Tape 7, Side A

[Begin Tape 7, Side A]

So I was really living a new life, I mean I was like starting over, and who knows exactly why but I’ve just been able most of the time to not let the past count that much, especially the farther it gets away from the present; it just seems to recede into a vaporous picture. I mean even now all the things I’m saying they don’t mean that much [laughs], they’re just stories I remember and things that I remember that happened to the individual that was me then.

So do you attach strong emotions to any of the…?

Sure, I mean certain things I can remember, you know, if I really relax and let them reveal themselves in all their detail and fullness I can remember exactly how I—well, I can remember what I imagine to be exactly how I felt at that time. That’s what’s so neat about the human memory [laughs]; you can do that, you know, you can bring back the smells and everything; but still I never had the ability to do it without work, you know I really have to sit down and work at it because normally it doesn’t... I remember when I first read Speak Memory, by Nabokov, now there I just couldn’t, I just couldn’t—it’s completely beyond my experience, because here he is in his forties and fifties writing about stuff that happened when he was six or seven and it was all just right there, present to him, and he had that metathesia thing where he could taste colors and smell colors, or vice versa, you know, certain colors would have a certain flavor to him, like yellow would taste like something or smell like something, but he just went on and on into lavish and poetical detail about how things were for him as a child. That was just completely beyond anything I could ever do because I was trashing it, trashing it as it happened. I mean I remember, [old man voice] I remember… Here’s a—it just popped into my head—here’s a… This tells you what kind of creature I am. When I was a kid they used to have these model airplanes, plastic model airplanes. You know these?

Sure, like Revel?

Exactly. There were lots of companies at that point.

With great detail….

Great detail. I loved those things, because the documentation--that’s when I started getting into detail documentation. Back to the personality tests: Can you follow written instructions? Oh yeah, I can do that, follow them written instructions. And that’s where I started following, you know, because it’s complicated things, all you had to do with the glue and the decals and the paint, but I never really got into the paint because you had to, that was expensive; you had to buy the paint extra, but the decals and putting things together, I really liked that. But I used to build them and then destroy them. As soon as they were completed I’d destroy them. So I remember—the best one was this a, it was like a, it wasn’t a battle ship. It was unusual for me to do a ship because I used to do airplanes, but this was a destroyer, some kind of destroyer, and it was the most complicated thing ever, hundreds of parts.

It must have been big.

Yeah, it was probably a gift, because, you know, I would go out to the stores and, you know: Buy me that! Buy me that! Because I’d want to do different ones each time. I wouldn’t want the same thing I already had. You know I put together endless Messerschmitts and Zeros and P-49 Trainers and ah…

Do you remember the final disposition of the ship?

Yeah. It took a long time. It was big, you know, it was like three feet long; it was the biggest thing I ever did, and I remember putting all the decals on; I got it all together and as soon as it was done I grabbed it off the shelf, put it down and stomped on it [laughter]. And you know I had this satisfaction in doing that. It was like, it was like—but of course it wasn’t really like—the Tibetan sand painters, you know, they would spend days creating these beautiful sand paintings and then they’d destroy it all after they finished.

So for you, even then, do you remember…?

Perversity, that’s what it was.

The enjoyment you got out of it was doing, the process of making it, putting it together?

Yes.

Or did you also like destroying it?

No, I didn’t really like destroying it, and I didn’t really realize… I think I didn’t destroy all of them, because it was not a foregone conclusion that I was going to destroy them. It was just, sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn’t.

But it would just be an impulse that would spring out of your head unbidden.

Yes, exactly, exactly…in the same way that later, when I was smoking later on pipes, I would go buy these wonderful pipes, you know, for twenty or thirty dollars and smoke ‘em and smoke ‘em and break ‘em in, then I’d throw ‘em in the ocean [laughs]. I don’t know why. Let’s leave that one for the Freudians.

Same thing though, just an impulse, you didn’t reflect on the impulse, you just did it.

Yeah, although then I was thinking, then I was doing it for…then the corruption of reflection set in, by then, and I was thinking about my actions and trying to figure out why I was doing certain things, and I think the reason was possessions: I didn’t want to be attached to possessions, so that was why. And I was doing my own little object lessons for myself, something I learned from Gene: teach yourself that you can’t love these possessions. Get rid of them. As soon as you find yourself attached to them: get rid of them. So maybe that’s the culmination of the earlier stuff and it all relates to forgetting the past and living now, living in the present.

