The old, weird America

Music writer Greil Marcus coined that phrase for a "strange yet familiar backdrop to our common cultural history," the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes."

That America can't exist now, not in an age of instant and constant communication, of Google Earth and cheap flights. I came of age right as that old, weird America was dying out.

I'd been staying at the YMCA in St. Petersburg, Florida, for a couple of weeks. I had sidled into St. Pete with some small savings after a year of teaching, intending to see what the Sunshine State had to offer, maybe go back to school there. I didn't have much else going on.

A friend and his girlfriend had put me up for ten days or so but I didn't want to overstay my welcome so moved into the Y. It was cheap and I didn't mind it. The rooms were tiny but clean and the other residents ranged from doddering old guys to young transients like me, and I was never hassled by anyone. Hard drugs weren't common then, just grass and alcohol, and those who overindulged were more likely to sleep than take the trouble to steal. I didn't have anything worth stealing anyway.

I hadn't intended to stay in town very long and was thinking I'd go to grad school in Indiana instead. But after a few weeks in St Pete I found a restaurant job and met Margot, the woman I would eventually marry. I decided I needed to find a better living situation if I was going to stay there.

In a grocery store I saw a bulletin board ad for a boarding house in central St Pete, some place called the Beaux Arts, so I went to check it out. It was a huge, gothic former luxury hotel in Pinellas Park. The proprietor, Thom Reese, had inherited it from his parents and turned it into an art school, gallery, coffeehouse and by-the-week hotel. I moved in the same day, everything I owned fitting neatly into a backpack and cardboard box.

Thom was a classically trained artist and he and the increasingly ramshackle old house and its rambling garden had become cultural icons in the area since the late 50's. The rooms were very cheap and each of the four floors had a single bathroom for four tenants, and to save money Thom turned off the power to the building between 10 am and 4 pm. Palmetto bugs were everywhere, but it was a very cool place to live, with every wall covered in art by Thom or his friends.

All the people living there were interesting—artists, musicians, filmmakers. One longtime resident recalled that "there were a lot of musicians. We used to leave our doors open, and there was always guitar music. People were always smoking a joint and playing guitar. During the week, it was so placid and quiet. You’d go down into the garden and walk around. It was just an ethereal place to hang out at and live.”

Thom hosted folk and classical concerts in the garden and showed movies every night in the basement coffeehouse, a "dark, high-ceilinged room, stuffed helter-skelter with stained easy chairs and ratty sofas," as writer Bill DeYoung put it. Lots of musicians performed there or in the garden, like Fred Neil, Gamble Rogers and Jerry Jeff Walker. Thom showed movies in the basement every night and Margot and I saw some excellent ones, such as Lianna by John Sayles, and some awful ones, like Pink Flamingos. Many were foreign films or experimental ones by people who lived there or had lived there. I would go to the movies by myself if she wasn't available.

Thom had been running the Beaux Arts for a quarter century by the time I arrived and was making just enough money from his art to keep the whole thing afloat. In 1961 Marilyn Monroe and then-husband Joe DiMaggio visited the gallery and bought one of Thom's paintings, leading to many more sales.

Reese was flamboyantly and publicly gay long before it was safe to be—he had been arrested in the 1960's for "crimes against nature" and for "lewd and lascivious conduct" during the dances he hosted featuring outlandishly cross-dressed men and women. The police raided the place more than once because the European art-house movies he showed in the basement were considered obscene in that conservative city and state. “Apparently,” one partygoer recalled, “Pinellas Park blamed him for the ‘60s.” Thom laughed all of it off and just kept doing what he wanted to do.

He didn't allow drinking in the Beaux Arts and from the 50s on a lot of teenagers were drawn there by the freedom it represented. "Thom gave us a safe place to gather, where we could escape the rules of our parents' generation and feel comfortable expressing our own opinions," one recalled. "I felt really comfortable with the people. I didn’t realize how weird I was until I discovered people who were weirder than I was.”

The coffeehouse gave poets and stand-up comedians a venue with open-mic nights. Allen Ginsberg visited at least once, and Jack Kerouac hung out there often near the end of his life, calling it "a little bit of San Francisco, right there in St. Petersburg." Thom would throw Kerouac out when he got too drunk. A fledgling and often-plastered Jim Morrison would recite his poetry there. Thom was eccentric and mercurial and "would explode on people” and "that's what Morrison was copying on the dramatic parts of his Doors records, where he would go from singing to screaming. Thom infused him with a lot of theatrical stuff," one of Reese's friends recalled.

I liked the Beaux Arts' eccentrics and the constant stimulation of bright abstracts on every wall, and the constant thrum of music and movies and poetry readings; but I didn't like having what little air conditioning the old house offered turned off during the hottest part of a Florida summer day, and moved out after a few months.

The Beaux Arts, a St Pete mainstay for decades, was destroyed by fire a few years later. These days St Pete has a thriving arts community, with the Dali Museum and much more, but few remember that Thom started it all. The fire that took the Beaux Arts took with it one more piece of the old, weird America.