Amateur Insanity

Chicks

 

The best reward for sitting on that saw horse on a griddle of summer pavement was the people Tim met, especially chicks: teenyboppers, topless dancers who were also groupies, secretaries with art degrees, etc. 

Chicks were the first ten or fifteen reasons Tim and I got the Scott Street apartment. The difference in our attitude towards them was due to my having a sister and close female cousins and his being an only child. He was in awe of the female. It was as if being one were a sleight-of-hand trick which, if he just watched closely enough, he would see how it was done.

Tim rarely came home alone from his sawhorse on Friday evenings. Often he met chicks in pairs and sometimes there was just one.

There was Brenda, a peroxide blonde in her late twenties who was a pill freak and early Jesus freak who didn’t eat meat or wear leather and who once remarked the only book she ever saw in her father’s house was Mein Kampf. She had a passably coherent personality until, in the middle of a conversation, she would jump up from her chair and talk to an invisible entity somewhere above her left shoulder. She had come up from L.A. with no money or even a place to crash trusting that whenever she needed food, clothes, shelter, or pills, the Lord would provide, and he did.

And there was Diane, a buxom groupie with eyeliner so thick it could have been applied with a canoe paddle.  She moved in for a week with her clothes and a portable TV, and every night the Fillmore or Avalon were closed, we watched old movies, stoned on the couch, Diane in the middle, Tim and I alternating handfuls of popcorn with handfuls of tit, but only her tits, since we weren’t musicians.    

Appropriately, Tim and I met through a chick. Even more than politics or a childhood among rednecks or an intense love of literature and art, the friendship between Tim and I was founded on awe for Ruth and her unique, askew wit set in a dazzling female body.

Ruth was younger than Tim and older than me. Tim left his wife, Carol, for Ruth. Six months later, Ruth left Tim for his friend Ben. About a year after that, she left Ben for me, and when she returned to Ben, Tim was there, helping to move her belongings and hoping to intercept her on the rebound. He didn’t, but he was looking for a room to rent and there was one available in the flat I shared in the Mission District with other San Francisco State students.

Then Tim and I got the pad in the Haight, where, through those nightly conversations at the kitchen table, along with a close friendship, there developed a cult of two around Ruth. Tim furiously wrote a novel in longhand on binder paper as homage to her. To any complaints about chicks the unspoken addendum was always: “except Ruth, of course.”