Voices From The Haight #1: A Walk Through San Francisco, Dec. 26, 1967

Continuing on my theme of recreating the sixties-era Haight-Ashbury as I actually knew it, as opposed to the mountains of hype that have been generated about it, I’m going to post some contemporary accounts – written by people who lived there – while they lived there.   Let’s start with Walrus Pemmican…

I knew Walrus well.  At the time of this letter, he had fallen on hard times.  Nearly twenty-six years old, he had finally split for good from his beautiful wife Linda Lovely.  He was living a cheap rooming house on Divisadero Street.  He called it The Black Hotel.  He had just lost his job at the post office when the authorities discovered he couldn’t load trucks because he had a serious heart murmur. He missed his four year old daughter desperately.  He visited her nearly every night to read her bedtime story.

I guess he was feeling more on the ‘On your own with no direction home’ side of life than the ‘All you need is love’ side.  He’d gone home for Christmas the day before, where someone had snapped the photo that graces this page.  Today he is back on Diviz…

12-26-67

Hi girl -

Back in the city, I am sitting on my fire-escape in the sultry dusk overlooking Divisadero – drinking Spur malt liquor and watching curly black heads pass between my feet – what a summer day it is!  Who would imagine this to be the day after Christmas!  Folks drinking beer on their front steps, kids rollin by, the tops down on their convertibles, the aroma of beans and pepper drifting up to me from Bishop’s Soul Food below in the pinkening twilight.  What a sweet day.

Today I ran errands – I stirred up the dust in my room and reshuffled my books and pencils and tapes, then ran down to Market St. – walking up and down in the December heat, doing errands – took my old Smith-Corona to be cleaned and repaired – $17.50 it will be, then to the bank, deposited my P.O. wages $151 dollars – it will be gone in 4 days, I’ll pay some bills, give you some bread,  and phoosh, gone – but that’s all right, ma.

The girl at the bank window knows me, she tells me about her real five-course American dinner (she’s Greek), then back up steaming Market St.  I stop to eat some pineapple cottage cheese in front of the laundromat, and wander into all those hi-fi stores, to stare at things I lust for – 500 tape recorders you can stick in your pocket and catch the lion’s roar, the smirk of the savant  – I visit Gyro Gearloose (ed. note: Rodney Albin) in his shop, making an electric violin, his ability with his hands fascinates me, I feel out of place in a place of hands, he shows me his latest lovely dulcimer, plaintive, hearts carved into the wood…

This day – I visit John Chance, but he is not home, so I walk through the magic Panhandle – every tree is golden today, every shape perfect, a park for lovers – I meet Peter Albin, he is going to play with Chuck Berry this weekend, to me it seems like a great honor but he takes it in his stride – used to playing with the great I guess – His wife, Cynthia, is dressed in an amazing violet Pucci print and looks twelve months pregnant, she stands apart, waiting for Peter to finish his jiving, then they walk on through the golden day.  I walk on, stop at Diane Warne’s; not home.

So now I sit in the deepening day.  It’s purple now, and I feel Spur in my brain.  Saxophones cry up from below – I love you woman – Tell me your day now.

WP

I wonder if Walrus ever got that tape recorder that would capture ‘the smirk of the savant’.  It must have been really sensitive.

Great Murders of San Francisco and Los Angeles

Yesterday while foodling on the Internet I discovered a retired police detective in San Francisco has been creating Google My Maps of all the San Francisco murders, year by year.  Great Murders of 1933, Baffling Murders of 1943, Drive-By Shootings of 1953 – you get the idea.  He doesn’t seem to have gone beyond the Fifties yet.  This is helpful data for a novelist.  And I can learn what neighborhoods not to move to if I go back in time.  I hope he reopens and then solves all those cases now that he’s retired.

My grandfather also was murdered (this is true), and it had a huge impact on the family right down to today.  Everybody knew who murdered him (it was his business partner) but the guy got off scot free.  The D.A. who prosecuted him later went to San Quentin for accepting bribes.

