Pescadero Memories

PescaderoMemories(PM):

What was your life with Neal Cassady like? I have his book, “The First Third;“ I remember buying it at Keplers which was near the street where you hung out in Palo Alto. Did Neal Cassady visit AN? I’ve heard about the Kesey movie…were you there when they were filming?

Russell Towle (RT):

Well. On Channing Way, in Palo Alto, in the early summer of 1966, Neal Cassady sometimes resided at the house I lived at. I was doing light shows. This house was a kind of commune with an old carriage house or
some such thing in the back yard where half a dozen more people could live. It happened that several of the Pranksters would stay in that backyard house. I didn’t interact at all with Cassady, being content to view him from a safe distance. He was given to carrying this little sledge hammer around with him, and was a regular expert at flipping it up and catching it again. Like the other Pranksters he was always stoned. So was I, but those guys were into methedrine, heavy into methedrine. If Neal Cassady spoke it seemed always to be in a flurry of words, from which one, with luck, might extract certain images or even feelings. I remember hanging around him at what passed for an acid test in Palo Alto, some weird auditorium full of echoes, some
music, too loud, and several young men and I encircled Cassady, enraptured with his bizarre monologue. He had abandoned his sledge hammer for one solitary orange. It was expertly flipped and spun and tossed while the words poured out. Then Cassady would take a break and dance with some hot chick, by far the most erotic dance one would ever see outside a strip club, I should imagine, having no experience with
strip clubs beyond what I might see on TV or in a movie. It was as close to having sex on the dance floor as would be possible.

No, I really don’t have many memories of Cassady. Being a Jack Kerouac fan I was somewhat adulatory; but I do not recall any kind of direct interaction with him. At that Channing Way house lived other people I found quite interesting: Gale Curtis and Paul Mittig, who headed up the light show, and Dave Nelson and Peter Solspock (spelling probably wrong) and Dave Torbert and Susan Klein (my girlfriend). The two Daves went on to form the New Riders of the Purple Sage. At that time, with John Tomasi, they were in a band called the New Delhi River Band. The light show and the band were a kind of package deal. All that summer we worked down at San Jose at a dance hall where, if I recall, Van Morrison and Them were also performing nightly.

It is too complicated to tell but for various reasons I idolized the Pranksters. Of course, because of Kesey. Cuckoo’s Nest had been a powerful read, several times over. But there was egotism, too, in that my own experimentation with psychedelic drugs had begun several years earlier. In 1966, everyone was on the drug bandwagon. I felt myself to be “like Kesey,” an early drug user. In retrospect it seems so idiotically silly. At the time it made sense, but Neal Cassady made sense, to himself, anyway. So, having formed a friendship with one of the Pranksters, whose name I quite forget, who spent a lot of time at Channing Way, and who injected himself every day with methedrine, I thought it would be very cool to inject myself with methedrine.

Of course, the Pranksters didn’t stop at intravenous injection of methedrine. Inravenous injection of LSD was very fashionable, in that set. So I began doing that, too. It meshed rather nicely with doing light shows. Whatever other truths can be gleaned from those days, I know now that methedrine is a regular recipe for psychosis. My life was soon in ruins.

Oh yes, the movie. Kesey’s Año Nuevo movie. Yes, of course I was there, I was in the movie, as was my driftwood cabin, which became the Princess’s house. The Princess was this gorgeous blonde, maybe nineteen years old, who went by the name of Summer. Kesey and the Pranksters were dragging her off into the dunes at every opportunity. Summer was a very free spirit. There were a lot of people running around with no clothes except maybe a tie-dyed headdress or some such thing. I was one of them. So was Summer. So tan, so pretty. Pete Moss’s Tower was in the movie, and perhaps even Bigfoot’s remote driftwood cabin, in a deep hollow nestled within the very highest dunes, on State Park land. Summer and Bigfoot became an item.

Neal Cassady had already died, at that point, I believe. It must have been June of 1970?

Bigfoot and Pete Moss and I were the only ones who actually lived there in the dunes during those years. We had so many jam sessions; Bigfoot had a couple of conga drums, Pete Moss his sax, and I played guitar, or sometimes a conga. Bigfoot tended to wear only leather pants, thick leather pants roughly made, with little bones and seashells and magical items tied on with little leather thongs, here and there. He made beautiful little sculptures from soapstone. He wore his hair in an Afro and was a very nice young Italian American man, from San Mateo, who had magically become an African American shaman, or so it seemed. He also had bones and shells tied into his Afro.

Since wrens are my totem bird, and at Año Nuevo there are Long-billed Marsh Wrens, Bigfoot carved me a fine little bas relief of a marsh wren

with a geometrical figure on the obverse, since geometry was a passion even then. I still have that carving. Somewhere.

