UCLA—Hollywood—1964 to 1968
From College Student to Hippie
At UCLA I got serious about studying filmmaking, theory, aesthetics, and technique, as well as the history of film and production itself. At that time, the film department was primarily housed in Quonset huts with tin roofs—sort of like those you saw in the films set during World War II. These huts were a marked contrast to the older, more traditional brick buildings housing the other departments.
There were some great instructors in the film department at UCLA. The renowned film theorist and writer Hugh Gray taught film theory; the department chairman, a charming middle-aged Scot named Colin Young, taught history and aesthetics; the documentary filmmaker James Blue and the Academy Award-winning director Louis Clyde Stoumen taught courses in documentary filmmaking; and the cinematographer Haskell Wexler and the noted film critic Robert Hughes imparted the learned expertise of their respective fields. But the instructor that influenced me the most was the iconic film director Josef von Sternberg. He was a rotund old man with closely cropped grey hair, but he still had the attitude and bearing of the longhaired directing genius of the silent and early sound era.
Von Sternberg seemed to take an immediate liking to me—perhaps because I was one of only two people of Asian descent in the class, which made me stand out from the crowd. His class was a comprehensive retrospective of his extant silent and sound motion pictures, held in the theater screening building where he showed and discussed all of his films.
It was a fascinating excursion that began with his seldom-seen first film The Salvation Hunters made on a shoestring budget during the silent era, and took us on through to the mid-1950s, when he made his enigmatic final film shot in the Japanese language with an all-Japanese cast, Anatahan. After we watched each film, von Sternberg would explain what went into the making of it and would answer whatever questions the class had. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn how he made those masterpieces. That class was never offered again.
One thing I quickly learned was that tastes change. I had never cared much for the actress Marlene Dietrich, but then again I hadn’t seen very many of her films. The von Sternberg films changed that—in fact, it was a revelation. In the first German sound film, Der Blaue Engel [The Blue Angel], I found that she fascinated me.
After seeing her in Shanghai Express, Dishonored, and Morocco, I had a new respect for her subtle talent and charisma, and after seeing what ended up being my favorite von Sternberg film, Blonde Venus, I fell in love.
It was evident that von Sternberg had a gifted eye for the casting of unusually attractive women in his movies—from the unexplainably erotic Georgia Hale in The Salvation Hunters, the mysteriously alluring Eve Brent in Underworld, and The Last Command, and heartbreakingly sexy Betty Compson in The Docks of New York.
But the thing that really grabbed me the most about von Sternberg’s films was the lighting. It seemed as if he had raised motion picture lighting to high art, and he himself was not in the least shy to admit that he had. A new word entered my film vocabulary: chiaroscuro.
To von Sternberg, the art of motion picture involved painting with light and defining the invisible by infusing it with the visible. The former was achieved by complex balances of light and shadow, and the latter through utilizing cigarette smoke, fog, steam, smog, and any number of creative devices that could serve to make the invisible air visible.
He was also an innovative pioneer in the early use of sound, as is evidenced on the soundtracks on his early sound films Thunderbolt and Der Blaue Engel. Unfortunately, he went into a kind of creative decline in the later years of his long career, something he refused to admit.
In the course of the school year, I got to know some interesting people who were studying film at UCLA. One was an architect named David Ming-li Lowe who had originally come from Shanghai. Another was a Broadway playwright and television writer who already had a few successful credits and an Obie Award named Krishna Shah.
I was on the crew of one of Krishna’s student film projects, the one that had the fascinating working title The Lotus, the Robot and the Art of Auto-Eroticism, which was later changed to 201-202 or something like that. Krishna subsequently became a very successful writer, producer and director both in the United States and in India.
Several of my other classmates also eventually went on to become active in the business.
Like Bill Norton, who went on to direct a film called Cisco Pike in 1972, and later made a few more interesting features before becoming a prolific director for television.
Another good friend was a fellow from back East named Burton Gershfield. Burt had come to Los Angeles with his lovely wife Carol, and he was very interested in experimenting with color solarization in film. He would subject outdated color raw stock to varying degrees of heat to cause color shifts in the images, which he could use creatively for special effects. At first I thought he was nuts, but eventually I began to realize the complexity of his experiments. He made an innovative short film which effectively brought home the tragedy of the Native American, titled Now That the Buffalo Are Gone. The technique that he had developed was so revolutionary and impressive that he was hired by a major motion picture studio to do the special color effects for the rock group The Monkees’ debut feature film, Head.
Yet another friend of mine, Jim Bryan, directed the cult horror classic Don’t Go in the Woods, and many other horror exploitation as well as hard and softcore sexploitation features. He had since become a kind of cult movie icon and is still working in the film industry, as far as I know.
