Baby Beatniks Go To College

In September 1959 it was still hot in San Jose, like it is everywhere across California that time of year. I was eating lunch at Walgreen's Drugs with Louise Picchi, a luscious brunette from San Mateo High, same as me (I was from San Mateo High, not a luscious brunette. Thought I should make that clear). In those late days of summer all the freshmen kids from San Mateo huddled together for a few weeks, like polliwogs in an eddy of the creek that ran through the culvert. Louie was going to be a drama major and I knew her through my actor pal Ricky Lazaro. We had almost nothing in common except familiarity and comfort, and that was plenty. Besides, from my side, she was a major fox. Normally not in my baby faced league.

Hey Louie. I can see your face so clear. Are you still eighteen somewhere in this universe? Still so killer beautiful, still so full of high spirits and joy?

We sat side by side at Walgreen's steaming lunch counter perspiring and laughing about our horrible registration experiences. Root beer in Coke glasses with two straws and tuna fish sandwiches with a little scoop of potato salad on half a lettuce leaf. I wasn't feeling beat today, I was trying out Joe College.

San Jose State was great for trying out that role. It had its share of concrete buildings designed by the Corps of Engineers for maximum boxy cheapness, but it also had, so unusual for a California state college campus – Tower Hall, a vine encrusted brick building from seventy years before. It was right out of a nineteen thirties hubba hubba college movie. To my eager young eyes it breathed a perfume of another world I wanted to be a part of. Poetry and great novels and people devoting their minds to thinking about big important things. You could walk down the ivy crawling cloister in the heat and hear droning professor flies lecturing on aerodynamics or Virgil or bonehead English grammar like it was still the 1920s and I could be wearing a tight sweater and bell-bottom pants and be the cat's meow. That was me, creating the universe around me as I walked through it, but most guys preferred to wear Butchwax flattops, chinos, little plastic pocket protectors in their madras shirts and slide rules in their pocket protectors and walk down Seventh Street to the cafeteria in tough engineering student gangs.

It was a different time, the fall of 1959 – for one thing, girls still went to college to get their MRS degree. They didn't think it was a joke. They majored in Home Ec or PE or possibly Elementary Ed and waited for the magic to happen and good luck and God bless 'em.

There's a gaggle of college girls coming now. Note their tight plaid skirts and white blouses, and one is wearing a sleeveless dress with petticoats underneath in spite of the heat. Actually, they're kind of cute. And is their lipstick red! They're on their way to the cafeteria to listen to 'Running Bear loved little White Dove' on the juke box. Then Paul Anka is going to sing 'Hold me in your arms Bay-bey Maybe you and I will fall in love.' Or some other song that would send me running for the door.

The cafeteria was much better about 4:00 PM when it was nearly empty. Then I could put on Oscar Peterson playing 'Round About Midnight. Yes, one cool thing about 1959 was that jazz and rock and roll could share the jukebox comfortably together. Like inside my head. And I could drink coffee and read poetry and feel cool.

Louie wasn't a gumsnapper like those girls walking down the street. She was my friend and those other girls weren't, so even if she didn't really like jazz or know anything about Jack Kerouac, she was still cool.

Yesterday we both stood in snaky lines in the headache sun for hours waiting to get our registration packets after all the sophomores, juniors and seniors were handed theirs. They were already inside the gym having fun racing from table to table signing up for classes. Once all the classes were full, then they let the freshmen in.

But we had won out in the end. We had some classes, even if they were not exactly what we had in mind. I had even got into English Comp 3A, required of and dreaded by freshman English majors. We were registered college students.

We had new homes too. Louie moved into the girl's dorms and I checked into a boarding house on South Twelfth. Of course we would never see each other's rooms. She could welcome me into her dorm lobby with all the other girls and their dates but not one step further. And Mrs. O'Reilly would have had a heart attack if a girl had knocked on her front door asking to see one of the guys. Unheard of. The adult world knew what young people would get up to if they ever had a chance to be alone and they were going to make damn sure they never were!

