Terry Wilcox; Martin & Murray

Terry Wilcox

          A month or so before Richard Clark got out of prison, a friend of his from Terminal Island had been released and had come to the Echo Park scene. He was skinny blonde guy, who looked like a drawing in an R. Crumb cartoon, named Terry Wilcox. He’d been a sailor in the Merchant Marine before getting busted in port and doing two years for smuggling.

          I remember going to see him in the furnished room he was living in as soon as he got out. He seemed to know his way around the social underbelly. He knew, for instance, where to hide his greenbacks in a furnished room in a fleabag building.

          Terry had one of the most extreme minds I’ve ever encountered. He was almost illiterate. Notes and other stuff that Terry wrote looked like they’d been written by a six-year-old. He had a limited vocabulary and talked kind of charmingly dumb. But he was as at home as hell with advanced calculus and physics and stuff, things that were way beyond my aptitude for mathematical abstraction.

          He’d spent his whole stretch in the joint studying chess books. He told me that since he’d had a broken foot when he’d gone in, he’d had the luxury of lying in his bunk all day, instead of “doing one of their bullshit jobs they try to make you do.” Once his foot had more or less healed, he’d continued with this inactivity, only with chess books. He hadn’t actually resisted the guards, he told me. He’d agreed with everything they’d told him, (“yes, boss.” “Sure thing, boss.”) and then lay in bed reading chess books.

          He could always beat me at chess in less than eight moves. He called it the “fried liver” opening. Apparently there was one way to counter it, which all chess crazies know, but since I didn’t know it, it beat me promptly every time. Terry seemed to find this amusing. What he couldn’t figure out was why I couldn’t figure it out.

          He had me take him to Foster’s Blue Grotto to try to hustle somebody up to play him chess for money, but that was, naturally, futile. It was fun to watch him try, though.

          He linked up almost immediately after he got out with the girl, named Chris, I was after at the time. Oh, well.

          He organised a deep-sea fishing excursion out of San Diego once for himself and me. I drove us down there. On the way we stopped at his parents’ house in a middle-class subdivision in Orange County. His father was addicted to World War II memorabilia. He and his dad seemed to get along great. There didn’t seem to be any bad feelings about his time in Terminal Island.

          The rest of the way to San Diego he looked at the fishing reports in a newspaper. The word “anglers” seemed to amuse him greatly. On the fishing expedition itself I didn’t catch anything but a sunburn. I’ve almost never caught anything fishing. Terry landed two albacore tuna, which he left with his parents on the way back up to L.A.

          Terry also had a sister, who lived in some working-class suburb in the eastern part of LA county. She was nice, but she didn’t smoke pot, and her husband was in some kind of trouble. I never felt very comfortable when I drove Terry out there.

          On the occasion of my 26th birthday, when Susannah threw my big 26-years-of-failure party, Terry phoned me in the early afternoon, just after John Ware had left to go play drums at the country-music bar in Glendale (leaving me a bit drunk), and invited me over to the little bungalow he was sharing with Chris. Various advanced books on calculus were lying around, along with sheets of paper covered with symbolic calculations written in Terry’s crude hand with a dull pencil. Out from between the pages of one of the math books he withdrew my birthday present: a small amount of brown heroin that someone had smuggled to him in prison, but which he’d never felt like taking. I snorted it up, but, combined with all the other controlled-substance presents I got that day I can’t say it, the one sniff of heroin in my life, was that noticeable to me.

          When I left LA a few months later we kept in touch for a while, Chris writing the letters for both of them. They moved up to somewhere in Northern California for Terry’s further studies in advanced mathematics, and got caught up in playing the well-known university games: “fresh flesh” was the way Chris put it. The woman I was married to by then wasn’t amused. She took it as an invitation to go look them up and join them, and she destroyed all copies of their address, and that was that.

Martin & Murray

          Martin and Murray lived in the first-floor apartment right next to Susannah’s at Bonnie Brae and Kent in 1972. They were hard-drinking, upper-gulping, outlaw independent long-haul truckers, not at all averse to driving the back roads so they wouldn’t get weighed, and all that other subversion of ICC monopoly-protection legislation. When Little Feat came out with the song Willin’, they loved it.

          They shared a rig. When Martin was on the road, Murray stayed in LA, and the other way around. They usually weren’t both in their apartment at the same time for more than a couple of days at a stretch, the first of these generally being party time, all neighbours invited. For some reason Murray usually liked to cook salt pork for these parties. Then it’d be time to wash and do maintenance on the rig, and then for the other to head out.

