Tape 16, Side B
[Begin Tape 16, Side B]
So that day ended and I thought it was kind of interesting and curious but no more than that, you know. I didn’t really want to be part of any family. I was completely electively deracinated. I liked it that I had no ties or familial attachments; that was perfect.
And having that taste of it just made you all the more convinced.
Exactly, exactly, every time I see [laughs], every time I experience a taste of family life on any level, mine or anybody else’s, it just, it still to this day solidifies my [laughs]… I used to have this postcard, it was an old fifties picture of a like a sort of Leave It to Beaver sort of Father Knows Best family at the dinner table and the dad’s there in his suit and the kids are around the table and the mom’s dishing up and they have little balloons added to the drawing and I think the mother’s saying: And they call this nightmare ‘family life.’ [laughter] Yeah it kind of makes me physically ill sometimes. Like I was telling you that Patricia engineered this big train trip recently where they were going to book, where they could have an entire train and they were going travel from San Diego down to Mexico and back with all these friends and relatives and that really just sort of made me ill for a minute, you know, just imagining being trapped in that car with no way out, no escape, faced with all these people all the time.
Were you able to communicate that to her or did you skip it?
I said I was having a haircut that day, I’m having a bad hangnail. No, I said, no, that doesn’t sound like fun to me.
That’s interesting though, she still wants it…
She does, she still does, but I have to say no, I have to head her off. In fact Dennis has a little bit of this too, and I hadn’t seen Dennis—we’re skipping ahead again to 1997—I hadn’t seen Dennis for a long time but I did get in touch with him after Patricia got in touch with me after twenty-seven years, and she had already talked to him, so I got him on the phone; I said: Hi, Dennis, it’s Mike. He said: Yeah, I know. I said: Here she goes again. Could she quit bugging us every twenty-five years! [laughter] So it’s kind of a joke. So we wrote a little bit but I had no motivation, plus when people move away their reality starts to granulate, you know, they start not to exist, so that was that, but there was a little connection there for a minute And the other thing that happened that I wanted to mention was how I killed the guinea pig.
Uh oh.
Yeah, we had, when I was living with Kathy we had little guinea pigs in a cage.
Was this in Berkeley?
No, we were still in Redondo Beach and we had this apartment on the top floor of a house and outside there was like a little porch and off of the porch was the rest of the roof in back of the porch; so my job was to clean the guinea pig cages once in a while so I figured… I think I used to take a guinea pig out and put it somewhere and take another one out, you know, put them in some other cage while I cleaned this cage, something like that. Well this time I thought: well this time I’ll just let them roam, they can’t get anywhere. So I let them all roam around and I was cleaning out the cage and over my head I hear this scraping like [makes sound of scraping]… and I thought: Jeez, what is that? and thud. And so I go out and these guinea pigs, you know, they have no traction but I thought they’d be okay because they were on this enclosed porch but this one big guinea pig scrambled around and climbed up on the roof and he got up to a certain point on the incline and then just slid down: boom, fell a couple stories.
And you were hearing…
Yeah, I was hearing him scrambling, scrabbling. Oh, that was bad. So I went down there and he was still alive. I didn’t know exactly what to do. I knew I’d have to kill him, so I put him in a little basket on a bicycle, a little girl’s bicycle—it was Kathy’s bicycle that I was using then—and drove around to an empty lot, dug a hole, put the little guinea pig in there, picked up a great big rock and smashed its head. I figured I had to. That was a traumatic guinea pig killing experience, and I got into trouble for that too, although guinea pigs, you know, they’re not that much, they’re not all that interesting, they don’t do much; they whistle, you can get ‘em to whistle, you take, like we used to get real stoned, you know, and that was a big source of amusement: get the cellophane packs off of cigarettes and crumple ‘em up and the guinea pigs think it’s like lettuce or something, they start to [a few short whistles] get all excited, run back and forth, run back and forth, yeah. That’s about it with guinea pigs, the running back and forth, that’s about it, yeah. So enough of that, I just wanted to…
So it was traumatic? You got in trouble for that because Kathy was upset?
Well yeah, yeah, it was an extremely stupid thing to do, you know, on the level of putting all the money in the… as Mike Steuer might say: Oh man, it’s just my naïvetivity. He’s the guy who, we were sitting around reading R. Crumb Zap comics one day and he said: Man, these are some crazy photographs. He was always slightly off.
Was he a post office guy?
No, this was Kathy’s friend from St. Louis, a guy who was into mysticism and occult, and later on when we saw him—everywhere he lived he would build a little shrine, you know, whatever books he was reading then, whatever religious objects he had, wherever he lived, and he lived many places—I think he lives in San Francisco now—but he always built himself a little shrine because he meditated and prayed in his way. He was full of antics. One time we got all—you know I was talking about driving and doping—it was when 2001 first came out. Oh, we gotta go see 2001, so we all piled in, we all took some kind of purple Owsleys or something, and got into the car (Lee Roy had this great old Morris Minor) and we drove into the city ‘cause it was in the city, and we went to see… oh, it was at the Cinerama Dome, the great big Cinerama Dome.
