Tape 9, Side A
[Begin Tape 9, Side A]
As you were saying about using the speedy drug… Were those street drugs or were those prescribed?
Well they were prescribed to somebody [laughter]. No, they weren’t street drugs. I think that’s the proprietary name of ‘em and that’s what I knew them as. I don’t know what they regularly were. I don’t know if they were amphetamines either. Is Ritalin an amphetamine?
Yeah, uh huh.
Well that’s probably what these were, that sort of thing.
Was that your first use of drugs? ‘cause it sounds like even though you knew that Gene was smoking dope and everything you were…
Uh huh, well that kind of thing. By then I probably had, Gene had probably laid a couple of joints on me. Right, you know I would come home and, like I say, he had access to my place so sometimes he’d leave me like, I don’t know, maybe a bottle of Chianti or he’d tie all my stuff up in a rug [laughs], leave me a nasty little note.
So he approved of drug and alcohol use but he did not approve of the way you would persist in not doing the dishes or…?
He was a clean man.
But stoned.
Very stoned, yeah. So you know I’d come home and on my counter there maybe a little note, I don’t remember, You might enjoy these or… He may have thought that I was already… I had people tell me, now, people that I talked to later, tell me that they thought I was pretty weird because of some of the things I did.
Really? Do you remember?
Well you know we were talking about clothes. I liked to, I liked to dress up funny. Sort of I did. I liked to amuse myself.
You told me about dressing up in your graduation gown and playing the conga drum.
Right. That’s when it all started. But I had couple of different things going; first of all I had these chef coats, and I really liked them, plus they were free; they were starched; they were white; they were double-breasted. And I had this great corduroy jacket with no lapel, just a little collar part, and that brown corduroy jacket on top of this starched stiff white double-breasted chef coat: that was cool; I liked the look of that; so I wore that, and maybe I wore a chef’s hat from time to time, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Some people have said that I did.
You won’t cop to that necessarily. So your identity as a chef, or was it just you liked the hat anyway?
I don’t know that I ever did that, ‘cause in Nachitos I don’t think I ever had a hat; they didn’t have hats, but they had those coats. Later on I was in a restaurant where they did have the hats, so perhaps I did then but, you know, once or twice. And I used to… I had ascots [chuckles]; I used to go around with ascots, you know, I went down and started… Perhaps that was the Playboy influence, I thought that was the height of relaxed sophistication was to walk around with an ascot, and plus it was funny, you know, I’m a seventeen, eighteen year old kid with an ascot.
You’re the only person I ever knew who wore an ascot, no, actually two: an Italian movie director and a guy who directed porno movies [laughs].
Ah hah, that direction thing. Yeah, it was creativity, a mark of creativity. And I don’t know maybe I had a couple different kinds of hats and… nothing far out, nothing really far out but…
Sounds like you didn’t go for conformity with the sort of high school and college age styles, fashions.
No. I was completely on my own; and I say I had friends at this time but I really didn’t. I knew some guys and we’d go see movies. You know that was the other thing: I really started going to movies a lot.
Partly just to do with having a little more money?
A little more money, a little more time, and I didn’t have a car but I knew guys and gals with cars and I’d get rides out sometimes. Sometimes I’d have to talk them into it or pay for gas or something like that in order to get out to maybe some new French movie or something like that because they didn’t want to--nobody wanted to see that.
Did you have to drive all the way up to L.A. to get to see that kind of stuff?
Yeah, L.A.. And then they had the Cinematheque that I became aware of and they would have midnight movies, like on Saturday nights. That was some really cool, you know, experimental shorts and stuff like that. I remember the James Broughton movies and European movies, and I think the first time I ever saw a Martin Scorsese movie, I didn’t know it then but later: ‘The Big Shave’, did you ever see that? [laughs]
Yeah, yeah.
Well this was just incredible to see.
That was his film school...
I didn’t know what it was, it was just… but all of these things I was watching were of that tenor: they were surprising, they were experimental, you know some of them were real yawners, just shapes repeating over and over: [cups hands around mouth] Boring!
And a bunch of stuff without a tripod…
Yeah. But the two that I remember are ‘The Big Shave’, you know this guy gets up in the morning, he’s kind of stumbling into the bathroom, and shaves, you know, gives himself a nice slow shave, and then he kind of blinks and looks in the mirror and does it again, and lathers up again, except this time with every stroke of the razor a huge big line of blood appears and he keeps on shaving and pretty soon [laughs]... And the other one I remember was ‘The Creditors’; it was a short; it was a long short, but it was nothing but credits. It was credits rolling over and over and behind the credits was all this action, you know, cars running over cliffs…
Do you think it was stock footage?
