The first issue paid for itself and left Harold fifteen dollars.

You have to wonder if Harold Gee isn’t spreading himself a bit thin trying to put out an occasional journal called the Party Paper on no capital with precious little publishing experience and no staff, and moonlighting as a go-go dancer. It’s especially difficult to understand him as a writer-editor-publisher when the fact is that he can't remember the last book he's read to completion.

Harold lives in the kind of middling squalor that visitors to San Diego inevitably dismiss as not so bad compared to the rat nests and rock piles of the nation’s other disadvantaged areas. His office and home is a whitewashed frame bungalow off an East San Diego alley, one of several in the backyard of the big house fronting the street. He spent good money installing iron burglar bars in the windows of this poverty-row shack. But what inside this slope-floored, low-ceilinged temporary post-war San Diego dwelling could be worth stealing? The bars seem to make as much sense as a good glass of cognac after a dinner at Jack-in-the-Box.

Harold's livelihood is inside, that's what. His livelihood and the articles from his life that he'll occasionally sell to feed himself when the Party Paper doesn't yield enough to cover living expenses. His meager resources have to do double duty.

Harld Gee at home. He lost some money a year or so ago printing up “East San Diego’’ decals for car windows.

Photo by Jim Coit

Drafting lamps grab at odd comers and swing to aim at all available flat surfaces when he needs to draw ads for the paper; otherwise, they illuminate the room with shades pointed upward. They're fed power by lengths of cheap extension cords, as is a hot plate, which eliminates the need for a space-consuming range. Even the outlets are asked to extend themselves, to accept three- and four-way adaptors. Harold's place is not decorated, it's just covered with stored things that are piled on shelves and cling to the walls. The bathroom doubles as a darkroom and Kodak yellow provides random accents. Card drawers are stuffed with snapshots, maybe 1500, maybe 2000, of women mostly but of others who’ve been in Harold's life and who are now indexed by names or dates or subject headings (the drawers are what he’d grab if he had just five minutes to escape a falling roof or fire), and dishes and pots are piled in dubious balance in the sinks while he waits to buy a type of scrubber sponge he favors for cleanup. All of this — the old ten-speed improbably equipped with Campagnolo components front, middle, and back, and lightweight sew-up rims that are tireless, the roaches groggily crawling the walls in defiance of yesterday’s visit from the exterminators — all of this recalls undergraduate days in outback Bohemia, Kerouac provincialism, the excitement of improvisation and congenial anarchy.

But Harold is not an undergraduate, nor a master’s or Ph.D. embryo. He is thirty-three years old, self-employed, and fighting to keep up with the rent and buy food on a total income that wouldn’t even cover the payments on a new Honda car.

Who is Harold Gee?

Did you ever have a period in your life, say when you were fifteen, did you ever want a van with oversize heavy slicks on it to run around in drinking beer and doing dope and all that?

Gee at work. "My mother is from Nebraska and my father, I don't know. He had a drugstore on El Cajon and Park Boulevard until 1956 or something."

Photo by Jim Coit

Actually, when I was about thirty or twenty-nine I wanted that. A Corvette with slicks. I was out of my mind, there was no possible way I could have gotten one. I wanted the power. I wanted to be all fucked up drunk and drive this car that could go a hundred miles an hour in five seconds and wear a cowboy hat and peel around corners and say rude things to girls because I’d been on the bottom for too fucking long and I just thought. I'm just gonna buy me a Corvette.

I was just out of my mind.

In your midtwenties?

Well, there was a period there when everybody in my age group got somewhat successful, they had some money, and I was just fartin’ around. I don’t know, I just couldn’t see doin’ some shitty job. If I was going to do something, I wanted it to be something. You know, otherwise you wind up pulling a lever 4700 times a day.

The major thing about people is that they want to have an effect. If you’re just treading water, you’re not making a difference and nobody cares. Well, they care a little bit; they care so far as they're going to make some money off of you.

How many people do you think escape pulling levers?

That's why there’re president killers. I’ve felt like getting on top of a tower and plugging people. Just anybody — Joe Blow on the street, some nice guy, just because you try so hard to do something and it’s impossible. You just think, “Hey, you want to know how ridiculous everything is? This is how ridiculous — BOOM, you’re dead. That’s how ridiculous everything is.’’ You want to have an effect. There’s a lot of people who want to have an effect, and it’s just pretty hard, you know?