          Martin was a Hungarian refugee. Martin Plavity. He was a good-looking guy with regular features who wore his hair straight back. As he told the story, he’d been one of those on the rooftops shooting at the Russian tanks in 1956. He’d managed to escape to Italy, but he’d been thrown out of Italy for pimping. They couldn’t deport him back to Hungary for humanitarian and political reasons, but England had been willing to give him a go. He’d promptly gotten into some sort of trouble there, I think it was pimping again, and the Poms had sent him to the most staunchly anti-communist country in the world, and therefore the only country willin’ to take him: the US of A. Southern California. The only place for him.

          Anyway, Martin trained as a machine-tool grinder, and was proud of his absolute accuracy in this skill. Once he showed me his kit of precision tools and told me about how some of them required him to be accurate to something like one one-thousandth, or maybe it was one ten-thousandth, of an inch. Alas, he also fell into pimping again (I think he’d done some time for it, but had remained safe from deportation). Then he’d met Murray and fallen for the lure of the open road.

          Murray never told anybody I knew if ‘Murray’ had been his first name or his last. He’d been a math teacher in a small town in central California. He had a red-neck accent and speech patterns, and, generally, a country, good-ole-boy way about him. I thought all this was a scam, because once I got to know him he didn’t seem that way to me at all. Well, not much. He seemed more like a former high school teacher on uppers. Anyway, the classroom had been giving him claustrophobia, and he’d taken to what looked to him like a life of freedom. I mean, long hours in the cab of a semi could conceivably give someone — someone else, that is — claustrophobia, I suppose. Not, however, Murray.

Usually.

          He did tell me a story about how he once scored a handful of black mollies (biphetamine sulphate, I think 20 mg) from an acquaintance at a truck stop, swallowed them down with his coffee, shared another joke or two, and then returned to his rig and its load of fresh produce (in his trucker slang, “garbage”) bound for Seattle. “I must have been 20 miles down Interstate 5,” he said, “when, I don’t know, I just had to pull over onto the shoulder, stop, run around the rig ten or twelve times, hop back in, and head on down the road.”

          Bon appetit!

          On the subject of bon appetit: once when we were neighbours Murray met an old friend at a truck stop who was driving a tank truck loaded with cheap brandy, and the friend had offered to trade or give Murray some of it. The only problem was that Murray had to provide his own containers. The only stuff in Murray’s load that was in containers was cooking oil, so he’d dumped a couple of ten-gallon tins of oil down the truck stop drain and filled them with cheap brandy tapped from the tanker. And he brought it home. And he gave me a half-gallon wine jug filled with this ghastly mixture of cheap brandy and little globules of vegetable oil. And I actually tried to drink it! I mean, as it turned out, I couldn’t drink it, but, heaven help me, I tried.

          Murray had a girl living with him. I’d guess she was about 20. Her name was Diane. He said she was the daughter of a friend of his. She had an absolutely perfect model’s face, but she was apparently what used to be called Not Quite Right In The Head. Spooky, actually. Susannah told me that when Diane had her period she used cloth diapers for feminine hygiene. Murray said he was taking care of her for his friend. She usually rode with him when he was on the road.

          When Murray wanted to send me a message, or wanted to borrow something, he always sent Diane. Susannah thought this was disgusting, manipulating me with her pretty face, but I didn’t mind.

          As the summer set in and my economic condition became ever more perilous, Murray decided to teach me how to be a truck driver. He took me with him once as he drove the rig down to some produce-distribution centre in Orange County to pick up a load of ‘garbage’. I remember trying to learn by watching how to shift through 15 gears while driving, and it didn’t seem to be as simple as Murray said it was.

          Rolling along the freeway, Murray gestured toward the expanses of Southern-California residential subdivisions stretching out into the distance, right and left, and told me, “You know what those are? Concentration camps! And the people in them don’t even know what they are! I’ll die before I’ll let anybody put me in one of those!” Murray tended to end his spoken sentences with exclamation points.

          At the depot Murray backed his rig into one of the bays at the loading dock more quickly and easily than I could have backed in my Ford Ranchwagon Six. I knew at once that backing a rig up like that was something I’d probably never be able to do. We hosed out the trailer, which had carried cedar shingles down from Seattle on Martin’s return trip the week before, and loaded it with produce. The refrigerator unit hummed as we worked, keeping things cold. I wondered at this trucking life.

          Murray dropped me off in Echo Park and picked up Diane for the drive North. I got a job offer from John Kuehne in Texas soon afterward, so my training on the Big Rig ended before it ever really began.