More notably, I met a fellow film student named Jim Morrison, who was around the same age as I was. We used to talk about films and filmmakers and occasionally poetry whenever we happened to meet by chance at the campus lunch truck, which was called the “gypsy wagon.” I remember the day when we were screening the student film projects and nearly all of the splices on Morrison’s film broke.
That day, when I saw him at the “gypsy wagon,” he came up to me and said, “I liked your film.” For my submission I had edited the footage I had shot on the Navajo Indian Reservation in northwestern New Mexico during my winter vacation into a short, lyrical film titled Navajo Winter. “That shot of the old Navajo man racing across the sunset in the horse-drawn wagon,” he went on. “It was as if he was being chased by Death.”
Although I had never quite envisioned the shot in that context before, I was warmed by the thought that at least someone had liked my film. No one else had said anything to me about it.
Like me, Morrison also enjoyed eating at the small Lucky U Café adjacent to the notorious Lucky U Bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, where Rosario “Pancho” Carrillo served up heaping portions of spicy chile verde, juicy and delicious pork chops, and sizzling T-bone steaks. Pancho was a great guy who stoically tolerated us college students and always saw to it that we were well-fed. We could take our beer from the adjoining Lucky U bar over to the wooden counter in the separate room where Pancho served his customers.
Pancho was also a soft touch. He realized that struggling students would frequently run out of money, and whenever we did he had no compunction about letting us eat there on credit. As a direct result of this kindness as well as his wonderful food, many UCLA students remained faithful customers of Pancho’s place for years and years after they graduated.
Of course, after Jim left UCLA, instead of becoming a filmmaker he went on to form the legendary rock band The Doors along with Ray Manzerek, another former UCLA student. Although Manzarek also took film classes, I never really got to know him all that well. In later years I would see him from time to time after Pancho moved his restaurant to the new place on Pico Boulevard.
The strange thing is, although my girlfriend used to play one of The Doors albums while we had sex, I never actually associated the lead singer with the Jim Morrison I had known at UCLA until much later. This was because during this period of my life I lost interest in rock music—it had begun to change and evolve so rapidly that I couldn’t really keep up with all the new sounds and new groups that sprang up seemingly out of nowhere. Instead of rock, the albums joining my collection were now solely classical music.
Instead of spending most of my spare money on records, I was now spending it on books, and there was no shortage of good bookstores in Los Angeles. Near where I lived was the Papa Bach Bookstore, where authors like Charles Bukowski would occasionally show up and read their poems and prose. There was Chatterton’s Bookshop on Vermont Avenue, which I always stopped at after going to see a show at the Los Feliz Theatre, and of course the Larry Edmunds Bookshop, where I frequently would run into Ray Bradbury whenever I went to add some books on film to my growing library.
Film school taught me the history, theory, aesthetics, and basics of professional filmmaking, and best of all it gave me access to see a great number of films, most of which I would never have had the opportunity to see otherwise. The UCLA Film Archive housed a remarkable collection of significant as well as rare motion pictures. There was absolutely no doubt at all that my horizons had been broadened. But film school hadn’t prepared me for the shocking realization that there were really no jobs waiting for me in Hollywood.
There’s an old saying in the motion picture industry that goes something like, “It’s not who you blow but who you know.” Well, I certainly was not going to blow anyone, and unfortunately I didn’t actually know anybody in a position in the business to give me any kind of helping hand.
I did, however, manage to land a job at the bottom of the ladder as a “hammer,” building sets for a television commercial company called N. Lee Lacy & Associates. It wasn’t really what I wanted to do, but at least I was working for a film company in Hollywood.
I was promoted to the production crew when one of the production managers found out that I had my own car. For a while I became what is known as a “gofer,” meaning if anyone wanted something I went for it. The job involved a lot of running around, but at least it was mostly outside work, which was much more fun than being stuck indoors on a set driving nails into wood and slapping paint on walls.
One day, when the production manager didn’t show up, I somehow got kicked up to the production manager position, probably because I was the only one standing next to the producer at the time. He gave me a clipboard with the location information and the one-page script that we were shooting and a manila envelope that contained everyone’s paychecks, and he said, “Get going!”
We all loaded into a couple of vans and I made sure that everyone knew where we were headed—Will Rogers Beach Park—but I was still a nervous wreck.
The actress appearing in the commercial, a little old lady named Ellen Corby, insisted on driving her own little sports car to the location. I was worried that she might get lost and the shoot would go down the tubes, but when we arrived at the location she was already there, sitting in her car waiting for us.