Harold Gee: "Surfers in about ’61 to about ’64 were sort of a Bohemian group."

Photo by Jim Coit

Funny talk to be coming from somebody who publishes the Party Paper, a kind of extended social column for low-budget hedonists. Harold takes submissions from people he knows, and those he doesn’t, relatively fearless of the breaching of good taste and the potential of libel (“Sue me? For what? Have your lawyer call my lawyer”).

The first two thin, four-page issues of May and June this year consisted mainly of party reviews by Harold and a handful of contributors who were enjoined to go out to parties, enjoy themselves, and come back to Harold with their assessments of how free the laughter, booze, and food were. Harold does not want his contributors to mealy-mouth; he wants the dirt and the booty described fairly. The third issue, euphemistically dated “midsummer,” broke from the first two and had no reviews. It was more, more . . . maybe literary’s the word. Someone placed herself fictitiously and bawdily at Lady Di and the Prince’s wedding; Jan Beck, Harold’s recent ex-roommate, reminisced about the trouble she encountered when as a little girl she love-matched a playmate’s Barbie Doll with her own statuette of Jesus.

The first issue paid for itself and left Harold fifteen dollars. Income from advertisers (two used clothiers, two recording studios, a music bar, a camera store, and a hairstylist) was $280. Costs of printing and gasoline for Harold’s moped, on which he delivers the 6000 copies, 800 at a time, came to $225 (lots of gas for a moped — he putts as far north as Leucadia, east to El Cajon, and most areas in between and out to the coast, dropping off copies at more than a hundred places such as record and bookstores, clothing shops, liquor stores, and theaters). The four contributors were given beer money. The second issue went under by $135, and the third made money, though a full report has yet to be made public. Harold opens his books for all readers to see, a neat pie chart showing just how much was made and lost entered on the second page of the following issue.

If the Party Paper's finances are hit and miss, it’s not because Harold is a complete novice; this is his second venture as a publisher of periodicals. It was in 1979 that he thought up something called the Rent Paper. Harold himself published the details of its conception: “A horny adolescent in the mid-sixties, I began making papier-mache ‘Carnaby Street’-style jewelry in order to have greater contact with the girls at school. A couple years later I was still fooling around with jewelry, although by now I was making ‘hippie jewelry’ that was actually salable in several San Diego stores.

“Entering college I learned metalsmith techniques and basically pursued an art (jewelry) major until dropping out because ‘Art at College’ began to seem silly, worthless, bourgeois, and just plain stupid. I had a few (mostly horrible) minimum-wage jobs in the following years as I tried to accept the homily, ‘Life Ain’t a Bed of Roses,’ but mostly I survived at the expense of my tolerant mother (Thanks, Mom) before deciding to try and make a living from my most well-developed skill at this time.”

A year went by as Harold washed dishes, installed vinyl tops, bused tables, and so on, trying to gather together money for handtools, and during 1977 and 1978 he opened one store and then another, chasing after the ideal: “To be able to sit down at the bench, work diligently making things that satisfied me as an ‘artist’ and sell them for enough to sustain the business (and myself) from month to month.

“Toward the end of 1978, exhausted of time, money, and energy, I began giving up on the possibility of earning money through any ‘artistic’ vision. During this time I began getting involved in the still-germinating punk/new wave scene.”

He gave up his store, for which he was paying $275 per month to work in, sell out of, and inhabit, and moved into a hundred-dollar house. He ate on food stamps, rode a bicycle for transportation, continued with odd jobs, and then decided to try concert promoting. “The thing that impressed me most about the experience was the power of print on paper. Once the flyers are printed and posted, people are gonna be there. They don’t know you’re broke and those posters were printed with a borrowed $50.” The first concert turned a minor profit and he was able to pay off the debt. The second concert went bust.

“After losing $60 on the second show, days went by when I had absolutely no money (maybe 15 cents), food was scarce and the most appropriate thing to do was lie in bed and conserve energy. Daydreaming, I began to wonder . . . How had I paid the rent in, say, July through November, '78? Or the month before last? I couldn't remember.

