Tape 15, Side A
[Begin Tape 15, Side A]
Was there more you wanted to say about the work and the work ethic?
No, other than, you know, in relation to things that happened later, I just want to get on record here that when I was there, when I was there, I worked hard; sometimes I wasn’t there when I should have been.
Oh really, what, you took a lot of sick leave?
Well later on I developed some bad habits. Actually no, well, you know, there’s a lot of telescoping here and a lot of going back and forth because I don’t actually remember sometimes the straight chronology of events, I mean I know I could put it all into one big grab-bag but I can’t be sure of what happened in what order, I mean I can’t be sure of the order that things happened, I mean we were all, all the six of us who came in at the same time, we were all more or less hanging out together, and I lived in many different places then, but I can’t exactly remember—up to a certain point—where I lived in place A before I lived in place B. I just remember I lived in lots of different places; I moved around trying to get closer to work, so I wouldn’t have to travel so far, especially when I started going to work at three thirty in the morning. So I found a place that was just blocks away, because I was still, you know, hangin’ out and doing things at night, so that if I could get, just by sheer force of will, struggle out of bed at three thirty in the morning, and force myself out the door so I could stumble to work, by the time I had actually fully awakened I only had a half-time job and I got off at eleven thirty, twelve; the rest of the day was mine. The first part of work I did sort of automatically.
Wait, now you’re saying you had a half-time job?
Yeah, because the first four hours I was asleep [laughter], I was still waking up, you know.
So it just seemed easy.
Yeah, yeah, so if I could just get to work, I mean ideally I would have lived there at the Post Office, that would have been a perfect solution.
‘Why I Live at the PO’* [laughter].
And that’s when I started, sometimes I would not come in, and you know you’re supposed to call in; I would not call in; and that’s when I started getting into trouble at the Post Office. But then I’d redeem myself by a string of no absences, and as I say: whenever I was there, I could knock it out, so whenever I was there they got more than their money’s worth, so in my mind I was keeping it even [laughs].
What was your feeling when you would just not come in?
Ah… liberation.
At what point would you usually decide you weren’t gonna come in?
Usually when I would wake up at three thirty, and sometimes I’d stay awake, or sometimes I knew the night before, you know, I’d just go to sleep and that was it, and I’d get up at eight like a normal person, seven or eight, whatever, probably earlier because I always got up earlier anyway.
So maybe is that part of the reason that you didn’t call, that you just wanted to go back to sleep?
No, no, I didn’t call because I didn’t care. Again, my way of looking at it was: when I’m there I work real hard, what more do you people want?
So screw them.
Yeah, right, that’s right. Sometimes I would call though, and, you know, when I went in I would get a lecture, and I’d say: Oh jeez, you’re right, I should call; then maybe I’d call the next time, but I really didn’t want to, didn’t see why I had to; didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever, you know, somebody else can do it, or I’ll catch up tomorrow [laughs].
So there was always somebody to cover for you?
I guess so [laughter]; I guess there was, but, you know, I wasn’t taking it seriously.
The world wasn’t gonna come to an end because…
Exactly. I had other things, you know, I had other things on my mind or other things to do, or sometimes I wasn’t even in town. We started… sometimes I’d take trips, you know, driving trips, drivin’ and dopin’.
Really?
I wouldn’t be driving; I’d be riding.
You’d do the doping?
Yeah. I starting hanging out with Kathy Stanis, and she had access to a car. I think her older sister, Patty, was in town too. Almost all her whole family was out of St. Louis and living in Southern California, except her parents. Yeah, that’s right, well her brother was up in Berkeley; he was a classical guitarist; he was professional.
So tell me more about how… you say romances kind of sprung up among this group of people.
Yeah, well we was all hippies then, or, you know, we weren’t hippies because we had jobs: we were never hippies. We had jobs and we worked hard.
But it was sort of the hippie ethic as far as romance, love.
Yeah, yeah, it was all out there, you know. Sometimes there were threesomes I suppose. [facetious voice] I don’t know anything about that but, yeah, there was all sorts of things as far as I knew.
And in your crowd was it the two Kathys were really the…?