Was this about the time when your…?

Brrrr [indicates he’s cold].

Yeah.

Oh no, I’m fine, I’m fine.

It’s a little chilly out here.

I’m teaching myself right now.

Was it about this time when you were living with Gene that you discovered Buddhism?

Man you’re right on the money, right on the money. I’ll tell you how that happened. The little garage I was living in was subdivided, and they told me that, Gene told me that what was on the other side was stuff that this guy they knew had left there; and this guy, I don’t remember much about him but he went to Israel, maybe he never came back, I don’t know, but they apparently had lost touch with him, so at some point I got over to the other side of the garage [laughs].

You always do.

I always do. And there was all this stuff there and I started rummaging around in it and among the stuff were these books, crazy books, books by Christmas Humphries and D.T. Suzuki and Allan Watts and the best of all was Philosophies of India by Heinrich Zimmer, and so I started, you know I’m always playing with what’s there, so I started reading these books, especially Allan Watts you know ‘cause they weren’t that old. The other things were a little older. D.T. Suzuki was a little obscure. Heinrich Zimmer book was pretty good, it was a little scholarly, but that was the one that I finally wound up stealing and taking with me everywhere. Oh, and there was a book on karate. I stole that one too. I remember now I stole that one too. It was published in Japan but it was in English; it had this great rope cover and it was like [grandpa voice] like no book I ever seen. Yeah, it was real rough, like sisal or twine or something like that cover, that was the cover of the book, but it was very heavy.

It was actually twine?

No, the cover of it was, it wasn’t leather and it wasn’t... it was neither buck nor quarter-bind; it was this ropy stuff in rows and you could feel it. Some kind of Japanese binding I think. It was almost like tatami, but it was ropy and strands would come off of it. I don’t know what it was really. So I was diggin’ all this stuff really, really hot because a lot of it seemed to explain some of the things that I was already feeling and also pointed out directions that I could go. And up to that point I’d found nothing that did that, you know, like What are you going to do with your life? or What do you think? Like I say, I didn’t know how to think about, I didn’t have the skills to think about any of that stuff or to articulate it, ‘cause I was just surviving, adapting, going from situation to situation, but here was some stuff where they were talking about things that made a lot of sense to me. Well, it’s hard to right now distinguish how all this new stuff really greeted me then from how it developed along the way, so I can’t really figure out exactly what…

Remember the first impression…

Right, I can’t do that. But a lot of the stuff in there, especially Allan Watts because he was funny, he was funny about it all, and Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti was the best of all because he would say: Don’t call me a guru; stop trying to follow me; think for yourself; ask yourself these questions, and he would pose the questions, and he said: Don’t ask me to answer these questions, ask them to yourself. And it took a long time for me to really understand all this stuff, but that was the intro to that, and then I started going out and buying more stuff and reading more stuff.

So you were out in your garage room reading, poring over this stuff.

Still going to high school. I had my little part-time job.

Was this another one of those things though that you kept to yourself about?

Absolutely, yeah.

So even Gene, who probably would have known something about this stuff…?

I may have asked him something about that guy.

‘Cause you must have felt kind of close to this guy.

In a way, yeah, I did, ‘cause he was interested in all this stuff. But had he been there I doubt that I would have even spoken to him about it, you know, I would have been too… You know I still didn’t trust anybody and I didn’t believe anybody could possibly really understand me and I certainly didn’t understand anybody else. The first thing that I remember—talking about first impressions—about reading all this stuff was that all that was okay, it was fine, it was just fine.

What do you mean okay?

It was okay to be whoever you are even if…

And for other people not to get it.

Right. Oh the worst is the stuff about the Tao, oh man I mean: He who knows doesn’t tell, and he who tells doesn’t know; so that was encouragement not to say anything [laughs] and not to try to ask anybody, discouragement to try to ask anybody. But I wasn’t really at the stage where I wanted to ask anybody yet anyway. So I’m picking up the little glimmerings like: Better one’s own dharma, though performed imperfectly, than the dharma of another, though performed perfectly; so I’m interpreting all this stuff as, you know, I’m okay, you’re okay [laughs], sort of, but you know it still hasn’t come to its full fruition yet. So I’m digging all this stuff and… The karate book was cool because I started doing… I started [laughs]… it reminds me of…

Just like jujitsu, you just took off on the karate huh?

