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 district.

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.  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 along the way. 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 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.

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

Luminaries of the Haight-Ashbury: Rodney Albin

Part I: The Folk Years

I guess of all the friends I had back then, in the halcyon days of my hippie youth,  Rodney Albin is the guy I miss the most.  When he died of stomach cancer in 1984, still a young  man, I felt like I was losing my brother all over again.

He was a pal, you know? Guys like him are hard to come by.

Well, so tell us about him, Pig.

Like so many of my erstwhile folknik hippie commie friends of the early sixties, I met Rodney kind of like this…

Late one morning in, I suppose, the Fall of 1962, I exited San Francisco State’s HLL building, where the boring part of my initiation into high Western culture took place, and ambled across the lawn towards the  Commons to get coffee and see what was up.  Despite its medieval sounding name, four legged sheep were not pastured in the Commons, nor did peasants, other than us, trudge there every morning to work their land.  The Commons was a big cafeteria in the center of campus, and everything of consequence that happened to me in those years took place inside its doors at the second table on the left.  Or on the lawn directly in front.  That’s it in the center of the picture, as it looked in 1960.  Who could guess a square building like that would become a cauldron of sixties counterculture?

On this particular morning, I happened to notice a new folkie sitting cross-legged on the lawn, surrounded by the regulars and passing around a dulcimer he had just built.  He was a tall gangly kind of folknik, just transferred in from the College of San Mateo, a junior college on the Peninsula.  He was wearing bright red trousers, a stove-piped hat and tails, and he was playing The Battle of New Orleans on his fiddle.  No.  Wait a minute.  That’s got to be my imagination.  The top hat and tails didn’t come until later.  OK, he was dressed like a normal person.  It was his dulcimer that was extraordinary.

Interested in dulcimers myself, I forgot about the coffee (never easy to do)  and squeezed into the circle.  That dulcimer was pretty cool, all right.  Shaped like Jayne Mansfield with soft flowing curves and strummed with a sea gull feather, you could tune it to any interesting modal scale you might be in the mood for, brush its strings with that quill, and there you were,  mournful and lost in the holler, sounding like you’d been born in Viper, Kentucky instead of San Francisco.  I started in on an improvised, sea gull strummed Pretty Polly, and pretty soon I was hooked.  The Commons fled and there I was in some longago fog shrouded mountain glen, watching some no-goodnik do in Pretty Polly while the pretty little birdies mourned.  It sounded like magic, and Rodney had created the damn thing out of a piece of spruce.

I got to know Rodney after a while and discovered he was from the next holler over.  My holler was called San Mateo and his they called Belmont.  He and his younger brother Peter were still living with their parents in an upper middle class shack in the Belmont hills.  I also discovered that Rodney wasn’t the new guy – I was.  He was well-known in folk circles up and down the Peninsula and across the Bay in Berkeley.  He’d masterminded the folk music festival at the College of San Mateo where young Jerry Garcia made his debut to an unappreciative audience of frat rats.  Rodney and George ‘The Beast’ Howell had opened the Boar’s Head the preceding summer, a folk-oriented coffeehouse in the loft above the book store in San Carlos where George worked.  Garcia and the other Palo Alto folkniks regularly showed up there to jam into the weekend nights.

I started dropping in to see Rodney when I was down that way.  On my first visit, he showed me the six string balalaika he’d built out of orange crate wood.   It was his first sort of crude try at building an instrument.  He was way beyond now of course. He’d already finished a viol de gamba, and now he was building a harpsichord on his bedroom floor.  Its parts spread hither and thither across the  carpet; tools, a reel to reel tape recorder and an unmade bed filled the rest.  He used the tape machine to record performances at the Boar’s Head.  Apparently some of these tapes still exist and are passed from hand to hand in Deadhead circles.   They would include: Garcia, Ron McKernan, David Nelson, Rodneys’s brother Peter of course, and other less talented performers who went on to become teachers and bureaucrats and accountants – but still played pretty good.

Rodney opened a whole new world to me.  Before Rod, folk music meant Joan Baez manning the barricades while Pete Seeger fired his musket at the Pentagon.  It meant peace marches, sit-ins and and drinking cheap dago red at parties while somebody plunked out ‘Twelve Gates To the City, Hallelujah’ on a nylon string guitar.  But these friends of Rodney’s were…dedicated.  They played bluegrass and old-timey stuff, They listened to Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers on scratchy 78s.  Was Charlie from Greenwich Village or Boston?  I wasn’t sure.  They sang about chickens loose in the barnyard squawk squawk and subjects like that.  Who could figure?  But, hey – I liked Rodney so I listened and tried to understand.  I just didn’t see how “Boil That Cabbage Down” would save the world from nuclear destruction.

