Tiki Totems

It begins as one tiny memory, and suddenly I am remembering sheaves of information. In the early 1960s, Barney West was carving a totem with a chainsaw, me sitting in the white convertible watching him work as my mom met up with some friends at one of the Sausalito houseboats. The day was harsh and Barney, dressed in shorts, and little else, was swarthy, sweat rolling off his back. She must've told him to keep an eye on me because he was cranky. He bristled. Wouldn't even talk to me. So, I sat there in the car, silent, and watched monsters unfold from the trunks of redwood trees. They glared menacingly from the shadows. Followed me home in sleep.

On teaching Poetry to Kids

This has been one horrendous countdown week, finishing up my poetry residency. Funding wasn't what it should have been this year and we only had 5 sessions total (including layout and art) to get a decent poem ready for our annual poetry book. That's 4 writing dates. Normally I have 6-7 sessions per grade.

In addition, the 5th grade had low writing skills. Low skills across the board, I'd say. Take ESL RSP, or At Risk populations, and a whopping 60% fit the profile. By comparison, the 3rd graders (their profile is just under 50%) are writing the socks off them.

It took me a full day to read some 70 students' work, comment on it, in some cases, wrestle a poem from their prose, and type up the best examples for the poetry book. (Their own published work becomes the model for more writing.) Normally, I type 8-12 model poems up each time, but if a class has weak writing skills, then the final day becomes a crunch day to squeeze everybody in—even if it's only a line or two—as I need to have a poem typed for each student in order to do a final editing session with them.

This year I have several new students from Cloverdale and places north. So I get to see first hand how much my returning students have retained over the years, as these incoming kids are entirely new to poetry. I asked them to do a prewrite and to tell me what they thought poetry was, what they thought about it, and if they liked it.

Generally speaking, boys will say they don't like poetry, and one 4th grader wrote he thought it was a waste of time. Let the Games begin. By Day 4 I had him fully invested in the power of the written word, he came up to me yesterday and saying poetry was neat and he really liked it. Pretty much ditto for the rest of the new students.

It's a long road to metaphor, let alone simile, and figurative language doesn't come easy to the students who've never been given the opportunity to do creative writing. Sure, there are great attempts at storywriting, something they've been rewarded for in the past, but it falls short of poetry by its excess of filler language.

Sure, students have learned about adverbs and adjectives, but not about strong verbs and nouns. Or junk food words that take up space but tell us nothing. So they litter their ideas with flabby prose and sometimes by the time we scrub away all the flotsam and detritus of language, there's a skeleton so scrawny, it won't sustain the bones of a poem.

How to teach fresh imagery remains central to my workshops. Some of these kids are so literal (as in factual reportage) they don't even get clichés or puns, let alone, figurative language. God forbid that I should ask them to use comparisons: simile and metaphor. They've never had to use their imaginations, and it's like a rusty tool left out in the rain.

We are a nation of passive consumers, whether it's via TV, Wii, video games or films. I should be thankful that my students are reading books. At least they're reading. But writing is a whole other ball game.

I tell my students to reread what they've written and to cross out all words they don't need. Put their poems on a diet. Toss out 10-20 words. Now look for weak verbs and nouns. Build strong images, use comparisons. We freewrite, we write the day's poetry lesson, and next class we edit the typed poems.

At residency's end, each student has a typed poem, edited and workshopped, ready for the book. It's a lot of extra work on my part to read poems, comment on them, type up 7-10 of the strongest poems each week, but by residency's end, I've got most of the poems ready for the poetry book.

Most students love poetry, one 3rd grader said she wished every day was Poetry Day. And of that 5th grade, I definitely was in a battle zone with one extremely recalcitrant and onerous student. Though he can write well when he chooses to, and I've eked good work from him last year (he was new), he's decided that everything in school is for shyte—especially poetry. So it's become a battle of wills. When he's out of line, I write his name up on the board, ask the teacher to deal with his behavior, and move on. Don't let it spoil my flow.

One rotten apple. The problem is in role model. I need to keep all the other boys engaged, and I did, but it was tougher than it should be. Sometimes the chemistry of the class is such, that you tend to overlook the good stuff. The girls who write their hearts out. The boys, invested in language, who write of dragons and dungeons and the dark side. Not my favorite but at least they're writing sci-fi.

I wish I could get the boys to make fabulous sports poems. Things from their lives. We talk skateboards and baseball and golf; they love to shout the terms, but bottom line, they can't seem to render it into poetry—even on opening day of baseball. They need to ride the coattails of fiction to allow them to enter into the poetic realm.

And that's my job as a writer, to offer them my coattails so that they can apprentice with me, and write fabulously every time. And ride the coattails of their own experience into poetry, not just parrot back something they read somewhere in a book or saw on TV.

