Alfredo Valentino

Alfredo Valentino

          At one of the parties at the stone houses I got my first of not many tastes of LSD. It was late autumn, the season of the Santa Anna winds, and the dry, clean, sweet-smelling evening desert breezes blowing in from the East, tinkling the stained-glass wind-chimes scattered about the property, made magic for my magic-vulnerable senses. The first Pink Floyd album, then just out, played “Interstellar Overdrive” over and over from somewhere nearby. A woman joined me on my interstellar adventure around the stone houses. She was an old-time beatnik, out from LA, about twice my age, on her umpteenth acid trip. She told me the exact number, which I thought was rather pretentious; I never did acid often myself over the next few years, but I didn’t count the times, either. She told her friends who’d driven her out from Silverlake to take off without her, and I drove her home early the next afternoon.

          The people she’d come out to Montclair with were Alfredo and Neri Valentino, long-time friends of the Osbornes’ from the beatnik days. A few weeks later the Osbornes utilised my VW bus to take them and their entourage to a party at Casa Valentino in East Hollywood/Silverlake. It was a cool, beatnik party in a cool, beatnik house. I spent much of the evening in the back garden singing oldies with a girl named Andrea — who turned out to be the previous year’s Playmate of the Year — until her date found us.

          There were more parties at the Valentinos’ place, and parties at other places where I’d run into them, and I gradually grew into friendship with them. Alfredo and I were fairly close for the next three or four years.

          Alfredo’s fifteen years older than I am. He was a man of many enterprises. He was a hairdresser with good Hollywood connections (Andrea, the Playmate of the Year, was one of his clients). He was a sometimes actor. He was an artists’ model. He was a landscaper/gardener. All sorts of things he could do under the influence of marijuana and for which he could be paid in good ole non-reportable cash. He was a lean and elegant Chicano, about my height, with a pointy goatee. He had an easy-going, laid-back way about him, but seemed always to be working at some needed job or another.

          Neri (pronounced Neddi), was a light-skinned African-American woman from Seattle. She pretty much had her hands full with six kids, and one soon to follow — Denise, Christina, Miles, Diego, Nicole, and Dominga, and then Alegra; I still remember each face and personality clearly — not to mention a full, active social life. She was sharp, intelligent, and very hip.

          When I moved into L.A. from Claremont I originally relied on Alfredo and Neri to put me into the scene. Neri introduced me to one or two of her girlfriends. One of these girlfriends took me off for an amazing and puzzling one-night stand soon after I arrived. Why did she pick me out from all the people at the Valentinos’ party the week before, when I hadn’t remembered meeting her? Why did she drive me for such a long distance through the San Fernando Valley before going back over the Hollywood Hills to see Alfred King play the Troubadour? Why did she dismiss me the next morning without an explanation? Neri didn’t know, either, or wouldn’t tell me.

Another of Neri’s girlfriends moved into the little ‘efficiency’ under the stairs of the funky old house on the Hollywood Freeway in Echo Park where I lived on the second floor. This one was a jumpy old-time white beatnik who’d apparently been a friend of Lenny Bruce’s. She was bone-skinny and apparently strung out, and worked intermittently as a manicurist. Her moods shifted, but in general she disapproved of me.

          A few months after I shifted in the Valentino family moved to a ramshackle old mansion just a block or so off Sunset on the edge of where Echo Park and Silverlake segue into each other. They had lots of neat parties attended by lots of neat people there. If I could I’d try to get to Alfredo’s by late afternoon if he’d told me they’d be entertaining. There was always work to do in the yard or garden or house, or in the kitchen, or running errands.

          The party food was generally a mixture of ethnic and health food. Alfredo made huge and varied salads.

          Most of the people who came to the Valentinos’ arrived fairly late. There were Hollywood people. There were people who intrigued Alfredo’s “interest in the occult”, as he put it. Of course there were artists. There were friends of the kids. Lots of them. There were exotic women. There were people from the health-food fraternity — Gypsy Boots, TV’s “Clown Prince of Health”, was one of Alfredo’s close friends.

          There were jazz people, and usually a jazz jam would develop. Generally someone would arrive some time in the evening with a drum kit. Later, when Denise Valentino developed a relationship with Herbie Hancock’s cousin, Chop — himself a sax player — Herbie would show up from time to time and sit down at the piano.

          In one corner of the big front room Alfredo kept a large and growing piece of junk sculpture. It was basically just a stack of interesting-looking, mostly metal junk piled onto an old wooden barrel. Whenever he would come across a nice piece of junk he’d find a place for it on the sculpture. He invited friends to do the same.

          I met one of Alfredo’s brothers, who was named Ricardo. He worked as a limousine chauffeur and had nifty tales to tell out of school about his famous passengers. I remember in particular those about a cute-little-boy TV star who liked cocaine and hookers with him there in the back of the limo. Ricardo was the only person I ever heard call Alfredo Freddy.

          In late 1969 or early 1970, when I was living in a tiny guest house — what we in New Zealand call a granny flat — in the Wilshire District, I got a phone call from another close friend of the Valentinos telling me that Neri had died.

          With all those kids. And little Alegra still a baby.

          Alfredo took it all with what seemed to me to be serenity, choosing to take a spiritual approach to the situation. He shined on. The older kids took care of the younger ones, friends helped, and things continued.

          He soon became attached to a new, somewhat part-time girlfriend named Helen. Helen was noticeably older than he was, and was as far as I ever noticed an extremely nice person. She was a semi-amateur artist with apparently a sufficient amount of money: she lived in a converted church in Santa Monica and had a nice vacation place out in the Mojave Desert at a place called Desert Hot Springs.

          Alfredo was really in his element in Desert Hot Springs, presiding over the nightly campfire out behind the house, wrapped in a thick woollen Mexican sweater against the chill of the starry desert night, surrounded by family and friends, maybe with a bit of mescaline tickling his veins, his dog (a German Shepherd named Lobo) doing dog stuff loyally by his side.

          From time to time after Neri died, during periods when I didn’t have a regular job, Alfredo would find work for me to do with him, sometimes for Helen, sometimes for other people — cleaning up people’s yards, moving heavy objects with my back and my van, modelling for art classes. It was always mellow, and the company and the weed were always good.

          Alfredo was about the last person I saw in LA before I left to do a roadie job in the Southeast in 1972. He came to see me off from the dingy basement flat I’d been living in that year. I saw him again when I made a three-day sentimental journey to L.A. some seven or eight years later. He had moved to another house a bit deeper into Silverlake, but it was definitely an Alfredo house. Most of the kids were grown and living off on their own by then.

          I tracked him down again around the turn of the century and we had a bit of a chat over the phone. He was about 70, living with one of his daughters and her family. He was about to “embark on a new phase” of his life, he told me, and leave LA at last. Most of his kids were living in the Pacific Northwest, and he said he thought he’d go and see what that part of the world has to offer.