And Then There Was Elizabeth

 And then there was Elizabeth.  She was part of a San Francisco State poetry group that would meet at our little house on Geary Street back in 1969.  I was 22 and she was 30.  I was smitten almost immediately.  And somehow, we ended up together.  I had only lost my virginity about a month previous, and was feeling sexually inept but she was pretty and pretty patient with me and not at all aggressive.  She hung out with a fascinating group of people, all of them nearly a decade older than me, and some of them holdovers from the beat generation.  Most of them were into poetry and music.

 Barbara was kind of frumpy, short, wore glasses, and was married to Larry, an intense black man who played the flute.  Dorothy was the real beauty of the group with high cheek bones, perfect skin and a patrician air about her.  She was married to Donald, another black man who sported a huge Afro and was very outgoing.  There were several others as well whose names I no longer remember, although I do remember the couple that decided to name their child Amadeus, and remember thinking “Oh, he’s gonna love that when he gets older!”

 Most of them lived either in Berkeley or Oakland.  Elizabeth worked over there as a bank teller.  She liked my poetry, and apparently liked me as well because we spent quite a bit of time together, and I had no money and no vehicle.  She pretty much schlepped me all around in her old sedan.  Elizabeth was from southern California originally and had a thing for Bob’s Big Boy burgers, so one night we drove all the way down the peninsula to Mountain View so that I could have a Bob’s Big Boy Burger, which I had never had before.

 Another time I joined her and her friends for a day at the beach, somewhere down near Santa Cruz.  It was a pretty intimidating group, and I mostly just hung out with them and smoked dope, and listened to their conversation, much of it political.

 In November of that year, we all joined in a huge anti-war march through the streets of San Francisco.  There were an estimated half a million people who began the march downtown and ended up in Golden Gate Park.  There we were serenaded by the Youngbloods and other local bands.  I really felt like I was part of something so much bigger than me and that, despite my poverty and reliance upon others, I would get by.  In December she and I went to the ill-fated rock concert at Altamont, took mescaline, and sat way on the edge of the crowd.  The vibes were just too creepy and we left before the Stones took the stage. Back at the Geary Street house, things were turning ugly between myself and my room mates.  I was spending more time at Elizabeth’s place in Oakland, a two-story Victorian in a rundown section of town near the freeway.

 In spite of the rather bohemian group she hung out with, Elizabeth played it straight pretty well.  After all, she was a bank teller.  I liked going places with her but sometimes felt the age disparity between us.  As it happened, I abandoned the Geary Street house the following January and ended up moving down to Santa Cruz where I would spend the next year living on mescaline, unemployment, and the kindness of strangers.  Although we continued to see each other, the divide between us grew.  When I took up with a local girl that pretty much ended it.

 Eventually I got a job with the National Park Service.  And over the years, Elizabeth and I would see each other occasionally.  Some times we would sleep together, other times we’d just pass each other on the same road.  Ironically she ended up working for the Park Service as well.  We finally lost touch all together.  But I’ve been thinking about her lately, wondering if she is still around.  If she ever thinks back to those tumultuous times in the bay area when we shared in the energy, the uncertainty, the passion and the pain of a decade’s end. In light of what is happening now in 2020, it seems so distant and almost quaint by comparison.  But she got me through an equally difficult time way back when, and for that I will always be grateful.

Bud's Books

Bud Kalette owned one of the oldest book stores in Carson City, Nevada.  Books & Antiques was housed in the bottom floor of an old Victorian on Curry Street, which rumor had as a former brothel.  For many years, he was also my sister Elenie’s landlord for her vintage clothing shop, Revelations, which was located several blocks away in the same old neighborhood, dotted with Arts & Crafts bungalows and stately Victorian homes.  Bud’s store straddled the abrupt dividing line between the Sierra Nevada range just a few blocks away, and the Great Basin desert splaying out into an infinite eastern horizon. 

 Carson City had been the center of activity during the days of the Comstock Lode.  Mark Twain had lived and written here for a while.  The moneyed upper class, the successful miners and merchants built their fabulous homes as close to the mountains as they could.  And when the state of Nevada was established, Carson City became its capital.

 Drive a few blocks east from the vintage neighborhoods and the capitol building, and today’s Carson is an abysmal conglomeration of car dealerships, casinos, and strip malls lined along US Highway 395.  Several miles to the north is Reno, still trying to convince itself that it is the “biggest little city in the world”.

To the south, past Minden and Gardnerville, the road comes alive through places like Bridgeport where Robert Mitchum  starred in the noir classic Out of the Past, and Lee Vining, the gateway to Yosemite.  And just beyond that the tufa-studded shoreline of Mono Lake.

 In any case, my sister eventually abandoned the store idea, and a few years later old Bud passed away.  But Elenie knew Bud’s sister, who was liquidating the inventory, and who graciously allowed the two of us to have free reign in the store before all the books were sold off.  So one late summer afternoon, not long after the store had closed its doors forever to the public, the two of us were granted access to its dark and dusty shelves.  With only Bud’s sister hanging out at the counter, the two of us had as much time as we wanted to pick through boxes, open drawers, poke around the shelves, and just sit on the floor leafing through pages of history.

 

Bud had a fantastic collection of Western Americana, everything from books about Death Valley to the history of San Mateo County, California and the development of cable cars in the west.  He also had drawer upon drawer of antique postcards, the old hand tinted variety, carefully cataloged and arranged.

I ended up with a huge stack of hard-to-find titles, mostly regional tomes like a history of Inyo County and Memories of the Mendocino Coast.  I really could have looked for much longer but I wasn’t sure I could afford to do it.  As it turned out, when I went to cash out, Bud’s sister charged us a pittance to carry it all off.  

 

But the most priceless part of the experience was having the silence, the solitude and the time to just look to our hearts’ content, to graze through the piles of paper.  In the dim lower floor of an historic home. With no pressure to buy.  No crowded aisles.  But surrounded by the most wonderful array of written material one could imagine.  If I could have, I would have spent the night gladly on that hard wooden floor with all those books as my companions.  But eventually, like waking up from a blissful dream, we had to emerge into the harsh desert light and the white heat of reality.