George Thompson; Don Couser

George Thompson

          After New Year’s, at the start 1975, the company that owned the swank restaurant where I was working put me on at another restaurant it owned, a steak house located next to the big Hilton on San Antonio’s touristy riverwalk. The work at the steak house wasn’t interesting, although several of the other waiters were. Some were in the business of doctoring the credit-card dockets of their more intoxicated customers to boost their tips significantly. There was a queen named Bob Bush (“a vulgar name, but what can I do?”) who was the black sheep of some prominent family in Virginia and was at times one of the funniest people I’ve known. And there was George Thompson, an odd dude I’d keep running into on and off for about a dozen years.

          His father was a professor of something at Trinity University in San Antonio. He himself was committed to being a waiter. He was also a union trouble-maker. For some time there, he always tried to organise his workplace for the waiters’ union, always failed, and always got fired soon after management’s inevitable triumph. He’d come to work at the steak house after just such an episode at the revolving restaurant at the top of the Tower of the Americas. He was a very handsome man, with a strong, dimpled jaw and a mellow voice. He wore either wire-rimmed or rimless glasses sometimes. He was then on his second marriage.

          Over the next few years, I hung a bit at a scene that developed at chez Thompson. George and his wife Cynthia moved into a rundown three-storey Victorian or Edwardian mansion at the corner of McCullough Avenue and Craig Place in Laurel Heights. It had a ballroom-sized living room, a fine old kitchen and several tricky staircases. They were fixing it up in an arty way. Cynthia had been an interior designer once, and would be again. It looked real cool. Sometimes I would help out. There was a scene there, with both George’s and Cynthia’s friends. It was a good place to socialise. George made a pot of chili for my second wedding in 1976.

          They also had a couple of kids. First a boy, then a girl. They hadn’t been able to agree on a name for the boy, so they finally decided to let him choose his own when he was old enough to do so. So, on his birth certificate it was “Boy Thompson,”, and when he was two he started calling himself Pepper. Cool.

          When the girl had been born they still hadn’t agreed on a name for her, either. But George was, he told me, determined not to go through the same process again. So when confronted by the nurse with the clipboard, asking for a name, George looked at his newborn daughter, and then at the nurse, and just said, “Cookie.” And Cookie she was to be.

          George had a bit of trouble keeping his dick out of other women, though, and eventually the scene in the big house became Cynthia’s. Early in 1978, a few months after I broke up with my second wife, I commissioned Cynthia to do the interior of my little two-bedroom duplex in Mahnke Park. She sewed the curtains and supervised her “assistant”, a genial fellow named Angel, in covering the walls with burlap, what we in New Zealand call hessian. Good job.

          I ran into George from time to time. It seemed he was always working at a different restaurant. Once he had a brief fling with one of my neighbours. She complained to me that George had, as she put it, “treated me like a cunt!” When I told George about this he shrugged, smiled his charming smile, and, in that Bing Crosby voice, said something like, “Well?” Another shrug. “I’d say that was appropriate.”

          He took the photos when I got married for the third time, in 1985. I don’t know what happened to them. Or him.

Don Couser

          In January 1975, at about the time I was buying into Truckers, I started taking a couple of courses in radio and TV production and programming and so forth at San Antonio College, aka SAC, the junior college where John Kuehne and Mike Nesmith had won the talent contest 14 years earlier.

          One of my teachers at SAC was Don Couser, a disc jockey who had risen to being the partner in an ad agency. He taught radio programming. He spoke in that well-modulated radio voice, and he could also talk like Donald Duck. He did his radio show with a sidekick named George The Duck. George was a somewhat irascible and sarcastic, but vulnerable and lovable, character. Talking with himself in two voices and personalities. Cool. He had a jolly face with a thick moustache.

          His father had been a foreman on the King Ranch, that South Texas empire that was, at the time at least, the largest working ranch in the US. Big, Bubba. He said his dad, a clean-freak ethnic German, taught him to shave his armpits, because there wasn’t deodorant always available out on the ranch in the old days.

          Don had made a name for himself doing the morning drive time slot, along with George, on one of the Top-40 stations. Then he’d picked up as a client a regional fizzy pop called Big Red, and had parlayed that into a partnership in an ad agency. Karcher Couser.

          He had all sorts of cynical stories to tell of the advertising world, but seemed to want to revel in being a part of that cynicism. Immersed in the business of creating demand for things people don’t really need and wouldn’t otherwise miss not having, he referred to people who respond to advertisements as “victims”. His job was to turn people into victims, and to try his best to avoid being victimised himself. I noticed no moral doubts — that’s the way things are, and a person has to make the most of it for better or worse. He told us a lot about his house in the country and about his trips to Acapulco. He also philosophised in front of the class about the benefits of him and his wife taking separate vacations. Thanks, Don.

          He tended to be a bit palsy with me. He frequently made a show of telling me he was going to come by Truckers “to buy some incense and other stuff”, but he never did.