Yeah, because when it was first released it came out in all those wide screen… it was 1968 I think.
That’s right, something like that, yeah. And we got sidetracked by the gigantic neon Coke sign that was down there on the strip or someplace. We had to stop and pull over and check that out [laughs], zizzing and zapping back and forth. But then we went to see the movie and that was okay, except Lee Roy fell asleep, so that was a standing gag for many, you know: How did you like that 2001, Lee Roy? Well I was there; I was there; that’s what he’d always say: I was there. But after that we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, you know, like it was midnight; we went to the art museum and the La Brea Tar Pits at midnight, and as soon as we opened the door Mike Steuer—I think he was bald at this time [laughs], he was bald and he had a little skullcap or pillbox hat and some other weird clothing on—he bounded out of the car and just went running madly off into the distance. We had no idea what he was doing or where he was going [laughs]. He was kind of a…
Did he ever…?
Yeah, he showed up. But we were all laughing at this and that, and some very cool L.A. type hippies came around, you know, they were [effete voice]: Why are you guys blowing it?! [laughs]
[laughing] for the rest of us.
Come on, Nancy. Yeah, why are you having so much fun?! [laughter]
So that was bad form.
We were just trippin’, yeah, we were just... That was a good one. You guys are blowing it. God. Is this your first trip? That’s the only reason we would go into the… ‘cause the beach life was so sweet, you know; the only reason we’d go in there was to see a movie or something like that.
The only reason you went to L.A.?
Yeah, L.A. proper. I went to the Shrine once, you know, one of those big jam packed Shrine Auditorium shows with millions of people on the bill. I have no idea who was there, Blue Cheer maybe, I don’t know. Went to a Stones concert in the Forum in Inglewood, you know, and got the best seats we could afford and, you know, saw a little tiny three-inch Mick Jagger [laughter]. [sings] Talk about the midnight rambler…
So you weren’t much enamored of the Stones?
Nah. You know they must have sold their entire catalog now ‘cause now you’re hearing all the Stones songs on commercials.
Really?
Yeah, they need the money I guess, I guess they do. Poor Mick. Yeah.
[Laughing] Yeah, I guess so. That is really sad. I mean the Beatles, you know, you can understand that Michael Jackson bought the catalog and so then he’s, you know, he needs the money [laughs].
That’s true, who actually, yeah, right. Who actually owns their stuff? I don’t know. But ‘Time is on My Side’, I heard a commercial for, I don’t know, foot deodorizer, I don’t know what it was. Well they started selling out with Windows, you know, Windows 95, when that first came out, the theme song was the Stones’ ‘Start Me Up’. [sings] You can start me up. So anyway, let’s get out of Southern California and live in Berkeley for a while.
Oh, I had a question about… well actually a couple things, threads to pick up, one is, before you forget, when you got mixed up in that thing at Grodin’s where basically you got fired or something like it.
Oh yeah, yeah, I had to go.
You mentioned that the guys were black and you said that that became significant later on.
Oh no, I just mentioned that because at the time when they separated us, I learned from them later, they were saying: So did Conkin put you up to it? He’s the ringleader. He put you up to it, didn’t he? And here I was just the hapless [cartoon music] do do dee doot doot do [Goofy voice]: Sure I’ll help ya! Because they were gonna make all the money; they weren’t gonna give me any.
So they just assumed: two black guys and a white guy, the white guy’s gotta be the leader.
And they were my bosses too, so you know. It’s a good thing they were square shooters—except for the stealing of the suits—because they could have ratted me out, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he… we don’t know what was… It was hard enough for them to maintain that they didn’t know what was going on, me too, you know, it was like: I don’t know what was going on, I don’t know why we were putting that thing in that way. You know usually you dump it. I don’t know anything. But the three of us communicated. It was kind of a paranoid thing. I remember thinking: oh the phones could be tapped or anything, or something like that, but we talked about it. I think they were veterans too [laughs], or one of them was; wound up getting some veterans benefits too, going to school. So that didn’t work out, but for some reason somehow, I mean I wasn’t supposed to go get unemployment off of that, but for some reason somehow I did get unemployment and food stamps and I was living on that for a while. I don’t remember exactly how that happened: did I have another job in there that I’ve completely blanked out on that I got laid off of so I could legitimately get unemployment benefits? No. I don’t know what it was. Maybe… maybe… Probably what it was…
Other Kelly Girl assignments?
Yeah, maybe that was it, or just some overall Kelly Girl thing. You know I wasn’t working for Grodin’s, I was working for Kelly Girl. You know I think that’s right because I think what happened was Grodin’s did buy out my Kelly Girl contract, so when I started working there… You know now I’m not even sure it was Kelly Girl; it was a temp agency but it may not have been Kelly Girl. There were a couple other ones around at that time.
I mean it’s kind of funny to be working for Kelly Girl, a guy I mean.
Kelly Guy. But somehow I was able to do that.
