APPENDIX TWO:
POPPA NEUTRINO, ONE OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN HIPPY BEAT SCENE.
During my captive encounter with the Floating Neutrinos, I was suffering a monumental dose of sour grapes due to withheld sexual favours and my own inability to deal with it.
Poppa Neutrino though I was later to realise was more of a true hero than I had given him credit for at the time:
He was born on October 15th 1933 as William David Pearlman and raised in San Francisco. His father was a sailor who abandoned him at birth and his mother was a gambler.
When he was twelve, he saw a TV documentary about the Australian aborigines which was to influence him deeply. He was impressed by the way they would strip themselves naked, burn their villages and leave for new terrain so readily, whenever the urge took them.
As a teenager he spent his time hitch-hiking Route 66 and got himself caught up in fighting and gambling.
At one point in his young life, he had an instinct to take his mothers housekeeping money from her purse. He hitch-hiked way off up the highway until he found a casino. He put all her money on the poker table and won 600 dollars. He returned home and replaced all the money in her purse without saying a word. Later, after his mother had bought a few things with some of the money, he took all the money out of the purse again, excepting the original amount of the housekeeping, hitched up to the same casino again, and lost the whole lot.
Eventually he tried out monastic orders but abandoned that as not being quite up to the mark.
Returning to San Francisco, he was part of the Californian Beat scene, and hung out with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. His life was one of perpetual adventuring which made Kerouacs own famous journeys seem tame by comparison.
He was married and divorced ‘several times’ and had three children and two that he adopted in later life (one of them being Shawn).
After the Beats, he moved to New York and started the ‘First Church of Fulfilment’ which claimed to be the only church that actually didn’t know ‘The Way’. That finally came to an end when a junkie in its basement shooting gallery accidently burnt the whole place to the ground.
During the seventies he led a merry band he called the ‘Salvation Navy’ across the waterways of mid-America on home-made junk rafts, making their way by busking and sign-writing and pursuing a home-made philosophy called ‘Active Reasoning’.
This philosophy was based around something he called Triads; three elementary characteristics which could be applied to any life scenerio, taking action according to whichever one seemed to fit best: going forwards, backwards or standing still; friend, enemy or stranger and so on; a positive, a negative and a neutral.
Another part of the philosophy was about actively choosing to do whatever you found to be the most most appealing thing possible at any one time. Hence his life was a wantonly exuberant affair, apparently quite random to those on the outside.
He was with a travelling circus in Mexico when a dog bite almost killed him at the age of fifty-two. He was seriously ill for two years, and felt so different about life at the end of it that he decided to change his name, a neutrino being an elementary particle that travels at the speed of light that can pass through matter undisturbed.
When back in New York, his family band the Flying Neutrinos made over 10,000 dollars in one month.
He rarely stayed put and made a point of never paying rent or working the 9 to 5.
He raised his four kids and two adopted kids for part of their lives on a raft built of salvaged junk. It was moored in the late eighties on a Manhatten dockside and called ‘Town Hall’. He fought a long-running battle with city officials until eventually it got removed on the grounds of ‘health and safety’.
Some time later in 1989 he achieved some degree of fame when he and his friends built the ‘Son of Town Hall’ and set to sea, becoming only the second group of people to have taken a raft across the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic ocean. They were the first to do it using a raft built out of junk; timbers, ropes and even a parachute that had all been found on the streets of New York and on the Hudson River. They set off from Newfoundland. They battled with twenty-five foot swells and fierce gales and ran out of food en route. After nine weeks they finally made land on the West coast of Ireland.
Between-times, him and his family would live on the road in station wagons. He would sit on the streets and play chess with anyone that wanted to join him.
He repeatedly flirted with the idea of building a floating orphanage that would sail from Brazil to India, but it never quite came to fruition.
When I met him, they had just sailed the Absolute Abolution down the Mississippi, busked in the blues joints of New Orleans and then sailed down the coast of Mexico to where our paths crossed.
After the parting of our ways, in 2007 he ran for US presidency under the name of the ‘Owl Party’, owls being mid-way between hawks and doves.
Later he came up with an American football move which he claimed would make any team unstoppable, and this idea was to be tried out by the Arizona Jets.
After that in November 2010, he built another raft in Burlington, Vermont called the ‘Owl Party’ in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Sadly, the boat floundered on Lake Champlain after only ten miles and everyone aboard had to be rescued.
He was a man who lived for big ideas and grand gestures. There would always be many people around him to tell him he was crazy and that whatever he was trying to do was impossible. Through all this though he carried himself with a fierce optimism which had a tendancy to unsettle people.
He was a rambunctious man who lived life in the raw and defied any kind of pigeon-holing and anything that smacked of ‘normality’. He was a modern primitive, a permenantly dropped-out nomad.
He died in a New Orleans hopsital aged seventy-seven on January 23rd 2011. He died from congenital heart-failure after having spent almost his entire life owning pretty much nothing.
Alex Wilkinson wrote an extensive biography of his life called ‘The Happiest Man Alive’.
Here’s to you Poppa Neutrino, and may the spirit of adventure and enquiry live ever on.
Richard Terry 