I applied, and it was like old home week. The editor was an amiable man named Bob Shea, the publisher a stocky man named Lou Kimzey. Lou’s background was in the motorcycle field, where his major claim to fame was draping a half-dressed model over the handlebars of the latest bike. At least for a while, it was something of a publishing sensation. (How Lou ended up as publisher of Cavalier, I never knew.)
I worked my way up from consulting editor to managing editor. I wasn’t top dog, but it was a nice place to work at and perhaps the biggest asset was that I no longer had to act as go-between between Uncle Bunky and the staff at Rogue.
There was only one fly in the ointment that bothered me. At Rogue I worked with a group of people who became personal friends. The staff at Cavalier were friendly enough, but there was none of the after-hours esprit de corps that had existed among the staffers at Rogue. No dinners or movies or plays after work. When people said “good night” it was obvious they had no desire to see you until morning.
The one exception was Bob Shea; he and I became close friends. We went together to a party at the L.A. Free Press, one of the first “underground” newspapers, where I got smashed on vodka gimlets and gobbled a hash brownie or two. What happened then was that I suddenly became painfully aware of just how drunk I was and had to call Walt Liebscher to take me home. I was very wary of any drug afterward that would fuck with my brain—pot didn’t screw up your head, it just made you feel better.
I asked Walt why the staff at Cavalier was relatively standoffish and said I was perfectly willing to change my toothpaste or underarm deodorant if that would help.
He looked surprised. “What can you do for them, Frank? Do you know anybody in the industry? Can you do anything for anybody?”
There was only one industry of note in Los Angeles at the time, and that was the film industry.
Could I do anything for anybody in it?
No.
I made friends elsewhere in Southern California, and it didn’t take long to discover that the state had a soft moral underbelly.
Maybe every state had one. New York certainly did, and Chicago had its Herb and company.
Walt introduced me to Mel Kells, who lived in a somewhat ramshackle house in Beverly Glen. Mel may have been house poor but he was certainly land rich—the land behind the house stretched up the sides of a hill for hundreds of feet. He had built a small cabin on it, which he rented out.
Mel’s house was never empty. He usually had a renter in the cabin, a boy or two living with him in the house, and at least three or four dogs of uncertain ancestry running around the house. Mel was a good cook and fed everybody who stopped by—mostly boys and young men. Mel’s house was a magnet for every young kid in the neighborhood.
Mel was a photographer who took the occasional male fashion photograph along with nude or nearly nude shots of young men—his “models.” The models were nice-looking, bare-assed in the photos, and Mel sold packets of them. He eventually turned his model photography into a magazine titled Mel Roberts’ Boys, a selection of photographs from his files—naked young men climbing out of swimming pools or lounging against wooden fences in the woods.
Not an unusual occupation—the L.A. newsstands were crowded with collections of naked men and women. Mel’s print run was about four thousand copies, most of which he mailed himself.
It was a nice, prosperous little business until Mel made a mistake. A centerfold in his latest issue showed a young man in his early twenties, with a much younger naked boy kneeling in front of him. The photograph was cropped at the critical point but you had a pretty good idea of what was going on.
At least the L.A. police did. They confiscated all four thousand copies, called Mel down to the office, and had him tear out the centerfold from each issue. They also confiscated his cameras, effectively putting Mel out of the magazine business.
What they did not confiscate was the extensive library of nude male photographs in Mel’s basement. Mel’s mail business tripled. I had no idea how “far” some of the photographs went, but most of those I saw were strictly nude shots.
Well … not quite. In a number of the shots, the young men showed erections. I had no idea how young some of the models were, but most seemed of age. A year or so after the closure of his magazine, Mel put out a hardbound book of some of his photographs.
The first book of “tasteful” nude shots was very successful, and the local bookstores sold hundreds of copies. The following book was guaranteed to sell many more—most of the models had erections.
