Hammond Guthrie
Laguna Beach - Hollywood Transition
from: AsEverWas (A Self-Descriptive Biopathy)
Following my temporary deferment from military conscription, my roommate Chip, who actually attended his classes, and had realistic plans for himself, moved back home with his well-placed parents to better accommodate his future--leaving me to my own devices. Shortly thereafter I read an article in a magazine about the supposedly dangerous effects of marijuana, and I knew immediately that I wanted some. Knowing the secrecy surrounding illicit drug use, I contacted my ex-cadet buddy, Mike in Newport Beach, who I suspected either smoked the "dangerous weed" or at the very least, would know where I could get some. Mike, as it turned out, was well versed and receptive, saying he could "score a lid for ten dollars" from his older brother, Nick. Twenty minutes later I was back at my place with a packet of rolling papers and a sack full of what Mike called "Acapulco Gold." I had never tried rolling a cigarette before and my first attempts produced dismal results. Following numerous failures I was finally able to light one up and I smoked the entire thing without feeling any effects, so I smoked another one. This gave me a headache and a slight buzz, but nothing like the phantasmagoria described in the magazine article, so I called Mike. "Hey, what's the deal here? I smoked two sticks and nothing's happened!" Like an over-enthusiastic appliance salesman, my friend said he would be right over.
Shaking his head at my my pitiful product, Mike pulled out a neatly rolled cigarette of his own. "Here," he said, "smoke this, that's a joint." I lit up, inhaled and blew out the smoke. Mike laughed and pointed out that nothing would ever happen if I didn't hold the smoke in my lungs for a while. "Joints," he said, were not smoked like cigarettes, and then showed me the proper way to "toke and hold the hit. " I tried it Mike's way, and halfway through the joint I was walking around my house backwards, speaking in tongues. From his prone position on the floor, my pot guru proclaimed, "Now you're getting the hang of it!"
Through Mike and his brother Nick I met Danny. Danny's pot was a little different than Nick's "Acapulco Gold", with weirder sounding names like "Oaxacan and Michoacan." The other significant difference with Danny's product was that he always included a pack of rolling papers and a tinfoil covered roll of cross-white "bennies" (benzedrine tablets). I started buying all my pot from Danny. My generous fresh connection lived just south of Costa Mesa in the seaside town of Laguna Beach, a favored tourist mecca for those in the know, which I was quick to learn was also a laid-back colony for bohemian artists and other fringe types. Due to my frequent trips to Danny's, I enthusiastically began exploring the city's rather fascinating neo-Beat underbelly.
The main street through town was lined with realtors, thrift stores, clay pot bazaars, seafood restaurants, curio shops, shack coffee houses and cheap cafes surrounding a diminishing number of elegantly rustic beach front homes. A curious fixture at the northern edge of town was an aging Gabby Hayes-like character the locals called "The Greeter" (his real name was Eiler Larsen). A gentle charismatic eccentric, Eiler held forth daily with an eternal smile, waving his gnarly old cane at the passing cars and welcoming everyone who drove by the best of stays in Laguna. "Just an old crazy guy," I was initially told, but long after our entertaining conversations of desert prospecting and hobo literature--when Eiler passed away in his lonesome hill-side shack, thousands of dollars were found stuffed inside his death-bed mattress.
During one of my intrepid strolls around Laguna I found a minuscule record shop known as Sound Spectrum, specializing in imported rock and roll. It was a drug-friendly environment, and I visited often to listen to the music and chat with the clientele. Following a number of these visits, and numerous Black Afghani enhanced joints, I was befriended by one of the owners, Jimmy the Clerk. Jimmy was one among several surf-friendly acid head investor types, all a few years older than myself, who seemed to spend much of their freely scattered time on the beach in Hawaii. Following a tandem LSD trip down to the "Orange Sunshine" shore one moonlit night, Jimmy introduced me to his discreet, though hardly silent fold of partners. Jimmy the Clerk and his friends had a small but expanding communal set located in a hidden canyon behind Laguna. In those days they lived quite happily, well away from outsider scrutiny, in a series of shanty boxes amid a luscious grove of aromatic trees, along with their quite beautiful girlfriend-attendants (male chauvinism had yet to be clearly defined), broken-down VW vans, copious amounts of psychotropic drugs, feral cats, a flock of obese hens and a number of seriously bewildered dogs. My new companions called their resourceful redoubt "Bluebird Canyon."