          One time in class he went off on a somewhat hippie-fascist tangent about these immutable cosmic laws, which I challenged with some fairly standard academic scepticism. And he got all huffy and aggrieved about my challenge, and ordered me to back off. Anyway, what he was going on about was a New-Age-y Texas thing called Concept Therapy, in which my third wife, whom I met for real many years later, was also immersed.

          After the course ended I don’t recall running into Don more than maybe once, even when I became an advertising jerk myself. Then, in about 1982 I got an invitation from a fellow I’d known from Truckers and from SAC, who had become involved in the luxury waterbed frame business. I’d written a story about him for the business section of the Express-News. He was having a brain-storming session on a new marketing arrangement and wanted me to be a part of it. It was at an Italian restaurant, dinner and wine included. Well, hell ...

          So I went, and during dinner this guy I didn’t recognise started talking to me. It was Don. He’d gained a lot of weight (“My new wife feeds me well”) and shaved off his moustache, but seemed content. During the brainstorm he didn’t have much to say.

          I read that he died in 2013.

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.

Bill Marsh; Brenda & Tyrone

Bill Marsh

          Tall and lean, a long-drink-of-water of a man, Bill Marsh was a Marsh of the Marshville Marshes from Marshville, North Carolina (pronounced Nokaleina), a rural settlement of about two thousand immortal souls near the South Carolina state line, about 30 miles (50 km) from Charlotte. The nearest town of any size is Monroe, which is about ten miles (16 km) away, and is where the residents of Marshville have to go to buy beer, because Marshville’s dry.

          Bill’s horizons stretched a bit further, however, and at the appropriate age he took off on his beloved Indian motorcycle to travel the country and see what he could see and do what he could do. After a few years he wound up in New Orleans and got a job as a pressman with New Orleans’s daily Times-Picayune. He bought himself a nice little house in a quiet neighbourhood in the Mid-City district, commuted by bicycle, grew a beard, read books, and found outlets for his need to express love and caring by acquiring dachshunds and a wife. None of this is in any particular order, but by some time in the 1950s or early 60s he had accomplished all these accomplishments. I consider having a beard and commuting by bicycle in the context of the era to be accomplishments.

          His wife, a seamstress, was named María, a mestiza from Honduras. She already had three children by her first husband, Martínez (divorced), and one by her second husband, Gatto (widowed). Her second husband, who was an Italian Lombard from France, had been some kind of a big-shot manager with the United Fruit Company, and after his premature death by drowning, whilst surfing, I believe, Chiquita had gone to the trouble to relocate his widow and her children to New Orleans as US citizens. How they managed this I don’t know. Anyway, she and Bill went crazy in love and remained so. They had two children of their own. Bill learnt Spanish.

          And so life settled down in the warm glow of steady work, family, bicycles – he and María got a tandem bike – books, and dachshunds. Of the three Martínez children, Raúl went off to university and became a research chemical engineer with the DuPont Company, Eliseo (“Just call me Joe”) got into sales, because he was like that, and Graciela got married and moved off into the middle-class Midwest somewhere.

          The problems, other than María’s occasional grog binges, tended to be associated with the banana-boss’s daughter, Helena Gatto, my first wife. Ignoring high-school academics in favour of dope, sex, and the fast life in the French Quarter, she kept life from becoming too settled. When I fell in love with her in Biloxi, for example, she was fighting two felony raps for selling weed. I helped to keep her out of the slammer, something that helps to make me feel good about myself.

          Bill and I got along real well. He had a laid-back way of talking, as if he’d modelled his speech on Bing Crosby and Dean Martin, with just the murmuring ruffle of down-home Marshville around the edges. He appreciated ideas and Latin American food and my little dog Naomi. He let Helena and me borrow the tandem bike to tour the city. He didn’t seem to have any liking at all for the sort of flamboyantly loud and drunken bullshit that characterises tourist New Orleans, and although not religiously inclined he was disposed kindly toward María’s extravagant Latin Catholicism.

          Bill wasn’t along the one time I visited Marshville. I was travelling with Bill and María’s two kids: Larry, who was in his mid-teens, and Annamaria, who was just barely pubescent. Our hostess at the old family home with multiple verandas was Bill’s elderly great aunt – I’m sorry to say I forget her first name – who was mostly blind and a relic of an earlier era. She gave the impression of being old enough to remember owning slaves, but that couldn’t have been right.

          She was most pleased to see the young people named Marsh, but I apparently bewildered her. ‘Ah declayuh, Honeychile’ (She actually said that to me in her almost-another-language rural Carolina drawl), ‘but I don’t believe we’ve ever had a Jewish person in Marshville before.’ (I’m sparing you the dialectical transliteration.) ‘All we’ve ever had in Marshville is Baptists and Methodists and backsliders.’

          I assured her that I fit right in, being a backslider, at which point she informed me about the need, mentioned above, to drive to Monroe if I wanted to buy beer.

          Soybean prices were up that year, which meant that everybody in that neck of country was eating off the highest part of the hog, and the first oil shock was just breaking. We went fishing on her farm’s stocked pond. It was a hot, humid, uncomfortable day swarming with various insects. Everybody, especially the old great-aunt and little Annamaria, caught plenty of fish – except me. I caught none. Then we drove on.

