Bringing in the Dead

John Trudell- an American Patriot.

2010-11-25T23:46:00.000-08:00

2010-11-24T21:44:00.000-08:00

She always liked the strong silent types. He’d been sitting at a corner table, just out of the limelight, for forty-five minutes. He was indifferent. She’d tried several times to catch his eye but he seemed to be oblivious to his surroundings. She asked the bartender to send him over a drink, and she adjusted her neckline for optimum exposure of cleavage- she cant wait to give him her million dollar smile- she‘s been told that her beautiful, white teeth are definitely the closer. She’d gotten plenty of cash at the ATM out front, and tonight she was committed to landing a winner.
The bartender delivers the drink himself, exchanging words with the tall dark stranger and motioning towards where she sits at the bar with a casual wave of his hand. The man glances over at her and smiles, all beautiful white teeth and a strong jaw line reminiscent of Hollywood during better times, before “androgynous good looks” became a standard compliment.

The evening moved along- she never liked eighties hair bands, but if it meant getting his GQ good looks into the sack she’ll put up with Tears for Fears and Duran Duran- even Wham!. They alternate between drinking, dancing and playing pool until she loses her patience with Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby and makes her move. She grabs his cock through his polyester slacks and leans forward, whispering in his ear, “Take me home you hard, handsome fucker- I want this inside of me.”

They left through the back door- there was a camera on the ATM out front. He never had to slip her anything at all- besides being dark and handsome, he was tall- he easily overpowered her.

She probably never would have guessed that she’d find herself in the trunk of a 90’s vintage luxury sedan, wrapped in a plastic drop-cloth with duct tape around her neck and a plastic bag over her head- she never would have guessed. As if the spare tire left any room for a girl at all, she really hates the smell of grease and motor oil.

Walking back to his apartment he felt nothing at all- just the passing of another day. The twinks were out on the street-corners, doing a healthy business. After passing a dozen or so, he couldn’t resist the best one yet. They exchange pleasantries and politeness, then they get down to business, negotiate and lock in on a figure. He takes a crisp clean hundred from her Burberry wallet and hands it to the fresh clean lad with taut skin, tight abs, a tan and straight teeth. The boy gave him a million dollar smile and a wink- he knew he had him from the moment he laid eyes on him.

Really Great Stacy Peralta Documentary

2010-11-10T00:23:00.000-08:00

Same guy that brought you the groundbreaking documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys". An excellent piece of journalism. (Stacy Peralta and Sam George- narrated by Forrest Whitaker.)

2010-11-08T20:52:00.001-08:00

Monday- 11-8-2010 6:15 after work burnt out my house Kailua

It’s funny- I struggle with letting anyone close to me. That’s not really a surprise- I always talked a lot but was unconsciously careful about what I revealed. I have always been a social creature, but have been burnt so many times early on that I became very cautious about who I let into my personal space, and how close I let them get. Today I struggle with the idea of a relationship- of that idea as something good- and of the realities that I’ve actually seen first hand.

The older I get, the greater the heartbreak takes a toll. Sometimes I wonder how many heartbreaks I have left in me. I think I can manage a long time alone, but I wonder about how long I can manage under that bleak, black cloud that follows disappointment, and how many more of those I can absorb. Sometimes I think that sounds so pussy- so fucking weak- but sometimes it seems so realistic and reasonable- I’ve always been really good at interpreting what I feel- and right now that logic seems very real.

I’m supposed to meet a girl for dinner this week. I’ve never met her- never seen her- nor she me. Type on a page, she and I. That isn’t a lot to go on. I write well- writers tend to look good in type. That always scares me- no matter how much they liked me on a written page, in person they tend to be either offended by me, or overwhelmed by me, or scared of me, or they just flat don’t like anything about me. In double-spaced 12 point courier font I’m a beautiful romantic, when I want to be. And sometimes I actually am. Rarely, these days- but it happens. In reality I am usually a cynic and a realist- I call a spade a spade, which never seems to be looked upon fondly.

I always struggle with the two ideals of men. The one is to play the game (which I’m not even capable of playing, actually- and for the most part wouldn‘t want to despite any fleshy rewards that might be offered) and telling them what they want to hear. The other is to just be me, and let the chips fall where they may. I always figure that I don’t want to be with someone who is attracted to the person I might act like I am- that’d be work. But truth be told there hasn’t been a lot of interest in a guy like me. Go figure, right? Girls don’t like guys like me who are honest. Guys like me are supposed to tell them all the things they want to hear, and when things fall apart we’re supposed to be real shit heads, and everything gets real ugly and dramatic for everyone involved.

I’m not really down with that. Call me fucked up, call me a dreamer- but I grew up with an idea of how this stuff might be, and I hang onto that naïve paradigm despite the harsh light of reality. Sometimes I think I’m a little like my dad- he was a dreamer, and he hung onto his principles to the bitter end, despite the realities of life- he hung on, no matter what. Maybe it was stupid, maybe it wasn’t- to me it was really good and right, for him- and I respect it. I wish I could be as trusting and loving as he was. Some large part of us is Scott and Irish, and at some point I figure we must make great martyrs. It’s in our blood.

So I guess I’d be a complete pussy if I didn’t go meet this girl. Funny- a couple guys can take the boots to me and I‘ll just curl up and survive- the bouncers can come drag me out in the alley and I will just be perturbed and upset and amused and a little worried- some meatheads might pick a fight with me and I’ll handle it with at the very least a little grace and humor and savoir fair- but make me sit at a table with a girl I don’t know who will undoubtedly expect something from me- now you have my attention, and I‘m completely phobic.

Of course I’ll go. Wish me luck.

This is me being honest about myself, and what I feel. Enjoy it- most of you wont get this all the time.

Aloha- TLH.

2010-11-07T10:35:00.001-08:00

He rarely knows the date though he can usually pin down the day and month. Sometimes he forgets the year. When everyone speaks at once he thinks they’re speaking in some foreign language.
Down with a chest cold, he’s been working long hours at a dead-end job with very little sleep. In the grey light of dawn he sits in his wooden chair at a wooden table with a wooden expression on his face. He looks weary, road-warn- and maybe he is, but right now he’s just tired of waiting for the coffee to brew. The glass carafe broke a year or so back, and he watches as the coffee drips directly into an oversized orange ceramic mug.
He takes his coffee black, which suits him well. He’s dark, black, bleak- he isn’t sweet like sugar or smooth like cream, he is a dark morass of emptiness, long past loneliness or despair- those things just made him a more durable piece of material. Standing at the window with the steaming mug in his fist he gazes out at the empty street, enjoying the early morning silence.
Wordlessly he makes his way to the bathroom, sets his coffee next to the sink and leans into the shower, adjusting the valves until the water scalds him. His plaid boxers drop to the floor and he steps under the hard stream of steam and heat, letting it pummel his skin, beating against him as if his chest and back are drums.
The steam rises around him, filling the small room. Whenever he stands in the shower he thinks of her. She was a long time ago, a distant memory, at this point an even mixture of pleasure and pain. Memories are arrows shot through time- they are no longer present yet they still inflict damage.
She was really beautiful- the mother of their child- she was graceful and delicate, intelligent, regal, sensuous, sexual- at one point they seemed to be joined physically- couldn’t keep each other’s name off their lips, could barely keep their hands off of each other. Today she doesn’t even speak to him.
They were together quite a while- years- a “whirlwind romance” as some people like to say, followed by a tumultuous relationship with all of it’s ups and downs. They loved each other fiercely and burned very brightly for quite a while, though they had their differences. In retrospect, probably a better than average relationship, up to the last year.
After the magic dissolved they still had their son to hold them together, and they both focused their waning love for each other upon him, renewing it, for a time renewing them, and again drawing them closer together. They still made love on the back porch underneath the stars from time to time, showered together by candle light- yet there were times when they didn’t speak for days, two ghosts occupying the same celestial space.
He was drinking a lot at that time, going out with his best friend Jason who was single at the time. She would let him go, knowing that ultimatums were an end of things. He and Jason would hit the bars, walking from one to the next, drinking to make the reality of the present soften and fade. When they were both single they’d shared a place, and were pretty close. Even so they would drift apart whenever they were in relationships, but always they came back together here and there as friends are wont to do.
They had a fight, he and she- a pretty big blowout- and she went to stay in her condo up North for a week, time to cool of and gather perspective. The baby was around two years old, and he would drop baby off at preschool and she would pick him up, and then the reverse the following day, alternately- so they didn’t have to see each other, didn’t have to speak. After a few lonely days of this he called her up and apologized, and she apologized also. He asked her to come home and she agreed, and said she would come tomorrow, after work. They both wanted to try again, and they both would for many years before they finally would part ways one last time to be forever separated yet always connected through the boy.

It was a week or so after she came home that he inadvertently picked up her phone thinking it was his own. He thumbed the send button and immediately knew it was hers, yet he was intrigued by several listings in a row, all showing the name “Fred Flintsone”. Thumbing the appropriate button he finds that she and Jason have been swapping calls for two weeks- lots of brief calls and a few long ones, more on the week that she was gone, but a few long ones during the day on the week after she returned. At first he was angry, then hurt, then a little amused that she had masked the name as “Fred Flintstone” rather than just erasing the call history. Stupid mistake for such a smart girl.

Every time he showers he thinks of her, pressed against someone else, hanging onto his best friend and telling him all the things she used to say to him. Even after all this time, even though that love between them has faded, every time he thinks of her he thinks of how she gave herself to his best friend and then quietly, wordlessly returned home to him. He knows her- she loves to have sex, always has. He knows Jason- Jason will nail anything with a heartbeat. After the fact he realized there was something quiet between them the whole time, right in front of him- it only took that week apart for them to consummate the physical act.

Every time he showers he thinks of her.

Every time he thinks of sex he thinks of her, with someone else.

Every time he thinks of relationships he thinks of betrayal.

Mostly he tries to just not think.

Psychiatrist: “So you’re still in touch with your son’s mom?”

The dark man: “Yeah- sure- I get my son every other weekend. I pick him up, give her some cash- she’s civil enough as long as I bring her some cash- doesn’t say much more than two or three words to me, though. I mean- come on- she‘s my son‘s mom- despite everything that‘s happened, there‘s always our boy to think about. ”

Psychiatrist: “What about Jason? You ever see him?”

The dark man emit’s a long sigh.

“Jason…… Yeah…… Jason.... he never knew what hit him.”

2010-11-05T03:36:00.000-07:00

I don’t sleep too well. My brain is like a hummingbird on meth. Hyperactive brain- the dialog is non-stop. I quit fighting it a long time ago. I used to go to the gym at 4 a.m. By the end of a couple weeks I’d be a wreck, trying to function on like 3-4 hours of sleep a night, tops. So I just stay up. I put a movie on and I either read or I write, and sometimes equal parts of both. I like gangster movies- Gangster movies, War movies, Prison movies- the dialog works for me, and I find the glorified violence way better than the lies on the news. More people should watch glorified violence- the bar scene from Casino where Joe Pesci fucks that guy up with a ball-point pen. The Bar scene in Sleepers where the hoods kill the prison guard. Apocalypse Now. The end of American Me. If more people entertained thoughts of getting mercilessly beaten with a shovel or a length of pipe maybe there wouldn’t be so many people around who act like complete fuckheads because they know our society protects them- it’s like their constitutional right to be a shitheel. I love the look of surprise on a person’s face when you fuck them up for being a witless prick. It’s actually pretty gratifying to make fuckheads really scared. And don’t get me wrong- I love the ideas and ideals of the Dalai Lama- but until everyone wises up, there are witless assholes out there who have to be kicked to the curb.

I also like that a lot of the movies use the Stones for the soundtrack for particularly dark scenes. The Imagery of the Hell’s Angels at Altamont must have really burned itself into some heads.

Anyhow- I pulled down some old Henry Rollins stuff this week- The First Five Years and Solypsis. I tend to go back to certain stuff over and over: Rollins, Larry Fondation, Denis Johnson, Craig Davidson, Brett Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Bukowski, Burroughs- the list is long but a lot of the work is similar in one way or another. Anyhow- I was reading this one passage from Rollins and it really made sense to me:

A bare bulb burns in an apartment in my brain. In the middle of the apartment is a small table and a wooden chair. There is a cot in the corner. Pacing the floor of the apartment is a man who has never slept, ever. He stares out the window constantly. He is scarred and insane from his thoughts. Everything he thinks is true. That’s why he lives alone. He writes words on the walls to remind and console himself.

I liked this- I think I have a little apartment in my brain, and the guy sprints around climbing the walls.

I’m going to go to bed and try to sleep. I bet the brain guy is climbing the walls as soon as I close my eyes, reciting Shakespeare and throwing around the furniture.

I leave the TV on while I sleep- so the little fucker has something to watch.

Playing catch-up.

2010-11-05T02:53:00.000-07:00

Judgement

2:32 a.m. November second, twenty-ten. Wont drink so I cant sleep. Tired of feeding the black, empty void inside of me. It’s never full, always ravenous until I’m unconscious. I listen to the radio make pedantic chatter about “Obamacare” and I wonder what the fuck they are talking about? I’m 45 and work for cash, have no retirement and get no benefits. It’s the only fucking job someone like me can get, and really I’m grateful I’m not living on a sidewalk somewhere covered in dirt. I’m just another casualty of the California school system, undiagnosed A.D.D. and a teenage alcoholic who fell through the cracks because I was middle class and white and tested with high scores. To them I was just another fuckup taking up space.

When I was 12 some well-meaning liberal assholes came up with a program called “voluntary integration” where the parents of pee-wee gang members from Sherman Heights could ride a bus over to our school on the coast to get a better education and to get them out of the “gang environment” where they lived. No hard feelings towards a few busloads of kids from Sherman, but our school was a fucking war zone the entire time I was there. The well meaning liberal assholes hadn’t considered that there were already several busloads of borderline criminals at our school teetering on the narrow precipice between a life working manual labor and a life in and out of the California Correctional System. Needless to say five years later most of us were reunited in scattered locations across the city. We’d see each other in emergency rooms, drug houses, court houses, Juvi and later county. After a year or two of buying the lie and fighting each other it dawned on most of us that we weren’t enemies- we weren’t allies- we were just casualties of a completely flawed system.

I’m luckier than most- I knew how to read and make complete sentences, so instead of prison or an early death I managed to last this long. 45 years- fuck- who ever would have predicted. At fifteen I figured I’d be lucky to see 18. At Nineteen I had no illusions about the slim chances of seeing twenty-five. Somewhere in there I quit counting years and instead counted off the intervals between funerals, only hearing a word now and then- usually years apart- of who was in or out of the can, who died and how. You never hear the good news- most of the alumni aren’t big computer guys- they don’t have Facebook at Pelican Bay.

I live alone. I see my kids every other week. I actually go to Parent Teacher conferences at my son’s school. Funny- I feel like a fish out of water at those things- all the soccer mom’s with their boob-jobs and their painted on smiles, the beaten down dads looking bored like they’d rather be on the couch or mowing a lawn or whatever it is they do. Lots of pretty young moms there, beautiful creatures with their dreams still intact. Here and there I see guys I think might be a little bit like me. Goddamn wolves in the henhouse. Sometimes worn out, time-hardened weary fuckers like me still love their kids enough to go sit in an auditorium like a fish out of water. I’ve done way harder things. I figure if I do this stuff, maybe my son will get a pass and a regular life, some dreams, a career that doesn’t include hammers and nails, a woman that loves him.

I’m a cynic, but I hold out a little hope for the kids.

After work today I pulled on some trunks and a tank-top and laced up my high-tops and walked around the corner to the basketball courts. I like to shoot hoop by myself after work. When you’re used to drinking, you have to find shit to do to fill that time. I think too much- time to think is my enemy right now. I think too much and I bum out- I look around me at all the vapid pop-culture and the advertisements telling me the things I can buy to have an image- I look at those glossy magazines in the check-out line at the grocers- and I bum out. I went to a therapist once, back when I had a job that gave me health insurance. I wanted to know why I was so fucked up in my head. The lady I talked to was really on it- I liked her- no bullshit. She was the one that told me I’m A.D.D. She said it was really amazing I’d handled as well as I had. She also told me that the reason I feel so fucked up is that for me, the magic is gone. There are no illusions for me- I look at a billboard and see lies. I listen to the TV- doesn’t matter what’s on- game show, the News, a commercial- and I ask, “What are you selling me?” and “Why?”

So I go shoot hoops. I put on my headphones to something that cranks me up to ten and I find an empty court and play. I didn’t shoot hoops for years- not since I was a kid- I never was a big “team-player”. But now it’s comforting. I don’t have to think- I just lob shots in and race in to grab them on the rebound- I jump and shoot, or pull off lay-ups. My right knee is a little fucked so I have to favor it, but it’s nice to sweat for an hour or two after work. To sweat and breath real oxygen, to feel the sun and to not think. It’s funny- I’m the only old guy out there, most of the time. Occasionally there will be a heavy set guy with a clipboard and “COACH” emblazoned on the back of his shirt, but otherwise it’s me and a bunch of kids. To them I’m invisible- I like that. I get my court, they don’t even see me, they just give me my space. That’s a good set-up for me. That would be nice in the rest of my life- just give me my space, don’t even see me.

I gotta try and sleep. Work at 7 a.m. There is no magic. What a fucking life.

11:42 November 4 2010

You just have to be strong- over the top. Unbreakable.
No one else can feel what you’re feeling.
No one else can fathom what you’re going through.
You try to convey it in words and they wink and say, “He’s quirky and weird.”
No- it’s better to keep your moth shut,
Your head down, a grim set to your jaw
Slip the punch and upper cut
Knock the fucking wind out of it
Be strong and tenacious
There is no rescue party
Either harden the fuck up or lay down and die

Be a piece of stone
Steel
Take care of you
Fuck them.

I sometimes look in the mirror and say “You’ll never be good enough.”
Sometimes I think, “You don’t deserve anything good.”

I step back and gesture to myself, standing there
And I ask myself, “How do you sleep at night, the things you’ve done, the people you’ve hurt?”
I glance over at my self and chuckle at the naiveté of the question. “ I don’t sleep- I lay awake until three a.m. most night, restless, bothered, at a loss- desperately tired yet unable to make the chatter stop. It’s my mind- it does that all on it’s own."

The only way to sleep is to drink myself unconscious- and that’s fucking weak. So I don’t sleep. Cest la vie.

Dancing Girl

2008-09-23T00:34:00.001-07:00

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht.
(Name withheld because it’s pitiful to quote _arly _imon.)

I walked up the stairs and into the club for the first time, trailing two girls from the Mercury who really just wanted an escort through Chinatown to fend off the panhandlers and chicken hawks. My first impression was that it’s just like every other place I ever liked- half-finished, well worn, dark, with decent music and a decent crowd of people having a good time.
Even so, there’s always that apprehension entering new territory for the first time, and the old habits kick in as I stay on the periphery and keep an eye out for trouble. Pleasantly enough, none materialized. You must know that feeling of walking into a strange place for the first time where everyone seems to know each other but you. I’ve always been a solitary guy in some respects, and the isolation is a little bit comforting, my mind wandering from the fact of my surroundings to a fiction in my mind as I imagine myself some kind of a mystery character from something well worn and familiar that was only released in black and white.
The girls break off and disappear into the crowd with some friends and I ditch the guy that was with me as he orders a Guinness and works diligently to get the number of the cute, friendly young girl behind the bar. I’ve seen this diorama a million times, and it never really was my cup of tea. Sometimes I think I’m too old for this shit, but a little human contact is sometimes comforting and I love the music, the interaction, the physical touch, some intellectual stimulation.
The young bartender hands gives me a smirk with my pint glass of ice water and the thought crosses my mind that they just can’t fathom how lucky they are that I’ve shelved my bad old ways. Back in the day I would have been drinking whiskey and Guinness and I would have been a pain in the ass, fighting or getting arrested, probably never even leaving the Mercury until they threw me out. Tonight I’m a day or two older and a little bit wiser, the hard lessons are still fresh in my memory. I’m happy just hanging in the shadows, nursing my water and leaning back against a column at the edge of the dance floor with my eyes closed, my body keeping a vague cadence with the music, my mind completely immersed in it.

A great flame follows a small spark. (Dante)

Hanging there in the shadows I find it comforting that in this new environment I feel somewhat at home, the familiar melodies of the Cure and Siouxie here and there hammering their cadence back into my soul, surrounding and enveloping me and taking me home to a place and time that no longer exist. I’m at peace there in the dark, thinking about nothing, floating around inside my head, operating on psychic cruise control.
I open my eyes and there she is in front of me, an apparition, alone and beautiful, so obviously and completely content to be dancing she captivates my attention immediately, dancing as if dancing alone is her sole means of life support. She is beautiful and lithe there in the half-light at the edge of the stage, eyes closed, more a part of the music than of the crowd or the room around her, more a product of the melody than the motion.
There was a certain irresistible quality to her presence, so visibly happy and content, making more sense there in the middle of the music than anything ever has. I watch her for a long time, afraid that to talk to her would break the spell and somehow ruin it. Watching someone so happy in what they’re doing is something like looking at the absolute best piece of art that ever existed, and it’s impossible to deny the yearning hope that if you get close to her maybe some of it will rub off and you too can immerse yourself in the warm, even glow that comes when one is part of the music and the music becomes part of you. It’s really easy to fall in love a little with that particular sweetness, especially when someone wears it so well.
It’s always a little disappointing that the night eventually has to end, all the mice and pumpkins returning to their secret lives away from the dance floor, the glass slipper lost down a storm drain somewhere- but that’s just the way the script is written. Like the life of a butterfly the beauty is fleeting, brief- and it’s only a matter of a chance passing that we witness it at all. To try and pin it down, to somehow capture and hold it would be to remove its natural beauty and leave just an empty façade.
Walking along down the empty streets of Chinatown I still see her dancing in my head, and I think to myself how lucky we are to get these little flashes of brilliance every now and then that make life worth living. I’d be lying if I said she didn’t cross my mind a few times well after the sun came up.

In this world there are only two tragedies: One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Oscar Wilde

Sisters.

2008-08-02T22:50:00.001-07:00

Two headed hag
They push him away
Spiteful, heckling and laughing.
“Where’s your mother, little boy?”
“Where’s your family?”
“Where do you belong?”
"You'd better go find them!"
He climbs into the back seat and accepts his position,
Head bowed and bracing for the next blow.

Bunny

2008-06-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

“I really like her use of color. This piece really excites me.” The woman with tall hair pushes her bifocals up an the bridge of her nose with a bony forefinger, squinching up her face and leaning closer to the painting hanging on the wall in front of her.
The man in the guacamole colored suit flicks ashes on the floor and takes a dainty sip of his Lemon-drop, careful to not smear his makeup as he dabs at his lips with a napkin. “It’s truly dramatic the way the reds run to black. I think this is a statement about our society, and the reds represent the West while that pink cottage cheese bit is the middle east, and those potato things there are the people, caught in a situation they did not ask to be in.”
The mute dwarf woman nods her head and grunts in agreement. “Ungh.” With a sudden urgency she pulls a pad from her pocket and scribbles a message on it, holding it in the mans face first, and he pulling it so that the woman with the tall hair can read it also. They all nod in agreement and the woman’s tall hair quivers like jello as she laughs out loud. “By god we may have another Basquiat on our hands! I must find out what the price of this piece is.” The three turn to look around for the agent who is already moving their way. Agents have a certain sixth sense that tells them when someone has set the hook on their own.
She ushers the artist over and there are introductions all around. The woman with the tall hair doesn’t mess around with small talk, but rather turns to the artist, a small blonde girl of 18. “I love this piece- it speaks to me. Can you tell us something about it?”
The artist smiles pleasantly and nods, setting her bottled water on a nearby table.
“Bunny fell in the blender.”

Going To Say Goodbye

2008-06-23T23:28:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 26, 2005. 7:30 PM
Sitting in the bar, thinking about a beer. The only plug in the airport is in the bar. Life is like this. Sitting in the bar at the airport waiting for my 8:45 flight to Los Angeles, where I’ll disembark at 4:45 a.m. and board another plane to San Diego that lands at 7:30 a.m. in my hometown. San Diego- slow death- a town that doesn’t mean a thing to me anymore. It hasn’t been my home for over twenty years and I walk off of the plane and drive the streets and nothing is familiar to me. No one is left. Everyone’s gone and no one sees me, no one meets me at the airport, nobody recognizes me and asks me where I’ve been. No one does and no one cares. God knows I don’t care. That town never did me any favors and practically anyone here now wasn’t here back then anyhow.

Going to say goodbye to dad. Dad’s been gone for over a month but this is the soonest we all could be together, I guess. My step-mom was tired from caring for him and she needed some time to fall back and regroup and get ready. All of us were tired from the stress of not knowing how we could help or what we could do for him. Truth be told there wasn’t anything we could do but wait and hope he’s comfortable and tell him that we love him and hope he hears. I love you dad. Dad’s already gone but from such a great distance it’s difficult to tell. He’s been gone now for over a month but still I can listen to his messages on my phone and hear his voice. God knows the longer I wait to erase them the worse it will be.

The barmaid has been eyeing me for a while now, watching to see if I’m drinking or if I’m just taking up space in the bar. There are a couple glasses on the edge of my table from the customer before me and it’s busy enough here that she can’t be sure, but I think I’ll have a couple beers before my flight anyhow. I am a terrible drinker, but what the fuck else do the Scotch-Irish do when they’re going to one last time say goodbye to their dads? And lord knows I hate to fly- everyone that knows me knows that. I hated to fly since the first trip but you put one into the ocean and all the sudden it all takes on a new, pressing reality. Shit happens. Hope it doesn’t happen tonight.
Bob Marley is playing in the background, and over the normal bar sounds he asks me, “Why should I bend down my head and cry?” Tonight I don’t think I’m really the one to answer that.
The beer tastes good. Two max, tonight- I can’t afford to be a lush right now, and god knows I’ve been one in the past- and I haven’t drank a beer in weeks so two really gets me all looped before my flight anyhow. My little brother told me when I dropped him off for his flight two days ago that we all would toss back a couple beers together after the funeral, and I agreed that yes- that seems to be appropriate for some reason. That ought’a be rich- bunch’a Scottish and Irish guys, crying in their beers, missing their dad or uncle or whoever dad was to them. Actually that sounds beautiful. I haven’t cried enough yet this month- not nearly enough as I should’ve. I never cry when I’m supposed to- especially when I don’t drink. Jimmy Cliff is on the house PA singing so sweetly that “You can get it if you really want.” I suppose Jimmy would no as well as anyone.

It’ll be nice to be surrounded by the people that I’ve known and that know me- mostly the siblings and cousins and old friends- and it’s comforting that all of us with all of our idiosyncrasies and each of our individual troubles- we all just love each other a ton and care about each other an infinite amount. Of course we all can stand each other for a couple days and feel a ton of warmth and comfort and love but god knows if it were more than a couple weeks we’d pick up just where we left off barely post-adolescence and we’d be at each other’s throats in no time, sick to death of each other and ready to do something irrational. Even so- it’s just so warm and fantastic to think about a couple days with all these people I love and who used to be so close with myself and my family, and maybe I’ll be able to have a proper cry about it and maybe I’ll be able to put dad to rest- and maybe I’ll quit thinking that he’s just off away somewhere, that sooner or later the phone would ring and I’d hear his voice telling me he’s Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes or some other minor literary figure gone awry. God I miss him.

Friday- May 27th
Landed in San Fran at 4:30 am. I’m afraid I pretended to sleep the whole way and convinced even myself. Two Tylonol P.M.s and a couple pints may induce hallucination under duress. Zombie walked off the one plane and onto another, perfectly happy I could miss L.A. just now but a little apprehensive about one additional takeoff and landing. It’s all about the percentages.
Landed in San Diego at 7:45. The rental car radio is playing an “80s resurrection weekend” and it’s almost like I never left. Same station, same DJ, same music. It’s a comfort and I feel for a second like I’ve come home.
Drank a pot of coffee and visited with mom for a bit, went to the places where I used to love to go. Balboa Park. Spanish architecture and Art. Got fed up with mom’s constant pushing and her animosity towards dad and left early for North County. Made my way through the city on autopilot, somehow managing after my twenty year absence to make the trip without getting lost once.
Picked up fresh fruit at a stand I always used to go to on Del Dios Highway near Lake Hodges. Strawberries, Bananas, Avocados, plums and apricots, homemade tortilla chips, a bag of homemade enchiladas. Stopped at a little Mexican place I found by accident and picked up lunch for everyone. Headed way up into the hills to the Kaczynski manor to meet up with the lot of them and see what needs to be done and how everyone’s faring.

