II. School, Grandparents, Divorce
III. Dad, Fishing, the Mountains, the Stars, Food, and Hippies
IV. Hawaii, Iolani, Diamond Head Tennis Center
V. Tucson, Miller Lake, Manoa Valley
VI. Back in Eugene: Kip’s Family, Basketball, Robin & Grant, Heidi
VII. Tom and Tom, David, the Ducks, the UO Campus, my High School Teachers
VIII. My Mother and My Stepmother
IIX. Antics with Sam Freeman, Tom, Dave Fish; Shannon Williams; Joni Mitchell
IX. The Guitar, Patty, and the Stage Left Crowd
X. The Oregon Coast; Raoul and Gene, Maya
XI. San Francisco, Oakland, Tony
XII. Elissa, Pine Mountain, Jazz, Philosophy, Pacheco
XIII. Mia
XIV. London, Proust
XV. Santa Barbara, Chris and Nicole
XVI. My Father
XVII. PhD Dissertation; London Again
College Avenue is a long street. Running north from Oakland into Berkeley, it begins at upper Broadway, proceeds through the Rockridge District and under the BART line, crosses Claremont Boulevard, Alcatraz Avenue and Ashby Avenue, and ends after two miles in a leafy district at the T-junction at Bancroft Way, where the campus of the University of California at Berkeley begins. The southern end, slighly elevated, affords one glimpses of the bay—as if one were looking at a children’s picture, with ships, ferries, and yachts criss-crossing, and airplanes, helicopters and the occasional blimp populating the sky. One can look beyond to San Francisco, Marin County and the Golden Gate, where on archetypal late afternoons, the fog would creep silently in under the celebrated bridge, wrapping its cold fingers around the San Francisco hills and buildings, to bring the day to a close.
A quarter mile or so from the campus, situated on the west side of
College Avenue, was our family home—an apartment, in one of those big wooden
houses of two or three storeys in the area, scrunched together with minimal
gardens, converted years before into multiple residences. A little way
down Ashby Avenue is Alta-Bates Hospital, where I was born on October 15th,
1960, me being the first and what would prove to be the only offspring of my
parents. Also in the family household were my mother’s two children from
a previous marriage— Grant, about eight, and Robin (a girl) about ten. My
mother’s previous husband was Bob Kimball, who was himself not her first
husband—she was married very young to someone who deserted her in less than a
year after their wedding, perhaps because he was disappointed to find that
despite his wife’s parents having a beautiful house at a posh address, they
were not rich. My father—who was, at the time I was born, just finishing his
Ph.D. in physics—had been married once before, to Constance Hwang, a beautiful,
educated and intelligent woman (later, however, I heard of stories of her
schizophrenia, which perhaps played a role in their splitting up). They
had one son, Laurence, about Grant’s age, who was living with Connie in a house
just off University Avenue on McGee Street.
Sometime in 1962 or 1963, my family moved five hundred miles north to Eugene, Oregon, my father having obtained a position at the University of Oregon as an Assistant Professor of Physics. At first, in Eugene, we lived in small house; but after a year or so we moved into a bigger house up a gentle hill on Orchard Street, just down from Fairmount Boulevard—a street of fine, and, for Eugene, being founded barely a hundred years before, venerable houses, many having picturesque views looking north or west across the city. Next door, in the house above us, on the intersection with Fairmount, lived Len Casanova, at that time the University’s football coach, having been a player of some fame (somehow I was aware from early on that our proximity to the Casanovas was, to my mother’s way of thinking, a source of pride, something you could mention offhand). Fairmount Boulevard had very light traffic, but a tiny bus came down the street perhaps once an hour, carrying domestic help—much more common in those days—old ladies, and the occasional child (never did it carry a man; such would be an object of suspicion). At the top end of the street there were disused tracks from the old trams to be seen. Above Fairmount rose the woods of Hendricks Park, with roads named Sunset Drive, Summit Drive and Skyline Drive, with big houses tucked between the fir trees.
My memories begin at a point sometime after the move to Eugene. The order of the first batch of them is hard to tell. I have fleeting and indistinct images of a house, and a light brown fifties’ style car, which must, assuming these are genuine memories, have been the small house we lived in before we moved to Orchard Street, and the car the one we had before we got the big Ford ‘Country Squire’ station wagon (a car with styling that reminds you of a space ship; it was to be a constant fixture in my life throughout the 1960’s). But I may have dreamed up these images. I do have what I’m in no doubt is an accurate memory of being locked alone in the car in the ferry to Victoria, British Columbia (I didn’t quite know the geography then of course, but the sense of being located on a map, of one thing’s having been north, south, east or west of another, has always been strong in me, however inaccurate). Also I remember the street, outside the people’s house we were visiting in Victoria. Somehow I'm persuaded it was early autumn.
I was sent on two trips in successive summers up
towards Portland in the lower Willamette Valley, staying at a farm which I
assume belonged to friends of my mother. I was still very young, perhaps four and five. There were various kids there,
always ready to play it seemed. I remember licking the spoon that had been used for the chocolate
frosting the mother had applied to a cake; I was given to understand that this
was a special honour, not to be sniffed at. During one visit we managed
to burn down the barn, accidentally of course, but quite expeditiously, thanks
to some older kid’s playing with matches in the dry hay. Running towards
the house we all screamed ‘Fire!’ (even at that age there was a certain
self-consciousness in the air: we were copying what we’d seen people in the
movies do, and it was a special treat to have the opportunity to say this line
for real; it made us feel important). On the same visit a calf was born and
immediately died, creating an amazing smell, adding to the sense of
catastrophe, was my impression. During the subsequent visit a somewhat
serious accident befell me. We were riding horses, and the normally gentle big red horse
I was riding was spooked by the combination of a loud stereo and a barking dog;
it panicked, galloped away, with me falling off and the crazed horse managing to step on me, imprinting on my chest a horseshoe (the impression would recede only
very slowly, over months). An ambulance came; I had a collapsed lung and
four broken ribs. Still on the whole the experience of staying on a farm,
with many happy-go-lucky, barefooted, half-dressed kids coming and going
unsupervised in the summer air, was intoxicating, or seems to me now.
I used to play along Orchard Street; my mother calling me home for dinner—‘Gary!’, she called, with a tinge of mournfulness it seems to me now, while standing on the sidewalk looking down the hill. Once when I was playing a long way down the street, a somewhat vicious rock fight took place with the kids across the street, me imagining the street was a river between us. I remember Grant’s friend Tony coming swiftly up the street, no-hands on his 10-speed bicycle; the older gentleman who was one of the crew hired to renovate the Orchard Street house had a lunch which, as a treat, featured Hostess cupcakes, which once he shared with me; a neighbourhood nasty little so-and-so seizing a paintbrush out of a bucket of paint, making a big mark on the driveway, then doing what we would have called ‘buking' it, that is, swiftly running away; the bees buzzing in the sticker bushes, amidst the red, inedible berries; the small front lawn and the Japanese cherry trees on the median; my leaping off a stone wall with an umbrella, imagining the umbrella would let me glide (it didn’t); the landing pad below being the front lawn of Sidney and Mrs. Greenstreet—the former was an esteemed professor of English Literature at the university (later when I was a student there I took a poetry class from him, and the good professor read my essay on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry to the class, he liked it so much; a little triumph for me); Grant and Laurence, pretending to throw me off the roof—‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three!’ they chanted merrily as they swung me out; it was a lark for them I suppose but it was not nice for me; sickness—my pyjamas with strange-smelling shit in them; another time, the measles, with the fascinating spots (to me); hiding the hated peas under the rim of my plate (bearing out the evident truth that kids do not like vegetables); upstairs with the large black and white TV – watching football, Batman, McHale’s Navy, F-Troop, the FBI, Dragnet, Mayberry RFD, The Beverly Hillbillies, Leave it to Beaver, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Let’s Make a Deal, The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, Jeopardy, Get Smart, Star Trek—with Spock, McCoy and Jim—The Outer Limits, the Twilight Zone, and various westerns including Bonanza and the Lone Ranger with Tonto—sitting with my back to my mother as she languidly smoked; the weatherman on KVAL-TV with a pane of glass between himself and the camera, with rudimentary maps printed on it— he’d write the temperatures on it with a marker, and indicate by means of rough drawings the wind, clouds, rain, sun—it was somehow mesmerizing (I suppose to make that arrangement work the image was reversed with a mirror); Robin’s spooky, infinitely long closet with a small window at the end; a shared bedroom with Grant, with a bluish rattan carpet in the room that made a waffle-like pattern on one’s elbows or knees, vaguely painful, when you knelt or laid upon it; electric football (a strange and fiddly occupation, with each play taking such a long time to set up; always exciting to anticipate but dreary to play; we’d always give up after ten minutes); Grant’s friends: Jerry, Tony (I remember going to Tony’s house nearby on Fairmount Boulevard—white stucco with blue painted window frames, and downstairs with a sort of party taking place, my first experience of that atmosphere); Grant inexplicably being called ‘Sarcy’; my other half-brother Laurence, who came to visit occasionally but remained living with his mother in Berkeley, saying he knew ‘all the little tricks’ for helping me build a model (and who was I to doubt that he did indeed know all the little tricks?); a summer’s day spent at Fairmount City Park, at the bottom end of Fairmount Boulevard, with a wading pool and me in my ‘baby-soup’, eating a bologna sandwich (white bread, mayonnaise); riding in our car as my mother drove, in the pouring rain, to Roosevelt Junior High to collect Robin and Grant; the Peanuts Treasury, which I must have read when I was in first grade, just learning to read—I was enchanted and delighted by Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, Sally, Schroeder, Violet (I still remember finding Linus’ saying, in response to some remark of Lucy's, ‘Gee’, so very funny—but only because I misread it as having a hard ‘g’ and found it hysterical that he should make such a sound); the film A Charlie Brown Christmas made its appearance on TV—complete magic, especially the nighttime ice-skating scene with Vince Guaraldi providing jazz piano, soul-stilling for me, this delicate little boy; one afternoon, standing in the kitchen, suddenly realizing with a stab that I too, like everyone else, would one day die; The Red Balloon, a picture-book featuring a boy that I thought was myself, either chasing or being chased by a red balloon through the streets and monuments of Paris; Burro (I still have him – a small stuffed donkey); trying to sneak something in behind my back—caught red-handed by my mother; the little foyer off the side door, the ‘mudroom’ it was known as; the vast basement; playing with the Electrolux vacuum cleaner, not turning it on but imagining it a gas pump; the hi-fi, the metal boxes painted white, built by Dad; two Siamese cats: Kefroo and Mika; a trip to Loon Lake, near the coast; someone trying but failing to get up on water-skis. Sometime I began to be known in the family as ‘Twerp’.
A children’s song I remember had strangely sinister overtones, as
children’s songs often have:
Little rabbit froo-froo
Went hopping through the forest
Scooping up the field mice
And bopping them on the head.
II. School, Grandparents, Divorce
School began at Condon Elementary in 1965. As per the American
system it began not with first grade but with kindergarten, which was held in
the basement of a converted house separate from the elementary school itself
(upstairs accommodated what were known as the ‘retards’ or even the ‘tards’, the
slur being unintentional I suppose, or at least normal). I can vaguely picture
the blond-haired kindergarten teacher, Mrs. King. I have curiously warm feelings towards her, even though her name and a smidgen of her appearance are the most that I remember. I have more vivid memories of walking to kindergarten along 19th Street, of
playing ‘house’ (I liked playing the teenager), of nap time (strangely effective; lights off for fifteen minutes, all the kids fall asleep). Next
year—first grade proper (Fall 1966)—we had a lovely middle-aged woman teaching
us, Mrs. Smith; smallish, plump, brown hair, neat skirt and polished little
shoes. I can almost hear her voice, telling the story of the vowels
featuring the protagonist A-e, and culminating in a line uttered by a
shopkeeper: ‘A-e, i-o-u five cents’; of her asking a minor miscreant whether
the story he told in explanation of his crime was a reason or an excuse (an
exercise of our incipient conceptual faculties); of guiding us along in singing
our abc’s. I felt vaguely put-upon by the class’s collectively reciting the Pledge of
Allegiance—my distaste for anything ceremonial, tribal, or simply
group-oriented was already making itself apparent (I felt very uncomfortable
whenever I had dinner at some house where they said prayers; luckily, in
Eugene, Oregon, I was not often subjected to this). Lunch in the cafeteria had a strange
aroma, unlike the aroma of any domestic kitchen that I had ever encountered;
but still one ate it.
On the second week of school an oddball named Kip Jones entered the scene, who came that first day on crutches, having got his foot tangled in the spokes of his big sister’s bicycle when riding behind her on its back, as I later learned (some years hence he suffered a ghastly compound fracture of his thigh, when playing football with his older brother; but he was no risk-taker or even clumsy, at most just accident-prone). His little leather school-bag marked him out for all to see as a genuine nerd, but I was drawn to him. While other kids went outside for recess Kip and I would sometimes stay inside, drawing battle-scenes with pencil on cheap paper. The pedagogical substance of being at school meanwhile was wholesome and pleasant—learning to add and subtract, basic information about civics—the three branches of government: the presidency, the courts, the legislature comprising the house and senate. I was put in the fastest of the three groups for reading (assumptions of superiority and entitlement were swiftly taking root I fear, needing only the barest of excuses). Names of other classmates: Elsa Gontrum, Tom Ettel, Naomi Siegal, Sarah Munz, Rick Lindholm, Julie Hoffman, Theresa Holmes, Amy Smith, David Lichtenstein, Jeff Alvarado, David Lewinsohn, David Linde, Dan Rousseau, Shelly Poticha, Rodney Jones, Angela Walken, Rusty Deschamps, and Mark Dooley—remembered largely because the poor child had invariably a dirty appearance, to go with what we imagined to be his often soiled pants. Yet I think of every single person with fondness—including Mark Dooley—and hope, believe and feel each has made something good out of their lives.
Accompanied by Laurence, we spent Christmas—in 1967 I think but possibly 1966—in Tucson, Arizona, at my mildly rich paternal grandmother Ruth’s splendid house in the Catalina Foothills, high above the city proper—high above the metropolis with its Mexicans and Indians (in the language of the day; the Native Americans as the latter are now known). Her third husband Chet—the source of her wealth—was by then an invalid; her own mother, my great-grandmother ‘Gommy’, was still alive and very much kicking (and smiling and laughing). Chet would die soon after but Gommy went on for some years, always living with Ruth. Like many people in places like Tucson who can afford it, Ruth drove a preposterously huge automobile, an Oldsmobile, whose principal function seemed to be not its size as such—rarely did it carry more than two—and not even the sense that you were lounging on a giant couch far from any companions, but to provide the powerful air-conditioning that made life in the Sonoran desert comfortable. She drank a lot—it seemed normal in her house and in the age of MadMen that the adults consumed hi-balls starting at lunch time, always with plenty of ice in the American way from the automatic icemaker inside the big fridge-freezer. Like most women then she smoked constantly—a habit which was always loathsome to me, with the lipstick-stained detritus left behind in the ashtrays—seeing to it that no matter where one sat in her house, a fancy lighter was to hand. She taught everyone to play a favourite card game, Spite and Malice, a kind of dual solitaire, with one’s plans always being thwarted by those of the other. She taught me to swim in their pool, to great screaming and splashing.
There
was a lot of wildlife to be seen in that picturesque desert landscape, with
only the mountains behind. It was like the archetypical travel poster, down to
human-shaped saguaro cactuses, which gave a vaguely comic air to the scene, as
if a not-quite-all-there cowboy might appear. Bobcats, rabbits, mice, toads,
rattlesnakes, gila monsters, woodpeckers, hawks, and quail—with their tuft of
feathers growing amusingly out of their head, which always looked like a long
beak, with the head thrown back—were all to be seen. The highlight was
early one morning, when a genuine bona fide cougar was spotted by the
pool. I missed it.
In second grade in the Fall of 1967 we were taught by the beautiful Mrs.
Norris—more about her in a moment—and the year started off well from my point
of view. But sometime at the beginning of 1968 my
parents split up. After a couple of months of Mrs. Norris I was sent down
to my maternal grandmother’s house—Mia’s house—for approximately January through May, while my parents undertook the difficult business of divorcing. I now attended school in Piedmont, at Wildwood Elementary.
Somehow as at Condon the smell of lunchtime lingers. I remember the vast school
playground, the adjoining park with a ravine and redwoods, and the walk
back up the hill to Mia’s house. I was fascinated by the older kid who
lived in the absurdly grand mansion across from Mia’s house in Wildwood
Gardens. I was most impressed by their giant Christmas tree, by the two kitchens in their
house, by the too-high ceiling of the main showpiece living room, by the boy’s
impressively doing homework in cursive and doing incomprehensible math
problems—until one day, far down the hill of the backyard of their house, at
the bottom, he threatened me with a knife, ordering me to go into the large and
suddenly fearsome drain pipe into which the creek flowed. He didn’t
follow through but I ceased to count him a friend.
Mia was not religious—as far as I could see—but unaccountably she signed me up for attendance at Sunday school. This was strange to me not least because she didn't go to the preceding service (and nor did I). There were sessions where some nice man explained the suffering of children in Africa, followed by a whip-round for tubes of toothpaste or cans of beans; I never had anything to contribute. The whole experience struck me as weird and artificial.
Robin and Grant—they must have been staying with Mia and Gpa also, probably Grant and me in the yellow guest room and Robin sleeping with Mia, as Gpa had his own room—were both very friendly with the Atwood family, who lived nearby in a big house on Wildwood Avenue. The Atwoods were famous for their many adopted children—they featured on the cover of Life magazine no less—some of whom were disabled, from such places as Korea, Vietnam, and central Africa. Robin was friendly with Stephanie—natural offspring—and Grant with Kim—adoptive, from Korea. For a short time I was close to Melanie, another natural offspring my age. I remember their house, a hive of activity, with kids, nurses, maids, and Dorothy the mother and head of operations.
I had not an inkling as to why I was staying at my grandmother’s, and
certainly wasn’t aware of either of my parent’s apparently having other
romantic interests. I do remember my mother having a Porsche of unclear
provenance to drive some of the time; later she insisted that at this time Jim
was involved with June Powell, wife of Professor John. A bit later Mother
took up with Dean Hague (they married in perhaps 1969). I have a somewhat
dim memory of coming home in early Summer 1968 to Orchard Street, and being delighted
to find Dad in the living room after an unaccountable absence of some weeks; ‘Dad!’, I
squawked. I suppose he proceeded to tell me then that he and my mother
had divorced and that I was now to live with him. On the first night of
living with him—it was on 26th and Onyx—I was happily bribed with
chocolate milk. It seemed not to be a cataclysm, not at first at any
rate, but to be a case of us boys being on vacation. Then we moved to 18th Street
for a few months, a duplex.
In third grade, Fall 1968, we were taught by Mrs Norwood, a gregarious, charming, yet fierce woman of middle age who for discipline would punish us with a miniature baseball bat on the rump. The object was more the humiliation than the pain, as well she knew. Nowadays I suppose she’d be done for cruelty to children, but not only did we respect her—unquestionably she did what she must—we genuinely liked and aimed to please her. She taught us multiplication tables, and read Charlotte’s Web and The Wind in the Willows to us for relaxation, and for bonding too. Meanwhile Mr. Harris taught us music with his strong tenor voice—only singing, singing in rounds and a tiny bit of harmony, ‘This Land is Your Land’ and the like—and he doubled as the Physical Education instructor, with his barrel chest, muscular arms and shiny bald head; he would proclaim merrily that some loathsome comestible from the school cafeteria such as overcooked spinach was ‘Good for the gizzard!’. Mr. Hochstatter was the Principal; with his suit, tie, and glasses, he had an air of the Ivy League about him. We would sit reverentially, our ears wide open, when it was his turn to speak at the central hall. I think it was this year that singers from Roosevelt Junior High School treated us in the same central hall to songs from the Age of Aquarius. It was a first time experience for me of that power, the power of many voices harmonizing singing as loud as they comfortably could: ‘When the moon, is in the seventh house; and Jupiter aligns with Mars ....’.
Despite 18th street being a busy street and our stay being less than six months, I think fondly of our little duplex, with its tidy front lawn, shaded ivy on the slope opposite to the front door, its blue shingled siding, and its perpendicular orientation to the street, from which a wooden fence afforded some protection from the traffic. I had some Hot Wheels cars and track (the track was yellow, and the cars the same scale as the ubiquitous Matchbox cars but faster and cooler). In the summer I played with the set-up on the lawn with a little Hispanic kid from the neighbourhood who hardly spoke any English, but who exclaimed to great delight ‘Hot Wheels!’. Alexi McKechnie was a pretty girl my age who lived in the other half of the duplex with her mother (much later Alexi would break the heart of Randy Myers, a blondish and befreckled character who figures later in this narrative); they had their spaniel Murphy with whom a game was played—naturally called the ‘Murphy game’—involving a ball and the impenetrable ivy growing on the slope. One threw the ball up the slope, and only Murphy could find it, which invariably he did with great enthusiasm.
I stayed up very late one night—the clock said ‘1:30’, not a reading that children are supposed to see—to be spooked by the film Mysterious Island, with its giant, fearsome lobsters and crabs, and its weird music.
For about nine years, from the time when I went to live with my father,
I had no contact with my mother, except on two brief occasions: one
afternoon when I knocked on her door and she graciously gave me something to eat, and once
when I arrived to find Grant on the floor of the living room bleeding
profusely, his leg having been impaled by a paling of a picket fence he had been attempting to clamber over.
We moved again, perhaps in late Autumn 1968, to 17th Street between Agate and Columbia. Condon School was next door and across the street was the place where ‘The Bookmobile’—a travelling outpost of the Eugene Public Library—parked for an afternoon every two weeks. This was great for me. For the University, it was time of great protest and militancy, mostly against the Vietnam War and its concomitant draft. A lot of medium-level violence took place directed against the continued presence of the R.O.T.C., which had their games on Saturdays with rifles, spiffing suits and marching, just outside our window in the Condon School playground. That Autumn featured the horrible election, of 1968. I knew that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, and of the great Eugene McCarthy, who barely lost the primary to Hubert Humphrey, who was in turn beaten by Nixon in the general election. My dad said that he ‘wrote in McCarthy’ in the general election (Fool! I thought, wasting your vote—but of course practically speaking it doesn’t matter how a single person votes, and perhaps it is interesting that I had swiftly worked out this basic and anti-democratic mathematical fact).
I wasn’t aware of Martin Luther King or of his death (or for that matter of the death of Malcom X, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, or Jimi Hendrix). We did become aware of the genius of Tom Lehrer—‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’, ‘The Elements’, ‘The Vatican Rag’ etc.—and Arlo Guthrie—of Alice's Restaurant fame. I didn't twig that Arlo was the son of Woody, author of songs learned in school, like the aforementioned ‘This Land is Your Land’, that seemed timeless. Even to think it would be like thinking that Pythagoras—the discoverer of x squared plus y squared equals z squared—was to be met with down at the supermarket if you hurry.
Dad was keen on the most sumptuous Peggy Lee:
Is that all there is? Is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friend, then let's keep dancing ...
Let's break out the booze ... and have ... a ball.
Fourth grade featured Mrs Norris again, except that thanks to a divorce
she had reverted to her maiden name of Miss Mercer. Often with her was
her boa constrictor, who gruesomely, in one gulp, ate the live mice Miss Mercer courteously supplied, and liked to hang out on her banister, or in her pink sweater,
whether or not she was wearing it. Sometimes she would bring the snake to
school, where she’d keep it in a large fish tank with a small light bulb for
warmth (it is a telling fact that one doesn't care about the snake's name or sex). Some dates with Dad came to nought, which was disappointing to me
as I think I loved her, despite the snake.
We had cats (‘Mutsy’, her offspring ‘Snowball’, ‘Tigger’, and others). Mutsy put on a marvelous show for us, giving birth to great yowling and generally showing that she knew exactly what to do thank you very much and yes the cardboard box will do nicely and do please hurry. During one afternoon the fireplace exploded due to my having lit a fire with what proved to be much too much fuel—which included the kitchen trash, which at first I thought myself very helpful for having got rid of in this way—luckily damaging only the carpet but the hot air of the explosion pushed poor Kip out the front door.
I had periods of loneliness, of unexplained wretchedness and misbehaviour: throwing a rock at the head of the unimpeachably innocent Theresa Holmes from behind—a bullseye of which when it struck I was momentarily proud, like Calvin when he scored a similar strike on Suzie with a snowball (Theresa’s father later knocked on our front door presumably to have a word with whoever was supervising me—finding me alone, he backed off); knifing some poor kid’s bike tire who was an ‘MR’, i.e. Mentally Retarded; Dad having an angry fit at the untidiness of our house, speaking of ‘this shithouse’; me—copying Dad—likewise having an angry fit (throwing stuff); an occasion of sexual abuse by Rick Jones, Kip’s weird older brother (but I confess I don’t remember feeling that something unspeakable had happened although I never spoke of it); lying in bed, counting the numbers until one thousand, being aware that there was no limit to high I could in principle count, but nevertheless feeling inadequate, as if I had failed in giving up at one thousand.
Music began ever more to figure—hearing Peter, Paul and Mary (memories that stand out include the
time-stopping ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, and once when feverish and
alone, ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’); the Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour: ‘Hello
Goodbye’, ‘Strawberry Fields’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘A Fool on the Hill’, ‘I Am the
Walrus’; all magic but somehow the strongest memory was of ‘Flying’, a
throwaway instrumental, with the monks singing, the simple guitar solo).
III. Dad, Fishing, the Mountains, the Stars,
Food, and Hippies
Often my dad took me fishing. I've so many memories, sometimes it was week after week as Dad was quite serious about it (I believe he had learned as a boy in Michigan, before moving to Mexico). Typically we went dead east, up the McKenzie; alternatively to the southeast, up the South Fork of the McKenzie; or further south, up the Middle Fork of the Willamette, or up the North Fork of the Willamette (yet more geographical detail: the Middle and North Forks of the Willamette join at Oakridge, forty miles southeast of Eugene, and the so-called Coast Fork joins at Mt. Pisgah, just south of Eugene; then the McKenzie and the Willamette join just north of Eugene, where the resulting unitary river flows a hundred and twenty miles to the north end of the Willamette Valley where it joins the mighty Columbia River, at the top end of Portland). Alternatively we would backpack with an inflatable boat into the Erma Bell lakes, or into Otter Lake, or, a little later, into a seldom-visited lake on the east side of the Cascades on the northeast flank of the North Sister called Yapoah Lake, which one had to bushwhack into but it was worth it, as it was so full of fish. Sometimes we’d fry some of the fish right there—not of course before the necessary bonking of their heads, the scaling and gutting of them. The trout—Brook, Brown and mostly Rainbow—that lived in the rivers had white meat, and those that lived in the lakes had pink meat. We caught the river trout with a bobber and flies, sometimes with a lure; the lake trout, most of the time, with a ‘Ford Fender’—a bit of jangly metal designed to attract attention from afar in the possibly murky lake—and a lure, or bait such as a worm, trolled from the boat. He seemed to be infinitely patient, as I often got my fishing line tangled, which he would sort out for me. Once Dad got the idea of catching dragonflies and running a hook through them; a creative idea but the dragonflies quickly fell apart. At the lakes we usually camped. We would make a campfire, have on the first night some simple meal plus hot chocolate and marshmallows, and would sleep tentless, beneath the stars in the classic way. It was surprisingly cold at night but the sleeping bag was warm.
