Tape 16, Side A
[Begin Tape 16, Side A]
We’re out on the deck again at Moffitt Library talking to Michael Conkin.
We might just do this for twenty-four hours at a time.
Yeah, we’re going for the marathons. So I wanted to, because we had a problem with tape 14 when you were talking about—as soon as you mentioned the El Ja Arms the batteries started to go down, so you mentioned the El Ja Arms and Paul Herron and his prescription shades, so maybe you could…
We were all in our early twenties and he was an ancient twenty-six, so he lived in a slightly different world than we did, but he was interested in some of the same things, but he would get kind of disappointed when he saw any of us spiraling off into the hippie direction. He thought we were being co-opted or something like that because he was from a different time.
You mean away from sort of more of a beat…?
Yeah, sort of like that but even more… I just think he thought he had more perspective than to get caught up in some trend, so, you know. I mean later on when I’d see him he wouldn’t talk to me too much because I had real long hair then and funny clothes and he just thought: Why did you do that? You were so smart and funny and… I mean not in so many words but that was the way it came across. But he, he was a writer; he would write stuff. He would actually… I never knew nobody like that: he would actually sit down and write short stories, and he would send them off, and he was a monster correspondent. He kept copies of all his letters. He was always writing letters, always writing letters on his typewriter, and he kept carbon copies of all the letters that he sent out, and he had them all arranged, and he had copies of all the letters that came to him, and he corresponded with people all around the world, long long letters. Damn I wish I had kept some of the letters I had got from him or some of the copies of the letters that I sent to him; I have a postcard or two but that’s about it, later on, because he went out there. I think he was a real talented guy and he wanted to be a writer and it seemed like he had what it took.
Did he send things out to try and get them published?
Yeah, I think he did, I think he did; yeah, he sent things out. Maybe he did get something published, I don’t know.
You should check Melvyl.
[Laughs] I’ve checked, I’ve looked around; I don’t see anything. But one time, I remember, he went on a trip to Hawaii and I got a letter back from him and he was talking about how he had run into some self-made millionaires and he said: These guys are really hip, you know, they’re some of the most aware people I’ve ever met. So maybe he went into direct marketing [laughs] or export-import or something like that.
That’s strange, so you think that it was sort of like he was…?
Plus I think he had some pressure from his family to excel and succeed in life. I think they might have been well off or something like that; I’m not sure.
So you think maybe he went straight?
Uh huh, yeah, I think he probably did.
And forgot about the world of art.
Yeah, art and [sings] red red wine.
Oh yeah, you said jug wine.
Yeah, in El Ja Arms, it was a rambling old dilapidated gigantic structure, it dominated the waterfront down there in Redondo Beach. Redondo Beach looks…, you know, it’s been completely… it looks completely different now than it did then, but it was kind of a funky old… it was a bigger city than Hermosa and Manhattan Beach. It wasn’t as big as Santa Monica or anyplace like that. But there was a lot of old stuff, you know, they still fished off the pier and sent fishing boats out, and there was this gigantic old hotel.
What year was that when you were living there?
Somewhere sixty-nine, seventy, because like I say I was yo-yoing back and forth, I mean I was going to different places and living in different places.
Was Berkeley in the picture then?
Uh uh. No, I was still on my own, and so at one of the points, for some reason, you know, I just had to keep moving, at one of the points I roomed up with Paul, and every night he’d have people over to his place and everybody’d sit on the floor and drink wine, you know, smoke a little dope, but he wasn’t really into that that much. In fact several… he took acid later than everybody else. There was this café we used to hang out at, and I said: Okay, I won’t take any; because he was a little concerned about it, that he might turn into one of them hippies or something [laughs], so I remember I gave him some fine acid and we went to the café and you know after about a half hour we were sitting at a counter—this is all I remember—sitting at a counter and he takes a spoon off and he kind of moves it over in front of him and he says: Okay, do something! [laughter]
Show me your stuff!
Yeah, right, okay. So I think he had kind of a mellow trip. He didn’t really care for that, that angle.
It’s interesting. It sounds like he was really resisting this hippie thing.
[Laughs] Yeah. But for some reason he would be invited to parties in Hollywood, or up on the strip—I don’t remember what the angle was—and he always had really dishy sophisticated girlfriends from that life, you know, sometimes they’d drop around, so he was attracted to that sort of thing and not the quasi-communal stuff. And he was a really fine guitarist too, like I said, he invented many of his own chords and his own fingerings; he was always working on that; wrote some songs, you know, wrote his own songs, another wonderful thing, and would sing ‘em, perform ‘em for all of us, but he was a little separate from us, different.
