Deconstructing Chocolate George

“Chocolate George is at my house now because Keegan hated it,” said Tim Loomis, co-restaurateur and owner with Keegan Konkoski of the gastropub Liquids and Solids at the Handlebar in Lake Placid, New York.

“Let me just say something,” said Keegan, laughing and leaning back on her bar stool.

“I don’t hate anything, but whenever we talked about the theme of our artwork we always said at some level it had to be about food and drink.”

“You’re right, it didn’t totally match,” said Tim.

What Mr. Loomis tactfully didn’t point out was that the framed print that eventually found its way to his house was Chocolate George’s Funeral, not Good Old George or Hells Angel George, which is what George was when he wrecked his motorcycle in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in 1967 at the tail end of the Summer of Love.

“So, when I got our last piece of artwork, I don’t even know what it is, but I was, oh, Tim, I have to move Chocolate George. There’s just no room for it.”

“I told her I would put it in the butcher shop in the meantime.”

Tim Loomis took Chocolate George next door, literally next door to Liquids and Solids, to the Kreature Butcher Shop they had opened in 2013. Liquids and Solids at the Handlebar opened its doors in 2010.

Charles George ‘Chocolate George’ Hendricks was a Hells Angel in the San Francisco chapter who hit a car while swerving around a stray cat one sunny August afternoon almost fifty years ago, was thrown from his motorcycle, and died later that night from his injuries.

He was known as Chocolate George because he was rarely seen without a quart of his favorite beverage, which was chocolate milk.

“He drank chocolate milk because he had an ulcer,” said Mary Handa, a friend of his in the 1960s. “He spiked it with whiskey from time to time.”

“We got the print when we opened,” said Tim. “We had no artwork, but we had a very old, very dear friend of ours who had followed both of us around to multiple restaurants. He was a lithograph teamster, from the city, and he had a lot of vintage stuff, stuff by Ralph Steadman, and he had Chocolate George.”

Chocolate George’s Funeral is the Holy Grail of biker posters, and although neither Mr. Loomis nor Ms. Konkoski are bikers, at least not in the sense of the Hells Angels – Keegan is an avid mountain biker – it found a place in their restaurant on the back wall just outside the swinging door into the kitchen.

“The walls were pretty barren,” said Tim about their first year.

“There’s never been a restaurant like this here before. Nobody would come in, not nobody,” said Keegan.

“Our friend came in about a month after we opened and gave us the print,” said Tim. “He was a great guy, and he loved us, always really supportive. He was a portrait of unhealthiness, but a great guy.”

George Hendricks was a strapping 34-year-old when he died and a favorite among the hippies in Haight-Ashbury because he was funny and friendly. Sometimes he sported a Russian fur hat, making him look like a Cossack.

His mustache and goatee were almost as long as his long hair, he wore a pot-shaped helmet when riding his Harley, and his denim vest was pockmarked with an assortment of round tinny pin badges.

One of the pin badges said: “Go Easy on Kesey”.

The writer Ken Kesey was the de facto head of the Merry Pranksters. Much of the hippie aesthetic can be traced back to the Merry Pranksters.

“The artwork came one by one,” said Keegan.

“It’s a hodge-podge, but that’s how we got started. It was the same with everything, we slowly got more and more ingredients, built up our larder, and the bar.”

“We had a pool table originally, and originally I wanted to play up the whole laid back feeling, so we kept the pool table,” said Tim. “I should have known better. It just attracts children and takes up seats that people could eat at. But, when we got rid of it, rumors started floating around, there goes the pool table, they’re already going out of business.”

Mr. Loomis and Ms. Konkoski were novice business owners introducing a new dynamic of craft beers and creative farm-to-table cuisine to a small town popular with travelers, but still, essentially, a small town with well-established tastes.

“When we opened we decided we weren’t just a door with a light on that anyone could stumble into,” said Keegan. “We thought you either have to have a little bit of knowledge or a little adventure in you to make it work.

“We didn’t want to hold hands or educate anyone. We always wanted people to appreciate what we had to offer, and if they were as passionate about it as us, then yeah, we’ll get to know you and chat, answer as many questions as you want. But, some people, they come in here and, I don’t want to sound judgmental, but they just don’t look like they’re going to like it here. All of our hostesses know to ask, have you been here before, you might want to check out the menu, it’s really different.”

