Peter Coyote
I don’t remember the friend who took me to meet Jean Paul (JP) Pickens in a sleepy San Geronimo valley town in Northern California, but I have not forgotten the meeting itself. A small, two story clapboard house was framed by a yard suffering the post-industrial nightmare of grass. Every available inch of space was covered by random artifacts of the mid-twentieth century: gun-metal grey cabinets, cardboard boxes of fluorescent light bulbs; improbably large machinery; lengths of bleached white PVC pipe and tubing; several automobile carcasses; welding equipment, a large yellow and black school-bus (also filled with industrial flotsam.) It looked like a flea-market which had metastasized across its aisles and separate tables, so cluttered with “stuff” walking was hazardous. JP spied our approach from an upstairs window, and shouted, “I’ll be right down.” He leapt from the second-story window, onto the rear seat of an old station wagon suspended from a block and tackle fixed to a leafless tree standing beside the house. Grinning like a Cheshire cat, and not oblivious to the reaction of his stunned audience, JP lowered himself down to earth in his improvised bosun’s chair, hand over hand. Giggling infectiously, he pointed out to us that the front door was covered by “stuff” and therefore impassable.
I examined him with curiosity. He was maybe five-four, well proportioned and quite hirsute. Hair was clambering to get out of his shirt, and the dark curls on his head were tangled and uncontrollable as escaping steam. He was unshaven, and wore thick, black-framed glasses taped at the juncture of the lenses, halfway down the bridge of his nose, and the smoke rising from the cigarette locked between his lips, forced him to tip his head sideways so that it would slip by his eyes. His face was creased with good humor, his eyes framed with crow’s feet at their outer hinges, twinkled as if he were contemplating a good joke. I received the distinct impression of ready humor, high intelligence and limitless curiosity.
He led me on a tour of his “stash”, as he referred to it, and his knowledge of each and every article was encyclopedic. We burrowed into his cellar “where the real treasures are, man”, and there in various toolboxes, stacked one on the other, he extracted precision tools of staggering variety – miniature micrometers, calipers, a hat-makers brim-shaver, clamps, magnets, assorted tins of miniature springs, depth gauges, screw extractors, and titanium drill bits. During this time of my life I was living a hard-scrabble urban existence and the primary source of my survival, was my 1949 Chevy one-and-a-half-ton flat-bed truck. Keeping it running, cash-free, required many and various tools, and discovering JP was akin to being handed the keys to a hardware store.
We began conversing animatedly, and it became apparent that JP was something of an elder in the world I had entered not too many years previously by joining the radical anarchist theoreticians of the emergent counter-culture – the Diggers. JP, slightly older than I, was a dyed in the wool bohemian, contemporary of the Beats like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, a banjo-playing poet, professional musician, extraordinarily skilled fabricator of material goods (like his homemade bosun’s chair) and just more damn fun than twenty monkeys in a barrel. His laugh was like a prize to be won, a toothy radiance, and manic giggle that could transform the most mundane activity into a conspiracy of good-humored lunacy. Before too long it was obvious to both of us that we would be fast friends, and part of one another’s mutual support system.
I don’t remember too much else of the day except worming our way into the darkened, equally cluttered house somehow and meeting JP’s wife, Maryanne, a quietly pretty, slightly distracted woman, who seemed to have the major responsibility for JP’s two daughters, KayAnne and CherylLynne, and his young son Paul Jr. The family was easy and comfortable with one another, something I have always attended carefully since it is both a heritage and skill which has eluded me in this lifetime. I realized that there was much that JP could teach me.
The friendship developed, as friendships do and before long JP and I were trading songs, auto-parts, mutual-aid, and unfortunately, methedrine. JP loved speed, and embraced it in a guiltless, engaging way. It extended his reach in the world, afforded him the waking time and energy to pursue his myriad interests. It was not uncommon for him to stay awake pursuing various projects for three or four days at a time, cat-napping at odd moments if he sat down, let’s say, and then percolating into full activity again when an opportunity presented itself. It was not long before he and I were running partners, cruising the 24-hour-a-day streets for “resources” – physical and creative, fueled by speed and imagination. Life appeared limitless in those days. Bodies had not yet ceased functioning correctly or rebelled at the abuse, and the future appeared to be a limitless vista of good-times. I saw in JP something of a mentor whose very existence testified that one could survive in this manner and so never thought to apply the brakes to any of my excesses. JP was a fount of encyclopedic political and practical knowledge and I’m sure he found the recognition of a younger man flattering. Furthermore, having a partner increased his range and access and capabilities. I was a guitar player and song-writer, so, what the hell, if all else failed we could always pick awhile if there was nothing else to do.
