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The Rico Chronicles: Inside Psychodrama

Rico with his daughters Rachel and Sarah circa 1990 photo courtesy of Steve Rees

This is the fourth and final article in a series commemorating my friend Rico Rees, AKA Richard Rees.

February 1967. Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Redwood City, California.

When Rico had two years and five months of high school left to endure, and I only had five more months of high school to get through, Rico bought a used mimeograph machine and he and I and Dave Biasotti launched Lyceum, a magazine. We brought out a new issue every few weeks chock full of articles and poems and stories. Dave made great pen and ink drawings for the first few covers, after which we used photos taken by Rico’s brother Steve for the covers. These photo covers were some of the very earliest Xerox copies.

We printed a hundred copies of the first issue and were thrilled when fifty people ponied up four dollars to have the next six issues mailed to them. Rico then convinced Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, the hippest bookstore in our world at the time, to sell Lyceum for 25 cents a copy, and Rico and I hawked the rest of the copies at school.

A heady experience of my young life was seeing several of my peers sitting around at lunchtime at Woodside High reading Lyceum. Along with drawing the covers, Dave drew a one-frame cartoon for each issue and wrote reviews of new folk rock and rock albums. Rico and I wrote articles and stories and poems, and by the third issue people were submitting poems and notices of things for sale, some of which we published.

Were we good writers? Hard to say. Were we enthusiastic? Very.

That spring Rico fell in love with a young woman named Maureen. She was beautiful and smart and sexy and funny, and she enjoyed Rico’s company but drove him crazy because she denied him the sensual romantic connection he longed for.

Also around this time, Rico shared with me that his doctors were not optimistic he would survive much beyond his twenties. He told me this in the context of a conversation in which I said something about us getting a place together, going to Europe, and living our lives as literary bohemians.

“I don’t know, Murray,” he said, sounding uncharacteristically pessimistic. “Lately I’ve been having this fantasy of blasting off in a rocket ship and just going.”

(Fortunately, advances in medical technology made it possible for Rico to live to sixty-eight.)

One afternoon I was at Rico’s and he asked me to play some jazz piano so he could jam with me on a saxophone he’d just gotten. He hadn’t taken lessons, but he loved jazz and wanted to make music. So I sat down at their wonderful Steinway and played a jazzy-sounding chord or two, and Rico blew slow long notes with great feeling. We were both thrilled by the sounds we made together, and Rico said he might take lessons, but as far as I know he never did and we never played music together again.

We brought out the last issue of Lyceum at the end of May, right before school ended, and Rico announced we’d made a profit of seventy dollars, which in 1967 was a pile of cash for the likes of us. Rico proposed we use the money to take some girls to San Francisco for walking around and supper.

I took my girlfriend Connie, Rico brought Maureen, and I can’t remember who Dave brought, possibly Connie’s friend Harriet. For some reason, Connie decided the gals would wear saris and she came up with three beautiful saris for them. We took the train from Atherton to San Francisco and caught a bus to North Beach where we hung out at City Lights Books, had coffee and biscotti at Caffe Trieste, went shopping in Chinatown, ate supper at The Spaghetti Factory, and came home on a late night train—everything paid for with money made from our magazine.

With the last of the Lyceum money, Rico got two tickets for Ray Charles at Frost Amphitheatre at Stanford, our last hurrah together before I headed off to college at brand new UC Santa Cruz and Rico stayed on at Woodside High.

I dropped out of college after two years, which coincided with Rico finishing high school. He decided to take what they now call a gap year before attending Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio. During that interim year, Rico rented a room in a house in Palo Alto for some months before he moved into a hippy commune in Palo Alto with Jean Trounstine who would become his first wife.

Jean was a bright energetic Jewish gal from Cincinnati, five years older than Rico. She had a BA in Drama from Beloit and had come to California to join the cultural ferment going on in the Bay Area. I first met Jean when Rico took me to House of Pies on University Avenue where Jean was a waitress. The waitresses there wore uniforms composed of skirt, blouse, and cap that supposedly made them resemble, symbolically, a piece of pie.

We had a hilarious time as Jean enacted the required shtick of House of Pie waitresses when Rico, following the printed prompt on the table, asked in the manner of Humphrey Bogart, “What’s fresh today? Besides you sweetie pie?”