Of course no one considered what two guys might get up to if left alone in their rooms. This was 1959! 'Gay' meant 'cheerful'. Of course there were homos and queers out there somewhere, but they didn't go to San Jose State. I thought they were probably all middle aged guys who lived in San Francisco's Polk Gulch.

My roomie was a big older guy who was majoring in Police Science. He didn't smile much. His Dad was chief of police of one of the San Joaquin Valley farm towns. I might creep back at three a.m. from some horrible drunken debauch to find him still up studying. We didn't have much to talk about but one Sunday he invited me to go with him to a Baptist church he attended way out in Los Gatos. And I, with great nonchalance, thought “what the hell...”

I didn't know what to expect. My parents, when they went to church at all, were more of the polite and proper Episcopal persuasion. For me, church happened in gothic stone buildings that should be in an Agatha Christie mystery, with bald guys in white surplices who handed out the communion wafer at the altar rail with real wine in a little shot glass, and it was all steeped in a thousand years of ritual and was peaceful and soothing and kind of spiritual in a funny way. I'd never been to a Baptist church.

Not that I wasn't worldly. By seventeen I was pretty damn sophisticated. I knew the score, man. Why, in high school I had written a poem that began:

Man is lost on a moor
Blind and deaf and lost on a moor.

ha ha! Let us laugh and be gay in the face of this bitter, tragic joke of life! Then I would light my pipe and stride gloomily into the mist. Keeping careful watch out for the Hound of the Baskervilles.

But I'd never been to a Baptist church. So we drove out to Los Gatos and before I knew it the preacher had launched into his sermon about why Caryl Chessman should be executed. This was a major case at the time and awareness of it had even dribbled down to apolitical seventeen year old kids like me. Chessman was supposedly the notorious “Red Light Bandit” who had robbed and raped women in LA many years before. After eleven years, he was still on Death Row in San Quentin but time was running out for him. Even for proponents of capital punishment the case was unsettling because Chessman hadn't actually killed anyone. Read the Wikipedia article here if you're interested.

I gathered that the preacher thought Chessman should be executed because he had violated God's law and God was a real stickler for punishing anybody who disobeyed him. The pastor went right through the Old Testament pointing our how this kind of miscreant was stoned and this other kind was supposed to be because she helped her husband in a fight by grabbing the bad guy's balls and squeezing real hard. Well, maybe he didn't actually mention that one. Not proper. Even young guys like me who disobeyed their parents were stoned and pretty soon my blood was running cold and I was getting mad. What kind of God did these people believe in? And how can I get out of here without causing a scene?

I figured, “Well this guy is a preacher so he must know what he's talking about. But if the Bible really says things like that than it's just one more proof that God isn't real because if there really is a God no way would he say things like that.”

We drove home in cool silence.

It didn't take too long for the Joe College thing to wear off. The kids I was meeting were so square! There must be some cool people here somewhere! At breakfast in the boarding house I shared the table with a history major who smoked a pipe, an accounting guy who took electric guitar lessons, an engineering major who made jokes about the way I ate my fried egg, a business guy who was pledging a frat, and, one bright light -- a coolguy from the San Fernando Valley who just wanted to get back to LA as soon as he could and marry his girl friend.

Dick would tell us hilarious stories about his high school scene at San Fernando Valley High and how he had taken Annette Funicello to his prom and I never could tell what was true and what he was making up but he made me laugh my head off and, unfortunately, that has always been my key criteria for people I want to hang out with.

Dick was from a show business family. His father wrote “You Never Miss Your Water Till The Well Runs Dry”. He said it as if I should be impressed. He was engaged to a honey blonde he talked to in the phone booth up at the corner every night. I used to walk up with him and watch him through the glass and wish I had a girl friend.

