Jerry Kleiner & Richard Basham

Jerry Kleiner

          During the summer of 1965 I started hanging out with a guy named Jerry Kleiner, who I’d met mostly from just Being Around, moving in the same general scene.

          Kleiner was funny and droll and given to odd interests, such as late-50s Connecticut black a cappella groups and playing the commodities futures market. He had long blonde hair, was a philosophy major, had a motorcycle, and was much more successful with girls than I was. There was one girl in particular who caught my fancy, but became his girlfriend, a brainy Scandinavian type from California with long, straight blonde hair named Karen. He was also a pot-smoker. He lived in a fairly large apartment in a roach-infested old building on G Street, where I started to hang out a bit. Both his parents were psychiatrists from somewhere around Woodstock, New York. It amused him that they thought he was going through a phase.

          We used to go for late lunch once a week or so at a French restaurant called Bonat’s, me riding behind him on his Yamaha. There was always a special on Saturdays on the full t-bone steak meal, which included a wonderful mushroom sauce, for those ordering after 2 pm. Real cheap. Kleiner had been doing it for a while, and had a friendly relationship with the waiter who was always on duty then, an old African-American man who preached on Sundays and who Kleiner called “Reverend” and referred to as “the Rev.” The Rev doted on us paternally. We were his special customers. He called us “my students”.

          Kleiner went out to San Francisco during the Summer of 1966 to check out the scene. He came back to school in September with stories and insights about what the dope-and-music scene people in the burgeoning dance-hall culture were up to, and what they were thinking. He was particularly scathing about Timothy Leary and the Oh, wow! school of mindless hippies, a point of view I shared despite not having his eyewitness experience. It seemed to us that all that crowd was doing was alienating a wider public whom we preferred would ignore us: “bringing the heat down,” as he put it. The Leary trip was not for cynics.

Soon after school started that year, Kleiner and Karen, a friend of his named Harry Wilker, and Harry’s girlfriend Donna (who was a champion target-shooter), and my girlfriend Pessie and I started getting together one weekend evening a week at the somewhat more standard, but still funky, apartment he’d moved into. We got hard-to-stand-up stoned, sometimes do things like make little films of inanimate objects with Kleiner’s 8mm camera, eat unusual flavours of ice cream and other munchies, and listen to Head Music, taking turns on the headphones. Often, late in the evening, when we were all just about too stoned to move, Kleiner would get up and roll one more joint, steadying his hands on the top of the refrigerator. The rest of us had a little song: “Oh, Christ, Kleiner’s at it again!”

          I must say that listening to the Mothers’ Freak Out! album under these conditions was one of the more powerful aesthetic experiences of my life up to that point.

          In late 1966 or early 1967 Kleiner moved into a different and more squalid apartment, broke up with Karen, and took up with a young soon-to-be-divorcée named Christina. They started taking pornographic pictures of themselves. He made a good deal of money in cotton futures, and they got a dog, of all creatures to keep in a place like that, which they named Cotton. Then he lost some money on pork bellies, although he was relieved when he unloaded them and wasn’t stuck with boxcar loads of the actual, tangible hog carcasses himself.

          He went off to do graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin. I stopped by to see him a couple of times while en route driving between Coasts. We got smashed together. Somewhere along the line he left graduate school and went into the printing business.

          In March, 1976 I got married for the second time. The wedding was in San Antonio, and Kleiner, who was still living in Austin, drove down for the event. Only he got there a little late. His passion at that time had become snakes, and he hadn’t been able to resist stopping at the roadside-attraction snake farms off Interstate 35 outside of New Braunfels. He brought a snakeskin garter — not from a snake killed for that purpose; Kleiner loved snakes — as a wedding present.

          After the wedding I never saw him again, we lost touch with each other, and I had no luck finding him on the internet. Then, in November 2004, he found me via the internet. He wrote me:

          “Caught in the Belly of the Beast, just like the old days. Only more dangerous.

          “Living in Middletown, when's the last time we talked? left Texas in '82 to take care of my mom, (at first it was gonna be for a week, then 2) she died in '01, we're still here. (My wife, Barbara, she moved up from Texas, we got married in '84).

