Douglas Roycroft came over to visit me one day, when I was living in that tiny basement apartment on Bessie Street down from Precita Park. He had a business proposition. He had run across a book describing how to make Absinthe, a liquor which France banned as too addictive more than fifty years before. All the books about Paris in the roaring twenties, Hemmingway, et al., memorialized this liquor .
I had known Douglas for a little over a
year. More accurately, I knew his flea bag,
unfixed female mutt better than I knew Douglas.
Both came over to visit my girlfriend Dea, all too often. Dea had formerly been living with Douglas at
37 Mirabel, just two blocks south of Precita Park. My Treat Street house was one block east of
the park and as a point of interest, just off the park was 288 Precita, the
SLA/Harris house where the FBI captured them the next year. Douglas's flea hound was like Pigpen in the
Peanuts cartoons. I had to do a
tent-over, full fumigation one summer just because of that dog.
What Douglas proposed was that three
people with money, like me, would cough up $100 each to finance his building
and operating a still for processing the wormwood. He would be able to buy ingredients for about
a dozen bottles, three each for our four people. It took about two months before he came
around with the final product.
It was strong and delicious. I could see why people loved the drink. The addiction took years and abuse, like
cigarettes, so I wasn't worried about that.
I would use it for entertaining, allowing people only a tiny shot glass
of the nectar. It was great fun.
Douglas was a friend of Dea, and she
was now living in my Treat Street house.
What a sucker I was. I moved out
and let her stay so she could spread her wings and be independent. Besides talking me out of the house,
temporarily, she talked me into getting a vasectomy, permanently. Now this was over thirty years ago and while
even then it was a simple snip, done locally in a doctor's office, it was still
a new procedure and not one that was reversible like it is today. This was about the time of Roe vs. Wade, Jan
1973, and only a decade after the pill first came out. Everyone wanted free love, but contraception
was a big issue.
I had Dea make the appointment at a
women's clinic and she of course booked it with a female doctor. I wasn't scared of the snip, but I should
have asked people about the after-operation pain. I hobbled around for weeks, in agony for the
first 3 or 4 days. I wasn't worried
about the permanent loss of effective sperm; my diabetes had done me in on that
score. My sperm count was ineffectually
low, so this was just a perfunctory seal of approval. They gave me a mild soporific and then shaved
and bathed a small area for the incision.
They applied something to freeze the area. All the while I was just sitting on the end
of an examining table, bantering with the nurses who all thought this was great
fun.
I didn't feel the incision and when
they got a hold of that little vein and stretched it out, I couldn't
watch. Snip and both new ends snapped
back into safety. They must have applied
a Band-Aid, no suture. I got up and
walked into the reception area where they gave me a glass of orange juice and
kept me sitting down, just like when you give blood. The nurses had applauded when I came out of
the Doctor's office and they brought me a pin that said something to the effect
that I'd been "fixed."
For years afterward, this tiny scar
served as an entry card to a dozen women's beds. My first experience with that just blew me
away. I was shooting pool at closing
time in this little nightclub down in North Beach. This was my regular hangout. Somehow the subject of birth control came up
and I commented that I wasn't worried anymore because I'd had a vasectomy. A woman who I only vaguely knew said to me,
"I'm taking you home with me, but you'd better be able to prove
it." I met a dozen women who knew
exactly where to look for this little scar, nurses I guess, and we were happy
when they found it.
Dea had done baby-sitting for Douglas
Roycroft in the past; often when she lived with him and this continued after
she moved out. His boy’s name was, Tree
Bear. That says it all; this was the
late sixties, early seventies. Douglas
was an antiquarian book dealer, but only out of his house. He put out a catalogue twice a year,
advertising a collection of thousands of military books he had amassed over the
years. Douglas was a bit of a nut case
on his military stuff and even a little neo-Nazi, but when I decided to go into
the book store business, Douglas seemed like a natural working partner. I put together the business plan, found a
location on 24th Street in Noe Valley, and obtained sixty metal book shelves
and magazine racks, on lease from my father's company, Industrial Tool. I began amassing thousands of used books
myself.
My initial plan was just to have a fun
place. A business, which financially
broke even, but would be a tax loss for the IRS. I was just going to hang out there an evening
or two every week and now and then on the weekends. Douglas was supposed to manage the day-to-day
operation. But I never get into anything
lightly. I found out about acquiring
books and I enjoyed that aspect of the business. There was a coffee house, two doors down
called The Meat Market, where men played chess.
Not 3-hour games of intense, old-man chess, but with a chess clock and
for 5-minutes total for each side. I'd
never seen chess played this way, and I had to try. I loved it and started spending hours down
there.
Eventually I started to bring players
back to the bookstore and I re-arranged the front room of the store, allocating
space for chess tables. After a month or
two of this, I had half a dozen tables set up and I had begun acquiring used
chess books for the players. I organized
a speed chess tournament on Friday nights that would draw in a crowd of twenty,
then thirty and forty people: to play or just to watch. As better and better players started to come
around, I began to stock new chess books and chess sets, boards and
clocks. I subscribed to all the
journals, six of them from the Soviet Union and had them up in the magazine
racks.
Of course, with each successive
expansion into the chess world, I spent more and more time with the store and
the chess end of things became larger and larger, both as the focus of events
in the store and a larger and larger share of the gross sales. I was making about a thousand a month profit
from this little chess business. One
result of my success was that I kept moving Douglas' side of the business
further and further into the bowels of the store. My fun chess club was marginalizing Douglas
and his book business. I hired a full-time
person to watch after the chess club 9-5 Monday to Friday while I was at work.
By this time the best players in the Bay Area were coming over to Fiddler's Green often and certainly on Friday nights. I had become a legitimate U.S. Chess Federation tournament director and was holding full two-day sanctioned chess tournaments as well as the speed chess tournaments. There were exciting moments, for chess people. We held a telephone match with The Marshall Club in New York, the most famous club in the Western world. We traveled as a team to local tournaments. I held a Women's Masters Tournament, which received nation-wide praise.
The biggest Friday nights occurred when two defectors from the USSR appeared on the West Coast, Anatoly Lein and Leonid Shamkovitch, rated third and fifth in the world. Walter Browne, the former U.S. Chess Champion and 8th in the world, often came over from Berkeley Friday nights and usually won the first prize of $50. The Russians were traveling with a New Yorker, Steve Brandwein, who loved playing speed chess. The NYC chess pundits thought he was as good at speed chess as Mikhail Tal, World’s Chess champion 1960-61 while in his twenties, and a famous speed chess player. Steve was homeless but wintered in the Bay Area, and often beat Walter Browne in my speed chess tournaments the previous year. Those games were legendary. The prize was up to $100. There were twelve players in the tournament, and they played double round-robin. The players all assumed that Steve and Walter would win every one of their games except between each other. The other ten players paid their $20 for the bragging rights. To not split the 1st prize, one of the two would have to win as white and black, hard to do, back-to-back. Steve was one of Bobby Fischer's warm-up partners when Fischer played Boris Spassky at Reykjavik.
Every chess wanna-be was there those
nights with the Russians: to watch Grand Masters playing speed chess or to
enter and be able to say they had lost to three or four of the world's top ten
players on the same night. I still made
everyone play me first.
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