A Distant View

Audio Recording of Mazzeo’s Storytelling

The Coast Guard Years

Here’s one of Margot and I in 1975.  I just got off of the CSNY world tour.  I’m wearing my Toronto Maple Leaves jersey.

 That’s how come I know that that’s exactly when that was taken.  

And Margot inside of one of Roger’s houses up in Druid Heights.

 Roger was really into doing laminated plywood and he would then sculpt out of stuff.  He did Neill’s bus.  

Here’s Roger, Jazz Musician and  an architect.

 And here’s all the girls in the hot tub at Potrero Heights.

This is a Sufi room.  This is all Japanese rice  paper panels.  Roger took down a theatre in Mill Valley that had the giant lighting board for lighting the  stage, all these lights, switches, dimmers, and panels.  You put it on the wall,  you go upstairs.  

Those panels slide and you see the inside room? There’s a round window and a Buddha and stuff.  And there’s a panel there and he could light up all these things and he could make them ambers, and pinks, or reds, he had the whole theatrical–so he could light up the whole rice paneled room and the walls, the roof, everything.  It was cool.

You see this table, here?  That’s the dining room table, Japanese style .  I go low to the??? floor except he put a copper fit down in there, so you sat on the floor but your legs just hang down.   Then he’d make us all take off our shoes and socks and we’d all be sitting [in rough???] eating and he’d fill up the tank with warm water that was circulating.  So while you’re eating, and getting all that sensual food thing, your feet are getting this warm massage.  You had these two different senses going at the same time.  It was really trippy.  

A little bit of fancy little shit in there.  There Ria? and there’s Rogers, and Seymour.  Here’s one of the shots of the mandala.

That’s Alan Watt’s library and then there’s other shots of it?  And Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl back in the day.  It’s one of the early Grateful Dead gigs.  Here’s Alan Watt’s mandala house.  And Roger designed it.  If you look straight down at it it’s a circle.  This deck goes out on a point, a circle, and it’s got this big, round, dome skylight in the middle of the circle.  You look straight down at it and it’s like these two little light circles and then the big one.  And then, it’s a clown’s face.  It’s a kid drawing a clown’s face.  It’s a circle with a nose and a mouth and the hat is a clown’s hat.  That’s the deck.  So you look straight down and it like the face of a kid’s drawing of a clown and it’s pretty cool.

This is the original old house up there.  But then Roger got up in the attic and cut all the beams holding up the roof, so the center of the roof started to sag, and as soon as he got the sag that he wanted, he went and blocked it up again.  And then he built those extensions on the outside and that’s  the main house.  

There’s Alan’s place, the mandala house again.  These are some of the sheds and shops and stuff we put on the property.  Another shot of the main house. That’s the inside, see all the rice paper? All of that would light up. [Cant hear sentence.]  So you have this [considered?] cool little window.

Kirk:  Where did you get these photos?

Off of the site, “Saving Druid Heights”.

Kirk:  Even the ones with you and Margo?

Yeah, that was in there, too!  

Here’s an early article about Roger doing Mill Valley, some local valley newspaper.  Oh yeah, inside the room he had a piano, just the soundboard. He mounted it into the wall and tied it in, so he could use it like a heart and stuff.  That’s it.  

Anyway, so there is the whole Druids’ Site thing and history, there’s a lot of history in there, so it might be good for you outline that site.  Just use it as a reference point because this guy is always coming up with —

That’s  Marg and Paul Krasner.  You know who Paul Krasner is?  [I do] Well, he was a writer in New York, and he wrote a bunch a books on the sixties and stuff.  A major contributor to a bunch of papers and stuff.  Big time writer,  he and Margot were really good friends.  He wrote a lot of stuff.  Yeah, check out Paul Krasner.  He’s quite  a character. 

HIGH SCHOOL ART
Kirk:  I thought it might be a good idea, because you have that story which I didn’t record about your art show and…

Yeah, yeah–how it ended up being at the commandant’s house.  Yeah, that’s a really good one.  We definitely have to get that one.

Kirk:  So you were in your senior year in high school–

My junior year in high school–my teacher started putting my stuff in local school contests and stuff, and I always did really good.  

Kirk:  Did you start out doing Abstract work?

He was into collages, too. It was cheap too.  We would do tissue paper and shellac collages like stain glass and tissue paper in just a rainbow–any kind of shade and color.  They had thirty-seven different shades of blue.  He had complete collections of tissue paper, big sheets; so we just cut them and glued them onto cardboard stock–chip board or whatever you call them.

