Tape 12, Side A
[Begin Tape 12, Side A]
This time we’re talking to Michael Conkin at his home in Fruitvale. To pick up the threads of our last conversation: you had mentioned the best dope you ever had: I want you to tell that story but I also don’t want you to forget to describe the third member of your triumvirate of hep cats.
Oh yeah, yeah, hep cats. Yeah, okay, so there was George Hunt, he was… I was trying to think of what these two guys did in the army too. I don’t remember. George may have had some creative job, I don’t know, working with the printing office or something like that, but he’s the one who was in for four years on a National Security Agency clearance; he was in the Defense Language Institute at Monterey and got bounced out of there for some reason; I don’t remember what the reason was; and he was from the Massachusetts area. He was into Lovecraft and the Spanish Civil War and in fact other sorts of wars: he knew a lot about war. He was a very thin, artistic kind of a guy; very intelligent and really sensitive.
Was he a lefty, I mean his perspective on the Spanish Civil War: was he a republican?
Probably, I think he was just interested in the romance of it. It was probably only romantic to the non-Franco supporters.
So then who was the other guy?
The other guy was Don Sutton, and he was, I don’t know what he did either, but he was a playful fellow; a real live wire; dynamic: just total nonstop energy, and he spent a lot of time—he had a car.
Did both guys have cars?
No, I think only Don had a car; it wasn’t that great of a car, but it was a car. And he always had girlfriends too. He was always out there. When he wasn’t on base he was in Seattle or Tacoma visiting his girlfriends.
So he always had more than one?
Ah, maybe it was a serial kind of a deal; I don’t know if it was more than one, I’m not sure. But he was funny and smart and, you know, we were all sort of on the same wavelength. The one specific thing I can remember that he used to do was: we went to see this French movie called Le Bonheur, which means ‘happiness’. It’s a story of—it’s probably a fairly ordinary story—but there were some bare breasts in it, some French frontal nudity.
[Laughs] French frontal nudity.
Yeah, something like that; and one of the things he would do—in fact we were always doing all sorts of things out in public, you know, not to freak people out but just to be amusing to ourselves I think—but one of the things he used to do was: at certain moments we’d work each other up into different states of frenzy and that sort of thing, and when he would get worked up he’d reach into his shirt, pull out a tit, pull out as much tit flesh as he could and say: Le bonheur! [laughter] That’s what I always liked about him. Le bonheur!
[Laughing] A shared thing.
And George’s thing was to, you know: his voice would drop an octave and he’d get this grimace on his face and he’d say things in a very theatrical or—I can’t even describe it—a strange way. That was how he acted out. And I acted out by, well I could do this real… I used to freak out a lot and kind of physically… do physical things; like sometimes I would actually fall on the ground and writhe—I remember doing this when I was in high school--
--In public?--
--In public—and sort of jabber [laughs].
Like you were having a seizure?
Yeah, like you were having a seizure, you know, throw myself around.
Did they call the medics?
No, because you would be out of there before anybody caught on to it.
Hit and run writhing?
Hit and run writhing. But I didn’t do it that much then. I remember earlier when I was in high school I spent a lot of time with this Japanese foreign exchange student, Tadayuki Morishta, and one time I did that around him and he got real horrified and he said, after I stopped he said: Is this good for your mental situation? So he was real—I didn’t do that around him—he got real upset. Most people just laughed. That was the extreme version, what I did mostly was just kind of be spastic, walk around like a spastic person, you know like a person who had some sort of ailment like cerebral palsy or something like that, and the other two guys would pretend like it was perfectly normal that that’s just the way I was. Plus I would… I use to have this thing—I still do but I don’t have it as much—where I could, I would recite stuff that was in these books that were in my head [laughs], books and newspapers.
Books that were in your head?
Yes, I could visualize…
You mean books that you had read or books that you were making up?
No, yeah, I was making them up but the script would appear to me, I would just be reading what it was. I could visualize, usually with your eyes closed you have to do this with; doesn’t everybody do this? Doesn’t everybody do this?
You would visualize words on a page?
I would visualize getting the book out, opening it up, finding out what the title was, who the author was, and then it never worked, I could never go to chapter one but I could go somewhere in the middle and just start reading what was on the page. So that was a cute trick. Or sometimes it would be…
And you really had a fix on the page, I mean word for word you could read along and jump around on the page and it was all there?