This happened in roaring LA in the 1920s.  My grandfather was a man in his forties with a young family – on his way up.  Here’s a picture of him in 1922 standing by one of his oil wells.

He was a wheeler-dealer, a millionaire on paper, but he’d built a house of cards only he knew how to hold together.  So when the crash came, the family, including all the country cousins who came out from Kansas to work for him, were back on the street – figuratively speaking.  We couldn’t even pay the property taxes on our Pasadena mansion.

Over the years I’ve thought of writing a book about the whole sordid story.  It has the makings of a bestseller and it would satisfy my itch to know.  The shock waves from the murder reverberated through my childhood even though my grandmother and mother would never talk about it.  But it’s pretty rough stuff too and I would have to face issues like – was my grandfather a crook like his business partners? I don’t think he was, but what if?  Do I want to know?

Once I went to Los Angeles, spent a couple days there reading the newspaper accounts of the 1924 murder and trial in the public library, I went to the Hall of Records and found the will of the man who shot Grandpa down, I went to the morgue to see if they still had a file on the case.  They did, but it contained only one sheet of paper.

But I ultimately decided I didn’t want to spend the next five years in the company of some unpleasant people who thought about money all the time while I wrote a book about them.  I moved on to the next subject – a strawberry ice cream soda at the Colorado Street Creamery.

I’d still like to read that book if somebody else would write it.  Aprilbaby would be a good choice, she needs a new bestseller.  But all in all I think I’m glad I moved on to the trippy hippie stuff.  My memories are lot more fun.

Footnote:  There seems to be no way to link directly to a My Maps map.  To see the murder maps, click on my link, which will bring you to Google Maps for San Francisco. In the left-hand column, click on the My Maps tab. Now drag down to ‘Featured Content’, then check the box at ‘Popular user-created maps’.  That will bring up a lot of content – drag through it and you will see links to the murder maps.

When The Candy Was Free

You know what I hate? People who hardly know each other jumping into bed together. I’m not against it for religious reasons. In fact, I’m not even sure what family values are — but I think they have something to do with the Care Bears. No, it’s because of my best friend John T.

Back in the late Seventies, John and I were “writer-producer-directors” for a big public relations firm in San Francisco. And over time we grew to be tight friends. We shared a lot of interests. He was a wonderful photographer and a classically trained pianist. He was gentle and funny and he had a warm heart. Truth is, over the years we worked together I came to love him like a brother.

John and his boy friend Todd were regular dinner guests at our big old house on Seventeenth Avenue and the evening always ended around the piano howling out Beatles songs or Cole Porter ballads or Christmas carols if the season was right. I won’t forget the time Patrushka attempted Creme Brulee for dessert, but the melted sugar topping got way too sticky and glued John’s mouth shut. The table fell apart from laughter.

John was a pal, and pals are hard to some by and I still miss him. Love is forever.

All because John couldn’t pass up a good orgy. He used to regale me with his sexual exploits. I learned a lot about the San Francisco gay community and its bathhouse, gloryhole culture. He once said living in San Francisco was like being a kid in a candy store and all the candy was free.

We used to go on the road together and I was amazed at his ability to spot and meet and pick up a gay cashier or waiter at the hotel – all with a look, a glance. He told me once he had been driving down Highway 101 up in the country somewhere and he had sex with a guy who passed him on the highway. They just exchanged looks and that’s all it took. They both pulled over and jumped out and got it on in the field and then jumped back in their little sports cars and off they went. Yahoo! Life in the free candy store.

He laughed about it and I laughed too. I guess I could have gotten all moralistic with him but I never thought of it, and it probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. That was the way it was in the gay world in San Francisco. Nobody had ever heard of AIDS.

