I Pay A Visit To Chet Helms

When I was in San Francisco the other day, I dropped by to visit my old friend Chet Helms.  I knew right where to find him thanks to Greg Hoffman, who is writing Chet’s biography and makes it his business to check on Chet’s whereabouts.

The job’s not too time-consuming.  In fact, for the foreseeable future, Chet will be residing with the artists,  musicians, bankers, captains of industry and possibly Emperor Norton at a swank retirement getaway in the Richmond District known as the San Francisco Columbarium.  Except no one gets away.

I stopped at the reception desk to see if Chet was in.  He was.  The receptionist was new and couldn’t tell me his apartment number, but the manager came out of her office when she heard Chet’s name.

“Are you here to see Chet?”, she asked, implying a certain intimacy.  “You can go right up.”  She rattled off Chet’s rather involved address on the third floor and I pawed for my notebook to jot it down.  She had it memorized.

As I walked up the stairs, I could hear workers below pushing a scaffold across the marble floor below and shouting to each other something about Carlos Santana.   I thought, “Oh no, what new bad news haven’t I heard?” But I checked when I got home later that day and Carlos is doing fine.  I guess they just liked Carlos Santana.  I kept climbing.

Chet’s keeping a low profile these days.  All boxed in, you might say.  Not so long and tall as the day I met him in the summer of 1962…(picture gets all misty and we dissolve through to a busy downtown street filled with gigantic cars and buses all spewing exhaust fumes into the bright air)…

That day I was hanging out at a protest on the steps of the main post office at Seventh and Mission in downtown San Francisco, tuning my Mexican guitar and entertaining the picket line with my faultless impersonation of Joan Baez singing I Am A Rake And A Rambling Boy.

I had nothing against the mail being delivered, you understand.  It’s just that the Federal District court was on an upper floor and the judge was hearing the case against the crew of the Everyman, a trimaran that had sailed into waters scheduled for atomic detonations.  Ka-Boom and all the little fishies were to receive their first dose of strontium-90.  It was the age of “atmospheric testing”, and apparently someone still wasn’t sure if H-bombs worked or not, because they kept testing them and testing them.  I thought it was a bad idea.

The story of that protest deserves to be told in detail – it foreshadows all the demonstrations and sit-ins and eventually the mass student strikes that characterized my youth.  But at the moment I’m looking across the street at the Greyhound Bus Station, watching a  tall, skinny young guy with lank hair and black-rimmed glasses come out of the depot, see the demonstration, and hop over to see what’s up.  And, well, look at that, he’s sporting a peace button.  Yeah, it was Chet, fresh off the bus from Austin, Texas.  I had the fortune to meet him on his first hour in San Francisco, scene of so many destinies, including Chet’s and my own.

I hate to admit it but in those days I only associated with people who passed the coolness test, and was quite ready to snub any  impostor with a Texas accent, but I could not snub this cat.  Chet’s ingratiating smile, his little heh-heh laugh, his unfeigned interest in everyone – within an hour he’d made the acquaintance of  most of  San Francisco’s peacenik community – I liked him immediately.  And he was back the next day, don’t know where he slept.  He was standing right in front that night when the real Joanie Baez showed up and sang on the post office steps to encourage us.  Maybe he tried to sign her for a gig at the Avalon, I get mixed up sometimes.

Funny – all those years ahead of him, full of friends and rock and roll and great parties and fame of a sort, but now they’re over.  Now Chet’s residing in a vase, a big doorstop.  Dust, our common fate.  To quote the prince of Denmark,

“Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

Oh dear, am I growing grave? At least Chet has his own apartment,  not far from Harvey Milk’s place. And he’ll never have to leave San Francisco again .

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

A Letter From Leslie OnThe Road – 1962

Leslie H. was a sister in our little San Francisco band of dirty Peaceniks. I lost touch with her years ago so I can’t ask her for permission to print this letter to me. But it’s a document well worth sharing – it seems to me a brilliant picture of The Life, as we baby beatniks conceived it in that long ago year of 1962.

I don’t have much left from that era, but God is gracious, and left me this letter. How can I not share it with you? That it still exists is a minor miracle.