Yeah, it was probably stock footage, but just when you thought it was going to be over and go into the movie, more credits would come up, and most of them were the same family name. That was good. And animation... So to get there I’d have to bribe somebody or else find somebody that was really interested in it. And the other thing that was out there was the L.A. County Art Museum. I started going to the art museum.
And there were movies there….
There were some movies there but the other thing was there was the…
Or at least they had a big film program later on.
Yeah, and they had a lot of, aside from a Bonnard exhibition or something like that they had installations of modern funk art, like Ed Rauscha (I think is that guy’s name), ‘Backseat Dodge 1938’, that was there then; I remember seeing that: awew! Look what this genius done put down!
That’s the one with the strange car and it’s open and there’s a couple in the back seat in flagrante.
That’s right, flagrant delight. I got some rides out there because Richard Solario, my friend at that time, he was an artist, a budding artist, so he always wanted to go out there, so I could get out there, but it was hard to get to the movies. There were movies around town too.
So are you trying to tell me though that you didn’t really have friends, you just had people who had cars that you…
Well that’s part of it. I had friends too but I would want them to go away after a while real quick so I could get back to my world of listening to the music and watching Steve Allen, he had that crazy nighttime weeknight show where he was, the studio was right across from the Farmer’s Market in L.A.; this was after his mainstream success as a competitor of Ed Sullivan and possibly the originator of the late night Tonight Show format; but at that time, in the early to mid sixties, he had a weeknight show from L.A. and he would do mad stuff every night.
Well he had Jack Kerouac on and he had…
Even on his prime time Sunday show he had Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce and he had Elvis too, maybe Conway Twitty, I don’t know. But yeah, he was interested in that kind of stuff.
So you think that in some ways your friends kind of got in the way?
Well no, after a while… yeah, I guess so, I guess you could say that.
Were they into the things you were into?
Some of ‘em, yeah, some of ‘em.
But the stuff was still, you considered it kind of private stuff. It wasn’t: Let’s hang out together and listen to this, it was more: Go away so that I can just dig this myself.
Yeah, so I don’t have to pay attention to you; right, ‘cause I got things I wanna do. Yeah, that’s what that was all about. And you know I still wasn’t—not that I’m deep and reflective now, but I was nowhere, I was very superficial then, much more superficial then—hard to believe—than I am now. But I wasn’t able to hold conversations with people, I didn’t want to hold conversations with people; in fact sometimes when I’d go around with my pals and some new person would be there—I’d be in the back seat of the car and the guy would turn around and say: You don’t say much, do ya?! [laughter] And I really didn’t. I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t have anything to say, I was just…
And if you didn’t have anything to say…
I wasn’t gonna say it.
You didn’t make conversation.
You know: How about that local sports franchise? No, I wasn’t gonna make any conversation. Sometimes, you know, I would respond to questions.
But you kind of spooked some people?
I guess so. I guess I did. Maybe not a lot of fun to be around, but then other people thought I was goofy and funny and mad, so how do you know? Who? What?
Who’s right?
Who’s right and who’s wrong? All I know is that I was following my own proclivities. Yeah, I wanted to be alone. Most of the time I wanted to be alone. I wanted to go places on my own. I wanted to ride my—I had a really hot ten speed—I wanted to ride that around on my own: I didn’t want to join the bike club, you know. I was just in my element. That’s what it was. Listening to all this great…by then KBCA—KBCA was the FM jazz station--had hit its stride and I was listening to that all the time and being introduced to all this great music, all the hard stuff that wasn’t on the AM radio, and jazz vocals from Mose Allison and Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure and all those really, really cool jazz singers. And I went out—I heard something on the radio, it was so cool, it was a song with Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane—I went out and got the album, and that’s probably the single most perfect album ever: the Johnny Hartman/John Coltrane album.
Okay now, Johnny Hartman is a singer?
Johnny Hartman was an undistinguished singer up to that point, you know, kind of a lounge singer, and John Coltrane was John Coltrane, but they got together and…
And Coltrane was already doing his groundbreaking stuff?
Yeah, he was way out there then. So here’s this… they put out this album that, you know Johnny Hartman never did anything before or since that great.
What was it called, the album?
My Favorite—no, not My Favorite Things. It’s called… it might be just called John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. It may have a name: Lush Life, I think Lush Life is the name of it ‘cause that was one of the things that was on there, and that’s what they played, they played that on the radio.
What kind of tunes were they, were they standard tunes?
Mostly standards, yeah, but they were completely transformed, and some of ‘em I had never heard before but some of ‘em I had, but it didn’t make any difference, you know, the mood and the tone was so perfect and so cool; it was really, really one in a million.
