El Charco and the Submarine

[Squane]

Phil Holmes was the son of a prominent Palo Alto attorney, a partner at Holmes & Seevley, which used to be located on California Avenue across the street from Cho's dim sum shop. I guess you could say that Phil didn't have a very good relationship with his family because he ran away from home at some point and began living in Barron Creek (at least when the weather was good). Phil used to go to the All American Market (which was bulldozed in the early 90s and is now a strip mall) and steal steaks, which he would cook for himself in the creek. Phil was caucasian, although he fancied himself a black blues singer/harmonica player. He did sing the blues and play a decent harp, but he was most certainly not a black man. However, he did hang around with some blues guys from EPA and they kind of took him under their wing as a curiosity, kind of the same way Ron McKernan (Pigpen of the Grateful Dead) became indoctrinated into the Bay Area black blues scene in the 60s. Maybe if Phil had been born 10 years earlier, he could have been hangin' with Janice and trashing his liver with Southern Comfort at 710 Ashbury Street. Phil went by the moniker of El Charco and hung with my friend Mark Watson, a fellow Gunn High School student, although I think Phil dropped out. During the rainy season, El Charco had to move out of the creek and lived for a while in a plywood submarine that Mark's dad Al built for his son when he was a child. The submarine was about 12' long and 8' high and didn't really look like a submarine, but since it was identified as such, I gave the builder the benefit of the doubt and accepted it for what it was intended to be. There was a cabin atop the submarine that couldn't have been more than 10 square feet, but that's where El Charco crashed for a time. When the weather got really shitty, the Watsons allowed El Charco to crash on their couch. In addition to El Charco's self-chosen moniker, Watson referred to him as the "Dirt Unit," presumably due to a lack of personal hygeine. Around the time I met Watson in 1981, the cast of characters at his folks' place included Sean Carmichael, Tim Omi, Jeff Milia (referred to by El Charco as "Cheap Italian Bastard") and some guy El Charco called "Sterno." Sterno was most likely a bum or fellow creek-dweller who couldn't afford regular alcohol and got high off of canned heat. El Charco had a philosophical streak, often contemplating his chosen lifestyle with the rhetorical interogative: "What's bums? Who can say what bums are?" Anyway, the last time I saw El Charco was in 1989 and he had totally cleaned up his act by then. He had followed Sean Carmichael out to Whidbey Island and got a job on a salmon trawler. The backbreaking seasonal work was apparently lucrative enough that El Charco bought himself a house, although I don't know if he sings the blues anymore.

The submarine is another matter entirely. One evening in the summer of 1986, Doug Franke and I were partying in Watson's driveway where the submarine was located and apparently had too many gin & tonics because we poured some gin atop the submarine and attempted to ignite it with a Bic lighter. Al Watson caught us trying to set fire to the submarine and the next day began dismantling it. What thought processes were behind the demolition I can only speculate on. Perhaps Al figured we'd be back with more flamable liquor like Everclear or Stroh and a blowtorch. Fortunately, the submarine has been photographed and can even be seen in the background of a travelling shot in my 1982 Hawaii Five-O parody. Al, however, succumbed to cancer in 1990, but Mark still lives in the same house at the end of Tennessee Lane, which, apart from the absence of the submarine, appears to have been untouched by time.

Later the same evening we attempted to ignite the submarine, Doug and I were sitting atop the seven-foot fence that separated Mark's front yard from a townhouse complex. We were drinking more gin & tonics and shooting the breeze. At one point, the notion of balance must have eluded me, because I fell off the fence into the townhouse complex, yet my left shoe stayed atop the fence. I sustained no injuries and felt no pain, even though there was only bare dirt to break my fall. The moral of the story is that if you are ever going to be in a plane crash, drink lots of gin, as it will limber you up and you will be more likely to survive. That is why James Bond is still alive, although he's a vodka man.

[Palmwine Drunkard]

I grew up in that area!
Gunn H.S.? Class of what? Maybe you know an old friend of mine, a band geek named Rob Cork from class of '80.
He was a Deadhead who liveed in Barron Park behind the A1 Liquors (I think) across from the Jack-in -the Box on El Camino.
We lost touch long ago and far away...
Nice story by the way.

[Squane]

I was class of '81. The only Deadhead in Barron Park I knew was Joel Pierce who lived way up on Los Robles. I was pretty straight-arrow in those years, not getting into the whole sex+drugs+rock n'roll thing until after I graduated.

[Palmwine Drunkard]

Sometimes it takes a certain degree of maturity in order to truly find one's priorities in life!

[Palmwine Drunkard]

Sometimes it takes a certain degree of maturity in order to truly find one's priorities in life!