Eventually even this offshoot of Mel’s publishing activities struck Mel and his bookstores as potentially dangerous.
Mel then hit upon the best idea of all. He did all of his own printing and turned out gorgeous twenty-by-twenty four-color prints of his better photographs for display in local art galleries. The photographs were tasteful nudes—a young boy climbing naked out of a swimming pool (his parents in the background) with the model showing plenty of bare butt. The photographs were attractive, legitimate in every way, and Mel sold them for thousands of dollars each in the art galleries in town. (Elton John was reputed to be a big purchaser.)
Mel had finally struck it rich by turning completely legitimate.
Mel and I became good friends and had the occasional lunch at the Apple Pan (best hamburgers and apple pie in town). I was never that friendly with his models, who were usually polite but standoffish. I was fond of one of the young men in Mel’s center gatefold—the oldest one, Alec, who was much older than the young man kneeling in front of him. He was a decent artist, had a motorcycle, and made most of his living (when he wasn’t posing for Mel) “detailing” some of the expensive cars in Glen and Beverly Hills that belonged to movie stars.
The relationship was polite but went no place at all. I was a little old for Alec—he preferred twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys. (Pedophiles aren’t always middle-aged men offering kids football tickets or used jerseys or priests who have a fondness for altar boys.) Alec was, of course, the idol of all the young boys in the neighborhood—he gave them rides on his bike and an occasional toke of pot. Both Mel and I warned Alec about playing around with the kids, and his answer was the same as that of every pedophile, including the occasional football coach or local priest: “But I really love them!” It never occurs to them that they may be hurting the child physically or leaving psychological scars that would haunt the kid for most of his life. (Ask me.)
Or maybe they just don’t give a damn.
Alec was a hero to the kids, but one of them reportedly told his sister about the relationship who in turn told her parents. Alec was arrested, but I understand that few of the boys would testify against him. The way I remember it, the police finally threw the book at him for the small pot garden behind his cabin.
He was released to a halfway house years later. With the current feeling toward pedophiles, I don’t know if he’ll ever go completely free.
In his twenties, Alec became friends with Rusty Mason. She had two kids, one of whom was the subject of the movie Mask, with Cher playing Rusty and Eric Stoltz playing the part of Rocky, a “lion-faced” boy with a face badly distorted by a rare disease. Rusty raised him right, never making allowances for him or treating him any different from any of the other kids in the neighborhood.
Rocky’s younger brother also became a close friend of Alec, who once gave him a week-long tour of the West on his motorcycle. When the kid grew older, he moved to San Francisco and became a member of BAGL, Bay Area Gay Liberation. (He eventually died of AIDS.) Rocky had died some years before, and my own feelings were that Rusty hadn’t deserved this.
Rusty eventually moved to San Francisco, and my agent convinced me there was a story there. After several months of taking notes, I realized there wasn’t one. Rusty was a “skimmed property,” and the only really interesting thing about this hippie woman from Brooklyn was her son with the lion face and the relationship between them. From a writer’s viewpoint that’s all there was,
but it was pure gold. (A year before writing this, Rusty was killed in an accident while riding her trike.)
One of my most memorable images of Mel before I moved to San Francisco some months later was when one of his dogs developed a disease that made it impossible for him to use his hind legs. Mel didn’t put him down. He lifted the dog’s hind legs and guided him into the backyard so he could take a pee.
You could excuse a lot for a man who was willing to do that.
XV
I DIDN’T SPEND all my evenings and weekends in Los Angeles, a city I was gradually beginning to hate. A city of few really decent restaurants, little transportation—buses were a rarity—and four million strangers.
On the weekends I usually grabbed a flight to San Diego and spent a few days with Earl Kemp (Hamling’s right-hand man) and his family. His backyard was one huge swimming pool with a twelve-foot fence so none of the neighbors could see in. The pool was usually filled with naked teenagers and young men in their early twenties. Earl’s wife, Nancy, cooked for the mob—she eventually tired of it but not for years, when she remarried.
