little. Spidery tendrils of…what? Friendship? Understanding? Whatever it was, we were wrapped in it, and it was nice. The tendril webs were going to prove strong enough to link us across the continent as we tossed through squalling marriages, and stayed strong enough to urge me to to keep her letters for nearly fifty years. I’m not sure those spiderweb tendrils have a name, but they wrapped round us like ectoplasm. They weren’t named romantic love, and surely not just friendship — you don’t want to hold a friend tight in the moonlight. But whatever it was it felt good. I had enough problems with passion at the moment. Who needed more?

We eventually emerged into a clearing beneath the great illuminated tower, its white stone turned golden by the floodlights. A half dozen couples like us and several melancholy gents perhaps looking for same wandered hither and thither in the moonlight. Leslie and I sat on the damp grass and looked out over the city at the rainbow’s end sparkling crystalline in the December night.

The ramparts of the Shell Building lit in blue-green shimmers, the parapets of the Russ Building flooded with gold shimmers, they beaconed over the Renaissance city like Doge’s towers, papal towers, Aztec towers, Inca towers – over the great city that sprang from the sand dunes on the far Pacific shore. And we were sprung too. Aw, Frisco – how’d you get to be so blessed?

You probably didn’t know native-born San Francisco kids can be just as manic about the town as any fresh arrival from Dubuque. On a crystal December night from the top of Telegraph hill we could feel somehow we’d been accidentally born in the perfect place.

Leslie said, “City’s sure beautiful tonight.”

I said, “Yeah…”

I didn’t mention the other nights I’d sat here, usually with Ricky and Parm, my high school pals, occasionally with a girl. Leslie didn’t go into her past either. The light descended upon us and into us. I had no plans beyond loving this night, this city, this sweet girl beside me – all in pretty much the same way. Generalized and without any particular future.

We thought we knew what we wanted. Leslie wanted to be free from sitting in rows waiting for the bell to ring, free from her mother’s plans for some wrong future, free to go where she wanted, to find out who she was, who she could be.

I was already free to be blown wherever the wind blew me, if not free from the chains of the skyway. What I wanted was someone to love forever with the freedom of complete equals. Someone who would want to go see where Mercutio got stabbed that starlit night. An adventurer comrade who would also be beautiful and very very hot.

It was eight years before I got her. And she came with kids and responsibilities. I had a lot of growing to do.

We sat there a long time, talking quietly and then not talking at all. Maybe this moment was what we really wanted.

Eventually though, the damp seeped its way through our jeans. It was a week night, anyway. Leslie needed to be home by ten-thirty.

When we hit Greenwich Street again, Les decided to run. She wasn’t really in that much of a hurry. Screw curfew. But the hill was so steep and we were so full of moonlight that when she took off I peeled out after her, catching up and grabbing her hand like we were kids or young lovers in a New Wave movie, running and laughing and trying to go yet faster but stay in step. Cats looked up from their garbage can in surprise. The old man walking his poodle turned to see more of this beautiful girl and the freak with the Buddy Holly glasses trying to beat each other to Grant Avenue. We careened around the corner onto Grant laughing breathless and didn’t stop until we passed the Coffee Gallery where we hugged each other as drunks shouted encouragement out the door and tossed quarters.

We kept going now just walking past The Fox and Hound where we could hear Jorma Kaukonen playing Delta blues inside on his slide guitar. Back past the Hot Dog Palace — through the window we saw George the Beast standing at the counter jawing with Fast Walker. But the night was coming to an end.

Aw, there’d be other nights. Hundreds and thousands of other nights in the city of our hearts where the fog never lifts and the moonlight never ends and the wind blows always bright and clean. George wasn’t going anywhere and we’d be young forever.

We drove across the City again over Russian Hill down past Van Ness and out through the Fillmore to Leslie’s mother’s flat on Baker Street. Miles was blowing Freddie the Freeloader on the radio and the night was sacred.