Once afterwards we walked downtown to see the new Sandra Dee flick “Gidget.” Dick claimed he knew most of the surfer actors in the flick, and maybe he did. Dick wasn't a pathological liar - he was a great story-teller and he never let truth get in the way of a good story. I learned a lot from him! And besides, what did I care if he knew all those guys. I knew Moondoggie himself. (For anybody younger than 64 - Moondoggie was the surfer dude that Gidget falls in love with in the movie of the same name.) He was played by Jimmy Darren and Jimmy Darren had performed at San Mateo High's 1959 Grad Night. And I'd said “Hi Jimmy!” So there.

Dick lasted one semester. He just wanted to get home to that honey babe as fast as he could. Sometimes I wonder if he got into show business like his father. I looked his name up on IMDB the other day. There is a guy with his name who directed porn movies in the seventies. Could it be him? Did he stay married to the beautiful honey blonde girl he was so in love with? Did they live in a big house in the San Fernando Valley and did he go off to work directing hot sex scenes all day? Then come home and read his kids a bedtime story? It's slightly possible.

Next Post: Baby Beatnik Makes A Friend

The Bus Ride Home

In September 1959, seventeen years old, I said goodbye to Ma and my beatnik friends back home and left San Mateo for the carefree life of an English major at San Jose State College. I was going to be a writer when I grew up. A novelist, like Jack Kerouac. My plan was to hitchhike everywhere, love all the longhaired beatnik girls, grow up, live in Greenwich Village and write about everything that happened to me. You must admit it's not a bad plan. I'd do what I wanted to do anyway and make a living from my pen.

I never wondered if I'd be happy. Happiness was impossible. Not part of the equation.

One cold night on the Greyhound heading back up the Peninsula to San Mateo for the weekend, I was thinking about my friend Way Out Willy, who was sleeping in Bear Mattson's car because he got into a shouting match with his parents and they threw him out.

I wanted to write about stuff like that too. Where is the love? What if I was on a long bus journey – like this creeping thirty miles up the El Camino to San Mateo, but I'd been on the road for weeks and weeks and I was burnt out, gone, exhausted in heart and soul. What if I was dragging my weary ass back to my home town even though my parents were dead or something, but a heartsick homesickness compelled me across the snowy continent. I knew when I got to my best friend Way Out's house (hmm, I'd have to call him something else) I would be welcomed like a son, received into the warmth of his family, be fed and a have real bed to sleep in. I'd be home again and safe to heal.

So, in my story dream the Greyhound grumbled to a stop at the little B Street bus depot on that rainy Christmas night and I limped through darkened and shuttered downtown streets. Just the odd Santa Claus statuette in a shop window illuminating my backpack and my worn beat seventeen year old face. I stumbled up through the shuttered mansions of Hillsborough and on into the redwood subdivisions high on the jolly Christmas rainy hillside. And there were the diamond pinpoints of the Peninsula below. I hobbled up Crestview Drive and just as I approached, still hidden by the night, I hear angry voices. There's Way Out's father at the front door and he's shouting at Willy and Willy is just standing there taking it. He heaves Willy's paintings and sculptures into the rain and keeps shouting and there they lie in the wet grass with little drips from the acacia tree onto his portrait of our friend Gypsy Girl. Little rain drips on her dark cheeks. The door slams shut, leaving Way Out standing in the rain in his Levis and red windbreaker. In the rain night ice night Rebel Without A Cause night star-filled air.

“Hey man.”

“Hey Walrus.”

That was the real truth. I had to tell that story. Just the kids. Lost and loose on the suburban sorrowful Crestview Drive of time. I thought I could write stories like that.

************************************************************************

The only trouble with writing was you had to sit at a typewriter for a long time every day. How fun is that? And then you had to sweat and sweat until you got an idea. And then you actually had to write sentences that communicated something more than 'cats ate rats'. And then words on the page sounded stupid when you read it to yourself out loud and you had to throw the whole thing out and start over. All that work for nothing.