A fishy rhyme, learned at that time:
Fishy fishy in the
brook
Daddy catch
’em on a hook.
Mommy fry ’em in
a pan.
Baby eat
’em like a man.
We climbed the South Sister, Three-fingered Jack and Diamond Peak. The views from the summits of these mountains was incredible to a little kid such as me; such space, clarity and distance, all of it subtly bathed in the blue of the sky. On top of the South Sister—it takes around six hours to ascend from a campsite at Green Lakes, which is itself about six miles from a parking area on the magical Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway—there is a large caldera, at the bottom of which, partially melted in the summer, is a lake, so impossibly blue, as not only is it at an altitude of over ten-thousand feet, it is surrounded on all sides by ice (it’s four-thousand feet above timberline). Despite the temperature being perhaps thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, and despite the presence of our climbing companions some of whom were ladies, and despite the fact that it’s a bit of a climb downwards to reach the lake, Dad proceeded to skinny-dip. He figured inflicting this considerable embarrassment on me and surely others was worth it, among other things because he wanted to put truthfully in the log-book maintained at the summit that Professor James Kemp not only reached the top of the mountain, but swam naked in the lake. The United States Forest Service probably has the log-book somewhere. Compromat.
Sometime in 1968 or 1969 Dad switched from lab experiments to astronomy, or to astrophysics to be precise (his main area at the beginning of his career was solid-state physics; he continued to maintain his extensive lab, for graduate students and for his own making and testing of electronic instruments; he had been an electrician and a radio engineer in the Navy, and could handle the mill and lathe for metal). I spent long, tedious evenings with Dad at the lab, when he was working on something or other. When not just moping about or doing my utmost to play the whiny obnoxious brat, I would make things with a soldering gun following simple schematics drawn for me by Dad, or play with a cart normally used for transporting large canisters of liquid nitrogen and the like, pretending it was a race car. The building was very linear, with endless corridors and four or five stories plus a substantial basement. And the subbasement is not to be forgotten—very mysterious, shades of some secret Los Alamos-style atomic physics laboratory which I was given to understand linked up to passageways from other parts of the campus. They were installed in the 1950s, something to do with The Bomb (all over the campus one saw signs indicating Fallout Shelters, with arrows pointing down). Astronomical research took place at Pine Mountain Observatory, a long drive to the east over the Cascades, thirty miles outside of Bend, on a lonely, windswept mountain of six and a half thousand feet, with sagebrush and juniper turning to Ponderosa pine nearer the top, with spectacular views of the surrounding high desert, a 24” reflector and slightly later a 32” reflector, and a comfortable duplex house for the use of astronomers. Dad’s ashes are scattered there.
On the kitchen wall in our house in Eugene hung a poster that fascinated me. It was of the moon. It was informative rather than artistic, more map-like than picture-like, telling of the mountains, of the craters, of the so-called dark side, of the distance from the Earth, of the size and gravity of it, of the phases and their explanation, and of the ‘seas’—for example the Sea of Tranquility—which were fancifully called ‘seas’ when first detected but are really just plains, areas relatively devoid of geographical features, one learns. Sometime in 1969 we got a hobbyist’s telescope, a 3” refractor with which we looked not only at the Moon, but the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, with their own moons, the red spot of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, at the more earth-sized planets Mars and Venus, with the moons of the former (Deimos, Phobos), and at a few galaxies and nebulae (I think this must have included the Andromeda galaxy, since you can find it with the naked eye; also the wondrous Horse Head nebula, I infer from the fact that I retain a clear memory of it). Dad explained the basics of the celestial coordinate system, and how to use the settings on the telescope to find the more elusive objects. I got to know Polaris—the North Star—the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, the Pleiades and the principal constellations, although I’ve forgotten most of them now, but some of the more obvious ones remain in my head—Orion, Draco, Cygnus, Gemini.
That summer Dad had his great discovery, a White Dwarf star that emits circularly polarized light, the degree of polarization indicating that its magnetic field was much stronger than any that had ever been detected and measured anywhere before (this was made possible by one ‘Photoelastic Biofringence Modulator’ involving quartz crystals that Dad had not only built for his own use but patented for production by Morvue, and then later Hinds International, both manufacturers of electronic instruments). This was thought to lend credence to existence of Black Holes, whose existence at that point had been predicted by Einstein's theory but had not been verified observationally, and more broadly, to some accepted but still somewhat speculative theories of stellar life-cycles. The story in Time magazine was I’m sure partly apocryphal: ‘That fateful night, due to Kemp’s nearsightedness, he had his son Gary, 9, set the telescope cross hairs; it was a fortunate decision’…etc., wrote the author (this was the 24” Cassegrain at Pine Mountain; the 32” as I said was installed a couple of years later). It was a triumph for Dad; he was made a Full Professor at age 42.
Dad prided himself on his cooking. Looking back at the particular things he cooked, it was nothing special, but it was enough for me, a growing boy, to be impressed—chicken wings with parsley, broiled trout, salmon or sole, pork chops with lemons and onions, fresh corn, French toast, rice, and waffles or pancakes at the weekend (the latter often made with buckwheat flour; the former in an ancient 'waffle iron' as he called it, with melted butter and so-called ‘maple’ syrup made by melting brown sugar in water on the stove). Once in a while he would bring home with triumph Dungeness crabs from Newman’s fish shop, and we’d attack them with pliers, eating them with sourdough bread and melted butter; sometimes when he’d succeeded in pulling out an especially big piece of meat from a leg, or better a claw, he’d let me have it. This was the ultimate act of love as I was well-aware. Sometimes we went out to Eugene’s restaurants; often to Tino’s—Italian food—to Louie’s Chinese Village (after the Bay Area, Jim naturally scorned it, but it was the best you could do in Eugene for Chinese food), or to the restaurant with the racially backwards-looking name ‘Sambo’s’, to have pancakes. But the main one for Jim, and in retrospect for me, was the beloved Moreno’s, a wonderful, elegant yet unpretentious establishment in a large 19th century Victorian-style house on busy Franklin Boulevard, exquisitely painted inside and out, with large elm trees outside and with handsome old-fashioned wooden furniture inside, that served dishes from central Mexico (still the best Chile Rellenos I’ve known; so fresh and light). There weren't a lot of Chicanos in the area at the time but there were some. Mr. Moreno was a sourpuss who didn’t like kids, least of all me, but brightened when my father would chat in Spanish with him (as I said my father lived in Mexico, alternately in Mexico City and a village near San Luis Potosi, from age twelve until eighteen). In about 1975 Mr. Moreno handed the restaurant over to his son Juan or John, who was equally tolerant, and equally intolerant; it closed in 2006 and the house was demolished, to make way for a re-routing of the roads.
I built up a collection of car models, always built in too much haste, and too much glue. For a pet, or rather a plaything, I had for a very short time a
mouse, who died of fright when he was played with too enthusiastically by Kip
and me. So blithely cruel we were! We put him in a toy truck which we made
to trundle around the inside of the bathtub, the mouse peeping out, terrorized, before keeling over.
Other hi-jinks which Kip and I got up to include the time on a weekday afternoon
when we dashed outside naked, and got to great laughter into the car (the white
Ford station wagon, on the rear bumper of which I’d put a large “STP” sticker,
incongruous against the smart, gleaming whiteness of the car with its outlandish fins
above the rear wheels). With impeccable timing Dad arrived home. Luckily there were two pairs of pants (trousers) in the car—some old ones of mine that
I hurriedly put on, now very tight, and my dad’s smelly fishing trousers for
Kip—‘We’re playing Big pants and Little pants!’, we said in explanation.
Another time when playing outside at Kip's house I stepped on a bee with my bare foot. When a strangely washed-out me said to
Helen ‘I don't feel well I want to go home’ she put two and two
together, and took me to the nearby hospital. And indeed I proved to be allergic to
bees—I could easily have died—and I was put on a
de-sensitization regimen.
We invented certain animals:
This we called a 'Bahoola'. It was native to East Africa; in West Africa was the 'West African Buhulu', which was relatively squat. The things atop their heads were known as ballicles. No one knows what purpose they served.
Eugene at the time was a hotbed of leftism, full of hippies. It fancied itself ‘Berkeley North’ and now I see that that designation was abundantly justified. It was served by the Green Tortoise bus to Berkeley among other destinations—nowadays a sort of commercial operator of tours-for-lefties, but it started as a slow-moving, cheap, somewhat dirty alternative-for-hippies to Greyhound or Trailways, with giant foam cushions and numerous pillows rather than seats. Later I rode it on several occasions; sometimes it would stop at the hot springs, only vaguely caring to make a schedule. (On one trip I had my guitar, which a longhaired Aussie chap, desirous of a serenade, called my 'piano', and who disappeared beneath the blankets to make—going on the sounds emitted—what one presumed to be love, to what one presumed to be his girlfriend.) The city had start-up hippie businesses and co-ops in profusion such as Humble Bagel, Nancy’s Yoghurt, Sundance Foods, Genesis Juice, Apple Kate’s (Juice and Cider), the Golden Temple Bakery, Toby’s Tofu Paté, many of which have survived, or even thrived in the case for example of Nancy’s. The products produced were genuinely good, certainly much better than the equivalent supermarket brands. The Oregon Country Fair started in 1969— at first it was called the ‘Renaissance Fair’—held yearly near Veneta to the West of town, and the weekly Saturday Market began in the Spring of 1970 in the center of town. Whereas the former was a wild celebration—part Woodstock and part alternative shopping—the latter was more sedate. Both sold candles, tie-dyed clothing, and crafts of various description along with produce and flowers. Though both grew over the years towards commerce with the straight clientele, they were initially by hippies, for hippies, and about hippies—long before the word ‘hippies’ acquired a fashionable connotation. Ken Kesey was a presence, in the height of his celebrity—with his two famous novels (Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), his physical magnetism, and the electric bus of the Merry Band of Pranksters fame, which Tom Wolfe immortalized in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Hippiedom didn’t affect me directly until later, but one day I was in
the tiny backyard of our house on 17th street, and who should
appear but Laurence. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years and he now had long hair,
really long, down to his waist. A hippie! I was a little frightened of
him especially as I had heard from Dad that he had been ‘buckshot’—hit in the
hand, I think by ricochet—at an anti-war riot in Berkeley, which fed my too-suggestible
childish imagination. He simply asked when Dad would be home, and was actually
no hippie, aside from hair and anti-Nixon if not anti-government views. He’d arrived to
begin his degree at the UO Department of Computer Science. That must have
been in early 1970, perhaps in late spring. Later, in 1973 when we
returned from Hawaii, he was a wonderful brother to me for three or four years,
accompanied by his fine girlfriend, the mini-skirted, athletic, and bookish Sue.
February 1969 was the 'Big Snow' (three feet of it—most unusual for the Willamette Valley, and it stayed on the ground for some weeks). Normally, from November to April or May, it rains and rains and rains in Eugene, the mercury rarely going below freezing even in the coldest months; with some exceptions the closest you’d get to snow was when the sleet or hail comes stabbing down. Then it turns into glorious summertime for about four or five months, with the sun shining, and the temperature frequently reaching the 90’s. Even 100 degrees in August or early September is not unusual. The grass turns brown, the trees branches become heavy with leaves, and at the end the flow in the rivers slows to a comparative trickle. The nearby farms produce peaches, nectarines, plums, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries; for two months in summer all these fruits become plentiful and cheap. For my money nothing beats a tree-ripened peach, which you could get if you drove or rode a bike out to the farms just to the north of town, where they would set up a table by the side of the road for selling the farms’ produce. Of course it being the U.S. of A, there was corn (in the American sense; maize or sweetcorn in the British sense), mountains and mountains of it, preposterously cheap. Sometimes we would rent a canoe on the so-called Mill Race—a disused canal that meanders around the university area, mostly between backyards—and pick the blackberries which grew thirstily by the water’s edge. There was no obvious way to reach the fruit except with the canoe, which enabled you to get right up under the bushes and vines. We’d satiate ourselves with these fat, ripe berries, and fill a bucket or two for later consumption, freezing, or to go into the baking of blackberry pies.
I’m not sure what Grant got up to at this time. But I do remember how he
played catch with me, with a football, and him giving me some pointers about
how to impersonate a quarterback (‘Eyes; feet set; throw!’). During the big snow of 1969
I had a brief but intense friendship with Tim Kays that centred on two plastic
mice: Ralph and Harry (figures from the game ‘Mousetrap’); Tim had Ralph, the
blue one, and I had the subordinate Harry, the yellow one; we talked in
squeaks, but the friendship petered out when we tired of that game. Later
he would sprint and play quarterback for South Eugene High. Another
short-lived but close friendship was with Jeff Mapp, who lived with his
divorced mom on Walnut St, along with his older brother Ken and ‘Paulie’, his
younger. I spent hours with their massive Lego collection, playing with
their cat, and occasionally, as my memory has it, eating oatmeal (we ate
oatmeal at home but this was very different; how was this possible, I wondered).
Dad took me on trip for two weeks to the American South, where he talked to various academics, I think of the more technical or engineering type. Places included Huntsville, Alabama; Knoxville, Tennessee and Kansas City, Kansas (so our hosts told us: this was not the much bigger city that you know, Kansas City, Missouri—it is a purely political distinction, as the invisible stateline separates the one from the other). None of these places made much of an impression, except that Dad had interminable conversations with these people. A much more lasting and positive impression was provided by Washington D.C., where we stayed for a couple nights before jetting home. We ogled the Washington Monument and so on, but the high point was Smithsonian Museum, especially the spacecraft and the mammoths.
I began fifth grade in fall of 1970 at Condon. I remember little, as I attended for only a month or two, before we moved to Hawaii some weeks before Christmas. While we were still in Eugene, Dad was seeing Sharon Mullins, a secretary in the Physics Department who had some sex appeal to go with her intelligence. Her apartment was far away in the west of the city, on City View Drive. She had a daughter named Tracy, my age. I remember going to sleep on Sharon’s bed while the adults stayed up late, watching shadows and headlights making patterns on the modern bedroom window with its clouded, louvered glass; at some other house, staying up past my bedtime, playing a game where one person goes out of the room, with everyone else collectively deciding which of the nine records laid out three-by-three on the floor will be the one; the person returns, is asked ‘Is it this one?’ by another person pointing with a stick, and the first person magically knows which is the one; we try to figure out the trick; Tracy and I on bikes, when out of the basket of mine fell Burro, the fall not noticed; later I found him missing, we retraced our route, and found him bitten in two, a dog evidently; we took him back to the apartment, and Sharon took the two pieces to a nice neighborhood lady who stitched him back together, now sporting a sort of saddle with stripes. Sharon’s apartment complex featured a swimming pool, of which in summer I availed myself regularly, perfecting my crawl technique and playing with Tracy and some other little girl. Just before we went to Hawaii we lived for a few weeks in a house up high near Laurelwood Golf Course (25th street or 26th, and Van Ness or perhaps Chula Vista street); I remember listening to the Beatles album Help!, which seemed ancient as it was from 1965, five years before; George Harrison’s ‘I Need You’; Lennon and McCartney’s ‘I Should have known Better’ stood out, plus of course the more famous ones. Once on the street in front of the house, I was trying to play catch with Tracy, becoming angry with her as she couldn’t throw; ‘Just get it to me!’, I roared, as she was reduced to tears.
At this time Dad was acquainted with Phyllis Kerns, a single mom with three children: Benji, Perry (a girl, my age) and I think Mia. They had a big modern house nearby with an enormous living room, where Benji had his drumset (either he or Mia was into Creedence Clearwater Revival). Later he became an accomplished photographer. For no discernible reason my memories from there are vivid.
A naughty tune that Dad came out with from time to time:
In the southern part of France
Where the women wear no pants
And men go around
With their britches hanging down.
The sense would have been enhanced if I had known of the British meaning of 'pants'.
IV. Hawaii, Iolani, Diamond Head Tennis Center
Our move to Hawaii, in October 1970, was occasioned by Dad's having secured a visiting position at the University of Hawaii. We ended up staying there for almost three years. We lived at first in a splendid, English mansion-style house that backed onto the rainforest in Manoa Valley, Honolulu, at the top of Huelani Place (and I’m not kidding when I speak of a rainforest; Manoa is perhaps only two miles from comparatively sunny Waikiki, but Hawaii is full of micro-climates). We shared it with a couple and their two girls, blonde-haired Nancy and brown-haired Nora, I suppose 11 and 9 (I was just turning 10). It possessed an extraordinary living room, very grand and formal in aspect but under-furnished. The rear wall featured a gigantic set of doors with an enormous iron latch to suit, which opened out onto the lanai—Hawaiian parlance for veranda—with the impenetrable jungle beyond. The place was full, like virtually every house in Hawaii, of geckos, those small brown lizards, clean and respectful, who ate insects, spiders included, and therefore were most welcome. I have a vivid image of an upstairs sitting-room, spacious and peaceful, with a large window opening over the jungle, seldom used but with books of poetry by Gary Snyder, Wordsworth and Basho, a book or two by Rudyard Kipling (the house was not far from a house known as something like the ‘Rudyard Kipling House’, where he had lived or stayed some seventy-five years before, and was now a tea-shop that also sold postcards and the like). The first evening while adults lingered over the dinner table, Nancy, Nora and I repaired to my bedroom, and to show off Nancy lost no time in taking off all her clothes, and Nora nearly—though more bashfully—at Nancy’s insistence; then their mother came upstairs and knocked at the worst moment. Luckily my room had an en-suite, so the girls ran into it, me throwing their clothes after them. It was a good thing she didn’t suspect, as I think the good lady was a very devout and perhaps fundamentalist Christian, and presumably would have taken a dim view of such mischief, however childish. Some days later, the three of us were playing in a room off the upstairs sitting room joined by a slightly older black girl named Belinda, who snogged me (they taste different! I remember thinking). We were just playing or 'experimenting' at that activity, copying our elders; none of us were old enough to really feel anything save curiosity.
In the back part of the house, my father had a self-contained apartment
with its own kitchen (which was not used however except for his keeping there a bottle of
whiskey, along with a coffee pot, cups, and Folger's coffee). In my room I had the
poster that came with the Beatles’ White Album hanging from a string, which I
suspended from one corner to the opposite corner. I remember ‘Sexy Sadie’, 'Revolution' and
‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ (the women singing background vocals on the last of these somehow entranced me; I felt love). I remember my dad in the main kitchen
making poached eggs on sourdough toast, another time tuna fish with mayonnaise
and pepper; and my having a terrarium of all things with a chameleon in it, who died not long
after I put him in (I doubt I knew to feed him). This was a sort of
school project; I retain inexplicably warm feelings towards the school
but I can’t remember any names (it was Manoa Valley Elementary; perhaps
three-quarters Japanese kids). I played hooky for the first month or so
there, then was enrolled at school after Christmas.
In March or perhaps February, after some sort of falling out with the family with whom we were sharing the house on Huelani Place, we moved down to Waikiki, to a modern apartment on the 14th floor of a building between Kuhio Street and Cartwright Avenue, two blocks from the sea and just across Kapahulu Boulevard from the zoo. Beyond the zoo to the east lay Kapiolani Park, a superb public park for any of various purposes—gloriously expansive, with softball fields, picnic tables, barbecue pits, a concert pavilion, undeveloped areas with palms and groves of eucalyptus trees, the beach across Kalakaua Avenue, and Diamond Head Tennis Center on the far side, nestled into the side of Diamond Head itself.
I quickly got to know the zoo, with its peacocks meowing at sunup, its lemurs seemingly running around loose, and the howls of the howler monkeys carrying across Kapahulu Boulevard. Often I walked through it, as it was free then, and was located between the apartment and the tennis club. Aside from certain denizens such the seals and otters—who are good at entertaining themselves it seemed—I remember the mood at the zoo as one of boredom and depression, despite the cheerful and jokey signs put up by the zoo staff. The life of an animal-in-the-zoo seems unutterably tedious and sad (although perhaps they’d take it if given the choice, with its free food and security over the comparatively precarious life in the wilderness). The herds of antelope seemed alternately irritated and frightened as they moved from one side to the other of their too-small enclosure despite its being an acre square with an enormous pile of rocks in the centre; the giraffes wandered about aimlessly, just a single dead tree being at their level. The big cats appeared especially hard-hit, as alone, demented from boredom, they walked alone in little circles, day after day after day. The monkeys and apes on their little islands had it better, as they had relatively more room and they had each other, but they also seemed frustrated on the whole. The two gorillas were continually flinging poo across the water at us, the zoo-goers, what with our constant intrusions, and unaccountable freedom.
Once I was desperate for ten cents, and thought ‘What the hell; “Please God …”’; and then looked behind the bed. A dime! But the success of this prayer had no spiritual effect on me (religion was always superstitious nonsense to me, although there was a temporary lapse, as it was about at this time that the film and book The Exorcist came out; late at night, I wondered as I fell asleep, in response not to the film but to the book, might the devil not tap me on the shoulder with his frozen finger?).
Robin came for a visit of a couple of months—she worked for a time at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s, where alas she was not appreciated, this pretty young Haole girl with a sense of entitlement, the other waitresses presumed—and then Kip came at Christmas, making the big flight all alone, for Christmas 1971. The two of us had a great time; I had missed him. When we met him at the airport, the two of us were like reunited puppies, greeting joyfully, with jumping, shouts and glee. All that stuff. Kip was not a great one for water sports and once when we were riding inflatable surf-mats—the easiest form of wave-riding—at Makapuu point, he came close, unbeknownst to him, to getting swept out to sea; I didn’t tell him the danger in which he was in momentarily. We flung water balloons off the lanai, reveling in the mighty splash the balloons produced after falling fourteen floors down; only later did we realise that they could have killed someone if the balloons had happened to land on their head. Another low-grade misadventure: Once with Kip I was walking along Kalakaua Avenue—the main drag through Waikiki—and when making some point, I put out my hands, one at each side, and accidentally struck a passing old Haole man; he thought I’d intentionally struck him, and went into an almost comic fighting posture, saying in a broad New York accent ‘What’s the big idea?’, before accepting that it hadn’t been intentional.
An attractive Japanese woman stayed with us for a while; she cooked
teriyaki beef on the hibachi, outside on the lanai. Another time the
hippie-esque Sandra stayed with us for a few weeks. I tried to frame her by
saying to Dad that I could smell marijuana in her room—but I didn’t even know
what marijuana smelled like. I think I didn’t take to her for the simple reason
that I had the kid’s sixth sense for weakness.
Jefferson School was a rough school, or at least it seemed so to me. It was mostly Hawaiian kids, then some Filipino, Chinese, Fijian, Samoan, and Tongan, some of whom were very poor, plus some Japanese, and about five or ten of us Haole, out of a total of say three-hundred fifty. All the kids at Jefferson were barefoot, me included. Once, during recess, I remember a much anticipated fight involving two sixth graders: a half-Hawaiian boy versus a Polynesian tomboy who everyone respected and even feared—the girls growing up a little earlier than the boys, no one thought this extraordinary in fifth and sixth grade—and half the school crowded round them, egging them on. Disappointingly to us, no serious blows could be landed before some teacher broke it up.
There was a wonderful Japanese art teacher there who encouraged me in drawing—in pencil, charcoal, pen-and-ink. An older Haole woman, with an orchid in her hair, taught us music with great zeal; she sang and played piano.
A snippet I remember from ‘The Sidewalks of New York’:
East side, west side, all around the
town …
The kids sang ring-a-rosie, London Bridge is falling down;
Boys and girls together … me and Mamie O’Rourke,
Tripped the light fantastic, on the sidewalks of New York.
To make fun of her was comme il faut, but looking back I think I was not alone in secretly thinking her magical.
Once a Hawaiian kid, at whose
desk I was sitting, became incensed at my asking ‘This your junk?’, referring
to the contents of the desk, as the ‘junk’ just meant ‘stuff’ in the Pidgin of
the day (which I quickly learned to speak); nevertheless a fight
ensued. Perhaps it was a case of understandable misinterpretation on his
part, or unjustified appropriation on mine, or more abstractly the pent-up
generalized inarticulate rage on the part of Hawaiians towards their smug
conquerors.
Next year, sixth grade, I attended Iolani School, across the Ala Wai canal. It was a private, at
the time boys-only school, the tuition of which was no doubt paid by my paternal
grandmother. It was probably seventy-five per cent Japanese, somewhat
posh. I didn’t benefit from it, really, except to learn more of my
anti-religious attitude: I got an F in Bible Studies and, shall we say, failed to manifest
due reverence when I had to take an occasional part in the readings in the
twice-weekly Chapel Service—it was Episcopal or Anglican rather than Catholic or
Presbyterian, not that those fine distinctions made any difference from my
point of view—to some muttering as well as sympathetic sniggering from the
other boys. An uncharacteristic show of rebellion from me. Also I
remember someone going round collecting for a charity walk for world hunger. What is the role of the walkers I wondered; why don’t people just give to the
charity directly? In the one essay I uncharacteristically tried to do
well on, the teacher of Social Studies—Mr. Basche I think his name was—was
flummoxed by the sudden show of intelligence from an otherwise feckless and
apathetic loner. In science class I constructed a radio which I never got
to work; when a buzz through an earphone was produced I proclaimed in a
Trump-like way that it was a great success. On a sort of class outing for three days at Kaena, North Shore, I remember being impressed by a scene involving two (pack) leaders of our class, Nathan Ng and Dale whathisname (a Haole). Dale took the opportunity to bring it about that Nathan was trapped somehow in the shower. Nathan screamed in humiliation 'Dale!', to which Dale replied by laughing; there was thenceforth no question about who was number one and who was number two. At this time I befriended a geeky
blond-haired kid called AJ Mundt who played tennis and attended Punahou (glitzy
private school mostly of white kids, not far from Iolani—at the time the school, it later turned out, of one Barack Obama).
It was sometimes difficult to sleep at our apartment, and not only
because of the lights and noise outside of busy Waikiki. Interrupting for
a few days the prevailing and refreshing trade winds from the North-east, the
‘Kona’ winds occasionally blew in from the South, with nothing but deleterious
effects on life—muggy, rainy, stubbornly warm at night with odd smells, and
everyone bad-tempered. I have a strange little memory of walking the
streets of Waikiki in such weather—not quite as crowded as normal but still crowded—furtively sucking on one of
those pen-like metal pressure gauges for car tires, imagining it contained some
sort of narcotic, and hoping that someone might see it and think me cool, or
maybe even dangerous, to be steered clear of (perhaps Midnight
Cowboy fed my imagination, the scenes of the lead characters on the streets of New York).