I double parked of in front of Mom’s place so Leslie could jump out but she didn’t jump out. I didn’t want her to jump out. We were illuminated, bright and I took her in my arms and we kissed. We took a long time. We could have kissed forever as far as I was concerned. But then it was over and she did jump out and in though the door and she did look back at me before diving through, Hi Mom! I drove back to 311 Judah levitated one foot off the front seat.

Did we fall in love and live happily ever after?
Did we save up together to go find where Mercutio was stabbed?
Or did the wild child Carmen O’Shaugnessy finally break up with me forever and
then did I finally completely disintegrate and catch mononucleosis and go home to recuperate in the suburbs and
there did I meet a girl at a party in Burlingame and
didn’t we split for Pacific Grove three days later and
didn’t she get pregnant that summer and
didn’t we marry and live together in love and misery and
didn’t Leslie run off to New York with Peter Van Gelder when she turned eighteen and
didn’t she get pregnant too and
didn’t she give up her son for adoption but find him again years later as
I found Leslie’s letters again in a dusty box and put them on the blog and
didn’t we meet each other again one time more when we’re old?

Would it have been better if we had found George the Beast and gone off to his hotel room and smoked pot all night? Or if Leslie had caught a cold and stayed home?

What does this scanty story mean, anyway? Why go sit under the moon observing a city with no clouds when you could be making money, lots of money? For that matter,
What is the meaning of life? I have no idea of course, but it might have something to do with the little tendrils that might creep out in the moonlight. Sometimes they grow into strong cables like the ones between Patrushka and me. Tested and true, no matter what. And sometimes they never grow beyond a tentative little spiderweb. But either way – they’re the best things God gave us poor humans. Nourish them. They make life worth living.

Photo credits:Coit Tower Moon: Dan Heller Photography; Chinatown restaurant: Dizzy Atmosphere’s Photostream; North Beach Hangout: Jerry Stoll from I Am A Lover copyright 1961

Did Anyone Get Out of Here Alive?

Gosh, here it is my birthday again. Sixty-five!

I can’t believe it. Me? Eligible for Medicare? You’ve got to be kidding. I never thought I’d make it to thirty and here I’ve outlived Kerouac by eighteen years…

Must be the love of a good woman.

Anyway, last year on my birthday I put up the following list, in alphabetical order, of friends of my youth (I’ve added more detail this year). They’re all people I knew and loved but who were lost in the swirl of the hurricane. Most are still lost, but some were found last year. Maybe this year I’ll find some more…

Bess Farr, AKA Lisa Farr, AKA Lisa McFadden. Dear friend and troublemaker, we were friends throughout the Sixties. The last time I saw her, she dosed me with MDA at a party. I wasn’t mad at her – I was just fed up with the life I was leading. But I’ve always felt like I deserted her when she was in trouble. And I wish I hadn’t. You okay, Bess?

Bob Gill – brother beatnik, peyote brother and card carrying YPSL. In my mind’s eye, he’s up on the barricades somewhere waving his ancient rifle defiantly and the Nationalists are closing in.

Bob Kaffke – diabetic Communist who rode horseback through Mexico. News: Bob is gone. Died of pneumonia in 1983 on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay. Leo Sadorf found this link put up by his son…

Bob Kuehn – Another of the SF State peace warriors. Ban the Bomb!

Danny Rifkin – so funny and creative. The first on our scene besides me to notice the Beatles were Something New. And he laughed at my poetry (that was good, not bad). News: Danny’s still out there hitting it. I found this article about him in the San Francisco Chronicle.

David Miller – Carpenter of Walrus and Carpenter. My singing partner and best friend till I betrayed him. Last time I talked to him he called to say good-bye. He was moving to Tennessee. Funny how I still miss him after all these years.

Don Auclaire – leader of our pack, the Dirty Peaceniks, 311 Judah Street, San Francisco.

Donna Conroy – Tom Conroy’s beautiful beat street wife from the Delaware horse country. Tom spent half his time fighting off the pimps who wanted to sign her up. Last time I saw here she was great with child.

Ed Ginsberg – comic peyote brother, photographer and a great heart. News: Someone told me this year he is living in Budapest.