You said something about he used to think people stole his chords.
I just remember that one… See how I just remember these little bits and pieces that float up. It was Jose Feliciano, and we heard him on the radio. I don’t know if it was “Light My Fire”—what else did Jose Feliciano do? That was the big one. So at some point he goes into a solo and Paul says: Hey, man, that’s my chord. I can almost remember what it was too, no, not quite, but it had a lot of open strings on it; it was kind of bittersweet melancholy chord; a lot of his stories were like that too.
So those were his favorite chords. You were talking also about Tim and Mike: a lot of musical people.
Yeah, there was a lot of music stuff going, you know; with all those… they were great guitarists, especially Tim.
And were they also hanging out with…?
Yeah, not too much.
This was all sort of happening around the El Ja Arms?
No, that was just sort of postal people. They had their own orbit and sometimes it would intersect with ours, but mostly because of Tim’s sister, Kathy, Kathy Stanis. ‘Cause they all knew each other in St. Louis, but Mike and Tim they were kind of doing some other things too. There were some great musical instruments around there too: Tim had a National Steel body guitar that he’d play slide bottleneck blues guitar on, and they were both drenched in the blues. Oh and Tim had a—well they both did—they both had harmonica stands, so they could do that thing too.
Holders, like Bob Dylan used?
Yeah, but it was all blues, you know, they didn’t want any slick uptown blues either, they wanted the…
Really? What did they listen to mostly?
As far as I remember: Sonny Boy Williamson, and I don’t know, maybe a little Mississippi Fred McDowell and Buddy Guy and some Chicago city blues people and country blues people, you know. Actually they would listen to anybody, you know, if they could get their hands on the record they’d come over to Kathy’s place, play the record into their little tape recorder, just to catch the licks; they weren’t interested in the whole song; they wanted to learn that particular… yeah.
Sounds like those were the kind of guys that, guitar players used to actually turn away from the audience so that the younger guitar players wouldn’t be able to learn their stuff.
[Laughs] Yeah, I believe it; I believe it. They could probably do that, especially Tim. It was amazing what they could do. I could never reach it. But they were really annoying after a while because they would, you know, in order to learn these you’ve gotta play ‘em over and over and over and over and over, so you know they’d be sitting there with their tape recorder playing that same thing: rewind, play, rewind, play; try to do it, then: play, rewind, play, rewind, and you just had to either get them to leave or you had to leave.
[Laughing] One or the other.
Yeah. Yeah, but there were a lot of characters, you know, I have to gloss over all the characters, all the lifers that were there in the post office, there’s just so many of ‘em, except one I want to mention: Nick Grimm. Nick Grimm was—because we were talking about Arthur Brown, the god of hell fire—Nick was a guy who was a real nerd, he was a real nerd but he was real speedy, talked a mile a minute, and he was famous for the lunches that he would bring. He had a real high metabolism, I guess, and he was famous for the lunches that he would bring in huge like suitcases, you know, lots of different kind of sandwiches and vegetables and chicken and whole salamis or bologna and apples. He would consume all that: he would eat all the time and he was really really skinny. Once he said—he was trying to explain all this because somebody finally asked him—and he said—I forgot what the explanation was but he said he had an exo-something heart; he said: You wanna see my heart? So he unbuttoned his shirt and you could see right through his ribs! there was a big bulge and his heart was beating: da dum! da dum! da dum! He was an oddity. [Cockney accent:] ‘E was a sport of nature.
And that condition somehow made it so that he had to eat all the time?
I guess that was all part of it, you know, he had to consume, and he worked pretty fast too: worked pretty fast, talked pretty fast, lived pretty fast.
So were you allowed to eat while you worked there?
Ah, you could smoke while you worked but I don’t think you could eat while you worked, you know, unless you secreted something. That was when we used to start calling him ‘the god of hell fire’, for some reason, I don’t know: Oh yeah, baby, that’s me, that’s me, I ‘m the god of hell fire. He was trying to blend in with the kids. You couldn’t sit down and post these letters. You could either stand up or they would provide these stools that you could lean against, they had round seats and you could make the seats flat so you could sit on it but you weren’t supposed to do that, that was a violation, you were supposed to ratchet them up so they were at an angle then you could lean the small of your back against them and at the front of them you had a lip up so you could rest your feet on it so you were sort of leaning back.
What’s the thing about not sitting?
