Tape 14, Side B
[Begin Tape 14, Side B]
Well, so you found kindred spirits.
So I got a real job, real job and real friends, and spending a lot of time hangin’ out. One of the gals there at the post office, her name is Kathy Burtner, she had a real nice apartment; I don’t think the rest of us had real nice apartments yet; she had like a house, yeah. There was a story how she had that, I don’t know, but it was big enough so that a lot of people could go and hang out in her living-room, and that’s what we would do a lot of times after work.
Was she older or was she your age?
She was about our age, yeah, everybody there was about our age, about my age, you know, give or take; and she is a doper queen.
Really?
Yeah, she always has something and she’s real generous so we can always go over there and just hang out and smoke dope and listen to the radio, listen to KMET, which is one of the first freeform FM stations—down there—probably started just a little bit after KSAN or whatever it was up here that was before KSAN, K… K-one of them others, yeah, and you know they had the cool disk jockeys and they could play any damn thing they wanted to and they did.
Right, off the albums…
Whole albums, yeah, and I mean the music was just happening then, whatever you wanted was there, and all the people who went to Monterey, the Monterey Pop Festival later that same year, they were all on the radio: Jimi Hendrix and The Who and Ravi Shankar, I mean… and jazz, they would play all that stuff, there were no boundaries between different types of music, and a lot of it was ‘head’ music, you know, really trippy stuff, and we were just all getting stoned with one another and groovin’ on one another.
Was it mostly smoking dope or were there other drugs?
I think there were a couple people who were speedy. I wasn’t interested…
Were you still doing the speed?
No, no…
That was just a phase.
That was just a little tiny part of the time when I was working at that restaurant. I probably had some uppers and downers later on: didn’t appeal to me, neither uppers nor downers.
Did LSD ever come into it?
It was starting to get there, starting to get there right about now. Besides the post office people there were their friends, and one of the young women there, another Kathy, Kathy Stanis, she was from St. Louis and a lot of her St. Louis pals had come out with her, among them one Mike Steuer. And this guy, he was a little bit younger than us, didn’t work at the post office, didn’t work anywhere actually: he crashed a lot, but he was always in the picture and he was one of the most unforgettable characters I’ve ever met. He’s good for a Reader’s Digest article because he was kind of a naïf but he was into everything, especially the mystical side of things, you know, he was into Aleister Crowley and white magic and purple magic and [laughter], and he would take anything, he would take anything, but it was all part of his experiment. He wasn’t just a drug freak.
It was a Rimbaud sort of thing of disordering of the senses?
That was part of it and just the psychedelic experience and he probably took mescaline and peyote and acid before anybody but he wasn’t really all that trustworthy a reporter because he was kind of mad, you know, but he was just full of enthusiasm and a quest for mystical experience. He picked up a lot of Asian philosophy and that sort of thing too.
Had he read some of the things that you’d read?
Yeah, some of them but from a different perspective, plus he would also read garbage like Urantia and some… what are all… I can’t remember all those things but all the stuff that was in the occult section, he was really into that.
You mean some of the more hoky National Inquirer, Uri Geller sort of stuff.
No. Uri Geller comes into it. I’ve seen Uri Geller, later on. But no, no, I mean stuff like ah… gosh, I wish I could think of something… Atlantis, The Motherland of Mu…
There was a lot of that stuff.
Yeah, a lot of it.
Didn’t Donovan have a song about Atlantis?
[Sings] Way down below the ocean, that’s where I want to go. Yeah. And he was always dressing up funny in costumes, and, you know, he was always moving, always moving and always doing something different, but again there was this sweet naïve quality to it too.
Was it kind of like Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot or something like that, sort of the holy fool a little bit?
A little bit, a little bit, but he was on a quest, he was definitely on a quest. [leafing through photos, he’s found something] There’s a picture of me and this Kathy Burtner who had the house and Mike Steuer from, whoa, January ‘69, so it’s a little later. But he always had some different kind of look and he always had some different kind of rap.
Yeah, he’s wearing a hat—very unusual—looks like a slightly squashed stovepipe hat with some kind of maybe silver disks on it—it’s hard to tell—on the band maybe, and you’re wearing desert boots maybe?
Oh, those are those really cool sued boots that I got in Germany, yeah.
And you have a mustache and you look to me older than your twenty—well now you would have been twenty-three--but did you always look a little older?
No, no.