“So, the Rent Paper was conceived. The idea being that if 100 people pay a dollar each to find out how I paid the rent, that would pay the rent.”

Numbers one through three were meticulously etched by hand in small stick-letters and then photocopied. How he got the rent in July was his first subject and he described dragging himself through a job as a temporary helper in a local warehouse, trying not to work more rapidly than the regulars, trying to get in touch with the rhythms of warehouse time, the slow pull of the clock. “Once, out of boredom.” Harold wrote, “I started mechanically powering at top speed until the guy I'm working with sez, ‘You're gonna work us right out of a job.' So I stop completely, commence to solidly loaf, and tell him I didn't mean to bug him but was just working like that for my own entertainment. About thirty minutes later he's still trying to catch up but mainly getting even more bugged because now I'm loafing way-y-y too solidly and the guy tells me to get with it. So I start with the warehouse movement, slow, purposeful, mellow into warehouse time and generally conserve energy until Friday."

Another time, he was a hand-stamper at a rock concert in the American Legion Hall. “Here they come, STAMP, smile, touch, roll across, nod, STAMP, look, reach for hand, roll across, not fast enough. STAMP, missed one. roll across, tan hand, cold hand, STAMP, tough guy, STAMP, passive girl, roll across, large veins, STAMP, why didn't I try and sell my stereo with a phone number on every hand?. STAMP - STEREO. $200? . . .”

Issue number three — maybe his best — was dominated on its first side by “How To Live Cheaply in San Diego,” and on its back side by “Concepts of Ownership"; both of them being Harold’s own theories of personal economics. In Harold's world, for example, rental costs are directly proportional to square footage occupied, so the less you own and the fewer bulky items you possess, the less you have to pay for space. Old cars may not cost much to buy, but they consume gas heavily as you travel from garage sale to garage sale. If you must own a car, try to be involved in wrecks with rich and insured motorists. To eat cheaply, work in a restaurant, apply for food stamps, visit friends at dinnertime. It wasn't Marx, but at times it came close: “When some individuals have billions while other starve on this abundant planet, thievery is just as valid a system of redistribution of wealth as any other we’ve got going.” It wasn't Ronald Reagan, but at times it came close: “Welfare should be nonexistent for able-bodied men and women. No welfare workers, no goddamn forms to fill out, no human resources development with fat-assed government lackeys chitchatting behind their desks.”

Harold's got a briefcase he now and then loads up with pages ready for the printer, or roughed-out ads he's taking on the moped to advertisers for their review. A roommate moved out once, failing to pay off a debt, and Harold stole the briefcase and some other things of value. The briefcase goes well with the white shirt and dollar-bill bow tie he sometimes wears. It goes less well with the ratty shorts and shirts he’s usually in.

Do you have any faith that if you keep doing what you're doing now, you’ll be successful?

Well, success to me is what other people would laugh at. If I made $350 per month doing the paper and people came in with late ads. I could tell them they’d have to wait until next issue because they were late, then I think that would be real success.

What about becoming well known, where you can walk into a room and have people say, "Oh, that's Harold Gee."

No, that’s not what I view as success. I’d much rather be valuable than notorious. What’s notorious? You just get shot. What was that question you asked earlier? Okay, yeah. I’ve always had this idea that if I just keep doing one little scam after another — scam not meaning something illegal, just something I think is interesting and there’s a place for — that sooner or later one of them’s got to hit. A friend of mine once said, “Think big, or get a job.”

Then you're not the kind of person who thinks that business is dirty? Business can be okay?

I don’t think the concept of business is fucked up. Well . . . I’m not sure. Once it gets on a large scale, maybe it is. I don’t think Chrysler should have been bailed out. They screwed up and couldn’t compete with Japan. What is that, capitalism? This is America and they should have been allowed to go under.

You sound like a San Diego Republican.

I think the Republicans have a lot of good . . . there was a time when the Republicans seemed just honest people who believed maybe you should work for a living. I don’t remember such a right-wing thing, where after a while it seemed like they turned into racists, seemed to change their values. Once they were just sort of economically based and thought people ought to work and tell the truth and be honest and they didn't believe in giveaways.

