Carl Johnston & Louis Parra

Carl Johnston

          A Trailways bus deposited me in San Antonio in July, 1974. It was hellishly hot everywhere that wasn’t air conditioned. I didn’t have a car. I took a city bus from near my furnished room off St Mary’s Street out to the On Stage office just off the Loop 410 beltway.

          The owner of On Stage was an extremely likeable young blonde hustler named Carl Johnston, from the local upper-middle class. He had bushy blonde eyebrows and a blonde wife and two blonde children.

          He’d been selling outdoor advertising for a big corporation, making, he said, an easy $50,000 a year doing basically jack shit (that’s almost $250,000 in 2016 dollars adjusted for inflation). And I thought, Why the fuck haven’t I ever fallen into a deal like that? But he’d had some contact with Star Attractions and had become acquainted with John Kuehne whilst buying ads at the newspaper. And he’d been bitten by the show-biz bug. So good-bye, billboards; hello show-biz.

          Anyway, On Stage wasn’t happening, and Carl was losing a bundle. He put up a good, cheerful, optimistic front, but it was soon clear to me that the reality wasn’t there. He put me on the phone to try to sell some acts to clubs in the Southeast. One of them was Rufus Thomas. The Funky Chicken, however, had been off the charts for a while, and so on, and nobody was buying. By the time I showed up, On Stage only had a few weeks to go.

          A year or so later, Carl decided to go about trying to save his big suburban house and blonde family by selling — with the assistance of his blonde wife Joanne and a dark-haired associate named Margie — potted house plants on the party plan. Suburban plant parties. I tried to picture it then and I couldn’t. I try to picture it now and I can’t. He called his operation The Plant People. He asked me to help with some of their promotions. “The Plant People Are Coming!” Heavy stuff, eh?

          After a fairly short while it became apparent that this wasn’t $50,000 per annum stuff, and he decided to open a shop, also to be called The Plant People. He got in with some other semi-artsy Upper-Middle-Class entrepreneurs and started developing a several-cutesy-shoppe complex in an old house way out San Pedro, in what was then the country. The place, now in mid-suburbia, has since been bulldozed as part of a road-widening project. They called it Country Concepts. Carl did most of the carpentry work on the conversion of the place. He seemed happy whilst hammering away in the sun.

          For the grand opening Carl envisaged something rather ambitious. He set about organising a small-scale hippie craft fair, with entertainment and so on. Pony rides for the kids. He had me help out a bit. I did a radio ad for him, but the would-be mainstream radio station wouldn’t run it, preferring instead to produce a dj-over-country-banjo bore-ass. No comedy allowed.

          The Cosmic Apple was there. The Cosmic Apple sold fresh fruit out of a bathtub at concerts and craft fairs and similar outdoor entertainments. The wife of the principal fruiterer sold home-made lemonade. I don’t remember seeing her at Carl’s extravaganza, and she doesn’t remember seeing me, but she was there, and so was I. She and I met again nine years later and got married and had kids.

          Country Concepts didn’t last out the year. The next move involved The Plant People moving into a flashy new retail location south of Alamo Heights along with a half-dozen or so other upmarket shoppes. For this purpose Carl took the business upmarket, with tall exotics and so forth. I went over to visit him there from time to time, but I didn’t feel particularly comfortable in that setting. I remember Carl asking me what “promotions” I was involved in, but all I was after then was survival. Then other concerns intervened. We lost touch. The Plant People disappeared from that location. I heard that Carl was selling off his inventory on the party plan.

          Four or five years later I ran into Joanne Johnston in an Italian restaurant. She introduced me to her new man. She and Carl had broken up. Carl was living in the Hill Country, building decks for people.

Louis Parra

          A week or two after Helena took Naomi back with her to New Orleans in July 1974, I discovered that around the corner from my garage apartment, and down Hildebrand Avenue a long half-block, was a hippie leather-crafts and headshop called Truckers General Store. Being a neighbour, I dropped in from time to time, and I got to know some of the heads that worked there, particularly the owner, Louis Parra.

          Louie was a shortish, nattily-dressed (in a hippie sort of way), relatively anglicised Chicano with thick glasses and longish, almost kinky black hair. I really admired the way he could wear flowered or paisley cowboy shirts and pull it off. I knew that I never could. He had a whiney nasal voice and a habit of pushing his glasses back up his nose with his forefinger. Young women tended to find him very attractive.

          He was about my age, I guess, and cool enough. He played the piano and knew everybody at the hipper live-music clubs. He was a concretely creative dude. He also knew where to get all kinds of dope, and all that. We got to know each other a bit. He started teaching me leather craft, and by November I was working there on and off. It was a good place to meet people.

          By February or March 1975 I borrowed $1500 from my mother and Howard and bought into Truckers as a minority partner. Fuck being a waiter and having to suck up to rich people in expensive restaurants. Fuck rich people and fuck expensive restaurants.

