Chet Helms, Margarita and Me

Let me start by saying Chet had his moment of glory - a long, extended moment - as proprietor and maitre'd of the San Francisco Sound. Along with Bill Graham, he made sure the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Big Brother and the Holding Company and, of course, Janis Joplin got right to the front tables and smoked the best dope in America.

I knew Chet pretty well in the Haight-Ashbury days, and we stayed in touch for a long time after. Here's a story about what manner of man he was.

At nineteen I fell in love with a beautiful and cruel seventeen year old named Margarita. On our first date she danced naked in the rain. I thought this stuff only happened in books! I'd never met someone up to her style before and I fell hard and passionately. We traveled across America together and when she'd had enough, she just hitched a ride with a trucker to her home town of San Bernadino.

Not to put too fine a point it, Margarita ripped my heart open and drove me insane. But she was worth it! What a girl!

OK, fast forward twenty-eight years. I'm happily married, a salaryman with a big New York career, living in a heartwarming but drafty Victorian in an country-quaint New Jersey town, watching old Bob Hope movies on TV with my daughter Kirstie and generally having a pretty good time of it.

Then, suddenly, I came down with a high fever. A very high fever. My doctor slammed me in the hospital and I began to get delirious. Fever visions. In the night, tossing on my perspiration bed I suddenly found myself to be nineteen years old again. I was standing under a street light across from Margarita's aunt's house on Effie Street in Silver Lake. I saw lights in the house but I was alone and I began to howl. They were long agonizing pain-wracked cries of grief for Margarita, the lost one. I howled to the full silver moon like a broken wolf or a starving coyote. I was astonished to find a gaping wound in my heart covered with the finest of skins. Not one drop of hurt had evaporated in all those twenty-eight years. And I hadn't even noticed it.

When I got to feeling better, I wrote to Chet about my strange experience. He had been around in those days and knew the players. I never heard back from him, but about three weeks later, I did get a letter - from Margarita!

She was a grown up too. Lived up in the Rockies somewhere. Had kids. Still played her flute in the moonlight. She was sorry she had hurt me so bad. She was ashamed of her seventeen year old self.

I was surprised to get her letter. But not all that surprised - I recognized her handwriting right away on the envelope. And I was glad too, because somehow the letter brought some closure that I didn't know I needed.

Margarita had been in San Francisco for the first time in years and she just happened to run into Chet on Market Street and he just happened to have my address in his pocket. So he told her about my letter and gave her my address.

That was Chet through and through. Always right where he needed to be. Always knowing what was going down in all the flats in the Haight. Just had his finger on it. And he still did.

Borrowed the pic of young Chet from Jim McCulloch's blog Stone Bridge. Hope he don't mind.