Previously in Miller Avenue Musings: while incarcerated in Napa, I saw my gay friend in the corridor with his arm in a sling and a bandaged wrist. I asked what had happened and he began screaming at me, calling me a freak and telling me to stay away from him.
I wasn’t aware of my father Blackie’s presence at the hospital at all, but apparently he was there that day for, within the hour, I was discharged into his care. I guess it was the fact that my friend attempted suicide, then turned on me in such a melodramatic fashion, which gave him concern for my safety.
Black was instructed that I must be accompanied at all times and take my medication daily. I was also not to smoke any weed or take any recreational drugs. Things moved quickly. I gathered what few items I had with me and soon Blackie and I were checking out of Napa and cruising down the highway towards Marin and San Francisco.
Before long we were at 929 Union Street in San Francisco. It had been about three weeks since my hospitalisation and the place was no different. My bedroom was exactly as I’d left it. Jar Dreyfus rang up and I took the phone in my room. He wanted to know every detail of my adventure so I started at the beginning and told him about staying up all night talking with Wes Wilson, then being picked up by the Highway Patrol out on 101 the next morning. I was delivering the facts in a straightforward manner, but Jared, from the beginning, began laughing heartily. As I told him each new detail, his laughter became more raucous. Why he should find my story so funny was a mystery to me, but being a natural performer, I found myself playing up to it: “Yeah but wait’ll you hear what happened next!” I’m pretty sure that I gave him a full account of the past three weeks and he howled his way through all of it. The phone call certainly lasted at least half an hour and Jared was still chortling as we wrapped things up.
A few days later I was visited by Jan Kaufmann which was nice but I was still babbling about John Lennon and seeing her as somehow attached to me which hadn’t been the case since the summer of 1965. She humoured me and it was a nice visit.
I didn’t make many excursions out into San Francisco but those I can recall were with my sister Katie and her partner Lonnie. I think my parents made a decision to fatten me up as I’d become awfully thin during my three weeks in Napa. The fruit bowls in the kitchen were full of ripe bananas, nectarines and apples. I was still convinced that I was the messiah but that delusion softened and became less urgent. Also I simply kept it to myself.
Three photos of me after my Napa incarceration. On the left, in front of SF City Hall, up on the roof at 929 Union Street and somewhere else in the city.
I was still totally ignorant of what was happening in the wider world, knowing nothing of events in the news, domestic and from Vietnam. In mid-August President Johnson made a statement about bombing raids near the Chinese border in Vietnam. He said that the Peking government knows that the United States does not seek to widen the war in Vietnam. “These air strikes are not intended as any threat to Communist China and they do not in fact pose any threat to that country.” At the same time he stated that the Viet Cong now appears less anxious to engage American forces in ground combat. Assessing the Vietnam situation at a White House news conference, Johnson said there had been a lull in both air and ground activity but added that this didn’t indicate any change in U.S. policy. “So far as this government is concerned, our policy has not changed,” Johnson said. “We are there to deter aggression.”
Two shots of LBJ leaving the White House and one of him towering over whoever he was telling a joke to.
On the same day, as Johnson spoke in the White House, Dr. Martin Luther King addressed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, stating that he would not support President Johnson for re-election in 1968 unless he changed his Vietnam policy. As a long time supporter of Johnson’s civil rights programmes, the statement marked a turning point for the veteran civil rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner. He had never endorsed a political candidate before and gave no indication of which one he might back in 1968.
Martin Luther King and colleagues in conference with President Johnson at the White House.
After a few weeks my parents found a day clinic through their Kaiser health plan. I was with Blackie the day we visited the clinic where I would spend the next month or so as a day patient. It was on an upper floor of a big building a few blocks from the Fillmore Auditorium, on the north side of Geary. Dr. Weinberg was in charge of the clinic. He was a short man like myself and very dynamic. He had a crew cut and his eyes were engaging. He had a physical resemblance to my school friend Tommy Harper. He wore a long sleeved white shirt with a black tie and his sleeves were rolled up. I liked him immediately. He was straight talking and the first thing he told me was that he understood that I had been behaving in a crazy manner and had enough medication running through me to knock an ordinary person out cold.
