I was a former “patron” if that is the correct description for some one who had just turned 18 and was in the company of my older brother Seth. I have some fond memories of the Trident and a lot of blurry images in my brain from nights of over indulgence.
At the time, (1971)my brother and I were sharing a house in Sausalito and he was running the Magnolia Cinema in Larkspur with two partners Barry Bedrick and Charlie Kessler. Seth had been involved with Janis Joplin and we often were hanging out with former members of the Holding Company, the Cockettes and various other nefarious and colorful characters from the Bay area. There were often impromptu gatherings at our house with various substances being laid out on the coffee table and then a trip to the Trident for late night drinks. At my age, I variously fell in love with every single waitress who worked there, none of whom seemed to find the attentions of an eighteen year old particularly enchanting.
There were several hilarious incidents which took place, one of which sticks in my memory. The Trident used to have sliding glass doors which opened onto the outside deck. They were always kept spotlessly clean so it was difficult to tell they were even there. If my memory serves me correctly, there was a carved wooden son on each of the doors which should have served to warn you that you needed to slide the door open before proceeding to the deck area, but newcomers often walked smack into them to the combined merriment of the patrons.
One afternoon, just such an event occurred and Seth was laughing his head off at the misfortune of some poor tourista, the only funnier thing in the world being when he performed exactly the same stunt about an hour and several drinks later.
Some memories are not as nice….
Being in the back of a borrowed Volkswagon Beetle on the way back from the Trident where Seth had picked up a hooker and they both had done some drugs. He kept trying to put the moves on her as the bug sped along the twisting hillside roads around the town, swerving at the last minute to avoid collisions and cliff edges. Requests that he pay attention to his driving were ignored or answered with snarls and eventually the inevitable happened and he side swiped a parked vehicle and then fled the scene.
It was a foreshadowing of his death in 1990 when he crashed his Harley on a New Orleans bridge killing both himself and his passenger. He left behind a novel based on his prison experiences in the late 1970’s which was critically acclaimed.
But he loved the Trident and so did I!.
The link here is to a photo I took of Seth at the Trident in the summer of 1971. He is on the right and the gentleman on the left was a fellow named Tim who ran the Boogie Bakery in Larkspur which was next door to the Magnolia cinema.
