Chapter Sixteen
So here's the score so far: I returned to the states, got the clap, spent three days in solitary confinement for hot checks (which I paid back), dropped acid, smoked dope, partied my heads off at the Texas Pop Festival and found myself on my way to San Francisco to be a hippie in a commune. Judy the airplane hopper had said to look them up if I ever got to town, so I did.
They lived in a great three story ”mansion” in the Potrero district ...a bit of a lower class neighborhood, though clean and not too dangerous looking.
I was welcomed with open arms and given a pallet on the floor in the attic. There were quite a few folks living there. I wish my memory for names wasn't so bad; but I recall Mae Margret -the matriarch of the house (known as "2703" for the street address), and Jimbo, a gregarious young man who could be anyone's best buddy, who said he’d grown up there and never knew it was a ghetto until he was an adult and read it in the newspaper. And Karen Miller. I'd fallen in love with her the instant I'd seen her. She was going with a man who made a profession of ignoring her. I told her all I had to offer was my presence. She liked that because she took me to her bed a few times during my stay there.
There were at least three others, including Judy, that lived there. All were quite into the seriousness and dedication of communes and subscribed to a highly secret underground publication distributed clandestinely to communes all over the country. I never saw a copy because I wasn't an official member of the group, and was never asked to be, but I was told of its existence.
I stayed there a week or two but moved when I got a job as a barker at a topless/bottomless club in North Beach. The first week I was there my wonderful GTO was repossessed and all sorts of memorabilia was lost.
Who’d have thought a bank would want regular payments from a hippie. Go figure.
Having worked in Soho, I thought I had excellent job skills at touting customers into the topless/bottomless bars of Broadway. Topless dancing had run its course and the next level was totally nude dancers on stage.
Lesson: There’s nothing newed under the sun.
The first place I worked was Little Caesars. It was located at the edge of the strip of clubs along Broadway, just west of Kearney Street. Sitting at the bar next to the service slot was a female store mannequin.
I thought it was a live woman sitting there when I walked in, which was the point. The owner, a kindly gent named Emelio Milletti was behind the bar seated in a wheelchair.
The story goes he was shot in the spine and crippled by a robber one night in an empty parking lot. There were no witnesses and the robber was never caught.
He was a distinguished Italian gentleman and he must have taken a liking to me 'cause he hired me on the spot to be his barker.
Mind you, they weren’t lined up around the block for the job.
He was a good boss who treated his dancers, and me, with respect and courtesy. We felt like family there.
Before I went outside to begin my first shift he warned me, "If a fight breaks out in here, walk away. Don't help out. I'm not paying you to be a fighter. If you want to fight I'll sponsor you in the ring, but around here you're just the doorman. Walk away."
I had no problem with that.
The only problem I had with working at Little Caesar's was the place did no business. People avoided it like there was a sign overhead telling them to go away.
The girls were lovely; the music was the same as the other clubs. The place was known for "that lady at the bar" but business was always slow. How he managed to stay open was beyond me (wink wink). After a few weeks I got a job down the street where there was heavier traffic and more action: at Coke's.
Anthony “Coke” Infante, and a partner named Tony, who actually started the phrase “yada yada yada”, owned the place.
Coke was good friends with movie star Robert Mitchum who would call whenever he was in town and the two would go drinking and carousing. I spoke with Mitchum a couple of times and asked Coke to get me his autograph...to no avail.
The job of a barker is simple. Stand outside the club and regale the passersby with tales of the wonders of the unclothed ladies within.
Here in San Francisco I didn’t have to worry about causing any obstructions of footpaths or spending a few hours in jail for doing my job.
All barkers have a rhythm and a speil. If there's a lot of foot traffic they'll be waving their arms and making grand flourishes and presentations at the doorway literally trying to swoop the clientele inside by creating a vortex with all their activity. It generally worked, too.
You could tell a good barker by the rhythm of his words and his movements. If you want to check mine out find a copy of Some of My Best Friends are Bottomless Dancers -a student film by Barry Pollack, made in 1970 while at Stanford University. He went on to write the screenplays for such TV shows as “Trapper John, M.D”, and Alex Haley’s “Hotel”. He also directed “Cool Breeze” starring Pam Grier.
