Since I don't think very many people in North America are outside right now, I'll post two articles instead of one.
A good crowd at the 'Plough'
I think it was that very first day that Phil introduced me to Rick W., or ‘Bones’ as everyone called him. He was living in the apartment right below us. For some odd reason Phil was very excited that we should meet, talking of it as soon as I arrived. He’d just met him a few weeks earlier and as they both played guitar and knew some of the same songs they became friends, though Bones was by far the more serious player, with compositions of his own and plans to make money performing in some of the local bars.
We met and became fast friends, so much so that the three of us decided to rent a flat together above an Irish pub called the ‘Starry Plough’. It was a long skinny apartment with a very small kitchen, bathroom and large closet near its entrance, and a hallway leading through a bedroom which you had to pass through to get to a large living room with bay windows overlooking the street at the front of the building. The place was cheap and vacant because it was right above the stage of the bar, where music played fairly loud till two a.m. every night. You could hear it just about as well in our flat as if you were sitting in the bar.
There was a loft in one corner of this large living room covered with curtains. That’s where Bones slept. Phil had the none too private bedroom and I would take the long couch or sometimes the closet, which had a double mattress in it, if the couch were full of people. It was a bohemian’s dream pad.
Bones had found the place when he talked to the owner of the bar about playing there, which he occasionally did. The ‘Plough’ was a small venue holding maybe sixty people when full, very dark inside, featuring Guinness on tap (served warm) and Irish music and dance (young women in bright traditional costumes) every Monday night. The other nights were various forms of rock and roll with the loudest and most popular bands on weekends.
The place had one long bar along one side and a kitchen behind that at the end of it, with a serving window. It had four tables next to it and on the other side a dance floor and stage, with five booths against the far wall. It had great character, dark and smelling of beer. At the near end of the bar there was a five-gallon glass bottle always full of bills and coins, even though it was frequently emptied, money for the I.R.A. It said on it ‘Irish relief fund’. But everyone knew the real cause and destination. There were two other bars in the U.S.A. affiliated with this one, one in San Francisco called the ‘Plough and Stars’ and another in Boston of the same name. This was the real thing for an Irishman.
There was a rule in this university town that no bar or liquor store could be located within ten blocks of campus, so the ‘Plough’ sat right on the edge of that border and only a few streets away from a very run down and dangerous section of Oakland, a no man’s land for whites after dark. Because of this poor location, weekday nights, except Mondays, were slow, with fifteen or twenty patrons after dark. Evenings were brisk with a colorful crowd of Irish and would-be Irish in for a pint after work, before heading home to the wife. The place had real atmosphere, a whole strange world unto itself, and this is what I moved into December first, less than two weeks after returning to Berkeley.
Bones himself had just arrived in the Bay area for the first time a month earlier. He grew up in rural, southern Iowa, a small farming town. He got in trouble with the law there (probably for a bag of pot) and the judge gave him three choices: 1) go to jail for a time, 2) join the Army, or 3) marry his girlfriend, (who was pregnant by him) and leave the State for good. He chose number three. So he ended up in Arizona for over a year doing hard electrical work in some mines, living with his wife, Robin. They had the baby there but the infant died in its first year from crib death. The relationship went sour and he had to get away, not only from that State but that way of life. He came to the right place.
Besides being a good guitar player and a fine singer, he was a very affable person, ready to start a conversation with anyone he chanced to meet, especially women, and even play them a song. After the hell he’d been through, I would say that meeting new friends and dating as many women as possible was his chief goal at this time and living above a bar was an ideal situation. He had a little money saved up, like me, and neither of us were looking for work, just fun.
As we were never in competition we became close friends. He liked my open talk and friendliness, my odd manners and my constantly quoting things out of strange books. He had little education, (southern Iowa) but a strong mind and curiosity. He considered me a poet and asked me to collaborate with him on some lyrics he was working on. I happily complied and he was happy with the results.
Phil on the other hand was in competition with him and everyone else on earth. He was loud and big and wild. All three of us had long hair, a sign of independence from the status quo. But Phil was Irish to a fault and liked to be the center of attention. Also, he had a stamina for drinking and doing drugs that one learned very soon never to imitate. I’d learned this from our first dorm days, five years earlier. Every hour for him was party time.
I remember once in those first few weeks that I came back to our pad one afternoon and handed him, in front of Bones, a glass vial containing close to three grams of extremely pure and potent methedrine (which I’ll get to shortly). Handing it to him as a surprise gift I said: ‘Now what would Lenny Bruce do in this situation’? He opened it, put the vile to his nose and snorted up in an instant an amount that would have equalled ten or fifteen very long lines. He yelled out: “Oh no, what have I just done?” A moment later he was running and screaming through the rooms, finally to the kitchen for a bottle of whisky and a fresh beer. That was the antidote and that was Phil.
After about three very crazy weeks Bones told Phil to move out. Bones knew the owner, signed the lease and had the upper hand. Two alpha dogs under the same roof couldn’t coexist. Without a fight, realizing it was for his own good, Phil moved back to his hometown of San Diego.
