JEFFREE LINDEMANN
Remembrance

I met Jeffree in 1971 when Janie and I, along with our two cats, moved from the Lower East Side to the Haight. We settled into a second story flat at 265 Frederick Street with Jeffree, Jane Norling, who had been Janie’s roommate at Bennington College, Sharon Healy and Gail Dolgin, who I knew from Newsreel in New York.

I liked Jeffree immediately. He came across as friendly, smart, funny and a little crazy and irreverent. All proved to be true, especially the irreverent part—more so than I first recognized. I’ve actually never known someone who could be so irreverent yet be so loving and serious. So Jeffree.

Since Jeffree died, I’ve been thinking about how much I cared for and loved him, all the fun we had over the years and sharing these moments with others, especially Erich, Andy and Brenda.I had been in San Francisco briefly the year before but didn’t really know the city. Jeffree took itupon himself to help orient me by taking me around with him. One of our first stops was to visit his friends a few blocks away where members of the Diggers lived. As we walked into the house the smell of fresh baked bread filled the air. I remember sitting around a large wooden table with others while someone spread a thick coat of hash oil on slices of whole wheat bread, then passed them around. Wow! What an introduction to the Haight.

On another occasion Jeffree took me to watch people lawn bowl in Golden Gate Park. The players were dressed in all white—from head to toe. Before leaving our flat Free handed me a tab of acid, saying we needed to acquire the right mood for the experience. It certainly made the day more thrilling. Walking in the park and afterwards around the Haight amid the scent of incense and patchouli oil, Jeffree pointed out the colorful Victorians, the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, the house where the Jefferson Airplane lived and more, and explained how things had become much more down and out.

One day I took him to visit my old college friend David Mitchell, who had been the business manager for the San Francisco Good Times. Big David, who stood 6’ 8”, lived on Cole Street with musician extraordinaire Paul Peña and his wife Babe, both of whom were blind. Within minutes Jeffree and Paul were in an animated conversation about Paul’s experience playing with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, probably one of Jeffree’s favorite musicians. Afterwards we went to see Paul open several times for Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders at the Keystone. Another time Jeffree took us to Minnie’s Can-Do Club, a blues/R&B joint on Fillmore Street.

Jeffree also introduced me to George Kosturos, who owned Cosmos Market, a bodega on Frederick Street a few doors from our flat. Georgie, as we affectionately called him, was the brother of the Greek Orthodox priest in town, though there was nothing priestly or religious about him. We often sat with Georgie on wooden crates in the back of his store smoking a joint and sharing a bottle of Almaden Claret while Georgie recounted wild tales of the Haight- Ashbury in its heyday of counterculture ideals, drugs and music.

One night Janie, Jeffree and I took some acid and drove to Berkeley to see an amazing double feature—The Devils, based on the novel “The Devils of Loudun,” by Aldous Huxley and Performance, starring James Fox and Mick Jagger—two of the most iconic movies from that era, both in one sitting. For years we recounted our experience, marveled in the cultural upheaval they represented and sang the words to Memo from Turner, which we each had memorized.

Another memory from those days was Jeffree helping us rebuild the engine on our yellow 1968 VW bus in the garage of friends’ home on Bocana Street after we blew out the third cylinder. Jeffree successfully removed and took apart the engine and sent us off to get it washed. Reassembling it was not as straightforward. At one point we had to restrain Jeffree when he started beating the engine with a ball-pein hammer.

Oh, and before I forget to mention it, on numerous occasions Gail gave Free a hard time when he didn’t perform his shared house chores. If you knew and loved Gail, you’d understand how merciless her reprimand could be.

The most memorable incident from this time was when Janie, Jeffree and I drove to Ocean Beach one night to enjoy the sunset. While we were sitting in our VW bus watching the waves and the sun slowly sinking in the water, we observed a guy staggering on the beach. As we watched, he stumbled, tried to get up, then fell face first into the surf. We looked at each other, as if asking, do we need to do something? Then the three of us jumped out of the bus and raced down to the water. Jeffree and I lifted him up; he was soaked, incoherent and recked of alcohol. We carried him to the parking lot and carefully loaded him into our bus, and with a towel tried to dry him off. Janie suggested we take him to an emergency room. Jeffree opened his wallet and to our surprise, discovered he was a fucking surgeon. What to do?

Knowing if we took him to a hospital, he would be in deep shit and may lose his license. I guess it was our anti-authority orientation that suggested we protect him, rather than thinking this drunk surgeon shouldn’t be allowed to operate on anyone. So, we drove him back to Frederick Street, carried him up a flight of stairs, undressed him, wrapped him in a blanket and laid him on a bed. The phone number we found in his wallet turned out to be his ex-wife. An hour or two later she and her brother-in-law reluctantly came to pick him up and thanked us for rescuing him. He was still unconscious when he left.

About 10 days later, just before Christmas, our doorbell rang. It was the surgeon, looking more dapper, though humble, and accompanied by a woman. They handed us a clean and neatly folded blanket, the one we had wrapped him in, and two large boxes filled with packaged food, a ham and other goodies. He profusely thanked us, then left. Imagine the irony he must have felt—a band of hippies saving his sorry ass and possibly, his career.