Yeah, it was all there. Sometimes it would waver.
Do you remember what they were like?
It was just random stuff. Sometimes they made sense, sometimes they didn’t; sometimes they didn’t go on for very long, they would start wavering and then you’d have to start filling in the gaps another way, you know, stuff you weren’t really reading, you were just bringing, you were just making it up.
Do you remember any of the titles?
No. Hey Beelzebub [laughter], that’s one I do remember. Like Hey Bub, Hey Beelzebub, you know, by Freddy Johnson or something like that. Or newspaper articles, you know, I could see the headline and read what city it was: Berlin, Reuters, whatever the headline was, and then start reading the story: At six pm today Ralph Abernathy… whatever, and it would be there. The best one was kind of like a scrolling screen and I had to be real fast to keep up with it. So I would do that, that was what I did: the spastic, hebephrenic walking around in jerks and starts with weird foot actions, like spaz, like spazes do: You spaz! Plus we would just engage in conversations in different voices, and when we were doing that we were just laughing and having fun.
And how were you thought of by other people?
I don’t know. As far as I knew people in the public they were them, they were all them. Sometimes you’d get a reaction, you know, especially when… I mean I guess I was good at it because when I stopped sometimes people would give me a hard time, like they thought I was that way, then they’d get all pissed off because I wasn’t that way. That only happened a couple times. And you know a lot of this was under the influence of beer or weed.
So do you remember when the books usually came to you?
Oh I always used to be able to do that. I could probably do it now.
It didn’t require mind altering substances?
No, no. It was easier and you could go into more readily, you know, give yourself up to it more readily and just be there reading whatever that was. There was another form too, what the hell, there was the newspaper, the book and the scrolling thing… there was some other form maybe like flash cards or something like that but I don’t know.
Did you ever think of writing any of these down?
I did, I probably did, wrote a couple of them down. I don’t have any.
Did you save them?
I was writing little songlets too then. I hadn’t done any music yet but I was starting to pay attention to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and stuff like that was out there in the air.
So was it that style of song writing?
Yeah, you know, just couplets, a b a b stuff, nothing very interesting; some of them were funny to me.
Was the imagery though kind of like Dylan’s?
No, it was more like… it was more like, more like Leonard Cohen if anything, that seemed to be more, for some reason it was more mysterious and unfamiliar. Dylan was mysterious and unfamiliar in a different way, but it was like… it seemed more, Dylan always seemed more accidental stuff—like he was reading those books! That’s probably what he was doing: he was reading those books in his head; it just came to him like that; but there was some craft, you know, it seemed like there was some serious stuff going in the Leonard Cohen stuff. I never liked poetry; I never read any of his poetry or anything like that, no.
You didn’t like poetry in general.
Too hard. No. Too many… and I was aware that there was a great, there was all this, many layers, you know, things that stood for other things, and I didn’t like that [laughs].
You didn’t want to work that hard.
Plus it was just too… I never liked that; I never was able to appreciate symbolism in literature; it had to be pretty superficial [laughs], pretty on the surface, you know, pretty much, and I knew that poetry was not like that. Pop songs were more approachable that way, I mean somewhere in between bubble gum music and serious poetry; it was just right: the music and the words, you know, and the words lent themselves to a limited number of interpretations and it wasn’t so serious, that’s I guess if I had to explain it. But we were, so you know we had some weed from around the area but then we ran out. We ran out and we all had some leave coming and George knew people who were still down at the Defense Language Institute.
Where was that located?
Monterey. So we were going to drive down from Fort Lewis, Washington, drive down to Monterey and back in Don’s car, and I was just along for the ride. Oh the other thing that I developed at this point was I was getting real good at my work in the army, you know, I liked to do all that stuff and control the office and get all the paperwork together but when I was done with that I didn’t want to be in that frame of mind anymore, so, you know, I wanted to be in this other frame of mind, so I figured out a way to do it.
You mean in the clerical frame of mind, the sort of bureaucratic…?
