Showing posts with label Jerry Melin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jerry Melin. Show all posts

Saturday, March 07, 2015

ATIT Reheated: Jerry Melin, Forger and Craftsman

By Jack Brummet, 70's Ed.




Two days ago, I wrote a piece detailing the summer of 1973 Scooter and $2 all you can drink beer day at the Sundowner circa 1973, and my friend's couch surfing and imbibing at the Sundowner. Now Scooter wrote back (See italicized text below), and brought up a fact I had forgotten.

Jerry Melin developed an almost foolproof system for forging Washington State ID's. I think the reason this slipped my mind is that I never actually had Mel make one for me. In his comments, Scooter pegs this to my having a girlfriend and being on a diet. However, it was something deeper than that I think. In those days I was never a particularly meticulous law-abider, but for some reason I don't ever remember going to a bar until I was 21. And I never attended a day at the Sundowner, as far as I remember. I don't know why, but it worked out OK in the end. I was able to spend plenty of nights in bars after I turned 21. However, to this day, I very rarely go to bars, and when I do, it almost always involves music. I always preferred a party at someone's crib to a bar. On the other hand, some of the craziest times I had in NYC were, naturally, in bars. Like the time we bumped into Allen Ginsberg at the Grass roots Bar on St. Mark's Place. We listened to a recitation of his latest poem and chatted, and he gave Mel a big, wet kiss on the forehead.

I remember Mel, sitting for literally, hours, working as Scooter details below, to alter a license. He was changing one digit in the birth year, and it took hours to get the perfect letter and get the registration just perfect. Even cops would miss the alteration. So, Phil, "Schubert," Spurge, Kevin, Mike Thies, et al, would have these nearly foolproof licenses. After I turned 21, I joined them in the bar wars. Still, we were college students, trying to live on $200 a month, so there were limits to how much we could even go out to bars at all, except for jazz night at Pete's, where you could bottles of wine for $4.99 and listen to jazz,


He would labor the same way to produce these fantastic Blake-ean drawings of ethereal winged, androgynous angels. . .none of which survives (at least I don't have any). We wrote a lot of poetry together in much the same fashion, taking hours to build up poems, usually focused on America, the police state, art, drugs, philosophy, sex, jazz, and rock and roll. And when he was serious about school it was the same thing: he would study for 12 hours straight, and whenever he decided he wanted to apply himself, he would pull straight A's. Jerry/Mel was the smartest person I ever knew who was constantly on academic probation (his first year...after that he became an A machine. There was nothing like seeing him engrossed in whatever project was at hand: art, poetry, forgery, calculus, economics. We would sometimes spend an entire night reading one of Blake's work's like America or Jerusalem, aloud, with endless bowls, digressions, and sidebars, and The Band, Lou Reed, Will the circle be unbroken?, or the Stones' Sticky Fingers on the turntable.  More often we would collaborate on writings...ten page free association poems on a manual Underwood typewriter.  All of these and probably fifty or sixty joint and solo drawings, other writings, mostly very short stories, sketches, and dozens of cassette tapes of us riffing, creating aural poems, improving playing fictional characters. . .these all formed The Archive.  And sometime in the mid 80's, The Archive disappeared.  It could have fallen off a truck, it could be still stashed somewhere in someone's parents's house, or somewhere.  It would be pretty cool to discover them, but I don't hold out much hope anymore.  But as an eternal optimist...you never know.
____________________________________

Scooter here.  Usually I am happy just to sit back and enjoy the show at All This is That but Jack, we called him Johnny in 73, got me thinking. He says that I may have been depressed, maybe/maybe not, but I did have a lot of time to kill that summer and, as he points out, very few dólores to fund any meaningful diversions.

I had gone from tending dogs to the dogs in two summers and had nearly depleted my savings account after paying for freshman year at WWSC and my share of body work to repair Mel’s parent’s Pontiac Le Mans after Phil K, Kev & I put it into a ditch during a night of carousing while Mel prudently elected to ride shotgun.

Mel misdesignated drivers to his advantage on more than a few occasions in those years and when he didn’t the cops usually learned about it.

I  played softball for a local men’s team in Kent that summer but Mel always joined me at the Downer on Thursdays. Phil K would come by regularly too but Johnny less frequently because he had a job and a girl friend and I believe adhered to a fitness regimen then that frowned on 12 hours of brews guzzling. Anyway, all of us, with the exception of David Fuller (RIP) were still underage in 1973 but we never, I mean never, had a problem gaining entrance to drinking establishments.

In the early 70’s WA had begun to roll out a new state photo ID that replaced the bifurcated WSDL and State Liquor Photo ID cards that folks had to carry previously. The new ID/DL used a process that impregnated a dense fibrous paper backing with the licensee’s vitals and photo and then sealed the face with a fine but durable laminate overlay. This new photo DL quickly made the State Liquor Card obsolete. While some youngsters purchased faked up generic out-of-state IDs from shops along Seattle’s 2nd Avenue they would only pass muster at skid row dives, so we relied on Mel’s obsessive compulsivity to create nearly perfect WA State issued DL’s with modified birth years.

For a few years Mel would periodically cook up some tea and then patiently scour magazines, novels, textbooks, trade and professional journals, telephone directories, and newspapers in search of the perfect pica/font to match the DOB stat on the WADL. He had assembled an impressive file of matches by 1973.