No, there were lots of others. There were people who were married and then unmarried. There were other people, and all sorts of… but it was a natural meeting place and breeding ground, because we were all—so many of us were the same age and were sort of living in the same area. Yeah, some people came into it unmarried and left unmarried and some people came into it and got married, and how those things happen I don’t know. I don’t exactly know how I started palling around with Kathy Stanis, except she had an apartment of her own by then—I suppose she already had it—but it was real nice. It was the whole top floor of a building, so it had a little, like a porch, you know, a porch part that you could go outside on, and so I started spending more time over there. She had a great record collection, and she liked The Firesign Theatre too, and she was listening to that, we were listening to that and we got stoned and one thing led to another and pretty soon I’m livin’ there and we’re an item. And, was it sixty-eight? well this is a little later. Yeah, so the two of us start spending more time alone, apart from the three others: we don’t go over to Kathy Burtner’s house too much anymore; we’ve got our own little domestic scene; but we have people over there from time to time, and sometimes, you know, everybody’s over at our place trippin’ out, and, you know, again, in these things we’re all eating acid and peyote or mescaline or whatever: I seem to be the calm one, the center, the one who makes it okay, or I’m still watching over things, you know, making sure nothing odd happens, because I was able to do that. I wasn’t not going to get stoned [laughs], I wasn’t gonna go that far, but when I did I was making sure that things stayed on an even keel, so when people started really freaking out like, you know, talking about the imminent war, or turning on the television and seeing some commercial and it turning into some satanic ritual or blood bath or something; I’d have to point out that no, this is just a commercial that’s on television, and no, what you’re seeing now is not the imminent beginning of World War III, because there was some apocalyptic stuff in the air and it was naturally going to affect people.
That’s interesting. So the drugs just didn’t…
It was all… it wasn’t transformative, it was superficial, like me! So I couldn’t have expected that anything else would happen. But I’d started meditating a little more at this point and I was reading Timothy Leary’s psychedelic experience about that and I was reading various things and I didn’t see any relationship at all. I mean it was a little different sometimes with peyote or mescaline, that seemed like a more organic thing, but the electric psychedelic rush of LSD didn’t seem to have any more than amusement value to me. I mean my mind was blown as much as it could get under that stuff, but I’d recognized that many of the things that I was witnessing couldn’t possibly be true: it was part of a show. So when people would hear a knock at the door and the door would open and somebody would come in and just the journey from the doorway to coming into the living-room their face would actually change about twenty-seven times so I had no idea who it was until they came in and sat down and talked to me.
But it just didn’t worry you.
No, I knew it was somebody who was supposed to be here, and it turned out it was! And you know when you’re listening to some crazy raga and you close your eyes and you’re taken away into some wonderland of internal sight and sound, you know if you open your eyes you’ll be back here: you’re not really going anywhere, and I think with some people they were going somewhere, or they felt that they were going somewhere; and I just never crossed that line; I always realized it was the effect of this chemical that I had taken a few hours earlier and that it would wear off.
It sounds a little bit like with you drugs were sort of like lucid dreaming where people dream and know they’re dreaming. You were stoned and knew you were stoned and never thought: Oh my God, this is real.
Yep, absolutely, yeah, this is really happening, no; but people did. My friend Lee Roy was particularly susceptible on that score, and I just marveled at… and I thought it was wonderful, I mean I was fearful for him. On the one hand I was fearful for him and on the other hand I did not envy him. He was actually apt to get carried away by this. He would [laughs]... He’s the one I thought of when I talked about World War III. He was somewhere—I guess I was with him but I was in some other room—and what was on television was somebody who was bandaged, and I think we were over at—he wasn’t living with his brother then, this was a little later, but his brother had moved from the flatlands up to Palos Verdes someplace and he had a place that overlooked just about the entire South Bay Area: marvelous view—but Lee Roy was watching something on TV and there was somebody with a bandage and just that tripped him off into this whole World War III thing where troops were going to be landing on the beach at any minute and we were all going to be slaughtered and airplanes were coming and I mean he knew on some level that that wasn’t real but he was into it. And there was another time where he was walking down somewhere in Hermosa Beach and he passed by a real estate office and the sign outside said: South Bay Realty, and read that as South Bay Reality, and something clicked in his mind at that time and it was another apocalypse, you know, there was going to be another… he had this feeling that everything was gonna start sliding: this was the new South Bay reality, everything was gonna start sliding into the ocean because he was on a slope, you know. Yeah, he had some bizarre trips like that, but he was open to it. He had dreams like this too, he told me later; so these were reflections of the kinds of things he was concerned about.
