Bill Cardoso died last weekend in Kelseyville, CA, of heart disease. He was a deadbeat-hipster-journo-master and friend to many of the ink-stained-ilk, and as writer and editor he had a surprising amount of influence in the early days of so-called “new journalism” for someone who wasn’t terribly well known and whose work wasn’t widely distributed.
His work was published in Rolling Stone, Harper’s Weekly, CITY Magazine, New Times, Ramparts, and other more obscure publications, and it should be noted that much of his best work appeared in numerous and lengthy letters to his friends, many of which were so crazed and hilarious, they ended up being copied and passed around hand-to-hand, samizdat-style. In 1984, Athenaeum published “The Maltese Sangweech and Other Heroes,” a collection of his pieces that is sadly now out of print.
Bill will be memorialized this week as guy who coined “gonzo” to describe a 1968 article he had assigned Hunter Thompson to write for him at the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine on Nixon’s primary campaign in New Hampshire, but I remember him for other reasons, beginning with the way he left us.
Thompson shot himself in his kitchen with his wife on the phone, but Bill had the grace to take a cab, as he always said he would. (“Take a cab” is old hipster slang for dying with your boots on … with a final measure of self-respect and class.)
I will never forget the story he wrote on the Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, which New Times refused to print. I think I can remember the lede, because I was the one who typed it in a room on the backside of the Chelsea Hotel when a tooth fell out of Bill’s mouth and he collapsed, taking to his bed complaining of having had a spell put on him in Kinshasa by someone he referred to darkly as an “Ndoke.” I think it went something like:
“From my window here in room 236 in the Membling Hotel in downtown Kinshasa, Zaire — the only hotel I have ever stayed in where your room is number may be 236, but your phone number is 628 — I can see the broad, green leaves of the Giant Hyacinth floating in the brown waters of the River Zaire, nee Congo, as it flows slowly, inexorably toward the sea. The International Press is here in force, of course, but they do not know what I know: every single Hyacinth leaf conceals a crocodile, lying in wait….”
He took the view of the river from his hotel room and turned it into the most hilarious, yet ominous image of deep, dark Africa you’ve ever read in your life. And the piece got darker and weirder and funnier from there.
One of my fondest memories of Bill was when I would pick him up at the Burbank airport back in the early-mid 70’s, when I was on a magazine assignment in LA. He was always down on his luck and “short,” as he said, so I would buy his ticket at the airport (about $25 in those days from SF) and just sit down and wait for a couple of hours and he would show up on the shuttle. We were usually not even out the door of the airport — Burbank was and still is a small airport, so it wasn’t very far to the door — when Bill would whisper out of the side of his mouth: Slip me 50. The first time he did it, I thought I didn’t hear him right, so I asked him what he said. Slip me 50, will ya? A man can’t walk around without something in his kick.
So I would slip him 50 and that would last him until I put him back on a plane to SF, sometimes days later, after we had “holed up,” as he put it, in a somewhat less than luxurious suite at the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood, which at that time cost exactly $23.00 a night. I have a clear memory of one time I arranged our flights so Bill and I met at the airport when I flew in from NY or somewhere else. I rented a car and we drove over the hill to the Marquis and checked in. We had barely closed the door of our “suite” when there came a loud knock at the door. Bill was already in the bathroom, staking his territory by laying out the contents of his Dopp Kit on the sink and checking his “coif” (that’s what he always called his curly Portuguese locks…his “coif”), so I opened the door. A skinny, wiry guy with hooded, darting eyes, dressed all in black, rushed into the room right past me. “Bob Neuwirth,” he rasped. “Truscott, right?” I nodded. I had heard of him. He was Dylan’s road manager on his early tours, and he had achieved something of a reputation as a songwriter and musician. I had seen him from across the room at clubs and a couple of parties in New York. He was wired into every scene you could think of and a few he’s probably forgotten by now.
