Father Brother and the Cool Colony

The Last I Heard, Phil Botkin Went Back to City College to work on his law degree, which is just as well because no one in the Village trusts him any more. They don't put him down, I mean, they just don't trust him. But it's always that way when a cat tries to swing with the political bit. He gets to be a Big Liberal and that means trouble every time.

Like when Phil first got to La Pluma he came on real cool. He was a tall, skinnay fellow with big eyes who was hung up on helping other people. He'd offer you his last benny or fix your hi-fi or loan you his chick – you know, a religious type. But what happened at La Pluma was all his fault. You probably read about it in the newspapers, but nothing that was true. I mean, what really happened wasn't in the papers.

Three years ago La Pluma was nothing but this run-down motel on the road between L.A. and San Diego. It wasn't even a real motel but what they used to call "Auto Cabins," a bunch of little shacks set about fifteen feet apart behind a gas station with a gravel driveway. It was run by an old character who wore a long, gunny-sack robe and called himself "Father Brother," who had inherited it along with half a mile of property between the road and the coast.

Well, one day Danny Simonelli, and Lenny Maytag and the Gypsy and another chick named Arlene stopped there to try and con the old man out of some gas. They were on their way to Mexico with a bunch of weather balloons they'd bought at an Army surplus store for twenty cents apiece. Danny had been studying wind currents and had worked out this scheme. They were going down to Chihuahua Province and float pot back over the border. He figured if they tied fifteen pounds to each balloon and sent them up at the end of March, the wind currents would float them over Denver in exactly three weeks. Then there was this cat in Denver, Tommy Gilooly, who used to be a gunner in the Air Force who says he can fly a plane, so they were going to steal a Cub, or maybe an Aeronca, and go up and grab the balloons with a hook the way the Air Force does with satellites. I guess you really can learn a lot of useful stuff, like they say, in the service.

What happened was they get to talking to this Father Brother and find out he's an old-time Southern California type. He used to be a spiritualist and a vegetarian and he was a Bishop in the neo-Vedanta Meditators and an Apocalyptic Martyr and a judo expert and a Yogi Disciple and an Anti-Immersionist and he played the guitar and knew all the words to Joe Hill and had been eating Amanita mushrooms and inhaling nitrous oxide for kicks back in 1925. He had been like ahead of his time. He was hip before there was any scene for it.

Naturally, in no time he and Danny are discussing Zen and Love Discipline and Bird Parker and first thing you know he's breaking out a jug of wine and cooking up a pan of fried beans and inviting them to stay over in one of the motel cabins as his guests.

The next day everyone makes it to the beach and there's more fried beans and wine and discussions and pretty soon a week goes by and Danny sends a card to L.A. and invites Duke Noonan and Big Carlo down and they show up with Little Bird and two more swinging chicks and Father Brother is happy as a bug. No one ever rents his busted-up old cabins anyway, and he really digs the bit.

He springs for a whole barrel of muscatel and more beans and spaghetti and tells Little Bird to send for her sister, and she comes out with a car full of hipsters from Chicago and they invite their friends and Tommy Gilooly makes it in and pretty soon there's a cool colony there with bongo beach parties and poetry readings every night. It's a big rolling ball.

No one gets to Mexico that summer at all. Around the middle of June when I moved in there must have been eighty, eighty-five cats at La Pluma including five artists who'd brought their wives and kids. They'd built themselves fancy pads out of old signboards and lumber they'd swiped from a new development in Oceanside and painted them with big purple and yellow flowers. New pads were going up along the beach every day and in no time it gets to be a real beat settlement, and Father Brother is like a mayor or a social director. Owen Mc-Gee called it "A brave and love-directed abscess of beauty on the soon extincted, billboarded, deodorized corpse of society." Owen was a poet.

Naturally it takes bread to buy supplies for this group, and that's where the tourists came in. All over Southern California in the summer there's these people from the Midwest who drive around trying to find something cheap to look at. When they'd see all the pads, they'd stop for gas and anyone who was goofing would offer to guide them around for a couple of bucks and turn the money over to Father.

Everybody helped. One night Big Carlo stole a trailer truck and went to San Diego and came back with a load of garbage cans. The painters decorated them with flowers and we put them on sale. Owen McGee and Pinto wrote up some special dirty poems, like extra honest, and got them mimeographed and the farmers would grab them up at fifty cents each.