          The last time I saw Bill was on Christmas day 1974. Helena and I’d separated about a half a year earlier and I’d been living alone in San Antonio. She had moved back to New Orleans, had Naomi, and I wanted my little dirtball back. Having the holiday off work, I’d driven through the night to New Orleans in my 15-year-old Karmann-Ghia and had tracked Helena down to Bill and María’s house. After some acrimonious phone calls, during which I did myself no credit, I drove up to the kerb in front.

          María, apparently drunk, was shouting in Spanish out one of the front windows. Bill came out of the front door, Naomi initially at his heels, and then running full tilt to me once she saw-and-smelled me.

          Once he got to me Bill drawled in his lazy voice, ‘What are you fucking up our Christmas for?’

          I replied something like, ‘Well, it wouldn’t even be a fucked-up Christmas for me without Naomi.’

          He considered this for a moment, and then, dachshund lover that he was, said, ‘Yeah, it aint right to keep a man away from his dog.’

          It was all over except for some loud and vigorous theatrics from María, who brought out a basket containing some puppies to whom Naomi had given birth a few weeks before, and me writing Bill a cheque to reimburse him for their veterinary bills, and I was off back to San Antonio, leaving Bill to recover his Christmas.

          I wonder if digitalisation eliminated the need for Bill’s job and, if it did, if he’d been able to retire first.

Brenda & Tyrone

          One day Helena and I were sitting on our front porch on Adams Street and this little kid came over from a front porch across the street and a few houses down with a note for Helena. The note said, “Hi, Let’s be friends,” and the skinny woman sitting on the other porch waved over at us. And so we got to know Brenda and Tyrone.

          Tyrone and Brenda were coon-assed to the marrow, and not your better sort of coon-ass, either. White trash, some might say. Anyway, Tyrone was by trade a house-painter, and by legal definition a prison escapee. I’m not sure what he’d been in for. Stealing stuff off building sites, I’d imagine. It doesn’t matter. The police wanted him. They came by looking for him from time to time.

          Once they came zooming up in police cars, sealing off our block at both cross-streets. Then they came down our street from both directions, as Helena and I watched from our porch, and converged on Tyrone and Brenda’s house. They surrounded it and went in by both the front and back doors. They searched that little two-bedroom shotgun house for the better part of an hour, then they came out, packed away their stuff, and drifted off. The street returned to its normally sleepy-quiet state.

          Then Tyrone came out onto the porch, stretched, and sat down on the porch swing to drink a beer. I was fucken amazed. Later, Helena got their secret out of Brenda: he’d hid in the fridge.

          Tyrone was a friendly sort, about my age. We got high together a few times. After I split from the French restaurant, he took me with him to a couple of building sites while he bid on painting jobs, but being Tyrone’s painter’s helper seemed much less attractive to me than being Murray’s apprentice trucker had been, and I hadn’t done that. And Murray hadn’t been wanted by the cops and acting real cocky about it.

          But they were friendly folks, and Brenda wasn’t nearly as crazy as Helena. They eventually disappeared, and a pleasant, friendly, unexciting working-class African American family took their place.

George McClughan

George McClughan

          The day after I arrived in San Antonio in August 1972 to work for Star Attractions, the good old boys in suits at the office gave me directions to a tract house in an older suburb inside North-Central Loop 410, where a number of Star Attractions roadies stayed the one week per month they were in town. Management was eager to get me out of the hotel where they’d put me up. I met George McClughan, who was to be my partner, there at the roadies’ house.

          McClughan was a shortish, confident blond fellow with a strong chin and straight white teeth under a reddish-blonde moustache. Both his parents were retired Army generals, he told me. His mother had been one of the first woman generals. He had a sort of Colgin-esque, frat-boy-gone-wrong way about him.

          As I remember it, they sent McClughan and me out on tour the next day or the day after. I left my car (with cardboard boxes intact) and my little dog Naomi with John and Vicki Kuehne at their newly-built house outside Loop 410 (which was the far suburbs in those days), and flew with McClughan from San Antonio to Panama City, Florida, where the tour’s equipment was being stored. I found out that McClughan liked a bit of pot from time to time, so the job seemed like it was going to be cool. McClughan told me some fun stories about acts and tours of the past. I immediately began to yearn for the month I would work a tour with such T&A acts as the Gold Diggers or the Ding-a-Lings. McClughan’s favourite, he told me, was Jaye P. Morgan, because she was funny and cool and a lot of fun to tour with.

          Treevie Lang, the chief roadie, met us at the Panama City airport. Treevie was a recently-retired Army NCO club manager and had a colourfully thick Appalachian accent. He gave the impression that he was more at home drunk and laughing than sober and serious, and referred to all male humans as “swingin’ dicks”. McClughan thought he was a riot, and I had no reason to argue.