“The bad news, John,” he said, “Is that you won’t be able to smoke dope anymore. But the good news is that this experience is going to make you 4F.” 4F was unfit for military service. He also told me he was involved in the ‘Recall Reagan Committee,’ which meant that he was of the political left. Dr. Weinberg showed me around the clinic which occupied an entire floor. After the tour he said I should be there at 9am the following morning.
By this time, the need for a chaperone seemed to dissolve as I don’t recall anyone accompanying me to the clinic. I took the same buses there as I would to the Fillmore Auditorium. I’d catch a 41 Union outside our apartment to Steiner Street, then transfer to the 22 Fillmore.
The Munis were my way of getting to and from the Day Clinic.
When I first returned to the Union Street apartment, I was able to listen to KFRC again and catch up on the songs I’d missed while in Napa. Light My Fire by The Doors was number one and the Beatles had a new single in the charts, All You Need is Love. Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons sang Can’t Take My Eyes Off You and Diana Ross and The Supremes were in there with Reflections. Ever since I was a little boy popular music had been a good friend to me and in this turbulent time of my life, it continued to be.
A record I particularly liked was The Letter by a group called The Box Tops who I never heard of again. The song however was recorded later by Joe Cocker and others. I liked the lyrics for its inventive use of air and train travel in an original way.
But of all the records in the Top 40 as August became September, the one song which captured my soul and became the soundtrack to this phase of my long road to recovery was Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry. This record had a haunting quality with its simple musical landscape and enigmatic lyrics. It evoked a world and way of life which was entirely alien to me. The song spoke of a dusty Delta day with names like Choctaw Ridge and the Tallahatchie Bridge, providing a vision of caucasian farming life in the cotton fields of Mississippi. The story mixed everyday chit-chat across a dinner table with news of a profound tragedy when Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. I connected with this record on so many levels, as it seemed to embody the precarious psychological territory I was now entering. I was not yet depressed but still exhilarated by my psychedelic experience. Depression would come later and it would be powerful indeed. Somehow this record predicted that reality. I never owned a copy of Ode to Billie Joe, I only ever heard it on the radio but it would run through my head every day as I made my way to the clinic.
Bobbie Gentry performing and the central shot is her standing on the Tallahatchie Bridge in Mississippi.
The Tallahatchie Bridge which crosses the Yazoo River at different stages of its existence.
On my first day I met the other patients, about twenty of them, both young men and women. There were several doctors on hand and often small groups would convene in one of the many rooms. One fellow I became friendly with was very preoccupied with guns. At least talking about guns and acting out the use of them. He would constantly describe how he would set up a particular brand of machine gun to mow down imaginary people. He acted this scenario out many times and was quite specific when describing his weaponry, knowing brand names and other details. I got the impression he was being funny, as he said all this with a wry smile. But it was always the same joke. Only the brand of machine gun occasionally changed.
There was a very thin delicate young woman who was super sensitive and could cry at the drop of a pin. Another patient was a tallish heavy set man who dressed in smart tweed sports jackets. He also had extremely long coal black hair and was in the process of transitioning to become a woman. One problem with this was that he had a very dark beard under his skin which he shaved close every day but his lower face was almost blue from the whiskers under the surface. This did make the prospect of being convincing as a woman somewhat questionable. He was having electrolysis sessions to remove his beard.
There was a tall man who seemed a bit older than most of the patients, possibly in his thirties. He had a copy of a paperback book about auto-erotics. Auto-erotic was not a phrase I had ever encountered before. It was, I soon learned, a fancy way of saying masturbation. I asked this guy about it and he immediately became aggressive. He asked if I would like to participate in one of his sexual sessions. When I declined his invitation he snarled at me to mind my own business. He had more than a whiff of the Tenderloin district about him and after this encounter, I regarded him with caution.
