Highway 7. From Minnetonka to Hopkins.
My Favorite Things: Hopkins/Minneapolis: rock and roll magazines, used records, Evergreen Review, Grove Press, New Directions, Ramparts, Berkeley Barb, East Village Other, D.T. Suzuki, Marlene Dietrich movies with Rod, Budweiser at Miami Duck’s. Duck “knew Miami like the back of his hand,” without ever having been there. I been there. Florida trip. Dream Cuba: cigars, shutter doors, ceiling fans, white suits. Hennepin Ave. Shinder’s News Stand, Mody Dick’s, Mousey’s (“Gimme a beer and a frozen mouse.”) and The Band Box on Five Corners. Washington Avenue, “Minnesota’s Bowery”.
Sly Stone called Minneapolis “worthless”. I’m inclined to agree.
*
City night, drunk driving. Duncan and I went to see The Secret of Sleep, a film by “Spider” John Koerner and Willie Murphy. Met his girl, the Clarabelle the Cow-esque Lily, who lives near and goes to the Institute of Art. Down the street comes dumb-ass Dave, a round and about bum we know from nowhere in particular.
“Hey, what you guys say we go someplace for a taste. Got any money?”
Of course we do. Ended up at a drunk Indian bash that night and round the horn to sitting on Lily’s front stoop the next morning. No Lily but her friend Sandra Lynne, a manic depressive, who says she falls in love with me when she sees me ushering a Grateful Dead concert.
I’ve no idea. She’s got the same birthday as my sister Min. We both smoke Lucky Strikes. She wears torn lacy baby blue bikini panties so small I hit my head against the wall when she takes my had and cups it over her cunt. My girl?
*
She writes: “When I seed you face I nude it was you, cuz you was in a garbage can. I saw you there in that orange and pepper red psych-e-delic garbage can and I said, wow! What a gone chick. The times got tighter but you smiled anyway. Next time I seed you, you was in the yard. You had a kat in your over-alls. I said, howdy! Howdy are you do? I do fine. Thank-you for everything, you ginchy little nipper. With your face comes funny things. Like oceans with people diving in and out like flying fish and when you came up you had a lily pad on you shoulder with a yellow lily in the middle. Which relates to both your mind and body. Like you never seemed grabby. If you were sick in bed I’d come and sit by you and I’d tell you a story. If I knew how to play a harp I’d play tunes so you could dance.”
Soon thereafter I quit her and switched to Chesterfields.
“Cigarettes sooth the conscience.”
March 18th: Date with Roanne Sroka. Miles Davis w/Gary Bartz, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Monera & Mike Henderson at the Guthrie Theater, where we both work. I’m smitten.
March 20. Dropped acid and Duncan & attended the rock festival at the Met Sports Center with Canned Heat, Grand Funk Railroad, Buddy Miles, the Amboy Dukes (Ted Nugent), the Litter, Brownsville Station, and the Stooges (Iggy Pop). In all, there were 12 groups that went on for 8 hours. In the tinny arena it all sounded like garbage. 150 cops made 20 arrests for gate crashing, etc
(upper left) Duncan and I with Sandra Lynne.
March 21st: Got my mantra from Dr. Arya and a perfectly awful Hindu name: Sukarma. Saw John Mayal play with Harvey Mandel and Johnny Otis’s own Sugercane Harris.
*
Tony and Jose come downstate from Holdingford for Easter. County Rd 17, my grandparents street/Holdingford’s Main Strreet, crosses Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street in Sauk Center, 45 min. due west. I come home stinking of reefer to Ma and her Ma at the dining room table. “So what’s it like,” they want to know? “You want to try?” and, to my surprise, they do. As neither, they claim, have ever smoked so much as a cig I have to give instructions.
“I don’t feel anything,” says Jeanne, irritated.
“Neither do I,” says her mother. “I don’t see what’s the big deal.”
“Grandma, you don’t feel nothing, huh? So why you standing on the dining room chair?”
*
April 3rd. Bitches Brew / Jack Johnson. Miles “fries my brain with chili,” says Kramer.
April 24-26. Took Sandra Lynn to the Sound Storm Rock Festival featuring the Grateful Dead, Crow, and Ken Kesey, who was dingy. A red wine and reefer affair. Went back to her dingy apartment by the Art Institute and had dingy sex followed by her boring me witless. Hippie chic
*
Summer:
June 5th, 1970:
To whom it may concern,
My son, Kurt Thometz, is traveling to California with my knowledge and permission.
Walter M. Thometz Hopkins, Minnesota
Berkeley. 3037 Wheeler Street. Fuckin’ crash pad trash, a one bedroom walk up Crosby and I took with Maggie M and curly cutie Mary Ellen J – tea-cup titted Donovan’s daughter, my first date, 1968. I just turned 15, a greaser, she was a senior, mystical, frilled and thrilled. Everybody got their long hair and their bell bottom jeans, beads, beards. We dropped her acid to a Dead concert at the Labor Temple downtown, and after several transcendental revelations she Thoreau me with kisses went south, me in her mouth…thought God was swallowing me.
