John Wilson
13 August1937 – 8 February 2013

As I started to write this, our dear John’s vital organs were shutting down, and he had perhaps at best another hour or so to live. Warren has since phoned to tell me that he has passed. I am not sure of the exact birth year for John, but I believe him to be 76. Our incredible San Francisco ‘family’ from Haight-Ashbury days, with one exception, has managed more or less to have stayed in contact these past forty plus years. Of us, John is the first to go. We’ve lost others (‘cousins’) along the way – Bob Pfeiffer, my brother Peter, but the core of us has managed until now to ‘hang in there’.

John is from Glasgow and was a proud Scot to the point of wanting independence for Scotland. His father was a professional cat burglar, and John at first followed in the trade. When I first knew him, he was thin and agile and was easily capable of stealthy entry. But I think that part of his past was already behind him. His lover was Marlowe, our family elder, and theirs was the most complex and volatile of relationships and one that always managed to keep the rest of us guessing. At the time, John worked as a male nurse in the psychiatric ward of the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco along with my wife Nancy, Coral, Lynne and Little Nancy. He was about the most resourceful of people I have known. He would collect mussels from the Lands End area of the Golden Gate and make us all wonderful stews. He could talk just about anyone into bed. He had a fantastic sense of humour. And he was always fascinating and fun to be with. His preeminent quality was to understand where the other person was and what the issues at hand were. And he and Marlowe experimented with all there was to experiment with in those heady and incomparable days of the late 1960s.

When Richard and I circled the world in 1982, we visited John in Palm Springs. He and Marlowe had parted ways. I remember being surprised that he had developed by that point a slight potbelly. As the years progressed, he claimed Marlon Brando in Marlon’s later years as his ultimate hero. Eventually, thanks to all the haggis and other outrageous but delicious foods of Scotland, John got to 16 stone. He would need help to get out of a chair. And with no accessible veins left in his body, it has been truly miraculous that he was able to last as long as he did.

He returned to Glasgow to care for his mother during her final days. After her death, he remained in her apartment in Townhead, Glasgow. This became John’s world, and it was always filled on occasion with the many people John had befriended. He used to go periodically to California – often to care for his friend Gayle. But with increased security, customs discovered John’s arrest record for transporting cannabis in a van from one of the Rocky Mountain states to California on one occasion, and he was deported as soon as he had arrived. When John’s sister Grace died suddenly on a cruise, his remaining ties to his blood family in Scotland came to an abrupt end. This was yet another burden John had to carry, but this like everything he did and did in his own particular style.

The end of last year John was hospitalised, and Richard and I went to visit him shortly after we got back to Britain in January. The second day we were in Glasgow, John was released home. He was happy to be there, but Iain insists that the hospital released him too early. At first, it was not quite the same John. He had lost weight during his long stay in the hospital and was determined to keep walking to regain some mobility. We talked last Wednesday (the 6th), and it was the old John full of laughs and humour. I asked what he was watching, and he roared in laughter, “Law and Order.” He loved the telly. I did get to speak with him briefly yesterday when he returned to the hospital after having had a heart attack the night before. He had been to the hospital this past Monday for a blood examination, and Iain maintains that the hospital infected him. Whether I like to say this or not, his time had come. A great and wonderful friend is gone.