Janis, Peggy and the Garden of Glass - Part II

A satirical imagination can be a dangerous thing.

Since I originally posted this imagined fantasy of Peggy Caserta's rock-star party cottage that once sat on my property in Coon Hollow, I received several comments from readers that I was unaware of until now. (I thought Blogger platform was supposed to notify me with comments...maybe I need to adjust some settings or something.) Anyway, the comment below from username "Brass Ovaries," is ostensibly from the real Peggy Caserta.

Hello Jeb, It's Peggy Caserta. I'm here to set a few things straight about what did and did NOT happen out at Stinson under my watch. This home was not a party house. It was a retreat, a sanctuary, a much treasured HOME. If I even saw a piece of paper blowing across that canyon I would scramble out and get it. Throw bottles? Never! Anyone who knows me knows this is ludicrous. I don't drink, and Janis would never, EVER be so classless and thoughtless as to throw trash into a pristine setting. No one threw bottles, trash, or anything from that deck while I owned it. They wouldn't dare. There never were any "parties". None of that is "Janis Joplin's Broken Glass". Not a chip, not a shard, nada. Heroin did not come in bottles, and there is no such thing as a "tie off widget" that I've ever heard of. Butterfield was never a guest, nor was Jerry, or Pigpen. Who ever trashed that canyon is no friend or guest of mine. So, there it is Jeb. The truth. Verifiable.

If I could, I would paste Peggy's comments into the original article with a disclaimer that reads "WARNING. The descriptions of Peggy's house and the activities therein are entirely products of my IMAGINATION! My apologies to PC for fictionalizing her Coon Hollow cottage in what some may perceive to be a squalid light." Unfortunately Blogger doesn't support the editing of old posts.

Yes, there was a cottage that belonged to Janis's girlfriend, Peggy, on Buena Vista Ave. in Stinson Beach. Yes, the property is littered with broken glass. Nobody knows how it got there. Perhaps Coon Hollow, which was probably choked with vines and creepers, was once a dump. I was 15 in 1970. I didn't go to any acid tests, but I read The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, the story of Ken Kesey's Merry Prankster's odyssey across the US in a day-glo bus, around that time. Is it any surprise, then, that I imagined a non-stop bacchanalia in Coon Hollow?

It is even more bewildering, to me, that someone would look at the picture of the broken glass and take it literally. I mean, really?

So, now that your curiosity is piqued with frothing slobber, I'm sharing the original post below.

Janis, Peggy and the Garden of Glass

Ever since we moved into our house here in Coon Hollow overlooking the mighty Pacific, I have been hearing things. Besides the constant crash and flow of the surf on Stinson Beach, the foghorns in the summer, the mysterious ghost moan coming from Bolinas and my very vocal pup Mister Boo, I've been hearing faint strains of Big Brother and The Holding Company. (In sixth grade I didn't quite get the double entendre of a "Holding Company", which had nothing to do with corporate subsidiaries in the Haight of 1966.) I'll find myself humming "looks like everybody in the whole wide world/is down on me" or "take it/take another little piece of my heart now baby", or, in particularly desperate states, just the "whoa whoa whoa" of Ball and Chain over and over.

I wore the grooves out on those first two albums, the only two legit Big Brother records, and I think of them as Janis’s truly inspired and beyond-compare efforts, despite everything that came later especially the travesty of Me and Bobby McGee and Mercedes Benz. That’s not to say that her singing wasn’t still beyond compare, but you can start to hear the fame and the money and the dope, especially the dope, in those later recordings when at first it was just this raw Texas orphan nerve snapping and sparking like a severed high voltage wire. There wasn’t anything like Janis and there hasn’t been since, and those that tried were only successful in mimicking the death by syringe scene and not much else.

We had heard rumors after we bought Coon Hollow that Janis had hung around the party cottage that originally stood on our property, but it wasn't until this New Years Eve while having rather comedic and borderline pathetic dinner at the Parkside Cafe that a guitar player named Milty suggested that we google Peggy Caserta. After trudging back up the hill to our Coon Hollow residence we logged on to learn that hippie boutique owner and millionaire Peggy Caserta and Janis Joplin were lovers right here at the original Coon Hollow cottage, right up to Janis's death by overdose in Hollywood.