          McClughan and I took the company van and the company horse trailer loaded with light and sound equipment and went to a local hotel, where I learned about the way that nearby paper mills smell. Treevie took off in the company Lincoln Continental — the Star Car — to Memphis to meet that month’s tour’s star.

          When McClughan and I drove up to Memphis the next day, we had to pull over with a flat tire on some two-lane blacktop state route somewhere in rural Mississippi. The spare was flat, too. A redneck in a pickup stopped to see what was going on. There I was, bearded and Jewish and coming down off an hour-before joint and fresh out of LA and in the Deep South for the first time. I recall feeling apprehension.

          But the Bubba was more polite than anyone I’d encountered for years and, not only did he take our flat back to Mudville, or wherever, to get fixed, but he insisted on helping us put it back on the van when he returned. It was then that I became convinced of the overwhelming importance and beauty of Good Manners. We don’t have to like each other, Good Buddy, we may even despise each other, but we can mask our dislike behind Good Manners. If that’s our culture. If that’s the sort of people we are.

          In Memphis we met the acts we were touring with (Norm Crosby, the doubletalk comedian who had opened for Tom Jones, and Patti Something-or-Other, a 40ish Vegas-all-the-way singer-dancer-‘entertainer’. I quickly learned to handle the PA cables and to operate the spotlight, and we were off on tour. McClughan knew the circuit well — which places were cool, where the clubs and the groupies were, and all that. He didn’t look all that at-home in the blue suit he wore when we were working, but he could introduce the acts slicker’n shit, projecting a disc-jockeyish, smile-in-the-voice “It’s Showtime!” attitude that went well with his strong jaw and self-assuredness. He swam laps in hotel swimming pools whenever he could. He ordered steaks from room service and spread lavish amounts of butter all over them.

          The first time we drove from Biloxi to Montgomery we got out-of-it stoned, McClughan driving, on an arrow-straight two-lane state highway going across miles of flat Alabama cotton fields. McClughan put the van on cruise control, put his feet up on the dash, the steering wheel gripped between his knees, and we talked shit for a couple of hours. ‘Honky Cat’ by Elton John came on the radio, just released, and we got lost together for a few moments in the piano solo.

          Being on tour was all right. We worked hard when we worked, drank hard, ate well, smoked plenty of dope, and laughed a lot when we were free. We didn’t go wenching together, though, as I got involved early in the tour with the hotel desk clerk who’d checked us into the Sheraton Biloxi, named Helena. Toward the end of that tour McClughan figured out a way for us to have separate rooms in the hotels where we stayed, instead of having to share. He had an eye for beating the system, whatever it was. Cool.

          Back in San Antonio we split up. Before we did, we went out to the suburbs and I met his dad. They talked together like old club-mates. Pals. Chuckling over “the local talent”, nudge-wink, and all that.

          I took my loaded Ford Ranchwagon and Naomi to Biloxi to move in with Helena. McClughan picked me up in the company van on the way from Panama City to Memphis, where we met Treevie for the September tour. The headliner this time was Jimmie Rodgers, the one that did ‘Honeycomb’, not the Singing Brakeman and the Father of Country Music. That Jimmie Rodgers died in 1933, the year this Jimmie Rodgers was born. McClughan and I agreed that Norm Crosby had been more fun.

          Jimmy Rodgers was going through a rough patch. There had been an incident in 1967 in which he’d been beaten up with a tire iron by an off-duty LA cop. His eyesight had gone bad, and he’d got religion in a big way. He carried around a large-print version of the New Testament. McClughan told me that once when Jimmy had been getting out of the Star Car he’d seen him hit his head slightly against the door frame, and the sound, according to McClughan, had not been a natural one. Metal plate, with a knowing nod. Anyway, there’d been a court case, and I think some compensation. Jimmy had an entrepreneurial vision of forming a film company for producing wholesome family features, to be called ‘Kids’ Stuff.’ I don’t think it ever happened. The competition, and all that. As they say in Hollywood, “Don’t fuck with The Mouse.”

          When we got to Biloxi I stayed with Helena in our new rented house on Santini Street, rather than in the hotel, where she’d been staying our first time through. The morning after the last Biloxi show McClughan showed up with the van, a bit late. Jimmie Rodgers’s backup band was travelling in the van with us. No more getting stoned with the accelerator on cruise control and listening to music on the FM radio while the cotton fields had rolled by.

          Anyway, I got into the back seat of the van. McClughan, it seems, had been getting into some kind of stoush with the band’s drummer, who was on one of the middle seats. I think it was over the inconvenience of having to make the detour over to Helena’s house to pick me up. I didn’t notice at first the tension crackling between them.

          Now, McClughan wasn’t one to rely on tact and diplomacy when faced with aggression. Stroppiness was not, however, the optimal tactic for him under the circumstances. He was driving. The drummer was behind him. The drummer was Sicilian, or at least Neapolitan, and therefore unlikely to take kindly to McClughan’s sarcasm or use of pejoratives. And, although the drummer was small, it’s generally unwise to mix it up with someone with arms that pound sticks on drums for two or three hours a night.