Stash Wagner + Karen & Richard Clark

Stash Wagner

          In 1968, when I first moved into LA from Claremont, Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys travelled without a roadie, which for me meant no paid work carrying their stuff until they returned to town. I’d started hanging out with a couple of guys in the band, and when they went on the road, I still intruded on their scenes, in particular the piano player, Bill Martin.

          Stash Wagner and his teen-aged wife Sue were Martin’s neighbours on Beechwood Drive in Beechwood Canyon, the hillside directly beneath the big “HOLLYWOOD” sign that’s on all those postcards. I don’t think Stash was over 18 or 19 then, himself. His birth-certificate name is Lawrence.

          Stash was the lead singer and primary lyricist for a group called The Fraternity of Man, now almost entirely remembered, by those who remember them at all, for the song ‘Don’t Bogart Me’, usually referred to by its opening line, “Don’t bogart that joint, my friend.” Stash was a real funny guy. We got on great, and I started picking up jobs humping amps and stuff for that band, too. The band itself had Elliot Ingber, who formerly had played guitar on and off with the Mothers, and Richie Hayward, who would later be the Little Feat drummer.

          I don’t think Stash had a car at the time, and we’d run errands around Hollywood in my 66 VW bus. One time Stash and I were down on Fairfax on some business or other, and we ran into the guys from Canned Heat, who’d just finished recording ‘Christmas Boogie’ with Ross Bagdasarian, who was David Seville and The Chipmunks. And one thing led to another and somebody bet Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite that he couldn’t eat 25 tacos in the space of an hour. It was on and we were off to a nearby Taco Bell for the event, which Bear won.

          One time I drove Stash and one or two other guys in the band up to a rock festival at a race track somewhere inland from Oakland. I was officially road manager, which meant that I was the one who took possession of the paycheck for safe conveyance back to LA, and so on. And there I was at last, on the inside of the fence, with credentials, surrounded by famous people, with mobs of star-struck teen-aged girls on the outside of the fence, eager to be grateful to me for getting them through the gates.

          After I parked and unloaded the microbus I went to take a leak, and I realised right then that I had the clap. Must’ve picked it up from that groupie from Wisconsin with the truly lovely tits who’d picked me up at a F.O.M. gig at some near-the-beach dance hall the weekend before. I thought, Shit!!

          I went and finagled a team of three groupies into the compound anyhow, explained my plight to them, and they were sympathetic. They comforted me by being nice, and by stealing wine and dope from the various big-name acts and bringing it back to me.

          Stash was less sympathetic. “Hey, Rich,” he asked,  leering, “Does it hurt when you spit?”

          Somehow Stash met this Danish blues-harp guy named Lee Oskar. And somehow the three of us went out to Claremont to see John Ware. I think it was because Stash was curious about the songs I’d told him Ware and I’d been fucking around with writing, and only Johnnie knew the music to them. Ware sort of ran through one with his acoustic guitar, and then Stash took the piece of paper with the lyrics and chords on it and started singing, and Lee Oskar whipped out his harmonica for further accompaniment. It sounded good to me. I felt unworthy.

          Then I left LA for about a half a year in 1969. When I came back the Fraternity of Man was in the process of fizzling out. They put out another album, but it wasn’t the same. The record company had made Stash clean up the lyrics to a nasty song originally titled “Fuck Her”. Stash tried to put it in a positive light when he told me about it, but I could sense that everything was just Not Right, and that was that for the Fraternity of Man.

          A year or two later I was experiencing yet another low ebb, and I worked for a week or so as a projectionist at an all-nude strip joint. The dancers went starkers, not me. I just threaded silent 8mm porn films into rickety projectors and flicked a little lever back and forth when they jammed. I left when the dive got raided. The vice squad dick told me I could maybe make a defence on First Amendment grounds, or I could just walk. I walked.

          Anyway, Stash’s then-wife was dancing there, so things couldn’t have been going all that well for him, either. It was during a soul-frying LA heat wave, when the smog seemed thick enough to cut with plastic scissors. I went to hang out with Stash for a while. They’d moved out of Beechwood Canyon into a small apartment down in the basin that was like thousands of other small apartments down in the basin. Stash and I had a beer or two. He told me that he was spending several hours a day just standing in a cold shower, and that Suzi dancing at that sewer really brought him down. It was tough for either of us to be funny. That was the last time we saw each other.

          Toward the end of the 80s I saw his name mentioned in some gossip rag as being the ex of some starlet.

