Berkeley Fire had no incident report on 1028 Vista Linda Way.
Jason Oblischer said, “Not sure what to tell you. I had them double-check, and there’s other reports from that month and year, so it’s not like they destroyed the whole batch. But the system’s returning a blank for that address.”
“The cops say they don’t have anything, either.”
“They wouldn’t, necessarily. They don’t have a dedicated arson investigator. We send our own guy out to every significant fire. PD might get involved if there’s deaths, but usually they’re happy for us to field it.”
“Less paperwork for them.”
“You know it. Made to guess, I’d say it got misfiled.”
“Shit. Well. Thanks for looking.”
“Anytime, brother. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”
He sounded like he meant it.
Firefighters.
—
WITH ITS SOARING ceilings and oily oaken tables, the central branch of the Berkeley Public Library harks back to a grander, more civic-minded era. No other local building embodies more starkly the gulf between 1900s idealism and twenty-first-century reality.
I climbed a wide marble staircase, bullnosed by thousands of feet, to reach the crowded main reading room. Some folks still came seeking knowledge and self-betterment. Many just wanted a place to rest their heads and get out of the rain. The scent of unwashed skin stewed with those of paper and glue to create a smothering atmosphere.
Official report or not, I tended to believe a fire had taken place on Vista Linda. I’d asked the neighbor, Diane Olsen, to confirm the story, and she’d done so without a moment’s hesitation. Not until I’d showed her the snapshot did she get jumpy.
Gee but it’s poetic, ain’t it, to imagine ol’ Gene watching the smoke twirl into the sky?
I showed the reference librarian my printout of the Berkeley Trip, the image of the goofy guy with the spinning eyeballs.
She said, “You need Jack,” and directed me to a back corner of the second floor. A sign above locked double doors read BERKELEY HISTORY ROOM.
My knock drew a white man in a pink bow tie and brown nubuck waistcoat. Early fifties, with a meringue twist of gray hair and multiple piercings in his ears. As if Orville Redenbacher had taken to plundering the high seas.
He braced himself behind the door to interrogate me. What did I want? Who told me to come? Why hadn’t I made an appointment?
Satisfied I wasn’t there to purloin his mother-of-pearl desk set, he admitted me grudgingly, locked us inside, and took my driver’s license for safekeeping.
A man for whom solitude had become an entitlement.
He grumbled and handed over an engraved card.
Jack, it emerged, was JAC: J. Artemis Cole, director of special collections and guardian of Berkeley’s printed legacy. The history room was his fiefdom, a dignified space clad in golden maple and lit with low-wattage bulbs. Vellum maps and photographs of city forefathers and -mothers hung on plumb. Blurry tintypes showed the western end of town in the 1860s, when it was still a separate municipality called Ocean View. There was a large central reading table and a microfiche machine and a glass display case containing a balsa wood model of the Campanile clock tower.
I gave him the Trip and explained I was trying to corroborate its story on the fire.
“Did you check the Daily Gazette?”
“The online archive stops after 1957.”
“They continued publishing into the seventies.” He retrieved a microfiche cartridge from the cabinet. “As I recall, they printed a regular fire report.”
For the week of March 8–14, 1970, Berkeley Fire had answered nineteen calls, including a pan left in the oven on Virginia Street, an overheated engine on Third and Jones, a false alarm on Shattuck, and four cats stuck in trees.
Nothing on Vista Linda Way; nothing the week before or after.
The Gazette likely got its information from the fire department. If the department’s record keeping had gone awry, the paper would have no source.
How then would an obscure, copy-shop outfit like the Trip find out?
JAC shrugged. “The counterculture had its ear to the ground.”
I pointed to the byline, Putta Hurton. “Any way to find out this person’s real name?”
“There’s no index. One assumes that they wrote pseudonymously for a reason.”
“I didn’t see any other issues besides this one on your website.”
“That’s because they’re not on the website.”
