Tape 15, Side B

[Begin Tape 15, Side B]

So you crashed into the catcher, head-to-head?

Head to head, you know, it was a shallow pop fly and neither one of us waved the other off, nobody claimed it, so I’m lookin’ up at it and I’m traveling full force and so was he and knocked me right out; yeah, took me to the hospital and got some stitches; scar on my head; prefrontal lobotomy.

[Laughs] Took care of all your worries.

And I was living with, crashed with… Oh here’s an interesting thing that happened at Luther’s. The census woman came around while we were all living there at Luther’s and she tried to get us all covered in the census but she got distracted from her work because she went down and hung out in Tim Stanis’s room for hours and he played guitar music to her and then for a while there was no music [laughter]: so he made out with the census lady! That’s what happened. That’s what happened to her.

Do you think she lost the count?

She might have lost the count; I don’t know. I was living with Gary Elmer. Gary Elmer was a kind of a wacky dude. He still worked at the Post Office; he was a letter carrier, but he had all this... he had developed some interesting theories about how his… maybe something that killed his mother or something that happened, maybe they were after him too. These were the sisters of Saint Martinez. He evolved this order called the Sisters of Saint Martinez—he believed this!—the Sisters of Saint Martinez, and they were part of this vast conspiracy that maybe were out to harm him, and he was on a different track completely. And what I liked about him was I could draw things, I’d draw all these crazy things and then give him the drawing and he would interpret it, interpret it according to the symbolism that was in his mind at the time: Oh yeah, well here’s my uncle and here’s what happens when the Sisters of Saint Martinez [laughs] take over.

And the Sisters of Saint Martinez always came into the picture?

They always came into it, yeah. He wound up in Berkeley too.

[Laughing] All the crazy ones went to Berkeley.

There was kind of a migration up to Berkeley, it’s true. It’s true. I don’t think Tim ever made it up here; of course Lee Roy did.

Were there a lot of lifers in the Post Office?

Yep, yeah, you know we had a lot of fun with them, because we’d talk about them, you know, like I’m sure the kids talk about us.

At the Lib’ary.

At the Lib’ary, but yeah, it was funny, they all had their stories and we just made fun of them, did their voices, did their walks. That’s what you do.

Was your group intent on not becoming lifers?

Oh absolutely, yeah. In fact that was one of the blandishments that they held out to me if I would shape up. Mr Hurd, one of the big supervisors, came around and said: “Yeah”, you know, “if you shape up you could be a supervisor.” I said: “Like you?” He said: “Well, yes.” He was an obsessive compulsive. He always washed his pens after, you know, washed his pens and washed his hands after he shook hands with you or handled anything.

[Laughing] So that was a great incentive, to be like him.

Yeah. He said: “Or you could be an inspector.” I said: “Oh, that’s swell. I guess I’ll keep that in mind, Mr Hurd.” And you know the postal inspectors, they had all these catwalks, at least in Redondo Beach, I think in other places they did it differently, but they had catwalks above the work areas with little peepholes, and postal inspectors could go up there at any time and observe you at your work, and I went up there a couple times to walk around and see what they would see, but I never... I think once we heard somebody up there. You could hear them up there, I mean it wasn’t that far over head, so, you know, I could be an inspector.

Creeping around and watching people through peepholes, ugh.

Yeah, but nobody wanted to do that, you know, in fact you know now that I think about it I believe that I thought at the time: If I don’t quit I’m gonna be here for years, so I had to get out of there. And you know everybody else had left by then too, so I was kind of bring up the rear.

Really? So your whole crowd had left before you. It wasn’t just Kathy, it was the rest.

No. Lee Roy quit a couple times, and they took him back. They were very generous about that, you know. They weren’t that generous though, as I found out later when I tried to get back [laughs].

You did?

Yeah, we’ll get to that.

It’s a sad chapter?