In the non-work… I liked to do all that stuff but I figured that’s sort of what they were paying me to do and it was all part of this army experiment which was going to lead to somewhere else I knew so I was still playing along with that, but apart from that there was all this other fun stuff that was happening and there was a transition between these two states of being and I wasn’t having trouble making the transition it was just that I needed some way of demarking when I was not doing one and when I could go ahead and just release and be myself, because you can’t… work is controlled behavior more than anything else. So I found, I had a talisman; I found a piece of bicycle chain and put a thong through it and when I put that around my neck I was me, you know, I was… [laughs] I could be as goofy or relaxed or crazy as I could, and these guys let me—that’s what I liked about them—they let me tag along even though I was real flaky and didn’t contribute much, you know, one of ‘em had a car, one of ‘em had a connection and they were real smart and they could talk about things and I couldn’t, but...
You didn’t feel very articulate?
Oh no, no, I still don’t; it’s all very slippery to me, thinking in words and all, it’s all slippery. I’m lucky I can hold a conversation; I can’t hold it very tightly, but I got better, you know you get better at it just from sheer habit; but no, words and thoughts were very slippery things to me, so...
So you always felt a little bit like you were, did you feel like you were tagging along with these guys?
No I just didn’t, for a long time I just didn’t feel like I was in, I mean these guys weren’t normal, you know, the way I thought that normal people were, and I knew I wasn’t normal, but they were better equipped than I was to deal with the normal world, and I was even less normal, or less capable than they were on that score, and later on when I was going away they worried about me! you know, when I was going to go to Germany they worried that I wasn’t going to make it [laughs], you know, that something awful was gonna happen. They sat down and had a little heart-to-heart talk with me, told me what to watch out for, what to do, just keep this in mind: it was very touching.
Now do you think, because you mentioned this before that you were a little bit naïve about the way things worked, like putting money in the mail, that sort of thing, and you mentioned that maybe it was growing up in the home or homes, do you think that had an effect? I mean you got out a lot, but do you think in some ways it was still kind of sheltered or kept you from getting with how the world worked?
I think mechanically, yeah, a little bit, but what it really was was my alienation, you know, my feeling of alienation: feeling like this wasn’t my planet [laughs] and that I had to watch out for other people ‘cause I wasn’t like them, and a lot of that did come from the home experience, but some of it was also just not being aware of the way my cohorts were, how the world worked and how people worked, you know, and how you dealt with people; but I was doing okay, you know, as I mentioned I read a lot and I was formulating ideas, I was putting two and two together, so I understood how things worked and they needn’t have worried about me because it was all very playful and I was more or less in control of what I was doing, you know, as long as I didn’t take too many unnecessary risks, and I never did, I always took controlled risks, so I was controlling the experiment as best I could as it went along, but I couldn’t have explained this at that time to myself or to them.
So they didn’t know the kind of detached way that you were looking at it, that it was kind of an experiment, that you were kind of toying with, in some ways, your effect on things and your control of things.
No, I mean because the full picture didn’t even occur to me until later, only in retrospect did I realize [laughs]. I mean it’s probably impossible to explain, I mean I was aware on some level of my progression but it wasn’t until much later that I could definitively say: well yeah, that’s what I was doing alright. Maybe if somebody had asked me at that point, or if I was self-aware enough to ask myself, I would have sat down and—‘cause I did ask myself some questions, and answer them, but not that one. So I knew that I was going along and I was trying to base everything on my experience and not on some social conditioning or some predigested spoon feeding. I was gonna chew it up myself, and whatever happened I was ready to pay the price: if bad things happened there was no one I could blame but myself because I felt that I was in control in an uncontrolled way, controlling the lack of control. So when I put my talisman on I was totally there as myself.
I wanted to get back to that too. So tell me, it was actually a bicycle chain?
It was like a six inch length of bicycle chain with a leather thong through it, that’s all it was [laughs]. It was magical.
It was a leather thong, and so you wore this around your neck.
Yeah, that was all, that was all it took, that divided things up pretty nicely.
And it was just kind of permission to be yourself at those times.
Yeah, yeah. It was like a magic hat. Put on your magic hat. So we got in the car and we took a wonderful trip down. I don’t remember too much about the trip down except we stopped off in San Francisco. Yeah, we stopped off in San Francisco first. And I had heard about or somehow we found out about the midnight movies because we did do that: we went to midnight movies at the Presidio Theater. [rummaging through some papers] I don’t remember what they had or how I knew about it but—damn it!
So you have some kind of clipping or…?
Yes, I’ve got my memento!
Oh…
So to buy a ticket you had to have one of these things; you had to be in a club.