Neuwirth sat down on a sofa that had seen better days and picked up the phone. “You on assignment?” I nodded. “Who for?” I think I said Penthouse. “Great! They pay good expenses!” He dialed the phone and started barking out a lengthy liquor order: “Two quarts of Jack Daniels, three cases of Bud, a quart of Beefeaters…” He paused, turning to me. “You drink vodka?” I nodded. “Two bottles of Smirnoff…uh…make that four cases of Bud.” Just then Cardoso appeared in the door of the bathroom. “Two quarts of Dewars,” he called loudly. Neuwirth spun around and spying Cardoso, practically dropped the phone in shock. Recovering quickly, he finished the order. “Two quarts of Dewars. Yeah. Room 217. Right.” He hung up.
Tapping a cigarette out of his pack of Picayunes (I have an entire sub-section of stories on the lengths we sometimes went to in order to find Picayunes in places like Twin Falls, Idaho) Cardoso slid across the room to Neuwirth and stuck the Pic in his mouth. “Got a light, Bobby?” Neuwirth fumbled for a pack of matches. He looked like he was in the presence of a ghost. Cardoso lit the Pic and sat down on the aging “modern” sofa and crossed his legs. Grinning at me he said, “The last time I saw Bobby was in the alley behind the Club 57. Hemway and I and the drummer for the loneliest plunk (that’s what he always called Thelonius Monk) were huddled together smoking a joint and Bobby was jumping up and down around us in a little circle yelling, lemme have a toke, Bill! Al! Al! Lemme have a toke! Please! Please? Cardoso took a drag on his Pic and gave Neuwirth a quick appraisal. “Nice threads, Bobby. Looks like life’s treatin’ you good. Why don’t you let us in on the scam on the phone.”
It turned out that Neuwirth was the de facto Mayor of the Marquis, had the whole place wired. Somebody at the desk must have informed him anytime a likely suspect checked in. He would make for the suspect’s room, and after checking on whether a record label was picking up the room tab, or there were travel expenses being picked up by Rolling Stone or some other magazine, he would place a generous order with Turner’s Liquor’s, a notorious outlet just up the street on Sunset Boulevard. “This is the Sunset Marquis, man,” Neuwirth explained in his speedy rasp. “At the Sunset Marquis, you dial 411 and you get information. You dial 114 and you get Turner’s Liquors and the tab goes on your room bill.” When I asked about the rather large size of the order, Neuwirth shot me a what-planet-are-you-on look and said, “There’s a lot of people stayin’ here, man. Stuff’s gonna be happenin’ tonight, tomorrow night…you don’t want us to run out, do you, man?” At the time, the logic of his question seemed inescapable.
It seems that Neuwirth studied the concept and practice of hip at the feet of Bill Cardoso and friends like Al Hemway and Larry Novick and other bohemians who were around the Boston jazz club scene in the early 60’s. It occurred to me that some years later, Neuwirth may have passed along to Bob Dylan some of the bohemian wisdom he had picked up from Cardoso and Hemway, but I was never able to confirm that. When I once broached the subject with Bobby, he gave me an indulgent look, like if you don’t know the answer before you ask questions like that, you shouldn’t ask them. Bobby always treated Bill with a rare kind of respect you don’t see much any more, and Bill, in his way, reciprocated. It wasn’t like Bobby ever said anything; nor did Bill acknowledge it. Both of them having received wisdom from unsung Bohemian masters like Al Hemway, they were way too cool for that. But it was there. I remember later one night when at Neuwirth’s invite, we showed up at Ben Keith’s “suite.” (Ben Keith is a famous steel guitar player who has played with Neil Young and most of the Nashville stars you’ve ever heard on the radio.) Donny Everly, Neuwirth, Geoff Muldaur and several other musicians were sitting around strumming and laughing and singing. When Cardoso entered, Neuwirth wordlessly signaled somebody to move so Bill had a place to sit. Nobody stopped strumming or singing or laughing. As was his wont, Bill took his sweet time sliding across the room to take his seat, giving Ben Keith a nod as he passed. Bill bent at the waist and examined the chair carefully, sweeping an imaginary crumb from the seat before he did a slow pivot and sat down. I think Ben Keith was wearing a cowboy hat, and when there was a pause in the music, Bill nodded to Keith and said, “Nice sky.” He motioned with with his fingers around his head, as if he were aligning the brim of a hat. “I should get one of those.” He grinned widely, his fingers frozen on the imaginary hat brim. “What do you think?” His words and the elegant little ballet of his fingers were so perfect, it was like you could see a cowboy hat perched ridiculously atop his the black curls of his “coif.” Everyone laughed. Bill Cardoso was in the house.