Maybe it’s just the mustache or something. So this is down there in Redondo.
Down there in Redondo, one of the few pictures I have of that era that does have Mike Steuer in it, and he was the other Kathy’s friend—this is Kathy Burtner—and he used to hang around with Kathy Stanis’s brother Tim, who was known variously as Daniels—no, he was known as, what was he known as? Sebastian was one of his names, and Walter was one of his names, and… what was his other name? I think his real name was Walter Joe Stanis but most people called him Tim. Mike Steuer called him Sebastian for some reason [laughs], I don’t know, but he had all these personae. And he was an ace guitarist. Kathy Stanis, her father—well Kathy and Tim’s father and their brother Mike, who comes into it too—he was a jazz pianist back in St. Louis, and so they grew up very musical, but Tim Stanis decided that he was gonna be a blues guitar specialist, and that’s what he did, and so Mike Steuer did too. They were both pretty good guitarists, so they were always wailing, especially Tim. They didn’t have jobs, they crashed here and there, but they were always on the fringes too, and Tim he got into some drug stuff too; Mike Steuer eventually got into some smack: like I say, he would take anything.
Did heroine make… was he the only one that you knew that was into it or were some of these people…?
Yeah, and it was much later actually that he was, so no, it was basically a grass culture, a grass thing, that was what really did it. None of us did it at work, I mean we had our jobs and were getting good at our jobs and hanging onto that. It was cool working at the PO, you know, it wasn’t that hard. It demanded a certain amount of thought and attention, and it was good work, I mean it was good works in that it was ‘the mail’, you know; we really thought it was good that we were working for this cause: getting the mail out, getting communication out to the people; so it was repetitive and tedious but—like library work—it had an underlying kick to it, and we all took it seriously even though we were all dopers. When we went to work, you know, we worked hard and we didn’t goof off like some of these old bastards.
The dope was for after.
Yeah, yeah.
So you didn’t mix it with work.
No, nope, we didn’t. Some of the carriers did [laughs], yeah, some of them were on speed or something like that, but, you know, we had to keep our lines open to the carriers because they got out there in the community and they could help us score [laughter], they could help us find out where the deals were.
So, sheez, I got an apartment, I got pals, I got friends, and pretty soon, by God, I had myself a girlfriend [laughs].
Whoa!
That was the other Kathy, that was Kathy Stanis.
She’s the one with the house?
Well no [leafing through photographs], that’s her, yeah.
I already got them mixed up.
How many Kathys do you have to keep in track? [under his breath] Where’s them pictures? So I’m telescoping sixty-eight here a little bit. You know what happened in sixty-eight, all the things that happened in sixty-eight. Robert Kennedy gets assassinated on… I happened to be watching television at that time, just by accident, because I was into the politics of it, digging that, and, you know, there was stuff happening in Paris, there was stuff happening in the United States, but it wasn’t really affecting me or any of us really, I mean we were all paying attention to it and we were all I think sympathetic on some level, but we were all out of the army [laughs], we were done with that, you know, we didn’t want any part of that and we didn’t have to have any part of that, but, you know, we weren’t joining any protests or anything like that, we weren’t going out and laying ourselves on the line, you know, we observed all that with interest and sympathy, but we were into having fun.
Was there very much real hard-core political stuff going on in Redondo Beach?
No, I don’t think so, not at the beach [laughs], not at the beach.
‘Cause I know that in L.A.…
There were a couple of vigils, candlelight vigils walking up and down the Embarcadero or something like that but nothing… and maybe some protests in Torrance, but I don’t know, I don’t think anything at the beach, not really there. You could go somewhere else, you know, you could go to L.A., you could go to…
Was there much happening in L.A.?
I think so, you know, there was stuff at the induction centers I think, and as far as I know there might have been… there probably, it was all in the background, I don’t remember it exactly. We were all reading The L.A. Free Press and listening to stuff on the radio, you know, so it was sort of in the air and accepted that the whole thing sucked and there was no justifying it. And we would get into arguments with the older men and women at the library, I mean at the post office, about the war and all that stuff, and the three of us who were veterans, we could speak with some authority about it, you know, because we paid our dues. So they couldn’t say: Ah, you just don’t want to go in the army, you’re just trying to get out of it; no, we were in it.
Do you remember when the Sunset riots…?
You mean [sings]: There’s something happening here*….
Yeah, is that what that song is about really?