Saturday- May 28th 2005.
Dad’s Memorial- dad's place- Kaczynski Manor. I think I’m the only one who calls it that. I’m a terrible son. As dad approached death his hair got longer and longer, wild- but truth be told he always reminded me a bit of the Unabomber- and I think he’d be able to laugh at it if he could hear it today.
Dad's always liked it away from people and he always was kind of the professor- super smart. Nearly a photographic memory for anything he read, surrounded by books, no TV- thank god he was like that- a tiny bit of it rubbed off on me. Not enough so anyone would notice, but enough to keep me from being some sort of bleating sheep, a drone or something along those lines. Greatest gift ever. Thanks, dad. I love you.
Spent most of my day hiding behind a camera. It’s an easy way to detach myself from a situation and pretty well hide from my feelings. It works for fear as well as pain, FYI. I’m sure a psychologist would find it food for thought, but whatever- sometimes I just don’t feel like feeling pain. Go figure.
I busy myself in running to town and getting supplies. When I get back I take beverages into the fridge at the back of dad’s shop and as I look around me I realize I may never be able to immerse myself in the comfort and safety of dad’s shop again. The familiar smell of wood shavings and 3-in-1 oil. Dad is everywhere in here.
I set up my laptop and break out my camera and proceed to shoot hundreds of photos, first in the dark with no flash- then in the light, filling two memory cards no problem. I am hurried as I only have the day and work with the realization in mind that I’ll probably have to touch everything up later but try to get the best stuff I can.
I turn on dad’s radio and am not surprised to hear National Public Radio, and as the radio drones on I look at life through my camera, and I see dad busy in his shop, building and tinkering and adjusting- maybe building his workbench that he always wanted to build.
The time draws near that I have to accept the loss at face value and I deal with it with my eyes forward and my head up. A whole lot of handsome, talented people around the house with serious faces and eyes that look like they’ve been crying. Most people here I haven’t seen for twenty years. My cousins- that whole musical clan from Long Beach- they never leave that place and the weariness shows on their faces and in their eyes. They’re all super talented musically and plan to sing and play some of my dad’s favorite songs during over the course of the afternoon. I hug a lot of people that I used to be close to, and I feel numb, detached, isolated.
I sit with my cousin Becca and talk for a while- she and I have been close since we were small kids and no amount of time apart can keep us from instantly feeling like we were just together yesterday. Mike looks great- so does Steve. Their kids are beautiful playing guitar and harmonizing in a back bedroom. Kitty and Vicki and Travis are there, and Travis and I fuck around with this beat up Gibson six string someone left on the porch. I have a beer and a little tension seems to slip off of me. My brothers look good. I just saw Russ days before when I dropped him at the airport- Saw Will at Christmas. Lots of dads friends here- most of them I haven’t seen since I was a teen and they all look good.
The ceremony starts with Amazing Grace on pipes and Drums of Scotland. Then my sister starts stuff off with a brief introduction followed by Hugh Peterson. Hugh’s cool- I have always liked him. He speaks a little and reads a poem. Then it’s my dad’s friend Sean Brennan singing a favorite of my dad’s and then a song he wrote for him.
Aunt Christie tells a poem and talks about how much my pop was her anchor in life- the one male component of her life that was always there for her amongst a sea of disappointments. She cries, and pretty much everyone has tears in their eyes.
Cousins Mike, Becca and Kitty sing a song. My aunt Cathy tells us how my dad was her only sibling after their brother died at five years old and then she reads one of her own poems titled “A Life Ends” which nearly kills me.
Hugh Peterson reads a Poem titled “The General Dance”. Hugh has been around as long as I can remember, a lifelong friend of my pop’s. Walt Richards and Paula Strong play guitar and Mandolin and sing “The Parting Glass”. Frank Stites Reads a Poem entitled “Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep” and then Walt and Paula do “River”.
A couple other guys I don’t know- a friend of my dad’s named Nick from Junior High in Oakland reads “We are the Mirror” and then a guy who I never met before who was my grandma’s boyfriend a long time ago and who helped raise my dad after my real grandpa abandoned the family- he said a few words.
My cousins sang “Morning has Broken” and then I had to get up and read a poem and say a few words:

“I had sincerely intended to spend some time on the flight over or before the memorial writing something clever. Instead I slept through half of my flight and spent the rest of the trip chewing my nails. I did manage to run to town and get beverages and ice and trash cans and helped out around the house. Then I holed up in Dad’s shop and took a whole lot of pictures. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t really get around to writing much at all.
But I got a chance to think a lot about things throughout that time and the basic message I would have written- what has been going through my head for the past month and certainly the entire time I was in dad’s shop and since I left home to fly to the mainland with the sole intent of saying goodbye to dad was basically as follows:
It’s just so great to see everyone here together for the first time in twenty years- we all live so far apart and get to see each other so seldom and I wish it were on a happier occasion and I love everyone a ton.
Living 2800 miles out in the middle of the Pacific I don’t bear the brunt of the realities that plague everyone who live closer together and have to deal with these things head-on, face to face, in real-time.
To me Dad’s just away from the phone and otherwise occupied- out working in his shop or out mowing down the weeds under the avocado trees. He’s busy right now doing the things he does, and just cant get to the phone right now. It’ll probably be like that for me for a long while. I’m stubborn like that- but hopefully we can all hang onto him like that for a long time in the future, and maybe try to not be so sad.”

Then I read the poem- “He lives in Wisdom” from the Bhagavad-Gita- loosely translated. After a brief pause my step-mom tells me from the front row, “You can keep going as long as you like.”
I suddenly realize I’ve said all I can say today, and I laugh and tell her, ”Nah- that’s pretty much all of it.” And then to everyone, “He knows how bad I am at poetry so he gave me a short one.” As always it seems with me- everyone laughed, everyone cried. No remorse- just goodbye.

After that pretty much all of the musicians in the family got up and played “Red River Valley”. Sam Taylor read a poem entitled “The Lord Bless Thee and Keep Thee” while we all stood there and listened, and then everyone played “Amazing Grace” and “Keep on the Sunny Side”.
The cool thing about it all- well one cool thing- is that dad- aware that he didn’t have a lot of time left- made up a list that included most of the songs and poems- and I’m almost certain he left a list of people he’d like to have read and play and sing, and a list of people to be contacted. He also got in contact with many people and buried a few hatchets- he didn’t have many- and made amends where he felt amends needed to be made. Basically he had the chance and he took care of business, wrapped up his affairs and got about the business that he had to get about at.
Standing outside with my brothers before the memorial we three boys had a beer together and talked quietly a bit about stuff. My Brother Russ and I were at home in the islands the day Dad died, but Will- the middle brother- was about to leave for the airport to board his flight. He mentioned to me that I was lucky to get my letter to dad and to read it to him over the phone at the time I did. Timely. Lucky. He also said it gave him some amount of comfort to get here while dad still lay in his bed but that it was odd seeing dad as just the lifeless shell of the man we once knew.
I too find that strange and an odd thing. We stood there under a pepper tree and drank a beer together with nothing much left to do or say and looked at the bedroom window and I wondered at that- at the man being gone- the spirit and the life drifting off into parts unknown and just the physical, lifeless body left to be attended to and each of us hanging onto his spirit and our love for him and keeping him alive however we can within our hearts.

Sunday- May 29th 2005- 3 am.
Woke up and ran the hot water over me for ten minutes in an attempt to feel human again. The beer didn't do me any favors but I'm not really so bad as I stopped drinking by five and was in bed by eleven. I stand in the doorway to the bathroom drying my hair with a towel. I had a little trouble finding my phone charger last night and now my crap is strewn pretty much throughout the hotel room. I dry off and brush that dry, gritty film from my teeth.
My flight leaves at 6am and I have an hour drive and the rental car to return and so I’ve got to get going. Packing in silence I run my schedule through my head, hoping I don’t miss my flight as I’ve been here long enough and need to be home where I feel safe and stable. I pack what’s still folded and fold a couple things more and then stuff the rest in on top and squash the suitcase closed and zip it shut. No matter how orderly things begin somehow they always end up in a mess.
I really want a cup or six of coffee but have high hopes of getting a nap on the flight and so drive by Braille, images in my head of Alex De Large of a Clockwork Orange- eyes propped open by sheer will instead of toothpicks- windows open as the Air conditioning blasts icy air on me and the eighties resurrection weekend continues from the radio.

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places
Worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going no where
Going no where
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression
No expression
Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow
No tomorrow
No tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very very
Mad world
Mad world

Running on autopilot nearly 90 miles per hour down foggy highways that I hardly recognize. Windshield wipers keep cadence with cracks in the pavement, tail-lights materializing out of the fog in front of me and whipping back into the dark behind me as I pass, out of sight out of mind. I keep an eye on the rear view for the inevitable Highway Patrol cruiser but they never materialize. God must figure that I’ve already had enough.
I feel the rear wheels slip a little as I navigate the interchange from Interstate to interstate, and again one more time- but I don’t really slow down and instead just roll with it, accelerating out of the turn and into the straightaway towards home.
By the time I reach downtown the fog has lifted and I cruise the surface streets navigating solely on twenty year-old memories. I make one wrong turn but quickly right myself, managing to get into the rent-a-car return lot. After a brief exchange with a bleary eyed agent I find myself standing alone in the darkness for twenty minutes, waiting for a shuttle that it seems may never come.
It feels good to not be driving- to have someone responsible in charge of my well being. I’m so fucking tired and we’re all just sheep being herded from one gate to the next, through turnstiles and checkpoints and onto planes where we’re packed as tight as if we’re in some sort of space aged cattle-car heading out to pasture or off to the slaughter.
I decline breakfast or coffee and drift off to sleep, waking in San Francisco where I disembark and get a quick bowl of bad Donburi at a Japanese take-out place in the airport and then board my flight home.
I get settled in the cramped little space they have allowed me, no room to work at my laptop and too tired to read. I opt for two sleeping pills and drift in and out of consciousness the entire 2800 miles, pretending to sleep as if I can fool myself into relaxing. I feign sleep, eyes shut and breathing well metered, trying to ignore thoughts of midair collisions and pictures of me strapped to this little chair, hurtling through space towards some dramatic impact with the surface of the hard, cold earth.
I land in Kona- home. Two days and everything’s just the same as I left it. Not even time for dust to settle on my dashboard. The lawn is the same length, and as I pull into the driveway I silently wish I’d mowed it before I left. Same bat time, same bat channel. Same old shit. Life goes on.

Monday March 30- 6am in the morning.
I dial dad’s number and his voice comes on telling me that I’ve reached the answering machine and to leave a message. I love his voice and wish there were some way I could save it on my end. He sounds so confident and strong and alive- in charge of himself, just away from the phone for a minute, out making everything okay. In a way I wish someone had answered, but still it’s really nice to hear his voice again.

Saying Goodbye

2008-06-23T23:27:00.000-07:00

The sun made him squint as he shifted hard from third to second “BAM!” a solid downshift to slow for an oncoming intersection. The front-end shimmies, threatening to pull the entire truck onto the soft shoulder of the road. The glare off of the windshield’s tint threw a funny shadow across his eyes, making his skin look blue above a perfect line across the bridge of his nose. He shifted hard again as he left the intersection for the safety of the open road, and now that he can relax he remembers how they carried his friend off in a clay urn, just ashes, to be thrown into the sea outside of what he once called his favorite surf spot. He won’t be calling it that anymore.
Another friend- a guy he respected, and mutually friendly the three of them were together, though they were rarely together- he got up and spoke at the funeral. Just a brief eulogy, about how he hadn’t shed a tear yet since they’d discovered him laying there on his living room floor, too young but his time came just the same. He hadn’t shed a tear, but now he couldn’t seem to stop them. He told how the guy had called him just a week before, and he’d told him that yeah- he just called to tell him that he really loved him and his family, and that’s all he really called to say- that their friendship meant a lot to him, and that life’s better, for him, because of it. Then he pushed his glasses up onto his head and wiped the tears from his eyes, and just said that he felt really lucky to have a friend like him at all. He looked at the sky and the sun filtering down through the Keawe trees and he just set the microphone down and walked to a seat and sat down, and that was all.
The time was past for this man to be making eulogies, and he’d never done it that day because he knew he’d never get through it without just breaking down and crying like a baby, and no one would be able to understand and they’d all shift in their seats uncomfortably and hope that he’d soon be done and take a seat. So he didn’t get up and speak, though it didn’t really bother him any. He’d already spoken to this dead friend, and he wa secure as to what they were to each other in life, and what they were to each other in death. Still it hurt a lot that he didn’t get a chance to say anything at all before it happened so suddenly, and he once again gets left alone to face life on his own.
He shifted hard into forth gear and put his foot into it, wiping a tear from his face as he reaches for his phone to call a friend just to say that he thinks about her. Just in case, he supposes.

Out on a Limb

2008-06-23T23:16:00.002-07:00

I went way out on a limb for you
and for a while it was the sweetest thing
you sitting out there with me, too.
I guess I can see
how dreaming that big could scare you
pretty soon I found myself
out there on that limb all alone.
It was a hell of a lot sweeter
out there holding hands with you
After you left I got a chance to look around
pretty soon I noticed it's a long way down.
Some of the hardest lessons in life
are the most painful.
All in all I'd have to guess
that just between you and I
Well- I'm the way better tree climber.

Six Years Later

2008-06-23T23:16:00.001-07:00

I still dream about you
when I wake up alone
I don't know whether to smile or cry.

Galahad

2008-06-23T23:15:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t help but notice you
From my vantage point here on earth
Aren’t you that guy in the pressed white shirt?
You work and work
You’re still a jerk
The more you try
The more you hurt
And every time you kick that football
She smiles and pulls it away.

See that creep with the little black book?
With the slicked back hair
And the greasy look
He smiles at her
She looks away
While you sleep he chips away
At your fairytale princess
Who takes your breath away.

Which one of you is daddy’s little queen?
You pretend that you can’t hear me
Nice guys in neckties
Stand outside and proselytize
Straight white teeth blonde hair blue eyes
While the wolves inside go for a ride
The party girls look for a mirror
Weak kneed and slightly smeared
Smooth out their dresses and fix their hair
You look confused but the wolves don’t care
They’re just here for the ride.

There’s something wrong
with your shining knight
You claim he loves you right
Yet verbally slaps you around
When he thinks you need it
I step away from my reflection in the glass
Thinking to myself how nice guys finish last
You spend the best years of your life
Learning the hardest lessons

Sick in the Head

2008-06-23T23:14:00.000-07:00

Sick in the head
Late bills
Slit wrist
Sleeping pills
I Don’t Like This Game
I
Don’t
Like
This
Game.
Dark places
In my head
I’m alive
I’m afraid to climb inside and hide.

Old Industrial

2008-06-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

Dingy gray, city- the pavement so worn it looks like it’s been sandblasted. Each stipple in the uneven surface casts a tiny shadow; wind-chop in bas-relief. Potholes and cracks with weeds taking root of the tiniest opportunity at what once was earth grab onto paper trash as it blows here and there trying to become air-born in dust-devils and fly free and clear of this place.
I run my hand across the sandpaper texture of the concrete leaving a gray mask of sand and concrete on my palm, brushing another layer of sand off of the deteriorating surface. Someday it will wear through and expose the earth below- long after we’re gone.
Gutters are the gathering place for the degenerates of the street- weeds and trash, cigarette butts and bottle-tops and chunks of the pavement that have broken free only to be trapped inches away and eventually crushed back to sand and cement by cars and trucks rumbling by on there way to a place where the future is clearer, closer at hand.
Through the smoke and dust, through the din and clatter of machines I walk, unscathed by the chaos, searching. Searching for a reason why- looking for answers only to find the strange looks from those who have given up and resigned themselves to unquestionable futures.
I’m digging for diamonds in a cesspool.

Down Here on the Floor

2008-06-23T23:08:00.001-07:00

Laying on the floor I can taste the dust and dirt
But I’m too wrecked to care enough
To get up and find someplace better
Click-click-click-click
The sound of heels approaching
I know without looking
And sigh
I can no longer muster the self-respect to care
Click-click-click-click
The heels stop a foot in front of my face
At angles to each other
Her weight shifting
from one foot to the other
“Why do you do this to yourself?”
There’s not a lot of sympathy in her tone
But I can’t really fault her for that
I really haven’t got a lot of sympathy for myself.
“You look like shit. What’s happened to you?
Where’s your self respect?”
I groan and roll to my side, wincing at the effort.
I sigh, looking up at her. She’s as beautiful as ever,
Beautiful and cruel.
“I think of it a lot like gestalt therapy, y’know?”
She’s looking down on me and I give her a crooked grin.
“I beat the crap out of myself as much as possible,
Just wreck myself until I can no longer feel
Can no longer tell right from wrong
Can no longer care
And then
And only then
I can pretend it was me that broke my heart.
I roll back over, taking my place face down on the floor.
I can hear her breath, can hear my own heart beat
I could hear a pin drop in angled mid morning sun
Click-click-click-click
I listen to her heels until I can’t hear her anymore.

Good Guys Wear Egg

2008-06-23T23:06:00.000-07:00

The guy who wants to love you forever
He’d lay in the mud and let you walk on his back
There’s one born every minute, I’m told
I really hope I die before I’m that fool again.
To you he lacks a certain attraction
The pleasing you and treating you nice
Doesn’t sit well with your self loathing
No matter how many times
You say you just want someone to love you
That you want someone who really listens
No matter how many times you claim
You just want someone who really cares
The guy who wants to
Fuck you and forget you
Wins out in the end.

He breaks your heart
Twenty times over
Leaves you full to the brim with guilt and remorse
Yet still you turn your back on mister right
After a smile and a swift kick in the crotch
And throw longing looks to the black knight once again.

Good guys finish last

Urban Struggle (part duex)

2008-06-23T23:05:00.000-07:00

You know I saw it on the internet
Some cat did the rat-ta-tat-tat
Or the “boom!” like that
Or the jump and splat
excessive
impressive
I thought, “hey I’m gonna do that!”
Every town needs one of those cats
Who does some thing drastic
A little bit spastic
To show the people what’s up
How wrong they are doing their this and buying their that
Boy when I get through
People are gonna think twice
Before they don’t think like me
They’re all sheep
And weak in the knees

For some people it’s a black and white world
Others see things only in primary colors
Today I’m seeing mustard gas
Static and white noise
Reptiles in the storm drain grates
Black helicopters circling overhead
Everything In my peripheral vision
Electric
Magnetic
Eclectic
Pathetic
I never make sense of much
I tear down whatever I touch
I wish I had a point
Why my nose is out of joint
Just what are my issues?
Better look in the back issues
Cause I’m just doing it like that first cat.

He Shaves his hair in a Mohawk
Like that one cat did before
He didn’t actually see the movie
But he has the sticker on his laptop.
puts three hand guns in his waistband
and asks, “You talkin’ to me?”
A sawed off shotgun in one pant leg
He says, “Say Hello to my little friend!”
He’s got a fully automatic weapon
and a mortar launcher under his camoflage jacket
Three hand grenades, some punji sticks and a bouncing betty
a gallon of gas and some waterproof matches
Some plastique and DYNOMITE!
Two stilettos and a blow-gun with poison darts.
Gee mack- now you’re a real man!

Looking casual he climbs aboard the 613 downtown express, taking a seat near the door.
He sends several text messages to his ex girlfriend
Saying, “See I told you I’d show them all!”
and “Free Tibet” and “Remember the Alamo!”
Too bad she’s had him blocked for the last year and a half.
He first was pathetic and second a pest
She’d told him he needed to give it a rest
And immediately deleted him from her friends list.

Tool and Toil.

2008-06-23T23:04:00.002-07:00

Cold in the morning
Water drips from the exhaust
A faded blue gray truck with chipped paint
And a cracked mirror
Idles at the curb
City logo on the side
Steam rises off of cups of coffee
Tough skin hands cupped to mouths
As they stamp their feet and climb into the truck
Two men
Grunt their salutation
A little thick from last night’s beer
Three years and change
One more day of the same
They drive the first mile in silence
Rakes and shovels clatter on a rack behind the cab
Radio chatter drowned out by the roar of the diesel
First stop city park
“Watch the game last night?”
“Just the highlights.”
“Raiders really kicked some ass.”
“Bout fuckin’ time.”
Moving along, not fast, not slow
Moderation is the key
When you know this will repeat itself
Five days a week
Day after day
As long as you can stand it
Pace yourself and the monotony reveals a rhythm
The path of least resistance
You’re a tree- a shrub
A part of the scenery
Just another piece of furniture
In a big fucking house.
The day crawls on, stop and drive
Bouts of silence and small talk about sports and cars
and the old lady’s bullshit
punctuated by cups of coffee and cigarettes
Ten o’clock break
And a forty-five minute lunch
stops and walks
a little sweeping
and a little shoveling
Hosing down restrooms
Washing away cigarette butts and candy wrappers
Needles and used condoms
Neatly packaged by rubber-gloved hands
Into bags of rubbish tossed in the back
piling up one upon the next
a visual history of the past
the sum of our accomplishments for the day
Two forty five
“Let’s call it a day.”
“I could use me a beer.”
Time to head back to the shop
One last stop
A head nod at an indistinguishable lump
A rolled up, beat up mess of blood and fur
Half on the road and half off
“Kitty-kitty-kitty…” and half a chuckle
It’s a tired voice that plays at whimsy
In lieu of shedding a tear
The cat is twisted
Contorted
Forelegs point North
Hind legs West and South
Head looking back
Sharp teeth frozen in a perpetual sneer
One eye on the pavement
The other bulging and leering
Generally unimpressed.
With one deft swipe of the snow-shovel
The entire package is handled
With ruthless efficiency
An economy of motion
Into the truck with the rest of the rubbish
Door slams, engine fires.
“Curiosity killed the cat.”

Cotton

2008-06-23T23:04:00.001-07:00

Cotton-mouth
Head thick from alcohol
Sweating out scotch whiskey
Risk of spontaneous combustion
Why do I do it?
It’s the way I’m wired
Some people can drink, some can’t
When I drink, I drink it all
Has a lot to do with bad genetics
Irish and Scottish, Scottish and Irish
I come from a long line of drunks
Lost a lot of family
Who I never did meet
They told me it was complications arising from alcohol
One grandpa got drunk and fell out a third floor window
The other shot to death by his second wife
While climbing in the bedroom window
Five to the chest and one to the head
That second wife was thorough
And a goddamned good shot
Both resided in that dark morass
Blackout halitosis, one bottle to the next
I never had the good fortune to meet them
Yet I feel like I know them
Every time I look in the mirror.
I got myself straight a couple times
Life was pleasant enough
there’s nothing like mornings without hangovers
Those are nearly as good as the first two drinks of the day
I spend my life chasing one or the other
Splitting my days evenly
Between trying to get drunk
and trying to get sober
But eventually the devil in me
Talks me back into the game
It doesn’t take much to lead an alcoholic to alcohol
It’s a tricky bit of work, the disease is deceptive
It’s the one ailment that convinces you that you haven’t got it
Misery loves company- or in this case, misery loves misery.
Miserable is as miserable does- and sometimes worse
I met some people around
Who could decorate a Christmas tree with one-month-chips
They’ve made falling off the wagon an Olympic event.
Refined it to an art
All you need is to show the proscribed amount of guilt and shame
Feign contrition and you’re off Scott free
That’s a program
where you can get drunk for the rest of your life.
Me, I take my medicine standing up, facing forward.
I may be a son of a bitch but at least I’m defiant
No one catches me feeling sorry for myself
And I’m not real good at bunnies and kittens,
mincing words and faking smiles.
Regrets? I’ve had more than a few.
I could swim in an ocean of self-doubt and misgivings
I travel on the passport of a legitimate broken heart
I wear my sorrow pinned to my shirt
But really- I’ve been handed a relatively charmed life.
Aside from a few potholes
It’s been a pretty smooth road.
Has anyone ever drowned in their tears?
No- the monotony of life is what gets me every time.

Down at the Lithium Bar

2008-06-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

I’m standing at the lithium bar broadcasting black thoughts, carving a gun from a bar of isotope soap, contemplating something desperate while absentmindedly scraping my skull plate with a slab of broken stone. Dark thoughts, black thoughts- deep, hurtful thoughts that would make the most hopeless cynic cringe and shield his eyes. It’s really futile, given the neighborhood demographics- there's more clueless dipshits in this city than there are warts on a whore's ass- but even so I’m hoping to finish my drink in peace without a lot of pedestrian rhetoric about insipid bullshit that no one really cares about anyhow.
Needless to say every asshole within a hundred mile radius risks cracking their collagen injected maw to give me a shit eating grin as they touch the seat next to me with their professionally manicured nails and ask, “Is this seat taken?”
Thankfully my poor upbringing kicks in (I’m fluent in cro-magnon and picked up a minor in back-alley hooligan at Matilda the Hun’s School for Bad Acting and Rugby Sideline Epithets) and I grunt my reply and cover my mouth, attempting to repel the urge to cough up wicked comments (a lot like large caliber shells aimed directly at the land of my upbringing) about complicated facial hair and watches with flames on them, the amount of metal in your girlfriend’s face and whether you by some odd chance happen to have an incredibly strong electromagnet nearby?
The next time it’s a bimbo with fake tits and synthetic yak wool robes wafting off enough patchouli to choke Ravi Chancre- dreadlocks that make even that dip-shit from Korn wince- and she's hiding the keys to an SUV that burns authentic fossil fuel brought in on the blood of a thousand pilgrim slaves.
Three minutes later it’s an eleven year old baby faced kid in a corduroy hat (properly monogrammed in Muave with the latest corporate logo) set the proscribed 13.03657 left of center, seven pounds of gold on the roll, pants precisely 2.379201 sizes too large and a basketball jersey printed with the signature of the last remaining professional basketball player who didn’t get blackballed for drugs, dog-fighting, RICO violations or illicit activities with a minor. “What up, yo?” HE sits down next to me and flags down the bartender. “White Russian and a gerber shot, yo.” He glances sideways and makes no pretense at sizing me up, smirking and nodding his head as the bartender places a white Russian in a Paul Frank sippy-cup before him and sets the gerber shot down with thinly veiled disdain. He nods towards me and laughs, apparently unimpressed. Picking up the gerber shot he toasts some nubiles across the bar and says, “Later-YO! Enough uh’me for all-yall!”
The girls across the way giggle as I give Danny the standard finger for one more drink. Danny laughs a bit and shrugs, turning his back to me for a moment and then setting a pint in front of me next to a large shot of straight strychnine in a water glass. “Shot’s on the house, Lifehater. Fuel for the fire, eh?”
I glance sideways at baby-spice next to me for a half a click and then smile up at Danny, pick up the shot and toast him. “Thanks, Danny- it’s just what the doctor ordered.”
Danny laughs deep from his belly and wipes the counter in front of me. “Yeah- Doctor Kevorkian."
I give him a quick wink and toss off the whiskey, setting it lightly on the bar in front of me as I wipe my mouth with my forearm. I inadvertantly elbow the proposed rap-star next to me andand notice him again for the first time, laughing, “Hey little girl- what’re you doing later tonight?”
He sputters something unintelligible at the comment and spits as I reach over and tip his drink into his lap. As he jumps up I hook his left foot with my right leg and jerk him off balance, slamming his face into a bowl of toothpicks sitting on the bar in front of him.
I give my best menacing leer to the ladies across the way and toss off his knit hat to grab a handful of hair, holding his head up so that they can see puff baby, eyes rolled back in his head with twenty-odd toothpicks sticking out of his face at odd angles. “Porcupine!” I can’t help but laugh. Life’s like this. Fuck ‘em all anyhow- it’s all just a lark and a good time- nothing serious that wont heal in a couple weeks.
I toss off the rest of my beer and place two twenties on the bar next to my empty glass. “Thanks Danny- I think I’d better head on home and get to bed. There’s some bad characters come in here late and I’m getting a bit tired.
Danny laughs and hands me a pint for the road. He gives me a grin and a wave and I wave back. We’re two of a kind- obsolete, outdated- and the town we grew up in grew up around us and now that the music stopped there just doesn’t seem to be too many places for guys like Danny and I. I look back once as I exit the pub and Danny has Baby Spice by the waistband of his pants and his hair. Danny catches me looking back and laughs, "Taking out the trash!" We both laugh and I turn the corner out of sight. Good enough explanation for me.
I whistle a familiar tune as I walk home, and I laugh to myself as I lean a little hard into the groups of tough kids on the street corners as I make my way. They talk a hard line but they give way. They must be smarter than they look. God knows they'd have to be.

Hele Mai Laundromat

2008-06-23T23:00:00.000-07:00

What I’m describing here is a life of a man that keeps people at arms length. It’s a lonely life, and the man would like nothing more than to have some companionship- someone to hold and to laugh with, someone to share his life with. But the few times he opened himself up and let someone have any part of himself he was left heartbroken, and so he is very careful about who he allows into his life, and just how much he allows them to have of himself. He tries to make inroads to friendships and romance and love affairs, but for every baby step forward there’s a hitch or a hiccup that sends him back into his circle of comfort.