All this to say, I'm now days behind on my own poem a day as it was so challenging to get the kids to write, there was no time left for me in class to write, and when I got home, and finished with their poems, I was too tired to write. I did write and drive one morning, but that's risky and Monday was far too stormy to risk multitasking at 70 MPH barreling up Highway 101 in the rain. Besides, I'm not fond of transcribing random driving notes, a fine idea in theory, but poems rarely come that way...

I've also two papers due for tonight's class, and haven't even begun my taxes, and it's nearly Good Friday. April is indeed a cruel month. But hey, at least I've written a blog of sorts.

The new principal and I met to sign the CPITS contract, and discovered we had friends in common. Alas, another obituary is in order: Darrell DeVore, the music man (AKA The Flute Man or Mr. Sound Magic), but it will have to wait.

Darrell and I worked as artists in residence at a school in Petaluma one fine spring. We spent a lot of time by the side of the road talking of all things verging. I remember potluck parties in the country, with impromptu music jams, listening to Richard Waters on his Waterfone and Darrell on his myriad flutes or hand drums.

Whaever happened to his son, Trane DeVore? (Bobbie Louise Hawkins' grandson). Trane (as in Coltrane) used to read at my poetry series, and I ran into him at UC Berkeley in the late 1990s or the early 200-ots. Heard rumor that he was getting a Ph.D or something... hope it didn't ruin his poetry. Ph.Ds will do that. Just like grad school, only ten times worse. I should know, that MA & MFA cost me poetically, and I'm no longer as prolific as I once was. All that intellectualizing is not necessarily a good thing for poetry's authentic voice.

Trane, who looked like a tall young WB Yeats, or my late cousin Ricky Reilly, used to work with my cousin Sinead who was a barrista at the Petaluma Coffee Company, way back when. I think they went to Casa Grande together. I knew Trane separately from his father. Different worlds colliding.

I'm just putting this stuff into the universe to see what happens... when you writing something down, it tends to develop a life of its own and attracts connections.

The Irish had an idea that grammar was related to glamour (an Irish word), and that writing itself was a kind of magic. As in Poetry with Merlin, as one 3rd grader wrote on her folder.

POETIC ASIDES: Yesterday's email brought a query from someone who stumbled across my blog, he was interested in my early Sausalito days, specifically Tiki Junction. He was asking about Barney West, the tiki carver. I barely remembered watching him carve the tikis at Gate 5 when I was a kid, I had no idea he was a cultural icon for tiki carvers. Now I'm racking my brain, trying to remember more, as there is a dearth of information on him or Tiki Junction.

What I do remember, is that people used to steal the tikis, so Barney shackled them all up like a chain gang. it was pretty funny. But did I have the hind/foresight to take photos of them when I was in my early 20s? I was not yet a writer... A little vault excavation is in order.

I must've known something about Barney as I do remember making a tiki pilgrimage to Trader Vic's in the City and to Tam High in the mid- 1970s. (The maitre d let us wander in and look at the tikis one afternoon, without making us order or pay for drinks.)

During my College of Marin daze, we also went on a Benny Bufano pilgrimage as well. And there's the Unknown Museum. I did take lots of photos of Dickens Bascom, Larry Fuente and David Best's crazy work. Some of it in Mill Valley, the Sausalito Art Center, etc., I just need to find and scan them. There was a Lady Godiva sequence, a woman posing on a bejewelled and beaded life size fiberglass horse on the San Geronimo Golf Course. More fodder there to uncover.

Times like these, I wish my friend Micaela had been around, or my brother was a little older so we could reminisce. But with nearly five years age different between us, growing up, we were universes apart. He was into his go-carts and mini motorcycles whereas I was into art with a capital "A."

Meanwhile those two Adult Ed pedagogy papers await my undivided, if narcoleptic, attention, and memory will just have to take its place in the cobwebbed corners of time a little while longer.

Tiki Junction, Sausalito

When my mother, actress and costume designer, Kellé Reilly (aka Maureen Hurley) was working at the Gate Playhouse theatre, I was often left behind with friends to be babysat on one of the houseboats at Tiki Junction, Gate Five or Gate Six. My favorite babysitters were the Smothers Brothers and Sterling Hayden lived in a railroad car by Tiki Junction. I loved it when my mom parked the big white Ford convertible right in front of the tikis at Tiki Junction because then I could stand up on the red car seat and see them eyeball to eyeball.

My mother knew Barney West, the woodcarver who learned his trade in the South Pacific. He once told us he had to padlock the tikis together like a San Quentin chain gang because people were always trying to steal them. These tikis were huge, stealing them must've taken some planning. Not something you could pop in the trunk on a whim without blowing out your rear tires and busting an axle.

