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Part 1 | Part 2
 I've mentioned HoneyBun and the opus Flapping here and in the first
chapter. Before we hit the road together, I think I should attempt to
illuminate any darkened nooks and crannies in your most estimable
cognizance, thereby banishing doubt, confusion from our narrative.
Your humble narrator, circa 1974
We must go back in time, my droogies, back to Berkeley of the sixties
and to the last great San Francisco era, the last true bohemia (as
opposed to rent-controlled
politically-correct permanent underclass, burners and bullshit we find
now—bizarro world) in the city, before BART
allowed the MoneyPeople™ to stream in and build the ugliest clumps of
highrises in the western world, before gay and women's liberation
polarized,
politicized, and froze all cultural discourse, before the bathhouses
turned the city into a plague-ridden petri dish, injecting suffering,
death, and prudery into the cool grey city of love.
A quick trip through a happier time and trifling tribulation and extemporaneous titillation.
Berkeley had been a great town in which to be a sprout. As the sixties
began, I was in seventh grade at Willard Junior High on Telegraph.
Trailing edge of the Beat cloud, vapor trails, berets, Genet, the
Mediteraneum Cafe on Telegraph, funky cigar and magazine shops ...
walking from Willard Junior High, humming Beatles, to watch Free Speech
demos at UC ... Dylan, Lennon, and Donovan channeled Kerouac,
Burroughs, Ginsberg to create the sixties. The Stones shored up the
dark side. We children, still hurting from the loss of our beautiful
player president, JFK, exhalted.
My best friend Tom and I lived in the Claremont area of Berkeley, so
named due to the proximity of the Claremont Hotel, where we, along with
a lot of the kids in the neighborhood, played often.
Aside from the pool and tennis club, the Claremont had secret passages
we knew by heart and, around the backside, five-story circular slides
which functioned as the hotel's fire escapes. We would creep up the
slides and slide down, over and over. Then the hotel security would
come out and go through the motions of yelling up the slide for us to
come down. We would freeze. It was so exciting, just like the Great
Escape. They would give up or sometimes call the police. If a police
car showed up, we would climb into the building itself and run out the
front door of the hotel. They never caught us.
When we were fourteen, Tom and I sat in the foyer outside the very
fancy Prime Rib Room Restaurant on the hotel's mezzanine. We had
encamped at a table twenty-five feet from the restaurant's entrance, in
sight of the Maitre d's station. Armed with a wallet, tied some very
fine fishing leader. We placed the wallet on the tasteful burgundy
carpet about eight feet from the door, slightly off the direct path to
the elevators.
A couple would exit, often in formal wear. Usually it was the man
spotting the wallet, and he would stop and bend down to pick it up.
Whoever was holding the line was in charge of jerking the wallet away
by maybe six inches. Every single time, these gentlemen would hop,
still bent over, after the wallet. There is an art to this and one has
to be acutely attuned to the old fart bending over to jerk the wallet
exactly the right distance and in the precise rhythm to keep him
hopping. After three or four hops, the light-bulb of recognition would
go on the geezer, you know, all of forty maybe, would stand up, look
over at us, howling like monkeys, and break into laughter himself, wife
joining in. The maitre d', an Australian, came over to the table and
told us how he and his friends would put horse manure into tea bags and
leave them on the street, where passersby would pick them up and take
them home, it being the time of the Great Depression.
We kept entertaining the intermittant revellers and ourselves for some time thusly.
Then, as one always must, a woman in her fifties, non-orgasmic for
thirty years, came out with her husband and it was she who spotted the
wallet. Both were dressed to the nines, maybe the elevens even,
although how she got the dress on with the Brobdingagian stick up her
ass, I'll never know. She bent over to seize the wallet. If I were a
betting man, I lay my last hundred down on the odds she was already
counting the money she was going pocket as she bent over. I jerked the
line, perfectly. Once, twice, thrice. She hopped after it like
everybody else.
Unlike the others, she did not laugh upon the realization that she was
the brunt of a joke. We howled. She screamed at us. We stopped
laughing. She stormed off with hubby in tow to complain to the manager
or the house detective. The maitre d' ran over and warned us we better
hightail it out for the night—the woman, whose inner-child girly-girl
we had apparently offended on some transcendent cosmic plane, wanted
our hides tanned, or at least flailed. We skidaddled, laughing again.
A couple years later, Tom and I were on our second or third acid trip
together. We were sixteen. It was early summer, 1967. We wandered the
neighborhood as we got higher and higher, in a goofy mood and getting
goofier. At some point we decided it was necessary to take a pee and
rather than just use some nearby bush or tree, we decided to use the
men's room right off the main entry way of the Claremont. It was about
9:30.
We walked into the hotel and down the wide darkened hallway to the
men's room, the world a swirl of moving color and after-flashes.
Laughing and giggling. We burst through the door to see two middle-aged
men standing motionless in the middle of the lavatory. They had
hillbilly hair, greased back duck's asses. Workmans's blue jeans rolled
up at the cuff. Plaid shirts. Work boots. Probably thought Merle
Haggard was God. They looked askance us stoned hippie seedlings. Raised
their fingers to their mouths to indicate silence. Serious. Perplexed,
slightly paranoid, although they didn't radiate evil, we stopped
laughing instantly. Sometimes it's hard to tell what's acid and what's
not, you know. Went to the urinals against the far wall. They stood,
silent sentries, as we commenced peeing, trying trying trying to not
laugh. Time passed in that way it does on acid. Finally Tom lost it and
burst out howling and ran out the door. I followed behind a moment
later, walking not running. I mouthed "WHY?" to the two men, who had
not moved.