In 1973, Peggy Caserta's book about her relationship with Janis: "Going Down With Janis", was published, but has since gone out of print. Too bad. There's nothing like a little gay junky depravity. But there's also something rather run of the mill and predictable about the fallen angels of the Summer of Love: the swirling vortex of junk, speed, psychedelics and every other form of dope, initially tuning in, turning on, and completely dropping out and off the face of the planet. The stories are all the same: archetypal, once married to H, you're married for life until death doth part you and corporeal world. In other word’s I’m not about to go drop $100 to get Peggy Caserta’s out of print book just to read about another H bomb, even if it is about a bixsexual rock star and her rather comely lesbian lover. As Peggy said in an interview with the documentary TV show, BIO, in 2009: 

“It worked for what it was. We had a lot of fun. We made a lot of love. It wasn’t a relationship that people think of or look at today as a ‘lesbian relationship.’ It was not like that at all. We were compatible and young and wild and interested in each other.”

Peggy Caserta

What’s curious about Coon Hollow and the inhabitants that preceded the razing of the falling down cottage in 1983 and the building of the spacious, wide open, high-ceilinged two story building we’ve called home since fall 2012 is...the glass. Shortly after we moved in around September of 2012 my son Jack was playing with Mr. Boo on a gopher 

ridden patch of the former lawn - just clumps of fescue that the gophers would methodically pull under their mounds, leaving fewer and fewer clumps - when he came back up to the top story where the living room is and said "we can't play with Boo down there. It's nothing but broken glass." He was right. An area about thirty by fifty feet was strewn with shards of glass: brown, green, mostly clear, along with broken ceramics or perhaps the household plates, bowls, cups and so forth, a few pieces of clay pots and some weird ribbed, white siding or some other composite. The pieces range in size from almost full-sized bottles (only one has been found intact) to big 4" x 6" pieces to tiny shards that glimmer in the noon sun.

The earth is not much more than dirty rocks alongside a spring fed creek. A run over the dirt with a rake churns up more and more rocks - mostly golf-ball sized but some big daddies - and more glass the deeper we dig. It's hard to imagine what the Buckleys, the family that built the current house, did once they cleared it of ivy, blackberries both regular and pricker-less/fruitless (aka The Luther Burbank Blackberry), scotch broom and other brambles. We've found some of the green netting that sod is grown in, so it's likely that they Buckley's simply covered up the rocks and glass with several yards of topsoil and a big sod lawn.

The following owners, who moved in around 1994, let the place completely go to seed, so by the time we got here the glass - Janis's and Peggy's glass - was practically jumping out of the rocks and dirt. It's not difficult to imagine cadres of stoned hippies showing up at Peggy's beach palace, sitting on what they might have imagined was a buried treasure under brambles ten feet high, so high the creek was a tunnel of water running through Coon Hollow, heard but not seen, and pitching their bottles into the brambles, listening to their delightful destruction on the rocks.

Not Peggy's cottage, but similar

It is an image of a big party and a little party, of times intimate between the lovers applying suntan lotion to each other's naked loins on the sun deck, completely hidden from prying eyes in the folds of the hollow,  hearing the surf crash on the beach below just barely masking the squeals of the kids - always the squeals of the kids drifting up the creek as if they were right in our backyard. Regardless of how ramshackle the original cottage was, there must have been some rip-roaring parties here in Coon Hollow.

I can see the jittery, writhing, multi-colored 20-something hippies in their beads and stovepipe hats gobbling down and shooting up every drug imaginable, back when all the shit was pure as the driven snow: China White, Peruvian Flake, Thai Stick, Owsley Acid, Crystal Meth, orange barrels of Mescaline and Psilocybin Shrooms oh joy of joys! Boys and girls and girls and girls and boys and boys and girls and the little kitty cat going off in threes or fours to the back rooms of the cottage, a copy of Naked Lunch in hand, or in the main room on the overstuffed couches and bean bag chairs, watching the sunset while the back door was slammin’ and the kids were rammin’ n’ jammin’ on axes that would now be worth thousands - the ubiquitous Gibson 335s, the Country Gentlemans, Strats, Tellys, Les Pauls, Firebirds and SGs, Vox Continentals, Jaguars, the vibra-wiggling Farfisa, polished wooden Martins and Guilds ringing clear and true against the perpetual crash of breaking glass on the rocks below. 