          “Barbara has old friends in New Zealand, we thought of going but since the rebirth of the ‘ugly American’ buying up huge tracks of exclusive choice NZ real estate, I don't think American émigrés are quite as welcome ...

          “I get up in the afternoon, like always ...

          “Man, you got out while the getting was good. There's not a long list of places to go. Barbara grew up in Venezuela and lived out of the country for years (Indonesia, Singapore, Libya, England, Mexico, etc). Her dad was with Mobil Oil. So she'd be comfortable lots of places. Me, I had years of French and no foreign language ability, and only ever been to Canada, which is too cold for her. Hell, NY is too cold for her. I'm just so parochial, but maybe it's time ...

          “I'm still in printing, sort of. I work at the local newspaper doing halftones and separations and occasionally I take some pictures. I took about a 50% pay drop from commercial printing 11 years ago because I had to be closer to home as my mom got worse. We're still trying to climb out of debt. My son, Justin, is in NYC, just got married in March. We were out of touch for about 8 years, (he was out of touch) still don't know why, don't think he does either, really, but it doesn't matter. We've always been available and clueless, but my mom never understood, they had been so close, she always just said ‘as long as he's happy.’ His wife is Japanese, took her a while to get back in the US after they got married, but I'm not sure they wont end up living in Japan.”

          I haven’t been able to contact him via facebook, but it seems as if he got himself elected as an alderman on the Middletown City Council and has been doing his bit to help people and his community and to oppose the local right wing.

Richard Basham

          In early 1966 I fell in with a guy named Dick Basham. He started showing up at my History of Latin America class about midway through the semester, usually about midway through the class, munching on a candy bar. Strung out on junk. But he got over it. That and his recent divorce.

          Basham was from Georgia, which is where his parents moved when his father got blacklisted from working in Hollywood during the McCarthy shit back in the early fifties. And, as he told it, his parents were indeed atheist leftist Jews. He was an anthropology major, and through carousing with him I got to know some people in the Anthropology Department, and they were all cool.

          He had already done some cultural-anthropology fieldwork, with Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. I remember him telling me how odd it was for him, coming from Georgia, to hear the rednecks in Washington state refer to the local tribe of their area’s original inhabitants as “niggers”.

          Basham was physically somewhat like me, only more so — a bit bigger, his beard a bit bushier, definitely more openly and cheerfully political. Maybe not louder. We both felt pot-smoking should be discreet, and usually toked up in the bathroom to be far from the front door and so we could dispose of the evidence quickly. We liked Donovan’s dope songs and the Byrds and Patrick Sky’s two albums that were out at the time.

          He had interesting friends. One of them, Patrick Gallagher, was the head of the Anthropology at GW. Patrick wasn’t that old at the time — maybe forty, give or take five years. He was tall and lean and had a red beard. He was enormously popular as a lecturer. I only saw him in action once, when he was covering for my anthropology teacher when he was sick one week. Patrick was amazing, bursting with energy. Leaping up onto a desk and mimicking a Great Ape, and so forth.

          On the day of the first big DC Human Be-in in Rock Creek Park, which was about a half-block from my apartment, Patrick came by to have some weed in late afternoon. Some of my friends were already there. I forget how Patrick knew where to go, but I felt honoured.

          Patrick’s problem was that his freshman course, Man, Culture, & Society, was so popular that he had to teach it in two groups of, if I remember correctly, about 500 each. Of course, he had graduate assistants to grade the tests and so on, but he read and graded all the final exams himself. Until the year after I left GW, or so I was told, by Basham and by my then sort-ex-girlfriend, with whom he’d had an affair — when at the end of the year he marked half of the final exams A, the other half F, and then checked into a mental institution for some assistance in regaining his composure. I don’t know if this is accurate, but it’s what they told me.

          After graduating from GW, I drove around the country for a couple of months before starting grad school in southern California. This was the Summer of Love, so I stopped off in San Francisco, where I ran into Basham. He was on his way to graduate school in anthropology at Berkeley. We went to the Fillmore and the Avalon — the famous hippie ballrooms. I remember falling asleep while Cream was playing, and waking up to Mike Bloomfield’s American Flag. What does that say? Later, on Haight Street, some stranger came up to us and asked, “How does it feel to be beatniks in the land of the hippies?” I guess it showed.