You'll hear my spiel over the opening shots of the North Beach/Broadway area and later in the film you'll see me at work, arms waving about.
Standing next to me is the man we used to call the Zodiac Killer, after the infamous serial killer operating in the area at the time. It was just our nickname for him and we were certain he wasn’t really the elusive maniac.
He was a little man who came to the club every week night. He always entered the club the same way: he'd use his omnipresent collapsing umbrella to spray the entire place with "machine gun fire". He worked in a weapons design firm, he told us. He always sat at the bar next to the service slot and he always ordered one rum and Coke, which he nursed for hours.
Midway through his visit he would give "his girlfriend" (one particular dancer) a Hershey's bar...with almonds.
He was true to "his girl" for weeks at a time. He'd flirt with her when she came to the slot for her drink orders when she wasn't dancing. After awhile he'd tire of one and pick a new girl with whom to flirt. She now became the recipient of the Hershey bar. After his nightly visit he'd head home but not without stopping to chat with me.
No one knew where his weapons firm was or where he lived. He never touched or made advances towards the girls. He never propositioned them. He was always polite and circumspect. He paid cash and never tipped.
And now he's captured forever standing next to me in the film which, incidentally, was about Roman Balladine; who taught nude, striptease, and belly dancing to housewives in San Francisco and who had his studio there in North Beach amidst all the “bottomless” clubs.
My spiel, which I can still rattle off without a hitch, went like this: "Here they are Ladies and Gentlemen: Topless, Bottomless, Armless and Legless. We just throw them out there and they just flop around. Step right inside. There's no cover charge, no door charge just step right in and sit right down. It's nothing you haven't seen before ma'am. Hurry Hurry Hurry. It's guaranteed by Good Housekeeping to be the filthiest, dirtiest, low-down rottenest, perverted obscene type show in town. It's even been blacklisted by Reader's Digest. So come on in and sit right down. Hurry Hurry Hurry!"
Lesson: You gotta have a spiel.
Many a night I stood out there doing my thing, thinking how this was great exercise for my voice for when I would be a great and famous DJ. I'd really lay the golden tones down for the customers, too.
Walter Keene, the artist best known for those “big-eye” paintings of little kids popular in those days was a regular customer. His wife was the creator of the genre and the more accomplished of the two. He'd come in and sit at the end of the bar in the afternoons and imbibe. He didn’t care a hoot for the dancers. It was just close to his studio.
The famous San Francisco Jazz Workshop was just down the street...a door or two down from Little Caesar's, and, whenever he was in town James Moody, the famous trumpeter, would drop by to visit with Coke. He always had a nice word for me and would stop and schmooze for a bit before heading back to work.
When you work on a street for a prolonged period of time you learn you'll see just about everything if you stand still long enough, similar to Siddhartha’s river experience.
One night I picked up on a couple across the street hitting all the clubs but not staying in any. A man and woman would approach the doorman and then pop inside for a peek and come right back out. They hit all of the clubs across the street and then I lost track of them.
I was involved in my work when, all of a sudden, a ravishing beauty stood before me. She'd planted her feet firmly and stood, arms akimbo, looking at me. She was absolutely stunning. She appeared to be about 30, maybe 5’5”, 130 lbs. Her hair was long and black and shined like the moon on a dark lake. Her blue eyes were piercingly clear. Without warning she popped open her suit coat exposing herself to me and said "Have you got anything like these in there?"
I was awestruck. I stopped breathing. My heart paused. My mind gulped. I appreciatively examined, alas only with my eyes, a pair of the most beautiful breasts I've ever seen in my life. They were large but not droopy: no pencil would be gripped beneath these breasts. They were young and proud and firm. Most wondrous of all, they were natural and had no marks on them. The nipples were perfectly centered, pink and increasingly erect.
And, oh, she was enjoying herself this evening. She made no move to cover herself. She was proud of her breasts and wanted me to take as long a look at them as I wanted to, to worship them, and to come to realize I'd never see them again...except in my dreams.
Believe me, I took my time.
Inside my club were beautiful women who could pick up five dollar bills (it had to be a five at least!) with their vaginal lips but out here was the real show.
