Fissy

I had to take down the posts about Star and Luna. My heart inside my chest was exploding. In the "Burning" post below, the photo shows SuperJoel picketing for the underpaid workers. He is flank by Eugenia Butler (left) and her daughter Fissy (on the right).

I just keep burning writings, drawings, pictures and "media" in the fireplace. As I am burning the papers of pleasure and pain it reminds me of lyrics from one of the few songs I wrote during those days in the Berkeley ... "The fire that warms, Your house in a storm, Will cause you to mourn, When it burns your house down." And when I think of Fissy's friendship I repeat the chorus "Sunshine please keep me high, Moonshine don't ever die, Don't ever die."


As I find these pictures of long past relationships what I don't burn in the cleansing fire I'll send to their rightful owners, that's if I can find them. And after my wife reads this blog of mine, I'll probably have to take this post down also but with my two, soon to be, newly broken arms.

Kinky Cove at the Kinks concert.

Burning

As I tear pages out of the black covered journals that have been sitting in boxes for more the thirty year … I throw then into the fire.

All memories reside in some physical object as well as in you mind or at least that’s what the Starman would say. He called all objects “media.”

SuperJoel was a firm believer that burning pictures, journals and clothing was a magic spell that helps one move on. You lose all the pleasure of holding on but you lose some of the pain. ‘Walking backwards into the future’ was how I described facing the past.

I think it’s an archetypal fear that your past will come back to haunt you. At the same time I think people are driven to know what happened to friends from the past. There is a natural haunting of memories; a sweet missing link … sorry for ironic Internet pun. But that is the point of the web; it can never fulfill emotional needs or allow for the truth to be felt.

By posting about the past I was hoping for a response and fearing a response at the same time.

Annelise and Fran, thank you for your comments. Thank you for showing me I still care.

Children of Paradise

In chaos, which Berkeley definitely was, there are points of condensation. Just as in water there are eddies and vortices in time. My art show at the Children of Paradise Gallery in Berkeley was just one of those points of condensation.





There are infinite streams of thought radiating for this moment is mine and other's lives including; Spacely, Marcy, Henry, Clover, Teske and Jimmy Butler.





Below Jimmy Butler 1956; Jimmy Butler at the Children of Paradise show late 70s; and click this link for Jimmy Butler now

"There's alot of bobbing and weaving ..."

We arranged for the kid to talk to the cops. The cops picked up the suspect in Luna's murder, then they let him go. Even though the guy live across the bay in San Franciso, the information that the suspect was released and free quickly got back to the East Bay.

I called the detective from Henry and Clover's pad. The cop explained that "There was a lot of bobbing and weaving in a murder investigation."



A couple of days later the story broke in the newspaper that they had arrest the Indian guy for Luna's murder. In the news story the police said that this crime had really upset the community and that they, the police, got help from a section of the community that usually wasn't co-operative.

A few days later there was a memorial for the our slain friend with Tim Leary. Luna's girl friends performed an interpertive dance to honor her. I didn't go ... I don't know why, I just couldn't.

When you google Luna's name what you learn is that her brain was placed in a frozen cryogenic state. I think that like all thing on the Internet, you learn nothing about the person nor what is true or spiritual about their lives.

There was sometime about watching some of the kids and people grow up in Berkeley through the seventies. Some like Luna, David D., Kathy D., Groovie, SuperJoel and many others didn't make it. I found out be chance others like; Spacely, Marcy, Jimmy Butler, Vanessa,and Clover did make it. Annelise, I don't know but I sense Star made and is happy somewhere... I hope so.


Star marbling.

It Was Too Fucking Crazy

I look back at that time in Berkeley, I stop breathing. I think of what I did wrong and what pain occurred and how the dead will never come back and the twisted lifestyle should not be glamorized. I am sorry for good, the bad and the remembering.

As this Blog approach 300 posts it is disappearing like a photo from the movie "Back to the Future." As if going back in time causes changes in the future time, space and beyond.

My heart goes out to Star and all the people that were caught in the cultural black hole of Berkeley of that time. I thank people like SuperJoel for pointing out a path to a guiltless free acceptance and a possibility of changing the solid walls we all put then up into walls with windows.

Now as I look to my memories and mementos of the past I am doing what SuperJoel suggested ... I am burning my clothes after wearing them one last time.

Sitting Around Doing Coke

The next night, in shock, I walked over to my connection's house on Derby. We sat around and since I didn't have any money they laid out some lines and gave me an import beer. I cleaned their pot tray and scrounged a couple of joints from the scrug. I thought about the time Adam came gunning for Henry and I stashed Henry and Clover and waited here in this house without curtains until the cops came.

We sat around doing coke trying to figure out who could have killed Luna. After all we had so many eyes on Telegraph Avenue where the murder happened. Luna had been beaten on the head with a portable charge card machine. You know, one of those sliding metal arm devices that would imprint the credit card onto a carbon backed sales slips.

We talked about any new comers to the Street. Any even more than normal weirdoes hanging out. Somebody mentioned a guy who called himself "Lord somebody" or "Sir somebody" that was getting too familiar too quick for everyone's taste. Maybe it was the coke, maybe it made us feel like wired Sherlock Holmes' but we agreed I would call the cops and tell them of our suspicions.

The detective I talked to was interested but not impressed. We really didn't know if the weird guy on the street was an infiltrator, cop or transient. I hung up thinking the cop knew who we were and we were grasping at straws.

Then the kid came in. He was a real runaway, one of the street kids that really did have something to lose dealing with the cops. To our amazement he described going to the store where Luna worked and thinking it was strange that the door was locked during business hours. He looked in the window and saw a big guy and no Luna.

Our jaws dropped. The kid was describing the former boyfriend of the storeowner, a big Native American guy with a grudge and who like to drink.

I called the detective back and said, "We got him." I told the cop the story the kid had related; the time line; the relationship to the storeowner; and that the kid was very frightened.
"Keep him calm,” the cop said. Sure, easy for you to say I thought.

Horror

It was a scream. More like "Oh No. NO."
The word flowed, rumbled through the crowd.
Luna was dead.
All I remember is Star running out of the house.
I can't recall anything after that for a day or so.
I really don't think I saw Star ever again.

Can Love Ever Be A Mistake?

When speaking of the past is it just as bad to worry over mistakes than to remember its glory?



I loved many people during my time in Berkeley; had many friends; had sex with many people; desired and didn't have sex with many others. In a post-free-love pre-AIDS anti-romantic drugged-out it was hard to stay clear in the polluted land of the radical and home of the revolutionary I called Bezerkeley.



Annelise, for me there is a responsibility that comes with even the mention of someone's name on the Internet. I have to believe that as I am talking to you I am talking to Star and millions of other people. I know that every second 5 new bloggers around the world come on line. I also know no one cares about what I write especially concerning my feelings.

So as I remember back to that night in 1976 when my friends and I gathered to celebrate among other things Patricia Luna Wilson's birthday, I think of personal fragility. How life can all fall apart and never return together.




At the party I mingled with many of the Telegraph Avenue regulars. Star and her young friends were in the other room. I had now known Star for a couple of years and believed her to be special and extraordinary. Luna and she had a special relationship that just for me, many years later as I thought about the two young women's spiritual relationship, they seem almost interchangeable or binary.

Don't get me wrong both Star and Luna were complete individuals but were connected. And as much as I respected the wise-for-her-age Luna ... I loved Star.

"Where is Luna?" the first questions at the Party were being asked.
"It's not like her to miss her own party", the comments continued as it got later.
"She worked today, didn't she?"