          I went up to Berkeley to visit once or twice while I was at grad school in Claremont — which wasn’t that long a time — and then gradually we fell out of contact. I knew he’d gone to Montreal to do field work studying the culture of urban French-Canadians.

In 2001, I ran a Google search on him and discovered that he was Head of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. ’Strahlia, maite! He also seemed to be much-quoted in the Sydney press as an expert on Triads and Asian crime in general. I emailed him and he filled me in on events since 1968.

          An email he sent back said, in part:

          In outline, after last seeing you, I did fieldwork in Quebec for my Ph.D. on the French-English problem, took a one year Asst. Prof. at SUNY, Stony Brook, and wrote it up. Then I went to U of Colorado, Boulder, for a year, went off to teach in Malaysia (73-74) at the Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, got interested in Thailand and started studying Thai (I've done fieldwork there ever since, mostly living in Bangkok and Chiang Mai), went back to Boulder and taught for three years, before taking a job a the University of Sydney in January '78. I've been here since, with many long periods in Thailand for fieldwork, and in the U.S. on sabbatical (Berkeley, Atlanta, D.C., and, most recently, 1 1/2 years in San Francisco).

          My wife's Thai. We've been together for 27 years and have a 21 year-old daughter who's at Berkeley. Needless to say, there is much more to tell, but I'll flesh that out later.
          Teaching is still ok. Most of what I teach has to do with Southeast Asia; most of what I do has to do with crime, Asian and otherwise. Since I've come back from sabbatical at the end of January, I've gotten stuck back into policing and crime in a big way, although these days I tend to run more with dissident cops (I was once on our version of the Police Board, if you can believe that). If you saw the guys I hang out with, you'd see the journey isn't as far as it might seem.
          The past few days, I've gotten up at 5:30 am to do 7 am media interviews, so I'm really beginning to run down. For the past 30+ years I've been working out regularly, these days — for the past 10 years — I swim 1½ kms 4-5X/ week and work out at the gym, as well, so I'm reasonably fit. The endorphins are really beginning to run out from today's swim, so I'm going home for a beer, a quick meal and an early crash.

          Over the following year, according to the Sydney Morning Herald and other sources available over the internet, Basham was busy. He “helped run a campaign that toppled a police commissioner.”

          “Dr Richard Basham,” according to the Herald, “is not your average academic. The University of Sydney anthropologist is neck deep in the murky politics of the NSW police, embroiled in an endless, behind-the-scenes fight between what he sees as the forces of good and evil. He knows people, too, and he's got influence.”

          The article talks about his nearly 30 years of studying Asian crime, his “ten years of consultancy work with the NSW police and Australian Federal Police, including psychological profiling during the backpacker murders investigation,” and the lectures about Asian crime he delivers “to members of the AFP and to police overseas.”

          They quote him as saying, “‘I really wish the Government would explain to the public ... why the police commissioner was dismissed. I feel really foolish because I have made promises not to break confidence with conversations I've had, say, with the Police Minister. But ... they have an obligation to step forward and explain why ... and I'm beginning to get a little impatient.’

          “Most academics,” the Herald continued, “could expect to be ignored when using such ominous language. Not Basham. With broadcaster Alan Jones” (the “7 am media interviews” he emailed me about) “and former and departing police officers Jeff Schuberg and Tim Priest, Basham was in the engine-room of a triumphant public campaign last year to put the heat on Ryan and the then police minister, Paul Whelan.”

          The article says that Basham and one of his police allies are “finishing a book ... on their whole campaign”, and that, “For a seemingly mild-mannered man, Basham has a capacity for personal vilification of public figures that has left academic and criminological colleagues dazed.”

          He has publicly expressed “strong views on a broad spread of policing matters, from gangs to bureaucratic structures, from corruption to crime statistics.”

          So of course there are those who don’t dig his act, including the head of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, a University of NSW law professor, and “crime academics”, such as the deputy director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Sydney. He was even attacked in a “radical independent” Australian website.

          He seems to be more or less retired now and living in a tiny Outback town in the far Northwest part of New South Wales, and not on facebook.