Once a week Dr. Weinberg would chair a meeting of all the patients in which any topics could be discussed. On the day of the meeting the auto-erotic guy brought a set of German handcuffs with him. He was showing them around to people and the super sensitive young woman asked about them. “Would you like to try them on?” he asked. She said yes. The cuffs were two interlocking metal pieces connected by a chain. You would put the chain around the wrists, fit one metal piece into the other then twist the chain. All eyes were on him as he put the cuffs around the girl’s very thin wrists. All went well until he twisted the chain and she screamed in agony, bursting into tears. Dr. Weinberg was immediately on his feet. He demanded that the guy leave the clinic at once and never come back or he’d call the police. Mr. Tenderloin scurried away taking his German handcuffs with him. He was never to be seen again.
Left and right two paperback books about auto-eroticism. The central pictures show German handcuffs. The ones on the left are from the Nazi era.
Political correctness was a concept which had not yet been conceived in 1967, but Dr. Weinberg was definitely not politically correct. He would always use the word ‘crazy’ rather than lofty psychiatric descriptions of psychological problems. At another one of our meetings, the man transitioning to be a woman asked if he could wear a dress to the next meeting. Dr. Weinberg said no. The trans man asked why and he answered: “Because you make one hell of an ugly woman.”
My days at the clinic continued to be interesting. Because depression hadn’t yet gripped my soul, I was a fairly upbeat patient. My friend with the gun fetish continued to act out his massacres which I confess I actually found very funny. He would mime the assembling of the weaponry in great detail and once the imaginary machine gun was loaded, he would then give a totally committed performance of blasting whoever the recipient was to smithereens with visual flourishes and audibly interesting sound effects. The trans man continued to complain about not being able to wear a dress to meetings and on journeys home from the clinic, Ode To Billie Joe was invariably running through my head.
Gradually I was coming down from my long drawn out high. I was still convinced of my messianic mission but not so stridently. At my parents’ flat, things were a little constrained as both Blackie and Beth were worried that I’d get involved in pot smoking again. Blackie told me that after my incarceration, he’d been visited by two narcotics agents who had been tracking the drug that I took. At the time I didn’t believe him as I thought he was just trying to scare me, but after reading Matthew Baggott’s article on STP, I am now more inclined to think Blackie was telling me the truth. The STP piece informed me about narcotics agents tracing the drug’s route through the Haight Ashbury district.
As I started my descent from the giddy heights of early in the summer, depression slowly began to creep up on me. My confidence, which had been so strong throughout the entire adventure, also began deserting me.
During this time, my father took to referring to young people who engaged in drug taking of any kind (so most of my friends) as “sick.” If ever I said anything weird to him he’d quickly retort: “Johnny stop that. You’re talking like those sick guys.”
At some point my parents’ friend Coco Cutler invited me to have dinner in Chinatown with her. She took me to a restaurant on Washington Street called Sam Wo. We walked through the slightly grubby kitchen on the ground floor and climbed the steps to the second floor. Coco clearly knew this place well and it later became a favourite with all my family, but this was my first visit. The waiter, recognising Coco, pointed to a table and shouted, rather rudely, “You sit there!” He was Edsel Ford Fung and his rudeness was a bit of showmanship which clearly was as popular as the delicious noodle dishes they served. They had a dumb waiter to send the dishes upstairs. I had beef chow mein and we drank lots of tea. Edsel Ford Fung gave us chopsticks with our meal, which I had never used before. Coco taught me how to eat with them which was life-changing in itself.
Sam Wo, the famous Chinese restaurant on Washington Street. On the right is Edsel Ford Fung at his retirement party.
Coco was well aware of what I was going through. Poor Blackie and Beth didn’t have a clue how to deal with me but Coco did and I found her easy to talk to. She lived in a beautiful apartment at the top of Telegraph Hill with a stunning view of the Bay Bridge. Unlike my parents she was interested in and knew a lot about psychoanalysis and, as I was moving into a phase of losing my ability to converse, she was a good person to be talking to.
To be continued…
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