Yeah, I think that was when I was… I think that was earlier. I don’t know, I just don’t know. I think that was earlier, like when I was in the army, but I just don’t remember exactly. The Sunset Strip Riots, and that was all, you know, bust the kids.
So it had to do with the cops and drugs?
Yeah, I think so, and just big congregations of kids interfering with business, I don’t know. What was that… Frank Zappa wrote a song like that too. I think they even made a single out of it and got some air play[sings]: There’s no way to delay the struggle comin’ every day… something about [sings]: And I’m watchin’ and I’m waitin’, even think I’ll go to prayin’… I don’t know if that was the Watts riots though, that might have been. I don’t know, it’s all confused; I can’t sort it out.
Well tell me more though about your Kathy.
Well we’re all groovin’ with one another and pairing up here and there and some of the pairs split and some of them rejoin and some of them take other directions. My friend, my lifelong friend Lee Roy Leo Luke Peck—he’s got all them names: Lee Roy, that’s two names, Lee Roy Leo Luke Peck, he’s got five names.
Those are the names he was given?
I think some of them are Catholic names; Luke’s probably a Catholic name. So his name’s Lee Roy. We either call him Lee or Lee Roy. He had been three years in the army. He served in Korea. He was a hunter-killer in Korea [laughs].
What’s a hunter-killer?
Sometimes you hunt, sometimes you kill [laughs]. That was his job I think, for part of the time anyway, you know, go on patrols; basically that’s what you do, go on patrols. He had a lot of Korean, Korea stories.
Was he older? He must have been older though.
He’s only six months older than me. So he went in early, he enlisted. But in many ways he was older because he had had a wife, and he’d spent a long time in the army. Three years, that’s a long time, man, I can’t hardly believe it.
Really, that one more year… seems like a long time?
Whoa, how can you possibly have done that?! But he was divorced. He was living with his sister and her husband, they had a big house in Hermosa Beach and he had a room there, did he? Yeah, that’s where he was living then. So he spent a lot of time hanging out with us too because he didn’t have an apartment. And he was paired up with Kathy Stanis for a while, and that broke up and I sort of got paired up with Kathy Stanis for a while. I was living in lots of different places. I was moving all over the place. I was living in various apartments and living in some little… I wanted to move closer and closer to the Post Office, but I did it in stages. At one point I was living in this real old hotel they had in Redondo Beach called the El Ja Arms, that’s J A, El Ja Arms. I was living there with Paul Herron. He was a little bit older than the rest of us. He was a writer. He did spend a year in Europe when he got out of the army. We were like twenty-one or twenty-two; he was an ancient twenty-six. He was a remarkable guy. He wore sunglasses all the time, and later on he said, Oh, you didn’t think I was doing that to be cool; it was just he never had enough money to get his prescription filled: these were prescription sunglasses. So he lived in this El Ja Arms. I don’t know what he was doing with the money, but he introduced us all to the delights of red jug wine and sitting around all night playing guitar and singing songs. And most of his songs were songs that he wrote, and that was: Wow, he can write songs? How did he do that? And he developed his own chordings, you know, he’d hear José Feliciano on the radio and he’d say: Hey, he stole my chord! It was some special augmented D, diminished D minor 7th, 75th.
Did some of the other musical people like this Tim who played the guitar, did they ever do anything professionally, play any clubs or anything like that?
No, no, never did. He was a bottleneck player too. They were both—Tim and Mike—they were interested in blues, and they walked around all the time playing blues on their tape recorders and they would—I’d never seen this before—they weren’t interested in whole songs, they were interested in licks, so all their tapes would have licks: a Sonny Boy Williamson lick here and another lick there, so they would listen to whole albums but then they’d back up and take… [indecipherable]
[Note: Battery failure caused the tape to slow and finally stop, which makes the voices seem to speed up until they become indecipherable.]
We had a little problem with power there, but we’re back. We lost a little bit, so I want to just go catch this. Michael noted that a couple of the friends who worked in the Post Office were a little bit shaky, not the sanest people, and so I asked if in this crowd maybe he wasn’t looked at as being quite so shaky as he had been in the Army by his friends who thought that he just might not make it.
