continuing on from previous post

After six months of living on a noisy Haight Street Kris and I decided that living in one room was not a long term plan so we began to seek a new place to live. I was now working as a filing clerk for what was then Pacific Telephone in an obscure office block downtown as a temp. The job was to go through sections of the unabridged LA phone book and pick out every 10th or 15th name, I forget which, and write out the name and address and number on a piece of paper. There were some famous names listed. I didn’t sell them to the National Enquirer. This was tedious, but saved only by my meeting of co-worker Mel Detesta, this was an assumed name, I can’t remember his real one, but he was a budding stand up comedy writer and a very funny man. We got talking and had some amusing times together at work. He said that there was an apartment available in his house, I think there were four all together. So Kris and I ended up in renting this top floor apartment in a house on 3rd Avenue in the Inner Sunset, this would be the last place we lived together. 

  This was an introduction to a new crowd of people, Mick the friendly, but cynical cartoonist pool player in the basement who worked for Rolling Stone magazine, Ernie a creative film maker who had made a 15 minute spoof short called Hardware Wars, Mel himself and through them a link to Rolling Stone people from The Tubes to writers Buck Henry and Ben Fong Torres. 

     The Inner Sunset was sleepy compared to the Haight, calmer, more boring, less counter culture, so we went out of the area to discover and soak things up. There was the wonderful Pharaoh Sanders “Our Roots Began in Africa”, who played at The Shady Grove on Haight Street, the obligatory Jefferson Starship free gig in Golden Gate Park and I’m certain I saw Santana play on their home turf in the Mission, if a little hazy.  I turned down the chance to see The Dead, they were too old hat for me and the Stones for the same reason. But strangely I did see ELO and Steve Hillage at the wonderfully named Cow Palace. There were warehouse parties in the South of Market area, I wasn’t drinking a lot at the time and turned down a communal bottle of red wine being passed around at one, it turned out to be laced with acid, something that did not end well for my friend Paula, who literally freaked out. She did recover, however, but it was a warning.    

     Work involved several temp jobs, more for the phone company, boring filing work. Then I came across a free newspaper advertising something called Communiversity, this was a left over hippy venture from the 60s and celebrated the fact that we all had things to teach and learn – a free exchange. I took a wonderful evening class in self healing and nutrition, which as a fledgling vegetarian was incredibly helpful to me. I learnt things there I still use today. It was all given out freely by a man from Columbia called Carlos. The other activity that I joined in after hours through the same Communiversity was my joining of The Suicide Club, named after the Robert Louis Stevenson short story, it was a place to challenge yourself. I would describe them as situationalists. Founded by the late Gary Warne, a  nearby bookshop owner it was a loose collection of freedom loving individuals who wanted adventure, and sometimes did dangerous things, but not to anyone else.  Amongst them a game of Star Wars with toy Han Solo blasters between two rival armies in Oakland Cemetery at night, police came and we hid behind gravestones, 30 of us. Amazingly they did not spot us.  A beautiful evening pot luck meal on Golden Gate Bridge, with chairs, tables and candles. The cops turned up and were fairly amused to see 60 or so people sit down to a candle dinner on the footpath and drove on. These days we might have been hauled off. A night time break into the empty Hamm’s brewery to make strange sounds in the vast beer vats and other strange and sometimes bizarre activities. 

I found a job painting apartments all in the same colour for a shady lawyer called Stan Arden, who owned several apartments across the city and hooked up with a pair of brothers from Colorado, named Jeff and Art, who smoked Picayune’s. I liked them very much and we often shared a cheeky beer in the afternoon. Arden noticed me and offered me a job in his office keeping track of his various apartment rents. He was a mean character, nobody liked him, or got a day’s respite from paying rent, the heavies were at the door in minutes demanding rent money. He once asked me to serve an eviction notice on somebody, I refused to do this and told him I wasn’t going to do his dirty work. That was the end of that job. 

  The summer of 1977 and I had the opportunity to go back to the UK for a month to see my folks, family and friends. I hadn’t even realised that it was Silver Jubilee year and all the bunting was out. More interesting to me was my witness to the punk movement in the midst of all this. I bought the Pistols ‘God Save the Queen’ single in the week that it reached No.1, someone stole it from me later, and the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP.  I saw my first Derek Jarman films which I found weirdly fascinating. I spent a week in Bristol visiting my sister and saw The Jam on their ‘In the City’ tour, a great burst of energy. I returned to California feeling like I was a changed person, my hair was shorn, clothes and musical taste were changing. 

My neighbour Mick, who I had given the task of keeping an eye on the Chevy, managed to total it in a messy accident. I suspect he had been drinking. It was no more when I returned and there was an insurance claim to deal with.

    I started running regularly and my favourite run was the three miles through to the Pacific Ocean through Golden Gate Park and back again past the fields of bison.

to be continued…