Actually, the word was starting to get around. I remember one bluesky Saturday morning in 1982. We took the kids over to John and Todd’s Potrero Hill flat and jumped into their hot tub in the backyard. We had a great time as usual, but underneath I worried. Could AIDS get passed on through water in a hot tub? Should the girls be in here? Looking back, I’m glad I ignored the thought. Those guys weren’t long for this world and I’m glad for every moment we had together.

So, the next year I took a job on the east coast and, after that, I only saw John and Todd when I flew back to the City on business. I’d always drop by their flat to see what was up, and John wasn’t looking so good. He never would cop to having HIV, but I saw him preparing little vitamin protein supplements to spread on his cracker. We never really got down to what mattered – we’d just talk about business and trade east coast vs west coast work stories and talk about if the multi-image slide show business would survive.

John and Todd usually stayed with us when they were on the east coast and we managed to stay in touch, but less and less. Then one evening Todd called to tell us John was dead. He caught pneumonia and died quite quickly.

The fuck.

John’s parents came out from Pittsburgh. I guess the flat was in John’s name because they sold it and evicted Todd. They blamed Todd for everything. After a few months, he left the City. There was someone in Long Beach who said he’d take care of him.

God bless those guys. They’re both dead now because John couldn’t keep it zipped. Why couldn’t he just stay home with Todd? Was it really that hard to do? Excuse me, gentle reader. But do you see why I have a personal dislike of promiscuity?

Instead of a dear friend I get to see whenever I go to San Francisco, I just get another stupid fucking grave to put flowers on. I’ll just have to miss his sweet smile and gentle ways till I get to heaven. I wouldn’t want to go to any heaven that didn’t include John T.

So while we’re changing the world around here today could we please eliminate AIDS too?

What Happened To Playland-at-the-Beach?

Is it true all good things must finally come to an end? It was certainly true for Playland at the Beach, the great amusement park that once promenaded along the western coast of San Francisco, out by the edge of Golden Gate Park. In its heyday in the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, even into the late Fifties, the place rocked with kids and young people and sailors and fun – and they measured their cost in nickels. San Franciscans didn’t need a car to get there because Playland was at the end of a couple of streetcar lines, as amusement parks usually were in the early twentieth century.

A traveler climbing aboard the B car heading downtown late on a weekend afternoon in the 1950s might find himself surrounded by packed-in black families from the Fillmore District. They were heading home tired, cranky and sandyfooted after a terrific cotton candy and enchiladas day. Latino families from the Mission, Irish and Italian families from the Richmond and Sunset districts, city teenagers mixed with teens from San Bruno all the way to San Mateo twenty miles down the brand new Bayshore Freeway, they were were hotfooting down the Midway, looking for fun, looking for thrills, looking for girls. On sunny days in September, Ocean Beach itself, across the Great Highway, was packed with families on blankets listening to big black portable radios or dabbling their toes in the ferociously cold surf. As Bugsy said to Shifty back in 1957, “I want to stick around while I get my kicks!”

I don’t know what happened, but parks like Playland were closing all over the country. Perhaps the opening of the original Disneyland in 1955 had something to do with it. Week after week Walt Disney used his television show, conveniently named Disneyland, to flog the wonders and delights of his new Magic Kingdom. Maybe the traditional family-oriented park at the edge of the big city was looking a little tawdry and old fashioned. Most young people had access to cars now. They could drive to big modern theme parks like Great America, the Bay Area’s first. It was (and is) just off the Bayshore Freeway, and, unlike Playland way out at the edge of a labyrinthine city, is easily accessible by millions of Bay Area families.

Besides, by the 1950s, the blue collar and middle-class families that formed Playland’s primary market were leaving the City in droves, off to their new martinis and togetherness playgrounds in the suburbs. But let’s not talk about that sorrowful day in 1954 when the moving van arrived at our beautiful San Francisco house on 47th Avenue two blocks from the vast, fogbound, eternal Pacific ocean and trucked the furniture to our new, open floor plan, wall to wall windows and a patio, subdivision miracle stranded on a mudflat on the San Francisco Bay. It’s too traumatic. I think I’ve been trying to get back home my whole life.

