BOOBJOB

Inter-
stisal
line-
ages and
dharma
bums
united alliances
on the mudflats
during king tides.
The Charles
van be damned.
Forget Varda's nudes.
Juanita's was the g-spot
to be for breakfast.
Fishermen never for-
got her boob muff-
in special.
No one
ever went
away
hung-
ry.

4/29/2016

You'd have to have known Juanita, Gate 5, Alan Watts, Varda, and crew... oblique references, at best. Locke would have to have been part of that Sausalito scene. Alan was living in the pilot house atop the Charles van Damme. Varda was downstairs. He nailed his painting to the wall to defy gravity, much to my delight. My mom worked for Juanita Musson, You didn't mess with her. She was a friend of Sally Stanford's. Her special was a boobjob, a muffin sandwich draped around some unsuspecting man's ears. Few ever fully recovered from Juanita's ministrations.

Bio Notes for Brian Kervin

For all you North Bay folks, Neil O"Neill and Maureen Hurley will be on the air live reading poetry (and music) on The Learnin' Kirven Show April 6th, from 4-6 pm at KWMR West Marin Community Radio  at 90.5 FM Point Reyes Station, and 89.9 FM Bolinas kwmr.org (live stream). Maureen will be reading poems of place, growing up in West Marin, highlights of our upcoming CPITS' 50-year anniversary, West Marin kids to read their poems. Neil will talk about coming to Marin in the 1970s, Ross Valley Players, his 30-year gig with Bread & Roses, and play some music.

I began to write Brian some bio notes and it got out of hand. Bloggy material, it is.

Google removed my memorial post of Juanita claiming it went against community standards

This is from a Facebook memory as Google removed my memorial post of Juanita, claiming it went against community standards. I thought it was spam egging me on so I ignored it. Mistake. Now it’s gone and there is no back up—not even in the Wayback Machine. I didn’t even find out about it until Google again removed 13 of my posts in May, 2021. So this is a placeholder. I’ve put the gleaned material in quotes.

I am heartbroken, as I know Google had flagged at least 7 other posts. Luckily I was able to restore the Woodside history play I co-wrote from an old hard copy. But what about the other lost posts?

This is what I gleaned from Facebook Memory: “It's been confirmed: Juanita Musson's Memorial Service is on Sunday, April 3rd at Olompali Ranch in Novato—Noon to 3pm. Please wear bright muumuus & Hawaiian shirts! A cock or a monkey on your shoulder, bedpans of food and wild Juanita stories will do...what a peculiar tribe we've been! 

We met a lot of folks I sorta knew or looked familiar or were at the same place/time thing. I recognized Jerry Tomlinson who lived at Rancho Olompali when it was a Grateful Dead commune. I remember going to big parties there, wading in the grotto. Falling in. 

Before Olompali was a commune it was Martin Ranch, I got my saddle fixed there—so it was a three wave tier of memory rolling in. One woman I met, Caron McCloud was with Greg Davis—so her kids were related to my old flame, Geoff Davis! That’s how I met Caron, Shiloh, and Shannon McCloud-Davis, and Kurt Crowbar Kansas. Shannon McCloud went to school with my brother Guy. 

Afterwards, we all trundled off to Sonoma Valley—up Nuns Canyon to a sculpture ranch, Relais du Soleil right next to Beltane Ranch. We drank and feasted on chicken until the stars sighed. We recited Juanita stories. "The food's good but not necessarily the temperament of the cook". —Juanita's Galley, Gate 4 and a half, Sausalito.

It turns out our host, Tim was a friend of Norton Buffalo's—so sad to see Norton's Ovation guitar silent, by the fireplace. Neil sang some folk songs. We walked in the sculpture garden. Big sheet metal horse running into rust. Amazing place over the hill from Beltane Ranch.”

I wrote a lovely log blog piece written ca. April 3-5, 2011, commemorating the memorial and the funereal supper. This group photo was from a 2016 FB post on Juanita’s page, and it gave me the terminus post quem date, so the missing blogpost that Google removed was still up in 2016. That’s all I know. Since it was all my original writing and photos, it couldn’t  have been a copyright issue. But then again, what do bots know about writing?

Link to Juanita’s page.

“Juanita Musson's memorial at Olompali. April 3, 2011 It was a Gate 5-ish reunion of sorts. Juanita stories abounded. Do you have a Juanita story or photos, etc? Post them here.

We were all trying to remember the 60's with little success — with Jerry Tomlinson, Yerushalmi Ben Yehudah, Larry Otis, Kurt Crowbar Kangas, Shannon Cinnamon McCloud, Stuart Ramsey, Lynn D Kircher, Neil O'Neill, Julia Brigden, Letitia Graves, Caron McCloud, Laurie Steese, and Shiloh Sophia. (Stuart's gone now...). 

I'm uploading the last of the photos to Picasa now. Two more folders to go. I'll leave them all at the end of the album so it's easier to distinguish them form the earlier ones (I had 3 cameras going—and Neil had one too). © Maureen Hurley 2011”

Friends not in the main photo: Pagan Neil and Carolyn Heal 

Alas, Picasa Web Album is no more, but the URL gave me the name of the ranch we went to, Relais du Soleil. Not only did I lose all the stories and tributes, I lost the names of the folks who attended the memorial service. I’m still so angry, I could spit.