Jean batted her eyelashes and said, “Hold on a sec, big fella. I’ll go ask our baker.” And then she sashayed away to the kitchen, mimed asking the baker, and sashayed back to us. “You’re not gonna believe this, but all the pies are fresh today. And you know what just came out of the oven?”

“The apple pie?” I guessed, the place redolent with the scent of apple pie.

“What are you psychic?” said Jean, gaping at me. “The apple did just come out of the oven. And the blueberry and the cherry and the lemon meringue.”

I loved Jean. She and Rico were a great match and they were devoted to each other for several years until their lives diverged when Rico was in his late twenties.  

Around the time he was beginning his relationship with Jean, Rico heard a talk by Husain Chung, a radical practitioner of Psychodrama as it pertains to psychotherapy, and shortly thereafter Rico began attending group Psychodrama sessions at a house in Palo Alto, the groups led by Vik Lovell and his Psychodrama trainees. Interesting side note: Ken Kesey, who lived in the area, dedicated his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Vik Lovell.

Rico was fascinated by the evolving use of Psychodrama in psychotherapy, and these Vik Lovell sessions were of particular interest to him because Lovell was, according to Rico, “constantly experimenting and unafraid to seriously fuck up.” Rico asked me to attend one of the Lovell sessions with him and I did.

Before being admitted into the house where the sessions took place, participants agreed not to leave until the three-hour session was over. Rico had told me a little bit about what went on at the Lovell sessions, but I was wholly unprepared for what I was to endure for the next three hours.

Vik Lovell was a handsome man in his thirties with an assured air. I am tempted to use the descriptors arrogant, insensitive, misogynist, and narcissist to describe him, but maybe he was just having a bad day. His trainees were men and women who dressed alike in loose-fitting pants and black T-shirts to identify them as Vik’s assistants.

Vik sat on a high stool just outside the large circle of attendees arrayed in chairs around the empty center of the big living room that served as the stage for the evening’s psychodramas. Vik communicated with his trainees by gesturing and pointing, and he directed his DJ with quiet asides to play certain cuts from a handy library of LPs—what Rico and I would later refer to as psychodrama soundtracks.

After reiterating we were not to leave before the session was over, Vik invited a tall bearded American man to stand in the center of the circle and tell us what was on his mind. With little preface, the man said he’d had sex with the wife of a friend, after which the wife and friend broke off relations with him. To my surprise, the two people he was talking about were there, and Vik directed the man and woman to join the bearded man in the center of the room.

The couple was British, the woman strikingly beautiful, the man handsome with a muscular build. The woman acknowledged she had slept with the bearded guy, said she regretted doing so, and was grateful to her husband for forgiving her and being so understanding. Both husband and wife said they had no interest in rehashing the affair or having anything more to do with the bearded guy.

The British guy struck me as intelligent and reasonable, the British gal the same, while the bearded American seemed seriously disturbed and obviously distraught about being booted out of his relationship with the couple.

Vik gestured to his trainees. One of the female trainees stood behind the British woman, one of the male trainees stood behind the bearded American, and another male trainee stood behind the British fellow.

And then all hell broke loose. The woman trainee accused the British guy of neglecting her sexually and shouted, “Which is the only reason I slept with that disgusting pig!” The trainee standing behind the British guy shouted at the British gal, “Bullshit! You slept with him because you’re a whore!”

The British guy protested, “No, I don’t think you’re a whore.”

And Vik asked, “Then what do you think she is?”

And before the British guy could reply, the bearded guy said to the British guy, “She told me you were impotent with women but got turned on by young men.”

“I never said that,” cried the British gal. “My husband is a wonderful lover.”

I don’t remember the order of events after that, but following a few more inflammatory exchanges spoken by the psychodrama trainees, the British guy and the bearded guy started seriously brawling, the bearded guy throwing punches, the British guy trying to wrestle the bearded guy to the ground, and the British gal trying to intervene only to be restrained by two of the trainees who continued to call her whore and slut.

Then an elderly man in the audience of attendees shouted, “This is wrong, Vik. You need to stop this!”

And in the next moment the bearded guy broke away from the British guy, pulled the elderly man out of his seat, threw him to the ground and started pummeling him, which caused me to jump up and try to stop the bearded guy from seriously injuring the elderly guy. But before I could pull the bearded guy off the old man, two of Vik’s male trainees grabbed me and slammed me against a wall and one of them pressed his fist hard against my nose and shouted, “What’s your deal, asshole? Working on your hero complex?”

