by Gary Indiana
I tagged along on a location shoot in the Sausalito hills, riding shotgun in a pickup driven by a hippie sound engineer, a roguishly bearded ex-Mouseketeer with a doomed aura named Brando Batty. (According to the state of California, that really was his real name. He once showed me his driver’s license.) By nightfall I had a temp job, as emergency gaffer and continuity girl on The Straight Banana shoot. My thing with the eponymous Straight Banana (we just referred to him as Banana, really) quickly lapsed, in the easy manner of the day, into a different thing with Ferd, who already had a male squeeze and a more involved relationship with an older woman named Carol.
Carol wasn’t much older, chronologically, but her weariness suggested she’d survived the Titanic and much else of cosmic historical significance. Older than a thousand years, still bitter over some deal gone terribly south in ancient Babylon, Carol sat stiffly in Brando Batty’s truck all afternoon, penciling irritable remarks on the script she’d co-written, or flipping through Variety. I sensed a crazy attraction to Ferd, but became completely spellbound by Carol. She had the vibe of somebody who’d lived the nightmare in a big, expensive way. Short, wiry limbed, her glossy auburn hair poodled in a perky cut, she seemed implacable enough to launch a military coup in South America.
Sporadically emerging from her four-wheel bunker during lulls in the filming, she’d march directly up to Ferd to give him notes before talking to anyone else. She blinked theatrically at the sun; slid her sunglasses down from their nest in her hair; aimed a studied yawn in our general direction; lit a Marlboro with a silver lighter; smoothed her throat with the fingers she’d covered the yawn with. Each movement set off baffling signals, her private-looking little actions both seductive and off-putting, a selfishly generous display: as she studied her effect on people, Carol also telegraphed her utter indifference to whatever effect that was. I instinctively sensed she would shove me or anybody else out of a lifeboat if she thought they added too much weight. But I often dismissed as paranoid intuitions that were as obvious as giant letters on a billboard.
Ferd was as easygoing as Carol was brittle. He japed, mugged, giggled, flirted, bantered with everyone while setting up shots, giving actors notes, squinting into the Arriflex viewfinder. His infectious looseness visibly stiffened when Carol asserted her presence. Their gravity together engraved a “serious” grown-up circle around them. The pornographic circus it excluded looked embarrassingly silly and juvenile, suddenly.
Which it was, of course. With the exception of Johnny Raw, however, we all saw the absurdity of a bunch of hippies making a porn movie. (Johnny Raw went on to fatuous national fame as the straight industry’s favorite penis, with a best-selling dildo, molded from his cock, named after him—“get that Johnny Raw sensation at home.” Johnny Raw bought the big sleep on a smack overdose at thirty, without a dime left. If you count in porn years, he had a long run.) They—we—were making trash to support ourselves at something we could bear waking up for. We had no delusions of glamour, though getting paid for anything at the time had a definite cachet. The stars were fucking people they would have fucked anyway, and sex for all involved (except me) was about as overheated as a sneeze.
During Ferd and Carol’s script conferences, they leaned against a white LeSabre convertible with bright red upholstery, where the film action was occurring in the back seat. The naked stars sat up looking dazed, smoked cigarettes, took bites from sandwiches. Cool breezes fluttered through the heat. We were on a dirt road high on a small mountain, a dreamy elevation with an awesome view of the bay.
To say I fell in love with Ferd the day I met him wouldn’t be completely wrong, but sounds schmaltzy if I consider how little feeling I had for Johnny Raw from the jump, aside from a fascination with the body part that made him famous. In less than an hour around Ferd, Johnny evaporated from my consciousness.
Ferd was the first male I ever felt attracted to who was smarter than me, intellect never having been conspicuous in the few men I had “dated” before. Decades later, after his looks went, his charisma continued to make him beautiful, in a wasted, Egon Schiele way. I’ve thought about Ferd over much of my life, and find him full of contradictions, but this is what seems constant: his intellectual finesse; his formidable conviction that his sense of reality trumped all others’; a decency of heart often wildly at odds with situations I found him in, as well as with the first two qualities I mentioned.