Added 4/1/23

Juanita's Gallery restaurateur Juanita Musson dies

My original tribute to Juanita

You rarely got what you wanted at Juanita’s Restaurant, but you got a lot of it

• RIP Juanita Musson

• DEAR GOOGLE, Blogger removed 13 of my blogposts  May 13, 2021. At least they restored these posts. 

RIP Juanita Musson

My mom worked as a waitress for Juanita at the Galley in Sausalito. She made Sally Lacy's (Marilyn' Monroe's stand-in) clothes—and many of Juanita's muu-muus too. I remember the fawn and the monkey.

My original story: You rarely got what you wanted at Juanita’s Restaurant, but you got a lot of it

Candy Philpot-Hall Good story and memories for you. My unofficial "Auntie" was Sally Stanford a family friend/ Sunday brunches at Vallhalla were a highlight of my childhood. I loved her parrot Lorretta..it swore like a sailor.

Added 2/2017 from Facebook Memories, a good thing too, as Google later removed my entire memorial post and photos, written in April, 2011, ca 2017. This is another Facebook Memory that at least restored the timeframe. A pity I didn’t think to also post the blog link along with the defunct Picasa links.

• 
  

  

  This is how I remember Sally Stanford.

• Google removed my memorial post of Juanita claiming it Went against community standards. 

Juanita Musson, colorful restaurateur, dies at 87

Juanita Musson, the outrageous and muu-muued former Sonoma Valley restaurateur who 40 or 50 years ago might arrive at a table holding her pet pig or monkey and might answer a patron's complaint by tipping a heaping plate into his lap, died Saturday. She was 87....

After running restaurants from 1953 to 1984 in Sausalito, Sonoma Valley, Contra Costa County's Port Costa, Fairfield and finally Winters in Yolo County, a long-sober and mellowed Juanita returned to Sonoma County more than 25 years ago to retire.
Late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen discovered Juanita in Sausalito and wrote multiple times about her overflowing personality and the eggs, slabs of ham and butter-soaked muffins that burdened her plates. Comics and other entertainers — The Smothers Brothers, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, Noel Coward — made their way their across the Golden Gate Bridge following late-night performances in San Francisco.
"She was something else," Tommy Smothers said Saturday night from his home in Kenwood. He remembers being out late with his brother, Dick, and friends in San Francisco in the late &‘50s and going to Juanita's place in Sausalito at 3 or 4 a.m. for breakfast.
"She was the most intimidating personality," Smothers said. He found her also to be charming, fiery and fearless, someone he equates with the likes of Alan Watts and Margot St. James. "There was a naturalness. There was no pretense about them," he said.
"Juanita never tried to hype herself," Smothers said. "Her sense was very in the present. She didn't reminisce very much. She was right there...."
While in Sausalito, Juanita befriended madam and eventual mayor Sally Stanford. Often enough Juanita was asked if she'd worked for Stanford and she'd reply, "I never charged a nickel from a horizontal position."  —read the entire article at the Press Democrat

You rarely got what you wanted at Juanita’s Galley, but you got a lot of it

THE most distinctive memory I have of of my mother during Sausalito's halcyon Bohemian Gate 5 days, was when she worked for local legend, Juanita Musson, circa 1958.

Friend of Sally Stanford, former madame and unlikely restauranteur, Juanita Musson, in her trademark Hawaiian muu-muu, and acres of hair piled atop her head, was a local—if not infamous—institution. Of ample body and heart, Juanita, who tipped the scale at 300-pounds, was renowned for her eclectic cooking and unorthodox style of restauranteuring, which was more akin to rest-RANT-eering.

Truly a unique dining experience was had by all who crossed her many thresholds. Juanita was both a finicky diner's and health inspector's worst nightmare; she was immune to the mundane trivia of sanitation health codes, brushing them off like midges. I remember a turkey being served in an oval enamel baby's bath pan.

Juanita's was open at 5 AM, and she fed everybody in town, including the local fishermen (Sausalito was still a real fishing village in those days). Her heart was so big, she fed starving artists and equally starving actors (everybody was thin as a rail) and of course, myriad stray dogs.

On fine Sunday mornings, everyone turned up en masse at Juanita's Galley, which was often so full, she fed the overflow crowd on long picnic tables made of sawhorses and old doors in the dirt parking lot at Gate 5 Road.

Doorknobs poked up through the tablecloths—if you got one. Generally there was nothing more than the unvarnished truth between your plate and the door. In those days, anything resembling a dish or a vessel—from ferries to jam jars to bedpans—was also pressed into service. It made the Baghdad Cafe look like a 4-star Marriot.

You rarely ever got what you ordered at Juanita's restaurant, not like Alice! and if you protested, well, then, she'd wave her arms like a windmill and scream bloody hell seasoned with plenty of verbal (as)salt at you in that big crass Panhandle voice, "Eat it, or wear it!" And if, God forbid, you didn't finish your food, then, you had to take it with you. Or else.