We frequented tribal stomps and effected deep spiritual motives and puritanical diets. Despite profound religious experience wound up in the Free Clinic by the record store explaining a burning discharge. By way of apology she gave up her ass as soon as we were better and I was all over it, if not for long. She always had older boy friends, bikers, whose dope we’d be doing. With me she it was Spiritual. Tea and incense.
When she graduated from Hopkins she moved into the Rainbow Family Commune, our first crash pad, where I came to think of her as a girl libertine. We made it as far as California together two years later. When she started calling Chicago Dave, Eskimo Sunshine, I knew she was doing him too. Same time it was Enlightenment, the Middle Way, Swami this and that, I was laughing at everything. Buncha Dumb Shits, I could hear Wally say when I was up to my ass in crash pad trash. So many we sleep out back on the brick patio and listen to the California cats mating and the Black Panther’s rash moves down the block.
The white trash in the black neighborhood, the cheap bad wine, crystal in the acid, when Bunzel, a low-life from Hopkins showed up joining a dozen new friends inviting themselves to every piece of available floor I took to the door, but not before Mary Ellen.
Crosby’s got a sharper tongue than most these people enjoy and’s what gets me through. He and I take to spending weeks tripping and fasting on the beach at Big Sur. Free love scented with stale Rollrite tobacco and ZigZag papers.
For two months we follow our dicks up and down the coast, cruising Telegraph, nights out at the Fillmore, Winterland. Days pan-handling quarters, Shamballa’s, Moe’s and Shakespeare’s books, drinking Red Mountain “Vino rosso delicioso” and smoking good Cali’ reefer.
We aren’t serious when we’re seventeen.
One fine evening, to hell with beer and lemonade,
Noisy cafés with their shining lamps!
We walk under the green Linden trees of the park.
Rimbaud
Hitched back via a commune in Boulder, Colo. to Mpls’s Nicolet Island, where I stayed drunk a week before showing up home in Hopkins, where I stayed drunk with Dunc’, the aesthete. I never. He likes “British Pop” and dresses like somebody in a teen mag but I don’t know … I’m wearing a beret, my hair’s half-way down my ass and reading The Angry Young Men. So’s he. Both of us keep journals. He’s going to be an artist. I’m going to be a writer.
*
Autumn:
Autumn: Pasted in: my “Most Likely to Queer Out” award from the ushering staff of the Guthrie Theater, a show card advertising Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band on a bill with Ry Cooder at that same theater, Theda Bera, Marlene Dietrich, LeRoi Jones, Samuel Becket, local legend Tony Glover interviewing Jimmy Hendrix, ads for Warhol movies at the Varsity Theater. I took a pretty girl named Eve I’d met in my Sanskrit class to see Warhol’s Trash.
*
Went to see Warhol’s Trash at the Varsity Theater with Dunc’. After was dreaming it. We been playing Velvet Underground and Laura Nyro’s New York Tenderberry to each other. Empty tenements, windy streets, crystal blue persuasions, New York, New York, New York’s playing out in my head. Spacing out on Bo Diddley’s Mona, all Paul Butterfield, Lee Morgan’s City Lights, Big John Patton’s Oh, Baby, Thelonious Monk’s Crisscross. Piecemeal quotes from Chinese and beatnik poets are just so much drivel.
Attired in new beret, disintegrating blue jeans, dirty tee-shirt & sleazy flannel, went to see Trash again with this brains and brawn blonde I took from the theater to the 400 Club to her place. Eve wears dresses, with stockings, with garters, with little lace lovelies I findt fetching. “Blindfold me. Please,” she says to M. Davis’s Porky and Bess, with pleasure. We got trashed on weed and red wine and I got me a limber pretty girl with a wonderfully dirty mind.
*
Having spent an unsuccessful year trying to shake me down for drug possession in “sensitivity training sessions”, Hopkins High let me pursue a course of Independent Study in the curriculum of my choice. I pursued my interests. Out west that summer I’d spent considerable time at the Zendo in San Francisco. In Mpls there was no Buddhist community and I found my way to an academic at the University, no less than the head of the Philosophy Dept, who was teaching Rama Yoga to about 25 people in the attic of an old house in a bad neighborhood off campus.
I’m fucking Evie and my English Teacher, Sherrill, who I report to at the high school once a month. She’s dirty blonde, 22 and hip. Wants me to introduce her to Tony of Koerner, Ray and Glover. We talk radical politics, make lists of favorite records and books. We go to Fellini movies like it’s educational and she asks me to speak to her class on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. She invites me to her place, where she talked me into bed and I talked her out of her cheap underwear.
