Chapter 7

San Francisco - 1971

I was apartment sitting for a casual acquaintance of mine who was best high school friends with a casual college girlfriend-lover. The apartment was one of those big old built in the twenties buildings with heavy plaster swirls on the ceiling, tile bathroom with claw foot tub, mirrored lobby with nooks for statues type of place. It had a Murphy bed hidden in a large closet behind a multi-paned mirror on a pivot and the thing worked so it was handy when I had a guest and needed more room. But usually when I didn't have an overnight guest it was the couch in the living room and my down sleeping bag spread out over me.

Laurie, the apartment's owner had a summer long internship and a lot of plants in her place. I had a new job in San Francisco and this apartment sitting gave me a way to save up the extortionate first-months-last-months and security and cleaning deposits SF landlords charged though the nose for. Besides being a much better place to live than I could have otherwise afforded, it gave me a chance to line up something really good by mid August when Laurie would be getting back.

Meanwhile I was getting the Murphy bed out a lot: Being a heterosexual that can dance and loves eating women and was reasonably well hung and who was hip enough to live in SF was definitely a good thing to be that summer. I had hooked up with several women and the word of mouth ... and I mean that in a literal way ... got me more than enough action.

Beanie was a character, a children's clown who gave away balloons on the Wharf and who lived in an old warehouse down in the Mission district. She and I had fallen into bed after meeting by chance in a bar while I was familiarizing myself with the City's weather peculiarities: It was July! I was having soup and recovering from freezing my ass off in my way-too-light windbreaker that I had erroneously thought would be adequate while waiting for a bus to come up Columbus. Nobody was strolling casually around the outdoor tourist sights in the fog and wind and her day was sucking financially, so she was bagging it. I had no idea of what she looked like under her clown costume. It was just interesting sitting there at the front of the bar looking out of the window for the sight of a bus and having a wasted afternoon and kind of interesting in a 'now this is a tall story in the making' way. I mean, come on! How many of you guys out there have ever hit on a girl wearing red hair standing straight out in frizzy fright wig, red ball nose, baggy assed red poke dot clown suit, size twenty five orange shoes and wearing whiteface?

Raise your hands if you have.

Yeah, she was funny, and I managed to talk her into coming over to my apartment to have lunch and as it would save her a fifteen minutes waiting for a bus out in the cold transfer and one thing lead to another and when she got out of the bag she was this very trim dancer who could shake that thang. We became casual but steady lovers and would usually go out dancing a few times a week and finish the evening with a few clothing optional events in the aforementioned Murphy bed. Good fuck buddies, although that term wasn't used back then, and it was really great dancing with her. She had a good solid streak of 'let it all hang out' abandon to her dancing that could get really down and dirty. We found a kind of strange creative spark bouncing around in the bars and the club where we usually danced we had become something of a nightclub act. She and I did a dirty tango and I should never have gone out wearing sweat pants that night. After the bartender had told me 'never do that sort of thing in here again, ' he handed me a shot of Gold and said it was on the house: Best In House Entertainment Award, Duffy's Tavern, 1971. She was one of two or three fairly steady sexual relationships I was having, all of us just playing these great body games with each other. Obviously, I was in no mood to mess with a good thing, and I was just marveling at my own life. I had a real life job taking pictures for an advertising agency in San Francisco and it was my first real job doing what I loved to do. It was a bottom level position but I had lucked into having one of the judges at a photo competition being a partner in the agency. After the competition he'd asked to see my portfolio and then the job offer. So here I was, just dropped out after my sophomore year in college and going around the Bay area taking photos of a huge number of completely different things. Microprocessors one day, designer houses the next: It was a heck of an 'on the job' training program as part of the time I was expected to be the roadie for the more experienced photographers doing the major shoots. I'd usually pick up a lot of stuff over lunch that you just don't get in classrooms, like what constitutes the 'the most essential things to have in your camera bag' horror stories of how to cope with what is hitting the fan.

Sometimes you find yourself in a place and time where it is all coming together and you know how good it is going and you're really happy with your life and what is really strange, you know you're happy with your life. You don't look back and see you were happy; you know it while it's happening. That was the summer of 71 for me.

Being as we both had jobs that weren't nine to five, Beanie and I got together during the day or on week day nights. Generally we were both busy on the weekends, her with her clown gig and me with whatever weekend event that the ad agency came up with me to shoot pictures of. It was not the type of job that you show up for and do your thing for eight hours and leave it at the door on your way out of the office. While my schedule was theoretically freer than a nine to fiver's, it actually worked out that I was doing a lot more than forty hours a week. But as it wasn't a 'you have to work overtime' scene, and it was doing what I really loved and was good at, man, so what? So I was putting in sixty hours or so one week, it was just an extra twenty hours of fun as far as I was concerned. And as far as being 'exploited' by being on salary, I was rubbing shoulders and picking the brains of men who had been doing this gig since the days of Speed Graphics and glass plates: What the other photographers didn't know about photography wasn't worth knowing.