It’s a sad story: crawling on my hands and knees. You’ll be back here crawlin’ on your hands and knees! But Lee Roy had done a couple of freak outs, and one of them he was, I think, he was naked in the streets and jumped up on top of a police car when it came, and maybe that was the PCP, I don’t know. He also, I found out later, had had a near death experience and a kind of a religious experience too, a little after that. He split for I don’t remember where. I knew that he wound up in Canada, or Vancouver, but I don’t know if I knew that then. He shows back up in Berkeley. By the way, that guitar, he gave me that guitar on my twenty-third birthday, that nylon string guitar, yeah. Yeah, so he was playing guitar too. And so, yeah, everybody split and I was crashing at all these different places and then… then I left, and I did go up north.
Oh, I should backtrack just a little bit. My first vacation I took when I was at the Post Office I went up to San Francisco. I don’t think I was hanging out with Kathy at the time, I just needed someplace to go because I had some leave, so it was probably use it or lose it, so I got me some 250 mics of primo mescalito and went up to San Francisco and just hung out in San Francisco. Stayed at the Baldwin Hotel downtown and just tripped around. Walked out to the zoo one time, walked back. The thing about that I remember is that—oh, that’s when I took the mescaline, when I walked out to the zoo and back: that was beautiful; that was beautiful [laughs]—the thing I remember about it was, you know the TV series The Prisoner was on at that time—there’s never been anything like that—and the final episode, the crucial final episode was going to be on TV, so I had to convince all these old gaffers living at the hotel, you know it was a residential hotel too, that instead of watching Lawrence Welk or whatever it was at eight o’clock they should turn the TV over to channel whatever so we could watch the final episode of The Prisoner, and they went along with it. It had to be completely mysterious to them because they hadn’t seen any of it before and it’s a very strange episode anyway, involving gibbering ape people and psychedelic music and all sorts of things that happen in the bowels of the village where this guy had been trapped for quite a while, and ah… you know, anyway… So, going up north to Berkeley. Now Kathy lived… she lived on College Avenue; she had a real nice apartment on College Avenue.

Do you remember where?

Twenty-five hundred… I don’t remember exactly—Parker! between Parker and Haste. It was right there in Berkeley.

Oh, okay, right up near the campus?

Yeah, right there, and it was a nice old wooden building that they eventually tore down and put some big apartments up there. So I was hanging out there for a while; we were on pretty good terms. I had no money; she was like supporting me. I remember I learned how to do card weaving, of all things.

Card weaving?

Card weaving, yes. You get a deck of cards, like squarish kind of cardboard cards with holes punched out in them, maybe four holes, one at each corner, maybe one in the middle, and you get some strands of multicolored… maybe you sort out what the pattern’s going to be first, but you string these… put the threads through the different holes and then you have this… it’s kind of a loomless loom, but the weaving is achieved by rotating the cards and then passing like a weft thread through it and then rotating the cards again in some direction or other, or rotating part of the cards, and you can make nice long strips of things; and I enjoyed that because it was relatively mindless and I could do it for hours.

And then what did you do, you sold the things that you made?

No [laughs]. I think later on she did sell some of those card weaving belts, but no, I just liked the rotation and…

I forgot this was the seventies and so… [laughter]

I was just into the action, whatever it was, however it came out, you know, and it was a three-dimensional thing that I could actually make, so I just enjoyed the process.

And you kept them?

Yeah, yeah. Some of them actually became belts or trim, something like that. But I didn’t want to work, I just didn’t want to.

You’d had enough of that for a while.

Yeah, but I knew that I couldn’t stay there and not work so I went back, you know—I’ll collapse things here—I went back to Redondo Beach and crashed with some people again; then I went up to Berkeley again; then I went down to Redondo Beach again; and then while I was down there I think Kathy visited me; you know every now and then she would send me five dollars or something like that: she was working, maybe had temp jobs. And so that went on for a long time. I was kind of lost, you know, I didn’t want to work and I didn’t want to crash at these people’s houses, you know, that was getting old, but I didn’t really have a plan [laughs], didn’t have any idea, so I went back to the Post Office and said: Gee, I’m sorry, can I have my job back? No, you can’t. Everybody always got their job back, but I didn’t. So, you know, it was like 1971 or something like that.