Much too much has already been written about this group of beatific surfers, and what hasn't been exposed in the media or by ugly rumor is best left unsaid. Jimmy and his fun-loving band smugglers, at the time uncommonly referred to as "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love," and eventually shortened by inside-outsiders to simply "The Brotherhood," entered the Psychedelic Hall of Fame for opening one of the original eastern import gathering centers for the Underculture known as "The Mystic Arts," located on Laguna's main drag, and among their numerous humanitarian acts, Jimmy and crew became the West Coast guardians for Dr. Timothy Leary's Pandoric stash box. The subterranean action swirling around Jimmy the Clerk's set in Laguna was, unfortunately for them, becoming rather notorious, but by then I was keeping more to myself, miles away from Bluebird's oncoming history--though due to Danny's complimentary speed and Jimmy's powdered LSD, I was most certainly not sleeping.
The entertainment quotient in Costa Mesa was severely depressed, so on Fridays I would roll up a pocket full of joints, gobble a handful bennies and head northward in my two-tone (lawn-green/white), four door, 1964 Ford Fairlane (on long-term loan from my ever-generous grandmother) and drive to Hollywood. As a rule I would leave the car in a coin operated "All-Day-All-Night" parking lot near the freeway end of Hollywood Boulevard, smoke a joint, ante up two or three bennies (perhaps mixed with a smidgen of LSD), and then head out on the weirding path.
Hollywood Boulevard has most likely always been a safe haven for the disenfranchised factions of an otherwise sunny Southern California lifestyle. Ever curious on my weekly trips up and down this historic Boulevard, I would come to meet other nomadic experimentalists who turned me on to the hot spots for diversive weirding. Places such as the soon to be closed Coffee House of the Rising Sun, The Blue Grotto, The Bizarre Bazaar, Ben Frank's Cafe, and the berserkian Fred C. Dobbs, where I met an astonishing array of oddly framed yet wonderful people, including Bunk Gardner, the multi-instrumentalist front-lineman for Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention. On the whole they referred to themselves as "Freaks" and belonged to a vague something-or-other they satirically called: "The United Mutation Front." (I immediately applied for membership.) One of the more mystically apparent non-leaders of this unwinding group was a Beat elder and studied sculptor turned bizzarro dance-guru by the name of Vito Paulekas. At the time, Vito held court within a tangle of wildly attractive lithe-bodied acid-bunny proto-groupies, and a smaller group of polymorphic male impresarios known collectively as The Fraternity of Man. The Frat-family and their gossamer clad women, who looked like the psychedelic brides of Dr. Frankincense, sported some of the most colorful clothing this side of the Munchkin Wardrobe from the Wizard of Oz. The group's interpreter and mephisto-jester was a ringlet-eared Mediterranean fellow named Carl Franzoni, who dressed like a rainbow-clad Oscar Wilde, right down to the crimson-skin tights and brass-buckled, patent-leather Artois shoes--a footwear named after the shoe-designing brother of France's King Louis XVII. Frank Zappa dedicated the Mothers of Invention double album "Freak Out!" to the outermost Carl, and The Fraternity band would become legends as the composers of the reefo-musical pearl, "Don't Bogart Me", later to be included on the sound track of Dennis Hopper's ground-breaking, though to my mind oxymoronic, biker film, "Easy Rider."
When you take benzedrine and stay up all day and night for three consecutive days spelunking the Underground, your peripheral vision gets a lot wider, and your normally in-sync-with-reality perceptions quickly begin to record, replay and filter your many experiences almost before they happen to you. With a set of pin-pointy pupils inaccurately scanning up and under side-streets of constantly split decisions, time becomes quite irrelevant, until your frazzled psyche requires more benzedrine. You get wired and you stay wired. On one of these safari-morns, absorbed in the workings of the inner-tinsel set, where breakfast, lunch and dinner was little more than an endless cup of coffee retro-boosted by a handful of mega-vitamins and speed, I pocketed my comb, ball-point pens, the ever handy safety razor, and my stash, feeling that I was equipped and fully qualified to confront the long unwinding whatever.
