Joshua Putnam

Eulogy for the Rainbow Cattle Company

It was Robin who first brought me to the Rainbow Cattle Company, back in 1985, shortly after Rock Hudson died of AIDS. I was 21. The Rainbow, as we came to abbreviate its name, was a residence hotel south of Market Street in San Francisco. It stood three stories tall, an old wooden building, box like and painted yellow, lodged between a freeway overpass and Mission Boulevard. On the ground floor was a bar, decorated in an old west style, with wooden tables and gas lamp fixtures that had been modified to hold electric lights. I only went into the bar a couple of times, but the hotel and its unusual residents became part of my life and have come to symbolize for me a culture which I experienced only during its wane, which has since largely passed away.

For the Rainbow was populated solely by gay men, mostly hippies and radical artists, who generally lived on some form or other of government assistance. Many of them had been in the city since the 60's, and over the years they had imparted some of their character to the place. This was strikingly noticeable as soon as one entered the front door and started up the stairway to the second floor. Every inch of the walls and ceilings of the stairwell was covered in a collage of images from magazines such as National Geographic, Life and Rolling Stone. Here one looked and saw Dorothy from the Wizard of OZ bending to thank the Munchkin king, there was Marilyn, perched on a cloud and surrounded in a halo no doubt cut from an image of the Virgin Mary. Peter Pan and the Pillsbury Dough boy were superimposed on each other in poses suggestive of homoerotic play, the expressions on their faces attesting the bliss this inspired. Paisleys and supernovas and babies enclosed in soap bubbles floated detachedly along in this psychedelic landscape.

On reaching the Second Floor one could see that this mural continued all the way down the hallway and up the stairs to the third floor. Punctuating this intermittent sea of images, like foam upon the waves, were a series of matted drawings placed between each of the doors, which led to the individual rooms. These drawings were very detailed, most portraying Hindu Gods or Demons in semi-traditional style, but set against swirling backgrounds of florescent color.

At the head of the stairs, where the hall began, was a pay telephone. I remember a small man, perhaps 30 years old, wearing leather chaps over his jeans and a leather vest, who was talking on the phone the first time I reached the top of those stairs. His expressions, his posture, and most of all his accent as he spoke into the phone, told me immediately he was from New York. As I climbed the last steps he and I made eye contact and he smiled at me and said "hello", in a slightly stagy tone of voice. I knew that he found me attractive, and though he was definitely not my type, I was flattered. I smiled back and followed Robin down the hall.

We stopped at the first door and knocked. "Coming!" came a gravelly voice from within. After a moment the door was opened by a small man with weathered features, a crooked nose and a kindly smile. He wore his long black hair knotted in a ponytail and I thought he was in his mid-forties, though I would later learn he was ten years younger. "Hi! I'm Joe!" he said warmly, extending his hand for me to shake. "I'm Josh." I replied, feeling the strength of his grip.

Joe's room was like a pack-rat's lair. The rooms at the Rainbow were all of different shapes, having been subdivided many times since the building was built. Joe had one of the larger spaces which had once been two separate rooms and still had a doorway, though not a door, connecting its two halves. In the first room was a large loft atop which Joe slept. Under this was a dresser, with clothes hanging out of the partially open drawers as well an old wooden chest, also covered by clothes and several milk cartons brimming with books and loose papers. Aside from a corridor leading into the other room and a path to the ladder leading into the loft, there was very little room to move around.

In the second room, where Joe bid us to sit down and make ourselves at home, there was a window looking out over a parking lot that separated the hotel from the freeway. In front of this was an old upholstered chair, with some of the stuffing leaking out of a gash in its tattered orange skin. This was Joe's seat and as long as he lived there the only time I ever recall him letting any one else sit there was the time when I brought him a joint for his birthday, which none of his other friends had yet remembered, and he let me sit in it for over an hour.

There was also a small table, on which Joe ate, and several less comfortable chairs for Joe's guests. Along the wall there was a counter on which Joe kept a hot plate for cooking, and above this were some cupboards. In the corner was a small refrigerator, and on top of this sat a fish tank containing three large rats.

Joe always loved his rats. I soon learned that Joe was a veteran of Viet Nam. In the war his job had been to infiltrate the miles long mazes of tunnels dug as hideouts by the Viet Cong, "looking for Charlie," as Joe would have put it. For doing this dirty work, Joe and his comrades in arms earned for themselves the nickname of "tunnel-rats". It was also in those tunnels that Joe, as a sort of human lab rat, had suffered massive exposure to the pesticide Agent Orange, resulting in his early aging. Though we never discussed it, I came to be certain that Joe's love for his rats came partly from his experiences in the war.

Now he lived alone in his room at the Rainbow, subsisting off of a partial disability check from the V.A. and an occasional advance of some cash from his lawyer on a lawsuit he was waiting to settle. Although he was gay, he had reacted to the AIDS epidemic with a soldier's instinct. That first day he told me he had forgone all sex since 1982. When I had grown to know him well, he confided in me that he still kept a loaded M-1 rifle in the chest in the other room, as insurance against the Apocalypse.

But for all this, Joe was essentially a peaceful man who regretted the war and his part in it and who would not tolerate violence in his presence, whether on TV or amongst his guests. Later, when I had a girlfriend, he would not tolerate my playful tickling and teasing of her. Many afternoons the three of us sat together and if any of us had money we would use it to buy a little food or some pot, depending which one we were hungrier for, and the three of us would share it together while playing cards or talking about the events of the day.