Feeling very grown up at the age of six, I ordered a rare treat, pancakes. It was a tough decision between pancakes and French toast. The kitchen was already out of French toast. My mouth watered in anticipation. I wasn't allowed to eat them except on Sundays. My usual fodder was my grandmother's oatmeal mush.

But, after an intolerably long wait, my order finally came. My mother was busy waiting on customers at the other end of the parking lot, so Juanita herself hustled out in her red muu-muu, and plonked down a real fisherman's breakfast: eggs, runny side up, bacon, a big leathery slab of steak, toast, and mountains and mountains of white rice—more than I could possibly eat in several Sundays. I was aghast. No syrupy sweet pancakes?

I just stared at those two quivering yellow orbs staring right back at me from the rim of the plate and did what any reasonable six-year-old would do, I cried. The sunshine had gone right out of my day. Thunderclouds on the horizon.

I was six, and I knew the clean plate rules, firsthand. I also knew about starving pagan babies in China, and all that. And as ill luck would have it, there were no street dogs or starving Chinese kids to the rescue. And mailing my breakfast to China was not an option. I didn't have the postage.

The insurmountable mountain of food would have challenged even a fisherman's prodigious appetite. As customers watched, transfixed—to see what would happen next—Juanita, startled by my tears, softened a bit, seeing as it was me, after all. And so she grabbed a stack of pancakes from a hapless customer who, knowing from experience, the futility of complaining to Juanita, was just about to tuck in to what HE didn't order.

Now instead of giving my first plate to the man, I was stuck with TWO breakfasts. And Juanita took no prisoners. You cleaned all your plates—even if you were six! I began to wail in earnest, while plotting an escape—perhaps I could crawl under the table. Then what? Make a run for the car? My mom was pretty swamped waiting on tables at the other end of the parking lot, so she couldn't run interference, or rescue me until the brunch crowd had been fed.

Someone finally took pity on me and helped me out. I think it was my mom's good friend, the tall, skinny bespectacled New Yorker, Skip Rognlien, who was a Gate Playhouse set designer, playwright and director (along with Les Abbott); he happily polished off a second breakfast.

There are many outrageous stories of Juanita's restaurants—and all of them apparently true. But unfortunately it's hard to find the active bearers of oral tradition. Hence this blog. To see what will crawl out of the woodwork. Most people remember Juanita, but not the specifics. Painter and sonic artist, Richard Waters remembers it was pretty crazy washing dishes for Juanita during his starving artist days the 1960s, but little else, other than he ate well. As classmate, Robin Williams famously quipped, "If you can remember the '60s, you weren't really there..."

Sometimes Juanita, with her auburn hair piled high and red lipstick often askew, or decorating a tooth—she had a large toothy smile—would sneak up from behind and wrap her big boobs around the ears of a hapless male customer and if he turned around, she'd smother him, rocking his nose deep into her cleavage, and then she'd laugh like a hyena while he struggled for breath. Wives later reported that Juanita's boob-muffin worked like viagra. I remember Juanita muu-muu-ing some poor fisherman who entered the galley kitchen. At Juanita's Galley, you were expected to pour your own coffee and to bus your own dishes—or you might be wearing them as ornaments upside the back of your head.

The kitchen was really a ferryboat galley. Was it The MV Vallejo? I don't remember. Someone insisted that it was the Charles Van Damme but that ferry was stuck high in the mud at the north end of Gate 5 or Tiki Junction and this Juanita's Galley was still floating. I remember that it moaned and shifted like an uneasy horse on the tide.

If I remember correctly, the ferry sported a forest green trim and the Charles Van Damm was white. Maybe Juanita moved the Galley over there later? Some of the mothballed green and white ferryboats were later retrofitted and sent to Puget Sound—in the 1970s, I rode the MV Lagunitas ferry to Anacortes. Does anyone remember what happened to The Trade Fair ferryboat by the park? Please drop me a line...

In her house above Casa Madrone, Juanita kept a strange menagerie of animals. One sunny afternoon when my mother and I were visiting (we lived out in Forest Knolls, my mom must've had a rehearsal at the Gate Playhouse), Juanita wore so many bangles on her wrists, they sounded like an empty closet of coathangers. She offhandedly offered me some grapes. But the monkey beat me to them. Beauregard leaped down from the ceiling molding and stole the grapes right from my hand.

Juanita kept a blind cockerel rooster that perched on her shoulder like a parrot, and there were rampant chickens, myriad cats, stray dogs and goats wandering in and out the front door. I remember she adopted an orphaned fawn named Sissy that rode around on a bed in the back of her white Ford Falcon station wagon. I remember that the fawn still had its spots, like a dusting of snow, and its fur was coarse to the touch. But its ears were shaped like the air scoop on the ferry and it had the longest lashes I'd ever seen.

I was already scandalized by the idea of a monkey in the parlour and a rooster on her shoulder. But I was particularly flummoxed by the conundrum of Juanita's owning a pet fawn, because even at the age of six, I knew that deer belonged in the wild, not in captivity.