My nose started gushing blood and Vik signaled his trainees to let up on me, which they did, and then and one of them took me by the arm and led me to a bathroom where I stemmed the flow of blood with a plug of toilet paper and stayed in the bathroom until the bleeding stopped.

The trainee walked me back to my chair and said, “Don’t get up again unless Vik tells you to.” By then the chaos had subsided and Strawberry Fields was playing on the stereo. The British guy and gal were sitting apart from each other, both of them weeping, and the bearded guy was lying face down, sobbing, and I don’t know where the elderly guy was. I desperately wanted to leave but was afraid if I tried to go the trainees would hurt me again, so I closed my eyes and waited for the hours to pass.

Rico was very upset afterwards and apologized for not warning me that I was never to intervene in an ongoing psychodrama unless Vik invited me to participate. I suffered for some weeks with bruised ribs and did not attend any more Vik Lovell psychodrama evenings. Rico, however, went several more times and reported learning many valuable lessons from observing what went on in those sessions.

Later in his career as a psychologist, Rico would employ less violent psycho-dramatic techniques, especially when working with children and teenagers. When we were in our thirties, Rico and I collaborated on a screenplay called Any Time You’re Ready about a woman psychiatrist who runs a home for emotionally disturbed teens and employs Psychodrama as part of her work with the kids. We were never able to sell the script, though we were certain it was the best movie ever written.

Rico on the James River photo courtesy of Steve Rees

In 1970, when I was twenty-one and Rico was nineteen, Rico and Jean moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio. I’d only spent a little time with Jean before they moved to Yellow Springs, but I got to know her very well when Ilived in Yellow Springs for two months in early 1971.

While Rico was attending Antioch, Jean taught Drama at Central State University, a predominantly African American college, and she taught theatre games to little kids and adults on weekends. While I was in Yellow Springs, I assisted Jean with her little kid classes, took her classes for adults, and Rico got me a job editing a student handbook for Antioch. I’m not sure how he convinced my boss at Antioch to hire me as an editor, but he did.

I rented a room above Deaton’s Hardware, ate most of my suppers with Rico and Jean at their cute little house on the edge of the campus, and unsuccessfully romanced their good friend Kay who enjoyed me but didn’t consider me boyfriend material.

Jean was a gourmet cook and a frequent dieter. An ongoing source of amusement for me was that Jean would serve Rico and me wonderful multi-course meals while resigning herself to eating a hardboiled egg and a chicken thigh. Yet nine times out of ten, I wanted that egg and chicken thigh more than I wanted the fancy meal. Go figure.

What was I doing in Yellow Springs, Ohio, you ask, besides living near Rico and Jean? Well, I was waiting to hear from a major publisher in New York to whom I had sent my first novel. In my extreme naiveté, having recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, I was sure I could write a novel as good or better than Vonnegut’s, and while living in a hovel in Ashland, Oregon, I wrote my first novel, The Apprenticeship of Abraham Steinberg, and sent it to Vonnegut’s publisher, having gotten their address from the copyright page of Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle.

On my way to New York to find out what was holding up my rise to lasting international fame, I stopped in Yellow Springs, Ohio and sent the publisher my updated contact numbers (Rico’s phone and address) and waited to hear from them, not knowing they didn’t read unsolicited manuscripts by neophyte writers unrepresented by literary agents.

In April of that year, I got a ride east with two of Jean’s Drama students from Central State University who were auditioning to get into the Drama department at Cornell University. From Cornell, I took a bus to Boston and crashed in a co-ed dorm with a couple high school friends, Dan Nadaner and Joe Tiffany, who were finishing up their undergrad careers at Harvard, and then I went to New York to find out what was keeping my literary career from taking off.

Interesting side note: while I was crashing at Harvard, one of the guys I got to be friends with, Jerry Hiatt, was taking a Creative Writing class from, you guessed it, Kurt Vonnegut.

In New York I stayed with my composer friend Scott Oakley in his roach-infested apartment in Harlem and called the publisher to inquire of The Apprenticeship of Abraham Steinberg. After a long wait, a young woman came on the line and sweetly explained that they did not read unsolicited manuscripts, but because I’d come all this way she would read my manuscript and get back to me in a few days, which she did.