*
Once a month I go to school, show them my Sanskrit homework, lecture on literature and leave. Mornings I hitchhike Highway 7 to work for Willie at the gas station in the parking lot of the Target store, filling up, lurking under car hoods, leaning on fenders (listening to Freddy “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights”) with my Mexican boss.
My mother flirts with him.
Afternoon’s I show up at the Guthrie for matinee, disheveled, long-haired, greasy, opinionated and cocky. Despite my showing lousy respect for my superiors and refusing to curb my tongue, I’ve fit right in and, for a change, seem genuinely liked.
*
Tony and Jose come downstate from Holdingford for Easter. County Rd 17, my grandparents street/Holdingford’s Main Strreet, crosses Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street in Sauk Center, 45 min. due west.
Tension at home. I did some speed and babbled on about politics, giving every appearance of suffering a nervous breakdown. I was high strung and half strung out. I been smoking opium, dropping acid, eating macrobiotic, studying Raja yoga and Sanskrit with the head of the University of Minnesota’s philosophy department, working in the theater and have been liberated from the hollow halls of Charles A. Lindberg High School to pursue Independent Study, as monitored by my short-skirt, tight-assed and righteous dirty blonde teacher in heels.
*
My parents, who claim to have had it with my lousy attitude, decided to put their foot down. It didn’t work. I flipped the fuck out and pulled a foot long Nazi dress dagger on Mother and told her it was time to leave. I did.
*
March 18th: Miles Davis w/Gary Bartz, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Monera & Mike Henderson at the Guthrie Theater.
June 5th, 1970:
To whom it may concern,
My son, Kurt Thometz, is traveling to California with my knowledge and permission
Walter M. Thometz Hopkins, Minnesota
*
Berkeley. 3037 Wheeler Street. Fuckin’ crash pad trash, a one bedroom walk up Crosby and I took with Maggie M and curly cutie Mary Ellen J – tea-cup titted Donovan’s daughter, my first date, 1968. I just turned 15, a greaser, she was a senior, mystical, frilled and thrilled. Everybody got their long hair and their bell bottom jeans, beads, beards. We dropped her acid to a Dead concert at the Labor Temple downtown, and after several transcendental revelations she Thoreau me with kisses went south, me in her mouth…thought God was swallowing me.
We frequented tribal stomps and effected deep spiritual motives and puritanical diets. Despite profound religious experience wound up in the Free Clinic by the record store explaining a burning discharge. By way of apology she gave up her ass as soon as we were better and I was all over it, if not for long. She always had older boy friends, bikers, whose dope we’d be doing. With me she it was Spiritual. Tea and incense.
When she graduated from Hopkins she moved into the Rainbow Family Commune, our first crash pad, where I came to think of her as a girl libertine. We made it as far as California together two years later. When she started calling Chicago Dave, Eskimo Sunshine, I knew she was doing him too. Same time it was Enlightenment, the Middle Way, Swami this and that, I was laughing at everything. Buncha Dumb Shits, I could hear Wally say when I was up to my ass in crash pad trash. So many we sleep out back on the brick patio and listen to the California cats mating and the Black Panther’s rash moves down the block.
The white trash in the black neighborhood, the cheap bad wine, crystal in the acid, when Bunzel, a low-life from Hopkins showed up joining a dozen new friends inviting themselves to every piece of available floor I took to the door, but not before Mary Ellen.
Crosby’s got a sharper tongue than most these people enjoy and’s what gets me through. He and I take to spending weeks tripping and fasting on the beach at Big Sur. Free love scented with stale Rollrite tobacco and ZigZag papers.
For two months we follow our dicks up and down the coast, cruising Telegraph, nights out at the Fillmore, Winterland. Days pan-handling quarters, Shamballa’s, Moe’s and Shakespeare’s books, drinking Red Mountain “Vino rosso delicioso” and smoking good Cali’ reefer.
We aren’t serious when we’re seventeen.
One fine evening, to hell with beer and lemonade,
Noisy cafés with their shining lamps!
We walk under the green Linden trees of the park.
Rimbaud
Hitched back via a commune in Boulder, Colo. to Mpls’s Nicolet Island, where I stayed drunk a week before showing up home in Hopkins, where I stayed drunk with Dunc’, the aesthete. I never. He likes “British Pop” and dresses like somebody in a teen mag but I don’t know … I’m wearing a beret, my hair’s half-way down my ass and reading The Angry Young Men. So’s he. Both of us keep journals. He’s going to be an artist. I’m going to be a writer.
*
March 21st: Got my mantra from Dr. Arya and a perfectly awful Hindu name: Sukarma. Saw John Mayal play with Harvey Mandel and Sugercane Harris.
*
Mary was my girl for a long month.