But then having you around was important to people like him who would… I mean you tended to keep people from…
I don’t know. I think they thought I was snooty, you know, because I wouldn’t go all the way, I wasn’t going all the way with them, so [laughs] there was that to it too… bastards.
[Laughs] Sounds like they relied on you though.
I don’t know if they did. It was just another one of those things that happened. Maybe in some cases when I was around it wasn’t so frantic. Because I have this picture of myself sitting in a chair—everybody else is down on the floor—and I’m looking down at them, smiling sort of indulgently, you know: play, children, play. But I wasn’t… you know Kathy Stanis, she would never trip out that drastically either, in fact she often would just go to sleep [laughter].
What was she like? You said she was into some of this…
She was smart and funny, smart and funny and cute. What more do you want? Plus she seemed to like me and boy that’s always a plus. Who cares whatever else is going on: if they like you, go that way. That’s my philosophy on jobs too: if they know about you and know what you’re capable of and still want you, you’d better go, you’d better go there, better go that way. So I went that way and we had a nice little year and a half, two years of punctuated domestic bliss, punctuated with times where I had to move out, you know, sometimes it was just: This is not my beautiful home! This is not my beautiful wife!* I should be living by myself. That’s what I like to do, remember? Oh, yeah, I remember now. I’m gonna go live by myself for a while.
So that old feeling of wanting to kind of get rid of people and get on your own.
Absolutely, and control everything myself. I didn’t like it that so many things were now not directly under my control. Turned out to be a control freak [laughter].
You never dreamed that that would be… Was she that way too? I mean were there times when you both agreed?
Yeah, we were very loose about it. We were young and kind of stupid and that was also the spirit of the time.
So you would go off and get an apartment, and then you’d end up…
… moving back in.
‘Cause you’d be spending a lot of time together.
Yeah, really, right. That’s expensive too.
What was the final…?
Well, let’s see….
Did it blow up or fade away or something else?
Well it came up north here for a while, but that was a later phase of it. That part of it was, it sort of faded away. I guess she quit the Post Office and moved to Berkeley. Now I wasn’t ready to quit yet but by then—we were going back and forth—by then I had misbehaved so badly that they were ready to fire me, but I was involved in the union at that time, so I was learning about union processes and appeals and that sort of stuff, and so I told them: Look, if you start termination proceedings now, a certain number of months will go by, then I will appeal that and then a certain number of months will go by, I’ll still be on the payroll from—whenever it was—March of 1970 to September of 1970, something like that; so I said: I’ll give you six months notice right now [laughs]. I’ll put it in writing. This way you won’t have to fire me, and we’ll both come out, you know, I’ll have an extra… and it’ll be less tension. I’m not gonna do anything different than I have been: I’ll come in when I want to [laughs].
Really?
Yeah. They went for it, and so I handed in my resignation six months ahead of time [laughter], or something like that.
Was that the main problem they had with you was this not calling in?
Yep, not calling in; not coming in. I mean at a certain point even if I had called in it was too much, it would have been too much, just not coming in.
How many days in a month do you think?
Not that many, you know, maybe once or twice a week.
[Laughs] Really?
Yeah, and you know they did start to depend on me for some of this stuff and I was letting them down, and I was letting some of my coworkers down: I was letting everybody down.
So sometimes, for instance, the parcels wouldn’t get sorted.
Yeah, they’d all be late. Somebody would have to do it. Maybe I’d miss two in a row and they’d hold off the first day and then I wouldn’t come in the second day and make good. Somebody else would have to do it and nobody else was really trained to do it, which was—hey, that was their mistake. They should have sequestered me and put me on a short leash as soon as they saw it happen, but they by then were kind of wary of me because I was involved in the union. I was the secretary of the union; I had a big badge that said so and I wore it around, and whenever a supervisor talked to any postal employee that was in my union, I was right there with a pad and a piece of paper just waiting to take down whatever they said and it was a marvelous effect: Oh, I’ll talk to you later. And I was involved with other employee’s actions; also they were trying to fire me for, you know, as soon as I got out of the army I never cut my hair again for many years.
But did they have any sort of dress code or anything?