But temping in those days was pretty much all secretarial and secretarial work was just simply considered women’s stuff.
Right, right.
It wasn’t considered sexist, although it obviously was.
Right. I think that the original job that I got set up for at Grodin’s through temping was like ‘sweeping’ or something like that, ‘cleanup’, or ‘warehouse cleanup’ or something like that, and it just developed into the other. It really didn’t make any difference what you did once you got there. So what they did, you know, they paid Kelly Girl, Kelly Girl paid me. But then Grodin’s hired me on, hired me off of Kelly Girl, which means they had to pay a little extra to Kelly Girl. So maybe I was getting unemployment off of Kelly Girl, but I don’t remember any other thing I did for them except Grodin’s. Must have been something, or maybe I was only getting food stamps, or I don’t know what it was; or maybe… no, I have no idea. Maybe it was the post office! [laughs] ‘Cause that in effect was my last real job, so maybe that… I don’t know.
It was pretty easy to get food stamps in those days if I remember.
It certainly was; it certainly was. So now I guess we’re moving into 1972 and… I still don’t have any money. There’s an election on, you know, George McGovern. That was kind of interesting: McGovern versus Nixon. I mean that’s what was in the air, and also we were hanging out a lot with—not a lot but some—with Kathy’s brother Mike Stanis who lived up here and they were running a music store, Paragon Music, over in the Walnut Center over there. He had all the lovely guitars. He was a classical guitarist, studied in Vienna, taught and that sort of thing. I think he just remarried at that time and his wife was… gosh, I don’t know… They had a real nice house. They had a nice apartment and then they had a nice house, so it was kind of fun to go over there.
Can you give me a kind of impression of Berkeley, not just of Berkeley but how Berkeley contrasted with the beach area, Redondo and that whole area, because I’m assuming that it was a little more political and maybe that’s…?
Yeah it was but I wasn’t… still I didn’t have no friends [laughter], you know, I didn’t know anybody in Berkeley really. I mean I was aware of all this stuff but it didn’t have... I missed the beach, I still, like I say, every now and then I’d have to go down there and live for a while a little bit. I still miss the beach, yeah, even though I’m not really a beach person; I just miss the quality of the sunlight and the air, and the Southern California sand and ocean is completely different than the Northern California: you just can’t get that up here, that kind of hit.
So you still miss it and feel like you…?
Yeah, I want to go every year I want to go spend some time; I haven’t been for a long time though. But yeah, it’s real magical.
So that was part of the reason that you kept sort of cycling down there, besides whatever fluctuations your relationship with Kathy went through?
Right, yeah. If I had hit something down there I probably would have stayed. So it took a little while to get into Berkeley but what I really liked about Berkeley were the coffee shops, you know, and they had so many of them, so many different ones, and in each one you could sit forever and talk, watch stuff, read; you could sit there and read and drink endless cups of coffee, or just one—it wasn’t so cutthroat. There was the Med. and Hardcastle’s and, oh, a whole bunch of other places, and it was kind of cheap too, it was kind of cheap around here then, so, you know, if you lived in the Berkeley Inn it had to be cheap [laughs]. Later on even when we had an apartment: we were still a one-income family and it wasn’t mine [laughs].
So you felt kind of like you had to keep your belt tightened?
Yeah. I couldn’t buy as many magazines; I always wanted to buy magazines, and the library, the Berkeley library was pretty cool.
So were you reading more in those days?
Yeah, I started reading again, picking up on the latest stuff that had come out by, oh you know, my favorites: Stanley Elkin and Thomas Berger and Anthony Burgess and all those kind of guys, and Thomas Pynchon, whatever he was doing then, I don’t know if it was… probably V was still in the air, hadn’t got to Gravity’s Rainbow yet. And, you know, couldn’t buy as many comic books as I wanted to. And comic book stores, I mean the underground comics: the R. Crumb, Zaps, and… not Weirdos but… oh, all that stuff from the Reprint Mint and other places, there weren’t any actual stores that sold them; they’d kind of be stacked up randomly, like you’d go into Shakespeare &Co and there’d be some on the counter or some on the rack, or you’d go into Moe’s and there might be a few there. And I think… there weren’t any actual stores, there were… maybe head shops. Head shops!
Were head shops still around in 1972?
I don’t know if there were any head shops in Berkeley. There probably were a couple, yeah; and Indian restaurants: there were three or four great Indian restaurants in Berkeley. Yeah, non of this steam table stuff too, yeah, cookin’ it right there. When Lee Roy was around we always had to find places that had vegetarian food too because that’s all he would eat and the Indian restaurants were perfect for that. I don’t know what I did for money though because I didn’t start going to school until I guess the next year, so let’s forget ‘72 [laughter], let’s move right into ‘73; and you know ‘73 was dominated mostly by the Watergate hearings, and I spent, you know, I wasn’t working so I spent all that summer and however long it was on glued in front of the TV set, except when I had to go down and get food stamps or make that trip down to the HRD down there on University.