Barney West salvaged a lot of his wood after the big storms. Winter of '64 was record flood year (we measured rain by the foot in '63 too), and when it retreated, (following on the cusp of the big Alaska quake and tsunami) left a lot of debris and salvaged boatwrecks behind.

Years later, there were still huge beached logs and big burls shipwrecked and marooned in the oddest places up and down the coast. (I remember the Good Friday quake, I was home, sick, leaning back on the couch the wall, with a fever, and the wall suddenly slapped the back of my head like a cricket bat. Marin was hit hard, the tsunami, though small inside the Gate, stacked the bay water up. Many boats, snapped from their moorings, were turned into kindling).

At the junction, there was always a tiki boneyard in reserve. We'd climb the logs and burls like they were Mt. Everest. Sometimes they'd be floating in the bay, seasoning, I guess.

I remember watching Barney work, shirtless, his sun-baked skin glistening like mahogany, sometimes he worked with chainsaw and axe, or with mallet and chisel.

Barney was not one for smalltalk, or for small kids pestering him, but I was fascinated, watching the progress from blank wood to terrifying tiki. Sometimes painted, sometimes not. What remains in memory, a flotsam carpet of woodchips, the sonorous chainsaw idle and whine, the resinous odor of carved wood left me with a lifelong urge to visit the mo'ai of Easter Island.

OTHER SAUSALITO BLOGGY BITS

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

Gate Five

Tiki Totems

ALAN WATTS

Take Five, Dave!

Guys and Dolls

Gate 5, Gate Playhouse, Sausalito

Gate Playhouse Theatre, ca. 1961. (Photo courtesy of Richard Knablin)

During the 1950s and early 1960s, my mother Maureen (Kellé Hurley) Reilly was an actress and costume/ set designer/painter for the Gate Community Playhouse Theater Company, on Bridgeway, catty-corner from the No Name Bar, in downtown Sausalito.

After a show closed, I used to love playing dress-up with the discarded costumes and remnants mouldering in my grandmother's basement. Yards of purple netting from Guys & Dolls at the Music Circus, loud silk print dresses, Victorian capes and witches' rags.

Sometimes I went to the theater or work with my mother when she was staying with us out in Forest Knolls. She never lived with us for long. She'd drive over White's Hill in her big white convertible with the top down and the known world spun past my forehead in the form of cerulean blue sky, green oak canyons and golden hills. I must've been about six or seven.

My mother supported her ephemeral art by working as a waitress in nearly every coffee shop in Sausalito. So I got to know them all from the inside out. The Kettle, The Valhalla, Juanita's.

Juanita was unforgettable with her menagerie (a rooster perched on her shoulder, a spider monkey and an orphan fawn named Cissy) following her around the parking lot as she served customers on Sunday mornings at Gate 5.

I don't remember the infamous Trident (until I was older) because it was on the other side of town by the bronze seal (though for a time, my mother did move into the big shingle house overlooking the water near Sally Stanford's infamous Valhalla). I do remember meeting The Kingston Trio. Perhaps that's why Tommy Smothers and others were hanging out at Gate 5. (It may have technically been Gate 6, but it was always called Gate 5.)

There was the time when my mother was working for Sally Stanford at the Valhalla and who should walk in but Perry Como! Richard Knablin happened to be hanging out at the bar that night, and said (my mother) Kellé looked great standing there in her Valhalla costume, fishnet stockings, tall heels, a merry widow and not much else, as Perry Como walked in and sit at one of her tables. She had the classic tall willowy showgirl figure for it.

Perry left a nice tip. There might have even been an autographed napkin involved as well. I've a vague memory of something like that....

My mother, Kellé Reilly (later it was Kellé Green—her stage name as there was already an actress, Maureen Hurley in SAG), Richard Knablin, Skip Rognlien and Vee Rae, Christmas, 1960. (Photo by Chris Gracida, courtesy of Richard Knablin.)

When a show was running at the Gate, sometimes I went to the theater (I saw Guys and Dolls, Pipedream, The Fantastics, Anything Goes, Annie Get Your Gun, On the Town, Of Thee I Sing, and a children's matinee, Hansel & Gretel—my mom played the evil witch. It was in November of 1960?, because The Gate Players had a tradition of bringing all the birthday kids onstage after the show for a big birthday cake and ice cream party. But it quickly became ice scream.

We were all gathered round the cake singing Happy Birthday to blow the candles out when my mom came out from the wings still in costume and makeup to give me a hug. I knew it was my mom, but the other kids didn't, they saw the witch had come to eat them, so when she hugged me, pandemonium broke out as they all ran off the stage—screaming.

I was the only one left standing so I blew out the candles by myself. I was also the last kid left standing, mortified, glued to the spot, but I had the whole cake to myself as none of the kids would come back on stage even after my mom took her makeup off. I shrugged my shoulders as if to say, it's their loss and went on with the serious business of eating cake.