No, and that’s how I got… no, they didn’t, it was just lore. And you know I was ready to get them on: there is no code, there’s no written code. What about girls? You can’t treat boys different than you treat girls. And they saw that. They wanted me out of there. So even if I had been a model employee they probably would have wanted me out for that reason, because I refused to cut my hair. Ain’t that somethin’? I got my ponytail, got my real long ponytail. I think at its longest it was almost butt-length, so I was a freak among the other kids too. Some of them were starting to grow long hair too, so then I was a bad influence on some of the younger employees, and by then they starting hiring these—what did they call them? Youth Employment… I don’t know. I think they were called YIPPIES, but this was before the other kind of Yippies, the youth something da da da da da. They were kids, high school kids, and they thought I was a hoot, and, you know, other people had cycled in and out of there too. I mean I was getting validation for being goofy, for being different, so I wasn’t gonna cut my hair. I had a beard and mustache. Nobody ever had any such things like that at the Post Office; made me wish I did have a carrier’s uniform, you know, because inside staff they just wear regular clothes; so I was looking to make waves if they did anything, so they were happy to go along with that deal.
So you gave them six months.
Gave ‘em six months notice. Now I was still…
Did they really leave you alone then?
Yeah, they did.
And you came in a couple days a week?
Oh no, I would not come in a couple days a week. Oh, I see what you thought. I would take off a couple days a week, yeah, maybe.
Basically you came in when you felt like it, and that was kind of the understanding?
Well they didn’t like it, but I pointed out to them the cold mathematical facts: so why not save yourself some wear and tear, and they went along with it, you know, as long as they could get him out of there.
So was that a bad six months, uncomfortable?
No, no, not at all; it was no different than what had come before except that this looming date was coming and I didn’t know what I was gonna do.
Was Kathy already up in Berkeley?
She had moved to Berkeley by then.
Was she going to school or…?
No. Her brother was up here.
… just wanted to be in Berkeley?
Yeah, yeah. And I guess I was gonna join up with her, or maybe not; I don’t remember.
Were you kind of off and on at that stage?
Yeah, uh huh. And so the clock ran out, and, let’s see… but I think I’d lost the apartment before that because for a while there, for a strange period, I was living in this rooming house in Hermosa Beach. Maybe I had lost my job by then too; I don’t know, but my friend Lee Roy was there, Mike Steuer was there and Tim Stanis was there. Tim Stanis, he had so little money that all he could afford was this tiny little room way, way in the back of everybody else. These were just rooms. One of them had a kitchen. I wound up in that one; that was nice; it was more expensive. This was run by, this was Luther’s Place; and Luther was this old guy, blind, and we paid him cash, every week, and he could tell by feel what the denominations of the bills were.
Really?
It was very, very good. Yeah. I don’t think anybody ever tried to trick him, but he seemed to be able to do it; so maybe he wasn’t blind, yeah, he was; somehow he was able to do that, maybe just through picking up cues or something like that. But that was a strange period. By then Lee Roy had quit and come back and quit again, and he was doing some really freaky things. PCP, people were taking PCP, yeah. I had some of that PCP: I was dead [laughs].
You were?
Well, I pretended, I pretended that I was going to be dead. It made you feel like you were dead. Everything was sort of pushed back, and I know what people mean when they say that PCP… [the cat meows to be fed] I think I’ll lock you in now. You want to stop that?
Yeah.
[pause in tape]
We’re back.
Fed the cat. But I don’t have no dog to jack off* [laughter]. Okay [laughs].
This is a very naïve question, but did you come up with any kind of plan about what you were gonna do?
No, I had no plan, I had no idea, I had no money, and I guess I had a vague feeling that I was gonna go up to Berkeley to meet up with Kathy, but I don’t know exactly how that all worked out. I think for a while, okay, I lived at Luther’s boarding house, and I crashed at some other guy’s house, and I guess I… yeah, I crashed at a couple—speaking of crashing—I crashed at a couple different places, then I realized I would go up north. Maybe it wasn’t even in the cards; I don’t remember; I don’t know exactly what happened there. I do remember I got beaned when I was playing baseball.
During that period?
Yeah, yeah. We used to go out once a week, postal people and ex-postal people, and play softball, and I was pitchin’. I was pitchin’ and I ran into the catcher. Head-to-head; head-to-head combat.