Were you able to do a good Nixon impersonation?
Ah, yeah, Nixon, yeah, we were doing Nixon, McGovern, and even…
Chuck Colson?
He’s hard, he’s hard. Sam Irvin, you know, all those: Sam Irvin… Erlichman, he was doable; Haldeman, not doable; Howard Baker, doable.
Haldeman’s wife?
[Laughs] John Dean’s wife.
Oh, John Dean’s wife, yeah, right, right.
Maureen, Mo, she didn’t say much.
Big hairdo I seem to recall.
Big hairdo, yeah, big hairdo. Let’s see, who else was in the picture then? Oh, that guy from… oh I can picture him, he was a Southern senator, a Southern Democratic senator, he was doable, he was real doable. What’s that cat’s name? And there was Daniel Inoue, the Hawaiian senator. That was real gripping; there wasn’t anything else but that then, because it was just so good to see Nixon squirm, probably like the right-wingers are just so happy to see Clinton squirming now.
And this is kind of closing a little point that you raised before because you said that your father always hated Nixon.
Always hated him whenever he showed up on TV, yeah.
That guy’s a jerk, and then now finally…
Well I saw Nixon speak; he was running for governor and he made an... sixty-six? naw, I don’t know, sixty-three or, whenever it was when he ran for governor.
That one when he mercilessly red-baited that woman?
No, that was Helen Gahagan Douglas, that was in the early part of his career. This was the one when he wound it up by saying [Nixon voice]: You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore. So he was running for governor against Pat Brown. When was that? It must have been sixty-two. No, it couldn’t have been… yeah, it must have been sixty-two. He made an appearance at Mira Costa High School, so I went in there and checked him out. Didn’t watch it for very long. Didn’t want him to be governor: just something about the man [Nixon voice]: I’m not a buddy-buddy kind of guy; I’ve never been a buddy-buddy guy.
Do you know David Levine’s caricatures of him?
Sure, yes, absolutely, yeah.
They really kind of summed it up.
Dark brooding evil…
Do you want a guy looking like that? with jowls like that? to be president?
[Laughing] Yep. So it was just wonderful to see him squirm.
And you had quite a bit of time on your hands to do that.
Yeah, I could see the whole thing. I’m sure I saw every minute of it, every minute from beginning to end, until it ended and it cycled off into impeachment hearings. But then I decided that I would go to school: so I went in to Merritt College, signed up for veteran’s benefits and started going to school there.
What was it that got you going on that, because you had been so resistant?
It was two hundred forty-eight dollars a month. That was a whopping… That was two hundred forty eight dollars a month more than I was getting [laughs].
So they were gonna give you…
That’s veteran’s benefits. Now you have to take a minimum; you have to take a full-time load or else you get a percentage, and a full-time load is twelve units, and my determination was to do as little work as possible. So I’m looking in the catalog. What I wanted was the most amount of units for the least amount of time, which is why you have to stay away from art classes, although I did take one later. The art classes—actually no, I took one right away ‘cause all I needed was two units—but it’s just the opposite with art classes, you know, a unit’s about an hour or something like that, yeah, you have to devote twice as much time to the same number of units for art classes for some reason. So I’m looking through the catalog figuring, you know: What am I gonna do? I want to take as few courses for as many units as possible, and I saw this, you know I’m scanning down there and it said: Russian, one to ten units, self-paced. I said: That’s it! Just like Brigham Young! So on paper I could claim to the Veteran’s Administration that I was taking a ten unit class; all I needed was another two units: ceramics, silk-screening or something like that. So on paper… I didn’t know how long this was gonna last. For all I knew it was only gonna last a semester and then I was gonna have to leave. So I had two classes: Russian, for ten units, and silk-screening or something like that.
And if they had been offering Sanskrit or Finno-Ugric or anything, you would have taken it? [laughs]
Yeah, that’s right, or silk-screening! [laughs] or music or California…
Business?
Sure. If I could say—I mean it wasn’t really ten units, it was going to be one to ten units—as far as I was concerned I was going to do one unit’s work and say that I was taking a ten unit class. But as it turned out I liked it, so I always wound up getting ten units, you know, for as long as I was able to do that.
So you really ended up working hard on the class.
No, I didn’t have to work hard. I enjoyed it, yeah, so there was no… I never had to work hard at it. I guess the play/work dichotomy has to be spelled out here. I was playing at it, I mean even though I was studying and memorizing and doing flash cards with words and going to the language lab: this was all very enjoyable.
So it never seemed like work.
It never seemed like work but part of the reason that I was able to do it—because it wasn’t something that I chose to do—was because they were paying me. So that was my little… my hook in my head: okay, go ahead and do this but recognize that you would not be doing this if they weren’t paying you. Okay, I’ll have to keep that in mind. Just like work here: we wouldn’t be here if they weren’t paying us.
[Laughing] With that, we’re right at the end of the tape, but you could add a comment if you think there’s anything essential.
[Laughing] No, we’ll just let it wind out.
Okay.
