As it turned out, he also was a prodigious drinker in the tradition of Brendan Behan, who was said to have had "a thirst so great it would throw a shadow." I was making my own beer at the time and Willard put a great strain on the aging process; I had to lock the stuff up to keep him from getting at it before the appointed moment.
Sadly enough, my beer and Willard's impact on San Francisco were firmly linked. The story is a classic, and if you travel in the right circles out here you will still hear it told, although not always accurately. The truth, however, goes like this:
Willard arrived shortly before I packed up and left for the East; we had a convivial few weeks, and, as a parting gesture, I left him a five-gallon jug of beer that I did not feel qualified to transport across the nation. It still had a week or so to go in the jug, then another few weeks of aging in quart bottles, after which it would have had a flavor to rival the nectar of the gods. Willard's only task was to bottle it and leave it alone until it was ready to drink.
Unfortunately, his thirst threw a heavy shadow on the schedule. He was living on a hill overlooking the southern section of the city, and among his neighbors were several others of the breed, mad drinkers and men of strange arts. Shortly after my departure he entertained one of these gentlemen, who, like my man Willard, was long on art and energy, but very short of funds.
The question of drink arose, as it will in the world of art, but the presence of poverty cast a bleak light on the scene. There was, however, this five-gallon jug of raw, unaged home brew in the kitchen. Of course, it was a crude drink and might produce beastly and undesired effects, but. . . well. . .
The rest is history. After drinking half the jug, the two artists laid hands on several gallons of blue paint and proceeded to refinish the front of the house Willard was living in. The landlord, who lived across the street, witnessed this horror and called the police. They arrived to find the front of the house looking like a Jackson Pollack canvas, and the sidewalk rapidly disappearing under a layer of sensual crimson. At this point, something of an argument ensued, but Willard is 6 feet 4, and 230 pounds, and he prevailed. For a while.
Some moments later the police came back with reinforcements, but by this time Willard and his helper had drunk off the rest of the jug and were eager for any kind of action, be it painting or friendly violence. The intrusion of the police had caused several mottos to be painted on the front of the house, and they were not without antisocial connotations. The landlord was weeping and gnashing his teeth, loud music emanated from the ulterior of the desecrated house, and the atmosphere in general was one of hypertension.
The scene that followed can only be likened to the rounding up of wild beasts escaped from a zoo. Willard says he attempted to flee, but floundered on a picket fence, which collapsed with his weight and that of a pursuing officer. His friend climbed to a roof and rained curses and shingles on the unfriendly world below. But the police worked methodically, and by the time the sun set over the Pacific the two artists were sealed in jail.
At this point the gentlemen of the press showed up for the usual photos. They tried to coax Willard up to the front of his cell to pose, but the other artist had undertaken to tip the toilet bowl out of the floor and smash it into small pieces. For the next hour, the press was held at bay with chunks of porcelain, hurled by the two men in the cell. "We used up the toilet," Willard recalls, "then we got the sink. I don't remember much of it, but I can't understand why the cops didn't shoot us. We were out of our heads."
The papers had a field day with the case. Nearly all the photos of the "animal men" were taken with what is known among press photographers as "the Frankenstein flash." This technique produces somewhat the same impression of the subject as a flashlight held under his chin, but instead of a flashlight, the photographer simply holds his flash unit low, so that sinister shadows appear on the face of a subject, and a huge shadow looms on the wall behind him. It is a technique that could make Casper Milquetoast look like the Phantom of the Opera, but the effect, with Willard, was nothing short of devastating; he looked like King Kong.
Despite all the violence, the story has a happy ending. Willard and his friends were sentenced to six months in jail, but were quickly released for good behavior, and neither lost any time in fleeing to New York. Willard now lives in Brooklyn, where he moves from one apartment to another as walls fill up with paintings. His artistic method is to affix tin cans to a wall with tenpenny nails, then cover the wall with lumpy plaster and paint. Some say he has a great talent, but so far he goes unrecognized -- except by the long-suffering San Francisco police, who were called upon to judge what was perhaps his most majestic effort.
Willard was as hard to define then as he is now; probably it is most accurate to say he had artistic inclinations and a superabundance of excess energy. At one point in his life he got the message that others of his type were gathering in San Francisco, and he came all the way from Germany to join the party.
Since then, things have never been the same. Life is more peaceful in San Francisco, but infinitely duller. That was pretty obvious when the rent strike cropped up; for a day or so it looked like the action was back in town, but it was no dice.
One of the "strikers," an unemployed cartoonist with a wife and a child and a rundown apartment for which he refuses to pay rent, summed up the situation. His landlady had declined to make repairs on the apartment, and instead got an eviction order. In the old days, the fellow would have stayed in the place and gotten tough. But the cartoonist is taking the path of least resistance. "It takes a long time to get people evicted," he says with a shrug, "and we're thinking of splitting to New York on a freight train anyway."
That's the way it is these days in the erstwhile capital of the Beat Generation. The action has gone East, and the only people who really seem to mourn it are the reporters, who never lacked a good story, and a small handful of those who lived with it and had a few good laughs for a while. If Willard returned to San Francisco today, he probably would have to settle for a job as a house painter.