His strategy was simple. He instructed us to make a claim to the DMV that we had lost our license so that if we had a real run in with the heat we could always present a valid DL. Once the replacement DL was in hand he would set up shop. He worked at a brightly lit table fitted with a square of picture frame matting. He always used medical implements instead of paste up tools. I had had access to scalpels and hemostats from my year at the veterinary clinic and Mel had built a fairly extensive kit of medical supplies for this and other endeavors.

He affixed the license to the matting with two hemostats and set about altering the last figure in the birth year. He was a master in this procedure by the summer of the Downer. He would cut a tiny square around tiny figure, taking exquisite care not to pierce the backing of the card. He extracted the character and a slight layer of backing leaving a void that read 195 . He then embedded a perfectly matched “”0”, “1” or “2” into the void. Once the card was relaminated even we had trouble detecting the alteration. By the time we reached majority age most bartenders had learned that shining a flashlight through the back of the card would highlight the incision around the altered birth year so the jig was up by 74 or 75 but I don’t remember the cards failing any of us, ever. How about you, Jack?
Oh, it's important to note that none of us could grow a respectable moustache until our thirties and most of us could have passed for high school students until our mid 20's. That's a fact and it proves the mettle of these IDs. To watch a bartender or bouncer go from scowling disbelief to incredulous befuddlement whenever we presented the ID for the first few times was priceless. Nobody believed to see us that we were of age but the cards didn't lie. And after we were established in the bar Downer and they never asked again.

Ed's note: A few other random ATIT stories about Mel (there have been quite a few):

Photograph: Jerry Melin At Mud Bay, Bainbridge Island, Washington
Jerry Melin, still missing, still missed
Mel, Part 1
Audioblogger Post::::Kevin Curran And Jerry Melin Meet The Poet Allen Ginsberg At The Grass Roots Tavern On NYC's Lower East Side
Senator Jerry Melin Speaks Out About 1979
---o0o---

Saturday, June 11, 2011

From The Archives: The NYC Slides, Part 2

By Jack Brummet
Chief Archivist



A couple of months ago, I began scanning a box of slides we have from the years 1973 to around 1983. I posted them on Facebook because many of the surviving subjects/participants are on there. I always intended to also put them on All This Is That. And, now, I am finally getting around to it. This new batch is from the years we lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn (1977-1982). Coming next, Bellingham, Seattle, and Europe.


Click all photos to enlarge. Right click to download.

Jerry, Vicki, Kevin in the garden next doot yo 158 W. 84th St.

collaped lung/double pneumonia, 1977

Frances, 1978, in NYC

Jack, Cheryl, and Keelin outside a cabaret

Colin and Karen ??, NYC, 1977

Vicki and Jack on the subway

Pinky and Jack at work @ Carl Fischer, 62 Cooper Square

Keelin at a dairy restaurant in Chelsea?

Jack, Julius Caesar, and Kevin/Franco

Jack and Jack at 158 W 84th St

Colin Curran, 1966

Jack on the Brooklyn Promenade with WTC in the background

Keelin on our rooftop of our loft at 351 Jay Street

Vicki, Jack, and Jerry at 158

Jack and Mary Durkan-Jones outside our apartment on Chrystie Street near The Bowery
---o0o---

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Photos of Jerry Melin

I recently bought a scanner with a slide/film attachment.  I am scanning our old cache of slides.  Here are some more photos of the late, great, Jerry Melin.  /jack







click images to enlarge
---o0o---

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Jack interviews Senator Jerry Melin, ca 1980

From 1973-1984, I recorded hundreds of hours of material in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City. The Archives--a collection of cassette tapes, drawings, poetry, and ephemera--containing these recordings has largely disappeared, being lost, borrowed, and rendered unusable by the ravages of time. This recording was salvaged from a crumbling generic cassette tape by a Seattle audio engineer, Ian Rodia. The sound levels vary widely, there is a large amount of ambient noise, including buses and semis passing by. To make matters worse, every few seconds there is a bump sound in the recording caused by a defect in the recorder's mechanism. Jerry Melin died a decade ago, and this is one of the few audio recordings that survived him.


---o0o---

Saturday, September 05, 2009

Jack Brummet interviews Senator Jerry Melin, 1980, New York City

Of the literally hundreds of hours of recordings in The Archives, only one cassette tape has survived. That cassette, fortunately, contained numerous recordings of the late, greatly and dearly loved Jerry Melin. This is one of them. Thanks to Ian Rodia, who digitized the crumbling generic cassette tape. As you can hear, the cassette recorder itself generated a "bump" every few seconds, and the tape is filled with the ambient sounds of buses, semis, glasses tinkling, coughs, and mumbling. Nonetheless, it is good to hear Jerry's voice.

---o0o---

Saturday, June 13, 2009

YouTube Slideo: Jack Brummet and Jerry Melin discuss Self Love. And Shakespeare.

Every time over the last four and a half years, when I post audio files, the hosting service goes out of business, and the links are dead.

I am going to upload audio files via YouTube this time---making "slideos" of the audio files.

Here is the first. Jack Brummet and Jerry Melin discuss Self Love. And Shakespeare.


---o0o---

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

'Moto [a/k/a Victoria Lenti] Remembers Mel [a/k/a Jerry Melin]


click to enlarge - Vicki Lenti on the Staten Island Ferry (with Our Lady Of the Harbor in the distance)

Vicki Lenti, or Moto, as we often call her, which is really short for Lentimoto, sent me this nugget about Jerry Melin a long time ago, and for some reason I am just getting around to posting it.