The Hele Mai Laundromat is totally beige. Beige washers and dryers, beige walls, a beige ceiling and a beige floor- even the stucco outside is a neutral tan, dirty and soot stained, even the graffiti scrawled into the grimy surface of the building lends a little contrast, if not color. The overhead lights cast a flickering strobe on the dingy scene through the spinning blades of ceiling fans, making any movement seem surreal and halting. Instead of a storefront there’s just a roll up door that is pulled up in the morning by the staff, leaving the entire front of the building open. Serveral low tables in front are occupied by young women folding their already dried laundry, and they laugh and tease, holding up different articles of clothing and inspecting them.
There’s one lone haole man in the midst of a dozen or so Filipino ladies. He reads a book, leaning against the washers, as the ladies wash and dry and fold, chattering amongst themselves in their singsong dialect. He is smiling slightly at the scene, he a part of it. To them he doesn’t exist, and they ignore him and work around him as if he were a piece of furniture. One of the older women gives him a nod and laughs out a string of words totally unintelligible to him, and the rest of the women laugh out loud and steal glances at him. He just smiles, a good sport- knowing that it’s surely in fun, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because he can’t understand it anyhow.
The Men stand around outside, occasionally beckoned inside to move a particularly heavy load of laundry, even though most of them look thinner and more frail than the women. Then they’ll return outside, leaning against the columns that support the roof, smoking stale cigarettes and speaking to one another in low tones. The security guard for the building sits near them reading the local paper. He’s huge, possibly Hawaiian or Samoan, and fills out his cheap blue and white uniform comically, spilling out of it at the waistband, arms like tree trunks growing from the sleeves. Occasionally he looks up at a passing car or an approaching pedestrian, but otherwise he’s totally absorbed with his paper and ignores most everything equally.
The Haole is in jeans and flip-flops, a button up shirt that fits a little loose in the shoulders and sleeves. He looks down at the washer in front of him, then back at the book he’s reading. He finishes up the page, dog-ears it and sets the book down in a laundry basket on the floor. Opening the washer, he takes his laundry out and carries it a few feet to an open dryer and places it inside. He makes three trips from the washer to the dryer, until the entire contents has been transferred, and then fishes in his pants pocket for some change. The deep rumble of the dryer seems to arrive out of nowhere as soon as he slugs the coins in with the mechanism.
“Ka-chunk……Whhrrrrrr….”
With that done he looks at his watch and up at the clock on the wall, mentally noting the 30 minute mark when the laundry should be dry, and he walks outside. The Filipino women glance at his back as he exits the building, the men barely note his presence at all until he’s well past, and then they murmer to each other, nodding towards his retreating back..

Pushing through the glass door of the used bookstore he knows exactly what he’s looking for. He wants a copy of Frank MacCourt’s “Angelas Ashes” in hardcover, and also one of De Berniers “Corelli’s Mandolin”. He scours the shelves and right away finds the MacCourt, but takes a little more time and care in finding the second choice. Eventually he finds it and pays the price written neatly in pencil on the inside of the book jacket, and then he returns to his watchful vigil amongst the other laundry patrons.

A group of Hawaiian girls fold clothes and tease each other in a clumsy pidgen that they’ve adopted as their language. They smoke cigarettes and wear big gold hoop ear rings, and when a lowered 81 Tercel pulls up with it’s bass speakers thumping out a monotonous rythem, one of the girls jumps up and opens the passenger door, climbing her large frame into the small car. The driver beeps the horn twice and inches carefully over the speed-bump directly in front of the laundromat. “Bye, Honey-Girl!” sings three of the Hawaiian girls, and the girl in the car looks back and smiles, waving as the car chirps it’s tires and speeds off into the evening dusk.

Now he stands in front of a counter, chopping chives and onions and garlic and bell pepper, dicing them finely and pushing them off the edge of the cutting board onto a plate. Now he reaches up for a wine glass and sets it on the counter before him. He reaches down and takes a bottle of merlot from a cabinet below. Now he pours himself a glass of the Merlot, then pours a splash into the wok before him. Taking a sip of the wine he picks up a small carafe of sesame oil and pours a splash of that into the wok with the wine. Then he takes the plate and pushes the neat piles of diced vegetables directly into the fray. The resulting steam and simmering makes him shy away a bit, and he stirs it quickly to spread the oil around evenly and then places the big steel lid on the wok.
He stands in his kitchen in front of the Wok, stirring at some vegetables cooking in sesame oil and red wine. Jack Johnson plays on a radio next to the espresso machine. He sips at a glass of Cabernet Savinon, stirs at the vegetables a bit more and then lays in a pink slab of marlin with a flash of steam, pushes the vegetables up around the fish and covers it again.
Alone, he really can’t appreciate how he lives, the quality of life that he demands of himself. He knows it’s there but it has no value, no measurement- there’s really no quantifying it without seeing someone he loves laugh and smile. At least for him, that’s the way it is. It really has no meaning without anyone to share it with. He smiles to himself, a subtle smile that anyone standing ten feet away would hardly notice. He smiles at the thought of having someone to share it with, and wonders when he will finally come around to that.

He sits on the seawall below his house, and he gazes towards the horizon without focusing on any one point, but just taking in the broad spectrum of colors and sounds and smells. The ocean draws him in, and he always comes back to her. The ocean is where his beginnings lay, and where his end will most certainly be. He watches the waves as they break across the shallow reef, and eventually he sees what he was looking for, and he takes up his board and picks his way gingerly through the rocks to the shore below him. The ocean sweeps in and engulfs him, and as it sweeps back out he paddles out with it, using it’s momentum to propel him towards the outside break.

Donna Rowe was as beautiful as anyone he’d ever seen. She was funny and smart and made him feel like a young man again (though he wasn’t really old), all butterflies and not knowing what to say or how to be- just a mess when she looked him in the eyes and smiled, that’s how gorgeous he found her. He met her one morning at the gym. The first time he saw her he was too self conscious to speak to her and then he mentally kicked himself the rest of the day because of that. After that, for a few weeks he didn’t see her, and he began to wonder about her, and hoped she’d come around but she didn’t, and the memory began to fade.
One day not long after that he saw her again though, and he forced himself to talk to her, and he asked her if maybe she’d like to go out one evening, for dinner or something. She paused a moment, thinking- and his heart sank at the prospect- but then she smiled that beautiful smile of hers and told him that yeah, she might like that. For him that “yes” coming from her sounded like music, like chimes- harps and bells. He gave her his number, because he didn’t want to ask her for hers as it seemed a little out of line. He could hardly pay attention to the rest of the conversation, and barely remembered telling her the days he came to the gym when she asked. They talked a little longer, and then he said that he had to get to work and she went on with her workout.
All of that day he was distracted by thoughts of her, and he hoped the phone would ring but it didn’t. The next day too, and he thought that maybe she was just being polite, and really he was being a bit of a bother.
The next time he was at the gym though, he kept an eye out for her throughout his workout, and he’d about given up and figured that she’d asked him which days he worked out so that she could attend the opposite days. But finally, just as he had given up and was going to head home, she walked in, gave him a quick glance and headed to another part of the gym. He finished up what he was doing and decided that he’d better go talk to her before he left for work, or he never would. He just had a great feeling within his heart that he should apply himself in this particular instance, or he’d possibly live with regret forever. So he headed back to find her, looking in another room but she wasn’t there, and for a moment he feared that she’d seen him there and slipped out a side door. Then he spotted her alone in a room with padded mats on the floor and mirrors on the walls, and when he entered the room she turned and smiled a gorgeous smile and he knew in an instant that her smile was sincere, and it truly just warmed his heart that she’d turn that kind of sincerity upon him even for a moment. He sat on the floor next to where she was exercising and they talked for a while, maybe twenty minutes or so. Then she said “Well, I guess I’d better go work out.” And he just wasn’t ready to stop at all and said “Let’s go out for coffee instead?” and she thought for a moment and then said “OK. I could do that.”
They went for coffee around the corner, and talked for an hour or so, and when it was time to go he truly didn’t want it to end, and he asked her if they could go out for dinner. She gave him her number and they set a date for the next Friday, and he was distracted all week, thoughts of her and worries of if he was too this or too that. In the end though, everything was OK and natural and perfect, and he didn’t need to worry because she let him know what she wanted and all he had to do was be himself, and that seemed to be enough.
They ate dinner and talked, and then went to his house and had a glass of wine and talked more. They walked to the beach and held hands a little, and he loved that she let him hold her hand, because that’s the kind of guy he is, that loves those little mundane things that really are such big important things. They sat on the beach and talked, and when they stopped talking they kissed. Then they talked some more, and kissed some more, and for the first time in a very long time he was happy, for just a moment perhaps at home, wrapped together she and he in each others arms. In his mind he kind of knew that he’d waited 36 years to feel the way he was feeling, and though he took a long time getting there he knew it was worth the wait. They walked hand in hand back to his place, and then sat on the sofa and talked a little more, and kissed a bit more, and he had no idea how it had started or where it was supposed to stop, but she let him know what she wanted, and when she said “Well, I think you’d better take me home.” He was a little sad, but a little relieved. He was sad that such a perfect night had to be over, but relieved that she’d tell him what it was that she wanted, for in some ways everything just took it’s natural course, but still he was afraid he’d offend her. They kissed a bit more, and then he stood and took her hands, and pulled her up to him. They wandered to his car, and kissed a bit more, and then drove to her house, and he truly didn’t want her to go but off she went, leaving him with a really sweet memory, walking on clouds.

The cow pastures above the Hamakua Coast are beautiful, lush and green and rolling perfectly until they run into dense eucalyptus forest or run off the cliffs above the ocean. He’d quit work early and sped across town to pick her up ay her place, smiling and laughing, spring sun making her skin and hair look even more beautiful than he had thought possible, and he smiles to himself, for the hundreth time marveling at his luck to have such a gorgeous girl be interested in him.
They speed along down the winding highway, she resting her head against his shoulder, half asleep- he with one arm on the wheel and his other arm around her, his hand gently rubbing her back.
“It’s beautiful up here.” He murmers softly, half to himself since she’s nearly asleep. She stirs, still resting against his shoulder.
Her eyes open. “You should have brought your cameras.”
He smiles again. “Didn’t really want to bring them.” He leans over a bit, trying to keep an eye on the road as he kisses her on the top of the head. He straightens back up and continues. “If I was carrying my cameras I maybe couldn’t be holding your hand. So I left them at home this time.”
She smiles and shuts her eyes again, dreaming a sweet dream and being happy living in the moment, just exactly the way things are.

At Laupahoehoe they stopped to stretch their legs. Walking hand in hand around the park, they pass some Filipino fishermen standing around a skiff and mending nets, their talk sounding like chatter from a distance.
“I wonder what they’re saying.” She daydreams a little, sometimes, herself.
He squeezes her hand a little and pulls her around so that they’re facing each other, and he wraps his arms around her and pulls her close against him, smelling the clean smell of soap and gardenias. “They’re saying look at that one haole guy over there- how’d he ever get a girl as beautiful as her.”
She squeezes him tight, her arms around his waist. Her face is laying against his chest, and there’s a moment when they both know that they are one, two halves of a whole, and warm and complete as they soak up each others affection. She pulls her head back to look up at his face, and they kiss, a long sweet kiss and then hold each other a little longer before walking on again, hand in hand.

The day that Donna Rowe dumped him he got really, really drunk. That doesn’t mean just tipsy and careless- that pretty much means stinking rotten drunk, like an Irishman that knows he isn’t drunk until the moment he breaks into tears or breaks a window, and sometimes both- and always finishes with how much he loves his mates. He walked down to the beach down trodden with a lager in each pocket, and sat on the rocks and watched the ebb and flow of the tide, drinking the beers one by one until all he had left was empty bottles and sorrow. He cried a little- just some tears at the corners of his eyes, and some long sighs- and then he held his head in his hands. After a time this became redundant, and so he shuffled down the beach with his head hung low, skirting the Kahaluu Heiau (Polynesian temple)and the Catholic church, and when he got to the other side of the bay he sat some more, head in hands and choked back the tears.
It wasn’t that he was all that attached to Donna- any girl would do, really- within reason. He just was sad because he was lonely, and was hoping maybe she’d be the one that’d stick with him for a while, and sit on the floor in the sun and let him tell her nice things about how beautiful she was, and then they’d lean against each other, heads touching, and they’d fall asleep or make love, whichever came first.
He sat at the beach at Kahaluu until he couldn’t bear the loneliness any longer, and then he shuffled off towards home. He knew he couldn’t stare at the four walls of his flat all night, as that was a picture he just couldn’t bear at the moment- so he swapped my flip-flops for tennis shoes and drove downtown to Lu-Lu’s and had a beer there. Then he hit the brew pub and had a pint there- then back to Lu-Lu’s to have another and a couple rounds of ice waters to cut the edge for the drive home. Lu-Lu’s was depressing, as it was full of tourists and wannabe toughs, and the former were embarrassing and totally unimpressive and he was slightly afraid he may break the latter’s arms and get thrown in the clink, and so headed home to bury his face in his pillow and hope tomorrow would come and go as quickly as possible.
On the ride home he saw Donna’s car outside of her work, and (being the romantic Irish boy that he always will be) he wrote her a note apologizing for any undue slight he may have put upon her, and told her “no hard feelings- I can be tough to take, a real handful- and it takes a certain girl to understand me.” Anyhow- he doubts she ever understood it but he tried just the same, and that’s what counts.
He awoke to the pounding of his temples at 4 am and had to give his sensibilities a severe reprimand. “You’re surely not going to the gym and work out, you idiot- so why don’t you go back to sleep like someone who’s half sane would do?!” He rolled over and dozed until 6 am, and faced the day with less than vigorous enthusiasm.
Plodding through the day like some lame mule, tired and pickled- at the day’s end he headed to a girlfriend’s house, and she told him that he’d be OK and she still liked him just fine the way he is, and if she ever lost that boy of hers she and he would most certainly have to go out once or twice, and give it a whirl. They talked for two hours or more, and at the end she asked him to come out to Pine Trees to watch the sunset with her tomorrow night. Just as friends, but a boy takes what he can get where he can get it, and he just might believe she may have plans of her own that she doesn’t tell anyone at all.

“The laundromat sucks big, I don't think anyone belongs in the laundromat, it's just a total waste of time, because you can't do anything in between but wait for your clothes. You can read and stuff, but in the back
of your mind you know you're just waiting for your
clothes.” Something a beautiful girl I fell head over heels in love with once told me, on the subject of my visits to the Laundromat.

So he makes his dinner, and he does the dishes. Doesn’t want to sit there staring at the walls, and the hamper’s full- so he heads to the Laundromat and dumps in the laundry, punches in quarters, pours in soap, and walks over to the pub for a pint. He sits and reads the paper alone, only one other patron at the bar at all. He watches the waitresses with one eye and the time with another, and when 45 minutes has elapsed he heads back to throw the laundry into the dryer. The rest of the patrons stand impatiently waiting for their laundry to wash, or dry. He doesn’t envy them, and after he’s back at the bar and has ordered another pint, he mentally toasts them that are standing in the humididity waiting for their laundry. He decides to not bother the waitresses and instead heads home after two pints. There’s one waitress that he believes he stands a chance with, but oh well. Next time maybe, god willing.
He drives towards home, two full laundry baskets occupying his passenger seat. At the last minute he pulls into a parking lot behind another pub, and heads inside for one last pint. He orders a pint and an ice water, and drinks the ice water, using the last pint just to secure his place at the bar.
Pete the barman walks over and asks……what does he ask? How’s it going Toby? How’s life treating you? Can I get you something? What the fuck does Pete the barman ask? Hear the one about Rodeo sex? You’re doing it from behind, and then right before you bust a nut you lean forward and whisper “This is exactly how your sister liked it.” And see if you can stay on for 8.5 seconds. Bwahahahaha! What the fuck does Pete the bar man ask?

“Laundry night again, eh?” Pete sets a pint of Harp in front of me and places both hands on the counter a shoulders width apart.
“Yeah- if it weren’t for my (Parole officer? Divorce attorney? Proctologist? If it weren’t for who god-damn-it?!!?) I’d have no social life at all.”

It’s difficult, being alone all of the time. It gets pretty…..lonely. I could go out and meet any number of girls, but just a warm body isn’t really what I need. I need someone who I can hold hands with, who I can sit back to back with on a Sunday afternoon and we can read books together. Someone I can fall asleep against, and someone who will let me tell her nice things like how beautiful I find her, and how much I like her, and that she’s really important to me. Someone I can send flowers to, just because it makes me happy to see her smile. Someone who can hold hands and window shop. Someone who would lean gainst me and watch the sun set, and we sit still long after the sun is gone, juyst because it would spoil it to break the silence.I guess I just want someone that I can share everything I have to offer with.
It takes a certain kind of girl to have that kind of relationship. Some girls want to be wild and party and have exciting times, but the most exciting times sometimes are spent just laying in the sun in a grassy field somewhere and listening to the wind. For me it’s who you’re with that makes it exciting, and how much you care for them- not what you’re doing really at all.

Coming Up For Air

2008-06-23T22:59:00.000-07:00

To say they met at work would be such a cliché. They met a hundred lifetimes ago and knew each other over and over again, without ever so much as seeing one another. They were together for weeks and months and years, through war and peace, through generations of tears and scars, yet only now after years of searching did they finally stand gazing into each other’s eyes, face to face and shoulder to shoulder, palms touching, absorbing each other and soaking up the warmth like two hungry animals that can’t talk or communicate but can only soak up the feelings that radiate from others.
Yet really, they met at work. He was replacing a window downstairs, oblivious of what was about to happen. She walks out on her porch to head off to work, glasses pushed up onto her forehead so that she can see to lock her door. Her heels click as she makes her way carefully down the stairs. She holds herself with a grace and dignity and style that tells him to shut up and watch, that he wont get another chance at this, that he wont see this twice. He watches as she walks by, dumbfounded, silent, as he doesn’t know what to say to this overwhelming beauty. He quickly thinks to head her way on some fictitious mission in order that he should get a chance to say hello or good morning or just to stand closer to her and bask in her radiance. He gets two steps before running into a door laying flat and unseen at head height, cutting his forehead and bringing him back to the reality of the situation. Blood dripping down his face he turns his head downward, awkward in his clumsiness, and he waits for this siren to drive off before he walks over to his truck to get a rag and staunch the flow of blood, silent, cursing himself for being such a boy when she so obviously would demand a man.

Every day he left for work a little early, relentless in the quest to see her and speak to her, and every day he’d clam up in the presence of such radiant beauty. Again and again she’d walk by, a small smile at the corners of her mouth, and all he’d be able to muster is a quick “Good morning” or a concise “hello” and she’d reply clearly yet softly, and he’d bask in that modest attention for the remainder of the day when what he really wanted to do was burst at the seams and tell her everything he ever knew and share the world with her, what little he had to share. Instead he’d watch silently as she’d climb into her car and head off into the morning, the sun paling in her presence as she drove away.
And so came the day when he was finished with his work, and still he had yet to utter more than a simple hello and in his head he could only imagine that she hardly notices him, the hired help, and that she has such better prospects wherever it is that she goes every day, she being in his eyes the most graceful and perfect feminine beauty that he ever set eyes upon. And so he decides to take action, and he decides to leave a small bit of work for tomorrow, totally out of character for he who dislikes loose ends and unfinished business. He leaves that small bit of work and loads up his truck early and goes to lunch very near where she works, in the restaurant connected in a roundabout way to her office. He eats lunch alone, his only company the two waitresses that appraise him from afar and make small talk, pumping him for information about who he is and what is his business. In time he gives in and asks about her, and their eyes light up at the mention of her name and they offer to help him make his way into her office. He declines, preferring an accidental meeting to something as clumsy as him standing like a deer in the headlights, alone on the carpet in front of her desk, fumbling for words and possibly making a fool of himself. He leaves the property at a bit of a loss, hopeful that the two waitresses will at least tell her that someone was there looking for her. Girls being girls, of course they did, and she undoubtedly put two and two together and wondered who or perhaps why.

The David Bruce Pinot Noir was perhaps one of the better buys that he’d ever made- a bargain at any price really, given the rewards he’d reaped thus far. That’s not to say that there weren’t other equally fruitful wines- the EdMeads Anderson valley (a California zinfandel of the sweetest variety, squeezed with care from late season grapes) comes immediately to mind but at $27.00 a pop it doesn’t exactly race to the forefront of the list of bargains. The Zilliken Riesling also comes to mind as a great wine for driving at less than 8% alcohol content, but while it’s got a great taste and fantastic body, Riesling seems to be kind of the Bubble Yum of viticulture.
No- when he weighed in all of the factors he had to admit to himself that the David Bruce Pinot Noir had time and again stood by him and gotten the job done with all of the subtlety and grace and joy de vivre that let him time and again get away with crimes frowned upon in even the roughest most callous circles. The David Bruce Pinot Noir was without a doubt the ultimate rapier and the one tool that stands on its own far ahead of the rest in the delicate game of the serial heartbreaker.

He stands in his kitchen with the bottle open before him. He stares across the countertop, across the dining room beyond at his own reflection staring back at him from the wall length mirror that backs the bakers rack/wet bar that stands against the dining room wall. From his critical gaze he sees that he’s beginning to weather around the edges like an old photograph- not enough for his date du jour to notice but just a wrinkle here and a little less glint from the blue of his typically Scotch-Irish eyes. As each day passes it becomes more and more of a challenge to keep himself in top physical shape. He was blessed at birth with a young face and a carefree demeanor that he’s carried with him throughout the years despite the hardships he’s had to overcome and the weariness he’s had to shoulder and carry and get past like an albatross around his neck. He carries within him the scars of a thousand battles though he’s never seen a war. With the heart of a lion he faced certain death and prevailed, only to be brought to his knees by the most delicate flower that ever sprouted from the earth, and with a wink and a laugh she crushed him beneath her heel and discarded him like so much rubbish.
For a time he thought he would die. The pain was overwhelming and the loss unbearable. He’d lost many friends before, close mates that he grew up with from the time they could barely walk- yet this new loss made the old ones pale in comparison. He was bleak and dark and devastated, and he nearly took his own life a dozen times or more, only to catch himself at the brink of defeat and talk himself down and remind himself that someday he may just look back on this and laugh. He exhales a short bark of a laugh without ever taking his eyes from his image in the mirror, thinking wistfully that it hasn’t been a funny kind of laugh at all, but just that rye, sarcastic laugh of a man that has faced death and prevailed only to find out that there are no winners in some games- no right answers- no prize but to go on absorbing the hurt and trying to keep a good attitude about it. Not bloody likely but he always was game for a challenge.

And so now he stands here looking into his own eyes and wondering at his own motives and he can’t really think about it too much because the alternative is lonely and sad and he doesn’t think any more of that could ever be beneficial to anyone. He can’t dwell on it too much because he doesn’t have much of a choice- she’s gone- finished with him- apparently lost interest and moved on to greener pastures (or maybe just newer, fresher- maybe even younger- pastures). He can’t think too much about it because it’s out of his hands- he’s resigned himself to that fact and tried to make the best of things. Thus far he’s drawn no conclusion about the results and is ever skeptical.
The sound of a flushing toilet breaks him out of his bleak, dark reverie and he puts on a game face as a slim blonde exits the bathroom and makes her way to the futon in the living room with the hesitant gait of one who has had too many drinks for good judgment, which is a big reason why she’s here with him now. She plops down on the futon with a giggle, her black mini skirt hiked up a bit from the fall showing pink panties and long legs. Her blonde hair falls across her face and he finds her terribly endearing as she makes futile attempts to blow at it to get it out of her line of vision. A smile on his face he tips the bottle before him and pours two glasses of wine hardly even looking at either the glass or the bottle, as if he were born to do this. He doesn’t believe he was, but one does what one can to retain ones sanity and survive.

“Serial Monogamist” He laughed when he heard that term get used for the first time a while back. He doesn’t laugh even a little about it anymore. A long line of beautiful women and a string of broken hearts later and he laughs even less- hardly at all these days, except when he barks his shin or bumps his head, hits his thumb with a hammer.
There were a lot of women that he tried really hard with- he bought them flowers and took them to dinner, weekends away and breakfasts in bed. At first it was innocent- just looking for the right one, the one that fit, yin to his yang, the other part of his puzzle. One after another they fell by the wayside, and though he tried to let them down gently he soon realized that this was futile- that there is no way to gently crush something as fragile as a heart. There were times when he vowed himself to celibacy- he swore that he would be alone forever rather than go through the charade again- but each time loneliness would prevail in the end, and he’d find himself going through the same motions and enacting the same routine that worked again and again.
Soon he began to see himself as something of a big game hunter- maybe even a predator- stalking and taking his game again and again. They’d become close almost as soon as it started. He had a knack for that- a certain familiarity that makes women comfortable- and very soon they’d be uncommonly close. Each time without fail she would initiate the affection. She’d deny it- say “I never do this on the first date” or “I’m not really looking for someone” but without fail again and again they’d say the one thing and at the same time do the opposite. Soon he comes to believe that this is just the contrary nature of all women, yet in his heart he knows better. Again and again they tell him that they’ve fallen hopelessly in love with him, and again and again he lets them- he encourages them- he thrives on that beautiful warmth that flows so easily between two people hopelessly in love. They hold hands and kiss and talk softly of plans for a life- plans that he’d love to realize, yet he knows that no matter how much he longs for them they are just pipe dreams. The pain in his heart always comes first, despite how things seem at any given moment the dream dulls the pain and glosses it over, but in the end without fail the heartache rears its ugly head and prevails. And so it always ends nearly as quickly as it begins. The only difference is that it begins with soft talk and light touches, yet it ends with soft sobbing and his head in his hands, a safe distance between them as he tries to draw himself farther and farther away all the while convincing them that they can be friends and that it just isn’t right- cant she see that it just isn’t right? They rarely see, even when they say that they do see- and in the end in his own eyes he is just an ogre against his long line of broken-hearted maidens. In the end, the reality of whether or not they loved or hated him became inconsequential- in the reality of his heart he began to loathe himself.

His memories are in black and white. Fuzzy, Hazy recollections like an old television. Sometimes his childhood flickers across the screen, other times his teen years roll vertically as if the antenna is swinging back and forth, possibly torn lose by those hazy, gusty Santa Ana winds that blow perpetually off the barren desert that is his soul. A fight with an old girlfriend rolls past diagonally, stretched and distorted, and he wishes he could adjust his perception or just turn it all off. He wishes the wind would finally tear the antenna lose from whatever holds it, violently breaking it free and throwing it. He’s certain it would tumble end over end for a very long ways, much farther than he can actually envision in his mind. He pictures it spinning down into a cavernous darkness; disappearing- swallowed by space- splashing minimally as it breaks the surface of a black ocean and slowly recedes to its depths.
With the antenna gone he would be free of his past, of the twisted paradigm experience has left him. He’d be free of the seedy, gritty memories of a youth hardened beyond his years- memories of let downs and disappointments. They’re hot sticky memories of a romantic kid trying to survive his childhood- to survive his parents and his teachers and all of the ideologies thrust at him from every authority figure he came into contact with. He can vaguely remember himself as a boy- like someone he met only briefly a very long time ago. He’s a little bit cynical at the thought, just the slightest memory of a shadow of that kid trying so hard to be brave and face the future yet struggling to prevail with some semblance of honor- to survive with some tiny bit of innocence or naiveté in tact. Needless to say those were some of the first things to die within him- or at least he buried them so deep within his hardened heart that no one could ever get at them, himself included. At one point he’d decided that he had to bury those things or kill them, that in the world he lived in those were truly his Achilles heel, and the vultures and wolves were going to grab those weaknesses between their teeth and drag him down, shake him, finish him off. In his world on the level he was dealing at innocence is nothing but a weakness, naiveté a liability.
He watches those memories with some reluctance, able to accept his past but really unwilling to live it again. He wishes again that he could turn it off, get it over with, to somehow make it stop. Sometimes he believes that it’s better to be with anyone- even someone he really can’t stand- rather than to be left alone with his thoughts.

He knew a guy once- when he was just a teen- the guy used to say that he could see the future. He said that he could read the oil stains on the pavement like you and I read a book. Interpretation- reading- like dream interpretation, throwing the bones, palm reading, Tarot- like daydreamers read the spring clouds in the sky- to him it was all the same. He used to say that whenever he met a girl that he liked, and he’d see how beautiful she was or how sweet or whatever- and he’d go in with the best of intentions. Then one day he’d look down towards his feet at the ground and see the signs and know it wasn’t any good. No matter how hard he’d try to resist eventually he’d look down- he’d have to, just to take a peek- and every time it’d be the same. As soon as he saw how it was going to turn out he’d get that same sinking feeling and he just couldn’t put his heart into it anymore- it was a foregone conclusion, doomed practically before it started- and he just had to let them go before he became more of an asshole than he had to be. He said he felt an obligation to let them go before they became any more attached to him, before he did any real damage. Back then it all seemed like bullshit, but now with a few years under his belt and a hundred heartaches later it takes on a new relevance that seems terrible and dark. The memory leaves him morose.
He used to have some premonitions of his own, back when he actually cared. Every Christmas morning he drove from his flat at the beach to his mom’s house where he’d visit and chat and give gifts and receive gifts- and then again to his dads to do the same. It was typically the holidays in California, he supposed- sort of Christmas in installments- a little with this family member, a little with that one- but never together, god forbid- that’d be too much to take. Anyhow, he used to drive along and see the bums creeping around early on Christmas morning and he’d imagine that maybe he saw himself, and he wondered if that was where he would end up. It created an incredible sadness within him that made him feel bleak and dark and hopeless, and he always remembered that sight and tried a little harder to keep on in the face of adversity, at the great risk of ending up as one of those dirty sullen creatures barely stirring on the deserted streets of Christmas. But sometimes he’d catch himself wishing he could finally give up, give in- and he thought that it’d finally be over, the struggle- when he found himself creeping out of some dark hole in some dirty ally on Christmas morning- and it gave him solace to know that he’d seen the bottom and maybe it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Hope comes from the strangest quarters.