She ducked into one of the vans to change into her costume and emerged a few minutes later clad in a tight black rubber diver’s wetsuit and large, floppy rubber fins on her feet. She was even carrying her prop, a real underwater spear gun.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” she said anxiously as she flip-flopped around. “I’ve got things to do, people to see.”
Naturally, I had recognized Ellen as soon as I saw her. I remembered the small part she had played as the maid in Edward Dmytryk’s RKO film noir Cornered and the great performance she gave as the aunt in George Stevens’ I Remember Mama, as well as numerous other film and television appearances. She would go on a few years later to play Grandma Walton in the long-running hit television series The Waltons.
Ellen was a feisty old broad who didn’t complain at all about the obvious discomfort of the cold water of the Pacific Ocean from which she had to emerge with her spear gun. She did what she was supposed to do in only one take, which the director said was perfect, but he made another take just as a safety measure. The commercial was for the Yellow Pages phone book.
I soon learned that being a production manager, in this case, mainly entailed making sure everyone knew how to get to the location and then riding herd on the talent and getting the releases signed before giving out the paychecks. It was an easy job compared to the manual labor that I had been doing, but it wasn’t, after all, what I really wanted to do.
The time came when there was a cameraman’s strike, and since I knew how to load film magazines, I got bumped up once again. Occasionally, if someone in the camera department didn’t show up, I would get pressed into service. Otherwise I was still hammering nails into flats. One time, the production manager pointed out a guy who was adjusting a light and said, “That’s the cameraman over there. His name is Lezly.”
Lezly turned out to be a talented young Hungarian cameraman named Laszlo Kovacs. I really didn’t have to do much of anything for him because he preferred to load his own camera himself, which, from what I gathered, was against union rules. But then again, nobody really seemed to care. Being a film loader was a little more fun than being a production manager. At least it was sort of a step in the right direction.
Of course, I realized that working for a production company making low-budget commercials in this capacity was only a temporary thing and would come to an abrupt end once the strike was settled. And I was definitely not thrilled about going back to being a “hammer.”
But my situation suddenly changed when one of the people on the crew, who could see that I knew how to handle a camera, took me aside and said if I wanted to I could get a job as a cameraman on skin flicks. I didn’t have to debate with myself for very long to realize that it was in my interest to seize this opportunity.
The sobering fact of life was that there were a whole lot of better-connected people than myself who wanted to do the same thing—to make films. Fulfilling my dream of making movies in Hollywood was appearing more and more like some kind of catch-22. In order to get a job directing a film with the studios, you had to be in the Director’s Guild. In order to get to be in the Director’s Guild you had to have directed a film.
Of course, there was the independent route, but who would be crazy enough to risk their money on an untried first-time director? I had what amounted to a snowball’s chance in hell.
It hadn’t even occurred to me to work in skin flicks before. In fact, I knew very little about the exploitation film business that operated, for the most part, somewhat anonymously and quietly on the fringes of Hollywood. But I was learning fast. I learned that it was a quasi-legal business that would give an aspiring young filmmaker like me a chance, something that just wasn’t going to happen in the mainstream film industry.
The opportunity was there if I decided that I wanted to take it, so I made a quick decision. Little did I know at the time that this quick decision would end up determining the course of my entire career.
The first “skin flicks” I shot during this early period were not the feature-length films that I would later direct, but were short, ten-minute one-reel films called “loops” that showed a female model undressing, then cavorting around in the room, before lying on the bed and cavorting around some more, before doing something akin to autoeroticism. In essence it was an ordinary woman’s version of a burlesque routine with a domestic setting instead of a stage.
One thing I had to be very careful about at that time was not to show any pubic hair, which was totally illegal to exhibit on screen. It seemed as if the authorities considered only the airbrushed Playboy Magazine-type pubes legal enough to be shown for public consumption.
But we had absolutely no way to airbrush these films, so sometimes it was almost comical the way the girls had to move to keep from revealing it. Some girls had much more than others, which made it even more difficult. A few of the models had shaved their pubes; in their case we still had to keep from showing the slit, which was also illegal.
I had seen many naked women before, so being in the presence of a nude model was nothing new to me.
The first loops that I made were for a slightly sleazy old arcade owner named Harry Pinch. Harry Pinch owned an adult film arcade on Fairfax. Like some of the arcades downtown on Main Street, Harry sold 8mm films of the illegal variety “under the counter.” But the arcade’s main business were the little booths where men pumped quarters into a box hooked up to an 8mm projector that would go on and show them, as they looked into a viewer placed in the wall directly in front of them, roughly a minute at a time of a beaver girl loop.
The projector would suddenly shut off at an important moment and the screen would go black until another quarter was pumped into the box to get it going once again. It took a lot of quarters to play the entire ten-minute loop, so Harry ended up raking in a lot of change. It was a highly profitable business, but the business was not without its risks.