Yeah. I started going around hitting things so I could develop calluses, and this went on for several years.

Did it work?

Oh yeah.

What did you hit?

Just walls, everywhere I went I hit walls, you know, like that [demonstrates], or one of these [again], so I had this big slab of callus on here; but my favorite one was, you know, when you put the tips of your three fingers together, you can develop a nice little callus ridge along there and you’ve got a little three-inch bar there that can do a lot of damage [laughs]; so I’d go around, you know [demonstrates a few times].

So you were just working on it so you’d be ready, whatever happened?

Well yeah, and I was practicing various moves. But it was all just part of the fun that I was having all by myself.

You didn’t want a teacher? You didn’t think of finding a teacher?

No. I didn’t want anybody [laughs], I was just, I was happy out there in my little world. You know I had a couple of friends at school but that wasn’t really, but not really. I didn’t trust anybody at school either. I didn’t trust any teachers or... School [laughs]…

Yeah, tell me about school.

School was great because it was a real Southern California high school: nobody cared about anything! Yeah, the teachers were very frustrated because they couldn’t get any, you know they couldn’t get any work… School had to get out at like two fifteen or two thirty in the afternoon so that guys could go down and surf. That was the reason why school had to go out, you know, and most of the kids were surfers. There were other contingents there, you know, the student body president types, and there was hodads, they had hodads there too.

That’s beyond being just a surfer?

That’s less than being a surfer. Yeah, wannabe surfers. They can’t really quite make it. They’ll wear the baggy shorts and they may even have little dings on their knees, but they’re not any good, they’re just hodads. They probably don’t even have a woody.

Were you listening to, what was happening, were the Beach Boys out there?

Not quite yet. There was Jan and Dean and… before there was Jan and Dean…

There were other surf bands: The Ventures? Were you listening to that stuff?

And Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. Yeah, that stuff was on the radio but really… I had a portable radio and there was an AM jazz station broadcast off of Santa Catalina Island, and…

Which would have been not too far from you, right? It was just about straight up…?

[Sings] Twenty-six miles across the sea… Yeah. What was the name of that station?… I don’t remember, but it was kind of mellow…

Did you pick up on this yourself or was it Gene’s…? Was there a lot of jazz in their house?

There was, in their house, you know, he had records; he had all the great records.

Was it bebop?

Bebop and whatever was happening then. Plus right down there in Hermosa Beach was one of the greatest jazz spots ever: Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse.

Yeah, I went there once. They had good jazz.

On Sundays kids could go in, you know, you could sit there and nurse a coke for a, you know, one of those... I can still remember those little thin glasses of watered-down coke and those awful little red plastic straws. Pew, you had to… They were expensive, buck and a quarter or something like that. You could hang out there all afternoon, and on Sunday… And later on I figured out how to get in at night too, I mean my brother went there all the time; he knew Howard Rumsey and that whole scene. On Sunday you could go down there and whoever their headliner was would be there, but in the audience would be other jazz people, because they weren’t playing then, and they’d come down and you might see... Who did I see? I think I saw Chico Hamilton and maybe Sarah Vaughn, you know, just in the audience groovin’ along. Playing there they had Jimmy Smith and Cal Tjader and Ramsey Lewis Trio, oh lots of ‘em. But that was great. So, you know, I was really getting into it then. And I had this radio and I would take it to school with me.

Was it portable; it was a transistor radio?

Yeah, a transistor radio; it was like a precursor to the boombox.

So it was bigger than the little tiny ones that we had?

Yeah, it wasn’t one of those little hand-held; it had a handle on it. I was always listening to that, and that’s why some of my grades reflect that, especially I remember I had an early morning French class that I never made because I would just go out of the house and go hang out at the coffee shop or something like this listening to the stuff that was on the radio. It was all this great, you know, that’s when Stan Getz had a big hit with ‘Desafinado’ and so they played lots of bossa-nova stuff. So this was a pretty mellow jazz station, you know, they didn’t have a lot of hard stuff going on. Later on there was a nice FM jazz station down there, but it was pretty good. They had a lot of crazy stuff. So you could hear Jackie and Roy and maybe Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, on the singing side, and Sarah Vaughn and Carmen McRae.