I shaved, put on my cleanest shirt, and went down to the snazzy publisher’s offices in the heart of Manhattan where a woman no older than I met me in the lobby, handed me my manuscript, and said she really enjoyed the story, that my writing reminded her of William Saroyan, keep trying, and get a literary agent.

A year or so later, I was living in a boarding house in Santa Cruz and looking for a job when Rico called to say he and Jean were getting married, would I come to Yellow Springs and sing at their wedding. I said Yes and was so inspired by the invitation, I wrote a song especially for the wedding and then wrote a collection of short stories entitled What Shall the Monster Sing? which I dedicated to Rico and Jean.

That collection of stories ultimately landed me my first and finest literary agent Dorothy Pittman, and contained a short story about disabled folks hanging out in a bar that presaged my novel Inside Moves.

I flew to Ohio courtesy of Rico’s folks, stayed with Jean and Rico for a week before the wedding, sang at the wedding, stayed another week, and flew home. Singing for all those people at the wedding in the glen in Yellow Springs, and singing again at the big reception at Jean’s parents’ house in Cincinnati, along with writing that collection of stories gave me a vision of how I wanted to proceed with my life, and I have stuck to that course ever since.

Five years later Dorothy Pittman sold my novel Inside Moves (original title The Gimp) to Doubleday. After I’d rewritten the book with the help of my excellent editor Sherry Knox, Doubleday sent forth the galleys and soon thereafter we had a big paperback sale and then a movie sale, and a week after the movie sale I was summoned to Los Angeles to meet with Bob Evans who had just made Love Story, The Godfather, and Chinatown, and now wanted to make Inside Moves.

But rather than fly directly from my garret in Seattle to LA, I stopped in San Francisco to commune with Rico. We stayed up late talking and he drove me to the airport the next morning, his parting words, “Call me if you need to talk.”

I landed in LA, got a cab to the Beverly Wilshire with a Czechoslovakian driver who kept insisting I was Clint Eastwood, had lunch with my new Hollywood agent Candace Lake and a vice-president at Paramount, Nancy Hardin. After lunch Nancy dropped me off at Bob Evans’ mansion and I met with Bob in the pool house next to his big swimming pool.

After a few niceties Bob Evans said, “You’ve written a nice little fable here. I couldn’t put it down. But it’s too quirky, too many cripples. You overdid the cripples. Don’t get me wrong, there are moments, but the second act is a dud. We can fix this and it’ll be huge. So here’s what we’ll do. We hold off on publishing while you rewrite the book the way I tell you to rewrite it. That’s what I did with Love Story. I told Segal what to write and he made millions and so will you. We’ll get you a place in Malibu, a secretary, a cook, anything you need, and we’ll get this done.”

I was in shock. Much to Bob’s chagrin, I did not jump for joy, but said I would think about it. Somehow I got back to my room at the Beverly Wilshire from where I called my sister who lived near UCLA and she came and got me and I collapsed at her place.

I called my agent Dorothy Pittman and told her what had happened. She said she would support whatever decision I made. The book was to be published in just a few months. She had already heard from my Hollywood agent and Nancy Hardin at Paramount both of whom had reiterated Bob’s proposal to have me rewrite the book per his direction, for which I would be handsomely recompensed, after which they would put big money into promoting the book.

Then I called Rico. He listened in his patient way and when I was done telling him what Evans wanted me to do, he said, “Your book tells the truth, Murray. They’re afraid of the truth. Don’t let them wreck your story. You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you do.”

And I did not rewrite the book for Bob Evans. He hired Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin to write a screenplay that changed the main character from a man crippled in Vietnam to a failed suicide, and they changed the heroine from a woman with a leg shrunken by polio to a woman with two gorgeous gams, and they changed Max from a man with no legs to a big strong able-bodied guy, and some months later Bob Evans dropped the movie, Dick Donner picked it up and shot Barry and Valerie’s script and added a revenge scene at the end of the movie that was the antithesis of the spirit of the book and the antithesis of the rest of the movie.

But the novel Inside Moves came out as I wrote it, and the inspiring story of a friendship between two physically and emotionally challenged guys, versions of Rico and Murray, lives to this day, however humbly.

Thank you Rico for being my friend.