What he’s given me here is a membership card, twenty-five cents, membership card for Underground Cinema 12, Presidio Theater, San Francisco: Every Saturday at 12 midnight. Wow, okay, and it was issued September 3rd, 1966. So these were midnight movies.
Yeah, just like the midnight movies that I used to like to go to in L.A., you know, with lots of shorts like ‘The Big Shave’ and some animation maybe and maybe some crazy Kuchar brothers stuff.
Yeah, you remember those guys, yeah.
Yeah, so that was a real treat because I really liked that sort of thing, plus it was midnight and it was foggy in San Francisco and we were trippin’ on something, I don’t know, smokin’ those Gauloise. And I think that night we wound up in Daly City; one of these guys knew somebody who lived down in Daly City and he was—I was telling you earlier—this guy was telling us: “You know”—all his stuff was packed up; he was getting ready to move—he said: “Everybody’s goin’ up to the Haight Street in San Francisco, we’re all gonna move up there. Lots of people are goin’ up there. There’s stuff happinin’ there already.” So that was… I said: “That sounds interesting; I’ll go up there when I get out.” [laughs]
So sixty-seven was when it first really… so this was the buildup.
Yeah, this was fall of sixty-six. And this guy had this huge glass jar full of roaches; that’s what I, that’s one thing I remember, huge glass jar full of roaches, I mean they must have been smokin’… there must have been hundreds of roaches in that thing, maybe even a thousand, ‘cause it was big.
So you think he’d been smoking for a long time.
Yeah. So we went down, we scooted down to Monterey and we got onto the base there at the Defense Language Institute and hung around while George, I guess it was George, went in to see his friend. He came out with his friend and his friend didn’t have no weed but he had a connection and he told us where to go in Berkeley; so there in fall of sixty-six is my first visit to Berkeley, California, and we wind up on the north side and I can… it was whatever that street is right off of, the next street right off of Euclid after Hearst, you know there’s Hearst and then there’s that street, where Seven Palms is, the little grocery store, so this was right off… so we walk in up there, we go round the corner and we go down the street a few houses and we go to the address and there we can see down, from the sidewalk you can see down into the basement apartment, there’s this great big window, it’s open to the world, the breeze is blowing in, there’s no screen, and there’s a guy down there: you can see on the table he’s got huge! huge! amount of marijuana on this table and he’s cutting and slicing and packaging it. So I guess we had saved up some money for this, so we split a key*, the three of us split a key…
A key; that’s a lot.
… and we took one key back to this guy in Monterey, as far as I remember, because we wound up sleeping on the beach in Monterey or Carmel or somewhere, and we started smoking this dangerous weed: it was the sweetest, gonest, wildest, mellowest, most hallucinogenic marijuana that I’ve ever smoked since. I thought I was really… I hadn’t smoked that much before really, and I’d never had a whole third of a key; I’d maybe had a baggy or something like that; but I had a third of a key in my possession: I thought I was gonna be like this forever [laughs].
Do you remember where it was from?
No.
So it wasn’t that old Mexican pot, it was… although…
No, but do remember the guy telling me… the guy down in the basement apartment talking about how it was, it was mellow-dee [laughter]. “This shit is mellow-dee!” And it certainly was. I knew that from that Lord Buckley line about Jonah, you know, how he was grooving down on the beach and everything was so mellow-dee and fine, and this stuff was mellow-dee.
So it seems there was kind of an inside, you know, Lord Buckley and all these things were current with a certain group of heads.
Heads, yeah, the community of heads. Are you a head? I’m a head. But this stuff was… ah, it went down easy; and I’m gettin’ the goose bumps just thinkin’ about it; and I had some visions…. I mean there were a couple of supernatural things that happened: I mean we were sharing these visions! We had this vision there was this gigantic white, like hound of the Baskervilles, this big old dog with wings flying off the cliff side and disappearing into the mist.
And you all saw it?
We all saw it! You know: Check that out. Check that flying dog out! Man… So we packed up and we rode back and the car broke down somewhere, for some reason I think it was Corvalis, somewhere around there, maybe not, maybe it was… somewhere in Oregon there’s a city with two words in it: The Dalles? Maybe that’s what it is.
Gonna have to turn the tape over. The Dalles.
Yeah, the big white flying dog.