Occasionally Earl and I, along with a couple of kids, would grab sleeping bags and go down to Baja California.
On one such trip, we found a stream and followed it for a few miles, slipping on an occasional rock. One of the kids, Robbie, had shed his cutoffs, and an occasional flash of moonlight would catch his bare butt.
We finally found what Earl considered a suitable campsite and spread out our sleeping bags, all in utter darkness, since Earl’s flashlight had burned out its batteries days before.
Morning was a shock. We had camped in the middle of a garbage dump. The days were hot enough so leftover footstuffs had long since baked away. Other campers had thoughtfully left their tin cans in little mounds, which we had luckily avoided.
We trudged over some sand dunes to the ocean and met a German couple and their kids who were skinny-dipping. They invited us in, and Earl and Robbie shed what little clothing they had on and ran into the water. So did I—but I kept on my Cooper-Jockeys, much to everybody’s amusement. (I was much too shy—a lifelong handicap.)
Sometimes I, Earl, and a young friend named Steve would go down to Tijuana. At that time it was a run-down, poverty-stricken town stitched together with dirt roads. Nevertheless, it had some great restaurants. (The cheaper joints, crowded with American sailors, had floor shows that left nothing to anybody’s imagination. When they brought out the donkey, I left.)
Back at Cavalier, a new hire, Peter Martin, had taken a weekend trip to San Francisco and came back wildly enthusiastic about a “Human Be-In” that had taken place—twenty-five thousand hippies making music, dancing, dropping tabs of acid, and smoking pot in one of the meadows in Golden Gate Park.
“It was the biggest block party in the world!” Martin enthused.
According to Peter, people on Haight Street, the center of it all, were long-haired, friendly, quick to offer you a toke, and were devoted fans of the various rock groups in the city—the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, etc.
A party, I thought. Free food, rock bands. And most of all, twenty-five thousand people in one place having a great time. It was something brand new for the country; it hit the media like a boulder thrown in a pond of water, and the waves soon flooded the country. First the underground press—the Los Angeles Free Press, the Oracle, and the Berkeley Barb enthused about it, and then the major media joined in. The San Francisco hippies were the new Christians.
Another “be-in” was held in Los Angeles, and I think it was then that Lou had his Big Idea. He was not one to let a new cultural craze pass unnoticed, and soon we came out with a few issues of a magazine titled Paperbag. It was printed on a form of rough kraft paper and carried articles by us fraudulent hippies on staff such as “The Death of Haight,” “Playing It Cool About Pot,” and a homage to the death of “Chocolate George,” a friendly Hell’s Angel whose nickname came from his taste for chocolate milk. One of the meadows in the park filled up with mourners, the Grateful Dead played, joints were passed around, and everybody had a great time.
I think our circulation could have been counted in the hundreds. The hippies could smell a fake a mile away, and nobody had gone out there to read magazines anyway. If they read anything it was the Oracle, a colorful underground paper that reached a circulation of a hundred thousand, and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which quickly became a bible for the crowds of adventure seekers and runaways who soon came to the Haight.
In my free time, I went back to writing fiction. I’d found four pages of a story in the bottom of my trunk and decided to finish it. The story had been intended for Astounding, which paid three cents a word. At twenty thousand words that came to $600, which I could really use.
My agent didn’t send it to Astounding—she sent it to Playboy. They said cut it by five thousand words and they’d run it. As a lead.
For three grand.
After all those years at a penny or two a word, I’d finally hit the big time.
Cavalier was going down the tubes by this time, and the end came quickly. Bob Shea joined Arthur Kretchmer (Bob had become editor of Cavalier when Kretchmer had departed for Playboy), and Peter Martin, our new hire, decided to become an investigative reporter and followed a story down on Union Street.