None of this was entirely apparent when I met him, when he lived with Carol. I quickly got tangled up with both of them, cast in confusing roles as an understudy to Ferd’s boyfriend, Chip (who I never knew beyond hello good-bye), and as a wayward urchin Ferd and Carol adopted. They collected people like pollen sticking to their clothes: runaways, burnouts, lost souls of all sorts. Carol acted as a vulpine den mother to a shifting cast of acolytes and hangers-on.
She reigned over the upper floors of a five-story Victorian on Broderick Street that exuded lifeless desuetude. Charles, the owner, retired from some clandestine profession, occupied in perpetuity a wing chair facing the fireplace in a musty floor-through salon on the ground floor. He passed his days draining tall cans of Rainier Ale while staring at a TV that was seldom actually on, stacking ale cans in green pyramids that almost brushed the high ceiling. Exactly where in that somnolent house Charles kept the box of earth where he slept, I never knew. His alleged college roommate, Steve, a more tangible, slightly corpulent man of sixty-two, was given to “sporty” plaid shirts, fishing pants with many pockets, and muted red loafers. Steve inhabited a room in the basement. Charles was a man of no words. Steve had a certain voluble joie de vivre. In a pinch, one might call him jolly. He wasn’t really.
In the fullness of time I became a tenant. I was given a claustrophobic child-size room on the third floor containing a canopied bed, a framed charcoal drawing of Leopold Stokowski, and a ceiling bulb. But not yet.
Carol: eyes habitually narrow with suspicion, picking over the ever-shifting assortment of Ferd’s shag-mates and “models” (as porn actors were then called), a poultry inspector in a battery farm. She spoke in rapid bursts, in tones of insulted intelligence. She was manic-depressive in a rapidly alternating, terrifying way. As Hoover Dam generates electricity, Carol generated fright and insecurity.
She had been a girlfriend of Lenny Bruce. Or not. I later suspected that Carol inflated and embellished brushes with the well-known, to indicate that she was only briefly, disappointedly slumming among less exalted individuals for dark reasons known only to her. In retrospect, it’s touching that the names Carol dropped were never household gods of celebrity culture ordinary people would recognize, but figures of the avant-garde: Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos. (Looking back, I first heard of Werner Schroeter from Carol.) With these rarefied souls, Carol shared an understanding of Art’s alchemical ways, its torturous difficulties, its isolating asceticism, communing with them in a spiritual Atlantis beyond our reach.
She lived off royalties from lyrics she’d written to a popular instrumental song that had played continuously on drive-time radio in California ever since 1963. Deep in her thirties, she evoked a rueful queen deposed from richer, more soigné and consequential realms. Spectral traces of an abandoned life entered the picture from time to time, in the form of a Paramount executive named Richard C——, who beamed in occasionally from Los Angeles, all Savile Row and attaché case, intent on rekindling a long-ago liaison in order to “bring Carol to her senses.” Now and then, a reedy albino tax lawyer showed up with bales of papers for Carol to sign.
The autumn of 1969 was a creepy season in San Francisco. In the long, rancid afterglow of the summer of love, the Haight-Ashbury had puddled into a gritty slum of boarded-up head shops and strung-out junkies, thuggish dealers, undercover cops in love beads and fright wigs. The hippie saturnalia had continued as a sinister Halloween parody of itself, featuring overdoses and rip-offs and sudden flashes of violence.
I had long stringy hair the color of rusty tap
water. I mostly wore shoplifted drag from thrift stores, “sensible” drag like pleated skirts and silk blouses. I looked androgynous enough to pass for a girl, unless I carried my Pan Am bag. (Flight bags were widely recognized as a fag accessory.) I was too reticent and unimposing to be a drag queen. I looked more like a flat-chested insurance secretary on a lunch break. But pretty—everyone said so. Lawrence Ferlinghetti picked me up one day in the park in North Beach. When catcalls from sunbathers who knew my actual gender alerted him to his mistake, he did the gentlemanly thing and took me to a café for a cup of coffee and made small talk.
