From Leaving the Farm and Friends

I had a long karmic history with Bill. We met at Cleveland High. His parents owned Lewis’ Bookstore in Reseda. A young salesman there mentored me into my first serious independent reading, starting with Orwell and moving on to Kafka and then existentialism. The karmic twist was that I was stealing the books. I think everybody knew, but nobody said anything. I later felt the burden so heavily that I swore off ever stealing anything again.

Then about ten years later I heard through the grapevine that Bill had been involved with Stephen. There was something about a rural commune in Northern California that made Bill a persona non grata with Stephen, the first I ever heard of a person attaining that status. 

When I left the Farm the first time, and decided I wanted to go back, I borrowed the money for my plane ticket from Bill.

When I left the Farm the second time I went to Northern California and when that didn’t work out I took a Greyhound bus back to my parents house. Mom picked me up at the Greyhound station in Canoga Park, a scruffy, very thin and exhausted 28 year old burnt out hippie. She drove me from the bus station back to the house, where she kindly but very firmly let me know that I could stay in my old room, but there were two conditions. The first was I had to get a haircut and clean up. The second was that I would have to get a job to pay my way. I went to the local Manpower after I got my haircut, and worked a week at Cadillac Plastics, cutting out the shape of plastic floor mats with a router. I moved to a communal house rented by Bill Welch in Tarzana, a few miles from my parents.

I lived in that house when I got my job as a stagehand. And I went to the Zen Center from that house for a Thursday night talk with Susie Niemack,  another resident there.  I moved into an apartment across the street from ZCLA the next day. It was from Bill’s house that I made the final physical transition from my 6 year counterculture plunge to my 28 year stay at the Zen Center.