          I had to pull the drummer off McClughan. I was twice his size and used to humping amplifiers and p.a. speakers around, but it wasn’t that easy and he came off McClughan with a big handful of George’s hair. I wondered that the whole incident had happened in the first place. It seemed to be about me, but it had nothing really to do with me at all.

          And so we went on our merry way. The tour and the job ended in Atlanta, where we were playing in a hotel in the suburbs. The news came in that Star Attractions had lost its ass with a major tour of Air Force bases with the Supremes, who they’d signed right after Diana Ross had gone off on her solo career. No Diana, no full houses, as it turned out. Star Attractions owed money to everybody, including the hotel where we were staying. Bankruptcy was imminent, if not actually already the case. According to Treevie, even the paychecks he gave to McClughan and me were probably no good. McClughan and I figured that the best way to deal with our final paychecks from a bankrupt company was to cash them at the hotel desk and head off on the next Greyhounds going our way — his to San Antonio and mine to Biloxi.

          A bit less than two years later I found myself in San Antonio again. I was alone again and had a job with On Stage, a company trying to do what Star Attractions had done. On Stage, true to its model, went belly-up not long after I got there. One of the first things I did when I got to San Antonio, however, was look up George McClughan.

          He drove down to Laurel Heights and picked me up at the furnace-like furnished room where I stayed for a week or so when I first got to town. He had my brown felt, Phillip Marlowe-style fedora hat that I had left behind in the hotel room in Atlanta. Saved it for me somehow. He also had a pleasant blonde woman with him named Debbie.

           They were living in a place out in the country, but not that far out in the country, maybe 35 km (about 20 miles) from my place off North St Mary’s Street. It’s probably suburban sprawl by now. They had two Afghan hounds, which were getting in trouble for worrying some local cattle. Debbie apparently had two kids, and I think there was some problem with custody because of her relationship with McClughan.

          They seemed to be in love, but he described it to me in a way I thought odd. He was impressed with the way she handled business, she passed the test “in the looks department”, and so he’d decided, why not?

          Somehow, in the turmoil of my looking for a life in that city, we drifted apart after a while. Maybe it was him being so far out of town, I don’t know. I remember hearing something from somebody that he’d moved up to Austin.

          When I tried to get in touch with him in 2003 I got a letter back from his father. George “just keeled over” and died of a heart attack in 2002. He was 54 years old at the time.

          Spreading butter on steak?

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

  

          Early in 1970, after I’d stopped working full time for Zappa and Herb Cohen, a friend of mine who worked as a doorman at the Troubadour gave me a paperback book called Notes of a Dirty Old Man, by Charles Bukowski. It had a black-and-white photograph of a naked girl (tasteful: not full-frontal), amongst other things, on its cover. I thought it was porn and prepared myself for such. The first chapter puzzled me. It wasn’t porn, but I wasn’t sure what it really was. The second chapter, which was a short story, blew me away. It was, to my mind, the best thing I’d ever read.

          I devoured the rest of the book. I re-read it. I held on to it and did stupid things to retain it in my possession. It made me redefine the way I thought about life and about writing, two concepts which were then somewhat foolishly mixed together in my mind.

          Then, late in April 1972, my friend Susannah asked me one day if I wanted to go with her to meet Bukowski. The Bukowski. Charles Henry ‘Call me Hank’ Bukowski. The Dirty Old Man whose Notes were like sacred texts to me. She’d got an invitation to drop by and see him off an introduction from another ex-groupie who was a mutual friend. I could tag along.

          Okay. I’d read enough of his work by then (two more books of prose in addition to Notes) to know that he’d be pissed off if I drank his beer, and in a good mood if I’d bring a six-pack of half-quarts along with me. And I was right. We got along great. I took to driving over to his slummy little bungalow in the bowels of Hollywood, always bringing half-quarts, about once or twice a week. And we’d drink and talk and laugh. We engaged in laughter frequently. Both of us. The Master and his disciple; rather like Robert Crumb’s Mr Natural and Flakey Foont.

          At the time, his writing regime consisted of sitting down at his typewriter with a six-pack of half-quarts on a Friday evening and writing until the beer ran out. I don’t know how he did it. I’ve never been able to write at all when under the influence of alcohol.

          Once, when we were yakking, I’d told some story about some little shitty thing that’d happened lately, and Hank had laughed in a reassuring way and told me, in his hipster’s drawl, “It’s all ma-teerial, baby. It’s all just mateerial.” All this shit — y’know: life — is just stuff to write about.

          Of course, not all the advice that Hank gave me was what could reasonably be called good advice. For example, at my 26-years-of-failure party I’d met an intelligent and decorative woman named Lynne. She sang in a hey-nonny-no Renaissance music ensemble with another friend of mine, an Echo Park soul singer named Nolan Porter. I started seeing her at about the same time as I’d started seeing Bukowski. She lived right across the street from the studio where they filmed Let’s Make A Deal. Often when I’d go to see her I’d have to pass by battalions of people in bizarre get-ups queued up on the sidewalk, waiting to be let in to beg, “Choose me, Monty!” at the tops of their voices.