Ferd shot smack more as a fashion statement than to quell an actual addiction. His personality was too controlling for him to enjoy the passivity of a heroin addict. Psychedelic drugs were taken like aspirin in San Francisco and heroin users were seen as the truly daring souls, more “seriously” troubled than aimless run-of-the-mill LSD dropouts. Ferd and Brando Batty, his partner in pseudo-addiction, sent me on missions to local emergency rooms to cop syringes. Ferd insisted that I go in drag, to what advantage I can’t recall. At the hospitals I confessed my lack of insurance coverage, got parked in an examining room, stuffed a handful of needles in my flight bag before the doctor arrived, then sneaked away, never to be seen again. It worked every time.
I lived on no money, with no fixed address, becoming a ward of whatever boyfriend or commune whose orbit I drifted into. For a while I lived with one of Ferd’s other smackmates, a torpid, troubled, horse-faced woman named Mary Blakey, aka Hamburger Mary, who usually came along on a nightly caravan to clubs and events with Ferd, Carol, Brando, and me, which sometimes included Ferd’s other boyfriend, Chip. Mary hoarded drugs and secretly shot much more smack than Ferd did. She had a more developed habit, though neither of them was a junkie in the full-blown “I’ll do anything for a fix” sense.
Mary never seemed fully conscious. She inhabited a private world where life’s volume had been lowered to half decibel, like the darkened bedroom of a chronic migraine sufferer. The banished daughter of a Marin County ear, nose, and throat specialist, she had played Ferd’s sister in a hard-core incest film with arty ambitions, Billy Rainey’s Brother, and kept the model file for Lowell Pickett, Ferd’s producer, up to date. For a month or so I slept in the Hollywood closet of her apartment on Leavenworth, while she “dated” a paroled gangster. We considered it the ultimate chic to consort with a genuine underworld type.
Lionel was svelte and Italian and sexy, and really did have an air of danger about him, though who he really was we never learned. We plotted a bank robbery with him, an intricate scheme worthy of a bad screenplay that never advanced past the outline. I couldn’t say now if we were serious or not. It was never clear at the time. We were desperate for something real to happen that would have consequences outside our little deer park. In any case, we all discussed the great plan so often and freely on the phone, between Leavenworth and Broderick Streets, that Lionel decided we were amateurs who would get arrested entering a bank. He tired of paying for Mary’s heroin, and disappeared.
We went everywhere in a posse, collecting rootless, powerfully attractive, emotionally flattened hippies of both sexes, who were soon employed on the psychedelic fringe of the porn business, which orbited around the Sutter Theater in the Tenderloin.
Local impresarios were shedding their squarish image, personified in the elephantine tits and corny floor show of burlesque queen Carol Doda in North Beach, by showcasing flower children and generally pandering to the waning hippie movement, hoping to capture a nonexistent youth market. Since the films held little interest for this target demographic (why watch other people fuck when you can easily do it, and probably them, yourself?), the porn theaters threw LSD parties and gala premieres that filled up with local celebrities and stoned kids from the Castro. Janis Joplin, all boas and bangles, turned up at one gala where my erstwhile porn boyfriend screwed an actress on an elevated duvet in the lobby, while Les Nickelettes performed their version of “Deep in the Heart of Texas” (“Deep in My Solar Plexus”). (I often ran into Janis on the street, where we both hunted for cock every day. She usually advised me to get a better wardrobe and asked if I had considered a sex change. She died later that same year.)
Our merry band dropped acid or mescaline or psilocybin and tripped off to the Nocturnal Dream Shows in North Beach, where the Cockettes performed at the Palace Theatre on Fridays. Or dropped into the Stud to shanghai boys to audition as porn models. The ménage on Broderick Street was becoming well-known as one of the less skeevy portals into the porn business. Whenever I found a prospective boyfriend, Carol or Ferd went to work persuading him to fuck an actress on camera. I believed I was in love with Ferd, and thought if I let him co-opt my lovers, he would love me back. They were feckless lovers, anyway. It was amazing how instantly they turned straight for a little cash.
A grimy curtain of sparkles hangs over these memories, probably an aftereffect of so much LSD. We lived allergic to daylight, when San Francisco felt like a graveyard under a bell jar. It had the muffled, overlit, queasy erotic gloom of Vertigo, with something in the grain of the daylight air a constant reminder that the drowsy dreamtime we occupied was sleepwalking to a bad end. Looking back, it was its own bad end: a narcotic lull in the motion of actual living, full of artificial, arbitrary dramas.