I was putting together a list of things that had their rightful order in the universe, but with the fawn, Juanita had upset my idea of order. I didn't give a thought to how a nursing fawn could survive on its own. Or the compassion Juanita must've felt as she nursed that orphan from a glass milk bottle with Lucas Valley Dairy imprinted on its side. The fawn was clearly imprinted on Juanita and followed her like a little dog on reed-thin legs. Tiny hooves clattered on cement like a staccato of hard rain.

I was just getting my first glimpses of life lessons and I was learning that my mother was becoming too fey and fragile for this world. It was as if God had made a deal with my mother—trading talent for emotional stability. She opted for talent and it drove her crazy. More than once, Juanita picked my mom up and put her back on her feet. Juanita was that kind of woman. Picked you up by the scruff of the neck and plopped you in front of the trough with the rest of your littermates.

It seems Juanita was always picking up and setting down roots herself (she was a plucky old gal—built like a Peterbuilt) and it seems that someone was always burning down her restaurants—by her own count, she had some eleven establishments.

Several of Juanita's legendary venues were opened in Sonoma's Valley of the Moon: Boyes Hot Springs, Fetter's Hot Springs and Glen Ellen. Then, I'd heard she moved to Port Costa, then to Vallejo and lastly, to Winters.

A surprising number of her places really did burn down. One—was it in Winters?—was lost to back taxes, or maybe Juanita just grew tired of it. There was always wild speculation that she did them in herself for the fire insurance, but as far as I know, Juanita always ran a lean shop, so there was no money for frilliness like fire insurance. Someone said she had a thing going with an insurance salesman....but you know how rumors spread like wildfire.

In the early '70s, I went to Juanita's Fetter's Hot Springs restaurant, and the joint was crammed to the gills with odd antiques and old hunting lodge memorabilia, with dusty moose heads and bucks with impressive racks—sort of like Speck McAuliff's bar in Lagunitas (another fabled Marin institution that fell to an arson's hands).

Cobwebbed candles stuck higglety pigglety in any convenient corner over the fireplace mantle and chimney, with bright layers of wax stalagtites dripping down the rocks in rainbow hues. Diners were crammed in knee-to-knee, tighter than a party of sardines at a canning factory. Sweet-old-Bob, my boyfriend from the 'burbs, was left speechless by his first (and only) Juanita dining experience.

The menu was prime rib for two and you had to share it with someone, or else. Heaven help the lone diner. When Juanita came out the kitchen with the cleaver in hand to divvy up the slab of meat, diners were surprisingly meek. The Juanita's Galley House Rules were printed on the dining check: 1. Pour your own coffee. 2. Write your own order. Be sure to put your name on your order so we can find you. 3. Our food is guaranteed—but not the disposition of the cook. Check Here for Special Service: Slow. Don't Care. Damned Big Rush. Those in the know never checked the last box.

Goats tethered in the yard on long chains (they ate through ropes), mowed down the weeds. There was Erica the white pig and even a holstein cow looking longingly toward the greener pasture out back of the restaurant. And there were flocks of randy ducks were swimming in the old bathtub cum water trough, or recreating, and nailing everything in sight—including escapee enamel bedpans from Sonoma State Hospital.

In 2006, I heard there was a "Juanita Roast" at Little Switzerland in Sonoma, replete with Juanita's signature dinner: moose-sized slabs of prime rib—enough to feed triplets, set in an acre park of mashed potatoes. The only thing un-Juanita-like about the dinner was the price. She'd never charge $40 a plate! During the Roast, Tommy Smothers (my one-time babysitter at Gate 5), or someone quipped, "Well, now, Juanita was never very good with candles...," and the audience roared with laughter. Ya hadda be there....

I recently ran into someone who remembered Juanita during the Sausalito days, and I had the opportunity to ask her: "Did Juanita really walk around with a rooster perched on on her shoulder or is my memory playing tricks on me?" She answered, "Yes, Juanita really did. So the story is true—which, BTW, inaugurated this blog.

Remember that blind, one-eyed rooster? Well, the story goes, that Juanita would amble up to men in the restaurant with that little banty rooster riding shotgun, and she'd say, "How do you like my cock?" Of course, at age six, that allusion went right over my head. I had to ripen a good decade or three before I finally got it.

© 2007 Maureen Hurley

A shorter version of this story appears in Marin Nostalgia (in fact, this story was revised and expanded in December, 2008 because Jason Lewis wanted to use it on his website.

Letter to Herb Gold

Herb Gold, c/o Letters to the Editor

Image Magazine

110 Fifth St.

San Francisco, CA 94103

It was interesting to read your reminiscences of the other Sausalito; I found myself looking for the other story, the characters and places I remember as a child: The No Name habitué, Lew Welch, and bartender/novelist Don Meredith. The Gate Theatre (my mother was an actress, costume/set designer); where I first met Sterling Hayden—one of my favorite babysitters. I liked Tommy Smothers better because he was so goofy.