Lower Hollywood Boulevard near the Hollywood Freeway was then lined with laundries, fading pawn shops, repair stores, end-of-the-line agencies and a number of all night triple-feature movie houses featuring B-grade exploitation films. One theater would run films like "MONDO CANE," "MONDO PAZZO," and "MONDO MONDO"--while another would have a Russ Meyers' Festival of soft porn celluloid like "Vixen," "Super Vixen" and "Well-Beyond the Valley Of The (next-to-last?) Super Vixen." The price of admission was a dollar, which was then good for 24 hours or until the theater's post-industrial janitor swept you out with the condoms and uneaten pop corn. Much cheaper than a motel, the movie houses were safer (and warmer) than sleeping in the Ford, they had relatively clean washrooms, and if I was there at the right time, I could play Mondo Bingo! (the lucky winners were paid in silver dollars). It was on such a Grade B morning that I headed out for what could be called Mondo Hammondo and The Technicolor All-Night Movie.
After inhaling a 99 cent breakfast, freshly combed and sufficiently wired, I strolled up the boulevard, zig-zagging in the general direction of La Cienega. Without detours, this is an easy walk that would take just about anyone thirty minutes--but due to the interactive nature of benzedrine and the curious-sparkle of the weird, it took me nearly six hours of outside-down work on the captivating up-streets, heading specifically in the direction of lord knows what. I persistently distracted myself with the fascinating diatribes of the many other victims and pheromonic interventionists typical of Hollywood Boulevard and its immediate environs. To quell the increasing frenzy building up inside my nervous system, I meticulously scanned the directory listings in the lobbies of anonymous buildings before entering the offices of the probably transient and curiously titled. My scattered attentions focused on places such as: Bzerpt's Induction, 1st Temple of Zymphonic Transference, Process Church of the Final Judgment, Grand Templar of the O.T.O., FulaVita-VitaVita, Silva Mind Control, Scientology and Overnight Squilbitz Removal.
"Hi there! Can I have a brochure?"
Continuing my walk on the wired side, I merged with cheap arcades, near-empty cafes, used bookstores and odd exhibits long-gone, such as the eerie Witch Craft museum. Candidly, I browsed among the lace and padded undergarments at Fredrick's of Hollywood, at that time largely catering to almost-starlets and full-bore transvestites. Without purpose, I toured myself through the professionally equipped Magician's Supply Store of illusion, Jaynes Auto Park (a truly curious palm-tree and small mansion rest stop, once a private finishing school, now sadly demolished), then across the street from Fredrick's, and into the wondrous lobbies of The Egyptian, The Pantages and, finally, Graumann's Chinese Theater--where I stuck my vibrating hands and feet into the fixed-cement impressions left by the illustrious stars. Finally reaching La Cienega I wandered onto Sunset Boulevard, where the somehow dated weirdness turns into a flashing cacophony of freakdom. In Ben Frank's Coffee Shop I learned about the nearby Fairfax District, past the closed in the afternoon Silent Cinema, where I would later sit watching Harold Lloyd hang from the hands of an enormous clock, while the theater's realtime piano player charmed me and the empty-house silhouettes of other moviegoers painted on the aging walls of a nearly bygone era. Further along Fairfax was the Los Angeles FreePress Bookstore where I would occasionally find crash pad housing, and across the street Cantor's Delicatessen always sported a long line of Freaks, would-be rock stars, fluorescent groupies and government agents in trench coats standing in line. Along with the delicate kosher fare, Cantor's provided a wondrous late night haven for a very strange set of patrons. The schizophrenic though oddly endearing street-singer Larry "Wild Man" Fischer would often come in to perform one of his aberrant ten-cent songs by running around the restaurant in ever decreasing circles, making awkward sounds before ejecting himself out the front door. Only Frank Zappa would recognize Larry's latent-croon potential by issuing a double album of the "Wild Man's" greatest ten-cent hits titled "A Evening With Wild Man Fischer" on his Bizarre Records label, which included a lovely photo of Larry standing next to his petite, grandmotherly-looking mother on the album's cover.