He sees how people cling to each other, and he knows it’s not alright- that they cling to one another as if to create some sort of supplicant ego, filling out their own deficiencies and making a whole person with one leg on one side and one on the other, only remaining upright because they are together. Basically he sees it as feeding on each other’s souls, and it makes him a little sick, but he knows it and is familiar with it and knows also that this sort of dependence is an acquired taste, and that there have been many times that he hungered for it. He sees this dependency- this clinging onto each other- and he knows that it isn’t right but he’s helpless to avoid it because the attraction is so strong, the taste of this so called “love” so terribly sweet. Sometimes these feelings of helplessness and the resulting despair makes him want to grab the wheel and swerve hard into the oncoming traffic, ending it- to put himself out of his misery, perhaps- or maybe to spare another heart from getting broken. Of course he quickly comes to his senses- death wouldn’t ever serve a purpose. All he wants is a life, and he knows how to easily supplicate that at the cost of a few drinks and dinner, maybe a weekend away somewhere if it really seems worth it. Death would only cheat him of that and so it seemed just a cheap way out. He smiles at the thought because really anymore it all seems to be a cheap way out.

He learned a long time ago to never, ever tell them the whole truth. They always seemed to either blanch and edge away, making some lame excuse why they had to go- or more often then not they just fell in some sort of love with him for telling the truth and being open. That’s one thing he learned- no matter how ugly the truth is, it’s so seldom told that people are in awe of it- they love it- can’t get enough of it. For most people the truth is a foreign thing- a luxury- and the sensation of hearing the raw truth is so rare that it gives them a bit of light-headedness, not unlike breathing pure oxygen. Whatever the situation, whatever their reaction, the bottom line always was that when he told the truth someone always got hurt. Sometimes it took a while for the effects to radiate out to where the damage is actually done, but without fail the truth always seemed to do it’s damage in the end. The frustrating converse of this, he’d found, is that even if he varnishes the truth- glosses things over, tries to assimilate a bit- even if he outright lies- still someone gets hurt. So really it didn’t seem to matter, so one time he tries the unvarnished truth, the next time he is the chameleon- it’s all the same in the end, when the hearts start breaking and the tears they flow like rain. Apparently the nature of the beast, either life or maybe just him- he has yet to decide which, but seemingly all the time in the world to figure it out.

After years of reckoning with the impressionable minds of people seeking solace in another’s arms, he has come to at least one conclusion. If he were smart he’d never say the word love- never talk about marriage or kids or where he’s headed along those lines- given time the answer always leads to heartache. Steer clear of these topics and one can stay pretty detached- remote, evasive, uncommitted as to one way or the other. But eventually the topics seem to arise, as they always do- and it all just seems so natural just to continue on and talk about it. He lies to himself that it must just be the nature of the situation, that men and women are attracted and attraction begets lovers, and lovers talk about the most intimate of things- but he really knows deep down that it’s just too easy to bring out that light in their eyes, to make them smile, to give them hope- they always say that he’s such a catch, that they can’t believe no one has snatched him up already. He grimaces inside, mentally stifling the sarcastic reply on the tip of his tongue- the one that says “if you only knew.” Instead he refills the wine glasses and sighs, thinking back to a time when he believed that there had to be more to it than this- that it’s all too clichéd and all too easy. He says something witty that goes over her head and shifts his body slightly, edging closer and putting one arm across the back of the sofa, behind her. She giggles a little and says he has a nice place.

So they’ve been together a while- perhaps the usual two months. Relationships seem to have a two-month shelf life in his world, give or take a few weeks. They’ve been together long enough- perhaps too long, as she’s become unusually clingy and they’ve been close longer and more than he’s really ever been comfortable with. Patience wears thin.
Little things. Sometimes the little things seem to be big things. A lot of times, in his opinion, the little things are the big things. They fight- or rather “she” fights. He listens. He observes. Detached, he comments. She’s annoyed. He never fights, if he can help it- the angst makes him a little sick, and it gives him a feeling in the pit of his stomach that makes him think of ulcers.
He remains calm, seemingly independent, quiet. Nonplussed. This only makes her angrier. Vitrolic. Vehement. This seems to make things worse. She cries. Her makeup runs, and this only makes her angrier. She threatens to pack her things and go home. He sits on the bed and comments to her back that he’d rather she didn’t do that. He tells her back that it’d be a shame to chuck it all for this. He says to her back that he wishes she would get it together and try to talk about it. He says this to her back as it’s leaving the room. She sits on the couch, the futon. The one that they stole the mattress off of and put on the porch one night and they made love and fell asleep under the moonlight, fast asleep in each others arms. She doesn't remember that they made love again in the morning. This slips her mind, as small details do. She also doesn't remember how he made her crepes with bluberries and mascarpone while she lay there and read the paper he brought her. She doesn't remember lots of things, when she gets in a mood. She sits on the couch and pretends to read Vanity Fair. In her world Vanity Fair is an impenetrable shield. In her world she cannot hear his words while protected by Vanity Fair. In her world she is seething, daunting- radiating a feminine danger of sorts. In her world she doles out the punishments and this time it is the dreaded silent treatment. In his world she has become a pain in the ass. Electricity is in the air.
He enters and exits the room numerous times, each time trying to talk with her, only to be met with that impenetrable wall of silence that only a princess of the most spoiled order can deal out. He doesn’t like the silent treatment. He likes to communicate. He likes to talk about things, to work things out. He tries to get her to talk. She pretends to ignore him. The more he tries, the more she ignores. He tries to be calm. She clams up and seethes. He talks, she ignores.
He’d really like to be done with this, so he kicks a chair across the room and puts a hole in the living room wall. He offers (no longer all that calm) to pack her things for her in a cardboard box and to place them somewhere in the street below his front porch. He then offers to throw her down after them.

She concedes. They don’t live happily ever after. In his world, romance is a temporary condition. While she drives to her mothers she has a hard time discerning her tears from the rain on the windshield. He’s putting away the dinner dishes, thinking to himself that he’s going to miss her.

There was a time a long time ago when he knew what he wanted, knew where he was going- at that time he was a pretty resolved young man, or so he had thought. His world was very black and white and decisions were too easy- he led a charmed life of a sort, in an underhanded kind of way. One thing that changed his view of things and rocked the very foundation of the world he had constructed for himself was to change everything in his life, efficiently, effectively, completely. This was the love of a young woman, and the subsequent lack thereof when in one cold move she broke his heart and nearly destroyed him. This took him totally by surprise and shook him, leaving him dazed and hopeless and helpless, in despair. He’d dealt with loss in so many ways in his thirty some odd years, but surprisingly he’d never dealt with this kind of thing before, and he spent months and even years recovering from it. In his own eyes and a lot of those that were close to him at the time he never really recovered from it at all- not completely. But then again, when does someone really recover from anything truly devastating- especially a broken heart? I mean- people play at being “over it” and pretend at being all better, but in the end there always seems to be that nagging memory, the optimism deep inside of deepest recesses of your heart- the residual hope that in the end everything really does turn out alright. Our hero learned over the years to combat this with a veiled cynicism that would lead some that don’t know him to believe that he was jaded. He never found that difficult to fathom, as he sometimes believes so himself.

At one time a long time ago he was a pretty efficient street fighter. Young and Irish, it was all in good fun and pretty much a symptom of the time, and he was fair and he was brave and he followed a code of sorts that separated him from the animals. One rule he always tried to follow was that he never fought someone outside of a certain demographic. He wasn’t a bad sort- he just liked to blow off a little steam- and so he only sought out those who were also looking to blow off a little steam. Oftentimes they sought him out, and most times in the end they regretted doing so. At any rate, this rule that he applied he came to think of as separating the “pros” from the “civilians”. Now here much later in life he’d tried to apply that same pretense on his current situation, in the hope of sparing some innocent from getting her heart terribly broken. He knew that he wasn’t really any good to anyone in the long run- not as a lover and mate- he’d already figured out that things don’t last so long for him before he begins thinking of her once again, and he never could multi-task very well when it came to affairs of the heart and matters of obligation. But after a time he came to the realization that he should have seen from the beginning, it was so obvious: in the situation he was in, no one was a “pro” or a “combatant”- no one is looking to get their heart broken- no one sane, anyhow. He gave it his best, but in the end the gentleman in him raised his voice and stated the ugly fact to him in bold terms: No matter who, no matter what- when he breaks their hearts it hurts them all just as badly as she had hurt him. In this, for him, he found no gray area whatsoever, just the ugly truth again and again as he attempted to let them down easy. Many times he drank alone for weeks following the end of an affair- walking alone along deserted beaches he’d contemplate the too few options between one sad state and the next. In the end he always came to the same spot, though sometimes it took weeks and other times months or years. Eventually he would always get back to the place where he’d find himself jumping back and forth between the idea of continuing on out of the fear that he’s only sabotaging himself and stopping dead in his tracks because he doesn’t want to put himself in that vulnerable position again. Two choices that are diametric opposites, and he never really could decide which of the two applied to him. The easy way was to put an end to whatever relationship he was involved him when he began thinking along these lines- the logic would say that he didn’t want to let her fall any deeper in love at this point but instead to bite the bullet and drop the whole thing like a bad habit, and then live out his years “keeping it light” and never becoming “attached” in any way again. He always chuckled at that as he found that particular cliché- to drop it like “a bad habit”- to hardly be a gentle euphemism for the situation. Sometimes he’d take the hard way and pursue things for a month or two longer, in the spirit of stick-to-it-iveness and defying his demons and all that- but in the end he always broke it off when he began looking for her at places they’d been and checking every car that looks like hers in the hope of running into her. That was always the sign- that’s when he’d begin to feel hopeless again, when he’d begin to lay the groundwork and break it off.

Patsy Coogan

2008-06-23T22:57:00.002-07:00

It was Autumn of 1978, my freshman year in Junior high when I realized that Pat Coogan was far and above the toughest guy in our neighborhood. Growing up with what was typically a girl’s name left him a predictable path through adolescence, and by the age of thirteen Patsy understood completely the plight of Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue”.
Patsy was an only child, playing alone in the front yard of a house occupied by a drunken plumber with a short temper and a cooing mother who tried her ineffective best to keep Patsy out of harm’s way. She meant well, and it wasn’t until the first day of kindergarten that Patsy became aware of the shortcomings of having a name like “Patsy”. Patsy really didn’t pay much attention to what the first grader was saying about him, but when the situation degenerated to pushing and slapping Patsy reacted like dear old dad had taught him and hit the kid three times, a surprise right to the nose, quick and solid followed by a combination to either eye. Patsy might not have been suspended on his first day of school if he hadn’t then taken off his prized cowboy boots and slammed the kid on the top of the head while he lay there crying in the dust.
While Patsy Coogan wasn’t stupid he didn’t seem exceptionally sharp either- just right down the middle of the road. We had attended school together for as long as I could remember, and by seventh grade Pat, Danny Dennison and I had permanent seats in the remedial classes not because any of us were particularly stupid but for a handful of other reasons. Our playful and mischievous camaraderie kept us together for sure. Beyond that, lack of motivation and a certain amount of distraction that comes with being fourteen shared the top of the list along with the fact that any time a decent swell hit our little stretch of coastline we’d make a beeline for the beach with our boards and be in the water, doing what we loved to do most.
While like the rest of us Patsy wasn’t either particularly bright or dull, he was a stand up guy, and whatever he may or may not have lacked in intellect he easily made up for in guts. Pat would face down anyone- take any challenge- he never backed down, even to older kids and adults. Basically Pat was calm under pressure beyond his years and it seemed like there was nothing that would scare him. Someone would talk some shit and Pat would step up and call him on it. When someone was dumb enough to challenge him Patsy would slowly circle with a mischievous grin, staying light on his toes with his weight a little forward. He would pick the guy apart with surgical precision, a jab here and a hook there, jab-hook-upper cut and then POW! And when you opened you’re eyes he’d be standing there above you grinning, nodding his head and asking, “are you done already?” Pat was like that, and to some extent so were we all. The way we saw it- if you can’t have a good time doing it and if you can’t do it with some style, some class- then why even bother kicking the shit out of anyone at all?
It was a good thing Pat was one of our gang because when it came to trouble he was light years ahead of us. If he weren’t with us he’d have been against us and we all would have had to go the rounds with him. If that were the case, none of us could have gotten away with being the bold, bad guys that we pretended to be.
The great thing about Pat was that what you saw was what you got- there was no bullshit. Growing up in Southern California you take bullshit as a matter of course- a natural element. In urban Southern California the bullshit flows like water, an endless stream of it. Maybe it was the result of too much television- of people beginning to believe the hype. Maybe it was because Hollywood was right there, just up the highway- and so many influential people counted on the masses taking that stuff seriously. Maybe it was just a unified acceptance of the dumbing down of America. I really don’t know. But Pat was the exception to the rule- the type of guy that was at one time pretty commonly respected in the Golden State. Pat was like a throwback from another time- and you could count on his word one hundred percent. If Pat went to the trouble of saying it, it was probably true. If you were being an asshole, you could count on Pat to tell you so, and he’d do this so bluntly that you’d be like the cartoon coyote being hit with an anvil. This constantly bought him trouble at school and with the cops- especially with the cops.
It was my eighth grade year when they bussed the Latinos over from Sherman Heights and Logan, a poorly thought out attempt to better the education of a couple bus loads of potential felons from East San Diego that resulted in a lot of potential felons from the beach area falling through the cracks. Without proper statistics I can only surmise but if I had to guess I would say that I was one of the kids who fell through the cracks, to varying degrees along with Patsy and Danny Dennison and a lot of other kids we ran with.
That kind of stuff was immaterial at the time- you can’t see it and even the most astute PHD would have a hard time predicting it. It’s just a non-action when it happens- anticlimax- making less commotion than a piece of paper fluttering to the floor. It’s not like you’re being beaten or abused or even neglected- not really. It’s different than that and it’s a little troublesome to pinpoint the actual instance it happens when a person falls through the cracks and nobody notices.
Raised by my mom I was the quintessential latch key kid. Even so I did relatively well through sixth grade but at seventh grade my sister went away to college leaving me alone with mom. Mom was rarely home and when she was there she was locked in her bedroom with the television and the telephone and a bottle of wine. The situation at school was also pretty unsettling. There were a lot of fights between the surfers and the Barrio Sherman guys and I spent a lot of time watching my back and choosing my battles. I was pretty eloquent for a teenage kid and I talked my way out of more than one fight without losing face. Fuck them. We were big fish in a small pond but still we had heart, and when they came at us we’d fight back. You grew up fast in our mean little town and you stood up for yourself or got zero respect. We’d all taken our share of knocks and there was pretty much no backing down in any of us.
Really I had a lot of respect for the Latino guys. For one thing they dressed real cool and had hot girlfriends who seemed about twenty years ahead of us. Plus they carried themselves with an air of sovereignty that made one immediately think that you should take them serious- this is no motherfucking joke- they weren’t fucking around. I think all of us kids from the coast envied them in one way or another. We envied their sense of culture, their sense of community. We envied their solidarity and their sense of identity, and their unity. Being white kids from urban Southern California it wasn’t too tough to realize that we’d been stripped of those things a long time ago- for most of us probably well before we were born. There was a cultural vacuum where our identity was supposed to be and it had a voracious appetite and would swallow up any number of cultures and trivialize and homogenize them automatically.
Us- we weren’t any one thing really- aside from ‘Californian’. We weren’t Jewish or Irish or Czek or German or Polish. There wasn’t some pub or church around town where our families went for three hundred years. We were Californian, a dubious honor. If that wasn’t what we wanted, we were pretty much screwed.
Still and all we had our own Latino community there on the beach- guys we’d grown up with and while they looked and dressed the same as the Sherman Barrio guys they represented our town and historically and we all got along pretty well. If we weren’t fighting with them we were backing them up, representing our people, the coast, youth against the world. It was a funny balance back then- something that struck me as older than us.
One time when the Border Patrol circled our school (as they regularly did back then) about half our P.E. class bolted and hopped the fence, scattering throughout the neighborhood before the guys could even exit their patrol vehicle. Even if these were kids who had only been with us a short time, they were part of our own small Latino community and we considered them- by association- to be part of the group of kids we grew up with. So while those guys bolted from the Gestapo the rest of us flipped them the bird on general principle and coach just nodded his head in disgust at the system and made us walk around the field for the rest of the class. The border was only fifteen miles away and I don’t think the school would have even let the Border Patrol on the grounds, but just the same- the guys always ran- it was ingrained in them as the smart thing to do. It was also just another reason for us to take the Latinos seriously, a common ground that we had in our fear of and subsequent disrespect towards law enforcement and authority figures in general. Because of that a small seed was planted that gestated and grew, and we all seemed to dislike the Border Patrol universally, maybe more than we disliked the cops that came into our neighborhood taking themselves way too seriously, dime store comic strip characters with batons and badges and guns, shoving people around and barking orders as if we all were criminals by default and they were in contrast some kind of gleaming pinnacles of virtue. We weren’t. They aren’t. It takes a while for the wolves to show their sharp teeth and pointy claws, and when they do sometimes they still get to eat the little girl. Amidst tyranny and injustice and broken hearts and a river of tears- life goes on.
One time out on the field in P.E. Danny Dennison got into a scuffle with a big Mexican kid named Alex Marino. Alex Marino was Pat’s counterpart in the Sherman Heights set- tough and street smart, vocal and fearless- about half a felon already- and essentially the unofficial leader of the Sherman Heights peewees. Alex was a good-looking guy and carried himself well. He was a sharp dresser and wasn’t afraid of a fight and had the scars to prove it.
Danny came from a tough family- he had two older brothers who were serving some time up in Chino and more than once he came to school with a black eye compliments of his drunk father. Oftentimes he shoplifted lunch rather than to admit defeat and take the free lunch coupons offered to kids from low-income families. Even so- plenty times while we were growing up he shared his lunch with me.
Out on the field we were playing football and as it always was when we got to choose teams- the Mexicans were on one team and the surfers and jocks on the other. We were playing flag-football with the crappy equipment the school provided and the flags never would release like they were supposed to. Alex caught a pass and Danny damn near yanked Alex’s gym trunks trying to pull the flag. Alex took offense and got in Danny’s face and made some threats. Danny was never real big on talk. He just skipped the chatter and put Alex on his ass with a solid right cross.
The coach stepped in before it went any farther than that and we spent the rest of the period running laps, the Latinos talking tough on the upper field where the girls were playing soccer and while we skulked around the deserted lower field licking our wounds.
Throughout that day there was a lot of hard talk between the factions and in the end it was decided that Danny and Alex would fight after school in the lot of an old service station just off of school property. It amazes me that the school didn’t catch wind of these kinds of things and sort of nip them in the bud, but when 2:40 rolled around and the bell rang most of the kids who normally ride the Sherman Heights bus were marching en masse down the street in front of the school. Walking along a side street were most of the surfers from that area, a lot of the jocks and a few hangers on from various groups. All in all there were probably close to 200 people involved when we met up at the service station, maybe 40 in the Latino group, a few more than that in our own. The rest were mostly just chicken-shit kids who wanted to witness the apocalypse, drama junkies filtering in from all different directions and keeping out on the periphery, safely away from the action.
Everyone congregated in a loose circle on the side of the derelict service station, with the Latinos grouping up on one side and the Surfers on the other, an empty space in the middle that no one seemed to want to step into just yet. Danny Dennison expedited matters by stepping out into open area in the center of the crowd. He was wearing a white tank top, jeans and tennis shoes. He gestured to Alex with an impatient nod and a wave of his hand to step it up and get it on. Alex had his crew with him and they made a big production of removing his jacket like the court would remove the mantle from their king, and then he removed his watch and his crisp, white button-up shirt, handing them to his “lieutenant” as he began bouncing around, loosening up. His hair was greased with some kind of pomade and he wore baggies and a wife beater and black, patent leather shoes. His dark eyes were serious and he looked confident, as if he’s just here to kick someone’s ass and then get on about his business. He honestly didn’t seem even the least bit unsettled by any of it.
Danny gave him another impatient wave as if to say, “Let’s cut the bullshit and get down to business” and then Alex stepped out to stand nearly nose-to-nose with him, unflinching. They both wore grim smiles as they stood unflinching, toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye as some unkind words were exchanged, racial epithets that meant nothing at all being spat back and forth like arrows between the two.
Danny got things started by shoving Alex back hard with two hands to the chest and then followed in with a jab and a right cross, both of which Alex effortlessly parried and returned with the same. It was easy to see that Alex knew how to box and that he was confident and relaxed, exchanging blows with Danny. Alex landed a couple jabs and Danny responded in kind. Alex grinned at Danny and jabbed at a cut that had opened above Danny’s right eye. Danny winced and then grinned back because that’s just how Danny was. Alex probably could have whittled away at Danny with the jabs and wore him out but Danny spotted a weakness in Alex’s technique- that when he threw his big right cross he left his right hand hanging out there just a little too long before pulling it back, leaving his rib-cage open for a second each time he threw it. The next time Alex jabbed Danny slipped the punches in a clumsy fashion and responded in a purposefully slow manner, baiting Alex to throw a big right cross and over extend himself for a second. Alex fell for the ruse and came in for the kill with his solid right cross. Danny bobbed and weaved, stepping slightly to the side and slipping the punch as he reached under with a solid left hook to the ribs that knocked the wind out of Alex, a look of surprise in his eyes. Danny stepped in and followed that with a well-connected right hook to the head that sent the surprised Latino to the ground, shaking the cobwebs out of his head.
Alex must have known that he was outmatched because when he stood back up he had a black handled switchblade in his hand, the gleaming chrome blade emitting a menacing “click!” when he flicked it open. He looked comfortable holding the knife out as he shuffled forward, waving the razor sharp blade and slashing cautiously at Danny’s stomach and face.
When Alex flicked that switch-blade open I came to a startling realization that even though they lived just thirty minutes down the road from us and even though in many ways our lives were similar in the end the Latino kids were living in a different world from us entirely. Even so, despite having never fought with knives Danny actually seemed game to make a go of it. Before anything could come of it the crowd parted and out darted Pat Coogan who hit Alex so hard with a huge right cross as he ran forward that Alex was knocked off his feet and unconscious before he ever landed face first on the asphalt. He spit on Alex’s inert form lying there on the pavement. “Mother-fucker! I never heard anyone say anything about knives.”
As a riot broke out around him Pat stepped in quickly and stomped on Alex’s knife hand, carelessly breaking his wrist. Despite the chaos all around me- and all of the years between then and now- I can still hear the sickening crunch the bones made as they broke. The Latino contingent grabbed the knife and passed it back through the crowd, apparently standard practice in this kind of situation to get rid of the evidence. It was gone before any of us ever thought of it. They had also grabbed Alex at some point though I don’t recall when.
Pat and Danny stood back-to-back and fought alongside the rest of us until the cops came and then the Mexicans ran off towards Grand Avenue about the same time as we bolted up the alley towards the beach, at this point the sense of self preservation easily over-riding anyone’s sense of loyalty. The Parking lot was empty except for a few onlookers before the cops even had time to get out of their car.
There were some repercussions over the next few weeks- the entire Sherman Heights Barrio gang circled the school off and on for a couple days in their tricked out Impala Low riders and one afternoon the surfers got ambitious and threw rocks at the busses that carried the East San Diego kids back and forth. There were several fights on campus before things settled back into relative normalcy. At one point shortly after the fight the older surfers that played basketball over at the rec center even got into it with some of the older Sherman Heights guys who had shown up trying to throw their weight around with golf clubs and crow bars. The old guys grabbed some softball bats available on loan from the rec office and sent a few of them back to Sherman Heights with cracked ribs and black eyes and bruised egos- business as usual. Shortly after that the windows of the gym were shot out in the night and there was some new graffiti on a wall at the front entrance. None of it amounted to much of anything and people grew up and clocks kept ticking, the world kept on in it’s orbit around the sun and rivers continued grinding rock to sand.
But things around school did eventually return to relative normalcy, though fights would break out periodically and in most of the classes I attended it seemed the teachers were satisfied as long as we didn’t hurt each other and to my estimation at some point our education had become an ancillary issue.
At that time I didn’t really care- it was all a big adventure for me- even the day I got jumped in the bathroom by four Shermans and then Billy Hardeman and Harry Weinstein kicked the crap out of them all in the stairwell outside. I stood up to them and immediately got my ass handed to me but still I was glad I stood up. The story got around and I gained the respect of my peers. I could walk with my back straight and my head high, eyes forward, no talk necessary. I was young and bored and loyal and naïve. I was a natural born martyr.
Even way back then I was a romantic at heart and education was a pretty important topic in my family and just from what I learned reading at home and listening with a keen mind I had a pretty good head start on the basics of my education. I was bored with school and I enjoyed the excitement, and there was no way some talking head lecturing us on the civil war or the revolution world could compete with me actually standing up for myself and getting a few good ones in and actually fighting a few battles of my own. Of course there was also no way I could do any comprehensive learning in that environment, as distracted as the imminent threat of physical violence was- and I never did finish high school even though I did manage to get out that environment with plenty time to do so.

I suppose the day the bar was raised for everyone was the day one of the Logan Heights kids pulled a gun on the drafting teacher and got laid out right there on the back stairs of building number one by our soon to be found out ex-bodyguard Columbian-born world history teacher.
The kid’s name was Gonzalo and he came from Barrio Logan. He was new to the school and in fact had just transferred in a week before. I remember the day he got transferred in because the surf had been really epic that week and I’d come in late for the third day running. I tried to check in at the attendance office, telling them again that I’d missed my bus. As was standard for a third unexcused tardy they sent me to the counseling office, which is where I was sitting when that kid had registered.
It was a little eye opening though- seeing this bad-ass Barrio Logan guy with his parents, all done up with his perfectly pressed and cuffed denim baggies and his black bandana pulled down over his eyes so he could barely see. He had the shiniest black shoes I’d ever seen and a black plaid flannel with just the top button buttoned over a clean white T-shirt. His presentation was flawless, except for his stereotypical California businesswoman mom who looked like she could very easily be my own mom’s best friend- and his dad could pass for one of the teachers at our school- suit pants and a pastel polo shirt, Casio wristwatch and gold, wire-framed glasses. They exited the counseling office and I caught a little of their conversation as they passed, the chastising the son for something in perfect English and the son responding in his bad, barrio Logan Chicano accent.
“Don’t talk to me in your bad-ass Latino accent.” The dad reaches over and slaps the kid on the back of the head, knocking his black bandana askew. The kid recoils and straightens his bandana, leaning away from his dad in anticipation of another assault. “and take that crap off. That will get you nothing but trouble.”
As soon as they passed I knew the pain that kid was feeling, wanting the whole trip to be over before too many people saw him with his parents. That kind of thing is universal- the uncomfortable time when your parents invade your teenage habitat. I understood it better than anyone.
Of all the kids I ran with I lived in the nicest house. It’s not like we could afford it, but mom made stuff work. Most of my friends lived with a single parent like I did, but most of them rented down near the beach, mostly single-wall flats in dire need of repair. I didn’t really notice it until I took my friends to my house back against the freeway. It was foreign territory for them, up on the hill there. We didn’t have a fancy house and it wasn’t an expensive neighborhood, but even so it was a lot different from the way they were used to living. I only took my friends there a couple times and when they made a big deal about it I was pretty uncomfortable. I didn’t like being foreign and I didn’t like being from somewhere else. I knew who and what I was and I didn’t like being defined by my parent’s house. My mom worked her ass off for that house and she never had much else. It was important to her- the security of owning her own home- it didn’t come easily.
So after seeing that kid with his suburban mom and dad I was kind of surprised that he’d done something as extreme as pulling a gun out and aiming it at Tennenbaum with the apparent intent to shoot. I half hope that he was just aiming it at the guy for effect- that he wouldn’t have really shot him. I hope that he was self conscious like me for having a little bit more than his friends had- and that maybe he was just trying too hard to overcome that obstacle any way he knew how. The way the story went, I kind of figure that’s not too far off.
The way I heard the story, the kid had been giving Tennenbaum a really hard time and had lipped off time too many. Tennenbaum just snapped and stalked over to the kid and grabbed him from behind and half-dragged-half-carried the kid backwards out of the class, the kid trying to get a foothold the whole time. He blasted the big steel door open with the force of the kid’s weight and shoved him through, stepping out behind him as the kid landed in a heap on the hot asphalt.
When they got outside Tennenbaum stood there over this kid, seething, just ready to blow. The kid got up and brushed himself off but he was visibly shaken, a niche now visible in his carefully constructed façade. Before he could get his composure Tennenbaum was back in his face though, asking him if he thought he was tough and if he’d like to take a free shot.
The kid stood there inches away from the older man and he could feel his heat, smell his rage like an electrical fire. The young Mexican held his position there eye to eye with the man, trembling, his lower lip visibly quivering as he tried to lean into the older man just a little and tennenbaum shoved him away hard. “That’s what I thought.” He points towards the office and says just one word. “Go.”
I never saw Tennenbaum as a fighter, but the way I saw it- anyone could be. I never saw our science teacher Mr Smith as a surfer but again and again I’d have to change my plans when I ditched school to go surf because I’d show up at Tourmaline and Smith would be there on his single fin tanker, already out grabbing my waves. You just never know. The kid’s mistake was choosing his battles and not knowing when to back off and save face. The teacher’s mistake was stripping this kid of the one thing that was at that time most important to him- his identity.
So anyhow- the kid Gonzalo got suspended for a couple days. I think the school went light on him because Tennenbaum left them a little vulnerable legally, but this was 1979- it wasn’t the big deal that it would be twenty years later. But a few days later between second and third periods this kid Gonzalo goes into his locker and pulls out a .357 and walks down the hall amidst kids rushing from their lockers to class and from class to class- I picture this kid just walking down that crowded hallway, eyes forward, his head held high. He walks past Senor Cardinez’ class- our world history class- and he maybe stopped at the top of the stairs for a second, maybe to gather up his strength and every bit of courage he can summon. Maybe he looked down off of the top of the stairs behind building number one at Mr Tennenbaum, standing outside of his classroom like he always did, watching the chaos and attempting to keep us from hurting each other.
I see this kid- a tall lanky teenager just growing into his adult body. Just one summer before I see him playing kickball with his childhood friends in an empty lot in East San Diego and just three summers before I see him kissing his mother’s cheek and running to catch up with his friend’s on the way to school, lunch box in hand. I see him reach into his black windbreaker and pull this dark, heavy instrument from his waistband and as naturally as you point your finger at some point far off in the distance he points it at this teacher who probably had kids of his own at some school not too unlike ours, somewhere just beyond our line of site. He looks down along the top of this black steel instrument with these lead pills inside, waiting to be deployed- but he hesitates. Maybe he hesitated because he was scared. God knows I would have been, there, back then. It scares me more now. Maybe he had some pangs of conscience and couldn’t decide whether he was the best judge of whether this man lived or died. I’ve always hoped that was the case. I’ve always hoped that at the last minute he realized that the world that we live in is just this flashing, brief instance and after this there are a multitude of roads to travel. This tall teenager in his black, bleak uniform of defiance stands there, and for the moment between he and Tennenbaum there is something tangible, as he stares down the barrel of the gun at the teacher. He sees a look of surprise and defeat on the teacher’s face, resignation in his eyes as he stands there- an easy target- looking back up across the sights of the gun at the calm, impartial face of his assailant, this urban militant post adolescent teenage god who hesitates just one minute and without changing his expression decides to let this one live.
Fractions of a second after this Senor Cardinez executes a perfect flying tackle and lays this kid out face first on the pavement, the gun skittering away ineffectively as we all begin to wonder just what the hell is the story behind Senor Cardinez and his flying tackle and what’s up with that purple scarf?
That kid got hauled off in cuffs and we never did see him again. Chances are after something like that he became a permanent part of the system. He crossed a line that puts you in an entirely different category and even for us- just for being in the general area- things became more serious after that.