They didn’t want you to sit down, thought you would become too drowsy and not be able to pay…
… wouldn’t be alert and might make mistakes…
Right, you wouldn’t be paying attention, so you couldn’t sit down. That was one of the requirements. Couldn’t wear open-toed sandals either, that was one big thing.
‘Cause you could get hurt.
Get hurt, yeah, exactly, actually. The one supervisor we had there who was really a character, Fred Dietrich, he was an ex-navy man probably in his early fifties; he had retired early from the navy, real stocky guy, walked around with a cigar all the time, called everybody by their last name: Conkin! Cody! Beck! And he always had invented… Once he said: If I can’t think of a cliché, I invent one; or something like that. I get my clothes down at the bargain basement at Macy’s. If you have to spend more than thirty dollars for a suit… One time somebody suspected that there was a package of explosives or a bomb or something like that, you know, that came off of one of the trucks, and Fred grabbed the PA system and said: There’s a hot one on the docks! and made everybody clear out. And in his spare time—I didn’t do this but during the initial phases, you know I was telling you about how you had to learn the scheme—he would have these kids over to his house and have scheme-learning parties, you know, he would have some cases set up, and during the in-between time he would entertain them with magic tricks because he was an amateur magician too. He was a real sweet guy actually. Yep… He became disappointed in me after a while because: Not fulfilling your potential; you know, another one of those things.
Your bad attitude. How long did you work there, altogether?
I guess I woiked there from sixty-eight, sixty-nine… about two and a half years, something like that, well, a little bit more: almost three years.
How long would you say your positive attitude lasted and when did the…?
Well I don’t think ah… I just made an adjustment that, you know, when I was there I worked real hard, but I didn’t see why I had to be there all the time, so I had a good attitude when I was there.
So you continued to have a good attitude right up to…
Yes, I was always a hard worker, and that was one of the reasons why they didn’t try to get rid of me earlier, because I was carrying them on the parcels.
But you started just staying home…
…started staying home, yeah…
…fairly early on then, a little bit at least?
I don’t know, probably took a year, yeah, probably took a year, something like that; yeah, that’s probably what it was. Maybe it wasn’t that long. I don’t know; I’m not really sure. But you know already I was starting not to want to work. Stealing my time away.
So you’ve been ready for early retirement all these years.
That’s right, that’s right; they took two years out of my life, those damn bloodsuckers. So yeah, I was just kind of… I was doing the maximum and the minimum, you know, the maximum amount of work I could do when I was there but taking the minimum amount of seriousness that I could just in order to keep on getting by, keep on getting some kind of paycheck.
In those days you would have still been able to go to school on the GI bill, wouldn’t you?
Oh yeah, I was eligible right then, as soon as you get out you’re eligible.
Did you ever think about that?
No, no, for one thing it was school, and for another thing it was like blood money in a way, that was my initial reaction—I overcame that as it turns out later on real easily—but I didn’t want any of their money.
That’s interesting. So you felt like in a way it would be like being dependent on…?
Yeah, that that was contaminated money, not dependent exactly, it’s just that I had a tiny shred of self-respect I suppose and I just wouldn’t go that far, and it didn’t occur to me till later that the solution was to think of it as you’re ripping them off [laughs], but I didn’t want any part of that, any of that government money: I work for my money, son.… But one of the things I missed out telling on the last go-round was that like in 1970, while I was working at the post office, I got a phone call from my sister, Patricia, that I hadn’t seen in… you know, eight or nine years, something like that.
Was she still in St. Louis?
She was in San Diego. She had tracked me down via the FBI.
Really?
Yeah, as a government employee it’s very easy for the FBI. That’s probably the first tier of searching: look for government employees, so that was pretty easy. So yeah, she was living down there in San Diego. She was, what, seventeen or eighteen, and was married and had a daughter I think, maybe two, and Dennis was hanging out with them too, so they were living there together. So I made a trip down there and, you know, found out more or less what had happened to them in the interim, and it wasn’t a very happy picture. They had been through hell, and one of the ways she got out was to get married, and Dennis was just a runaway, you know, he was fifteen or sixteen, something like that.
What had happened? I mean you said that the institution had changed and for them it wasn’t quite the sort of benign place that it had been for you.
Yeah, I still don’t know the whole story, but you know, Dennis got… plus they got, they were older, and I don’t really know that it was bad for Patricia other than just being there, but Dennis got beat up or something, something awful happened to him.
By?
I don’t know, I’m not sure, either other kids or, you know, the powers, the authorities. But they stayed there another couple of years or so, then they went back there to Sunnyvale, to another… All the people that were in Turkey came back, let’s see, that’s two kids, two adults, they all came back and got them out of the home again.
