🚀 go-pugleaf

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eye WEEKLY                                                May 30, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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NAKED EYE                                                    NAKED EYE

                     IF YOU GO TO SAN FRANCISCO...

                                  by
                           WILLIAM BURRILL

Just got back from California and, as always, going to California 
brings back a lot of memories, both bad and really gruesome. The first 
time I went out to California I was 19. I drove west in my '66 MGB, 
which I'd been able to afford by working in a factory making 
electronic comb brackets from midnight to 7 every night for nine 
months. Yep, I reckon I made more comb brackets than any man-jack or 
woman-jack of you lot. So there. I made like millions of them. The 
fact that I never figured out what a comb bracket was for is not the 
point. The point is I never bothered to ask. I was that good.

Once winter came I quit my comb bracket career and bought the MGB and 
took off for California. I think I got the idea from a Led Zeppelin 
song when I was stoned on Toad Blotter. Sounded like a good idea at 
the time.

This was 1974, when we were in the grips of The Oil Crisis. You 
youngsters won't remember those days, but it was a time when the Big 
Multinational Fossil Fuel Spewing Giants banded together and pretended 
they were running dry of oil. (Just for a laugh. They were really 
hoarding the stuff and snickering about how much they could jack up 
the price once we all got sucked in.)

During the oil crisis drivers were only allowed to buy gas every 
second day, depending on whether your licence plate ended in an even 
or odd number (this is in the days before people had vanity licence 
plates that spell out cute things like "FUCKU"). You had to be lined 
up at the pumps by 7 a.m. or the day's ration would run out before you 
got yours. Often gas-crazed drivers tried to cut into the line, which 
resulted in many comical scenes involving complete strangers beating 
the shit out of one another with baseball bats. It passed the time.

The MGB had a fuel range of about 300 miles (a whole bunch of 
kilometres) so I had to take the trip west slowly, staying for two 
days at a time in places like Des Moines, Iowa, Kearny, Neb., 
Cheyenne, Wyo., Salt Lake City, Utah, and who could forget Elko, Nev.? 
I made the best of the experience by spending a lot of thoughtful 
hours drinking beer in cheap bars with the "locals," who usually had 
maybe two teeth and one brain cell among them.

                            DEADLY WEAPONS

Anyway. Got to California and did the cool hippie thing -- rented a 
dive in Berkeley, just outside San Francisco and Haight Ashbury, where 
my fellow hippies had flowers in their hair. Not stuck in their hair -
- growing right out of their filthy skulls (you could also grow 
vegetables in your hair if you didn't wash for long enough). My first 
day in the City of Love a crazed, acid-baked woman tried to stab me to 
death in a pizza joint. I did the brave thing. I ran around the 
restaurant screaming with the psycho in hot pursuit until she was 
tackled and disarmed by a black marine sergeant. I bought him a beer.

Next day my flophouse neighbor, some guy named J.D., came over to my 
room for a social call. I should have guessed something was odd when 
J.D. took off his shirt, put on my leather jacket and kept stroking 
the leather sleeves while he played my Ziggy Stardust album over and 
over. But I was a rookie in the City of Love and I just thought he was 
weird, like everyone else I'd met. I went to the corner for a six pack 
and when I returned J.D. was lying on my bed with his pants off and 
his hard on. Two days in town and already I'd had two dangerous 
weapons pointed at me. I tried to kick him out but he refused to 
believe I was serious until I pulled out my .22 calibre gas-powered 
Luger replica pellet gun and told him "Beat it!"

Bad choice of words...

                          SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE

At the Berkeley campus I met a pretty flower child named Poppy who was 
playing guitar. I introduced myself and soon we were trading songs. 
She would play "You Are My Sunshine" and then I would play, say, "Why 
Don't We Get Drunk And Screw?" You know. Love songs.

Poppy invited me to a "big party" at her place that night and I drove 
out there. To my surprise she lived in a huge spooky mansion. Poppy 
answered the door, told me to take off my shoes, leave the beer in the 
car and put out the cigarette. She introduced me to a room full of 
zombies as "Brother Bill" and soon I was surrounded by people who were 
making intense eye contact and rubbing my shoulders and praising every 
dumb thing I said. We sat down at a long Last Supper-like table that 
had no legs and ate a meal of some kind of slop that contained nothing 
edible and certainly no protein. No one was drinking, smoking or doing 
drugs. As for sex, when I took Poppy's hand and, you know, suggested 
we lose these clowns, she started to cry.

When I went outside for a butt I was closely tailed by a Chinese guy. 
He even followed me into the can. The dinner ended when some old 
short-hair in a bad Nehru shirt and huge medallion made a speech about 
one world, one people all living in peace and then invited me to join 
them "on the bus" for a trip to their private camp near Mendocino. 
Everyone else oohed and ahhhed and said yes! Please come on the bus, 
Brother Bill.

By now I had pretty much clued in to the fact that I was dealing with 
a room full of Moonies. So I pretended I was thrilled at the idea and 
even offered to give them my car and money. Which is what they seemed 
to be hinting at. I bullshitted them into trusting me and then -- when 
my minder let down his guard -- I bolted shoeless for the door and 
jumped into my MGB. It was blocked in by other cars but I got the 
engine fired up fast and burned sod while tearing across the front 
yard with several Brothers and Sisters in chase.

I wasn't ready to become a brainwashed Moonie. Not unless they served 
free beer. I hate grape Kool-Aid.

I didn't stop driving until I reached Los Angeles.

Now THAT was another story...

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