***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When Butterfly Swirl Swirled

 

A YouTube film clip of the Kinks performing their classic rock number, You Really Got Me.

A lot of times I get an idea for a sketch, for good or evil, from the cover art on CDs (in the old days record album covers and subsequently cassette art to trace the technological progression). Some of the scenes brought to mind by the cover art that graced those artifacts were from personal recollections, ancient personal recollections, others though just from thoughts reflected through the cover. This sketch is drawn from the former.

 

The said cover art in mind from the mid-1960s showing in the background a motley foursome from some post- British invasion invasion group (after the Beatles and Stones turned the music on its head) all with then de rigueur Nehru jackets and hair getting little long in the back and on the sides.  “Better get to the barber, boys” reminded dear old moms from Liverpool to North Adamsville (that’s in Massachusetts, my hometown also not important to the story except to show that we were heading west from many places in those days). But that part of the picture was some much fluff. Because in the foreground is the object our, ah, inspection, one female, one Botticelli-vision, dangling earring bejeweled, but more importantly day-glo, or if not day-glo then some non-toxic paint celebration, painted flower on her cheek. No tattoo, not permanent not in those days, although more than few young women has an off –the- back- of- the- shoulder flower and some even had one right down in their, well that is a story for another time. A time when the snooping grandchildren are safely out of sight.

The whole effect, as if in a flashback, no not that kind, not some Owlsley- Dixie cup kool-aid freak out Jefferson Airplane White Rabbit Fillmore West flash-back from too much blotter (read: LSD, for the clueless look it up on Wikipedia) but memory flashback immediately brought to my memory’s eye one Kathleen Callahan, a. k. a. Butterfly Swirl, Carlsbad (California, that’s important) High School Class of 1968 and Josh Breslin’s old flame from the summer of love, 1967 version, circa San Francisco in the merry prankster, yellow brick road night.

Of course, as always in the interest of full disclosure, Ms. Swirl was my girl. Very much my girl, until old Josh, Olde Saco High School Class of 1967 (that’s up in Maine, although that is not important to the story, or just a little) showed up in a Russian Hill park (that’s one of the Frisco hills one day).

[That, by the way, is Joshua Lawrence Breslin, the radical journalist whose by-line has appeared in half the unread back hall recycle bin radical newspapers and public good alternative vision journals in the country over the past forty years. And here is the beauty of it for my purposes. Since he is legally a “public figure” (I looked it up before starting) and thus open to fair comment (as opposed to you and me and our quest for some semblance of privacy), although he is right now holed in some podunk Maine log cabin holding off the winter chills in solitude, he had better not even think of the word “defamation.” I know where the bodies are buried and while I am not usually a “snitch” I do have a long, very long memory.]

This was a day when we, our whole merry prankster crew, Butterfly Swirl included, were taking in the view (read: smoking dope, fine stuff I can still smell now from Panama I think, and actually inhaling don’t let anyone, including amnesiac Josh, tell you otherwise. Yes, and I said that with the full knowledge that the statute of limitations has run out on that. I checked that up too just to make sure). That one fine day was, well, when Josh “stole” her from me. That too is not important to the story, except maybe to explain, a little, the kind of magnetic gal Kathleen was. What is important is how she came to be, not even out of high school yet, Butterfly Swirl.

No question in 1957 or 1977 Kathleen Callahan, brown hair, bright smile, good figure, great legs, and an irksomely sunny disposition would have been just Kathleen Callahan, maybe the head cheerleader at some suburban school, some seaside suburban school like Carlsbad where she was from just norte of San Diego. Or, more realistically given that locale, some dippy surfer joe girl watching while they, some impossibly blond surfer joes, were hanging five or ten or whatever they did to those LaJolla, Malibu, Carlsbad waves that weren’t harming anybody as they slipped tepidly to shore before the surf board invasion. And, as Ms. Swirl later confessed to Josh, she actually had been a surfer joe girl, although the guy’s name was Spin Curley, nice right.

Then the 1964 British invasion came, and she, all of thirteen, although fully formed in lots of ways as she also told Josh was swept away, swept away from the silly little surfer girl life, small seaside everybody adobe-housed Spanish fandango and the inevitably inevitable Spin. She told Josh it was really the Kinks that got her off-center. Not the Beatles or Rolling Stones as you might think like those of us a few years older. She said she was mad for their You Really Got Me, it kind of turned her on, turned her on a lot. A lot more than Spin could deal with what with his having to hang five or ten out in mother nature wave land slamming them to the tepid shoreline. So naturally she headed to Los Angeles to check things out for a few days. Her and another girl from school a year ahead of her but about one hundred years ahead in everything else, whose story can be summed up in one word-bonkers. Heavy petal to the metal drug bonkers.

But she, that girl, get this, already had a moniker, Serendipity Swan, and knew some real cool people that she had met down at LaJolla (us, earlier in the spring ) where they were taking care of some rich guy’s estate (they are all estates in that zip code, then known as postal zones, look that up in Wikipedia too, alright). This rich guy got rich, got very rich by “inventing” acid (LSD), or something like that. Or knew guys who invented it, or something like that. Old Serendipity wasn’t much on facts, straight or crooked. But in any case, the guys taking care of the estate, Captain Crunch and his confederates were always high, were always on the move with their merry prankster yellow brick road bus and were always welcoming to lost lambs, and ex-surfer girls.

That was how, a couple of years, before Kathleen, who had not then metamorphosized into Butterfly Swirl, kind of at wit’s end, eventually came up further north. And that is how I met her, when she got “on the bus” around Big Sur, I think, somewhere north of Xanadu. And became the Swirl (my pet name for her, for obvious reasons, obvious between us and like I said before relatable when the grandkids are not around). Complete with some tempera design on her face most of the time. Nothing elaborate but sometimes in a certain light like I said she looked like something out of Botticelli. Here’s the funny part though, as things got weird on the bus, or too weird for her and her embedded suburban girl manner (when she wasn’t high, high she was like a Buddha or Siva or whatever those divines are called) she hankered (my word) for home, and for her Spin and his hanging five or ten, or whatever he did to those waves. Like I said in 1957 or 1977 she wouldn’t have even been “on the bus.”

 

But just for that 1967 minute, driven by those wicked not Beatles, not Stones Brits she broke free, free for that minute in the 1960s when we thought we could fight the dragon and win, could wrap all our pre-histories in a bag and toss them in the nearest rubbish barrel. No such luck. Josh, after his theft of her from me, and there is no question of that in my mind since he came at her like crazy the minute he set eyes on her knowing she was “my girl” kept her amused for a while until she slipped away one night with some surf-etched dream in her head and maybe some ganja too. Josh went down Carlsbad and LaJolla way like some mad monk searching every woodie and Volkswagen bus to see if she was there but never caught up to her again. Adieu Swirl, adieu.