It's kind of appropriate, because tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day, and it was exactly ten years ago on Saint Patrick's Day that Jerry Melin's funeral was held in Ross, California. Namasté, brother!
______________________________________

Jerry Melin
By Vicki Lenti

Catfish was how I was first introduced to Johnny [ed's note: often now known as Jack]. The year was 1972 and I met Chris (Milo) Petersen at Green River Community College. Little did I know that the course of my life would change after that meeting. With Chris came his friends. . .and they soon became my friends. I was introduced to John, Johnny, Jack, “Cat” ”Catfish” Brummet, Jerry “Bart” Melin, Kevin “Scooter” “Mort”, “Tibbs” Curran, Keelin Curran, and Frances Hayden. I was one of the lucky females to get a nickname, and that was Moto. I remember Jerry giving me that nickname, but it may have been the combination of Jerry and Johnny. Anyway, 36 years later, I will still answer to it.

I was taken aback by this group of people when I first met them. I remember thinking that they were the hippest (1972) group of people I had ever met and that Keelin and Frances were (and STILL are) the epitome of “together” females. From Tacoma to Kent to Bellingham to NYC and back to Seattle, my life has been blessed with knowing them. Through them I met so many others, like Nick Gattuccio, and the list goes on.

So many memories come to mind, it is hard to know where to start. I found this blog by searching under Jerry’s name, so I will pay tribute to him. I LOVED JERRY. I loved all these people that I met in 1972, but Jerry and I had something special--as I know Jerry had something special with all the people he loved and I feel so lucky that he loved me.


click to enlarge - Jerry on Bainbridge Island, visiting Jack and Keelin

When you were with Jerry, you were important to him and you felt it. I remember some early memories of Jerry; one of the first was that he had that long fingernail (his pinky finger). I remember having a bad cough at the time and got some codeine cough medicine. Jerry asked for a swig and drank half the bottle.

Jerry always pushed the limits, and I don’t know how many of the stories I heard at that time were true (I believed them all), but the image I had of him was like “Neal Cassady or Dean Moriarty,” Jack Kerouac’s friend in On the Road. I loved this about Jerry and I was even a lucky recipient of a Jerry Melin “fake” driver’s license. [ed's note: see Jerry Melin, Master Forger and Craftsman].

I had a green Ford Maverick in those days and something was always happening to it. One day I went out to drive the car and it was gone. In calling around, I found out someone had hit it the night before, and it was slammed into a building. The city had towed it away. Jerry rose to the occasion, donned his leather jacket and (I think) with Milo, went to the tow yard to retrieve the vehicle and make sure I didn’t have to pay a fee.

After many mishaps to that car, I was sitting in an apartment. that Jerry and Fran occupied. We heard a crash, looked out the window and Jerry says “it’s Moto’s car”. We all ran down the stairs and confronted the person who hit me. My car, which had been hit several times before, looked like an accordion. The person who hit me had insurance and since I was only in town for the weekend, we met with the insurance company to settle matters. Jerry went with me and the agent offered me $1000. This was big $$$ at the time and the car wasn’t worth much. Jerry told me beforehand not to say anything too quickly. When the agent offered the $1000, Jerry and I were silent, then Jerry looks at me and say’s “Well Moto, what do you think?” To which I replied “I guess that’s fine”. I thought I would have to pay at some point to have this car put down. This was a jackpot and we laughed all the way home.

In 1982, I was lucky enough to drive with Jerry cross country to New York City. Jerry pushed my dark side somewhat and we ended up in the kind of places I would only end up with him. We stopped at a strip club in Amarillo, Texas and listened to the Blues on Front Street in Memphis. As we approached Washington D.C., the same day as Ronald Reagan’s inauguration [ed's note: Vicki must have the dates wrong...RR was inaugurated in '81], he told me that if anyone asked what we were doing there, to say we were on a mission from Jane Wyman to buy the Blair house and not to give out my last name.

Arriving in NYC, on the doorstep of John Brummet and Keelin Curran, we entered a new chapter. First, I must say that John and Keelin were incredible. They let us stay until we found a place and that whole time is such a wonderful memory to me.

Happy hour took place daily at John and Keelin's with red wine, and new WAVE music was in the house. They introduced me to the “Talking Heads” the “Pretenders” and all the wonderful bands of the time. CBGB’s, NYC. . .what more could you say? – good bye disco!!!

Jerry and I got an apt. on Ave. B, which at the time was dicey (now trendy). Jerry “greased” the super’s hand and we got the apt. We quickly named it B flat and started to fix it up. Jerry started substitute teaching and his first job was at a Hassidic Jewish school. I remember reading (AND busting up over) the scraps of paper on that table, that the kids wrote, answering Jerry‘s question on what they learned today – not a good question to ask. Part of that first check was spent in a little storefront room up the street (by Kevin’s place) where pot was openly sold by the Moghrebis [ed’s note: the St Mark's Place Puerto Rican Pool Hall, reefer & hash Emporium]. There was NEVER a dull moment when were with him. His wit, his attention to detail, everything…I MISS JERRY very much!!

There are so many stories about this great group of people. These are some of my memories of Jerry, and I hope to add my memories of others at a later date. Unfortunately for me, I have not been the best at keeping up and I miss and love all of the above. Thank you for enriching my life and introducing me to so much, and being involved, and who you are.

Love to you all,

MOTO (Vicki Lenti)
---o0o---

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Drawing of Jack and Keelin Curran by Jerry Melin, 1981


click to enlarge
---o0o---

It's been ten years and 7 days days since I last heard Jerry Melin's voice


Click to enlarge - a painting I did from a photo of Jerry. Curiously, on the wall behind him
is a piece of sheet music for the song "Dear Old Pal Of Mine."