Well everybody who worked at the Post Office was okay; a couple of the other people in the larger group didn’t have jobs and couldn’t hold down jobs probably: they were a little more out there. But among those who worked in the Post Office, we were a hardworking crew, and I was working real hard too because I enjoyed it, and as I say: we all liked to get the mail out, we all wanted to get the mail out. I wasn’t as disengaged as I had been in the past with the world around me. I was forming associations instead of getting rid of associations, so that was the phase I was going through at that time: form as many associations as I could: get as dependent as possible. So that was just another role that I was… or another roll of the dice, roll of the wheel.
But you also said that when it came to the work that you were actually, at least certain kinds of work, you were the best in the group.
Well I thought I was, yeah, I thought I was one of the most industrious, hardest working, fastest, right on, accurate people they had there, and they realized that. They gave me the coveted job of pitching flats, and that’s… ‘Mr Flats’ was my title at that point. Other people became Mr Flats later.
So how does that work?
Flats are just magazines and big things, big things that aren’t letters, so you get a great big case instead of a little letter-size case; still the same slots but you’re pitching larger things. And you know it’s not for the weak. With letters, if you’re right-handed, you scoop up a bunch in your left hand and start pitching ‘em with your right hand; with flats you have to hold an armful in your left arm while you pitch them down and then pick up another group, and you know the weak and feeble would have to put them on a stand or something like that as they pitched them, which meant there would be a certain amount of—it slows things down when you have to do it that way, because you have to pick it up from the stand, get it up to your eye so you can see the address, but if you have ‘em in your arms and you have great big hands and you have a reach you can pitch flats just like you pitch letters, so if you get really good at it and fast at it you can almost keep up with somebody who’s pitching letters; and nobody could pitch flats faster than I could, but as time went on I went on to an even more coveted assignment in some quarters and that is pitching parcels. Now that meant that I had to change my schedule and that I had to kind of depart from the group, because everybody else was more or less working a daytime schedule. To get the flats out you have to do that early in the morning; you have to get there three thirty or four am, and there’s nobody else who does that, so it’s a lonely job but rewarding.
So there’s nobody else there basically except the people doing that work?
There might be some other people getting ready, but the staging area for the flats pitching was in the basement of one of these other buildings and there is nobody down there, so that can become your kingdom and instead of a giant case this time you’ve got racks and racks of postal bags and it’s a lot like basketball [laughs], unless you’re being careful, and sometimes you were, you know, you could be careful but sometimes you couldn’t afford to be because you had to move these parcels and get them into the right bags and then somebody would come around and roll the racks up to the loading dock and tie the bags off and get them out.
So you’re really throwing the parcels in the same way that you were…?
Yeah, slam dunking, yeah.
Is that why the parcels sometimes end up at the house kind of messed up?
It could be, yeah, could be.
That shows a lot of dedication to your work though.
Well I liked it again because I was all by myself and nobody was looking over my shoulder and I had my little kingdom down there.
So you still had that kind of impulse, though you had a lot of friends, you still had the kind of impulse to keep to yourself and those things were operating at the same time.
That’s true, yeah. Yes, and even though I would hang out with all these people I was still aloof, I was still more aloof than them, and, you know, I’d giggle along with the rest of ‘em, but I’d only take it so far, and I’d never freak out, you know, never. By now we were starting to take some acid and somehow I got the reputation that I could be relied upon to have some center or have some—I don’t know—some more perspective than the others, because I never tripped out as much as they would, or never... I don’t know how to explain it, I was always…
So you didn’t kind of lose it as much as other people when they were…?
No, to me it was all, you know, just a… it was cosmic, it was a cosmic joke but it was wry rather than hilarious, although at certain times it was hilarious too but I was always… I was prepared to have my mind blown but it never got blown, you know, it just never did; maybe it was the quality of stuff or maybe it was just me, but I never lost touch with… I always realized that I was under the influence of some chemicals, that there was a chemical…
You never felt that kind of psychosis [laughs].
No, absolutely not; never did, and so, you know, some of these guys and gals thought that I was a little… I don’t know, condescending or… yeah, something like that, of their behavior, but I just thought, I thought it was all wonderful and funny, but I never went nuts, you know sometimes they would go nuts and I never did.
Did you envy them? [laughs]
No, no, no, I thought that was their trip and this is mine, you know, look, it turns out that I’ve taken the mind altering substance and it turns out that my mind is definitely altered but there’s nothing threatening to my level of awareness, there’s nothing personality altering here; I’m still more or less the same Joe but it’s not… it’s different but it’s the same.
We’re at the end.