So would you just wear out the grooves on that record?
Yeah, all those records I had, you know, in the short time that I had my record player, were worn out, and then I made tapes of them too, great big reel-to-reel. And that was a trip too because I started making little playlets and little things to amuse myself.
You did?
Yeah, with sound effects [here he makes battle sounds on the microphone]… Wars and rumors of war. Little radio things. Man I wish I’d known about Firesign Theatre then; they weren’t doing anything then.
Did you save any of this stuff?
Yeah well for a while. It’s all gone. I did little interviews with myself in different voices. That was fun. It was all for my own amusement though. I know where I got started on that, because my brother Gene and his buddies used to do that sort of thing, but they weren’t… you know when they were stoned, they would do little interviews back and forth. I don’t know if they were recording them though. But they were improvising little things about people who shot Novocain into the soles of their feet and walked around on them and [laughter] [maniacal voice] that’s what I like to do. And they were playing with Lord Buckley and all that sort of stuff. Maybe they were recording it too.
So you in your own fashion then wouldn’t get a bunch of people together and get stoned, you would just sit in your place and whip out stuff, do it.
Yeah, right; but then I would get stoned too, ‘cause I found out how to do that [laughs]. That was a whole lot of fun too.
Do you remember the first time you got stoned, smoked dope?
No, not exactly, because I probably wasn’t smoking it right, you know, in the beginning. I probably wasn’t holding it in long enough and that sort of stuff. I remember being buzzed, buzzed up, but nothing like I really got stoned a couple years later when I was up in your area, up in Washington, Fort Lewis, Washington, up there, when I was in the army. Yeah, that’s when I really started understanding what it was all about, so I was just goofin’ at that point. And I was reading, you know, I was reading about it too. I was reading about changing your consciousness, and I don’t know if LSD had come into… it was just starting to, people were just starting to write about and mention LSD in various places; it wasn’t that big but… You know I was still reading Buddhist stuff and Zen stuff and that had to do with changing your consciousness, so when I finally really got into it I was ready, I was ready for it. But then I was just playing around with it. I didn’t know where to get it until a few months later I started, well you know, I started talking to people [laughs].
Because you had to.
I had to. I had to. Well, you know, I had to figure out more and more what was going on. It was just a constant process of waking up, you know, to what was really going on and what was around me. I’m still not awake. I’m still kind of drowsy. But that whole time when I was living in that little house and had my job at Nachitos, that was a wonderful time, but it had to end because, you know it was just like with those airplane models that I would destroy, I had to do something different, after a while I just had to do something different; I don’t know why; but coincidentally I got my draft notice. So now we’re like in 1965, fast forward through a couple years.
So you had spent a couple years there, you spent what, two years at that restaurant?
About two years there, two years there at that restaurant, and by then I’d, you know...
And if you had gone to college you would have…
Oh, I did go to college! [laughs] I tried to go to college. So let’s back up a year. I tried to go to college. There was a community college, you know, so I let a year go by or a semester or whatever and said well maybe I should go to college, I can do a little bit of that and work.
And you were already in the restaurant?
Yeah, I mean that was a full-time job. So I started going to El Camino Community College way down there in Torrance someplace; no, not Torrance but...
Was that further south?
Further east. Not Torrance but Lawndale, you know, way out there somewhere. Lawndale, yeah, it was a long bike ride.
So you’d ride on your bike.
Sometimes, most of the time I’d ride the bike, sometimes I’d take a bus. Here I was walking around with my ascot on [laughs], and I had this—my friend John Martin reminds me of this; I’d forgotten; this is another one of these fellows, I mean I’m meeting these people after twenty-five, twenty-eight year absences, I mean getting in contact with them—he reminds me that when I was going to school there I used to carry around a briefcase with a thermos full of warm sake in it. I remember every morning I’d get up and heat up the sake and put it in the thermos and fix my ascot; and I had a huge pipe collection then but my favorite was this church warden, you know a church warden pipe, it’s about this long, with a little tiny bowl, and it’s about three feet long—probably need a boy to help you, in those days they probably had to put it on a stand or something.
That was one of your pipes; you had a collection?
Yeah, had a collection of pipes.
You didn’t stomp on it or do anything terrible to it?
No, I don’t think; I don’t know what happened to that; probably sold it or gave it away or just left it there when I finally left. So I cut kind of an odd figure I guess, yeah and I had some new boots with these really, really high heels [laughs]; I remember that; I don’t know what that was about. So you know I tried to take some German classes and some English classes, but it wasn’t interesting; it wasn’t any fun, so I didn’t do that, so I stopped doing that.