If Harold weren’t so grubby so much of the time, and if he didn’t spout such definitely angry sentiments about boorish newcomers to the city and unethical business practices and the meaninglessness of the nine-to-five, he might well have become an upstanding member of the general San Diego community on the strength of his will to believe in the good old Main Street values — thrift, honesty, enthusiasm for local enterprises and local people.

He lost some money a year or so ago printing up “East San Diego’’ decals for car windows. No one was interested. He wants to organize a big block party for his neighborhood. He cares for San Diego. He was born here.

• • •

What's the origin of your name? I've never heard it before.

My father, Adolf Gee. My grandfather’s name was Gee. That’s as far back as I know. There’s not a whole lot of history in my family. A lot of alcoholics, bar fighters. My mother is from Nebraska and my father, I don't know. He had a drugstore on El Cajon and Park Boulevard until 1956 or something. I think he might have croaked because he took amphetamines or something. He was an alcoholic and had to get up every morning with a hangover after drinking all night. He was super skinny and kind of nervous and had kind of a bad temper, kind of like an amphetamine sort of guy. I have a lot of remembrances of him but he died when I was eight.

How'd your mother make it after that? Did she work?

She went to work after my father died. She had an R.N. before; she went to work at Mercy Hospital. She was a smart bad girl, a little loose.

When? In the home while you were there?

No, no, in school. She got straight A’s and ran around with bikers, or whatever they were back then.

In the Rent Paper, you quote her as saying this: "I was out in the garden the other day and as I was walking down the rows, weeding and generally sampling the vegetables, as I went along they tasted so good raw and I hate to spend time cooking and I thought, gee, it's too bad we just can’t come out here and graze.” She sounds nice, very sympathetic.

She’s great! I have a good time with her.

Oh. sometimes it gets boring, the wav it always does with parents and people you know — blah, blah, blah all the time. But she's a smart woman. She used to write all my papers for me. I guess that’s where I learned to write. She didn’t really write them, but I'd bring them to her and she'd say, “What does that mean? Why don't you say it like this?” I like her stuff; it’s sensibly composed and doesn't have any run-on sentences. I keep trying to goad her into writing something for the Party Paper.

What about San Diego? Have you become bored with it after thirty-three years?

I’m bored by San Diego now. I see all kinds of people and everybody says San Diego is lame and boring and there are no artists and so forth, but the people I know that arc the most interesting and unusual are the people who are local, who grew up here. You know, I go over to my buddy Jim Reeder's house and he says, “Harold, look at this thing I was doing today,” and he lies on the bed and turns on the tape recording he'd made playing his guitar and he’d backed it up and run it forward, and taped over it, slowed it up and speeded it up and breathed “Whoaaaeee " into it. So he's got this completely odd soundtrack and you can't tell the instruments in it. and then he's got a fan blowing on a piece of Mylar taped to the ceiling with a spotlight on that and he just lies in bed with the light bouncing around the room as it reflects off the Mylar. In San Diego, everything's in the closet. The guy’s played really wild guitar fora long time and he never gets out. There’s a lot of people like that.

Why do people end up staying here forever?

I know why I’ve stayed. I don’t have any money. That's not completely true. I mean I could sell my bicycle or whatever else of value that's left, but I just want to leave at my convenience. I don’t want to sell off my whole life and leave for someplace and find out I don't like it there.

You're afraid to leave, then?

Not really afraid of leaving. I’m afraid to sell my bicycle and then come back here and have to buy another one for $500. I've had people tell me that if I went to New York or San Francisco I'd be wildly successful. But I just think I'd like to be a success in my own home town before I went someplace else. You know, if you have a casual attitude and you're kind of easygoing, that's fine; but people think that attitude should extend into other areas, like business, and it shouldn't. It just doesn’t work. I’ve thought about starting this business club where, to be a member, everybody must call back people who've left messages within twenty-four hours, pay their bills on time, and just conduct business in a normal fashion. But I don't know, making it here seems to be tough. I know some fantastic artists and craftsmen, and their stuff doesn't sell! Are you kidding? At these low prices?

There's got to be some rewards or people wouldn’t stay.