Yes. To find things. Guided by my wrens, or whatever, I do find things. It was a matter of some pride. Others would find the beautifulshards of chert in the dunes, I would find the arrowheads. Etc. etc.

Later, in 1973, or 1974, I returned from Grass Valley, in the Sierra, to visit Año Nuevo and Janet and Merrill, and also stopped in Santa Cruz to visit Bigfoot. He was living in an old Victorian house which was up on jacks, so a contractor could put a cement foundation under the thing. Piles of dirt lay near the front door. We stood there and conversed. I launched into the story of a magical finding: I had been digging a foundation trench in the Grass Valley area, and right beside me a fellow worker suddenly exclaimed, “What is this?”

He held up a little white sphere. I was so jealous. It was an antique marble! And not only that, it was a marble marble, and had been used so much it had got out of round!

Just as I sang out the phrase, “marble marble,” Bigfoot reached down to the dirt at our feet, and picked up, bizarrely, a marble marble.

So you see there were strange forces at work.

PM:  I am certain I met one or more of the characters living at AN. I don’t think  it was you. In my mind, I see a large, healthy man, maybe shirtless. He had something to do with the driftwood sculpture along Highway 1. We, John and I, walked around AN often during a short period of time. We surfed there–which, in retrospect, I find horrifying. It was even my idea!! There was something on the beach, on the sand, living quarters built out of wood; that’s what I’m remembering in my mind.

RT: Ah, that rings a distant bell. A large shirtless man. But I can’t recall who he was. That would have been later, I was there 1970-72, and then again in late 1976 and 1977. Janet and Merrill attracted quite a flock of artistic visionary types to their Año Nuevo home. I disapproved of most of them. Some were great. Joe and Wendy Lysowski were very nice, but it could hardly be said to count for much that, say, Ken Kesey had complimented my guitar playing, or that I had met Jerry Garcia before even the Warlocks existed, and Pigpen, too, for that matter–how could this count for anything, when Joe and Wendy had been at the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh during the whole time the Beatles and the Beachboys had been there, and knew them all personally! They could trot out stories about John and Paul and George like nobody’s business!

Ah, so nice, though, Joe and Wendy, living in their garishly painted van. They gave me sculptor Ron Boise’s old Honda Dream motorcycle, bored out from 300cc to 350cc, and they gave me some ancient windows from a Santa Cruz Victorian, curved at the top, which even to this day live on in my hexagonal cabin. But I lost touch with them long long ago.

Story by Russell Towle

email Russell ([email protected]

June, here’s another story from my years at Año Nuevo Point.

I had lived quite a wild life for a time in the 1960s, a life which among so many other things included riding freight trains all over the West, and doing light shows for a living, at times at the Old Fillmore, at Avalon Ballroom, and other notable venues, and also, taking all too many drugs. LSD in particular was, on the one hand, reputed, as in Timothy Leary et. al., to lead to religious or spiritual experiences and awakenings; one would finally hear the sound of one hand clapping; with a little luck one would levitate; and yet, on the other hand, it was quite a powerful drug and, for me, not conducive to social interaction. Yet I was often in social settings. I decided to lay off the LSD, and in 1968 and 1969 took it only once, as I recall.

Then came 1970, and the little driftwood cabin. The quasi-wilderness of Año Nuevo. Someone gave me a hit of acid, and one evening I took it. I would consult my Muse. I would commune with my new home. Alone.

Alone with the fog, the wind, the waves, the agatized whale ribs and vertebrae, the dunes and Indian mounds, the birds, the perpetual uproar of sea lions on the Island, all alone with my mile of beach and
its always-renewed palette of flotsam and jetsam. I was a nature mystic, and would “call” treasures to me. If ever I found a sea lion tooth, near some lonely little pillar of rock jutting from the sand, thenceforth every time I approached that pillar I would “call” for another tooth, for another treasure. And, totally tangential to the story, while calling for another tooth at that very pillar, once upon a time, I was amply rewarded by a killer whale tooth. Oh, was Hank Bradley, of Coastways Ranch, jealous. He borrowed the tooth, and mailed it off to eminent marine biologists, to obtain a precise identification.

So I had my little acid trip in my little cabin and all went well enough, except, I did not levitate for the umpteenth time, and all I heard was sea lions bellowing into the night, and waves thundering up and down the lonely beach. I called it a success. As dawn’s first light changed the depths of night into merely deep gloom, the beach seemed the place to be. It was, after all, only eight feet away. I bounded lithely down to the sandy expanse, and started south. Immediately, a small heap caught my eye, a couple hundred yards away.

“Something new,” I reflected, and, trusting to my inimitable, nature-mystic luck, I figured some new treasure would soon be mine. All mine!

