My Life as an Outlaw
By Robin Gail
June 2, 2010
When I was a kid I wanted to be a famous outlaw when I grew up. Or maybe a pirate. I imagined myself leading a band of brigands or train robbers. It didn’t matter that I was a girl – I knew I could handle the responsibilities. I longed for the excitement and glamour.
The point is I always imagined myself living outside the law, and for a number of years I did. More or less. Don’t get me wrong, I never did get to lead a band of outlaws, and the crimes I committed were minor. In fact, I was more a scofflaw than an outlaw. Nevertheless, my son, at least, will enjoy the stories. Here are three of them.
I
In 1964, my girl friend Arian and I had become accomplished shoplifters. Not professional quality, you understand; I never had an overcoat with hidden pockets, and I never stole anything to sell. We were amateurs, but we were pretty good at it. Until one disastrous evening at the Cala Market at the end of Haight Street.
We were shopping for food for dinner for ourselves and two friends.
We swept through the nearly empty store, surreptitiously gathering what we needed with practiced hands, and tucking everything into our purses. We purchased some items as a cover, and all went well until we checked out and stepped through the doors.
There, to our surprise, a security guard gathered us up, turned us around, and marched us back into the store and into an office. How could we have been so stupid and over-confidant? He had stood in the dark outside the store, watching us through the plate glass windows as we purloined our way around the store. He saw everything.
The police wagon came and transported us to the nearest station about two blocks away. Fortunately for us, it was 1964 or 65, and Hippies had not yet taken over the Haight Ashbury, so we were not regarded as part of a nuisance-sub-culture, just a couple of girls caught shoplifting.
They left us alone, sitting on a bench in the station while they did their paperwork, and Arian and I had plenty of time to work up a story. And we spun a good one!
We gave them false names and told them we were fresh from Montana (sniffle) and the guy who gave us a ride to San Francisco had driven off and stolen all of our clothes and things, (sob) and we had been rescued by two nice ladies who were giving us a place to stay (sniff.) We said we had stolen the food because we wanted to cook them a nice meal to return their kindness.
We cried and sniffled in all the right places, but they weren’t phony tears – we were terrified of getting put in jail! We had heard stories of what happens in jail. Besides, we were students at San Francisco State, and we were scared we’d be kicked out if the administration learned we were jailbirds.
The cops transported us down the 7th Street Station, where our friends bailed us out. When we hadn’t come back from our shopping spree, they drove past the now-closed store, spotted our car all alone in the lot, and figured out what happened. They even found us under the fake names! When they called, the officer said, “Yeah they’re here, but those ain’t the names they gave us.”
The next week we had to appear in court. There, we cried some more and told the judge our sad tale of being abandoned in the big city. He gave us probation and put us in the charge of a lady from the Salvation Army whose name was Agnes Nightengale. (Really!) She took us into a back room and gave us some clothes to replace what had been “stolen,” and, to our embarrassment, we had to accept them and wear them back into the courtroom. The judge said, “Young ladies, The City can be a dangerous place. You need jobs and a place to live.”
Our two friends testified that they had taken pity on us – poor waifs from Montana – and they would give us a place to stay and would pay us to paint their apartment.
We had to report to Miss Nightengale weekly for some period of time. She was so kind and so naÔve. The whole experience was frightening and embarrassing, and I’m happy to report that I never shoplifted a single thing again.
While I was a student at SF State, it cost $13 a semester for a parking pass. Tickets for over-parking were $2, so I figured I could get six tickets in a semester and still be $1 ahead. Unfortunately, I got way more than six tickets. I would stuff them into the glove box and ignore them, and over time I collected quite a few.
One day I came home from classes and found a summons on the door with a note from a police officer. A poet, he had written,
Robin Gail,
Pay your bail
Or go to jail.
Naturally, I ignored the advice, but early one morning there was a bam, bam, bam on the door, and a cop yelling, “Open up.” My girlfriend and I looked at each other in terror, and I slipped out through the French doors and down into the garden below. She opened the door and managed to prove she wasn’t me, though he was suspicious about that. The officer sat in his car out front for a while, watching for me, while I watched him from the garden.
When he finally left, I scurried down to the station and paid $126.
In 1968, my boyfriend Chuck and I used to sell marijuana simply to pay for what we smoked. At that time, pot buying and selling was not ruled by Mexican drug cartels and other guys with guns, and most pot dealers, like us, were simply friendly, neighborhood smokers. We would buy a pound or two, break it into approximately ounce-sized portions, and sell them for $10. A couple visitors a day would drop by, and etiquette seemed to require we all smoke together before they could leave.
All our customers were ordinary working people who liked to smoke and didn’t know anyone else to buy from. To them we represented the daring underworld of drug dealers, but we regarded them as our friends. As I recall, Chuck and I had no social network other than those customers at the time. I had a job downtown, but beyond that, we didn’t do anything but sit around and get stoned.
We gave a party and invited all those “friends,” and it was the most boring party I’ve ever experienced. I think the guests were titillated, expecting to meet members of the dangerous world of shady drug deals, and they were disappointed to find other ordinary folks like themselves. Nothing to do but keep the joints going around and get everyone stoned. How boring. I call pot the “stupid drug,” because the more people smoke, the stupider they get. Everyone was stupid that night.