And I just was making a bunch of them.  All Abstract, non-objective kind of stuff.  And we kept winning.

Kirk:  You were at different art shows…

Yeah, mostly intermediate high school ones. Two or three high schools would have a big show at one of the schools every weekend, something like that.  

But then San Jose had the Valley Fair Shopping Center, and every year they had this art festival.  That’s seven hundred artists from all over the Santa Clara valley, seven hundred entries.  I got three prizes.  I got Best of Show, Best Modern Art piece in that category; and then an honorable mention on one of them.  I think the Honorable Mention was the tissue paper one that i sold for forty bucks.  That was about that high and about that long along in there, and it was all in gray and white tissue paper, which turned out to be very atmospheric, foggy-looking, a city skyline-in-the-fog kind of stuff.  Which [looked?] really good in the commandant’s library.  [laughs.]

Kirk:  I’m trying to remember how….So you sold that.

Sold it in high school, for forty bucks. 

Kirk:  And after high school you went–

My father put me in the coast guard.  My dad was in the coastguard, and his father was in the coastguard, and the draft was on.  

So after high school, my father said, “Okay you got three choices:  You go to college, you come to work for me, or you go in the military.”

[Accidentally erased paragraph about college buddies]


those skidrow? anymore didn’t want to go there.  


I didn’t for my dad.  He had a direct-mail advertising company called “Store Ad Printers” –junk mail.  Except he turned it really big.  He started it when he divorced my mom in 1954.  

By ’58, he was remarried, and his new wife’s father had a little printing press in his garage.  He would go down to the little grocery stores in the neighborhood and go in and say, “Why don’t you put your coffee on sale for ten cents a pound?  I’ll print it up so they can bring a coupon in; they can buy a pound of coffee for ten cents.  And he’d go print up a few hundred of them and stuff all the mailboxes around the grocery store, and all the wives would go in to get their ten cents, and they’d buy bread and, you know.

So that was the beginning of “Store Ad Printers” in his future father-in-law’s garage.  
When my dad was with my mom we moved from Hollister up to San Jose.   Lockheed and IBM were all moving to the Santa Clara Valley and they were tearing up the orchards,  moving eleven hundred houses a week.  Eleven-hundred families a day, moving into San Jose valley for about six years.  It just filled up, over a million.  San Jose was a small, little five-block town when we moved in in ’53.  

So my dad went to work.  He did some stuff with my grandfather in Hollister.  My grandfather was a minister, but he also taught my father Dutch furniture finishing and refinishing techniques.  He was a master at  furniture refurnishing.  So my dad worked with him after the war and then ended up selling furniture in Sears & Roebuck, but there were eleven-hundred new houses a week going in, so he was selling tons of furniture and he knew all the hot salesmen in the valley because he was a good salesman.

So when he started Store Ad Printers, he got the six top salesmen in Santa Clara valley.  Made them a deal to come to work to build the company up.  

Then he went to IBM and bought this early IBM computer machine which printed up these metal tabs. It was tab kind of thing.  It would put in these dots things for your code, and then it would do the “click-click” and pull up the tab, and print it.

So all the others direct-mail printers just printed “Resident” and an address.  The resident mailing costs in those days cost something like eighteen cents a mailing and if you had the guy’s name on it it was four cents.  So my father computerized.  The tab machine could fill this room, just the one that did the addressing, because it was all metal tabs and “click-click-click”–just noisy.  

So that’s the way he started out on.  Then they hired college kids to go and get the names of all the houses and people’s names and turn it in; they programed it all in.  They ended up getting every name and every house from Santa Barbara to Oregon, and all the way into Nevada.  All of Northern California. They would do real estate, any kind of mailings you wanted, they could do.

And all the competition, before they had computers, couldn’t compete.  My father was doing four-cent mailings, hundreds of thousands of them, and the other guys had to do eighteen-cent mailings, hundreds of  thousand of them.  So my dad got all the business.

So he goes, “You want to be an artist, come work for me.  I got an art department, just take over the art department.  Look at these? whatever you do:  houses, cars, whatever you want.  Come work for me, you’ve got it all.”

“You want to go do your stupid thing, you’re on your own.”

“Good. I’m on my own.  I’ll see you later.” [laughs] “No thank you. Stick to that deal, Pops, that’s a good one, I’ll take that one.”