          In February, 2001 I tracked him down on the internet. He was living in Denver, doing an artist thing, hawking his paintings over the net, and designing websites. He told me, “I too have been married three times, divorced four times (one palimony). I guess I’m still a sucker for pretty women. I try to keep my artistic spirit alive, but have been known to work in more ‘human’ type jobs (music editor, PR, even sales <my acting experience comes in handy there>).”

          We sent emails back and forth fairly often for a while. I got the impression that he was a bit weirded out by having spent the previous third of a century or so being The Guy Who Wrote Don’t Bogart That Joint, as if everything else he had done and accomplished in his life paled before a song he’d written when he’d been 17. But he was still getting the royalties, and it had just popped up in another movie, to his surprise and financial gain (“That’s cool after 30 years to still get an income from that song.”).

          He told me that he wasn’t satisfied with his scene in Denver, feeling “like a fish out of water”, and was looking to move on. He’d done okay in the music and acting rackets — even working as a music editor and as a PR dude — for years in Hollywood, but had left, he told me, to move to Nashville (“Old rock-n-rollers don’t die, they move to Nashville.”). He’d been put off, however, by what he’d seen as the dishonesty of the people he’d been involved with in Nashville, and had moved on to Denver.

          For a while there he was considering coming out to New Zealand, but then he connected with a woman in Toronto who was involved in putting together a movie project. He moved to Toronto in late June or early July 2001 and told me that it looked like he was going to get married.

          Two years later he was back in Denver playing in a rock & roll band, the Toronto thing not having happened. Then, after a while, my emails to him started to bounce back to me.

          Eight or nine years later we reconnected via facebook. He now lives in a place called Lapu-Lapu, a highly urbanised city near Cebu in the central Philippines, noted for its beaches and the locale of a few upmarket resorts. He’s married to a Filipina and has two small children – and also a dog named Bogart. He is apparently involved in civic affairs involving the arts, is the sponsor of a local talent contest and, hobnobs with locally famous people.

          His facebook is a mishmash of the old Stash – pro-marijuana stuff, old Zappa anti-theocracy videos, insightful musical posts, occasional glimpses of the sense of humour that used to characterise him, some pro-refugee stuff, and so on – and a bewildering new Lawrence (Stash) Wagner, who espouses tea-party conspiracy-theory shit, other ignorantly off-the-wall right-wing chicken-hawk nonsense, contrived inspirational platitudes, and anti-refugee stuff. We’re all such complicated units.

          From his photos he’s still just about as good-looking as ever.

Karen & Richard Clark

         

         When I moved into LA from Claremont in the Spring of 1968 I found an apartment in an old house facing the Hollywood Freeway in the Echo Park District. Down one side of the hill from where I lived, on Sunset Boulevard near Rosemont Avenue, was a little cluster of hippie shops called Metamorphosis, one of a string of hippie-oriented businesses along Sunset in Echo Park and Silverlake called The Other End shops.

          The main shop at Metamorphosis was an upscale lapidary salon. There was also a head shop and a shop that sold hippie-esque women’s clothing. Upstairs over the shops were a lapidary workshop and some sewing machines. The whole thing was owned by a nerdy-looking rich guy named John, who seemed to enjoy playing Mr Bucks to a bunch of oddballs. He didn’t show up with his bemused-yet-lordly smile often.

          I found it easy to hang out with the Metamorphosis people, especially Richard Clark, the manager of the head shop, and his pregnant teen-age wife Karen. We became close friends, and I slipped into their circle.

          Richard was originally from somewhere out in the San Fernando Valley. He’d been into Hollywood/Echo Park scenes for a while. Karen was from Kansas City. She’d come out to LA to do the hippie thing. Life as an R. Crumb cartoon. She’d met Richard while she’d been selling the Free Press somewhere on Sunset up toward the Strip, and then, lo and behold, she was pregnant and living in back of a head shop in Echo Park.

          Since I was mostly unemployed, I had the time to hang out with them and their friends. We laughed and smoked pot and listened to music — that sort of thing. Richard was a cheerful, easy-going sort of fellow. We tended to see things in a similar way. Although the scenes we moved in were heavily populated by people with passionate devotions to one occult world-view (or bullshit superstition) or another, he and I both were sceptical but open-minded. Laughs mattered more than spiritual enlightenment to us both.      

          When I left LA at the start of 1969 and went to live back East for what turned out to be about six months, we kept in touch. Karen was about due when I left, and the baby was born soon afterwards, a little girl they named Psyche.