Peter Albin was already a more accomplished musician, although still in high school.  He could wail on Bile That Cabbage Down but he could also play Mississippi Delta slide guitar riffs, and,  what really impressed me — he knew some Chuck Berry stuff.  I know I was supposed to have outgrown this teenaged foolishness, but tell my ears that!

There was something about Rodney, his gentle spirit, his brilliant mind and his dry sense of humor, that drew me to him.  I liked hanging out with him, and so did most everyone else in our circle. Later I learned there were circles like that all up and down the Peninsula.

Rodney was kind of funny looking.  He had a classic beanpole shape, gawky you might say, you might even say gawky and sniffy.  He was born to play comedy roles, and he worked it.  The first time I saw him (as opposed to meeting him) was the preceding spring when he was still attending the College of San Mateo.  I knew some CSM kids in a school production of Twelfth Night, and I went see one of them, Dick Shapero,  play Malvolio.  Dick was an experienced actor and knew how to get laughs,  but when Rodney as Sir Andrew Aguecheek entered stage right, Dick had to give up.   Rodney didn’t say anything.  He just stood there in his Elizabethan get-up, awkward, gawky, rubbing his nose, looking around as if he couldn’t quite remember his lines. The audience slowly began to titter and he built the moment into a the play’s biggest laugh.  He worked that role successfully for the next twenty years.

(I KNOW this isn’t Twelfth night, ok?  I don’t have a photo of Twelfth Night and I need a photo here.  So here is the same company’s Pygmalion, produced a few months later)

A few days after Rodney passed his dulcimer around, I was sitting on the grass trying to impress some proto-hippie chicks by  playing “I’m a  whinin’ Boy, don’t deny my name” on my Mexican folk guitar.  I was using a two-fingered picking style I’d made up.  Like crab pincers, my thumb kept the rhythm while my index finger picked out the melody.  It was pretty primitive.  If I hadn’t been a soulful singer, the chicks would have walked.  As it was, they were listening all right, but they weren’t idolizing me like they should.  What could I do?

When it was Rodney’s turn to do a song, he launched into ‘Freight Train, Freight Train Going So Fast’, singing in a thin nasal voice like an elderly gent from Viper, Kentucky.  I thought his singing could use some help, but, man, he had that Elizabeth Cotton style finger-picking right down!  His thumb was rocking between the bass strings and he syncopated the melody just like the old girl herself!  Actually, I’d never heard of Elizabeth Cotton before, but whoever she was, I wanted to play like that too.  But three fingers!  How could anybody ever make so many fingers work together?  Maybe I should stick to my authentically primitive crabstyle.

But Rodney encouraged me.  He showed me the moves over and over till I started to get them.  I went back to my apartment and drove my wife mad singing the silly holy thing over and over with my thumb rocking and fingers trying to syncopate it right, “Please don’t tell them what train I’m on so they won’t know where I’ve gone.”

Linda was thinking, ‘When’s that train leaving?”

Come Christmas, Linda, in a moment of madness, gave me a mandolin.  She’d found it in a Third Street pawn shop and bought it for $20.  I was thrilled.  It’s just – how did you play one of these things?  I loved messing around with instruments and could sort of play a lot them, all by ear and without much skill.  I asked Rodney if he knew how to play one and it turned out he did.  He showed me how to hold a pick and how to play a simple tune called Liberty.  After I mastered that he taught me a more complicated minstrel song called “Colored Aristocracy.” After that, I didn’t need any more lessons.  I knew four chords and could pick two songs.  I was ready to roll!

I didn’t know it yet but I was about to take my place in the Albin Brothers’ amorphous shape-shifting band, The Liberty Hill Aristocrats.  One night, Rodney said they were going to play the Top of The Tangent in Palo Alto and they needed somebody on mandolin.  I was a mandolin player!  So next night, with some trepidation,  I got up on the little stage, playing with the likes of Jerry Garcia and Peter Albin and David Nelson – real masters of their instruments.  Rodney didn’t care if I only knew four chords.  He even let me sing one, I think it was Little Birdie.  – he liked to include people, and that included The Pondering Pig.  You had to love a guy like that.  I did.

That was Rodney, he got people going, he included them, even if it affected the professionalism of the music.   He had his priority list, and friends were higher up than professionalism.  Me too.

COMING SOON: THE  STORY OF 1090 PAGE STREET

Photo credits: Rodney, CSM Play: Pig’s files – photographer unknown, SF State campus: SF Pub Lib

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.

But Now We Are Sixty-Six

Oh boy, 1948, the year I turned six. First of all, for my birthday I got a pull-dachshund on a string whose legs moved as I pulled him along. And it got even better! We went to the Russian River for a week that summer and my brother showed me how to play Cruisin’ Down The River On A Sunday Afternoon on his uke. I got to go down the dusty road to the general store all by myself and I could buy any funny book I wanted. Except no horror or crime comics. But that was okay – I could read those on the comic book stand until the owner got wise.