And this is…?
Maybe it’s San Jose or Sunnyvale, someplace like that, someplace down there.
How many years had it been since your father left for the second time?
I’m not really sure, I imagine it was like two or three years, yeah, I’m not sure.
So they had gone through the same thing.
Here they go again.
Here’s the dream, and had he bought another house?
Bought another house; I don’t know what kind of job he had; but it was much worse than it was before, you know, he couldn’t handle them even then when they were littler, now they were older he couldn’t handle them; he had flipped out and he was doing some awful things: he put Dennis in a home. The way Dennis tells it they were just taken someplace, he was escorted into this little room, the door closes and his father walks away [an uneasy laugh].
And this was in Sunnyvale, I mean the home?
This is somewhere down there, San Jose; I’m not sure, yeah, I think it’s somewhere down there in Santa Clara County. And you know Patricia’s being slapped around and it just didn’t work out.
By your father?
Yeah, he was totally insane now, as I understand it, and they just had to get out.
Was he drinking?
I don’t know. No, he just couldn’t handle it, handle anything. So they had endured this for a few years and then they had escaped from it. Patricia got married and looked up Dennis and he was kind of hanging out with her down there in San Diego. Then we had a big old reunion up in Van Nuys, everybody but Gene, and I don’t remember exactly why not Gene—maybe he wasn’t in town—but we all went over to Bob’s house in Van Nuys and, you know, from my point of view had a very uncomfortable [laughter] day.
Was Bob still kind of…?
No, he was a very successful man, you know, he had a great big house and he had a big family, so he was hosting the whole thing.
What was uncomfortable for you?
Just being there and having to endure all these people and you know I felt like I should say something about why I don’t, why I don’t feel like I have any brothers and sisters [laughs] and not wanting to say that, you know, or I never did and I don’t really now and I’m not sure exactly what’s happening here, plus I hated Van Nuys; I hated the house, you know, I had bad memories of that. But they seemed to want to do it, you know, Patricia certainly did. And then so that was over and they gave me a ride back to Hermosa and then I didn’t see my sister again for twenty-eight years [laughs].
[Under his breath] God.
We stayed in touch a little bit. She married a navy man and he was stationed in Oshkosh, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and so I remember getting some letters and doing a little correspondence there, especially after moving up to Berkeley, and actually when I went up to Berkeley later on Dennis popped up and so he was around, you know he was around the streets of Berkeley, then I lost touch with him for, you know, twenty years until just last year.
Would you say in those years had Dennis been pretty shaken up by his… ‘cause, let’s see, how old was he when you went back to St. Louis the second time? He was still just a little kid, right?
Yeah, yeah, eight or nine, something like that, as old as I was when I first went there.
It sounds like the subsequent years had been pretty hard on him.
Yeah, I think out of the three of us it was hardest of all on him. He doesn’t remember our mother, for example, and he may remember a little bit about the first time he was at the home, but that’s all he’s know is that kind of thing and then this punctuated bizarre family life, two instances of that, the second of which was horrific.
And he kind of got the worst of your father too, because you knew him when he was still pretty together and, you know…
Yeah, yeah, he’s got some horror stories, and so does Patricia about that time, but that’s not, you know, whatever happened that person is not the same person that I knew, you’re right.
What, you mean your brother?
My father. Yeah, whatever he did to them—or the depiction of him that I get from them now about how he was: completely unrecognizable to me, but although I can certainly see the seeds of some of that in my understanding of him at that time. But like I say I just Xed him out, I just kissed his ass goodbye when he gave me the hundred bucks and sent me up north, you know, that was it, that was all. So, you know, in hearing these reports they’re like a, they really are like a stranger, an insane stranger, the doings of an insane stranger; plus the Turkish stepmother—I can’t remember her name, Niri I think—she had more of a stranglehold on him too, and so he was in all that tension as well, so who knows, who knows what kind of pressure he was under, but he just flipped, I’m sure he had started flipping when his wife died in 1956.
But even in those days when he took you and you were sort of driving around and he was crying all the time and everything, it sounds like he wasn’t actually mean was he, it doesn’t sound like?
Oh no, no, no.
I mean he didn’t knock you around or anything like that….
Not that I remember.
He just broke down a lot.
Yeah, in those days, yes, he was just a dishrag. So, and he hadn’t kept in touch with Gene or Bob either, so he just came back and there they were.
And he expected to just kind of pick up and…?
I don’t know; I don’t know what; I don’t know what he was on; I don’t know what kind of thing he was in.
I’ve gotta turn this over.