[End Tape 14, Side B]
Well, so you found kindred spirits.
So I got a real job, real job and real friends, and spending a lot of time hangin’ out. One of the gals there at the post office, her name is Kathy Burtner, she had a real nice apartment; I don’t think the rest of us had real nice apartments yet; she had like a house, yeah. There was a story how she had that, I don’t know, but it was big enough so that a lot of people could go and hang out in her living-room, and that’s what we would do a lot of times after work.
Was she older or was she your age?
She was about our age, yeah, everybody there was about our age, about my age, you know, give or take; and she is a doper queen.
Really?
Yeah, she always has something and she’s real generous so we can always go over there and just hang out and smoke dope and listen to the radio, listen to KMET, which is one of the first freeform FM stations—down there—probably started just a little bit after KSAN or whatever it was up here that was before KSAN, K… K-one of them others, yeah, and you know they had the cool disk jockeys and they could play any damn thing they wanted to and they did.
Right, off the albums…
Whole albums, yeah, and I mean the music was just happening then, whatever you wanted was there, and all the people who went to Monterey, the Monterey Pop Festival later that same year, they were all on the radio: Jimi Hendrix and The Who and Ravi Shankar, I mean… and jazz, they would play all that stuff, there were no boundaries between different types of music, and a lot of it was ‘head’ music, you know, really trippy stuff, and we were just all getting stoned with one another and groovin’ on one another.
Was it mostly smoking dope or were there other drugs?
I think there were a couple people who were speedy. I wasn’t interested…
Were you still doing the speed?
No, no…
That was just a phase.
That was just a little tiny part of the time when I was working at that restaurant. I probably had some uppers and downers later on: didn’t appeal to me, neither uppers nor downers.
Did LSD ever come into it?
It was starting to get there, starting to get there right about now. Besides the post office people there were their friends, and one of the young women there, another Kathy, Kathy Stanis, she was from St. Louis and a lot of her St. Louis pals had come out with her, among them one Mike Steuer. And this guy, he was a little bit younger than us, didn’t work at the post office, didn’t work anywhere actually: he crashed a lot, but he was always in the picture and he was one of the most unforgettable characters I’ve ever met. He’s good for a Reader’s Digest article because he was kind of a naïf but he was into everything, especially the mystical side of things, you know, he was into Aleister Crowley and white magic and purple magic and [laughter], and he would take anything, he would take anything, but it was all part of his experiment. He wasn’t just a drug freak.
It was a Rimbaud sort of thing of disordering of the senses?
That was part of it and just the psychedelic experience and he probably took mescaline and peyote and acid before anybody but he wasn’t really all that trustworthy a reporter because he was kind of mad, you know, but he was just full of enthusiasm and a quest for mystical experience. He picked up a lot of Asian philosophy and that sort of thing too.
Had he read some of the things that you’d read?
Yeah, some of them but from a different perspective, plus he would also read garbage like Urantia and some… what are all… I can’t remember all those things but all the stuff that was in the occult section, he was really into that.
You mean some of the more hoky National Inquirer, Uri Geller sort of stuff.
No. Uri Geller comes into it. I’ve seen Uri Geller, later on. But no, no, I mean stuff like ah… gosh, I wish I could think of something… Atlantis, The Motherland of Mu…
There was a lot of that stuff.
Yeah, a lot of it.
Didn’t Donovan have a song about Atlantis?
[Sings] Way down below the ocean, that’s where I want to go. Yeah. And he was always dressing up funny in costumes, and, you know, he was always moving, always moving and always doing something different, but again there was this sweet naïve quality to it too.
Was it kind of like Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot or something like that, sort of the holy fool a little bit?
A little bit, a little bit, but he was on a quest, he was definitely on a quest. [leafing through photos, he’s found something] There’s a picture of me and this Kathy Burtner who had the house and Mike Steuer from, whoa, January ‘69, so it’s a little later. But he always had some different kind of look and he always had some different kind of rap.
Yeah, he’s wearing a hat—very unusual—looks like a slightly squashed stovepipe hat with some kind of maybe silver disks on it—it’s hard to tell—on the band maybe, and you’re wearing desert boots maybe?
Oh, those are those really cool sued boots that I got in Germany, yeah.
And you have a mustache and you look to me older than your twenty—well now you would have been twenty-three--but did you always look a little older?
No, no.
Maybe it’s just the mustache or something. So this is down there in Redondo.