So I went into the coastguard.  I went in in August and I graduated  right around Thanksgiving in November.  [Then I was in this holding company I was in?] and the commandant sent his driver to come and get me.  I graduated from boot camp and the coast guard commandant signs all the graduation certificates, he hand-signs them and he was doing them and saw the name James Mazzeo.  And his daughter bought and said, “Yeah, I bought it from a kid in San Jose, named Mazzeo.  And he said, “There aren’t that many Mazzeos that come by and you fit the bill so we stopped/thought we would see if this  was you.  

Kirk:  So he sent a car out to pick you up?
Go get Mazzeo, he just graduated from Holden company.  I talked to the chief and he’s getting Mazzeo ready to come up come to the office and said I don’t know if this is commandant.  Just come home and put on your dress uniform, he wants to see you at this place.  And I just thought, “This is either a joke, and they’re setting me up to go knock on the commandant’s door so they can go, “Ah!  Guess we what we got Mazzeo to do–he actually knocked on the commandant’s door.  I thought, “Oh my god, they are setting me up for this is a joke.  I kept looking him in the eye and going “The Commandant, huh?”  And he said, “Yeah, look–see that gray car out there?  That’s his driver, he’s waiting for you.  Hurry up!”

And I thought, “Why’d I have to put on my dress uniform if I’m going to go mow this guy’s lawn?”  I could do that in my dungarees….”

That’s all I could think about was, Does he want me to wash his windows or mow the lawn, or some stupid thing.  So I talked to the driver a couple times.  I’d look him in the eye to see if he were going to laugh or something, but he was serious.  So we went there and  went up the stairs and knocked on the door.  The house was up on this hill and he lawn went down and it flatted up and went down again then to the end/bend? of the road, so like two sets of stairs just getting up the front door and big column on the porch.  A big mansion, two or three stories high, big old brick mansion.  It’s where all the admirals in the Navy, they all lived on this hill looking out over San Francisco.  This was one of those places.

So I went up and knocked — I looked at the car one more time before I knock on the door and see if the guy was “Ah, he’s filling in?  But he was just sitting there, so I knock on the door.  The commandant opened the door and went, he was chewing on a cigar, an unlit cigar; and he had on kind of like a housecoat, like a sort of red and black velvet housecoat jacket–you know, a smoking jacket or something?  But he had on this commandant hat with all the scrambled eggs on the brim and everything.  He had on this big old hat and he opens the door and he’s chewing on the cigar and he looks at me and goes, “Mazzeo?”  And I go, “Sir, yes sir!” (He’s God, you know) and he looks back at the house and he goes, “Mazzeo’s here, dear.” And then I hear this woman’s voice go, “Well, I’ll be right down.”

He said, “Come on in, come on in.”  I thought, “Oh my gosh.”  There’s this entrance way and there’s this big beautiful wooden curved staircase in the second floor curving down to the entrance way, the foyer.  So I’m standing down there and his wife comes down the stairs, nice lady, and “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

And she goes, “You’re probably wondering what this is all about, aren’t you?” And I said, “Yes,  Ma’am.” (laughs)

I’m looking around and it doesn’t look like they need dusting or the windows look clean to me.  And she goes, “Well, come in the library, maybe that will explain things.”  

So we go in there she goes, “Jim, my husband and I, we do a lot of entertaining.  We have congressmen, foreign dignitaries, all kinds of people from Washington D.C. coming through, and we have these dinners.  And after dinner, my husband likes to take the men into the library to smoke a cigar and they invites us ladies in and we all socialize after dinner in the library.”

“Come on into the library.”  She points to the fireplace and there’s a big mat and above it framed really nicely was my painting.

I go, “Wow — I sold that to you?”

She said, “yeah, my daughter bought it  and she gave it to us for Christmas because I got out in November, right?  and she had bought it in had to be before June–May–before I graduated.  Maybe 
she didn’t get it for Christmas, maybe they gave it to her for their anniversary she gave it as a gift.  They had it for about five or six months.  And she said, “We have these dinners and stuff–and everybody that’s seen this painting just marvels at it–they just say what a great painting –it really looks like the foggy day looking out the window at San Francisco.  It really did look it–all I had to do was put a couple little seagulls in the fog and it would have been perfect.

She said, “we get so many comments about this picture we just had to meet you, and my husband signed these diplomas, your name came up, and we just thought, “Well, it has to be him!”


I said, “Yeah, that’s the first painting I’ve ever sold in my whole life!”  

And then the commandant goes, “Mazzeo, you think  you can paint coastguard rescue scenes?”