Aside from Peter, the first time I heard about the Haight was at a party in Los Angeles. I was with a group of Hollywood hippies—beads, bells, Jesus hair, and $100 worth of the latest mod clothing—who were counseling a young navy deserter on what he should do next. When we were alone I asked him if there was any difference between Hollywood hippies and the San Francisco type.
“They’re a lot more real, man—they took good care of me. Look up Emmett Grogan when you get there. He’ll tell you what it’s like.”
I had a little money now and decided to go to San Francisco to see what the noise was all about.
On the trip to Frisco with a friend, we picked up a Mexican whore. She was dumpy and weathered, midforties, and said she’d once knifed a Hell’s Angel who had beaten her up. She rhapsodized about the early Diggers. “They feed me, they give me clothes, they real nice to me.”
We let her out at the Embarcadero, bought her a cup of coffee, and then she blew our minds by giving us an Indian head penny “from my coin collection.”
That night I spent at a hole-in-the-wall in North Beach, trying to ignore the cries of the barkers below and the noise of the tourists leaving Carol Doda’s topless club.
I didn’t know much about the Haight, but decided I’d like to live close to it but not in it.
For $70 a month I found a small basement apartment—1492 Sixth Avenue (easy number to remember). I had made myself comfortable when there was a scratching at the door. I opened it and a skinny cat stalked in, looked around, and then at me. We had a staring contest for a moment, then he settled down in a corner and ignored me. (I found out later on that raccoons would come around late at night, and if they found a cat, they’d take it apart.)
The cat looked perfectly comfortable in the corner and I decided the apartment belonged to it. The previous tenants had obviously left it behind. My duty was to feed it and give it water and then it would tolerate me.
I said, “Hey, cat,” and it turned and looked at me and I guessed that was what the previous tenants had called it.
That afternoon I walked down Haight Street past Ashbury, where the Grateful Dead were supposed to be living—there was a guitar nailed to the front door—and somebody waved at me. I waved back, thinking it was probably Bob Weir, a member of the band.
Lou had given me the address of Mouse and Kelly, the two most prominent artists of rock posters. I think it was Mouse who opened the door and asked me what I wanted. There were about a dozen people in the living room, and the smoke was fairly heavy.
“Lou Kimzey said I should drop by and say hello.”
I had everybody’s attentio
n then. “That son of a bitch!” Mouse screamed. “He still owes us money!”
It seemed Lou had bought cartoons from them for some of his magazines and forgot about payment. He was thousands of miles away, and what was their hurry anyway?
“What the hell do you do?” I think it was Kelly, but they were all curious—it was obvious I’d just come to town. “You a friend of the bastard?”
I got smart very fast. “He published an article or two of mine,” I said. “I usually write science fiction.”
The tension in the room immediately simmered down, and I was waved to a spot in the circle. When the joint came around, I took a huge puff and fought like mad to keep from coughing. (I couldn’t help thinking of the time at Rogue when I had warned the staff that anybody caught smoking weed would automatically be canned.) Apparently most of my new friends were science fiction buffs, and if writing it was what I did, I must be okay.
I left and wandered down Haight Street to Golden Gate Park. Most of the apartment windows were open, and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was blasting out. The people on the street frowned at me—I was out of place, a stranger from another world they’d left a few months ago or maybe only a few weeks.
Just past the entrance to the park was a lagoon and a hill that had been nicknamed “Hippie Hill.” It was dotted with a few dozen guys sunning themselves, passing a joint around, and watching the parade on the sidewalk below.
“Hey, Frank!” somebody shouted. “Come on up!”
I glanced up the hill—it took me a moment to place him. A photographer whom we had given a few assignments to at Rogue. He was sitting next to another contributor who had been briefly on our masthead, Jim Sagebiel.
I stretched out on what was left of the grass, unbuttoned my shirt, and let the sun shine through. Strange world, I thought—a lot different from L.A. I had a hunch I’d be there for a few months.
Not So Good a Gay Man Page 11