Was it a quarter or semester?
Yeah, it was one of those units, whatever it was.
And what were your grades like?
I don’t know that I completed anything, but they were bad, you know, ‘cause I wasn’t... I didn’t want to study anything, and that went on for a long… that keeps coming back to haunt me again and again, you know: I liked to play chess; I’d learned how to play chess and I was really good at stomping everybody’s ass that I was around, and then I found out that, later on, especially when I was in Berkeley, I met some grand masters hanging around, you know they studied it. They studied it. They sat down and memorized moves and combinations and that just took all the fun out of it as far as I was concerned; the same thing with literature, you know, the academic pursuit of literature, you know later on when deconstruction came around, I didn’t mind that ‘cause that was kind of like a game, but the kind of thing where you have to dismantle some work and look at critically in terms of symbolism: that was just all awful; I hated that. I just wanted the magic! You know I almost didn’t even want to know that a human being had sat down and written it. That I could take, but I didn’t want to know that it was so mechanical, you know, like the same with chess, that it was so mathematical and mechanical that you could plot it out and do it by the numbers: the whole codification of symbolism that was promulgated in these academic classes, even when it came to UCB*, I just thought that was the wrong way to look at that stuff.
So you were more inclined to a more mystical…?
More holistic, yeah; I didn’t want to see that man behind the curtain: Don’t look at me! No: Don’t look at that man!
Pay no attention to the man….
Pay no attention to that man [laughter]. Especially the kind of things that I really liked to read, it was all too clear what was happening. I felt that all this gas that people were passing about symbolism and hidden themes and all that was all wrong anyway. Obviously the people who did this stuff weren’t thinking like… Naked Lunch : I knew about the cut-up method, and that was kind of funny.
It came out about that time.*
Yeah, I went right out and got it. Yeah, Naked Lunch was great, in fact some of these essays that I would hand in in the short time I was in junior college were heavily influenced by Naked Lunch.
[laughs] I’ll bet that shocked your professors.
[old man voice] What is this? What is apomorphine? Mr Conkin, what is apomorphine? What is this giant white slug you keep talking about? And, you know, John Barth and Stanley Elkin, some of the great American black humorists, and Thomas Berger, all that stuff… even John Updike wrote a couple of noirish books like the Beck book, it might just be called Beck, and the Enderby books by Anthony Burgess: those were the kind of things I enjoyed, and they didn’t need to have all this grad student exegesis to enjoy them or to take what you could from them; they just existed in and of themselves, and that was enough. So I kind of respected the intellectualism of it and the work, and some of it was actually really awesome, to see that people could do that and think like that, but it didn’t serve my interests. So that school didn’t work; that school thing didn’t work. German was kind of interesting; languages were kind of interesting, but I just didn’t want to do the work. I didn’t want to study. I didn’t want to study anything. I wanted to either be there or not. You know I wanted to do whatever I could do but at the point where I had to study it I’d drop it. The same thing happened with music. You know I picked up a recorder, you know the musical flute-like recorder, and I’d play around with it and I’d play along with the records, you know like… ‘cause I knew Roland Kirk, you know he liked the recorder, in fact Roland Kirk liked anything you could blow out your mouth or your nose. He did the nose flute; he could stick five or six horns in his mouth and the nose flute and play them all, plus, you know he wasn’t using the correct tonguing and fingering that you should use in playing these flutes or the recorder or anything like that, and I wasn’t either: instead of playing it up so you can get the nice tones out of it I was playing it down, see, so you can get a little breath with it too. [demonstrates the sound] …And like that… But then I found out you’d have to study to learn to read music and to... and that was it. Same thing with the guitar, you know, I did a little bit and learned some chords. Well, there were two things there with the guitar: I would get so carried away just by being able to produce one or two notes and that was almost enough. I’d just sit there and ding [imitates ringing sound of one note]. By then the drugs had taken hold [laughter].
And you were satisfied with one pluck of the strings.
And I was satisfied with that. Yeah. The thing with Nachitos just came to an end; by then I’d got my draft notice too, so it was perfect.
Now why did that come to an end?
I had to do something different. I just wanted to do something different. I was tired of that, you know, I figured it was time to move on, not to advance or anything like that, in fact the job I got was a step down, just to do something different; but I didn’t mind that at that time because I was gonna let myself get drafted. I could already see that. You know I got my notice several months ahead of time, so I gave Nachitos two weeks notice and got another job to tide me over in the meantime and didn’t tell them.
Just to cover for that little bit of…?
Yeah, just so I could have some income, ‘cause I was gonna clean up my affairs.
