Aretha, Al and The Log

When I got out of the Nut House, the State of California, in its infinite wisdom, paid for my training as a computer programmer at a commercial training institution in San Francisco.  I was also given a stipend of $132 per month for the duration of my training which lasted, I believe, eight months.  I knew nothing of San Francisco, but was advised that there were establishments, known as residence clubs, where one could pay a relatively small rent entitling one to not only a a room or a bed in a shared room, but also to two meals per day, breakfast and supper, in a large dining room.  (On Sundays, alas, one got only breakfast, making it quite a stretch to feed oneself with the funds available.)

I found a shared room in the Kenmore, which is still a residence club 50 years later, sitting in a sort-of-grandish building on Sutter street between Gough and Octavia.  My rent for a month in a room with its own toilet (but with the bathing facility down the hall and shared by many), a room with not one, but two other occupied beds, was $125.  On a whim I just looked up the rent nowadays, (for yes! The Kenmore survives!) and it is now $1280. For those among you who are not math whizzes, I will do the computation for you: the monthly rent at the Kenmore left me a total of $7 for spending money each month.  I was told this had been added on to the stipend for the rent in order to pay for my transportation to and from school.  I was rolling in dough!

My two roomies already were in residence.  One was Jimmy, a smallish slim guy with curly brown hair who thought it hard to imagine why Elvis had never received an Academy Award and the other, Cliff, was a much larger guy who vaguely resembled the actor Jon Hamm, with facial features a bit more weighted in the direction of average than those of the glamorous Mr. Hamm.  Jimmy was pleasant enough, although we never became any closer than two guys forced to share a room, while Cliff was just sort of there.  Jimmy soon moved out, but not before I entered the room one day, apparently unexpectedly, to discover him performing oral sex on one of the men who worked as a waiter in the dining hall.  I had lived a more sheltered life than I thought up until then and had never developed a set of manners for such an occasion.  I backed rapidly out the room and came back sometime later that day.  Jimmy and I acted as if nothing untoward had happened.  

Cliff and I virtually never spoke; I never saw him speak to anyone except his father who showed up one day.  Even with his Dad he said little.  And then one day, after Cliff and I were left as the only two occupants of our very quiet room, he suddenly asked me if I’d like to get something to drink.  I was so eager to have some degree of communication with him that I said, “Sure,” and we proceeded to go to a nearby liquor store and to purchase a pint of rum.  We said nothing on the walk to and from the store.  Back in the room we proceeded to drink the rum together without exchanging more than a word or two.  I am not sure how I found out, but it turned out that Cliff, like me, had come to the Kenmore directly from a mental hospital and was, I think, also having a vocational course paid for by the state.  The combination of the low rates and the certainty of at least two meals per day made these clubs attractive as a sort of halfway house. I flatter myself that I had come out of my stay on the Funny Farm with a bit more going for me than Cliff.  He had a small voice recorder about the size of a Sony Walkman, although Walkmen (Walkmans?) were not yet on the market.  Every so often he would record a verbal note to do something or other: “Pick up the laundry.”  “Buy some cookies.”  To my complete shock, I discovered that Cliff had a girlfriend much in the same way I discovered that Jimmy was, um, friends with the waiter from downstairs.  Life at the Kenmore was certainly a worldly experience.  I came back to the room one day to find Cliff and a woman lying in each others’ arms under a blanket on his bed.  They were fully dressed, however.  I said nothing, but had nowhere to go, so I just lay down in my bed and turned away.  They said almost nothing to each other and hardly moved from the position in which I had discovered them and eventually they got up and left.  Nobody (other than me) seemed at all embarrassed.  He told me that she was his girlfriend upon his return.  

I cannot fathom what “girlfriend” meant to him, however, since he knew less about boys and girls together than even little virgin me, as I was to discover.  Apparently knowing anything was a bit of a struggle for Cliff.  He was in the process of learning how to become a time clock repairman.  He had a model on his desk to work on.  One day he was facing an exam, I gather, because he suddenly asked me to check a paper with text on it while he attempted to check his memory of the contents.  It hardly sounds believable even to me, but the sole contents of that paper were a list of the twelve months numbered from one to twelve.  He began to recite this, “One is January; two is  - um - February, three is, is, is March…”  He was having real difficulty with this!  

I soon established friendly relations with a few other residents of the Kenmore.  One was a student from Japan studying at a local college.  He was a very slight and slim guy, very soft spoken, who practiced akido.  It must have done wonders for him; he rented a room which did not have its own bath and one day when he was walking down the hall in his robe I saw that he had the calves of Hercules.  