Are you bitter?

No, they were well within… I would not have given my job back to myself anyway.

You had pretty much burned that bridge.

Yeah, burned that one, yep. I mean just for a second I thought they were gonna do it. I saw that light in his eyes; he said: Let me go ask, you know, somebody else, the post master; it was: No, I’m sorry. Even up to the last… They were very generous, the post office was, so even though I did all that stuff, they were almost ready to do it. I said: I’ll be good; I’ll put something in writing, da da da da, you know, you can cash it in whenever you want, you know, I’ve changed. I see how important it is to be on time [laughter], and to come to work [laughs].

As you turned your pockets inside out.

That’s right. And I think one of those points was when Kathy came down to visit me. Let’s see, exactly what happened?… I don’t remember. I think I was living with… no, I don’t remember. She got busted when she went back to the airport. She took a ride back to the airport. How did she get there? She was maybe hitchhiking, I don’t know, but she wanted to go back to LAX. She took a ride with this guy, and just as he let her off, by way of thanks, she gave him a joint. She gave him a joint. This poor son of a bitch freaked, apparently, called security; she was in line to get on the plane; they hustled her off the plane and busted her and she winds up in jail.

This was in L.A.?

Yeah, this was in LAX. She was getting in line to go on the plane.

So this was just by way of thanks to the guy for the ride.

Here buddy, thanks for the ride, here’s a joint. You know, anybody in his right mind was: Wow, groovy. Not this boy. He panicked. He probably never had contact with somebody from the drug culture before.

[Laughing] And I hope he never had any again.

Wow, I just… What a narrow escape: I just spent fifteen minutes with a drug addict!

Wow, so what was the…?

So she called me up from somewhere.

Was she charged and everything? It wasn’t one of those…?

Oh yes, no, they threw the book at her.

Was she holding much?

I don’t know; maybe she had another joint, something like that. They couldn’t get her for selling; they got her for ‘furnishing’. That was the charge: furnishing… drugs.

To this guy, and of course he was ready to testify.

Yeah. Just don’t put me in the same room with a drug addict! I’ll do whatever you say, yeah, I’ll go to the lineup. Well, so she called me up and I had no money, so I went over and talked to this Gary Elmer and said: Can you loan me some dough so I can… actually, before I went to Gary Elmer I… [addressing the cat who’s been meowing for attention] You can’t go out now, you’re trapped, you’re trapped for the night.

Just to bail her out. Was she stuck in jail?

Yeah, stuck in jail, stuck in Sybil Brand, which is—and by the way the Manson women were in there at that time, so she saw the Manson women walking around with big Xs on their heads. Sybil Brand Institute for Women, way the hell out there in Newhall or Saugus or I don’t know exactly where it is. I got in contact with Bob and Gene, or Bob at least. And can you imagine how he would feel after having not heard from me for four or five years, just suddenly getting a phone call: loan me a couple hundred dollars or something like that? He wasn’t having any part of it, and I can’t fault him for that. I don’t know if I called Gene: I don’t think I did; I don’t think I did. But I got the money together and Gary Elmer and I went out there. We got the bail all set and we drove way the hell out there and picked her up and she went back up north, and I guess I stayed there then. She came back down for the trial and…

What was the outcome of that? because they hadn’t started decriminalizing marijuana then.

She got a fine of some kind. She didn’t do any time, but it looked bad because the case before her was a drug case and the defendant was a young woman and the judge looked at her and said: Don’t you bat your pretty little eyelashes at me, missy! or something like that, you know: You won’t be able to use your tricks on me. And she did get some time I think, so it looked bad. But I don’t remember the upshot.

Was it her first offense?

First offense, yeah. Maybe nobody appeared.

Even that creep didn’t show?