[End Tape 9, Side A]
As you were saying about using the speedy drug… Were those street drugs or were those prescribed?
Well they were prescribed to somebody [laughter]. No, they weren’t street drugs. I think that’s the proprietary name of ‘em and that’s what I knew them as. I don’t know what they regularly were. I don’t know if they were amphetamines either. Is Ritalin an amphetamine?
Yeah, uh huh.
Well that’s probably what these were, that sort of thing.
Was that your first use of drugs? ‘cause it sounds like even though you knew that Gene was smoking dope and everything you were…
Uh huh, well that kind of thing. By then I probably had, Gene had probably laid a couple of joints on me. Right, you know I would come home and, like I say, he had access to my place so sometimes he’d leave me like, I don’t know, maybe a bottle of Chianti or he’d tie all my stuff up in a rug [laughs], leave me a nasty little note.
So he approved of drug and alcohol use but he did not approve of the way you would persist in not doing the dishes or…?
He was a clean man.
But stoned.
Very stoned, yeah. So you know I’d come home and on my counter there maybe a little note, I don’t remember, You might enjoy these or… He may have thought that I was already… I had people tell me, now, people that I talked to later, tell me that they thought I was pretty weird because of some of the things I did.
Really? Do you remember?
Well you know we were talking about clothes. I liked to, I liked to dress up funny. Sort of I did. I liked to amuse myself.
You told me about dressing up in your graduation gown and playing the conga drum.
Right. That’s when it all started. But I had couple of different things going; first of all I had these chef coats, and I really liked them, plus they were free; they were starched; they were white; they were double-breasted. And I had this great corduroy jacket with no lapel, just a little collar part, and that brown corduroy jacket on top of this starched stiff white double-breasted chef coat: that was cool; I liked the look of that; so I wore that, and maybe I wore a chef’s hat from time to time, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Some people have said that I did.
You won’t cop to that necessarily. So your identity as a chef, or was it just you liked the hat anyway?
I don’t know that I ever did that, ‘cause in Nachitos I don’t think I ever had a hat; they didn’t have hats, but they had those coats. Later on I was in a restaurant where they did have the hats, so perhaps I did then but, you know, once or twice. And I used to… I had ascots [chuckles]; I used to go around with ascots, you know, I went down and started… Perhaps that was the Playboy influence, I thought that was the height of relaxed sophistication was to walk around with an ascot, and plus it was funny, you know, I’m a seventeen, eighteen year old kid with an ascot.
You’re the only person I ever knew who wore an ascot, no, actually two: an Italian movie director and a guy who directed porno movies [laughs].
Ah hah, that direction thing. Yeah, it was creativity, a mark of creativity. And I don’t know maybe I had a couple different kinds of hats and… nothing far out, nothing really far out but…
Sounds like you didn’t go for conformity with the sort of high school and college age styles, fashions.
No. I was completely on my own; and I say I had friends at this time but I really didn’t. I knew some guys and we’d go see movies. You know that was the other thing: I really started going to movies a lot.
Partly just to do with having a little more money?
A little more money, a little more time, and I didn’t have a car but I knew guys and gals with cars and I’d get rides out sometimes. Sometimes I’d have to talk them into it or pay for gas or something like that in order to get out to maybe some new French movie or something like that because they didn’t want to--nobody wanted to see that.
Did you have to drive all the way up to L.A. to get to see that kind of stuff?
Yeah, L.A.. And then they had the Cinematheque that I became aware of and they would have midnight movies, like on Saturday nights. That was some really cool, you know, experimental shorts and stuff like that. I remember the James Broughton movies and European movies, and I think the first time I ever saw a Martin Scorsese movie, I didn’t know it then but later: ‘The Big Shave’, did you ever see that? [laughs]
Yeah, yeah.
Well this was just incredible to see.
That was his film school...
I didn’t know what it was, it was just… but all of these things I was watching were of that tenor: they were surprising, they were experimental, you know some of them were real yawners, just shapes repeating over and over: [cups hands around mouth] Boring!
And a bunch of stuff without a tripod…
Yeah. But the two that I remember are ‘The Big Shave’, you know this guy gets up in the morning, he’s kind of stumbling into the bathroom, and shaves, you know, gives himself a nice slow shave, and then he kind of blinks and looks in the mirror and does it again, and lathers up again, except this time with every stroke of the razor a huge big line of blood appears and he keeps on shaving and pretty soon [laughs]... And the other one I remember was ‘The Creditors’; it was a short; it was a long short, but it was nothing but credits. It was credits rolling over and over and behind the credits was all this action, you know, cars running over cliffs…
Do you think it was stock footage?