I wasn't really reconciled to it. Then there was the part where you walked around and wouldn't talk to anybody and people thought you were sulking but you were just trying to get it together in your mind. The right place in my head. Where is it? It was there yesterday!

Writing is still like that. When the spirit is in me, writing is the funnest thing. I make myself laugh and I work myself up into fits and I am amazed to see little scenes come to life. Wow! And then there's the part where you groan and have to chain yourself to the seat because nothing will come. At least in the days of typewriters you had to work for your distractions. Now the whole Internet is out there to distract us hapless writers.

But you know what? For better or worse, I was made and molded and formed to do this. It's in my blood. Funny. Now I'm 64. And this is still what I want to do when I grow up. I hope I get to.

Baby Beatniks in "Yet Another Reason Not To Smoke"

One night in the summer of 1960 the Baby Beatniks are driving around San Mateo in Bear Matson's lowered '49 Merc, wondering what to do with the night. For beatniks, they look suspiciously like four normal eighteen year old guys. Radio's on, they're being treated to yet another encore of 'Aleey-Oop-Shoop He's The King Of the Jungle Jive', and the streets are deserted. DePalm from the back shouts Hey Willie, change the stupid station, will you? but the other Top 40 provider is spewing up sickening Teen Angel:

What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night?
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight.

Quick, Way Out Willie (named two years before from the song Willie and the Hand Jive) turns back to the King of Jungle Jive.

Kids, this was the dark night of rock and roll. All the heart-pounding soul, the glorious chromatics of doo-wop, all gone. Elvis was in the Army, Buddy Holly was smashed, Jerry Lee Lewis was in jail, Little Richard had become a preacher. The Beatles were four years in the future. Instead we had promoters trying to move product, and squeamishness, mawkishness and white bread had won the day. There were no FM car radios yet, so no cool jazz was available to beatniks cruising through the American summer night.

The American summer nights of 1960...the Baby Beatniks got home just before dawn, having gone nowhere and done nothing. Roaming and roaming, looking for a party, looking for someone to buy them beer, driving up to the City and walking around North Beach Telegraph Hill Chinatown, back in San Mateo rambling from Curt's house to Mickey's house to Buzzy's house to see what was up, but nothing ever was. Making up songs (often obscene, always funny) and making each other laugh. And just really digging being together. Pals, you know? They weren't bored at all. In fact, it was a perfect life.

On this particular night, it's still early, before midnight. Rounding the corner from Palm Avenue onto Ninth, Toot (that what the Babies called The Pondering Pig in those days. His last name Newton got shortened to Newt, which was misheard by somebody as Toot, which was funnier, so it stuck) ) he asks Matson if he can "borrow" a smoke. Bear hands it over and Toot puts a match to it.

Unfortunatly, Toot's forgotten he has a piece of surgical cotton in his nose. He's been having trouble with nosebleeds. In fact he had the problem vein cauterized that afternoon. The doc told him to leave the cotton in overnight.

So, when he lights the Camel up, his nose lights up too. The Baby Beats turn and stare. Is this a trick to get their attention, to get more laffs? A fire on Toot's nose! If so, it works pretty good.

Toot though is, like, "I don't think this is funny, okay?" There is a big pink welt where his skin used to be.

DePalm suggests it might be wise to get Toot to Emergency before gangrene sets in. So the Merc rumbles to life again. They roar around the corner onto the El Camino heading north towards the hospital -- for about fifty feet. Then the big car sputters and comes to a dead stop. They're out of gas.

After a hasty conference, they all decide the best plan is to push the Merc seven blocks to the Chevron station up on Second.

I did eventually get to the hospital - pushing that big Merc nearly the whole way. Fortunately, we had a dollar between us for three gallons of gas. Oh yeah, I had to call my mother again..."Mom, I'm at the emergency hospital. But I'm okay! Really! It's only a second degree burn!"