*
Downtown’s Weasels played the Mill City Feet in beer ball. I’m on neither team so play for both. Can’t believe I’m playing baseball. Sports bore me.
*
Messed up on the week he’s marinated in belladonna, Crosby and I listen to T-Rex, eat “little pies,” tour the yard and compose a great Toyota Corona automobile symphony with squeaking fingers on trunk, howling “pitters” and accompanied by a distant police car’s siren. Cros’ is King.
*
City night, drunk driving. Duncan and I went to see The Secret of Sleep, a film by “Spider” John Koerner and Willie Murphy. Met his girl, the Clarabelle the Cow-esque Lily, who lives near and goes to the Institute of Art. Down the street comes dumb-ass Dave, a round and about bum we know from nowhere in particular.
“Hey, what you guys say we go someplace for a taste. Got any money?”
Of course we do. Ended up at a drunk Indian bash that night and round the horn to sitting on Lily’s front stoop the next morning. No Lily but her friend Sandra Lynne, a manic depressive, who says she falls in love with me when she sees me ushering a Grateful Dead concert.
I’ve no idea. She’s got the same birthday as my sister Min. We both smoke Lucky Strikes. She wears torn lacy baby blue bikini panties so small I hit my head against the wall when she takes my had and cups it over her cunt. My girl?
*
She writes: “When I seed you face I nude it was you, cuz you was in a garbage can. I saw you there in that orange and pepper red psych-e-delic garbage can and I said, wow! What a gone chick. The times got tighter but you smiled anyway. Next time I seed you, you was in the yard. You had a kat in your over-alls. I said, howdy! Howdy are you do? I do fine. Thank-you for everything, you ginchy little nipper. With your face comes funny things. Like oceans with people diving in and out like flying fish and when you came up you had a lily pad on you shoulder with a yellow lily in the middle. Which relates to both your mind and body. Like you never seemed grabby. If you were sick in bed I’d come and sit by you and I’d tell you a story. If I knew how to play a harp I’d play tunes so you could dance.”
Soon thereafter I quit her and switched to Chesterfields.
“Cigarettes sooth the conscience.”
*
April: Tyrone Guthrie died, Walker Art Center opened. I worked opening night. Who are these people? Worked the gallery with the Duane Hanson art museum guard as the art museum guard, making it impossible to take the job seriously
Ushering at the Guthrie with drunken Duncan Hannah and fellow lapsed Catholic Rod Gordon, dubbed “The Fearsome Threesome” by Nelson, our pun meister and head of the staff, being: Reid Papke, Fred Koivelmackie, Brian Sprunk, Vernon Surrat, “Yo,” Ellery Carr (the first two black guys I ever knew), Skumper – “Here” – Joe “Pretty Boy” Lin, staff homosexual, John Brister, as queer – “Here!” – Pete “My hair’s really getting’ nice in back” a.k.a. “Jesperson Airport,” quotes Rolling Stone (sad), and alcoholic Anderson.
1970 Guthrie Season
The Venetian Twins
by Carlo Goldoni
adapted by Robert David MacDonald
directed by Robert David MacDonald
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men
by Lonne Elder III
directed by Israel Hicks
The Tempest
by William Shakespeare
directed by Philip Minor
A Man’s a Man
by Bertolt Brecht
directed by John Hirsch
A Play
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
adapted by Paul Avila Mayer
directed by Michael Langham
*
Eight o’clock on Turesday night. Spring evening full of potential. Disgusted after talking politics with my parents, hop in the car and cruise into town for cigs. Pall Mall, pell mell. See Doug Peterson, scrawny beard and wise eyes, in a phone booth on Hopkins main drag planning a robbery. See Joe Whitney working sweet sixteen Aphrodite, Carol B, beautiful as a lotus blossom, and damn if I don’t steal her away.
Later, Jefferson Airplane concert on mescaline: The lights go on and I realize the state I’m in and so does the rest of the auditorium and things look pretty funky. I try my sea legs and wander with Duncan. We get back in our seat and the Airplane’s movie comes on, wind blown hair and tits – really a gas. Dahlberg says, “Are we supposed to think this is the Airplane?” – then laughs like crazy. Really crazy.
Jeff’s a rich boy self-destructive head case.
I pass an elephant size joint to the girl next to us. Airplane’s off with Volunteers of America. Blue tender amp glow and zap flash musicians with Grace. Totally transfixed on the light tunnels bending in my mind. March up and find a chair to stand on. My knees sway. The Airplane played a buzz saw current with thrashing guitar whipped slashed and double backlashed off it. An instant feel good.
*
Roger Welsh, Oglala Sioux descendent of Black Elk, gets a friendship braid for being one. Sporting a turtle claws necklace, gift from an Apache friend, told me the story of his grandfather the chief, his death song, buffalo robe and Seven Sisters belt. “The medicine ring of soft willow dried on the ground: life goes in circles and we are just part of all the circle. Winter winds from the north, summer breezes from the south, thunder from the west and eternal sunshine from the east. Take what you need. Anymore and it’s theft of what should be left alone.”