Leslie is eighteen and on the road with Peter, her lover (they married later, a true-love match.) She’s living the life we loved. The long hitch-hiking journeys, the drugs, a bit of the world-weary feeling I associate with those unpsychedelicized times, the uncapitalized sentences, the eternal ongoing planning of adventures to come. And of course – the literate self-awareness and ability to express herself well on paper.

Together they make up the essence of my times, kiddos – welcome to the winter of 1962. The day I received it the snows were beginning to fall over Long Island and the first winter rains were pouring into the sewers of Lily Alley, San Francisco.

I’ve added a few links to references that may be obscure today.

christopher christopher christopherhow happy i am to get your lawn letter–i’m childishly delighted and even overjoyed. here for the last couple of days i had been, not homesick, but kind of surprised and sad at being 3000 miles away from anyone who really knew how i function. (this is the result of being bored silly and therefore starting to take it out on peter, but trying not to, because he really doesn’t react well to threats of leaving or not sleeping with him at all.)

all this culminated last night with peter pouring chocolate milk shake on my head and i throwing my newly acquired enovid out the car window. i cried myself to sleep thinking of the past with the help of three seconal. but all is slightly better this morning–peter and i woke up early and talked and made love. so i have made him his breakfast, listened to e power biggs playing bach’s royal instrument (the organ), finished sanding, oiling, stringing, and tuning our new guitar–we took off all the mexican finish and wanted to leave it like that and oil it, but we ended up some how putting mahogany varnish on it–, and teaching myself bach’s minuet in g major on the piano and guitar.

a new thing for me–a snow storm the other night. if i had been younger or marguerita i would have run outside in it naked. now the snow has been here for two days and it is melting and looking a bit soiled.

we have been here for three weeks and i haven’t yet seen new york city, which is why i think we hitched out here. i can’t really remember why we came anymore except it has something to do with rolexin and the president and me and peter and new york/and cuba and kruschev and bombs

once i had a job for two weeks where i had to type all day.

i could tell you what happened to us hitch hiking and the people we met and what they said but it is not really very interesting or xxxxxx

(typing fades and gets scratchy-looking)

What is wrong with the fucking typewriter?

(she switches to pencil)

i will use a drafting pencil for want of a pen.

(she switches to blue ink)

i found a pen – i don’t like it

(this time she switches to black ink with bold point)

here is a fountainpen. i’ll use this.

anyway my point was that before i started i thought that hitch hiking to new york would be a great adventure and it wasn’t at all just mostly cold and boring. i have lost all my faith in jack kerouac.

we did meet some wonderful people in madison, wisconsin. They were students and mostly hippies but some cool – not cool really, but sweet. peter and i set out to close the university of wisconsin by turning everyone on to rolaxin (romilar there) i was introduced to everyone as the high priestess of romilar. we were staying with two great friends of peter’s – sam and john. one night we were all high and someone knocked on the door. john answered it and a man asked – do you have any cockroaches. sam told him – yes, but they’re on our side.

the night before we left i got into a drinking contest with peter. i lost miserably. it’s the first time i’ve ever been drunk. i vaguely remember crying for two hours about my abortion – peter was very sweet and says i really wasn’t too bad. i also somehow cut off a large section of big toe. i am now firmly convinced that pot is so much better for teen-agers than booze.

i don’t want to write on and on and bore you. so i will shortly close.

how are you and linda and expected baby? and working, being responsible, etc.

everyone there except peter’s mother thinks we’re married. address any future mail accordingly. i even have a woolworth’s golden wedding band ($1.00, without tax) i am also maybe pregnant, which is fine with both of us. peter is a very fine person to have babies from.

we have plans. we will be back in san francisco by april (by way of virginia, etc.) and then peter and i will get jobs (if i am not pregnant, i will) save money until june. take a bus to mexico city – some odd $60 dollars (both) and go to mexico city college. my parents will support me – i will support peter. will have baby in mid-August and let a maid take care of him ($15 a month). i want so much to learn things! i mean, at college – therefore a maid for the baby. i am going to see all the art galleries and museums in new york (while peter works – he may be able to get a job as an artist’s model for 7.50 an hour). i am going to learn to really cook – no instant anything. and find a place to practice piano, and look at new york and maybe sew pregnant clothes. – why do i always plan things?

anyway write to me – maybe often. i need it. are you kidding about the naval? tell me about it.

have you seen or heard of riley, teresa, and george. do you have addresses of the first two?

very much love to you – and i will think about you.