[End Tape 16, Side B]
So that day ended and I thought it was kind of interesting and curious but no more than that, you know. I didn’t really want to be part of any family. I was completely electively deracinated. I liked it that I had no ties or familial attachments; that was perfect.
And having that taste of it just made you all the more convinced.
Exactly, exactly, every time I see [laughs], every time I experience a taste of family life on any level, mine or anybody else’s, it just, it still to this day solidifies my [laughs]… I used to have this postcard, it was an old fifties picture of a like a sort of Leave It to Beaver sort of Father Knows Best family at the dinner table and the dad’s there in his suit and the kids are around the table and the mom’s dishing up and they have little balloons added to the drawing and I think the mother’s saying: And they call this nightmare ‘family life.’ [laughter] Yeah it kind of makes me physically ill sometimes. Like I was telling you that Patricia engineered this big train trip recently where they were going to book, where they could have an entire train and they were going travel from San Diego down to Mexico and back with all these friends and relatives and that really just sort of made me ill for a minute, you know, just imagining being trapped in that car with no way out, no escape, faced with all these people all the time.
Were you able to communicate that to her or did you skip it?
I said I was having a haircut that day, I’m having a bad hangnail. No, I said, no, that doesn’t sound like fun to me.
That’s interesting though, she still wants it…
She does, she still does, but I have to say no, I have to head her off. In fact Dennis has a little bit of this too, and I hadn’t seen Dennis—we’re skipping ahead again to 1997—I hadn’t seen Dennis for a long time but I did get in touch with him after Patricia got in touch with me after twenty-seven years, and she had already talked to him, so I got him on the phone; I said: Hi, Dennis, it’s Mike. He said: Yeah, I know. I said: Here she goes again. Could she quit bugging us every twenty-five years! [laughter] So it’s kind of a joke. So we wrote a little bit but I had no motivation, plus when people move away their reality starts to granulate, you know, they start not to exist, so that was that, but there was a little connection there for a minute And the other thing that happened that I wanted to mention was how I killed the guinea pig.
Uh oh.
Yeah, we had, when I was living with Kathy we had little guinea pigs in a cage.
Was this in Berkeley?
No, we were still in Redondo Beach and we had this apartment on the top floor of a house and outside there was like a little porch and off of the porch was the rest of the roof in back of the porch; so my job was to clean the guinea pig cages once in a while so I figured… I think I used to take a guinea pig out and put it somewhere and take another one out, you know, put them in some other cage while I cleaned this cage, something like that. Well this time I thought: well this time I’ll just let them roam, they can’t get anywhere. So I let them all roam around and I was cleaning out the cage and over my head I hear this scraping like [makes sound of scraping]… and I thought: Jeez, what is that? and thud. And so I go out and these guinea pigs, you know, they have no traction but I thought they’d be okay because they were on this enclosed porch but this one big guinea pig scrambled around and climbed up on the roof and he got up to a certain point on the incline and then just slid down: boom, fell a couple stories.
And you were hearing…
Yeah, I was hearing him scrambling, scrabbling. Oh, that was bad. So I went down there and he was still alive. I didn’t know exactly what to do. I knew I’d have to kill him, so I put him in a little basket on a bicycle, a little girl’s bicycle—it was Kathy’s bicycle that I was using then—and drove around to an empty lot, dug a hole, put the little guinea pig in there, picked up a great big rock and smashed its head. I figured I had to. That was a traumatic guinea pig killing experience, and I got into trouble for that too, although guinea pigs, you know, they’re not that much, they’re not all that interesting, they don’t do much; they whistle, you can get ‘em to whistle, you take, like we used to get real stoned, you know, and that was a big source of amusement: get the cellophane packs off of cigarettes and crumple ‘em up and the guinea pigs think it’s like lettuce or something, they start to [a few short whistles] get all excited, run back and forth, run back and forth, yeah. That’s about it with guinea pigs, the running back and forth, that’s about it, yeah. So enough of that, I just wanted to…
So it was traumatic? You got in trouble for that because Kathy was upset?
Well yeah, yeah, it was an extremely stupid thing to do, you know, on the level of putting all the money in the… as Mike Steuer might say: Oh man, it’s just my naïvetivity. He’s the guy who, we were sitting around reading R. Crumb Zap comics one day and he said: Man, these are some crazy photographs. He was always slightly off.
Was he a post office guy?
No, this was Kathy’s friend from St. Louis, a guy who was into mysticism and occult, and later on when we saw him—everywhere he lived he would build a little shrine, you know, whatever books he was reading then, whatever religious objects he had, wherever he lived, and he lived many places—I think he lives in San Francisco now—but he always built himself a little shrine because he meditated and prayed in his way. He was full of antics. One time we got all—you know I was talking about driving and doping—it was when 2001 first came out. Oh, we gotta go see 2001, so we all piled in, we all took some kind of purple Owsleys or something, and got into the car (Lee Roy had this great old Morris Minor) and we drove into the city ‘cause it was in the city, and we went to see… oh, it was at the Cinerama Dome, the great big Cinerama Dome.