Yeah, it was probably stock footage, but just when you thought it was going to be over and go into the movie, more credits would come up, and most of them were the same family name. That was good. And animation... So to get there I’d have to bribe somebody or else find somebody that was really interested in it. And the other thing that was out there was the L.A. County Art Museum. I started going to the art museum.
And there were movies there….
There were some movies there but the other thing was there was the…
Or at least they had a big film program later on.
Yeah, and they had a lot of, aside from a Bonnard exhibition or something like that they had installations of modern funk art, like Ed Rauscha (I think is that guy’s name), ‘Backseat Dodge 1938’, that was there then; I remember seeing that: awew! Look what this genius done put down!
That’s the one with the strange car and it’s open and there’s a couple in the back seat in flagrante.
That’s right, flagrant delight. I got some rides out there because Richard Solario, my friend at that time, he was an artist, a budding artist, so he always wanted to go out there, so I could get out there, but it was hard to get to the movies. There were movies around town too.
So are you trying to tell me though that you didn’t really have friends, you just had people who had cars that you…
Well that’s part of it. I had friends too but I would want them to go away after a while real quick so I could get back to my world of listening to the music and watching Steve Allen, he had that crazy nighttime weeknight show where he was, the studio was right across from the Farmer’s Market in L.A.; this was after his mainstream success as a competitor of Ed Sullivan and possibly the originator of the late night Tonight Show format; but at that time, in the early to mid sixties, he had a weeknight show from L.A. and he would do mad stuff every night.
Well he had Jack Kerouac on and he had…
Even on his prime time Sunday show he had Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce and he had Elvis too, maybe Conway Twitty, I don’t know. But yeah, he was interested in that kind of stuff.
So you think that in some ways your friends kind of got in the way?
Well no, after a while… yeah, I guess so, I guess you could say that.
Were they into the things you were into?
Some of ‘em, yeah, some of ‘em.
But the stuff was still, you considered it kind of private stuff. It wasn’t: Let’s hang out together and listen to this, it was more: Go away so that I can just dig this myself.
Yeah, so I don’t have to pay attention to you; right, ‘cause I got things I wanna do. Yeah, that’s what that was all about. And you know I still wasn’t—not that I’m deep and reflective now, but I was nowhere, I was very superficial then, much more superficial then—hard to believe—than I am now. But I wasn’t able to hold conversations with people, I didn’t want to hold conversations with people; in fact sometimes when I’d go around with my pals and some new person would be there—I’d be in the back seat of the car and the guy would turn around and say: You don’t say much, do ya?! [laughter] And I really didn’t. I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t have anything to say, I was just…
And if you didn’t have anything to say…
I wasn’t gonna say it.
You didn’t make conversation.
You know: How about that local sports franchise? No, I wasn’t gonna make any conversation. Sometimes, you know, I would respond to questions.
But you kind of spooked some people?
I guess so. I guess I did. Maybe not a lot of fun to be around, but then other people thought I was goofy and funny and mad, so how do you know? Who? What?
Who’s right?
Who’s right and who’s wrong? All I know is that I was following my own proclivities. Yeah, I wanted to be alone. Most of the time I wanted to be alone. I wanted to go places on my own. I wanted to ride my—I had a really hot ten speed—I wanted to ride that around on my own: I didn’t want to join the bike club, you know. I was just in my element. That’s what it was. Listening to all this great…by then KBCA—KBCA was the FM jazz station--had hit its stride and I was listening to that all the time and being introduced to all this great music, all the hard stuff that wasn’t on the AM radio, and jazz vocals from Mose Allison and Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure and all those really, really cool jazz singers. And I went out—I heard something on the radio, it was so cool, it was a song with Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane—I went out and got the album, and that’s probably the single most perfect album ever: the Johnny Hartman/John Coltrane album.
Okay now, Johnny Hartman is a singer?
Johnny Hartman was an undistinguished singer up to that point, you know, kind of a lounge singer, and John Coltrane was John Coltrane, but they got together and…
And Coltrane was already doing his groundbreaking stuff?
Yeah, he was way out there then. So here’s this… they put out this album that, you know Johnny Hartman never did anything before or since that great.
What was it called, the album?
My Favorite—no, not My Favorite Things. It’s called… it might be just called John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. It may have a name: Lush Life, I think Lush Life is the name of it ‘cause that was one of the things that was on there, and that’s what they played, they played that on the radio.
What kind of tunes were they, were they standard tunes?
Mostly standards, yeah, but they were completely transformed, and some of ‘em I had never heard before but some of ‘em I had, but it didn’t make any difference, you know, the mood and the tone was so perfect and so cool; it was really, really one in a million.