Back on The Strip I used my well-worn Marine identification to get into a burlesque house across from what was to become country-crooner Gene Autry's Grand Hotel. Inside, I continued to up my ante by washing down more benzedrine with a gin and tonic, watching the aging strippers twirl fluorescent pasties under the black light gloom of booze-hound, bar-fly and washed-out patron. Much like an out of work scientist I combed through the many night clubs of the time, such as The Sea Witch, The Trip, Pandora's Box, The Whiskey, Gazzarri's and the ill-fated den of iniquity known as The London Fog--an early sub-public watering hole catering to a dark and suspicious crowd. Needing a break in my continuum I went to the experimental Cinema Cinimatique near Pandora's Box and watched the current underground movies, including Warhol's, "I A Man," oddly featuring Valerie Solanas, Andy's future would-be-assassin, and a blinding piece of celluloid by Conrad Brooks called "The Flicker," which probably caused seizures in some fixated moviegoers.
Out on the pavement again, I stuck out my thumb and within seconds I got a ride from a guy driving a battered blue Pontiac Sedan. He said his name was Barry Something, and as I got adjusted to the recently torn seat he asked, did I "mind riding in a stolen car?" Before I could answer, Barry told me that he stole the Pontiac from a used lot in Pittsburgh on his way out to California, having tired of his TransContinental bus ride. Talking a mile a minute, the disheveled Barry said he was "working in a greasy spoon, to kip enough smash to go on up to Frisco." I began to get the speed shakes when he asked me if I "liked Wyamines?" "Y-ya-whats?" I asked, and without answering, Barry pulled out a plastic inhaler, cracked it open on the steering wheel and pulled off a strip of sticky looking foil. Handing me the slip of supposed narcosi he cautioned me to "cook it up real slow" before injecting the yellowish goop into my veins! In a near state of speed shock I thanked Barry profusely before jumping out at the next red light. "Tell'um hello in Pittsburgh" I said. I beat the light across the boulevard and dumped Barry's proffered foil into the first bush I came to. To avoid the obvious I ducked into the darkened courtyard of a quasi-subterranean establishment called The 5th Estate.
Inside the spacious coffee house I immediately ran into Bernardo, whom I had met on a previous junket to San Francisco. Bernardo, who spoke with a slightly effeminate whisper, stood a good 6 foot 4 inches tall, plus another 6 inches of naturally electrified Afro, and dressed like "The Spider From Mars" long before singer David Bowie became a world-scene Face. Ugly rumors circulated around Hollywood that the reportedly well-hung Bernardo had carried on a week-long menage a trois with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Miss Mercy of the all-girl group, The GTO's--but in order to "protect the guilty" Bernardo refrained from spreading idle gossip. After the requisite set of hand configurations and brotherly jive, Bernardo introduced me to his "good-friend, Moses-Two"--another Afro-wired spade in his mid-to-late twenties with an infectious smile, and who graciously offered to give me the fifty-cent tour of The Estate.
There was a room in the back for folk singing, and another housed a small art gallery. The main salon had an espresso machine and a diverse lending library with a small fireplace, off which was a cinema room where silent European films were shown. The clientele at the 5th Estate was a much more eclectic group than the frenetic crowd over at Fred C. Dobbs. Everyone from over-qualified psychiatrists to under-employed grave diggers hung out at The Estate, and on subsequent visits I would learn from this intriguing group about the jazz scene at Shelly's Manne-Hole and The Icehouse out in Hermosa Beach where Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers frequently played. Other clubs would appear within my spectrum such as The Omnibus, Ashgrove and Bito Lito's in Cosmos Alley where Arthur Lee and his soon-to-be discovered group LOVE was the house band--but The 5th Estate was far and away the hippest scene I had encountered.