With this kind of action going on it wasn't long until one of the Los Angeles papers heard about it and ran a story on the place. They called it "Beatnikville" and said it was an "outgrowth of bohemianism" and a hotbed of free love and vivisection and was ruining real estate values – the kind of jazz they always print. What happens after the story comes out is business picks up like five hundred percent.

It keeps up, so we start charging thirty-five cents admission and Father builds a shed by the gas station and puts in hot dogs and pop.

And Charley Rasputin puts up a sign which he says is a bug for the whole world, the ultimate rejection of true hip acceptance. The sign says Beatnikville and in no time there's more newspaper stories and editorials and a magazine spread and La Pluma has become a place the tourists have got to see like Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm and the trained whales.

Everyone is getting kicks putting them on. You know, we give them these farout stories about the wild life we lead and they eat it up.

Because of all the publicity, the settlement is growing. Hipsters are dropping in from all over, even Canada, and building more pads. Father Brother is taking in a lot of loot but he's putting it all back into the place. He has a big shed put up with a kitchen in it which we call the poetry hall, and he buys a second-hand piano and a set of community bongos and hires his own private connection to bring in peyote and mescaline. Harry Fagin has been sculpting a twenty-foot-high head of Ezra Pound out of a rock down by the beach, so he builds another fence around that and charges the sight-seers an extra two bits to go in and look at it. It was a gas.

Father walks around in his gunnysack robe and discusses things with the tourists. He really puts them on selling them what he calls "Hip Cigarettes." He winks and the squares giggle and sneak him half a buck apiece for them. They're just plain old rotten Mexican cigarettes he gets in Tia Juana five hundred for a dollar.

But the biggest put-on was the Zen lecture. Father would get the tourists inside the poetry hall – for an extra two bits each – and Johnny Otawari would talk to them for fifteen minutes in Japanese. In all the time he ran it, not one tourist ever complained. In fact, one lady from Iowa wrote back and said it had cured her arthritis.

It was a real community. We even had our own doctor, "Poppo" Wollen, even though he only came down on weekends because he had to report to his parole officer in L.A. every Monday. There was a cool dentist and even a psychiatrist with a degree and everything. The psychiatrist wouldn't treat anyone, but if you bugged him long enough he'd tell you his problems, which was sort of therapy, in a way, I guess.

By the next spring, it was the most. We'd sit around all day and read quarterlies and discuss life plans and music and cars, and then at night we'd make it over to the poetry hall and have wine and hero sandwiches and beans and spaghetti and listen to Lee Leroy and his combo and sing folk songs and play the bongos and on Saturdays there'd be mescaline all around. It was a gas, a real Shangri-La.

But what the hell. Like you learn in Zen, life is a wheel. In June this George Smith showed up.

He pulls up in a 1953 Ford and says is there a place he can live in and (continued on page 128)father brother (continued from page 64) Father says Sure. How was he to know what kind of a nut he was?

He gets one of the original cabins that some chicks had just cut out of, and he offers to give Father Brother some rent. This should have been a tip-off, but Father says he sort of liked this cat. What was to like? He was a sawed-off creep with no chin and a high, nervous sort of voice.

That afternoon he moves in with his wife – who is wearing a little nowhere blue dress and a white hat – and their seven-year-old kid. Then that afternoon, just as everybody is getting up, here comes this van and two moving cats get out and carry in a bed and a sofa and some boxes and, so help me, a television.

Well, at first we figure it's some kind of a gag. But it turns out that this Smith has a job in Santa Ana. He's an accountant. The only reason he takes the pad is because he can't find anyplace else to live that he can afford. You see, he's trying to save enough loot to open up his own business.

The next morning at eight A.M. it starts. Smith is up with his television turned on as loud as possible. His kid is out hollering around the other pads waking everybody up. He leaves for work and his nowhere wife is banging and hammering around all morning putting up little taffeta curtains.

That's just the beginning. It turns out that two or three days a week Smith brings work home. He sits out in front of his cabin with a white shirt and a necktie on going over balance sheets and writing figures down in account books. And when the tourists come by and see him sitting there with his haircut and shoeshine and necktie, well, it looks awful. We try to explain that he's some sort of far-out eccentric, but you can see it doesn't sit well with them.