At The Gate Playhouse Theatre, I sat through countless performances of Pipe Dream, Of Thee I Sing. My mother was the wicked witch in the Hansel and Gretel matinee. After the performance, we birthday kids were nervously lined up on stage, the audience singing Happy Birthday to You as the cake was carried out by my mother—while still in costume. When she hugged me, there was pandemonium; all the other kids ran off the stage crying and screaming.

No story about Sausalito is complete without some mention of Juanita Musson, the legendary restaurateur who, to my horror, kept a fawn in the back of her white Ford Falcon station wagon. Meals at Juanita’s (the Bridgeway parking lot on weekends) were always a surprise. Juanita’s wrath was legendary; customers quickly learned to shut up and eat, even if what they got wasn’t what they ordered.

Instead of pancakes, Juanita brought me runny eggs and rice. I was crushed, my mother (the waitress) signaling, Let it go. . . When I burst into tears, Juanita exploded, Fer Chrissakes! her cursing louder than her parrot or her muu-muu. The more experienced patrons instinctively ducked as she charged back to the kitchen. Juanita pysically endorsed the clean plate club; for my crocodile tears, I got a lovely stack of pancakes the size of dinner plates, and as tall as Everest, my work clearly cut out for me. . .

Juanita’s apartment above Bridgeway was a realm of filtered pink light, with beaded curtains, gizmos in every available space—and the menagerie—a monkey who might pinch, pee on us (or worse, fling shit), if we didn’t feed him the grapes Juanita handed us. At least one big rooster strutted his stuff in the living room.

At the Village Faire, and the Trade Fair, a converted ferry boat, we were regular little filching Olivers with our five-gallon wide-mouthed black naugahyde purses. We’d sit on the retaining wall outside the Village Faire, pool our money for fish and chips, and compare the day’s catch: wooden mice and cheap silver Navajo rings that we later mailed off to Micaela’s parents’ puzzled friends and relations.

My friend’s father, Patrick Wall, was a retired art dealer from Carmel, and his wife Betty, a potter, so we ran wild through many an artist’s party including one on Varda’s ferry boat. The Charles Van Damme was so rakishly angled that Varda had to nail his cobalt and vermilion montages to the walls. Caught stealing food in the kitchen, and compounded by a case of mistaken identity—as some guest’s brats—we were sent upstairs to the captain’s deck, prisoners with nothing to do but watch the Spreckles House slowly sink further into the mud.

When we were 86ed from another party, we balanced on the thin warped boards that threatened to toss us into the raw sewage as we peered in the portholes of Piro and Alice’s houseboat at Gate Five. Piro Wolfe, who founded the successful Anchor Steam Beer Company, once made legendary history when he and Alice, dressed to the nines, took a dingy to the opera—neglecting to check the tides—only to arriving hours after the opera was over.

The first major influx of tourists came hard on the heels of the flower children. Comedian Robin Williams (with whom I went to school) was right to repeat the Marin adage early and often: If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t really there. I will forgive you for bungling a few facts. We’ve all had to reconstruct our past from the literary fragments that followed. We had no idea we were living through a significant era until after it was over and done with, dead and anthologized, taken from us by the coffin of time and by the tide of eager hordes that followed.

Maureen Hurley

Bohemian Housewarming Party

At my childhood friend Micaela's housewarming party in Berkeley, I ran into small segments of our past; it's such a shock to see Micaela and her brother Chris, mirrored in the faces of their children. Christopher has a 10-year-old boy named Chris who looks just like him; Chris must've been 10 when I first met him. I wasn’t prepared for this telescoping of time.

Chris is an equipment appraiser for Bank of America, a vice president in a roomful of vice presidents, living in suburbia, with the wife and two kids. I expected so much more from Chris, with his intellectual prowess, I expected him to go places. All the people that his parents knew were part of the avant-garde Bohemian world. Instead, the black corporate heart of America took him hostage. I wanted to say to him, Where is Chris and what have you done with him? 

The people we met through Micaela and Chris’ parents, and step-parents were unusual—in and of themselves. Bohemian artists for the most part. Arthur Boericke was friends with Jaimie de Angulo. I remember the stories about the drunken sweat lodge parties in Berkeley. Imagine building a full-on sweat lodge in a Berkeley backyard.

I think Arthur was a sociologist by trade. During the 1970s, he wrote Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art, the first book of its kind. Then there was Patrick Wall who was Micaela and Chris's father, from the island of Jersey, his formidable intellect, his love of classical music, his coldness shaped us. His third wife, Betty the potter, once married to painter Wilfred Lang, was a worrywart and self-depricating in a delightful way that made up for Pat's distance.

Micaela and I went for a hike on Saturday and while comparing notes, we discovered that both Pat and my grandmother actively discouraged us from using the broad American Aaaaa sound they found so offensive to their ears. Their tirades against our using that nasal American A sound left us feeling a little like mini Eliza Doolittles. They didn’t want us to sound American. To this day I still say ofTen with a full T sound instead of offen.

Betty's first husband, Wilfred Lane, recently died; his paintings are valuable already, said Chris. Micaela mentions the name of the woman that kept Wilfred in suspense for years – Marsha. I remember meeting her with her Mexican tiered skirts and Wilfred with his gobs of tiered turquoise. They were all living in Santa Fe at the time.