[End Tape 16, Side A]
We’re out on the deck again at Moffitt Library talking to Michael Conkin.
We might just do this for twenty-four hours at a time.
Yeah, we’re going for the marathons. So I wanted to, because we had a problem with tape 14 when you were talking about—as soon as you mentioned the El Ja Arms the batteries started to go down, so you mentioned the El Ja Arms and Paul Herron and his prescription shades, so maybe you could…
We were all in our early twenties and he was an ancient twenty-six, so he lived in a slightly different world than we did, but he was interested in some of the same things, but he would get kind of disappointed when he saw any of us spiraling off into the hippie direction. He thought we were being co-opted or something like that because he was from a different time.
You mean away from sort of more of a beat…?
Yeah, sort of like that but even more… I just think he thought he had more perspective than to get caught up in some trend, so, you know. I mean later on when I’d see him he wouldn’t talk to me too much because I had real long hair then and funny clothes and he just thought: Why did you do that? You were so smart and funny and… I mean not in so many words but that was the way it came across. But he, he was a writer; he would write stuff. He would actually… I never knew nobody like that: he would actually sit down and write short stories, and he would send them off, and he was a monster correspondent. He kept copies of all his letters. He was always writing letters, always writing letters on his typewriter, and he kept carbon copies of all the letters that he sent out, and he had them all arranged, and he had copies of all the letters that came to him, and he corresponded with people all around the world, long long letters. Damn I wish I had kept some of the letters I had got from him or some of the copies of the letters that I sent to him; I have a postcard or two but that’s about it, later on, because he went out there. I think he was a real talented guy and he wanted to be a writer and it seemed like he had what it took.
Did he send things out to try and get them published?
Yeah, I think he did, I think he did; yeah, he sent things out. Maybe he did get something published, I don’t know.
You should check Melvyl.
[Laughs] I’ve checked, I’ve looked around; I don’t see anything. But one time, I remember, he went on a trip to Hawaii and I got a letter back from him and he was talking about how he had run into some self-made millionaires and he said: These guys are really hip, you know, they’re some of the most aware people I’ve ever met. So maybe he went into direct marketing [laughs] or export-import or something like that.
That’s strange, so you think that it was sort of like he was…?
Plus I think he had some pressure from his family to excel and succeed in life. I think they might have been well off or something like that; I’m not sure.
So you think maybe he went straight?
Uh huh, yeah, I think he probably did.
And forgot about the world of art.
Yeah, art and [sings] red red wine.
Oh yeah, you said jug wine.
Yeah, in El Ja Arms, it was a rambling old dilapidated gigantic structure, it dominated the waterfront down there in Redondo Beach. Redondo Beach looks…, you know, it’s been completely… it looks completely different now than it did then, but it was kind of a funky old… it was a bigger city than Hermosa and Manhattan Beach. It wasn’t as big as Santa Monica or anyplace like that. But there was a lot of old stuff, you know, they still fished off the pier and sent fishing boats out, and there was this gigantic old hotel.
What year was that when you were living there?
Somewhere sixty-nine, seventy, because like I say I was yo-yoing back and forth, I mean I was going to different places and living in different places.
Was Berkeley in the picture then?
Uh uh. No, I was still on my own, and so at one of the points, for some reason, you know, I just had to keep moving, at one of the points I roomed up with Paul, and every night he’d have people over to his place and everybody’d sit on the floor and drink wine, you know, smoke a little dope, but he wasn’t really into that that much. In fact several… he took acid later than everybody else. There was this café we used to hang out at, and I said: Okay, I won’t take any; because he was a little concerned about it, that he might turn into one of them hippies or something [laughs], so I remember I gave him some fine acid and we went to the café and you know after about a half hour we were sitting at a counter—this is all I remember—sitting at a counter and he takes a spoon off and he kind of moves it over in front of him and he says: Okay, do something! [laughter]
Show me your stuff!
Yeah, right, okay. So I think he had kind of a mellow trip. He didn’t really care for that, that angle.
It’s interesting. It sounds like he was really resisting this hippie thing.
[Laughs] Yeah. But for some reason he would be invited to parties in Hollywood, or up on the strip—I don’t remember what the angle was—and he always had really dishy sophisticated girlfriends from that life, you know, sometimes they’d drop around, so he was attracted to that sort of thing and not the quasi-communal stuff. And he was a really fine guitarist too, like I said, he invented many of his own chords and his own fingerings; he was always working on that; wrote some songs, you know, wrote his own songs, another wonderful thing, and would sing ‘em, perform ‘em for all of us, but he was a little separate from us, different.