*
Into the mix (April). The Depot opens. Saw Joe Cocker, Butterfield Blues Band, The Small Faces & Poco.
We meet Allen Ginsberg, reading at the Guthrie: Harmonium groans while old beatnik horn rim glasses spots Dunc out the corner of his eye singing praises to Shiva – songs of awaiting Maitreya the Venerable Buddha who is to be born in times to come – Om Srium Maitreya, Om nama Shivia. Sings William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Ginsberg exposes himself to the audience, his inner self, his physical self, his intellectual self, his “true” self. Talks of dying America, dying ecologically and mentally, like an art angel. He speaks and reads and chants as to give us his all. Blue shirt and flower-power tie under Japhy Ryder wool plaid shirt. He’s mobbed after but pulls us out of the crowd:
“Where you guys from?”
“Oh, we’re just a couple of high school kids…” Hannah, all flattered, says.
“Did anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful? I’d noticed you in the shadows but you looked too good to be true.”
We lose him. He finds us. He tells us about opium smuggled with help from the CIA, names names, impresses our Suburban Souls to no end. Tells us how William Burroughs is in London making “funny tv commercials. The last one he played a mad scientist in an anti-marijuana commercial. He’s got this huge hypodermic needle, the size of a baseball bat, and he runs over to a table full of rats, picks up a pregnant one, inserts the needle almost splitting the rat in two and says, “This hypo was filled with Cannabis serum and you can see for yourself the effects.”
Ginsberg slips Duncan his address, sees us to the door and parts with a Hindu bow and a Jewish “Salome.” Oh, he’s ready to expose himself.
It’s not just that the poet’s so pug ugly that I just don’t get the boys kissing boys thing.
*
Retreat to the Strip, Hopkins, Excelsior Blvd, Jay’s Drive-Inn, our scum ball team The Sharks: Dave Sundeen, Dan Jacobson, Tommy Kock, Mark Warren, Tom, Dennis & Jimmie Goeman. Everyone on the team wants to fuck my Marsha Berry.
Call Sundeen: “Hi Dave, whatcha doing?” “Oh, laying on my stomach.”
Shark’s party at Rock Isle listening to Beatles 8 tracks. The team deeply facetious motto’s “As in sports, as in life.” Long-hair crazies and townies smoking cigarettes, drinking beer tastes like cans. Hey, batter-batter-batter. Swing batter! Over the fence! Mama wants a new pair of shoes. The littlest Mighty Mouse.
*
Parents gone to Ely for a funeral. Worked the Guthrie for Murray Lewis Dance Company. Watched Straight Jacket, smoked reefer, talked stupid to 4 a.m. Fucked somebody’s big titted cousin at her parents’ big house by Lake Minnetonka to KRSI 50’s Hits.
*
Another photo. This one from the Minneapolis Star: “Swami Rama, Indian Guru, Welcomed at Local Hindu Temple. Dr. Usharbudh Arya, left, priest at temple, greets teacher of yoga.”
Swami Prefabri-Guru we called him. I have him to thank for dropping the ass-hole mystic routine. John Robson and I were assigned personal assistants during his holiness’s stay at the Radisson, covering for his sneaking cigarettes and lechery. After 4 days of hypocrisy we quit and went on a drunk.
*
I wrote in my book: A linty look that passes through his gravy colored glasses. His punch drunk eyes are awog, drained of sex appeal. Think of Casadesus musician, whose score for this is all omission, a lovely scene which cannot conceal. Richly a nostalgic perfume, rising from a can of Spam. Dinner table angry you. Within a merely pompous toad, bubble eyes popping through blurry spectacles of gold.
*
Reading a book on movie thrillers, a James Dean’s biography, a Sagan novel, and a new translation of Artaud,. Effecting Charlotte Rampling pin ups. Friends on blotter acid show up dressed as Nazis to watch The Happy Jesters on Jerry Lewis telethon playing Yes We Have No Bananas while dancing to James Brown’s Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.
Wholly carried away we showed up, half a dozen of us, in dirt bike punk attire at the Lexington Hotel on the Nicolet Mall to watch the local portion of the telethon live in a big hall full of charitable VFW types. We steal a plastic Jerry Lewis banner and promise to wear it to school every day this year when nabbed.
*
Sept. 3rd. Backstage passes to the New York Dolls performance at the Teen Pavilion of the Minnesota State Fair with my boyhood hero, misanthropic, paranoiac, virtuosic blues master, Tony Glover. I pick up a nice chick under a false pretense. She’s an old buddy’s ex-girl who’s drunk and wants me to get her behind the scenes where she disappears into the john to puke, letting me and everyone else know it. Bowery, Midway…punk is wherever you’re fucked up.