Any business such as this, that catered to the skin trade, operated in a gray area and was at any time subject to the whims and harassment of the vice cops. This also meant that shooting the films to supply the fare for the arcades could be dangerous in the same sense as well.
Still, I was undaunted, and the first time I shot one of those films I was very nervous and excited. In fact, if the model I was filming hadn’t been so very understanding and sympathetic, I don’t know if I even could have done it.
I was stammering and at a loss half the time about asking her what to do, so, having done this sort of thing before, she would finally ask, “Do you want me to do this?” and she would demonstrate something for me. And since that action seemed appropriate, I’d say, “Oh, yes, that’s great” and so forth until the loop managed to get done, which was when the film ran out in the camera.
It was a hot late summer day when I picked up that first loop I had shot for Harry Pinch from the lab. I had to deliver it to Harry at his place of business, little knowing that I would be in for a big surprise. My wife and baby girl were in the car with me when I pulled up and parked the car in front of the arcade. We were going to go on a picnic at Griffith Park afterwards.
When I walked into the place, I saw Harry sitting behind the counter talking to a customer in front of it and when he saw me walking in, I watched his jaw suddenly drop and he stopped talking. Then I noticed the beads of sweat that had formed on his forehead.
Standing in front of the counter was a tall, thin middle-aged guy dressed in a dark suit. He was even wearing a necktie. At first I thought that he was a well-heeled customer, but it took only a few more seconds before it dawned on me that he wasn’t a customer—he was a cop.
The cop looked casually down at the round shape of the can of film inside the brown paper sack that I held carefully in my hands and smiled.
“What you got there, son,” he asked, “a pie?”
I had absolutely no idea what to say, so I said absolutely nothing. The cop sighed and held out his right hand and said, “Give.”
Reluctantly I handed the sack over to him, and he opened it up and took out the reel of film that was inside. “Well what have we here?” he asked, glancing menacingly down at Harry.
Harry was quick to respond, saying, “I have no idea what that is.”
“I didn’t think you did, Harry,” the cop laughed. Then he looked over at me, scrutinizing me carefully. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-three,” I replied. Even though I was twenty-three, I still looked like a kid. In fact, whenever I went to buy beer or liquor, I’d be asked to show my ID until I was well into my thirties.
“Well son, I suppose I’m going to have to see your driver’s license.”
“It’s outside in the car,” I nervously told him.
“Then I’ll go outside with you to get it.”
We both walked over to my car. I retrieved the wallet with my driver’s license from the glove compartment and handed it to him. He was looking at my wife and child who were both sitting in the car waiting for me and wondering what was going on.
The cop looked at my driver’s license carefully, as if he was studying it, but much to my relief he didn’t bother to write anything down. Instead, he looked at my wife and child again and then he looked back at me. I could tell from his menacing expression that he was thinking about doing something, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was.
He held up the paper bag in which he had replaced the can of film. “I suppose you just found this out on the street somewhere, right?” he asked sarcastically.
I was still speechless. I could visualize being arrested and going to jail. My poor innocent wife, who had just come along for the ride, was beginning to look concerned. My little daughter Amy was growing uncomfortable and bored, sitting in the hot car, so she began to cry. My wife bounced her on her lap, trying to comfort her.
“Tell me you just found it,” the cop became more insistent.
“I just found it,” I managed to finally say.
He chuckled and tapped the bag. “Well, I’m going to have to hold onto this, you understand. Be careful about what you find in the future. Now go on, get out of here.”
Needless to say, I quickly got into the car and as we hurried away from the scene Alice asked me, “So what was that all about?”
“It’s a good thing you and Amy were with me,” I replied. “I think you both just saved me from being busted and thrown in jail.”
The next time I saw the arcade owner, I apologized to him and he said, “Don’t worry about it. I know that cop. That particular day he just decided to come over and give me a hard time. And I managed to get the loop back,” he laughed. “So you ready to shoot another one for me?”
By the time I had shot my third loop, it had all become routine. I also learned that I could make much more money if I produced the loops myself and made them initially for theaters instead of arcades. These 16mm loops were now first exhibited in certain specialized theaters like Shan Sayles’ Paris Theatre, for example, as well as the storefront mini theaters that had begun to appear in droves.
After the loops had played their run, I could have 8mm reduction prints made from them to provide the fodder for the coin-operated arcades such as Harry’s that had now sprouted up all over town. There were also the under-the-counter retail sales in the adult bookstores that lined the length of Main Street. It was still not something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but at least I was operating a camera and running film through it.
