Huey
Huey was a few years younger than me. He had long, blond hair, shoulder length, was very fit and handsome and had mild manners. He had little formal education but had traveled widely, vagabond style, because he’d been for many years a Grateful Dead head, following their concert tours wherever. He was so fanatical in this that he even followed them to Egypt, to the pyramids when he could only afford a one-way ticket. While he was there word got out of such amazing devotion, and when the band heard about it they let him fly back to the States with the roadies. He showed me a large packet of scribbled notes of these adventures and asked me to edit them and put them in book form, but I never got around to it. Five years later in my life I would have gladly taken up such a rare proposal.
We became fast friends. The first two months there were like living the dream. Huey had no money. Henri only had the bare minimum for him and his wife. But I still had a few hundred dollars and was willing to share. We had a beat-up Toyota to drive but it was in a very sad condition. We went to the dented can store, the day-old bread store and so we had cheap food. We had our daily occupation, a boat to build and dreams to live on.
Henri was a great teacher. He’d show us tricks of carpentry, the Spanish winch, how much a single nail could hold by tapping it just one inch into a beam, lifting himself off the ground with a rope around it. I had plenty of hours to read, all my backpack books, (I was reading through Mathew Arnold at the time) while Huey loved wandering the abandoned quays and waterfront, bringing back all sorts of junk he’d discovered. Sometimes I’d go with him and we’d talk the whole time. Every new setting, every new way of life entered into, is a honeymoon.
I would say that Henri even taught us a little bit about ethics. He was an extremely hard worker and he loved it. It was like breathing to him. He was almost ill at ease at rest. He took very short breaks or none at all. His lunch sandwich was gone in a minute, down the hatch. Though a loner, he wasn’t antisocial. He talked to us, with us, while we worked and I could tell he enjoyed our company. We laughed a lot.
He’d been working on this boat for many years all alone, (maybe five) so I know he didn’t mind solitude. And I could see that there were many types of people that he didn’t like and would have nothing to do with. But he praised industry, energy and ingenuity in anyone.
He came upon me early one foggy morning reading Mathew Arnold on the deck. I suspect his own scholastic career had been nipped in the bud by the war and had no love of books, but he paused upon finding me, as I leaned against a hard wall sitting right on the wooden deck, not a comfortable seat and not a warm morning, but I was totally engrossed in my book. This must have puzzled him, seeing intellectual pleasure prevail over comfort. He hesitated a moment, asked what book I was reading and said: ‘good for you’.
The only time I noticed a bit of Prussian in him was in a rare boastfulness. He told us how he once broke his wrist falling off a ladder, (but then he pointed out right where the accident happened and how and what to watch out for) and how he went right back to work after the cast was put on, and how he broke it twice again because he gave it no time to heal, the pain making him work harder. I also recall that he ate aspirins all of the time and drank a single beer at the end of each day before driving home. Such was Henri.
Every week we’d get a few sets of visitors. The boat was plainly visible from the road and seeing such an oddity people would pull in the open gate. Henri didn’t mind the visitors, literally. He acted like they didn’t exist. They could wander through the boat all they wanted but when they asked him a question he would ignore them or say he was busy now, and he was always busy.
Huey and I took a different tact. We started giving tours and answering all the questions we could, getting Henri off the hook. When we started running low on money we even set up a donation box with a sign at the end of our tour route and made a little income.
My father was one of these visitors, taking a few hours off a business trip and dropping by. He loved boats and sailing. In fact, as a young engineer he’d spent much of his free time with a partner, George Hinterhauler designing and building a ‘Shark’, the first fiberglass hulled ship twenty-seven feet long. We had number ‘seven’ and sailed across Lake Ontario when I was a boy. George quit his job where my father worked, built many more and became a millionaire, with a large shop in Queenstown. My father might have been his equal partner in this but kept his job that took me to France, Geneva N.Y. and finally California and Berkeley. I’m glad he did. An uneventful childhood in one place often leads to an uneventful, dull future.
As he toured the vessel he was amazed at the complexity of the carpentry. Henri even deigned to converse with him for half an hour after I introduced him as my father. Once again I was near-broke and he left me with a handshake and a compliment on my newfound job. But I liked that about him. I didn’t bring up the subject of money. I was a bohemian. If I had he would have opened his wallet instantly and given me what he had with him or sent me more. But I didn’t.
When low on food Huey and I spent a day applying for food stamps. It was a huge room in Oakland filled with hundreds of Black people in long lines, with many guards with guns monitoring them. We waited for hours. Finally, the Black lady at the counter, pissed that two ragged white boys stood before her, rudely gave us the forms. But we had our mailing address at the boat and did everything right and got our stamps a week later, fifty something dollars each.
I’m going to jump ahead a few months to paint a contrast. It was the only other time I ever applied for food stamps but this time I was living with Kim in a free little shack behind a house in the flatlands of Berkeley. I told Kim of the nightmare in Oakland, and a five-hour wait. Norma was visiting and suggested we use the Marin office. She would drive us there and we could use her mailing address. So off we went.
Now Marin was the second richest county in the States, (some place near Denver beat it). The food stamp office was located in a cathedral-like glass structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. We walked down a long, carpeted, empty hallway, the sunlight streaming in from all sides, into a plush sitting room with a coffee table and the latest magazines before the couch. But we didn’t have to sit down. The receptionist, who looked like a young Shirley MacLaine, wearing bright red lipstick and a pleasant perfume, greeted us instantly with a big smile because we were the first customers she’d had in a long time. She helped us fill out the forms and told us they’d be processed that very day and our stamps sent out the next.
Before leaving Marin we stopped to pick up a six-pack of ‘Lucky’ beer because it was cheaper here than in the slums of Oakland. Where the rich live, everything is cheaper, more pleasant and sweet smelling. Where the poor live everything is dangerous and Hell-like, more expensive and lower in every quality and way imaginable. I know it's a crude aphorism but true, shit only flows downhill. Heaven is always a place high above us.
