TWO

Journal Entry 12/26/2008
The sea is restless this morning, the waves swollen with impatience, throwing foam into the air and hissing like angry sea-dragons. The sky is gray and close. On the mountain above there is a dusting of snow. Bundled warm I sit on the rugged bench sipping the coffee and looking down upon the shore a half mile below. Here, on this perch each morning, I experience the huge expanse of the sea, and come to know something of my solitude, as silent as the soul.

Saw a young doe along the path to the bench. She was about twenty yards from me and just stood there watching me curiously as I walked right past her. She looked at me with such openness, I felt that she might suddenly speak! Maybe I have been having too much time to myself. Soon I’ll be hugging the trees!

Back in the cabin beneath the redwoods the air is damp and cold. There is a fire in the stove and the water is steaming. I shall make a hot brandy since there is no one to condemn me for indulging in an early warmer. Not a word written since Monday night when drunk and raging behind a jug of Red Mountain, singing and scribbling notes, now unintelligible. All this in response to another attack of unbearable clarity perhaps motivated by doubt. What am I doing? Who am I trying to kid? The mind is filled with the stories but each word is a wound. Sometimes it is physically painful to sit and write out these sequences, these songs.

Thinking about those early days in the City, a long dream. What is real, what is imagined? What was lived, what was conjured from the wind? Once it gets flowing it is all real and accurate in detail, as if being seen through a window, revisiting the voices, the sounds, the smells of the City, the warmth of my jacket.



Tubby's Bar & Grill
Summer 1964

We enter the City from the north; Santa Rosa, Cotati, Petaluma, Novato, San Rafael, Sausalito, and over the Golden Gate. How could we know what lay ahead, the months and years, the suffering and joy, the lives lived and lost. The City was always the jewel stone of the future for me when I was growing up in Sacramento. It was the place where I knew my life would one day begin. It was not just the hills and cable cars, the vistas, the bridges, that tugged on my sleeve, but the jazz clubs where you can stand right next Miles, or Thelonias, or Cannonball, the City Lights book store where you just might run into Kerouac, or Ginsberg, or Gary Snyder. The Beatniks. The poetry. Coffee houses. Lenny Bruce. Lord Buckley. The long lush park. The beach. It was the City, a living breathing creature! Always urging me in.

Maxwell drives the long blue Desoto through the fog with all the windows down, shouting over the roar of the engine. I shiver contentedly in the passenger seat looking out at the fog, empty and silent. I feel the newness and freshness of each mile that takes me yet further away from the rubble of all that is past. This is a new life, I tell myself, each moment a new eternity. I secretly hope we will never stop driving, never arrive. There is no destination for me, no plan, no idea, yet we know this is the beginning of everything else, born out of the old and finished, the past, already falling away. I am as free now as I will ever again be.

Everything I own and care about is in the car. A few books, a box of LPs, the writing journals. Sapphire, my black string-bass, is stretched between us, her long neck almost reaching the dash board, as much a part of this adventure as either one of us. Occasionally I pluck a string, just to hear her hum. KJAZ on the radio: Bill Evans and Scotty LaFaro. A magnet pulling us into the cool, breathing City.

48th Avenue runs along the Great Highway which skirts the sand dunes and ocean beaches from the Cliff House, on south. In the back of the second floor flat is a small enclosed porch where an old agitator washing machine with an automatic wringer attached services the family. Off the porch is a tiny room, slightly larger than the cot that occupies it, and a window that cannot be closed, which looks out across the highway, the sand dunes, and onto the Pacific Ocean. This is my room, a paradise of privacy where I can close the door to the energy of the children and the inevitable bickering between Maxwell and Clara. Here the drowsy afternoon sun fills the room and the salty scent brings childhood snap shots of sand castles, tide pools, starfish.

The next few days are spent walking the beach and the long beautiful park. Clara works in an office; Maxwell part-time at a ceramics supply business. I take the N-Judah to the Financial District from where I can walk to Broadway and North Beach, the wharf, or the warehouses south of Market, the Tenderloin. I might stop at the bus station at First and Mission for a cup of coffee, sitting in the naugahyde booth to look out at the line at the ticket counter, the waiting room, bored and lazy, and the teenagers playing pinball machines as I had once done. At Fisherman’s Wharf I smell the boiling crab and sourdough bread and listen to the Italian vendors speaking their native tongue with tough, arrogant tenderness, and calling out: “Hey, fresh crab. Hey, fresh crab.” The fishing boats creaking in their stalls; the gulls bickering over scraps. All music.