[this letter started out fine but it bogs at the end and is incoherent - i'm sorry]

leslie

Peace, Brother

I could blame it on growing old, but I know it’s not, not really. I’ve seen them all my life, seen these ghosts. Not jumping out to spook me, just watching me like children in the corner. I think I left San Francisco because I was tired of their shenanigans. I wanted to be someplace new and clean and free of ghosts. Now they haunt my second home New Jersey, too.

Some places are more ghostly than others though, like the corner of Seventh and Judah Street in San Francisco. I cannot walk past that corner without seeing Solveig coming out the door with ‘Ban The Bomb’ placards and banners for the demonstration. She might as well wave at me, but she never does. Or seeing Peter Weiss swinging over the rail of the entry stairs onto the shoulders of one of the teenagers who are crashing our big peacenik party. And whomping on him in peacenik joy. Or seeing Margarita emerge from the front archway wearing long braids, my Mexican chaleca and her brassy confident smile.

Who were these people, man? Were they always ghosts? Were they really real once? Is this all a dream?

I wish it wasn’t so gray in Spokane. Grey skies, gray ice down the sidewalk, gray homeless hearts standing aimless forever in the skid row doorways on Third Avenue.

Kaffke Of The Comsymps

Of all the freaks who congregated at the second table left of the front door of San Francisco State’s Commons, the most unique was a pugnacious little guy named Bob Kaffke (Koff-key). If there ever was a man born to be investigated by the FBI, Kaffke was he. He had a one-track mind and that track was non-stop revolutionary socialism. And at our table he had a congenial, or at least non-judgmental audience.

The Commons was not a village green where the the peasants kept sheep at night, but rather a big noisy cafeteria filled with cigarette smoke and students of every variety smoking them. Jocks, business majors, drama majors, art students, blacks, Asians, sorority sisters – every group had a corner and one, two, three tables that were theirs and nobody else sat at them. Unless it was raining or something.

After the student strike in 1968, President S.I. Hayakawa tore the building down, making the pithy comment: “The Commons breeds revolution.” Replaced it with the Student Union – lots of little rooms where groups stay isolated. But in its day, the Commons was the intellectual and cultural ignition point for everything that was Happening in San Francisco. Don’t let those Berkeley people tell you anything different. Plus you could get a bowl of chili with extra soda crackers for thirty-five cents.

Funny to think of us all after so long. The peacenik table in those early years — ‘61, ‘62, ‘63. We were lit majors, polly sigh majors, philosophy majors and biology majors, mostly dressed in beat war surplus peacoats or field jackets and scruffy beards or Cost Plus Guatemalan peasant skirts with handmade sandals and maybe a wool flannel stadium coat- (the kind that had toggles and leather loops instead of buttons) against the foggy San Francisco afternoon. Plus more young guys who didn’t attend classes at all, but took the M car out to State to hang in the Commons and eat chili. Future founder of the Family Dog Chet Helms was one regular visitor.

Vietnam was just a worry in the left wing weeklies. The Freedom Rides were beginning but their struggle seemed far away in the south somewhere. Ban the Bomb: that was the issue of the day. The government had restarted atmospheric testing of H-Bombs at their Nevada test site. Radioactive clouds were drifting over the little cowtowns of the west and heading for Vegas. Doctors found Strontium-90 in middle class American mother’s milk. “Perfectly harmless,” said the middle class American fathers in Washington.

Then there was Cuba. Fidel Castro was nationalizing all the American-owned sugar plantations and the US was unhappy about it. Kennedy decided to embargo all trade between the US and Cuba, import or export. That would hurt the Cubans good. Still, there are limits to pain. According to legend, Kennedy purchased 5000 Cuban cigars for his personal use immediately before ordering the embargo. (It’s still in place after nearly fifty years – did it work?)