Falstaff and Lucky, Busch Bavarian, San Miguel and Mickey Big Mouths - that’s what the Redwood high kids were drinkin’ down in front of The Castle on the beach in 1970 while Janis, Peggy, Pig Pen, Bloomfield, Butterfield - the bluesers - were shootin’ up in Coon Hollow, tossing bottles over their shoulders: Seagrams, Royal Gate, Beefeaters, Jack Daniels, Early Times, Hiram Walker and his brothers Johnny the Black and Johnny the Red, Jose Cuervo and the sweet syrupy nastiness that Janice was famous for drinking: Southern Comfort. I remember seeing Janis on stage with the Dead at Pepperland, playing Love Light for hours while she goosed Pig Pen and fondled Jerry with one hand and wielded her ever-present bottle of SC with the other. She sat in with the Dead,  but Janis sang the blues, played the blues, lived the blues, like Pig Pen.  Stick a loud Farfisa and slap a little tremelo on the ES 335 with a shuffle chuggin’ underneath and you got the San Francisco Sound.

All happening right here in Coon Hollow at Peggy’s little love getaway, next door to Cold Comfort, the name given to the house uphill from ours over 50 years ago, perhaps after Cold Comfort Farm, a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932 and made into a TV series by the BBC.  The phrase? Shakespeare, of course:

King John, 1595:

KING JOHN:

Poison'd,--ill fare--dead, forsook, cast off:

And none of you will bid the winter come

To thrust his icy fingers in my maw,

Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course

Through my burn'd bosom, nor entreat the north

To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips

And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you much,

I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait

And so ingrateful, you deny me that.

There is a curious connection between Shakespeare’s morgue vision and the silly, fatalistic parody of Britain’s country gentility in Cold Comfort Farm. Sometimes these hidden yet powerful ironies make the most sense in light of senseless death, like Janis Joplin’s. As Sam Andrew, her bandmate in Big Brother and the Kosmic Blues Band once put it:  

“Janis had a big appetite for everything: living, having a good time, everything,” he

recalls. “If it was food, she wanted the most and best of anybody in the room. If it was a good time, she wanted the most. She had a big appetite for drugs, too, and she had the opportunity and money to indulge it. Maybe if she would have had less of an appetite, it would have turned out better. She didn’t have a lot of caution at times.”

Peggy Caserta is still around, according to the available info, living somewhere in the Inland Empire of SoCal, clean at last after a long career with the needle. But Peggy’s a business person, not a musician. My theory is that the forces that drive the creation of truly inspired music - that yearning for complete catharsis and the accompanying mindless euphoria - are the same forces that can get a blazing heart and head to run for cover, shoot the moon, drink a case of Miller bottles and a fifth of Early Times and heave the bottles off the porch. 

I might have to give it a try myself, except that I've cleaned up all the rocks and am in the process of transforming the garden of glass into a field of grass. And let me tell it's just such non-stop euphoria and catharsis I can't hardly stand it.

On Amazon

Looking for a new and interesting way to hack a little true romance?

I got your inspiration right here!

So

Road Rage vs. Marilyn Monroe - an excerpt

 

The following is an excerpt from my novel The Healing of Howard Brown, 

published by Baby Bingus Books, Aug. 2016.
Now giving away e-books in exchange for reviews!

I can picture what happened next as if it happened yesterday. I was just about to head north off Sir Francis Drake onto highway 101, but to fetch Tripp I had to go south. I looked in the rear view: there was just enough space to cut over a couple of lanes and get to the southbound exit, so I put on my blinker, shoved my gorilla arm out the window and hit the gas. Still, there was no way to avoid cutting off a couple of drivers, who started honking, naturally. Then I saw this one driver – a red-faced Fu-Manchu dude with mirrored sunglasses and an Oakland Raiders cap in a junior-sized blue Ford Ranger – getting really pissed, shouting and flipping me off violently. So, like I always did when I upset a fellow driver back then, I blew him a kiss. This was a bad idea: Mr. Fu-Manchu got so close behind me on the freeway onramp that I thought he was going to bump me. Then he pulled up alongside, shouting unintelligibly through the open passenger window. He was so close I could see the throbbing blue vein in his red forehead, but I just kept blowing him kisses like I was Marilyn Monroe on the stairs of an airliner, bidding adieu to her adoring fans. What the world needs now is love sweet love, right? Well, I was giving it to Mr. Road Rage, who I could now see had a shaved head under his mesh-top Raiders cap and was just getting more and more infuriated. Then he made his move: he cut in front of me diagonally so I had to swerve to avoid him in the heavy Saturday afternoon traffic: brake lights flashed, horns blared, tires squealed and I could see several vehicles fishtailing behind me to avoid a pileup.