Let me give you an example of what kind of guys I was hanging out with. One day down on Market Street one of the older photographers at the ad agency and I both finished up with our editors at the same time. We went out for lunch and he ran into a guy he knew from being a combat photographer during WWII, so we all went out to lunch at this Hof Brau. I got introduced and basically listened to these guys talking war stories and about what happened to numerous people they knew in common. We got back outside and said good byes and he wished me good luck with my work and we went to get the car my coworker had stashed in a garage. He was going to drop me off on his way as I had taken a city bus downtown to avoid the parking hassle. That's when I found out that the average looking guy we'd been having lunch with had shot that Iwo Jima flag raising picture. The look I got on my face must have spoken volumes because he cautioned me about 'being a fan' and pestering Joe with a lot of questions about that world famous photo. I listened to him but had this severe urge to 'be a fan' and bug the hell out of the guy for details on that image.

'Down boy!' Was the way my mentor put it and he had it right: How would you like to have just one conversation with every stranger you meet about something you did thirty years ago? It was a damn good piece of advice and another one I took to heart that served me well in the years ahead when I would be meeting world famous people: Don't talk about what they did in the past, keep the conversation on what is going on in the now.

Meeting Joe Rosenthal and having a casual lunch with him and not knowing who the hell he was and him treating me like just another guy: That took some time to wrap my head around.

Anyway, there was a lot of that sort of stuff coming my way. 'Pinching myself' stuff, you know? 'I had to pinch myself to make sure that it was really happening' kinds of things: I was meeting people whose photographs I'd looked at with longing while I was studying photography in college. Ansel Adams, Joe Rosenthal, Detroit Annie. You probably know Detroit Annie better as Anne Liebowitz, but she was just another scuffling-to-make-it photographer at the time. There was a lot of people I crossed paths with in those days that later on went on to become world famous. It was a time of infinite possibilities opening up in my life and I was totally dumbfounded by my lucking into this gig and finding myself out here on the west coast.

The photos I was taking in my spare time of Rock and Roll stars kind of fell into my lap. I've always loved music but have absolutely no talent musically. A well known British rock and roller was hired by a speaker manufacturer to pitch their products and I got to be the photographer on that shoot, just by dumb luck. The guy that was supposed to be shooting it stepped on a nail and gotten an infected foot, so I went from being an assistant on the set to being the head honcho. I was really lucky in that the other guys in the crew knew a hell of a lot more about doing indoor ad shoots than I did at the time. They got me through the perils of set up while I hob nobbed with the rock star, building a rapport with him the same way that I would with any other model and the pics came out well. Later on he got me a back stage pass and I loaded up a Nikkormat with a super fast (read- expensive as all hell!) lens on it and some pro film that I later pushed three f-stops developing and he liked my work. The ad agency was very cool about my 'side jobs' that came out of all that and let me sell my pictures to the various rock and roll magazines, which is where my career eventually wound up being.

So besides having a full time gig during the week, any weekend I had free I was at the Fillmore, or the Avalon, or at Pepperland in Marin or over at The Great American Music Hall in Berkeley or wherever some rock and roll group that I thought worth the effort of shooting was playing. I made friends with stagehands and made sure to give Bill Graham some copies of my work (that he liked, by the way) and was slowly getting a foot in the door. And anytime the agency I worked for had a need for a commercial ad with rock and rollers in it, I was the guy they picked as I was a lot younger than any of the other staff photographers and could relate to the long hairs better, so I got all of that work tossed my way.

But that stuff was just starting to come my way and it was a hell of an interesting summer, my first summer in California: I was just out of school, but the ad agency liked my work, I was learning from some of the very best photographers that I had ever meet in my life, I had a really nice apartment to live in, I was getting laid more than I had even in college (and those were the pre Aids, free love, tag end of the sixties days) and I know if I was to try and keep up with the kind of life I was living back then I would be dead in a week these days. There were a lot of mornings where I dragged my ass out of bed by sheer will power and went to work on way too little sleep.

'Sleep is for the weak' was my motto that summer. If I got ten hours of sleep at a time, it was generally on a Sunday morning; say between the hours of five a.m. and sometime in the afternoon. I think that happened maybe two or three times that summer. The ten hours of sleep, that is.

Well, just below the kitchen window in 'my' apartment was a notch in the building and the windows there faced the windows in the kitchens across the hall from me. There was a guy in his forties that lived right across from me who went to work in a suit and tie every weekday. But one floor down there was a couple of girls that had a place together. One was flat out gorgeous red head and the other one was this sweet looking round faced girl with a an infectious grin that I had said hi to a few times in passing in or out of the building. I'd also seen Red in the foyer, but she had an attitude of 'I'm much too cool for you' stuck-up-ness that was a pain in the ass, so I had stopped saying hello to her but ignored her right back whenever our paths would cross. One morning, she asked me if I could get her car started, and I was late for a shoot and just said 'no', not having the time to explain that a six volt Volkswagen couldn't jump start a 12 volt car. I got a lot more frost from her after that, but frankly, I didn't care for her, nor her attitude, so it was no great loss, but I did like her roommate, who was not as good looking but a lot friendlier. A few days after Red had asked me to jumpstart her car, I ran into her roomie at the mail boxes in the building and she asked me what had happened and I explained to her about the electrical systems and how I was running late for work so didn't have time to explain it to Red. I found out her name was Julie and Red's was Laurie though.