I had some success with tennis tournaments. Almost every day after
school, and on the weekends all day, I would hang out at the aforementioned
Diamond Head Tennis Center, a small (seven courts plus a paddleball court)
semi-public club with only a perfunctory monthly charge (I see on Google maps
that it now has ten courts, including a small stadium court, which seats
perhaps two hundred). Dear, dear Ed Krysa would give me a free lesson,
when he could, and a paid one once per week (he was 48 then, a retired
serviceman from Boston). I would hit or play sets with anyone who wanted
to: Mike Popa, a middle-age Romanian with a big necklace on his suntanned
chest; Kimo, a younger roguish type, part-Hawaiian, part-Haole; a
Filipino—a funny, self-proclaimed layabout, who when leaving the club would
always announce to no one in particular ‘I like go home, sleep’; a tallish
Chinese man—a doctor I believe, polite and friendly to me; a handsome and
sporty Haole named Charlie Hansen who played basketball and softball (a big
game there; technically it was ‘mountainball’, where the strike zone was a
rectangle laid on the ground and the pitches had to be underhand, the eponymous
high arc being traced by the flight of the ball); Heather Dahlgren (sixteen then
but who was well on her way to being Hawaii’s Number One Female in tennis); James
McArthur, who played Danny on Hawaii Five-O and starred in a couple of movies,
and was very genial to me as well as to everyone; kids my age included Reynolds
Barney, a boy named Morgan, and Bonnie McKenzie, who
was a little older, maybe fifteen. I would hit serves endlessly in the paddle-tennis court,
perfecting a topspin, slice, flat and a twist. Once I had a sustained
outburst of rage on Court One when playing my dad, as I was playing poorly and
was not winning; Ed told me sternly he would cease to be a coach to me if did
that again. Also on one occasion on Court One I served as a ballboy for none
other than Jack Kramer, playing an exhibition (I imagine he was about 50 or
so). For a racket I had a Wilson Tony Trabert, then a Wilson Pro Staff; I
remember the best in the 12-and-unders in Hawaii were Reid Fukumoto and Jay
Gerhard, then a big dropoff; I liked to think I was the best of the rest, but I
didn’t play quite enough tournaments to get ranked.
For dining we often went to Coco’s restaurant—rated just a step up from
Denny’s and the like but for Dad it had good broiled fish as well as wine on the menu. Other times we ate takeout ‘plate lunches’, which were very good—Filipino,
Chinese, Japanese, with a bit of Hawaiian thrown in including of course poi, a sort of equivalent to hummus or mashed potatoes but made from taro root—despite being prepared at
these funky, roadside take-out establishments there are everywhere in
Hawaii. At the weekends we frequently went to Hanauma Bay for
snorkeling, or Sandy Beach, Makapuu Point for body-surfing; sometimes we drove
up the relatively cool windward side to Kaaawa, Punaluu, and Kahuku; or to the
warmer west side—to Nanakuli, Makaha, and Waianae. Names.
V. Tucson, Miller Lake, Manoa Valley
In summer 1972 Dad sent me to Tucson for some six weeks, to the house of my paternal grandmother Ruth. She had lost her husband but was still accompanied by her mother Gommy, and had moved to a slightly less grand house in the Tucson National estate, a luxury retirement paradise with the somewhat prestigious golf course of the Tucson National Golf Club interwoven with the streets and houses. I loved being there, taking full advantage in every way of being spoiled. Ruth tried to get me to call her ‘Gammy’—to go with ‘Gommy’ I suppose—but I felt the name was somehow distasteful (I imagine these were the names used by her other grandchild, my cousin Jeffry who I met once, the straitlaced son of my father’s half-brother Jerry—Jerry was biologically a Kemp but my father, and hence me, only nominally so; and I'm told that the father was actually a Kempf, until the anti-Germanism of 1914 persuaded him to change it to Kemp, which can be passed off as English). The housing estate was very quiet and had some bicycle paths, completely unused as far as I could see, that ran through the undeveloped areas and across the fairways. She had hired a bicycle for me and a sort of tricycle for herself, but she never used the tricycle—indeed it seemed a little far-fetched that she would—and I myself never used the bicycle, preferring the tricycle as an interesting change from my normal cycling ways. She had located a tennis pro—named Gary—and paid for several lessons, always in the morning as that was the only tolerable time temperature-wise. I spent a lot of time perfecting my overhead and changing my footwork on the forehand side; the rest of the day was typically spent at the swimming pool, on shopping expeditions in Ruth’s giant car, or at home, playing Spite and Malice with Ruth and her friends, drinking Coke, eating sandwiches and cookies. Or reading. The particular reading matter I had brought with me caused something of a stir: it was The Happy Hooker, a detailed ‘autobiography’ by one Xaviera Hollander. When Ruth discovered it in my room, she asked ‘And what is it about the book that interests you?’; you can imagine my stammering in reply. But she didn’t take it away from me, much as she would have liked to. Later in the visit, Carly Simon was on TV in that extraordinary maroon dress, singing ‘That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be’. Ruth was not as enthusiastic as I was.
We took a road trip, Ruth and myself, plus a friend of hers, who with great ceremony donned special driving gloves when it was her turn to
drive. We went north, staying at nice American motels, each with a
swimming pool and a Denny’s or equivalent for food. We saw Monument Valley, the
Grand Canyon, Sedona, the Navajo, Hopi and Apache lands with real Indians who
would congregate in front of some dilapidated shop or gas station. They
seemed beyond the possibility of approach and even scary to me, familiar with
them as I was only through Hollywood westerns. Ruth awkwardly gave a boy
a quarter for 'watching her car', well-meant but evidently not quite realizing the
humiliating and thoroughgoing insult that that implied, I came to realize, but the boy took it in
stride; after all twenty-five cents is twenty-five cents. We took a pointless detour
to a completely factitious place known as “Four Corners National Monument”,
which is just a spot on the map where four states meet—New Mexico, Colorado,
Utah and Arizona. Only in America could such a place be a tourist
attraction. Perhaps there was some note of cultural, political or even military triumph in the willful
imposition of these artificial and regular lines on the Wild West.
I formed friendships with a slightly older boy named Lee, and his
younger sister Lori, the grandchildren of some friend of Ruth’s. We
played on their trampoline in their backyard, and Lee was impressed by my ability to make a
saliva gland spray outwards a distance of some several feet. ‘I must say,
that’s pretty good’, he exclaimed, much to my gratification. I sampled with them
a bit of the real Tucson—that was at that very time producing Linda Ronstadt no
less—seeing stock car racing at some racetrack, a half-mile dirt-packed oval. The
chap called Marion Smiley won every race; naturally by the end we were joining
with the crowd in cheering him on. Fascism in miniature, and in its
innocence.
It was perhaps the same summer that Dad took me to the town of Puerto Penasco, at the northern end of the Gulf of California. It was a long drive through the southern part of Arizona—barren, uninhabited and indeed unhospitable—through a small sleepy little town called Ajo ('Garlic'), through an almost comically small and rickety border-crossing, into Mexico. Easy to imagine there a scene from some Sergio Leone movie. Puerto Penasco itself was very quiet and no tourist town, at least not then; it was mostly fishing I suppose. Standing the beach, we could see offshore Manta-Rays leaping out of the water as they do, a sign of fish I supposed. We rented a perfectly adequate, modern-ish room, with a noisy but effective air-conditioner. Food was splendid—a lot of shrimp and swordfish as I remember—even if inevitably I got a mild form of the curse of Montezuma, which thankfully lasted only a few hours. We spent most of the time at the beach, which had some canvas shelters for escaping the sun with one serving as a bar and minimal taqueria. I made friends with some local boy, and aside from swimming and drinking Coke we traded names of things; I would point to something and say its name in English—'cement!' for example—and he would say 'cemento!.
In the same summer I joined Kip for two weeks in attendance at Camp
Miller Lake, a ‘Y-camp’—a camp operated by the YMCA in Eugene. Miller Lake is not near Eugene but in the southern part of the state, not far
from the famous Crater Lake. It was indeed a classic American-style
summer camp. We played football, softball and frisbee, took part in treasure
hunts, slept in a tent, had various shenanigans in the lake, and sat round a big campfire
hearing ghost stories and singing songs, including—proving that some
stereotypes really exist—‘Kumbaya’. We had a not un-strenuous backpacking
expedition of a few days duration. It was optional; it was mostly fitter
boys, and just a few girls. A group of maybe twenty of us went first to
Hollack Mountain, where we camped and went in for glissading down the
still-snowy slopes; then over the shoulder, but not quite ascending to the top of
the fearsome Mt. Theilssen—to ascend to the top would have required ropes and pitons, obviously too dangerous for summer campers of a tender age—then down to civilisation’s outpost, the gas
station and café at Diamond Lake, where Kip and I tore into hamburgers, as along
with rest of our party we waited for the vans which would take us back to
Miller Lake. Sleeping up there was easy as everyone was so tired; eating
was not as successful as it was mostly freeze-dried casseroles and the like,
too ghastly for words (each of us had to carry some). We learned suitable
poetry for kids on long hikes: ‘A hundred bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred
bottles of beer; we take one down and pass it around, ninety-nine bottles of
beer on the wall. Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles
of beer …’, and so on. We gave up in the eighties. A man we took to be a wise counselor
counselled us on the ways of berries: Blue berries are always safe to eat; red
berries sometimes; white berries never.
For year three in Hawaii we moved to a sweet little house on Lowry Street, back in Manoa Valley. I was becoming more self-conscious, and began to feel that there was something wrong with me. I was often unhappy, spending too much time alone, and the tennis club at Diamond Head now was too far away for me to go there after school. Evidently there was something wrong with me for the last two years in Eugene, but it was at this later time that I became more reflective, sufficiently self-conscious to form the thought ‘I’m unhappy’. In fact the memory of a certain occasion when that thought afflicted me is so vivid it seems like yesterday: in the carport in front of the house, mid-afternoon, no-one around. The neighborhood was very quiet, and it was, as often, raining, a nice recipe for melancholia I suppose. I began to puzzle over certain questions, including crude but baffling questions about what later I would know as freedom of the will (it wouldn’t make any difference to me, or to anyone practically speaking, if everything were determined, since the illusion of ‘choice’ would go on as it had before, I think was my conclusion; que sera, sera). Somehow also at this time I became aware that my usual shyness, and indeed my sense of inferiority, was interpreted by others as arrogance.
The property had a papaya tree, a guava tree, and giant mango tree. It was heaven for Dad as those are approximately the fruits of his adolescence, though indifferent for me except now in retrospect. But I liked the large lawn in the back and the high fence all round it. And for a time I would crawl under the house and make lakes and streams out of the dirt, with a garden hose supplying the water; the attraction of it is a mystery to me now, especially with the dirt being perfect for the cat Suzy to use for defecation (in my mind’s nose, I can still smell it). I spent a lot of time on my bicycle, especially going back and forth to the Institute of Astrophysics where Dad had his office, or to the disused area nearby where I would imagine I was on official patrol, looking out for bandits and the like, chasing them through the thickets of trees, racing over mounds of detritus and jumping over puddles. I made toy spacecrafts out of pens, tape, paint and vacuum tubes; I acquired APBA football on cards, presumably on mail order; I was into football statistics as well as baseball and basketball boxscores which I pored over in the newspaper. I drove Dad to distraction in the evenings, playing ‘basketball’ inside with a tennis ball, dribbling it, doing moves off an imaginary opponent, passing and receiving passes by bouncing it off the wall, and of course shooting it, the space between the curtain rod and the wall being the basket. Indeed basketball—playing at school and in an extramural league—largely took the place of daily tennis in this third year in Honolulu.
Honolulu is a sprawling city—at this time it comprised some 750,000 people, about the population that San Francisco was then, but not nearly as compact—a mixture of big downtown city-scapes, a major port, various military bases including the famous Pearl Harbor at the western end, ethnic neighborhoods, the large tourist area of Waikiki, and seedy areas. There were a lot of sailors there, hence needful of being serviced—virtual slums, posher quarters on the rises above the city, a very swish beachfront enclave known as ‘Hawaii Kai’ just on the other side of Diamond Head from Waikiki—mostly Haole of course, along with the mysterious residences behind tall fences of oligarchs or royalty from Indonesia, Malaysia or Thailand—and pockets of suburban middle-class bliss such as Manoa. There was magnificent ornate palace built during the Victorian age for I believe Queen Liliokuani, when Hawaii was not yet a state of the union. At the end of Manoa Valley, beyond which the sharp, high peaks of the Koolau range catch all the passing clouds, there was something called ‘Paradise Park’, comprising a large system of interconnected aviaries—with the biggest being several stories in height—featuring tropical birds from all over the world. I wish I retained some names of these birds in my memory but the enduring impression was the sheer audaciousness of the appearance of many of these birds, as if they were being made by their masters to wear this absurd garb to compete for some silly prize. Stronger is the memory of the various fish I got to know when snorkeling, sometimes in Waikiki but especially at Hanauma Bay as mentioned, maybe ten miles to the east of Diamond Head, close to Koko Head. The bay is about a square mile’s extent, protected on three sides by cliffs, with coral, rock and sand arranged just so, to support an amazing variety of sea life. On the occasions when my dad would drive us there, while he snoozed on the beach, I would spend hours ogling the Parrotfish, the Needlefish, and the Lauwiliwili nukunuku oi’oi’—and indeed the ‘Humuhumu-nukunuku-opua’a went swimming by’ as per the song by Don Ho. There were Moray Eels too, and people had said that despite their fearsome appearance and size they are harmless unless you disturb one in its lair, sticking your fingers in its face. But I thought it just as well that I never came across one.
Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School, where I attended Seventh Grade, was just outside Manoa Valley, in the Punchbowl district I think it’s called. We had a good science teacher, youngish and Japanese. Like Jefferson it was a pretty rough school at the time but it had some moments—especially friendship with Stuart Ho, during which we formed a team which reveled in the power of two, as we say, excluding our activities from a willing third boy, a Filipino; ‘Go away, we do not want you!’, we sang; it was the height of gratuitous, petty, boyish meanness (but neither Stuart nor I was conspicuously mean, at least not that either of us thought; we were mean to the Filipino because the opportunity to do so was so rare). Most of the kids snacked on dried fruit that came in little plastic packets, with Japanese writing—the shops always displayed the many kinds prominently. But I didn’t go for it, I thought it too sweet.
All the boys including me played ‘Trumps’—not as in Donald J. Trump but a
simplified version of bridge (some features: you bid only a number, not a suit,
and he who wins the bidding declares trumps; as I remember there are no partners or dummies
but always four players). Pencil fights also were popular, where you take
turns holding your pencil between your two fists, with your opponent having a
strike at it with his pencil, either trying artfully to chip at it
using the metal hasp that holds the eraser, but with eraser removed and the
hasp altered to function as a hatchet, or simply trying to knock through it with
one blow. Also popular was a game where you set up ten baseball,
basketball or football cards on the skirting, and your opponent tries to win
the cards by knocking them down, flinging cards at them from a distance of
about twelve feet; ten shots, then it’s your turn. The girls played a game
with knitting needles that involved a nonsense poem and a certain ritual with
the needles (the needles would be prohibited nowadays). We were obliged
one afternoon to go to what was for Stu and I our first ‘Disco’, at the nearby
high school; I remember Roberta Flack’s magical ‘Killing Me Softly’ being
played, while we from the Middle School all stood around largely terrified,
with rough older boys and bare midriffed girls sauntering by.
One day AJ Mundt and I, plus a friend whose name I’ve forgotten, were swimming in the large outdoor pool at a local park, when a vast and mean-spirited splash-fight broke out. Afterward, about twenty-five kids followed us home—Manoa itself was a peaceful area, middle class as mentioned—when a somewhat older leader said he wanted to apologize, came up to me, and said ‘sorry’ as he sucker-punched me in the stomach. Although it was painful, I felt pride that I had offended him to such an extent. It meant I must have won—that is, must have been perceived as a leader of the winning side in the splashfight. Dad was the victim of another act of violence: He got into an argument with some big tie-wearing cigar-chewing Haole, over something about a car which Dad had rented from him; Dad called him a son-of-a-bitch, to which the cigar-chewer responded with an overhand right, knocking Dad to the floor.
We (Dad, the three boys—AJ, the same friend and I) took a trip to Haleakala, Maui, a strange lunar landscape in the inner caldera of the mountain 10,000 feet up that dominates the island, with touches of snow, featuring the Silversword plant as the only living thing for vast areas. It looks more like an animal, perhaps a giant silver sea-urchin, with just a hint of green. One wants to know how it evolved, what the survival value is of having such an unusual appearance. We explored the caldera on horseback, with a cowboyesque guide. Also we visited Hana, the ‘Seven Sacred Pools’; not worth the three hour drive on a winding road required to reach it, we thought. Another time we explored the island of Kauai by rental car (travel between islands is always by airplane). We visited Waimea Canyon, Hawaii’s answer to the Grand Canyon, and hiked along the Na Pali coast, a roadless region with pristine beaches, cliffs above, with some caves inhabited by hippies. This was other worldly and magical. Off to the south and west we glimpsed the mysterious island of Niihau—private, closed to visitors.
I still very much liked the Beatles (although I knew of the breakup). Simon and Garfunkel
too. For what I think was my first taste of professional, live music, I witnessed, with Dad, Bill Withers opening for Bill Cosby—the comic of course, not a musician—at
‘H.I.C.’, the Honolulu International Center. The former was new to me and
I liked him immediately— ‘Use Me’, ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, ‘Lean on Me’ (which I thought was
‘Lead on Me’, I thought it was about how in friendships one person tends to be the leader). I knew Bill Cosby not from television—that was later—but
from recordings of his stand-up routines, performing for example the hilarious
‘Noah’, an ordinary man who could not believe what this voice claiming to be God was telling him to do; ‘umm
… right…’ he’d say in his inimitable voice. Dad also took me
to some other concert hall to see Vladmir Ashenazy; first real taste of serious music; I was
not impressed. Dad sometimes played chess with me, spotting me his Queen
and a rook. He’d say ‘Awk!’ when I made a good move.
The University’s basketball team, the Rainbows, were fun to watch. They played a fast-breaking style with Rod Aldridge, Jerome Freeman, Melvin Werts, and Tom Henderson, an All-American. I watched the Los Angeles Lakers on TV with Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West having that transcendent season; and the ’72 Olympics in Munich: The US Basketball team—all college players, which was the way of the times—were defeated by one point by the USSR, because at the end the obviously conspiring referees saw to it, granting the Soviets three tries with three seconds left on the game clock until finally Alexandar Belov scored (‘The game ended, and we won. Then it ended again, and we won again; and then ...’, the Rainbows star Tom Henderson is reputed to have said in the aftermath). Dave Wottle had his great moment in his baseball cap, going from last to first in the last 300 meters of the 800, the epitome of the 'kick'; Olga Korbut did impossible things on the uneven bars. I became aware of Israel, Yassir Arafat, the PLO and Palestine, but mostly the terrorism was an annoyance to me, getting in the way of the Olympics.
We had a sequence of housemates who cared for me and for the house,
living rent-free in exchange for their labour: again Sandra (hippie, didn’t
like her as before); Sidney (loved her); Doug (distant). My first
‘girlfriend’ was Crystal Pangalinan, met in summer 1972 on a trip to Eugene, at
an Emeralds baseball game (it began not with banter or a sip of Coke but with
her sitting below me and untying my shoelaces, me kicking her in response); I
guess she was half Filipino (or Indonesian, or perhaps Malay). I think it
was on this trip to Eugene, coming back in a car from an evening fishing on the
McKenzie, when Kip very impressively issued a rhetorically charged lecture to
my dad on how it was absolutely insupportable to be living in Hawaii, that he
must without question or delay return to Eugene (his motive was
transparent). ‘You’d better ...’ was phrase he’d use, the intonation just
so. Dad was silenced, or rather saw no advantage in not allowing the kid
to have his little speech. I was thinking that Kip had learned well this
style of arguing, or rather lecturing, from his own dad—and had a prescient
sense that such performances never have their intended effect (except when the
speaker is in fact a feared dad, the listener a dutiful son, so the outcome is
preordained).
It is difficult to describe a certain otherworldly sequence of incidents that occurred around this time. I’m certain that it happened several further times over these few years, but only twice that I can distinctly remember. It happened once in
1972 on a visit to the big observatory situated at the summit of
fourteen-thousand foot Mauna Kea—on the ‘Big Island’, i.e. the island of
Hawaii—and the next year in our apartment on Kincaid Street, Eugene. On
Mauna Kea—site of a major international research facility, with several large
telescopes at the top, at 14,000 feet—I remember walking around the dormitory in the middle of the night,
not asleep of course but not exactly awake either. One would say I was
sleepwalking but I remember it vividly (the altitude may have played a role,
medically speaking: the dormitory was at nine-thousand feet). Then the
other time, when I was sitting on my bed peering across my darkened room, to the
other side, which seemed impossibly far away (but was in fact eight feet), as if I were looking across the vastness of space at far away galaxies. There was
something that it seemed I absolutely must do, something of a scale appropriate
to the yawning abyss before me, but it seemed impossible to carry out this
unnameable but vital task. Then I became aware that somehow the task had been done. I don’t know why I
think of these things as in some way the same phenomenon. A felt affinity.
VI. Back in Eugene: Kip’s Family, Basketball, Robin & Grant, Heidi
We returned to live in Eugene in Summer 1973. Along the way I
attended a tennis camp for three weeks—a ‘Tennis America’ sponsored camp with
the great Billie Jean King the nominal figurehead—in the early part of that
summer in Montana, just across the panhandle of Idaho near the town of
Libby. It was run by the diminutive but athletic Herb Neils, military
friend of Ed Krysa in Honolulu and owner of the ranch-like place with its eight
or so tennis courts, at which he’d spend the summer after wintering in
Honolulu. A USTA-sanctioned tennis tournament took place there and then; I couldn't get past the semifinals, beaten by the third-seeded player. But otherwise it was a good time, with just the right mixture of tennis and hanging out as kids on the cusp of teenagehood, and discovering among other musical delights 'So Far Away' by Carole King. Most memorable was a kiss from the delectable fellow
tennis-camper Serena Chao. Later that summer my Dad took me and Serena to the swishy Benson Hotel in Portland; the young couple were too
tongue tied to take it further, whatever taking it further would have meant at
age twelve. I remember enjoying the Lobster Thermidore.
Re-acclimatisation to life in Eugene was relatively seamless, but not without the odd hitch here and there. It must have been early evening before sundown, in August, when Kip and I were at some party-ish atmosphere with my dad in south Eugene. I was outside on the street with Kip, 'boxing'—doing the Ali-shuffle, combinations, imagining I was one bad dude. A litter of kittens were all around, sweet and curious, sniffing everything, and randomly pouncing on imaginary prey in the way that they do. Suddenly a car went racing by, which we thought nothing of, but then we could hear an odd, wet, flip-flopping noise. There, on the street, was a most remarkable, most hideous sight: the noise was produced by the carcass of a freshly run-over kitten, its motor nerves still active even if the relevant parts of its brain, at least we hoped, were not; flip was its head hitting the pavement, flop was its lower portions. Flip, flop, flip, flop. Then another car went by, and another kitten was squashed, this time more completely. No flip-flopping. We'd remember this for a long while—sometimes, when together at quiet moments, one of us would interject, out of the blue: 'flip, flop, flip, flop'.
I attended
eighth and ninth grade at Roosevelt Junior High, my Dad having rented an
apartment on Kincaid Street for the first year, then one on Harris Street, part
of a house, for the second. Dad’s mother Ruth visited us on Kincaid Street,
flying in from Tucson. It was strange and even unsettling seeing her outside
of her normal opulent surroundings where everything was organized to a T, and everything was squeaky clean and
polished; we didn’t even have proper glasses or cutlery and the like, and we had nowhere
genuinely comfortable for her to sit, certainly not for a lady accustomed to
American luxury.
Sarah van Riper came into our lives at this time; the great manic episode happened then but I’ll take up story of Sarah later. I saw some of the dear, sweet Dorothy Hayes. We knew her from before our going to Hawaii, where she visited us; I liked her very much but my dad didn’t really go for her. I admired her son Roger, a semi-hippie, perhaps eighteen or twenty; and I spent time with her niece Jennifer, who I remember lying with on the large sofa, resting her head on my stomach, and who expressed surprise that I hadn’t “screwed a girl” (what did that mean, I wondered). Dorothy introduced me to the wonderful sport and pastime of cross-country skiing; later I went many times with Laurence and Sue.
Speaking of which, it was Laurence, I believe, who would intiate the following conversation:
‘Hey, you got snoo on you!.
‘Huh? What’s snoo?’
‘Oh not much; what’s new with you?’
So stupid, so perfect. It was very much a Laurence kind of joke. The Giant Mouse, my father
called him.
My friendship with Kip went on as before. We had bicycle trips to Collins Cycle Shop—mostly just to ogle the latest exotic bikes and parts from Italy—to Eugene Toy and Hobby, especially for the sake of our burgeoning model train set-up—to the streets of downtown, the central parts of which the city fathers had pedestrianized with mixed success—and on the bike paths along the Willamette River. One day after school we sampled Dad’s beer (the brand was Raineer Ale; didn’t like it but it was memorable because it was the first experience we had had of drinking beer), and we were both enamored of John Denver (‘Rocky Mountain High’, ‘Country Roads’). It was the time when Muhammad Ali made his comeback from being barred from fighting due to his refusal to serve in Vietnam; Kip and I like most kids were in no doubt that Ali was in the right and were flummoxed by his narrow defeat to Joe Frazier (though eventually he won the title most sensationally from George Foreman).
We constructed the aforementioned model train thing in the Jones’ attic. It was Ho-scale, with buildings, trees, and cars. The hills we made of plaster, the buildings mostly from kits, and we painted the streets etc. In the Jones’s basement we’d play ping-pong and a miniature hockey game we made up, the sticks with wooden handles and metal shafts that we’d constructed in metal shop. The latter was not a great success. More successful was a game I created with the help of a Xerox machine, an elaborate baseball game played with a 14-sided die in addition to the normal six-sided dice, with complicated statistics involving each player—a card for each player from the San Francisco Giants, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the New York Yankees. Each game took about twenty minutes to play (a real baseball game takes two hours or so). At the height of it, I made several issues of a one-page ‘Sports Section’ like the ones in the newspapers, complete with standings and statistics. Once Kip took the game home and played a game pitting the Phillies—his favourite team—against, I think, the Yankees; the score was 22-0 for the Phillies—he would not admit his infamy, both of which, the crime and the cover-up, were quite uncharacteristic of him. Kip and I also made up a pretty good whiffle-like baseball game, one-on-one in the Jones’ backyard—you’d pitch, the strike zone determined by a piece of wood placed roughly where the catcher would be, a target; if the batter put the ball in play he’d run to first, and the pitcher would try to collect the ball and throw out the batter by hitting a piece of plywood placed next to first (and of course you’d be out if the pitcher caught a fly ball); the imaginary baserunners would advance automatically, one base for a single, two for a double, etc. The ball was not actually a whiffle ball—it was slightly heavier plastic, without holes; the yard was completely enclosed, perfect for the game; if you hit the ball out of the yard, that of course would be a home run. We’d play for hours.