Occasionally I would be told to let a flash of beaver go by, since something like this might make a loop more salable. If a theater owner was afraid to show it as it was, he could always cut those few offending frames out. As time went on, the flashes that we allowed became longer and longer until we would film the girl quickly opening and closing her legs so that the audience could get a peek at the forbidden fruit.
Some of these girls were natural teases, and most of them were pretty bold, so sometimes we ended up with what might be considered a really steamy loop. These wilder loops were interspersed with the tamer ones for the theater’s program, and when they came on, everyone held their breath, fervently hoping that the vice cops wouldn’t notice or bust them. It was all still a very risky business in those days since censorship and legality were still up in the air.
Around that time, my marriage to Alice came to an end. It took us almost three years of living with each other to discover that we had very little in common and around another two years of constant fighting and bickering to realize that we most certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives with each other.
The only thing we really had in common was Amy. We both loved her and wanted her to have a normal, happy childhood. We gave her birthday parties and took her to see Santa at Christmas. We wanted to do right by her, but the way we were trying just wasn’t working.
At first, we both felt sad about this turn of events, but, being young and resilient, we decided to move on with our lives. Alice had a pretty good job and I didn’t have to worry about sending support money for Amy for the time being. In fact, she was making far more money than I was.
After the divorce, Alice started a new life for herself in Florida. Amy, at three years old, went to live with my mother, now divorced from Dr. Toney and living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with my grandmother Gertrude. Amy ended up spending a good ten years or so in the care of my mother. She lavished her love and attention on Amy, yet brought her up properly and strictly. Amy would later tell me that she had a very happy childhood growing up in my mother’s house.
All this doesn’t negate the fact that I was a sad excuse for a father. Having been fully immersed in furthering my career, I rarely saw her. Time had passed so quickly that I didn’t even realize that Amy was growing into a beautiful young lady.
So, in 1968, I was now out on my own once again, and this time I was going to totally enjoy my freedom. I became a hippie in Hollywood, which was a much happier place back then. During this brief and enlightening period of carefree existence, I was probably experiencing the most content time of my life. I was no longer pressured to work, and in spite of the fact that I felt totally relieved of responsibility, my outlook in general was also beginning to mature somewhat.
I was becoming more and more aware of the fact that our society was in the midst of a major period of transition. Old values were rapidly being replaced by the new. The aftermath of World War II and the Korean conflict had brought about startling changes. I first became aware of these changes when I began reading Beat Generation poetry by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Carlos Williams, and Kenneth Rexroth, and novels such as Calder Willingham’s End as a Man and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
A whole new counterculture had been born out of the ashes of those wars, and the rebels that had heralded it went against the established social values of our country. When I had read these works of the Beat Generation, I had been totally in tune with their spirit of rebellion and freedom, but the subtleties that they had expressed had somehow managed to elude me.
Now that I was older and perhaps more aware of the realities of life and the pressing need for our society to undergo change, rereading them offered me new insight because now I was living some of the experiences for myself.
On the more conventional front, in the world of theatrical entertainment there had been Nicholas Ray’s groundbreaking motion picture Rebel without a Cause, in which the late James Dean had shattered the mold of the traditional American teenager. Dean was now an icon who symbolized rebellion and teenage angst, the catalyst for a youth movement that had begun to change the world. I was aware then that I was a member of the younger generation that was now searching for something—a higher meaning in life—while questioning old established values.
This was a good thing. Civilization could only advance with a sociological revolution brought on by inquiring minds, and inquiring minds led the way in the search for truth, something that conservative politics and religion had tried so hard to suppress. Progress was slow, but inroads were finally being made. People were becoming more aware and it was an exciting time to be living in.
The formerly banned books of Henry Miller and Marquis de Sade were now considered literature by the more liberal minds, while the conservatives still saw them as filthy smut and a dangerous threat to not only our moral values but also the very fabric of our society. Now, the ready availability of these books in bookstores all across the country struck a positive blow for First Amendment rights. But it was obvious that there was still a long way to go.
That freedom still didn’t extend to things like theatrical motion pictures. People with small minds, self-appointed censors, would continue trying to get whatever books that didn’t suit them taken out of libraries and bookstores. In the meantime, I wanted to be in the vanguard when it came to fighting against censorship.
I decided, screw the film business. That path had led me nowhere. If anything, I was going to become a great writer like I had originally intended to be. Hell, I was a creative guy. My short stories had been published and had even won prizes. It was about time that I undertook a novel to prove what I could really do. I would write the great American novel. I would write exactly what I thought about and felt, experienced, and lived. But in the meantime, I needed to find a place to stay.
An acquaintance from film school named Conrad Rothman had leased a huge old two-story house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. It was an old, relatively quiet part of Hollywood, with aging houses and multistoried apartment buildings that had stood during the golden age of Hollywood’s heyday. Conrad lived in the downstairs bedroom with his girlfriend Connie Walkling, and they rented out the three rooms on the upper floor.