Days later, drunks past. It was an all drunk week. Less for me than for Hannah. Sunday morning he awoke to his father saying, “I found him.” Duncan sprawled out on linoleum at the foot of the fridge asking, “How drunk’s drunk?” A couple of nights later we’re in Sutton’s, Minneapolis’s gay bar, drunk before we even get there, cocky as hell. The place is empty except for a pretty blonde girl at the bar. I saunter up with a suave, ‘Hey, baby’ and call the bartender, ‘Hey, fag! Double Scotch. What cha drinkin’, honey?’ – ‘I’ve got a drink, thanks.’ Cold. She turns around trying to get out of the picture of me.
‘Nice hair. How you keep it like that?’
‘Get your hands out of my hair.’
Nov. 29. Elton John at the Guthrie. Uh-huh.
1971
Feb. 1, 1971. The Pilot. Hopkins Charles A. Lindbergh Senior High School.
A Day in the Life of….
Kurt Thometz is a senior in our school. Maybe not such an ordinary senior but that’s another story. What makes him so “out of the ordinar”? Well, he is interested in yoga … but that’s not what makes him so unusual. Maybe it’s that he suudies under a Hindu priest. Yes, it’s true. He does take lessons once a week from a priest who was raised in the Brahman caste in India. But it isn’t these facts nor because he studies Sanskrit, an ancient language from the Arian people, or that he is on a macrobiotics diet, a diet made up of mostly brown rice and carrots, But all these things have made him what he is today.
During the past summer, Kurt lived with some friends in Berkley, California. He lived with an astrologer and a Buddhis monk. He also had some Hindu friends. All of these people encouraged him to find out more about meditation so when he returned to Minnesota he looked up Dr. Arya, his teacher. Kurt says, “Everything I am, I owe to Arya. They are on a teacher-disciple basis.
When I interviewed Kurt said, “I’m sure the kids would want to know how all this changed my life. I have never had a bad day since the beginning of school. It has given me a very optimistic view.” He stated that it was meditation that does this. “It gives you and amazing outlook on life.”
Kurt isn’t sure about his future. His mind changes quickly. But whatever happens it will be very interesting.
Guthrie Theater
In 1971 Mr. Langham took over as artistic director of the Guthrie. Lengthening its season and expanding its touring program, he put on well-received productions of classic plays, including “Oedipus the King,” “Cyrano de Bergerac,” “She Stoops to Conquer” and Shakespearean works
My “Most Likely to Queer Out” award from the ushering staff of the Guthrie Theater, a show card advertising Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band on a bill with Ry Cooder at that same theater, Theda Bera, Marlene Dietrich, LeRoi Jones, Samuel Becket, local legend Tony Glover interviewing Jimmy Hendrix, ads for Warhol movies at the Varsity Theater. I took a pretty girl named Eve I’d met in my Sanskrit class to see Trash.
*
Spacing out on Bo Diddley’s Mona, all Paul Butterfield, Lee Morgan’s City Lights, Big John Patton’s Oh, Baby, Thelonious Monk’s Crisscross. Piecemeal quotes from Chinese and beatnik poets are just so much drivel.
Attired in new beret, disintegrating blue jeans, dirty tee-shirt, greasy hands, went to see Trash again with this brains and brawn blonde I took from yoga class to the 400 Club to her place. Eve wears dresses, with stockings, with garters, with little lace lovelies I get fetching. “Blindfold me. Please,” she says to M. Davis’s Porky and Bess, with pleasure. We got trashed on weed and red wine and I got me a limber pretty girl with a wonderfully dirty mind.
*
Having spent an unsuccessful year trying to shake me down for drug possession in “sensitivity training sessions”, Hopkins High let me pursue a course of Independent Study in the curriculum of my choice. I pursued my interests. Out west that summer I’d spent considerable time at the Zendo in San Francisco. In Mpls there was no Buddhist community and I found my way to an academic at the University, no less than the head of the Philosophy Dept, who was teaching Rama Yoga to about 25 people in the attic of an old house in a bad neighborhood off campus.
*
I’m fucking Evie and my English Teacher, Sherrill, who I report to at the high school once a month. She’s dirty blonde, 22 and hip. Wants me to introduce her to Tony of Koerner, Ray and Glover. We talk radical politics, make lists of favorite records and books. We go to Fellini movies like it’s educational and she asks me to speak to her class on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. She invites me to her place, where she talked me into bed and I talked her out of her cheap underwear.
Once a month I go to school, show them my Sanskrit homework, lecture on literature and leave. Mornings I hitchhike Highway 7 to work for Willie at the gas station in the parking lot of the Target store at Knollwood Plaza, filling up, lurking under car hoods, leaning on fenders (listening to Freddy “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights”) with my Mexican boss.
