Arthur Lisch does not seem to notice any of this. He just keeps talking about cybernated societies and the guaranteed annual wage and riot on the Street, unless.
I call the Lisches a day or so later and ask for Arthur. Jane Lisch says he’s next door taking a shower because somebody is coming down from a bad trip in their bathroom. Besides the freak-out in the bathroom they are expecting a psychiatrist in to look at Bob. Also a doctor for Edward, who is not O. K. at all but has the flu. Jane says maybe I should talk to Chester Anderson. She will not give me his number.
Chester Anderson is a legacy of the Beat Generation, a man in his middle thirties whose peculiar hold on the District derives from his possession of a mimeograph machine, on which he prints communiqués signed “the communication company.” It is another tenet of the official District mythology that the communication company will print anything anybody has to say, but in fact Chester Anderson prints only what he writes himself, agrees with, or considers harmless or dead matter. His statements, which are left in piles and pasted on windows around Haight Street, are regarded with some apprehension in the District and with considerable interest by outsiders, who study them, like China watchers, for subtle shifts in obscure ideologies. An Anderson communique might be doing something as specific as fingering someone who is said to have set up a marijuana bust, or it might be working in a more general vein:
Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again again, then feeds her 3, 000 mikes raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gangbang since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street. Kids are starving on the Street. Minds and bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.
Somebody other than Jane Lisch gave me an address for Chester Anderson, 443 Arguello, but 443 Arguello does not exist. I telephone the wife of the man who gave me 443 Arguello and she says it’s 742 Arguello.
“But don’t go up there,” she says.
I say I’ll telephone.
“There’s no number,” she says. “I can’t give it to you.”
“742 Arguello,” I say.
“No,” she says. “I don’t know. And don’t go there. And don’t use either my name or my husband’s name if you do.”
She is the wife of a full professor of English at San Francisco State College. I decide to lie low on the question of Chester Anderson for awhile.
Paranoia strikes deep—
Into your life it will creep—
is a song the Buffalo
Springfield sings.
The appeal of Malakoff Diggings has kind of faded out but Max says why don’t I come to his place, just be there, the next time he takes acid. Tom will take it too, probably Sharon, maybe Barbara. We can’t do it for six or seven days because Max and Tom are in STP space now. They are not crazy about STP but it has advantages. “You’ve still got your forebrain,” Tom says. “I could write behind STP, but not behind acid.” This is the first time I have heard of anything you can’t do behind acid, also the first time I have heard that Tom writes.
Otto is feeling better because he discovered it wasn’t the cocaine-and-wheat that made him sick. It was the chicken pox, which he caught baby-sitting for Big Brother and the Holding Company one night when they were playing. I go over to see him and meet Vicki, who sings now and then with a group called the Jook Savages and lives at Otto’s place. Vicki dropped out of Laguna High “because I had mono,” followed the Grateful Dead up to San Francisco one time and has been here “for a while.” Her mother and father are divorced, and she does not see her father, who works for a network in New York. A few months ago he came out to do a documentary on the District and tried to find her, but couldn’t. Later he wrote her a letter in care of her mother urging her to go back to school. Vicki guesses maybe she will sometime but she doesn’t see much point in it right now.
We are eating a little tempura in Japantown, Chet Helms and I, and he is sharing some of his insights with me. Until a couple of years ago Chet Helms never did much besides hitchhiking, but now he runs the Avalon Ballroom and flies over the Pole to check out the London scene and says things like “Just for the sake of clarity I’d like to categorize the aspects of primitive religion as I see it.” Right now he is talking about Marshall McLuhan and how the printed word is finished, out, over. “The East Village Other is one of the few papers in America whose books are in the black,” he says. “I know that from reading Barron’s!”
A new group is supposed to play in the Panhandle today but they are having trouble with the amplifier and I sit in the sun listening to a couple of little girls, maybe seventeen years old. One of them has a lot of makeup and the other wears Levi’s and cowboy boots. The boots do not look like an affectation, they look like she came up off a ranch about two weeks ago. I wonder what she is doing here in the Panhandle trying to make friends with a city girl who is snubbing her but I do not wonder long, because she is homely and awkward and I think of her going all the way through the consolidated union high school out there where she comes from and nobody ever asking her to go into Reno on Saturday night for a drive-in movie and a beer on the riverbank, so she runs. “I know a thing about dollar bills,” she is saying now. “You get one that says ‘mi’ in one corner and ‘mi’ in another, you take it down to Dallas, Texas, they’ll give you $15 for it.”
“Who will?” the city girl asks.
“I don’t know.”
“There are only three significant pieces of data in the world today,” is another thing Chet Helms told me one night. We were at the Avalon and the big strobe was going and the colored lights and the Day-Glo painting and the place was full of high-school kids trying to look turned on. The Avalon sound system projects 126 decibels at 100 feet but to Chet Helms the sound is just there, like the air, and he talks through it. “The first is,” he said,”God died last year and was obited by the press. The second is, fifty percent of the population is or will be under twenty-five.” A boy shook a tambourine toward us and Chet smiled benevolently at him. “The third,” he said, “is that they got twenty billion irresponsible dollars to spend.”