Kip’s mother Helen was rather eccentric and maybe she was rather brilliant. She kept house and raised her four children (Gwyneth, Elene,
Rick and Kip, the baby of the family), but stood defiantly apart from typical
Oregonians—she smoked little cigarillos, did not attend the hairdresser but
wore it on her shoulders, managing with hairpins, always an old dress or skirt
and never trousers and with a wrap in winter, boots, and just a tiny amount of
make-up. She played piano, spoke French, and was a stage actress of some local
renown (I saw her act once, transfixing as the lead in Mother
Courage). She kept a special room for herself, jam-packed with
mysterious, old and dusty objects, often difficult to name but also
including an old but still active sewing machine and a dressmaker's mannequin. I wish I’d
opened up to her more, learned from her more. Once I was arguing with Kip
with Helen present, and I wanted Kip to admit the role of instinct (he the
rationalist, me the naturalist), and tried to make him flinch by making as if
to hit him, except I did hit him, by mistake of course but the
moment was heated. She reacted by saying ‘Oh god’, and leaving the room, as no
such thing had ever happened in her home and she had to think about it. In the end this put me in her doghouse for
a little while and I didn’t like it. Kip’s father Ellis was tall, dark and
distinguished-looking, the chief engineer of the local Highway Department. He
was distant, reading books in his leather chair and smoking cigars, without
friends by choice, but laughed reassuringly and occasionally made good jokes,
delivered in his deep, cigar-influenced bass voice. On one occasion he
and my dad played chess (Ellis was a fan and passed it on to Kip; it was the
time of Bobby Fischer). I don’t remember the outcome but it was a carefully watched
encounter as you can imagine. Jim committed a faux pas—he tried to
violate the touch-move rule, touching one of his pieces while it was his turn but not
moving it. Ellis called him out. Kip and I played a lot of chess, at this time; normally he would beat me.
I think this was just before Robin returned to the Bay Area. She was distant to me but a reliable sister nonetheless, and very much an independent spirit as we say; she rather than others chose each step of her path, or so it seemed. She was forced to be free, as the saying goes. I didn’t see lot of her at this time, but once Robin and I, and two of her male friends, were in a car, driven by one of the friends; the other guy—perhaps one of these was her boyfriend—began to smoke some hash. Ever the thoughtful sister, Robin asked ‘We’re smoking hash; is that okay with you, Gary?’. I didn’t know what hashish was—it is effectively just a concentrated form of marijuana—and imagined something extreme. Meanwhile the driver gunned the car down the hills of southern Charnelton Street, with the car almost going airborne as it went over the cross-streets, like the scene from Bullitt. My first sight of drugs, combined with automotive danger! Somehow I liked it despite its making me nervous. Perhaps the initial stirrings of teenage-hood played a role.
Over these years, through boyish inattention, I had three bicycles stolen from me. First, an unmemorable 3-speed in 1972 in Hawaii. Second, a fully-tricked out and rather expensive brand new red stingray in 1969, a theft which exasperated Dad when it was kyped from our garage (I had ‘locked’ it but only to a flimsy piece of wood that was attached to the wall of the garage, and furthermore you could see the bike from the street, so shiny and tempting); a pissed-off Dad drove with me, up and down the alleys of the neighborhood searching for it whilst berating me, of course to no avail, neither the searching nor the berating. Third, later that year, my dad’s Schwinn 3-speed was stolen when I was in possession of it (but I stole it back when, completely adventitiously, I bespied it on campus, unlocked). Upon returning to Eugene in 1973 my father forked out yet again, this time for a ten-speed, a Dotson (local brand similar to a Peugeot: Simplex, Mafac etc.).
I had some good times with Laurence and Sue. Often in winter they took me cross-country skiing as mentioned, to the point of my getting my own skis, a pair of mountain skis midway in width between narrow cross-country skis and wide downhill skis, with cable-bindings, good for skiing up mountains: when you reached the top you would tuck the cables in and the skis behaved passably like downhill skis. Grant re-emerged, now with long dark brown hair tied back in a ponytail. “Grunt!” I cried when I came home on Harris Street to find him sitting on the couch. I don’t know why I called him by that less-than-flattering appellation. He worked for a time at Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream on Villard Street, where he perfected the art of tossing scoops of ice cream from the scoop into the air and catching them on a waffle-cone, including the case when the cone already had a scoop or even two scoops of ice cream on it. I was very impressed.
When we were still in Hawaii, the election that happened in 1972 made a vivid impression: Nixon was re-elected over the surprisingly intellectual and wildly leftish—for an American politician—but beloved by people like us George McGovern (I remember hearing earlier that year the Democratic convention on the radio, as we made our way in the afternoon on the interminable freeways through the summertime smog of Los Angeles, the sun a giant orange orb). Then in 1973 back in Eugene, the Watergate scandal made an equally vivid impression—the names etched into my skull through constant repetition in dramatic circumstances, as the news was on TV constantly at our house and at Kip’s: John Dean, Charles Colson, Howard Hunt, Bob Haldeman, John Erlichman, Archibald Cox, Sam Ervine.
In February that year was the 'big freeze',
the temperature remaining below freezing for weeks, clear skies, and Kip and me—along with
many others—having great fun on the vast ice sheet which formed over the gravel of the Autzen
Stadium parking lot. Music meanwhile was Elton John, The Carpenters, Carole King, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Wings.
Dad married Sarah in 1974 and we moved to Harris Street as mentioned. Gretchen, Sarah's daughter about three years older than me, lived in a seperate studio just up the stairs, with the cat Maya, who would figure in my life later. The already-immortal distance runner Steve Prefontaine (‘Pre’) crashed his car returning from a post-meet celebratory party at the Alvarado’s house high above the city, on Skyline Boulevard (I knew Jeff Alvarado from school); later I learned that when it happened, Mr. Alvarado the elder had heard the nearby smash, and ran down the street, only to find Pre trapped helplessly beneath his sports car; he could not shift the car in time to save him from suffocating. Horrible. I heard about his death if not the details—I've since heard from Bob Penny that the fault was not Pre's but the driver of another car, which got away—on the radio when getting up at five a.m. for two-a-days with the Roosevelt 9th grade basketball team. Gary Crabaugh was the enchanting, handsome, cowboy-boot wearing, hard-assed country-boy of a coach; ‘How do you do?’, he merrily half-sang when a woman from the school office spoke to him through the school intercom (maybe it was not exactly innocent; later he got into serious trouble for having a sexual relationship with a fourteen year-old student). He remained a fantastic player himself though only five feet ten inches, in good shape but a diabetic (we believed him when he said could take certain well-known NBA players one-on-one, such as Jo Jo White of the Celtics). Crabaugh ran us into the ground. Almost always I was out in front running ‘lines’ but one day I quit—then un-quit a moment later (as punishmment: ten lines!). The basketball itself was good and the learning-curve for everyone steep, except frustratingly I had Cass Jackson, a legit star, playing ahead of me, so naturally playing time was limited, and since we didn’t have any really tall players I had to play center, which I didn’t like, was better at forward (I exacted some mean-spirited revenge some years later in a pick-up game, when I was a much better player and Cass was not quite fully-recovered from a knee injury). My high was five points and a memorably blocked shot, on some star from North Eugene called Niko, Greg Niko I think. I met Sam Freeman who was on the team and had just moved to Eugene from South Carolina; good times with him in ‘73 and ‘74 and later (still the best defensive player that I ever played against) but he stole money from me, and I knew that if I fought him he’d win; humiliation but Sam would despite this prove to be a good friend over the years (in fact, in mitigation, he was two years older than me). Other teammates I remember well were Bob Stephenson, Ed Allen, John Shorack, and again Tim Kays; Ed was a favourite of everyone and nowadays I keep in touch with him.
The 1970s, I believe, was the peak period for ordinary broadcast television in America. ABC, NBC, CBS were the corporate triumvirate and PBS the less-watched but excellent publicly-funded alternative. The big three watched each other closely, one of the results being that the news programs—though of course careful not to be anything but middle-of-road politically—were extremely well-researched and comparatively reliable, with each trying to avoid both factual errors and getting scooped by their rivals, whilst also trying to scoop their rivals. Not only was it the time when the Electric Company and Sesame Street made their debuts on PBS, something about changing social attitudes made shows possible on commercial networks that were more challenging, exploratory and imaginative than at other periods, less controlled by the money men, by corporate interests, and with only small amounts of gratuitous eye-candy. Perhaps this was influenced by the power of Big Labour, where heroes were often working class, not the wanna-be or pretend rich. Programs were not afraid to show the ugliness of America. It was the time of gritty cop shows like Baretta, Kojak, Columbo, Mod Squad, Adam 12 and The Streets of San Francisco, but also of situation comedies such as All in the Family (centering on Archie Bunker, a lovable bigot, lovable partly because he somehow made one aware of the preposterousness of his positions, helped by some insanely funny moments, much like Basil Fawlty and the Germans); Welcome Back Kotter (a ragtag assortment of New York characters—black, Puerto Rican, Italian— thrown together in a remedial high school class including a young John Travolta who was enormously funny and charmingly self-deprecating); Room 222 (a lot of good role models, including the main character, a handsome black teacher); MASH (implicit criticism of the Vietnam War except the story took place in the Korean war—Alan Alda delivering scintillating one-liners non-stop); Hogan's Heroes with the ineffectual Colonel Klink and the bumbling private Schultz (who famously, in response to his charges' plans to escape, thought it best not to know, and would say 'I know nothing!'); Mary Tyler Moore Show (subtly feminist—this single female making her way); The Odd Couple (with the perfectly cast Tony Randall and Jack Klugman), Sanford and Son (loosely based on Steptoe and Son, but the characters were inner-city Blacks, with Redd Foxx), One Day at a Time (single mom and her two teenage-daughters getting up to some tricks, only one daughter in any sense a looker); and the unforgettable beginning episodes of Saturday Night Live (with the hyper-talented, manic John Belushi, Gilda Radner with her beloved creations—Rosanne Rossanna Dannah among them—Chevy Chase, Jane Curtain, Garret Morris, Larraine Newman and Dan Akroyd—doing such skits as the Killer Bees, with guest hosts of the likes of George Carlin, Steve Martin, and Eddie Murphy).
In 1974 Heidi Frye came on my scene, displacing Lisa Weese. Lisa was perfectly nice, middle class with long blonde hair, but we had nothing to talk about. Heidi
was tall and strawberry blond cut page boy style, a precocious sex bomb, mildly witty, talkative and insubordinate, and significantly troubled—her formidable parents were divorcing, the mother a judge and the father the Lane
County District Attorney—and she dropped out in 1976 or 1977. After a half
year as my girlfriend she became frustrated because I was too scared to ‘go all
the way’ (verily, I had a case of being S.O.P.); this hurt me, and she took up
with some rough denizens of the auto-shop wing of South Eugene High School, got
pregnant, married some Vietnam veteran with a drinking problem, and has since been afflicted with various troubles in her life. I retain some good memories with her—at Roosevelt, our walking
proudly down the halls together arm-in-arm and sharing a locker; her singing in
the A Cappella group ‘The Chantals’; her bedroom, her pet turtle, her looking
on as I hopped the fence at the Amazon Recreation Center to swim in the public
pool on a summer night; a wonderful trip to the coast with her father and his
lady-friend Laurie. But a pungent memory is the phone call when she
said ‘I want to end our relationship’ (I can still hear it; such are the things
etched in our minds, bigger than we know).
Roosevelt junior high was a gas, and academically absolutely first-rate,
even though few of us were aware of this. It had the best shop facilities
– wood, plastic and metal – music to die for – two jazz bands plus classical
ensembles including vocal groups as mentioned – and the teachers of subjects
such as mathematics or history could fashion their courses pretty much as they
liked, as in the case of 'Thimk', which was entirely about logic puzzles – all of which turned
out all to the good both socially and pedagogically, but naturally one did not
really perceive this, not having anything with which to compare them. I remember some of the teachers' names: Farrell Mizer, Dick
Himes, the aforementioned Gary Crabaugh, and Ray Scofield, Aaron Kaufman, and Mittie Daniels. I was not
notably academic. I was torn between hanging around with Kip, versus hanging with Lisa
and then Heidi, with members of the basketball team, and with the vague promise of ascending higher in the social
hierarchy, whatever that was.
VII. Tom and Tom, David, the Ducks, the
Campus, my High School Teachers
We moved to Elinor Street in summer of 1975, to a modern house on a hill toward the south of town, purchased largely with Sarah’s money I assume. It was very near the Pioneer Cemetery, which with its crumbling mausoleum, and majestic fir trees on a hilltop, stirred my imagination as I walked its overgrown paths to school, throwing rocks at the tombstones, imagining I was in some sort of competition. Once on the way home from school on a drab grey day I came upon, and was spooked, by what seemed to be a funeral from the 1800s. Everyone was dressed in black, with a coffin perched on a mound next to a freshly dug grave. Perhaps it was only a film set. I got into running at this time, at first running around the cemetery and the streets, and later using ‘Pre’s Trail’, the glorious bespoke running paths made of wood-chips that wound through the deciduous trees in the semi-wild Alton Baker Park, just north across the river. The habit of running never left me until my 40’s.
Gradually I saw less and less of Kip. I suppose my interests were changing, probably for the worse (away from studious things, chess, and the complicated games we devised, and towards girls, beer, and things that in my estimation were thought cool). I made the acquaintance of Steve Pacheco, who still is close to me. He’s a tall, handsome gentleman now, but he was a scrawny little jokester then, indeed a class-clown you could say. His mother Barbara was Italian—Sicilian—and his father Manuel was Mexican, but born in San Jose I think, when it was mostly fruit orchards. They were divorced. Steve played soccer and did philosophy and biology at UO after being obliged to spend his high school years in Sacramento, and now teaches philosophy in San Diego and lives in Ensenada, Mexico, with his Spanish or rather Catalan wife, Merixtell, a research psychologist who among other things does unspeakable things with mice. More on Steve later.
I met Tom Hynes in ninth grade, and remained friends with him until after high school. An extremely intelligent, devout Roman Catholic almost in the old style, he was determined from early on to make it as a jazz guitarist. There had already been two seriously good guitarists at South Eugene High School who have since made it in the jazz world—Richard Smith and Mike Denny—and Tom made it three. Also around this time there was Frank Griffith (tenor sax), his younger sister Jennifer Griffith (voice and composition), Matt Cooper (piano), John Bishop (drums)—all these made it as professional musicians or academics in music, that is in jazz. Tom and I came together not through the guitar—I would take up the instrument some years later—but through tennis (the coach insisted on Tom and I being the number one doubles team, which didn’t suit either of us; we lost continually to teams the members of which we’d each crush individually in singles (in the doubles matches, the proportion of close attention to the game and that required actually to hit the ball was too much for me; my mind would wander). His adoptive father Joe taught English at the University of Oregon (I had one class from him; I still have the essay I wrote for him, on Women in Love). Tom is now married to Hope, a musician herself, Hispanic and Catholic; he is an instructor at a college in LA, and has built up a reputation as a guitarist, guitar teacher, a teacher of small ensembles and stage bands and so on. In his 20's, he played in the Disneyland orchestra, not as a guitarist, but as a player of the banjo. This I cannot help but tease him about.
Another Tom was Tom Reid, the second Tom but first of the Reids I met at this time. Later I hung out with his younger brother David, then later still it was the
sister Laurie the artist (they had two more siblings, John—retarded—and the
comparatively straight-laced Amy who I never really knew). Tom at the
time was famously neat, tidy, scrupulously well-dressed, carefully mendacious and stingy; he had great wit
and was in on many pranks (he was memorably referred to by a friend named Corey
as a ‘slippery eel’). But never did I have any but the utmost trust in
Tom in a deeper sense. David had a more serious penchant for crime (and
drugs too, marijuana of course, and psychedelics of various description but
also opiates which everyone else knew to stay away from). Later, I was
arrested late one night for having a suspended driver’s license by a cop in Springfield, who
pulled me over for having tail-light that was out-of-order; the reason that my
license was suspended turned out later to be that David had told the cops, on a
previous occasion, that his name was ‘Gary Kemp’, when he was pulled over in his
pickup, and his license had already been suspended. My
first and only experience of jail ensued, if only a for few hours as my
girlfriend Martha Anderson’s mother came down to bail me out. Laurie
would figure still later, when I was in my 20’s. Dick, the father, was Catholic
and still lives; Carolyn, the mother, died in about 2012.
It was in fact rather rare for me to be in Springfield. It lay entirely on the other side, the east side, of Interstate 5, and, with good reason, generally to be avoided. It was generally poor, about half the population of Eugene, entirely white—with a sizeable percentage mixed-in of 'white trash'—shaped long and skinny, built around approximately six miles of the west-east running US 126. It would have been the way one would be obliged to go en route to the McKenzie River and Santiam Pass, but the wise city fathers saw that that would not do, and built Interstate 105 as a fast detour skirting the north, enabling the more genteel people as well as trucks etc. to avoid Springfield. In the center of that fair city is the gigantic Weyerhauser plant, makers of various products from trees, and also maker of a prodigious rotten-eggs style odor that permeated all for miles around. Springfield was a sort of counterweight, a reminder to Eugeneans that all in America was not culturally or politically as it may have seemed.
As I write this, at the intersection of Fifteenth and Agate Streets—just across from Condon School and our old house on Seventeenth Street—thanks to the ample financial support of Phil Knight, head honcho of Nike, a fantastic, futuristic stadium is being completed, which will be dedicated entirely to the sport of Track and Field. It will be the ‘New Hayward Field’. The Old Hayward Field, which had been there since the 1920s, comprised two large wooden grandstands—the East Stand and the West Stand—each with a roof, plus bleachers at the two ends. It was a magical place, and many consider its tearing-down to be an unforgivable act of desecration (I sympathize but I believe the new thing will be wondrous to behold). Until 1967, the Ducks played their football there, wherupon they moved to Autzen Stadium across the river, and Hayward Field became track-only (the decaying West Stand was replaced in 1971). Track is not a big sport in the United States like football, basketball or baseball, but is at its biggest in Eugene, ‘Tracktown USA’ it fancies itself. The University of Oregon teams—the men as well as the women—always challenge for their respective NCAA national titles, and at this period, at least in the men's case, sometimes drew crowds approaching 10,000. Apart from the UO track team, Hayward Field has various prestigious meets throughout the summer, and it is the site, most times, of the United States Olympic Trials, at which athletes compete for places in the US Olympic teams every four years. At such times the place is absolutely packed, the fans enthusiastic and knowledgeable. They know the fabulous history of track at Oregon—the legendary coaches Bill Bowerman and Bill Dellinger, and world-class athletes including—among the ones I knew—Rudy Chapa, Joaquim Cruz, Bill McChesney, Don Clary, Alberto Salazar, Matt Centrowitz Sr., Mac Wilkins, and the transcendent one, Steve Prefontaine. The crowd’s rhythmic clapping during distance races I’m sure helped them to do their best. Once, in 1978 at the UO versus Washington State dual meet, I saw the great Kenyan Henry Rono, who was positively laughing his way over the jumps in the rain as he was feeling so good and in such incredible shape, and would have broken the world record in the steeplechase, but his coach did not want him to grant that honour to Hayward Field, so got him to slow down for the last lap. He came in at about 8:10 (the world record at the time was 8:08.1); a few weeks later he set the mark at 8:05.4 (along with world marks in the 5000 meters and the 10,000 meters—over an unbelievable stretch of two weeks). But many world records were indeed set at Hayward—at the Olympic Trials, or at the international meets held later in the summers (The Twilight Meet, the Bowerman Classic). You can’t believe the scene at Hayward, the sun going down in late summer, thousands of people united in urging the distance runners to give their all. Once in perhaps 1980 I saw a young Carl Lewis, talkative and smiling, looking not unlike a horse from the waist down. Often Tom Reid or Steve Pacheco attended; I think both were with me when I saw Steve Smith in a furious battle with the great Jamaican Don Quarry in the 200 meters; he beat him, clocking 19.7, which would have been the record but the wind was just above the legal limit.
The Oregon Ducks basketball team was a near religion at this time and included me as a disciple. Home was McArthur Court, or as we knew it ‘Mac Court’, an old building by West Coast standards that was covered with vines—though not with twelve little girls in two straight lines—that somehow seated 10,500, and was always sold out with incredibly raucous fans, the hip rally band, cheerleaders whose style was modeled on the local Strip Club. Not to mention the ‘Lone Ranger’, who always sat near the floor in the Northwest corner, always it seemed intoxicated although I'm sure he played that up, and during a time out would always do a little dance in the corner of the floor as if he were riding a horse, as the band played the William Tell Overture, the crowd egging him on and clapping. The ‘Kamikaze Kids’ coached by Dick Harter were at their best in ’73-’74, with Stu Jackson, Greg Ballard, Gerald Willet, Ernie Kent and the incomparable Ronnie Lee the starting five. Ballard would go on to a long and solid NBA career; Lee’s NBA career was shorter but he led the league in steals one year, no small achievement; Jackson was perhaps the most talented of them but had a significant injury which put an end to his playing career at Oregon at the beginning of the ’74-’75 season when he was a junior (but went on to a good career as a coach and player representative in the NBA). Coach Harter made them hustle like nobody’s business, and they upset the NCAA’s number one team, the John Wooden-coached, Bill Walton featuring UCLA Bruins, once, and reached number seven in the rankings. The atmosphere was electric, being known as ‘The Pit’ as it was so unbelievably loud, and was always sold-out, and the fans so close the action. I didn’t have tickets for them and anyway they were always on television on late-night replay, yet I did see a few games in person nonetheless. To get in to see the games, I would go in to Mac Court on the afternoon before the evening’s game—it was always open during the day for P.E. classes and pick-up games—and would hide in the upper balcony until paying customers began to arrive. Jack Inglis snuck in by the alternative and more challenging means of climbing up the vertiginous ivy-covered walls on the outside, scooting through an open window, high up. Another time, I took part in a mass break-in at Mac Court: about eight of us—Tom Reid was among our party—all overran an entrance door at once, and safely inside, scattered.
More generally, the wonderful campus of the University of Oregon often figures in these memories, with its stately brick buildings, walkways, trees and gardens, laid out just so. With breaks while we were living in Hawaii or when I was in the Bay Area, I passed through it continually from the age of seven or eight until the day I left Eugene at age twenty-six, getting to know it in every detail: Mac Court, the athletic department and Gerlinger Annex for playing basketball figured prominently in my life—at least one of the three was always open (until nine o'clock)—as did the tennis courts and the covered tennis courts, the latter designed by Otto Poticha, father of my elementary schoolmate Shelly (which kept the rain out, but unfortunately created bad shadows on the courts in the mornings or late afternoon); the beautiful library, the exquisite art museum with its tranquil inner courtyard and a fountain featuring an Indian maid cast in bronze; the vast science complex, its hallways all interconnected so that you never had to go outside even if your destination was a quarter mile away; some statues of the past, including the ‘Pioneer Mother’, sewing something on her lap in a quiet area; Deady Hall, a fine building from 1877 which one reads was the first building of the campus, now the place of Mathematics; the more modern art department, an eclectic building of odd spaces and angular windows, easy to get lost in but perfect for artists. Most important for me was the giant Erb Memorial Building, the ‘Erb’ it was known as, home of the Student Union and various clubs including the Black Student Union, the Native American Student Union and so on. It was situated most conveniently between my father’s office and the tennis courts and the athletic department. In the earlier times, often with Kip, I would visit the Erb, either to have lunch—often I would order a hamburger, eaten either in the large dining room or, weather permitting, in the enclosed patio, with a bronze sculpture and fountain—or, later, to seek out some nook upstairs for studying, or to go downstairs to the recreation centre, to play Asteroids, shoot pool, or once in a while even to bowl. Later I would go alone, or with Steve Pacheco, or sometimes with a girlfriend (once I was canoodling with Martha Anderson in the ‘Fishbowl’, a big eating establishment, and suddenly there appeared the face of Larry—a guy I knew from the basketball courts—three feet away and singing ‘Love Birds’, evidently pleased as punch that he’d caught me in that position).
Later I saw Allan Holdsworth and then Ornette Coleman at the upstairs stage; Holdsworth I had heard and was unsurprised not to find a lot in his music; Coleman’s music on the other hand was new to me, and instantly transfixing. He had the guitarist Bern Nix, two bassists and two busy drummers.
I often had the house on Elinor Street to myself, when Jim and Sarah
were at the observatory. So naturally I had to take the chance, at least
once, to throw a party. A big party. Tom Reid and I went in for
some extraordinary amount of alcohol—jugs of rum, vodka and gin, a keg of
beer—plus mixers, ice, and plastic cups. We set up the kitchen as a sort
of bar, set up the keg downstairs, and put everything not tied down into a
bedroom. By ten o’clock the joint was jumpin’, with well over a hundred
‘guests’. And at perhaps one dollar per drink—maybe it was two—we made a
lot of money. Strangely the cops did not come, even though it went far
into the night in a quiet neighborhood, was all underage, and some rough boys got into a noisy scrape
in the street in front of the house. Nothing was stolen except of course
the money—by the end I was very drunk and did not take care of it, but I
figured it was easy come, easy go. The next morning, hungover, I had to
face the reality of beer sopped carpets, mountains of used cups and worse, and
marks on the walls, etc. I don’t how I managed to clean it up sufficiently so
that Sarah did not notice anything upon her return. Tom, Brenda Marbes, and
Terry Sprague stayed over the night of the party. I remember watching Tom’s
eyeballs as he slept late on a couch, strange in their weird REM pulsations.
Tom and Terry split when they woke up; a sleepy Brenda commented on how she
liked the tuna fish sandwich I made for her; I sneered at her (because she was
attractive), but had a strangely pleasing sense of domestic accomplishment.
As a junior I traded my Dotson—a local approximation of a Peugeot—for
a genuine Peugeot (this is not to be sniffed at; bicycles were very important to us, not least
the brands). I graduated from South Eugene in June 1978, earning one Advanced Placement in European History (these are courses that count
at universities for credit), but stupidly didn’t take calculus in 12th grade
because I didn’t have to (South Eugene, so enlightened, didn’t have
distribution requirements, and you could take whatever classes you liked so
long as your parents agreed, which in my case was easily arranged by forgery).
I still played a fair amount of tennis although never as intensely or regularly
as in Hawaii. I was improving in basketball, though I didn’t ‘go out’ for
the school team after my sophomore year, as I didn’t like organized team sports
and was lazy. It’s funny how the teachers and coaches all
thought I was a stoner; that didn’t begin until the summer immediately after
graduation. I was just depressed, quiet, unkempt (as Chris Mithen liked
to point out for all in earshot: ‘Ha ha! Unkempt!’). Indeed in what I
think was my Junior year, my dad, after having heard someone throwing up outside
the night before, took me aside and asked me severely ‘What drugs you been
taking?’; I don’t think my protestations of innocence cut much ice with him but
they were true. Anyway after Dad married Sarah he seldom showed signs of interest
in me; he busied himself with work, I had become a more difficult phenomenon as
a teenager, and he might have thought for day to day stuff I would count on the
services of Sarah.