“At boot-camp down there, there’s seven different barracks with each different company in a barracks in a three or four-month -long boot camp program, it’s a really long boot camp.  And every barracks has a big green  room in the middle of where all the people are sleeping.  There’s this room that you can shut off in the birthing area called “the quiet room” and that’s where all the boots go in to study, like the study room.  And every barracks has one.  so there was twelve quiet rooms and he goes, “There’s no art, there are just all those quiet-rooms and just empty walls and green room.  I think that you could really paint inspiring coastguard rescue scenes and you have four walls so you could fifty or sixty rescue scenes and just make you “Base Artist” and just paint rescue scenes.  And I said, “Well, you know, I only really do modern, abstract art, I don’t do too many  people scenes but I can try, I can learn I suppose.  It might take me a little while to get into it but I’ll try.  I’m not going to say no to them.  

And he goes, “Okay, I’ll get everything set up then.  And sure enough it took about an hour to drive back to Alameda from Treasure Island.  By the time we got back to the base, the chief was there and he goes, “Commandant called, he had us get you a space for a studio and we got you the gunnery shed way out on the end of the island, no one will bother you out there, it’s kinda nice.  It was out on the mud flats, looking at the estuary and looking West at sunset.  Kind of groovy.  It was funky.  The gunnery shed was twenty to twenty-four feet wide and about a hundred feet long.  And it was empty inside, no walls, no nothing.  And what they normally at the gunnery sheds, they had four or five out there for the boots.  and your company would go in and there was a long cable right down the middle at about four feet wide and divided and you’d go and get your M1 rifle and set it on this table and they’d teach you to take it apart and put it back together and everything and that is basically what you did in those sheds was disassemble forty-fives and weapons and put them back together so you would know how to do it.  That was part of our boot training.  

A up to that one.  They gave me the end one out there.  And they put in–I don’t know where they got it but they put it in this big old stuffed chair, this easy chair that Fran? sit in and then a hundred feet down they built this sort of anvil place put these canvases.  I guess they wanted me to do three-foot by four-foot, you  know–big–dramatic rescue scene paintings.  so they had this big old easel.   Eighty feet back  my chair.  Nothing between it you just sit back and –go like that–


I said, “This is cool!  This is great! But I’m going to have to study to do these kind of rescue scenes because–The commodore goes, “May I ask, I see these rescue scenes, maybe like a stormy night and a sinking boat; and there’s a young mother with her baby, and there’s a helicopter hoovering? above the boat and a coastguard is reaching out to get the baby and the mother is holding the baby up in the storm.  Some “Save the Baby” kind of thing.  

I’d go, “Oh my god, this is…”  Well, I said I could try.  

So the chief said, “I’m going to have to go and learn how to do it, go and see how the masters painted their scenes and stuff, I’m going to have to devote some time to getting ready before I can start painting these things.”

And he said, “Yeah, here’s your “Liberty card”, and he gave me this laminated Liberty Card.  

And I’d just gotten out of three-and-a-half months of being in prison on that island.  All I wanted to do was swim the estuary at five in the morning and run and never come back as long as I lived.  

Now, normally all the other guys with only two stripes have to go to the chief and say, “Can I get liberty from Friday to Saturday night?” 

If they get a special liberty card, that’s only good for those times, and then you’d have to be back or else the shore patrol would arrest you.  But I had a laminated liberty card so I was in charge of my own liberty.  That was a mistake, because I left.

  I came back maybe once a week, just to kind of get the feel of what’s happening .  The chief goes, “How’s it going?”  I’m going, “Oh, it’s pretty good, I’m down at the DeYoung Museum, I’m looking at paintings and getting inspired, and I’m learning some stuff and I should be ready to paint sometime soon.”

The truth of the matter was I moved into a studio-owned art gallery on upper Grand Avenue and met Margo St. James, and I got laid and I smoked my first joint and I had this old beat up I wanted to be a beatnik in highschool so here I was living the life of a beatnik in North Beach, had all my highschool paintings in the studio-owned art gallery on upper Grand Avenue and I just had a whole wonderful little life going on in this and every now and then I could drive back to Alemeda.

I’m actively in the coastguard!  I’m supposed to be there seven-five days a week or something, but i was never there and I never spent a night there because I slept in the gallery for awhile and then Margo had me move in with her and that was really much more fun.