Finally we get up a deputation and go see Father Brother and demand that he get rid of this Smith. It's not that we're prejudiced. A cat can be a little peculiar, but after all, we have to have some kind of standards. Anyway, what was this Smith trying to prove?

Father says he understands the problem and he agrees to ask Smith to move. But Smith says he's sorry, he doesn't have any place to move to. And he offers to pay rent again.

So Father says what can he do? He can't throw them out. That'd be an act of hostility and would set his Zen discipline back five years. Besides, Smith told him that if he tries to evict him he'll hire a lawyer and if anyone gets tough he'll call the cops. He says he is a legal tenant because he has possession and has offered to pay any rent the state commission might find suitable.

In fact, before Father leaves, Smith puts in a few knocks about the pad and asks when he's going to get a paint job.

Some of us were pretty sore, but right there is where Phil Botkin had to stick his nose into it and talk us out of it. Phil said that we should live and let live, you know, like in a state of coexistence with the Smiths. Phil even tried to make friends with them. He'd send his chick over with some Demerol, or he'd stop Smith on the street and offer to give him bongo lessons or invite him to a blast at the poetry hall but Smith just says, "No, thank you," sort of nasty and marches off. He wasn't having any coexistence. A real weirdo.

He keeps playing his television night and day and it seems every time sightseers go by, he's always out in front of his pad watering some miserable little geraniums he's planted or marking down figures in his books, wearing his necktie, reading the Reader's Digest. The Smiths don't even smell good. Every time they go by you get this odor of soap. Everyone is just generally getting bugged.

But what really set everything off was his kid. One evening Sydney Wax makes it into the hall, but really bugged, like the most. It seems Smith's kid has been teaching Sydney's kids to play baseball. And you know what a thing like that can lead to! First it's baseball. Then it's trying to make the team. Next it's trying to make good grades in school and by the time the kid is grown up – what's he fit for? A job, the suburbs, a barbecue, candles on the dining room table, insurance, and finally a Buick and a fourteen-hundred-dollar funeral.

"He's like a threat to our way of life!" Sydney yells real inflammatory, waving his arms. "He's putting it down, man. We're pioneers here and we got an interest in the bit. Are we gonna stand for this troublemaker coming in and trying to poison our children's minds? If he can't make the scene, let him go back where he came from!"

There's a big cheer here, and the Gypsy jumps up. "Hey, there's no place for his kind here," she yells. "Hey, let's like burn down his whole pad. Who'd know? It'd be, hey, like an accident, man!" The Gypsy is always big with violence, and if Danny hadn't of grabbed her she would've run out and barbecued the whole damn Smith family.

"Cool it," Danny says. "We don't want any state law down here."

But by this time a lot of cats are steamed, and a couple of motorcycle types who are visiting Duke Wadek start hollering, "Let's get 'em! Those leather-jacket kids are always wanting to "get" somebody. It's a stage of development they go through. They keep screaming "Let's get 'em" and in no time the whole mob has marched down to Smith's pad and are standing out front muttering. They're in an ugly mood.

At first no one does anything. Then Honey Henley's little sister ran up and drew a big square with a black crayon on the front door.

No one laughed though, and then someone, I don't know who, threw a rock. Then a couple more rocks hit the house and one went through the little window with the taffeta curtain and the glass busted all over. That sort of shocked the crowd. They were quiet like waiting for something to happen. In a minute the door opened and this George Smith comes out on the porch. You could see he was scared, but I got to give him credit. He came right out and faced them.

"You people go away," he says. "I have a right to live here. It's a free country."

The crowd sort of moves forward, but before anything can happen Phil Botkin jumps up on the porch beside Smith and waves his arms and yells "Cool it. Cool it!" until he gets attention.

"Fourscore and twenty weeks ago," Phil says to the crowd, "like we came to this place and made a large hip scene so that swingers from all over could have a big mother pad, and we could meditate our rebellion and not be bugged by cops or landladies. These are the times that try cats' souls. The summer goof-off will, in these put-down times, get out of orbit. But we dig these truths to be cool. That all men are created hip and have the right to go, go, go, to get their kicks and to dig everything the most in their private way, so that the hip scene, for the hip and by the hip, shall not cut out."