For the sake of his first professional job after graduation from UO, Laurence, along with Sue, was living in the aforementioned Roseburg, a small city of perhaps 40,000 mostly redneck people, some seventy-five miles south of Eugene. A big sawmill wanted to take the plunge into computers—this was before the advent of the PC—and Laurence was their man. I got the idea of visiting them on my bicycle, as there is in addition to the normal route on Interstate 5 of say 75 miles, a quiet, secluded route you can take which branches off from Cottage Grove, runs alongside Dorena Reservoir, then goes over some hills and down to Roseburg. Perfect for a one-day trip. But at the top of a long hill my gear cluster came apart, exploded you might say. I managed to piece it back together in a ramshackle sort of way—and then as I descended into Roseburg, rain began to pour down, and railroad tracks suddenly appeared, cutting across the now busy road at an angle, and too late for appreciably slowing down. So thwack, my bicycle slipped out from under me, and my hip hit the pavement, seemingly as hard as it could without breaking. Luckily no cars ran me over, but then again no one stopped to see that I was all right. Next day my hip was black and blue but nothing was broken.
This was one of the last times I spent any serious amount of time with Laurence. Later we met over Dad’s deathbed 1988, and when I visited him with my family in Seattle in about 1993—he moved to a job at Hewlett-Packard in about 1981, and broke with Sue sometime after that—and when he visited me and my family in Scotland in roughly 2002. I have nothing but good memories of him, of his enthusiasm and intelligence (although by no means was he an intellectual). I never stopped looking up to him since the times when he used to come from Berkeley for visits to our house on Orchard Street when I was four and five. I did wonder why Laurence always downplayed his being half-Chinese. I never heard him utter a word of Cantonese, a language he was sure to have heard as his mother was fluent, and when his mother’s parents were around (most Bay Area Chinese immigrants were from Hong Kong and other Cantonese-speaking parts of China, I believe).
I have never been one for making speeches, and especially not speeches animated by anger. Indeed I almost never feel angry, at most just exasperation with myself—it would come out for example when I was having a bad day playing tennis. In argument it is the same: I may show anger, but it is almost always self-directed, irritated that I can’t formulate a point properly or clearly, or the run of events having shown me to lack organization, intelligence, or foresight. In order to really feel angry, one has to feel justified, and I’m too full of doubts for that. Genuine episodes of anger, or indeed of self-exasperation, more often than not rob me of coherence, of the ability to say what I mean, or even to mean anything definite. Yet one day, at this time, downstairs in the Elinor Street house, I had a singularly beautiful episode of righteous lucidity, berating my Dad. I remember mostly the manner of it and not so much the subject matter except that it involved a lack of respect for Dad's work, but the wonderful after-effect of calm and well-being struck me almost violently. Of course, needless to say, it did not have a transformative effect, or indeed any effect.
My interest in music was still essentially in pop music but it was broadening; now it was the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Hubert Laws, Ronnie Laws, Weather Report, Marvin Gaye, Don MacLean, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind and Fire, The Brothers Johnson, The Isley Brothers, The Commodores, The O’Jays, The Ohio Players, Chic, Rose Royce, the Blackbyrds, Carole King, Billy Joel, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, Jackson Browne, the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Tower of Power.
Tower of Power (a wonderful racially mixed band with a powerful horn section, that are from Oakland, but I never saw them live):
You got to know what it means,
When a man comes to you,
With his little heart in his hands,
Just to love you …. Oh baby…
(chorus singing sweetly)
You’re still a young man, baby….
VIII. My Mother and My Stepmother
In 1977 I received a telephone call from Mom—‘Samantha’, or ‘Maxine’—after eight or nine years of silence. It was very awkward as by this time her voice was not exactly familiar to me. I had a sense that I was nowhere near being myself when talking to her, of not knowing what to say or what was expected of me. I went to visit her in ‘77 or ‘78, and I will grant her some vestige of credit, she did drive up with Mia to witness my graduation in June of ‘78. She was living in an apartment on Lincoln Avenue in Alameda with her husband Dean, who managed the apartments and sold vacuum cleaners (as I remember). I drove down to visit her a further few times; first time was alone, second time in ‘78 or ’79, with Shannon Williams, then in’79 and ‘80 with Lynne Seabloom. My formative years were spent not thinking of her, and indeed I had long grown accustomed not to think of her. She never explained the silence of eight or nine years, and I had no idea how to begin such a conversation, nor how generally to behave towards her. And I was not curious. I certainly did not want to analyse her or grasp her justifications, and could not do so even if I wanted to. Nor did I feel warm to her, or resentful either. To tell the truth I felt nothing, and merely waited for our visits to be over. I had only a few indifferent memories of her—not memories of warmth especially, and none tinged with longing—and eight or nine years is an eternity to one so young.
She drank a lot. Dean was a more conspicuous alcoholic but still I liked
him—a loudmouth sales agent out of a 50’s movie who drove a baby
blue Volkswagen Beetle, with absurd aggression, shaking his fist and
beeping his horn. He was in his way an elegant man, well-dressed, with some pretensions to literature, very good looking with a fine voice and accent, and could dance. Once he took
me for lunch to the North Beach Restaurant, that Italian paradise (in very Italian way, the dish that stood out was merely sliced tomatoes, with basil, in olive oil and vinegar). For her part my mother was self-dramatic and selfish, and once sat me down and told
me mysteriously that I didn’t know ‘how to love a woman’;
another time, that she ‘didn’t like’ Shannon Williams; another time that Dean
was impotent (too much information as one says but I went along with the
conversation; ‘Oh, ah … really? .. hmm’.). Later, in 1991 when her mother
died—the great Mia, about more anon—and left Maxine nothing, I told her, in a
fit of guilt, compassion, or charity, I’d give her $40k, in yearly $10k chunks
for tax-purposes, out of what Mia had left me ($174k); after the first chunk I
reneged on this; I rationalized it on the grounds that I needed the money much
more than her since I was a struggling father of two whereas she was a selfish
drunk, that it was a moment of irrationality and weakness when I agreed to pay
her, and more generally that Mia had left her nothing for the good reason that
she did not deserve anything. After a couple of drunken phone calls from her
followed by ones from her apologetic lawyer, I ceased to have anything to do
with her from 1992 on. She died in about 2007 from complications due to a
fall, alcohol-addicted. Robin has some better memories of her and I know this is not a disinterested account.
In 1973 Sarah was coming out of her marriage to John Cook, the
philosopher, heir of the John Deere family (of caterpillar fame, that is of
tractors, not bugs) and by more than one account a fundamentally bad egg (I got to know
him later in Santa Barbara; more below). She had had three
children, Carol, Aaron and Gretchen: all intelligent and all blonde. Gretchen was perhaps two years older than me and still lived at home; she was
for many years a connoisseur of drugs and less than reputable guys, but got it
together to have a good career as a journalist, working for National Public Radio in Washington
D.C. Carol was the oldest and I didn’t see much of her; she became a
Professor of English Literature at Cornell. Aaron I saw more of. He
was certainly not a hippie, and not inconsistently with possible resentment
towards his father, sought out a right-wing anti-intellectual life—he was a
‘Hoe-dad’ (a tree planter), drove a pickup and had a rifle—but also smoked weed
and had longhaired friends. I liked him very much (I picked up from his
listening habits the Allman Brothers, the Band, and Stevie Wonder). He
had a big rambunctious Doberman named ‘Bruno’, of whom my cat Maya was terrified,
which of course egged on Bruno. Whenever Maya had an encounter with the
dog, she’d disappear in some closet for hours, and then would—still in her
hiding place—meekly meow in her deep voice as if to ask ‘Is he really
gone?’.
Sarah had a some very good qualities to be sure: intelligent, good cook, and good looking (I think sexually Jim and Sarah got on well, at least for the first few years). She was in many ways a dead ringer Doris Day—intelligent but with a defiantly American accent, blonde and attractive but not too much. But the marriage to Cook had taken its toll, as by all accounts he was a real bastard. On Jim and Sarah’s honeymoon in 1974, and in the week preceding it, she had her first manic episode. At a party of her friends, a sort a pre-honeymoon celebration or reception, she whooped and hollered, telling dirty jokes; not at all the demure bridge-playing lady we knew from Grinnell, Iowa. When they returned from Hawaii, where they had had their unfortunate honeymoon, she was put on lithium. Afterwards she became embittered, depressed, and like my mother, an alcoholic; her looks began to fade. There were some happy moments: afternoon chats with her, her enthusiasm for the word-game Perquacky, learning from her about orchids, and the care of houseplants in general, listening with her to NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’—at its best then with Susan Stamberg, Bob Edwards, Cokie Roberts—their bridge evenings hosting the Wanniers (Gregory, a Swiss physicist who almost won a Nobel Prize, and his refined wife Carol), sometimes with dinner; her cooking (scalloped potatoes and ham, roast beef, and a Mexican dish—rice with Monterey Jack cheese, sour cream and chopped jalapenos, a dish I learned from her and still make from time to time). She was nice to me for the first couple of years, but grew distant from me and occasionally angry as I was selfish, secretive, and behaved as teenagers do. She needed a not inconsiderable amount of support to cope with manic depression and the effects of the lithium. She quickly learned that Jim was not to be relied on for such attention—that he was absorbed entirely with his work, and would not support her as she needed; I don’t think he ever did stuff like go shopping for groceries (except en route to Pine Mountain) let alone orchids or clothes with her. She became lonely, and more and more unhappy. Later in the 1980s, he was lacking in fidelity, and they had some big fight – perhaps it was a manic episode but maybe it was just that she was at the end of her rope – and consequently he moved out briefly in 1986 or 1987. Sarah on the whole is very much to pitied, and would be a great case for man-haters to cite as a representative martyr. My dad was not equipped to be in anything but a relationship where the wife acts as a self-effacing, adoring slave and willing concubine. I think he did have some glimpses of a more balanced relationship—once or twice he spoke wistfully of some Scandinavian or German woman, a physicist naturally. After Dad died in 1988, Sarah remained in Eugene. In the summer of 1991 I visited her with Patricia and our two babies but she was not happy. She moved up to Seattle in the mid-1990s to live near or with Aaron, who had made a life for himself with a woman named Cassie. Sarah died in about 2004.
IIX. Antics with Sam Freeman, Tom, David Fish; Shannon Williams; Joni
Mitchell
My first job was at a carwash, in roughly June 1978 (when Carwash was a big hit movie, with an accompanying eponymous song by Rose Royce, a couple of black girls stopped me when I was working, and sang to great giggling and snapping of fingers, “Workin’ at the carwash …This ain’t the place to be, if you plan on being a star”). At this time I lived downstairs in the house on Elinor Street, which was for all practical purposes a separate apartment. It had been occupied earlier by Aaron, then Gretchen and her boyfriend. I was joined there for some months by a guy named Jerry, a virtual orphan, from Hermiston (hick town on the Columbia River); strangely religious, studious, reasonable tennis-player and owner of a hopped-up, 360 cubic inch V8 equipped, yellow with black racing-stripes Dodge Dart (which I borrowed occasionally, and once very drunk, in the rain and darkness, went wildly at 120 miles per hour on Interstate 105). We had some obstreperous times together, including the occasion when we flung unwanted LPs high in the sky and down the hill, towards the Pacheco’s house, not registering that these were potentially lethal weapons. After a month or so I got fired from the carwash, having made an enemy of the cashier when I came inside for a screwdriver to help a lady-customer at the gas pump (‘He just came in here like he owns the place’, sneered the cashier; I surmised that was really going on is that, more generally, my habitual supercilious demeanor was not to be borne). Next I lived for a spell with Jerry in an apartment on lower Willamette street, where I met the boy Boogie, a completely unsupervised, wild, monkey-like four year old with blond curly locks, whose single mother was none other than the genius jazz-vocalist Nancy King, at this time holed up in her apartment, perhaps strung out and apparently not gigging. We did not twig that Nancy was at the very top of jazz singers, which was not generally recognized as she has one weakness, which was a lack of sheer power (think of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, or Anita O'Day). The pool there was nice, and loved by Boogie for peeing in (it was hard not to love him all the same). We had lower Willamette on display outside our front window, which meant on Friday and Saturday nights 'The Gut' came into being—as in those scenes in American Grafitti, the street came to be jammed with cars, many of them hot-rods, full of teenagers, 'dragging the Gut', going from 26th street down to 30th, back to 26th, repeated ad infinitum. No hippies to be seen. Memorable music at this time was George Benson, Weekend in LA, a live set.
My next job was working at Lipman’s Department store as a night janitor (much stealing I confess, it was so easy), then at the YACC/BLM—the Young Adult Conservation Corps, and the Bureau of Land Management—in the fall (now living with Bill Friday and his gay lover Franz) to January 1979. Desperate, I tried kissing homosexual man; it didn’t work for me. The YACC crew featured Gary Mercer, a tall black guy who lived with his sister, and another black guy called Michael; we hung out together, often disappearing to relax and smoke weed when the rest of our YACC crew was cutting brush. A funny memory involving Gary was seeing him perplexed when his sister entrusted him to clean the front room, for she knew that the vacuum cleaner had stopped working; but wait a minute—from the closet, he fished out a rake! Perfect for the shag carpet! Gary plunged in with vehemence to the raking, with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. It would have been great if I had had a video camera.
I was then selected for a solo assignment, to work with a boss in the BLM, Lance Sentman—a funny, quietly subversive gentleman. Some days I was allowed to take a BLM rig by myself to a region of the coast range to check on certain trees, as part of a large-scale project for fine-tuning the development of strains of Douglas Fir, Spruce and Cedar (but not the ubiquitous Hemlock, which was considered a weed); a great opportunity for getting stoned and driving around aimlessly on the deserted back roads of the coast range. Once I drove all the way out to Florence, by the sea.
Bill Friday was a most interesting specimen—about twenty years my senior, a fine cartoonist, artist and potter, not bad as a tennis player and better as table-tennis player, and cynical, cantankerous and very funny. He was a fire lookout for the Forest Service, and was a car mechanic and race car driver when younger. Easy to individuate by Russellian means. But after having some sort of bust-up with him I was back to living at Elinor Street in January 1979 (or maybe November, or December 1978). I had some good times with Tom Reid, Anthony Brown, and Sam Freeman. Tom lived in a suburban house on the other side of College Hill with Anthony; they threw great parties which were enhanced immeasurably by Anthony’s Bose 901 speakers and Phase Linear amplifiers (Rose Royce, The O’Jays, Chic, The Ohio Players, Parliament, the Blackbyrds were his favourites); since both of them were scrupulously tidy, a policy they enforced on others, the house remained relatively unsullied by the many party-goers. Next door lived the NCAA-champion wrestler Leonard, who despite the wrestling regimen had parties it seemed almost every night, no doubt encouraged in this by the many chicks that would parade by. Anthony used to talk to girls on the phone, putting his case that they had no reason not to come over and kiss him, but unlike Leonard he was deeply religious and family oriented as many black people from the South were, and well as chaste and sober, certainly not indulgent of weed. Anthony was a fine runner, running the sprints as SEHS, perhaps 9.5 in the hundred yards.
On several occasions that summer our little posse comprising Sam, Tom, and I, walked brazenly into the crowded pool area of the Valley River Inn, charging food to some random room and having horseplay in the water. Great fun. Another time we (Tom, Sam, I think Terry Sprague, and I) were dining at El Sombrero, a solid honest place on 11th street, whereupon we ‘dined and dashed’—literally dashing, as seldom did four boys move as fast as we, laughing uproariously as we made our day down the back alleys (Sam and I less uproariously pulled the same stunt more than once at the relatively sedate JC Penney cafeteria at Valley River Center, a big shopping mall—until we were caught, identified by the license plate number as we drove away, stupidly drawing attention to ourselves by honking the horn; fortunately they were satisfied by my sheepishly paying the bill a few days later). My conscience was not entirely clear over these minor heists especially the one at El Sombrero, but I carried on as before, including an occasion when I walked boldly out of a shop with an expensive tennis racket under my arm, which I exchanged at another shop for my preferred model, a Head Competition II.
Also at this time—from 1975 until 1979—I spent a lot of time with David Fish. He was easily South Eugene High’s number one singles player, ranked fourth in the Pacific Northwest, 18 and under. I could never beat him, as he was so fiercely competitive and was surprisingly good at the net despite being no more than five foot six inches in height; I was alternately second, third or fourth in the singles ranking on the team but played a lot of doubles as described above. Dave won the District singles title in an epic match, three sets over Leo Young of Elmira, a very talented player though insufferable as a person. Afterwards Dave was tortured by an attack of cramps in the back seat of my car; a bottle of Coke proved an effective remedy (the sugar I suppose). He was planning to follow his father’s career as a doctor, smoked a lot of weed, and was a fantastic rock and folk guitar player. A funny, passionate, and very compact guy. I didn’t see him much after as he moved to Seattle to go to the University of Washington. His family were Jewish of course but not particularly religious; many Jews I knew in Eugene were that way. Indeed the fact that so many of my friends were Jewish never registered.
I pieced together another bike with a black second-hand Colnago frame
(wangled not altogether honestly from Collins Cycle Shop), largely out of
top-flight stolen parts acquired piece by piece, and sold it to great profit.
It was a not-so-minor heist, but it was gradually executed, I can say either in
mitigation or further damnation. The minorest of heists is remembered
for the accompanying verbal exchange: After purloining a sandwich from a little
grocery store at 24th and Hilyard, I triumphantly and impishly
announced to Steve Pacheco ‘I’ve got a sandwich in my pants’, which Steve heard
as ‘I’ve got a salmon in my pants’. Laughter.
Not knowing what else to do, I enrolled part-time at UO for one quarter, the Spring quarter 1979. I took two courses. To make up for my foolishly not studying it in high school, one of these was calculus. But not attending until the third week, it was impenetrable to me and after two weeks I stopping going—a gap which was not remedied, insofar as it was remedied, until much later, as a graduate student (when I finally saw for myself what my father insisted on, that calculus is actually easier, in the sense of being more intuitive, than say trigonometry). The other course was a philosophy class on the History of Ethics, which had little effect on me at the time but I remember the professor Bill Davie’s misty-eyed lectures on the ‘Folkways’ of William Graham Sumner, which no one understood but one was impressed by the conviction of Davie’s delivery. I got a D for the first essay, but for the second I got an A, and remember saying to Sarah that I liked doing the essay because you had to argue for what you said, you can’t just say it and reference it in the manner of a stenographer. In the early spring of 1979 I worked on a three month fixed-term deal at the highway department (a job arranged for me by Ellis Jones, father of Kip; one day he quite rightly called me in to dress me down for lacking enthusiasm); then the Eugene Country Club as a busboy to summer 1979, fired again, this time for insubordination. The Highway department job introduced me to Curly the stoner with his beautiful Israeli girlfriend; and the Country Club job to Jack the bartender, who had been in a band impersonating Jim Morrison. I then worked as a painter with David Reid (he never paid me but at least I learned a lot), then for Dad at the observatory (this arrangement was to be repeated for some years—a partial payment for his supporting me in college; more below).
I was fast
becoming experienced drug-wise: weed, hash, cocaine, crystal meth, LSD,
mescaline, and various kinds of mushrooms. A memorable acid trip involved
driving up to the Cascades on a sunny day in winter, with Garry Mayer and Dave Brantley—Dave
was on the UO basketball team, making a trip which was multiply in violation of
team rules no doubt—and we skied up and down some mountain on cross-country
skis, the sun shining and me for no reason carrying on as if I were Mick
Jagger, hilariously I thought.
I met Shannon Williams that summer (intelligent, pretty, rich); we
laughed together, smoked weed, and on several occasions swam in Fall Creek with Dave Reid and
Lynne Seabloom. We made each other happy for a time. We took a
trip down to my mother’s in the Bay Area—the apartment in Alameda—me sleeping
in my mother’s living room while Shannon was made to sleep in another, vacant
apartment. Robin was also renting a flat there, and along with her boyfriend—Tom
was his name, I think—the four of us hung out, with Robin and I having what was
probably our first time together as more-or-less equals. Despite
Shannon’s denials I maintain it was she who turned me on to Joni Mitchell—Court
and Spark the album. I remember vividly Shannon and I returning
from Pine Mountain observatory on one of those endless summer afternoons, to
nap in the empty house on Elinor Street; and Shannon on my sofa later that evening, happily grooving on bong hits and rockin’ to the Rolling Stones’
‘Shattered’; and of the hot tub at her house, in the summer rain complete with
thunder and lightning. But for no discernible reason except that I was
vaguely dissatisfied, restless, I left Shannon in September. She moved down to LA, to begin as a freshman at Pizter College.
One of the highlights of my life as a musical spectator, at least when viewed retrospectively, was on a trip to the Bay Area with Lynne, seeing and hearing Joni Mitchell with her ‘Shadows and Light’ band at the San Francisco Civic Center, in September 1979. She had Michael Brecker, Jaco Pastorius, Don Alias, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays in her band; all unbelievable, and Joni was an unapproachable goddess-like figure with her long hair in curls, never more so than when she played the hauntingly beautiful ‘Amelia’, to be joined at the end by Metheny’s stunning guitar solo, which segued into an arrangement, featuring Alias’ congas and Joni’s guitar, of the austere and extraordinarily dark lament of ‘Hejira’. Wisely a recording was made the same week in Santa Barbara, of the same sequence. It was on the same trip, I believe, that Lynne—Lynne for whom my mother expressed enthusiasm due to her blonde curls and her acting the doll when it was required—and I hung out happily on the beach with her longhaired cousin in Capitola, a sleepy town south of Santa Cruz. Here was a taste of the endless summer about which the Beach Boys sang so sweetly.
Then it was back to school in the Fall quarter of 1979, followed by my
moving to a place just off 18th street, with David Reid and his
delightful German Shepherd named Shasta, in perhaps October. David, despite his
marginally criminal activities, had many wonderful qualities; very much the
outsider and not without intellectual interests even if this failed to
translate into a professional life let alone into academia, and with good though unusual looks (Mick Jagger
would not be far off the mark for a comparison). We had many superb
days playing chess, or swimming in the McKenzie (and Shasta had a habit that
I believe was unusual for a dog: once in while she went awol, 'on a walkabout',
and after a day or so would always show up at the Reid house, or at the Elinor Street house
of Dad and Sarah, if not at David’s place—it meant that she knew how safely to
get to locations all around the city; and never once did I see her on a lead, in
fact it would make a ludicrous sight, like having your grandfather on a
lead). It was a nice apartment but with two still-teenage boys living
there the arrangement could not last.
IX. The Guitar, Patty, and the Stage Left Crowd
I met Martha Anderson in February 1980, and I confess mostly out of sheer loneliness plus the excitement of her being new to me, I moved in with her in an apartment on 15th and Walnut Street in April. It worked for a while but it emerged that we didn't have a lot to say to each other, and had different tastes in music and so on (she liked Cat Stevens—which now in retrospect was all right, but for some reason I thought him too square then—and Queen, who I never could abide). She did have a guitar and with her encouragement I took up the instrument (I retain a soft spot for the book by Mickey Baker, a very useful jazz guitar book that I worked through at this time), and listened to Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, and Joe Pass. I was taking too much drugs, but getting along okay school-wise.
Over the previous couple of years, I had developed a friendship with the two shopkeepers at Napier Audio near Valley River Center, Craig and Lee, who doubled as connoisseurs as well as small-time dealers of various kinds of drugs. Craig was a big man, ex-basketball player—he could easily take me one-on-one, as he was all too pleased to do on his backyard hoop when we played a couple times—and was sweet and generous to me, none more so than at his home, dealing out bong hits and ice cream while we listened to his top of the line stereo, while his demure wife stayed strangely in the background. Lee lived near Craig, was also tall but not athletic, slim with long curly blonde hair—a dead ringer for some rock star—with a pretty and voluble wife, a veritable chatterbox. He was funny and liked to wax poetic on his latest experiences on mescaline or MDMA. I would show up at the shop as they closed it down for the day, and would listen to combinations of turntables, amps and speakers, as Lee and Craig went about their business, and eventually, taking advantage of the dealer's prices given to me by Craig, settled on a set-up which I still have. Alas, children came to both couples, hence they were obliged to rein in their drug intake, and had less leisure for the likes of me.
After some
months I met Patty Freeman, for whom I split up somewhat brazenly with Martha—poor Martha, especially it was through her that I met Patty, the time
the die was cast being when Patty and Jennifer Griffith decided they would give
me a haircut. Memories include having a good laugh with Patty when walking down
13th Street, as she was so short and I was so tall; of walking and swimming with each other
on a very hot day on Fall Creek, with Patty embarrassing me while flattering me
all the same by commenting for all to hear on my behind. She cooked,
studied French literature, played the violin and listened to Billie
Holiday. Her parents played in an amateur string quartet; they were Jewish but not
notably religious. At first she was working at Lenny’s Nosh Bar,
then at Poppi’s Greek Taverna—the latter introduced me to Eli, Daphne and Alexi
Petrohilos, and their mother Poppi; all very sweet and creative people. That summer we used often to go to the Autzen Stadium footbridge, which spanned an
area of rapids on the Willamette River, where you’d sunbathe on the adjacent
rocks and would intermittently dive in, as the river was deep despite the
rapids; it slowed a little further down, where you’d climb out. Some
brave souls jumped in from the bridge, a plunge from a height of perhaps
twenty-five feet. I think this was part of the magic of Eugene: a very left-wing population, a high-grade university, just big enough to have a snippet of city life, but a completely wild river going right down the middle of it.
I worked further at my father’s observatory, perhaps three or four stints of a week or so, charged with pointing the 32” telescope at SS433, adjusting the tracking (it always drifts a little), and turning on the photometer; but mostly the data collected itself, and the job was mostly monitoring the equipment. I had a bad LSD trip (the total number of LSD trips overall was about fifteen) that caused Patty to be late for work as she had to stay with me—no small thing as she was working at Lenny’s Nosh Bar, with Lenny being a generous but severe Jewish man who was not to be crossed; then a good LSD trip that featured my playing basketball and laughingly dunking at the UO gym; no one suspected, except perhaps an acquaintance who was mentioned earlier named Larry, who was there most days and who would look at me, look down, smile and shake his head. Larry. I would like to know what became of him.
Another psychedelic trip, this time on mushrooms, took place two miles up a trail off the old McKenzie highway at Linton lake. David Fish, Patty and I were perhaps the highest we’d ever been, with Patty in particular completely gone—later it emerged that she could not remember any of it, repeating over and over as if it were a mysterious rune, We’re all going to die; I’ll bleed—me thinking the forest was on fire, the sky full of strange birds. Lucky for us and for them too, no one else was at the lake. I split with Patty in August. I don’t know why; she was intelligent, just counterculture enough and very pretty. Perhaps a pattern begins to be discernible, Patty pointed out as I walked out the door.
I then shifted, or drifted, from one set of friends to another: roughly, from a sporty set to an artistic set, with Martha and Patty forming the conduit. I had met John Denning (through Martha), and moved in with him next to Prince Puckler’s Ice Cream (at 19th and Agate), in August or September 1980. I took Maya (Burmese) and Suzy (Siamese) from the house on Elinor Street, as Sarah was only too pleased bid adieu to the cats, as her attention in that direction was now centred on a Black Labrador named Kila.
