Gidget and Mimi Farina, Big Sur, 1964

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you feel anything, man?

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

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

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

What? You’ve never heard of Lawrence Ferlinghetti?

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

Freshman English Papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beatnik Detectives Fight Slimey Sid

I’m feeling guilty. Here you go dropping by the Pigsty looking for a few laughs with the Old Pig, and what do you get? Angst! Existential dread! I think I’ll start writing tough detective novels instead.

What if the Baby Beatniks find a body sitting propped up at a little table in a beatnik coffee bar? When they ask to use his sugar, he falls over and there’s a

knife in his back! Then the police try to pin it on the Baby Beatniks and they’ve got to prove it was really Slimey Sid the undercover narc who’s been shaking down the whole street. He’s on the take but no one can figure how how he gets the dough. Then it turns out one of the Baby Beatniks is a pig!

And all the time there’s way out jazz on the soundtrack and sultry beatnik blondes in berets who look like Veronica Lake are doublecrossing Curly and Chico and Goofy and the rest of the Baby Beatniks.

I need time to think! The cops are closing in! Hey Maw! Top of the world!

While I’m writing, I think I’ll post some nice peaceful Patrushka pictures…

This first one is called NICE PEACEFUL MERRY-GO-ROUND HORSE…

This second one is called NICE PEACEFUL MERRY-GO-ROUND HORSE FREAKS OUT…

Here’s one called TOTALLY FREAKED!

You’ll like this one. It’s called NICE SECURE WALL WITH BIG HOLE IN IT AND DANGEROUS OCEAN BEYOND

And finally: SLIMEY SID’S HIDEOUT

Photos are by Patrushka. Titles by PonderPig

Famous People I Never Knew #1: Neal Cassady

I’m a peaceful pig. Always have been. If there’s a wild party going on, you can count on my being there – for about ten minutes. I’ve always preferred going for a walk by myself, maybe in Golden Gate Park, to ponder the mysteries of life and see if there’s any more treasure beneath that statue.

But people keep asking me about famous people I knew when I was a young hippie pig in the Haight-Ashbury and a young beatnik pig in North Beach. Cutting down Haight Street in my beret and goatee with sandals on my trotters – people naturally wanted to meet me and possibly get a kind word or my autograph. Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, the President of the United States – they watched in wonder as this pondering porker trotted by.

Or was that in my dream?

In any case, I’ve decided to tell all, as I get around to it, beginning with the first time I “met” Jack Kerouac’s literary inspiration and Merry Pranksters chauffeur Neal Cassady.

In the Spring of 1962 I was hanging out in North Beach with my girl friend Linda Lovely and the raffish denizens of the Hot Dog Palace, spare changing tourists and dropping by the parish hall at St. Peter and Paul’s Church opposite Washington Square at sundown for a free hardboiled egg sandwich (this actually was a hardboiled egg, shell and all, between two big slices of French bread wrapped in newspaper like fish n chips.)

My pal George the Beast had snagged a job as night clerk at the Hotel Dante, next door to topless pioneer Carol Doda’s club The Condor. Kids, the Dante was not like hotels of today with chocolates on the pillow and turndown service. The Dante was a real Sam Spade dusty, dim light, dark hallways hotel above a bar where real men in fedoras and revolvers in shoulder holsters thought existential thoughts while they stared at the bare lamp bulb screwed above their single bed with the metal bedstead. Outside the street with its million stories and the fog drifting in from Bay as the foghorn groaned in the night…(oh, you fill in the rest).

So one day, George says to us “Hey, you want to see Neal Cassady’s room?”

“Well….duh!” I sez to George, using a well-known anachronism since that tagline hadn’t been thought up yet.

Cassady was just out of San Quentin. He had been busted for possession of marijuana and been sacked away for a couple of years. (Kids, sez the Old Pig in an aside to the young people listening with bated breath – it’s true. When you are idealizing the Sixties remember this: it was a time when you could be sent to prison for years if a cop happened to put his hand in your coat pocket and found one joint. This happened to my pal Danny S. Except he beat the rap thanks to his tough, crooked lawyer, Niccolo Bellisimo)

Even in 1962 Neal Cassady was a legend – THE Dean Moriarity of On The Road, and of course we wanted to be within the glamour circle of his greatness, a real legendary member of the real beat generation. Not like me and Linda Lovely and George the Beast, not quite sure who we were, wanting to be real beatniks and looking like real beatniks but actually twenty years old and acting a lot like kids who had memorized Howl and thought Dharma Bums was a treatise on right living.

This was about four in the afternoon, nothing happening in the “lobby” of the Dante – a little space as big as your office with George behind the counter grinning like a cat with his gold earring gleaming. So George leads us up the stairs to the second floor and down the dark passage to an even darker doorway on the right hand side.

“There it is – that’s Neal Cassady’s room”. Wow! I could almost feel the beat emanation exuding through the door. Was he behind it writing long mad letters to his famous pals? Was he out looking for another joint to put in his pocket? I’ll never know. Because we went back down to the lobby and laughed and joked for a while and then when George got off for his dinner break, we all walked down to Huey Looey Gooey’s for a big bowl of seaweed soup.