So late at night, we would hang-out in Marquis “suites” with the likes of Keith, Kinky Friedman, Iggy Pop, and others even less reputable. Somehow, Neuwirth’s “suite” was never the site of any of the revelry, a move Cardoso observed had been something of a rule back in Boston. “Why mess up your own crib?” Bill explained. At least once every time we met in LA for a summit conference at the Marquis, we would take a drive down to Southgate to visit his old Boston friend, Al Hemway, an aging hipster who lived with his mother in a bungalow in a neighborhood which even then you practically had to shoot your way in and out of. Cardoso introduced me to Hemway as the first guy to “import” pot from Mexico into Boston, principally by driving down there in a car and picking it up and driving it back. Hemway was far more than that, as I soon learned. Bill would describe Hemway completely deadpan to an outsider as “one of the guys I worked with when I drove for Volvo.” Long story.
Can I tell one more story? It’s the one Bill told about a night he spent carousing Kinshasa with Budd Schulberg and Harold Conrad, who were there for the Rumble in the Jungle. Conrad, for the uninitiated, was the real person the character Humphrey Bogart played in Schulberg’s classic fight film in the 50’s, “The Harder They Fall.” He was a former Brooklyn Eagle sports writer who once did “PR” for Meyer Lansky and later turned fight promoter — he promoted Ali’s first three fights, back in the days when he was called Cassius Clay, and he was the guy who introduced Ali to Norman Mailer and George Plimpton and started him on his high-flying act amongst the NY intelligentsia.
Cardoso was in Zaire for New Times Magazine, which unbeknownst to him was on its last legs, and when Foreman cut his eye in training and the fight was put off for something like 70 days, the entire international press corps went home, except Cardoso, who was stuck by New Times in Kinshasa without a promise that they would fly him back for the delayed fight if he returned to NY with everyone else. Having spent his meager “expenses,” Cardoso did what any enterprising Boston boy would do: he started dealing Zaire weed to the small American community in Kinshasa. By the time Conrad and Schulberg returned to Kinshasa some two months later, Bill had an entire chest of drawers stuffed with Zaire weed, and the night they got back to town, Bill treated them to some of his stash. When they returned to the Membling from their night of carousing in Kinshasa, the three of them got on the Membling’s aging wire-cage elevator to go up to Bill’s room so he could send them back to their digs at the Intercontinental (which Bill referred to somewhat snootily as the “Inter” in his piece) with some weed. According to Bill, as they got on the elevator, Schulberg was telling a Hollywood story, and Conrad was chiming in with his usual sideways observations and Bill was howling with laughter as the two older men fed each other lines. One story led to another and the three of them were cracking each other up. Finally there was a pause in the merriment and someone — Bill thought it was Schulberg — commented on how slow the elevator was. Bill looked through the old accordion door of the elevator at the lobby, then he checked his watch. They had been standing in the elevator on the first floor for more than 30 minutes. When he announced this fact to the others, Conrad stroked his pencil-mustache and smiled. That’s some weed you’ve got there, Bill. It felt like we were going up the whole time.
Then there’s the story about Bill stealing Francis Coppola’s CITY Magazine car (logo emblazoned on a Hondo civic or something like it) when they wouldn’t pay his expenses for covering the world series back in ’76, sometime around then. It was right when Patty Hearst had just been kidnapped. Bill wrote three or four stories on the Series for CITY, and when he returned to SF, handed in an expense bill for about $1700, and Coppola just flat refused to pay him.
Bill called me up and announced that I had been promoted from Colonel to Marshall Field of his newly-formed ZLA, the Zinger Liberation Army, named after John Peter Zenger, one of Bill’s heroes and the only newspaperman jailed for sedition. Patty Hearst had recently been kidnapped by the SLA, and the city of San Francisco was consumed by the story, so Bill named himself Marshall Field of the ZLA, promoted me from Colonel to Chief of Staff, and named his roommate, the mad-crazed VN war photographer Tim Page (who had more shrapnel in head than brains) as Minister of Information.