A lot of it is, you basically know you're not going to go anywhere in life if you stay. You have to be a little bit stupid to try and tear the world apart and live in this town at the same time. I mean, if you have half a brain, you just stay at home and do what you do.

A lot of people have come here for that reason, because they knew nothing was expected of them.

I don’t know, there are a lot of goons that come here, too. I wish they'd go home. I really don’t like meeting assholes who come to California with some preconceived notion of being mellow.

So, how are they going to ruin it?

It’s already too late. It’s gone.

When did it go?

Some time after the Vietnam deal, about 1970. It seemed like there was a San Diego mentality that pervaded up to that point and then after that there were so many visitors and so many foreigners.

What was that San Diego mentality?

Well, I’ll just try and blend everything. The old guy who showed me how to paint a box . . . some hokey feeling ... he was just some old guy who’d been in World War II, and he was happy. It’s vague. Nobody wants to bother anybody, or be bothered. But on the other hand, if you made an effort to say hello, they’d bend over backward to say hello back. When I was a little kid my parents moved into this street in Kensington and it cost seventy-five dollars per month — a two-bedroom apartment — and I said. “Let’s get acquainted with the neighbors." I had this little puppet, it was a pirate, I think, and I wanted to take it around with my parents and just go visiting, and they said, “You can’t just do that,” and I said, “Why not?" and they go, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe so, we’re not going to do it.” So I went down our side of the street, I wasn’t allowed to cross, and I had the puppet and I knocked on every door and just said, “Hello, we just moved in on the block,” and you know, a lot of people invited me in and said, “Ohhh, how nice!!!!”

You're still kind of peddling yourself, aren't you?

“If I tell you how I live and you're willing to pay me a buck per copy, then who's hurt? You're keeping me alive."

It’s like taking up a collection.

That’s true. There used to be this lady in the State College area who used to collect for Jerry’s kids, Jerry Lewis, you know, the telethon, and she used to go out and collect from the neighborhood and everybody knew that she was going to keep the money for herself, she was an alcoholic, but they still gave her money. She did it about every two months. They all knew it was a lie and they’d all give her the money.

And that was San Diego, too?

I guess maybe it was. 1 don’t know.

Was there less suspicion?

Ohhh . . . there was never any suspicion. That’s one thing I know. Nobody was paranoid here, or nervous. There was no thought of danger, where you’d have to carry a gun.

Do you think of that now?

Yeah, occasionally I think maybe I ought to get a gun, just because I don’t want to be fucked with. I don’t like the idea too much, but on the other hand I don’t really do anything that’s bad, particularly. So what the hell. I’ll get a gun. If somebody fucks with me. I’ll shoot the motherfucker, they shouldn’t be doing it. It’s sort of a real redneck attitude.

It’s changed a lot. The thing that was better about San Diego, the city was better. There weren't so many freeways and the beaches weren’t so crowded. Everybody I know that used to go to the beach — I used to be an avid surfer, avid — and now everybody I know just hates the beach, they don’t even go anymore. Surfers in about ’61 to about ’64 were sort of a Bohemian group. Weren’t beatniks, but they were just live and let live. At my age, it was just the only alternative, because there weren’t any hippies back then, but it was the only alternative to being some sort of square business guy. So it attracted a lot of interesting types. Whereas now, if you’re going to go out to the beach, you may as well go out to El Cajon and the Jack-in-the-Box in a four-wheel-drive. Surfers now are not the same at all.

Surfer days. People would barely get showered and put on a shirt before going someplace to dance and make it, I suppose?

That’s why I started surfing — I couldn't get laid.

That’s the reason you’ve done a lot of things - metalworking, dancing. I’ve read your stuff, you know. I wonder how much of a motivation is sex?

It’s major, man.

That’s another thing about Harold Gee that keeps him from becoming an upstanding member of the community: his seemingly complete lack of discretion when it comes to matters of intimacy. Back when he was losing faith in the possibility of making a living by working at his jewelry bench, Harold began putting together a very long, very honest magazine devoted to his relationship with a woman named Barbara Thompson, complete with color photos of the two of them on various outings with her young son, Derek, some of the photos showing Harold without a stitch on, her in the same state of innocence, and just generally telling all — even their conflicts over sexual infidelity.