Ferd was a born leader. More so than was strictly good for him. Charismatic, more overtly willful than anyone else in his orbit, besides Carol. His mind was opulent, quick as lightning, stuffed full with the vintage furniture of Western civilization. His political notions were vaguely terroristic. If Carol behaved like a deposed monarch, Ferd suggested a restive Trotsky, marking time in exile with literary and aesthetic distractions. We aped his sensibility, his inflections, copied the style of his convoluted, Jamesian sentences. He would have liked to have been born in symbolist Paris, clutching a calla lily and gargling absinthe. He said things like, “We can’t shoot with Sandy today, she’s been remanded to the custody of her parents.”
Murkily, however, Carol piloted his decisions, and seemed to color his every thought. It was vaguely understood that they would marry each other and pursue a different life, in an indeterminate future—at least, I think it was. For Carol, everything happening then was an aberration, some detour she’d taken out of perversity. She often withdrew in neurasthenic silence to the top of the house on Broderick Street, at which times a convalescent pall descended on the rest of us. Whatever we happened to be doing, an image of Carol, in dark velvet dresses with crepe de Chine collars, pacing in solitary rumination, one scarlet fingernail holding her place in a volume of Mallarmé, was never far from anyone’s mind.
They were a formidable couple. Fond of elaborate, cruel psychological games, like characters in Laclos. They attracted paramours and hangers-on like regents of a medieval court, or, to put it baldly, they operated with good-cop-bad-cop teamwork, of a type I later observed in certain “power couples” of the 1980s art world, and elsewhere.
Ferd dallied with people, to use an apt, archaic word. He inspired a maniacal allegiance in those drawn to him, as he was uniquely quick-witted, inexhaustibly charming, and at twenty-seven possessed a quirky, haunted beauty of Strindbergian intensity. His looks became less beautiful, but more disturbingly intense in later years. I barely remember the few times we had sex. A rushed, furtive blowjob, usually, in Brando Batty’s pickup, the toilets of bars in the Castro, or the porn theater where The Straight Banana ran for several months—I was never alone with him much longer than a few minutes. There were always, always other people around, competing for his attention.
Carol seduced people into complicity with her grievances against him. In that way, she alienated him from them instead of her. She capriciously elevated one or another member of the tribe to the status of “special friend,” or turned on friends and banished them forever, as whimsy dictated. Our coven cast a Baudelairean spell over its accumulating human wreckage. It was notorious in circles it touched for inte
rnecine intrigues, secret liaisons, and Byzantine exit strategies, which everyone in it continually formulated. It was not quite the Mansons, but more like a diluted version of the sinister Lyman family on Fort Hill in Boston, home of The Avatar underground newspaper, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, and Maria Muldaur—now long-forgotten, anarcho-mystical artifacts of the 1960s American underground. It was lumbering toward an unpleasant finale from the outset, but we were young, gifted, and pretty in 1969. None of us gave a damn about where we were going and hadn’t a clue what to do when we got there.
Somewhere in the course of the magical mystery tour, when summer died and the bay breezes turned chilly, I migrated from Hamburger Mary’s to the child’s room in the house on Broderick. Moving my belongings was simple. I didn’t have any. Once installed, I found the room so constricting that I became a piece of animated furniture in the other parts of the house, most of the time in awkward orbit around Ferd and Carol.
I don’t recall the exact wording of the note. It was tacked to a corkboard, obscured by other tacked-up messages, in a basement corridor of the Otis art school, when Otis was in the Wilshire District near my former apartment in the Bryson. Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan, who pushed endurance art to a place where it really hurt, had given a performance seminar, in the course of which Sheree had nailed Bob’s penis to a block of wood. Someone in the audience had fainted. I had been to many Bob and Sheree events. At least one person fainted every time. We were leaving the building when I saw the note, scrawled on pumpkin-orange paper in quivery pencil strokes: “When I die, I want to come back with a smaller penis.” This struck me as the funniest thing I’d ever read, for some reason. I couldn’t stop laughing about it. I said, “You have to look at this.” Sheree had already seen it. It had been up there for a week. The boy who’d written it had hanged himself right after tacking it up for the world to read.