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Odds and Ends From (Mostly) America : “How You Live? How You Stay Alive?”

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[Image from Fever of Unknown Origin Berlin 2009]

I’ve been thinking a bit about what the definition of a story is and how many of my favorite stories wouldn’t actually qualify as stories under commonly established criteria for defining them. I went through a period of reading the nosleep subreddit a lot and tried my hand at writing a few pieces on it that weren’t very good. When I wrote The Dreams in the Red House I thought it would be a good idea to share it there as it was my first piece that actually felt scary.

It got removed after a couple of hours for not being a story. Apparently detailed descriptions of a series of nightmares and sleep paralysis events doesn’t count as a story on that board unless it results in real world consequences. I thought of adding a throwaway final sentence like “and then I woke up and the monster was in my room” and resubmitting it to be obnoxious/funny but decided to just leave it alone.

Now one of my pieces, The Name Is Death Turkeys!, does actually contain a piece of original horror fiction but I’m not sure if it would count as a story either. I don’t want to put in too big of a spoiler in case any readers feel like clicking over and checking it out but I’ll say that the story is somewhat ambiguous as to whether or not anything supernatural happened. I wonder if there are pieces by writers like Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft that are horror classics but wouldn’t count as stories on that subreddit either.

Anyway the things I am going to be calling stories in this piece are just situations where strangers said things that I thought were funny. On the non sequitur to joke continuum most of these little sketches would probably list toward the former. I was thinking earlier today that this whole bit might work better as a comedy album because so much of it is going to depend on vocal mannerisms and timing. I know the exchange rate between words and pictures is fixed at one thousand to one but where would it be for audio?

The first selection in what will probably be a triptych comes from San Diego and was most likely the late nineties as I don’t think I was drinking yet. I was sitting with Francois at the prototypically San Diegan twenty four hour burrito shop on Third Avenue and Washington Street – I want to say that it was early in the afternoon but it could have been the middle of the night. Francois was telling me a story that wasn’t one about the type of tea that is supposedly picked by monkeys.

The story always goes more or less the same way: somewhere in China there are wild tea plants growing on mountainous peaks and ledges too precarious to be reached by human hands. Instead a tribe of wild monkeys has taken to collecting the tender leaves and exchanging them for fruit with the nearby villagers in an arrangement as old as time. I kind of doubt the reality is as idyllic as this anecdote would suggest but even at its worst it would have to be a million times better than the somewhat related cottage industry of force feeding coffee berries to wild civets and waiting for them to shit them out.

The following character was seated at the next table over: a bald and slightly heavy set white man with a soul patch dressed in a leather jacket and one of those colorful caps made up of triangles in different shades of leather suggestive of the 1970’s and Funk Music. He held a small brown paper bag that was crumpled at the top to accommodate the fluted neck of a forty ounce bottle of malt liquor. He looked significantly in our direction and offered the following observation in a voice tinged with sadness and wisdom:

“I’ve heard they uh… steal your belongings and what-not. The monkeys…”

If you’ve seen the Tupac Shakur movie Gridlock’d his voice and speech style were nearly identical to that of the small time heroin dealer and jazz musician character called Mud. The film is set in Detroit but I’m not sure if this monkey man was from there. He seemed to have stepped out of a timeless world where saxophones, poetry and cigarette smoke compete for space in the stilted air of an endless afternoon. Soulful eyes speaking out in earnest wistfulness for an ever-flowing stream of pilfered cameras and sunglasses.

The next bit comes from around 2005 or so in the hey-day of the counterfeit Greyhound Ameripass. I was crossing the desert on my way to or from Chicago and stepped off the bus to stretch my legs. The sharp eyes of a young Desert Rat lit upon the book I carried and the finger as bookmark to indicate it was no mere accessory. Having now spent time living in different versions of what is essentially an oasis of artificial irrigation surrounding an Am-Pm I understand why such a simple sight would have stood out as both significant and encouraging.

He was dressed in what is more-or-less the standard uniform of a dusty California nomad whose life can be neatly divided into long walks either to or from the convenience store. The brimmed cap with protective neck flap was there but what leapt out even louder was the refillable and sun faded insulated soda barrel. It was the kind that the guys who hold the stop sign for road construction crews always carry – probably 64 ounces if I had to guess. He had a long plastic straw to allow sipping without having to lift this burden any higher than waist level:

“Whatcha reading?”

I held up my copy of a popular translation of The Saga of the Volsungs and told him it was The Saga of the Volsungs. He proudly held up his own significantly thicker volume that I have to confess I stopped reading the title of after recognizing the Dragonlance logo. I understand that the books have a bit of a reputation and following but I struggle against deeply ingrained culture snob tendencies.

The entire situation reminds me of a bit of teenage trick-or-treating I did dressed as a Rene Magritte painting that caused my friend’s clown costume to appear especially pedestrian in comparison. We were in a fancy rich neighborhood for the better candy giver and the professorial candy-giver was impressed with my get-up:

“Ah yes, Magritte! My favorite surrealist is Dali!, and what are you young lady?”