The cold war was full bore. Commies! Fidel was a Commie, get it? Now those evil Svengalis were were only ninety miles away. Anything could happen! And most likely, anything included an American invasion of Cuba followed by a rain of nuclear warheads and the end of civilization. That’s how I figured it.

Redbaiting was also full bore. Complaining about the imminent possibility of nuclear rain was tantamount to admitting you were a communist in some people’s minds. A fellow-traveler. One of those students the evil Svengalis liked to dupe! A Comsymp! I was sure that J. Edgar Hoover had my picture in his files.

Yet what had I done? I was an English major, but I preferred to spend my afternoons singing folk music on the lawn in front of The Commons like a peacock spreading his plumage. Calling all girls – look, a beautiful, sensitive poetic folksinger come to serenade you. Come, sit down beside me. But death was lurking in the clouds. Maybe we’d better sit inside.

In my simplicity, it seemed to me if a country wanted to be communist, they should be able to do whatever they want. It’s their country. And, in 1962, it looked very much like we were about to invade Cuba and take ‘em down. I thought it was a classic case of the big schoolyard bully pushing his weight around, and this cocky little one foot tall midget Fidel Castro lighting another cigar and blowing smoke in the bully’s face just before he got creamed. So we would listen to Kaffke’s tirades with tolerance and a certain measure of agreement.

He was not the centerpiece of our table by any means. But he had a ferocious intensity and a lack of humor that placed him apart. His one subject was humorless dead ahead radical socialist politics. Unilateral versus bilateral disarmament. Pacifism. Conspiracy. Bay of Pigs. FBI agents under your bed. Always serious, never getting the joke, always dead set on his fixed idea – some vague revolution sometime somewhere that would lead to world peace and kindness and gentle lambs. Except first a big satisfying bloody revolution.

It’s not like I thought revolution was a bad idea, but Cuba was a long way away man, and I had gotten my girlfriend pregnant during the summer. Now we were married and making each other’s lives miserable, and the future looked like death coming in a little apartment. The Commons was my lifeline to the cool world. I needed it bad. The little lambs would have to wait till I got off work. For me, Kaffke was part of the entertainment.

I wondered about the guy though. Sometimes he’d drop teasers about his past – he’d fought in Korea and received a Purple Heart. He’d been a boxer, fought under the name Ruby, and someone had put him in a novel.

He was diabetic – I saw his syringe and little vials of insulin in a kit he always carried with him. Yet in spite of the disease he had ridden horseback through Mexico from San Blas up to Tepic and beyond, camping out in the jungle and the banana plantations.

OK, maybe he was cool after all. Because THAT was cool.

He’d been married a couple of times and had a daughter – 13 or 14. The idea of one of us having a teenager astonished me. I was thinking about my own little kid to come. What will it be like to have a kid? I imagined us living in Greenwich Village and having lunch at a sidewalk cafe. She was ten in my daydream and I was a famous young novelist. No wife in sight! Or maybe I’d be a big English professor at San Francisco State and own an imposing house in the hills near Buena Vista Park and there she is getting on the 43 Roosevelt bus — off to the Conservatory of Music for her violin lesson.

Kaffke was a spectre of my personal nightmare, I think. What if I got to be thirty-five and I still was living with my parents and had nothing better to do than take the streetcar out to State and sit in the Commons all day. The horror!

Castro loomed large in Kaffke’s cosmology. One day he got into an argument with a passing Business major. I remember him saying emphatically, “Castro…he is a Saint!” Caught me up, because a day or two before Kaffke was defending his Catholic faith and described himself as a true believer. No, he was a Fidelista first and last in the years I knew him. Cuba Si! Yanqui No! He showed us an incoherent document he had written attacking the American embargo on Cuba, and I began to wonder if he had a screw loose. That would explain things! Yet, although he never graduated he told us he had over 150 units to his credit. That’s a lot of incoherent but passing term papers. No, he wasn’t crazy in that way. Just mad – really mad inside.