Eva Bessie – Bess’ best friend, daughter of Hollywood Ten screenwriter Alvah Bessie. She was immortalized on two beautiful Fillmore posters done by her husband Wes. Still living in the Ozarks somewhere last I heard.

George “the Beast” Howell. A legend in his own time. A friend ran into him ten or fifteen years ago in the rugged mountains of Northern California up by the Oregon border. He was on a buying trip looking for high quality virgin wool. Something about Persian rugs. He’d picked it up living in Asia.

Joe Novakovich – Fingerless Joe himself. He had warped fingers due to a birth defect, yet became a masterful autoharp player and stalwart of the San Francisco folk scene.

Johnny Chance – Saintly drummer for The Final Solution and first guy on our scene to notice the Beach Boys were cool. Funnier and smarter than anyone, yet he dressed like a Catholic schoolboy. He joined the Moonies and I never saw no more.

Laurie Sarlat – with the Long Island accent, poet Allen Cohen’s consort and Wendy to this lost boy. She left town with a guy I didn’t know and I never saw her again. Allen told me years later she’d joined a cult.

Leslie Hipshmann AKA Leslie Van Gelder. Most beautiful and sweetest of the teenaged hangers-on at 311 Judah (funny, I was a teenager myself!). She split for New York and I never saw her again. Leslie, I still have the letters you wrote me from the East Village.

Margarita Bates AKA The Bitch. Unforgettable. News: An anonymous tipster wrote to tell me she is alive and where she is living. Thank you.

Melanie Kinkead AKA Lamie da Kink – as dear a girl as I ever knew. I wrote about her in Famous People I Never Knew #2: Janis Joplin. News: I am back in touch with Mel thanks to the blog and she is still just as funny, and still the best.

Michael Rachoff – Page Street friend of years but we lost touch in my wanderings.

Peter Kraemer – Virgina City filmmaker and leader of the Sopwith Camel – the first San Francisco band to hit the charts.

Peter Walters – my boyhood best friend who lived at 47th and Balboa. Peter didn’t care if I was sick in bed much of my childhood. He’d always come by and play games and make puzzles and draw battleships with me in bed and him sitting in a chair beside me. What a great kid!

Peter Weiss –tough kid from the Bronx who danced with Ann Halprin’s Dancer’s Workshop. Last time I saw Peter he and his girlfriend were heading for Japan.

Riley Turner – holy tennies street kid from Lowell High School. I wrote about him in Song For Riley  Tornfoot

Solveig Otvos, AKA Solveig Rimkeit, AKA Ruth Weissinger – the beautiful Latvian. Where are you, Solveig? I still hear you laugh in my dreams.

Tom Conroy – the North Beach street kid cartoonist who got me busted in Oakland. Tom dealt in Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon comic strips and could spot newspaper insulation in every blowndown ghetto redevelopment Victorian we broke and entered.

I know where too many of my early friends are today though – in the ground.
Here’s to you, Rodney Albin and Chet Helms and Allen Cohen and Wendy Norins and Tom Hobson and all the rest of you – friends forever.

I have a lifetime of stories to tell just about these guys. There they are through my window: young and sunburnt and storm-tossed – the best of the best, the San Francisco kiddos of the pre-invasion Sixties – my generation.

History of San Francisco Underground 1961- 65

All the famous hippies emerged from Woody Guthrie workshirts like butterflies on May 14, 1965.

Except of course for one who
saw the old sun rising
golden gleaming intriguing from the
freight car door. He stepped out
of the box car
into the light,
and
wished all the rest of us
a merry good night.

R.I.P.
Gary Marxon
1943-1963

Photo by permission Cyberhobo

Gidget and Mimi Farina, Big Sur, 1964

Help! I have barricaded myself into my house. Outside, crowds are shouting for more Gidget. More Moondoggie. More beach parties and more Coors Beer in tan cans. And put in more surf boards – those big ones, like Moondoggie used.

Now I have to make good on my promise to write about those strange and magical beings when what I really want to do is sit here like a three toed sloth and listen to Joan Baez singing Sweet Sir Galahad again. Didn’t she ever sing Surfer Girl?