Phil was really turned on. As he went on with this speech Carlo starts chording some blues on the guitar behind him and Shelley Kahn and Little Bird start playing the bongos and it builds to a real swinging finish, and you sort of feel he's cooled everything. But just then Smith has to open his mouth.

You can tell he hasn't dug anything that Phil has said. All he knows is rocks were hitting his house and Phil was making a speech.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," he says to Phil. "All you people should be ashamed of yourselves. You're nothing but a bunch of good-for-nothing loafers. You should go out and get jobs."

Well! This is not a thing to say, especially at such a time. It starts everybody up again.

"Split, square!" someone hollers and then everyone is yelling.

"Cut out!"

"Get analyzed, man."

"Make it someplace else, creep."

"Like vanish, Dad!"

By this time Smith's nowhere wife has come out on the porch and is trying to drag him back inside, but he won't go. Then another rock hits the roof and one of the motorcycle kids comes up and shoves Smith in the chest.

Smith gives him a big wallop right on the nose. The bike kid falls backwards and right away he's screaming for everyone to "get him." A real rumble is starting. Phil is trying to quiet everyone. Duke and the leather jackets are taking off their belts. The Gypsy is in back of the cabin shoving newspapers under it and trying to get her lighter to work.

Right then we hear the sirens. Some of the tourists up front had heard the racket and an old chick had pushed the panic button and phoned the cops. This was just what the state law had been waiting for, and there were three squad cars there in nothing flat, and troopers are all over shoving everyone and yelling, "All right, break it up! Break it up!" like they hear cops say in the movies.

They charge right in and, naturally, the first one they grab is Smith. He's right in the center of all the shoving and yelling. Then one big trooper grabs Smith's wife and that sets him off. He jerks loose and goes for this trooper, but the trooper just bats him aside and the wife screams and that's when old Phil, who has no business being within a mile of this kind of action, jumps on the big trooper's back and starts in hitting him on the head and yelling terrible square things like "Unhand that woman!" I swear that's what he said. "Unhand that woman, you Cossack!"

This "Cossack" must be a dirty word in Irish because the trooper throws Phil over his head and when Phil jumps up and rushes him he gives him about four real, no-fooling-around belts. And who can blame him? I thought Phil had flipped.

Anyway, they carry Phil off and round up me and Danny and about ten others as "Ringleaders" and drag us up to headquarters in Long Beach, and we spend the night in the tank.

The next day the judge gives us a long, dumb lecture. You can see he's aching to put us all away for a million years, but there's no complaint against us. The old chick who phoned the law isn't there, and we all say we were just having a peaceful birthday party. The only charge they can figure out is against Smith for resisting arrest. But the judge can see Smith is an oddball, and he calls Smith's boss on the phone, and the boss says Smith is the most, so after the judge runs out of lecture, we get dismissed.

The newspapers, of course, had big page-one headlines about the no-good beatniks and the awful "riot" that was caused by free love – so by the time we get back to the settlement, cars are parked for a mile along the highway in each direction. You never saw such crowds. I heard later it was the first day since it opened that Disneyland ran in the red. And only six people saw the trained whales.

Well, the next morning the motorcycle kids have cut out, and we all feel sort of ashamed. When Smith comes outside everyone looks away, but he goes right up to Father Brother and says he has taken the day off from work and is going to the country hospital to visit Phil and will drive anyone else who wants to come. Five of us pile in with him and off we go.

Phil has a busted nose and a cracked rib and looks awful. But this Smith makes a real un-cool speech about how he appreciates Phil's protecting Gladys (that's his wife's name) and says he admires Phil's courage and character.

In a week Phil is back, and from then on he and this Smith get real buddy-buddy. Smith is teed off at the locals anyway for pushing him around, and pretty soon he and Gladys are showing up at the poetry readings and the jazz sessions. He sits up front on a little folding camp stool and snaps his fingers on the downbeat and shouts things like, "Get hot!" and "Get out of this world, fella!" which is pretty embarrassing, but evidently not to him.