[End Tape 15, Side A]
Was there more you wanted to say about the work and the work ethic?
No, other than, you know, in relation to things that happened later, I just want to get on record here that when I was there, when I was there, I worked hard; sometimes I wasn’t there when I should have been.
Oh really, what, you took a lot of sick leave?
Well later on I developed some bad habits. Actually no, well, you know, there’s a lot of telescoping here and a lot of going back and forth because I don’t actually remember sometimes the straight chronology of events, I mean I know I could put it all into one big grab-bag but I can’t be sure of what happened in what order, I mean I can’t be sure of the order that things happened, I mean we were all, all the six of us who came in at the same time, we were all more or less hanging out together, and I lived in many different places then, but I can’t exactly remember—up to a certain point—where I lived in place A before I lived in place B. I just remember I lived in lots of different places; I moved around trying to get closer to work, so I wouldn’t have to travel so far, especially when I started going to work at three thirty in the morning. So I found a place that was just blocks away, because I was still, you know, hangin’ out and doing things at night, so that if I could get, just by sheer force of will, struggle out of bed at three thirty in the morning, and force myself out the door so I could stumble to work, by the time I had actually fully awakened I only had a half-time job and I got off at eleven thirty, twelve; the rest of the day was mine. The first part of work I did sort of automatically.
Wait, now you’re saying you had a half-time job?
Yeah, because the first four hours I was asleep [laughter], I was still waking up, you know.
So it just seemed easy.
Yeah, yeah, so if I could just get to work, I mean ideally I would have lived there at the Post Office, that would have been a perfect solution.
‘Why I Live at the PO’* [laughter].
And that’s when I started, sometimes I would not come in, and you know you’re supposed to call in; I would not call in; and that’s when I started getting into trouble at the Post Office. But then I’d redeem myself by a string of no absences, and as I say: whenever I was there, I could knock it out, so whenever I was there they got more than their money’s worth, so in my mind I was keeping it even [laughs].
What was your feeling when you would just not come in?
Ah… liberation.
At what point would you usually decide you weren’t gonna come in?
Usually when I would wake up at three thirty, and sometimes I’d stay awake, or sometimes I knew the night before, you know, I’d just go to sleep and that was it, and I’d get up at eight like a normal person, seven or eight, whatever, probably earlier because I always got up earlier anyway.
So maybe is that part of the reason that you didn’t call, that you just wanted to go back to sleep?
No, no, I didn’t call because I didn’t care. Again, my way of looking at it was: when I’m there I work real hard, what more do you people want?
So screw them.
Yeah, right, that’s right. Sometimes I would call though, and, you know, when I went in I would get a lecture, and I’d say: Oh jeez, you’re right, I should call; then maybe I’d call the next time, but I really didn’t want to, didn’t see why I had to; didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever, you know, somebody else can do it, or I’ll catch up tomorrow [laughs].
So there was always somebody to cover for you?
I guess so [laughter]; I guess there was, but, you know, I wasn’t taking it seriously.
The world wasn’t gonna come to an end because…
Exactly. I had other things, you know, I had other things on my mind or other things to do, or sometimes I wasn’t even in town. We started… sometimes I’d take trips, you know, driving trips, drivin’ and dopin’.
Really?
I wouldn’t be driving; I’d be riding.
You’d do the doping?
Yeah. I starting hanging out with Kathy Stanis, and she had access to a car. I think her older sister, Patty, was in town too. Almost all her whole family was out of St. Louis and living in Southern California, except her parents. Yeah, that’s right, well her brother was up in Berkeley; he was a classical guitarist; he was professional.
So tell me more about how… you say romances kind of sprung up among this group of people.
Yeah, well we was all hippies then, or, you know, we weren’t hippies because we had jobs: we were never hippies. We had jobs and we worked hard.
But it was sort of the hippie ethic as far as romance, love.
Yeah, yeah, it was all out there, you know. Sometimes there were threesomes I suppose. [facetious voice] I don’t know anything about that but, yeah, there was all sorts of things as far as I knew.
And in your crowd was it the two Kathys were really the…?
