flak photo: June 2005

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June 30, 2005

Side Street

Riga, Latvia
January 2005

June 30, 2005 in Marc Johnson | Permalink

June 29, 2005

Bring It On

Coney Island
June 2005

June 29, 2005 in J. Daniel Janzen | Permalink

June 28, 2005

Great Egg Harbor River

Mays Landing, NJ
June 2005

June 28, 2005 in Robin M. Buehler | Permalink

June 27, 2005

Richard Nixon Karaoke

Numata, Gunma, Japan
January 2005

June 27, 2005 in Vanessa Oguchi | Permalink

June 24, 2005

Pheasant Branch Conservancy

Middleton, WI
June 2005

June 24, 2005 in Andy Adams | Permalink

June 22, 2005

Annie
Annie

San Francisco
May 1992

One of my old roommates from the early days in San Francisco. There were four of us sharing a flat in a Victorian at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (I'd met the others through Roommate Referral, back in the pre-Web days when you had to sit on a blown-out couch in a dingy room, thumbing through binders of potential roommates & apartments and trying not to seem desperate in front of the other losers).

Our apartment and the one below were united through old friendships and current relationships, Deadheads all, as were the loose constellation of fellow travelers with whom we traveled to Dead shows, loitered on the front stoop, and generally wasted our lives. It was all good fun.

Annie was an inner-circle Deadhead through her close friendship with the photographer Herb Green, who took many of the definitive Grateful Dead portraits from the late 60s (when they lived just a few doors down from our place). At one point, she worked at a photography gallery that carried the work of Jock Sturges, whose nudes of adolescent girls led to a porno case in Cincinnati at around the same time as the Mapplethorpe dust-up). She left that job (office manager/accountant) after some financial misunderstandings--a pattern that would be repeated in later jobs. She thought it was great that I'd gone to Harvard (she hadn't gone to college), and always wanted to introduce me to her mother. It was hard not to have a soft spot for Annie; she was an underachiever, but very sweet and ready to laugh.

Annie was a pot dealer when I moved in, supplied by growers in the Emerald Triangle--all very organic and non-organized-crime-like--and also handled Ecstasy on occasion. In spite of her asthma, she wake-and-baked before work every day. Some of her friends went for the harder stuff. One of these (a jackass alpinist none of us could stand) became her boyfriend, and the volume of narcotics in the household--once forbidden--rose abruptly; for example, this guy's idea of a cool thing to do was to rent Scarface and match Tony Montana line-for-line. He also scaled an Alp and named it for her, and rode a vintage Triumph motorcycle. What a guy.

Within a year, Annie was hooked on heroin and Mr. Triumph had moved on. The house and its population were changing. Our favorite roommate had moved back East (replaced for a while by Mr. Triumph, alas). Some of the crowd were busted here and there for dealing and drunk driving; another got his girlfriend pregnant and handled it wrong. Jerry Garcia wasn't dead yet, but he would be soon. The rest of the roommates were at the point of evicting Annie (stuff kept "disappearing" around the house) when she moved out on her own. Last I heard, her health was spiralling downward and she'd been in a fairly serious car accident. I'd be surprised if she were still around, but if she is, I wish the best for her. The long-lost favorite roommate and I remain good friends. I haven't heard from any of the others in years.

The photo is from a morning early in Annie's dope days.

June 22, 2005 in J. Daniel Janzen | Permalink