Now I’m sixty-six, and what do I get? I get to chop ice all day. Shovel snow. Oh well, I shouldn’t complain. For birthday dinner my German mother-in-law made her famous beef roladen, red cabbage, mashed potatoes and gravy, and for dessert my favorite home-made creme caramel as only my mother-in-law knows how to make it. Smooth, creamy and wonderful with that rich burnt sugar syrup slooshing down its sides to make a little lake in the bottom of the bowl. And we polished off a bottle of top-notch Cabernet, grown in my current home state of Washington. Then we watched a French movie called A Very Long Engagement. It stars Audrey Tautou, the actress who played Amelie.

You probably won’t like it. It’s relentlessly melancholy, like me. About a young woman who, also like me, knows to the depths of her being that love is forever. She refuses in the face of all evidence to believe her lover was killed in the Great War. For the Pig Of The Grey Skies And Rain, her performance and her character provides the penultimate revelation of a true heart. In fact, I’ve got to go watch it again right now.

(Two hours later) Where was I? Oh yes, I was about to start complaining.

You know me, the Complaining Pig. I’ve made a career out of never being satisfied. So here’s what I’d really like for my birthday. I’d like to know what happened to all the loved friends and befriended lovers of my youth. All the kiddos who are wrapped in gold in my heart and whom I can never and will never forget. Here, for the third year, is my birthday roll call, with updates since last year…

Was Anyone Left Alive?

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 – she just made made me realize how fed up I was 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? 2008 update: Eva Wilson told me Bess died of ovarian cancer about 1992. I never got to see her again. I always thought one day we would have lunch together and she’d tell me her life had turned out okay. Bye, Bess. I wrote about you in It’s Too Late, She’s Gone…

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. 2008 Update: I wrote about Bob in Kaffke of the Comsymps.

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 until 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. 2008 Update: Solveig told me she visited him in the Mexico City jail in 1963. George Howell told me he was living in the Haight-Ashbury with Teresa Sweeney in the spring of 1964. After that he fades from view like dust on cracking film emulsion.

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 last year he is living in Budapest.

Eva Bessie – Bess’ best friend, daughter of Hollywood Ten screenwriter Alvah Bessie. She was immortalized on two Fillmore posters done by her husband Wes. Still living in the Ozarks somewhere last I heard. 2008 Update: Eva is a psychologist in Missouri. Happily married these long years and now with grandchildren on her knee. We’ve talked and corresponded several times. God bless that little piglet who made a success of her life.

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. 2008 Update: Peter Albin gave me his phone number. With awe and trepidation I called George just before Christmas. To hear again after so long that voice of legend, my North Beach comrade George the Beast, King of the Baby Beatniks…it was like watching ice melt around a mammoth frozen aeons ago with daisies still hanging from his mouth and waiting for him to trumpet once more. George lives with his sister near Clear Lake, California. He’s got emphysema and can’t get out much. Still appraises rare and valuable carpets. But he is still here, still on the ground, not in it. God bless you forever, brother. I wrote about George in Famous People I Never Knew #1: Neal Cassady.

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. 2008 Update: I’ve heard sad stories about Joe I will not relate until I know if they’re true.

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 him no more. I miss his goofy smile and cracked sense of humor and Petaluma intelligence.

Laurie Sarlat – with the Long Island accent, thick black hair and blue-green eyes, she was 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 Christian cult. 2008 Update: She’s living in Arizona. I don’t know where.

Leslie Hipshmann AKA Leslie Van Gelder. Most beautiful and sweetest of the teenaged hangers-on at 311 Judah Street (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. 2008 Update: I wrote about Margarita in Chet Helms, Margarita And Me

Melanie Kinkead AKA Lanie da Kink – as dear a girl as I ever knew. I wrote about her in Famous People I Never Knew #2: Janis Joplin. I am back in touch with Mel thanks to the blog and she is still just as funny as ever, and still the best. 2008 Update: I visited Mel in Sacramento last summer and it was like we had been apart for five minutes. What a pal!

Michael Rachoff – Page Street friend of years but we lost touch in my wanderings. 2008 Update: I’ve talked to Michael on the phone several times and hope to see him in a few weeks. He still lives in San Francisco.

Peter Kraemer – Virgina City filmmaker and leader of the Sopwith Camel – the first San Francisco band to hit the charts. 2008 Update: I recently heard Peter is living in Mexico and planning another reunion of the Sopwith Camel.

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 Relay Tornfoot.

Solveig Otvos, AKA Solveig Rimkeit, AKA Ruth Weissinger – the beautiful Latvian. Where are you, Solveig? I still hear you laugh in my dreams. 2008 Update: I’ve talked to Solveig, now known as Rochanah at her home in Chico, California. She claims she remembers nothing but she remembers everything. Her laughter still brings joy to ice.

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. 2008 Update: George Howell told me Tom lives in New Mexico and has a successful business running a stock photo archive.

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 Bess Farr 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.