Then one day trauma struck the Frederick Street flat when one of our cats peed on Jeffree’s duffel bag. He was understandably, though so uncontrollably, angry that he tore the door off its hinges in the little loft area where he slept. I remember him cursing that he hated cats, they had no redeeming qualities and should be left to forage on their own—yet remembering 50 years later his affection for his own cat.

Shortly after that incident, we moved to a 50-acre defunct farm and apple orchard near Watsonville. Jeffree was a frequent visitor and helped me re-roof one of the old barns, fitting me with a full harness so I didn’t fall off the roof and kill myself. He even showed up one day with Georgie, several bottles of wine and a bag full of steaks to grill.

When Jeffree moved to a house he bought in Bernal Hill, I visited him frequently; we did some business together. Two things stuck with me from that period: Jeffree beginning to be more reclusive, with the shades on the house almost always drawn, and his ongoing battle with his elderly next-door neighbor, who would occasionally turn her hose on him. We were renting a house in Santa Cruz at the time and were having a dispute with our landlord. Jeffree said he had the solution and handed me a book entitled, “Get Even.” He pointed me to a page that outlined how you could unscrew the electrical switch plate from the wall and drop Limburger cheese, reportedly the stinkiest cheese in the world, in between the walls. He took joy in knowing he had a hand in our sweet revenge.

In 1979 Janie and I bought land in Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We asked Jeffree if he would be willing to do the electrical work on the house we intended to build. He said he had never wired an entire house before, but he was game to take it on. Funny how things stick in your mind. One was Jeffree arguing with our architect about the need for two-way light switches, with Jeffree contending they were a bourgeoise convenience and unnecessary. The other was his epic fights with Joe the plumber. From the routine joke:

Q: How many plumbers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: One to get the beer and one to call the electrician.

Or “Joe, if you were any dumber, you’d be a plumber. Oh, you are a plumber.”

To the routine banter, “No, I’m not going to help you carry the fucking hot water heater. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a professional.” When I tried to intervene, Jeffree would say, “You don’t understand, we’re natural enemies.” Later Joe told me Jeffree did help carry the water heater and he loved working with him, even though he was “grumpy.” I should mention Jeffree did a terrific job wiring our home.

As the years passed, with Jeffree and Carol getting married and both of us busy with work and raising kids, we saw less of each other, though we connected whenever there was a special occasion, like watching the Super Bowl, going to a baseball game or if I needed to pick up some product. During this time, we moved from Santa Cruz to Menlo Park. We did stay in touch with phone calls or an occasional visit to drop off bundles of clothes from our boys who were several years older than Erich and Andy.

During this time, we both played competitive softball and occasionally went to the batting cages together. Jeffree lent me his copy of Ted William’s “The Science of Hitting” and I lent him my 36” 28 oz aluminum bat that had a “Smoke” moniker emblazoned on its barrel. He loved that bat and said he hit better with it. Go figure.

In 1997 I took a job in Oakland. For the next 17 years, Jeffree and I saw each other much more frequently. We had lunch together, went to concerts and baseball games. I would often stop by his house after work, even though it was the opposite direction to get home. These were the days Jeffree delved deeply into his music collection, making mixed tapes and burning CDs for his many friends.

On almost every visit, he introduced me to some obscure B-side of an early rock ‘n roll classic I had never heard before with an accompanying story about the artist or venue or studio where the recording took place. And when I left, he handed me one of his psychedelic brownies, always with the same admonition, “Don’t eat it until you get home.”

On one of those visits I brought Jeffree a hard drive filled with over 100,000 songs from my own music collection that had been digitized and categorized by genre, artist and album. I helped him connect the drive to his computer and loaded iTunes so he could easily access the songs. I also practiced the Zen art of answering his questions via telephone afterwards about how he was struggling to find the music he wanted. I think it was Erich who told me it was hopeless, but that he and Andy loved the collection.

These were also the days Jeffree was studying the literature of mind-expanding properties and the curative powers of psychedelics, exploring physics, the cosmos and re-reading many of his father’s seminal papers on grief. On one visit he shared the study his father did on bereavement in the wake of the deadly fire at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub on November 28, 1942. The Cocoanut Grove fire was America’s deadliest nightclub fire, and, until 9/11, it was the second deadliest single-building fire in United States history. As I learned from Jeffree, then later reading the study myself, his father’s work helped to reshape the way the medical world understood grief, which would help to redefine and reform mental health treatment in the United States. Jeffree’s father and mother later established the first Community Mental Health clinic in the country.

When his father was receiving treatment for cancer at Stanford in 1972, he was also a visiting professor at Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences after retiring as professor at Harvard and chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. One weekend, Jeffrey invited Janie and me to meet his parents. And while the conversation we had escapes me, what I do remember from the visit was the loving relationship Jeffree had with his mother and father. He was proud of both of their societal contributions. And he often commented about how he learned to live in the world from his mother, reminding me that he and his sister Brenda were raised in the Quaker tradition with the tenants of simplicity, truth, equality and community that guided his life.

I already miss my extraordinarily unique friend. “Seeyoubye,” a phrase spoken as one word he often used to end a visit or conversation will stick with me. I’ll forever remember this irreverent, loving, grouchy and amazingly generous man.

Seeyoubye, Free.

Sam Karp
February 14, 2021