I flew immediately from wherever I was to SF. Cardoso had the CITY car stashed in a garage in Daly City, and we drove over there with a recorder and taped a message from the car in the style of the dispatches issued by the SLA. First the car’s engine started, and then somebody — I think it was Bill — mimicked Patty Hearst’s voice in a first-person “communication” from the stolen car: I’m being held hostage by the ZLA and won’t be released until Francis Ford Coppola pays Bill Cardoso’s CITY Magazine expenses, etc etc. Bill released the tape to Pacifica and within a day or so it was all over Bay area radio. Warren Hinckle ran a photo of a tourist with a Pelican sitting on his head in his column, identified the loon under the Pelican as Bill and wrote this hilarious gibberish about the outrageous kidnapping of Coppola’s car and demanded that any reader who saw “this man” should immediately call the police, because he was known to be armed and dangerous.
The whole thing went on for days. Coppola had been holding fast, refusing to pay, but when the tape hit the airwaves, reporters and TV cameras staked out his Pacific Heights mansion, and he caved. I think Bill spent most of the $1700 on a week of celebration, and he was back where he was before, cadging cocktails from pals as he held forth at his local watering hole with a new stash of stories about the ZLA’s war against Coppola’s forces of darkness.
I’m rambling here, but I think there’s room for one last story about the two-plus months Bill spent in Africa, a time which haunted him for years and after which his appearances in print became fewer and fewer.
It occurred to me over the last few days that while Bill may have named gonzo journalism, he didn’t practice it. Gonzo was a kind of shorthand to describe Thompson’s twisted take on things, which included stuff he quite literally made up. The scene of Ed Muskie’s collapse in the 1972 Democratic primaries, which Thompson blamed on Muskie having been addicted to the South American drug Ibogaine, was the example of his gonzo journalism cited most frequently after Thompson’s death.
Bill’s best stuff was frantic, written like he was a man on the run. It had an edgy noir-ish paranoia — a motel clerk who looked like a biker who had just finished filing his teeth peered at him darkly through thick bullet-proof glass and gave him the wrong change on purpose when he paid for his room. He was convinced that everyone else had proper terry cloth bath mats, and the paper one placed next to his tub was there to remind him of his place in the world.
But Bill didn’t make anything up. Everything he wrote was real, and while most of it was hilarious, a lot of it was as painful for him to write as it was for us to read. I finally concluded that’s why his Zaire piece never ran in “New Times” or anywhere else. “New Times” was owned and edited by Jon Larsen, the preppy and wealthy son of one of Henry Luce’s partners in Time Magazine. Larsen simply couldn’t stomach the Zaire piece. Bill’s story about an American prize fight staged in Zaire under Mobutu Seze Seko wasn’t profane, but it had a raw and primitive feel that reflected Bill’s take on the African continent more than it informed readers about the fight. He was spooked by Africa, and although his writing was hilarious, it was also deeply disturbed.
When he first arrived in Zaire, Bill was amused by the sight of hundreds of night-watchers who were hired by home owners and businessmen to sit on their haunches outside doorways in Kinshasa where they kept oil-fires going in tin cans to ward off evil spirits. “Ndokes” were the zombie-spirits of dead relatives and enemies who came out at night to enter unprotected houses and sit at your bedside where they would watch you sleep and cast a spell if you had the misfortune to awaken and see them. A month or so later, his amusement had turned to fear. Bill swore to me that he woke up one night in his room at the Membling to find an Ndoke sitting in a chair watching him. He was spooked, and when his tooth fell out of his head on the street outside the Chelsea Hotel the day after he returned to the United States, he was convinced it was as a result of the spell that had been cast on him by the Ndoke he saw in his room at the Membling. When he wrote about it in the Zaire piece, it wasn’t gonzo, it was real.
Sadly for us today, some of best stuff Bill Cardoso wrote was never written down at all. He lived a life rich enough to fuel a half-dozen literary careers, and if I may take my liberties, Bill Cardoso was a national treasure. Hopefully, one day there will be a Great Reckoning, and someone will add up what we lost when Bill, and Conrad, and Hemway each took a cab.
Unless I miss my guess, somebody else will have to pay the fare, because none of them — not a one — would stoop so low as to dig into his own kick and pay for the privilege of going out with class.
So here’s $50, Bill. Have a nice ride. We owe you at least that much.
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