My great friend Jerry Melin died ten years ago today. It was probably the second worst day of my life. As St. Paddy's day comes around, I always remember Mel, and his funeral on St. Paddy's Day itself. I have printed this before here, once or twice, and feel compelled to one more time. I still have moments when I wish I could tell, or ask, him something. I don't think a day goes by that I don't think of him at least once. And ten years later, his intelligence, and love of life and friends and family remain a part of my life. When I read or write or paint or speak or draw or recite of listen to music, or watch a movie, I often feel Mel looking over my shoulder. He may not applaud or approve whatever I'm up to (and I can live with that), but I still check in with him, as best I can. Mel: there is no question about it--you are both still missing and still missed.

_____________________

I'll never forget--as long as I'm compos mentis--the morning Dot Melin called me to tell me the news. It was about 7:00 in the morning. I was taking a shower and my son Colum came in and said Dot's on the phone for you. And I knew. I knew it as sure as I'd known it that day on May 19, 1964, when I rode home on my bicycle from a baseball game and saw my mom standing on our back porch watching for me to arrive home. "He's gone."

It was this week he died. His funeral was held on St. Patrick's Day.

Ten years ago, Jerry Melin, died in Marin County, California (where he lived near The Grateful Dead, a band we both loved). He even met a few of them during his years in Ross. Mel's death was a jackhammer blow; a blow I still try to understand and absorb. There is not a day when I don't think of him often, all these years later. Even now--last night, in fact--there are things I want to tell him; things so strange, or amazing, or bent, or obscure and ethereal, that only he could plug in to them. And yet my loss is nothing like that experienced by Dot, and his three wonderful daughters. Whenever I see them, I know that he's smiling and maybe bragging them up to Gabriel and St. Peter.

Mel died instantly of a heart attack in the middle of a tennis match. His wife, Dorothea, asked if I could speak a eulogy at his funeral. I wasn't sure I could, if I could even write it. I wasn't thinking right. Somehow, 'though, I felt Mel peer over my shoulder and was able to get something on paper. I was even able to deliver the eulogy in a packed church without completely breaking down. It wasn't looking at his widow or his three young daughters, or all our friends, or the people of Ross that got me through it. I asked myself "what would Jerry do?" How had Jerry managed the deaths of our friends Phil, Peter, Jannah, Colin, or his father? It was not by boohooing...that was not his way.

The Way was to realize that chapter was over and go from there, and celebrate. "You celebrate them by digging that we're here, " he would say, "there's plenty of time to be pushing daisies. You celebrate them by celebrating this. Dig this and dig it now because tomorrow never knows, as that hippie Beatle sang."

I gave a eulogy at his funeral in March, 1999:

Eulogy for Jerry Philip Melin

[This first paragraph about the church I ad-libbed at the funeral and wrote down when I got on the plane that night].

I look around this church, and I see--what?-- Three Hundred People? I know Jerry would have been amazed; he would be amused. This is half the town of Ross, California. Jerry never dreamed he could sell out a Catholic Church. It's S.R.O.--Standing Room Only--here. It should be. No, Jerry could not have dreamt this. I wonder if it's some kind of dream myself. But I know it isn't, because we are here, together. And I wish we weren't.

My earliest Jerry memory might be the Letterman's Jacket Incident. Jerry lettered in gymnastics, and had later made "improvements" to his Kent Meridian High School letterman's jacket. In addition to a carefully rendered, bright white rendition of Mister Zig-Zag on the back, he reversed the letters on his jacket to read MK. The football coach stopped him one day and asked (I'll try my dumb coach voice): "Hey­­ what's this MK jazz stand for?"

When Jerry answered "Mein Kampf," the coach, of course, went absolutely bananas. Jerry had to surrender the Jacket eventually because it violated several rules, but for Jer this was a personal triumph, beating anything he'd done on the parallel bars or the rings, and leaving his vaulting wins far in the dust. He'd riled The Man.

Over the years, I called him at various times--of the names I can actually say in church--Jed, Jer, Mel, Bart (referring to the Hobart Dump), Jeddy and even sometimes, Jerry. These last few years we settled into Mel, and he called me either Doc, or Jack.

He was a skilled artist, creating bawdy cartoons of people locked in improbable combinations and situations, and incredible William Blake-inspired drawings of sinners and angels. He was a skilled stockmarket analyst and a securities trading wiz (not bad for a guy with a degree in English literature). He wrote chilling fiction and fantasy, often in stream of consciousness bursts, folded into those twenty page letters from Mexico, Alaska, Greece, Bellingham, Manhattan or Seattle. He was an introspective philosopher who could keep you up all night discussing The Big Ideas, and Art and Women and Godhead. Jerry was also a prankster unparalleled. I could go on about that alone forever. Jerry was an adoring husband, a doting father, and a friend whose intensity swallowed you up. You knew he loved you.

I tried to find my box of letters, stories, drawings, and poems from him before I came to California for this funeral--and even those many emails. His letters to me, at least, were machine-gun meditations on life--a vortex of free associations on the nature of Art and Destiny and Man's follies. These letters were shot through with his comic vision of humankind that plumbed the lowest and highest of humor.

His warped sense of humor and willingness to talk from the heart sustained us through a lot of happy times, tragic losses, and life itself.

In 1978, Jerry and I took a most ill­-advised trip from my home in New York City to his home in Seattle. You could travel from anywhere to anywhere in the U.S. for $49 on the Greyhound Bus.