You said something about he used to think people stole his chords.
I just remember that one… See how I just remember these little bits and pieces that float up. It was Jose Feliciano, and we heard him on the radio. I don’t know if it was “Light My Fire”—what else did Jose Feliciano do? That was the big one. So at some point he goes into a solo and Paul says: Hey, man, that’s my chord. I can almost remember what it was too, no, not quite, but it had a lot of open strings on it; it was kind of bittersweet melancholy chord; a lot of his stories were like that too.
So those were his favorite chords. You were talking also about Tim and Mike: a lot of musical people.
Yeah, there was a lot of music stuff going, you know; with all those… they were great guitarists, especially Tim.
And were they also hanging out with…?
Yeah, not too much.
This was all sort of happening around the El Ja Arms?
No, that was just sort of postal people. They had their own orbit and sometimes it would intersect with ours, but mostly because of Tim’s sister, Kathy, Kathy Stanis. ‘Cause they all knew each other in St. Louis, but Mike and Tim they were kind of doing some other things too. There were some great musical instruments around there too: Tim had a National Steel body guitar that he’d play slide bottleneck blues guitar on, and they were both drenched in the blues. Oh and Tim had a—well they both did—they both had harmonica stands, so they could do that thing too.
Holders, like Bob Dylan used?
Yeah, but it was all blues, you know, they didn’t want any slick uptown blues either, they wanted the…
Really? What did they listen to mostly?
As far as I remember: Sonny Boy Williamson, and I don’t know, maybe a little Mississippi Fred McDowell and Buddy Guy and some Chicago city blues people and country blues people, you know. Actually they would listen to anybody, you know, if they could get their hands on the record they’d come over to Kathy’s place, play the record into their little tape recorder, just to catch the licks; they weren’t interested in the whole song; they wanted to learn that particular… yeah.
Sounds like those were the kind of guys that, guitar players used to actually turn away from the audience so that the younger guitar players wouldn’t be able to learn their stuff.
[Laughs] Yeah, I believe it; I believe it. They could probably do that, especially Tim. It was amazing what they could do. I could never reach it. But they were really annoying after a while because they would, you know, in order to learn these you’ve gotta play ‘em over and over and over and over and over, so you know they’d be sitting there with their tape recorder playing that same thing: rewind, play, rewind, play; try to do it, then: play, rewind, play, rewind, and you just had to either get them to leave or you had to leave.
[Laughing] One or the other.
Yeah. Yeah, but there were a lot of characters, you know, I have to gloss over all the characters, all the lifers that were there in the post office, there’s just so many of ‘em, except one I want to mention: Nick Grimm. Nick Grimm was—because we were talking about Arthur Brown, the god of hell fire—Nick was a guy who was a real nerd, he was a real nerd but he was real speedy, talked a mile a minute, and he was famous for the lunches that he would bring. He had a real high metabolism, I guess, and he was famous for the lunches that he would bring in huge like suitcases, you know, lots of different kind of sandwiches and vegetables and chicken and whole salamis or bologna and apples. He would consume all that: he would eat all the time and he was really really skinny. Once he said—he was trying to explain all this because somebody finally asked him—and he said—I forgot what the explanation was but he said he had an exo-something heart; he said: You wanna see my heart? So he unbuttoned his shirt and you could see right through his ribs! there was a big bulge and his heart was beating: da dum! da dum! da dum! He was an oddity. [Cockney accent:] ‘E was a sport of nature.
And that condition somehow made it so that he had to eat all the time?
I guess that was all part of it, you know, he had to consume, and he worked pretty fast too: worked pretty fast, talked pretty fast, lived pretty fast.
So were you allowed to eat while you worked there?
Ah, you could smoke while you worked but I don’t think you could eat while you worked, you know, unless you secreted something. That was when we used to start calling him ‘the god of hell fire’, for some reason, I don’t know: Oh yeah, baby, that’s me, that’s me, I ‘m the god of hell fire. He was trying to blend in with the kids. You couldn’t sit down and post these letters. You could either stand up or they would provide these stools that you could lean against, they had round seats and you could make the seats flat so you could sit on it but you weren’t supposed to do that, that was a violation, you were supposed to ratchet them up so they were at an angle then you could lean the small of your back against them and at the front of them you had a lip up so you could rest your feet on it so you were sort of leaning back.
What’s the thing about not sitting?
They didn’t want you to sit down, thought you would become too drowsy and not be able to pay…
… wouldn’t be alert and might make mistakes…
Right, you wouldn’t be paying attention, so you couldn’t sit down. That was one of the requirements. Couldn’t wear open-toed sandals either, that was one big thing.