“We’d rather have them leave and not sit down then be unhappy,” said Tim. “Because once they sit down and it’s gone south, there’s just no fixing it.”

Five days after George Hendricks’s death more than 200 bikers trailed a hearse and the family car up and down the city’s narrow streets, pausing and revving their engines at the Straight Theater, near where he had crashed. The funeral ceremony was performed at the Cypress Lawn Cemetery, Mr. Hendricks was cremated, and his ashes scattered over Twin Peaks, which are in the center of the city, overlooking it.

Two quarts of chocolate milk slowly got warm in the back of the hearse.

The funeral procession then became a motorcycle parade, parading to Golden Gate Park where, joined by hundreds of hippies from Haight-Ashbury, a daylong wake erupted. Big Brother & the Holding Company and, appropriately, the Grateful Dead were the live music send-offs.

There was free beer courtesy of the Hells Angels and free food supplied by the Diggers.

“Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see, lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it’s been.”

The Haight Street Diggers were characterized at the time as a “hippie philanthropic organization.” They used the streets of San Francisco for theater, gatherings, and parades. The organization fed the flock that made the scene in the Panhandle with surplus vegetables from the Farmer’s Market and meat they routinely stole from other local markets.

Two months after Chocolate George’s funeral the Diggers announced “The Death of the Hippie” by tearing down the store sign of the Psychedelic Shop and burying it.

“Our reputation in Lake Placid is really mixed,” said Keegan.

“We’re the weirdo’s down here,” said Tim.

Not everyone agrees.

“This gastropub with Western saloon flare has the best beer selection – both draft and bottle – in the Adirondacks,” wrote Lauren Matison in Thrillist NYC. “Also awesome, their next-door butcher shop churns out rillettes, pates, cured tongue, sausages, and cheeses.”

“Much credit is due to chef Tim Loomis and his business partner, Keegan Konkoski, the competent and adventuresome mixologist,” Walter Siebel wrote in his review in the Watertown Daily Times.

“I’m definitely probably known more as the bitchy bartender than anything,” said Keegan.

“If you want a macro brew I say we don’t have that and suggest the bar across the street. I don’t pour shots, and I say no to drunks. I don’t serve them. They’ll look at me and say ‘you don’t want me here!’

“After we opened I had to do a lot of weeding out and getting rid of some people who just wanted to come in here and get wasted.”

The craft beer and craft cocktail-focused bar at Liquids and Solids is more in the vein of the Experimental Cocktail Club than it is Happy Hour, of which there is none, although since the drinks are fine and delicious it could easily be said that any time at the Handlebar is a good time.

When asked why they were having such a big party for George Hendricks, Henry ‘Hairy’ Kot, his best friend, said: “George loved be-ins and happenings, so we thought we’d have a happening just for him.”

The wake had been advertised as George’s Wail! on psychedelic-style posters hung in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

The next day a photograph of the funeral cortege stretching away on a long loping street ran in the San Francisco Chronicle, along with a story titled “The Gang Gathers”. The photograph was taken by Bob Campbell and later printed as a poster by the Print Mint in San Francisco.

The words Chocolate George’s Funeral at the top of the poster are in brown and gold. The rest of the photograph is in black and white, except for the funeral car, which is a bright fluorescent pink.

“We never knew what the pink was about,” said Beth Hendricks, George Hendricks’s second-youngest daughter.

Three years after struggling out of the red and pushing into the pink Mr. Loomis and Ms. Konkoski collaborated again on the Kreature Butcher Shop next door to Liquids and Solids. Mr. Loomis found a new favorite t-shirt emblazoned with Meatatarian.

“We have a counter guy there, but he’s not the butcher,” said Keegan. “Tim is the butcher. He takes the whole animal and breaks it down.”

“When we started Liquids and Solids a good friend of mine and I went and got our first pigs together,” said Tim. “When we talked about it later we remembered how long it took to break that first pig down. Man, it took six hours.