No, there were lots of others. There were people who were married and then unmarried. There were other people, and all sorts of… but it was a natural meeting place and breeding ground, because we were all—so many of us were the same age and were sort of living in the same area. Yeah, some people came into it unmarried and left unmarried and some people came into it and got married, and how those things happen I don’t know. I don’t exactly know how I started palling around with Kathy Stanis, except she had an apartment of her own by then—I suppose she already had it—but it was real nice. It was the whole top floor of a building, so it had a little, like a porch, you know, a porch part that you could go outside on, and so I started spending more time over there. She had a great record collection, and she liked The Firesign Theatre too, and she was listening to that, we were listening to that and we got stoned and one thing led to another and pretty soon I’m livin’ there and we’re an item. And, was it sixty-eight? well this is a little later. Yeah, so the two of us start spending more time alone, apart from the three others: we don’t go over to Kathy Burtner’s house too much anymore; we’ve got our own little domestic scene; but we have people over there from time to time, and sometimes, you know, everybody’s over at our place trippin’ out, and, you know, again, in these things we’re all eating acid and peyote or mescaline or whatever: I seem to be the calm one, the center, the one who makes it okay, or I’m still watching over things, you know, making sure nothing odd happens, because I was able to do that. I wasn’t not going to get stoned [laughs], I wasn’t gonna go that far, but when I did I was making sure that things stayed on an even keel, so when people started really freaking out like, you know, talking about the imminent war, or turning on the television and seeing some commercial and it turning into some satanic ritual or blood bath or something; I’d have to point out that no, this is just a commercial that’s on television, and no, what you’re seeing now is not the imminent beginning of World War III, because there was some apocalyptic stuff in the air and it was naturally going to affect people.
That’s interesting. So the drugs just didn’t…
It was all… it wasn’t transformative, it was superficial, like me! So I couldn’t have expected that anything else would happen. But I’d started meditating a little more at this point and I was reading Timothy Leary’s psychedelic experience about that and I was reading various things and I didn’t see any relationship at all. I mean it was a little different sometimes with peyote or mescaline, that seemed like a more organic thing, but the electric psychedelic rush of LSD didn’t seem to have any more than amusement value to me. I mean my mind was blown as much as it could get under that stuff, but I’d recognized that many of the things that I was witnessing couldn’t possibly be true: it was part of a show. So when people would hear a knock at the door and the door would open and somebody would come in and just the journey from the doorway to coming into the living-room their face would actually change about twenty-seven times so I had no idea who it was until they came in and sat down and talked to me.
But it just didn’t worry you.
No, I knew it was somebody who was supposed to be here, and it turned out it was! And you know when you’re listening to some crazy raga and you close your eyes and you’re taken away into some wonderland of internal sight and sound, you know if you open your eyes you’ll be back here: you’re not really going anywhere, and I think with some people they were going somewhere, or they felt that they were going somewhere; and I just never crossed that line; I always realized it was the effect of this chemical that I had taken a few hours earlier and that it would wear off.
It sounds a little bit like with you drugs were sort of like lucid dreaming where people dream and know they’re dreaming. You were stoned and knew you were stoned and never thought: Oh my God, this is real.
Yep, absolutely, yeah, this is really happening, no; but people did. My friend Lee Roy was particularly susceptible on that score, and I just marveled at… and I thought it was wonderful, I mean I was fearful for him. On the one hand I was fearful for him and on the other hand I did not envy him. He was actually apt to get carried away by this. He would [laughs]... He’s the one I thought of when I talked about World War III. He was somewhere—I guess I was with him but I was in some other room—and what was on television was somebody who was bandaged, and I think we were over at—he wasn’t living with his brother then, this was a little later, but his brother had moved from the flatlands up to Palos Verdes someplace and he had a place that overlooked just about the entire South Bay Area: marvelous view—but Lee Roy was watching something on TV and there was somebody with a bandage and just that tripped him off into this whole World War III thing where troops were going to be landing on the beach at any minute and we were all going to be slaughtered and airplanes were coming and I mean he knew on some level that that wasn’t real but he was into it. And there was another time where he was walking down somewhere in Hermosa Beach and he passed by a real estate office and the sign outside said: South Bay Realty, and read that as South Bay Reality, and something clicked in his mind at that time and it was another apocalypse, you know, there was going to be another… he had this feeling that everything was gonna start sliding: this was the new South Bay reality, everything was gonna start sliding into the ocean because he was on a slope, you know. Yeah, he had some bizarre trips like that, but he was open to it. He had dreams like this too, he told me later; so these were reflections of the kinds of things he was concerned about.
