Gypsies Tramps and Thieves: installment 11

[mitchtv]

Charles Carmalt, Jimmie Gutierrez, and, the Bolivian Dykes


Charles Calmalt thought that bigger was better. I mean that queen was big; her family owned one sixteenth of some county in Pennsylvania, as he was fond of reminding almost anyone who would listen. Oh, she was grand. I don’t remember where we met, but I remember lots of details. Charles was just too bizarre for me to not want to add him too the list of peoples I had traditionally collected. She boasted incessantly, and drove a Packard. She must’ve weighed 350 lbs., and I’m being kind.
I was living with Jimmie Gutierrez, and we were poor. I’m sure, and I remember it was in the mid seventies because we had a lot of coke. The Bolivian Dykes were in town. Marta Lara and Maria Ester Cardenas. Maria Ester was a semi professional tennis player who had some unique tennis racquets, they were hollow. She visited the US several times a year, but was new to San Francisco. We had met years earlier in La Paz. Can you imagine being Gay in La Paz? It’s scarier than Cincinnati, very, very straight, and Catholic.
Charles worked, or claimed to work for the locally famous drug lawyers Rohan and Stepanian. He brought me to their offices, and I wasn’t able to verify the story. Everyone knew him all right, but it seemed that he just annoyed everyone… looking back now, I know he did. Charles didn’t know any Gay people, so I let him tag along with Jimmie and me. I ended up “leaving” with Charles in the Packard. There was no sex involved on my part. Sexual attraction on my part was virtually impossible, considering the combination of Charles’ enormous size, and obnoxiousness. I was however forced to see him naked, as he tried to “hop” in the shower with me. I don’t remember the terms of the interlude, but considering how I was living at the time, it was most likely financial. It was nice to have someone with a car around, for a change, and drugs! He had everything plus coke connections, or at least she bragged about it. For a while, she was the toast of the town with all of us hippie coke queens with the South American connections. Juanita and I had just come back from Bolivia with a kilo of the finest uncut coke, and the Bolivian Dykes were staying at his apartment on Woodland Ave, known to the gang on Sixth Ave as the “Jewish Mausoleum”. (It had very few, tiny windows) It was almost like a wedding of two tribes, yuppies and sissies. Our friend Linda Chan met K.O. Hallinan, and hooked up, Jimmie had an affair with KO’s younger brother “Tuffy”. It was real short lived; I’m not even sure the guy was gay or not, I just know it ended in tears, but so did a lot in those coke filled days before it became professionally smuggled, when people went down and smuggled in mom and pop operations. Some did real good.
In any event, Charles did know people, although he annoyed everyone. He once supplied Ernie Bake some important legal help when he was stopped by the LAPD. Ernie was a Black man, so high powered legal assistance was of the essence. Charles was bombastic, and once humiliated Juanita at Tadich’s Grill on Lower California St. The tacky queen responded to a reservation call of another party, in order to avoid the tremendous mid day wait at the very popular eatery. Needless to say they were ejected from the table, all the while Charles loudly denying his big mouthed part in it. He was happy with the Gay crowd, because he was Gay, and nice person or not we took “her” in to the crowd. It would be fair to say that Caligula, as he later became called, glommed on to us and used a variety of methods to make himself impossible to extricate. Some of the weaker queens at Sixth Avenue fell under her heavy thumb almost immediately. Roberta, and Joey (Brenda) polished her bras for drugs, others like Tommy Nevin came out on top every time One thin Juanita had in common with Jimmie, who she hated, was their extreme dislike of Charles. Charles called Jimmie “Shirley Gutteress”, which I’m afraid was very close to the truth. I once called the Phone Co. myself and told them that I was Charles, and to please disconnect the phone immediately. With Charles, the phone was a weapon and she embodied the phrase malicious gossip.
Jimmie was a Chicano, but half Puerto Rican; he learned English the old fashioned way, the nuns hit you if you spoke Spanish in class. He learned his English very well. He claimed to be the best new abstract poet in the US. His association with Allen Ginsberg seemed to confirm that claim, although the relationship was as much romantic as it was professional. I never understood much of what he wrote, but it was pretty. Jimmie however was not. It was love at first sight when I first saw him playing pool with the dykes at Kelly’s Saloon on 20th and Mission. Kelly’s was a rough place and Jimmie fit right in. He ran with a dyke named Sonny and her dog named Blue. I was there that night with the Bolivian Dyles and with all that coke; introductions were easy.. The cops showed up that night as we were all leaving. They were threatening to “get” Kelly, she was yelling back. Good thing Jimmie was outside by then, because he was still very much a minor.