Betty Wall gave me these when I was a young. I returned the pots, bowls & cups to Micaela

The New Mexico contingency included Betty and Wilfred and the children—Chris and Micaela's stepbrothers and sisters: Pete, Sonia, Stan, and Justina—the joke always was: What is your name? Tina. Tina? No, Justina. Just Tina? and so on. But they originally hailed from Sausalito. Circular file.

I suspected that Pete had a crush on Micaela, she was so beautiful, and but he went off to become a spy And she became a hippie. In the early 1970s I stayed with Pete and his wife Sara in Parksville, British Columbia. They moved to Florida where he built wooden boats, and later got divorced. She's now living in Hawaii and he's in Galveston Texas, said Chris. The others I didn't ask about. 

Stan was living in the Virgin Islands. I think Micaela was always a little in love with Stan who looked like bad boy James Dean. I was a little in love with Chris. I imagine Sonia and Tina are still living in New Mexico. Sonia was one of the first people to move to Morning Star Ranch in Occidental, and become part of Lou Gottlieb's commune. She was always out there on the periphery of way cool. Ironically I lived just down the road from Morning Star in the early 1980s.

Chris and Micaela's mother, Rosalind Sharpe Wall died about four years back; her book on Big Sur memories was on its third printing. Kudos, but sad that none of this happening during Rosalind's lifetime ironically. She grew up on a rancho in Bixby Canyon in Big Sur. Rosalind dabbled in paint too, which was handy as her then husband Patrick was an art dealer in Carmel. The first modern art dealer on the West Coast. 

One artist that was well represented in Patrick's house beside Wilfred Lang, was Carmel artist Ellwood Graham. Graham's paintings always fascinated me. (See more Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: Ellwood Graham).

Rosalind dabbled in the occult as well. She was an overbearing woman who always had some project going. She was a bit like Frida Kahlo, and Wilfred was a lot like Diego Rivera but they never hooked up. I couldn’t imagine that combo. Both of them larger than life. I don't think the fabric in the time-space continuum could've contained it.

The mysterious Marsha was more like Georgia O'Keeffe, the model. I've no idea what she did, other than to be haughty. Her full size portrait has a marionette at the bottom. Was it a portrait of the artist, Wilfred? who was pulling the strings?

Rosalind, and my mother were like two cats locked up in a room, too similar for words, each itching to defrock the other of her occult witches' vestments. Each calling the other a fraud, each designing their own tarot decks. Rosalind's rather simplistic deck design was at least published, in John Starr Cooke's The New Tarot: The Tarot for the Aquarian Age (Boxed Set with Cards)1970.

It turned out that Brite Bonnier, the painter with her jaunty beret and red sports car, was also a friend of John Cook's. Small world. She was at the party with her small dog. I was so glad to see her again, the last time I saw her, I was a child.

I arrived late to Micaela’s housewarming, having nearly been nearly clobbered by a bad driver who, as luck would have it, was also coming to the party as well. I wanted to clobber her in real time as well, but thought that would make a bad entrance. I had to go a block out of my way to keep from being hit, so when I finally parked, Micaela and Brite were on the front steps. 

And I was in a rage so I wasn't introduced to Brite ’til much later. That I even remembered her last name was a miracle. She mentioned her brother living in Sweden. I think he visited once. I never knew she was Swedish. She asked if I remembered the barge in Sausalito. I'm not sure, but I do remember the Charles Van Damme, Pero and Alice Wolfe's houseboat, and the others. 

I remember crashing parties when we were kids, Chris lighting off cherry bombs underwater. We were banned from the parties, but snuck in anyway. I was on the Charles Van Damme ferryboat at least two times when Varda lived there. His paintings were bolted to the walls of the skewed boat. I recognized the paintings by style, like the ones I had seen in Patrick's house in Sausalito, and later when he was our neighbor in Forest Knolls. Varda, Lang, Graham: a litany of Bohemian artists: West Coast names that changed the very face of art.

I remember late at night walking the plank at Pero and Alice's houseboat, and peeking into the windows to see the partygoers, the water was alive with biolytic luminescence under the full moon. Which place was Brite Bonnier's? She was friends with John Cook and I will have to interview her to find out more about it. 

I tell Brite the story of how I managed Western Star Press for Alice Kent. Alice was John's sister. Before John's death in the early 60s, Chris, Micaela and I used to steal trinkets from the Trade Faire, a ferryboat emporium. We were nine and ten years old and we mailed large turquoise rings to John Cook in Cuernavaca. He must've wondered about why we were sending him turquoise rings in the mail as we didn't have any money.

I remember John Cooke, a tall broad-shouldered bald silent man with a kindly face. At that age we knew nothing of the world. Betty called us her brats. And we ran wild through the shipways and alleys of Sausalito, and the hills of Forest Knolls. I didn't know I would want those memories back one day, but with the tag that explains their significance and relevance.

For it was those interesting people that help shape us and made us who we are. By their very presence, and not necessarily by design. The order of the Golden Dawn, Allister Crowley, Alan Watts, Jean Varda—these are all names out of my childhood. But I have no place to put them in the larger order of things. Just fleeting recollections of childhood.

