Our shortstop, Galen, was the revolutionary. I was just a hippie who played a shallow third base. And music. Well, I didn’t really play music, not a guitar or anything like that, but I played records from nine to midnight on the campus radio station. Yes, records, this was a while ago. But that’s getting ahead of the story. The entire outfield and half the infield was actively fomenting radical change, often fiercely debating the eternal question: “Do you favor the overthrow of the United States by force, or by violence?” I generally voted “force” as I didn’t want to see violence anywhere, here in L.A. or across the ocean in Vietnam. Both pitchers and one of the catchers were Gandhian pacifists. The rest were undecided, but alive to the possibilities of the time.
I played in close at third because my glove hand was faster than my fear reflex so I could short-hop a hard-hit ball and fire an overhand strike throw to first, all before the batter could get there, and — equally important — before I realized how scary the entire experience might have been. On this collection of anarchists, communists, spartacists and more, my innocent campus activism and Grateful Dead fanaticism was a source of endearing amusement to my older teammates, each of whom vied to be the one to convince me of his specific world view. I wasn’t the only bearded one; indeed, we were so hairy that three games in a row we heard opponents ask if their schedule was incorrect, and were they “playing the House of David?” They weren’t. Our name was The Snoids. Snoids, we explained, were “little men who lived in the sewers,” as drawn by R. Crumb. We looked the part. I don’t know how we wound up in that division of the Recreation League. Most other teams were collections of real estate agents or bankers. One team was all cops and that game was the most fun of the season, and probably for them, too.
Most Snoids were older, relatively recent grads or dropouts from the university. At nineteen, I was almost the youngest. Galen was the oldest at 36. He was a barrel-chested guy with hair that cascaded from a perfectly centered bald spot all the way down to his shoulders. His legs were thick and muscled but his feet nimble. Maybe he was an incarnation of Honus Wagner, the great Pittsburgh shortstop of the early nineteen hundreds. Even if he wasn’t, I was happy to play beside him.
Only the second baseman was as politically naïve as I was, but he was the center fielder’s little brother, a star on his high school team, and unquestionably the best player we had.
When Galen wasn’t at our games or the non-mandatory weekly practices, he managed a club downtown called The Club. The building was nondescript on its best days. It had been a transmission and brake shop in an earlier lifetime and the transition had been so quick there was no time for real cleaning. It was open only at night, with candles on the tables and a few lamps that barely pierced the darkness, which was a wise decorating choice. The Club featured aged blues masters, new folkies, and cheap beer. Too often, cheap beer was the headliner. Sometimes, it would close to the public to offer lefty groups a place to meet, greet and ignite. Occasionally, it was the combo plate: music benefits for the Panthers, or Farmworkers, or Venceremos or the random bail party. Galen hardly slept because he was having so much fun. He was a fortunate one who had found his place. There was an actual owner somewhere but Galen ran things on the ground. He was creating the conditions, complete with peanut shells on the floor, for smashing the state. And back in the batter’s box, he swung as if the softball were Richard Nixon’s face, and Galen was no pacifist.
I became a Snoid because I met Galen through my campus radio gig. At the station, among a batch of rock-and-roll-loving stoners, I fancied myself a budding Ph.D. – Pretty Heavy Dude. The gems I picked up in the dugout provided fodder for nightly commentary, amid pointed songs by Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and the Jefferson Airplane. The Club and I had a deal that was gold. I did free advertising and every two weeks my name (+guest) was on the pass list. Life was never so cool as when I showed up with a potential girlfriend, be greeted by name and waved right in.
One near-midnight Tuesday, I was doing my show, spinning Paul Butterfield’s mournful East-West when Galen called. He often checked in to remind me of what was happening where he was, or just to rehash a recent ballgame. This time was different. He sounded like he’d been yelling or sobbing and he could barely form words, that words had become alien to his tongue. It took half a minute before I figured out it was him.
“You got to tell everybody! They torched the place. People need to know, people need to be here!” Later, I could make out the sentence structure; at first, it was one extended howl.