Rico photo courtesy of Steve Rees

fin

Why Now? for Rico

Audible Inside Moves narrated by Todd

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Inside Moves Apple Books

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Hungry For Color note card by Todd Walton

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser November 2012)

“Life is full of obstacle illusions.” Grant Frazier

A recent San Francisco 49ers game ended in a tie with the St. Louis Rams, the first professional football game to end in a tie in four years. I’m still not used to the Rams being the St. Louis Rams because they were the Los Angeles Rams for all of my youth and for decades thereafter, which made them our dread rivals along with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Lakers and all things Los Angeles. The Lakers, by the way, are called the Lakers because they were originally the Minneapolis Lakers, Minnesota having lakes whereas Los Angeles has viaducts; but the Los Angeles Viaducts would have been a silly name for a basketball team, so…the Dodgers were originally the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Golden State (Oakland) Warriors were originally the Philadelphia Warriors, and soon the San Francisco 49ers will be playing their games in Santa Clara and…nowadays professional sports franchises move ever more frequently from city-state to city-state at the whim of their billionaire owners.

This year, for instance, the Brooklyn Nets played their first games with that moniker having been moved to Brooklyn from New Jersey by their new multi-billionaire Russian owner who just built a billion-dollar sports complex in Brooklyn to house his new team. The Nets are the first professional sports franchise to call Brooklyn home since the Brooklyn Dodgers fled to Los Angeles in the 1950’s, and now New Jersey is without a professional basketball or football or baseball franchise. Oh well.

Anyway, that 49er’s game ending in a tie took me back to my senior year of high school when I was the goalie of the Woodside High soccer team and we were playing Sequoia High for the league championship. The year was 1967 and a long time before soccer would become the major American institution it is today. There were no such things as soccer moms in those days because there were no soccer leagues for children to be driven to. In fact, very few American high schools in 1967 had soccer teams, soccer being of such little interest to most Americans that we never had more than a handful of spectators at our games, and most of those were girlfriends of the players.

When we played for the league championship against the perennial champion Sequoia, there were perhaps fifty people in the stands, most of them the fathers and mothers and siblings of Sequoia’s many Mexican players, the large Mexican population of Redwood City being the basis for Sequoia’s perennial dominance of a soccer league otherwise composed of white kids, most of whom had played soccer for a few years at most, while the Mexican kids had been kicking balls around since they began to walk.

Miracle of miracles, and largely due to our stifling defensive play, that championship game ended in a 1-1 tie, and in those days penalty kick shootouts were a thing of the future. Ties happened and that’s just the way it was. I do remember that most of my teammates and all the Sequoia players were angry that the coaches wouldn’t let us play on until one team or the other scored a winning goal, but our anger quickly morphed into relief. After all, we probably would have lost had the game continued, and what was wrong with being co-champions? Nothing. Nowadays every sport from the peewee leagues to the pros has elaborate protocols for coming up with a winner in the event of a tie at the end of regulation, and I’ll wager this latest 49ers tie will set off a flurry of demands for rule changes to eradicate tie games in professional football forever.

It is never too late to be who you might have been.” George Eliot

As I was musing about why tie games have become so unacceptable in America, I happened to catch a few minutes of a radio program featuring the president of the California Teachers’ Association and two other well-informed educators talking about the educational holocaust created by Bush’s No Child Left Behind, a program Obama has continued under the new name Race To The Top. This asinine system has severely damaged an entire generation of students (and teachers) by teaching the kids absolutely nothing while insisting they memorize and regurgitate masses of useless information in order to be tested on how much useless information they can memorize and regurgitate. These millions and millions of brilliant young people were not taught to write well or how to think critically or how to create art or how to invent things or how to solve problems or how to play musical instruments, and most importantly, as far as I’m concerned—and this relates to our new cultural taboo against games ending in ties—students were not taught to work together, to help each other, to cooperate, to share, and to undertake group projects that end in ties with everyone winning.

Race to the top? The top of what? The societal pyramid, right? And doesn’t that imply that if a tiny percentage of the people race to the top of the pyramid (or more likely are born there and jealously guard their lofty domain) that many more people will be on the bottom of the pyramid or near the bottom? Most people? Of course it does. We have the newest fangled gadgets and phones and computers and cars, but we have a fundamental design flaw in the organization of our society, a flaw we teach and preach as the law of the land. Race to the top, sucker, and you’d better get to the top or you will lose, no tie games allowed.