“Holy motherfucking shit that fucking cocksucker almost killed us all!” I hollered, dropping back in traffic until the blue pickup was out of sight. Feeling like I was having a heart attack, and realizing that I had been out in the big, bad world very little in the five years since my retirement – driving around Marin appeared more dangerous than ever – I took the next exit and pulled into a parking space beside a Chevron Extra-Mile mini-mart, thinking a beer or five on top of a little oxy would calm me down.

“Dad!” I heard Trip’s tiny voice. He sounded like the little boy that couldn’t seem to scream “DAD!” loud enough. “Dad are you there?”

“Buddy! I can’t find the phone!” I shouted in the general direction of where his voice had come from under the driver’s seat. All the swerving around on the freeway had dislodged the phone from its harness. So I opened the door and, knees on the pavement, fished around under the seat, then did the same under the passenger’s seat. No phone.

“Dad, I’m over here!” I could hear him chuckling as I peered between the passenger seat and the center console. There it was, wedged in snug and cozy. I lay my plus-sized gut across the driver’s seat with my gargantuan ass sticking out the door and tried to liberate the phone while Tripp reported on fishing conditions at the Yuba. “The water is pretty low, and it’s been a pretty dry summer up there, so we’re gonna wanna look for pools with deep channels where we can just swing a fly right across the bottom.” With the mention of “bottom” somebody gave my ass a powerful, violent shove that pinned me against the seat.

“Hey! What the fuck?” I shouted, trying to get up, but whoever it was had squashed my crotch against the electric seatback control. Suddenly, my wiener was in charge; a little shift against the button I could recline or incline the seat.

“You’re some hot shit race car driver, ain’tcha?”

Oh for fuck’s sake, I was thinking. It’s the shaved-headed Oakland Raiders fan, Mr. Road Rage. He has tracked down my custom-designed Saab and is going to chop my balls off, then jam ‘em down my throat.

“Dad?”

“Hey, Buddy,” I said, bemused. “There’s a fella here trying to buttfuck me in the Chevron parking lot.”

“Shut the fuck up, fag!” growled Mr. Road Rage, shoving me even harder. He stunk of beer, gin and vomit so powerfully that I felt a sympathy barf welling up. I also recall worrying that the asshole had a gun trained on my bald spot, which I was told existed but had never seen.

“That’s him, the buttfucker,” I reported.

“Hey, you shut up, asshole!” Tripp shouted, picking a fight from the cell phone stuck between the seats.

“Turn that fuckin’ phone off, dickface.“

“I can’t! It’s stuck between the seats!”

“Yeah, can’t you tell, shit-for-brains?” Tripp yelled. I could imagine the sneer on Tripp’s face.

Then I felt this giant upwelling of superhuman power as I shoved my angry wiener against the seat control, inclining the seatback as forward as it would go, which enabled me to get a grip on the sides of the seat. With a bloodcurdling war whoop, I pushed myself back against my attacker who, with one foot on my ass and the other on the ground, lost his balance and fell backward, his acrylic Raiders cap bouncing on the pavement. I spun around, ready to blanket him with my immensity, when two uniformed mini-mart attendants blasted out of the double glass doors side-by-side like Butch and Sundance, arms waving and yelling “Stop! No fighting here! No fighting! You must stop!”

Instead they stopped, about 10 feet away from where I stood over the vanquished butt stomper. The station managers were looking at us as if we were combustible materials.

“Why for you like fight?” one of them shouted, almost melodiously. My rage was draining and my crotch was throbbing.

“Dad? What the hell is going on there? Dad?” Tripp yelled. The station managers were now studying my Saab, marveling at the odd configuration of the driver’s seat.

“Sir,” one of them said, “your phone. Somebody is talking.”

Mr. Road Rage was snickering and hissing like a Disney anaconda.

“I’m sorry about this,” I said to both of them, avoiding the gaze of Mr. Road Rage, who was probably fifteen years younger than me and pretty good sized, a kangaroo to my grizzly bear.