He strode to a wall of shelving packed with journal boxes. GOURMET GHETTO. CIVIL RIGHTS. URBAN PLANNING 1910–1939. Two boxes devoted to People’s Park.
He pulled down EAST BAY UNDERGROUND PRESS. “I intended to digitize the entire collection. We ran out of server space, so in most instances I’ve had to limit myself to a single representative item. Are your hands clean?”
“I think so.”
“Mm.” He set the box down, pulled a pair of white cotton gloves from a desk drawer. “Put these on.”
The box contained several dozen file folders, each tabbed with the name of a publication I’d never heard of. The Berkeley Bang. Cosmic Traveler. End of the Rainbow.
“Thrice I’ve applied for a grant,” JAC said, riffling folders, “only to be told there are ‘higher priorities.’ What could be more important than making these documents available to the public, I cannot fathom. Ours is an intellectual community, and these are its lifeblood.”
The documents were available to the public. You just had to visit the library. But by replicating the history room’s contents in virtual reality, JAC could avoid having to admit actual people, with actual sweaty hands, to the actual history room.
“Here we are,” he said.
He tugged out the Trip folder and began laying out its contents.
No gloves for him. Apparently his own sweat was acid-free.
The inaugural issue of Berkeley Trip had come out in November 1969. Five more followed, on no particular schedule. The issue Peter Franchette had found, featuring the story about the fire, was the sixth and final one, as though the paper had ceased to exist immediately thereafter. While I didn’t want to wring causation from correlation—my infant daughter knew better—I did find the timing peculiar.
“Is this the complete print run?” I asked.
“I’ve made every effort to be thorough, but it’s impossible to know for certain. These have come to us in dribs and drabs. I can’t afford to be choosy.”
Curious if other counterculture papers had picked up the story, I asked to check for issues on or around March 13, 1970. One by one JAC took them out.
The Berkeley Pipe. The Groovy NewZ. Blastoff!
“You have to envy their sense of possibility,” he said lovingly, as we perused the Berkeley National Spotlight. “Who puts the word ‘national’ in a local paper? It seems so whimsical by today’s standards. Issue a manifesto. Change the world.”
“It’s still true. Everything in Berkeley’s political.”
“Except politics,” JAC said. “That’s personal.”
Grandiose name notwithstanding, the National Spotlight was little different from the Zinger or the Truthteller or any of the others: printed on the cheap; festooned with hokey graphics, excitable prose, and occasional grainy nudity. Authorship unattributed or pseudonymous.
Only the Trip mentioned the fire at the Franchette home.
While paging through the Weakly Freekout, I stopped on the comix page, peering at a strip titled The Tao of Mortimer Q. Nutsack. Over four panels, its protagonist waxed philosophical, concluding that the meaning of life was “a nice pickle sandwich.”
It wasn’t Nutsack’s insight that had drawn my attention. It was his exploding hair, the spirals he had for eyes.
They matched the character from the Trip nameplate.
The author of the strip was F. Henkin.
I pointed out the similarities to JAC, who shrugged, unimpressed. “A relatively small circle of people created these. Run out of money, get shut down, regroup, start over.”
The clock on the wall chimed two. I noticed JAC appraising me sidelong. I had yet to identify myself as law enforcement. It also helps that I have a lot of experience appearing trustworthy. It’s a skill, like any other.
I said, “Any suggestions?”
“Frank might know more.”
“Frank…”
“Henkin.”
I’d taken it for a pseudonym. “That’s his real name.”
“It’s the one he goes by. He was active in the scene.”
“He must have some stories.”
“No doubt.”
“Do you know if he might be around?”
JAC hesitated, as if on the verge of divulging the nuclear launch codes. He slicked up the front of his hair, then said, “He runs a record shop in Temescal.”
I thanked him, which made him grimace. He waved me off when I offered to help clean up the papers. He didn’t want things getting out of order, so if that was all…
In exchange for the gloves, he returned my driver’s license. As the door closed behind me, the dead bolt punched home.