          Louie, like most proprietors of small businesses, tended to sail pretty close to the wind financially, taking draws as needed against an ocean of debt, and my infusion of capital helped revive the place.

          Truckers taught me a large amount about various drug paraphernalia (“Sold as novelties only. Not intended for use with any illegal substance.”), cheap hippie jewellery, fancy belt-buckles, and brands of incense. Truckers also carried magazines (High Times), how-to books (growing your own, and such), and underground comix. Mr Natural forever!

          I moved into the spare bedroom at the house Louie was buying in a nice, working-class neighbourhood off Blanco Road north of Hildebrand but well inside Loop 410. He had a cool record collection and had the money to buy hip new releases. I hadn’t bought music for a while, and anything recent I had wasn’t anything that had made the mainstream. I even first heard Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe (’) when Louie played it for me.

          Louie and I worked together, often side by side, for more than a year. I spent most of my days and evenings at Truckers, waiting on people and doing leather craft. I could never escape the idea that if I’d been in India I’d’ve been so unclean as to be beneath the untouchables, working all day with cowhide.

          Controlled substances were, of course, integral to the scene at Truckers. I remember in particular one guy in a dusty old Dodge who stopped off on his way back to New York from a vacation in Arizona. He’d filled the trunk of his full-sized sedan with peyote buttons he’d picked himself. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of those suckers in there. And would we accept some in trade for some merchandise? Louie and I looked at each other. We would.

          Back before Xmas 1974 Louie had, in exchange for some advertising time, made a shitload of leather key fobs with the call letters of radio stations KMAC & KISS on them. At that time KMAC/KISS was a funky little operation that broadcast an odd playlist that was moving toward what would become alternative, and eventually would become hard rock/heavy metal. They broadcast Spurs games live back before the Spurs joined the NBA.

          Anyway, Louie thought it’d be a good idea if I would make the commercials Truckers had coming, me being the class clown and all, so I wrote up a couple that I thought’d be funny and went down to their studios in an old art deco apartment building facing a park at the north edge of downtown. And I did them, using extreme character voices, and they sounded okay, and people came into the shop talking about them.

          Louie and I worked out a wholesale price list and made up a more or less complete line of sample leather belts, bags, hats, sun visors, key fobs, and so on. I stowed my gear at Truckers, loaded the samples and Naomi into my 1959 Karmann-Ghia, and headed for the coast. I found it fairly easy to take orders from surf shops and craft shops and souvenir shops and so on in Rockport and Port Aransas and Corpus Christi. I came back to help Louie and the craftspeople he had helping us from time to time fill the orders. It took a little longer than I had hoped, but we got them done, and Naomi and I returned to the coast to make a little more hay while the summer season lasted.

          This time it took Louie longer to fill the orders than before, what with his own adventures with drugs and women and suppliers reluctant to extend his credit further. I was pretty perturbed by the delays — I’d given my word to some of these people about delivery dates — but, really, I can see in retrospect that I was in no moral position to be critical about delays caused by dope and pussy and general human weakness. Still, it seemed to me that I’d done an awful lot of selling without noticeably increasing my supply of pocket money.

          When I got back off the road from selling I took to sleeping in Truckers’s main workroom in back. Then, in early 1976, I moved out of the workroom at Truckers — and into another garage apartment. This place was one of a line of garages and garage apartments in a long, low structure facing an alley off Huisache Avenue in Laurel Heights. It made my first garage apartment seem cool. The plumbing tended to back up, spilling turds onto the floor around the toilet, so I had some contact with the landlord, a chiropractor who spent his evenings as the Ring Physician at professional wrestling exhibitions. He gave me a good bone-cracking once, on the house.

          Anyway, it started to seem unfair to me that I was busting butt and living in a hole while Louie seemed to just swan around, sleeping late and going to nightclubs, and making payments on a two-bedroom house. To make ends meet I got a job as a waiter, which made me resent Louie more. And so things built up, and by February we were going through a nasty business divorce. I took off with a bunch of the jewellery and belt-buckles and other small, easily transportable items, just so I didn’t come out of it with nothing. Louie followed me to my girlfriend’s mother’s house, so he knew where I was holding it, but he agreed to let me keep it. We got somebody to take inventories, and went through a division of assets. My girlfriend and I ended up taking the shit I took from Truckers to a flea market or two, where most of it was shoplifted.

          Louie and I didn’t see each other again for about six years. Then we ran into each other in a bar across Broadway from Brackenridge Park, near where I was living at the time. He’d gained some weight, but he was still sharply dressed. For a moment we didn’t know whether to start scrapping right there or what. Then we both shrugged our shoulders. I bought him a beer. He bought me a beer. We talked about nothing in particular. We haven’t seen each other since.