The young urban professionals who took their places, filling the swinging Tony Bennett bars on Union Street, were not likely to suggest a date night at Playland riding the Wild Mouse.

More tomorrow.
Photo of Playland, 1958 by my brother Gary.

Joan Baez Again

It’s been almost exactly one year since my first love letter to Joan Baez appeared at the Pondering Pig. Now Hector at The Walrus Speaks has put up another Joan Baez video, this time of Diamonds and Rust, her sweet and heartfelt ode to Mr. Dylan and to lost-love nostalgia in general. And I find I have a few more heartfelt thoughts about that key figure and soul sister of my generation.

But you’re probably getting bored listening to me go on and on about Joan Baez. Why doesn’t he write about somebody with blond hair, like Shakira? Or Christina Aguilera. Now they’ve got blond hair! That Joan Baez, her hair is as gray as the Pondering Pig’s! Grayer even! And I’ve never seen her even try to belly dance.

Actually, it would be interesting to ponder the current music scene and report back to other graysnout pigs such as myself. But I am the least likely of pigs to take on such a task. I don’t even own a television set, so how could I watch the MTV awards?

Show your support! Take up a collection so the Pig can properly ponder Shakira! You’ll be amazed at my unexpected insights.

Actually, I am maybe a little too puritanical to really get into Shakira and her contemps. All that blatant on stage sex kind of embarrasses me. Makes me feel like I shouldn’t be in looking at this private moment.

Joanie took a different route. In her rise to showbiz success she portrayed herself as an enemy of violence, as a friend of farmworkers, as someone who might show up at anti-war demonstrations and peace marches and just sing for free. In fact, not only did she portray herself that way, she actually WAS that way. What a publicity coup!

She was more, well, more Sixties. Just the music. Just the achingly pure voice. Just the one guitar. No bullshit please. There is more to sing about in this life than my hot blood and my breaking heart.

Actually, when I think of Joan Baez, I get a lump in my throat. It’s weird, I know. Maybe you have to be from my time and place. For instance, I will never never forget the day in November 1978 when San Francisco’s Mayor George Moscone and our outspoken gay rights Supervisor Harvey Milk were both shot down in San Francisco’s City Hall by a bitter and hate wracked man whose name will never again be spoken by this pig. Shot down in cold blood just ten days after news had broken about the massacre at Jonestown. Ten days after our own little homegrown cult, the People’s Temple, took the Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Cam, our graphics artist at work, listened to the radio while she worked, so she heard the news first. We all stood around her radio to hear Supervisor Dianne Feinstein speak over the air. “”Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot . . . and killed. The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”

I stood numb on the 1 California bus all the way home. Staring out at the streets of my gone gray city, smelling the dirty overcoat of the Chinese guy standing next to me, looking blankly at the elderly black lady with her Bible in her hand — just like the woman who used to collect down at Seventeenth and Geary for the Jim Jones People’s Temple. The one who was probably lying dead in a morgue in Guyana right now. No weight has ever lain heavier on my shoulders. My city, my city, my broken city of sorrow and death.

At home that evening, Patrushka and I and our seven year old daughter Hannah watched the little black and white TV in mourning. Patrushka was ready to give birth so we weren’t standing with the candlelit crowds in the Civic Center. We just sat in our darkened living room on Seventeenth Avenue feeling that stunned and dark feeling. What more evil could happen to hope? (John Lennon’s assassination was still a year away.)

KGO-TV’s camera swept across the 25,000 grief strained faces, gay and straight, black, white and Asian, there to hold up their little candles, to listen to forgotten heartfelt, extemporized speeches, to be together, who knew why? Because the rolling sky was on fire.