Back at the table, Moses-Two and Bernardo were leaving to go to a party and asked me if I wanted to go along. "Does a horse have wings?" I asked, and off we went, zipping around corners and skittering down unlit side-streets with Moses-Two at the wheel like a nervous mole burrowing his way home, and when I noticed the Watts Towers roll by I started to get the speed shakes again. Moses-Two finally pulled over in front of a row of tenements with the remains of an old sedan in front. "We're here!" he exclaimed and hopped out of the car. Bernardo and I followed him up some stairs and down a grimy hallway to an unmarked door where Moses-Two rapped the secret rap. When the door opened we were quietly invited into the dimly lit living room by an older black woman Moses-Two referred to as "Mom." Fresh MoTown was playing softly on the radio, and as my eyes adjusted to the lack of light I saw that six or seven people (all of them black) were lounging on the numerous sofas lining the walls of Mom's apartment. Everyone appeared to be on the nod and didn't acknowledge our arrival until Mom introduced Bernardo (who took up much of the room) and me as being friends of Moses-Two. Mom disappeared into the bathroom and when she returned, she spread the paper napkin she was carrying on the coffee table, exposing a large pile of multi-colored capsules, and everyone in the room, including Bernardo and Moses-Two took a handful before going back on the nod. I didn't recognize any of the pills but knew that it would be seen as bad form to refuse, so I scooped up a fistful and popped one of the big red ones in my mouth. Soon I was getting rather edgy if not outright paranoid about the set, when Mom came over and sat beside me on the sofa. "Lissen here Sugalamb--why yu be sittin in ma houze ain't nuthin bay-go-hatten, dig?" I felt better after her reassurances and accepted the joint she offered me. Mom said it was "Panama Red," and true to its reputation, the stick took the top off my benzedrine enhanced head!
Around 2:30 a.m. we thanked Mom for the hospitality, and Moses-Two and Bernardo drove me back to my all-night-movie motel on Hollywood Boulevard. Moses-Two gave me his phone number for the next time I was in town and they let me go, stumbling blindly into the loge section where I fell into a Panamanian-Seconal-Benzedrine fugue. I awoke a few hours later. On screen, naked MONDO women rubbed fresh wildebeest manure on to the sides of their pathetic huts. Crying out in starvation, emaciated children with large festering ulcerations on their bodies nursed futilely at the mottled breasts of their mothers and huge bottle flies swarmed. Clear of my previous haze, I stormed out the MONDO theater, got to my car and drove back to the relative sanity of Costa Mesa where I slept solidly for two days.
PostCrypt
I continued my weekly forays into Hollywood, meeting so many would-be artists, odd-drug enthusiasts and came to know some of the local groups, such as members of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Bunk Gardner of the Mothers was still around, Skye Saxon of The Seeds, and most notably, Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield. I also hung out briefly with FM radio pioneer Tom Donahue and David Osmund of The Firesign Theater. However, my own spirit quest was becoming much too self-absorbing for me to get overtly involved with the burgeoning Los Angeles art/rock scene, though I had many opportunities to enter into the questionable side-world of "The Other Crew." A debilitating quasi-profession where wires, women, copious drugs and backstage passes take you mercilessly down the road of privileged excess--where the mystery is not your own--and furthermore, in those early days of garage-beginning rock, no self-respecting group wanted somebody in their band whose primary instrumentation was playing the drugs.
To branch out I began invading the elevated enclaves of the Silverlake and Echo Park Districts, finally extending my walk of the wired along Wilshire Boulevard past the La Brea Tar Pits and into the heart of downtown, where I stretched my young psyche by hanging out at the infamous Pershing Square. This is where the already weird go when their regular routines become pedestrian. Ghostly figures wandered these nearly indifferent streets at all hours, muttering into a trash-strewn eternity from out the subcortic bowel of writer Charles Bukowski's rummy world of butt-ugly barflies, flimflam artists and failed magicians on their last legs amidst a plethora of squalid bug-infested rooming houses perched ominously above Elbow Room bars-a six by twelve block sanctuary, where a shifting population of bohemian outakes, Synanon drop-outs, confused perverts, stiletto-toed queens, and rather literate drug users went to get away from it all. To keep abreast of this sordid scene I would occasionally spend the weekend in one of the area's less than accommodating hotels where I had three heavy metal slide-bolts on the inside of the door, and a short view that looked out onto a steam vent spewing vaporized grease and grime over Broadway and the nearby Greyhound Bus terminal-home to a bustling Glory Hole and Tea Room trade. After a few weekends living among and observing this truly lost and limping generation I knew it was time to pack it in, go back to Costa Mesa and get my act together.
Los Angeles was/is a condemned city.
Material World Linkage:
http://www.itsonlywords.com (type "writenow" in the Composer Search)
http://www.corpse.org
http://www.somalit.com/index.htm
http://www.howtospeakhip.com
http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/2008olympics.html
http://www6.brinkster.com/pociao/eme.asp
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