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Henry David Thoreau

One of the things I greatly appreciate about living in Mendocino is that most of the full time residents I’ve gotten to know could care less about racing to the top of any sort of social or economic pyramid or heap, and that’s one of the reasons they’ve chosen to live here. After abiding for eleven years in Berkeley where such racing and clawing and competing is endemic and exhausting, I am greatly relieved to live somewhere where I am liked or disliked for who I am rather than for who I know or where I live or how much money I have or don’t have. That racing clawing competing energy visits Mendocino on weekends and during the summer months when folks from the Bay Area come up to recreate or occupy their second (or third) homes; and whenever I find myself in the line of such unfriendly psychic fire, I escape post haste and thank my lucky stars I don’t live in Berkeley anymore.

“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” H.G. Wells

Speaking of what’s new, one of the best things to become established in America in my lifetime is the popularity of bicycles and bicycling. When I moved to Sacramento in 1980, my main means of transportation was a bicycle, and so few people rode bicycles in those days that I was soon known in midtown and downtown as “the guy who rides a bike.” Seriously. I’m not kidding. I walked all over town, too, and dozens of times I was greeted by complete strangers with, “Hey, where’s your bike?” or “Hey, it’s the bike guy.”

“You know what I always dreamed of? That with the greenhouse effect, one day Estonia can be what Los Angeles is right now. I always thought when the end of the world comes, I want to be in Estonia. I think then I’d survive.” Carmen Kass

Speaking of bicycles, things, as in the projected changes in the earth’s climate, based on actual measurable data, are not looking good for the survival of humanity beyond another couple of generations unless we dramatically fantastically and heroically shrink our carbon footprints to almost nothing, and soon. “Oh, dear,” we Americans collectively respond to the irrefutable information about what’s happening on earth at this very moment, “but how can we reduce our carbon footprints even a little if the powers that be won’t provide us with groovalicious mass transit and spacious sturdy solar electric cars made from recycled plastic and inexpensive renewable energy and stuff like that? How can we change the way we live if someone else doesn’t provide convenient and excellent alternatives to the way we’re living now?”

The answer is that we, you and I, are extremely intelligent and resourceful people, and there is no doubt whatsoever that we can figure out myriads ways to dramatically fantastically and heroically shrink our individual and collective carbon footprints to a perfectly reasonable level if we set our minds and hearts to the task. Not only that, but we are so resourceful and creative that we can dramatically reduce our carbon footprints and have fun at the same time. To get your imaginative juices flowing in that direction, think about walking, bicycles, insulation, potluck dinners, ride sharing, solar power, wind power, buying local, thermal underwear, driving less, candlelight, darkness, vegetable gardens…

And think about what Thomas Hedges just reported for Truthdig:

Since 2000, Germany has converted 25 percent of its power grid to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and biomass. The architects of the clean energy movement Energiewende, which translates to “energy transformation,” estimate that from 80 percent to 100 percent of Germany’s electricity will come from renewable sources by 2050.

Germans are baffled that the United States has not taken the same path. Not only is the U.S. the wealthiest nation in the world, but it’s also credited with jump-starting Germany’s green movement 40 years ago.

“This is a very American idea,” Arne Jungjohann, a director at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung Foundation (HBSF), said at a news conference Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C. “We got this from Jimmy Carter.”

Indeed, the only thing stopping Americans from inventing and implementing wonderful new carbon-lite lives is our unwillingness to believe that such changes are truly necessary.

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Dead Airplane Kerouac Caen

(This article originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser February 2011)

“The past is never dead, it is not even past.” William Faulkner

When my wife and I joined forces four years ago, she came equipped with the nicely aged Toyota pickup I’d always wanted and I came with a Toyota station wagon ideal for toting cellos, so we swapped. The station wagon was subsequently crushed by a falling pine and replaced by a more commodious sedan, but the pickup lives on and I love the old thing.

Marcia bought the truck from the person who bought the truck new, Jim Young, our superlative chiropractor and friend and coach of the Mendocino High School (boys) basketball team. Now and then when I am under Jim’s thumbs, as it were, he will inquire about his former truck and I am happy to report the old thing is humming right along and still getting admirable mileage in this age of fast-rising fuel costs.