One time Kaffke disappeared and we heard he had a job teaching high school in Angel’s Camp, a little town up in the Gold Rush country. Math or civics or something. He lasted about four months, then one morning there he was, back at the table. As an exercise in civic responsibility, Bob had his students write letters to Kennedy criticizing his Cuba policy. The town fathers gave him 24 hours to get out of town.

What motivated a guy like that? I’ve often wondered. Was he making a principled protest against American colonial attitudes? Was he seeking personal glory? Was he just trying to make a buck? How did he support his daughter? Did he go down to the FBI office and report on the gossip around the Peacenik’s table?

I knew J. Edgar Hoover was convinced we were a threat to the American way! What a laugh! We couldn’t even get to our next class on time. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley – which really kicked off the massive student protest phase of the Sixties, was still a couple years away.

I knew plenty of Communists, older guys who would come out to campus and make speeches about class struggle sometimes. They had gnarled up little minds with one fixed idea, an obsession with a worker-ruled economy that just didn’t fit the world I saw growing around me. They were just part of the entertainment. The chances of being duped by them were zero. But Kaffke was a generation older than me. Maybe they still made sense to him.

I wasn’t surprised when Kaffke hit the front page of the paper on July 1, 1963. He was giving an exclusive telephone interview from Havana. My journal for the day simply notes: “So Kaffke and Lorie (Cantrell) actually made it. They’re in Cuba, by way of Paris and The Prague. He’s described as ‘a 35 year old art student from S.F. State’. He’s an art student? He’s thirty-five?” They were staying at the “luxurious” Hotel Riviera, guests, along with 57 other students, of Fidel Castro. The students were on a “fact-finding mission”, checking out for themselves if Castro had horns. I think they decided he didn’t. The article didn’t mention who paid for their tickets.

Photo Credits:
Bob Kaffke photo: Days of Rage (Memoirs of the Sixties)
J. Edgar Hoover; Women Strike For Peace Picketers – Library of Congress
Castro & Khruschev: AP
Peace Symbol: No Nukes North
Hands Off Cuba: Mary Ferrell Foundation

Labels: Bob Kaffke, hippies, Looking Into The Past, Peaceniks, San Francisco State

Song for Riley Tornfoot

Riley, if you are still on this planet
And bones not moldering with Wyatt Earp’s in a Colma graveyard,
If you are still scuffling the streets of the Fillmore
In toebrokethough stained tennis shoes and
not chained in a state institution somewhere,
If your first-born child knows your face and thinks of you at all or even if she don’t, here is a song for you, sad-eyed leper.

First saw you barefoot, cross legged, eighteen, Lowell High School drop-out, Don Baudelaire’s new sidekick – you walked for peace together LA to San Francisco in the long ago 1962 you were arrested went to jail it was all the same to you. Before your intelligence was sucked from you like you juice from an orange.

You and Don lounging cool on our ratty mattress, bare except for Margarita’s unraveling Mexican blanket, dirty red and yellow. Baudelaire laughing as usual, heavy black rimmed glasses coming down his nose, spare black mustache crinkling up. You’re heroes to us, weary warriors of nonviolence.

Yes you were beautiful that morning surrounded by hippie girls, Riley, they loved you and made much of you – Teresa Sweetness, red haired, freckled, seventeen, wife of Mike Squaredoff, stuffy, square, and doctrinaire – saving to move to Yugoslavia to be free of the capitalist system. Teresa just wanted to be free of her mother.

And Leslie Chapman cozy between you and Baudelaire. She’s Don’s girl friend, straight black hair, satin skin, also seventeen. She lives with her rich mother in Pacific Heights but goes off balling with Don on his motorcycle.

Leslie, sweeter than Sweetness, brought over her Bob Dylan album. Nobody’s ever heard of him. “His voice is so scratchy and nice,” she says, “he doesn’t sound smooth like a singer.”

Riley, you sprawled there smiling, quiet, what were you thinking? In with these peacenik hippies, and hippies are white, all but you. You’re part of this scene of socialist politics and blue workshirts and Sing Out! Magazine, and pot smoking, beat poetry, and Miles Davis. What brought you to peace marches and demonstrations and this dusty mattress?