National Observer, April 20, 1964
The Nonstudent Left
Berkeley.
At the height of the "Berkeley insurrection" press reports were loaded with mentions of outsiders, nonstudents and professional troublemakers. Terms like "Cal's shadow college" and "Berkeley's hidden community" became part of the journalistic lexicon. These people, it was said, were whipping the campus into a frenzy, goading the students to revolt, harassing the administration, and all the while working for their own fiendish ends. You could almost see them loping along the midnight streets with bags of seditious leaflets, strike orders, red banners of protest and cablegrams from Moscow, Peking or Havana. As in Mississippi and South Vietnam, outside agitators were said to be stirring up the locals, who wanted only to be left alone.
Something closer to the truth is beginning to emerge now, but down around the roots of the affair the fog is still pretty thick. The Sproul Hall sit-in trials ended in a series of unexpectedly harsh convictions, the Free Speech Movement has disbanded, four students have been expelled and sentenced to jail terms as a result of the "dirty word" controversy, and the principal leader, Mario Savio, has gone to England, where he'll study and wait for word on the appeal of his four-month jail term -- a procedure which may take as long as eighteen months.
As the new semester begins -- with a new and inscrutable chancellor -- the mood on the Berkeley campus is one of watchful waiting. The basic issues of last year are still unresolved, and a big new one has been added: Vietnam. A massive nationwide sit-in, with Berkeley as a focal point, is scheduled for October 15-16, and if that doesn't open all the old wounds, then presumably nothing will.
For a time it looked as though Govemor Edmund Brown had side-tracked any legislative investigation of the university, but late in August Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, an anti-Brown Democrat, named himself and four colleagues to a joint legislative committee that will investigate higher
education in California. Mr. Unruh told the press that "there will be no isolated investigation of student-faculty problems at Berkeley," but in the same period he stated before a national conference of more than 1,000 state legislators, meeting in Portland, that the academic community is "probably the greatest enemy" of a state legislature.
Mr. Unruh is a sign of the times. For a while last spring he appeared to be in conflict with the normally atavistic Board of Regents, which runs the university, but somewhere along the line a blue-chip compromise was reached, and whatever progressive ideas the Regents might have flirted with were lost in the summer lull. Governor Brown's role in these negotiations has not yet been made public.
One of the realities to come out of last semester's action is the new "anti-outsider law," designed to keep "nonstudents" off the campus in any hour of turmoil. It was sponsored by Assemblyman Don Mulford, a Republican from Oakland, who looks and talks quite a bit like the "old" Richard Nixon. Mr. Mulford is much concerned about "subversive infiltration" on the Berkeley campus, which lies in his district. He thinks he knows that the outburst last fall was caused by New York Communists, beatnik perverts and other godless elements beyond his ken. The students themselves, he tells himself, would never have caused such a ruckus. Others in Sacramento apparently shared this view: the bill passed the Assembly by a vote of 54 to 11 and the Senate by 27 to 8. Governor Brown signed it on June 2. The Mulford proposal got a good boost, while it was still pending, when J. Edgar Hoover testified in Washington that forty-three Reds of one stripe or another were involved in the Free Speech Movement.
On hearing of this, one student grinned and said: "Well I guess that means they'll send about 10,000 Marines out here this fall. Hell, they sent 20,000 after those fifty-eight Reds in Santo Domingo. Man, that Lyndon is nothing but hip!"
Where Mr. Hoover got his figure is a matter of speculation, but the guess in Berkeley is that it came from the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst paper calling itself "The Monarch of the Dailies." The Examiner is particularly influential among those who fear King George III might still be alive in Argentina.
The significance of the Mulford law lies not in what it says but in the darkness it sheds on the whole situation in Berkeley, especially on the role of nonstudents and outsiders. Who are these thugs? What manner of man would lurk on a campus for no reason but to twist student minds? As anyone who lives or works around an urban campus knows, vast numbers of students are already more radical than any Red Mr. Hoover could name. Beyond that, the nonstudents and outsiders California has legislated against are in the main ex-students, graduates, would-be transfers, and other young activist types who differ from radical students only in that they don't carry university registration cards. On any urban campus the nonstudent is an old and dishonored tradition. Every big city school has its fringe element: Harvard, New York University, Chicago, the Sorbonne, Berkeley, the University of Caracas. A dynamic university in a modern population center simply can't be isolated from the realities, human or otherwise, that surround it. Mr. Mulford would make an island of the Berkeley campus but, alas, there are too many guerrillas.
In 1958, I drifted north from Kentucky and became a non-student at Columbia. I signed up for two courses and am still getting bills for the tuition. My home was a $12-a-week room in an off-campus building full of jazz musicians, shoplifters, mainliners, screaming poets and sex addicts of every description. It was a good life. I used the university facilities and at one point was hired to stand in a booth all day for two days, collecting registration fees. Twice I walked almost the length of the campus at night with a big wooden box containing nearly $15,000. It was a wild feeling and I'm still not sure why I took the money to the bursar.