This wasn't a professional dancer. This was the woman next door. This lady probably sold you your draperies or maybe filled out your accident claim at your attorney's office, or was the attorney. She was Mrs. Middleclass whose husband liked to stand back and watch his wife expose herself to appreciative strangers.
"No ma'am. I'm afraid we don't have anything as beautiful as yours", I admitted, truthfully.
"Congratulations", I continued, "You win my booby prize for the night!"
She and her escort broke out laughing and she closed her coat to me forever. She said goodbye and the husband tipped me $5 for the corny joke. He said I was the only one who'd had a sense of humor about her. The others just leered.
Lesson: Location. Location. Location.
Everyone has a favorite Chinese Restaurant in San Francisco. Mine was Woey Loy Goey’s (pronounced: Woy Loy Goy’s). A couple of doors off Grant Avenue on Jackson in Chinatown. It, at one time, had been a pretty seedy looking joint. Back “in the day” you got to it by going down a dark street to a doorway where you took some creaky stairs down to a dirt floored restaurant (from the looks of the aging photos of it's earlier incarnation on the walls); but, now, it was a successful café/restaurant: remodeled, bright and shining example of delicious Chinese home cooking.
One of its major draws was that a party of 6 of us could eat, in 1969, for less than $1O, not including a healthy tip.
Trays of food would be brought to our table and lovingly distrubted among us.
The waitresses were all in their 50's at least and bustled about keeping attentive eyes on everything going on. They were like doting little grandmothers on patrol.
If your plate grew a bare spot your waitress would be there to cover it with more fresh cooked rice, or chicken with peanuts, or shrimp in lobster sauce, or whatever was left from your combination platter... and there was always plenty left.
No one was allowed to be on a diet at Woey Loy Goey's. If you weren't hungry it was best to stay away because sitting down at a table committed you to food and plenty of it.
As the meal wound down, and as the platters were being scraped clean of their delicacies, our waitress would take up any remaining platter and begin dispensing from it to the one with the most room on their plate.
There was always the admonition, "You eat! It's good for you! Make you strong!" There was a characteristic fussiness in the voice, but there was unmistakable love, pride and genuine caring, too.
Lesson: Listen to your grandmother.
Google Street View of The Former Dante Hotel -my room left arrows.
This was 2 years after its use in England in Soho.
She'd successfully taken her dainty B cuppers and pumped them up(with injections in those days) to a massive D cup virtually overnight becoming a certified San Francisco Landmark in the doing.
Kathy, back at the Windmill Club in London, had started with D’s and gone up and away from there!
Lesson: Get a good PR man!
The Dante Hotel’s picture could illustrate the word "dump" in the dictionary. It was a two story hotel, the second floor lobby of which you reached by climbing a long, straight flight of stairs from the street. I paid $16 a week for a huge corner room overlooking Columbus and Grant. At night I could listen to the heroin dealers hawking their China White to the denizens of Grant just a block from the coffee houses made famous for their poetry readings and literary-giant clientele.
At least once a month I'd smell the denizens who'd bought the China White and subsequently died from an overdose of it in their veins. They'd come to the Dante to die. Rent a room. Shoot up. Die. Rot. Call the coroner. Have a nice day.
It wasn't the Ritz.
It was home to the regulars of North Beach. Several strippers and their men lived there. Here and there a few hookers hung their bras when they weren't working elsewhere.
How she paid her rent I never knew; but there was a young woman who'd either taken one acid trip too many or was permanently retarded, who sat in her room, naked with her door open, babbling at a TV screen that projected nothing but static. It was her only channel. And she seemed quite pleased with it. No commercial interruptions either.
The rooms all had sinks, the bathrooms and showers were down the hall. They were actually pretty clean all things considered.
I preferred showering with two of the strippers from one of the neighboring clubs. We had a bit of a ritual if we were all home at the same time.
I used to scribble poetry on the walls of my room in hopes I'd be a great and famous poet one day and the walls would become "shrines" to my great mastery of the genre.
I figured if Lord Byron could have a frame installed around his name on a pillar in the dungeon of the Chateau de Chillon on Lake Geneva, then I could have a poem enshrined on the wall of my corner room in the Dante.