The pickup is faded white, eighteen years old, with the requisite rust spots and windows that must be manually cranked up and down. Otherwise non-descript, the truck sports a subtle ornament that Jim affixed to the rear window, an insignia identifying the vehicle as a chariot of the Dead, the Grateful Dead, the band, not my ancestors. I had no idea these five nearly identical dancing bears—blue green yellow orange pink—had anything to do with the Grateful Dead until shortly after I took the helm and picked up a hitchhiker on my way to Fort Bragg, his first words to me, “Love those bears, man. Long live Jerry Garcia.”

Over these ensuing four years, I have been treated to salutes, knowing smiles, waves, words of comradery, and a Pass The Joint victory signal on the order of once a month as a result of Jim affixing those dancing bears to the truck’s window. There seems to be some debate among Deadheads as to whether the bears are dancing in the manner of a famed fan named Owsley tripping on LSD or whether the bears are marching. One Grateful Dead web site claims that a flipbook rendition of the bears proves conclusively that they are marching. In any case, a Gypsy woman winked at me yesterday as a consequence of those bears, and her wink sent me hurtling back to the bygone years of my youth when I and a few of my friends had the Grateful Dead, live, all to ourselves for hours on end.

I feel compelled to admit that I am not a Grateful Dead fan. Indeed, the only Dead tune I ever liked was Barefootin’ from their very first album, and the only words I think I remember from that song are See that girl, barefootin’ along, whistlin’ and singin’, she’s a carryin’ on. When I lived in Santa Cruz in the early 1970’s, I had a friend who was a drummer in a Grateful Dead cover band, if you can imagine such a thing, and after attending their third concert of astonishingly accurate, and, to me, horrifying imitations of their heroes, I have avoided listening to the Grateful Dead for lo these forty years. Yet I do love the Grateful Dead, for they were of the utmost importance to me in my teenage years and provided the soundtrack for a great awakening.

“Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.” Sean O’Faolain

Ladera is a housing development a few miles from Stanford University that sprang up in the 1950’s and was home to professors and doctors and stock brokers and dentists and school teachers, mostly white people with a sprinkle of Chinese and Japanese families, and a few serious artists who liked living close to San Francisco in a rural setting not far from beaches with such beautiful names as San Gregorio, Pomponio, and Pescadero.

Ladera had an elementary school that sent its graduates to junior high at La Entrada in Menlo Park, and from there to Woodside High, famous for being the first public high school in America to have a major pot bust in the early 1960’s, many of those busted being children of the first families of Ladera. And it was there in Ladera that the Grateful Dead, yes, Jerry’s band when the keyboard player was a gravel-voiced guy called Pig Pen, used to rehearse on weekends in the multi-purpose room at the elementary school; and I and a handful of my friends were admitted to that sanctum to dance to the music on a vast expanse of highly polished linoleum.

What I remember most vividly about those amazing afternoons are two superb conga players, each with multiple drums, and several men with long hair and mustaches playing guitars in front of stacks of amplifiers, Pig Pen hunched over his keyboard, the music all of a piece—a vast electric raga made of pulsing chords and hypnotic rhythms over which fantabulous guitar solos cried like phantasmagoric muezzins to which I danced and twirled and danced, my too too solid flesh melting and resolving into sweat and ecstasy, my body free of pain at last, and those persistent inner voices of doubt and shame drowned in the sonic deluge, my entire being steeped in glorious visions of life beyond the choking confines of suburbia and parental neuroses.

And I remember my anguish when I arrived at the multi-purpose room one sunny Saturday afternoon and found the entrance barred by a huge man who said the rehearsals were now closed to the likes of me, only invited guests allowed, my magical mystery tour at end. I waited around for my friends to show up, and watched indignantly as the bouncer admitted my most beautiful friends Mona and Cassie, and rebuffed all the boys and the less beautiful girls. But that big goon couldn’t take away the visions I’d had while dancing to those awesome ragas of the Dead; and I vowed to start my own band one day and blow the roof off the jail, so to speak, and set everybody free.

