“Write about what you know,” said Kush. Johnny asked Kush one evening at a poetry reading. “Write about what you want to know and let the spirits be your guide,” exhausted Kush who blew sage smoke from a pipe filled with vowels, but void of consonants or syllables.
Kush could have been related to Bill Graham, the way he looked and acted. He seemed to be a displaced New Yorker of European descent. His five-foot-six compact frame, like a welterweight, kept the vegetarian gleam of nutrition in his mindfulness. His dark bushy eyebrows hung heavily over deep-set eyes. A narrow nose with two gourd-shaped nostrils ended a long suspension. His narrow face almost made his jaw look pointed, an illusion exaggerated by the sucked-in cheeks gripping the clay sage pipe. His short thinning hair, a touch of, gray.in need of a trim, was un-parted and pushed to one side of his brow, covering the tops of his close-headed ears.
Kush wasn’t young, but he wasn’t old, either; perhaps thirty-five. Johnny always thought him to be an older brother, perhaps ten years older than himself. He wasn’t a married man and wasn’t necessarily straight or gay; he could have been either, or both. He was ethereal. Kush was in love with the natural life of indigenous people. It showed in his easy manner, shuffling feet, buffalo flip-flop sandals. He was a hippie at heart who took love and peace seriously. Perhaps he was one of the youngsters of the Family Dog commune. He was not one of the freedom riders who converged on Height-Asbury Street.
Kush earned his income as a teacher at the California Institute of Asian Studies on Mission Street. He couldn't be called a professor; he had long let go of earthly ambitions. Poetry, to Kush, was a manifestation of the descriptive of life, as it really was, and could be again.
Two Dykes-on-Bikes poets received applause from the gathering, including Kush’s. There was a feminine strength to their poetry, but it had militancy and spunk. Johnny was to read next in the circle. His poem, called “The Fairy’s Tail,” alluded to the lack of militancy and self-interest of the gay community in the Castro. It was poem that anticipated the ruckus a year later over the murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone. There was nothing wrong with being gay, the poem inferred, so long as one wasn’t a Republican capitalist. Personal freedom, Johnny wrote, didn’t end at the tip of your dick or clit. Liberty didn’t pertain only to bars and bedrooms. The same conservative system that vilified socialism and workers' rights was coming after gay rights, too, unless one acquiesced, joined political conservatives, and gave up the big fight for the rights of all workers, gay or straight.
But Kush was no crush when it came to progressive thought; no flower child or political patsy was he. Native American chants played on Kush’s cassette, low, aloud from a room elsewhere, heavy in bass, tinged with treble, somewhere in Cloud House.
Emerson took a seat on the fringed rug which covered most of the poets’ room. Only the alcoves on either side of the recessed doorway were bare-floored up to the two picture windows. Two tiers of shelved books and magazines circled three sides. On the wooden floor, a maroon rug of Mandala design, mirrored the circle meeting in the center, an empty space. The poets started to assemble on it.
In walked David Moe who join Emerson, two Dyke- on-Bike poetesses and other poets. Moe greeted Kush who flowed absent-mindedly around the store front room, pipe in mouth, puffing smoke through every space. Acknowledged, the poet took his place around the perimeter of the rectangular rug. Kush was seated and unfurled his talisman; clay pipes, bandannas, writing implements, charcoal for sketching, hemp-bound pads with exotic covers placed near or between crossed legs, legs held crooked up by the knees, to their chests, clasped hands. The ceremony was about to begin.
Whoever was there or whoever would come later would know the ceremony had begun because an invocation, a speech on the cassette player in the back room, would be played and all tranquility passed around with a fat joint or two. That’s what Kush did on open poetry reading nights. Steven Kushner lives forever in Cloud House. “Walt Whitman Breathes Here.” Tommy Trantino, Pancho Aguila. David Moe, and Johnny Livewire, too, in small part.
Starlight was the monthly periodical that Cloud House poets published. Someone published it; Johnny didn’t know who. Johnny figured the donation collected after the invocation was for that publication. He dropped a dollar in the small battered wicker basket passed around not long after the last roach had been extinguished.
The new issue of Starlight was ready to be distributed and stacks of bundles sat on one side of the Cloud House’s back room. They would be delivered by those present, and others, throughout the Bay Area from Daly City to Sausalito, throughout San Francisco and across the bridge to Oakland, Berkeley, and points south on the mainland up to Haywood. They were put into newspaper boxes on street corners alongside other newspaper boxes; The Tribune, Enquirer, Job Offerings, and The Examiner. Johnny had seen the Starlight cover through the boxes’ transparent plastic covers and thought it was pornography, like Screw, because of the large black and white print of a naked woman with star covered areolas; sticky slick color captions. When a horny customer dropped two quarters into the slot, he anxiously opened the cover somewhere, later on. He would be shocked to see not what they had hoped for, but page after page of poetry with sexy words, if he imagined right.
A.D. Winans, editor and writer, produced the Second Coming 180 Poets and Music Festival honoring Josephine Miles and John Lee Hooker. Cloud House was invited to do a segment at the venue, a theater in the Mission District. Johnny Livewire was there to recite his poems. He had already resigned himself to being a small part of a poetry troupe. He spent hours with other Cloud House regulars reading "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman on the steps of the San Francisco Public Library, part of the troupe. Now Johnny was getting a chance to read his own poetry in public. Perhaps one day he would be as appreciated as those he loved to read.
Johnny wouldn’t make the same mistake Jim Morrison made; rock ‘n’ roll was no vehicle into a poetic consciousness for the people. If attitudes were going to be changed in America, they would be co-opted by record companies long before they made any radical difference, so thought Johnny, serious about helping to make a change in American society. Johnny so wanted it to be a fundamental change and not just a trend. War had to end. Marijuana had to be legal. Wealth had to be redistributed. Poor Patti Smith, so in need of fame and celebrity, went the wrong direction. No matter how much Johnny Livewire had hoped, rock ‘n’ roll bait would catch schools of fish and return errant hippies to dredge public oceans polluted with ruling class interests.
Johnny lost sleep staying up nights, smoking weed, drinking tequila, writing and dreaming how he could make it happen. He listened as Patti swam into shallow waters, waters lacking oxygen. It took the death of many of her friends for her to start swimming back to her peers. Johnny would cut straight through the debris; to the poetic hearts of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Whitman, and Blake.
Johnny’s role at the Poetry Festival was to walk up one aisle and down the other, like a cloud in the Cloud House troupe, between readings of poetry from on stage. Bringing life from the boredom of audience seated during intermissions, or leaving for rest rooms or outside for a smoke, Johnny chanted. On a dreary damp San Francisco Saturday in June, Johnny was a heat lamp roaming the audience burning dampness with words of love and wisdom. With verses in hand, Johnny gesticulated the poems meaning and danced up and down the aisles with his long, fiery brown locks, in flight, stopping to give personal readings to patrons with a love of the poem. He read and gave attention to what he spoke. He read his own poems: “The City of Virginal Sin,” “The Fairy’s Tail," some. Some he sang, put to music by bands he had played with in Brooklyn a few years before San Francisco. Johnny loved what he was doing; he was a cloudy poem. Johnny Livewire was at home in San Francisco.