Actor and dancer John Cooke was a kind of a mythical God. We instinctively knew he was special, but we didn't know why. Begin the Beguin was his favorite song, said Alice Kent. Did the Sufis really burn him with their hands on his shoulders at the airport because no one ever escaped their order – was it in Morocco? Tangiers? The imprint of the hand on the shoulder had the doctor shaking their heads, for it was to become the cancer that eventually killed him. 

John's Tarot for the New Aquarian age was decades ahead of its time. And we grew up on the arcane trivia from the Tibetan and the Egyptian books of the dead, we grew up on tarot, and astrology, you name it—long before there was a New Age. 

My mother's world, and Micaela and Chris' world, each parent was a satellite with an asteroid belt of followers—and small rivalries were of no concern to us. My mom was an actress and costume set designer at the Gate Playhouse Theatre in Sausalito. 

Patrick was a connoisseur of the arts, he was in the realm of the philosophical world. Rosalind Sharpe was into the occult, living in Sausalito during the early 60s as well—these people that helped shape my life. 

What I remember most are the visual images, the quality of light, the colors of the sky, the colors of the bay and the cypress trees, and the odor of nasturtiums and geraniums. Chris's paper route. The stinking bay. The dilapidated boats. Gate Five. Tiki Junction. And now all those adults who lived there are nearly all dead now, and their stories, buried. All I have left are these incomplete fragments that have little cohesiveness, or shape. 

What about Pero and Alice Wolfe? the story of Pero who once owned Anchor Steam Beer, crossing the bay in a boat dressed to the nines, to go to the opera, but they forgot to check the tide table. So they spent the night fighting the tides, the ferocious bay singing primal arias. Who will write their stories?

Micaela said her lover, musician Tim Boomer, with whom she had bought the house, hence the housewarming party, reminded her a bit of me, Chris, Rosalind, and Pat. All of us so strong-willed with lots of interesting things to say. 

Micaela elaborated how her mother was so overbearing, she snuffed her out like a candle. And I'm shocked by the inference. Did she feel of no importance as a child with nothing to say? Sure, I spin fantastic stories now, but back then I was rather mute, quiet and shy. My entire world was made of horses. Micaela went on to say that the best years of her childhood were spent with me running around the hills of Forest Knolls with me (when I thought I was a horse).

School was awful, a kind of death for her. Me too. She dropped out during her sophomore year. I'd always thought it was because of the drug scene. We grew apart by the time puberty had set in. And she was far more adventurous, the Summer of Love, pot, etc., while I was still verging on redneck, and more than a couple of years behind her socially, so to speak.

I remember a reconciliation of sorts at age 13 or 14. We spent a good week together making miniskirts out of old 50s corduroy pencil skirts, and castoff clothing, and then we gradually drew apart into our own respective fragmented worlds. 

We lost touch when she moved—or ran away. I didn't consciously drop her as a friend, she just moved on. Our values were no longer the same. I suspect sex had something to do with it. She was 14, I waited until I was 18. The invisible border between child and woman had been drawn out and there was no defrocking of the wall, pardon the pun on her last name, Wall.

Micaela reminded me of the time that Ken and Mary Howard were having a party and a movie on Arroyo Road and we were forbidden to attend. But Chris was allowed to go. So incensed, we snuck over to the Howard's place at sunset after they had all left, and under the cover of dusk, we crept into the darkened living room to watch The Wild Ones.

Brando lounged on his motorcycle. In the late 1940s, bikers took over Hollister. What are you rebelling against? ask someone. What've you got? quipped Brando. After the movie was over, we made our escape via the kitchen, only to be busted for tripping over the silverware box. The Bohemians we were surrounded by, busted us for watching The Wild Ones. Odd. What exactly were they sheltering us from?

We'd seen much more by way of errant or deviant behavior in real life. Jean Varda liked young women, lots of them, Alan Watts, and Jaunita Mousson all lived on the Charles van Damme. Not all at the same time. Maybe it was her party, I don't know. My neighbor George said that the Charles van Damme was falling apart even way back then and she was busted for something and then hauled out. 

Who moved in after Juanita? Brite Bonnier? But she had the barge I think. Perhaps it was Varda. Anyway, what was the big deal about seeing Brando anyway? Ken Howard was a Harvard man and Mary had East Coast leanings, and money too. Both are dead now, their daughters, Debbie who now goes by the name of Nina, and Sarah, were pretty whacked and scarred by that warring relationship. 

Ken and Pat were very much alike—both carpenters, both very intellectual, utterly charming and bitterly cold towards women, unless they wanted sex. They were unnecessarily cruel to their daughters, who didn't survive them emotionally. The boys fared better, Chris Wall, and Guy Howard, but they chose the American life over Bohemia. Perhaps to escape their parents. 

Children of Bohemians living a middle-class life, feeling like frauds, and feeling guilty for going against the quasi-Bohemian grain, fitting into neither world very well. I was the observer, raised by my grandmother from a previous generation, call it Victorian, or Edwardian, and a way of life destined to fail, for what could follow that? 