So, about three months went by and I’d just been abusing I’d go to the island about once every two weeks instead of a weekly, you know, had a demanding life going, as a beatnik in North Beach.  I’d be hanging out, smoking dope with Mose Allison, Lenny Bruce, and all these amazing guys because Margo’s the unofficial hostess and all these incredible people were coming by and hanging out all the time.  

So finally I show up and the chief in the gunnery shed and I get there he comes over and goes, “Commandant called today.”  

“Oh really?”, I said, ” I think I’m getting ready to start painting.”

And he said, “Yeah, you are.  Get your sea? back together and go check in on the weather color? comes over started painting.  He goes, “You are going to paint.”  You’re going to be chipping rust and painting he was sending me out to Ocean station, November. it’s a hundred miles square in the middle of the ocean, halfway between California and Hawaii.  This weathermen on board, they launch weather balloons that they track on radar at different heights they see which way the winds are blowing and how fast by tracking these weather balloons at weather station.

But also it’s a ditch station, because all the Trans-Pacific airplanes have to fly over Ocean Station November on their way to Hawaii because it’s the halfway mark and if there’s anything wrong with the plane, it’s where they can ditch.  It’s a ditching station, if something’s wrong on a flight somehow.  

So we were out there doing ditching exercises, launching these lifeboats and going out, it’s kind of fun, it gets you off of the big boat.  You are there for thirty or forty days at a time.  Floating down in there.  The other forty days were desensitize?, all you’d see was an occasional goony-bird fly by and there was a horizon line with water below and sky above and sometimes a cloud would come through.  Also, because we were in the Japanese  trade currents, Japanese glass fishnet balls would break loose in storms in Japan and get in the current and they’d come floating by.  So we’d have these contests:  who could find the biggest glass fishnet bottle for the thirty? pull one out of the water.  At the end the guy that got the biggest one like won the lottery, you know.  Forty bucks or something.  We paid fifty-cents to join the fishnet ball lottery.  It also captured gooney birds with pieces of meat on a string and pull them up on four or five of em on a Sunday afternoons they’d have Goony bird races on the back fan tail of the dock, because goony birds aren’t used to walking on solid objects especially ones that are rocking and so they were like six drunken sailors trying to do a foot race.  People were all betting on which goony birds go and shit like that.

So I did six ocean stations in about nine months, I guess six –they cut me, they didn’t want me there.  I had too much fun on land.  

So back then I was hanging out, I was living at Margo’s.  but I did six stations and then my sonar school came through.  What happened though was because of the commandant thing, it was put down in my record that I was close to the commandant.  The commandant was like–you know, and between that I got my school and went to school and became a sonarman? and became a non-commissioned officer and I’m in 95 foot search and rescue boats, it was really fun, really cool.

But every time I’d fuck up, which was —occasionally, instead of getting a captain’s mask or some kind of judicial penalty, they just go, “You know, Mazzeo, you really can’t do these kind of things with passerby?”  They treated me with kid gloves because in my records, I’ve looked and I haven’t seen any particular leave notation but somehow it said, “Mazzeo has friends in high places, because they went out of their way to really oversee indiscretions and stuff.  So that was what happened with that

I did those weather stations and I got my out of sonar school and the duty was really good right up until the last six months in the coastguard man.  

Kirk:  How long were you a sonar man?

About three years.  Well, I was a sonar man up right up until I left except  and I was on the ninety foot search boat.  I was up in the bridge with the captain and he was a lieutenant JG which is like the first grade out of the academy.  It was his first command, this ninety-five foot rescue boat.  He’s twenty-five years old.  I’m nineteen and all the other guys are thirty, thirty or thirty-five and they had been in the coastguard for fifteen-twenty years.  and they were all married and they all had families, and they all have families in Alameda and in the Bay area.  And the “SAC?” we were only on Active Search and Rescue, one week out of the month.  So one week out of the month we must be tied up to a buoy across of Sausalito, just off Sausalito, right under the Golden Gate bridge.  and our search and rescue was outside the Golden Gate bridge, never did any inside the bay, forty-footers at the inside the bay so–ninety-fives went out to sea and we went from Point Reyes to Monterrey about a hundred and seventy-five miles that squared was our search and rescue area.  and the waves are really fucked in there, you got fifty-foot waves in Half Moon bay, mavericks and we have thirty foot waves and sleeper waves/steamer away?