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.” Denis Diderot

My father had a 1963 Karmann Ghia, red bottom, white top. Cute little long-nosed Italian body, a two-seater with a Volkswagen engine. Remember those? In 1966, gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon, the Karmann Ghia got about thirty miles to the gallon, and it was twenty-seven miles from Redwood City to San Francisco. Four teenagers could squeeze into that little car, one in the cramped back compartment, one sitting on the lap of the one sitting in the passenger seat, and one (me) driving. And that’s how we got to the Fillmore, that vast windowless rotting warehouse in a dangerous part of San Francisco on many a Saturday night to hear Quicksilver Messenger Service (with or without Dino Valenti) open for the Grateful Dead who then set the stage for the Jefferson Airplane, pre-Grace Slick.

I have had several musical heroes in my life, most of them jazz people, but I have only adored one band and that was the original Jefferson Airplane. I saw the Airplane perform with their first female vocalist Signe Anderson four times, and each time I saw them they were brilliant and fabulously musical. Then Signe split and I was devastated, the devastation of a jilted teen. And then Grace Slick came aboard and my misery deepened, for to my ears the magical synergy of my favorite band was gone, so I kissed the folk rock scene goodbye.

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted;

One need not be a house;

The brain has corridors surpassing

Material place.
”

Emily Dickinson

So here we are forty-five years later living in the wilds of Mendocino where through the auspices of unseen patrons the San Francisco Chronicle arrives on our driveway every Sunday morning. The Chronicle of today is largely unreadable junk and wire service propaganda, but I dutifully solve the Sunday Jumble words, skim the Sports section for news of the Giants, and thank those unseen ones for providing us with a week’s worth of fire starter.

And this morning, while I was getting the fire going, a headline in last week’s pink section caught my eye: Jefferson Airplane Mansion for sale. Upon closer examination, I found this headline to be the lead item of a section entitled Wayback Machine, the headline referring to something that happened twenty-five years ago.

“February 4, 1986. The ‘Airplane House,’ a piece of San Francisco rock n’ roll history, is up for sale. The mansion overlooking Golden Gate Park that was once the home of the Jefferson Airplane, one of the pioneer psychedelic bands of the ‘60s, is on the market for $795,000. The three-story, Colonial Revival-style mansion on Fulton Street, with its distinctive Doric columns in front, has 17 rooms, stained-glass windows, silk wallpaper, rich mahogany woodwork, fireplaces on every level and lots of memories. ‘If the walls could talk,’ said Nadine Condon, publicist for Starship, the band that evolved from the original group. ‘We’ve had some great parties here,’ she said, climbing to the uppermost floor. ‘The joke used to be that the higher you got, the higher you got.’ In 1968, still flush from the Summer of Love a year earlier, band mates Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassady and their manager Bill Thompson, bought the mansion for $70,000. When the mansion was built in 1904 by R.A. Vance, a lumber baron, the Golden Gate Park did not exist and sand dunes rolled uninterrupted to the ocean. The mansion survived the earthquake and fire of 1906. According to legend, the great tenor Enrico Caruso, a friend of Vance, fled from the Palace Hotel on the day of the quake and found refuge in the house. Most of the house is as it always was, but the second-floor kitchen is trimmed in orange and purple Day-Glo paint. ‘The last vestiges of hippiedom,’ Condon said.”

EARLY SPRING

The dog writes on the window

With his nose

Philip Whalen

So what should I find on the flip side of that pink page with the story of the Jefferson Airplane mansion but a Chronicle Classic reprint of Herb Caen’s column from October 22, 1969, entitled One thing after another, which includes the following:

“Poor, embittered Jack Kerouac, dead at 47, almost forgotten in the North Beach byways he frequented—and helped make famous—more than a decade ago. In his last years, he turned on the young people, sometimes viciously, and they in turn turned their backs on him. Yet a small literary niche will forever be his. ‘On the Road’ remains the finest chronicle of the Beatnik era.”

And in the same Caen column: “Steve Frye, a hippie-hating L.A. policeman, now has mixed emotions. Last Wed. night, driving through the rain in Big Sur, he had a flat tire, and the only people who stopped to help him were—two hippies. This so unraveled him that after he drove on he was suddenly seized with an uncontrollable urge to pick up a hippie hitchhiker. Which he did. There is hope for us all.”

See that girl, barefootin’ along,

Whistlin’ and singin’, she’s a carryin’ on.

There’s laughing in her eyes, dancing in her feet,

She’s a neon-light diamond and she can live on the street