Down there in Redondo, one of the few pictures I have of that era that does have Mike Steuer in it, and he was the other Kathy’s friend—this is Kathy Burtner—and he used to hang around with Kathy Stanis’s brother Tim, who was known variously as Daniels—no, he was known as, what was he known as? Sebastian was one of his names, and Walter was one of his names, and… what was his other name? I think his real name was Walter Joe Stanis but most people called him Tim. Mike Steuer called him Sebastian for some reason [laughs], I don’t know, but he had all these personae. And he was an ace guitarist. Kathy Stanis, her father—well Kathy and Tim’s father and their brother Mike, who comes into it too—he was a jazz pianist back in St. Louis, and so they grew up very musical, but Tim Stanis decided that he was gonna be a blues guitar specialist, and that’s what he did, and so Mike Steuer did too. They were both pretty good guitarists, so they were always wailing, especially Tim. They didn’t have jobs, they crashed here and there, but they were always on the fringes too, and Tim he got into some drug stuff too; Mike Steuer eventually got into some smack: like I say, he would take anything.
Did heroine make… was he the only one that you knew that was into it or were some of these people…?
Yeah, and it was much later actually that he was, so no, it was basically a grass culture, a grass thing, that was what really did it. None of us did it at work, I mean we had our jobs and were getting good at our jobs and hanging onto that. It was cool working at the PO, you know, it wasn’t that hard. It demanded a certain amount of thought and attention, and it was good work, I mean it was good works in that it was ‘the mail’, you know; we really thought it was good that we were working for this cause: getting the mail out, getting communication out to the people; so it was repetitive and tedious but—like library work—it had an underlying kick to it, and we all took it seriously even though we were all dopers. When we went to work, you know, we worked hard and we didn’t goof off like some of these old bastards.
The dope was for after.
Yeah, yeah.
So you didn’t mix it with work.
No, nope, we didn’t. Some of the carriers did [laughs], yeah, some of them were on speed or something like that, but, you know, we had to keep our lines open to the carriers because they got out there in the community and they could help us score [laughter], they could help us find out where the deals were.
So, sheez, I got an apartment, I got pals, I got friends, and pretty soon, by God, I had myself a girlfriend [laughs].
Whoa!
That was the other Kathy, that was Kathy Stanis.
She’s the one with the house?
Well no [leafing through photographs], that’s her, yeah.
I already got them mixed up.
How many Kathys do you have to keep in track? [under his breath] Where’s them pictures? So I’m telescoping sixty-eight here a little bit. You know what happened in sixty-eight, all the things that happened in sixty-eight. Robert Kennedy gets assassinated on… I happened to be watching television at that time, just by accident, because I was into the politics of it, digging that, and, you know, there was stuff happening in Paris, there was stuff happening in the United States, but it wasn’t really affecting me or any of us really, I mean we were all paying attention to it and we were all I think sympathetic on some level, but we were all out of the army [laughs], we were done with that, you know, we didn’t want any part of that and we didn’t have to have any part of that, but, you know, we weren’t joining any protests or anything like that, we weren’t going out and laying ourselves on the line, you know, we observed all that with interest and sympathy, but we were into having fun.
Was there very much real hard-core political stuff going on in Redondo Beach?
No, I don’t think so, not at the beach [laughs], not at the beach.
‘Cause I know that in L.A.…
There were a couple of vigils, candlelight vigils walking up and down the Embarcadero or something like that but nothing… and maybe some protests in Torrance, but I don’t know, I don’t think anything at the beach, not really there. You could go somewhere else, you know, you could go to L.A., you could go to…
Was there much happening in L.A.?
I think so, you know, there was stuff at the induction centers I think, and as far as I know there might have been… there probably, it was all in the background, I don’t remember it exactly. We were all reading The L.A. Free Press and listening to stuff on the radio, you know, so it was sort of in the air and accepted that the whole thing sucked and there was no justifying it. And we would get into arguments with the older men and women at the library, I mean at the post office, about the war and all that stuff, and the three of us who were veterans, we could speak with some authority about it, you know, because we paid our dues. So they couldn’t say: Ah, you just don’t want to go in the army, you’re just trying to get out of it; no, we were in it.
Do you remember when the Sunset riots…?
You mean [sings]: There’s something happening here*….
Yeah, is that what that song is about really?