But there was a study? for waves, they were out there, fifty miles off shore, and I never had to go rescue somebody on a nice, calm, beautiful sunny day.  It was always bumfuck storm, nobody in their right mind would go out in the waters like today and then we’d have to go and do ‘leven?” tight search pattern grids and stuff , trying to find the rescue, stay with the signal kind of —like that.  I didn’t have to do too many of them, I did some real–I did one where we were getting thrown from side to side, over 60 degree, with? old switches?  I think it was seventy-one degrees we actually just roll upside down and die.  So we were coming nine o’clock?  And I remember up on the bridge really hanging on captain and I barfing and just everything, it was horrible.  And I told the captain, “Who do they send to rescue us?”

We are out here looking for a guy we’re not going to find, and when do we go home?  when do we call it off.  We don’t call it off until we get orders to call it off .  “Mazzeo, we only have orders to go out and rescue, we don’t have any orders to come back.  (Laughs)

“So if you come back you come back on our own or we just don’t come back come back at all, you know–oh my God.  

So it was really good duty.  It was great duty and the last six, they ask if I wanted- the Viet Nam thing was happening, this was 1966, August of ’66, I got out and in June or July they called me in, these guys, and they said (I was a D5 at that time)  “Here’s the deal, Mazz, we are real interested in you staying in the coastguard.  They invested a lot of money in Sonar school and I had all this training and if I only staying for four years, they lose money.  If I stay in for ten or twelve years, they actually make some money.  So that was another reason why they treated me really nice too, because it’s critical rate? and they want people who sign up  so you’ll sign up for more.

But we been out of second in command on this boat and we have these new eighty-seven foot boats being built, and we want you to go to officer candidate school.  You come out a full officer.  You have to sign up for six years, or we send you to officer candidate school and you get out, you can have a brand new eighty-seven foot boat to take command of.  And I said, “What’s it replacing the ninety-five footers?  No they said, “These are going to Viet Nam.”  I go, “Wait a minute–“

“You all going to take an eighty-five foot boat and go up and down the Mekong delta? shooting people out of the water?”  Everybody in their black pajamas?  I got to tell you something,”  I said, “Four years I’ve done a lot of search-and-rescue, I’ve helped life and property at sea.  Haven’t had to shoot anybody or kill anybody. Having to get my gun out or nothin'”.  I said, “I was a pretty good coastguard guy, I did pretty good.  Good enough that you want me to be an officer.”  I said, “But if you sent me over to where I’d have to shoot and kill people, I think I’d be the worst coastguard guy I think I’d be a terrible drunk and I just think– that’s just not what I’m going to do.  Actually  I got plans to go to Hollywood, I’m going to be a movie star.”  That’s what I told them.  And they said, “Well, okay, when I’m second in command the captain goes, “Second in command, you’re Education Officer, and you get four requests to send somebody, every year you got to send two guys to Navy firefighting school on Treasure Island and they take a refresher course.  Port security law enforcement, dangerous cargo and these schools would come up and you would have to send somebody off your crew to fill that slot because I had to fill them.  And Captain says, “If you can’t get anybody to go, you go.”  Because somebody has to go.  So your education officer, you either get somebody to go or you go.  and all these guys are married, they didn’t want to go anywhere.  They just wanted to go home every night.  so no one would ever volunteer to go.  so I went to firefighting school like four or five times.  I went to dangerous cargo school in Roanoke, Virginia.  Learned how to fire a Thompson submachine gun because we were Federal Department, Coastguard is not in the Navy except in times of war so w——–in the treasury department.  So I had an old treasury, “Elliot Ness” machine guns: “cccurrrrrr”-kind of shit.  It was fun, it was fun shooting those things.

So I did that, and also I went to this dangerous Cargo school, that’s how to load ships with bombs and how to stack them in just the right way and block them in with wood so they don’t shift around out at sea and you have to sign off every hold, make sure you’ve inspected the thing, sign if off and close it up, do the next hold and fill them up.  The Viet Nam war was going on so my six months, because I wasn’t going to do what they wanted me do, they took me off plush? duty and they put me up in Port Chicago which is up in Martinez on the delta that’s where the ammo base was and all the coastguard guys out there — there were marines guarding the marine squad, the entrance of the ammo right of the wartime so we had to go through a marine guard to get in and out.

We had our coveralls and our jacket and our white hardhats and our big red book on how to have a sign-off shed and a book of cargo laws and shit.  There were about ten or twelve of us, one of us on each ship and then there were like always four ships being in loaded and filling them up with Napalm bombs and shit like that.  And trainloads of Napalm bombs would come in.  Sometimes they would open up a train car to start unloading the napalm, they were all in these sort of wooden frames the aluminum boxes and they would put them on a fork lift.  