But right about then I got sent up to my dads until things blew over, ending one career in petty bullshit and beginning another-and by the time I returned all we were was another year older and into entirely different mischief that looked suspiciously like the last chapter.
While I was gone a lot of things happened- there was a big party one night on the roof of the school and some of the guys broke in and vandalized the place. Mike Kerry got busted for that and ended up doing three months up at juvi. Dack Morris ended up in the hospital when he got caught stealing some tools from a construction site on the way home from a party. Chris Moore got Julie Brown pregnant and Julie ended up moving in with her brother and sister in law up in the Pacific Northwest somewhere. Jimmy Severn crashed his bike bombing Soledad Mountain one night and died in the middle of an intersection before anyone got there. A big Northwest swell tore sixty feet off the end of the pier. Some people dropped out or went away. Some new people showed up. Some things changed, a few things stayed the same.
Eleventh grade- or maybe it was twelfth. It all blurs together and I skipped one year in the middle there somewhere. By my second year of high school I was back in town living at mom’s house and Danny Dennison was off and on doing his own time up at Juvenile hall, finishing school for young felons. A lot of us had discovered punk rock and were spending time up in North Park or downtown in San Diego proper where there were a couple seedy clubs that capitalized on our kind of entertainment. It was new and different but at the same time it was as old as man. The excitement of rolling into the fading light of evening, high on speed or booze or hallucinagenics or just high on adventure. Evenings were like a fresh canvas- an empty tablet of lined paper- anything could happen.
We were drinking and doing speed, fighting and getting hassled by cops, playing in bands and reveling in the chaos. Same old shit, only different. A few of the old crew were right there with us but a lot of the old crew didn’t really get the punk rock thing and were pretty critical of it. Even so, we all surfed together and had a few beers now and then. Sometimes with age comes a bit of tolerance, once you run out of friends who might tolerate you.
Pat Coogan was still a tough guy- most likely even tougher- but now well into the beginnings of adulthood he was competing in a different league. Pat ruled the line-up with an iron fist, and if outsiders tried to surf our local spots Pat had a free hand to create new and inventive ways to cause them discomfort and imminent harm and basically to chase them off. In his late teens, nearing adulthood he found a certain perfection in that, refining to an art the activities of chasing off encroaching surfers from Clairmont and lighting up drunken yuppies that had enough Vodka-Sevens to believe that they’re invincible. It was all fun and games but the better he got at it the less gratifying it became- less satisfying- and though he didn’t understand it and never voiced it to anyone, it all left him feeling a little cheated after the dust settled.
We endured school only because it gave us a regular venue to get some sleep. We surfed and played in bands, partied and raised hell. A lot of the guys were dealing and doing drugs and getting into the variety of petty crimes that can finance a growing drug habit. Petty theft and burglary were pretty common, as was drug dealing- first with weed and then coke. Only the hardest guys got into heroin. It’s a steep learning curve and a lot of those guys didn’t last long after their introduction to the Mexican Brown that was common with junkies around that time and place. I knew a few guys that were into it, but me and my crowd were mostly into shooting speed- crank or meth, maybe occasionally some coke but coke was usually cut so many times by the time it got to us that it wasn’t really worth much beyond getting yourself a little more regular.
We also drank a lot of beer, which we mostly got for free by pulling “runners” at liquor stores all over town. We once hit the same U-Totem three times in one night. We must have got 10 cases out of that place that night, the last time right after two a.m. closing time.
We also took a lot of heat for being punks and we ended up fighting a lot- but usually only with people who were looking for a fight. Over time we learned to be ruthless and unforgiving when we fought and we got pretty good at it. There’s a lesson to be learned there, for the bullies: If you continually and repeatedly attack someone, chances are eventually they are going to become pretty proficient at fighting back. Sooner or later you’re going to lose, and it will be no one’s fault but your own. I imagine there’s not a whole lot that is more demeaning than getting the shit kicked out of you by someone who you’ve picked on for years.

Back then there was a cop who had been around forever- Neil Magrett. The local kids had forever dubbed Magrett either “Maggot” or “Faggot”, depending on whom you talked to and when. (I always preferred to show the gays I know a bit of courtesy and refer to him as maggot, despite the irrevocable fact that it’s obvious most cops are painfully latent homosexuals trapped in the farthest reaches of their dark, cramped closets.)
Maggot had it in for us kids from his first day on the job. It was a classic case of hate at first site, and he had a hard on for us in particular because we had absolutely zero respect for him whatsoever and made a point of showing it at every opportunity.
Danny Dennison really hated Maggot and vice versa. Maggot was the guy who arrested Danny’s brothers. He knew Danny’s brothers were up in Chino and he knew that Danny’s dad was a drunk. Maggot constantly belittled Danny Dennison and often prophesized that the boy would undoubtedly suffer the same fate as the rest of his clan, to become a drunk and a convict. In the spirit of fair play, every time Maggot came into Fillipos Pizza where Danny worked evenings and weekends Danny made a point of spitting in his food. Any guilt Danny may have initially felt for the act was immediately absolved when he found out that Maggot was eating on the pad, a common involuntary pay-off between businesses and cops on the beat.
Though there was no way he could prove it Maggot was certain that it was Danny who stuffed his patrol car door locks with auto-body filler, successfully locking him out of his car and forcing him to choose between breaking his own car window or calling a tow truck to get he and his patrol car a ride back to the police sub-station. He was also certain that if it wasn’t Danny who filled his hubcaps with fish carcasses pilfered from behind the local fish market then it must have been Pat Coogan. By the time he had figured it out the stench of rotten fish had surrounded his patrol car twenty feet in any direction and stray cats surrounded his car whenever he parked.
Danny was too smart to take responsibility for any of it, and although Danny was astute enough to let Pat take credit for the fish we all silently believed that it was Danny.
One night I was up in North Park with some guys, hanging out in front of a hall before a punk show and this car cruises by on the darkened street and the guy on the passenger side makes a rude comment about punks, loud enough for us to know that he wants someone to hear. So somebody calls him a fucking loser and the driver hits the brakes and four big guys jump out, ready for action. They immediately are the recipients of a barrage of beer bottles and the collective walks out into the street towards them in the dark, ready for action. I get up close and this guy is coming towards me and I never hesitate and just throw a punch while walking forward, only to pull the punch at the last minute when in the darkness I can finally make out the guys features. “Danny?” He looks shocked as he freezes in mid punch, his arm cocked back to lay me out. Out of the darkness he chuckles, disaster diverted at the very last second. “It would be you, now, wouldn’t it?” He’s laughing as Pat Coogan comes over from by the car and we’re all cracking up, hanging on to each other and laughing at the absurdity of the situation, that in all of this city it’s us who run across each other.
I tell them to park it and come hang out with us, and they run with us all night that night at that punk show and a couple parties afterwards, drinking and fighting, getting kicked out of bars and clubs, driving around downtown and getting into mischief wherever we go. At the end of the night I think maybe they have a different idea of what the punk thing is and a bit more respect for the guys who run in those circles, just some more tough kids who will stand up for themselves, ready to rock and roll at the drop of a hat. Didn’t really matter, life goes on- but sometimes maybe it’s kinda nice to get a little understanding from the people who are from where you’re from.

I didn’t see Danny or Pat much after that. I got tired of being hassled by the cops and moved up North, away from the city. I got a job as a carpenter and when it got real stupid and guys started dieing in fights and from drugs I just walked away from that whole punk thing completely.
Ten years later I ran into Pat at an AA meeting of all places- ten years and three thousand miles away from where we started. He’d kept up the tough guy act until at 22 two bikers threw he and a guy he was running with through a plate glass front window of a seven-eleven. Pat got 117 stitches and spent a week in the hospital. His buddy died almost instantly at the scene from a piece of glass that severed his carotid artery.
In a few weeks he’d recovered and within that time he’d come to the realization that this was no way to live, and a really good way to die. He swallowed his pride and walked into that community hall like he did everything else- back straight, eyes forward, no bullshit. After that day he didn’t drink or do drugs again, and he did everything he could to avoid fights if at all possible.
He eventually enrolled in community college and became a counselor for the city handling youths dealing with substance abuse. We’re sitting across a folding table in Honolulu after a long, drawn out session of catching up and he turns to me and grins and says, “And guess who I work with.”
I’m a little hopeful when I ask, “You wanna tell me it’s Danny Dennison?”
His brow furrows and he takes a drag off of his cigarette. “No- I guess you didn’t hear about that, you being away and all.” He looks down at the cigarette in his hand for a few seconds and then back up at me. “Danny finally got his chance to take on Magrett- one on one. Caught him off duty drinking at a bar down on Rosecrans and he took Magrett up on a challenge to step outside.” He grins at me, a little satisfaction in his eyes. “It was a fight everyone talked about for quite a while- they still talk about it now and then, at the pubs down around the pier. It was as good as any golden gloves boxing match and some people claim it went on for fifteen minutes.” He looks across at me, serious. “You know how things are- that cop didn’t stand a chance. No doubt Danny went there because he knew Magrett would be there, off duty in plainclothes- and he knew Magrett couldn’t resist making some off color remark to him. There wasn’t a day after we were fifteen that Magrett could have beat Danny in a fight. Just no way at all.” He grins at me and tips his head a little to the left. “Danny was Danny and he just had to take that thing with Magrett too far. Danny beat him damn near to death out in the parking lot behind that saloon and when it got to court it was his word against Magrett’s, and he ended up getting five years upstate for assault.” He looks a thousand years old when he looks up at me and nods his head. “Inside- Danny got involved in the gang thing there. Shit- he pretty much had to- you know Danny. Anyhow- there was a lot of trouble going on between the factions up there at that time and Danny walked right into the middle of it and when they tried to test him and see what he was made of he jumped right in with both feet. He was no stranger to trouble- he was right at home up there. Anyhow there was a riot and they locked the place down. Two guards were killed and in the confusion Danny got stuck in the back with a shiv enough times that he died right there where he fell.” He looks across at me and gives me a wistful smile. “I heard it took six of them. Guess they figured if they fuck with old Danny they’d better kill him all the way, because if they didn’t he was gonna come after every last one of them.”
It made me sad to think of Danny Dennison dieing like that. I can still see him under a yellow street-light down by the pier where we used to hang out and drink beer when we were kids, cool and composed, leaning against a car, ready for anything, ready to rumble. But that’s the way it goes- you don’t meet a lot of old street fighters. Lucky if you meet any old anyone from down there.
It occurs to me that Pat’s still sitting there and I snap out of my thoughts and come back to the world of the living. “So who was it that you work with?”
Pat grins across the table at me, knowing me well enough to know I’ll find some beauty and justice, some redemption in his response. “Alex Marino. I share an office with Alex Marino.” He laughs at the look on my face and takes a sip of his coffee. “Shoot- couple times a year we run a retreat for underprivileged kids- a camp- we spend a week together.”
All I can do is laugh and shake my head at the absurdity of life. I think to myself that god must have one hell of a twisted sense of humor.

Brothers

2008-06-23T22:57:00.001-07:00

I was always the one who had to go first even though I was the youngest, my brother Artie being roughly a year and a half older than me. Artie was both my nemesis and my mentor, and in retrospect he must have thought that I was his own personal guinea pig.
Mom was at work most of the day, holding down two jobs to keep us fed and clothed with a roof over our heads. At the end of the day, after the sun had already gone down mom would come home and have dinner with us, grilling us about our day and making sure we’d done our homework. As we got older she began leaving the dinner up to us, with food in the refrigerator and instructions on the counter. Both Artie and I became pretty decent cooks because of that, thanks to dear old mom.
Mom was out of the house at dawn, waking us up just before she headed out the door on her way to work at an office downtown. Artie and I got ready for school on our own, making instant oatmeal or eggs and bacon and walking the mile and change to school together. We liked to take different shortcuts to see what kind of mischief we could get into before the drudgery of academics began.
We did okay in school, and Artie sometimes helped me with my homework. We weren’t the best kids, and neither were we the worst. We got by as best we could, sticking together and watching out for each other.
While school was in session we rarely crossed paths except for between classes and at lunch, being a grade apart. After school was our time, however, and spending our afternoons for the most part unsupervised, we made good use of it.
I remember one time we were walking home and found an old furniture dolly- the kind that’s just a wood frame with four casters on the bottom and the wheels pivot so it can go any direction. The two of us dragged that dolly to the top of railroad hill and Artie convinced me that I was the test pilot. “Come on, Teddy- you’ll be famous!” Truth be told I liked going first, both to prove I could do anything my older brother could despite my age and because I liked to please him. “You’re like Neil Armstrong on the first moon landing, Gary Gabelich setting the land speed record at Bonneville Salt Flats.” I also thought it was a good idea that I go first because if I broke a leg Artie could always drag me home on the furniture dolly, provided it was still in one piece.
So I bombed Railroad hill on that furniture dolly, finding out shortly after Artie gave me a shove that I had zero steering capability and the casters made it spin more and more as I picked up speed. Telephone poles and mailboxes whipped by me with increasing frequency, the fleeting thought crossing my mind that if I hit a car I’d be dead for sure. It was a lucky thing that I was facing backwards when I hit the Chesterfield’s privet hedge, as I just scraped my back a little on the branches and landed with a dull thump in the center of their lawn, nearly landing on their spaniel who bit me solidly on the leg. I lay there for a second catching my wind as the manic pup barked and lunged. I shook it off and scramble back out the hole I’d made in the shrubbery on the way in, the dog yapping and snarling, lunging out the hole behind me against the length of it’s tether.
Artie was running down the hill towards me with panic written across his face, thinking that this time he’s killed me. I brush myself off and stand up to my full four foot six, arms raised in a “V” like Mohammed Ali, the panic leaving Artie’s face, as he slows to a walk, laughing.
“That was rad!” He looks at the hole in the hedge. “Where’s the cart?”
I point towards the Chesterfield’s yard. “In there with Fluffy.” I turn my leg and show Artie the small punctures on my calf, “Fluffy tried to bite a chunk out of me.”
Artie reaches over and picks some leaves on a twig from my hair. “Mission accomplished, Astronaut.” He holds the twig up between his thumb and forefinger and pretends to smoke it like a cigarette. “Should’ve bit fluffy back.”
We abandoned the cart and walked towards home, kicking a half inflated ball we found in the alley behind Sports-Mart and inventing new derogatory names for Fluffy.

Growing up like we did, on our own a lot with just the two of us- that was a good time. Some people seem to find it sad, but neither one of us ever really met our father, as he went to Vietnam shortly after Artie was born and never made it back. Mom told me once that our dad volunteered to go to Vietnam and was made a forward scout in the infantry. The way it was told he volunteered to be the point guy somewhere near the Laotian border and he got caught in an ambush, one of the first guys to go down. He was awarded the Purple Heart and a Medal of Honor posthumously, which Artie and I used to take out and look at sometimes, along with the folded up flag and a black beret. He had two months left on his tour when he died.
Being so close in age and without a man around the house, Artie and I ended up being pretty solid the whole time we were growing up, even though he damned near killed me many times. Like when he convinced me to jump off the Magnolia Street Bridge and I found out only when I hit that the water was actually only six feet deep. Or the time he lowered me into an old mine shaft we found out in the forest to the south of town. He stood up there yelling, asking me what I could see. “Teddy? What’s down there? You see anything?” Even though he’d sent me in first, it was driving him nuts being up there away from the action. I was about to tell him I couldn’t see a thing when the rope snapped, and it was just lucky that the bottom was a scant dozen feet below me and sandy. I looked up the fifty feet I’d traveled to see Artie’s silhouette appear in the small blue hole that was the mouth of the mine. “Hey Teddy-You alright?” I’m standing there brushing myself off in the dark. “No I’m not alright. I’m at the bottom of a sixty foot hole and I can’t see a thing and we have two pieces of rope twenty five foot long!” In the end Artie dropped me down some kindling and a pack of matches and I built a little fire while he ran back to town to get help. They ended up sending the fire department and they climbed down and pulled me out around nightfall, and they called mom at work and made her come down. At first she was freaked out, but later she was seriously pissed. In the morning she laughed about it, though- and the county filled the mineshaft in so we never had a chance to do that again.

Through High school we continued to run around together, and we did the normal stuff that teenage guys do- played sports, got part time jobs, learned to drive, bought cars, killed time, dated girls. Inevitably we did most of that together, even going on double dates now and then. One time we went on a double date with two sisters, and I ended up really liking the girl I was with and Artie ended up not liking his date very much at all. This was pretty uncomfortable for a while, as I continued to see the girl I was dating and we eventually were married ten years later.

It’s funny how Artie and I grew apart. I don’t think either one of us ever would have predicted that would happen. Artie got out of high school and went to college two states away for a year before dropping out and taking a job driving a beer truck. I finished High School and enrolled in community college near home, living with mom and interning at our local paper. Artie and I would get together now and then for a beer, most of the time me driving to see him. Occasionally we’d get together and really tie one on, reminiscing about our idyllic peter pan childhood and commiserating that in real life it doesn’t go on forever. I’d sleep on his couch for the night- every once in a while for a couple days- and then we wouldn’t see each other for months, though once now and then he’d come home and see mom, and every Christmas for sure.
Mom got cancer when I was twenty-nine. She didn’t cry when she told me, and I hung in there and didn’t cry either. Nancy and I had been married for nearly two years. I was working at the paper and trying to write my first novel. The disease was aggressive and mom passed away shortly after that. Artie and I sat there by her side those last two months, taking turns at taking care of her. Mom was always pragmatic and I will always be in awe of how bravely she faced death. She was at peace with the world and told us she was proud of us. Then she was just gone, leaving the two inseparable boys as grown men with hardly a strand to connect us.
After she was gone we didn’t know what to do. It was a sort of uncomfortable anticlimax, with certain finality to it. We sat on Mom’s front porch and got wrecked that night. We’d carried the sofa out and put it on the porch because being inside the house was more than either of us could handle just then. We sat on that sofa and polished off a fifth of Scotch Whiskey, and then a good part of another, talking softly to each other in the still of that hot summer night. I can’t even recall what we said that night, but I imagine none of it was very much fun.
Over the next few days we packed up mom’s things and cleaned out the house. Nancy helped take care of the funeral arrangements which neither Artie or I were really capable of doing at that time. Then we parted company, he going back to his life two states away, me going back to my family.

Time moves along whether you keep up or not, and our calls to each other became less and less frequent, the visits nearly nonexistent. Nancy and I had two daughters over the two years following mom’s death. In retrospect I don’t know what that’s about, having my two girls all the sudden after mom’s death. Maybe I needed to fill that mom shaped void in my life- I don’t really know. I sure wish mom could have seen my two girls that look a bit like her, taken them on walks and played with them.
I really didn’t know what was going on with Artie at that time, as we really didn’t talk that much. I played with my kids in the park, worked at the paper, wrote a novel that never got published and some short stories that did. I often thought of Artie but I was as guilty as he was of not taking the initiative to call. I don’t know what that was either, but I can guess that we both looked at each other and saw mom, and it was just easier for us both to stay away, to give it some time.
Artie moved to the West Coast, got married and then got divorced, and ended up being heavily involved in cocaine and alcohol, then even more heavily involved in AA and recovery. I didn’t imbibe much after mom died, but I guess Artie did just the opposite. When Artie told me he was in a program and getting sober, I bought a ticket and flew out to California, crashing on his couch and spending some time with him. We went to meetings and generally killed a lot of time together, just like the good old days. We’d get up in the morning and cook some breakfast, go walk around the city exploring whatever the city had to offer.
I spent three weeks there with Artie, and managed to get him to the beach and out to watch some movies, to a ballgame and to a shit load of meetings. After two weeks Artie’s sponsor told me that sooner or later my brother had to stand on his own two, and that he would be watching out for him when I go home. I spent another week out there and then Artie and I said our goodbyes, promising to keep in touch more frequently than we had in the past.

The last time I saw Artie I was 43. I flew out to Los Angeles and caught a cab to the hospital. He said the reason he hadn’t told me was because he didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. Just like mom the disease was aggressive, and by the time a friend of his was able to get in touch with me Artie was already staying full time at the hospital.
I stood in the doorway and looked at him, laying their frail, drained- just a whisper of himself. There was an I.V. in his arm and a tube in his nose, a bandage on his head. “Hey buddy.” I speak softly, the way you always feel compelled to talk in a hospital. His eyes open and he rolls his head towards me and gives me a wan grin. “ahh-shit…Teddy. You found me.” His voice is hardly a breath, weak. “How the fuck are you?”
I walk over and sit down on the aluminum chair next to him, tears in my eyes. “You should have told me sooner.”
He nods his head almost imperceptibly. “Fuck it. Not much anyone could do.”
He rolls his head to look at me and I take his hand. “Lotta good times we had together, Teddy-Boy.” He laughs and breaks into a coughing fit, spitting up a little blood. I grab a towel from the nightstand and wipe his mouth, tears pouring down my face.
“I’m sorry, Artie.” I have his hand in mine. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
He exhales the saddest sigh I’ve ever heard, closing his eyes for a second and then opening them again, staring at the ceiling. He grips my hand with his weak grip and squeezes. ““Aw fuck it. Don’t beat yourself up about that.” He wheezes the words out, laboring for breath. “It was me moved away anyhow. You stuck it out and took care of Ma.” He coughs at the word ‘ma’, and I have to wipe his mouth again. He rolls his head and grins at me, and in that instant I know nothing has ever changed between us- that we’re just the same as we were raising each other twenty-five years ago. He lies back on the pillow, somehow conjuring up a glint of mischief in his eyes.

“Looks like this time it’s me that’s gotta go first.”

Lion-Country Safari.

2008-06-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

Summer is almost over when we piled into the Winnebago and headed out to Lion Country Safari. Dad’s been threatening to make this trip all summer, and we’ve been telling him there’s no fucking way we’re going. He’s been drunk pretty much all summer and the Winnie lost second gear on the way back from Burning Man but miracle of miracles, today’s the day and here we all are- as if we had anything better to do.
Luckily I have a half full bottle of valium that grandma dropped behind the toilet. Stuffed in a backpack Jeffy and PJ have a quarter pound of the best quality hydroponically grown Amsterdam hybrid money can get you- a particularly potent strain referred to simply as “Hogsbreath”. They also have a quarter ounce of Peruvian flake and four sheets of blotter acid in four separate zip-lock bags, one hidden in each shoe. Last year they were obsessed with model airplanes. This year it was just the glue.
Grandma has been holding a one sided conversation with grandpa for seven months, since about a week after his death. The Winnebago was grandpa’s pride and joy and despite it’s age he kept it clean and well serviced with a fully stocked bar. The Winnie was also the instrument of his demise, as it was she that rolled off the jacks and came to a rest on top of him as he attempted to lubricate the rear end, which come to think of it is an awfully Freudian way to go.
So dad is carrying on a semi-intelligible monologue, weaving this big boat out Pacific Coast Highway, driving by Braille. He seems to accept the brief moments when he passes dead center as perfect driving but really he spends most of the time well off the actual roadway, barking out short bursts of sinister laughter at the terrified looks in the eyes of both the oncoming traffic as well as pedestrians well off of the roadway. Grandma has a terrified look too, clutching her Pomeranian, Barfy, and mumbling to grandpa like she does. I don’t know if it’s her usual terrified look that she gets when she has the squirts or a result of witnessing a businessman on a Harley Davidson glance off of the front left fender a block back. Conditions lead me to assume that it’s a combination of both.
Mom is passed out in a lithium haze on the bed in the back of the Rv but I think PJ and Jeffy wedged her between the mattress and the sidewall of the Winnie when they started to really come on to the sheets of blotter in their shoes. It’s tough to keep the zip-locks closed when you’re pulling your shoes on and it’s hot in the Winnie with a family of six. Plus both of them had to walk through an inch of piss in the bathrooms at the chevron just off Santa Monica Boulevard.
PJ was the first to realize they were in over their heads when dad nearly took out a traffic cop giving a citation on the side of the road and grandma jumped up, screamed and cut the cheese so loud and so hard that the dog yelped and hid under the driver’s seat.
If Barfy found that alarming he had no idea how close to his own mortality he really was. Driving into Lion Country Safari we passed several signs that stated in no uncertain terms that dogs weren’t allowed in the park, but dad figured that a tiny Pom wouldn’t be any big deal and he force fed Barfy a shot of Crown Royal to keep him quiet and stuffed him in the glove box while the ranger had a look around.
This proved to be less than prudent as Jeffy, peaking on an undetermined amount of high quality blotter acid, chose to “liberate” the Pomeranian back to the wild- just to see how it would react in it’s natural habitat.
Surprisingly enough Barfy actually held his own for a bit, standing his full 9 inches tall and yapping ferociously as the lions paced and slunk in a circle thirty feet out. We were all pretty amazed at the speed he got up to and really I thought he had a chance until he had to slow and corner at the end of the fence, where a lion made up some ground and eviscerated poor Barfy with a quick shake of the head, hurling the aft parts off into the weeds and landing the fore parts across the windshield face-first directly in front of Jeffy and PJ. Sitting in the front bench seat they both let out a low “Hol-ee fuck.” simultaneously and then returned to the back of the vehicle where they stayed and smoked furiously throughout the balance of the trip until we reached the Bob’s Big Boy on Hollywood Boulevard.