Maybe, in the case of the Rent Paper and this magazine, Brief Glimpses of a Romantic Entanglement, Harold was just aping Henry Miller and pursuing self-documentation as an art form. It could be. because Harold know s some of Henry Miller’s books ("I think I finished one. I liked that guy”).

At any rate. Brief Glimpses opens with a 1976 picture of Barbara, her son Derek, and a woman friend in Hillcrest after a vegetarian lunch, accompanied by a typically candid caption of Harold’s: “We stopped at the car I was living in so I could change clothes and snap their photo. Having known Barbara but several days I remember considering the possibility of going to bed with her friend, Diana. . . .” Then there are pictures of her parents in their backyard, more of Derek and Barbara sometimes smiling sweetly at the camera (“You can tell they loved me when this picture was taken’’). of Harold and Barbara mouth to mouth (“This photo has always disturbed me. There is an unnaturalness about our body positions that is not representative of the way we got along”), of him in four-colors totally, unselfconsciously naked and of her, in another, spread out like a maja but flat on her back as if awaiting a blanket to be thrown over her (“That Bush! Those Thighs! Those Hips!” the caption exults). Harold moved from the parked car to Barbara’s place uneasily, knowing his own, beach-bummish ways were not matched to her more urban and urbane tastes (“I would stand on the porch in quiet desperation for minutes at a time feeling low and wretched and unsuccessful, knowing that on the other side of the door would be Barbara and everything that reflects her lifestyle, values, and method of living. There was no place here for me to recuperate, be alone, freak out. or do whatever people do to stay normal and well balanced. Feeling like I had no other alternatives. I'd go inside and there would be Barbara expecting a modicum of reciprocity for her pleasant. affectionate ways. How she could like me at times like these I'll never understand”).

But they settled down a bit, she running with her friends and Harold with his, giving Harold the chance to continue living like a dog, which he “welcomed happily, shedding bits of guilt and reluctance associated with innocuous sexual affairs that occasionally came my way.“ It continued for three years, this part-time marriage, while Harold struggled with his jewelry, then moved out into a house shared with a rock and roll friend named Gary. At that point Harold's partying and fooling around increased and Barbara's tolerance decreased. “I had hoped she’d understand that love and promiscuity are separate emotions and that sooner or later this was a fantasy that needed to be played out," he wrote. “Well, she felt threatened and insecure about our relationship in terms of my ‘new’ lifestyle and instructed me to avoid the subject of parties and promiscuity. Consequently there became less we could talk about, and instead of blabbing away unconsciously with her, I always had to be on my guard."

The worm turned, however, and by 1979 Barbara was not always waiting around for Harold’s call. One time Harold went over to her place, “feeling a little tired, not very sexually aggressive (but you never know)," when another couple they knew stopped by. Harold left. Another party and Barbara is more or less with the guy, and then she asks Harold if he wants to go home with her. Harold says no (“I’m not gonna macho bull move in when she’s hanging out slightly with another guy"). Then come occasional affairs for Barbara, some of them with people Harold knows, and it’s the end. He goes over to her house one night and they can’t make love because she would feel guilty because one of those men. the one at the two earlier parties, is now, obviously, her new lover.

Isn't it conceivable that Barbara’s parents might have seen the magazine?

Well, that would be okay.

Would it ?

I don’t know what they’d think about it, but it wouldn’t bother me if they saw it. I didn't lie about anything. At one point Barbara said, "This isn’t true," and I said, "So, go write your own magazine."

You didn't worry about her being embarrassed?

If I were to put out twenty of them, I would have talked to her beforehand, but since I made only five — one went to her husband, one went to her son, one went to her new lover, and then some gal she didn’t even know thought it was a cool magazine so she bought one.

You mention in the magazine this constant conflict over your wanting to go out and have affairs with other gals. How did that work with Barbara? Was it a source of irritation to both of you ?

Yeah, but it was something I had to do. I guess it’s not that groovy an aspiration, to run around and be a floozy — on the guy level, that is. Not New Age or anything.

Not humanistic.

Then what accounts for the breakup with Barbara?

What accounts for that is that I had sort of neglected her for a long time.

Being the floozy?