          In our exchanges of letters Richard found out that I was having trouble finding a connection in Delaware, so to surprise me he mailed me some weed in a package of incense. Seemed a big risk to me, but nothing bad happened.

          Later in the Spring I got a letter telling me that Richard had been busted. Through correspondence I followed the story of Richard’s arrest for selling hash, his trial, and his conviction. It’s a hell of a world.

          When I got back to LA early in the summer Richard was out on bail waiting to go in. He told me he’d sold five ounces of hash to a Fed. He told me what it had been like when they’d pulled large-calibre handguns on him. Not at all fun. He was a peace-and-love type, himself, and not into guns as a lifestyle. They sentenced him to five years at Terminal Island. One year for each ounce of hash.

          After Richard went in I did what I could for Karen, considering the demands of the job I had during half of 1969, in the way of being a helpful male friend who wouldn’t hit on her for nookie. In the Spring of 1970, when I was working on the production of a low-budget movie, I got Karen a job as night-watchperson at the set, which was in a warehouse in Burbank. She and Psyche had a good time wandering around the set before sleeping each night on the couch in the reception room in front. I believe Psyche appears in a dream sequence somewhere in the movie, but I never saw the final cut.

          One time, I guess it must have been in 1971, Karen’s sister came out to visit from Kansas City. Unlike hippie Karen, her sister (I forget her name) was all straight fashions and make-up — a former Miss Missouri, they told me, although not a Miss America pageant one. It’d been some other pageant. And whereas Karen was tall and fair, the sister was shortish and dark.

          Karen set me up to be her date. We went to a party in West-Central LA thrown by some friends of Alfredo’s. I found it difficult to relate to her, but I remember that on the way home, after hours of failing to connect on a human level, she decided that she wanted me to carry her piggy-back for a while, and it felt somehow intimate to me.

          By 1971 Karen and Psyche were living in an apartment on the top floor of a subdivided old mansion at the corner of Kent and Bonnie Brae Streets in Echo Park. It was a well-established address for people in our — and a few other —  bohemian circles, with one or two elderly non-freak tenants as well; I’d known people living there since I’d moved into L.A.

          Karen was selling Shaklee, an early look-alike of Amway, or trying to.

          Then Richard started getting out of Terminal Island on a day-release basis to take a wood-working course at LA Trade-Technical College. Sometimes he cut a class or two to visit Karen and Psyche at Bonnie Brae. I went down to have lunch with him at the college’s cafeteria a couple of times. He remained the same cheerful person he’d been before, but maybe he was just cheerful about being outside the walls. He had a few prison stories to tell. I got the impression that Terminal Island didn’t seem that violent a place — just profoundly boring and full of ass-holes.

          One of the ass-holes in particular irritated him. Owsley Stanley, the legendary San Francisco LSD chemist, producer of the best-selling Orange Sunshine and Purple Owsleys. “Bastard acts like he’s better than the rest of us, like we should treat him like he’s some sort of fuckin’ celebrity.”

          I think it was early in 1972 that Richard got out on parole. He and Karen and Psyche moved into an apartment on a hillside walkway leading down from Echo Park Terrace facing the other side of the park. It was just a bit more than a hole in the ground with a wall on the downhill side.

          Richard got a job at a factory in Glendale that made the cabinets for some brand-name speaker — the sort of job that nowadays would have long since been exported to Asia. He went off with a lunchpail in the mornings; sometimes I drove him there. He built the frame for a waterbed in the basement apartment I’d moved into under the house on Bonnie Brae. We resumed hanging out in the same network of friends.

          Richard saved his money and bought some tools and started making antique reproductions. He knew a gay decorator in Beverly Hills who started buying everything he could make. Then I left LA again, this time for good, and later, when the insanely jealous woman I was with destroyed my address book, we lost contact with each other.

          About 40 years later Karen found me on facebook, and we’ve been in friendly correspondence since then. She and Richard broke up some time in the 70s, and she told me that she hasn’t seen or heard from him since Psyche’s high school graduation. I’ve been unable to contact him. Karen wrote me that, ‘He's living in Los Osos near San Luis Obispo with his wife, Gretchen. They've been together pretty much since he and I split up. They have one son, Jesse, who is college age now.’

          Karen herself remarried in 1981 and the union seems to have thrived. She frequently posts photos of herself, with long white hair, and spouse Jerry, with long white beard, going thither and yon all over North America in a camper and undertaking long and arduous hiking (NZ: tramping) expeditions. I don’t know where the money comes from and I haven’t asked. Psyche has become a professional dog breeder and has showed at least one champion golden retriever.