Change is a time of opportunity, I council myself. The universe is open, awaiting my choices and will then spin and conjure and finally lay everything at my feet. I keep telling myself this.


It is early morning, before 5 AM. I am drifting down Sansome Street in the fog. Footsteps echo while distant sounds muffle and throb. Before me opens the Financial District, a great stage set with a few flicking lights, the clack of one street car. Huge monoliths rise out of the mist to stand in silence before me, gray and empty at this time of day, as if waiting to be animated, ignited, to become of use. Dark windows, doors closed, street people curled in blankets on the steps. I stop in wonder, looking up Market which fades away in the mist, stage right, and then down to the wharfs, only imagining the black bay waters beyond. Where am I in all of this? Only eyes and this beating heart. Behind all of these dark windows, will I discover myself? I only know this: I am alive, and these monoliths stand silent and cold. But where am I in all of this?

The situation in the 48th Avenue flat deteriorates quickly. Clara is unhappy with my constant presence; Maxwell is troubled by this, defending our deep friendship. I take to slipping away shortly after they arrive from work with the children in the evening. I wear a warm Navy pea coat with the collar up, my hands buried in the pockets, and a knit cap and walk the districts looking in store windows, lingering near the doors of the bars, occasionally going in to sip a beer. I quickly learn to stay out of the Tenderloin district where everyone is watching for a John or a trick or a tenderfoot tourist not unlike me; where there is desperation and bitterness. Polk street near Sacramento is the gay district, festive and friendly. Fags and transvestites, raucous and a little too loud, just to draw attention to themselves. They take me for a sailor and invite me into their clubs, but just wave me off when I decline, laughing with one another.

Further up Polk near Washington, away from the gay scene, there is a neighborhood bar and grill called Tubby’s with a dozen or so tables and a piano bar. Happy Hour is from 6:00 to 9:00 PM every Monday through Thursday when tap beer is fifty cents and a huge table of hors d’oeuvres is set out. Besides the usual olives, celery, cheeses, crackers and chips, there is always a great mound of shrimp and crab meat with garlic butter and salsas on the side. This is where I “dine” four nights a week sipping my fifty cent beer and listening to the jazz pianist called Minton, a light skinned black man of mixed heritage with Jamaican features. There is a small “orchestra pit” behind a semi-circular bar with a trap set in the pit and the piano above on a platform with a string-bass resting on a bar stool next to the piano. But on Monday’s through Thursday’s there is no drummer or bass player, just Minton working his way through a seemingly endless book of music. He has excellent technique and a smooth and easy style reminiscent of Nat King Cole’s piano. Occasionally he will slip into the left hand strumming style of Erroll Garner, usually “I’ll Remember April” or “Autumn Leaves”.

There is a group of regulars who sit at the piano bar listening to Minton and applauding each piece. I sit at the end of the bar closest to the piano where I can watch his hands, doing my best to learn the chord changes to his selections. One evening, resting between tunes, he looks at me and asks, “What do you play?” This is the first time he has recognized my presence, and I hesitate. “Now, don’t be telling me you don’t play, ‘cause I can see you do. Musicians know each other right away. And I can see you’re pretty hungry, too, coming here mostly for the Happy Hour, and could probably use a gig.” He and I both smile at his insight and candor. “I play a little bass”, I say, “and I take good food wherever I can find it.” “I heard that!”, he says and holds out his hand to be tapped by mine, which I do. “Come on, let’s take a break”, he says, and I follow him through a door into the kitchen. We slip past the cooks and kitchen workers and into a small break room with a couple of bar stools and a sagging, red divan. Minton pulls out a joint and strikes a wooden match on his Levis like a cowboy. It’s a fat Jamaican joint and he takes a long luxurious toke, holding it down with his eyes closed and then releasing it in a cloud aimed at the ceiling. He hands it to me and I dampen my finger with saliva to doctor a run down the jay, showing that I know what this is all about. I then take a hot toke that erupts in my lungs and I explode with a cough that blasts out my mouth, nostrils and probably eyes and ears as well. Snot is running down my lip which I wipe with the back of my bare arm. Minton looks at me with comically raised eyebrows and half a grin. “It’s been a while”, I explain. “Where you from, little brother?” I’m pleased by his familiarity and we talk easily for a few minutes while finishing the jay. On the way back to the bar he says, “Come on up and play a set”.