‘Cause you could get hurt.
Get hurt, yeah, exactly, actually. The one supervisor we had there who was really a character, Fred Dietrich, he was an ex-navy man probably in his early fifties; he had retired early from the navy, real stocky guy, walked around with a cigar all the time, called everybody by their last name: Conkin! Cody! Beck! And he always had invented… Once he said: If I can’t think of a cliché, I invent one; or something like that. I get my clothes down at the bargain basement at Macy’s. If you have to spend more than thirty dollars for a suit… One time somebody suspected that there was a package of explosives or a bomb or something like that, you know, that came off of one of the trucks, and Fred grabbed the PA system and said: There’s a hot one on the docks! and made everybody clear out. And in his spare time—I didn’t do this but during the initial phases, you know I was telling you about how you had to learn the scheme—he would have these kids over to his house and have scheme-learning parties, you know, he would have some cases set up, and during the in-between time he would entertain them with magic tricks because he was an amateur magician too. He was a real sweet guy actually. Yep… He became disappointed in me after a while because: Not fulfilling your potential; you know, another one of those things.
Your bad attitude. How long did you work there, altogether?
I guess I woiked there from sixty-eight, sixty-nine… about two and a half years, something like that, well, a little bit more: almost three years.
How long would you say your positive attitude lasted and when did the…?
Well I don’t think ah… I just made an adjustment that, you know, when I was there I worked real hard, but I didn’t see why I had to be there all the time, so I had a good attitude when I was there.
So you continued to have a good attitude right up to…
Yes, I was always a hard worker, and that was one of the reasons why they didn’t try to get rid of me earlier, because I was carrying them on the parcels.
But you started just staying home…
…started staying home, yeah…
…fairly early on then, a little bit at least?
I don’t know, probably took a year, yeah, probably took a year, something like that; yeah, that’s probably what it was. Maybe it wasn’t that long. I don’t know; I’m not really sure. But you know already I was starting not to want to work. Stealing my time away.
So you’ve been ready for early retirement all these years.
That’s right, that’s right; they took two years out of my life, those damn bloodsuckers. So yeah, I was just kind of… I was doing the maximum and the minimum, you know, the maximum amount of work I could do when I was there but taking the minimum amount of seriousness that I could just in order to keep on getting by, keep on getting some kind of paycheck.
In those days you would have still been able to go to school on the GI bill, wouldn’t you?
Oh yeah, I was eligible right then, as soon as you get out you’re eligible.
Did you ever think about that?
No, no, for one thing it was school, and for another thing it was like blood money in a way, that was my initial reaction—I overcame that as it turns out later on real easily—but I didn’t want any of their money.
That’s interesting. So you felt like in a way it would be like being dependent on…?
Yeah, that that was contaminated money, not dependent exactly, it’s just that I had a tiny shred of self-respect I suppose and I just wouldn’t go that far, and it didn’t occur to me till later that the solution was to think of it as you’re ripping them off [laughs], but I didn’t want any part of that, any of that government money: I work for my money, son.… But one of the things I missed out telling on the last go-round was that like in 1970, while I was working at the post office, I got a phone call from my sister, Patricia, that I hadn’t seen in… you know, eight or nine years, something like that.
Was she still in St. Louis?
She was in San Diego. She had tracked me down via the FBI.
Really?
Yeah, as a government employee it’s very easy for the FBI. That’s probably the first tier of searching: look for government employees, so that was pretty easy. So yeah, she was living down there in San Diego. She was, what, seventeen or eighteen, and was married and had a daughter I think, maybe two, and Dennis was hanging out with them too, so they were living there together. So I made a trip down there and, you know, found out more or less what had happened to them in the interim, and it wasn’t a very happy picture. They had been through hell, and one of the ways she got out was to get married, and Dennis was just a runaway, you know, he was fifteen or sixteen, something like that.
What had happened? I mean you said that the institution had changed and for them it wasn’t quite the sort of benign place that it had been for you.
Yeah, I still don’t know the whole story, but you know, Dennis got… plus they got, they were older, and I don’t really know that it was bad for Patricia other than just being there, but Dennis got beat up or something, something awful happened to him.
By?
I don’t know, I’m not sure, either other kids or, you know, the powers, the authorities. But they stayed there another couple of years or so, then they went back there to Sunnyvale, to another… All the people that were in Turkey came back, let’s see, that’s two kids, two adults, they all came back and got them out of the home again.
And this is…?