[End Tape 12, Side A]
This time we’re talking to Michael Conkin at his home in Fruitvale. To pick up the threads of our last conversation: you had mentioned the best dope you ever had: I want you to tell that story but I also don’t want you to forget to describe the third member of your triumvirate of hep cats.
Oh yeah, yeah, hep cats. Yeah, okay, so there was George Hunt, he was… I was trying to think of what these two guys did in the army too. I don’t remember. George may have had some creative job, I don’t know, working with the printing office or something like that, but he’s the one who was in for four years on a National Security Agency clearance; he was in the Defense Language Institute at Monterey and got bounced out of there for some reason; I don’t remember what the reason was; and he was from the Massachusetts area. He was into Lovecraft and the Spanish Civil War and in fact other sorts of wars: he knew a lot about war. He was a very thin, artistic kind of a guy; very intelligent and really sensitive.
Was he a lefty, I mean his perspective on the Spanish Civil War: was he a republican?
Probably, I think he was just interested in the romance of it. It was probably only romantic to the non-Franco supporters.
So then who was the other guy?
The other guy was Don Sutton, and he was, I don’t know what he did either, but he was a playful fellow; a real live wire; dynamic: just total nonstop energy, and he spent a lot of time—he had a car.
Did both guys have cars?
No, I think only Don had a car; it wasn’t that great of a car, but it was a car. And he always had girlfriends too. He was always out there. When he wasn’t on base he was in Seattle or Tacoma visiting his girlfriends.
So he always had more than one?
Ah, maybe it was a serial kind of a deal; I don’t know if it was more than one, I’m not sure. But he was funny and smart and, you know, we were all sort of on the same wavelength. The one specific thing I can remember that he used to do was: we went to see this French movie called Le Bonheur, which means ‘happiness’. It’s a story of—it’s probably a fairly ordinary story—but there were some bare breasts in it, some French frontal nudity.
[Laughs] French frontal nudity.
Yeah, something like that; and one of the things he would do—in fact we were always doing all sorts of things out in public, you know, not to freak people out but just to be amusing to ourselves I think—but one of the things he used to do was: at certain moments we’d work each other up into different states of frenzy and that sort of thing, and when he would get worked up he’d reach into his shirt, pull out a tit, pull out as much tit flesh as he could and say: Le bonheur! [laughter] That’s what I always liked about him. Le bonheur!
[Laughing] A shared thing.
And George’s thing was to, you know: his voice would drop an octave and he’d get this grimace on his face and he’d say things in a very theatrical or—I can’t even describe it—a strange way. That was how he acted out. And I acted out by, well I could do this real… I used to freak out a lot and kind of physically… do physical things; like sometimes I would actually fall on the ground and writhe—I remember doing this when I was in high school--
--In public?--
--In public—and sort of jabber [laughs].
Like you were having a seizure?
Yeah, like you were having a seizure, you know, throw myself around.
Did they call the medics?
No, because you would be out of there before anybody caught on to it.
Hit and run writhing?
Hit and run writhing. But I didn’t do it that much then. I remember earlier when I was in high school I spent a lot of time with this Japanese foreign exchange student, Tadayuki Morishta, and one time I did that around him and he got real horrified and he said, after I stopped he said: Is this good for your mental situation? So he was real—I didn’t do that around him—he got real upset. Most people just laughed. That was the extreme version, what I did mostly was just kind of be spastic, walk around like a spastic person, you know like a person who had some sort of ailment like cerebral palsy or something like that, and the other two guys would pretend like it was perfectly normal that that’s just the way I was. Plus I would… I use to have this thing—I still do but I don’t have it as much—where I could, I would recite stuff that was in these books that were in my head [laughs], books and newspapers.
Books that were in your head?
Yes, I could visualize…
You mean books that you had read or books that you were making up?
No, yeah, I was making them up but the script would appear to me, I would just be reading what it was. I could visualize, usually with your eyes closed you have to do this with; doesn’t everybody do this? Doesn’t everybody do this?
You would visualize words on a page?
I would visualize getting the book out, opening it up, finding out what the title was, who the author was, and then it never worked, I could never go to chapter one but I could go somewhere in the middle and just start reading what was on the page. So that was a cute trick. Or sometimes it would be…
And you really had a fix on the page, I mean word for word you could read along and jump around on the page and it was all there?