Rebel Without A Cause

Still under the spell today of the love and death theme. Skyrockets and spectres. Hot cars over the cliff. Romeo and Juliet. Teen Angel, Tell Laura I Love Her and the other mawkish drivel that clogged the charts at the end of the Fifties.

I heard a voice that cried from the deep:
Come join your Baby in the Endless Sleep, Endless Sleep

(That one, if I remember rightly, about a girl who commits suicide by walking out into the ocean, was truly scarey)

It's rainy and grey on the Rhode Island coast today. My Patrushka is on the other side of the continent seeing her mom through surgery. The perfect day to do some research on love and death among the young of m-m-my generation. The perfect day to watch... Rebel Without A Cause!

I wonder if the video store has it? (The Pig calls Blockbuster) Hmm, their only copy is booked solid because some students have to do a term paper on it. Ahh, my little Rebel, are you reduced to this? Fodder for high school AP English classes? To be analyzed and dissected on the chloroform table by chloroform kids listening to The Bloggers on their ipods? At least you haven't joined High School Confidential in the endless sleep of forgotten teenager flicks.

OK, I don't need a stupid videotape! This is the Pondering Pig here! I will gesture hypnotically, look into the mystic reaches of my alternate universe and...there it is...just a few light years away...

Rebel Without A Cause. The best movie ever made. The first and maybe the only movie that told the truth about the adult world. The first movie that took me and my brother seriously. James Dean, the best actor of all time and Sal Mineo, the saddest sidekick of all time, and Jim Backus, the most screwed up father of all time and, bless her, we lost her to the chilly deep, the endless sleep - sixteen year old Natalie Wood.

I seem to be given to hyperbole today and these stupid tears get my trotters wet while I type and I have no idea why, except my mystic memory brings back the feelings as well as the sights of that time.

Oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no!
The Shangri-las

One rainy winter night in 1955, I was 13, my brother Noel 16, three years left till he rounded Dead Man's Curve, we drove though those rainy suburban streets to the teen-packed Burlingame Theater to see the gospel preached to us all in full-bore Cinemascope, a sight never to equalled again. From the opening scene...Jimmy falling on the sidewalk in his red windbreaker drunk, in close-up 100 feet tall it seemed, fitting, epic, laughing at the little toy monkey he found - alone, was he laughing or was he crying? We didn't know it but we were about to be shown the world-shaking truth. I don't use the word gospel lightly. Except it wasn't good news. Just the truth.

Here it is: Beneath that self-satisfied, prosperous, Rotary Club and martinis adult world we just drove through, inside those little suburban houses just like ours, something is terribly wrong. The adult world is neither happy nor content. Nothing is what it seems to be. And only the teenagers can see it and feel it. Yet they're powerless, caught in their own ritual webs of tribal violence. Only love can save them. Only love can save us.

If it's not too late.

In the key scene, Jim Stark (James Dean's character) and Buzz, enemies, rivals in every way, are going to prove nothing to no one by racing stolen cars off a cliff into the ocean below. The first one to jump before the cars go over is a chicken.

In the most tragic scene ever filmed, Buzz and Jim are talking by the cars before they start and realize that, in another world, another time, another reality, they would be friends. Jim says to Buzz, "Why do we do this?"

Buzz answers, "Well, you gotta do something now...don't you?"

As the years went on, when I tried to make sense out of my confused young life, the scene replayed in my head again and again.

You probably remember rest, if you're old enough. Hard to forget. The race. Jim jumping first. Buzz's leather jacket wrist strap stuck in the door handle. Crashing to his death in the breakers breaking brokenly forever on the rocks below.

We drove around for a while after though the empty wet streets in speechless stunned silence. I thought about all the kids in that theater and what we had been through together and what was this world I was growing into?

I didn't want to join my baby in the endless sleep. I wanted love to win. I wanted something...I wanted SOMETHING.

In a world gone crazy
Everything seems hazy
I'm a wild one
Ooh yeah I'm a wild one
Little Ivan (1958)