So would you just wear out the grooves on that record?
Yeah, all those records I had, you know, in the short time that I had my record player, were worn out, and then I made tapes of them too, great big reel-to-reel. And that was a trip too because I started making little playlets and little things to amuse myself.
You did?
Yeah, with sound effects [here he makes battle sounds on the microphone]… Wars and rumors of war. Little radio things. Man I wish I’d known about Firesign Theatre then; they weren’t doing anything then.
Did you save any of this stuff?
Yeah well for a while. It’s all gone. I did little interviews with myself in different voices. That was fun. It was all for my own amusement though. I know where I got started on that, because my brother Gene and his buddies used to do that sort of thing, but they weren’t… you know when they were stoned, they would do little interviews back and forth. I don’t know if they were recording them though. But they were improvising little things about people who shot Novocain into the soles of their feet and walked around on them and [laughter] [maniacal voice] that’s what I like to do. And they were playing with Lord Buckley and all that sort of stuff. Maybe they were recording it too.
So you in your own fashion then wouldn’t get a bunch of people together and get stoned, you would just sit in your place and whip out stuff, do it.
Yeah, right; but then I would get stoned too, ‘cause I found out how to do that [laughs]. That was a whole lot of fun too.
Do you remember the first time you got stoned, smoked dope?
No, not exactly, because I probably wasn’t smoking it right, you know, in the beginning. I probably wasn’t holding it in long enough and that sort of stuff. I remember being buzzed, buzzed up, but nothing like I really got stoned a couple years later when I was up in your area, up in Washington, Fort Lewis, Washington, up there, when I was in the army. Yeah, that’s when I really started understanding what it was all about, so I was just goofin’ at that point. And I was reading, you know, I was reading about it too. I was reading about changing your consciousness, and I don’t know if LSD had come into… it was just starting to, people were just starting to write about and mention LSD in various places; it wasn’t that big but… You know I was still reading Buddhist stuff and Zen stuff and that had to do with changing your consciousness, so when I finally really got into it I was ready, I was ready for it. But then I was just playing around with it. I didn’t know where to get it until a few months later I started, well you know, I started talking to people [laughs].
Because you had to.
I had to. I had to. Well, you know, I had to figure out more and more what was going on. It was just a constant process of waking up, you know, to what was really going on and what was around me. I’m still not awake. I’m still kind of drowsy. But that whole time when I was living in that little house and had my job at Nachitos, that was a wonderful time, but it had to end because, you know it was just like with those airplane models that I would destroy, I had to do something different, after a while I just had to do something different; I don’t know why; but coincidentally I got my draft notice. So now we’re like in 1965, fast forward through a couple years.
So you had spent a couple years there, you spent what, two years at that restaurant?
About two years there, two years there at that restaurant, and by then I’d, you know...
And if you had gone to college you would have…
Oh, I did go to college! [laughs] I tried to go to college. So let’s back up a year. I tried to go to college. There was a community college, you know, so I let a year go by or a semester or whatever and said well maybe I should go to college, I can do a little bit of that and work.
And you were already in the restaurant?
Yeah, I mean that was a full-time job. So I started going to El Camino Community College way down there in Torrance someplace; no, not Torrance but...
Was that further south?
Further east. Not Torrance but Lawndale, you know, way out there somewhere. Lawndale, yeah, it was a long bike ride.
So you’d ride on your bike.
Sometimes, most of the time I’d ride the bike, sometimes I’d take a bus. Here I was walking around with my ascot on [laughs], and I had this—my friend John Martin reminds me of this; I’d forgotten; this is another one of these fellows, I mean I’m meeting these people after twenty-five, twenty-eight year absences, I mean getting in contact with them—he reminds me that when I was going to school there I used to carry around a briefcase with a thermos full of warm sake in it. I remember every morning I’d get up and heat up the sake and put it in the thermos and fix my ascot; and I had a huge pipe collection then but my favorite was this church warden, you know a church warden pipe, it’s about this long, with a little tiny bowl, and it’s about three feet long—probably need a boy to help you, in those days they probably had to put it on a stand or something.
That was one of your pipes; you had a collection?
Yeah, had a collection of pipes.
You didn’t stomp on it or do anything terrible to it?
No, I don’t think; I don’t know what happened to that; probably sold it or gave it away or just left it there when I finally left. So I cut kind of an odd figure I guess, yeah and I had some new boots with these really, really high heels [laughs]; I remember that; I don’t know what that was about. So you know I tried to take some German classes and some English classes, but it wasn’t interesting; it wasn’t any fun, so I didn’t do that, so I stopped doing that.