The four of you so young and cool and free as I look back on you from 2006 – your long sunny, moony youth still ahead of you. No pain or suicide or madness is evident as you pass the gallon jug of Val Vin burgundy from hand to hand.

Riley, two years later when I was out you hit on my wife. Me — your friend. I was pissed when she told me but you were too sad to stay angry with.

You had a blue sweater color of the sky – I could always see you coming through the fog. I’d be home lonely reading comic books, cutting out magazine pictures for collages, wondering what the fuck, with baby daughter napping in the bedroom. We’d get high and laugh and listen to Lighting Hopkins records, then you’d leave me – stoned and alone.

Riley in blue sweater and torn shoes, you had a wife too – sandy blonde beat girl who stuck by you and had your child. I came by to see you in your little madras bedspread one room pad on Fillmore Street but you were gone to score. She was alone and large with child. I felt sorry for her, only white girl on the block, vulnerable and you out to cop. But she was tough and capable and took care of both of you in the lowdown Fillmore pads you lived in – none for long.

Riley, one blue day in 1964 we drove down to Big Sur in my liver colored Studebaker Lark. Wandering back roads looking for a place to camp we met Ferlinghetti in a field – like a sage from the older world, like an Elder from Olympus in the fields of Big Sur. We camped by a stream and smoked pot as the sun went down on trembling creek waters. We all believed that summer 1964 you could get high smoking scotch broom – and we spent an afternoon in the fields of broom by the roadside picking and dodging bees. The smell of it — if only it had worked – angel Pacific glory.

We stopped at Big Sur Hot Springs (later Esalen Institute for new age wisdom gestalt therapy). Mimi Baez was singing at crowded party Big Sur hippies congregating in smoky dark dim kerosene light, surely after making art all day, wonderful paintings and poetry and novels. Such I still believed was the life of Bohemians. You didn’t think so. We waited for sister Joan to come, but she never did

We crashed at a cabin up a canyon, park car at head of canyon and trudged up to it in the mooney dark. One room, no water, bare boards, blonde Viking woman’s home to drink Red Mountain burgundy and smoke scotch broom blossoms in the night, hippies on the floor snoring as we toked.

Riley, you got heavier into drugs, heroin I suppose though I don’t know and I moved to the Haight-Ashbury. I didn’t see you any more except once flitting down a back street looking for a phantom fix – sad specter of the streets.

Last time I saw you was in 1975 on Haight Street. I was crossing the street going into Rodney Albin’s guitar shop and you appeared, losteyed. I was dressed in brown you thought I was driving truck for United Parcel congratulated me on getting a well paying gig. We shook hands in the gutter at the corner of Haight and Masonic and you disappeared into the traffic. Disappeared into the traffic like you’d never been there at all. You didn’t have the sweater anymore.

Famous People I Never Knew #3: Jerry Garcia (Part 1)

Today Nathan Zakheim is an art conservator in LA, world renowned, and bald. But in 1963 Nathan was the biggest leftie folksinger (maybe second biggest) at San Francisco State, bold and brave, with mounds of curly black hair and red cheeks of kibbutz health and a curly black beard. Nathan dressed the part too – like he’d just stepped out of a 1930s WPA work camp and was about to grab a freight across America to go to the big Wobbly meeting in Tacoma. Not that it was an affectation, you understand. I dressed exactly the same way.

So did everybody in the Underground (except for a local named Ale Ekstrom, who dressed like a nineteenth century tar and played sea shanties on his concertina). Nathan was the face of folk music to me – a guy in a red check shirt and an acoustic guitar and a bold attitude singing out signals of destruction from the Underground.

At this late date, I don’t have Nathan’s set list in front of me, but I’m pretty sure he sang Old Left songs about the galvanic labor struggles of fifty, sixty years before. Stuff like I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night (Joe Hill was a labor organizer who got shot for his trouble) and You Can’t Fool Me, I’m Stickin’ to the Union and Solidarity Forever, the Union Makes Us Strong. He might have also sung the beautiful Russian folk anthem Meadowlands.

“Meadowlands, Meadowlands, meadows green and fields in blossom,
Merrily greet the plucky heroes, heroes of the Soviet Republic”…or something like that for fourteen verses.