Graffiti Love Story

2008-06-23T22:52:00.000-07:00

Bid Wexler finds me playing Bullshit for pennies with Bean at the Chicken’s Roost, a run down arcade that fronts the boardwalk just West of Samson’s Fury, Piedmont Park’s deteriorating wood roller coaster. He weaves his way through the pool tables and arcade games and stops next to our table, watching us with a speculative eye. He gives bean a nod and then turns to me, decision made. “Hey Tobus- y’wanna make a couple bucks giving me a hand?” I’d been hanging around for over an hour, smoking cigarettes and losing at cards while Donnie plays pinball- and the Roost closes at Two a.m. which is ten minutes away so I throw my cards on the table in front of Bean and say “Whatever you have planned, it’s gotta be better than losing pennies to Bullshit Bean.” Bean shuffles the cards with one hand, leans back and grins up at me showing his crooked, nicotine stained teeth as I pull on my jacket to leave. Beans voice is low and coarse, like he gargles with gravel. “Bullshit.”
I lean towards him and snatch my smokes off of the table next to his lighter where he’s tried to hide them amongst the debris. I hold up the smokes and then slide them into my pocket.
“If bullshit is an art, Bean- you’re a fucking Picasso.” Bid screws up his hatchet-face into a grimace and laughs his heckling laugh, the victim of many beatings becoming at his own hand a victim of self-parody, a living, breathing Picasso.
We check coin returns all the way to the door, the sound of peanut shells and broken glass crunching against the beer soaked carpet beneath our feet, acting as percussion to the symphony of Bean’s drunken laughter, the sounds of the arcade games and the hustle of the boardwalk outside.
We walk out the door and into the night, pulling up our coats against the cold as we head down the boardwalk towards Ventura. Making our way through the fog towards Bid’s House, the usual characters line the boardwalk, bums and hookers in the well lit places like moths to flames, street dealers and the associated bottom feeders staying out in the shadows where the business is done. Pulled in tight against the curb at the top of Ventura, three custom early-sixties Impalas sit low against the curb, hand-sprayed metal-flake paintjobs garish underneath the yellow glow of the street lamps.
The same Vato Locos who are always there on a Friday night are standing in a loose circle next to their rides, smoking and drinking and talking shit, just another Friday night in toon-town.
We know they see us coming but they don’t even look our way. They rarely do. As we pass, the alpha dog at the center of their little diorama makes eye contact with Bid and Bids stares back, unflinching. After a bit the Latino Chief gives Bid an almost imperceptible nod and turns his head to say something, then looks back. Bid doesn’t miss a beat, staring a few seconds longer as we walk by and then giving the Vato Loco a short nod back, just a flick of the head and then it’s eyes forward, the continuation of an unspoken agreement from two sides of the neighborhood.
I see all of it without really looking; I don’t really assume anything. To tell the truth it’s just the way things are around here- cat and dog- it goes on every day. People packed in like rats in a cage, trying to find their little place in the sun- their tiny chunk of Paradise. Sooner or later someone’s going to try to take yours, and there has to be some sort of agreement in order to cohabitate- a tiny bit of compromise so that everyone gets a chance to live their lives without having to fight their way across town every day just to fight their way back.
With the Mexicans and us- we just keep our distance- same with Red and his dirt bag Bikers down by the Daley Double, T.J. and that crowd of knuckle-dragging surf Nazis up by the pier. No one owns this neighborhood- there aren’t any rules set in concrete. It’s the Wild, Wild West, cowboys and indians.
Just the same, if they tried to muscle us out- well we were born here, they were born here- and we’re here to stay. Needless to say things would get ugly. Life’s better without all that shit. We basically ignore each other and our respective differences and do our own things, and we all get along- for now, anyways.
“So what have I gotten myself into?” I ask Bid, fumbling to match light a cigarette as we walk.
Bid shoots me a blank look and shrugs. “Is this one of your deep, nutsoid philosophical questions that can’t really be answered?”
I can’t help but chuckle. It’s like I speak another language sometimes. “No- I mean like right now- my duty as the indentured.” I take a drag off my cigarette and blow the smoke towards the sky. “What, exactly, am I giving up? My virtue? My pride? My life?”
Now Bid is laughing too. I like hanging out with Bid. Bid has his shit together- he makes his own way, does mechanic work downtown four days a week and builds motorcycles in his yard sometimes for a little side money. He makes his own way without having to deal drugs on the street and he makes his own decisions. He’s a stand-up guy, he’s always treated me fair, and he’s always down for a good time. “I need some help doing a… thing.” He snatches the cigarette out of my mouth and takes a drag off of it. Bid doesn’t really smoke, only when he’s tweaking and when he’s nervous. He all the time is grabbing our smokes and smoking them, one of those guys to whom “not smoking” actually means “doesn’t buy smokes”.
He places the cigarette back between my lips and adopts this serious posture, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched as if we aren’t the only two people for half a block in either direction and someone might be eavesdropping. He glances left and right and then looks me in the eyes. “First you gotta promise not to tell anyone any of this. Savvy?”
I nod. “Sure- of course. That goes without saying” I’m a little surprised he even says this. I’m a guy who keeps my mouth shut- he knows that. I wouldn’t be around otherwise. Now he’s got my interest though, and I figure maybe it’s a drug thing, though that would be a little out of character for Bid.
He looks at me and grins. “We gotta go paint something.”
“Like a car?”
“Like graffiti.”
“I’m cool with the old school.” I shrug. “So what’s the scary part?”
“No scary part.” He takes another drag off of my cigarette, putting it back like I’m his ashtray. “I just don’t want anyone to know.” He eyes me coolly. “Honest to god, I probably wouldn’t even tell anyone else- but you have a head for this kinda shit. Woods and them- I just can’t see them getting into it.”
I’m intrigued now, and it shows in the cashed butt burning between my lips. Bid flicks it free and grins. “Just wait. Have patience my son. You’ll see.”
We stop at Indian Liquors to lift a twelve pack and then run across the street to the house Bid and his dad share behind the Jack in the Box. Bid’s dad is pretty much a mystery to us- an eloquent man though one of few words, about six foot two, looks like a hell’s angel, carries himself like he’s untouchable, and flinches at nothing. Rumor is he went to college and was at one time a principal at an alternative school on the East side of the city. Apparently somewhere along the way he took a wrong turn.
He rarely says two words to us, sometimes he tolerates us and other times he tells Bid to get rid of us. One time a brief case he was carrying fell open and a .357 and bag of peanut-butter crank the size of a brick fell out. He never even looked at us- just said ‘whoops’ and leaned over, scooped the stuff up, and disappeared into his bedroom.
Bid is a lot like his dad in a lot of ways, but whatever Bid’s dad does for a living is no concern of mine, but Bid’s dad is pretty adamant that Bid doesn’t get into doing penny-ante street deals up on the boardwalk like Roper and Grendle do. Bid’s Brother Mike is up in Campo for that very thing- slinging hash up on the boardwalk with Roper and Grendle- and that’s certainly a bone of contention with the senior Wexler.
Bid has already got the gear loaded in the trunk of his beat up ’64 Nova sedan and is ready to roll. We cut a couple of short lived lines on the hood of the Nova and then hit the road at full attention, defcon-one, leaving the lights of Ryker’s Point behind us.
It’s just after two a.m. as we drive across the bay in the dark and on up into Sherman Park. As soon as we’re out of Ryker’s Point the fog lifts and suddenly we’re surrounded by the panorama of twinkling lights that is the surrounding city.
Bid turns on the tape deck and we both wince as it immediately fills the car with Hall and Oates. He feels around on the floor until he finds a tape. He holds it up and squints at it and then tosses it in the back seat, scrabbling around on the floor again until he finds another tape and slams it into the player and turns up the volume to ten.
The opening strains of Reagan Youth’s ‘Degenerated’ immediately hype me up for some action. I reach into the twelve pack in front of the seat on the floor between us and open two beers, handing one to Bid and taking a slug off of my own. I lean back against the vinyl bench seat and gaze across the river that separates the Beach from the city and gaze at all the buildings and lights out there, foreign territory- another world.
Bid puffs on a cancer stick, talking in even tones about this girl he used to date- Debbie Dumbrowski- some of it familiar from stuff he’d mentioned before when we were up all night tweaking, rambling on and on about everything and nothing- some new material.
He used to date this girl- Debbie- who lived up in University City. He first saw her at a Tex and The Horseheads show at the Sherman Park Presidents Club and she and some of her girlfriends went to a bar after. Bid was there at the bar and they met and they hit it off and started spending some time together.
This was a huge thing for Bid, who spent his whole life in Ryker’s Point where everyone knew everything about everybody, and he’d dated a couple girls before with disastrous results so up to now for the most part it’d been all about hanging with the boys, drinking and drugging and surfing, getting into fights and getting into trouble.
So he and Debbie Dumbrowski date for like six months, she’s a half-assed suburban rich-kid and Bid’s about the craziest thing she’s ever done. Bid is really into this chick, trying to straighten up and fly right, toning down the rough stuff. She’s digging having a guy that her girlfriends find a little bit scary. Everything is going along cool with both of them and it’s all going pretty good and then bam- one day out of no where she tells him she wants more, not more as in a gold ring and monogrammed invitations, as in more dick. As in she doesn’t want to see him anymore.
So she just shuts him down and Bid’s like “What the fuck just happened?” and he tries to talk to her but she just won’t have it. She just flat vaporizes- changes her number and moves somewhere across town and Bid is just left there holding his dick with a dumb look on his face, finally understanding the true meaning of the phrase “the novelty wore off”.
Bid takes a drag off of his butt and flicks it out the window, rolling it back up quickly to fend off the cold night air. “So I Bummed out for a couple months, and then I just said ‘fuck it’ and moved on.” He takes a gulp off of his beer, wiping some foam from his mouth with his sleeve and he turns to me and shrugs. “But no matter how heinous she might seem to you after all that, I can’t get her out of my head.” He navigates the car through the dark, empty streets in silence for a half a block swerving to miss a shopping cart overturned in the street and nearly grazing a staggering drunk in the process.
I roll my window down to spit and then turn to Bid again, tired of the build up. “So what’s the plan- we gonna dress up her car a little?”
Bid barks out a laugh and nods his head, “Is that what you would do?” He hands me his empty and I promptly whip it out the window, nearly making it into a trashcan on the corner as we pass. “Yeah- I guess maybe you would.”
“Well I can’t do that. It’d be… you know- counterproductive.” I open two more beers and hand him one as we roll past the strip clubs on Rosewood Boulevard and through the factories along Belt Road. I lean back and close my eyes as we sneak up through Marion Hills in the dark, listening to Bid tell his story.
So he goes on this campaign of graffiti, painting messages to her on bridges and overpasses along the various routes between her new apartment and her work. It didn’t take any time at all to find out where she was living- he had a buddy who works for the cable company look her up in the computer- and he already knew where she worked downtown.
So here we were, on a mission. All of the messages he painted before were one-man endeavors- stuff like “I miss you Debbie” and “What was I supposed to do- never fall in love with you?” and other pointless yet poetic, romantic scripture- some stenciled, some freehand- all prominently placed on bridges and overpasses and blank walls where she would see them on her way to or from work.
Up to now Bid had just wanted her to know that she wasn’t a passing thing for him- that what they had was important- and for a guy like Bid to want to say a thing like that- well that’s a thing you take seriously, because Bid’s the kind of guy that didn’t even cry when his Pit Bull ‘Erko’ died- he just bought a round of shots and a round of beers and made a toast to “Commander Erko, a goddamned good dog”.
While up to now Bid had applied himself, and for a guy who normally inflicts serious physical harm when injured- been pretty inventive- this time he had plans to go much bigger.
As we drive up the hill the architecture changes quickly from rundown factories to rundown retail stores to coffee bars and cottage law firms and doctors offices, until eventually we’re driving past neat little vintage forties adobe style row houses with well-kept lawns and manicured hedges. “Man- this place was a fucking ghetto just five years ago.” I point at a bookstore and coffee bar that’s closed down but still lit up in front. “That place was a strip club- the place two doors down was the most notorious gay bar in San Diego. Guys in ass-less chaps and leather grape smugglers would roller disco in front of the Pizza place next door.”
Bid slaps the dashboard with the palm of his hand and howls. “Disco Pizza! I went to show right next door to that place. It was crazy! We all went over and had beers with the queers. There were some burly fuckers in there- and they were watching the Raiders game so we hung around for a while. They knew we came in for the show and tried to fuck with us a little. Grendle called one guy a silly sailor and told him we’re just here for a beer and he didn’t bring his dancing shoes. They seemed to find that funny and left us alone after that. I actually think they wanted us to start some shit but there was six of us and about fifteen of them, so we took a pass on that. Those guys were actually pretty all right though- a little weird, but all right.”
“Looks like the yuppies have taken over now though.”
“It happens everywhere.” Bid drinks his beer and wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his flannel. “Any place that’s remotely cool they’ll eventually come in and ‘clean up’ and raise the rents and push people like us out into the valley.”
“Fuckin’ Yuppies.”
“Fuck ‘em. Make ‘em suffer while we can.” Bid turns the volume up so that Black Flag is blasting out of the Nova’s tinny speakers. “I bet they never clean up Ryker’s Point! That place is built on beer cans, pharmaceuticals and toxic waste!” He has to yell to be heard over the music. “You know the back-bay behind Ryker’s Point is where the old city dump was? You can bet they didn’t clean that up and haul it away when they built Piedmont Park- no fuckin’ way. They built on top of it, guaranteed!” He reaches over and turns the music back down.
“Crazy.” I finish off my beer and stuff it under the seat. No point in getting arrested for littering up here on the well lit streets of Sherman Park.
“Fuck yeah it’s crazy…but then so are we.”

We drive across Sherman Park and park off the shoulder at the West end of Suicide Bridge, trying to get Bid’s car as far into the bushes as we can. We do another fat line before leaving the car- a little something to get us through it.
Bid hands me a box of about twenty spray-cans and shoulders a big coil of heavy gauge rope and a window-washer’s harness and we walk out onto the bridge. As soon as I see the coil of rope I’m having second thoughts. “So- we’re going to hang off of the bridge and paint- is that the plan?” Bid’s laughter reverberates off the sides of the bridge as we walk along by moonlight. “Nah- don’t get cold feet on me just yet. I’ll hang over the edge and paint- all you have to do is hold the rope.” Now I’ve got visions of the rope slipping through my hands and Bid falling 100’ to the highway below, leaving a large Bid-shaped smear on the asphalt. But I was more comfortable with that than I was with me hanging over the edge and painting- so I keep my mouth shut.
We reach the mid-span of the bridge and Bid pulls on the Window Washer’s harness, which is a series of interlocking canvas straps that circle his shoulders and legs with a belt around the waist and two large metal loops front and back to attach the rope too. Bid gets the harness on and checks all the straps and buckles. He grabs the straps and jerks them, attempting to pull them this way and that. He looks up and grins at me in the dark, apparently satisfied. “Bondage! Punk fuckin’ rock.” I attach the metal loop on the end of the rope to the loop on the back of the harness and jerk on it. “You’d go over real big in this with the butchies back at the Disco Pizza.” Bid chuckles and then turns to face me, grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling me close with a serious look on his face. “Dude- whatever you do, don’t fucking drop me. That would be really fucked, and my dad would hunt you down and kill you.” I peer at him through the darkness, silent, considering the responsibility of literally holding his fate in my hands ten stories off the ground while completely whacked on meth.
He then slaps me lightly on the side of the head. “Just fuckin with you.” He hands me a pair of thick, leather, work gloves, which I immediately pull on.
“Don’t worry about it- you’ve really only got one thing to do.” He shrugs as he winds the rope one time around the four inch steel railing and hands me the balance of it in a coil. “It’s pretty simple- just don’t let go.” With that he climbs over the railing as I brace my feet against the cement curb. He stands there a minute and leans his weight against the rope, one hand holding the rope and one hand gripping the railing behind him.
“Hey bid?” He leans back against the railing and turns his head, impatient that I’ve broken his concentration.
“What are you going to write?”
He leans his weight against the rope and turns to face me, chuckling softly. “Use your imagination. Killroy was here.” And with that he let go of the bridge and put his full weight on the rope as I scrambled to hang on and lower him down.
We’re there for an hour, Bid dangling below spraying away while I’m now sitting, leaning back with my feet wedged against the railing and am hanging on with everything I’ve got. After the first five letters the weight was already beginning to wear on me, as was the enigma of exactly what message Bid is writing down there. I personally would have written, “For a good time call Debbie Dumbrowski!” or “Debbie Dumbrowski gave me herpes!” But that’s just my no nonsense approach to ending a relationship without a lot of drama.
When he came up to move over to the next letter we did another line each and I asked him again, and he just heckled me and wrapped the rope around the railing a couple more twists. Then down he went again, leaving me with the rope looped around behind my back so that I could kind of half-assed sit with my weight against the rope holding bid up and giving my hands a break. I could hear him down there spraying, and I called out to him, “Bid?”
He stops spraying and yells back, “What?”
I nearly drop him as I start cracking up, “Is it ‘I did Deanna Dumbrowski in the pooper’?” This is followed with a long silence.
“Good idea, but no. Maybe next time.” I hear him spraying again and I go back to watching for cars.
There’s a pretty long stretch of road on either side of the Cabrillo Bridge so you can see cars coming a half-mile or more away. Every thirty minutes or so I’d have to yell down to Bid to hang on and I’d loop the rope around one of the railings twenty times and then tie it off and stand there in front of the coiled up rope smoking a cigarette while the car went past. I had to have looked pretty suspicious out there having a smoke on the mid-span of the bridge at three-thirty in the morning, but nobody ever stopped. I wasn’t as worried about the car so much as I was that the rope would come loose and Bid would plummet to his death on the concrete roadway three-hundred feet below while I was on my smoke break. Taking into account the amount of crank typically in his system I still didn’t think he could weather the impact gracefully.
It’s 4:38 in the morning when Bid climbs back up onto the bridge for the last time. We hadn’t realized how tired we were until we were walking back to the car carrying the box full of empty spray cans, which we disposed of in a dumpster a few miles away so as to not leave any evidence. We drove around Balboa park as the sky lightened, finding a place to park where we could do a line and drink a beer with a clear view of the sun rise. I consider asking again about what he wrote but I’m spent and he isn’t going to tell me anyhow, so I just sit back and let the chemicals do their thing while watching the sunrise.
Once the sun is up we’re wide-awake again, getting our second-wind both chemically as well as naturally. “Well, I guess that’s about it.” Bid fires up the Malibu and wheels us out of the parking lot and down the road to the highway that would take us to the freeway and then home. “Whattya say we shoot home real quick and see if we can get a surf before the crowds show up?” I nod in agreement and sit back in the Malibu’s plush seats, pretending to catch a nap in hopes of fooling my brain into feeling like I’ve slept.
There are tall eucalyptus trees lining the road as we drop down into Laurel canyon, and it’s almost like we’ve left 1982 and are back in old California, without the city and the people piled one on top of the next and the cops and the smog and all the shit we deal with every day we live here. I look off into the trees on the side of the road and I see an owl sitting on the branch of a eucalyptus tree, but before I can say anything we’re past it. I know we’re right below the zoo and imagine it would be cool if we were to see a giraffe or an elephant.
We come around the bend and there’s the Cabrillo Bridge towering over us, the road we’re on passing beneath it between its massive supports. I look up to where we were only an hour ago and immediately I cant help but burst out, doubled over in hysterics. There’s a line of three foot tall black letters spanning nearly fifty feet across the mid-span of the bridge that spell out “MISSION BEACH GHETTO GUERILLAS” and below that is a thirty foot long hypodermic needle, and below that in smaller letters it says “LOCK YOUR DOORS - HIDE YOUR DAUGHTERS!”

I gaze up and look at what we’ve done and I don’t have time to process the feelings that I experience before we pass under the bridge and on down the road, out of sight of Bid’s accomplishment. I’m giddy. I want to laugh harder than I’ve ever laughed. I’m a little apprehensive that we may get busted for this one, but at the same time I appreciate how much balls it took to pull it off. I don’t know what to think- I’m just dumbstruck.
I laugh again and turn to Bid, “That’s fucking great!” He hands me a beer. “I mean- that was just fucking beautiful!” I’m stammering now. Bid cracks a beer for himself and laughs. “That fucking bridge is over a hundred feet tall- I haven’t met a woman yet that’s worth that!” He laughs again. “That’s one for the mother-fuckin’ yuppies to have to look at on their way to work.” We laugh and drink our beers, thinking about a little surf as we roll on home with the sun rising at our backs. We’ll never go down without a fight.

Ted Avery O’shea and the Mission Beach Ghetto Guerillas

2008-06-23T22:51:00.000-07:00

Teddy was a man when I first met him, me hanging around on the North side of the P.B. recreation center; he was riding circles on a black Schwinn Spitfire. His one leg was doing double duty at the pedals, only because the other was in a cast riding straight out on the handlebars in front of him.
I was twelve or thirteen at the time, and Ted was a couple years older than I. I had been hanging around with his younger brother Tim (who was a year or two younger than I) and I hadn't ever met Ted before, I think because he was in juvi or away with his dad in L.A., I can't recall clearly which. His dad was in the navy I think- I don’t remember for sure- but I vaguely remember a story about Ted getting in a hit and run while skateboarding up in L.A., so maybe that's what it was. Teddy was riding these lazy circles on the basketball court outside the P.B. rec, talking with Braden Frye and Whitney Costello, a Krakatoa cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth, smoke drifting into his face and stinging his eyes while he concentrated on keeping the bike upright and moving forward. Teddy always had a Schwinn Spitfire, which was the standard vehicle for cruising the boardwalk in 79. They were pretty indestructible, easy to work on, and kind of retro before retro was a thing. We used to steal bikes all the time back then, grind the serial numbers and mix up the parts with other frames so they were hard to identify. Me and this kid Ramin had a regular chop shop going for a while in ninth grade, but had to quit when John Garris inadvertently gave us up to the cops (Garris and I looked pretty similar, and when the cops hauled him in as me he let it slip that maybe it was Gibson. By his account he didn't think it was me-he was just trying to get out from under it because he was guilty for as many crimes as myself at the time- but still I was pretty sore about it, and I got sent off to my dads place out in the sticks for my tenth grade year because of it.) Ramin got off easy because he was an Iranian immigrant and it was 1979- plus he pretended not to understand anything they said to him, and constantly made no sense speaking Iranian surferese pidgen until the police and the school finally gave up and let him go with his parents. He was a streetwise kid, but I heard all that caught up with him later anyways.
Teddy once told me that he dropped out of seventh grade, and since I never saw him at school I guess that it was true. He was a typical beach kid in a lot of respects: parents split up, raised by a single mom in a rented beach cottage, worked at Fillippi’s Pizza on Garnet Avenue to get a little extra change- Pretty much standard fare for P.B. with a pretty good chance that life would continue on like that indefinitely. But when I got to know him I found he was much more than all of that extraneous shit, as I'm sure most everyone around there could turn out to be if there was anyone there that a person wanted to get to know and would let you get close to them.
Teddy was a romantic and an idealist, a fighter with his fists as well as a fighter for whatever rights he could discover or make up. As the easiest ways to make money in P.B. back then was to sell dope to the swabbies on navy payday and to steal, we were all of the time getting rousted by the cops for one thing or another, and there became quite a bit of animosity between the local surfers and the San Diego's finest.
Teddy used to be the first to flash them the finger or throw his arm straight out in a nazi salute and call them pigs or the Gestapo. At some point we always ran, and they always chased us in some parody of Porky Pig chasing the Road-runner- them with their flashlights and keys and all that crap they keep jangling around strapped to their rotund pigness so when they did luck out and catch us they were already pissed off just for being a parody, and Teddy would point and laugh and taunt them, jeering at them until they finally pushed back and roughed him up, playing on cheap shots because they inevitably had nothing on him and then Teddy would just get all fired up with his stereotypical Irish temper and offer to take them all on in one shot.
Plenty of times we fought side by side on the boardwalk at night, and I always ended up picking glass from the ally floor out of my back and teddy would come away clean because he could hold off two or three guys with that double edged dagger he carried in a boot sheath and that kind of crazy iciness that radiated off of him when he was in any kind of danger. It may sound like a lot to handle, but at that time and place he was the best guy to have by your side, and loyal to the bitter end. Mission Beach Ghetto Guerillas and to hell with anyone that gets in our way.
Ted and Phil let me move in when my mom tried to send me back to Dad's place the second time. These days I’ll be the first to admit that I was too much for mom to handle and dad and my step-mom were having some infidelity issues that didn't leave much time for problem teenagers- so Teddy said “Shine it!” and I moved in with he and Phil. Phil was supposed to be in San Diego going to college, but instead he was working at the firehouse deli by day and getting stoned with us by night and trying his best to stay out of our trouble. I would pretty much bum around all day and hang with Bid when he was around and Ronnie Haig and all of the rest of the street dealers, drinking a beer or eating at thousand dogs, this little taco stand on Ventura (the real name was Alcupulco number seventeen but thousand dogs just fit. No explanation necessary.) I spent my days deteriorating in the shadow of the Belmont Park roller Coaster, and at night would damage myself alongside the rest of the crumbling city.
We had an upstairs studio apartment on the alley by Isthmus court. It had two beds and a table with chairs. When I slept, I slept on the floor. At 5 a.m. the guys left for work and I would scam one of their beds and sleep until noon. We didn't have a T.V. because Phil got fed up with the bullshit one day and plucked it up and marched down to Bayside walk and across the lawn and the sand and threw it into Mission Bay, and we all sat there in the sand and smoked reefer and drank beer and gave the TV a proper Eulogy.
So after that at night we'd get stoned and listen to black and white T.V. on the one station that came in on the radio. I used to always draw (which seemed to flat out amaze Teddy, a lifelong product of our wonderful urban city schooling who as far as I could tell was never encouraged to express himself in any artistic manner) and so I made us a T.V. out of a cardboard box. I think I even made a couple of pictures to make up a couple of different channels. I remember Teddy just letting out a quiet laugh at the whole thing, and Philthy staring at it intently for an hour out of respect for my efforts and Jah- Ras Tifari, looking away only long enough to pack another bowl. We used to listen to a tape of Firesign theater over and over, and Phil and Ted would quote it verbatim as if they were performing it on stage, as we stomped in our engineers boots down the back alleys of mission beach usually on our way to nowhere particular (we always traveled the alleys- both to avoid the cops as well as enjoy the scenery while searching out waylaid spitfires)
Those guys had a lot of names for me. I was younger than them both (Phil, who at the time went by the nom du pluer “Philthy Riggs”, was 24 to my 15) and I was kind of under their supervision and tentative protection- I guess in retrospect not too unlike a younger brother. I was “Toby” first, from way back. Then it was “Tobus McBobus” one night when we were shrooming, and I have no Idea where that came from. Then it was Just “Mac B” For a bit. After a couple impulsive episodes it was “Toby the Cat Hater”, because whenever we went off stomping, if I saw a cat I'd chase it down the alley in my combat boots and feign at wanting to kick it (though I never did do it, nor ever wanted to. That was just something I did.) The other guys we hung with were pretty much too far-gone to have any kind of close friendship like we had, though they were all our bros and they also took care of me when things got rough. There was just no way they could do the stuff we did, like the T.V. thing or catching snakes at Robb field, or the time we rented mopeds and rode all over the city, or the time Ted and I went to the zoo (He was eighteen and had never been to the zoo? What the fuck?!), and fishing off of Bud’s dock for sand-sharks, and the spur-of-the-moment evening fishing on the Seaforth fishing charter with a twelve-pack of beer and a couple packs of smokes. We could do that because we were still hanging onto our humanity, but the street dealers like Woods and Bean and Wally were all about dealing and doing dope, and the stuff we did they would laugh at and give me a hard time. They were hard guys, and I guess you give up some of the good stuff in order to have the security of being a hard guy. I don't know where they are now, but I hope they all eventually came around and get to at least do the zoo and that stuff, even if they are still into heavy stuff. I mean it's not like there's too many guys that are tough enough to give them a hard time for it. At least there’s not too many left now.
One time Phil got a car- or maybe it was Bid, I don't really recall now. We didn't have much use for cars as we rarely left our neighborhood except to go to the occasional show downtown- and then whenever we did go out of Mission Beach we usually traveled in a group. Anyway- We had this car- a 69 Primer gray Malibu- and it was the Monday after swabby payday and Woods and Wally came over with a bunch of money and beer and said why not let's all go to the drive-in over on Rosecrans. I don't remember but I guess we were all for it because pretty soon there was Phil driving (Phil was the only one with a drivers license that didn’t have some sort of leverage against it, and damn near the only one who could give his real name if we got pulled over.) Woods and Wally riding shotgun, and then Ronny Haig, Teddy, Bid and myself in the back. It’s pretty much a matter of course that we’re all drinking heavily, and then we get there and Wally, Ronnie and myself get in the trunk while Woods and Bid hop the fence and sneak in that way.
To tell you the truth, I have no idea what the movie was, and am in fact dead certain that we didn't know what was playing until we got there as that would have taken possessing and reading a current newspaper , something I just don't recollect this bunch doing much. Current events were what was happening on the boardwalk, the price of an ounce or a gram, and when did the next carrier come in from the West-Pacific Fleet, all information which was readily available in front of Hamels Skate Shop or the plunge- anytime- day or night.
Anyhow- the movie barely gets started and we're running short on beer. Woods and Wally have been drinking, snorting and smoking copious amounts of substance all day and are now holding out on us for the last of the beer, which they’ve stashed in the pockets of their flannels and leather jackets before we realized the shortage was upon us. As if this didn't dampen our moods enough, Woods is getting flat out belligerent with a couple carloads of swabbys behind and to the right of us, and they're telling him to shut up or else which we know already only delights Woodsy when he's looking for trouble. Ted and Phil are Lying on the hood of the Malibu and I'm on the ground with my back against the bumper when Woods decides to push everyone out of the back seat so that he can yank it out and stuff it through the front windshield of some swabby’s Trans Am. All of us are still by the car (except Wallace, who's dutifully backing up his partner) and Woods is yanking these swabbys out of their car one after the next and cold-cocking them. Bid has to back up Woods, as there's the spirit of free-trade and he owes Woods a couple, and poor Ronnie Haig is so blazed that he's just kind of lying there where Woodsy Dumped him when he jerked the back seat, but Ted and Phil want no part of this (both because the odds were pretty good for taking a beating from about six dozen swabs and doubly so for going to jail) and so they give me and each other the nod and off we three go into the night, on a long walk home on some lonely and unfriendly avenues.
That's about what it was like with those guys, and I guess that’s probably that's why we didn't venture out too often. We would stay around the relative safety of the neighborhood until enough time had passed that either our counterparts had forgotten or we had, and then we'd venture across town for another misadventure.
There were lots of times, though, where people came around M.B. looking for trouble, and then it was pretty much all in good sport because it was pretty much their prerogative whether they stayed or left, and it was pretty much their funerals.
I remember a bunch of times that the boys sent me in to college parties around Mission beach because they knew I was small enough that some bully boys would try to fuck around with me, and they knew that I had a lot of anger and this permanent sneer on my face and I'd tell them to fuck off. So in I'd go looking for the keg and this would lead to that and some big dumb jock morons would be about to throw me down the stairs or toss me through the picture window and in would come the cavalry for a free for all and to trash the house, rape and pillage, take anything of value and dash after the fun's over to lick our wounds and drink their beer.
Those people had no business there anyway- they were just frat boys pretending to live dangerously or slumming it or something, and I guess for them we were just one of life’s lessons, and probably not that big of a deal in retrospect. But there was never a dull moment, and I must admit it was a lot of fun sometimes.
When we grew up. That sounds really weird in light of the fact that Teddy died when I was twenty-two. But we really did grow up in that time, more so Ted because he started growing up so young and because I still haven’t grown up today. We grew up and I moved on because in my gut I always knew there was no future for me in staying there, and the only reason I was there was to see what all the fuss was about, why I was supposed to be good and do what I'm told and be like everyone else, and exactly what was going to happen if I did just the opposite. But it's all the same anyway- you either play now and pay later, or pay now and play later, but whatever it is- I doubt it matters when your gone, and we pretty much all look the same after were gone a while.
So I moved around, and played in bands and went to San Francisco- then came back, blew it some more but eventually came around some little by little and managed to survive my own adolescence.
Teddy did good too, though I think he still sold a little weed here and there- who’s to blame him when there's bills to pay and money to be made, and everyone around there is either using or selling or both? So Teddy’s working somewhere and I'm doing construction up the coast in Encinitas and I had made plans to go to Ensenada with Mike McCarthy but on the “morning of” he tells me he's too hung over and backs out like a big sissy. I'm dead set on a surf trip so I call Teddy and spur of the moment he tells his live in might as well be wife that we're off and away we go- like thirty minutes notice.
Only there's no surf, so we just eat fish Tacos and camp on the beach drinking Mexican beer and he looks absolutely, positively like he is where he belongs, standing on the beach in the dirty weedy sand of La Salinas- grinning and mellowing out, safe and sound.
I finally understand a little, that the urban environment we grew up in- it grew up around us, and maybe Teddy and those guys would have fit in a little better twenty years earlier, or even in the wild west days. Mexico suited Teddy just fine, and it looked good on him, and he looked good in it. But we had to go home, and so we did.
The ending. So I guess there couldn’t have been a middle aged Ted O’shea, any more than there could have been an old Bruce Lee or an old Bob Marley or Sid Vicious. It just wasn't meant to be. And so early one morning I got a message just like many times before, and many times since, the message that another good friend was gone forever. But at least he went with his head up and his back straight, eyes alive, not like a lot of others who went after years of suffering, junkies or alcoholics, dead in the gutter of lethal self injection or a knife in the gut.
We have the same Birthday, Teddy and I- and we used to go drinking together on August eighth or thereabouts, to celebrate our good luck of being young and alive and born on the same day.
And so it is that I remember every birthday, as well as a lot of other days when the morning's just right or the surf is perfect, and I think to myself that Teddy would have really dug this, if only he could see where we can go and what we can do. And so I only hope he burned as brightly as he possibly could and that he knows he's with me everywhere I go and in everything I do.