Being a "non" or "nco" student on an urban campus is not only simple but natural for anyone who is young, bright and convinced that the major he's after is not on the list. Any list. A serious nonstudent is his own guidance counselor. The surprising thing is that so few people beyond the campus know this is going on.
The nonstudent tradition seems to date from the end of World War II. Before that it was a more individual thing. A professor at Columbia told me that the late R.P. Blackmur, one of the most academic and scholarly of literary critics, got most of his education by sitting in on classes at Harvard.
In the age of Eisenhower and Kerouac, the nonstudent went about stealing his education as quietly as possible. It never occurred to him to jump into campus politics; that was part of the game he had already quit. But then the decade ended. Nixon went down, and the civil rights sturggle broke out. With this, a whole army of guilt-crippled Eisenhower deserters found the war they had almost given up hoping for. With Kennedy at the helm, politics became respectable for a change, and students who had sneered at the idea of voting found themselves joining the Peace Corps or standing on picket lines. Student radicals today may call Kennedy a phony liberal and a glamorous sellout, but only the very young will deny that it was Kennedy who got them excited enough to want to change the American reality, instead of just quitting it. Today's activist student or nonstudent talks about Kerouac as the hipsters of the '50s talked about Hemingway. He was a quitter, they say; he had good instincts and a good ear for the sadness of his time, but his talent soured instead of growing. The new campus radical has a cause, a multipronged attack on as many fronts as necessary: if not civil rights, then foreign policy or structural deprivation in domestic poverty pockets. Injustice is the demon, and the idea is to bust it.
What Mulford's law will do to change this situation is not clear. The language of the bill leaves no doubt that it shall henceforth be a misdemeanor for any nonstudent or nonemployee to remain on a state university or state college campus after he or she has been ordered to leave, if it "reasonably appears" to the chief administrative officer or the person designated by him to keep order on the campus "that such person is committing an act likely to interfere with the peaceful conduct of the campus."
In anything short of riot conditions, the real victims of Mulford's law will be the luckless flunkies appointed to enforce it. The mind of man could devise few tasks more hopeless than rushing around this 1,000-acre, 27,000-student campus in the midst of some crowded action, trying to apprehend and remove -- on sight and before he can flee -- any person who is not a Cal student and is not eligible for readmission. It would be a nightmare of lies, false seizures, double entries and certain provocation. Meanwhile, most of those responsible for the action would be going about their business in legal peace. If pure justice prevailed in this world, Don Mulford would be appointed to keep order and bag subversives at the next campus demonstrations.
There are those who seem surprised that a defective rattrap like the Mulford law could be endorsed by the legislature of a supposedly progressive, enlightened state. But these same people were surprised when Proposition 14, which reopened the door to racial discrimination in housing, was endorsed by the electorate last November by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.
Meanwhile, the nonstudent in Berkeley is part of the scene, a fact of life. The university estimates that about 3,000 non-students use the campus in various ways: working in the library with borrowed registration cards; attending lectures, concerts and student films; finding jobs and apartments via secondhand access to university listings; eating in the cafeteria, and monitoring classes. In appearance they are indistinguishable from students. Berkeley is full of wild-looking graduate students, bearded professors and long-haired English majors who look like Joan Baez.
Until recently there was no mention of nonstudents in campus politics, but at the beginning of the Free Speech rebellion President Kerr said "nonstudent elements were partly responsible for the demonstration." Since then, he has backed away from that stand, leaving it to the lawmakers. Even its goats and enemies now admit that the FSM revolt was the work of actual students. It has been a difficult fact for some people to accept, but a reliable poll of student attitudes at the time showed that roughly 18,000 of them supported th
e goals of the FSM, and about half that number supported its "illegal" tactics. More than 800 were willing to defy the administration, the Governor and the police, rather than back down. The faculty supported the FSM by close to 8 to 1. The nonstudents nearly all sided with the FSM. The percentage of radicals among them is much higher than among students. It is invariably the radicals, not the conservatives, who drop out of school and become activist non-students. But against this background, their attitude hardly matters.
"We don't play a big role politically," says one. "But philosophically we're a hell of a threat to the establishment. Just the fact that we exist proves that dropping out of school isn't the end of the world. Another important thing is that we're not looked down on by students. We're respectable. A lot of students I know are thinking of becoming nonstudents."
"As a nonstudent I have nothing to lose," said another. "I can work full time on whatever I want, study what interests me, and figure out what's really happening in the world. That student routine is a drag. Until I quit the grind I didn't realize how many groovy things there are to do around Berkeley: concerts, films, good speakers, parties, pot, politics, women -- I can't think of a better way to live, can you?"
Not all nonstudents worry the lawmakers and administrators. Some are fraternity bums who flunked out of the university, but don't want to leave the parties and the good atmosphere. Others are quiet squares or technical types, earning money between enrollments and meanwhile living nearby. But there is no longer the sharp division that used to exist between the beatnik and the square: too many radicals wear ties and sport coats; too many engineering students wear boots and levis. Some of the most bohemian-looking girls around the campus are Left puritans, while some of the sweetest-looking sorority types are confirmed pot smokers and wear diaphragms on all occasions.
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 56