My mother flirts with him.
Afternoon’s I show up at the Guthrie for matinee, disheveled, long-haired, greasy, opinionated and cocky. Despite my showing lousy respect for my superiors and refusing to curb my tongue, I’ve fit right in and, for a change, seem genuinely liked.
*
Tension at home. I did some speed and babbled on about politics, giving every appearance of suffering a nervous breakdown. I was high strung and half strung out. I been smoking opium, dropping acid, eating macrobiotic, studying Raja yoga and Sanskrit with Dr. Arya, the head of the University of Minnesota’s philosophy department, working in the theater and have been liberated from the hollow halls of Charles A. Lindberg High School to pursue Independent Study, as monitored by my short-skirt, tight-assed and righteous dirty blonde teacher in heels.
*
My parents, who claim to have had it with my lousy attitude, decided to put their authoritarian foot down. It didn’t work. I flipped the fuck out and pulled a foot long Nazi dress dagger on Mother and told her it was time to leave. I did.
*
Downtown’s Weasels played the Mill City Feet in beer ball. I’m on neither team so play for both. Can’t believe I’m playing baseball. Sports bore me.
*
Messed up on the whole week he’s marinated marijuana in belladonna, Crosby and I listen to T-Rex, eat “little pies,” tour the yard and compose a great Toyota Corona automobile symphony with squeaking fingers on trunk, howling “pitters” and accompanied by a distant police car’s siren. Cros’ is King.
*
April: Tyrone Guthrie died, Walker Art Center opened. I worked opening night. Who are these people? Worked the gallery with the Duane Hanson art museum guard as the art museum guard, making it impossible to take the job seriously
Ushering at the Guthrie with drunken Duncan Hannah and fellow lapsed Catholic Rod Gordon, dubbed “The Fearsome Threesome” by Nelson, our pun meister and head of the staff, being: Reid Papke, Fred Koivelmackie, Brian Sprunk, Vernon Surrat, “Yo,” Ellery Carr (the first two black guys I ever knew), Skumper – “Here” – Joe “Pretty Boy” Lin, staff homosexual, John Brister, same– “Here!” – Pete “My hair’s really getting’ nice in back” a.k.a. “Jesperson Airport,” quotes Rolling Stone (sad), and alcoholic Anderson.
*
Eight o’clock on Turesday night. Spring evening full of potential. Disgusted after talking politics with my parents, hop in the car and cruise into town for cigs. Pall Mall, pell mell. See Doug Peterson, scrawny beard and wise eyes, in a phone booth on Hopkins main drag planning a robbery. See Joe Whitney working sweet sixteen Aphrodite, Carol B, beautiful as a lotus blossom, and damn if I don’t steal her away.
Later, Jefferson Airplane concert on mescaline: The lights go on and I realize the state I’m in and so does the rest of the auditorium and things look pretty funky. I try my sea legs and wander with Duncan. We get back in our seat and the Airplane’s movie comes on, wind blown hair and tits – really a gas. Dahlberg says, “Are we supposed to think this is the Airplane?” – then laughs like crazy. Really crazy. Jeff’s a rich boy self-destructive head case best known for having peed on Hubert Humphrey’s leg.
I pass an elephant size joint to the girl next to us. Airplane’s off with Volunteers of America. Blue tender amp glow and zap flash musicians with Grace. Totally transfixed on the light tunnels bending in my mind. March up and find a chair to stand on. My knees sway. The Airplane played a buzz saw current with thrashing guitar whipped slashed and double backlashed off it. An instant feel good.
*
Roger Welsh, Oglala Sioux descendent of Black Elk, gets a friendship braid for being one. Sporting a turtle claws necklace, gift from an Apache friend, told me the story of his grandfather the chief, his death song, buffalo robe and Seven Sisters belt. “The medicine ring of soft willow dried on the ground: life goes in circles and we are just part of all the circle. Winter winds from the north, summer breezes from the south, thunder from the west and eternal sunshine from the east. Take what you need. Anymore and it’s theft of what should be left alone.”
*
Into the mix (April). The Depot opens. Saw Joe Cocker, Butterfield Blues Band, The Small Faces & Poco.
We meet Allen Ginsberg, reading at the Guthrie: Harmonium groans while old beatnik horn rim glasses spots Dunc out the corner of his eye singing praises to Shiva – songs of awaiting Maitreya the Venerable Buddha who is to be born in times to come – Om Srium Maitreya, Om nama Shivia. Sings William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Ginsberg exposes himself to the audience, his inner self, his physical self, his intellectual self, his “true” self. Talks of dying America, dying ecologically and mentally, like an art angel. He speaks and reads and chants as to give us his all. Blue shirt and flower-power tie under Japhy Ryder wool plaid shirt. He’s mobbed after but pulls us out of the crowd:
“Where you guys from?”