Jean talked often and fondly of his family, and tried to balance the conflictual demands of his affection and sense of responsibility for them, and his authentic drive to explore all the potential experiences of his human existence. Being young then, I couldn’t always understand his concern. I simply assumed kids kind of took care of themselves, or their mothers looked after them, but JP knew better, and worried aloud to me about the strain his absences were placing on his family. Several improbable adventures were fueled by his sudden decision that a present for one of his children was in order, and we would wind up crisscrossing the Bay Area for hours, climbing over garbage piles of metal to find the parts to assemble a bike, or a swing or whatever seemed to be required by his impulse of the moment.
Hindsight has tempered the humor of my memories with the costs that were paid, and I would trade many reckless adventures to have JP beside me picking and singing my favorite of his songs with the catchy refrain, “If you got a good woman, you better tell that woman, better tell her that you love her tonight.”
It’s not to be, however. There’s a saying on the street that “payback is a motherfucker” and it’s true. The “life” we lived cost JP his life, cost his son his life, cost his wife and his children years of struggles with the demons hatched in the real world of those angelic hopes and visions. Payback cost me my health, more than 18 friends, dead-and-gone, embroiled me in acts for which I am still paying karmic retribution. Yet, despite that, the part of it I regret most are the drugs for it is they which dull the self-protective, regulating instincts that create the dividing line between health and pathology. It was not JP’s music, his adventurous spirit, his quest to live free and improvisationally, his fascination with “stuff”, nor mine, which exacted these exorbitant costs, it was drugs and our failures of character and will to refuse them. But we were young men, spending on credit, and the bill had not yet been presented, so, how were we to know?
In a sense, this “knowing” is JP’s final legacy. It’s just by luck that I survived him, really, only luck. And remembering his sweetness and generosity it would be easy to be embittered at his fate and the costs it exacted on all those he loved. There was nothing about the man really that deserved such punishment, and yet that punishment was instrumental in stopping me in my tracks at the cliff’s-edge; forcing me to pause momentarily and consider what I would have my own fate be. In that sense, my presence is branded by JP’s past and I never forget it.
I am not nearly as patient and kind a father as he was, but none of my children have died. I was a much more unconscious husband than he, yet my wife was never temporarily crippled by a breakdown. He was never as judgmental and intolerant as I was, and yet it was me that was left alive to judge us both. There is no explanation for this other than the ancient, twisted, invisible roots of karma. In the face of its inexorable laws we are simultaneously judged and blameless, and there the matter must rest.
I wrote a book about this time and JP’s daughters were correct in calling me to task for it’s one-sided treatment of their father. I was shocked to see that they were correct, and was glad to have been offered the opportunity, to offer these words, like pebbles that Tibetans place around sacred sites, constructing monuments to their devotion. These words bear the same meager relationship to JP’s smile as those paltry stones do to the vast realization of the Buddha, and yet, sometimes, words are all we have.
Toronto
December, 1998
I examined him with curiosity. He was maybe five-four, well proportioned and quite hirsute. Hair was clambering to get out of his shirt, and the dark curls on his head were tangled and uncontrollable as escaping steam. He was unshaven, and wore thick, black-framed glasses taped at the juncture of the lenses, halfway down the bridge of his nose, and the smoke rising from the cigarette locked between his lips, forced him to tip his head sideways so that it would slip by his eyes. His face was creased with good humor, his eyes framed with crow’s feet at their outer hinges, twinkled as if he were contemplating a good joke. I received the distinct impression of ready humor, high intelligence and limitless curiosity.
He led me on a tour of his “stash”, as he referred to it, and his knowledge of each and every article was encyclopedic. We burrowed into his cellar “where the real treasures are, man”, and there in various toolboxes, stacked one on the other, he extracted precision tools of staggering variety – miniature micrometers, calipers, a hat-makers brim-shaver, clamps, magnets, assorted tins of miniature springs, depth gauges, screw extractors, and titanium drill bits. During this time of my life I was living a hard-scrabble urban existence and the primary source of my survival, was my 1949 Chevy one-and-a-half-ton flat-bed truck. Keeping it running, cash-free, required many and various tools, and discovering JP was akin to being handed the keys to a hardware store.
We began conversing animatedly, and it became apparent that JP was something of an elder in the world I had entered not too many years previously by joining the radical anarchist theoreticians of the emergent counter-culture – the Diggers. JP, slightly older than I, was a dyed in the wool bohemian, contemporary of the Beats like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, a banjo-playing poet, professional musician, extraordinarily skilled fabricator of material goods (like his homemade bosun’s chair) and just more damn fun than twenty monkeys in a barrel. His laugh was like a prize to be won, a toothy radiance, and manic giggle that could transform the most mundane activity into a conspiracy of good-humored lunacy. Before too long it was obvious to both of us that we would be fast friends, and part of one another’s mutual support system.