But you can't put down anyone who tries, right? He's still with the haircut and white-shirt bit, but he gets rid of the necktie and carries around a book on Zen. He has a lot of talks with Father too, and finally, as a favor to Father, he makes a survey of the "operation" as he calls it.

It turns out that Smith has come up with a lot of ideas for running the "operation" more efficiently, and Father makes him sort of a general manager.

First thing he does is buy a mimeograph machine and put up a big bulletin board. Then he puts up "assignments" on the bulletin board. Father Brother explains that it is for the common good and will mean, in the long run, more extra time for us all to meditate our rebellion against the lack of spirituality in society. Regular guides are assigned for certain hours, like they have to be there exactly when it says. Smith has them memorize a set speech to give to the tourists (Father has started calling them "our guests"), and every morning before the guides go out he would inspect them to make sure their hair wasn't combed and their jeans were dirty enough.

Then Smith figures out that it'll give us all more free time if the painters show up one afternoon a week to paint the garbage cans and another afternoon to work on little pictures, like on an assembly line. Each cat puts on one color, and then the chicks sell them out on the road as "genuine beatnik oils" for twenty-five dollars. He organizes the Mexican cigarette bit and gets packages wholesale with "Hippies, the Real Cool Smoke" printed on them, and we have to put in one day a week filling up the packages.

And that's just a start. Smith puts up a Jack Kerouac museum (admission ten cents) and he has Johnny Otawari giving his Zen lecture every hour on the hour. He puts up another building and calls it an "Authentic Buddhist Yabyum Parlor" and hires a stripper from Gardenia to do a cooch dance four or five times a day.

His wife, Gladys, is around organizing guitar classes for the chicks and teaching them to bake cookies. Cookies! Everything seems to be sort of different. Whenever we see Smith on the street he calls us by our first name and says godawful things.

"Like man, Rog," he says, "our gross is like up seven percent over August. It's like crazy." Or, "It's cool the way our new deferred tax setup scene allows us like to make the amortization bit with the wholesale raw materials jazz, man."

What really started to bug us was when he put up on the bulletin board that everyone should grow beards. A beard is a personal thing and if you don't dig beards, what the hell. The whole bit is getting to be a drag. Whenever you don't show up for an assignment on time Father Brother comes around (Father is having his gunnysack robes made by a tailor in Long Beach now and has a different color for each day) and gives you a big talk about inner discipline and our responsibility to the protest movement, and it is just getting to be too much. Who needs it?

But what was like the real final putdown was the sign. Smith talked Father into putting up this big, new sign over the coffee house, which had been rebuilt to include a cocktail lounge with booths all decorated in chrome and imitation leather with fake patches on it. It had plastic cobwebs in the corners and mice painted on the walls and signs all around saying: Try Our Non-Conformist Hamburgers, and, Our Waitresses are Beat, But Not Our Steaks, and, Everything is cool, Man – but Our Soup. Out front there was a shop selling "Beatnik Sandals," "Beatnik Orange Marmalade" and "Beatnik Spray Net (to give your hair that chic tangled look)" and Beatnik souvenir ashtrays and pennants.

But like I said, the sign was what did it. It was about three stories high with Beatnikville spelled out in neon and at the bottom there was a picture of Father Brother. That was creepy enough, but right under the picture it said, "Approved by California Junior Chamber of Commerce – Member of the Diners' Club."

When they got it up everyone stood around looking at it for a long time. No one said anything, but Danny and Lenny stayed up all that night working over their MG and next morning they took Arlene and Harry Fagin and cut out for Acapulco.

It turned out that the waitress chicks had been holding out pretty good on the tips and that afternoon Paint Girl and Julie Chapek bought a second-hand Porsche 190 and headed for Chicago and a bunch of the L.A. cats caught the four o'clock bus. After dinner the Gypsy started talking about the Village and next day she chipped in with Lou Annie Ryan on a '56 Chevy and four days later we were sitting in the Rigoletto on MacDougal street.

Within a week most of the cats who would normally be around the Village were back. It didn't bother Father Brother or Smith much though. They just hired a gang of high school kids and some movie extras to take over, and last I heard they were even advertising on television.

Too bad, because for a while, until that George Smith showed up, La Pluma was like we really had it made. I mean, it just goes to show, like they say, that one rotten apple can spoil the whole barrel.