Yeah, because when it was first released it came out in all those wide screen… it was 1968 I think.
That’s right, something like that, yeah. And we got sidetracked by the gigantic neon Coke sign that was down there on the strip or someplace. We had to stop and pull over and check that out [laughs], zizzing and zapping back and forth. But then we went to see the movie and that was okay, except Lee Roy fell asleep, so that was a standing gag for many, you know: How did you like that 2001, Lee Roy? Well I was there; I was there; that’s what he’d always say: I was there. But after that we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, you know, like it was midnight; we went to the art museum and the La Brea Tar Pits at midnight, and as soon as we opened the door Mike Steuer—I think he was bald at this time [laughs], he was bald and he had a little skullcap or pillbox hat and some other weird clothing on—he bounded out of the car and just went running madly off into the distance. We had no idea what he was doing or where he was going [laughs]. He was kind of a…
Did he ever…?
Yeah, he showed up. But we were all laughing at this and that, and some very cool L.A. type hippies came around, you know, they were [effete voice]: Why are you guys blowing it?! [laughs]
[laughing] for the rest of us.
Come on, Nancy. Yeah, why are you having so much fun?! [laughter]
So that was bad form.
We were just trippin’, yeah, we were just... That was a good one. You guys are blowing it. God. Is this your first trip? That’s the only reason we would go into the… ‘cause the beach life was so sweet, you know; the only reason we’d go in there was to see a movie or something like that.
The only reason you went to L.A.?
Yeah, L.A. proper. I went to the Shrine once, you know, one of those big jam packed Shrine Auditorium shows with millions of people on the bill. I have no idea who was there, Blue Cheer maybe, I don’t know. Went to a Stones concert in the Forum in Inglewood, you know, and got the best seats we could afford and, you know, saw a little tiny three-inch Mick Jagger [laughter]. [sings] Talk about the midnight rambler…
So you weren’t much enamored of the Stones?
Nah. You know they must have sold their entire catalog now ‘cause now you’re hearing all the Stones songs on commercials.
Really?
Yeah, they need the money I guess, I guess they do. Poor Mick. Yeah.
[Laughing] Yeah, I guess so. That is really sad. I mean the Beatles, you know, you can understand that Michael Jackson bought the catalog and so then he’s, you know, he needs the money [laughs].
That’s true, who actually, yeah, right. Who actually owns their stuff? I don’t know. But ‘Time is on My Side’, I heard a commercial for, I don’t know, foot deodorizer, I don’t know what it was. Well they started selling out with Windows, you know, Windows 95, when that first came out, the theme song was the Stones’ ‘Start Me Up’. [sings] You can start me up. So anyway, let’s get out of Southern California and live in Berkeley for a while.
Oh, I had a question about… well actually a couple things, threads to pick up, one is, before you forget, when you got mixed up in that thing at Grodin’s where basically you got fired or something like it.
Oh yeah, yeah, I had to go.
You mentioned that the guys were black and you said that that became significant later on.
Oh no, I just mentioned that because at the time when they separated us, I learned from them later, they were saying: So did Conkin put you up to it? He’s the ringleader. He put you up to it, didn’t he? And here I was just the hapless [cartoon music] do do dee doot doot do [Goofy voice]: Sure I’ll help ya! Because they were gonna make all the money; they weren’t gonna give me any.
So they just assumed: two black guys and a white guy, the white guy’s gotta be the leader.
And they were my bosses too, so you know. It’s a good thing they were square shooters—except for the stealing of the suits—because they could have ratted me out, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he… we don’t know what was… It was hard enough for them to maintain that they didn’t know what was going on, me too, you know, it was like: I don’t know what was going on, I don’t know why we were putting that thing in that way. You know usually you dump it. I don’t know anything. But the three of us communicated. It was kind of a paranoid thing. I remember thinking: oh the phones could be tapped or anything, or something like that, but we talked about it. I think they were veterans too [laughs], or one of them was; wound up getting some veterans benefits too, going to school. So that didn’t work out, but for some reason somehow, I mean I wasn’t supposed to go get unemployment off of that, but for some reason somehow I did get unemployment and food stamps and I was living on that for a while. I don’t remember exactly how that happened: did I have another job in there that I’ve completely blanked out on that I got laid off of so I could legitimately get unemployment benefits? No. I don’t know what it was. Maybe… maybe… Probably what it was…
Other Kelly Girl assignments?
Yeah, maybe that was it, or just some overall Kelly Girl thing. You know I wasn’t working for Grodin’s, I was working for Kelly Girl. You know I think that’s right because I think what happened was Grodin’s did buy out my Kelly Girl contract, so when I started working there… You know now I’m not even sure it was Kelly Girl; it was a temp agency but it may not have been Kelly Girl. There were a couple other ones around at that time.
I mean it’s kind of funny to be working for Kelly Girl, a guy I mean.
Kelly Guy. But somehow I was able to do that.