Were you into the vocal stuff then?

Not too much. I liked Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, later Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan, because they would launch into their scat singing. I really dug that scat singing. Jazz singing is really, I never liked that. I never liked that jazz singing until later on I found some cool stuff.

So you weren’t so much into the lyrics?

No, lyrics were real stupid. Standards were okay. I didn’t really appreciate them either. The songs that were written as jazz songs, they’re pretty bad, I mean, let’s face it. Later on when I discovered Bob Dorough and Mose Allison, that was different. Most of the jazz songs were pretty bad, but the jazz music, that was wonderful. So I’m reading the Playboys and reading the Allan Watts and Krishnamurti and diggin’ the jazz and living by myself and I’ve got my little job.

So now tell me about that job. What did you have to do?

Ah hah [laughs], stock boy, you know, stock boy at the drugstore, and that was interesting because ah…

Oh and then there must have been magazines there.

There were magazines there; you could take ‘em; you could take ‘em in the bathroom and read ‘em, or you could take ‘em with you, you know, tear the covers off, no, you know, the ones that were going back. But in fact I ah… No, that was another thing. Skip that. Edit that out. Edit that out later. I’m a sensitive man [laughs]. I got fired from that job eventually for stealing [laughs]. But it took a long time. I was trying to be good. It took a long time before I got that far, and there was some sort of event that made me think: Oh these bastards, I’m not gonna, I’m just gonna take something then.

You started to kind of resent them?

No, it was pretty cool; there was one event, it was some kind of event I think that happened that was unfair.

Event?

I don’t know what it was.

You mean it was like the steps?

Yeah, it was like that: I’ll show you!

So you don’t remember what happened but something aroused your resentment.

No, I don’t remember what happened, but before that I was being so good that I remember I bought my sister, my sister, Gene’s wife, my sister-in-law, some kind of birthday present. It wasn’t a very good present, now that I find out, it was an iron; but I put it on layaway; I had it on layaway, and I knew where the layaway room was, and all this stuff was on layaway, so I could go up there anytime and I could have stolen any of that stuff that was on layaway, but I didn’t. I paid down on that iron and gave it to her.

And you remember that you were checking your impulses?

Yep. And well so I’m working there at Guild Drugstore one time, and my brother picks me up, Gene. It was completely unheard-of because it was you know like early in the afternoon, and he says… and he was always trying to get me to learn how to drive too. So he’s driving this great big boat; I don’t know what it was; maybe it was a big white Bonneville, and he slides over into the passenger seat and says: Drive.

Really, and you hadn’t done…?

No, he was always wanting me, yeah, he’d given me lessons here and there….

So he had already worked with you for a while?

Yeah, he’d worked with me; also Bob had worked with me, and Bob had this girlfriend with this little Sprite, and every now and then she’d let me drive her little Sprite up and down the beach. That was real cool.

Yeah, those were great little cars.

So he said drive, so we’re going home and he starts telling me what had happened, and I’m trying to shift and pay attention ‘cause there’s this huge steep hill you have to go down, but he’s telling me this: that some people from the school, like case workers or…I don’t know who they were--they were from the school or from the county or from somebody--just came to the house unannounced, because they [Gene and Bob] were my guardians, they’re not my parents, they were known as my official guardians, so they were doing some kind of checkup, just doing some kind of checkup: wanted to find out how I lived, what I was doing and so on. So they show up unannounced—I’m guessing—and my sister-in-law takes them out to my little room in the garage, which is a complete mess. You know, they don’t check up on me. Stuff’s strewn all over the place; probably there’s some evidence that I’d been on the other side of the garage, you know, and taken their books; plus I don’t tell them that I smoke--I’m smoking these pipes, you know—I love to smoke pipes—so I’ve got my pipes and my pipe tobacco all around. They never go in there. They never check up on me. So it’s very embarrassing for my sister-in-law.

And Playboys and stuff?

I never took them out there, ‘cause they were in the other part [of the house], but whatever else, you know, I might have had some Mad magazines, some other awful stuff: Stag or… no, I never got into that… Soldier of Fortune, Juvenile Delinquent Monthly.

Wait a second…. I just need to change the batteries and turn the tape over. Hold that thought.

[End Tape 7, Side A]