Yeah, it was something I just wanted to do. I mean some guys just never got enough when they were sixteen, and you know I didn’t do enough when I was sixteen because I didn't get laid until I was nineteen. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? That was a different era. I mean, birth control wasn’t always available, except for rubbers, and also the mentality was a lot different, so I didn't get as much sex as I wanted to. Hell, I used to go in the supermarkets when I was fifteen or so and go, “Look at that housewife, she looks gre-a-a-t. Those curlers don’t bother me a bit. I’ll bet she’s lonely.” She’d be pushing the cart around and all I’d be there for was a couple of Twinkies and she’d be looking at a can of beans and I'd walk up next to her and pick up a can of peas and she’d be right there and I'd kind of lean toward her, getting closer and she’d go. “Hmmmmph!” and push her cart off and the fucking bubble would burst. That happened lots of times.

You know, I just didn’t want to die. or be sixty years old chasing around and trying to get laid. I was kind of hoping Barbara could understand that and still stay with me. But she couldn’t.

Why do you think people might be interested in the personal and intimate details of your life?

There’s probably a reasonable number of people who live similar lives. They don’t have a lot of money but they do have some time so they can fool around and pursue their interests. And it’s always more interesting to read about people who don’t have really structured lives.

A lot of times it would be better to hold back, but I don’t have anything to be ashamed about. If I’m going to write. I’m going to write about something that matters, or it would be just filler. I just want to deal with intelligent people who know real value. I don't want to package things, people don't need more hype than they’re already getting. I don't know. I’m just too old for bullshit. I might be able to revamp, though, if I went from making four dollars an hour to thirty-five dollars. That might make a difference.

• * •

Harold’s odd job — the one he works because the Party Paper can’t support him yet — is still what he calls “Sex Dancing,” which he defined in the Rent Paper of January. 1980 as “a style adopted for money just as dancers in general adopt a jazz, Hawaiian, or ballet style of movement.” But he no longer works the Classic Cat in La Mesa, where he made four dollars an hour; he works private parties, gathering appointments from the standing ad he puts in his Party Paper — a picture of him in bikini briefs, his eyes wide open (glasses off), and skinny body a counterpoint to more macho professionals.

Do you get much work?

The last time I got called, they canceled. There are a lot of false alarms in it, and you can understand why. The type of women, ninety percent of them, who think about having a guy come and dance are really mainstream people — they work at the telephone company or in an office — they’re not really liberated or self-motivated. You’ll get a second call like, “My fiance is a little nervous about this” and they’ll call back a third time just before I’m supposed to be there and cancel. He’s found out, and he’s coming home.

How do they behave?

Ohhh, some shriek and others just beam right on and tell people to get out of their way so they can see. But ninety percent of them do it as a way to hang out with their girlfriends. You know, they haven’t been brought up the way guys are and don’t really know how to hang out; they don’t have the skills. I remember a couple of parties I worked and they were really charmingly inept, it was nervous fun, they were glad they were there but they didn’t know how to go about it. And then there were all these neurotic phone calls from their guys. A guy would call up and somebody would have to go to the phone to placate him, it was obvious he was suspicious. God, if they wanted to get laid, they wouldn’t call in a male dancer, they’d go out to any bar in town and get laid.

The dancing is actually a good job for the editor of a publication that has to do with partying, or whatever it is the Party Paper is all about. Harold gets to know women from the stage or tabletop in a way that he might not ever have understood them if he were to attend mixed parties only. And perhaps because so many people these days are trying to figure out where they stand on the big questions of singlehood, relationships, monogamy, and fooling around, Harold has gotten onto something with his Party Paper. It’s not easy to find someone willing to discuss so openly ideas about these big questions.

What's the inspiration behind the Party Paper? .

I just wanted to do a newspaper about parties because parties are the time when human beings get together and do something universal and timeless, a chance to experience each other without a format. It’s the most free-form experience, the time when human beings get to go to the playground. It’s not just big parties. A party is any time two or more people who aren’t working get together.

Is that enough to carry a publication?

It probably isn’t. As of yet, I don’t have a firm grasp of what the Party Paper is. I’d like the articles to say something more than the food was nice, the people were nice, the house was nice.

Do you like parties?