Was it a quarter or semester?
Yeah, it was one of those units, whatever it was.
And what were your grades like?
I don’t know that I completed anything, but they were bad, you know, ‘cause I wasn’t... I didn’t want to study anything, and that went on for a long… that keeps coming back to haunt me again and again, you know: I liked to play chess; I’d learned how to play chess and I was really good at stomping everybody’s ass that I was around, and then I found out that, later on, especially when I was in Berkeley, I met some grand masters hanging around, you know they studied it. They studied it. They sat down and memorized moves and combinations and that just took all the fun out of it as far as I was concerned; the same thing with literature, you know, the academic pursuit of literature, you know later on when deconstruction came around, I didn’t mind that ‘cause that was kind of like a game, but the kind of thing where you have to dismantle some work and look at critically in terms of symbolism: that was just all awful; I hated that. I just wanted the magic! You know I almost didn’t even want to know that a human being had sat down and written it. That I could take, but I didn’t want to know that it was so mechanical, you know, like the same with chess, that it was so mathematical and mechanical that you could plot it out and do it by the numbers: the whole codification of symbolism that was promulgated in these academic classes, even when it came to UCB*, I just thought that was the wrong way to look at that stuff.
So you were more inclined to a more mystical…?
More holistic, yeah; I didn’t want to see that man behind the curtain: Don’t look at me! No: Don’t look at that man!
Pay no attention to the man….
Pay no attention to that man [laughter]. Especially the kind of things that I really liked to read, it was all too clear what was happening. I felt that all this gas that people were passing about symbolism and hidden themes and all that was all wrong anyway. Obviously the people who did this stuff weren’t thinking like… Naked Lunch : I knew about the cut-up method, and that was kind of funny.
It came out about that time.*
Yeah, I went right out and got it. Yeah, Naked Lunch was great, in fact some of these essays that I would hand in in the short time I was in junior college were heavily influenced by Naked Lunch.
[laughs] I’ll bet that shocked your professors.
[old man voice] What is this? What is apomorphine? Mr Conkin, what is apomorphine? What is this giant white slug you keep talking about? And, you know, John Barth and Stanley Elkin, some of the great American black humorists, and Thomas Berger, all that stuff… even John Updike wrote a couple of noirish books like the Beck book, it might just be called Beck, and the Enderby books by Anthony Burgess: those were the kind of things I enjoyed, and they didn’t need to have all this grad student exegesis to enjoy them or to take what you could from them; they just existed in and of themselves, and that was enough. So I kind of respected the intellectualism of it and the work, and some of it was actually really awesome, to see that people could do that and think like that, but it didn’t serve my interests. So that school didn’t work; that school thing didn’t work. German was kind of interesting; languages were kind of interesting, but I just didn’t want to do the work. I didn’t want to study. I didn’t want to study anything. I wanted to either be there or not. You know I wanted to do whatever I could do but at the point where I had to study it I’d drop it. The same thing happened with music. You know I picked up a recorder, you know the musical flute-like recorder, and I’d play around with it and I’d play along with the records, you know like… ‘cause I knew Roland Kirk, you know he liked the recorder, in fact Roland Kirk liked anything you could blow out your mouth or your nose. He did the nose flute; he could stick five or six horns in his mouth and the nose flute and play them all, plus, you know he wasn’t using the correct tonguing and fingering that you should use in playing these flutes or the recorder or anything like that, and I wasn’t either: instead of playing it up so you can get the nice tones out of it I was playing it down, see, so you can get a little breath with it too. [demonstrates the sound] …And like that… But then I found out you’d have to study to learn to read music and to... and that was it. Same thing with the guitar, you know, I did a little bit and learned some chords. Well, there were two things there with the guitar: I would get so carried away just by being able to produce one or two notes and that was almost enough. I’d just sit there and ding [imitates ringing sound of one note]. By then the drugs had taken hold [laughter].
And you were satisfied with one pluck of the strings.
And I was satisfied with that. Yeah. The thing with Nachitos just came to an end; by then I’d got my draft notice too, so it was perfect.
Now why did that come to an end?
I had to do something different. I just wanted to do something different. I was tired of that, you know, I figured it was time to move on, not to advance or anything like that, in fact the job I got was a step down, just to do something different; but I didn’t mind that at that time because I was gonna let myself get drafted. I could already see that. You know I got my notice several months ahead of time, so I gave Nachitos two weeks notice and got another job to tide me over in the meantime and didn’t tell them.
Just to cover for that little bit of…?
Yeah, just so I could have some income, ‘cause I was gonna clean up my affairs.
[End Tape 9, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:26 PM
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