he was such an entertaining gadfly.
Hundreds of hours were spent jamming and partying with those guys. We went back, like blood, the blood pumping in the music. The music which pumped our hearts. A language of pure sound. Like a mental telepathy we all shared. They were a good crew to ride through the years with.
For a few years there, me, Zeke Moon, and Dada Trash lived together in an apartment at 666 Ashbury, right down from the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Sam Silent and Roth Forjic may as well have lived there they were over so often, and eventually Sam Silent did move in. That was where we met T2000. He answered our ad at a roommate referral service that said we were looking for “satanic musicians with a yen for the schizophrenic.” As soon as he finished moving in his twenty-two synthesizers and ton and a half of electronic sound processors, we knew we had picked the right person.
Haight Street seemed like the center of the alternative underground universe and there was nothing we loved better than just wallowing in the spectacle of it all. You could see a good band any night of the week and the punk rock girls walked around in leather lingerie or next to nothing. There was almost a constant quiet hum in the Haight, like a subliminal frequency that let you know this was where it was all happening. The magnetic pole of hipness.
That apartment at 666 hosted endless LSD revelries, all night parties and a drug blur of bands and jam sessions. Right below 666 was a huge basement space that we soundproofed and insulated. This became a righteous music studio, a room that we spent hundreds of hours in. Me, Dada Trash, Zeke, Sam, and T2000 would go on sonic binges that left our ears ringing for days. One night the bunch of us dropped hits of acid while walking into the studio around 10 p.m. and by the time we emerged again around noon the next day everyone was straight and sober. Every drop of LSD and fried brain cells had gone into creating sound. Our jam sessions were like a great turbulent beast that could never be tamed, but every now and then we caught a hell of a ride.
Sometimes at the height of a psychedelic rave-up I could swear that ideas were actually bleeding from the walls of the basement and infecting our songs. 666 had stood there since 1910. It seemed like hundreds of bands must have played in that basement, the wood walls and stone foundation soaking up all those vibrations. So many crazy experiences must have ta ken place in that basement the room was supercharged like a karma battery. And every time we played in there, we fed off that energy.
One night I developed a weird theory about synchronicity and tonality. It was based on certain things observed in various chemical states while we played music. Sometimes during our jams we'd hit a certain note or harmony which had been played in that place years before and suddenly we'd be back in that time. Our band would be united with those long gone musicians by bathing in the same vibration. Like two identical tuning forks touched together, and all life would be frozen in a perfect crystalline moment. As if that harmony existed independently, outside of the turning of clocks, a sound like a single unbroken thread weaving through the wrinkles of past, present, and future. And through the genius of accident, our experiments with musical instruments had stumbled upon an audio form of time travel. I often thought about the frenzied jams and improvisations that must have occurred there during the '60s. LSD, hippies, and feedback were written into the history of the house. It wasn't ghosts but old songs that haunted 666. Old gray melodies faint as brain-damaged memories, still struggling to fill the silence. Playing music was communing with the supernatural world. Part seance, part exorcism. A three-chord ritual, rock and roll is just a form of chanting. Every time we played, it was in homage to our house gods, those songs in the walls, and it gave us great joy to add our voices to the chorus of spirits.
Once Sam Silent went to a barbecue that got pretty way out. The people there looked normal enough, but once they started talking it turned out their thoughts were in outer space. Literally. They believed in UFOs. We're not talking about your garden variety “there may be something out there” skeptic. No, these people were true believers. Sam first thought things were strange when someone said, “Well, this country hasn't been the same since 1947.”
“Yeah, the Roswell Crash changed everything,” Sam joked.
“It certainly did,” the guy replied without batting an eyelid. “The discoveries from Roswell led to all of modern science right down to the Thighmaster.”
And it just got worse from there. Sam kept trying to make little UFO jokes to lighten the mood. He was certain they were kidding. But the people would just stare at him stony faced, as if he'd uttered some blasphemous sacrilege. They didn't think extraterrestrials were a joking matter.
Everyone at the party believed aliens visited the planet on a regular basis. That they manipulated the world's governments in strange interstellar conspiracies. One woman claimed to have sold her earth baby to UFO aliens. “They made me an offer I couldn't refuse,” she said. There was a tattoo of a third eye on her forehead. All the people there were convinced that aliens were mating with human women and had been for centuries. A woman named Unix claimed to have given birth to an alien love child. There was a tattoo of a flying saucer on her upper arm and another of ET on her cleavage so it looked like the creature was peeping up out of her blouse. “He was a great lover,” she said. “But he had to go back to Alpha Centauri. It's a shame that he's light years away and can't see his son.” In fact, many people at the party agreed that having sex with aliens was not necessarily a bad thing. It could even be pleasurable. All this led up to one person saying, “As long as they lubricate the probe, I don't mind.”
4
Last Laugh Distribution, an alternative book and magazine distributor, had been in business since the '60s, and I worked there as a phone salesman. This madhouse was owned and run by an old hippie named Thor Tinker who bore more than a passing resemblance to the mythical thunder god. He was kind of an uneven cross between Father Time and Mr. Natural, with moods that could go from gentleness to fury faster than a Trans Am goes from zero to sixty. On the whole, though, he was a pretty nice guy. I liked my job even though it drove me insane. Lots of pressure, and I ate stress like beat cops down donuts. Some days when the phones were really ringing I might as well have been a broker on Wall Street. I started working at Last Laugh when I was twenty-five. After two weeks there, I said to myself, “If I keep this job, I'll be dead of a heart attack by the time I'm thirty.” Well, I was still working there and I had just turned thirty-two.
Sam Silent was this really cool poet/slacker/intellectual guy I hung out with. I met him through the local SF writing scene (we called it Poetryland) and back when he was at a real low point financially I got him a job at Last Laugh. He also worked as a phone salesman. A strange job for someone whose last name was Silent. Sam was a natural conversationalist. Tremendous sense of humor. A mind like an encyclopedia of dirty jokes. He had a story for every occasion. Sam was 24 and enjoying life as one in their early twenties should. It was his constant banter and steady stream of weird jokes emanating from the desk behind me that kept the boredom and stress from driving me to tantrums.
One day I was taking a break. On the job, I was a high pressure hard sell, a compulsive personality who drank massive amounts of coffee and yakked my fool head off to clients all day. Into the receiver I spewed a nonstop stream of consciousness monologue that described some of the most perverse rags the world of publishing had to offer. Last Laugh sold a motley assortment of underground comics, literature, pulp fiction, punk rock magazines, drug manuals, and kinky sex journals. What paid the bills was the porno we moved, or as we liked to refer to it, the smut. In a lot of this smut stuff the only thing people were wearing was the staples. In a perverse way, I was proud of being a smut peddler and thought nothing of wearing the First Amendment like a fig leaf. I figured that was what it was there for.
The company didn't have anything as traditional as a receptionist so it was also my job to answer the phone. I picked up the receiver hundreds of times each shift saying, “Hello, Last Laugh.” I said it so often that when I was home I would answer my own phone, “Hello, Last