Sometimes they would slide open a train car.  One would slide out and land on the guy who slid the door open, kill him.  I saw a couple guys get killed that way.  It was pretty weird shit.  Plus Margo, I couldn’t live in San Francisco because I was way up in Martinez, so Margo goes, “My friend Owsley has a house in Orinda, which is only about ten miles from Martinez.  He lives in this lemon orchard and he’s making acid up in his /this house on the top of hill on the lemon orchard.”  

She goes, “There’s another house down at the bottom of the hill by the gate and Owsley just asked if I knew anybody that wanted to live there because he wanted a gatekeeper to keep an eye on his illicit LSD manufacturing he made all the LSD for the Grateful Dead, he made the best LSD in Northern California.

so I moved in there.  I was living there for my last six months.  I’d come home.  I got a note from Owsley saying with a hundred dollar bill on my kitchen table saying, “Mazz, sorry, I had to use your  refrigerator and all my food would be out on the sink and there would be a hundred dollar bill to buy you food.  And I’d open up the refrigerator and there was just ALL filled with pink and purple tubes of liquid tubes  of LSD, just totally filled up.  

So all the guys at Port Chicago were fuckups in one way or another.  they weren’t there because they earned the right to be there.  They were there because they deserved to be there for some reason including the commanding officer.  He was a fuckup.  He was more than a lieutenant.  he was a lieutenant commander and LC.  And he had fucked up too, he was okay.  

But two days before I get out of the coastguard I have to do my last six months and two day up there I could go up to the city? and sign out.  He calls me into his office and says, “Mazzeo, I know you are not going to sign. Normally they want me to have one last talk to the guards before they get out and this is the time I would allot for our talk.  And he goes, “I know damn well that there is no way in hell you are going to sign up.”  I went, ” Absolutely, man, I’m out of here, I’m gone.”  

He goes, “Yeah, I thought so.  Now, there is something more important than that.  I’ve been reading about this LSD 257 and this was 1966.  If anybody in the entire United States coastguard knows where I can get some LSD 25, you do.”

And I went, “Yeah, I have a whole refrigerator full of it!.”  

And he goes, “You DO?”

I go, “Yeah, Owsley just lives up the hill from me, he makes the best.  I got pink liquid, purple liquid.  For the first trip, I recommend the pink liquid.  When you get off work, follow me home and I’ll give you some, no problem.”

He goes, “Hell with getting off work, let’s go right now!”

And so we got there, we went to my house and I gave him a dose of pink liquid and he ended up talking, I had this old Weimaraner dog, who was a pleasure point beach dog that my surfer buddy couldn’t have anymore.  His name was Adolf and Adolf used to chew rocks on the beach all the time so he had no teeth, he had worn them down.  Everybody used to call him Adolf, the Rock Crusher.  Adolf was, oh God, he was thirteen, fourteen years old.  he was really old and Adolf and my commanding officer spent twelve hours talking to each other .  And he’d be the corner talking to my dog and I’d be playing music and stuff, and I was on acid too.  I put little yellow camera lenses on my window.  I’d look out at the lemon orchard on acid through the yellow camera lenses and all of a sudden instead of a lemon orchard they became these apple trees with these huge apples, like four-foot diameter apples, hanging on these trees and there was dinosaurs, big, old long-necked dinosaurs and they were leaning over the apple trees picking apples and chewing on them.  On acid right?  And I played Straus and classical music and shit while all this is going on, I’m kind of amused by that and every now and again I’d look over at my commanding officer and he would go, “This dog–this dog knows how to talk!”  

I said, “Yeah, that’s what happens on acid.  You commune with forms of nature, they commune with us–we were getting all heavy and shit.  By the end of the–twelve hours later, the next morning, it was about six-seven in the morning when we’d been all night high and at one point I thought, “Let’s go for a ride!”  About ten o’clock the night before after we had been on acid for about five hours, I’d gotten high to a concerts and stuff and I just went, “Let’s go to a concert, I’ll drive!”  Man I got down, by the time to the gate, it was like, “Oh my God.  Let’s just leave the car here and walk back.  That was NOT the right idea!  So anyway, the next morning as he gets ready to leave, the commanding officer and he looks at me and he goes, “Mazzeo, as soon as I get my brains back I’m going to try this again!”