Les Abbott and the Marquee. Vee Rae photos 1961

Courtesy of Vee Rae photos 1961

But more often than not, I was left on one of the houseboats at Tiki Junction or at Gate Five or Gate Six.

Before the show, I was deposited at Dick and Tommy Smothers' houseboat where there were folks sitting around on chairs and pillows in the living room singing and playing banjos and guitars. With all that adult attention, I was pretty precocious and I'd dance around in circles to the music. In hindsight, it was probably The Kingston Trio and entourage down from The Trident.

My babysitters were the funny men: There was big black Sam the actor, with a fabulous physique who looked like a bald muscleman genie from Aladdin. I asked him if he was Samson but where was his hair, did Delila cut it all off, and was he still strong? He roared with laughter and tossed me up into the air. I'd never seen a black man before wearing a single gold earring so I knew he was exotic and not of this world.

In those days, I was preparing for my first communion, I was busy equating everyone with Biblical characters—trying to reconcile imperfect metaphor with reality. The nuns at the Lagunitas church, St. Cecelia's, told us me that whenever it rained, it was God's tears because we were so bad in church. I said He was peeing on us and let me tell you, I got into deep doo-doo for that remark. I was never was asked again to be Queen of the May, never again to crown the statue of the Virgin Mary.

Unlike his dour brother, Dick, who didn't seem to like kids, Tommy Smothers was kind and funny, if not funny looking with his ears sticking out like teapot handles. I liked Tommy the best. He was a real kid magnet. Whenever I'd spot him, I'd launch myself at him and he'd sing me around the room by the arms and then throw me through his legs and toss me back up into the air until I nearly hit the ceiling and I screamed with laughter. (And I probably immediately fell asleep exhausted).

In the '60s and 70s, I was shocked to later see Tommy's name on billboard at the Purple Onion, or on TV —The Smothers Brothers Show. A few years ago, when I ran into Pat Paulson's daughter and we exchanged stories, she said Pat was living in Sausalito too, but I don't remember him. Weird to think I might have played with her as a child.

Gate Playhouse. Vee Rae photos 1961

I remember seeing Sterling Hayden in a movie—The Ten Commandments—I was in Switzerland as an "exchange" student in 1973—I'd seen very few movies in my lifetime and almost no TV when I was young, so I tended to remember everything in minute details. I asked my mom why he seemed so familiar and she said because I knew him from the Sausalito days. Another veil lifted. I have only one image of Sterling, taller than forever, tossing me up into the air by the elephant fountain. I thought he was a Viking God.

During the '50s and '60s, McCarthyism drove many Hollywood folks north to the Bay Area. In the '80s I remember seeing converted chicken ranch barns in Sebastopol and Cotati made from Hollywood backdrops and movie props. Whatever happened to the Gate Playhouse director, Skip Rognlien, from New York, or to beautiful Greek Athena Martin the actress living in the Alta Mira above the Village Fair, who looked like Jackie O?

Back of the Gate Playhouse. Vee Rae photos 1961

Back of the Gate Playhouse opened abruptly into the bay,
a tiny ledge & nothing more than air. Vee Rae photo 1961

I ran into my mom's sidekick, Sally Lacey, who lived near Sally Stanford's Valhalla, they'd all meet for coffee and sit on the deck with the whiskey-voiced chain smoking Madame, Sally Stanford, and later mayor of Sausalito holding court. I ran into a toothless Sally Lacy—in the looney bin at Napa State Hospital where I was teaching poetry to the inmates. Sally Lacey remembered me, but that was about it. Time had not been kind to her. Was Sally one of Madame Sally's girls from 1144 Pine Street in the City? Or another colorful character from Sausalito's past? Vee Rae said Sally was Marilyn Monroe's stand-in in Hollywood.

And I haven't even mentioned Pat Wall, Piro and Alice, Peter Wolfe and Jean Varda....but that was my second Sausalito incarnation, when I was ten and learned to pilfer at the Trade Fair. Fodder for another blog.

The Ark, 1967

Sally Stanford died in 1982. I heard that Juanita died in a fire, when someone torched her restaurant in Boyes Hot Springs. But rumors of her death are greatly exaggerated. She's alive, and well, living in Sonoma County, (She died in 2011) Sterling died in 1986 in Sausalito.

They cleaned up the waterfront, blew up the ferryboats and a bit of the past along with it. Tommy opened a Volvo car dealership in Santa Rosa, and Pat opened a winery in the Valley of the Moon. My mom died in 1994, Lloyd, in 1998. With them, the rich stories of Sausalito in the 1950s, are irrevocably lost.

The 7 Seas

© 2007 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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