I thrive on parties. Occasionally I don’t feel like going out, but I do anyway and I come alive. It’s a one-time thing, you know. You just have to take a chance. Some of them are bad — small talk, chitchat. Maybe people are afraid to talk or don’t want to get on a heavy level, or the music’s too loud to talk. That’s the worst thing — put that in there — when the music’s too loud to talk over it and there’s no dancing and no dip.

The Rent Paper was a paper that was largely Harold Gee, but the Party Paper is entirely different.

That was my paper. I had a lot of people ask if they could advertise in the Rent Paper and 1 just told them no. It was just my paper completely. I wouldn’t allow anybody else in it.

Isn't there a difference as a result? To me, the Rent Paper was much more entertaining.

Well, the Rent Paper took me longer to put together. 1 wasn't in any rush to put them out on a monthly basis.

Are you trying to put the Party Paper out more consistently?

I’d like to put it out regularly, since it does deal with a lot of other people as well — business and advertising and so forth. You have to come out on a regular date. It’s a lot more of a business proposition. There are a lot of ads in there I have to put together. If I didn't have to spend time on going out to advertisers and putting the ads together — sixty to seventy-five percent of the work has something to do with ads — I could make a lot more bitchin’ paper. I don’t think about writing now. That’s not my main gig now. At the last minute, after all the ads are together, I just sit down and try and write some shit.

So there’s Harold, in his horn rims, struggling along on a moped to save gas, eating whatever he can sneak up on at parties, filling his stomach on lean days off the food stamps he draws, apparently without any obvious chagrin over the inconsistency of his views on government handouts and his own disdain for the nine-to-five that feeds most people who aren’t on welfare. But Harold has his own nine-to-five.

• • •

How much time during a week do you spend just screwing around or partying?

That's difficult because the paper colors my fooling around, but I suppose if you’re talking about those times and the times when it’s all pure enjoyment, I suppose I spend an average of three to four hours just fartin’ around every day.

Do you ever have people tell you you’re not working and you ought to get a job?

Nah, I don't run into people like that. People like that just don't talk to me. And when they do, I just tell them to get fucked, because they don’t know, and walk away from them. I don't know much about politics, but I really don’t think we ought to have a welfare system. I think that everything is too big. I went down to the welfare office and talked to some people there and they said that every dollar paid out in welfare costs an additional two dollars in paperwork. For every sixty-five or seventy bucks a month they give me in food stamps it costs them $210 in tax dollars. . .a lot of money, you know.

If they're telling you the truth.

I think they are. Look around and see how many people they have to employ to check us out, clean up the building, clean the floors. I don’t know, there’s always going to be people who need money but can’t hold a regular job, or don’t want to look for one. There ought to be a place where people who need money can go and work for four hours and they’ll pay you right then and there.

Well, there was that idea in the New Deal in the Thirties. WPA? Did people just check into those places or what?

Are we in a depression right now?

No, I don’t think so. If we were in a depression right now I don’t think we’d see so many Mercedes being driven around and not getting their windows broken with bricks. If we were in a depression right now, would people drive around in $30,000 cars?

You said in a Rent Paper that welfare’s just a form of government control, didn’t you? You wrote that welfare is designed so that people won’t throw bricks through Mercedes windows.

I think that’s true. If you get desperate and without any support at all, you say, “Fuck it, what’s the point? I’d just as soon eat three square meals in a prison.’’ Besides, you never know before you get there that you won’t strike it rich and be able to stay out.

A couple of days after this late-night, nothing-else-to-do session, Harold was riding his moped on some or another Party Paper errand when somebody, an older man in a car, squeezed him off the road, forcing him to point his little 1975 machine straight toward a four-inch curb. Harold jumped off (Harold Surfer) just as the moped bucked upward, and he escaped with a knee bruised as it passed over the handlebars. But the moped’s front fork is all bent up and now awaits a budget fix-up, if Harold can find such a thing. He’s been reduced to walking, or riding the buses he cursed in an earlier conversation (“How much does it cost, eighty cents a ride? How far can you get on a moped for eighty cents? You can ride sixty miles in any direction you want on a moped, at any time you need to.’’) “It was great, though,’’ Harold said after the accident. The thing that was great about it was this: he landed on his feet.