          Maybe it was mostly physical, but it seemed to me that I was becoming rapidly attached to Lynne. She had a little kid, who I also became fond of. But it must have dawned on her that I was an underemployed loser living in a grotty basement and going nowhere, and she decided we should Just Be Friends. And my emotions got in the way.

          I went over to Bukowski’s, and we drank maybe more than a few half-quarts of Schlitz. He advised me not to skulk away to lick my wounds, which is what seemed natural to me, but to let my hurt out as anger directed at her. Specifically, he advised me to hit her. But when I went over there with his instructions ringing in my ears, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just snarled out something angry and spit on the ground in her general direction. She said, “Richard, I don’t think I like you any more,” and that ended that. At least no more Just Friends.

          When I told Hank about it, he thought it was enormously funny.

          After I left LA, I lost touch with Bukowski when my first wife destroyed all my contact information with everybody I knew from before.

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.

Susannah Campbell & Leda

Susannah Campbell

          The woman who lived with Jon Keliehor in the court on Fountain went by the name of Susannah Campbell. She turned out to be one of the best friends I had during the time I lived in LA.

          Susannah Campbell wasn’t her birth name. She was the black sheep of some old New England family with old New England money. Horses. Polished hardwood yachts, and all that. She was short and blonde and round-faced and very femme and a few years older than I was. Her home decor always seemed to have a beatnik Beatrix Potter thing about it. Lots of frills and arty knick-knacks. She always seemed to thrive on being busy with cosy little domestic stuff. The architectural style of the court on Fountain suited her fine.

          She’d been something of a groupie in the early sixties. She told me groupie anecdotes about Chick Corea and some other high-profile jazzbo, and a trip to Greece with the Donovan entourage. She’d had a series of doomed affairs with other creative types, who usually treated her badly. She wrote songs and sang fifties-style jazz in a light, airy voice. The overall impact was that of a Yankee Billie Holiday, right down to the affinity she had for heroin. She had a fine critical taste for music and art and people.

          After Keliehor went away she had a rock & roll photographer named Danny Seymour staying there with her for a short time. I only met him once, briefly, but she was devastated when he did her wrong. Later he was to feature in a legendary but unreleased documentary about the Rolling Stones’ 1972 North American tour called Cocksucker Blues, and still later I heard that he had been mysteriously murdered on a yacht off Mexico. After he left Susannah I comforted her and we kissed. It was a nice kiss, but we never became a couple. Over the years we got to bed maybe twice, but both times when one or both of us were too drunk to be satisfied or satisfying.

          Once in mid-1970 I got her a job singing in a sleazy nightclub down on Olympic Blvd, but my career as her manager never really got off the ground. A few weeks later, when I moved out of my granny flat in the Wilshire District, my little dog Naomi and I slept in my VW bus in Susannah’s assigned carport space behind the court on Fountain Ave. She didn’t have a car and wasn’t using it.

          Some months later she moved to a place near Elysian Fields, east of Echo Park, where she was badly burglarised of her wonderful record collection. Then the blues got to be too much for her and I remember visiting her at some heroin rehab place where she was doing crafts.

          When I returned to LA in January 1972, I slept for a month or so on the couch in the front room of Susannah’s place-at-the-time, a little hillside house on Glendale Boulevard near Alvarado Street in northern Echo Park, almost to southern Glendale, not far from the old Mack Sennett studios. It was right beneath the transmission tower of one of the big top-40 radio stations, and odd things in the house would pick up the signal. Susannah complained to the radio station when she plugged in her iron and it started talking to her, an event that apparently did ill to her nerves.

          A week or two after I began staying there I scored some weed and, feeling it was proper to contribute to the household, I dumped it into the pot stash she kept in a shoebox. I was mortified when she came home and thrashed me with an emotional scolding for diluting the sacred top-grade Acapulco Gold that Michael Bloomfield, the guitarist, had given her. But she forgave me.

          I don’t recall ever having a clear idea of what Susannah did to make a living when she wasn’t being a housewife. I seem to remember her having a shit job once as a waitress, but it didn’t last long. I gave her some money toward the rent when I was staying at her place on the hillside, but I recall things there being tight. Once when I was living there she went out on a date that had been set up by a girlfriend. She came home with some money, but she was miserable. When I made tolerant noises, she told me that she felt as if her soul had been damaged.

          Not long afterwards I moved into a ratty basement apartment under the big house on Bonnie Brae where Karen Clark and Psyche had lived toward the end of Richard’s confinement. I knew the basement flat was coming vacant because I’d known the guy who was moving out of it, a motorcycle racer named Don, for years. Susannah moved into the same address shortly afterwards, but into a much bigger and nicer place than mine, up on the ground floor.

          It was there, in Susannah’s apartment upstairs from mine, that she threw a big birthday party for me, celebrating “26 years of failure”. It was also there that she tried to set me up with a nelly-gay friend of hers who was crashing there for a few days. He gave me deep, penetrating looks and told me that he had a rare form of throat cancer that required fresh semen for treatment. Susannah expressed amazement that I turned him down. Sorry, not my type.