What I can never forget was the moment Joan Baez came out of the crowd, tuned up, and, standing on the City Hall steps, began to sing “Amazing Grace.” And through that little portable TV speaker on Seventeenth Avenue we heard again her blessed angel voice of hope and healing and truth. I grabbed on and held tight. I guess it wasn’t much in the great scheme of things, but at that moment, it felt like a whole lot. What I heard was – ‘the light’s not out yet, the light’s not all the way out.’

God bless you forever for that, Joanie.

Patrushka gave birth to our daughter Kirstie the next day. She came out screaming. Full of hope. And ready for joy.

Thanks to Uncle Donald’s Castro Street for the vigil photo. His site is worth visiting if you remember or would like to know more.

Baby Beatniks Seek Truth Too

And now I’ve started questioning
If anything is true…
Christopher Newton (1966)

All I want is the truth
Just give me some truth.
John Lennon

In my distress I cry to the Lord,
that he may answer me:
‘Deliver me, O Lord,
from lying lips,
from a deceitful tongue.’
Psalm 120

I’m afraid I’m making my Christian readers a little nervous here. Believe me, I am not turning my back on Jesus Christ. I am saying there was nothing in the brand of Christianity that I was served up at the age of sixteen, with its tender ritual and mindless rote prayer and comfortable satisfaction with the status quo, that could hold me.

And second, to those who say why don’t I forget about the past and just forge on ahead, I say “Forget about it? Forget about it!”. My mind teems with these images and memories. I am convinced that what I saw and felt and heard is as eternally important as that snowshoe bunny over there running down the glacier. I hope that’s clear. OK?

Now, meanwhile, back in 1959…

I wanted God in my life. I longed for Him/Her/It. But, near as I could tell, the Biblical God was not really God. For instance, I read Psalm 18 about God riding down to earth on his thundercloud with smoke coming out of his nostrils – well, what God is this? Did he create the entire universe and now is riding around shooting lightning out of a thundercloud in the hill country of Israel? How could anybody take this stuff seriously? That’s how I felt. I’m just being honest, okay? At seventeen, this was an issue about truth for me. And it’s still a valid, if sophomoric, question. Especially if you are presenting a struggling truth-seeker with a fundamentalist, every word is literally true, belief about the Book and how it works.

In a world that was full of lies and deception coming at me from every corner like arrows whizzing by – which is how I and every truth-seeker has to feel, why should I believe your version of the truth just because you say it is the real one? Coca-Cola is the real thing too, according to them.

The book Dharma Bums, which I’ve been blogging about the last few days, presented me with another option – seeking God through direct experience of him. I don’t have a copy of the book at the moment – lost or given away in my many years of wandering – but in memory at least, the book is about three guys searching for God, and God is Truth. Simplistically, that’s what Dharma means. In one episode of the book Jack and Gary Snyder (under novelistic pseudonyms) go on a crazy mountain climbing quest in the Sierras. Even at seventeen I could see climbing the mountain was really about two things — first, going on a totally great adventure with great wild friends , and second, about getting higher – higher into the pure truth and out of the smog of the world’s stupidity. A direct experience. An enlightenment. Real proof because it happened to you!

That’s what it still comes down to, guys and girls, truth is true if it happened to you. (For a modernist, I’m quite a good post-modernist). I know God is real. Not because of anything in the Bible, but because I saw him. The Bible fills in the picture because it’s about other guys who saw him.

And there are other scenes in Dharma Bums where Jack (I think this is in Dharma Bums – but maybe it’s On The Road or Subterraneans) is sitting in a library in the Santa Clara Valley day after day surrounded by the spring cherry orchards and reading the Diamond Sutra. I didn’t know what that was, but it seemed to be some kind of teaching where you didn’t have to belief in all of these stories about God riding around on his thundercloud. He was –Something Else. Unknowable. Ineffable. Something beyond understanding. Both personal and impersonal. Encompassing everything. Wow! I felt that must be the way God really is. Big.