He starts with a medium tempo blues, showing his generosity. Many jazz players will shake you down on the first tune with an up tempo “All The Things You Are” type tune to see if you have any chops and can play a tune with slippery changes. But Minton is cool and generous, and from that day on refers to me as “Little Brother”. I sit on the bar stool with the bass between my legs, closing my eyes and evaporating into the music. It is easy and joyful to be playing again, and when he says, “Take a few”, I drift into a melodic solo that seems to be playing itself. He occasionally echoes bits of my phrases behind me, which has the effect of pushing me on to the next level, the next turn of the mind, as if we are floating on an ocean of music together. Of course, these are blues changes at a medium tempo, so I’m not being challenged technically. Again, it is his generosity that opens the gates for us both.

He invites me back any time I choose on the nights he is playing alone, offering free beer and a hamburger for payment. I sit in for a set and then I wander back out into the streets, still buzzing from the pot, as happy as I can be. San Francisco! I’m living in San Francisco!


The ecstasy and adventure of change eventually cycles through the weary drudge of what is called “reality”. Why we refer to the hard and monotonous tasks of life as “reality”, while labeling pleasure and joy, truth and freedom of spirit, as “fantasy”, I will never know. I, for one, never bought into those labels, nor was I ever much interested in people who did. What we call “reality” seems to have a lot to do with money, the making of money and the desire, above all else, to have money – a lot of money – more money than one actually needs. There seems to be the idea of security – safety, comfort, peace of mind – words and phrases the insurance salesmen have co-opted - in the accumulation of massive amounts of money. When money becomes the dominant value, the truth of the heart is smothered, discounted, ridiculed. It just so happens that in these times, the 1960s and 70s, especially here in San Francisco, there are many others who, more or less, agree with me.

To the musician, “reality” means the most dreaded of all conditions: the Day Job – the ultimate cop out. To take a day job means to have compromised the most sacred of your values, to have succumbed to social pressure and to have become possessed, not unlike the zombies in that famous movie “The Night of the Living Dead”. It is a dreadful alternative to consider. And yet there often comes a time when push comes to shove, and certain levels of the “reality” compromise must be considered. One must eat; one desires a home, if only just a small two room apartment, a safe haven to retreat to when weariness sets in. And so it comes to pass for me, here in the City.

With my last unemployment check I take a third floor walk-up two room apartment at 1661 Sacramento Street. Of an evening while roaming the streets I notice a FOR RENT sign in the window, climb the six concrete steps to the opaque glass door and press the button marked: MANAGER. Almost immediately I hear the buzzer and push open the door. Directly in front of me is a carpeted staircase with carved wooden railings fading up and away into the dimness. On the right is a door labeled #1 Manager. The door opens and there stands a jolly round Chinaman with a bald head and a huge wide smile showing two rows of large, white, perfect teeth. “Yes, yes, yes”, he says in rapid succession. His great smile draws out of me my best smile in helpless response. “Yes”, I reply. “Yes”, he answers. Finally, I manage to break the routine. “The apartment. You have an apartment?” “Yes, yes.” I am beginning to wonder if he speaks any English other than this one word, which he has perfected. “Here”, he says pointing at the stairs. I am relieved to hear this variation of language. He holds his great smile and begins climbing the stairs, pointing a finger in the up direction, and I obediently follow. On the second floor landing I notice two doors marked #3 and #4, and on the third floor landing there are two doors marked #5 and #6. It is #6 that he opens with a key, flips on a dim light, and we enter a fair sized square room about 15 feet wide. There is a bare window that faces Sacramento Street and opens onto a fire escape with an iron ladder hanging down the side of the building. There is a view of Sacramento Street, the apartment buildings across the street and the corner of Polk Street. I can hear the traffic churning below, an occasional horn honk, headlights and tail lights aglow. It is perfect, everything I had ever imagined a San Francisco apartment would be. There is a very small bedroom, a white and black tiled bathroom with a four-footed bathtub, a large black chip in the white enamel, and a kitchen just large enough for one person, with a four burner gas stove, chipped and stained. Along the outside wall there are white cabinets over a tiled counter and a deep sink below a small window no more than a foot and a half from the wall of the next building. Perfect.