And I go, “That’s great!” and the next day I just signed out and that was it and that was like my last day in the coast guard.  It was pretty cool.  

I got back there.  I went over there to sign out, I had to sign out at Fort Baker in San Francisco and when I’m signing out they go, “Hey Maz, you got a couple hours before you finish signing out.  Why don’t you go on over and take your captains test.  You totally qualify.  You have all your sea hours and everything.  go you can get your captains license.”

And I said, “Cap–I’m never going to work on another boat again as long as I live, man!  I don’t want no captain’s license!”  

Years later, I became a sailor, if I had had a captain’s license I could be doing six-back charters, and taking boats up and down.  I was taking my own boat up and down the coast.  I should have gotten that captain’s license.  I could still go get it but it just wasn’t the same thing.

Well, that gets me pretty much out of the coast guard.  The next thing is hanging out at Margo’s, Ken Kesey, and then the West Coast Pop art-experimental band.  

These musicians there in town and they are going to play my party and it was Billy and Danny and Ralphy Within, which is Neill’s original Crazy Horse.  but it was Danny and The Dreamers.  Danny had some hits down in LA.  when Danny died of heroin, Neil said, “In every singer/songwriter’s life, there’s one guy that he can play with and sing with like nobody else will ever be able to replace and he goes.  And he goes, “That’s what Danny was.”  and if you listen to after the Gold Rush and some of Neil’s first two albums, that’s Danny singing with him.  All those great songs.  Those are like some of probably his best albums ever, there was After the Gold Rush, every knows this is nowhere on the Neil Young album.  that’s jack Niche, later he did alot of soundtracks, he did One Flew Over The Coocoo’s Nest soundtrack.  He did lots of film score soundtrack.  he was a composer and he did a lot of Neil stuff.  A lot of really trippy stuff with Neil.  Nells Lochran played with the early Crazy Horse.  A lot cool guys played on those early.  But Danny and Ralphy and Billy, three-piece band, they played in our living room, which was hung over the sidewalk on upper Grand Avenue, second floor.  It had bay windows.  They were in the bay-window area with the windows open, and the whole street just filled up with people.  Just dancing down on the sidewalks and in the street.

Everybody would go, “Yeah, Margo’s party!”  And the door was open–people going up and down.  And I invited my captain from the boat to go to the party and he reported that he thought that people were smoking funny cigarettes’ and shit.  And I got called into the CGI and they said, “Yeah, the captain said he went to a party at your house and people were smoking pot.” 

And this was 1967 , or ’63, and nobody smoked pot in my senior year at high school.  I was probably the last graduating class that absolutely nobody even knew what Marijuana was, we all drank and got drunk and shit.  But 1964, high school kids were smoking pot and stuff, so it was a transition era.  So this was right on the transition line, an early party.  The captain reported it to the CGI and he called me in and said, “Yeah, the captain thought there was pot being smoked.”  

“Pot?”

“You know, Marijuana.”

“Marijuana, what’s that?”

And he said, “Well, they call it Pot, and when people smoke it, they hold it and they hold it and they talk like that (hoarse, closed-throat talking).  Did you see anybody doing that?”

I went, “No, everybody smokes out here, people smoke it all over the place.  Everybody smoke.  I’ve never seen anyone hold it in and talk like that.  Humphrey Bogart in a movie or something.”  But I said, “No!”

So I’m lying through my teeth to him.  And I’m sitting at this table, right?  but I’m young, you know, this is like, “Oh my God, CGI, you know and I could go to prison forever.  and underneath I’m like, really smooth and just talking to him but underneath my brain is just, I’m so nervous I couldn’t stop my leg from going like that (banging sound).  I knew they knew I was lying to them and they just let me go.  And then I didn’t want to walk straight.  I didn’t want to get to Sansom ? street, the Federal department of downtown San Francisco and i lived in North Beach, about six blocks away.  and I didn’t want to go straight back to my house because I didn’t want to lead them back to where I worked?.  So I took this dubious road, through China town, and up and down some alleys, and made some quick left turns, trying to cover my tracks.  There was nobody following me but I took every precaution.

Parties:  so basically I’m at Crazy Horse for about two years met Crazy.  And Ralphy said that Margo gave him LSD that night and he had the worst trip and he’s never taken acid since that time, he totally freaked out–didn’t know what was happening, went totally nuts and later on I said, “Yeah, that was my house, Ralphie!”  And he goes, “You were there?  He couldn’t remember hardly nothin’ except we had this terrible experience.