One of the things I remember most about that trip is how much we laughed and babbled and talked through the night as we crossed those twelve desolate, frozen states in those nightmare bus seats, usually trapped in the back of the bus, near the toilet. We finally arrived in Seattle, and staggered off the bus after three and a half showerless and cramped days. We went to our respective family's homes.

Jerry called two hours later to see if I wanted to hang out. We had been six inches apart for 85 hours! I was ready for a serious and long Jerry­break, but he wanted to know when I would be arriving at his place to liberate him! There was more to transact! We had unfinished business. He could never have enough. I was always the first one to go, to hang up, log off, or go to bed. He never ever wanted to say goodbye.

There was never a time when we talked that he didn't hound me to come visit him in Kent, Seattle, Bellingham, Manhattan, Long Island, Mexico, San Francisco, or up in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Wherever he was was where I should be. It was critical that he knew exactly when we would see each other again. It was always "Jack. . .drive that car down here tomorrow. . .it's only 16 hours and you've got five days off." Or "Doc. . .come down here and quit working so damned hard. . .we'll sit in the hot tub and talk about politics and Rembrandt and old kings."

Jerry would never ever hang up without extracting a solid promise we would get together As Soon As Possible.

In retrospect, I wish I had driven down here a week ago, the last time he insisted I come immediately. He was really applying the heat this time. He knew I had a lot of time off, and I thought about it. He really applied the pressure­­. But I don't think Jerry had any sense of what was to come later that week; I don't think he knew he had days to live. He just wanted that visit to glimmer in the distance, as a possibility, as a carrot to keep him going. Mel had to know you'd be there again, in person.

How can we not all love and cherish someone who loved us as relentlessly as that? For everyone who knew and loved him, there will always be a void that only Jerry can fill.

I'll miss those midnight calls about Flemish painters and Yeats and Shakespeare and the mad popes. It was all so very important to him and he always wanted every detail about my life, and the things I read and wrote and painted, and created at work, and about my family, and about my wife he adored. . .all of that was never far from his mind. Half the time, I couldn't pry a word out of Jerry, but he was there, pumping words out of me like an oil derrick.

Mel measured his life by the people he loved. That was his yardstick. I hope we can all come to practice even a little bit of what he taught us about devotion and intensity and reaching out. Jerry's love was relentless.

I know I speak for Jerry when I tell you he wants us to somehow accept this terrible thing and learn to laugh again. Jerry was never much of a mourner; he was a liver. This much commotion about his passing would be too much. He wants you to ponder not his passing but his glorious transit through this bright blue ball.

It's going to be too long
until we hug Jerry
but until then,
I know that once you're through
with the orientation and settling in,
you'll be teaching those angels
new moves and showing them
just how much room there really is
to dance on the head of a pin. ­­­­

Jack Brummet, 1999

_______________________

Some other articles (although the ones wth audio links no longer work) on Jerry:


Jerry Melin, Master Forger and Craftsman
A Blog for Phil Kendall
Photograph: Jerry Melin At Mud Bay, Bainbridge Island, Washington
Jerry Melin, still missing, still missed
Mel, Part 1
Audioblogger Post::::Kevin Curran And Jerry Melin Meet The Poet Allen Ginsberg At The Grass Roots Tavern On NYC's Lower East Side
Senator Jerry Melin Speaks Out About 1979
Further ruminations on Phil Kendall
---o0o---

Monday, February 18, 2008

A painting of Jerry Melin (with links back, and a poem)


click to enlarge

I found an old picture of Jerry and decided to fiddle around with it. Curiously, in the original--and you can still see part of it here--is a piece of framed sheet music titled "Dear Old Pal Of Mine."

Here are earlier references to Jerry Melin on All This Is That:

Jerry Melin, Master Forger and Craftsman
A Blog for Phil Kendall
Photograph: Jerry Melin At Mud Bay, Bainbridge Island, Washington
Jerry Melin, still missing, still missed
Mel, Part 1
Audioblogger Post::::Kevin Curran And Jerry Melin Meet The Poet Allen Ginsberg At The Grass Roots Tavern On NYC's Lower East Side
Senator Jerry Melin Speaks Out About 1979
Further ruminations on Phil Kendall

A poem I wrote for/about him:


Shorts For Jerry Melin [ca. about 1988]

1
A dim crescent
Hung cockeyed
On cathedral skies.

2
An orchard of salt pillars
Circles Gomorrah's ashes:
Lot's Wife had no name.

3
Two vultures flap
Side by side into the sun.
Calcutta awakes.

4
The wine in this cup
Has a tide all its own.
I am the sucking moon.

---o0o---

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

A Blog for Phil Kendall



One of my best friends. Phil Kendall, drowned under tragic and mysterious circumstances (e.g., he was being chased and jumped from a bridge into a canal) when he was traveling in Amsterdam in 1974. He was twenty years old. I became fast friends with him when he was a freshman at Western Washington University, and frequently traveled up to Bellingham to visit, talk, and "party" with Phil, Kevin Curran, and Jerry Melin.

This trio was responsible for introducing me to Keelin Curran, noted attorney, and my wife, best friend, and partner of 34 years. Yeah, they hooked me up with a righteous babe, but our friendship(s) transcended that even, and became the touchstone of all my loves and friendships since.

