The crack

It was a boarding house above Cannery Row- around 1976. I was working as a janitor at the Hotel Carlos downtown Monterey. I had the only room upstairs that had two doors. One went to the hallway, one went outside to the outside stairs. Tim had a back corner room which had a wall that looked like this. He was working  cleaning fish down the hill. He had just come back to Monterey and wanted to go back to the community college  there. He was a musician and a painter. Had tried to ride the rails a year before and fallen and had broken his leg in three different places and had to go hang out in his old bedroom in his parents house in the midwest to mend. We had a little one night and decided that his room needed an abstract painting to hide this ugly crack. We started painting the wall and it brew and grew until the painting finally took over the entire wall. Several nights later, we had to move his desk to finish the wall. It really was abstract expressionistic. He found a house in Pacific Grove and with a third guy moved in. He bough a Vibraphone and taught himself to play it while I wrote the Great American Novel upstairs night after night. My girl friend hated him and I had to move out to keep her. Never saw him after that. I don't remember his last name. So its kind of hard to track him down, even with the internet. He played nice.