The Beatniks were not the physical inheritors of the Bohemians, for they escaped the middle-class, and sought refuge here, while we children of Bohemians were never middle class. More like ravaged by a social experiment. I later found out that one of the thinkers that influenced the Bohemian movement, Allister Crowley was an omni-sexual pervert, flaunting sexual mores and delving into magic. But we were sheltered from any deviant behaviour. 

I'm sure Brite Bonnier and John Cooke were both bisexual, and Crowley's teachings would've seemed like a blessing to them. Brite, being Swedish, only had quasi-American morals to overthrow. John Cooke came from a real missionary family, for they were the famous Cookes of Hawaii. They were the black sheep, Alice assured me, not the Castle-Cookes, not the Big Five.

The Beats would've been closer to my mother's age. And Patrick was from a previous generation; he was in his 40s when he had children. Our generation is doing much of the same thing, having children so late... or not at all, except by accident, not design. That failure to commit runs deep.

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• Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: Ellwood Graham (journ...
• Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 2 Betty Wall (journal...
• Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 3 Henry Miller and th...

Napa State Hospital Poetry Journal, June 24, Sally Lacy

Napa State Hospital Poetry Journal, Day 5

6/24, Wednesday. Nothing scheduled. Linda Wargo's class was canceled at the last minute. These things happen. A riot, a lockdown, and everybody loses. So I hang out with the typewriter and Patricia ushers likely unsuspecting prospects my way. 

I got a nifty Canon Typestar six typewriter that has a three-line memory that allows me to type and print poems out at Napa. That process instantaneously makes a radical difference in how people respond to the writing process. Immediate reward.
.
Peter D, a Berkeley communist revolutionary, tells me his fiancée jumped off the Golden gate Bridge and will bring a poem later.

On the outside, and why I'm here were our writing prompts.

Peter tells me, We had an unique situation in Marin. We had a teacher, Sam Johnson, at College of Marin, who led us, who brought us books, we wouldn't have been able to otherwise read. He was eventually hit by a truck.

Someone else said, and don't let that man have any magazines. He's a child molester. There's a picture of kids and babysitting them.

In the library I run into Sally Lacy, my mom's old friend from the Sausalito days. My mom, Sally Lacy, Sally Stanford, Juanita Musson were Sausalito's bad girls. These unique women were my early mentors. A cook, a mayor, a former Madame, and an actress. Sally tells me she's from Ward Q1. There's a payphone near their ward which is a very big deal. Communication with the outside world is possible with one thin dime.

Well, Mom told me to look out for Sally Lacy here. Sally was standing by the world globe, muttering and looking for Malaysia. The librarian asked her, Do you want to meet a poet? She snapped, NO. And she fiercely spun the globe. I recognized her voice. I said tp Patricia: Tell her that Kellé's daughter is here to see her. Kellé who? She asked, trying to place the name. Kellé Green, I said. Startled, Sally turned toward me, recognition, dawning, and asked, What on earth are YOU doing here? Thinking I too was an inmate. Hahah.

Sally tells me I look just like my mother, she says. Spitting image. Petting my face. We talked about my mother and caught up on old times.  She wants to know how Kellé is doing. It's always a variable thing, I say. Sally gets it.

It is eerie, even uncanny to be sitting across the table from Sally in the library, knowing that I knew her way back when—when I was very young. And here she is now, the blonde bombshell, once a Hollywood stand-in actress for Marilyn Monroe, now a withered crone, her tongue thick from medication, dry mouth, missing teeth. smeary mascara, Is that what's in store for me? A sobering thought. I didn't ask what atrocity brought her here. That would be delving too deep into the past.

I put up a display of my Mexico aquarelle paintings and poetry in the library, and I made and mailed flyers and sent them to all the wards. I wonder if anyone will come. still, it is comforting to me, to be surrounded by all my work in that library.

Scheduling problems again. I'm trying to work with more groups. Too much slack time. We spent most of the afternoon trying to fill vacancies. Clearly I'm not good with downtime. I like to be busy. I could use the time to write, but I'm easily distracted, and it's hard to concentrate in this strangest of places. My California Arts Council artist in libraries grant is unique. The other artists who were chosen for the project, are working in regular libraries with a normal clientele. And here I am, hanging out with the crazies. Double indemnity.

Chuck comes up, and spontaneously dictates a poem to me. You have to be ready to assemble the parts—to borrow a line from David Meltzer. I'm glad they are beginning to see me as the town scribe. But the impulse and urgency to get it down takes over everything else. I feel like I'm up at bat, the bases are loaded, and I'm on strike two. And someone just kicked sand in my eyes.

Inside Chuck's locker

A domain
Artistic paintings
Four corners
A picture in the middle
Three cats
A picture of a woman 

down below a rainbow 

underneath a tunnel
It has a saying on there
Once upon a time
A story
A hat
Went to autumn
Come cat
Brittle star
A windmill, 

like a bucket drifting off.

Chuck D Ward S – 9
List poem

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  • Napa State Hospital Poetry Journal, June 25
  • Napa State Hospital Poetry Journal, June 15 & 16