          That summer she got back into heroin. Once again I was a disappointment to her: my aversion to even the sight of a syringe meant that I was unable to assist her either with tourniquet or works when she was giving herself a fix. Then she got a new boyfriend some years younger than she was, who was also into smack. His name was Gray. She told me how much better heroin is when she was all strung out than when she’d just been joy popping; it became just one long mellow cruise. She also told me how she and Gray kept infecting each other with the same gonorrhoea, as they couldn’t get it together to get to the clap clinic at the same time.

          Soon after I left LA at the end of August I got a letter from her telling me that she and Gray had gotten married. Then I got married. Then she wrote me that she’d had a daughter. We exchanged a few more letters before my wife destroyed my address book and all my letters. About thirty years later a mutual friend, who’d reconnected with me via facebook, told me that somewhere along the line Susannah had “made the transition. Drugs.”

Leda

          In the autumn of 1970 I moved out of Yabo’s place in Beechwood Canyon into the spare bedroom of the apartment of a young guy Yabo knew named Jim Coblentz. Jim aspired to be a film editor. The place was on — I loved this — Normal Avenue, across the street from LA City College.

          At the time I was also hanging out a bit with an Italian-American guy from New York named Nicky Lampe who was also a friend of Yabo’s. He did a bunch of the carpentry work on the set of Yabo’s movie. He said he’d learnt the trade from his father and his grandfather. He was also a dab hand at the 12-string and sang in the style of Jesse Colin Young and post-Belmonts, post-heroin Dion. He had ambitions as a singer, but was about to go inside for a while — something to do with dope.

          Anyway, Nicky introduced me into a social circle that hung out at a smallish mansion in central Hollywood. It had one wall that was a giant aquarium. I did a yard-work job there. And of course there was this girl. Her name was Michelle. She had good-looking boobs and talked about her mother a lot, but I didn’t get the drift of what she was getting at. Anyway, she gave me her phone number. And I called her. She was staying at, of all places, the Bel Air Hotel. She told me to pick up her mother and come out to Bel Air to get her. Once again I proved useful as a chauffeur.

          Her mother was a woman named Leda. She wasn’t her biological mother. She was her spiritual mother. Leda looked like she was in her thirties, but that was probably deceiving. She turned out to be an acquaintance of an ex-girlfriend of mine who had been more than twice my age, but who hadn’t looked her age, either.

          Leda was a notorious Hollywood character and publicity-seeker. She went around in astrology gowns talking all sorts of spiritual-esque rubbish in the medieval-to-pagan vein. She popped up from time to time as spiritual adviser to various phonies with sort-of-familiar names. I remembered seeing her picture, with a good-sized caption, in a copy of Esquire. It’d been in a Manson-inspired article about Hollywood heaviosity-sleaze. The picture had been of her simulating (I would perhaps incorrectly assume that she was simulating, that is) having sex with a live swan. Hi, Mom. The cover blurb said that Lee Marvin was afraid of her.

          She lived in a biggish house downhill and on the other side of Beechwood Canyon from Yabo’s place. I picked her up some time in the middle of the day and drove her out to Bel Air. As I drove, she filled me in a little bit on what was going on. She wasn’t easy to follow.

          On the one hand she was obsessing about another of her daughters, who had been attached to John Phillips, formerly of the Mamas and the Papas, in what sounded to me like a groupie relationship. Anyway, this daughter had been reduced to dancing in a nude go-go bar in Long Beach. And this other guy named John, the one who’d bankrolled Metamorphosis in Echo Park, where Richard Clark’s headshop had been, was involved in what to Leda was some nefarious way as well, but Leda failed to make clear exactly how. What Michelle was doing at the Bel Air Hotel, and why she was running up a big tab that she had no way in hell of paying, was also left vague. It seemed to have something to do with making someone Leda had a grudge against do the paying. We smoked a joint or two on the way out, and I was a bit high when we got there.

          Michelle was staying in a large one-and-a-half story bungalow that reeked of luxurious expensiveness. I got the impression that she’d been staying there for several days. She produced some large, white capsules that she swore were organic mescaline, and we each popped one. I was keen to escape Leda and go for the brass ring with Michelle, but they decided to go have a late lunch — on the tab — out by the pool. And who was I to tell someone she shouldn’t have lunch with her mother?

          I was aware by this time that Michelle was ripping somebody off — either the hotel or someone else — bigger’n Dallas. And I was a bit hesitant to participate directly in the scam. I was the chauffeur, and I was probably going to be the getaway driver (my fantasies of mescaline-enhanced dealings with Michelle’s boobs and better guaranteed that), but I felt a block against stealing anything directly. Not that that would’ve counted for much if it became a matter for the criminal justice system, but there it was. And I had my little dog Naomi with me. Naomi probably wouldn’t have been welcome at the poolside restaurant.