Jean-Claude Lizitsky became a friend—he was an older, longhaired French doctor on some extended research project at the University who loved psilocybin mushrooms, the small ‘liberty caps’ in particular, which he would go on expeditions to collect—and also Tony Molatore, Shannon Curran, Dick Glass and Julie Westphal, all met via John, plus Daphne and Eli Petrohilos, met through Patty. Once on a hot day, Jean-Claude, John, and myself, were driven by some obliging person—I think Tony—to a spot near Jasper, about ten miles up the Willamette River, carrying those giant old-fashioned inner tubes from the wheels of trucks, and proceeded to float down-river all the way to Alton Baker park, the delirious going made all the more so by an intake of mushrooms.
Tony played the drums, jazz-style, prided himself for his sharp and disarming wit (slyly passive-aggressive in that way—one can well imagine him as a charming side-character or wing-man in a gangster film); Shannon was only 15, incredibly pretty but her personality would flower only later, or at least was understated at the time (she would wear old-fashioned summer dresses, dark mascara to contrast with her fair skin, and would drink Pepsi—never Coke—out of sixteen-ounce glass bottles). We were all stoned all the time. A marijuana-fueled highlight was one day, after consuming pot brownies, we saw The Police—Sting, Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland—near their creative peak, performing at the Paramount Theatre in Portland.
We formed The Pedestrians: John, who doubled as the lead singer, on
bass, Mike Denning (twin of John and who had just completed a stay at the Guiar Institute of Technology in Los Angeles) on lead guitar, Dick Glass on keyboards, Tony
on drums, and me. I suppose the Velvet Underground would indicate our
pretensions, but for ‘influences’ you might mention The Stranglers, The Gang of
Four, UB40, the Police, Joy Division. There was some interest in the
songs—composed mostly by John and myself but some by Mike—but there was not
enough musical expertise on the part of John or me to really make them fly.
I liked John’s voice; it was resonant, not showy. Mike was much more
experienced and it’s a wonder that he, as well as Tony and Dick—very competent
musicians—could put up with us. Later we were slightly more competent but
Tony left, to be replaced by one Barry Bender, a sort of nerd, a
sort of not-as-high-IQ and fatter version of (genius level) Kip, greasy and pasty in a black Pink Floyd
T-shirt, not one that the fashionistas would choose, but he was game and I
liked him. We recorded a few songs—I suppose ‘Rocket Ship’ by yours truly
was the best, a basic rock and roll thing with a nice suspended touch on the
phrase ‘Beyond the stars’:
I wanna go up in a rocket ship
I wanna go up in a rocket ship
Everything here has happened before
Everything here has happened before
Take me to Saturn
Take me to Mars
Take me to a place
Beyond the stars.
Also there was John's more inventive 'Sick with No Spine': 'I kiss your shoulder and I ... I don't want you any more! I'm sick with no spine! I'm sick with no spine!'
Eventually we played bigger gigs. Although it was beginning to sound better, it fell apart out of boredom and
restlessness. None other than Ken Kesey appeared at one gig, but he left after a song or two. At
this time I made the acquaintance of Michael Billings (talented, kind yet with a severe aspect, a kind of David Byrne type who could easily have made it big time, who
had The Michael Billings Project, and Solid Citizens), and Katy and Bruno—a very
welcoming couple—and the guitarist Trey Gunn, who went on some fame playing
with King Crimson.
I did a most terrible thing: I abandoned Suzy the cat. She wasn’t happy in the apartment, and had taken to wandering around yowling, so I put her in a sorority house—I mean I just put her in via an unlocked door and walked away, without asking. A callous act.
John and I fought some of the time, but we learned from each other. John liked Baudelaire, Kafka, the Gang of Four, The Stranglers, David Bowie and Lou Reed, film and painting, and was respectful of my interest in philosophy, which was then beginning. One day—I suppose it was in autumn—John and I drove to a favourite spot on Fall Creek, having rented wetsuits, masks and fins, and dropped acid. We spent hours, swimming around in that weird underwater world, mesmerized. It was John’s idea and as a result we bonded at least for a while.
Around this time John made a Super 8 film, and then Tony made a 16mm silent film in black and white, using a fine old wind-up camera. John’s film was called The Dead Girl, 'starring' John, Shannon, Shannon’s older sister Heather and me (I was the murderer). Tony’s film was called Ran Aground, with the same players plus Gene Flores, Stu Henry, Corby Poticha, John’s girlfriend Adrian, Tony Molatore’s redheaded girlfriend Ingrid, Matt Bonham, and Matt’s friend from the military—I think his name was also Tony. Some of these people had had a theatre group in high school known as Stage Left. Tony’s film turned out to be a more difficult project not least because it was shot over three days at the Oregon coast, but we or rather Tony managed to complete it. It looked terrific, partly the format and partly Tony’s skill. In John's earlier film Dead Girl, an unexpected high point was Shannon’s role as a Japanese waitress, providing a bit of comic relief: when asked where she came from, she did her best oriental accent in answering ‘Alabama’, struggling hilariously over the letter ‘l’ just as Japanese people do. John probably has copies of these films, as well as some recordings of the Pedestrians.
One evening we somehow learned of a certain appearance by a certain
someone, an event which the certain someone wanted to keep secret. Another person, Sri Chinmoy—he of fame for meditation, running
and music—was to appear at some church, with his band of followers, and the certain someone. We—I
think Tony, Shannon, Gene, Julie and I—arrived just as their festivities were
to commence, and sure enough, there was nothing you could call a crowd, just a few earnest spectators. They had succeeded in keeping it quiet. Mr. Chinmoy talked a bit, then the band ‘performed’—mostly
bells, hand-drums and chimes but an acoustic guitar strumming and Mr. Chinmoy
playing a very passable flute, with our certain someone at the back,
respectfully playing finger chimes. After a brief intermission, he
then stepped out with an electric guitar and small amplifier, with the acoustic
guitarist in tow. It was Carlos Santana, not twenty-feet away. Boy,
I remember thinking as he began to coax music from the most rudimentary
equipment, this cat can play, and no mistake.
For us, the election of Reagan was an ample source of incredulity and merry scorn. His election seemed incomprehensible to us, living as we did in the Eugene bubble, a bubble filled with hippies and pot smoke. Once John, Shannon, Julie, Gene, Tony, Dick and I made up a ludicrous song or chant, ‘Reggae Reggae Rea-gan’, to percussion. In Reagan’s honour we hosted a ‘Bad Taste Brunch’, at 8 a.m. Saturday Morning, with the invitees bringing the worst and most artificial foodstuffs they could find in the supermarket: we had Tang, Start, powdered eggs, dehydrated hash-browns, imitation bacon and sausages, Spam, Nescafe or worse and white bread with margarine. It was a riot, not least because Jeanne Maasch and her pal Edi brought many bottles of champagne. Another time a large group of us went to the Erb Memorial Building to go bowling, which was ludicrous and eventful as you can imagine but for some reason we all thought stealing the bowling shoes would be a good idea.
X. The Oregon Coast; Raoul and Gene,
Maya
Eugene is midway between the coast and the summit of the big Cascade Range. The coast is sixty miles west from Eugene over the ‘coast range’, a rainy set of hills running north-south that separates the also north-south running Willamette Valley from the sea. The summit of the Cascades is perhaps seventy miles east, again north-south running, with the McKenzie and Santiam passes providing ways through among others. I visited the coast perhaps twenty times over the years. Driving east, past Veneta, Noti, then Mapleton along the Siuslaw River and its estuary, the perhaps fancifully named Florence is the first seaside town one hits. Typically one would then drive north up Highway 101, over towering cliffs and past sundry weather-beaten rock formations and lighthouses, and then the road took you down to Yachats, Waldport, Newport, with its famous bridge, and picturesque Depoe Bay with its fishing boats and its tiny, sheltered harbour, and Lincoln City, Neskowin, Tillamook—of cheese fame—and Manzanita and Cannon Beach. One of the first things one comes upon travelling north from Florence is a place called the ‘Sea Lion Caves’, where one would park at the ‘Pixie Kitchen’, a café oriented to families, meaning as always children, situated a dizzying five hundred feet above the rocky shoreline, and take an elevator down to the giant cave full of barking sea lions. You can imagine the noise, rising up as you descended. And the smell.
The weather on the Oregon coast is consistently wet, windy and cold, but once in while the clouds would part and perhaps if you’re doubly lucky the wind would die down, and you’d have a Pacific northwestern facsimile of paradise. The size and power of the sea are difficult to describe if you haven't seen it. The beaches are impossibly wide, with masses of driftwood piled upon them and cold water and big surf always pounding and pummeling—the constant noise is deafening—but when the weather cooperated one would go in the water nonetheless, one is so excited and pleased at the sheer wildness of it all, plunging into each wave, trying not to swallow too much of the salt-water, and glimpsing between the waves the cobalt blue of the Pacific, with nothing offshore but Hokkaido, Japan, several thousand miles away.
Other times instead of going north one would go to a place just a few miles south of Florence, crossing the Siuslaw River and turning off Highway 101 at Honeyman State Park, location of the Oregon Dunes. At the edge of the dunes is a sheltered lake—Cleawox Lake—and one would climb the dune, rush down to the lake and jump in with an almighty splash. Beyond the lake, to the west and south, is a vast expanse of dunes that visually is a dead ringer for the Sahara.
I moved to Hilyard Street in spring 1981 with Randy Myers, who we called Raoul (I don’t know why we called him by that name and I don’t how I met him; possibly at South Eugene High or through Tony or Gene Flores), and met Elissa, having what she and I would come to call the ‘A-Period’ (bashful but romantic). I had Maya, who, when she was locked inside a couple of times, pooped in the bathroom sink, which Raoul naturally found repulsive but which I took for another sign of her intelligence. I remember well my getting a most serious case of the flu. I could not eat for a week; Patty, now an ex, took pity and gave me some chicken soup that she had made. At this time Randy turned me on to the record label ECM, and in particular the album Solstice, with Ralph Towner, Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber and Jon Christensen. A beautiful, mesmerizing alien world; I learned ‘Icarus’—the so-called Real Book has it (the Real Book was pirated but every jazz musician used it then)—and much later the tune was the inspiration, if you can call it that, for my tune ‘Polaris’. Then with Randy I moved to 18th and Mill Streets in the Fall of 1981, with Gene joining us. Gene was sweet and talented—completely self-taught on the piano and guitar, fingering and chords all his own. He sang, played percussion, played piano and composed songs, some of them really beautiful. He drew and painted too. Once in a while we would go to the house of his father, an architect who had constructed his house to be maximally efficient so far as energy is concerned, with all the rooms over its two stories built around the flue of the central wood stove, and the south-facing wall largely made of thick glass. Randy was quiet and had a beautiful Yamaha upright on which he played classical stuff and some jazz (he turned me on to Bud Powell, and taught me really to listen to Bill Evans). Since Gene had over three hundred records, and I had my stereo, presto we listened endlessly in clouds of weed smoke—Gene turned me on to Frank Zappa, Oregon, Jethro Tull, Traffic, Yes, Santana, Stevie Winwood; and by this time I had just about every record by the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix (I had a period of some months immersed in Hendrix, learning to play Purple Haze, Castles Made of Sand, and one of which I was especially proud, Little Wing). He also had many by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter, and John Coltrane (I remember being shocked at the egregious clam—a wrong note—played by McCoy Tyner in My Favorite Things). These musicians along with many others became identifiable from just a bar or two.
We—Gene, Raoul and I, sometimes with Dick or Shannon—often went past midnight to Hoot's, an American-style diner that was open 24/7, with cheap hamburgers and milkshakes; we would sit at a booth at the back of the place, to be served by a giant hare-lipped blonde waitress (the odd people that now stand out as heroes in our memories, for their energy and grace under fire, the fire being several jabbering potheads who couldn't make up their minds). Somehow at Hoot's it would never cross anyone's mind—including I think those of the regulars, who besides stoners like ourselves included various truck drivers, midnight workers from the nearby canning factory, and sundry down and outers—to dine and dash. There was also on tap what we called 'Fish Night at the Inn', an evening every Friday when you could go to the Colonial Inn on Willamette Street—not normally a place which one would be caught anywhere near, it being a Freemason's lodge or some equivalent—where they had an all-you-can-eat fish fry, including deep fried oysters and shrimp, for some ridiculously low price. We could eat for more than one day; there would be only another two tables max with other customers.
Maya was with us at the apartment, happy as there was no want of attention she’d receive from three stoned boys and their friends, munching popcorn—that’s right, she liked popcorn, a favourite of hers—showing off her intelligence by opening a door which she manipulated by the door-handle, her athleticism in tearing around the house including up the curtains, and her fights with one’s hand—she’d get intensely riled up, her pupils wide open, positively snorting with excitement, and claws fully out—and then her affectionate nature when she’d come and bite your chin, plonking herself down on your chest for a session of purring and petting.
I would go out at night for long runs, very stoned, the rain or mist
keeping me cool, sometimes erroneously feeling there were no limits to how fast
I could go, or for how long.
For some of the time we had staying with us Gene’s cousin Matteo, a young illegal—perhaps fifteen—who was not especially welcome, not because he was just learning English, or because of the space he’d occupy or the food he’d consume, but because he picked up the guitar and progressed with alarming speed, and was very eager to show off what he’d learned. Other friends: David and Penny Martinez (met through John Denning; older; they lived in beautiful apartment on 13th street; he was an accomplished art-photographer); Kim Campbell and Bruce Alter (she was an English major who was into Faulkner; he was an early adopter of the Apple; and they had a parrot called Dimitris, who did not like me, or felt jealous of me—he would run along the back of the sofa to bite me on the neck, much to the amusement of Kim and Bruce). I used to play my guitar for them; and they were big connoisseurs of weed, as were David and Penny (David and Penny were also most fastidious in their coffee, freshly ground, always made in their Chemex, and poured out with due ceremony; a not unimportant aspect of their being dedicated to the art of living well). Mike Lee lived with Kim and Bruce for while; he had a rat called Desdemona (I can’t remember how the bird got on with the rat). The rat would happily run about the living room, sniffing one’s hand and collecting little bits of paper, eating crumbs. As rats go, she was charming. Mike played trumpet in the UO rally Band, worked at KWAX (the university’s radio station, mostly classical music), and studied Journalism. I had some good conversations with him (‘But what does that mean?’, he asked, of a solo by Eric Dolphy, and kept trying to convince me of the merits of Julian Jaynes, author which I inexplicably tut-tutted of The Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind; but a thought of Mike’s which I could not understand then was that he was thinking with his pencil; this is the germ of what is now a big industry in the philosophy of mind, the ‘Extended Mind’ hypothesis). I had with Elissa what we called our ‘B-period’ (non-romantic period). A serious interest in jazz begins, along with philosophy. At the same time Shannon Curran was becoming more mature; I loved her then but so did all the boys.
XI. San Francisco, Oakland, Tony
In late autumn 1981 I went to live in the Bay Area, first at my grandmother’s house in Piedmont, then in an apartment in the Lakeview District of Oakland (but there no lake to view). I wasn’t sure how long I’d be there, but it turned out to be just a few months, maybe six. I took Maya along with me (I can still see her, on the floor in front of the passenger seat on the drive south, puzzled and disoriented, intermittently ‘talking’ in her deep voice, seeking reassurance I assumed; the trip from Eugene to San Francisco took eight or nine hours).
Tony also moved down. I was tight with him then—we had a great, expansive pot-enhanced talk at my grandmother’s house (I always was puzzled as to why Tony didn’t take advantage of his formidable mind; admittedly I’m an academic and therefore prejudiced but I could never quite understand why he didn’t, for example, go to film school). We had good scenes at the apartment he shared with Stu Henry (who insisted on a full breakfast each morning; 'Gotta have eggs!', he would say) and Dave Cunningham (a painter and a waiter; his woman, astonishingly enough to us at that time, was thirty-years old!). The place was on very close to Fenton's Ice Cream Parlour, an ever-popular place with ever- noisy crowds, the workers of which took delight in serving orders of magnitude sizes of obscene ice cream concoctions to often obscenely fat human beings, under bright lights, far into the night (we were frequent customers; once as the waitress arrived with our humungous sundaes I knocked over a glass of ice-water, the formidable waitress said with her voice dripping with good-natured sarcasm, 'Now, now, no need to get so excited'.) Later Tony would live with his friend Keith in a voluminous yet edgy apartment in South Park, San Francisco—when it was still marginally affordable—then later still he would live with his girlfriend Terry in the ghetto—therefore very affordable—of West Oakland, before marrying her and moving to a more reputable address off Martin Luther King Way, Oakland.
For a short period Tony and I conceived an unanticipated and perhaps peculiar interest in cemeteries, and columbaria in particular. You see, in San Francisco, there is much wealth and many Catholics, so presto many people with means spare no expense in commemorating their dead—with the columbaria comprising these vast resplendent marble halls of miles and miles, lined with tombs, fountains, and exotic plants, and with organ music playing very quietly (and uniformed security guards lurking unobtrusively). These are fine sights to see. Colma—south of San Francisco—was the veritable City of the Dead, a city whose raison d'etre was disposing of the bodies, but with all the many connected businesses including florists, gardeners, stonemasons, undertakers, and law firms, specializing in estates. Closer to home was Mountain View Cemetery, at the border between Oakland and Piedmont at the top end of Piedmont Avenue, at which the Winks sisters—my grandmother Marge Lindgren nee Winks now included—have, along with members of their families, their final resting places. One day when Tony and I were about to leave Mia's house, Mia's maid, Sadie—old fashioned, sixtiesh, and wearing her maid's outfit—was puzzled and not a little horrified at our announcing our destination as we were not in any sense dressed up; 'But .... somebody die?', she asked incredulously.
At this time the Bay Area still retained much of the romance—in addition to the unchangeable geographic features—that made it the Bay Area, that made San Francisco San Francisco, Oakland Oakland, and Berkeley Berkeley. San Francisco then had a significant working class, plus a wide spectrum of cultures and races, with blacks in the Lower Haight Street area, Mexicans in the Mission, Jews all round (Levi Strauss—of blue jeans fame, not the linguist—was a San Franciscan), Russians, Poles and Irish in the Richmond District and the Outer Richmond District, Italians in North Beach. I suppose when you think of San Francisco the Italians are the most famous, not only having produced Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joe DiMaggio, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Alioto, and Nancy Pelosi, but its wonderful old-fashioned Italian restaurants, delis, bars and cafes—ones that I knew were the North Beach Restaurant, Enrico’s, US Restaurant, Washington Street Bar and Grill, Tosca’s, Savoy Tivoli, the very civilised (and my favourite) Café Puccini, Café Trieste (with opera on Sundays), Café Milano, Café El Greco, Molinari’s, Liguria Bakery—famous for simple focaccia—Sotto Marie, Jazz at Pearl’s, and the Keystone Café which featured jazz—not to mention the remnants of beatnik culture on the south end of North Beach, with Vesuvio’s bar and the City Lights Bookstore, where one could bump into Ferlinghetti. Plus of course making their inimitable mark were the perhaps one hundred-fifty thousand Cantonese-speaking Chinese in Chinatown—a largely insular culture which survives still, even if its days are numbered; it’s a time slice of the old, pre-revolutionary China, with only battered and perhaps resentful connections to today’s modern, affluent China. Chinese tourists today visit them. You could frequent on Stockton street—parallel to the touristy Grant Street—a Chinese fish shop, which was all business, with its many varieties of fish, its live eels, crabs, lobsters, sea-urchins, sea-cucumbers and turtles, which when ordered would look out at you as its back was ripped off, its insides scooped out. Also alongside the Chinese were Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese people, recent immigrants thanks to the recently-concluded war in Vietnam.
When I was a kid, before their wholesale renovation in early 1980's, the famed cablecars cost ten cents. They were a
grown-up form of transportation, for locals. Of course tourists were allowed
but they were an afterthought. You could jump on them anywhere, hanging
on the outside, jump off anywhere, and if the ride was short you didn’t pay—I
guess they figured so what, it was only ten cents. The trolleybuses—electric
buses, getting their power from overhead lines—were everywhere, and, especially at the end of the day when darkness fell, strangely
comforting, like home cooking. Modern BART—‘Bay Area Rapid Transit’, a modern metro that went fast as it did when making the trip underneath the bay to Oakland—and the slower Muni Rail, 'trams' as they are called in Europe, was less poetic, but you admired them just the same, and saw the cars on Judah or Taraval, or felt them rushing underfoot when walking down Market Street.
From little yellow-painted metal-and-glass vending boxes, located all over the Bay Area and beyond, you bought The San Francisco Chronicle. It's difficult to over-estimate the power of a newspaper in those days, before the internet of course, to unify people from all walks of life, to get them talking about the same things, using the same language. The Chron was one of the best. It was a morning newspaper; in the afternoon came the San Francisco Examiner, with many people, including Mia and Gpa, subscribed to both. A thing that many people did, doubtless the same in many other cities, was to buy the Chronicle and carry it folded-over under your arm into whatever haunt you haunted for coffee in the morning. People had time for that. Herb Caen was the Chronicle's inimitable columnist for some sixty-years, with his trademark ellipses, sometimes dark humour, openness to many kinds of people, romance for San Francisco, quietly left-wing politics that were nonetheless consistent with his being in attendance at first nights of the swish San Francisco Opera, and to his being photographed laughing merrily with a twinkle in his eye—a dry Martini with an olive always in hand—with anyone who was anyone in the United States social scene. The Sporting Green was the paper's sports section, printed on green paper, the statistics for the previous nights games being pored over by men in coffee shops and cafes Bay Area wide.
Speaking of newspapers, Mia was fast friends with one Louise Wright, who wrote the local society column—the sort of thing that presumably doesn't exist nowadays—for the Oakland Tribune (a serious newspaper in those days, I should say). Louise was single, perhaps ten year's Mia's junior, and lived in part of a big house just down Wildwood Gardens from Mia and Gpa. Her drinking stood out, which is saying something, as people of her generation tended to have cocktails from five in the afternoon or earlier, for lunch. She was always generous and friendly, with an unspoken undercurrent of sadness. Often we'd visit her and play cards, Gin Rummy or Spite and Malice. Other times, when we had parties, she was a fixture; once at a pre-Christmas soiree she wrote about it for her column; according to her, it was 'Hot time in the old town ...', with descriptions of Grant, Robin and me, as if we were small-time visiting royalty.
My grandmother Mia used to speak almost reverentially of ‘The City’, meaning, of course, downtown San Francisco, as a place where one had to dress up to visit—what Mia referred to as getting ‘gussied up’(indeed at that time many restaurants such as Ernie’s, Vanessi’s and the North Beach Restaurant, required gentlemen to wear ties)—where you’d go to receptions and openings, or to meet friends at elegant establishments such as the Palace Hotel, the Fairmont, or the Clift Hotel, to shop in Union Square at I Magnin’s, Neiman Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue, perhaps get your shoes shined by one of the many ‘shoeblacks’, perhaps have a martini at the top of the Mark Hopkins hotel with its splendid views, or the sumptuous Redwood Room with its its eponymous paneling, its grand piano and large facsimiles of Klimt; and at Christmas time you’d make special trip to see the magical window displays at the incomparable Gump’s. The city was pulsating with mystery and a sense of magical possibility, as you looked from Nob Hill down the great skyscraper-lined canyon of California Street, with night darkening and the lights coming up, the distinctive neon sign of the timeless restaurant Tadich’s announcing quietly that the scene before you is the real thing, the automobiles being mostly yellow taxis, the cable cars ascending the hill and inching tightly up their tracks, those glowing silvery ribbons, and a yellowed moon appearing between the buildings to the east. To me it seemed a city made for grown-ups, exciting but very serious and even vaguely scary—indeed North Beach and the almost impenetrable Chinatown had a long established culture of gangs, Italian and Chinese, engaged in the usual illegal trades, with a very visible Mafia hit taking place at a restaurant on upper Grant Street while I was in the Bay Area in about 1978—a place where you’d wear overcoats, walk with purpose and ride taxis not caring for the cost, like they do in the movies. To this day it remains a thrill, entering the city from Oakland by car over the elegant Bay Bridge, so supernaturally high above, with ships passing silently underneath, the fog crawling in and Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill presiding over it all, that benign, silent watchtower.
‘There is no there there’, Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland. I could never see it that way. The idea of Oakland was not of course glamourous and picturesque like that of San Francisco, but it was a vivid idea nonethess. The place was still largely working-class and comparatively featureless from a strictly geographical point of view, though interesting from an architectural point of view (largely built before World War One), and varied from a demographic point of view—with large near ghettos like West Oakland and what is called East Oakland but is really more like South Oakland, and the self-contained Oakland Chinatown—and maybe out of sheer familiarity it felt more like home to me than San Francisco did. And it etched itself on my mind most strongly during the romance, intrigue and wide-eyedness of my youth. Highlights that stick include Fenton’s Ice Cream parlour, Flint’s Barbeque, the workaday resturants of Oakland Chinatown, Biff’s all-night diner on Upper Broadway, the all-night news agent on Lower Broadway, the wide and long Broadway street itself, the magnificent Grand Lake Theater with a gigantic sign to match, Piedmont Avenue and Piedmont Grocery (but strangely these are in Oakland, not Piedmont, which is higher up the hill), and Lake Merritt.
Meanwhile the most evident reason for visiting Berkeley—bordering Oakland to the North—when I was a teenager, were the delights of Telegraph Avenue. Those delights are now almost completely gone—now there is not a lot to distinguish it from shopping streets in other college-towns, what with Starbuck’s and Nike and that ilk—but at this time it was an almost lawless region seemingly transported from the third world, consisting of several blocks’ worth of sidewalk vendors densely packed in in front of cafés—Café Mediterraneaum, Espresso Roma—shops of exotic clothes, especially clothes purportedly of Tibetan, North African or Peruvian provenance, and the many book shops—Mo’s, Cody’s, Shakespeare Books—and the rich gold mines of used record shops, the undisputed leader being Rasputin’s Records but there were others too. The crowds were shoulder-to-shoulder at most times—the shoulders of hard-core hippies not infrequently to be rubbed against—with the still-illegal pot-smoke mingled with incense, candles, and assorted exotic odours from the many outdoor food booths. There was normally to be found a crazy woman doing a belly-dance, a nearly-naked guy doing a dance of some Indian Tribe, he gave one to understand, or some guy in rags dancing at random; it was unclear whether they were positively seeking handouts, or accepting of them, or even whether they would acknowledge it if offered one. Craziness, I suppose, but there was no sense of danger, on account of the many people, behaving as if it was all normal. Behind was People’s Park, a zone unofficially set aside for vagrants, ex-servicemen, and otherwise drifters, for camping, drinking, smoking, hanging out or shooting up.
When I was living in Oakland in the Highland Park area, Robin lived in an apartment in the same house, and it was comforting to know that she was nearby, but we didn’t meet very much. I practiced my guitar, began to sing—to my surprise I could sort pull that off—worked at Convenience Foods in Piedmont, often saw Tony, Stu and Dave Cunningham at their apartment on Piedmont Avenue, and hung out reading books and drinking coffee at the Coffee Mill, a quiet place on upper Grand Avenue. I was now a voracious reader—Lawrence, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Mann, Hesse, Austen, George Eliot, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Flaubert, Zola, Nabokov, Musil.