Hey, I’m not talking politics. Who knew about politics? My politics began in rage because someone was about to drop an H-Bomb on my head and ended with carrying Ban The Bomb! (you bastards) on a placard at demonstrations. I know when I sang Meadowlands every verse was meant to be a comic dada snowball thrown to knock off the proper pillbox hat of uptight materialist sleeping SQUARE America and its weird right-wing defenders – the Christian Ant-Communist Crusade, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and, of course, George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party mates.

Nathan lived in a the dust and cold squalor of a big Victorian flat on Divisadero Street with a dangerous pyrotechnical wizard named Edmund, a kid from LA named Al and my friend Rodney Albin, luthier, harpsichord builder, folk musician and greathearted brother of my heart forever, though he would laugh to hear it.

On a day in early Spring, 1963, Linda Lovely and I picked up Rodney and Nathan in our little liver-colored Studebaker Lark – we were driving up to Rodney’s big house party at his uncle’s summer place on the Russian River north of San Francisco. Apple blossoms brushed across the windshield as we turned down the little dirt road to the Sebastapol farmhouse where Nathan’s father, the great Thirties muralist Bernard Zakheim, lived and worked. His murals illuminated many of San Francisco’s civic buildings of the Thirties, most notably Coit Tower, and we were a little in awe of meeting him. Grey-bearded and smiling, Bernard came out into the orchard to greet us. He served us tea and we smiled gratefully. He paid the most attention to Linda.

As we drove on raindrops glistered in the sky like in a Thirties children’s picture book or a Grant Wood painting or a Bernard Zakheim mural of a little brown car in purple light painted from high above the two lane highway ribbon and workbooted children inside the car actually listening to rock and roll on the radio in spite of their folk genuinity. We turned right at Occidental and crossed the dripping spring valley and tawny hills into the redwood forest that edged out from the river where the light dims and the air smells damp, musty and poignant.

The light fades fast in the redwoods. I switched on the headlights as we looked for the private road up through the redwoods to the big dank and mildewed summer vacation house, except it’s now early spring. Inside the house, ghostly in the ascending mist, lights are welcoming and someone is tuning a banjo, someone else has got the wood stove going and someone else has set four big jugs of Val-Vin Burgundy, $1.99 a gallon, on the trestle table, and yet someone else is working on the spaghetti and French bread and salad, and everything’s happening in the kitchen, the only warm room.

The proto-hippies are starting to arriving now in force — San Francisco State folkniks and Palo Alto folkies and a few hangers on like me, unsure of who I am, because I love this scene but I hate this music!

Continued in Famous People I Never Knew: Jerry Garcia Part 2. (I know – where’s Jerry? Hold on a bit – he’s coming. One day at a time)

Reprise: We Shall Not Be Moved

Still looking at this picture. The guy with the intense expression and Buddy Holly glasses is me, Christopher Newton. I’m playing the Spanish guitar Don Auclair gave me because he felt bad about sleeping with my ex-girlfriend before she was an ex. Today it’s sitting in my daughter’s closet gathering dust but with every molecule in its cracked sounding board and warped neck still charged with power.

My current girlfriend Linda Lovely – she’s sitting behind me. Linda at 20 is a true innocent heart in her own way, but not very happy today – she just found out she’s going to have a beautiful baby who has given both of us joy ever since – but it’s a bit unexpected, and she’s not used to the idea.

The soulful intellectual pondering my kazoo is Joe Pratt, subject of a lost short story Joe Pratt at Stinson Beach. The hair in the foreground belongs to Solveig Otvos, nee’ Rimkeit, and as good a friend as I ever had. We are sitting in Golden Gate Park’s Rose Garden on a foggy day in the summer of 1962, four friends and a nameless photographer.

Linda and I are still tight and see each other several times a year. Joe wandered off into another life as friends of our youth tend to do. Perhaps he became a wandering kazooist. Solveig followed a spiritual path, Subud, and changed her name to Ruth. We lost touch as I got deeper into it and she climbed further out. She’s the one I miss most — sensitive, loyal, able to see bullshit for what it was and laugh it away. And that sexy Latvian accent!

