After our six week sojourn to the Pacific North West Kris and I arrived back in the city in late August 1978 and tried to figure out what to do next. Events conspired to determine what actually did happen. My newly sprouted moustache, which I had groomed over the summer, attracted quite a lot of male attention, remembering that this was San Francisco in the late 70s. This came to a head a couple of weeks later when I went to see David Lynch’s Eraserhead on my own at a midnight screening at The Roxie Cinema on 16th and Valencia in the Mission. The film had already become a cult classic and I was curious to check it out. Kris didn’t want to go, so I caught the bus over the hill from the Inner Sunset. Standing in the queue outside I was approached by a journalist from the Chronicle (or was it the Examiner?) writing a piece on the people who go to cult midnight movies and he asked me what I thought about the film. I told him that obviously I hadn’t seen it yet and might tell him later. He appeared to take a keen interest in me and asked me to save him a seat, so I did, thinking nothing of it at the time. For those who haven’t seen it, Eraserhead is Lynch’s first full length feature, shot in shadowy black and white and set in a strange subterranean city, where bizarre characters mingle in a surreal atmosphere. What stood out for me at the time was the weird soundtrack, it left me with a feeling of unease, but I did get the sense that I had travelled to another world. The journo, whose name I’ve long forgotten, and I watched the film together and afterwards went to a gay bar for a drink or two, ostensibly to talk about the film and one thing led to another back at his nearby apartment and with some mind altering substances introduced, all kinds of things happened that I have only a hazy memory of. I must have been well out of it when I stumbled out of his apartment at about 3am and staggered home. There was hell to pay, Kris and I had an enormous blazing row when I told her what had happened and this really was the beginning of the end of our short lived marriage, which was really based on getting a green card and the right to live and work somewhere else. We had been drifting apart for some time and this proved to be the catalyst. We were through, I moved out two weeks later. It was painful and wrenching, but in hindsight I think it needed to be as we were no longer really connected. So I could say that David Lynch played a part in the end of my four year relationship which had a not very serious marriage built into it. My moustache didn’t survive another month, but it had done its job, which I can say now, although it certainly wasn’t planned at the outset.
I quickly found a room in a shared apartment on Masonic, again back in the Haight, with a pair of left wing community radio presenters and Stan Ulysses Moore, originally from Atlanta Georgia, who became a close friend for several years. My sister Jane had in the meantime moved back to the city and was living around the corner with Craig and Mary. Craig had an alter ego in the form of Oinoid the Clown. I found his character quite bizarre, I’ve never really taken to clowns. The apartment on Masonic suited me better, I did a lot of painting and started designing photo punk postcards and listened to a lot of new music and shopped at Aquarius Records over in the Castro for my music. It was then that I found a job at a new place called Pier 39 near Fisherman’s Wharf, which was just opening. The story continues…