Once I was working the cash register at Convenience Foods when a woman—maybe thirty, thirty-five, with a model's body, cigarette and shoulder-length reddish hair—asked me out of the blue, with her Dutch accent, whether I would come and 'do a job' for her. Although it did emerge that she did have that sort of hope—was a mother of two but was not a happy wife—it turned out to be an honest job involving a shovel, pickaxe and a wheelbarrow. Sylvia and I became good friends, not lovers; she would take me on errands, or we'd hang out for coffee. She delighted in importing into the conversation my name for a certain workmate of mine, of which I am not proud: the 'UFB', which stood for the Ugly Fat Bitch. For example, when I said I was not available to meet of an evening, she asked, merrily of course, 'Who are you seeing? The UFB?'. Although the bearer of this name was indeed ugly and fat, by no means did she deserve the third moniker. I did show some modicum of awareness of this, as when some rich scoundrel made her cry at the check out, I, incensed upon seeing this, followed him outside and asked him what the problem was. He rolled his eyes as he got quickly into his brand-new Mercedes, and drove away.
A song I wrote from this period had these lyrics:
Hoodlums on the left of me,
White lies on the right.
I read it in the New York Times
And I don't want to fight.
The instinct for self-preservation
It’s hounding me at every turn!
It’s behind my criticism
Of the instinct for self-preservation.
XII. Elissa, Pine Mountain, Jazz,
Philosophy, Steve Pacheco
Eventually I felt that this was so much spinning of my wheels, so in the Spring of 1982 I left the Bay Area and came back to Eugene, with a half-idea of returning to the university. I distinctly remember the drive up as Maya was so good, once in while meowing, eating the bit of hamburger I gave her, and dutifully taking advantage of the bathroom breaks at the Rest Areas when I stopped. The drive is nine hours on Interstate 5. I did it many times in those years: up the boring, flat Sacramento Valley—often with a stop-off at the town of Williams with its enormous delicatessen, which had an unaccountably high popularity to quality ratio but equally unaccountably you'd look forward to it—then Redding, Red Bluff, a swift climb past Mt. Shasta, Lake Shasta and the Castle Crags, across the state line (near Ashland, site of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), then down to Medford, Grants Pass—favoured place of the Oregon branch of the KKK, it is said, with the famous Rogue River, a wild and treacherous river that will remind you of the film Deliverance, and was indeed used for parts of The River Wild with Meryl Streep—then Roseburg, Cottage Grove and then, after a much anticipated sign that said 'Eugene 11', the turn-off to Franklin Boulevard and the University of Oregon. A few times in winter, when I-5 was in danger of closing or when I didn't have tire chains—the part around Shasta, the 'Siskiyou Summit' is 4310 feet above sea level—I would take the coast route. It was scenic of course—especially from about Port Orford to Eureka, not as famous as Big Sur but very beautiful and largely uninhabited—but at twelve hours minimum it's too long to be anything but a chore. And this is largely a two-lane road, requiring one to pay attention; driving on the freeway is a comparative doddle, an opportunity for the mind to go where it will go.
I moved in with
Gene Flores on 24th street and, swiftly proceeded to what we called our ‘C period’—the second romantic period—with Elissa. I played for while with The Hoodlums—a
Ska-R&B band that was more successful after I quit and was replaced by Dov
Osheroff. Gene’s health seemed to suffer during that time, from too much
crystal meth I presumed, but I believe they had a good run.
This was the last period of my working at Pine
Mountain. Pine Mountain is twenty-six miles southeast of Bend, about
three hour’s drive east from Eugene. My times there are
responsible for some of the strongest and most stirring memories I have.
Driving across the Cascades from Eugene (elevation just four-hundred feet): after circumventing Springfield, it was up, up, up, past Walterville, Leaburg, the Leaburg Dam, Vida, Nimrod, Finn Rock,
Blue River, and Rainbow (the location of the Holiday Farm, an old inn on the
McKenzie River where, when I was younger, we dined on trout or steak, and afterwards I
would play in the downstairs ‘rec room’ while the adults carried on cavorting
upstairs); then McKenzie Bridge, the Clear Lake cut-off, Santiam Junction, and
Santiam Pass—5,100 feet—shortly after which the environment suddenly changes to a much more arid landscape, going down to Sisters (occasionally—only in summer, as it is closed in
winter—I would take the ‘scenic’ route—the ‘Old McKenzie Pass’ U.S. Route 242—which
branches off after McKenzie Bridge and after a steep climb goes over the vast
otherwordly lava fields and, at the top—5,300 feet—passes Dee Wright
Observatory, a structure built of lava for people to look at the surrounding
mountains, seemingly up close with sightlines and names of the mountains
inscribed in metal plates, before dropping down to re-join the main route at
Sisters, elevation 3000 feet; it added only half an hour at most but it is actually shorter as it is very windy in spots). Then after Bend, suddenly with very sparse traffic,
the route would take you over Horse Ridge—Horse Ridge is a strange geological
point of interest, ancient riverbed now thrust high in the sky, semi-desert with hawks and rattlesnakes,
sagebrush and gnarled juniper—then off the highway at tiny Millican (windswept
and treeless, population three at most—gas station, store, and what was a tiny
motel but has long since been boarded up), and five miles up a gravel road to
the astronomical observatory.
On Pine Mountain, elevation 6,500 feet, the long hours of silence and
solitude suited me, especially the sense of space: the views back to the west of the
Cascades—Diamond Peak, Mt. Bachelor, Broken Top, the South Sister, the Middle Sister and the North Sister, Mt. Washington,
Three-fingered Jack, Mt Jefferson, Mt. Hood, sometimes through the sparkling blue as far as Mt. St. Helens
and Mt. Adams north in Washington—to the deserts of the south and east, where
you can see for a hundred miles without seeing any sign of humans. The
terrain of Pine Mountain is complex, with several summits and valleys and ravines between.
I got to know it well on foot, as the days were empty, without anything like a
schedule to make or taxing chores that needed doing, and unspeakably quiet, the air
surpassingly clear; the short walk to the nearest peak, with views of the
mountains to the west and north-west; a walk of about half a mile up the access
road to the highest peak, with its splendid views to the south and
south-east—to Newberry Crater, China Hat and Fort Rock; a walk in the opposite direction—the
opposite direction to the route back to Millican and Bend—taking a gravel road
which eventually led down to a place called ‘Sand Springs’; but normally I turned
off after a mile or so into the forest, finding old campsites, the charred,
rocky remains of campfires, the obligatory beer cans, and the spent shells of
the campers’ shotguns and rifles (in the Autumn, it was a good region for hunting
deer and elk). Very late at night, when the work for the night was done, one
would look up at the sky—seeing the Milky Way, the constellations, the planets,
such delights as the Pleiades or Cassiopeia—and the feeling of the vastness of
the universe was overwhelming, yet somehow comforting, a reminder of the
unspeakable vastness that surrounds us at every second, yet strangely intimate.
You’d hear the coyotes doing their howling thing, but I never saw them.
In Summer 1982 I moved alone to a place on 14th street. It seemed perfect. Maya loved it even though she couldn’t go outside, since the apartment was upstairs and outside was a busy neighborhood (back on Elinor Street, she disappeared for days at a time, evincing unusual tastes—eschewing birds and mice but catching snakes, lizards and frogs, and eating them I suppose; her main culinary delight however, for which she was positively bonkers, was raw beef liver). Pacheco lived across the hall with his girlfriend Justina. I was now serious about philosophy as well as jazz—I met Garry Hagberg, a philosopher and brilliant jazz guitarist who gave me lessons, and his wife Catherine Wilson, a philosopher and scholar of some standing who was a great beauty to boot (they soon split up but I have remained in touch with them each individually). Everything seemed perfect but then I was required by the landlord to give up Maya (house rules, they explained). I took Maya to stay for a day at the house of Kim and Bruce, an arrangement which was delicate as they also had Dimitris, remember, their precious parakeet (Mike Lee had moved out, hence there was no rat). Maya was locked in a back bedroom. Kim and Bruce put up with it for a day, but at the end of it, I still didn’t know what to do with Maya. I picked her up on foot, and wandered around the city at night with the cat riding atop my shoulders; finally I took her, at midnight, to my previous dwelling, the house of Gene and now Raoul. No one was home so I let her in through a back window, and next day I took her to Gene’s dad’s house out on Old Dillard Road. For some reason she didn’t stay at Mr. Flores’ house but took up with a family that lived next door. After one visit I didn’t really check further on Maya’s well-being, for I was simply too afraid that she hadn’t adjusted and I’d have her on my hands again. These events scarred me deeply and to this day I cannot think of her without a pang. I loved her, yet when push came to shove, I did what was convenient. Then later I was kicked out anyway from the flat for 'shacking up' with Elissa (a sweet old couple were my disapproving landlords; they didn’t want ‘that kind of thing going on’ in their house).
In the fall and winter, after Elissa returned to Brown, I lived alone on 13th off High St., became very depressed, but played with three short lived bands: First, La Quinta Columna (Gene Flores, Dick Glass, Louie Ledbetter, Todd Briarton), I suppose latin-rock; the Michael Billings Project (except for Todd, Michael, and the bass player Dave whose last name escapes me, I don't remember any names), and then in a sort of experimental band—modern jazz crossed with new wave—with Brooks Brown, Todd. and another very good bass player, I think Mike Medler (Brooks later played with the group Cherry Poppin' Daddies—a semi-swing high-energy pop ensemble with vocals—that was very successful almost immediately and still is nominally together, I think, but Brooks would leave after the first run of success, not being temperamentally suited, I assume, for that sort of life). At around this time I saw Rickie Lee Jones at Hult Center, doing a seamless short set including the whole of side one of Pirates, cabaret-style. Another musical highlight.
I would often be found at the High Street Coffee Gallery, a perfect little place in a converted house, run by an amusingly bad-tempered woman who saw to all the baking. In the summer of 1983 Elissa returned from Brown University, and she and I got a place further up on 13th, near the Bijou Theater. Elissa and I were very close for a time, but somehow we didn’t quite click; she was playing with being a lesbian or rather bi-sexual, which I never took quite seriously but it hurt that she did it with me in the picture. I suppose also I was put off by her being so active and organised, and that she so much wanted to believe in things while being surrounded with people who believed in the same things—the direct opposite of me, the cynic, the lazy introvert (indeed later, after she moved to Berkeley, she converted to Judaism and married a Jewish guy; to this day I don't believe her).
I flew to Boston en route to Providence, Rhode Island, in Spring 1984 to comport with Elissa. Mike Kalish was there along with Marthe Reed, his lifelong main squeeze—I mean almost literally so, as they got together in high school and parted only when Marthe died, the unimaginible victim of a middle-aged stroke. Also there was Ingrid Redd, formerly Tony's girlfriend and now with boyfriend Tecumsah Fitch, who went on to some reknown as a biologist interested in animal communication. One day we tripped it to Long Island; I was amazed to see these over-the-top gigantic oceanside houses, mostly built before the Great War. It was unseasonably warm that day; we had a taste of the beach and the sea, still cold as it was only April. For some reason the most vivid memory was at Elissa's communal house, where attached to a note taped to the wall in the kitchen, saying 'Please, please use the plastic bagel-holder to slice your bagel; do not make my mistake of holding it in your hand', was a Polaroid, you guessed it, of a bloody hand.
After some months of steeling myself for a big decision, I traded my blue Strat for a blond Gibson archtop, an ES-175 made about 1974 according to the serial number. I came swiftly to cherish it (I still have it, although it is now loaned to Uri Stav, who can use it very well). I was listening intently to Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery. I became a regular at the Oregon Electric Station and Jo Federigo’s, two bars on Fifth Street that featured jazz, and the Eugene Hotel, where Garry Hagberg often played; of those I remember, I saw Bobby Hutcherson, Eddie Harris, and locals Jeff Homan, Andre Saint James, Tom Bergeron, Dennis Caffey, and Nancy King. I remember sitting right up front for Bobby Hutcherson, completely transfixed (with Hagberg I also saw Allan Holdsworth at the EMU ballroom, as mentioned before, a serious jazz-rock guitarist—with an emphasis on rock—who bored me; it seemed a mere athletic display, too many scales). What with its jazz station KLCC and these three bars, Eugene had a solid audience for jazz. Jazz never came easily to me, but I loved it all the same, and from this time forward I ceased to play any other music except for example Bach for purposes of improving my sight-reading.
The Filipino Phil Boucher came to Eugene to do a degree in Biochemistry,
and became a close friend of Steve’s through soccer. We took a Spanish class
together—the pretty Latin American teacher of which said to me, good naturedly, ‘Oh Gary, you
are so stupid!’, much to Phil's satisfaction. It would not be far off to
describe Phil as being obsessed with food along of course with biology and soccer—Phil the Filipino cooks Filipino food we would say (adobo of course, and lumpia), and would often be found at the
Bamboo Pavilion if not at Poppi’s—the latter would serve cut-price meals at
closing time—getting his daily fix of meat and rice; ‘Gotta have meat and
rice’, he would say. The three of us plus Tom Reid once went to stay at a
trailer on the beach near Florence which belonged to the parents of Tony
Molatore; a soccer match on the beach took place, with me and Tom—absolute
beginners—on one side, and Phil and Steve—experts—on the other. Once,
completely adventitiously, I dribbled right around Phil; ‘Hey, you aren’t
supposed to do that!’, he laughed. Phil.
Otherwise for 1984 I was devoted to getting A’s in Philosophy—studying the Philosophy of Art with Bill Holly and Garry Hagberg; Hume with Bill Davie; Bishop Berkeley and Logic with Don Levy; Kant with Arnie Zweig (who said, of the essays on Kant we the classmembers had done and that he'd just finished grading, ‘they're like little pieces of shit’); the Philosophy of Literature and the History of Analytic Philosophy with Catherine Wilson; plus I had a first plunge or two into Wittgenstein with I think Davie (I had just missed the period when philosophy at Oregon was dominated by Wittgenstein, in the shape of his epigones John Cook, Frank Ebersole and John Wisdom; all three were well-known worldwide amongst Wittgenstein scholars. Ebersole was the least famous of the three though brilliant by all accounts—but a famous bully, equally to colleagues, secretaries and students; he would respond from underneath his fisherman's cap to a greeting in the elevator with ‘Fuck you’). They had all left the department by 1982 but their influence was still felt keenly—by Levy, Hagberg, Davie, and Holly most obviously. Levy stood out as a most effective teacher, whose style was the opposite of what they encourage us to do with students nowadays: he had no lecture notes, teaching very much on the hoof and in the Socratic style of questioning his students (with the addition of this wild Jewish sarcasm of his). It takes a certain amount of chutzpah, of confidence in your own skin, and it’s definitely not for everyone, but resulting classroom atmosphere remains an ideal for me. One is switched-on.
The philosopher Robin Collingwood wrote in his autobiography that
when, as a boy, he first encountered philosophy—in the shape of Kant’s
ethics—he knew instantly that this was a world made for him, that this was his
destiny. In these years at the University of Oregon I had a not
dissimilar sort of experience, but slowed-down and tinged with something of which I’m not
proud, something that I’m afraid has never quite left me, namely a certain
absurd arrogance, even a certain sense of ownership of the ideas
themselves. To this day I instinctively cannot believe that another
person—unless he goes by the name of Hume or Wittgenstein—understands things
better than I do, or least understands things better than I pretend to. Shameful and ridiculous, and I don’t know precisely how
that works in my psychology, except to venture that it was a mode of
self-protection, a way of assuming that no matter how ingloriously I may have
lost the multitudinous games of life, here is something for which I can always
decree myself a success, or rather a factitious success.
I took a couple of classes from David Milton. Milton was a sociologist
who, after working in the Merchant Marine and on the docks in San Francisco,
lived for some years with his wife in the People’s Republic of China in the
years just following the Cultural Revolution—I think it was a Peace Corps
gig—and then did his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. I suppose that in a sense he
was a poor teacher, but in another sense, the sense that matters at least for
kids of our age, he was the most inspiring teacher I had. He would begin a lecture by reading out some tedious formulation of a bit of Durkheim or Weber,
intending to comment before proceeding in an orderly fashion to the next item
of like nature. But he would seldom get beyond the second or third item
before he’d launch into one of his orations, his tirades, often in response to
the latest outrage from the Reagan White House, or in response to something
that reminded him of some revealing event that he’d once witnessed in China or on the
docks. What he talked about, at least so it seemed, mattered.
The rants were impassioned, by turns angry and funny, but he was always warm,
approachable and charismatic with a twinkle in his eye (he once said of Reagan, ‘This guy has never been
in a fist fight his entire life’). Once we had the honour of a talk by Milton’s
close friend and colleague Studs Terkel, from the heyday of the Chicago and San
Francisco union activity in the 1950’s.
I don’t know how I met him, but Mohamed Taghdi from Libya was a fixture
in my life for a couple of years. He was not only destitute, but technically an 'undocumented alien'. He stayed with me for a few months while Elissa was away at Brown. He cooked a kind of fish stew, mild but tasty, which I copied (over the years, just by osmosis from Dad and Sarah and then Gene, Patty, Steve and others, I'd become passably adept in the kitchen, mostly improvisational rather than knowing set recipes). He picked up a
job washing dishes and had a girlfriend for part of the time, Leslie, a
photographer with short red hair. We would sit outside in front of the
Fall Creek Bakery for sessions of mutual raconteurship; he was funny,
irreverent and charming. Throughout all these years in Eugene, maybe twice per
year, one would climb Spencer’s Butte, a short but steep climb at the south end of town
that had a rocky, treeless area at the top, from which you could see such
delights as the Three Sisters, Mt. Jefferson, and Diamond Peak, now seen from
the west. It was a treat to take Mohamed up there—so different, I assumed, from
Libya. But later when I was in London he had moved to Seattle, was
desperate for money which I never sent, despite saying I would; another sign of
my fundamental offhand selfishness.
I graduated in March 1985, though I did not go to the commemoration or graduation ceremony (such things have never interested me). During this time—I think it was this time—after seeing for many years the sad slow decline of Peanuts (it had become self-conscious, and as often happens in such cases, Schulz seemed to have ran out of ideas), I saw the ascendance of Calvin and Hobbes. Like all daily newspapers at the time, the Eugene Register-Guard had a full page devoted to the funnies—and by ‘a page’ I mean a page of broadsheet—plus an entire section on Sundays, with each comic taking much more space, and in colour to boot. Calvin and Hobbes won me over instantly, with its delightful drawings, hi-level wit from Hobbes, and of course the absolutely self-absorbed, wicked charm of Calvin.
Also during this time I really bonded
with Steve. He too was studying philosophy at UO along with biology. We
talked about the former, and jazz, and our respective parents (his mother, an
Italian remember, was nearly crazy, and perhaps mean-spirited; his father Manuel, a
philosopher, was a fascinating guy with a dry sense of humour but distant,
unhappy). Steve was interested in food, being as he was of Italian
and Mexican parentage. Eugene, as I was coming to appreciate, was miles ahead
of anyplace in the West save Seattle, Los Angeles and the Bay Area itself for
its interest in and availability of food (and make no mistake it followed
closely behind Berkeley and San Francisco in its taste for coffee); the Fifth
Street Market, Newman’s Fish Market, Sundance, the Saturday Market were
familiar haunts. Steve also had a reliable source for cocaine, so once in
a while we’d do that (he once informed me that his connection had come through
with a note that read ‘The Incas have come’). He was playing a lot of soccer (he was on a team of
non-whites, with among others Hassan from Libya, who could not believe how clueless the
Americans were on the etiquette of soccer, ‘They are like mad dogs’, said
Hassan). Steve was not bad at basketball either. He played tennis
too; once when I was playing with him he pleaded with me to let him win a set;
no way, I said—you’ll just go around saying that you ‘beat Kemp’.
I hadn’t seen very much of David Reid in the years immediately previous, but one sunny morning in early summer he invited Tom, Laurie, Elissa and myself to a sort of cabin on the southeastern edge of town that he was then living in, for late breakfast. He made biscuits, bacon and eggs, on a finely seasoned fifteen inch iron skillet which we all admired. He spoke movingly of the death of Shasta, his beloved and universally adored German Shepherd. He was, in truth, strangely affected by it; and it was to be the last I saw of him, and indeed even his siblings Tom and Laurie didn’t see him very much afterwards. It was the beginning of what one would term his psychological decline—but perhaps it wasn’t that—one which saw him living out in the back woods of southwestern Oregon, getting a bit of a reputation as a poker player, developing an interest in the more mystical side of the Hindu religion, and in later years sending incomprehensible emails.
XIII. Mia
My maternal grandmother Mia—together with her husband, the tagline was ‘Mia and Gpa’, pronounced ‘Mee-ya and Jee-pah’—was born in 1900, in Alameda (Alameda is technically an island next to Oakland, home to 100,000 and at the time with a large naval base). Marge or Marjorie was her real name; Russ or Russell was his. She was one of six sisters, the brotherless ‘Winks sisters’ (1 in 64 chance of having six girls out of six offspring, none of which are twins, right?). She was married sometime about 1921 or 1922, and bore my mother in 1925. The man was at least partly either Algerian (or Armenian, I forget which), named Clarence Hamma (perhaps it is of psychoanalytic interest that she, like her daughter, had an early, short-lived marriage). His darkness was responsible for my mother's and my brother Grant's dark hair and eyes (I think brown eyes are recessive, are they not?). They split up and Marjorie went to live in Portland, working at a department store (the exile happened, I assume, because at the time it was a real stain on a woman to be divorced or abandoned), without her child who must have been left at the Winks’ household. She then returned and married Russ Lindgren, and took back her daughter. What went on between Russ and Mia remains a mystery; I don’t think I even saw them hug as lovers do, let alone kiss, but then one doesn’t expect that of a couple their age. Robin has some emotionally intimate yet still chaste letters, which I have seen. We both suspect the marriage went unconsummated. Perhaps Russ (Gpa) was secretly gay—as far as we know they always kept separate bedrooms.
They had a beautiful house built in 1933—white painted stucco with clay roof tiles, extensive, decorative ironwork, and a large wooden balcony painted dark red—on a lot of about an acre and a half in Wildwood Gardens, in verdant, quiet and secluded Piedmont, overlooking Oakland, the Bay Bridge, San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, with an endless garden, criss-crossed among the oaks, azaleas and hydrangeas by paths made of brick. Mia was happy—socially active, a gracious and generous hostess, impeccably turned out, with fine taste for choosing not only items for her wardrobe but rugs and furniture, glassware and cutlery, and houseplants and flowers; she was strict but generous as a grandmother, and was a dedicated gardener, but by no means without an eye for diamonds, furs and grand automobiles (for her last forty years, a driver of a Cadillac). She referred to jolly persons as 'a kick'. Russ was not rich but well enough-off, and they designed and built the house when labour was super-cheap owing to the depression, and bought a modest amount of stock in IBM in the 1950’s which as luck would have it grew prodigiously. She always lamented not having attended college, and loved and admired my father Jim partly because he was, in her eyes, as well as in reality, a successful and even famous academic. They subscribed to the book-of-the-month club, dutifully tended to read them all, and acquired a liking for Tolstoy, especially not Anna Karenina but War and Peace, which she was re-reading in her declining years. She volunteered at charity shop on Lakeshore Avenue, but I don't think ever held a job upon marrying Russ.
For me, as a child, the house was a wonderful enchanted fairy-tale, so beautiful in every room, so many eccentricities they had brought from Mexico during their many trips there or bought from the oriental antiques shops in Oakland and San Francisco (I still have the big oriental rug and two of the four Mayan tin masks—masks which frightened me as a child). In an inconspicuous part of the house off the dining room was Gpa’s den. In addition to various peculiar objects on or in his desk, it featured a fine collection of bottles which were displayed against the giant window, the late afternoon sun’s rays streaming in to be split kaleidoscope-style by the multi-coloured vessels. Another room downstairs, beyond the Mayan masks and a sign warning ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’, was the ‘rumpus room’, library-like with bound collections of Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post but with a long dis-used bar and a discreet sign asking 'What'll y'have?'; back upstairs, the magnificent living room with its grand piano—Mia could play and sing—beautiful rugs atop the stained oak floorboards that went throughout the house except the kitchen, and a giant brick fireplace; a grand formal dining room where they would entertain guests and preside over Thanksgiving and Christmas festive feasts; a small ‘breakfast room’ with its exquisitely carved, one-of-a-kind paneling and a big cuckoo clock, that Gpa (and Gpa alone and no mistake) would wind every two days by lifting the big weights, and whose loud ticking could be heard throughout the house, not to mention its cuckooing (as a child I once monkeyed around with the weights, earning a stern rebuke from Gpa), but one swiftly got used to these sounds, which became comforting rather than irritating; a kitchen that featured a wonderful view through the window above the sink and a magnificent Wedgewood stove, with six burners, a grill (in the American sense), two ovens and broiler (a grill in the British sense), and a fine gas control that would be hard to find in gas ranges made nowadays; upstairs off Mia’s room a glorious ensuite bathroom, meticulously tiled with black porcelain fixtures including ‘Salut! Monsieur!’ and ‘Oui, oui, Madame’ inscribed on the appropriate parts of the commode; a large deck where one could sit surrounded by Mia’s garden, with birds chirping and squirrels going about their squirrely business. Every year towards Christmas, Gpa would lavishly decorate the whole house with lights and various things picked up over the years, decorative or whimsical but everything in the best taste, including the miniature trains, cars, houses and trees set atop snow of white cotton, and ice of pieces of mirrors, beneath the Christmas tree. Unless you messed with his cuckoo clock, Gpa was always very kind if distant, not talkative; he liked beer in a glass mug that Robin still has, Mia’s cooking—to her genuine gratification he always raised a glass to her midway through dinner—he liked puttering about with tools kept in a shed behind the fireplace, intermittently snoozing outside on the lovely brick patio underneath the oaks while listening to Giants’ games on the radio. He cottoned on to me when I was about sixteen or so, ‘sneaking around this house’, and died in about 1979, embittered as many become.
Mia had it in for Samantha, for Maxine. I know that she regarded her as selfish and of too much sense of entitlement; she said darkly of the idea that Maxine would inherit her legacy that ‘She’s got another thing coming’, but I don’t know what really irked her. Possibly it was her having divorced my father, possibly it was her having abandoned me, possibly these early faults were compounded by her having married Dean, who was elegant in his way and took great pains to be attentive to his mother-in-law, but without appreciable effect and he never made anything of himself, especially not financially let alone professionally or academically. Mia maintained an unexplained animus towards him, the cause of which I seem to recall Dean as being bewildered about.
Robin organized a lavish ninetieth birthday party for Mia. In attendance were about seventy-five guests. Mia was smoking and drinking, and 'showin' leg' at Terry Sittig's description, even if she had noticably weakened physically and it was to be her last real public showing. To my guitar, I sang 'Got Bless the Child' and 'My One and Only Love'; to his guitar, Grant did a couple of numbers one of which was 'On the Sunny Side of the Street', with his friend Tom LaFile harmonizing, very successfully I thought. I like to think Mia was pleased, her two grandsons singing to her for all to see, at a grand party put on by her granddaughter.