Where was someone who could have shown me the Christian Way in its adventure and power and truth? Who was there to show me Jesus Christ in His awesome complexity?

I didn’t hear you knockin’. In fact, in all those long years from 1959 to 1968, when I encountered my first Jesus Freak, there was not one soul who defended or even spoke to me of the Christian faith with a fair understanding or true commitment. If I didn’t ask – well, who would I ask?

OK, that’s a fair question. Let’s see. At San Francisco State a few years later there was the Campus Crusade for Christ. They had a regular table outside the Student Commons, handing out tracts and stuff. At the next table over there was another group called the Young Americans For Freedom. They espoused every right-wing conservative position available in the early Sixties, from going into Viet Nam to stop the Communists to getting arch-conservative Barry Goldwater elected president. (Man, Goldwater’s looking pretty good these days! He was a man of honor.) Members of both organizations wore the same short sleeve white shirts and skinny black ties, crew cuts and they carried the same kind of bookbags. I wasn’t sure, and didn’t think about it much, but I figured maybe they were both part of the same organization. They both looked like The Enemy. I couldn’t see much difference between them, except they both wanted me to believe things that weren’t true.

I don’t remember ever being “witnessed to” by a Campus Crusade guy but if I had been, you know what I would have said? “The only thing I want to be saved from is having to spend eternity with guys like you! How dare you try to “save me,” whatever that means. You know nothing of the pain I suffer. You haven’t earned the right! Go away!”

No preaching, no witnessing, no handing out of tracts would have had the slightest effect on me. If they pointed out some eternal truth from The Bible, I could counter with an eternal truth from Bambi. They were both just books!

You know who I might have listened to? A Christian girl I was in love with. If she spoke earnestly and I could see through her life that it was true, then I would have given Jesus a fair shot.

Second best would be if I heard about Jesus from another freak. Someone I trusted would speak truth to me about his own experience. Someone I respected. Not some preacher dressed up in hippie clothes, but one of my close friends.

I wish I had known about a secret house church of dirty underground beatniks who were at war against the Great Society of lies and malice for all. In other words, people who were really following Jesus. I would have gone there in a New York minute.

Now that I think about, I STILL want to go to that church!

Famous People I Never Knew #2: Janis Joplin

(Here’s Janis as a normal person, shot by my friend Herb Greene about 1966 and rights owned by him.)
In the Fall of 1966 I was living with a bunch of freaks at 626 Clayton Street, about four doors up from the circus that was San Francisco’s Haight Street. I didn’t actually want to go to the circus everyday. But Haight Street was home. All my friends were there and where else would I go?

I’d walk down to the corner to get a sandwich or a bran muffin or something and get engulfed in a sea of strangers, kids from LA and Vermont and all points in between, spare-changing like I’d done just a few years before and looking bedraggled and innocent, foolish as lambs.

Where was my nice Haight Street of the year before when you could walk in the red neon fog at midnight and see maybe two or three other freaks on the street? Where I knew everybody and everybody I knew was cool? Where nobody was checking if it was true smoking dried banana peels could get you high.

“Hey, Donovan said so, man…”

The Diggers, a radical, anarchical, poetical offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troop, were already beginning to give away free food in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle just to bless the sixteen year old runaways a little bit. Somebody had to.

The Pondering Pig is not a cynical pig but he was beginning to wish the newspapers would stop writing about hippies all the time.

And the Summer of Love was still nine months away. Gad!

I split the Clayton Street flat’s rent with Melanie Kinkead (I use her real name because I hope someday she will read this and write back, “Here I am – I’m OK!”) — I loved Lanie, so sweet and sad and vulnerable. She affected the ultra-feminine side of hippie dress, with frills and flounces, hair in a tumble of curls, masses of eye shadow, miniskirts with white tights and and possibly even Mary Jane shoes. Or I may be hallucinating here – my memory doesn’t really extend to Lanie da Kink’s shoes. In any case, think Mary Pickford circa 1915. Mel was the daughter of a San Francisco travel writer and PR guy. Robin and his wife didn’t know what to make of their ultrafeminine (can a heterosexual girl be described as effeminate?) daughter. Once they invited me to their swank Pacific Heights flat for dinner and to discuss what could possibly make her tick. I hadn’t a clue either. I just loved her like a big dumb older brother. Just not enough to protect her from her fate.