To my surprise Maxwell decides to make the move with me, depositing the family in their own apartment along Lake Street on the edge of the Richmond District where the children can attend a nearby school and Clara can bus to her office. It has been almost five years since we shared the hut in the Okinawan village of New Koza while in an Air Force band together and we are charged with a new sense of adventure. “The chicks are back!”, we chant while carrying the first arm-loads of clothes and books up the dim stairwell. But when we open the door for the first time to our new adventure we are assaulted by a hoard of tiny leaping insects jumping up at our legs from the dusty old carpet that covers the floor. Fleas! Hundreds, thousands of fleas! We retreat to the landing and drop our stuff. Maxwell looks at me and I know that it is my responsibility to confront the landlord.

I knock on the door marked #1 Manager and wait in the stillness. It is Saturday morning, he must be in there. I knock again and he opens the door with his round bald head and the toothy smile. “Yes. Yes”, he says. “Uh, there’s fleas up there, thousands of fleas.” “Fleas”, he repeats, “yes”. “Yes”, I say, “fleas, lots and lots of fleas”. He nods, the smile fading just slightly, and looks at me dryly, waiting to understand my point. “They’re all over the place! We can’t walk in there. Look”, I say, pulling up a pant leg to show him the little buggers still on my leg. He leans over to look carefully at my hairy leg and then back up at me. “Fleas”, he says pointing at my leg. “But, but, you’ve got to do something. We can’t live with fleas all over the rug!” “OK”, he sings, nodding in agreement, “OK, OK.” And with that he closes the door leaving me in the roaring silence of my confusion. I raise my hand to knock again but something stops me, the clear futility of it all. I know I have been out witted by this monosyllabic Chinaman from an exotic culture obviously far more advanced than my own.

“Well, what did he say?” asks Maxwell as I emerge from the stairwell. I shrug my shoulders. “He said ‘Yes, yes, fleas, OK, OK’”, I sing, mimicking his voice and smile, “then he closed the door in my face”. We stare at one another through a moment of wonder and then double over in laughter, overcome by the high and beautiful humor of it all. We buy six cans of flea spray and carefully cover the entire rug from corner to corner, open the living room and kitchen windows, and head up to Tubby’s to splurge on a burger and beer. Our work is done, at least for this day. After this, the relationship between landlord and tenant is firmly established. We leave one another alone.


It isn’t long before Maxwell has migrated back to the family apartment and I am spending a lot of time alone. Jazz music has been my companion and my solace from the age of thirteen and it can be said that listening has become my greatest pastime. I now find myself listening for hours at a time to my fairly large collection of LPs, and any that I can snag from Maxwell’s collection. I am particularly entranced at this stage with Sonny Rollins, the tenor man who had played with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet, Thelonious Monk, and many others and had finally made a name in his own right. I love his piece, “St Thomas”, based in the calypso root. His tone is big and broad and his lines are solid, simple and pure. The calypso beat is one of the happiest rhythms in all of music, impossible for me to hear without dancing, at least in my head. The album is “Saxophone Colossus” and I play it over and over again.

Listening to music is a dream state for me, a way of putting all else away on a shelf for a while. I can disappear into music, wander, float, ooze through realms of color, morphing shapes and drifting emotions. It doesn’t matter the style or form of the music, when it touches my soul I am there, where there is no there, riding the clouds of musical rhythms and textures. It may be “Clifford Brown and Strings” or Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”, it could be Jazz at the Philharmonic or Duke Ellington, if it touches my soul I can fly away.

I was never much of a musician, undisciplined, untrained, and maybe most importantly, uninterested in the performance aspect of the occupation. I loved to play the music, yet had no interest in performing. If I had had the ability to tolerate the formality of musical training, school, I would have become a composer, not a performer. But I did not, and instead, became a musical dreamer.

Two or three nights a week I go up to Tubby’s to sit in with Minton. He is consistent and generous, tolerating my barely adequate bass playing and feeding me burgers, beer, pot, and stories, and teaching me cord changes and musical styles simply by playing them, occasionally playing my base line for me with his left hand to show me, not tell me, how it is done. I will always remember him with kindness in my heart, but it all comes crashing down one night, literally, in a way I would have least expected.