Four of Phil's sisters—Becky, Claudia, Kacia, and Kathi—recently decided to start a blog honoring his memory. Claudia contacted me a week ago and since then, I have been beating the drum for all our friends to contribute stories, photos, and memories of Phil. I am still contacting people. It has been wonderful to touch base with Claudia again, and go back and forth on our now somewhat hazy memories. Their blog is here. I am going to reprint our first contributions on All This Is That. After this, we'll just have a link to their blog, because this should be about Phil, and them. For you rockers, think of it as a very important side project.

Pat Spurgin remembers...

Pat Spurgin (a roommate of Phil's at 1721 Iron Street in the fall and winter of 73/74) wrote in an email to Keelin Curran:

"I am a little astounded because I have had a picture of Phil in my memory (I can't retrieve a nickname) and that blog pic is exactly what I had in mind, frozen from 1974 when I left Iron Street in my deep funk about pointlessness and distractedness.

Phil's sister (maybe it was Claudia) was quite wise one night back in '73-74 to not loan me her car after I drank the better part of a bottle of tequila and sailed off into the Bellingham night. It's an old story. I wound up laying in some front yard, sans glasses and one shoe, rescued by Bart & who? Imagine me driving. Wasn't it Phil who bought the Savoy Brown albums that stuck in my head for so long that I downloaded selected cuts off of i-tunes?

I must join in the wonderment and grief over things having gone so wrong.

Jack Brummet responds to Kevin Curran with a couple of Phil stories of his own

How moving. . .and loving. . .and your remembering is of such great clarity and depth and warmth. If you don't mind, I want to throw this on the Phil blog, and maybe this too.

Maybe this is perfect to set things in motion.

I knew Phil in high school--we were slight friends. But when I started coming to Bellingham, it was maybe after only one or two trips that I became fast friends with both Phil and Jerry. You and I were at that point old friends, and knew each other's families, and by then had a pretty long history (well, four years, say). Not surprisingly, Phil and I became friends sooner than Jerry and I did. In most ways, Phil was much more ebullient, and more open. Mel, as you remember, could also retract into toxic silence. Especially in the morning.

One other connection with Phil was books, Shakespeare, and poetry. Somehow you guys sucked me in to the point where I've been writing poems for like, what...35 years?

I agree with you on Phil's poem on the blog (See Sept. 7, on this blog). Startlingly mature. As Phil himself was easily the most mature of all of us. And yet he mostly always forgave our knucklehead ways. I think what Phil liked were my jokes, you know...my schtick...not jokes, but bent stories. I remember how much I liked telling him jokes, and stories of my hillbilly upbringing. He would just get the crazed look and howl and nearly fall to the floor. I can't remember his laugh exactly, but it was infectious and Falstaffian. It was such a great laugh that I always felt compelled to summon it up.

We got to know each other pretty quickly, and it wasn't very long before we were hooking up in Seattle too, even when you weren't around. And then, one day, something totally clicked between me and Mel. Or many things. One of us must have said or done something so funny and warped that it endeared us to each other forever.

So now, all of a sudden I had three brothers I loved in Bellingham, while I was stuck in Kent, at the Crisis Center. It was good work and important work, but at some moment in early 1973, I knew I had to go to college, and hang and create and party with you guys full time. This was not exactly easy for a poor hillbilly kid to do. In my entire family, only my mother had even graduated from high school. And my widowed mom had nary a nickel to contribute. Obviously scholarships were out. And my high school records screamed UNDERACHIEVER and rabble-rouser. It's another long story, but I was able to wheedle a letter of recommendation from both the Governor and the Mayor of Kent, and I was provisionally admitted to college in the fall (I was rid of the provisional part after my first successful quarter).

In the interim, the focus of my life became to hang with you [Kevin], Phil, and Jerry. I charged up to Bellingham every chance I got to drink it in. One of my favorite and most vibrant memories of those days were road trips to Seattle.

I especially remember the first road trip the four of us took after we were all living together. That car had a fog like Jeff Spiccoli's van as it rolled up to the prom. We were racing down to Seattle in Mel's still gleaming Pontiac, blasting the Stones' brand new Sticky Fingers, and rounding those looping I-5 turns, wending our way through the mountains with their sporadic clear-cuts, and digging "Can't You Hear Me Knockin."

And we played all our current favorites: The Dead's Europe 72; the Kinks Celluloid Heroes; Deep Purple; and Humble Pie's Rockin' The Fillmore. I don't know what we even did in Seattle, where we stayed, or anything. I do however most explicitly remember all four of us digging life to the max, and actually saying "this is the life. Whatever happens from here on, it won't get any better than this." We knew it for a fact. It was stew of friendship, being in college, being 20, and being free. And at that moment, on that road trip, we achieved a shimmering moment of eternal friendship.

As for Bleak House...it was a rathole, but I had so much fun and was so happy there that it shimmers in my memory. And that fun was all based on proximity to you, Phil and Mel. It became bleak later, I think, for outside reasons and the fact that Mel recruited a new roommate who was certifiably insane (and who, I heard later, would pick up the wedding cake at his brother's wedding and lob it at the bride and groom!). More about Bleak House next time. Maybe next time, we should delve into the pizza trick heist.


The Popcorn Story by Kevin Curran

Here is one of my favorites. While living on Humboldt Street Phil would suggest that we make some popcorn to enjoy during a bone head session. He always recalled that he had made the last batch and would insist that I had to prepare the next batch. I would agree and set off for the kitchen and as I created a racket pulling the oil, popcorn and pot onto the stovetop he would amble in and quietly take over. It was downright comical because it happened over and over again. He would suggest popcorn, make a big stink how he made it the last time, insist the it was my turn, and then as I had barely started he would gently push me out of the way and take over.