Mr. Road Rage hopped up from the ground and brushed himself off, glaring at me while he hissed, “You are such a fucking fag. You wanna kiss me now, asshole?” His sleeves were rolled up over the elbow with a dragon’s tail stretching across his freckled arm. His face was still fire engine red. I paused to retrieve the phone, telling my son that I couldn’t explain it all at the moment but would call back later.

This was not how I had planned to re-enter the world. After five years in relative hibernation – on

the patio with Mr. Booper, at 156 Woodland with parents, caregivers and my frequently ill-mannered sister, and in bed with Sandy – I had forgotten that even marvelous Marin County streets and highways were tinderboxes of pent-up frustration and rage just waiting to explode, like my new acquaintance had just demonstrated. I briefly contemplated going home and calling off the search – I was grossly unprepared for the dangers of American highway culture – but then an alarm went off inside the mini-mart: a half dozen kids were making off with bags stuffed with as much mini-mart crap as they could carry, mostly twelve-packs of Bud Light. The station managers were after them in an instant. I jumped in my car and ducked behind the dashboard. But these kids were hardly dangerous. Instead they looked like the backfield for the Redwood high school football team: ripped dudes with crew cuts, tattoos peeking out from under tank tops, shorts falling off their asses. I got the feeling that the theft was more of a prank than a serious robbery – they probably didn’t even open the cash register – so I got out and hobbled behind the running security team, when along came Mr. Road Rage from behind, streaking across the blacktop to where the guys were jumping into the back of their truck, one kid ripping the gas hose out of the tank. The station managers and I froze as the all-star wrestling Fu Manchu maniac hooked an arm around the football player with the gas hose and slammed him into the side of their big boy pickup truck, beer cans erupting out of the twelve pack in a glorious explosion of golden suds. One of the other kids jumped out of the pickup bed onto Fu-Manchu’s back, wrapping his legs around his waist and whomping on his shaved head with a free hand while Fu got the other football player by the nape and was banging his forehead into the passenger side window. Just as the glass shattered into a million tiny shards sparkling against the blacktop, my phone rang.

“Dad!”

I went running back to my car, which waited with the keys still in the famous between-the-seat Saab ignition. “Hey Buddy you won’t believe what is happening here.” I described the scene, which, as I pulled out of the Extra Mile, had developed into a sort of scrum with Mr. Road Rage Fu Manchu getting the shit kicked out of him by a half-dozen beefy teenagers. By the time I turned into the freeway entrance, the kids were peeling out of the Extra Mile and the station managers were attending to Mr. Road Rage on the ground who, I supposed, got more fight than was originally planned when he followed me into the parking lot, as had I. And the real search for Sisi hadn’t even started yet.

I drove back into the flow of freeway traffic, headed to Tam Junction and the Shoreline Highway that would take me out to Bolinas. Soon I would lose cell service. I scanned my rear view for the blue Ranger, paranoid as always that some random nut case out there would pull up alongside me and blow my brains out with an assault rifle, or toss a grenade into my lap. “I’m gonna lose you in a little bit,” I said as I crested a hill past Muir Beach and met the broad aquamarine expanse of the Pacific, but Tripp was already gone.

That particular stretch of Highway One, after the road climbs out of Muir Beach to the ridge, revealing the craggy cliffs that fall into the seething foam of the ocean, has, in its arresting panorama, always forced a moment of reverence and reflection. Instead, on that particular afternoon, I found myself imagining how I would have loved to pop Mr. Road Rage’s bald, red head like a big pimple. Terrified by my own violent visions, I started to wonder: what am I getting into here, and why? Was leaving my patio, my chucker, Mr. Booper and my wife’s broad, creamy bottom worth a harebrained boondoggle for the sake of fostering some final family harmony?

Then, as if Baba Ram Dass had started dancing on the hood of the Saab chanting “be here now,” I finally came back to where I was, gazing across breathtaking blue-on-blue stretching across the Pacific Ocean into infinity. I wished my father could see it. I wished my son could see it. I wished my wife could see it. Most of all, I wished my sister could see it. At least then I would know exactly where she was.

Want a free e-book version of Howard? Drop a line to babybingusbooks@gmail.com and leave your email address!

Now on Amazon in print and e-book