It is raining softly, the collar of my pea coat turned up, the knit cap pulled down over my ears. Hands stuffed in the pockets I turn up Polk Street, auto headlights and taillights glowing in the mist. There is a taste of ocean salt in the air, even this far in from the beach. San Francisco is a city with millions of people living and working, breeding and dying side by side. To many it may feel cold and harsh, impersonal, even dangerous, but for me it is friendly and I imagine a sense of comradery between us all. I slip into Tubby’s, through the hors d’oeuvre crowd and into the break room in the back. Minton is reading a Down Beat magazine and says without looking up, “Hey, little brother, what’s happening?” “Rain”, I answer. “That’s cool, let’s play ‘Here’s That Rainy Day’. Ever hear Bill Evens do that? He gets inside that piece, turns it inside out. Changes styles about four times, looking at it from all angles. Ever see him play?” “Once in L.A. with that Miles band, Coltrane, Cannonball. Man, what a group! Philly Joe, Paul Chambers. Maybe the best music I’ve ever heard.” “Yah, they were something else, young and alive.” He is pensive and considers me for a moment, looking up from the mag. I can feel him looking at me, in me. I would guess that Minton is about fifty years old. His body is hard and young, his face always on the verge of a smile. Yet there is something distant in him that I do not know, something that holds me back. I look down, unable to hold his gaze. Then he says, “You know, to play good music you have to believe, little brother. You have to believe in something, something in yourself. Playing the right notes is not enough. Music has to come from something else, something alive in you. The music you play is who you are.” It occurs to me that he is about to launch into a Jesus sales pitch, but I dismiss the thought. He is more than that. I nod my head because I know instinctively what he means, but I don’t know it in my mind and don’t know how to respond.

Up on the stand I look out at the crowded room and notice Maxwell sitting at the bar. He nods Hello. I am on the platform with the piano to my left. The bar forms a horseshoe around the drum kit which is below me, bass drum and snare, ride cymbals, high hat, toms, a floor tom. I sit on the stool with the bass between my legs and my feet hooked comfortably behind the ring that supports the four metal legs. Minton goes into an intro to “Here’s That Rainy Day”, showing me the key he’s in and some of the changes. I join him in the head, a slow and beautiful ballad with broad changes that leave plenty of room for passing chords and unusual voicings. A couple of times around and I know pretty much what I am doing and can relax and lay down some support for Minton as he moves through his improvisation. My eyes are closed and I am seeing the music as color and form and the noise of the crowd, the cash register, the waitress taking orders, the clang of glasses is eliminated from my consciousness. I feel as though I am floating. Suddenly my eyes pop open and I can see that I have been leaning too far forward and I am tilting precariously toward the empty space before me. This feeling of floating is real, but I’m not floating, I’m falling! Instinctively I pull at my feet to catch my balance, but they are hooked behind the ring of the stool and pulling at them only serves to push me even further forward. I cannot believe what is happening and do all I can to deny it, frantically searching for a solution, but no, there is nothing that can be done. It all happens in slow motion and complete silence. I try to turn myself under the bass so that it will fall on me, cushioned by my body, and I glide myself sideways at the same time, hoping to avoid being gouged by the high hat stand that points up like a spear. Somehow it all comes together as imagined. My body hits the drums on a sideways slant knocking them asunder but away from me toward the bar and the patrons who are sitting at the bar, frozen solid. My head and back hit the floor first knocking me senseless so that for a few moments I see only red and yellow fireworks. There is a huge crash of drums and cymbals that seems to go on and on like the roar of a Titan missal lifting off from the launch pad. It is the one and only drum solo of my entire life! And when the banging and crashing finally comes to an end, there is complete silence in the room, everyone frozen in place, stunned into statues. The first sound I hear is Minton’s piano playing “Here’s That Rainy Day” without having missed a beat. I am on my back, my arms and legs pointing up like a dead dog in a cartoon, the bass miraculously balanced on my hands and feet. Minton continues to play, the crowd begins to stir. I want to laugh but discover that the wind has been knocked out of me and I can’t breathe. My mouth is opening and closing like a landed fish on the bottom of the boat, the bass still balanced above me. Finally a breath wheezes in, and then another. It seems, much to my mortification, that I will survive and live to see another day. Finally, I slide out from under the bass, sit up and look around. The horseshoe bar is lined with faces looking down at me in sober silence. I set the bass up on the stand and begin reassembling the drums as best I can. No one says a word and Minton’s piano continues to play. His face is frozen and cold. I climb back up on the stand, pick up my pea coat and knit cap, and head for the door. Maxwell is nowhere to be seen.

Out on the street it is pouring down rain. Lights flash, horns honk. I walk back to the apartment in the driving rain, my pea coat still under my arm, knit cap in hand. I never again enter the doors of Tubby’s Bar and Grill, nor do I ever run into Minton. The gig is over. It will be more than ten years before I play a bass again.