Eventually, I'd just raise a clatter and sure enough he'd show up to take over. I couldn't help but tell him, and while he smiled at me with that crooked grin he never again interrupted me during my popcorn turn. I wished I had kept it to myself not because I was getting over but because he just couldn't help himself and he was so glad to be hanging out making fun with a friend.

Kevin Curran Remembers Phil (installment one)

Kevin Curran writes from New York City:

The Phil blog touched me. I loved the pics and wonder if Phil in an apron was from our stay at bleak house. Here are my first thoughts.

I loved Philip. Our friendship lasted four years and yet I think of him frequently still and recently told Kris how much I miss him, even now. For a few years after his death I regularly dreamt that he had come home with some wild explanation for his absence. I would awaken flooded with joy until it sank in again with aching clarity that he was really gone.

I don't remember the exact moment we became friends. It may have occurred during high school football since we both played, though he was a year behind me at KM, surely our connection to Tom Brush was a factor. We may have attended the same writing class my senior year. I enjoyed rereading the poem that Phil’s sisters posted to the blog, it is really sweet and better than anything I remember writing then.

It was no accident that Phil and Jerry were friends. They both were athletic and smart and hilariously rebellious but I would say Phil’s brand was slightly less edgy and more prone to giggling than confrontation. I know that I met Jerry through Phil. I remember our friendship was well on its way during my stint at the Robo CarWash which began no later than early 1971. Phil would often pick me up after my shift on a Friday or Saturday evening. We hung out regularly after I graduated. I know that we shared in weekend shenanigans after I took up residence with BM, Smoothie and the monkey at the Comstock bachelor pad.

Phil purchased a small sports car around 1972, his senior year, (an MG midget maybe) which was toward the end of my year at the dog hospital.

I remember Phil driving up with the top down one sweet summer afternoon. He was brimming with a kind of Route 66 brio just as the car conked out in the parking lot. He fussed with that car throughout the summer and struggled to keep it on the road. He got the car to Bellingham in the fall of 1973 but I don't know how. He may have towed it behind a U HAUL. I remember it parked outside the Humboldt Street house for awhile but I don't remember that we ever took a ride in it that year. He either disposed of it or returned it to his family's home and I don’t think he had a car when we moved into bleak house on Iron Street the next fall.

Do you [Jack] remember your first trip to B’ham? It must have been winter quarter 1972-73. I remember that you and Milo made the trip and arrived after dark. I think that was that the first time you met Phil and Jerry. Our years on Humboldt and Iron Streets were full of stooges moments. I will put them together over the next few weeks. [to be continued]

An amusing (and shocking story from The Phil Zone) [another story from Jack Brummet]

I do remember one incredible and improbable story about Phil. Incredible, because, well, you'll see. Improbable because Phil was one of the smartest people I've known.

Kevin, Jerry, and Phil were sitting around their house on Humboldt Street one day, doing what we usually did (because it was cheap): talking. Eventually the talk somehow turned to amputations. I think they were talking about digital a/k/a finger amputations. Phil looked at them and said: "I know it hurt, but it will grow back, you know."

He was dead serious. When they finally realized he was serious, they, of course, howled and pounded the floor in mirth.

Sometime early in life, one of Phil's parents had told him that if you lost a finger or toe, it would grow back. And in the interim years, he had never seen or heard anything to ever make him think twice about that. Until that night in Bellingham. It was the most endearing thing he ever said.

I know this is hard to believe, but Phil confirmed the story to me not long after it happened. And I loved him all the more because of it.
---o0o---

Friday, August 10, 2007

Jerry Melin, Master Forger and Craftsman


ckick Mel to zoom him up

Two days ago, I wrote a brief piece detailing the summer of 1973, and my friend Scooter's couch surfing and imbibing at the Sundowner. Now Scooter wrote back (See italicized text below), and brought up a fact I had forgotten. I am usually the victor in these memory wars, over Scooter and Keelin Curran. Scooter trumped me this time, with a memory that is now crystal clear, but never would have bubbled to the surface without this cue. However, in retaliation, I challenge him once again to remember his friends, the painter, Fred Birchman, and his lovely wife Paula!

Jerry Melin developed an almost foolproof system for forging Washington State ID's. I think the reason this slipped my mind is that I never actually had Mel make one for me. In his comments, Scooter pegs this to my having a girlfriend and being on a diet. However, it was something deeper than that I think. In those days I was never a particularly meticulous law-abider, but for some reason I don't ever remember going to a bar until I was 21. And I never attended a day at the Sundowner, as far as I remember. I don't know why, but it worked out OK in the end. I was able to spend plenty of nights in bars after I turned 21. However, to this day, I very rarely go to bars, and when I do, it almost always involves music. I always preferred a party at someone's crib to a bar. On the other hand, some of the craziest times I had in NYC were, naturally, in bars. Like the time we bumped into Allen Ginsberg at the Grass roots Bar on St. Mark's Place. We listened to a recitation of his latest poem and chatted, and he gave Mel a big, wet kiss on the forehead.