As I drew closer I knew several things the heap could not be: it could not be mere seaweed; it could not be a sea lion, there was something blue; it could not be … .

Oh.

What it could be, and what it was, became all too visible. A dead man. Weeks in the sea he’d been, just the right number of weeks, so that all flesh was stripped from head and arms and feet, but ligaments and
tendons still held them attached. A skull of white bone, two hands, two arms, of white bone, two feet of white bone, blue jeans hiding the legs, and yet a torso almost intact, a little battered, a little ripped, but basically intact.

This was yet another incredible find, yet another stroke of astounding luck. And horror.

I was not really so alone in my sand dunes. A couple hundred yards away was a driftwood tower, rising fifty feet into the air, built by the very remarkable young man named Pete Moss, a protégé as it were of Merrill Bickford. Pete Moss had attended Peninsula School while Merrill was teaching there. He was an only child from a broken home, raised by his mother, and he rebelled; he ran away; and here was Pete Moss, maybe seventeen years old, living in a kind of sorcerer’s tower he had constructed from driftwood. It had multiple “floors” inside, at various levels. If it had a forty-foot-long tie-died flag flying from its summit mast, as it did while Kesey and the Pranksters were filming their movie there, it could be seen from a long ways north on Highway One. Well. A few miles, at any rate. Two at least.

So. There was really only one thing to do, having found my horrible corpse. I must run and wake up Pete Moss and bring him down to see my lucky find.

I scampered up into the dunes, following a certain serpentine path, and soon arrived at the Tower. Pete was still sleeping but I shouted him awake, not yet revealing my important secret. He stumbled down a ladder from one of the upper levels, stark naked, as was not uncommon, at that remote time in history, and began eating a banana. I gave him about twenty seconds before I launching into my coy “Guess what I found on the beach this morning” routine.

“A DEAD MAN!!!!!” he screamed, and tore out of the Tower like a bat out of hell. I followed at an only slightly slower pace. After all, I was now an old hand at this business of finding bodies on the beach.

We stood and examined the body for a time. We agreed: someone would have to walk over to Cascade Ranch, the nearest telephone, and call the San Mateo County Sheriff. I ended up with that job. It was a good
hour’s walk to the ranch. I made the call. In another hour or so, it being a long drive “over the hill” from Redwood City or wherever, the deputy arrived.

I was barefoot, dressed in some kind of sturdy Army surplus pants, some kind of rough old coat to ward off the bitter, eternal, piercing wind, and of course, I had my long curly hair, and my long curly beard. The deputy was nice enough, though. After a brief recapitulation of my discovery, we drove down to the beach.

The road was fairly rough, and only got worse as it neared the beach, but the deputy was brave, and we wallowed through deep sand to the little turn-around where one could park.

Just so soon as we left the car, we heard the wailing of a saxophone. The deputy was filled with suspicion; he rounded upon me, he hurled questions. I explained that my friend Pete Moss played the saxophone.
This seemed to calm things down. But matters only grew worse when we reached the beach, where Pete Moss, still stark naked, stood over the corpse, playing a funereal dirge in the dead man’s honor.

I should say that Pete Moss was, even then, a very gifted musician, and played several instruments, including classical guitar; I learned a lot about the guitar from Pete Moss. He would teach me the chords to some piece by Bach, so I could accompany him while he practiced the fingering of the melody. And this all happened in our driftwood cabins, a million miles from anywhere, as it seemed.

The deputy was, rightly, I suppose, astounded, and rightly, I suppose, suspicious.

Things sorted themselves out rather quickly once we had a chance to converse. The Coroner’s van was summoned. More hours went by. The van arrived. Pete Moss had left the corpse for a time, and now he
returned, and began wailing on his sax while the body was rolled into a black bag, which in turn was lifted onto a gurney, which was, perhaps, not the best idea, considering the long distance, over soft sand, back to the van itself. So the coroner’s men were struggling along, Pete Moss was wailing on his saxophone, the Sheriff’s deputy was, himself, now an old hand not only at finding bodies on the beach, but at listening to strange young hippies play the saxophone, and I was just, well, observing, when the sound of drums, and yet another saxophone, wafted over the dunes.

It was some of our friends from Pacific High School, come to visit, and for some reason, they were dressed in black robes, long black robes, like medieval monks. They carried their conga drums and other instruments right down onto the beach, just as the corpse was being wheeled, if you could call it that, away. So there was a kind of Greek chorus of black-robed men, and Pete Moss, playing a Death March for the coroner’s men, and the deputy, and for the Spirit of the Departed.

Such was an exciting day at Año Nuevo Point, in early 1970. If I recall, the man had crashed his airplane into the ocean while doing stunts, some weeks before.

Russell Towle