We’d all met through the San Francisco State Student Peace Union. It’s hard to remember now just how imminent the end of the world seemed in those Cold War years. But it just absolutely freaked my generation (this was a couple of years before Viet Nam). Russia and the US were playing a galactic game of poker called brinkmanship and the whole world could explode in cosmic fury at any time. Hey – we were young. We didn’t want to die in flaming fission because one player called the other’s bluff. Would you?

The Peace Movement at San Francisco State coalesced around the immediate issue of atmospheric testing of H-Bombs, which had started up again in 1961, the year I transferred to State. The Air Force was exploding them in the Nevada desert to learn how to kill more people and the fallout was drifting across the desert into California and eastward into Utah. The breeze was full of a radioactive substance call Strontium-90 that was getting into mother’s milk among other places. (Where is this stuff today? Has it decayed by now?)

And it made me mad. That was my politics. Still pretty much is, I’m afraid. It was just one more, but the worst example yet, of an adult world I wanted no part of running amok and preparing to cremate the world to make it safe for freedom or something. But to me and Joe and Solveig it was just cold death leering at us in an unpleasant way.

The FBI thought we were all working for Nikita Khrushchev, or else Communist dupes. The best thinking of the era had decided that Communists were like demons and had supernatural powers over the minds of all young people who didn’t prefer nuclear destruction.

I’m not saying the Commies weren’t trying to use us to their strategic advantage – but I had met members of the San Francisco Communist party and they were tired, worn-out. Their time has passed. In our snotty youth we thought them laughable and knew nothing of their struggles in the hunger-wracked Thirties.

There was a song we used to sing at demonstrations. The chorus ran “Just like a tree, standing by the water, we shall not be moved” and we would make up the first line. The head local Commie was a guy named Archie Brown, and we used to sing “Archie is our leader; we shall not be moved” just to bug the FBI guys who were usually wandering harrumph with little cameras at the demonstrations.

For Joe and Solveig and Don Auclair and my ex-girlfriend Margarita at least this was not a political issue – demonstrating was an existential fist in the face of our imminent demise. Maybe there was nothing we could do to stop it – but we weren’t going to go peacefully. To the barricades!

Allen Ginsberg on Love, Hatred, and Peace Marches

I’ve been reading Empty Phantoms: interviews and encounters with Jack Kerouac, a sad but necessary account of one of our great American writers’ descent into alcoholism. It’s funny and brutal.

Here’s Allen Ginsberg in 1980, looking back on his separating friendship with Jack as he dug into the anti-War movement of the Sixties while Jack stayed home and drank:

“One built-in stereotype which still exists and is poisoning the left here insists on “hatred” as a “revolutionary weapon,” an old-fashioned prepsychedelic nineteenth-century hatred…which was contrary to his nature as it is contrary to mine. This hatred is at the root of most radical consciousness in America [...] when the entire left went into a completely masturbatory period of social violence, calling everybody pigs, with self-righteousness and self-isolation which finally led to the election of Nixon.

That gross element in the left repelled Kerouac, who felt it was a betrayal of what he had prophesied. He prophesied a spiritual, angelic generation that would ultimately take over with long hair and exquisite manners, you know, “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” Instead they were, like, greedy as pigs and harmful as dogs. It’s still a problem, the left being poisoned by its own anger…

I always had Kerouac in mind when I got on a peace march and I always made sure it was, like really, straight, pure, surrealist, lamblike, nonviolent, magical, mantric, spiritual politics rather than just marching up and down the street screaming hatred at the president.”

So what has changed in the twenty-five years since Allen spoke? The warlords won, the left is impotent, screeching and snarling but with fewer teeth than in 1980, the world seems even bleaker than it was. The dark Sixties will soon be referred to by the media as “a time of innocence” like the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, and Fifties before them. And still no revolution wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

I, wistfully and with some trepidation, still demand the revolution of love to begin today. To the barricades, you guys. No more screeching and snarling but rather touching and healing with hearts of compassion. Even for that sonuvabitch in the White House.

Labels: Jack Kerouac, Peaceniks