Unlike
normal children, grade school was an utter waste for him. He would sit
on the floor by himself planning unemployment insurance scams while the
other kids struggled with primers. Likewise, in sports he was, effortlessly,
the star with every team he bothered to show up for. Girls would experience
their first vaginal emulsions when he entered a room. In short, he was
a prodigy, a golden boy. In any other circumstances, he would have matured
into an insufferable giggolo in high school.
But
two things would save him. The first was the petty jealousy of his parents
whose constant taunting nurtured in him a cynicism so majestically deep
that it approached an Eastern detachment. The second was his enrollment
in Pinole’s famous Elysee du Songwriting, which removed the hard beveled
loneliness he felt until the rest of us grew up. I have seen him like a
mad Chinese poet laugh his way through an entire San Francisco Chronicle.
He popularized the word "hilarious" in 1975. He would have been a
hero to the rest of us if we were not so jealous. Our struggle to do what
he could do gracefully would, however, bear some fruit. Like George Harrison,
or Diane Keaton we would occasionally manage to surprise ourselves. More,
he embued in each of us the same strain of happy cynicism which permits
one to refer to Camus as "that dope", and to imagine that relationships
need not be long to be successful.
As he left for
Yale late one summer night, we assumed we would never see him again. We
were assembled like bleary apostles at the picnic tables just behind Andy's
Oak Pit under the awning, smoking a final joint, studying the carvings
of hoodlums in the table wood, watching the cars aimlessly pass by on Pinole
Valley Road. "Cheer up," he said, as his girlfriend braked at the curb
in her green Volkswagon. "Remember, boys: there are no risks." He put his
bags in the back of the car, sat behind the wheel and drove off completely
unprepared for the adrenal ice-storm of the 1970s. (Coming soon: The Post-early
years.)