It's not like I was worried they'd ever paint over it or anything!
Ralph Kellogg, the sax player for the rock group “Blue Cheer” and his wife lived there.
Blue Cheer was a major part of the psychedelic times there in San Francisco. They took their name from a type of LSD and were touted highly by the well known acid chemist Owsley Stanley, after whom another type of acid was named: “Purple Owsley”...a rather potent and sought after high. They were at the forefront of the establishment of the musical style now known as “heavy metal”.
I knew his wife (whose name escapes me now) better than Ralph since she was a stripper in the thrice weekly "Amateur Contests" at BIG AL'S Club. He was a serious doper.
One night I and my date du jour visited their room for some smokeable and he offered me some PCP -horse tranquilizers/aka Angel Dust- which he was in the process of cutting; thinning or weakening, then mixing with the grass. He gave me a couple of joints laced with it and two capsules filled with it.
We thanked him and went to my room two doors down to smoke and love away the night.
I don't know if what I was given was actually PCP but I do know I'll never get within a bazillion miles of that stuff ever again. Let me tell you, the experience I had was the pits.
First we smoked the laced joint. Nice enough. Things went normally well in the loving department that evening, but then I dropped the capsule, too, and started to drift off, almost to sleep.
But, as I drifted, I went numb! My mouth went numb. My hands and feet were numb. My teeth went numb and then my scalp. I couldn't feel squat.
Hell, my dick went numb.
And that really worried me!
We were using it at the time!
I asked my date if she felt anything (bad question!) and she reminded me she hadn't dropped her cap yet. I told her not to.
I was getting pretty drowsy and went on to sleep. I kept waking up throughout the night and she seemed to be pretty out of it, too, by then. By morning she'd wished me goodbye and left before I could get up.
That was the last I saw of her.
Go figure.
But I wasn't finished with the experience, yet. I had major trouble walking to the bathroom to pee. I couldn't feel my feet hit the floor. I couldn't see straight, either. Nothing focused. By hanging onto the walls and tables and chairs in the hallway I finally made it to the bathroom by crawling there, but I don't know if I hit the bowl or not.
Somehow my sense of direction was not impaired and I made it back to my room and into bed. I wanted to die. But first I wanted to be able to feel my dick.
It was Sunday and that meant I was pulling a double shift at the club. We double shifted every other weekend so one of us would get the day off. Noon to midnight. At one o'clock my friend Ray Martin came to see what I was up to. I told him there was no way I'd be able to work but I got dressed. He had to guide me to the club, like I was a blind man: I still couldn't focus my eyes. I was dizzy and uncoordinated.
Since I wasn’t going to be needing it any time soon, I let my dick fend for itself.
But what was worse, I could still feel that I couldn’t feel it.
I spent all afternoon vainlessly propping myself up at the end of the bar in Keene’s regular spot, hoping he wouldn’t come in.
Gary, the weekend bartender, understood and didn't make me stand outside and bark. It was slow anyway as Sunday days always were.
By 7pm I was feeling a little better and could focus my eyes. The feeling was coming back to the good parts of my body, too, albeit the sensation was not unlike the wearing off of the dentist’s novocaine, with its maddening itching. It took till 10pm at least for all of me to tingle awake completely.
Thank heavens.
The main view from Coke’s doorway was of New Joe’s Restaurant and the parking lot next to it. All night long all sorts of cars would pull in and out. But a great majority of its business was pimpmobiles: Cadillacs, Rolls Royces and Bentleys.
As I've said, if you stay on a street long enough you learn a lot. I got to know a couple of the pimps pretty well. We were never drinking-and-hanging ¬out buddies, but we acknowledged each other as members of the community.
They mostly hung out at “Mike’s Recreation”, a pool hall cum bar and grill, next door to Coke's. Or they made their way up and down the street keeping their eyes on their ladies.
I used to watch one skinny little pimp named Robert drive up and park his Corvair. It was a beat up blue job with more dents than paint. He'd pull into the lot, get his ticket and start struttin' down the boulevard. Business was good to him because within three months he was parking a brand new Eldorado in the same lot.
Lesson: Once you’re in a Cadillac, it’s easy to stay in a Cadillac.