And pretty much first thing on every birthday I can’t help but think: Happy Birthday dude. I miss you.

MASTERS

2008-06-23T22:50:00.000-07:00

“Bam!” He slams the shifter from second to third like he’s driving a point home- physically, manually forcing his position on some unseen victim, captive and reluctant. The oversized tires skid a little and spray gravel in his wake, the cherry-red S.U.V. with the license plate reading “MASTER” veers off of the pavement a little before regaining purchase and coming back to a preferred course between the white lines.
Gulping coffee from a stainless steel travel mug he avoids dribbling the hot liquid down the front of his khaki floral print button-up by leaning forward over the wheel in a caricature titled “Small Dick Behind Wheel”. Ahead on the roadside he sees the same gnarled old Mexican man that he’s seen a hundred times before- every morning at this time making his way slowly up the roadside on the narrow shoulder, humble, trusting, determined. With his back to the oncoming traffic and a lurching, hesitant gait he treads onward, step by step- leaning heavily upon the gnarled walking stick in his grip it’s apparent that he’s favoring a lame knee or something in his lower extremities that has gone dramatically wrong.
“Fucking Mexicans.” The big man Masters mutters as he approaches the tottering old peasant. When he’s directly behind the old man he grins his first menacing grin of the day as he places both palms against the center of the wheel and gives the horn a hard and decisive blast. Satisfaction is written all over his face as he watches the old man lurches and hunches his shoulders as if receiving a blow from behind, nearly losing his balance and falling into the gravel and thorns and broken glass that line the roadway. Chuckling through bright, beady eyes he watches the Mexican disappearing into the distance through his rear view mirror, staggering- tired eyes casting a wan look at the retreating S.U.V. that had nearly hit him. The baleful look from the Mexican makes Masters feel a confusing mixture of emotions that he interprets as something between pity and hate. In reality it’s just disgust, but he has neither the heart nor the inclination to let himself admit that and so in his mind he settles on the whole affair being his own selfless effort to keep the aged cripple off the street and out of harms way. He smiles to himself at the idea and forgets the whole exchange, now looking forward to the next time he passes the bi-polar and more than slightly schizophrenic boy that sometimes walks the narrow shoulder of this same road, hands over his ears as he lurches with a somewhat spastic gait, futile in his attempt to protect his fragile existence from the cacophony of passing traffic. Masters leans back into the plush bucket seat with a smile recalling the last time he passed nut-boy when he managed to startle the little whack-job so badly he dove headlong into the bougainvillea. Another fit of philanthropy that brought tears to his eyes he was laughing so hard. He’d immediately decided it was more fun than dousing pedestrians by charging through mud puddles and that rainy days would never, ever be the same for him.
Phone ringing jars him from his reverie. He fumbles on the seat next to him until he has the phone in his fat paw, opening it and putting it to his ear with one hand. “Yeah?” Voice dry through the tiny receiver. “Masters here.” The voice on the other end of the line asks for Chris. Wrong number. Dumb ass. Masters pauses contemplatively, considering his immediate course of action. “Chris?” His voice has taken on a new tone- the necessary softness of consolation. “I’m terribly sorry- you must not have heard?” A pregnant pause on the opposite end . “Were you close to Chris?” The person on the other end stammers out a confused answer to the affirmative and waits in a silence that begs more information without uttering even a sound. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this but Chris met with an unfortunate accident involving a cement truck yesterday while riding his bike near Seventh Street. The ceremony is Thursday at Our Lady of Peace. Truly sorry but I’ve got to go- I haven’t been well since the accident and talking about it has only upset me more.” Click. Smile. Pulling into the Starbucks drive-through smug in the satisfaction of a job well done.
Crossing over the bridge that connects one side of the city with the other- the “haves” to the “have-nots”- the fat man named Masters reminds himself of a time many years ago when he was less confident and less self-assured. In his mind he knew he was strong and independent but he had little guidance from his father who was oftentimes too busy running the family business to be bothered with teaching a teenage boy exactly what it takes to be a man. Many times he hid behind a façade of bitterness and bravado, and many people thought of him as a heartless bully. “That may be…” he thinks to himself now, “But I’m here now and who knows where they are today.” He smiles to himself at the thought of his big house with perfect lawns, tended by maids and gardeners that come here from far away places seeking a better life. He doesn’t care where they are now- they don’t matter to him now. He knows where he is, and he likes it here on top. He likes to stand out in the evening and look down across the city below him and see where he’s been and where he came from. Miles down the hill he can see a bridge that he once walked across to get to school. He drives that bridge now occasionally on his way into the city. When he was young he walked over that bridge many times, over the dirty brown water that passes for a river. One time he was crossing that bridge with his gang of boys from school and they’d started trouble with a black man from across the bridge. They’d been drinking some wine that they’d stolen near school as they walked home and he came to the middle of the bridge and here was the man coming from the opposite end of the bridge, walking his dog at the end of a long leash. The man tried to walk near the edge of the narrow walk but the young boy Masters didn’t want to move aside even a little for the man and instead pushed him hard with his shoulder, forcing him to stumble into the street. There was a heated exchange of words which escalated into the hurling forth and back of expletives. The man was close in the boy Masters’ face and they both had veins pulsing and hot blood coursing through their veins. The dog followed instincts and began barking and pulling, nipping at Masters’ pants cuffs. Master’s warns the dog’s owner to reel in his dog once but in the heat of the moment alone surrounded by several seeming enemies he can’t think quickly enough, and all at once Masters crouches and scoops up the snarling pet. He ignores the bites he receives to his forearms and deftly steps over and drops the dog off of the edge of the bridge where it freefalls silently, leash trailing behind it- for sixty feet before hitting the water below with a soft but audible “plop”. Anticlimax, understated.
The boys quickly run away, laughing. The man stands at the peak of the bridge looking down at the ever-widening circles on the surface of the water below, weeping until well after his tormentors are out of sight.

This memory doesn’t make Masters happy, but it doesn’t upset him either. He only believes himself to be stronger from the experience- stronger in fact than anyone he’s yet encountered or that he ever will encounter. In his mind nothing can touch him, and no one can come between him and his will. He gets what he wants, works hard and achieves his goals. No one can stop him. Were he a weaker man every morning when he woke he would beg whatever higher power there is for forgiveness for this atrocity. Every night when he goes to sleep he only thanks a god he has created in his own image for the power and will to be what he is and the ability to shed his past like a skin and walk onward in no man’s shadow.

2)

Swinging the big red SUV through the parking lot Masters is oblivious to the traffic cruising around him. “Big Dick on a Mission” is the caricature he paints this time, and he whips the vehicle dangerously close to the front of a Toyota, ignoring the horn blast as he hits the automatic windows and door locks.
Stepping from the vehicle without a glance back at the Toyota he pays no attention to the driver’s rude comment of “Thanks you fucking douche bag- your mom have any children that lived?” Masters pretends he hasn’t heard this, shuffling along- painting a pretty picture of serenity until the driver opens the door, apparently to get out and teach Masters a lesson.
Masters pauses slightly for just a fraction of a second, watching in his peripheral vision until the man has his foot out of the door and on the pavement, and then he wheels and kicks the door as hard as he can, wedging the would be assailant’s leg between the door and the frame of the car. He moves with surprising agility for a man of his size and weight. Cat-like and quick he leans against the door and puts his weight into it- hard, steady pressure- wearing that Cheshire grin as the man in front of him squirms and wails, sweat beading upon his forehead as he makes a futile attempt to free the trapped limb.
“Hey partner- you need some help?” Master’s asks the man with feigned innocence, increasing the pressure against the door by clamping the door and the car’s frame together with one hand. With his free hand he pulls a pack of Pall Malls from his shirt pocket and shakes one out, pulling it free with his mouth.
“You look like you’re in a lot of discomfort.” He pauses dramatically, leaning his substantial girth against the door while he cups the cigarette with one hand and operates a Bic lighter with the other. He puffs on the smoke to get it going and glances up at the crowd forming at the sidewalk’s edge in front of him, nodding a hello to them and grinning with apparent satisfaction as he takes a white linen handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the sweat from his forehead. Taking a long drag off of the cigarette he returns his attention to the task at hand, pointedly exhaling a long plume of tobacco smoke directly into the man’s face.
“What d’ya say, pal- y’wanna talk about it?” A toothy grin- he looks like a Piranha asking a mongoose to go ahead and take a swim. “I’m sure we’d both feel better if you get it off your chest.” Taking his weight off of the door slightly he reaches through the door and punches the man solidly in the chest one time, hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs and leave him aching. “Oughta be careful who you fuck with, cupcake- never know what kind of low life you might turn up.”
He suddenly turns his body away and starts off towards his original destination, slamming the car door one last time on his now silent and shaking victim’s leg before he can get it clear as some sort of punctuation marking the end of the exchange. “See you around, princess.” He flicks his cigarette at the feet of the small yet seemingly concerned crowd that’s formed at the sidewalk’s edge, showering the closest ones with sparks. “Jesus….” He mutters just loud enough for everyone to hear. “What a fucking putz.” The crowd parts as he walks directly through them.

3.)
Masters rules his roost with an iron will. “I may not be doing something right but by god I’m doing something.” He used to think to himself as he worked his way up the company ladder with deceit

“Andrea- did you ever think of reading the instructions on the can?” Masters tosses his coffee cup out the thirteenth floor window and listens for its impact on the sidewalk below. The impact never comes. He shrugs and presses the intercom button with the heel of his tennis shoe. “Brew me up another pot and this time try not to burn it.” He sighs to himself and wonders what the hell she hired him for, but then recalls the salacious advances he’s made over the months she’s worked here- the time he got her to play grab-ass in the file closet or the time he got her for real on her desk when she stayed after hours. She isn’t worth a whole hell of a lot as a secretary but boy she can really apply suction. He chuckles as his mind wonders to the time the men’s john was being worked on and he snuck into the women’s bathroom and left a gold medal turd easily fourteen inches long and as thick as a brown snake. He laughs out loud now and nearly tips over backwards in his chair recalling how she must have lifted the lid to sit down and how she maybe jumped a little at the sight of it laying there coiled as if ready to strike. A tapping snaps him out of his reverie and he looks up to see Andrea peeking into his office. “Here’s your coffee mister Masters.” She totters in on her six-inch heels and reaches across his desk with the cup held in both hands. Masters takes a good long look at her ample breasts and thinks to himself that he’ll keep her around a while yet- even if she does make a shit cup of coffee. He laughs out loud at the image of her face when she told him the toilet was clogged and he just reached behind his desk and handed her the plunger. It was pretty certain at that point that Andrea and plungers had yet to cross paths and he was glad he had a chance to broaden her horizons a little. “Sir?” She’s still headed out the door but has craned her neck around at the sound of his laughter. He winces as she collides with the half closed door, knocking her glasses askew and nearly knocking her off of her heels and onto her ass. “Careful with the navigation there Andrea- it’s a complicated world.” He thinks to himself that perhaps he ought to try her again today- maybe ask her out for drinks after work. He hated the chatter but it was easier if he got her well lubricated and she may even forget about it if he got her drunk enough. Goddamn the last thing he needed was for her to get all attached to him. Yeah- one more time and then he’d start shopping for a new secretary.
At the sound of approaching sirens he walks to the window and rests both hands on the sill, gazing down thirteen floors at a crowd of people around a still body lying on the pavement. “Another asshole jumped.” He mutters to himself. “Fucking quitter.”

The Prince and the Jester

2008-06-23T22:49:00.000-07:00

Crack! The hollow snap of a beer can being tapped is unmistakable in the still midmorning silence. So definite is the sound amidst the stillness of 10am that the pit bull mutt laying in the lawn at his feet stirs and rolls on her side, exposing her soft belly to the warm rays of the sun.
She lets out a long sigh and returns to semi-unconsciousness and he takes a long draw on the tall, cool can, trying to make a headcount in his mind of the remaining number of cans in the cooler at his feet.
He has to pace himself- he needs to stay sober enough to face the momma when she returns home from work- sober enough to watch over the infant that sleeps in a playpen twenty feet away, protected from the sun by a sheet stretched from one rail to the other like a tent. He has to stay sober enough to drive his old Ranchero down the road a mile to Maggie’s Market where he can pick up enough beer to get him through the afternoon. But he has to nurse them carefully until the kid wakes up. Despite his “condition” the kid is his main priority. Everything else comes second- even the booze.
That’s an elusive fact that most people looking in from the outside never can understand- that despite the fact that he can’t hold a job and has long “forgotten” the several unfinished manuscripts that he never had the constitution to finish up and submit- despite the fact that the neighbors long since have written him off as “incorrigible” or “irresponsible” or flat out “just a drunk”- despite all of that, still he’d do about anything for the baby.
He hasn’t picked up his guitar in a couple years now. His boards hang up in the rafters collecting dust despite the beautiful swells that have come and gone. This doesn’t go unnoticed amongst his friends- who are still his friends and still love him- albeit at more of a distance since as his condition becomes more and more apparent.
The neighbors see him asleep in his car parked at odd angles across their lawns now and again. They see him stagger in and collapse in the hammock between two coconut palms and they see him wake there the next morning. And it’s not that he doesn’t care- it’s more that he can’t. He expends all of his energy trying to survive it all and doesn’t have anything left to spend worrying about how he looks to the people looking in from that foreign land that is “normal”.
In his mind those people don’t really matter anyways. They aren’t empathic or understanding- something that he actually is, and something that he appreciates more than most human traits he finds around him. They can’t possibly see things from the eyes of a man who is both intelligent and empathic- both understanding of others and terribly flawed himself- and he doesn’t expect them to. He just takes into consideration their own aberration of being too quick to judge and too unwilling to understand- and he continues to plod on through his own flawed life hoping that somewhere along the line he’ll find an answer or a cure. He doesn’t hold high hopes for that, but he’s hesitantly optimistic just the same.
It’s difficult going through life with a genetic disadvantage- or perhaps a few genetic disadvantages- working against you. A lot of people don’t realize that those derelicts laying in the gutter once may have been children that a mother and father loved. It’s difficult to see through the grime and the decay, but those hopeless degenerates perhaps were once people who loved a puppy or who gave up some large part of themselves for someone else. It’s hard to see the past through lenses marred and scratched and muddied by years of misuse and abuse and filth. And so people see things in a fashion that they are comfortable with- through the lenses of their own narrow perspective. The detritus of society is swept off to the side or under the rug or into the gutter in a vain hope that no one will notice and realize just how remiss we all really are.
And where does that leave this character- this man that is intelligent and analytical and caring and feeling- despite the flawed DNA that makes him weak and vulnerable and “less than” in most people’s eyes? Well- it’s a lucky thing he has someone who loves him- someone who is understanding and compassionate and tries to see things from his warped point of view- otherwise he’d be down in the gutter with the rest of them.

The baby stirs as he finishes his pint can and he reaches into the cooler and produces not another silver can of beer but a purple bottle of milk with a nipple on the end, and he walks over and lifts the 18 month old boy from his spot on the clean white sheets in the bottom of the playpen and he holds him to his shoulder, savoring the way the infant grabs onto him and pulls, caring infinitely for him before he’s too old to know better. He savors the days they spend rolling a big green rubber ball back and forth across the lawn. He savors the moments when he wakes to find momma has placed baby next to him in bed as she prepares herself for work, and despite his sleep baby lays a hand on daddy to be assure himself that daddy truly is there next to him. He savors the days that he follows the little prince on journeys down the beach, his large feet stepping in small footprints, the reverse of a picture he once had in his mind many years ago.
He savors the beauty and naiveté of the little life he has before him and only hopes that they can both somehow survive together.

Evening In Summertime (Saying Goodbye)

2008-06-23T22:48:00.000-07:00

Evening in summertime, inland Southern California. The scent of wood smoke drifts on the breeze, filtering down through the branches of evergreens. Oak soot from wood fire, some from dad’s barbeque at the edge of the back porch- the rest remnants of the recently extinguished wildfires that blackened the hills to the East and North of us.
“Whap!” “Whap!” “Whap!” My brother and I toss the ball back and forth on the lawn next to the house. “Whap!” That positive impact of ball hitting mitt- years later this sound is just as reassuring as it ever was, the one certainty in life: If it hits the mitt with that solid “Whap!” it just isn’t coming back out.
“Whap!” The ball stings my hand through the mitt but I don’t dare tell my little brother. Instead I try to whip a little more speed into my return pitch.
“Whap!” I almost discern a wince. It barely registers on my brother’s face. He turns his head a little as if distracted and takes the ball from his mitt with his pitching hand. Windup- “whap!” This time there’s got to be a bruise on my hand but I keep it to myself, looking over at the barbeque a little to hide the tears forming at the corners of my eyes. That smarts.
I put everything I have in this next one, trying unsuccessfully to disguise my elaborate windup.
“Whap!” My brother whips off his glove and looks at his hand, the palm now red and a little swollen from the repeated abuse.
“Geezus Christ!” he looks to the heavens, mumbling.”.…trying to put a hole in me…” He rubs his palm. A smile appears on my face as I wipe the tears from my eyes with the tip of my forefinger.
My brother nods across the lawn at me, laughing. “Smoke get in your eyes?”
I nod the affirmative nod, coughing out an abrupt laugh back his direction. “Yeah- goddamn smoke.”
Screen door swings open and slams shut. Cats scatter leaving a flurry of dried leaves in their wake.
Dad’s all business in a denim apron with a blue willow platter of meticulously marinated chicken parts balanced on one raised hand, tongs and a brush and a bowl of barbeque sauce gripped in the other. The picture of concentration, he lays each piece over the red-hot coals with care and precision, smiling only when we break him from his reverie to ask how long it’ll be until dinner.
Tongs held in midair he flashes us a smile, wiping his free hand on a towel dangling from his apron string.
“Dinner will be served in half an hour, boys.” Focus returns to the task at hand, shifting and turning the meat constantly to ensure it is evenly cooked. He looks up again, catching us before we return to the important business of tossing a ball back and forth. “Why don’t you two do me a favor and go set the table?” A rhetorical question, I make one last half-hearted toss to my brother and pull my mitt off.
“Love you dad.” I say as I walk past towards the porch door.
Stopping again this time with a piece of chicken in midair he flashes me that same sincere smile, taking the time like he always tries to whenever he gets the chance. “Love you son.”

Dreaming is Free

2008-06-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

Sick. Sick. Sicker than sick. Sick as a dog- and tired- dog tired. If I had any guts at all I’d end it. I’d just step out into traffic or off a tall building. I’d wave a gun at a cop or taunt a local street gang until they end me mercilessly. It’s a lot of fucking pain, life- meted out in tiny increments day by day, minute by minute, every agonizing second. The clock on the wall says tick-tock tick-tock but it seems like it’s running slow, slowing down, running backwards, I’m reliving each painful second a thousand times, the black and white schoolhouse clock of pain.
Everything is going backwards. If it looks wrong it’s probably right. If it looks right you’d better watch your step because things could just get ugly, blow up in your hands, hit you in the face with a brick. You take things for granted and all of the sudden you find yourself standing there in the shit with a confused look asking, “What happened?”
Now the boss- there’s a ruthless motherfucker. Cold. Cold as stone. To that guy people are just numbers on a ledger, and you’d better hope you’re on the plus side because you move from “asset” to Liability” and he’ll fuck you hard and quick without even thinking about it. He’ll take care of you on lunch break. To him we’re all just pawns to be traded, commodities to be used up without emotion.
I’d love to be that detached. Then I wouldn’t feel the guilt, the obligation- I wouldn’t regret that I ended up in the human garbage can, just another scrap in the scrap pile. A piece of flotsam hurtling through space and time, creating chaos and hurt and detonating anything I come into contact with, hurting anyone who gets near me.
No one can ever love me. I could never respect someone who would settle for a guy like me. Alone by attrition, drunk and miserable, dead set on destruction. Fuck you for wanting- I’m not your fucking superman.

“Can you sit over here where I can see you?” To the man sitting behind him it doesn’t sound much like a question, but more an order.
“Why- does it make you nervous for me to sit back here?” The man sitting behind him makes a note on a clipboard.
“I just don’t like anyone behind me. It’s a habit. It works for me.” The man makes another note on the clipboard and then moves his chair forward a few feet, not in front of the man lying on the couch but at least in his peripheral vision.
He sits back down and asks, “Better?”
The man laying on the couch stares at the wall in front of him. “It’ll do.”
“So what were we talking about last week?” Sitting man shuffles through some papers on his tablet. “Fear. That’s right. So what is it you’re afraid of?”
The man lieing down doesn’t hesitate, “I’m not afraid of very much.”
“Then what are you running from, why do you lean so much towards self destructive activities? What do you think is driving that?”
The man lays there and thinks about the question. Driving, driving, fueled by alcohol, alcohol burning vehicle of self destruction, driving drunk, driven to drunken danger in the dark. Death.
“The pain- it’s always pain, everything. It’s tedious and painful, I just have to move and it hurts.”
The sitting man makes another note on his clipboard. He then takes a drink of his coffee and leans back. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a penchant for self pity?”
The laying man turns his head and laughs out a short bark of a laugh, like he coughed up something hard and slick and black. “All the fucking time.”

Home
He woke up before dawn, lying on the sofa in the dark, guessing at the time. The television casts a surrealistic blue gray glow on everything around it, the news running the same loop as last night about a car bomb in London, a battle on the Gaza strip, Police corruption in New York, another pedophile beats the rap, one more Hollywood asshole O.D.s in his hotel room. Same old shit.
His head hurts from too much wine, and for the thousandth time he wonders why he does this to himself. He already knows the answer- the disease is progressive, like a cancer- dark, black, malignant- and it doesn’t get any better with time. But still, it’s an old habit he has, beating the absolute shit out of himself and then pretending he doesn’t know why.
He navigates by memory, picking his way towards the kitchen in the dark. There isn’t much to run into since Shizuko left. Most of the furniture was hers, all of the dishes, the pictures on the walls- pretty much everything. He likes the empty rooms, though, and has slept on a secondhand sofa for the past two months with a television on a milk crate in the corner for company. Shizuko was good for him- she was his self-control. He was bad for her, though- he messed with her meticulous sense of order. Two years together. Two monotonous years down the drain. Funny thing is she hardly spoke a word of English. That’s probably the sole reason the relationship lasted as long as it did. Shikata Ga Nie- bridge under the water. And so in the vacuum she left he realized he was never going to be good enough and accepted that, settled down into a regular schedule that was split 50/50 between getting drunk and getting sober, a steady diet of alcohol and vicadin, Maalox, bullshit and denial. Before her plane left the ground he’d already taken a place at the airport bar.
He opens a cabinet and takes out a glass, turns and fills it with water from the dispenser on the front of the refrigerator. He drank three glasses of water throughout the night, a system he has come up with to be well enough to face the day after a night of drinking. He has a lot of systems. Vicadin does the trick in a pinch. He shops at three stores so that no one ever knows exactly how much alcohol he consumes. Sometimes he buys three pints at one store, three at another and a bottle of wine. Sometimes he tries to fool himself that he’s just changed his mind at the last minute, but in an alcoholic’s mind there’s only two things: drinking it all and abstinence. There isn’t a whole lot of gray area in the middle. He even takes the trash to the dump himself now and then, so that the trash man doesn’t see how many cans he has.
In his mind the whole thing is ridiculous. It used to be that when he thought of addiction he would think of heroin and cocaine. Alcohol is such a household product, like Drain-o or Lysol. It’s legal and available at the corner store. Why would they sell you something so insidious without some sort of warning label. He already knows the answer to that, too. It's a tricky disease, not for the faint of heart. It'll lie to you with a soft purr, convincing you it's not there. It will look so innocuous there on the table. It even has cute names that bely weakness like "Libation"- that sounds so festive. Dark Carnival. That the first time will be the best thing an you ever felt, but the rest of the time you’re chasing that feeling, a trick done with mirrors, a maze that leads you into a dark, miserable morass. It’s a slippery slope, a black hole, a whirlwind of irresponsibility. Misery.
There was a time when he was young and the future looked bright. He thought he was going to be an artist or a writer, but he never was any good at school and the disease really took away his edge. It does that sometimes, mires you in mediocrity. It’s tough to concentrate when you’re thinking those solitary thoughts about what comes next, later, much later but even so it rattles around in your head now, agonizing about it and It’s giving you a slick grin and encouraging you, not put out in the least as you lie to yourself about how today’s the day you wont do it. You’re weak, it’s strong- it knows that as well as you do.
He boxed for a while, and he was pretty good. The training kept him sober, in the gym, busy. In the end though the booze won, and now he was just some hired muscle, a driver for a local businessman. Even in that he likes to keep his drinking off the radar. It’s a mean world out there and people will exploit any weakness they can unearth.
Standing on the front porch with a cup of coffee he watches as the sky lightens to the east, behind him, waiting for the vicadin to kick in. A comfortable warmth rises up from his chest and the headache lessens in minute degrees, listening to trucks rumble to life, horns honking, sirens in the distance.
He’s startled out of his reverie by the loud buzzing of the neighbor’s clock radio, letting him know as it does every day that it’s 6:15. He cleans up the wreckage from last night’s drinking like he’s trying to erase his memories. He takes a hot shower, attempting to sanitize it, to wash it all away. He knows by noon he’ll begin to feel slightly human again, ready to take on the demons one more time. Until then he’s getting sober.