Yeah, it was all there. Sometimes it would waver.
Do you remember what they were like?
It was just random stuff. Sometimes they made sense, sometimes they didn’t; sometimes they didn’t go on for very long, they would start wavering and then you’d have to start filling in the gaps another way, you know, stuff you weren’t really reading, you were just bringing, you were just making it up.
Do you remember any of the titles?
No. Hey Beelzebub [laughter], that’s one I do remember. Like Hey Bub, Hey Beelzebub, you know, by Freddy Johnson or something like that. Or newspaper articles, you know, I could see the headline and read what city it was: Berlin, Reuters, whatever the headline was, and then start reading the story: At six pm today Ralph Abernathy… whatever, and it would be there. The best one was kind of like a scrolling screen and I had to be real fast to keep up with it. So I would do that, that was what I did: the spastic, hebephrenic walking around in jerks and starts with weird foot actions, like spaz, like spazes do: You spaz! Plus we would just engage in conversations in different voices, and when we were doing that we were just laughing and having fun.
And how were you thought of by other people?
I don’t know. As far as I knew people in the public they were them, they were all them. Sometimes you’d get a reaction, you know, especially when… I mean I guess I was good at it because when I stopped sometimes people would give me a hard time, like they thought I was that way, then they’d get all pissed off because I wasn’t that way. That only happened a couple times. And you know a lot of this was under the influence of beer or weed.
So do you remember when the books usually came to you?
Oh I always used to be able to do that. I could probably do it now.
It didn’t require mind altering substances?
No, no. It was easier and you could go into more readily, you know, give yourself up to it more readily and just be there reading whatever that was. There was another form too, what the hell, there was the newspaper, the book and the scrolling thing… there was some other form maybe like flash cards or something like that but I don’t know.
Did you ever think of writing any of these down?
I did, I probably did, wrote a couple of them down. I don’t have any.
Did you save them?
I was writing little songlets too then. I hadn’t done any music yet but I was starting to pay attention to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and stuff like that was out there in the air.
So was it that style of song writing?
Yeah, you know, just couplets, a b a b stuff, nothing very interesting; some of them were funny to me.
Was the imagery though kind of like Dylan’s?
No, it was more like… it was more like, more like Leonard Cohen if anything, that seemed to be more, for some reason it was more mysterious and unfamiliar. Dylan was mysterious and unfamiliar in a different way, but it was like… it seemed more, Dylan always seemed more accidental stuff—like he was reading those books! That’s probably what he was doing: he was reading those books in his head; it just came to him like that; but there was some craft, you know, it seemed like there was some serious stuff going in the Leonard Cohen stuff. I never liked poetry; I never read any of his poetry or anything like that, no.
You didn’t like poetry in general.
Too hard. No. Too many… and I was aware that there was a great, there was all this, many layers, you know, things that stood for other things, and I didn’t like that [laughs].
You didn’t want to work that hard.
Plus it was just too… I never liked that; I never was able to appreciate symbolism in literature; it had to be pretty superficial [laughs], pretty on the surface, you know, pretty much, and I knew that poetry was not like that. Pop songs were more approachable that way, I mean somewhere in between bubble gum music and serious poetry; it was just right: the music and the words, you know, and the words lent themselves to a limited number of interpretations and it wasn’t so serious, that’s I guess if I had to explain it. But we were, so you know we had some weed from around the area but then we ran out. We ran out and we all had some leave coming and George knew people who were still down at the Defense Language Institute.
Where was that located?
Monterey. So we were going to drive down from Fort Lewis, Washington, drive down to Monterey and back in Don’s car, and I was just along for the ride. Oh the other thing that I developed at this point was I was getting real good at my work in the army, you know, I liked to do all that stuff and control the office and get all the paperwork together but when I was done with that I didn’t want to be in that frame of mind anymore, so, you know, I wanted to be in this other frame of mind, so I figured out a way to do it.
You mean in the clerical frame of mind, the sort of bureaucratic…?