          So Naomi and I hung out for a while at the bungalow and then we went for a stroll around the landscaped grounds. But I got thirsty, so I went back to the bungalow, put Naomi in the VW bus, and went to the pool area to look for Michelle and Leda. I sat down to join them and ordered a beer, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather than putting it on Michelle’s tab. They were drinking champagne. And we sat and chatted. Mostly about that ghastly business with John Phillips and John the eminence gris and the wayward daughter. I guess it would have been more accurate to say that Leda and Michelle continued their chat while I looked around at the social milieu poolside at the Bel Air Hotel. It wasn’t a society in which I ordinarily mixed.

          It was late October, and the sun went down fairly early. We went back to the bungalow and Leda helped Michelle pack in preparation for doing a runner. As I recall, Leda helped herself to a number of items that clearly were hotel property — ornaments, bed linens, and the like. They packed Michelle’s and the other stuff into the back of the bus and got ready to take off. At the last minute, though, Leda disappeared. I thought it’d be a good time to make a move on Michelle, but it wasn’t.

          A few minutes later Leda emerged from the darkness with something large stuffed into one of the hotel’s pillowcases, jumped into the back seat, and told me to take off. She’d stolen a swan from the hotel garden’s pond. Why I was surprised, I don’t know. This was a woman with a large and warped ego, zinging on mescaline and champagne and who knows what else, who led a clearly delusionary life even under ordinary circumstances. I moved Naomi closer to me on the bench-style front seat, shifted the bus into first, and my mind into neutral.

          The swan was, obviously, distressed, but Leda did her best to calm it down by cooing soothing words at it. She gave me on-the-fly directions (“Turn left here; now turn right here,” etc.) to a mansion in Benedict Canyon. It was Papa John Phillips’s house. While I drove her over there she was busy writing and drawing shit all over the swan’s pillowcase in lipstick. Occult warnings of some sort, I would imagine. I was hoping I wasn’t getting involved in some Manson-esque ugliness. I stayed, mentally, in neutral, but I was nerving myself to come down on the side of goodness and animal welfare if Leda got violent. But she didn’t. Not really.

          Anyway, what happened was that I parked in sort of a courtyard in front of the Hollywood Olde Englishe house. Lots of probably fake half-timbering. Leda and Michelle gathered up the pillowcased swan and headed for the front door. I turned the bus about so it was facing the way out. Way out, indeed! Then Leda and Michelle came running noisily back from the house, giggling like adolescents, climbed into the bus — Michelle in the front passenger seat and Leda in the back seat — and told me to take off. Now, a ’66 VW bus was not a vehicle for flashy displays of torque, but I did my best as they laughed and loudly remembered the looks on Phillips’s and his friends’ faces when she’d released the swan into his front room.

          And, goddamn it, Leda had kidnapped Phillips’s dog, a big old placid thing — some kind of a retriever, I think. She was ecstatic. The dog had a tag with Phillips’s phone number on it. She’d phone and tell him that she’d found his dog. At the hotel. Then maybe he’d do right by her daughter! I saw in the rear-view mirror that the dog looked bewildered and scared. I headed for Hollywood.

          I pulled Naomi closer to me and said something like, “You’re not going to hurt that dog, are you?” in my cold, calm, in-neutral voice.

          Leda answered me in a normal tone of voice, with nothing of the phoney goddess about it. She assured me that she had no intention of doing harm to any innocent creature. Then she started cooing to the dog, as she had the swan in the pillowcase.

          Michelle, if I remember correctly, was dozing off, her cheek against the window. I didn’t know how many days she’d been awake.

          Leda and I had something resembling a sane conversation for a while there as I drove along, about people and values and things like that. When we got to Leda’s house, I carried Michelle’s bags inside. Leda took the dog into the kitchen to phone John Phillips. It wasn’t that late — maybe nine or ten o’clock.

          Michelle went upstairs. I was wondering whether to go up after her or to wait for her to come down when there was a knock on the door. Some rich Hollywood *faggola was there. It was somebody I knew slightly. He had a date with Michelle for a party at somebody’s house. Michelle came breezing down the stairs and headed with him to his sports car. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t fucking believe it.

          I must have been standing there with my jaw hanging down to my belly when Leda came out and bad-mouthed the dude and Michelle for me (“He’s nothing but a party-boy — and I do mean boy — nothing at all like a man like you”), but that didn’t help much. Leda then told me that she’d called Phillips, and that he was coming for the dog, and that she had to prepare the room — throne, candles, incense, music, and so on — to be properly imperious and intimidating for his arrival.

          Not a scene into which I would fit, obviously, so I drove back to Normal Avenue with Naomi. I must say that it did take me a while to get to sleep. I never saw Michelle again. I ran into Leda from time to time, but I never asked her what happened after I left. At least the cops never came looking for me.

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*faggola was I term I devised to describe a certain Hollywood type: relentlessly heterosexual decorative males who prettified themselves in the extreme and behaved in a flutteringly camp and traditionally feminine manner in order to attract decorative Hollywood females.