Besides Lanie, we split the rent with Diane W., who was already exploring the joy of putting crystal amphetamine in her arm; Alice, a pleasant plump stranger with a big dog; and some kids in the front – I had no idea who they were — Teens from LA who were here to drop acid in large quantities and wear striped bell-bottoms. Well, it takes all kinds. I think Way Out Willy and his dog Arthur lived there too.

Alice’s major weakness was she let her big black lab shit in the hallway or kitchen or wherever the dog happened to be and then let the dogshit lie on the floor for days until somebody, usually Melanie, cleaned it up. Taking a dog for a walk involved walking, which was often physically impossible.

Kvetch kvetch – what’s a little dogshit? “Peace, man. Don’t be so uptight.”

I think my trouble was I was getting older, and, at 24, I had seen a lot. I had decided to finish school and, with Revolver spilling sitar notes full volume down the hall, I was trying to write a paper on William Wordsworth or somebody. I burned Japanese incense all day and covered the doorway to my room with an Indian print bedspread. I had a daughter lived up the street with her mom. I was hoping to get back together with Linda if we could just stop fighting continuously and every minute.

I thought literary criticism was the world’s most stupid activity but a great introduction into the absurdity of life, – hey, just read the book! But I did tend to prefer the company of Will Wordsworth to the kids in the front.

So I wasn’t in, like a totally psychedelic place, dig?

Groan. But sometimes Haight Street was still cool. It wasn’t the Summer of Love yet and I still could run into cool people whenever I walked out. I suddenly remember talking to Phil Lesh like that one night, so excited about his new life with the Grateful Dead and just boiling over with enthusiasm. Or Chet Helms walking up the street handing out posters for whomever was appearing at the Avalon that weekend and we’d talk briefly about his split with Bill Graham or something.

Or like Janis Joplin. One day I was standing in line at the Hibernia Bank around the corner on Haight Street and there was Janis standing in line a couple of people ahead of me. She was carrying a bag of groceries. I had no impulse to run up saying “Oh Miss Joplin, I just love your ultimate forever take on Take it, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now Bay-bay.” Although I did, and do. I was cool. Cool people stayed cool. It was still just a normal day, even though Big Brother was already the hottest attraction at the Avalon because of her. We were still all just young people sorting out our lives and her way led to an exploding burnout nova death. Bah, humbug. I’d rather remember her standing in line at the bank with her little bag of groceries and all the future ahead.

I was cool but when I got back to the pad, I still said to Melanie, “Hey Mel, guess who was standing in line at the bank with me today – Janis Joplin!”

When I Was Twenty in San Francisco

Golden Gate Park.
August, 1962

There’s a guy going to interview me tonight for his book on San Francisco rock impresario Chet Helms. I think the main reason he wants to talk with me is that I’m still here with memory intact. And I knew Chet back at the beginning – 1962, 1963.

So I’ve been digging around in the backfiles of my mind today turning over events of forty years ago when I was twenty years old in North Beach, twenty-two years old in the Haight-Ashbury, married to Linda Lovely, baby on the way and in my arms.

I can walk down the hallways – look in every room. I can tell you what Allen Cohen was wearing the day Laurie Sarlat blew through the front door of 1736 Page Street into our lives – but I can’t tell anyone what any of it meant. Just a collection of images in my mind, some clear, some fuzzy.

Why do I bother? Because I gotta pay my debts, I guess. I wish I knew.

The writer will be calling from California at 7:30 tonight. I’ll let you know.