Another resident with whom I became friendly was a half-Burmese man named Al Braithwaite.  Al looked like someone from India.  He was brown-skinned and taller than me with an athletic build and slightly wavy black hair.  His Mom was of Burmese nationality and his Dad British.  It was a mystery to me why he looked neither Burmese nor European, although he spoke with an English accent.  I liked Al very much.  He had a great sense of fun and we did a number of things together.  He worked at the Lucky Lager Brewery which entitled him to a certain amount of free beer each week or month; I forget which.  What was not to like?  One day, I discovered him in tears.  He apparently had been unable to pay his rent for the single private room he was occupying and the woman who managed the club had apparently spoken in a way to him that caused him great shame.  I think that what passed between them had felt more shameful to him than it might have been to an American.  He did have enough money to take over the bed that Jimmy had vacated, and I suggested that he do just that.  It was nice to have someone in the room with whom I could have a normal conversation.  We more or less talked around Cliff when he was present, since he rarely said anything or even acknowledged we were in the room.

The following sounds like a joke, but I swear it is exactly what happened.  One day Al and I were chatting away about our lives and he recounted some youthful misadventure with a girl.  Suddenly Cliff spoke up with a gem of his own.  

“In high school,” he began, “We had sex education classes …”  This sounded promising; at last a three-way chat in the room.  

“They told us that a boy puts his dick inside the girl and that’s how babies are made.”  

“Yes, yes,” thought Al and I.  “And?”

“But that is now how it happens at all,” said Cliff.  

The room got very quiet.  Al and I exchanged some of the most uncomfortable looks I have ever shared in my life.  It is hard to describe, but I had such a feeling of shifting out of reality and into somehow dangerous mental territory.  The method for impregnation Cliff then outlined involved a funnel and a length of rubber hose.  When he finished, Al and I said nothing; we just sat there kind of in shock.  This was a man in his twenties; one that claimed to have a girlfriend whom I had actually seen.  How was it even possible that he would say something like this?  There was no more conversation in the room that evening.  

On an evening when Al and I had consumed more beverages than was wise, we found ourselves - just the two of us - in our room in the evening and we picked up Cliff’s recorder and started recording whatever came to our heads.  I recall Al saying that Cliff just lies there like a log, and from that point on, we never called Cliff anything other than “The Log” when we referred to him.  We realized the next day that we had not erased our remarks and we shook in our boots a bit, but nothing was ever said.  

One cold and grey day, Al and I took the Geary bus to Ocean Beach and walked around out there just for something to do.  While there we clambered across some rocks close to the water and a sudden wave, larger than the rest, completely soaked me.  It was a cold day and I was soon shivering; we had to wait for the bus to return and by the time I actually was able to take a warm shower, I was in such a hurry to do so and to get warm that I dashed into our toilet room, tore off my soaked clothes and dropped them where I stood, wrapped a towel around myself and went off to the shower down the hall.  I was just finishing when The Log burst into the shower room and said that the manager wanted to see me in our room.  I said I would be there in a minute and he said, “Now!” and I realized he was practically shaking with rage.  It turned out that he had returned to find my wet clothing on the bathroom floor and had called the manager.  He was in the right in that I should not have left my wet things on the floor, but I would certainly have picked them up when I was warmed from my shower.  The manager was not at all understanding nor pleasant; pleasantness did not seem to be in her job description, nor in her personal arsenal.  From that point on, I was a bit afraid of The Log (OK, a lot afraid; he had been enraged beyond all reason) and very soon Al and I moved into a different residence club just down the street.

This new club was still on Sutter Street on the corner of Gough and, on the corner across Gough was a neighborhood bar where Al and I used to go when we had some funds to spare.  This bar had on its jukebox, Respect and Chain of Fools by Aretha Franklin.  Al loved these songs, and I liked them also, and they got quite a lot of play between us and the other patrons.  These are the only songs I can recall on that jukebox.  When I heard of the death of Aretha yesterday, some of my first thoughts were of listening to these two songs with Al in that bar.  

Each person has his or her own memories of first hearing those singers who were icons of our generation.  Most, I suspect, are as personal and trivial as my own, but taken together, they form a huge shared experience of a time and of a great performer.  I was not a such a devoted fan of Aretha as many were, but I liked her music and I loved some songs such as these two; and part of the good feeling of life, part of my life’s soundtrack, include these and a handful of other songs by Aretha.  She was with us when we partied, or drove our cars, or sat at home alone and with friends; she was there when we felt sad or happy or in between.  And now she is gone and a little of the warmth has gone from our generation’s memories.  

When I finished my schooling, I moved back to the South Bay Area near L. A. for a few months and Al and I lost touch.  He had left the second residence club before I did, to take an apartment because he had met a girl he liked.  We saw a bit of each other up until I left town, but we were on divergent paths and I rarely think of him except when I hear one of Aretha’s first two hits.  This is one of the great gifts that come with music; a song you really like nearly always puts you for a brief moment right back into the circumstances and with the people you knew when the song first came to your notice.