Maybe it’s San Jose or Sunnyvale, someplace like that, someplace down there.
How many years had it been since your father left for the second time?
I’m not really sure, I imagine it was like two or three years, yeah, I’m not sure.
So they had gone through the same thing.
Here they go again.
Here’s the dream, and had he bought another house?
Bought another house; I don’t know what kind of job he had; but it was much worse than it was before, you know, he couldn’t handle them even then when they were littler, now they were older he couldn’t handle them; he had flipped out and he was doing some awful things: he put Dennis in a home. The way Dennis tells it they were just taken someplace, he was escorted into this little room, the door closes and his father walks away [an uneasy laugh].
And this was in Sunnyvale, I mean the home?
This is somewhere down there, San Jose; I’m not sure, yeah, I think it’s somewhere down there in Santa Clara County. And you know Patricia’s being slapped around and it just didn’t work out.
By your father?
Yeah, he was totally insane now, as I understand it, and they just had to get out.
Was he drinking?
I don’t know. No, he just couldn’t handle it, handle anything. So they had endured this for a few years and then they had escaped from it. Patricia got married and looked up Dennis and he was kind of hanging out with her down there in San Diego. Then we had a big old reunion up in Van Nuys, everybody but Gene, and I don’t remember exactly why not Gene—maybe he wasn’t in town—but we all went over to Bob’s house in Van Nuys and, you know, from my point of view had a very uncomfortable [laughter] day.
Was Bob still kind of…?
No, he was a very successful man, you know, he had a great big house and he had a big family, so he was hosting the whole thing.
What was uncomfortable for you?
Just being there and having to endure all these people and you know I felt like I should say something about why I don’t, why I don’t feel like I have any brothers and sisters [laughs] and not wanting to say that, you know, or I never did and I don’t really now and I’m not sure exactly what’s happening here, plus I hated Van Nuys; I hated the house, you know, I had bad memories of that. But they seemed to want to do it, you know, Patricia certainly did. And then so that was over and they gave me a ride back to Hermosa and then I didn’t see my sister again for twenty-eight years [laughs].
[Under his breath] God.
We stayed in touch a little bit. She married a navy man and he was stationed in Oshkosh, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and so I remember getting some letters and doing a little correspondence there, especially after moving up to Berkeley, and actually when I went up to Berkeley later on Dennis popped up and so he was around, you know he was around the streets of Berkeley, then I lost touch with him for, you know, twenty years until just last year.
Would you say in those years had Dennis been pretty shaken up by his… ‘cause, let’s see, how old was he when you went back to St. Louis the second time? He was still just a little kid, right?
Yeah, yeah, eight or nine, something like that, as old as I was when I first went there.
It sounds like the subsequent years had been pretty hard on him.
Yeah, I think out of the three of us it was hardest of all on him. He doesn’t remember our mother, for example, and he may remember a little bit about the first time he was at the home, but that’s all he’s know is that kind of thing and then this punctuated bizarre family life, two instances of that, the second of which was horrific.
And he kind of got the worst of your father too, because you knew him when he was still pretty together and, you know…
Yeah, yeah, he’s got some horror stories, and so does Patricia about that time, but that’s not, you know, whatever happened that person is not the same person that I knew, you’re right.
What, you mean your brother?
My father. Yeah, whatever he did to them—or the depiction of him that I get from them now about how he was: completely unrecognizable to me, but although I can certainly see the seeds of some of that in my understanding of him at that time. But like I say I just Xed him out, I just kissed his ass goodbye when he gave me the hundred bucks and sent me up north, you know, that was it, that was all. So, you know, in hearing these reports they’re like a, they really are like a stranger, an insane stranger, the doings of an insane stranger; plus the Turkish stepmother—I can’t remember her name, Niri I think—she had more of a stranglehold on him too, and so he was in all that tension as well, so who knows, who knows what kind of pressure he was under, but he just flipped, I’m sure he had started flipping when his wife died in 1956.
But even in those days when he took you and you were sort of driving around and he was crying all the time and everything, it sounds like he wasn’t actually mean was he, it doesn’t sound like?
Oh no, no, no.
I mean he didn’t knock you around or anything like that….
Not that I remember.
He just broke down a lot.
Yeah, in those days, yes, he was just a dishrag. So, and he hadn’t kept in touch with Gene or Bob either, so he just came back and there they were.
And he expected to just kind of pick up and…?
I don’t know; I don’t know what; I don’t know what he was on; I don’t know what kind of thing he was in.
I’ve gotta turn this over.
[End Tape 16, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:12 PM
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