In the non-work… I liked to do all that stuff but I figured that’s sort of what they were paying me to do and it was all part of this army experiment which was going to lead to somewhere else I knew so I was still playing along with that, but apart from that there was all this other fun stuff that was happening and there was a transition between these two states of being and I wasn’t having trouble making the transition it was just that I needed some way of demarking when I was not doing one and when I could go ahead and just release and be myself, because you can’t… work is controlled behavior more than anything else. So I found, I had a talisman; I found a piece of bicycle chain and put a thong through it and when I put that around my neck I was me, you know, I was… [laughs] I could be as goofy or relaxed or crazy as I could, and these guys let me—that’s what I liked about them—they let me tag along even though I was real flaky and didn’t contribute much, you know, one of ‘em had a car, one of ‘em had a connection and they were real smart and they could talk about things and I couldn’t, but...
You didn’t feel very articulate?
Oh no, no, I still don’t; it’s all very slippery to me, thinking in words and all, it’s all slippery. I’m lucky I can hold a conversation; I can’t hold it very tightly, but I got better, you know you get better at it just from sheer habit; but no, words and thoughts were very slippery things to me, so...
So you always felt a little bit like you were, did you feel like you were tagging along with these guys?
No I just didn’t, for a long time I just didn’t feel like I was in, I mean these guys weren’t normal, you know, the way I thought that normal people were, and I knew I wasn’t normal, but they were better equipped than I was to deal with the normal world, and I was even less normal, or less capable than they were on that score, and later on when I was going away they worried about me! you know, when I was going to go to Germany they worried that I wasn’t going to make it [laughs], you know, that something awful was gonna happen. They sat down and had a little heart-to-heart talk with me, told me what to watch out for, what to do, just keep this in mind: it was very touching.
Now do you think, because you mentioned this before that you were a little bit naïve about the way things worked, like putting money in the mail, that sort of thing, and you mentioned that maybe it was growing up in the home or homes, do you think that had an effect? I mean you got out a lot, but do you think in some ways it was still kind of sheltered or kept you from getting with how the world worked?
I think mechanically, yeah, a little bit, but what it really was was my alienation, you know, my feeling of alienation: feeling like this wasn’t my planet [laughs] and that I had to watch out for other people ‘cause I wasn’t like them, and a lot of that did come from the home experience, but some of it was also just not being aware of the way my cohorts were, how the world worked and how people worked, you know, and how you dealt with people; but I was doing okay, you know, as I mentioned I read a lot and I was formulating ideas, I was putting two and two together, so I understood how things worked and they needn’t have worried about me because it was all very playful and I was more or less in control of what I was doing, you know, as long as I didn’t take too many unnecessary risks, and I never did, I always took controlled risks, so I was controlling the experiment as best I could as it went along, but I couldn’t have explained this at that time to myself or to them.
So they didn’t know the kind of detached way that you were looking at it, that it was kind of an experiment, that you were kind of toying with, in some ways, your effect on things and your control of things.
No, I mean because the full picture didn’t even occur to me until later, only in retrospect did I realize [laughs]. I mean it’s probably impossible to explain, I mean I was aware on some level of my progression but it wasn’t until much later that I could definitively say: well yeah, that’s what I was doing alright. Maybe if somebody had asked me at that point, or if I was self-aware enough to ask myself, I would have sat down and—‘cause I did ask myself some questions, and answer them, but not that one. So I knew that I was going along and I was trying to base everything on my experience and not on some social conditioning or some predigested spoon feeding. I was gonna chew it up myself, and whatever happened I was ready to pay the price: if bad things happened there was no one I could blame but myself because I felt that I was in control in an uncontrolled way, controlling the lack of control. So when I put my talisman on I was totally there as myself.
I wanted to get back to that too. So tell me, it was actually a bicycle chain?
It was like a six inch length of bicycle chain with a leather thong through it, that’s all it was [laughs]. It was magical.
It was a leather thong, and so you wore this around your neck.
Yeah, that was all, that was all it took, that divided things up pretty nicely.
And it was just kind of permission to be yourself at those times.
Yeah, yeah. It was like a magic hat. Put on your magic hat. So we got in the car and we took a wonderful trip down. I don’t remember too much about the trip down except we stopped off in San Francisco. Yeah, we stopped off in San Francisco first. And I had heard about or somehow we found out about the midnight movies because we did do that: we went to midnight movies at the Presidio Theater. [rummaging through some papers] I don’t remember what they had or how I knew about it but—damn it!
So you have some kind of clipping or…?
Yes, I’ve got my memento!
Oh…
So to buy a ticket you had to have one of these things; you had to be in a club.