The trouble is I’m a beatnik pig. I never drank Coors Beer in tan cans. When I went to the beach, I went to San Francisco’s North Beach, ‘where there isn’t any water and Big Daddy ain’t your fadder’, as the old song says.

What, you’ve never heard that song? It was very big on Sacramento Street in 1962. Beatniks in peacoats would sing it in unison as they strode through the swirling fog and damp and snailed down the steps into the Ant Palace for another night under the fluorescents watching Officer Bigarini rousting less fortunate beatniks on Columbus Avenue outside the Ant Palace door.

What did we know from Gidget? I went to the movies to see the divine Marie Dubois get shot by that stupid crook in the snow at the end of Shoot The Piano Player.

What? You’ve never heard of that movie? It was very big with ratty student scruff in 1962 as we huddled in our peacoats against the fog and damp of ocean air Irving Street on the way to the Surf Theater to see it for the 81st time.

Sometimes we’d get tired of watching Marie Dubois get shot again so we’d go see Jean Paul Belmondo get shot down in the street like a dog at the end of Breathless because of that traitorous turncoat American itchy bitchy blonde Jean Seberg. Who actually looked a little like Gidget.

Is this clear? Will the lynch mob of admirers outside please go away? Let’s talk about somebody cool instead, like Mimi Farina.

What? You’ve never heard of Mimi Farina? She was very big in the cold plastered kitchens of incandescent Haight-Ashbury flats. Reflections in a Crystal Wind was the name of the LP she put out with her beatnik poet husband who got smashed on his motorcycle in 1966 just when things were really peaking. I can hear it now ringing in my ears along with Donovan’s Sunshine Superman and Country Joe and the Fish’s first album. That was about it for music in our commune the Fall of 1966 thanks to my insufferable roommates the Gunderson twins. Interrupted my studies of the Goldberg Variations, but what could I do? I know. Smoke more dope.

Richard Farina left behind his legacy novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me which I still haven’t read. It’s been right up there on my must-read list since 1966. First I have to get through Dune. And The Fellowship of the Ring. That will take me forever. Richard will just have to wait.

Mimi’s legend was huge. I won’t even mention that she was Joan Baez’s little sister. So demeaning to a great lady who went on to found Bread and Roses, the group that brings top music acts to prisons and hospitals and orphanages. She ran it till she died young of cancer a few years ago.

Those Baez girls – unbelievable how they affected all of us. Like there were some people out there who were like us except higher and more beautiful and more noble and could sing better. And knew Bob Dylan.

I saw Mimi perform at a party in Big Sur once. In 1964, when she was about nineteen. Now that I think about it, David Crosby was there too and he was just one more pretty good Big Sur folksinger. But Mimi! There was this air of expectation in the smoke dark rooms of Big Sur Hot Springs. Mimi was coming! Her legend, her mystique was already rife. Joanie’s little sister, she just had to buck up under her big sister’s Queen of the Folksingers aura. Mimi’s actual singing is a blank to me, I’m afraid. I just see her in a pool of saintly angelic light, the scruffy crowd of vikings and timber beasts and grunge artists all hushed and dragging on their Camels as her pure voice sang Cripple Creek or something.

That night we drove to the back of a nearby canyon and hiked up to Crazy Mary’s streamside cabin in the redwoods. It was the summer that word swept though the Underground – smoking Scotch Broom flowers could get you high. Riley Tornfoot and I were in Big Sur to test this hypotheses. We asked somebody what Scotch Broom looked like, then we picked the little yellow flowers all afternoon, stuffed them in a corncob pipe and inhaled deeply. We passed the pipe around to other experimenters. We went outside the cabin to look up through the redwoods at the starry post-Mimi Farina night sky. They glittered no more brightly than before.

Do you feel anything, man?

Maybe. I think I might be feeling something. Give me some more of that.

Or else we would have to drink more Coors beer in tan cans like the surfers did. Actually, beatniks never drank anything stronger than Val-Vin Burgundy $1.99 a gallon.

One more thing, the night before, camping in a field back from Highway 1, we saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his girl friend walking through the field. He was wearing a wide brimmed hat and speaking to her of ineffable, wonderful things that we could never know.