In the early part of the following year Patricia and I visited her with our two babies, less than six months old; she was in the hospital temporarily and smiled wonderfully at the babies, pleased as punch at their crawling around her bed. Later I visited alone, when she was much reduced and paranoid; she died a few months later.
XIV. London, Proust
I enrolled as a PhD student at University College London, with Malcolm Budd initially, then with Richard Wollheim when he returned from Berkeley. The latter figure—whose work to which Garry and Catherine introduced me—was my main reason for being there. This was September 1985, the time when Wollheim was just finishing his landmark series of lectures, Painting as an Art. London, at this time, suited me. I was alternately very up and very down, but the up times very much outweighed the bad times. My landlady in Stoke Newington was one Winifred McEwen, a Scot from Edinburgh; irreverent, far leftish, witty and defiantly Scottish. We watched Spitting Image—it was the time of Mrs. Thatcher—and Dynasty on TV, occasionally drank Teacher’s whisky, and she would tell me amusing anecdotes of her job teaching at some college. Some aspects of life in London preserved their old English flavours: taxis all of the same type and colour, quintessential red doubledecker London buses with conductors in their grey suits and mechanical ticket machines strapped to their tummies, the architecture, the amazingly bad food served in most places—though once Winifred took me to breakfast at the famous Savoy, as well as introduced me to the delights of Indian restaurants. I was pleased to receive mail addressed to ‘Mr. Gary Kemp, Esquire’. Stoke Newington is north of Islington and at this time was not yet gentrified, with a main street featuring an old-style greengrocer’s and fruiterer’s (you don’t touch the vegetables or the fruit, rather you tell the man what you want), a fishmonger’s, an ironmonger’s (hardware), betting shops like leeches, and second-hand clothing shops (which were most assuredly not charity shops). Winifred’s house was an ordinary three bedroom terraced house, on Leswin Road just off Stoke Newington High Street, where the number seventy-three bus would come; the bus went through Islington, The Angel and past King’s Cross, and I would alight near the courtyard of the UCL campus.
I had my first reading of Proust. I’ll never forget it. I had started a few months before with ‘I used to go to bed early’ in a café, one sunny morning over breakfast in Providence Rhode Island, while visiting Elissa at Brown, in April 1985 I think. For the rest of it I was in London—In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Prisoner, The Fugitive, and Time Regained—often read in the UCL foyer or while walking round London, or waiting for a bus, or riding on same. I’ve read it three times since that first time and look forward to the fifth. I attended meetings with Malcolm and then Richard, and the friday afternoon postgradate seminar with Malcolm and Chris Peacocke presiding. Richard did his aforementioned Painting as an Art lectures at Birkbeck; somehow this didn’t make such an impression on me at the time but now having the read the great book twice I suitably bow down to it. I saw many wonderful pictures, for the first time not as mere reproductions in books—at the National Gallery, The Tate (in Pimlico, before the split), Dulwich Gallery, The Courtauld (in Bloomsbury, before its move to Somerset House, the Strand). I attended many concerts—the Barbican, South Bank, Wigmore Hall, St. Johns at Smith Square—becoming switched-on to classical music at such places (a concert of solo piano—Debussy and Ravel—an orchestra doing Shostakovich, and a string quartet, playing Haydn and Beethoven, stood out) but also at UCL I saw Wayne Shorter for the first time—not his best band but he was marvelous.
I made the trip to Paris. Memories are slightly dim but I remember
the glory of the Champs d’Elysees; discovering Manet at the Musee
d’Orsay; disappointment at the long lines, too long, to get into the
Louvre; a fine Winter morning on the steps of Le Sacre Coeur, with coffee and
croissant; awe at the beautiful, self-possessed and unapproachable women;
wonder at Notre Dame, an absurd sense of ownership of the Eiffel Tower, and the
railway cashier, true to type, affecting not to understand my pronunciation of some
station. Just later—at Christmas—back in the UK, Elissa came to
visit, and the train at King's Cross took us North to Scotland, via Edinburgh to Leuchars (St. Andrews);
from there we got a taxi to Winifred’s mother’s house in Boarhills (Winifred’s
mother was somewhere else). The weather was glorious, the air still, with
bright sunshine, the temperature well below freezing. High points were a
walk around the nearly deserted St. Andrews, a frigid but splendid hike around
the coastline, and a Boxing Day visit to the local pub in Boarhills—we being
unaccountable non-locals, with everyone going silent when we entered, but
resumptive of their chatter immediately as we ordered pints. Elissa and I got
along well then.
My studies in London—often in the main building of University College with stuffed Jeremy Bentham looking on, otherwise in the Student Union or the Senate House library—were earnest and I suppose productive. Looking back, I still didn’t quite get philosophy—could not believe that after Wittgenstein, people were still unaccountably making up theories. Maybe I wasi—if in a slighttly more advanced version—in the state I now often perceive in students: They don’t really understand the ideas, but at that age they get turned on for more or less irrelevant personal reasons by the very idea of philosophy whatever that is, and eagerly adopt philosophical turns of phrase and so on. It feels good and flattering to one's self-image to read, to write, and to speak them; it gives them a sense of getting on in their lives which is so important at that age, and also a certain superiority, yet without much in the way of understanding. But eventually, bit by bit, understanding if not merely facility with the lingo, comes for some, and it came for me, at least I like to think so.
XV. Santa Barbara, Chris and Nicole
Having secured a Fellowship from the University of California at Santa
Barbara, the day I left London for Eugene it was March, with a very few
lonely blossoms on the ornamental cherry trees in Gordon Square, a teasing sign
that Spring proper was coming but was still a ways off. Things seasonal
were further along in Eugene. I joined Elissa, who was staying at a cooperative
household in the Whiteaker Neighborhood just north and west of downtown, owned by the countercultural but
disciplined Alpha-Bit co-op that ran a big farm out near Mapleton, towards the
coast. I worked at the Beanery, a somewhat hip café on 14th street
with an emphasis on coffee but with omelettes, bagels, salad etc., just a stone’s throw
from Alder Street and then the University. When I went to the café to collect
my final paycheck, I found myself accused of taking a large amount of money
from the cash register the night before, the last shift I worked there. I
was indignant at this; the very idea! Don’t they know that I had long since
grown out of such miscreancy? Of course I couldn’t prove I hadn’t, and on
reflection I figured fair enough, as there were so many times in the past when
I had profited with similar capers; I took my pay without further
complaint. At the Beanery I learned the invaluable skill of operating the
espresso machine, which like all the espresso machines in those days was a
‘manual’ model—that is, to force the steam through the coffee, there is a big
handle which you pulled down. We liked to call ourselves ‘espresso
jerks’, after the soda-jerks of the old-time soda fountains, like the
Woolworth’s downtown—by this time closed but remembered from childhood, with
uniformed and be-hatted workers, and with a long bar, where temperate old
ladies would put their shopping down at the stool next to theirs, and order a
cherry coke, an iced tea, or, if she were feeling mildly peckish and not too impecunious, splash out on an
ice cream float.
In June 1986 Elissa and I moved to Santa Barbara, me up for an academic
challenge but she being at a kind of loose end with her degree in Classics from
Brown, prestigious but useless unless you want to become a Classics Professor.
We needed money so she worked at some bakery and I got a job painting houses,
with John Forster. I learned a lot, and it was good to have that bit of
experience as a proper working man, especially as it would prove to be the last time I
was a proper working man. I started at UC Santa Barbara September ’86, and broke
up with Elissa in maybe October (or rather she broke with me, but it was the same). Just before I had gone to a University
psychiatrist, explaining that among other things, which were no doubt obscure
to the good doctor, I was wont to think ‘I am a Monster’. He stiffened,
hurriedly wrote up a prescription for Prozac after waiting a decent interval, and showed me the
door. The anti-depressant had its effect for a few months—I mean, it
was at first interesting, and even stimulating, to feel so different—but
the effect was very short lived, the side-effects became all too apparent, and
I stopped taking it. Later in life I had similar experiences with other
anti-depressants; and have been depressed most of the time, but I’ve never felt
it acutely, never quite had it getting in the way of functioning.
Santa Barbara is a little smaller than Eugene. The weather there is disconcertingly perfect all the time, assuming that the sun bearing down mercilessly is your idea of perfection, although it's rarely positively hot—the seventies, eighties. The people there are largely vacuous in the Southern California style, even if politically (they like to think) to the left, relatively speaking. There is nothing like a buzz on the streets (there is a sizeable Hispanic population, but somehow the city fathers keep them hidden, with the exception of such excellent manifestations as La Superica, a taqueria, and the solid, unpretentious Rose Cafe). Next to it to the east is Montecito, posh beyond all measure; to the west is Goleta, middle-class suburbia, correspondingly tedious, but good for visiting the hardware store and the like. I lived always in central Santa Barbara, near State Street, near what passes for downtown. The Lobero Theatre, the Santa Barbara Art Gallery, and the splendid Santa Barbara County Courthouse made for a pleasant enough central district, but it seemed to me devoid of life, soporific; not even my favourite coffee hangout, the Espresso Roma café, could quite dispel this feeling. The campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara is actually not in Santa Barbara but ten miles away between Goleta and the student-ghetto Isla Vista, on a peninsula which would be a nature reserve were it not for the campus. There is, beyond the student union, café and bookstore, a big brackish lake, and beyond that a natural marshy area, and then the sea (south-facing, with the Channel Islands visible). I rode the bus daily to the campus, except for the odd occasions when I took my bicycle to the campus, riding on the separate bike-path, that winds pleasantly through the Eucalyptus trees amidst the rear gardens of the houses.
Among my first classes was one with Peter Hylton on Quine. The main thing with which I came away with from Hylton’s lectures on Quine, other than their extreme clarity and depth of vision, was an appreciation of Quine the philosopher, that here was a philosophy that is positive and relatively immune to Wittgenteinian scepticism, and accordingly that creative work in philosophy is rare and hard-won. It requires near genius and extreme appetite for reading and intellectual work, not to say some panache as a writer (the latter of which, if not exactly the former, I inexplicably had a modicum). To this day I’m mystified by how little appreciation there is among philosophers of how vast is the gulf between such figures and their own relatively paltry abilities. On the other hand I suppose my philosophical life has been one of hero-worship: Wittgenstein, Frege, Quine, and Wollheim. Perhaps it’s ultimately a sort of father-worship, which might be a form of self-loathing ('Me and my friends are not possibly up to snuff compared with previous generations!'). I learned also from Nathan Salmon, Francis Dauer, Hubert Schwyzer, Bill Forgie, Noel Fleming and Tony Brueckner—quite a line-up, and looking back now I realise I should thank my lucky stars, as these people constituted a formidable defence against the ever-worsening professionalism and philistinism of today's academic philosophy, as these on the whole were anything but philistines (for example, Forgie could whistle lines from Beethoven’s late quartets as well as take his students through Gödel; Noel would recite Shakespearean sonnets but also knew his Leibniz back to front), and were sometimes ludicrously unprofessional, by contemporary standards.
Indeed I spent a certain amount time with Noel, who is without doubt one of the most peculiar people I ever met, and I've known a few as I'm drawn to peculiar people. He was about five feet six, maybe one hundred and fifty pounds at most, short reddish curly hair and monkey-like bearing. He wore the plainest shirts and trousers imaginable, along with a floppy fisherman's cap and soft, 'hush-puppy' style shoes or sandals (with socks!). He hailed from Kansas, and though he spent a few years in England, his way of speaking was decidedly Kansan, if not Kantian. This, combined with his most impressive erudition, resulted in an unusual blend of intellect and Midwestern folksiness. Pretense was foreign to his nature, while common sense, plus a remarkable degree of intellectual agility, were simply instinctual in him. He likes—or rather loves—dialectical conversations about philosophy, literature and art (as mentioned he could recite numerous bits of Shakespeare, including of course many of the sonnets). He was a wonderful companion to have on a trip to the Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary Art.
I had a short-lived romance with Valerie Stevens. Despite her
intelligence and wistful beauty, and despite everyone’s saying we were perfect
together, it didn’t work for me. I had long known her—she was an actress,
with the Stage Left crowd—and stayed with her at her flat in Oakland a couple
of times; she came down to Santa Barbara once on the train; we went for an absurdly
long walk, trying to reach the hills but turned back, defeated. I think
we were too pent up inside but it was manifested only in the subtlest of ways;
a counselor would have recommended that we talk more.
In the elevator at South Hall, in the first month of being a student as
UCSB, I met Chris Belshaw. I was carrying Ulysses; he pointed and
asked what was it, and I said its name, and remarked how I found it priceless
at points but the style frustrating (an idiotic remark), to which he said ‘It
keeps changing’. Too true. Right away we hit it off, and soon were dining
at some café, snickering uproariously, if that is possible. He turned me
on to Beethoven’s late quartets but also was keen on the Beatles, Sinatra etc.,
and played various musical instruments. I found him easy to talk to. His
was the right sort of intelligence combined with complete cynicism; I had met
my match. We also played squash, and I was also amused to hit tennis
balls with him. Later we drove—or rather I drove, as being British he wasn’t
confident enough driving on the right—his ’67 Mustang to the Bay Area (I think
Mike Kalish was there, in the car, as far as Berkeley), then on to Oregon, where Chris met my father, Sarah, and Pacheco, had coffee at the Fall Creek Bakery,
and we drove to the Cascade Mountains, for a little taste of my childhood.
Next year my roommate was the wacky Dick Leibendorfer, aficionado of
Donald Davidson, Gareth Evans, and toothpicks. I met Nicole
Alper—attached to the diminutive Nikky who Chris had designs on—at dinner at Chris’ apartment,
followed by the four of us going late at night to a coffee shop, which featured
some shenanigans with a water pistol and our being shown the door.
Nicole was a good match for me, beautiful, articulate and oh-so sarcastic; yet
somehow I couldn’t respect her properly and I imagine it was because she was only
nineteen—I pined perhaps subconsciously for what I imagined was maturity in a
woman, with the obvious explanation I fancy, that I was searching for that
impossible creature, a mother-like figure still in the first flush of sexiness.
Nicole had cacophonous brown hair and eyes that squint because she
wouldn’t wear her glasses, and a fragile but aristocratic bearing; she looked
wonderful in good clothing, with her long bones and pretty face. She was
either afraid of her intelligence or not convinced of it. She talked very
softly, but well, without any of those useless and maddeningly ubiquitous
phrases that clutter the speech of most girls her age. I believe she
suffered from a terrible mistrust of people, at some deep level; was vaguely
aware of some abyss which might or might not be beneath her.
Because Nicole’s family lived in Burlingame, on the San Francisco
peninsula, we made several trips to the Bay Area in her resplendent Audi—a
boring drive on Highway 101 of five and a half hours that passes through Santa
Maria, San Luis Obispo, Atascadero, King City, Salinas and Gilroy—all
forgettable locales with the exception of San Luis Obispo, with little of the
beauty just over the hill of the famous coastline Highway 1—before entering the
south end of San Jose, the effluent drain of the entire Bay Area. I was often in Berkeley, and on one such occasion I ran into Richard Wollheim. He was sitting outside a cafe on Bancroft Street, having coffee with Barry Stroud; I went up and said 'hi' etc. but I hated myself as I was so tongue-tied. Also on one or two such occasions Nicole and I stayed at Tony and Terry’s house in Oakland, where
Tony was in fine form—he was very much in love with Terry, with whom he has
remained married—and their two cats Zoey and Momaar; Zoey amused us by playing
fetch with little rubber fish, while the handsome Momaar remained aloof.
We had some good times, Nicole and I, especially because of her wit and waggish
cynicism; even though our conversation was not exactly genuine—neither of us
could be sincere, especially not me—still we were as one,
instinctively.
I saw John Cook—the first husband of Sarah—a few times, as he was living
in a beautiful hacienda-style house in Santa Barbara, near the Mission (the
supernaturally charming Santa Barbara Mission of 1786, brick and stucco painted white,
with its vast lawn in front, its extraordinarily variegated gardens to the
rear). He was finishing his book on Wittgenstein, arguing that Wittgenstein
was not Wittgensteinian enough, that actually he was just another
phenomenalist, that the real wisdom and true Wittgenstein lay in the writings
of his colleague back at Oregon Frank Ebersole (who counselled as Wittgenstein
did that one should get out of philosophy, which, unlike Wittgenstein himself, the
preacher of this advice duly practiced). I was of course a very
impecunious graduate student, and began to get a glimpse of the nobility to
which Sarah and Aaron drew attention when Cook, having gallantly paid for my
coffee at Espresso Roma on a previous occasion, and the bill having arrived for
more substantial fare at some pricier café up the street, gave me to understand
that it was my turn to pay.
XVI. My Father
I have a lot of good memories of my father. He spoke Spanish and Russian fluently (the former because he lived in Mexico—partly in Mexico City and partly in the country near San Luis Potosi—from age twelve to eighteen, the latter because he was at first a Slavic Languages major in college; he also learned a bit of Czech there, played passable chess and could do that Russian form of dancing, where one impersonates a leaping crab). In his years in Mexico he was keen on climbing the great mountains there—they retained their Mayan names, Ixtaciwatl was one, Pocapetepetl was another—and taught himself electronics. He did two or three years in the Navy in the aftermath of World War Two—an electronics engineer—before going to college at Michigan and then transferring to UC Berkeley, where he got his Bachelor’s Degree. I don’t know how or when precisely he switched to mathematics, then to physics, but he somehow came to enroll as a graduate student in physics at Berkeley, in the early or mid-1950s. During those years he had communist leanings, which was no innocuous deal as this was the time of Joseph McCarthy. As a small child of course I loved him; his building a stereo for use in the living room, his taking us fishing and backpacking, playing catch with me (baseball; a funny old glove he had, so tiny), playing chess with me and later tennis. He was tall at six feet one inch, dark brown (almost black), then grey hair, and remained throughout his life very lanky, with big bones, skinny, except muscular calves and forearms, with large hands and feet. A fine baritone voice. Later his habits and dress became more eccentric: he smoked a corncob pipe, abandoned jackets and suits for sandals and shorts even in winter, sported some old T-shirt with short sleeves, with a pencil in the pocket, and when the weather absolutely demanded it, a ratty old sweater. In winter he wore a preposterously big but cheap coat with an imitation fur-lined hood, still with shorts and sandals. Evidently he cared not a whit for material things, a good habit which I've tried to emulate but not very successfully. As I grew up he was at his best at mealtimes (he ate slowly, a good habit I learned from him). He could sing with his baritone and whistle expertly (he liked Beethoven, Edvard Grieg, Tchaikovsky).
The choice of song was decidedly uncharacteristic of him, but he would sing the following bit of Americana at odd moments:
Well old man Tucker was a crazy old man,
He washed his face in a fryin' pan;
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel
And he died with a toothache in his heel.
Too late for old man Tucker,
Too late to get his supper.
Supper's over and dinner's cookin',
Old man Tucker just stands there lookin'.
I remember being puzzled at the fourth line but delighted at the mild absurdity of the last (I've since learned that there are many versions; often known as 'Old Dan Tucker').
He seemed to be at his happiest when alone, working. Indeed he had no friends outside of work. He would have animated talks for hours on the phone but still only to his colleagues and graduate students, sometimes conversing in Russian to Soviet colleagues. Always the subject was physics—speaking of Big Bertha, photon multlipliers, photon rectifiers, 1017, etc. Unintelligible to non-physicists. He could be very awkward with people, especially with my friends (once Sam Freeman came the door; ‘Where Kemp at?’, Sam asked; ‘uh… I’m Kemp!’, stammered Dad in answer, the very picture of an educated white man confronted with Southern black speech; another time with Steve Pacheco present he announced, out of the blue, without prefacing with such pleasantries as ‘Hello’, ‘There’s some wine here if you’re interested’; I doubt he even knew Steve’s name). In Hawaii as mentioned he loved papaya, guavas and mango, the latter from the big tree in our backyard. I imagine it was a pain to be saddled with me – morose, distant and deceitful me – from the time of the divorce to about the time of his marriage to Sarah. But after Sarah entered the scene, and I became an adolescent, I saw less and less of him. He did however support me financially for the few years when I was attending the University of Oregon until 1984 (with breaks), and in return, as I say, in very partial return, I worked for him at the observatory in the summer. But then contact was minimal, because when I filled in at the observatory – typically with the grad student Mark Barbour – he was in Eugene; and when he came up, I went back to Eugene.
When Jim became estranged from Sarah in 1987, and visited me in Santa Barbara, it was good to see him and to talk extensively—it was perhaps the first time that we had talked seriously and frankly about painful or difficult things. We went to Montecito Beach where I gave him A Boring Story, by Chekhov; a little too close to home perhaps (the story of an old professor, coming to terms with disillusionment), but he appreciated it. I didn’t see him again until the next year—March 1988—when he was on his deathbed at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eugene. It was pancreatic cancer; he was just 61. I didn't twig that this was the end. When I showed up he was crazy from the morphine, and recoiled in fear or anger at the sight of me, saying something to that effect (it might have been that I was slow to come to the hospital—coming from Santa Barbara, I had been in Eugene for a day or two before coming); later he appeared to be imagining himself sorting out fishing line, tying flies etc. When he was very near death the morphine was turned down; he appeared to recognise us – Robin, Laurence and me – then he made a horrible face, struggling so, and died. Robin said through her tears ‘Let it go’; good advice under the circumstances, I thought. Sarah was not there thank goodness; I phoned her, and she made a sort of howl at my words ‘He’s gone’. The day before she had told me of some of her misgivings but I don’t remember precisely what they were, even if I can well-imagine their type; but myriad expressions of resentment, anger, and embitterment were on display. I hated her then, though that feeling was short-lived. On our visit three years later, I felt nothing but compassion for her.
I know (insofar as one can speak of knowledge of such things) that my
mother’s behaviour was the proximate cause of my woe; but also that my father
did not help it, being so distant and preoccupied, never explaining.
Nevertheless he loved me in his way, as we say. Everything personal or
romantic he felt to be distractions from his work even if some of it was
necessary; once in a fit of anger and lucidity which I mentioned, about age
fifteen, I said something like ‘Your work is important only to you!’
and thereby perhaps suggested that it was so only because he was a failure at normal
things. Teenagers can be so cruel.
XVII. PhD Dissertation; London Again
I earned my Master’s Degree in January 1988 (it took four terms for me
to ‘advance to candidacy’ for Ph.D.; I was given credit for two courses for
time spent at UCL, and rather than taking a term to write my ‘Qualifying Paper’
I simply submitted a paper I’d done for a course).
When Dad died I panicked—at least gradually and in a subterranean fashion, for I suppose I didn’t quite realize the significance of the event at the time. I was barely able to function as a Teaching Assistant. On one occasion I was uncharacteristically angry at Patti Forgie over some inconsequential bit of extra grading she gave me to do, and was insupportably rough to Nicole.
I spent Fall 1988 at University College London. Unlike the last
visit, London was not the thing for me. It was a complete waste of the
fellowship that supported me, and money was tighter than it was the last time
due to a big change in the exchange rate. I did have a good visit with
Chris, now with Carrie in Lancaster (she was and is his one true love); we made
some fine trips up the Dales and the Howgills on mountainbikes; in sunny
weather, with those unmatched scenes all around, coming down the slopes was
glorious. Back in London I was comparatively poor and emotionally
unsteady, and made for a temperamental lodger for Judith and Bob, friends of
Winifred McEwan, nice gentle college teachers just approaching middle-age who
leaned distinctly leftwards in their politics (the flat was in Clapton, not far from Stoke Newington). I was still thinking I
would write my PhD thesis in aesthetics, and wrote some ludicrous mumbo-jumbo
which I foisted on Malcolm Budd, a Professor if you remember at UCL (understandably he never responded). I
was very depressed; upon returning before Christmas I broke up with Nicole; a
great mistake but it was bad timing, as well as too early for us I suppose.
On the way to London, or perhaps on the return trip, I had my first stay in New York. Laurie Reid had become, over the years, a close friend—partly through her having been in the background of my friendship with her brothers Tom and then David, and partly through her having developed a tight friendship with Elissa (they had a pet name that each would call the other, ‘Bunny’ or ‘Bun’, which was presumably a take-off from straight-laced middle-class white girls’ friendships in the 1950s and pre-hippie 1960s). Partly also because, inscrutably, I felt that I knew her—even at the time when all I really knew of her was a certain knowing (and not entirely good natured!) look she had, when she was twelve and I was sixteen. At this later time I had also gotten to know her parents Dick and Carolyn, that is, got to know them as other than the parents of the boys I was hanging out with. Laurie was finishing her degree at Reed College—an academically discerning, left wing private college in Portland—and was already making a name as a painter, which no doubt pleased Dick, as he too was a painter, in his case an accomplished amateur with a style that reminded me at the time of Richard Diebenkorn, although more abstract. Laurie met Charlie Cohen at Reed, whose father was a somewhat wealthy stockbroker or banker—I can’t remember the details—but Charlie chose a different path, becoming a schoolteacher and accomplished guitar player in swing and klezmer bands. Their family home was a magnificent flat on 5th Avenue and about 95th Street, across from Central Park. For my visit to the Big Apple, I stayed there for about ten days. The parents were away—Laurie and Charlie were there for most of the stay and then I was entrusted with a set of keys to stay alone for the final few days. I went up the Empire State Building with Laurie and Charlie, with them sampled hot dogs, sandwiches, and bagels from delis or from street vendors—verifying both what Laurie said, that so-called ‘bagels’ from outside New York strikingly lack the indefinable quality of bagellity—and something a deli worker gave me to understand with some vehemence, that mustard and mayonnaise is not a possible combination on a sandwich and no mistake. We went to the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum, my thirst for such things now being at a fever pitch, and to the Village Vanguard (a quartet with Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, Joe Henderson and a piano player who I can’t remember); and to the tiny but magical Bradley’s (with the Bill Mays-Red Mitchell duo). After Laurie and Charlie had gone I went alone to restaurant where Tommy Flanagan—the piano player on the famous John Coltrane record Giant Steps among other things—was giving sets which were reviewed very favourably by the New Yorker. But I didn’t like it, and my impression was that neither did Mr. Flanagan, what with the vibe of the-musician-as-entertainer-in-the-background, it encouraged one to think of Flanagan as one's servant. It smacked of racism, or jazzicism, or both.
When I returned to California, I had a brief relationship before Christmas with Suzanne Gauntlett, a rich blond Berkeleyan businesswoman, my mother having introduced us. She didn’t know the woman but my mother spotted her sitting alone in the restaurant, and asked if I liked the looks of her (Suzanne was very well-dressed); at my ‘I suppose’ she graciously went up to her, introduced herself, my sister, and then me. An unusual talent, which makes me think on the one hand of parties in Wildwood Gardens in the nineteen-thirties and forties where she learned the necessary tact and self-confidence—and on the other of a discreet and well-turned out madam: it felt vaguely sordid, as if I were gangster’s son, having his people negotiate for him in a club.
February 2021
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