But then having you around was important to people like him who would… I mean you tended to keep people from…
I don’t know. I think they thought I was snooty, you know, because I wouldn’t go all the way, I wasn’t going all the way with them, so [laughs] there was that to it too… bastards.
[Laughs] Sounds like they relied on you though.
I don’t know if they did. It was just another one of those things that happened. Maybe in some cases when I was around it wasn’t so frantic. Because I have this picture of myself sitting in a chair—everybody else is down on the floor—and I’m looking down at them, smiling sort of indulgently, you know: play, children, play. But I wasn’t… you know Kathy Stanis, she would never trip out that drastically either, in fact she often would just go to sleep [laughter].
What was she like? You said she was into some of this…
She was smart and funny, smart and funny and cute. What more do you want? Plus she seemed to like me and boy that’s always a plus. Who cares whatever else is going on: if they like you, go that way. That’s my philosophy on jobs too: if they know about you and know what you’re capable of and still want you, you’d better go, you’d better go there, better go that way. So I went that way and we had a nice little year and a half, two years of punctuated domestic bliss, punctuated with times where I had to move out, you know, sometimes it was just: This is not my beautiful home! This is not my beautiful wife!* I should be living by myself. That’s what I like to do, remember? Oh, yeah, I remember now. I’m gonna go live by myself for a while.
So that old feeling of wanting to kind of get rid of people and get on your own.
Absolutely, and control everything myself. I didn’t like it that so many things were now not directly under my control. Turned out to be a control freak [laughter].
You never dreamed that that would be… Was she that way too? I mean were there times when you both agreed?
Yeah, we were very loose about it. We were young and kind of stupid and that was also the spirit of the time.
So you would go off and get an apartment, and then you’d end up…
… moving back in.
‘Cause you’d be spending a lot of time together.
Yeah, really, right. That’s expensive too.
What was the final…?
Well, let’s see….
Did it blow up or fade away or something else?
Well it came up north here for a while, but that was a later phase of it. That part of it was, it sort of faded away. I guess she quit the Post Office and moved to Berkeley. Now I wasn’t ready to quit yet but by then—we were going back and forth—by then I had misbehaved so badly that they were ready to fire me, but I was involved in the union at that time, so I was learning about union processes and appeals and that sort of stuff, and so I told them: Look, if you start termination proceedings now, a certain number of months will go by, then I will appeal that and then a certain number of months will go by, I’ll still be on the payroll from—whenever it was—March of 1970 to September of 1970, something like that; so I said: I’ll give you six months notice right now [laughs]. I’ll put it in writing. This way you won’t have to fire me, and we’ll both come out, you know, I’ll have an extra… and it’ll be less tension. I’m not gonna do anything different than I have been: I’ll come in when I want to [laughs].
Really?
Yeah. They went for it, and so I handed in my resignation six months ahead of time [laughter], or something like that.
Was that the main problem they had with you was this not calling in?
Yep, not calling in; not coming in. I mean at a certain point even if I had called in it was too much, it would have been too much, just not coming in.
How many days in a month do you think?
Not that many, you know, maybe once or twice a week.
[Laughs] Really?
Yeah, and you know they did start to depend on me for some of this stuff and I was letting them down, and I was letting some of my coworkers down: I was letting everybody down.
So sometimes, for instance, the parcels wouldn’t get sorted.
Yeah, they’d all be late. Somebody would have to do it. Maybe I’d miss two in a row and they’d hold off the first day and then I wouldn’t come in the second day and make good. Somebody else would have to do it and nobody else was really trained to do it, which was—hey, that was their mistake. They should have sequestered me and put me on a short leash as soon as they saw it happen, but they by then were kind of wary of me because I was involved in the union. I was the secretary of the union; I had a big badge that said so and I wore it around, and whenever a supervisor talked to any postal employee that was in my union, I was right there with a pad and a piece of paper just waiting to take down whatever they said and it was a marvelous effect: Oh, I’ll talk to you later. And I was involved with other employee’s actions; also they were trying to fire me for, you know, as soon as I got out of the army I never cut my hair again for many years.
But did they have any sort of dress code or anything?