But temping in those days was pretty much all secretarial and secretarial work was just simply considered women’s stuff.
Right, right.
It wasn’t considered sexist, although it obviously was.
Right. I think that the original job that I got set up for at Grodin’s through temping was like ‘sweeping’ or something like that, ‘cleanup’, or ‘warehouse cleanup’ or something like that, and it just developed into the other. It really didn’t make any difference what you did once you got there. So what they did, you know, they paid Kelly Girl, Kelly Girl paid me. But then Grodin’s hired me on, hired me off of Kelly Girl, which means they had to pay a little extra to Kelly Girl. So maybe I was getting unemployment off of Kelly Girl, but I don’t remember any other thing I did for them except Grodin’s. Must have been something, or maybe I was only getting food stamps, or I don’t know what it was; or maybe… no, I have no idea. Maybe it was the post office! [laughs] ‘Cause that in effect was my last real job, so maybe that… I don’t know.
It was pretty easy to get food stamps in those days if I remember.
It certainly was; it certainly was. So now I guess we’re moving into 1972 and… I still don’t have any money. There’s an election on, you know, George McGovern. That was kind of interesting: McGovern versus Nixon. I mean that’s what was in the air, and also we were hanging out a lot with—not a lot but some—with Kathy’s brother Mike Stanis who lived up here and they were running a music store, Paragon Music, over in the Walnut Center over there. He had all the lovely guitars. He was a classical guitarist, studied in Vienna, taught and that sort of thing. I think he just remarried at that time and his wife was… gosh, I don’t know… They had a real nice house. They had a nice apartment and then they had a nice house, so it was kind of fun to go over there.
Can you give me a kind of impression of Berkeley, not just of Berkeley but how Berkeley contrasted with the beach area, Redondo and that whole area, because I’m assuming that it was a little more political and maybe that’s…?
Yeah it was but I wasn’t… still I didn’t have no friends [laughter], you know, I didn’t know anybody in Berkeley really. I mean I was aware of all this stuff but it didn’t have... I missed the beach, I still, like I say, every now and then I’d have to go down there and live for a while a little bit. I still miss the beach, yeah, even though I’m not really a beach person; I just miss the quality of the sunlight and the air, and the Southern California sand and ocean is completely different than the Northern California: you just can’t get that up here, that kind of hit.
So you still miss it and feel like you…?
Yeah, I want to go every year I want to go spend some time; I haven’t been for a long time though. But yeah, it’s real magical.
So that was part of the reason that you kept sort of cycling down there, besides whatever fluctuations your relationship with Kathy went through?
Right, yeah. If I had hit something down there I probably would have stayed. So it took a little while to get into Berkeley but what I really liked about Berkeley were the coffee shops, you know, and they had so many of them, so many different ones, and in each one you could sit forever and talk, watch stuff, read; you could sit there and read and drink endless cups of coffee, or just one—it wasn’t so cutthroat. There was the Med. and Hardcastle’s and, oh, a whole bunch of other places, and it was kind of cheap too, it was kind of cheap around here then, so, you know, if you lived in the Berkeley Inn it had to be cheap [laughs]. Later on even when we had an apartment: we were still a one-income family and it wasn’t mine [laughs].
So you felt kind of like you had to keep your belt tightened?
Yeah. I couldn’t buy as many magazines; I always wanted to buy magazines, and the library, the Berkeley library was pretty cool.
So were you reading more in those days?
Yeah, I started reading again, picking up on the latest stuff that had come out by, oh you know, my favorites: Stanley Elkin and Thomas Berger and Anthony Burgess and all those kind of guys, and Thomas Pynchon, whatever he was doing then, I don’t know if it was… probably V was still in the air, hadn’t got to Gravity’s Rainbow yet. And, you know, couldn’t buy as many comic books as I wanted to. And comic book stores, I mean the underground comics: the R. Crumb, Zaps, and… not Weirdos but… oh, all that stuff from the Reprint Mint and other places, there weren’t any actual stores that sold them; they’d kind of be stacked up randomly, like you’d go into Shakespeare &Co and there’d be some on the counter or some on the rack, or you’d go into Moe’s and there might be a few there. And I think… there weren’t any actual stores, there were… maybe head shops. Head shops!
Were head shops still around in 1972?
I don’t know if there were any head shops in Berkeley. There probably were a couple, yeah; and Indian restaurants: there were three or four great Indian restaurants in Berkeley. Yeah, non of this steam table stuff too, yeah, cookin’ it right there. When Lee Roy was around we always had to find places that had vegetarian food too because that’s all he would eat and the Indian restaurants were perfect for that. I don’t know what I did for money though because I didn’t start going to school until I guess the next year, so let’s forget ‘72 [laughter], let’s move right into ‘73; and you know ‘73 was dominated mostly by the Watergate hearings, and I spent, you know, I wasn’t working so I spent all that summer and however long it was on glued in front of the TV set, except when I had to go down and get food stamps or make that trip down to the HRD down there on University.
Were you able to do a good Nixon impersonation?