One of the regulars at Coke's was a distinguished pimp also named Robert. Robert had style and class. He also had a .45 automatic. He offered a higher class of prostitute to his clientele and had them scattered throughout the finer bars and hotels downtown. He was good to them and they were allowed to leave him if they wanted to (a trait I learned was not too common among the panderers to the baser instincts of mankind).
Robert was style and class in the world of pimpdom. He drove a sedate Eldorado and wore designer suits perfectly tailored to his beefy physique. You'd never know he carried a weapon because the jacket was cut to conceal its bulk. He always left a healthy tip for the bartender and the dancers. He even remembered me out front when he left the club.
He had a good reputation among the dancers and the other "ladies" I'd see and talk to on the street.
When you stand outside a club 6 hours a night 6 nights a week you get to know the regulars pretty well. Everyone agreed he was kind and fair.
From conversations with Robert and the hookers on the block I learned a few things about their profession.
For instance, a girl never got into another pimp's car. If she did she was signaling she was leaving one for the other. Sometimes this, naturally if not intentionally, caused a certain amount of stress among the parties involved.
Tempers might flare. The Coroner’s office might intervene.
More times than not, the girl would end up going back "home" to her original man.
All of the money made by the girl was given to her pimp. If any was held back she'd he punished. Robert wouldn't tell me how he punished his girls and I never asked.
One of the ladies who strolled the street told me of beatings with coat hangers, or “fuck sticks”, while being held down by her other "wives-in-law" , as the other women in the same stable are known .
The beatings were generally severe and almost always included the genitals.
I asked how the other women could hold someone down while that was being done and was told they'd be beaten next if they balked.
Money was doled out on a need basis. Clothes, drugs, make-up, spending money –if any, everything was meted out to them by the pimp. They owned nothing.
The going rate in 1969 was $50 for straight and/or oral sex with a fairly decent looking woman not visibly strung out on drugs.
A girl was usually required to bring home $500 or more a night. Most pimps in the area had 3 or 4 or more girls working the North Beach area. Upwards of two thousand tax free dollars a night buys a lot of Rolls Royces in a short time.
It was easy to see how our skinny little friend had moved up from a Corvair in just a few months.
And how Robert kept himself in designer clothes ...and bullets.
When asked why the girls needed a pimp they invariably said "for protection" and that usually meant from other pimps. "They take care of us. They love us. They bail us out of jail. They buy us things."
Why not go into business for themselves and keep all the money? They just wouldn't think of it. They had to have someone who loved them and whom they could love.
After 6 months on the door I was starting to feel trapped. Again, the wanderlust.
I could see how easy it was to get lost in the business. I spent my entire life, literally, within a 2 square block area. I went nowhere else. Six months of that was enough.
There was a girl at our club named Nancy. We called her "Bullet Tits" because her breasts were beautifully large and firm and their pointed shape made them look like the front of a 1955 Cadillac Eldorado.
Once, Carol Doda had come up to her and jealously asked if they were real! They were. Doda stuck her nose in the air and, thereafter, would cross to the other side of the street if she saw Nancy in her path.
Nancy and her boyfriend, Doug, were from Vancouver, British Columbia and were always talking about how beautiful it was up there.
When I decided to go, I decided to move north. It was March of 1970 and I'd about had my fill of life in North Beach. Too much sex drugs and rock and roll.
Well, not too much.
Instead of paying the rent with it, the next trust fund check paid for my airline ticket to Canada.
Doug, had moved back there recently.
Nancy and I had become an item for a few evenings after his departure.
She and I met again a few weeks after I landed in Vancouver and we spent another lusty night together.
She left early in the next morning and later a pair of policemen came by.
They regularly check the registers of transient hotels and they were interested in her whereabouts.
I told them I knew her from the strip club in San Francisco and we had just run into each other there the night before, quite by accident. They politely asked me to call them if I saw her again.
She was wanted for murder.
Lesson: Sometimes there’s more to a nickname than meets the eye.
Upon arriving in Vancouver, I started looking for Doug immediately and found him within an hour. Not bad when you don't even know someone's last name.
But hippies were easy to find. Hippies always know the main hippies in town.