No, and that’s how I got… no, they didn’t, it was just lore. And you know I was ready to get them on: there is no code, there’s no written code. What about girls? You can’t treat boys different than you treat girls. And they saw that. They wanted me out of there. So even if I had been a model employee they probably would have wanted me out for that reason, because I refused to cut my hair. Ain’t that somethin’? I got my ponytail, got my real long ponytail. I think at its longest it was almost butt-length, so I was a freak among the other kids too. Some of them were starting to grow long hair too, so then I was a bad influence on some of the younger employees, and by then they starting hiring these—what did they call them? Youth Employment… I don’t know. I think they were called YIPPIES, but this was before the other kind of Yippies, the youth something da da da da da. They were kids, high school kids, and they thought I was a hoot, and, you know, other people had cycled in and out of there too. I mean I was getting validation for being goofy, for being different, so I wasn’t gonna cut my hair. I had a beard and mustache. Nobody ever had any such things like that at the Post Office; made me wish I did have a carrier’s uniform, you know, because inside staff they just wear regular clothes; so I was looking to make waves if they did anything, so they were happy to go along with that deal.
So you gave them six months.
Gave ‘em six months notice. Now I was still…
Did they really leave you alone then?
Yeah, they did.
And you came in a couple days a week?
Oh no, I would not come in a couple days a week. Oh, I see what you thought. I would take off a couple days a week, yeah, maybe.
Basically you came in when you felt like it, and that was kind of the understanding?
Well they didn’t like it, but I pointed out to them the cold mathematical facts: so why not save yourself some wear and tear, and they went along with it, you know, as long as they could get him out of there.
So was that a bad six months, uncomfortable?
No, no, not at all; it was no different than what had come before except that this looming date was coming and I didn’t know what I was gonna do.
Was Kathy already up in Berkeley?
She had moved to Berkeley by then.
Was she going to school or…?
No. Her brother was up here.
… just wanted to be in Berkeley?
Yeah, yeah. And I guess I was gonna join up with her, or maybe not; I don’t remember.
Were you kind of off and on at that stage?
Yeah, uh huh. And so the clock ran out, and, let’s see… but I think I’d lost the apartment before that because for a while there, for a strange period, I was living in this rooming house in Hermosa Beach. Maybe I had lost my job by then too; I don’t know, but my friend Lee Roy was there, Mike Steuer was there and Tim Stanis was there. Tim Stanis, he had so little money that all he could afford was this tiny little room way, way in the back of everybody else. These were just rooms. One of them had a kitchen. I wound up in that one; that was nice; it was more expensive. This was run by, this was Luther’s Place; and Luther was this old guy, blind, and we paid him cash, every week, and he could tell by feel what the denominations of the bills were.
Really?
It was very, very good. Yeah. I don’t think anybody ever tried to trick him, but he seemed to be able to do it; so maybe he wasn’t blind, yeah, he was; somehow he was able to do that, maybe just through picking up cues or something like that. But that was a strange period. By then Lee Roy had quit and come back and quit again, and he was doing some really freaky things. PCP, people were taking PCP, yeah. I had some of that PCP: I was dead [laughs].
You were?
Well, I pretended, I pretended that I was going to be dead. It made you feel like you were dead. Everything was sort of pushed back, and I know what people mean when they say that PCP… [the cat meows to be fed] I think I’ll lock you in now. You want to stop that?
Yeah.
[pause in tape]
We’re back.
Fed the cat. But I don’t have no dog to jack off* [laughter]. Okay [laughs].
This is a very naïve question, but did you come up with any kind of plan about what you were gonna do?
No, I had no plan, I had no idea, I had no money, and I guess I had a vague feeling that I was gonna go up to Berkeley to meet up with Kathy, but I don’t know exactly how that all worked out. I think for a while, okay, I lived at Luther’s boarding house, and I crashed at some other guy’s house, and I guess I… yeah, I crashed at a couple—speaking of crashing—I crashed at a couple different places, then I realized I would go up north. Maybe it wasn’t even in the cards; I don’t remember; I don’t know exactly what happened there. I do remember I got beaned when I was playing baseball.
During that period?
Yeah, yeah. We used to go out once a week, postal people and ex-postal people, and play softball, and I was pitchin’. I was pitchin’ and I ran into the catcher. Head-to-head; head-to-head combat.
[End Tape 15, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:14 PM
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