I remember Mel, sitting for literally, hours, working as Scooter details below, to alter a license. He was changing one digit in the birthyear, and it took hours to get the perfect letter and get the registration just perfect. Even cops would miss the alteration. So, Phil, "schubert," Spurge, Kevin, Mike Thies, et al, would have these nearly foolproof licenses. After I turned 21, I joined them in the bar wars. Still, we were college students, trying to live on $200 a month, so there were limits to how much we could even go out to bars at all, except for jazz night at Pete's, where you could bottles of wine for $4.99 and listen to jazz,

Mel would labor the same way to produce these fantastic Blake-ean drawings of ethereal winged, adrogynous angels. . .none of which I still have. We wrote a lot of poetry together in much the same fashion, taking hours to build up poems, usually focused on America, the police state, art, drugs, philosophy, sex, jazz, and rock and roll. And when he was serious about school it was the same thing: he would study for 12 hours straight, and whenever he decided he wanted to apply himself, he would pull straight A's. Jerry/Mel was the smartest person I ever knew who was constantly on academic probation. There was nothing like seeing him utterly engrossed in whatever project was at hand: art, poetry, forgery, calculus, economics. We would sometimes spend an entire night reading one of Blake's work's like America or Jerusalem, aloud, with endless bowls, digressions, and sidebars.

Needless to say, I miss Mel, still. A few stories about Mel:

Photograph: Jerry Melin At Mud Bay, Bainbridge Island, Washington
Jerry Melin, still missing, still missed
Mel, Part 1
Audioblogger Post::::Kevin Curran And Jerry Melin Meet The Poet Allen Ginsberg At The Grass Roots Tavern On NYC's Lower East Side
Senator Jerry Melin Speaks Out About 1979

Scooter references on all this is that:

Mario Cuomo's 1984 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address
The Brummets, Currans, Kruses, and Sanchezes in NYC
Interview with a Manhattan bartender: varnishing coffins and 86ing the rubes
Manhattan Nightmare - The Transit Strike Is A Go/Remembering The 1980 Strike
Scooter and $2 all you can drink beer day at the Sundowner circa 1973
Audioblogger Post::::Kevin Curran And Jerry Melin Meet The Poet Allen Ginsberg At The Grass Roots Tavern On NYC's Lower East Side
Rolling Stones dodge Depends [tm] barrage at Superbowl
My Worst Jobs: Fifty Tons Of Sand

____________________________________

Scooter here, usually I am happy just to sit back and enjoy the show at All This is That but Jack, we called him Johnny in 73, got me thinking. He says that I may have been depressed, maybe/maybe not, but I did have a lot of time to kill that summer and, as he points out, very few dólores to fund any meaningful diversions.

I had gone from tending dogs to the dogs in two summers and had nearly depleted my savings account after paying for freshman year at WWSC and my share of body work to repair Mel’s parent’s Pontiac Le Mans after Phil K, Kev & I put it into a ditch during a night of carousing while Mel prudently elected to ride shotgun.

Mel misdesignated drivers to his advantage on more than a few occasions in those years and when he didn’t the cops usually learned about it.

I remember that Kev played softball for a local men’s team in Kent that summer but he always joined me at the Downer on Thursdays. Mel and Phil K would come by regularly too but Johnny less frequently because he had a job and a girl friend and I believe adhered to a fitness regimen then that frowned on 12 hours of brews guzzling. Anyway, all of us, with the exception of David Fuller (RIP) were still underage in 1973 but we never, I mean never, had a problem gaining entrance to drinking establishments.

In the early 70’s WA had begun to roll out a new state photo ID that replaced the bifurcated WSDL and State Liquor Photo ID cards that folks had to carry previously. The new ID/DL used a process that impregnated a dense fibrous paper backing with the licensee’s vitals and photo and then sealed the face with a fine but durable laminate overlay. This new photo DL quickly made the State Liquor Card obsolete. While some youngsters purchased faked up generic out-of-state IDs from shops along Seattle’s 2nd Avenue they would only pass muster at skid row dives, so we relied on Mel’s obsessive compulsivity to create nearly perfect WA State issued DL’s with modified birth years.

For a few years Mel would periodically cook up some tea and then patiently scour magazines, novels, textbooks, trade and professional journals, telephone directories, and newspapers in search of the perfect pica/font to match the DOB stat on the WADL. He had assembled an impressive file of matches by 1973.

His strategy was simple. He instructed us to make a claim to the DMV that we had lost our license so that if we had a real run in with the heat we could always present a valid DL. Once the replacement DL was in hand he would set up shop. He worked at a brightly lit table fitted with a square of picture frame matting. He always used medical implements instead of paste up tools. I had had access to scalpels and hemostats from my year at the veterinary clinic and Mel had built a fairly extensive kit of medical supplies for this and other endeavors.

He affixed the license to the matting with two hemostats and set about altering the last figure in the birth year. He was a master in this procedure by the summer of the Downer. He would cut a tiny square around tiny figure, taking exquisite care not to pierce the backing of the card. He extracted the character and a slight layer of backing leaving a void that read 195 . He then embedded a perfectly matched “”0”, “1” or “2” into the void. Once the card was relaminated even we had trouble detecting the alteration. By the time we reached majority age most bartenders had learned that shining a flashlight through the back of the card would highlight the incision around the altered birth year so the jig was up by 74 or 75 but I don’t remember the cards failing any of us, ever. How about you, Jack?

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

scooter said...


Oh, it's important to note that none of us could grow a respectable moustache until our thirties and most of us could have passed for high school students until our mid 20's. That's a fact and it proves the mettle of these IDs. To watch a bartender or bouncer go from scowling disbelief to incredulous befuddlement whenever we presented the ID for the first few times was priceless. No body believed to see us that we were of age but the cards didn't lie. And after we were established in the bar Downer or otherwise they never asked again.
---o0o---