Monday night denizens at Garbo's

The Russian River was an interesting place to be during the late 1970s and early 1980s. I met so many people in those days, (daze). So many roads intersected and overlapped that after a while it all became a blur.

 (My blog, Literrata, was an attempt to chronicle some of those events. But it is swamped by all manner of writing, and the pertinent bits that comprised one aspect of my life living on the river, have been swallowed whole by that python of a blog. So I’m pulling bits that pertain to the Russian River Writers’ Guild and reposting them here.)

As one of several Russian River Writers' Guild poetry coordinators for Garbo's Niteclub, along with Marianne Ware, Lee Perron, Donna Champion and Jim Montrose, we met parades of writers and musicians looking for gigs. What most of them had in common was probably alcohol. And Garbo’s was a low key watering hole with a good sound system that featured real live music most nights— no disco, and because the owner, novelist Margery Summerfield, had a literary bent, and the bar was otherwise dark on Monday nights, we had a home. I don’t know how we hooked up at Garbo’s but it was brilliant while it lasted.

We met all manner of folks both famous and formerly famous on the river —including David laFlamme, the lead singer from It's a Beautiful Day, a gorgeous blond guy with the voice of an angel who was reduced to pumping gas into my VW bug at the Guerneville Flying A station... an angel fallen from grace. He kept to himself, nursing a drink at the bar, he’d read a poem from time to time, but he never brought his violin.

Among the most strangely notable: Madame Blavatsky's sister...so very occult and so very Russian and so very old with her black dyed coiffed hair, heavy mascara and myriad shawls! A Victorian goth. How did she wind up in Sonoma County? I would love to have her backstory, but she was an eccentric crone who heavily relied on her sister’s notoriety. So we learned little of her circumstances, or how she came to live on the river. There was an old White Russian community on the river, so she could’ve been part of that group. My second cousin married one of the Obuhoffs. But, after two kids, it didn’t take.

John Prine's brother was another Garbo’s regular. Monday nights, he’d sit at the bar with Sam the Bartender to keep him company. I learned John's songs from his brother. Wish I could remember his first name. His own songs never caught on, but we’d all sing along whenever he sang one of John’s songs. The Jungles of East Saint Paul was one of my favorites.

Utah Phillips came through town once a year or so, to play a gig, often accompanied by Rosalee Sorrells, or with Bobbie Louise Hawkins in tow. He and Ed Balchowsky, a Spanish Civil War survivor, would dust of the old war songs. We never had much money to offer them, other than the door, not even a place to stay, but they said it wasn’t about the money, it was about the story.

May Sarton's sister attended the series for a while... Like Blavatsky, she was another odd one, who also relied on her sister’s fame during Open Mike. The polar opposite of Madame Blavatsky’s sister, she was also from another era, always dressed in prim white sweater sets replete with pearls.

You could smell Jerry the Gypsy coming to read at Open Mike. He was legally blind, and wore cokebottle glasses. He’d hold his poems inches from his face, and even then, struggled to read. Jerry’s story was that when he was young, he worked on a farm back east, and was the subject of Robert Frost’s The Mending Wall. Jerry lived in a camper with squat Rasta-haired Buck Chapman—neither one of them had bathed in decades. I guess he needed Buck to drive the truck. At least I hope Buck was driving.

I could go on.... those really were the halcyon days on the river. Living in the moment, we never thought it would end, but then AIDS struck the gay community and businesses foundered. Our former guild home, Garbo’s, shuttered its doors, with no warning. And there we were, dazed, standing in the gravel parking lot, gazing across the river at twilight, poets with no place to go.

When Garbo’s went belly-up, Leonard Matlovich gave us a home at Stumptown Annie’s. Leonard Matlovitch who made the cover of Times fame. The Military comes out of the closet. That’s how I found out Hoover was a cross-dresser. But Leonard soon sold Stumptown Annie’s in 1984. Peter Pender, world chess champ, who revitalized an old summer lodge, was still in business, occasionally we produced reading there. But poetry just wasn’t their thing. By that time, the AIDS epidemic had decimated the entire river community, businesses both gay and straight, foundered. And more than just the nightclubs went dark. The nascent Gay 80s had come to a close. And an era had closed its doors for good.
(This piece, a fragment from my blog, Literrata, was vastly expanded. I’ll need to lift some of this and add it to Garbo Denizens).