The day that I met Joe we both had pot, though mine was better. After we had smoked some, Joe strongly encouraged me to turn on Deo, the manager of the hotel. At first I questioned whether this would be such a good idea, but Joe and Robin both assured me that he was cool and that by making his acquaintance I could assure that I would always be welcome at the hotel. So I agreed.

Deo's room was at the end of the hall, by the head of the stairs. It was full of books, lining every wall, piled on the floor by the bed, piled on the desk next to his primitive typewriter. Deo himself was a tall man, in his early forties, still with youngish features but sporting a bald spot on the top of his head. When he spoke, he formed his words slowly and carefully.

As it turned out many of the books in Deo's collection were ones that I had read, and by the time we had finished smoking the joint that I rolled we were deep into a discussion of gay life as portrayed by writers like Mitch Walker, Harry Hay and William Burroughs. It was quickly clear that Deo and I shared a certain anarchistic and humanitarian approach. I knew we would be good friends. When I noticed him rubbing his neck repeatedly, as if it were stiff or sore, I offered him some massage - one of my specialties. By the time I had finished he was nearly asleep.

Forever after, until the hotel closed, Deo offered me and my girlfriend (when she was with me) a room to stay in for as long as we needed it whenever he knew we had nowhere else to stay.

Next we went down the hall to a room on the left hand side all the way at the other end. This room belonged to Sean, the man in leather whom I had seen on the phone when I first walked into the Rainbow, and to his lover, Harley. Harley was a fat man, about thirty-five, with black hair and soft, rounded features. When I met him was wearing a splendid white nightgown and he had a flower in his hair. He was lying in their bed, which nearly filled the room, and Sean was feeding him grapes - like Nero and one of his slaves. The bed was covered by a hot pink satin comforter that hurt the eyes to look at. Over the bed, framed, was a portrait of Marilyn Monroe. There was also a New York Dolls poster and several collages which were clearly not by the person who had done the halls, for their quality was inferior.

Scattered around the room were several odd objects, a large copper urn, a toilet seat painted with flowers and stars, an old piece of some kind of electrical instrument, it's housing removed to reveal several rows of tubes. A bird cage hanging by the window contained a stuffed parrot, and an Indian tapestry hung from the ceiling. "Where do you get all this stuff?" I asked. "Harley finds it all. She's a great trash scavenger!" Sean replied, with pride.

Later, Robin took me upstairs to meet Jerico, a mountain of a man in an orange Buddhists robe, though he was no monk. Jerico had been living at the Rainbow for twenty years when I met him, and he was the artist who had done all the work in the halls and stairwells. His room was similarly covered in collages and drawings. He had a large color TV at the head of his bed and it was usually on, tuned to the Smurfs or GI Joe or, less frequently, to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Even when he was creating his art, it remained on in the background. Although we saw each other many times over the next few years, I always found Jerico to be somewhat distant and inaccessible, and we never became close friends. Still, I always liked him and his artworks. I was saddened when he died.

For the AIDS epidemic was to exact a heavy toll from our community, especially heavy there at the Rainbow Cattle Company. Jerico was the first to become ill and die, then Harley, then Frank (another resident whom I met later), then Sean began to waste away. By the time Deo resigned, in a fight with the owner, and the hotel was sold off, only Joe and Robin remained alive of the people I had known there. Later, Robin too would be diagnosed and finally die.

I always thought that Joe, of all those people, would be one to survive. For he was celibate and when I lived in the city marijuana was the only drug he would use. But when I went back to San Francisco to visit Robin for the last time, in 1990, I spent a night in Joe's new apartment, only a few blocks from the old Rainbow, and he confided in me that since I last had seen him he had gone through a phase of being addicted to Methamphetamine and through sharing of needles he, too, had become infected with HIV. After that visit, Joe moved out of the Bay Area and we lost touch with one another. I am not sure whether or not he is still alive.

So I count myself as one of the few survivors of the Rainbow Cattle Company, and I praise it in memory. For it was a unique and magical place where men who had little in the way of worldly goods but who had large hearts (and other organs) lived together and shared a real sense of community, a feeling of togetherness in challenging the boring, tired realities of stereotypical straight and stereotypical gay life. It was a place where the spirit of the 1960's and the 1970's, of hippie liberation and gay liberation, still lived, still quested dangerously but bravely in our togetherness.

I consider myself lucky, certainly, to have been spared by this epidemic. But even more so I consider myself lucky to have known some of those who have died. My friends at the Rainbow Cattle Company were always there for me and for each other. There was a gentleness, a generosity of spirit, that hung about that place and seemed, at least to me, to seep outward for a few blocks into the surrounding ghetto, making its colors brighter. I will always cherish my memories of those last years, when AIDS had already begun to destroy so much that was beautiful about the world.

But the world is beautiful still, and as long as I am in it I will carry my memories of the Rainbow not as a burden but as an inspiration. For the staff of wheat that dies disperses seeds that will spring up anew, and the spirit of revolution, of love and freedom, can not die. In my life here in Boston, with the friends I have now and the people I have yet to touch, I am resolved to be as open as the people I used to know. Though the Rainbow Cattle Company is gone, whenever I find myself among free spirits who have gathered to share their love I have the sense that deep inside me is a rainbow in my heart.