One room on the upper floor was occupied by an artist, Norman Klein, and there was a large back room rented by a sculptor, Jack Baker. A small front bedroom on the southeast side of the house was vacant. It had puke-green walls that were dirty and stained in various places with who knows what. The wooden floor also had more than its share of unsightly stains and scuffs. I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable about having to live there.
Basically, the place was dirty and unkempt, and one could only imagine what had gone on in it over the years, but the price was right, and beggars can’t be choosers. If I had to put in a little work to make the place livable, I thought, it was worth it. So I moved in and quickly found out that it took a lot of hard work and cleaning. But at ten bucks a month, who was I to complain?
Conrad told me that I could do absolutely anything I wanted with the room, so I decided to take him at his word and go all the way. I managed to score a few cans of surplus paint and painted the unsightly green walls a glorious sky blue, and the scuffed and scratched floor, which had previously been a burgundy color, I painted a glossy orange. It gave the room a cool feel and the heady smell of fresh paint reminded me of the way a brand new apartment smelled.
Fortunately, I got along well with my two neighbors. Although he was friendly enough, Jack usually tended to keep more to himself, but Norman, while somewhat shy, was a bit more outgoing, and we became fast friends. Once we got to know each other, we found that we both had a boundless appreciation for life, love, and happiness. We also shared similar tastes in food and women.
Norm was a laid-back guy, a few years older than I was, but he had recently been divorced like me. Whereas I had a daughter, Norm had a small son that he visited on alternate weekends. Norm was short, stocky, and almost a little chubby, but he nearly always had a pleasant and sincere smile on his face. He said nothing bad about anyone and no one said anything bad about him.
He worked part-time as a hairdresser to finance his one great passion: painting. He hadn’t made any money from his painting yet—he was still looking for a style that would express who and what he was and what he felt and was trying to do, searching for an intangible something that would express his personal vision.
As an artist, Norm constantly experimented with various styles of painting when I knew him, but his best work were those canvases that I found to be reminiscent of expressionism. He painted passionately and quickly and with full concentration but was rarely happy with the result, so he usually painted over his canvases and kept trying.
Since he had been living the so-called hippie life much longer than I, he had almost perfected the art of living on very little money. Most of his earnings went to alimony and child support. He had an ex-wife, who was also a hairdresser, and a cute young son. A good deal of the rest of his money went to buying tubes of oil paint and canvas and wood for the canvas frames. I learned a lot about the various artists and styles of art from Norm.
Norm broadened my admittedly flimsy knowledge of philosophy as well, introducing me to the works of Nietzche and Hegel and the existentialist thoughts of Kierkegaard. In the course of the frequent summer evenings, we shared a pint of Kessler’s Whiskey or Old Overholt Rye and sat on the second floor porch of the old house. We both readily agreed about one thing that meant the most to us—freedom of expression.
We discussed literature and I reread various writings by Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Malcolm Lowry, and Antonin Artaud, and began to have new insight about them. It’s strange how some things that you’re unfamiliar with can elude you at the time of the first reading. I suppose as our knowledge and experience grows, so does our capacity to understand. Norm would also introduce me to the more poetic visions of the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti and the inspirationally sublime poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. He also introduced me to something I had never eaten before, which he called “Nigger Ribs.”
In order to partake of this particular delight, we had to venture into the most dangerous part of town, the South Central area that was almost exclusively populated by blacks. There were gangs down there who didn’t particularly appreciate non-brothers invading their turf, even if we had only come there to eat some spareribs.
Once in a while, Norm, Jack, and I would enjoy the succulent, lean, hand-cut corned beef and pastrami sandwiches at Langer’s Delicatessen on Alvarado Street, and before we left, Norm would always go up to the deli counter and buy a smoked whitefish chub or a cold roasted turkey leg or one of those wrinkled air-dried salami so we could take it home to snack on later.
On those occasions, late at night, we’d head on over to Canter’s Deli & Restaurant, which was not only open all night but also had the world’s most bossy and outspoken waitresses—something akin, I suppose, to the stereotype of the Jewish mother. Once they allowed us to order, we would chow down on the deli’s great corned beef, pastrami, or tongue sandwiches as well as tasty borscht and soothing chicken soup with great big tasty matzo balls or the thick, savory, and doughy Jewish version of wonton known as kreplach.
We would sometimes hang out in the bar at Barney’s Beanery where the food was filling if somewhat unmemorable, but the draft beer and bar atmosphere was tolerable and it was a good place to waste some time. Or, if we were flushed with cash, we might have dinner a little farther down the street at Theodor’s, where the food was somewhat better but a little more expensive.