What? You’ve never heard of Lawrence Ferlinghetti?

Special thanks to everyone who unknowingly lent me the pictures in this post.
SurfnHula, The web’s best source of collectible Hawaiiana and surfboards
Le Cinema Francais
World Cinema
The Richard & Mimi Fariña Fan Site

Freshman English Papers

Looking back on my freshman college year, you know what’s better about today? I don’t have to turn these posts in for a grade! No grim faced professor is allowed to scratch pencil marks around the edges of each little essay. Just think – I can write a whole blog full of fragmentary sentences and there’s not one thing they can do about it!

And I do write them. Hither and thither. Sometimes you just have to go with the way the words sound. That’s how I felt then and that’s how I feel now.

On my desktop I keep a list of Jack Kerouac’s thirty axioms for modern prose. They’re pretty good and I recommend you immediately go over here and study them. You’ll notice Number 13 suggests “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.” He doesn’t say we don’t need to understand grammar or syntax – but don’t let them get in your way. Try to get the picture clear in your mind and go straight for it. I keep Jack’s list at hand for inspiration and to remind myself that anytime I put words to paper (so to speak), I’m part of a long line of guys who struggled their whole lives to learn how to write out of the box, how to keep their idea line as free of crap as if Keith Jarrett (a piano player I like) was writing it.

The only difference is I’m a pig. It’s hard for me to tell where my inspiration leaves off and the crap begins. Jack’s axiom #1 is the whole key, for me anyway: “Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.” And if I make myself laugh as I type, then I figure I’m heading in the right direction.

Those professors at San Jose State in 1959 wanted me to write clean, clear prose. Like this: A plus B = C. Start with your introductory paragraph (which itself has to start with a grabber sentence), add body, then concluding paragraph. All nice and neat and when you’re done your reader thinks, “Aha – I see. Cats eat rats! Very interesting.”

Sorry, Dr. Smith. I already heard all this already in high school. Next you’ll want me to turn in my outline.

The more they tried to whip me into shape (of a square) the more I wriggled and jiggled and wandered off in four directions. It became a game. I was sublimely confident in my ability. I was convinced my English Comp professor wouldn’t know good writing if Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti broke into the classroom with their guns leveled straight at him.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I just wasn’t very good at it. Needed more practice. Still do.

I always felt when they wrote ’spelling’ in the margin they really meant “Why can’t you be more like a girl? They check their spelling! They’re nice! They smell good! No – you’re sloppy and improvisational and you should shave off that scruffy beard if you think you’re going to get a decent grade in here.

“And what’s this? Horrors! Slang! You’ve used slang in a college-level essay! And just look at this illogical and non-parallel series of clauses and phrases. How can anyone possibly understand this beatnik prose? Why don’t you write like Ernest Hemingway? Mr. Pig, you are MUCH TOO SELF-INDULGENT! You must write to communicate, not for your own private pleasure…Tsk tsk tsk..”

And on and on. Next I was accused of ‘rambling’. What’s wrong with ‘rambling’ anyway? I’ve spent my life rambling round this country, and I’ve met a lot of funny men. Some robbed me with a six gun, others with a fountain pen. Woody Guthrie said that. There! I used an eminent authority to emphasize my point. Are you happy now?

Whatever I was doing in college, I was not here to learn how to write a simple, clear, direct essay. That was for sissies. Sissies, drones, English professors, and other bores. Funny, in later life I have come to admire that approach. I usually write to capture a feeling or a moment of time, or possibly make you laugh if I can, but if someone is writing to communicate an idea, and I can actually understand what they are trying to say – I love it! That’s the whole idea.

Don’t know quite why I rambled down this path this morning. I really meant to tell you about my beatnik-lefty-socialist seventeen year old pal Bob Gill. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t write out your outline ahead of time. By now, you’d be up to the demonstration and kids getting washed down the stairs with fire hoses and it would be really exciting. Instead I’m still sitting up in my attic room in the boarding house writing a paper I have to turn in in the morning. Wonder what he’ll say this time! I know. “You use too many exclamation marks! This reads like a comic book!”