—
TEMESCAL IS WHAT realtors call a transitional neighborhood. In truth, the transition is well under way, and if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
Telegraph and Shattuck avenues boast several record shops, hipster-owned and -operated. Striking out there, I found myself pacing a stubbornly grungy block of Forty-Seventh near the freeway. Wayback Vinyl had a two-star rating on Yelp and was supposed to be around here somewhere. All I saw was an abandoned bank no one had yet converted to a beer garden.
A lull in traffic allowed the faintest whine to eke out. I followed it, crunching over puddles of safety glass, to the rear of the building, where I discovered an unmarked door wedged open with one purple Croc.
I parted a bead curtain—the electronic eye made a sci-fi ray gun sound—and stepped into a cloud: the sweetish, chemical odor put out by two tons of decomposing celluloid. Black mold caked the ceiling, which was surprisingly high, giving not a sense of lightness and lift but of peering up from the bottom of a well. The walls had been painted a nauseating green, then plastered over with decals and concert posters drawn in the same style as Mortimer Q. Nutsack. They touted weeknight billings at the Freight & Salvage; be-ins and protests; a festival in Golden Gate Park, Jefferson Airplane headlining. The effect was dizzying, like a rabid mob of angels adorning some gonzo cathedral.
I crabbed sideways, through racks set disagreeably close, to reach the register.
A pasty man with long, curly hair the color of pigeon excrement sat on a high stool, paging through a robotics magazine, hands warmed by a countertop space heater. Bluegrass warbled on the turntable. The singer recounted a litany of misfortunes. His crops had failed, his mule had died, and his woman had left him. I couldn’t blame her.
“Frank Henkin?”
The man sighed. Gappy teeth, too-small head. He wore a fraying cable-knit sweater, and his fingers were white and agile and slender, drumming as he waited for my question, which was obviously going to be an utter waste of his time.
I put my copy of the Trip on the counter. “Am I right in thinking this is your work?”
“Huh.” He centered the pages. “Blast from the past.”
He regarded me with newfound interest. A fan! “What can I do for you?”
“I wondered if maybe you’d kept in touch with some of the other people who wrote for the paper. This person, for instance—”
“Yeah, sure.”
He hadn’t even glanced at the page.
“You know him,” I said.
“Yup.”
“Putta Hurton.”
He smirked.
I said, “You’re him.”
The smirk became a jagged, what-can-I-say grin.
“The whole paper was you.”
“Shit don’t write itself.”
“This one story, who was the source?”
“Same source I always used. Middle third of a joint.”
I smiled.
Henkin issued a put-upon grunt and felt around for his reading glasses, finding them tangled in his hair. He balanced them on the end of his nose and murmured:
“ ‘Nuke prof gets roasted.’ ”
The grin faded; the small muscles of his face began to twitch, and his chin tilted up and back, as though he was recoiling from a punch. The paper wrinkled in his tightening grasp. Thinking he might actually take a swing at me, I shifted my feet in anticipation.
Instead he slid off the stool.
He had nowhere to hide—the area behind the counter was about five by five—but he made a game effort to shut me out, fiddling with the turntable, knocking the tonearm out of the groove and bringing the banjo break to a screeching halt. In the scraped silence he began seizing other records lying nearby, pretending to scan the track listings.
“Mr. Henkin—”
“We’re closed for lunch,” he said.
“It’s three thirty.”
“Closed.” His hands were trembling. “Leave.”
“Yours is the only paper that covered the fire,” I said. “How’d you learn about it?”
No reply.
“Did you know Gene Franchette?”
The trembling intensified. He shook a Bob Marley album from its sleeve. It slipped out of his hands and bounced on the concrete.
“Mr. Henkin.”
He picked up the record, blew it clean, and set it on the platter, reaching for the tonearm, his lips moving soundlessly.
I said, “Norman.”