Yeah, I think that was when I was… I think that was earlier. I don’t know, I just don’t know. I think that was earlier, like when I was in the army, but I just don’t remember exactly. The Sunset Strip Riots, and that was all, you know, bust the kids.
So it had to do with the cops and drugs?
Yeah, I think so, and just big congregations of kids interfering with business, I don’t know. What was that… Frank Zappa wrote a song like that too. I think they even made a single out of it and got some air play[sings]: There’s no way to delay the struggle comin’ every day… something about [sings]: And I’m watchin’ and I’m waitin’, even think I’ll go to prayin’… I don’t know if that was the Watts riots though, that might have been. I don’t know, it’s all confused; I can’t sort it out.
Well tell me more though about your Kathy.
Well we’re all groovin’ with one another and pairing up here and there and some of the pairs split and some of them rejoin and some of them take other directions. My friend, my lifelong friend Lee Roy Leo Luke Peck—he’s got all them names: Lee Roy, that’s two names, Lee Roy Leo Luke Peck, he’s got five names.
Those are the names he was given?
I think some of them are Catholic names; Luke’s probably a Catholic name. So his name’s Lee Roy. We either call him Lee or Lee Roy. He had been three years in the army. He served in Korea. He was a hunter-killer in Korea [laughs].
What’s a hunter-killer?
Sometimes you hunt, sometimes you kill [laughs]. That was his job I think, for part of the time anyway, you know, go on patrols; basically that’s what you do, go on patrols. He had a lot of Korean, Korea stories.
Was he older? He must have been older though.
He’s only six months older than me. So he went in early, he enlisted. But in many ways he was older because he had had a wife, and he’d spent a long time in the army. Three years, that’s a long time, man, I can’t hardly believe it.
Really, that one more year… seems like a long time?
Whoa, how can you possibly have done that?! But he was divorced. He was living with his sister and her husband, they had a big house in Hermosa Beach and he had a room there, did he? Yeah, that’s where he was living then. So he spent a lot of time hanging out with us too because he didn’t have an apartment. And he was paired up with Kathy Stanis for a while, and that broke up and I sort of got paired up with Kathy Stanis for a while. I was living in lots of different places. I was moving all over the place. I was living in various apartments and living in some little… I wanted to move closer and closer to the Post Office, but I did it in stages. At one point I was living in this real old hotel they had in Redondo Beach called the El Ja Arms, that’s J A, El Ja Arms. I was living there with Paul Herron. He was a little bit older than the rest of us. He was a writer. He did spend a year in Europe when he got out of the army. We were like twenty-one or twenty-two; he was an ancient twenty-six. He was a remarkable guy. He wore sunglasses all the time, and later on he said, Oh, you didn’t think I was doing that to be cool; it was just he never had enough money to get his prescription filled: these were prescription sunglasses. So he lived in this El Ja Arms. I don’t know what he was doing with the money, but he introduced us all to the delights of red jug wine and sitting around all night playing guitar and singing songs. And most of his songs were songs that he wrote, and that was: Wow, he can write songs? How did he do that? And he developed his own chordings, you know, he’d hear José Feliciano on the radio and he’d say: Hey, he stole my chord! It was some special augmented D, diminished D minor 7th, 75th.
Did some of the other musical people like this Tim who played the guitar, did they ever do anything professionally, play any clubs or anything like that?
No, no, never did. He was a bottleneck player too. They were both—Tim and Mike—they were interested in blues, and they walked around all the time playing blues on their tape recorders and they would—I’d never seen this before—they weren’t interested in whole songs, they were interested in licks, so all their tapes would have licks: a Sonny Boy Williamson lick here and another lick there, so they would listen to whole albums but then they’d back up and take… [indecipherable]
[Note: Battery failure caused the tape to slow and finally stop, which makes the voices seem to speed up until they become indecipherable.]
We had a little problem with power there, but we’re back. We lost a little bit, so I want to just go catch this. Michael noted that a couple of the friends who worked in the Post Office were a little bit shaky, not the sanest people, and so I asked if in this crowd maybe he wasn’t looked at as being quite so shaky as he had been in the Army by his friends who thought that he just might not make it.