Doug was staying at "Cool-Aid", a crash pad for young people living on government support.
He was glad to see me and we went out for pizza and then tried to find work for me as a bartender in a couple of clubs.
I neglected to mention I’d been sleeping with Nancy after he’d left California.
One place wouldn't let us in because I wasn't wearing a tie and Doug wasn't wearing a shirt. I had on a fancy purple crinkle-crepe dress shirt with ruffles down the front that wouldn't take a tie and Doug was wearing a very nice sweater. Still, we didn't get in.
We did hit a few more bars though and even caught a very militant Cannonball Adderly’s set at one. But no jobs.
Doug steered me to the Ford Hotel for a room. It was cheap and comfortable: $16 a week with a view.
The lobby was upstairs, just like the Dante, but here it was spacious, clean and hospitable.
The next day I learned the Old Colonial Theater needed a comedian and emcee for their new show, Vaudeville '70. I was hired on the spot.
I was in the big time too: ten dollars a night for a 4 week run. They jokingly called me “The Suit”.
It was an interesting format. The theater ran an old film then presented an hour long live “vaudeville” show followed by the film again. Usually, films cost quite a bit to run, but the proprietors here had convinced the distributors the film was considered one of the acts in the vaudeville show; and, since admission was only a dollar, they shouldn’t have to pay regular rental fees or percentages.
The distributors bought it.
TV actress Ann Southern was a regular audience member. She was rumored to be putting together a new showcase for herself and was looking for talent.
She had put on considerable weight and wasn't looking too spry anymore but I still fantasized about her picking me for a part in whatever it was going to be.
She was always complimentary of our work, but she never stayed too long afterwards to schmooze and no one was ever hired away.
After the performances we'd go to a jazz/blues club (can't remember the name) and catch Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, two blues legends.
They’re perched atop a train, singing, during the opening sequence of the Lee Marvin film Paint Your Wagon.
Sonny was blind and played the best harmonica in the business. He and Brownie had been an act for as long as time had been registered, I'd heard, and they'd seen it all.
Backstage between sets the boys would be drinking whiskey and milk: "I learned how to do that during the Prohibition and I ain't seen a reason to quit since", Sonny told me.
After their sets a group of us would go eat at an all night restaurant downstairs of my hotel on Granville Street.
It was a hangout for theater and entertainer types much like the Pompeii Club in Dallas had been, but without the radio show or entertainment.
Sonny's favorite meal: Pork Chops, vegetables, and mashed potatoes. When it came he asked someone to tell him at what time everything was at on the plate. He went right for the first chop, paused for effect, and with a broad smile on his weathered face said the “only way to eat pork chops is with your fingers”, and dug in.
When the meal and conversations ended, Sonny asked us to point him in the direction of his hotel and walked off into the night tapping his cane before him.
He always left alone, never wanting anyone to accompany him. He'd say he was okay as long as you pointed him in the right direction.
Brownie never joined us.
Sonny and I talked about audiences and whether or not they affected an entertainer's performance. The conversation got around to comedians and hecklers.
I asked Sonny if they ever had trouble with hecklers. He told me he never paid them any mind. He was there to play and that's what he did. If they didn't want to listen it was okay with him.
I asked if he ever lost concentration. He said he'd worked in such rough clubs in his life that there wasn't much anyone could do to make him lose his concentration any more.
He said one night they were playing in a really bad room somewhere in the South. One fella in the audience didn't like what they were playing and fired a shot at them. The bullet grazed Brownie's ear but they never stopped playing, and Brownie never missed a lick.
Sonny then told me the story of how comedian Redd Foxx handled a particularly funny heckler in his early nightclub days.
Seems the heckler was pretty good at coming up with one-liners. Every time Redd would top him he'd come back with something better and top Redd. This kept up for quite a while. Finally, Foxx came down into the audience and took the man's hand. He started shaking it, pumping it, telling him how he'd been in the business for so many years and in that time he'd never met a man as funny as this man was. He said he could top anyone but tonight this man had beaten the ole Foxx at his own game. He kept pouring the praise on thick to this guy and, all the while, Redd had unzipped his pants and was pissing on him!
Lesson: Don’t kid a kidder
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