Skipping ahead twelve years, John Seebach, a life-long friend and my son Will in 1989.
John Seebach, though he was my favorite new friend, was not one of our most frequent visitors as he had a job as a projectionist at a small Berkeley cinema four or five nights a week. It didn’t pay much, being only five hours a night but it was all he needed for his bohemian lifestyle. He could watch movies for free and sneak me and Bones in through a fire door, which he did occasionally. His single room and bathroom, being just inside the edge of Oakland and in a rundown neighborhood, was only fifty dollars a month. The rest of his earnings went to food and beer, and for that they were sufficient. The one commodity he valued was free time and in that he was rich.
He’d grown up in Berkeley, a native son. His father was a pot smoking jazz musician and his mother, (strange combination) a strict policewoman. He’d seen firsthand and joined in all the riots and changes of the late sixties, and had imbibed, like many do, a great deal of knowledge of literature and the arts by just living near the University, among so many bookstores and coffee shops and highly educated companions. He’d even worked at Moe’s bookstore for a while, knew Janis Joplin well and had shot up heroin with her a few weeks before she died.
I find it striking just how much knowledge disseminates and radiates from a good university. You could say it ‘pollinates’ the town. With all the bookshops, the coffee shops, the overheard conversations in restaurants and bars or on any public bench, it’s as if learning fills the air. I remember Larry Davis, whom we called Lawrence of Berkeley, a street person who almost never worked, living off some small remittance in near abject poverty, telling me one day in our casual conversation, as mine had drifted there, that he knew very well the history of Zenobia, queen of Palmyra. Another friend, a house painter, read through Herodotus at my suggestion. Bones, from Iowa, picked up a good store of literature and history from our company. So, I would call John, with his sharp ear and mind and voracious reading, having never attended classes at the university, a highly educated individual, much more so than many of the students who did.
His complex character unfolds in future pages, as we were close friends and spent much time together over the next eleven years. About a month after our acquaintance began, John came to our pad one afternoon very excited and eager to introduce us to a friend of his who had just returned that day from San Diego. His name was Kim V.
Of all the many people one meets in life I was never so lucky or blessed with a truer friendship than the one that began on that day.
John and Kim, though best friends for many years, were opposites. John was heavy set, bearded, scruffy, a sloven in dress at best, a pure intellectual whose eyes and mind flashed conversing in any company, impressive to many intellectual women but rarely bedded.
Kim was handsome to a fault, well dressed, a would-be rock star who convinced everyone he actually was one, on first impression. He was very talkative in a Hollywood sort of lingo, (in fact our nickname for him was ‘Hollywood’ or sometimes ‘Wiz-Waz’). He was a lady killer, that is he could wrap almost any woman around his little finger in minutes with his persona, not deep in school learning but an open encyclopedia of current pop culture, with the dates and names and performances of even minor stars at the tip of his tongue, as he read the music magazines regularly and seemed to memorize them.
The success he so promised never did come his way. He was a part time guitar player with a few flashy riffs but never practiced enough to be competent in a band. He had been a tennis star in high school, from a rich family in San Diego, but an injury ended that and all ties to his family. He was wandering around broke doing odd carpentry jobs (at which he also excelled but never persevered) for just enough money to wander some more, often crashing on a friend’s floor or in some woman’s bed for a few nights or weeks, seldom more.
It was at this point in his ragged glory that I met him and even though we were more unlike than he and John, (for John was outgoing and gregarious as he was while I was reserved in many ways) we hit it off right away. Although his character, prima facie, seemed shallow, he had a talent of seeing, as they say, right through people in a minute and in me he must have perceived something deep and rare because we quickly became true friends.
For me it was his novelty at first. My first impression of him was what the French call a ‘Bon Vivant’. But soon I realized that his respect and attachment to me was far purer and deeper and more trustworthy than anyone else’s. And I reciprocated in kind with equal devotion to him. It was a mutual, deep respect for each other’s intelligence.
Strange to say, though we hit it off right away, I don’t remember spending any time at first with Kim alone. We were always in the company of others. By late January there were often five or six people dropping by, sitting around our coffee table each night, doing lines and drinking beers, talking, playing songs, smoking joints until the early hours of morning. Kim was a welcome part of this set for his lively stories and comradery. He had a sort of aura of fame about him that captivated and impressed both Bones and me. We could see he was a very rare individual. He was sleeping on John’s floor most nights but we gave him our couch the nights he stayed late. After three a.m. it was dangerous to walk the ten blocks through the ghetto to John’s.
Our friendship quickly jelled in this group. Whenever either one of us said anything especially poignant or witty in a subtle way (which happened a lot) we would acknowledge it with a quick glance or nod to each other, like some insider joke, knowing we were the only two who got it, John excepted, but he was only occasionally there. So a secret bond and language developed between us. He called me Robert with the French pronunciation, a silent ‘t’. I rarely descended to nicknames and called him ‘Kim’. Sometime in February he came over one evening a little early as it was his birthday. Just Bones and I were there. The occasion demanded a present so I laid out a gram of speed on a mirror, chalked it up and spelled his name in big letters with the razor blade. When I brought it to him, like a cake, he didn’t know quite what to do and thought it was incumbent on him to snort the whole thing, like blowing out candles. He started, to our horrified surprise and we quickly stopped him, handing him a bag to save it in as a private stash for weeks, as a gift. But in the first seconds he’d consumed almost a quarter gram, enough to keep him ripped the rest of the night. It was almost like Phil all over again.