What he’s given me here is a membership card, twenty-five cents, membership card for Underground Cinema 12, Presidio Theater, San Francisco: Every Saturday at 12 midnight. Wow, okay, and it was issued September 3rd, 1966. So these were midnight movies.
Yeah, just like the midnight movies that I used to like to go to in L.A., you know, with lots of shorts like ‘The Big Shave’ and some animation maybe and maybe some crazy Kuchar brothers stuff.
Yeah, you remember those guys, yeah.
Yeah, so that was a real treat because I really liked that sort of thing, plus it was midnight and it was foggy in San Francisco and we were trippin’ on something, I don’t know, smokin’ those Gauloise. And I think that night we wound up in Daly City; one of these guys knew somebody who lived down in Daly City and he was—I was telling you earlier—this guy was telling us: “You know”—all his stuff was packed up; he was getting ready to move—he said: “Everybody’s goin’ up to the Haight Street in San Francisco, we’re all gonna move up there. Lots of people are goin’ up there. There’s stuff happinin’ there already.” So that was… I said: “That sounds interesting; I’ll go up there when I get out.” [laughs]
So sixty-seven was when it first really… so this was the buildup.
Yeah, this was fall of sixty-six. And this guy had this huge glass jar full of roaches; that’s what I, that’s one thing I remember, huge glass jar full of roaches, I mean they must have been smokin’… there must have been hundreds of roaches in that thing, maybe even a thousand, ‘cause it was big.
So you think he’d been smoking for a long time.
Yeah. So we went down, we scooted down to Monterey and we got onto the base there at the Defense Language Institute and hung around while George, I guess it was George, went in to see his friend. He came out with his friend and his friend didn’t have no weed but he had a connection and he told us where to go in Berkeley; so there in fall of sixty-six is my first visit to Berkeley, California, and we wind up on the north side and I can… it was whatever that street is right off of, the next street right off of Euclid after Hearst, you know there’s Hearst and then there’s that street, where Seven Palms is, the little grocery store, so this was right off… so we walk in up there, we go round the corner and we go down the street a few houses and we go to the address and there we can see down, from the sidewalk you can see down into the basement apartment, there’s this great big window, it’s open to the world, the breeze is blowing in, there’s no screen, and there’s a guy down there: you can see on the table he’s got huge! huge! amount of marijuana on this table and he’s cutting and slicing and packaging it. So I guess we had saved up some money for this, so we split a key*, the three of us split a key…
A key; that’s a lot.
… and we took one key back to this guy in Monterey, as far as I remember, because we wound up sleeping on the beach in Monterey or Carmel or somewhere, and we started smoking this dangerous weed: it was the sweetest, gonest, wildest, mellowest, most hallucinogenic marijuana that I’ve ever smoked since. I thought I was really… I hadn’t smoked that much before really, and I’d never had a whole third of a key; I’d maybe had a baggy or something like that; but I had a third of a key in my possession: I thought I was gonna be like this forever [laughs].
Do you remember where it was from?
No.
So it wasn’t that old Mexican pot, it was… although…
No, but do remember the guy telling me… the guy down in the basement apartment talking about how it was, it was mellow-dee [laughter]. “This shit is mellow-dee!” And it certainly was. I knew that from that Lord Buckley line about Jonah, you know, how he was grooving down on the beach and everything was so mellow-dee and fine, and this stuff was mellow-dee.
So it seems there was kind of an inside, you know, Lord Buckley and all these things were current with a certain group of heads.
Heads, yeah, the community of heads. Are you a head? I’m a head. But this stuff was… ah, it went down easy; and I’m gettin’ the goose bumps just thinkin’ about it; and I had some visions…. I mean there were a couple of supernatural things that happened: I mean we were sharing these visions! We had this vision there was this gigantic white, like hound of the Baskervilles, this big old dog with wings flying off the cliff side and disappearing into the mist.
And you all saw it?
We all saw it! You know: Check that out. Check that flying dog out! Man… So we packed up and we rode back and the car broke down somewhere, for some reason I think it was Corvalis, somewhere around there, maybe not, maybe it was… somewhere in Oregon there’s a city with two words in it: The Dalles? Maybe that’s what it is.
Gonna have to turn the tape over. The Dalles.
Yeah, the big white flying dog.
[End Tape 12, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:20 PM
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