Yeah, he was probably frightened out of his life; the international drug conspiracy would come after him and debone him. So yeah, nothing came out of it, it was very, very stressful though, it involved money: I just felt bad because I didn’t have any. It took too long. She had to stay a couple nights in jail; it took me a while to get it together; so I’m starting to think: Okay, well maybe I’ll really look for a job. But I wound up back in Berkeley. She was living… let’s see, I’m not sure she was living at the same place; somewhere in there she got the notice that they were gonna tear the building down, so we had to get out. So for one month we found a place over in North Berkeley—not North Berkeley, North Oakland, sort of Rockridgey, on James Street; probably a student—this was during the Christmas vacation—a student who was going to be out of town for a month wanted to rent their place, so we stayed there; then we went to the Berkeley Inn, so we stayed in the Berkeley Inn for quite a long time. And that was kind of neat. We had a great big room; had to go down the hall for the bathroom. It was great old threadbare furniture and rugs, and it was kind of funky, but right around the corner was everything: The Med, you could stay there all night, all day; Moe’s Books and Cody’s and… let’s see, what else was there? There was People’s Park was right out our window. That was a happening place, nothing like it is now. It was all cheery and joyful, except people who were building barricades and every now and then they would have an attack; we’d have to shut the windows; we’d get a whiff of tear gas coming in. [sniff, sniff] I remember that: Private Conkin, US56400570. That tear gas ain’t nothin’ to me! nothin’ to me! Give me some more. Also where the Amoeba Records is was the One World Spiritual Family Commune.

Oh really?

Yeah, they were a commune that operated this big huge restaurant, organic stuff. I think they later went on the road. You know the mural that’s there now; I think there was another mural there too, really big; maybe that’s when they painted that one. I don’t remember. Whatever mural was there we saw everybody working on that. Lee Roy came back into the picture, so he was hanging around in Berkeley too, and he described some of his experiences up in Canada where he had gone to live with people who were into Surat Shabd yoga, and that is… sometimes you see the pictures of their gurus on the walls. It stems from Sikhism; they’re all Sikhs, they’re all turbaned Sikhs, you know, the Indian gurus. Surat Shabd yoga has to do with light and sound, you know, following the light and sound channels back to the source. And it’s all very personal. So he’d become quite spiritual, had become a vegetarian, in fact still is to this day. That’s when he told us about his—he’d nearly drowned apparently down there in Hermosa, he nearly drowned and didn’t and he had a religious experience thereafter and this guru, one of these gurus came to him and told him how it was, what the lick was and what he was going to have to do.

So for real the guy did, or he had a vision of…?

Oh no, I believe that he had a genuine experience of some kind, and he’s been looking for a recreation of that ever since and I don’t think he’s ever actually found it. So that was a real thing and it drove him… I think he still follows that to some extent, as best he can, even now, twenty-million years later. But he was living up in Vancouver…

Is this the friend that’s gotten in touch with you recently, or you were in touch with him continuously?

No, no, he’s always been around. So yeah, he’d been living up there in one of their retreats and now he was ready more or less to get back into the world. But I still didn’t have any job, and it was still kind of okay. We moved to an actual apartment on Haste Street, 2214 Haste, and, you know, Kathy was payin’ all the bills and I was just lyin’ around doin’ nothin’.

And what was her job?

She was temping as a legal secretary.

And so she did that for quite a while, some years, huh?

Quite a while, yeah, through Kelly Girl, and she said: You know, you should go down to Kelly Girl, they might have something. And I said: Oh, that sounds okay, temps, I could do that. So I did, I went down to Kelly Girl in Oakland and found a couple of jobs. They pay you every day, so that was okay, so I started to have a little money but, you know, I wasn’t keeping up with it. But then I got a big job at Grodin’s, at their warehouse, kind of right around here on the way to Alameda here. And I held out for quite a while. Was it part-time? It might have been full-time but, you know, I had to get up, get on the bus, get out there.

What was the gig?