“I can do a pig cleaner in an hour now than I did back then, no problem. It’s partly just knowing what I’m doing and partly having the right tools. We didn’t even have a saw then. We still only have a hand saw, but at least we can saw through bone.”

“We prefer to get our animals whole,” said Keegan. “Then we can use everything. We try not to waste anything. The whole sustainability, consumption thing is important to both of us. Wastefulness really irks us.”

Kreature’s beef comes from Kilcoyne Farms in the St. Lawrence Valley and pork from several different suppliers in the North Country. Their yogurt comes from North Country Creamery in Keeseville and their cheese from Sugar House in Upper Jay.

“They keep doing more and more plots up in Keeseville every year, some cool stuff,” said Keegan.

“No one can hold a candle to Margot’s cheese,” said Tim.

“But, just because it’s local doesn’t mean we carry it,” said Keegan. “If it’s good and local, two thumbs up. We try to support them in anything that’s delicious, absolutely.”

“We always get our beef from Pat Kilcoyne Farms, which is grass-fed and finished on grain,” said Tim. “I’m not a huge meat eater but, wow, sometimes I have a steak and it’s phenomenal.

“We were approached by Asgard about taking one of their cows, which are all grass-fed. When Pat asked me if we needed a cow in the next couple of weeks I said, not this time Pat, I’m getting one from Asgard.”

“Well, have fun chewing on it,” said Pat Kilcoyne.

“I tell beer makers, if you brew something and think it’s dynamite, bring it down,” said Keegan. “The ones that are well-done and are great, awesome. It has to be good. I’ve made mistakes before, put something on the menu and, oh, my God, it’s horrible.

“There are so many young passionate people that are part of our restaurant lives right now.”

It’s the passion of people who act it out because the energy is in the action, not just the thought or feeling. Even though it’s the thought that results in the act, it’s action that sets priorities.

“I remember the day I met Lucas at Fledging Crow,” said Tim. “I had no idea who they were. I was, like, I’m opening a restaurant, and I need some vegetables.”

Every day is the day that time opens its door, never a minute too late, never waiting for the next minute, sometimes leaving a shadow behind.

On one level Chocolate George’s Funeral is a moment in time, an historical document of something that happened in one place on one day, but on another it’s an unsettling existential document, a ripple in the veneer of everyday life, so that its black and white truth seems suddenly illusory.

The signifiers in the picture are the street and medians, the flat-fronted buildings, and the receding line of electric power poles. A single person in white shorts stands at the corner of one of the crossroads in the deep focus photograph, either watching the funeral procession of black-clad bikers or simply waiting to cross the street.

What makes the picture unstable are the other, contrasting signifiers, the motorcycles and their riders. There are hundreds of them, a restless band bound together by their outcast and yet conservative ideology, riding Harleys which are both engineered and emblems, parsing an age-old ceremony as they rumble slowly up the street.

They are in rows and lines as orderly and mundane as the street, the rows of apartments, and lines of power poles. Even still, they are troublesome men.

“The Hells Angels try not to do anything halfway and anyone who deals in extremes is bound to cause trouble,” said Hunter S. Thompson, author of Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.

“Our friend who gave us Chocolate George used to bring us moonshine-soaked cherries, the real deal, not the stuff you buy from Old Hickory, or whatever,” said Keegan.

“But, he was a weirdo. We got a tour of his bomb shelter once. It was full of serious stuff and more canned food than you could eat in a year. The guy was ready.”

“He had gone up to Au Sable to live, escape from the city,” said Tim.

“He’s now deceased,” said Keegan.

The poster they had been given stayed at the far back of Liquids and Solids, gracing a wall above a small round two-chair table next to the kitchen, for more than three years.

“Tim liked it,” said Liz Yerger, one of the gastropub’s servers. “He never said why, exactly, except that a friend had given it to him.”

“Maybe we were too scared to take the picture down all that time,” observed Keegan.

Maybe that’s when Keegan Konkoski broke out a bottle of spirits and mixed up something strong, – her own Maple & Spices – a heady brew of bourbon, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, and lemon and apple juices, and after all that time all that long strange trip took leave of George ‘Chocolate George’ Hendricks.