I don’t remember too much else of the day except worming our way into the darkened, equally cluttered house somehow and meeting JP’s wife, Maryanne, a quietly pretty, slightly distracted woman, who seemed to have the major responsibility for JP’s two daughters, KayAnne and CherylLynne, and his young son Paul Jr. The family was easy and comfortable with one another, something I have always attended carefully since it is both a heritage and skill which has eluded me in this lifetime. I realized that there was much that JP could teach me.
The friendship developed, as friendships do and before long JP and I were trading songs, auto-parts, mutual-aid, and unfortunately, methedrine. JP loved speed, and embraced it in a guiltless, engaging way. It extended his reach in the world, afforded him the waking time and energy to pursue his myriad interests. It was not uncommon for him to stay awake pursuing various projects for three or four days at a time, cat-napping at odd moments if he sat down, let’s say, and then percolating into full activity again when an opportunity presented itself. It was not long before he and I were running partners, cruising the 24-hour-a-day streets for “resources” – physical and creative, fueled by speed and imagination. Life appeared limitless in those days. Bodies had not yet ceased functioning correctly or rebelled at the abuse, and the future appeared to be a limitless vista of good-times. I saw in JP something of a mentor whose very existence testified that one could survive in this manner and so never thought to apply the brakes to any of my excesses. JP was a fount of encyclopedic political and practical knowledge and I’m sure he found the recognition of a younger man flattering. Furthermore, having a partner increased his range and access and capabilities. I was a guitar player and song-writer, so, what the hell, if all else failed we could always pick awhile if there was nothing else to do.
Jean talked often and fondly of his family, and tried to balance the conflictual demands of his affection and sense of responsibility for them, and his authentic drive to explore all the potential experiences of his human existence. Being young then, I couldn’t always understand his concern. I simply assumed kids kind of took care of themselves, or their mothers looked after them, but JP knew better, and worried aloud to me about the strain his absences were placing on his family. Several improbable adventures were fueled by his sudden decision that a present for one of his children was in order, and we would wind up crisscrossing the Bay Area for hours, climbing over garbage piles of metal to find the parts to assemble a bike, or a swing or whatever seemed to be required by his impulse of the moment.
Hindsight has tempered the humor of my memories with the costs that were paid, and I would trade many reckless adventures to have JP beside me picking and singing my favorite of his songs with the catchy refrain, “If you got a good woman, you better tell that woman, better tell her that you love her tonight.”
It’s not to be, however. There’s a saying on the street that “payback is a motherfucker” and it’s true. The “life” we lived cost JP his life, cost his son his life, cost his wife and his children years of struggles with the demons hatched in the real world of those angelic hopes and visions. Payback cost me my health, more than 18 friends, dead-and-gone, embroiled me in acts for which I am still paying karmic retribution. Yet, despite that, the part of it I regret most are the drugs for it is they which dull the self-protective, regulating instincts that create the dividing line between health and pathology. It was not JP’s music, his adventurous spirit, his quest to live free and improvisationally, his fascination with “stuff”, nor mine, which exacted these exorbitant costs, it was drugs and our failures of character and will to refuse them. But we were young men, spending on credit, and the bill had not yet been presented, so, how were we to know?
In a sense, this “knowing” is JP’s final legacy. It’s just by luck that I survived him, really, only luck. And remembering his sweetness and generosity it would be easy to be embittered at his fate and the costs it exacted on all those he loved. There was nothing about the man really that deserved such punishment, and yet that punishment was instrumental in stopping me in my tracks at the cliff’s-edge; forcing me to pause momentarily and consider what I would have my own fate be. In that sense, my presence is branded by JP’s past and I never forget it.
I am not nearly as patient and kind a father as he was, but none of my children have died. I was a much more unconscious husband than he, yet my wife was never temporarily crippled by a breakdown. He was never as judgmental and intolerant as I was, and yet it was me that was left alive to judge us both. There is no explanation for this other than the ancient, twisted, invisible roots of karma. In the face of its inexorable laws we are simultaneously judged and blameless, and there the matter must rest.
I wrote a book about this time and JP’s daughters were correct in calling me to task for it’s one-sided treatment of their father. I was shocked to see that they were correct, and was glad to have been offered the opportunity, to offer these words, like pebbles that Tibetans place around sacred sites, constructing monuments to their devotion. These words bear the same meager relationship to JP’s smile as those paltry stones do to the vast realization of the Buddha, and yet, sometimes, words are all we have.
Toronto
December, 1998