Other times, we would walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard in the evening for exercise, greeting all the new young hippie girls who made the scene, hoping that we might get lucky. But in spite of the fact that I was only twenty-six and Norm and Jack were thirty or so, I suppose they considered us already too old for them. That didn’t stop them from being our friends, though.
Experiences like these, I thought, were just what I needed to put into my novel. Late at night when I was finally alone I would sit with pen and paper and try to write, but nothing would come. Night after night I struggled, but it was as if the well was dry. I told myself, just write down anything and edit it later, so I began doing that, but when I got around to rereading what I had written later I realized that it was all just a bunch of crap.
Sure, I was living the carefree life, drinking cheap booze like Jack Kerouac and having a series of casual sexual encounters like Henry Miller, but when I put this stuff down on a page it seemed to lack all the power and the impact of what they had written. Maybe I just needed more experience. Maybe I just needed more maturity.
Since I’d become a hippie, I had stopped cutting my hair and had now gone beyond shoulder-length. My limited wardrobe consisted of a couple of pairs of well-worn jeans, a pair of soft, dark brown corduroy pants, a few long-sleeve shirts, and a treasured, well-worn white denim Levi jacket that my friend David Korn had given to me.
Somewhere along the line I had tossed away all the other clothes I had owned in my previous life. I had sold just about all of the many books I had collected during my years in Los Angeles. All I had left were three boxes of my most prized possessions.
I still had a lot of things accumulated from my youth stored in the closet of my old bedroom at my parents’ house in New Mexico. But I never really thought about that stuff anymore. For the first time in my life I felt unencumbered by a vast load of material stuff I had amassed over the period of my childhood and early adult life.
It gave me the strange feeling of being absolutely free. If I had to move tomorrow I knew that I could easily do so, with or without whatever I still had and without even looking back.
Financially, however, I wasn’t doing all that great. There had been times during my marriage when money had been tight, but I’d always managed to earn enough to keep us going one way or another.
All through my childhood I had never been without money, what with the help from my parents and my own enterprising nature. But now, since I had decided to live the life of a hippie, I was no longer working and there was no money coming in. I tried to exist as frugally as I could on what little money I still had.
When I finally ran out of money, I remained penniless for a while, just to see what it was like. It was a totally new experience being poor and trying to subsist on almost nothing. I would collect pop bottles for the pennies they would bring in and try to find ways to scrounge up some cash.
Eventually this all became pretty boring, so I sold my car, my Plymouth Sport Fury, so that I would have some money once again. What good was it, after all, if I didn’t have the money to put gasoline in it? I had now pared my possessions down to the bare essentials. Perhaps I was starting to become more Buddhist in my outlook after all.
Toward the end of 1968, Norm, Jack, and I attended the Artist’s March for Peace, sponsored by the Los Angeles Free Press, to voice our protest against the Vietnam War.
I was not a traitor or a Communist or even a radical, but it was obvious to me that the Vietnamese people didn’t really want us in their country, where we were propping up a corrupt dictatorship and a totally corrupt government that ruled by force and terror and exploited the civilian population by using the force of the American military.
But what really got to me were the day-to-day atrocities that we, as Americans, were perpetrating against the Vietnamese civilian population under the transparent guise of acceptable collateral damage.
My father had been killed during World War II, a war that everyone accepted as a way to make the world safe for democracy. But democracy wasn’t really being threatened in Vietnam. Instead, we were propping up an oppressive regime, a brutal dictatorship posing as a democracy, because the alternative—what most of the people of Vietnam actually wanted—was not in our country’s best economic interest.
In my senior year in high school, I began to realize what my country was doing to maintain its status as the most powerful nation in the world. Our government shamelessly backed and financed brutal dictators and their death squads and right-wing strongmen who laughingly pocketed the money to squirrel away in Swiss bank accounts. And this was done with our own tax money, so it meant that, even unknowingly, we were complicit in these crimes.
In my opinion, the war raging in Vietnam was a totally unjustifiable war, and for this our brave American servicemen were risking and giving their lives daily. I knew what it was like to grow up without ever having known my real father. How many more orphans of war did our country need?
Whether our protest march would have any effect or not was beside the point. As Americans, we were all simply exercising our Constitutional right to express our beliefs.
Of course, we joined this protest march with the images of the Chicago police beating up antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention on August 28 firmly etched in our minds. Could a similar thing happen here in Los Angeles? We doubted it because this was California, after all, but the possibility still remained.
We all marched down La Cienega Boulevard in a serious show of solidarity. I had never done anything like this before, and I found it invigorating. There were a few people I recognized and a great mass of strangers that I didn’t. There were some well-known people and some not-so-well-known people, but everyone was there united for a common cause.