Well everybody who worked at the Post Office was okay; a couple of the other people in the larger group didn’t have jobs and couldn’t hold down jobs probably: they were a little more out there. But among those who worked in the Post Office, we were a hardworking crew, and I was working real hard too because I enjoyed it, and as I say: we all liked to get the mail out, we all wanted to get the mail out. I wasn’t as disengaged as I had been in the past with the world around me. I was forming associations instead of getting rid of associations, so that was the phase I was going through at that time: form as many associations as I could: get as dependent as possible. So that was just another role that I was… or another roll of the dice, roll of the wheel.
But you also said that when it came to the work that you were actually, at least certain kinds of work, you were the best in the group.
Well I thought I was, yeah, I thought I was one of the most industrious, hardest working, fastest, right on, accurate people they had there, and they realized that. They gave me the coveted job of pitching flats, and that’s… ‘Mr Flats’ was my title at that point. Other people became Mr Flats later.
So how does that work?
Flats are just magazines and big things, big things that aren’t letters, so you get a great big case instead of a little letter-size case; still the same slots but you’re pitching larger things. And you know it’s not for the weak. With letters, if you’re right-handed, you scoop up a bunch in your left hand and start pitching ‘em with your right hand; with flats you have to hold an armful in your left arm while you pitch them down and then pick up another group, and you know the weak and feeble would have to put them on a stand or something like that as they pitched them, which meant there would be a certain amount of—it slows things down when you have to do it that way, because you have to pick it up from the stand, get it up to your eye so you can see the address, but if you have ‘em in your arms and you have great big hands and you have a reach you can pitch flats just like you pitch letters, so if you get really good at it and fast at it you can almost keep up with somebody who’s pitching letters; and nobody could pitch flats faster than I could, but as time went on I went on to an even more coveted assignment in some quarters and that is pitching parcels. Now that meant that I had to change my schedule and that I had to kind of depart from the group, because everybody else was more or less working a daytime schedule. To get the flats out you have to do that early in the morning; you have to get there three thirty or four am, and there’s nobody else who does that, so it’s a lonely job but rewarding.
So there’s nobody else there basically except the people doing that work?
There might be some other people getting ready, but the staging area for the flats pitching was in the basement of one of these other buildings and there is nobody down there, so that can become your kingdom and instead of a giant case this time you’ve got racks and racks of postal bags and it’s a lot like basketball [laughs], unless you’re being careful, and sometimes you were, you know, you could be careful but sometimes you couldn’t afford to be because you had to move these parcels and get them into the right bags and then somebody would come around and roll the racks up to the loading dock and tie the bags off and get them out.
So you’re really throwing the parcels in the same way that you were…?
Yeah, slam dunking, yeah.
Is that why the parcels sometimes end up at the house kind of messed up?
It could be, yeah, could be.
That shows a lot of dedication to your work though.
Well I liked it again because I was all by myself and nobody was looking over my shoulder and I had my little kingdom down there.
So you still had that kind of impulse, though you had a lot of friends, you still had the kind of impulse to keep to yourself and those things were operating at the same time.
That’s true, yeah. Yes, and even though I would hang out with all these people I was still aloof, I was still more aloof than them, and, you know, I’d giggle along with the rest of ‘em, but I’d only take it so far, and I’d never freak out, you know, never. By now we were starting to take some acid and somehow I got the reputation that I could be relied upon to have some center or have some—I don’t know—some more perspective than the others, because I never tripped out as much as they would, or never... I don’t know how to explain it, I was always…
So you didn’t kind of lose it as much as other people when they were…?
No, to me it was all, you know, just a… it was cosmic, it was a cosmic joke but it was wry rather than hilarious, although at certain times it was hilarious too but I was always… I was prepared to have my mind blown but it never got blown, you know, it just never did; maybe it was the quality of stuff or maybe it was just me, but I never lost touch with… I always realized that I was under the influence of some chemicals, that there was a chemical…
You never felt that kind of psychosis [laughs].
No, absolutely not; never did, and so, you know, some of these guys and gals thought that I was a little… I don’t know, condescending or… yeah, something like that, of their behavior, but I just thought, I thought it was all wonderful and funny, but I never went nuts, you know sometimes they would go nuts and I never did.
Did you envy them? [laughs]
No, no, no, I thought that was their trip and this is mine, you know, look, it turns out that I’ve taken the mind altering substance and it turns out that my mind is definitely altered but there’s nothing threatening to my level of awareness, there’s nothing personality altering here; I’m still more or less the same Joe but it’s not… it’s different but it’s the same.
We’re at the end.
[End Tape 14, Side B]
posted by epikles at 4:15 PM
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