Ode to Batman

Many people walk past history everyday not skipping a step at once was. Down a historic street like Fillmore in San Francisco, I’m guessing the Starbucks at 2222 Fillmore seldom gets a second glance.

Once home to Batman Gallery circa 1960, this was Billy Batman’s gallery and hangout with the beatnik’s, poet’s, artist’s and outcasts of the time.

Batman Gallery 1964

Nicknamed Billy Batman for his early love of the batman comics, Batman grew up without need of money coming from a wealthy “to do” family. Given Batman gallery by his family to “stay out of trouble”. Batman was a significant artist himself playing with early xerox, copy art or known as xerography.

“Rose Birth” by Billy Batman

Later Batman found himself with the Diggers in San Fran. He even had the birth of his child documented in classic form in the Realist Issue No. 81 – August 1968 { Page 10 } link if you would like to read here http://www.diggers.org/digpaps68/birthdig.html

But what brings him to our attention was his love of hash. I will let Jerry Beisler tell of his meeting from his book ‘The Bandit of Kabul’.

“After the buzkashi match, we met “Billy Batman” and his wife in the midst of the anarchy that passed for a taxi stand on the edge of the stadium grounds. They were legendary in Kabul, having survived there since 1969. Billy was older than all of us, and it was said he brought hash into New York City in the late 1950’s and supplied it to authors and poets, including Allen Ginberg and William Burroughs as well as jazz greats and stage stars. We enjoyed listening to his tales of the beatnik era…
Billy Batman earned the name because of a new technique he created for making hashish.
Billy had invented what he called “the Batman Technique”. He purchased heavy vinyl that was made in Germany and he put hash pollen into the vinyl, wrapped it up and tied it off with tape so that it was about the size of a baseball. He then took a Pakistani shoe mallet and slowly tapped the ball all over, bit by bit. As the heat built up inside the vinyl covered ball, the pollen liquefied. The ball had to be tapped slowly because the vinyl could split and destroy the entire, painstakingly produced product. But if one did it properly, the liquid congealed. When allowed to cool and carefully unwrapped, the resulting product was the most perfect form of hashish imaginable.”

With so many stories about smugglers that just wanted money, here you have someone that just loved hash. Well enough to risk his privileged life, travel to the ends of the earth to live a rustic dangerous life to not only participate but to improve something that was obviously dear to him.

Billy Batman never made it home from the adventure of the hippy trail. His undoing captured in Ira Cohen’s poem from “The Moroccan Journal – 1987”

“And Billy Batman, who made the best hash in the world,
he dropped a loaded pistol in Kabul, shot himself in the balls,
took some heroin and lay down to die.”