Idle hands

The Double J bar on Seventh and Culver has the original furnishings from 1979. The stools are in amazing shape for their age, the tables immaculate. The lighting isn’t so good, though- and everything looks better in the dark. The fossils decaying up against the bar must have grown there. They never move.
I’m playing the waiting game, solitaire, flipping cards and cheating while my boss talks on the phone. I’m on my third ginger ale but I’m already thinking a drink might make me feel a little better, and it isn’t even noon. The Eagles are playing Tequila Sunrise. It’s not the first time I note that the jukebox in this place has the shittiest selection ever.
About half the time this is the office, the rest of the time spent driving from place to place, stopping in at a Laundromat he has an interest in, a card room uptown, another bar down by the beach. I don’t do much but drive and stand around. I’m more of a visual deterrent. People fuck around less if you have some back up. I rarely have to do anything at all except keep my mouth shut and drive. It’s a bullshit job but it pays pretty Ok, and I was never much for manual labor.
The door opens and two men walk in, the bright sunlight rendering them to shadows while briefly illuminating the layer of cigarette smoke that fills the top two feet of the room, switching back to darkness as the door closes behind them. They say something to the bartender and he nods over in our direction. I notice the fossils shift in their positions, craning their necks to check out the new arrivals, two Latino guys in bad suits. I stand up as they approach, but my boss waves me back down, telling me that he’s expecting them.
I take my leave and head into the bathroom. My stomach hurts and I really regret that second bottle of wine I drank last night. It feels like I have something explosive in my gut, bloated and acidic. The bathroom is as dank and yellow as the rest of the place, illuminated by one bare yellow bulb set in the center of the ceiling. I can hear the Eagles end and the Commodores come on muffled through the walls and my head hurts more. I settle down on the toilet, careful to keep my pants off of the floor as much as possible. Just as I’m about to unload I hear yelling from out in the bar and I’m split- should I stay or should I go? I jump up mid-crap and run out into the bar trying to get my pants up, bursting through the door to find my boss and the two Latinos sitting calmly at the table while two of the fossils are in a scuffle near the bar. My boss and the Two Latinos look over at me standing there with my pants half on, a dumb look on my face and the sneaking suspicion that I just crapped myself. My boss nods his head and waves me off again, the Latinos making stern looks at the intrusion. I return to the bathroom and sit back down, finishing my crap and then spend ten minutes washing my boxers and drying them under the hot air hand dryer.
When I return to the bar the Latinos are gone and the Boss is back on the phone. I go straight to the bar and order a Vodka Cran and a large ice water. I notice for the first time that there are two guys playing pool in the back room. They must have come in when I was in the crapper. I pop a vicadin and grab my drinks and go back to my card game, keeping half an eye on the pool game. The guys are a couple of real assholes, half assed gangster types with a pitcher of beer at ten in the morning, talking loud about fights and drugs and making a general spectacle of themselves. There’s a black guy and a white guy in their late teens or early twenties, all decked out in nylon sports apparel and crooked caps color-coordinated with the neighborhood flunkies. I see the boss giving them a long look while he talks on the phone, and I figure it wont be long before he has me toss them out.
Sure enough ten minutes later these guys start chopping lines of speed on the edge of the pool table and the boss taps me on the shoulder, waving vaguely in their general direction. I put down my cards and walk back there, grabbing some darts on the way.
I throw a couple darts at a board near where they are standing. They look up at me and sneer, trying to look hard. To me they look high and stupid and over-confidant. I stare back at them, indifferent. I feel like shit still from the wine last night and it might make me feel better to squash a couple bugs, maybe pull their wings off or burn them with a magnifying glass. I nod towards the speed on the pool table and reach over and wipe it off and onto the floor below. They both stare at me in disbelief as I lick my fingers and rub the stuff into the carpet with my foot. “Sorry- the maid’s on vacation.” The bigger one says, “What the fuck was that?” and as he begins to get up I whip one of the darts at him, catching him in the cheek. I then grab him by the arm and pull hard, whipping him past me, letting his own momentum plow him into the side of the whack-a-gator face first. The other guy is standing there not liking the odds very much, and I feel so sorry for the fucker that I give him a break. “Take your pal and get the fuck outa here. The boss doesn’t like drugs on the premises- it attracts a bad element.” The guy scrambles to pick his friend up off the whack-a-gator and shoulders him through the bar and out the door. I throw two more darts and then go back to my cards.
The boss shoots me an amused look as I sit down. “Coke?”
I nod my head in disgust. “Crank.”
He laughs and nods his head in agreement. “Fuckin’ knuckleheads.”

Polynesian Underground

2008-06-23T22:45:00.002-07:00

The heat is oppressive, and even in the dim evening light of my flat at Kahuluu it weighs on me like a lead sheet. Sitting at my desk typing is a huge effort, my desk tucked like it is back in the darkest, stuffiest corner of my place- but the whole place is only 450 square feet and so there really aren’t too many options as to where what goes. Sweat runs on my face in rivulets, making its way down my neck and into my shirt until the cloth is one big pool of perspiration, enveloping me in such a way that I could never ignore it. I swat at mosquitoes and gnats, moths and flies- flicking wood ants off of my desk and spraying aerosol poison at them against my better judgment, inhaling the sickening smell of canned death while battling the onslaught of ants across my desk and writers block all at once.
It’s been hot this August- maybe the hottest summer that I can remember- and to aggravate tempers worse there’s been almost no surf since May, the typical end of May to mid-June swells missing us completely and the subsequent doldrums lasting longer than usual. Local kids drive up and down the coast like angry ants, scurrying back and forth wreaking havoc, leaving a trail of graffiti and empty beer bottles as they search for the slightest hint of swell, drinking Steinlager beer and smoking Kools or Marlboros, the deafening beat of they’re bass drowning out the sound of them swearing exaggeratedly. By the time nightfall comes they’re frustrated, aggravated- and they drink more and sometimes they fight.
We stand under dim streetlights made even dimmer by the bugs, listening to the throbbing drone of a band playing inside of the nightclub behind us. Brandon and Kainoa stand off to the left of me, towards the street, drinking beer and talking quietly between themselves about something I can’t overhear. Kalani and I stand back against the front wall of the Other Side bar, inside of which is the entrance to the nightclub where the band is playing. We’re outside getting a breather, watching traffic and getting a break from the band, which really was beginning to grate on my nerves.
A Volkswagon Golf enters the parking lot in front of us, cruising slowly by. The driver is a medium sized Polynesian guy, probably half Asian, not big enough to be Tongan or Samoan- not really big enough to instantly pose much of a threat. I can see at least one other guy in the car, in the front passenger seat. There’s possibly two or maybe even three in the back seat, but whatever- we weren’t really expecting trouble. Things have been quiet now for some time, and the edgy feeling that I get when things are tense has faded and been replaced with a certain indefinable calm that comes with peace.
The Golf cruises by us slowly, low and quiet, and the driver swivels his head and fixes what I expect is supposed to be a steely gaze on us, but with that glazed look in his eyes it just comes off as hopped up and a little wild.
“Trouble.” Kalani murmers under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear. He takes a drag off of his cigarette and flicks it into the street behind the Golf, which is now just passed us.
“Whatever.” I say casually, just loud enough for the driver to hear. I take a pull off of my beer and quickly have to think that maybe I’m a little drunk to be fighting, but I suppose it may be a little late to dwell on that just now.
The Golf stops fifty feet or so away, nearly at the end of the small parking lot. There’s a couple other people standing around in front near us, but they’re oblivious to anything that’s gone on, unsuspecting of anything that may yet come.
The drivers side door opens and the medium sized possibly Chinese-Hawaiian steps from the car. I look him over a little and decide that maybe it’s Portuguese-Hawaiian, with perhaps a little Pake thrown in. He walks back towards us a little unsteadily, and I instantly decide that he may just be drunker than I am, but perhaps he could just be hopped up and a little clumsy.
“So What- you like say something or wot?!!” He stands there before us now, apparently calling us all out on his own. “One’uh you like a piece of me eh, c’mon. Less go!” He’s got himself all worked up, and we just stand there where we were, wondering what to do with this little fucker, and how many more there are i9n the car, and how many will come back later tonight if we toss him through the plate glass window behind us.
Kainoa mentally steps up to the plate, standing exactly where he has been, slouched a little casually, beer in hand. “Ho-cuz, nobody here wants any trouble- no one’s looking for a fight. We’re just having a good time tonight.” He smiles at the guy even though inside he can’t stand the fucking little troublemaker. “How about we buy you a beer instead. Eh- we’re all getting along here pretty OK just now.”
“Fuck you Brah- You wanna talk shit and then when I call you out you back down like a fucking little pussy!” He spits on the ground at Kainoa’sfeet. “C’mon you big fuckah, I’ll fuck you up!”
Kalani smiles at him from over by me and stands up a little straighter, hands out as if to shrug. “Nah-nah, no thanks eh- we’re all just having a good time. You win man- we lose. No problem, eh?”
The guy stands there not knowing exactly what to do now, bewildered that the four okay sized guys before him don’t want to take him up on his offer of an ass kicking. He grins again, a nasty looking sneer, and spits on the ground again in all of our general direction. “You fucking pussies- if I see you again I’m gonna fuck you up!”
He turns his back to walk away- a stupid mistake in any tense situation, but nearly fatal in this one, as kainoa quickly and quietly takes the two long steps between the two of them and gets him in a choke from behind. Brandon and Kalani quickly grab his feet and I kick him three times solidly in the kidney. Kainoa slams his forearm across the guys face a couple times and growls out “You stupid little fucker- you better hope you don’t see me again!” We real quick carry him towards the golf, which now has the lone passenger half in and half out, wondering just what the fuck he’s gotten himself into. We pick the troublesome little fucker up and with a quick toss put him through his own rear windshield. It’s frightening, the speed which things escalate sometimes, when we get out of hand.
Brandon and Kainoa reach in and punch him a couple more times in the head and face, and I throw my beer bottle in and clip him in the head. “You got beer on my shirt you fucking little prick.” I wipe at the stain on my shirt in a futile gesture, and Kalani and Kai laugh at me worrying about my shirt. Brandon gestures towards the passenger with a wave of his hand. “Whatta we do with him?” I shrug and look at the guy, sighing. “Do you wanna kick our asses too?”
He nods his head apprehensively, backing away a half step. “No man, we’re cool.” His hands are out before him implying surrender.
“Cool.” I say, turning my back to him and walking back towards the bar. “Get the fuck outa here.” The boys fall in behind me and we head to the entrance together, a crew, the boys, pals. I exhale another long sigh.

“Fucking kids…”

LIFEHATER

2008-06-23T22:45:00.001-07:00

“So you made it your first week- how does it feel to be free?” He looks at me from across the table, noncommittal in his corduroy slacks and his clean white Polo shirt, offering no hint of what he’s fishing at or if he’s fishing for anything at all.
I laugh to myself at the way he uses the word “free”. I’ve never been free- don’t know the meaning of the word. I’ve always been shackled by the constraints of social norms and right and wrong and my own underhanded moral standards and those rules and lines I’ve set for myself that aren’t to be crossed.
The guys that I know who are truly free- well I’d never let them in my house. Shit- I’d never turn my back on them. To be truly free is something that lets you do anything at all without consequence. Me? Nah- not free yet.
“Out on your own, no one watching you- gotta be some temptations there, right?”
I just give him a blank stare across the table and nod almost imperceptively to the negative. This guy’s good- I’ve played this game with the best of them but this one’s really polished his game. He should play blackjack in Vegas instead of fucking around trying to trip up ex-cons in their own tangled up stories. “Anything? All the open space giving you the creeps?” He takes a sip from his coffee as if it’s hot, even though I know by the time we’ve been sitting here mincing around it has to be nearly cold.
“I dunno….” I take my hand from the table and scratch my head offering nothing, really- nothing he can sink his teeth into. “I guess it’s just nice to be able to walk around and to come and go as I please. I never much liked being inside if I didn’t have to be.” I rest both hands on top of my legs beneath the table, letting out a long sigh. “ I sure as hell don’t miss the food.”
He doesn’t laugh but maybe I see a smile forming at the corners of his mouth. People like me- they always have assumed more than there is. Or assumed wrong, anyhow. I’m not the hard case he’s thinking I am. Everyone always assumed that I was trying to pull something off. They never could figure me- the rest of my crew were hard guys, and they assumed that I by association was a hard guy too.
But I could hold my own in conversation and had read a few books that seemed to some to be some indication of some type of formal education. Mostly people jumped to the logical conclusion that I was running a racket of some sort. No one could for even a moment admit that I was just on a big adventure- a tourist in this culture that they caught me in. To them I manifested their fears of treading in the darkest shadows- attempting to discover why our parents told us not to go there but could never tell us why. I never did really find anything too shocking out there- I was a product of my environment and there wasn’t anything much left that was worth seeing that I hadn’t seen.
Now my crew- they were different. Potter and McGinty and Crawford and I- we all grew up together but I was one type and they were an entirely different breed of cat. I layed back and layed low- I’d back them up if the occasion arose- and the occasion did- but I wasn’t a hard case. I was just someone that grew up in the neighborhood. Those guys were tough and callous and crazy- I was just crazy.
But the rest of my crew got taken down, one by one- first Potter and Haig got it under the roller coaster down by the boardwalk. Then McGinty O.D.ed one night and we found him under a tree down by the railroad tracks- he sat there till noon because everyone just figured he was hung over or asleep. Crawford got shivved in the ally off of Ventura down by Todd Bolt’s house- and Bolt got it two nights later in front of a bar on PB drive- supposedly by a disgruntled “customer”. One morning I woke up and took a look around and saw that I was the only I was left.
I shoulda split then, but where was I going to go? Somebody got to each and every one of them until I was the only one to take the fall and when the shit hit the fan it was me they came looking for and it was me they hauled away and it was me they locked up. They said they were throwing away the key but things didn’t work out that way. It was a hard time but I kept to myself mostly and rested easy and read a lot and kept my mouth shut and minded my own business and stayed out of trouble and sooner or later I was walking out of there. Sooner or later I did.
So here’s this guy sitting across the table from me, looking me in the eye and trying to call my bluff. Trying to let me know who’s boss and what’s what and to get into my head and trying to get it across to me that he’s onto me- that he’s seen it all and his formal training as a head-shrink and a cop puts him one step ahead of me- and all the while I just have to laugh because no one’s got shit on me.
I’m just like anyone else- flesh and bone- a man, not a machine. I’m just a guy that wasn’t afraid- and to most people that’s scary. If I’ve got anything at all to hide he’d be the last guy to know. Plus, I keep my mouth closed- always have. That’s why the boys let me hang around even though I was a lot younger than they were. That’s how I stayed around and stayed alive- by keeping things that didn’t need to be talked about to myself. Nobody's gotten under my skin yet, this guy isn’t about to do it in one sitting.
“How’s work?”
I think about this one a minute, deciding how I want to answer. Taking a deep breath I exhale, something between a sigh and a chuckle, spreading my hands wide, steady, palms down in front of me. “I don’t think work is going to pan out so good.” This is as much as I want to say- work didn’t work out to the tune of some asshole foreman calling me convict all day and fucking with me- verbally- until the moment he tried to push me physically and I pinned him against one of those big stainless steel dryers and held the tip of the double edged dagger I carry in my shoe against his throat. I held him there while he struggled and told him if he fucked with me one more time he was going to find himself breathing from about six inches lower than he’s used to. Scared the absolute piss out of him- he actually pissed his pants and shook and shivered and started blubbering like a baby, begging me to let him go. Fucking princess, that one.
“What do you mean by that?” The starched white Polo shirt isn’t going to understand it- of this I’m certain- so I spare him the gory details. “I guess the boss and I don’t really see eye to eye.” He jots something down on his clipboard- I assume a note to him self to talk to the boss down at the dry cleaners where they got me working. Me? I guess I had enough of this.
He looks up at me with a surprised look on his face as I stand up against the table- confusion in his eyes but he doesn’t really look startled or scared- his eyebrows are raised and he has this stupid expression, coffee cup in his hand- just curious as to what I’m doing. The look turns from curious to startled as I raise the pistol in my hand with one smooth motion, gazing down at him as if looking at a bug through a microscope- taking careful aim, calm, unperturbed, unflinching at the dropped coffee cup and the panic and fear rising behind his eyes.
Red stains blossom on the barren plain of his starched white shirt, his eyes showing equal parts indignance and discomfort and disbelief – a hundred other emotions vying for position flash across his face in an instant. Trying to stand as he was when I put the two in his chest his legs wont cooperate and he now begins to crumple back into his chair, trying to speak- to plead with me- but only mouths the words with soft exhalations as he expends the last of his oxygen.
Barely raising my hand at all I take careful aim and give him one quick tap exactly in the center of his forehead like a punch to the face that sits him back into his chair as if he’s just come home from a hard day at the office, leaning back with his arms outstretched, legs in front of him- a small whisp of smoke drifting up from a small black hole in his forehead. No need to empty the clip. No, no need for melodrama.
“How does it feel to be free?” I ask him softly, not quite smiling, imagining his total and complete freedom. “You should never have let the Lifehater back out.”

Another Day in babylon

2008-06-23T22:39:00.000-07:00

I walked into the blue light of the pool hall and tuffy was already disqualified from the tournament. Technically he was just out by process of elimination, but when he broke his cue on the side of the table after hearing the results, the officials only let him save face because they were afraid it’d be their skulls the next cue around. Tuffy walked off and smoked luckys, drank more than he should have and sulked, silently cussing the rules and officials and life and luck.
I hadn’t even intended to go out that night- had actually planned on staying home and reading a book. I went to the Pub with Kevin for a couple pints after work, and then this led to that and we ended up at a pool tournament in a skeezy dive called the “Corner Pocket”. Tuffy was pissed at me for showing up late. I tried to apologize and say no disrespect intended but he wouldn’t have any of it, so in the end I told him to fuck off and he bought me a beer.

I didn’t particularly like her- she wasn’t terribly pretty, though she was nice enough- and usually I went for the petite ones, and she was far from that. She wasn’t very bright- she thought Hemingway was an actor from the late eighties, and Rollins a black blues guy from the South- but what the fuck- I was bored and had nothing but time on my hands.

We fucked around for a while and made small talk about nothing, as we had little to nothing in common. Then I leaned forward and kissed her and didn’t feel anything at all. A vacuum, she and I- not a feeling anywhere, just two sweaty bodies against each other for lack of anything better to do. We moved over to the bed and I continued to try and feel anything at all for her, to no avail. She really didn’t appeal to me even a little. Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was her stringy hair and her bad complexion, maybe I just liked Hemingway more than I did her. She paused as if wondering how to break the bad news to me, and finally just kind of blurted it out, telling me that she didn’t want to have sex, but just wanted to mess around. I rolled over on my back, relieved and also a little awestruck at the way god could toy with me so, like a cat with a mouse. She lifted herself up on one arm and stared at me, half worried and half amused at me laying there chuckling softly to myself. She asked if something was the matter, and I said “No, no… nothing’s the matter- you’re ok, you’re fine- all good, really.” I inhaled a long breath and exhaled a couple more laughs and a half a chuckle, torn between the idea of pulling her against me and kicking her out of the bed and into the street for not knowing who Hemingway was.

Days of Whimsey

2008-06-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

I remember days of whimsy when we took times like that for granted, as if the supply of carefree moments would never end. Drinking from bottles in paper bags we'd sneak across the line to the carnival where we’d play whack-a-Gator or Ski-ball on broken down machines until 3 a.m., staying up until our eyes bled. We'd wander home in darkness, casual silence- avoiding the militia, the Angels and the Himalayas as the sun threatened to rise turning black to gray and then blue to orange and purple and pink way off to the East.
Across the line was the part of the city that still maintained some semblance of order, operating at an almost comedic level of disfunction. Even so, despite the regimental atmosphere instituted by the national militia, inside the gates it does for all appearances resemble a city, living and breathing with a chain of command and order and by some definitions functioning.
The decades before the disaster were unsettling times with few clear insights to the past and very little hope for the future. The well-intentioned naiveté of the mid-twentieth century made way for the cynicism and dissatisfaction of the end of the millennia, and by the year 2001 the state of the world had deteriorated to such a degree that religious fundamentalists were once again strapping explosives to their torsos and killing in the name of the god of their choosing with startling frequency. Vanloads of fertilizer punctuated the landscape of history with their reports, the craters they left brought on a parody of heightened security that came nowhere close to circumventing the mayhem and genocide humanity can bring upon one another in the name of peace. There is no overestimating what a religious zealot can do with eight pounds of explosives, a roll of duct tape, a detonator and the word of god.
It was the ultimate irony that the line was drawn one afternoon by completely scientific causes, an errant chunk of space rock slipping under the radar and hitting the earth with such force that the impact resembled a nuclear detonation and the fragments dug a deep crevasse through the center of the city.
The impact wreaked holy hell on the planet, causing fissures and chasms in the surface of the earth, resulting in earthquakes, floods, and eruptions, fluctuations in the laws of gravity and magnetism, and the general astrological mayhem that meteors are wrought to do. While religious fundamentalists attempted to bring about the end of the world a natural phenomenon brings our civilization to its knees.
As if to add insult to injury, after all of the floods and earthquakes settled down to a reasonable amount, nothing else happened. People returned to their lives as best they could, doing the usual heinous human things. Anticlimax. The street preachers were crestfallen, finding no heaven or rebirth of Christ in the aftermath of their oft-predicted apocalypse. Instead there was just rubble, chaos, bread and wine.

Civilization is a broken toy that won’t be fixed. Life is short and full of peril. Fuck it- a person takes what small comfort they can.

The impact wreaked holy hell on the planet, causing fissures and chasms in the surface of the earth, resulting in earthquakes, floods, and eruptions, fluctuations in the laws of gravity and magnetism, and the general astrological mayhem that meteors are wrought to do.
From that day forward the city was divided by a rift- a fissure. The line was passable in places and smoked constantly, belching out soot regularly and periodically, occasionally producing molten magma that would increase the heat in the city as it ran out towards the places where no one had traveled. We were cut off from the world and independent in its apocalyptic darkness. The powers that be holed themselves up in the center of the city, amassing what forces they could as a military. They led from obscurity, unknown and never seen. They quickly established that most water supplies in the immediate area were tainted, poisonous, and they secured the one known natural water supply and in keeping that they controlled the city. Lines were established on the East side of the city, and a border was erected within which they attempted to keep some semblance of order.
Outside of the militarized zone general mayhem reigned, people taking what they could and attempting to hold onto it. Neighborhoods were cordoned off and militias were formed. Roving gangs fought for control, and there was a constant roll over of power. Food and water quickly became the commodities to trade in. After the impact gas engines no longer operated, firearms no longer fired, electronics no longer functioned. The principles on which we had based our cultural achievements throughout the technological revolution no longer held precedent. For all intensive purposes we were starting over from scratch.
At some point long before I came along bread and wine began to appear more regularly on the market. At first it was thought that some resourceful soul had managed to put together some sort of manufacturing, but that turned out to be unverifiable. I always assumed they were making the stuff inside the walls, leaking it out into the outside to keep the savages from uprising and tearing the gates from their hinges to crucify the masters.
The wine was red and bland, the bread hard and stale. The sky was gray, always gray- and the soot was everywhere, insidious, in your hair and nostrils, into everything.
All of that was long before me, handed down verbally. I’ve heard a lot of different stories about the end of the last civilization, but it seems to make sense. I was born into this and I’ve never known any different. I make do the best I can. Anyone who grew up around here knows how to get across the line and into the city, and there always seems to be enough bread and wine. I really don’t know what more there is to want.
Sometimes I can hear the voices of the dead, reciting their poetry, making no excuses for their plight. Not everyone can hear them but I think a few others do. Not everyone admits it. Some pretend they can’t hear them. It used to give me the creeps, like someone is looking over my shoulder. After a while I figured the voices were like the light of a star, extinguished for a thousand light years yet just reaching our naked eyes. They were like an echo- it wasn’t really them- or just a very minute part of them, anyhow, lingering like dust in the air.

In the end our city was divided, cut off from the world and independent in its apocalyptic darkness. The powers that be holed themselves up in the center of the city, amassing what forces they could as a military. They quickly established that most water supplies in the immediate area were tainted, poisonous. Lines were established on the East side of the city, and a border was erected within which they attempted to keep some semblance of order.
Outside of the militarized zone general mayhem reigned, people taking what they could and attempting to hold onto it. Roving gangs fought for control, and there was a constant roll over of power. Food and water quickly became the commodities to trade in. After the impact gas engines no longer operated, firearms no longer fired, electronics no longer functioned. The principles and technology on which we had evolved throughout the past hundred years no longer held precedent. For all intensive purposes we were starting over from scratch.

Back before the impact we were already busily eating up our resources, mowing down forests and piping sewage as deep as was economically feasible into the black depths beneath the sea. Eventually the balance between supply and demand and the sheer economics of our gluttony threw our culture so off balance that the only thing we could afford to do was rattle sabers and hurl epithets and then rattle our cage doors and watch as the bombs plummet towards a miniature diorama that is earth.
With the atmosphere charred and black hardly anything grew and it snowed a lot, even though it wasn’t always cold. The difference between night and day were variants of gray and black, but the dangers seemed to never sleep at all. A series of massive earthquakes hammered away beneath our feet for months, eventually diminishing in number and frequency until they were just a bad memory. Cracks in the ocean floor opened up and the faceless, black subterranean creatures came up to the surface to bask in the soot and filth.
Somewhere around that time anyone with any money dove deep underground and those of us without did the best we could. A lot of us compromised some principles and committed acts that we did not agree with in order to achieve an end that we did. Car bombs led to suicide bombs and between the nerve gas and the chemicals in the water supply nobody knew which was worse. We drank wine because we were pretty sure it was safe, and although processed food had become a valuable and rare commodity we could get the brain trauma we needed to make the situation seem a little less hopeless, and Terry showed us how to peel our eyes back and Ronnie and I finally saw the sky.

Life was liquid- the only exit was suicide.

Later the dark creatures came from beneath the sea, but that's another story entirely.

Ralph and Zil. Potatoes O’brien.

Finch opened his eyes to the gray in between light of dawn and strained to make out shapes in the haze. His neck is stiff from sleeping all night on the concrete steps and he sits up and stretches, yawning, wiping the hardened crust away that had formed around his eyes in the night.
As his eyes register to the darkness he makes out the door across the room and the outside world, vague shapes beyond hint at the coming dawn. He barely makes out the soft murmur of two breaths in unison and turns to see Ralph and Zil curled up together in the corner just a lump with four arms and legs jutting out at random angles from underneath a pile of coats. Beyond them is Potatoes-O from across the ruins. They’d run across him sometime last night walking alone with six bottles of wine and a handful of brain damage stuffed into his pockets. After they’d helped him to lighten his load they all sat in the fountains on the remaining half of Senator Square and watched the passing fancies until they were too tired to play. When they ran out of wine O’Brien had walked back to the castle with them in the dark and the silence to avoid the curfew. Better to cross the ruins by daylight anyhow. Mostly because of roving gangs there weren’t too many people anymore who crossed the blackened scar that divided the two sides of the city, but Potatoes O’Brien lived a charmed life and he lived on both sides, going where he pleased. “Luck of the Irish” he used to say, though he doesn’t know what it means.
Finch stands and stretches, picking his way through the darkness to the doorway and out into the damp of dawn. He fishes into his pocket and pulls out a bindle, rolling a stick and lighting it with his prized possession, a tarnished vintage Zippo with the words “Harley Davidson” engraved on the side. Momentarily blinded by the flame he closed his eyes and waited, listening to the silence. When he opened his eyes Potatoes was standing next to him, and he grinned and took the stick from him, inhaling the tart smoke that tasted like cinnamon and curry and then handing it back.
It had rained during the night and there were pools of soot on the pavement, piling up around the cracks where the water ran through.
Potatoes glances over at Finch and takes out his last two clips of brain trauma and popping one into his mouth, handing the other to Finch who promptly pops his into his moth and swallows it.
“Looks like a decent day to do absolutely nothing.” Potatoes looks off towards where the sun would be and watches dark gray turn to light.
“Just like yesterday.” Finch takes a hit off the stick and hands it over.
Potatoes takes a hit and exhales, blowing a cloud of smoke skyward. “And the day before.”

“And the day before that.”