Phil Blaine
(Photo by Paul Goettlich)
In my Junior year at GW I took an elective in poetry-writing, and the good folks on the creative-writing floor of the English Department’s converted stone townhouse steered and recommended me into applying to go to this summer thing called the Aspen Writers’ Workshop – something dreamed up to help keep things ticking over in Aspen when it wasn’t ski season. There was a music thing going on there, too, and other artsy-fartsy stuff. I went for the second half of the summer. I made one close and enduring friend when I was in Aspen, named Phillip T Blaine.
Phil was from
Somerville, Massachusetts, a working-class suburb in the Boston metro, just
upriver from Cambridge, the home of Harvard and MIT. He’d just got out of the
Air Force. He’d been an aerial photographer in Vietnam and hadn’t liked it, so
he’d jacked up a medical discharge for himself, he told me, on the grounds of
dermatological disability. He explained that his beard hairs were so wiry and
curly that they grew back into his face if he didn’t shave twice a day, and
after one mission he’d come back with his beard growing into his face and had
refused to shave, as it would have damaged his skin, and they went for it, or
so he said.
Still, the first thing he said to me when we met was, “Fuck
you, Airman!”
He was an odd-looking
duck. Ethnically, he said, he was, “Part Scot, part Irish, part Choctaw, part
Apache, part Ethiopian, and part Sudanese.” At this point he would pause, and
then say, “That’s right: a nigger.” He was medium height, but burly. Green
eyes. Somewhat apricot-coloured skin. That super-kinky beard, which was a
fairly light brown. Chubby cheeks and a devilish smile. I could easily picture
him in his pre-war motorcycle-bandit colours, the disgusting funkiness of which
he described to me in loving detail.
Phil wasn’t one of us
workshop attendees. He was just passin’ through. He did get real turned on by
contact with the Writers’ Workshop and wrote a piece of hard-boiled-dick
fiction that was certainly more commercial (because more readable) than
anything I’d ever done. He was an enthusiastic and somewhat messy cook, and
taught me an incredibly cholesterol-rich pasta recipe with cream cheese,
cottage cheese, and sour cream that he called, for some reason, “kosher
spaghetti”.
We worked up a comedy
routine involving mostly race humour, with me playing the black guy and Phil
the white guy, with some phoney pro-wrestling moves thrown in. We hung out
together quite a bit, and even had an afternoon of tag-team sex with a student
soprano from Aspen’s summer music school. I couldn’t believe it. We were in her
apartment, telling jokes and generally putting on our comedy routine, and then
Phil said, “Let’s throw fingers to see who fucks who first,” and the soprano
said, “Sure!” It never would have occurred to me to make that proposal, or to
expect to hear that response. We ended up at my room in the Writers’ Workshop’s
apartments, taking turns.
Phil liked Bo Diddley, the Fugs, and loud motors.
Fortunately, neither one of us had a car in Aspen, although we did borrow
somebody’s VW microbus to drive through the night to Denver for me to catch the
plane back East to start a new school year. The strange young woman he’d been
sleeping with in a skiers’ dorm flew with me as far as O’Hare, but that’s an
indiscreet Letter-to-Penthouse story.
The following winter
I took a train up to Boston to carouse with him for a weekend. He was living in
an apartment on the Cambridge-Somerville town line. Right on the line. His
front room was in Somerville and his bedroom was in Cambridge. He had a job in
the main Harvard library, but was mostly into just living la vie boheme. Amongst other activities during my visit, he and a
full-figured young woman and I went through the snow to an Italian restaurant
where we ate Tom Jones-style (the
movie, not the singer) before going back to his apartment for yet another
episode of contrapuntal sex. Phil seemed to like that sort of thing.
I stayed with Phil in
Somerville during my Boston-area stopover after being graduated from GW. He was
still working, and staying stoned, and having a good time. I remember in
particular how crisp and clean the sound on his new stereo was.
Later, in the Autumn
of 1971, when I was staying in rural Oxford, Pennsylvania, Phil took the train
down from Boston. He took over the kitchen and made a quiche lorraine (which he
called, leeringly, “an open-faced French tart”). The woman with whom I was
staying, Pam, took a dim view of the mess he left in her kitchen. His first
evening there he made a heavy move on a friend Pam’s, in an apparent, but
unsuccessful, attempt to get contrapuntal yet one more time. In general, he
made Pam drop lots of hints about when he’d be leaving. I was sorry to see him
go when he did go a few days later, though, and I haven’t seen him since. We
lost touch and I haven’t been able to find him on the internet.
Jud the Prophet
Sometime during the
mid-60s I read an article in a short-lived magazine called Fact: about Kerista, which it called “the world’s first hipster
religion”. Kerista had been instigated in New York by a man named John Presmont
who had changed his name to Jud the Prophet. They were, at the time of the
article, endeavouring to set up a commune in Belize, then called British
Honduras.
When I cruised
through San Francisco during the Summer of Love I somehow ran into the
Keristans. Somebody introduced me. There weren’t many of them, and I couldn’t
tell if they were serious or if they were basically satirical. It seemed
obvious to me that all that religious stuff was total bullshit, but the
Keristans went through the motions with only the occasional smirk. The way I
saw it, people might want to make smoking dope and engaging in free sex the
basis for a way of life, but why organise it and give it a name?
Somebody took me to
Jud the Prophet’s flat to meet him. He turned out to be a genial, overweight,
middle-aged guy with long grey hair, a beard, and a drawling baritone voice.
Graciously, he rolled up a large number of skinny East Coast style reefers and
began to talk. Most of what he said sounded a bit pompous, but what the hell,
it was his weed. When someone knocked at the door he quickly covered the
reefers on the tabletop with a magazine.
Jud’s wife, who went
by the name Joy, was a jolly, zoftig
African-American woman, considerably younger than Jud. She seemed to be happy
to be along for the ride and not all that impressed by Jud’s spiritual
grandeur. When he said, “While I was meditating,” Joy mouthed the words, “He
means taking a nap.” And so on. Jud seemed to take great delight in recounting
recent wife-swapping adventures to me in an unemotional hipster’s drawl.
I picked up a
relatively buxom speedfreak on Haight Street that night and had sex with her in
a concrete drainage culvert off a freeway offramp just on the other side of the
Golden Gate Bridge, with her chanting “I love God” over and over again. She
said she knew the Keristans, so the next day I took her to see generous Jud,
who explained at length what her chanting “I love God” over and over again in
those circumstances signified. It sounded like bullshit to me. The next day I
left her with a couple of other Keristans she knew and headed north.
There’s plenty of
information on the internet about what the Keristans got up to later: they
finally got organised for real in the early 70s, got their numbers up to about
30, started up a successful business in the computer industry, and stayed
together until 1991.
Jud’s dead by now, of
course.
No comments:
Post a Comment