“What? What’s going on? Cool out, Galen, I can’t understand a thing.”
He slowed his speech for a few moments but it sped up again.
“Man, they set fire to The Club! There’s smoke everywhere, and water. I’m standing in water. The whole front is trashed. Jesus, even the windows are broken.”
“Are you okay? Is anyone hurt? Shit, man, what the hell happened?” I had a habit then of adding swear words when I wanted to sound impressive, or older, which I pretty much imagined was the same thing.
“Yeah. Shit. I’m coughing like a fucking dead man, but I’m fine. Nobody’s hurt. Nobody was even here. No show tonight, I was about to crash in the back when BOOM! I ran out in my damn boxers and the place was burning. Jesus.” He paused, coughed twice. “You need to tell everyone, tell them to get down here, in solidarity. We can’t let the fuck-ass Gusanos get away with it.”
“The who?” Again, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. He was speaking on a channel my antenna couldn’t reach. “The Gooses?”
“No, man, the Gusanos, the fucking Gusanos. They’re pissed ‘cuz of last week.”
What happened last week? I tried to remember, knew that I should know, looked at the wall to the left of the turntables to see if I could spot a Club calendar. Nothing.
The spiraling rhythms of East West continued, Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop trading guitar licks that would last an eternity. It was my good luck to have chosen a thirteen-minute cut.
“The trucks got here fast, I’ll say that for them, but now let’s see if the pigs do their jobs. I won’t hold my breath. God, what a mess this is. Jesus, those goddamn Gusanos.”
Again that word. What was he saying? Who would firebomb, for that must have been what it was, The Club?
The music ended. I patched Galen in and began to exhort my listeners to get down to Third Street, down to The Club. This was important, I told them. The “revolution was being televised,” right now, the battle had begun, the smoke was still there, the burned building a testament to … to …. to what? Again, I was lost. I stopped and handed it over to Galen: “Brothers and sisters, on the line with me right now is my friend Galen Mayfield, from The Club. He’s there, he was there when it happened, when the Goose, the Gusanos … when they torched it. Galen, right on, man, tell everyone what’s going on, but be careful, remember you’re on the air. The FCC and all that.”
He was his own megaphone. Again he hurried, ranting about Gusanos and reactionary assholes. He said he only had a minute because the cops wanted to talk to him, and he sure as hell wanted to talk to them. I still had no idea what he was talking about, except for the fire part, but he spoke as if the entire audience, just as he had assumed with me, understood everything he said. Maybe they did. As he was finishing I cued up the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.” Galen ended with “Thanks man, I gotta run. I hope everyone gets down here. And we’ll be open, or have a benefit for ourselves, as fast as we can. Those fucks can’t stop us.”
He was gone. I was left in the dark studio with Mick Jagger and the boys. I was worried about the FCC and I was remembering a line from a Graham Greene short story from my English Lit. class:
“ … like the pictures in a book no one had read to him, the things he didn’t understand terrified him.”
The next morning, the paper did have an article about the fire but they buried it on page 22 next to the legal notices and work-at-home advertisements. That’s when I learned who the Gusanos were — gusano was Spanish for worm — the “worms” who hated Castro. They were anti-Castro Cubans from Florida. I didn’t know what they were doing out here in California? I didn’t even know that some Cubans didn’t like Castro. I was still a long way from even a semi-hip dude. I vowed to play nothing but Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan until everything was clear.
It’s been awhile but I’m still playing them. On a damn turntable, for crying out loud, forty years later. Everything goes around, or comes around, or something like that. I know we used to say something like that.
# # #
Tony Press tries to pay attention and sometimes he does. He’d be thrilled if you purchased his recent story collection, CROSSING THE LINES (Big Table), available at indy bookstores (yay!) and even from that Amazon place (okay). He is far too proud of his two Pushcart Prize nominations, Best of the Net nomination, and Million Writers Award nomination. Though he lives near San Francisco, he has no website.
Photo: Gabriel Ramos