Ah, yeah, Nixon, yeah, we were doing Nixon, McGovern, and even…
Chuck Colson?
He’s hard, he’s hard. Sam Irvin, you know, all those: Sam Irvin… Erlichman, he was doable; Haldeman, not doable; Howard Baker, doable.
Haldeman’s wife?
[Laughs] John Dean’s wife.
Oh, John Dean’s wife, yeah, right, right.
Maureen, Mo, she didn’t say much.
Big hairdo I seem to recall.
Big hairdo, yeah, big hairdo. Let’s see, who else was in the picture then? Oh, that guy from… oh I can picture him, he was a Southern senator, a Southern Democratic senator, he was doable, he was real doable. What’s that cat’s name? And there was Daniel Inoue, the Hawaiian senator. That was real gripping; there wasn’t anything else but that then, because it was just so good to see Nixon squirm, probably like the right-wingers are just so happy to see Clinton squirming now.
And this is kind of closing a little point that you raised before because you said that your father always hated Nixon.
Always hated him whenever he showed up on TV, yeah.
That guy’s a jerk, and then now finally…
Well I saw Nixon speak; he was running for governor and he made an... sixty-six? naw, I don’t know, sixty-three or, whenever it was when he ran for governor.
That one when he mercilessly red-baited that woman?
No, that was Helen Gahagan Douglas, that was in the early part of his career. This was the one when he wound it up by saying [Nixon voice]: You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore. So he was running for governor against Pat Brown. When was that? It must have been sixty-two. No, it couldn’t have been… yeah, it must have been sixty-two. He made an appearance at Mira Costa High School, so I went in there and checked him out. Didn’t watch it for very long. Didn’t want him to be governor: just something about the man [Nixon voice]: I’m not a buddy-buddy kind of guy; I’ve never been a buddy-buddy guy.
Do you know David Levine’s caricatures of him?
Sure, yes, absolutely, yeah.
They really kind of summed it up.
Dark brooding evil…
Do you want a guy looking like that? with jowls like that? to be president?
[Laughing] Yep. So it was just wonderful to see him squirm.
And you had quite a bit of time on your hands to do that.
Yeah, I could see the whole thing. I’m sure I saw every minute of it, every minute from beginning to end, until it ended and it cycled off into impeachment hearings. But then I decided that I would go to school: so I went in to Merritt College, signed up for veteran’s benefits and started going to school there.
What was it that got you going on that, because you had been so resistant?
It was two hundred forty-eight dollars a month. That was a whopping… That was two hundred forty eight dollars a month more than I was getting [laughs].
So they were gonna give you…
That’s veteran’s benefits. Now you have to take a minimum; you have to take a full-time load or else you get a percentage, and a full-time load is twelve units, and my determination was to do as little work as possible. So I’m looking in the catalog. What I wanted was the most amount of units for the least amount of time, which is why you have to stay away from art classes, although I did take one later. The art classes—actually no, I took one right away ‘cause all I needed was two units—but it’s just the opposite with art classes, you know, a unit’s about an hour or something like that, yeah, you have to devote twice as much time to the same number of units for art classes for some reason. So I’m looking through the catalog figuring, you know: What am I gonna do? I want to take as few courses for as many units as possible, and I saw this, you know I’m scanning down there and it said: Russian, one to ten units, self-paced. I said: That’s it! Just like Brigham Young! So on paper I could claim to the Veteran’s Administration that I was taking a ten unit class; all I needed was another two units: ceramics, silk-screening or something like that. So on paper… I didn’t know how long this was gonna last. For all I knew it was only gonna last a semester and then I was gonna have to leave. So I had two classes: Russian, for ten units, and silk-screening or something like that.
And if they had been offering Sanskrit or Finno-Ugric or anything, you would have taken it? [laughs]
Yeah, that’s right, or silk-screening! [laughs] or music or California…
Business?
Sure. If I could say—I mean it wasn’t really ten units, it was going to be one to ten units—as far as I was concerned I was going to do one unit’s work and say that I was taking a ten unit class. But as it turned out I liked it, so I always wound up getting ten units, you know, for as long as I was able to do that.
So you really ended up working hard on the class.
No, I didn’t have to work hard. I enjoyed it, yeah, so there was no… I never had to work hard at it. I guess the play/work dichotomy has to be spelled out here. I was playing at it, I mean even though I was studying and memorizing and doing flash cards with words and going to the language lab: this was all very enjoyable.
So it never seemed like work.
It never seemed like work but part of the reason that I was able to do it—because it wasn’t something that I chose to do—was because they were paying me. So that was my little… my hook in my head: okay, go ahead and do this but recognize that you would not be doing this if they weren’t paying you. Okay, I’ll have to keep that in mind. Just like work here: we wouldn’t be here if they weren’t paying us.
[Laughing] With that, we’re right at the end of the tape, but you could add a comment if you think there’s anything essential.
[Laughing] No, we’ll just let it wind out.
Okay.
[End Tape 16, Side B]
posted by epikles at 4:11 PM
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