“Oh, we’re just a couple of high school kids…” Hannah, all flattered, says.
“Did anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful? I’d noticed you in the shadows but you looked too good to be true.”
We lose him. He finds us. He tells us about opium smuggled with help from the CIA, names names, impresses our Suburban Souls to no end. Tells us how William Burroughs is in London making “funny tv commercials. The last one he played a mad scientist in an anti-marijuana commercial. He’s got this huge hypodermic needle, the size of a baseball bat, and he runs over to a table full of rats, picks up a pregnant one, inserts the needle almost splitting the rat in two and says, “This hypo was filled with Cannabis serum and you can see for yourself the effects.”
Ginsberg slips Duncan his address, sees us to the door and parts with a Hindu bow and a Jewish “Salome.” Oh, he’s ready to expose himself.
It’s not just that the poet’s so pug ugly that I just don’t get the boys kissing boys thing.
*
Retreat to the Strip, Hopkins, Excelsior Blvd, Jay’s Drive-Inn, our scum ball team The Sharks: Dave Sundeen, Dan Jacobson, Tommy Kock, Mark Warren, Tom, Dennis & Jimmie Goeman. Everyone on the team wants to fuck my Marsha Berry.
Call Sundeen: “Hi Dave, whatcha doing?” “Oh, laying on my stomach.”
Shark’s party at Rock Isle listening to Beatles 8 tracks. The team deeply facetious motto’s “As in sports, as in life.” Long-hair crazies and townies smoking cigarettes, drinking beer tastes like cans. Hey, batter-batter-batter. Swing batter! Over the fence! Mama wants a new pair of shoes. The littlest Mighty Mouse.
*
Parents gone to Ely for a funeral. Worked the Guthrie for Murray Lewis Dance Company. Watched Straight Jacket, smoked reefer, talked stupid to 4 a.m. Fucked somebody’s big titted cousin at her parents’ big house by Lake Minnetonka to KRSI 50’s Hits.
*
Another photo. This one from the Minneapolis Star: “Swami Rama, Indian Guru, Welcomed at Local Hindu Temple. Dr. Usharbudh Arya, left, priest at temple, greets teacher of yoga.”
Swami Prefabri-Guru we called him. I have him to thank for dropping the ass-hole mystic routine with graduation from high school. John Robson and I were assigned personal assistants during his holiness’s stay at the Radisson, covering for his sneaking cigarettes and lechery. After 4 days of hypocrisy we quit and went on a drunk.
*
I wrote in my book: A linty look that passes through his gravy colored glasses. His punch drunk eyes are awog, drained of sex appeal. Think of Casadesus musician, whose score for this is all omission, a lovely scene which cannot conceal. Richly a nostalgic perfume, rising from a can of Spam. Dinner table angry you. Within a merely pompous toad, bubble eyes popping through blurry spectacles of gold.
*
Reading a book on movie thrillers, a James Dean’s biography, a Sagan novel, and a new translation of Artaud,. Effecting Charlotte Rampling pin ups. Friends on blotter acid show up dressed as Nazis to watch The Happy Jesters on Jerry Lewis telethon playing Yes We Have No Bananas while dancing to James Brown’s Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.
Wholly carried away we showed up, half a dozen of us, in dirt bike punk attire at the Lexington Hotel on the Nicolet Mall to watch the local portion of the telethon live in a big hall full of charitable VFW types. We steal a plastic Jerry Lewis banner and promise to wear it to school every day this year when nabbed.
*
Sept. 3rd. Backstage passes to the New York Dolls performance at the Teen Pavilion of the Minnesota State Fair with my boyhood hero, misanthropic, paranoiac, virtuosic blues master, Tony Glover. I pick up a nice chick under a false pretense. She’s an old buddy’s ex-girl who’s drunk and wants me to get her behind the scenes where she disappears into the john to puke, letting me and everyone else know it. Bowery, Midway…punk is wherever you’re fucked up.
Days later, drunks past. It was an all drunk week. Less for me than for Hannah. Sunday morning he awoke to his father saying, “I found him.” Duncan sprawled out on linoleum at the foot of the fridge asking, “How drunk’s drunk?” A couple of nights later we’re in Sutton’s, Minneapolis’s gay bar, drunk before we even get there, cocky as hell. The place is empty except for a pretty blonde girl at the bar. I saunter up with a suave, ‘Hey, baby’ and call the bartender, ‘Hey, Monsieur! Double Scotch. What cha drinkin’, honey?’ – ‘I’ve got a drink, thanks.’ Cold. She turns around trying to get out of the picture of me.
Later I thought, I wouldn’t fuck me, which may account for why I’m straight.
Nov. 29. Elton John at the Guthrie. Uh-huh.