It was just pushin’ racks around, opening crates, you know, they had to furnish all the clothing to all the Grodin’s outlets. I guess Grodin’s is completely out of business now, but they had stores in every shopping center, you know, they had five or six stores: clothing, clothing stores. So boxes would come in; we’d take all the suits out; size ‘em up, you know, from twenty-seven triple portly to size forty-six X-X-X-X-L: so on one rack you’d have little tiny wide midget suits to these gigantic Andre the Giant suits. And then shoot ‘em out to wherever they were supposed to go. That was great. I liked that. I developed several new ways of improving the operations mostly having to do with opening the cartons by [laughs] by smacking them, by smashing into them.

On the top, at the weak point.

Yeah, hitting them at the weak point and then kicking them open, and then once the—you know what they used to do was once they’d take out a suit they’d put it on the… they had this great system of rolling rails, so you’d put it on this rack that rolls along this rail all throughout the warehouse up to the loading dock, and you’d reach in and take out a suit and put it up there, reach in and take out another suit and put it up there… My improvement was to reach in there, take an entire rack, lift it out and put it on the rail.

Was it pretty heavy? Did it take a certain amount of upper body strength?

You bet, you bet it did.

So by then you’d developed upper body strength.

I guess so, just enough to do that. And then you had to break down the carton and you know what they usually did was they’d take the little cutters and cut the carton up into little pieces. And what I did was climb into the carton and start kicking at all the corners. Pretty soon that thing was flat and you could just stomp on it and roll it up and get it flat. And I kind of liked that gig and was learning a little bit about the clothing industry and some of the other fellows were saying: We could use you in the Oakland store. So I’m thinking: Well, okay; but they would have to hire me away from Kelly Girl; that was okay. They were willing to pay; you have to pay a penalty when you do that.

So this job was through Kelly Girl.

Yeah. But it didn’t last, I mean it had a bad ending. A couple of guys that were working there, my seniors, supervisors, they were… these were black guys and I mention that because of something that happened later, but one day I realized that they were doing some odd things. They had kept one big box, big carton, unbroken-down and they were putting suits into it. Usually you’d take suits out of these cartons and they were putting these suits into it and laying them carefully down flat and covering them up with other layers, and if I had been paying attention I would have understood what they were doing, but I wasn’t paying attention, I was only peripherally paying attention; but at a certain point they needed to take this carton, in which they were stuffing all these suits that they were going to steal and resell, they needed to take this out and put it in the dumpster, not dump it upside-down in the dumpster but lift it up over the edge of the dumpster and let it settle down into the dumpster so they could pick it up later; so they chose a moment when they thought the bosses were going out and they said: Hey, you, come on, help us. And I said: Sure. So I’m going out with these other two guys and we’re poised with this gigantic carton that fits probably snugly into one of these gigantic brown dumpsters and we had all the doors open and we’re releasing it in there and the two bosses roll up.

And you just didn’t get it.

I didn’t get it. I wasn’t paying attention. So… Oh shit!

Did they kind of put it on you, did the guys?

That’s the first thing that happened--one of these guys told me later--was: So is he the mastermind? He put you up to it, right? So they separated us and I said: I am not gonna say anything until I see my union representative; ‘cause the Retail Clerk’s Union, they’re strong. and I knew from my other experience that I did not have to say anything. And the upshot of it was that they agreed to let us all go without firing us if we didn’t choose to apply for unemployment benefits. I said: Sure.

Just because it wouldn’t be money out of their pockets for the unemployment because they would have had to pay half of it or whatever the portion. Well, we’re just about at the end of the tape, so is that a good stopping place?

Okay, that’s a good place, sure.

Once again: who knows what’s gonna happen next? [laughter]

Who knows?!. And then I died. And then I was killed by the Oakland Police in a People’s Park riot.

Have you heard that: Poor Neil. Remember ‘The History of Rock-and-Roll’, one of those National Lampoon recordings?

Ha uh.

Poor Neil, we used to hitch to gigs together.

[End Tape 15, Side B]