They solemnly and silently pointed into an open toilet stall Tom and I
had not noticed on arrival. I looked. There within paisley starbursts
that orbited through my vision, as the walls danced to cosmic sound
pulsating down through rainbow rabbit holes, a obviously hard-working
or hard-drinking man sat on the throne, balding head between knees,
arms drooping to floor, pants and boxers bagging around ankles,
absolutely out to the world.
I burst out laughing and ran out the door in to the cool Berkeley night to tell my friend.
And that, my droogies, was my Berkeley of the sixties, which prepared
your humble narrator for the the decade that really bent the twig and
warped the sprout.
Of course, I am leaving out the assassinations and the riots and the
war and the rise of Nixon and the Lizard People and the coming of the
great darkness and how the world was Revolution No. 9, the acid
collapse of the tried and true order of things, and John and Paul
having to suffer a drunken Tallulah Bankhead on the Johnny Carson show
without Johnny there, but all that was before your humble narrator had
discovered the almost infinite healing powers of booze.
The s-s-s-seventies ...
The Cockettes, emblematic of the era.
Wild wild wild burst beauty lust and promise forth as tattered
fragments of hippiedom sailed out of San Francisco on cool winds. The
revolution moved to Berkeley, along with the lesbians. Beautiful
Berkeley buried under beansprouts. Cowtown now.
Berkeley, my home, wasn't so much fun anymore. I had discovered saloons in North Beach.
Chronicle columnist Charles McCabe wrote a piece wherein he stated that
Berkeley had more therapists and less saloons per capita than any other
city in the country, drawing obvious conclusions from this statistic.
This did not escape my notice. To this day, I have no idea where he got
his numbers, but my intuition tells me his thesis was grounded in truth.
I moved to San Francisco, where the party was—lower Nob Hill, upper
Tenderloin, your call. Radical drag and disco, glam and punk, and much
expanded and contracted, simultaneously, thanks to cocaine, quaaludes,
and the Pill. In my late teens and early twenties, I practiced guitar
four to eight hours a day. I wrote music. I wrote the beginnings to
numerous stories. Music, the only thing that really mattered to me,
other than booze, drugs, and girls, was the first thing to go as decade
progressed: when partying like David Bowie, one is David Bowie.
Being Drunk as big as the sky back then, as blue, as beautiful.
Wild club nights, all blurry now.
Some incidents shine through the fog like pinpoint spots, diamond
bright, crystalline moments that comprise my tattered, lovely
remembrance of the decade.
Iggy Pop on the Raw Power tour at some club on Columbus in North Beach,
the usual early seventies freak crowd paying homage to the anointed, by
Ziggy, prince of glam punk. Iggy in red bikini underpants, knee-high
black boots, silver hair, wailing
—Gimme danger, little stranger, and I'll heal your disease ...
diving into the crowd, writhing on the dance floor, mike in hand, as we
enthralled circled him. A drag queen with a beard knelt down beside
him, pulled down his underpants and sucking him right there on the
floor. Iggy yelling into the mike
—I'm getting head and it feels great!!
Standing outside a club on upper Grant. At the curb in full Bowie drag,
platforms, satin pants, make-up. A stunning blond came out of the club,
spotted me through the throng. Walked across the sidewalk to me, said
—You're beautiful.
Put her arms around me, kissed me.
I said
—Take me home.
—I can't. she said softly.
She left soon thereafter. These are things you never forget. .
Another Friday night, we, my gorgeous friends Ellen, with whom I was
deeply in love, unrequited, I'm afraid, and Diane, my coke dealer on
whom I had a mere all-consuming crush, were imbibing numerous zombies
on Union Street. And we had come down to North Beach for more. Diane
parked her car right by a fire hydrant at Columbus and Broadway, right
in front of El Cid underneath the blinking neon nipple of the
incandescent Carol Doda marquee. She never got tickets.
Your humble narrator today.
We drank at the Savoy for a while, I believe. The exact where doesn't
matter: I would discover in the years to come that there is only One
Bar: One Bar spanning the globe, a million different rooms all beckoning
and welcoming the thirsty. Thirst was my co-pilot.
As we proceeded back down Upper Grant, I watched, amazed and impressed,
these two lovelies, as one, in lockstep fashion, without a word, kick a
garbage can off the sidewalk into the street. The garbage can looked so
horrorshow, o my droogies, rolling and clattering out into the
yellowish glow of the streetlights—an eloquent, wordless, and poetic
political statement and I instantly determined to so announce my own
stand against the forces of darkness.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, my brothers.
I picked my target in a rum-fueled delerium from thirty feet. I charged
through a sidewalk full of pedestrians, wearing blue satin pants,
see-through shirt, beige platform boots with heels a good 3.5 inches
high. I kicked the concrete tree-planter as hard as I could, and the
shooting pain from impact of my foot with the planter brought me
instantly out of the blackout in which I did not know I had been
ensconced. I don’t believe I so much as dislodged a leaf on the tree in
the planter.
So much for a blow against the Man’s creeping hegemony.
Time for a drink.
I limped for weeks.
Boots wrecked.
I had loved them.
Part 4
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