The police presence was there but not in any great force. It appeared that the Los Angeles cops were more interested in maintaining order than being belligerent. There was no riot gear or tear gas or nightsticks cracking heads. There was no call-out for thousands of National Guardsmen. Los Angeles was far more liberal and tolerant—more laid-back, perhaps, than the uptight Eastern and Midwestern cities. A few of the policemen even went so far as to march alongside us for a while.
Eventually we all, with the exception of the policemen, ended up at Santa Monica Beach, where we sat on the sand beneath the heat of the unrelenting sun, gnawing on beef jerky that someone had thoughtfully provided and sipping from a fifth of bourbon while listening to the various rock bands perform.
Norm surveyed the vast crowd milling around us and smiled. “We gonna get laid today, man,” he confided in me, nodding his head. “Yeah, just look at all that good stuff floating around here.”
I had to agree. The atmosphere surrounding us was happy and festive. Strangers greeted each other and shared their food and drink. We talked, had seemingly endless discussions about our opinions of the war, and laughed and had a great time.
A tall, pretty girl named Misty gave me a necklace made of shiny round red porcelain love beads, which I continued to wear for the next couple of years. It would be my good luck necklace, she had said, and I believed her, because I was hoping that I would get lucky with her. I kept eyeing Misty as she flitted around from place to place without a care in the world. Eventually she disappeared from view and I realized that I probably wasn’t going to get lucky with her after all.
When the bourbon ran out, someone went to the liquor store and came back with some sandwiches and a gallon bottle of ice-cold Gallo rose wine, which went down easily since we were overheated and parched after sitting in the hot afternoon sun.
The day was all about freedom. Some of the girls nearby took off their tops to reveal bare breasts. There were all sizes and shapes, but this was California, after all, so just about all of them were pretty spectacular.
As we drank the day away, the afternoon heat gradually transformed itself into early evening coolness. The music eventually stopped and the scattered chatter drifted away, and soon only the booming sound of the crashing waves held sway. The girls began to put their tops back on and people started slowly drifting away.
Aside from the occasional screeching of the sea birds, it became relatively quiet on the beach. I was at peace with the world and I felt the caress of the wind on my face as I blew out the smoke I had inhaled from my cigarette. Instead of getting laid we’d ended up getting drunk. Still, I thought, life was pretty damn good.
Norm and I took to hanging out at a small hamburger place called George’s. The hamburgers, which were always freshly cooked to order, weren’t all that bad and there always seemed to be a little action of some kind or another that was happening there. Once we were there enjoying some conversation and coffee when we noticed a small, cute little hippie chick who didn’t look to be more than fifteen or sixteen sitting at a table near us. She was almost in tears.
Beside her was a tall, thin black dude, obviously a pimp, and he was also obviously hassling her, probably trying to get her to join his stable. When he wouldn’t let up, she came over to Norm and me and begged us to make the guy leave her alone. He was a lot larger than us, and in all truth we’re no heroes, but it didn’t even occur to us not to get involved. We told the guy in no uncertain terms to get lost and leave the girl alone or he’d be sorry. Of course, neither Norm nor I had any idea how we were going to make a big and scary guy like he was “be sorry.”
The pimp gave us the evil eye before he went away muttering some pretty strong curses, but he left the girl alone. She looked tired and hungry so we bought her a hamburger and a coke. She was shy and not very talkative, but she was a nice girl and she did tell us that she had just arrived in town. The black dude had followed her all the way from the Hollywood bus depot on Vine Street.
After a couple of days, she hooked up with some other street kids around her age and we were relieved that she had found a place to stay. She must have told them what we did for her, because from that time on whenever she and her friends would see us they would always greet us as if we were their friends. I can’t remember this girl’s name—I think we called her Sunshine—but I can still picture her face in my mind’s eye.
At that time I thought that incident might make an interesting chapter in the novel that I was trying so very hard to write, so upon returning home I shut myself in my room and hastily wrote page after page until I suddenly realized that I really didn’t know where I was going with it.
One day, while nursing a terrible hangover from all the rye whiskey and cheap wine from the previous night, I looked at my face in the cracked and stained mirror of the communal upstairs bathroom and said to myself, “OK, Chinn, face up to it. You’re not a great writer. You’re never going to write the great American novel. So what the hell are you going to do with your life?”
Eventually the money from the sale of my car ran out, and I was broke once again. This time I wasn’t particularly thrilled about not having any money. In fact, being broke really sucked, and I was also growing a little tired of being a hippie. The life I had envisioned as a writer was just not working out for me. There was more out there in life for me, and the time had come to accomplish something meaningful.