So much for the glamorous outlaw life!
I must add here that I have been clean and sober now for almost 30 years, and when I first came to sobriety I realized I must always have had a Higher Power looking out for me. I did foolish, sometimes dangerous things over the years, but nothing glamorous ever happened as a result.
My “outlaw life” will never be noticed by history, and that’s all right with me.
Beyond Armagh
By Marty McReynolds
June 2, 2010
I’ve already shared what was for me the memorable adventure of visiting my elderly great-aunts in Northern Ireland in 1957, while on leave from a U.S. Army base in Germany.
But there was more to that trip. After leaving County Armagh, I went on to visit Belfast, Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and Paris.
The bus from my aunts' rural settlement of Ballylane took me to the small city of Armagh, where I had just enough time to buy a tweedy blue Irish wool cap before taking a rickety train to Belfast, which I referred to in my notes of the time as “a bustling port city. “
From there it was a two-hour ferry ride across the Irish Sea to Stranraer, Scotland, and on to Glasgow. I spent the night in Glasgow’s North British Hotel, which seemed a model of luxury, but didn’t get a chance to explore the city. I left early the next morning for Edinburgh by train, noting the green hillsides with grazing sheep along the way. Having just visited what was left of my mother’s side of the family, still living in Northern Ireland, I was thrilled to reach the land my father’s people had left two centuries earlier. I genuinely enjoyed wandering the steep, narrow streets of the old Scottish capital, drinking in the atmosphere and taking pictures. I bought a record of Harry Lauder songs in a record store and a Scottish wool cap in a haberdashery.
I visited the usual tourist sites – Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, the Heart of Midlothian, St. Giles High Kirk, Greyfriars Bobby, a showy floral calendar and the Sir Walter Scott Memorial tower, which I climbed.
I remember little of those attractions but three small anecdotes stick in my mind.
One was from the National Gallery, where I arrived just as a large, well-dressed woman – I think she was Scottish – strode in and was greeted by a guide at the door.
“Is there anything I should see?” the woman asked in a commanding voice.
“Yes, ma’am,” the guide said cheerfully. “The queen’s portrait, second gallery on your right.”
She hurried off in that direction and I couldn’t help wondering if she bothered to look at anything else in the place.
The second anecdote is from my visit to an Edinburgh pub, where I drank a glass and listened as a customer standing at the bar told a joke.
“So this old fellow comes into the pub,” he said. “And one of the regulars says, ‘Well, Jim, are ye all right?’
“All right up one side and all left down the other,” Jim says.
“But, Jim, how are ye getting on?”
“Oh, just one foot after the other.”
“Dammit, mon, how do ye feel?”
“Wi’ my hands, as usual.”
(So much for Scottish knee-slappers. )
The third anecdote is a bit fuzzy but it goes like this. I was staying for a night or two in another stately Scottish hotel. I was used to living in a barracks with no privacy so I didn’t think to draw the curtains when I went to the room and started to undress for bed. Hearing faint giggling, I looked out the window and saw movement in rooms on the other side of a broad air shaft and a couple stories higher. It was apparently the floor where the hotel's young chambermaids were quartered and they seemed to be peering down into my room. That sent the blood charging through the veins of a 24-year-old who was lonely for female company.
I pondered the chances of sneaking up to that floor and engaging in a wild orgy. A moment’s thought convinced me the likeliest outcomes were: I would get lost in the unfamiliar hallways, get turned back by some chaperon or, in the event I actually reached the giggling women, would be totally flustered as they made high fun of the wandering Yank. I gave up the idea, but seem to recall making one silent response -- turning my back to the window and dropping my drawers. The giggling stopped. At that point, I didn’t dare show my face at the window again so I turned off the light and climbed in bed. I had never heard of “mooning” in 1957; it was just a spontaneous gesture of frustration.
From Edinburgh, I took a seven-hour train ride to London on the Flying Scot – very pleasant, with more beautiful scenery (I admired old farmhouses) and a delicious meal of roast lamb.
Again, I visited the usual tourist sites of London but what stand out in my mind are small vignettes. One was at the Tower of London, where I joined other tourists snapping pictures of the famous Beefeater Guards. Unlike the ramrod-stiff guards at Buckingham Palace with their tall bearskin hats, the Beefeaters were downright relaxed and cordial. As one woman snuggled up to a Beefeater to have her picture taken, he struck a pose and asked helpfully, “Will this be all right?” Then, as the woman’s companion got ready to take the picture, he noticed a camera strap dangling over the lens and offered advice. “Mind the strap, madame . . . mind the camera case, it’s getting in the way.”
The Beefeaters’ cheerfulness was noteworthy because in July of 1957 London was having a record heat wave and the poor guards must have been roasting in their heavy wool uniforms. My notes say it was “as hot as the Dickens.” A newspaper cartoon showed two Londoners with deep tans over a caption that said, “If this keeps up, there’ll be no colour problem.”
Two other memories of London stand out – one of a warm encounter with an immigrant family from County Armagh, the place I had just visited in Northern Ireland, and the other of a noisy performance by orators at the famous Speakers’ Corner of Hyde Park. But that will have to wait till the next chapter.
To be continued . . .