“Uh.. I’m a clown, sir.”

In this analogy the Saga of the Volsungs is me in the Magritte costume, the Dragonlance novel is my friend and I’m the judgmental rich guy with the candy:

“Uh… yeah. This one is epic poetry about the Germanic Hero Siegfried…”

The Desert Rat crumpled his chin and attempted an expression of grave intellectualism. His rejoinder would have been hilarious as piss-taking mockery of my snobbishness but as a genuine attempt at pantomiming a Classical Education it was timeless. In the disaffected tone of a worldly scholar:

“Yeah… Socrates… Siegfried and Roy… I’ve read that stuff…”

I could throw out something wry about the Western Tradition here but honestly I think this particular pull-out quote speaks for itself.

The final bauble comes from a situation where a person whose natural register already falls within the “comedic voice” category suddenly switches to a different, more intentionally comedic voice. This isn’t the actual bit but during the production of the experimental opera Fever of Unknown Origin in Berlin in 2009 Raul and I went out to the Museeinsel dressed as goblins. I was in black leather with a witches nose and a badger’s preserved fur mask as headdress; Raul was wearing a horses mane in tanned leather on the back of his head and high platform boots.

We hadn’t specifically coordinated our looks but the entire trip had been goblin-themed for me at least. A woman politely asked in precise German if she might take our picture. I was actually the only member of the American contingent who understood German but I pretended not to because we’d been posing for pictures all day and I was getting bored of it. She asked her male companion what language he thought we might speak in the same precise German and he shrugged.

She asked in German again but with an exaggerated screechy goblin voice like the character Blix in Legend. I still pretended not to understand and we didn’t pose for a photo but I think about this lady and this moment all the time. That rarest of anomalies: a German attempt at humor that was actually quite funny.

This brings us to the third and final thing that I am loosely referring to as a story. I was with Jacki for this one, the brief Jubilee to my Wolverine: a mouthy teenage Asian sidekick. I think this happened in Los Angeles but it could have been Saint Louis or New Orleans. We met on the Rockaway and did a bit of traveling. It was most likely 2008.

I am going to refer to the man who we met on the street as a “crackhead” but the facts of the matter are that we only ever saw him smoking marijuana. I am using the term only for some specific tropes concerning voice and character. A Court Jester like persona and the type of deep and raspy speech you can no doubt already hear in your head. He had asked us to smoke his weed with him and we weren’t smoking very much of it so he complained that we were getting him “drunk” as he took one uninterrupted toke after another.

As these guys are always wont to do he was holding court on nothing much of anything:

“The other day my kids come up to me and say…”

This is where things got odd. When he switched to the character of his “kids” his voice got even deeper and even raspier. Think of somebody that already speaks in a stereotypical “crackhead” voice and now imagine that person doing the most intense, exaggerated impression of a “crackhead” voice they could muster. The tone was still light and comic but the edge on the voice was like something out of a horror movie:

“How you live? How you stay alive?”

My response was almost involuntary:

“Damn! Your kids got some fucked up raspy ass voices! They even older than you are?”

We all laughed. I was making my wife laugh telling this story again in the car with me. She’s getting near her wit’s end with the stories which is part of the reason I started writing them down in the hope that getting some of it down in print would save me from cycles of endless repetition but she never gets sick of this one. I thought about the absurdity of telling the story, doing his voice and then doing him doing the voice.

As always I have to wonder what the fuck is wrong with the hypothetical children. It occurred to me today that maybe they weren’t children in the usual biological sense at all but rather some type of deeply fried homonculi he had inadvertently created by spilling blood on the ground like in the first Hellraiser movie. Twisted, skeletal golems of wire, bone and garbage clawing their way out of the mud and desperately wanting to know:

“How you live? How you stay alive?”

New York 2004 : “We Squashed It”

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Living back in San Diego I ended up in a long term relationship with a New England type pedigree girl. She was from Cape Cod and into stuff like Diesel Jeans and making Cosmopolitans, probably the closest I’ve ever been to dating a “normie”. She lived in the same Mission Valley apartments as the woman that Andy Panda was seeing – still is actually but she might have moved by now. She was really good at getting jobs as a “brand ambassador” so I got to experience that world in all it’s weirdness. Operate an Oxygen Bar to promote Trojan Condoms at OzzFest, that sort of thing.

We made a trip to the East Coast together so I got to see Cape Cod through the eyes of a local: hear people talk about how some tunnel wasn’t finished yet, go to a bar somebody in The Pixies owned, hear the way people said words like Hyannis. We stayed at her Grandpa’s house and one morning a newborn bat had fallen from wherever they were nesting to just in front of the front door and died. It looked like an emaciated human infant swaddled in a blanket of it’s own skin.

Her Grandpa asked me if I was much of a fisherman.

Her dad was renting a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard so we went out there too. If you’ve never been it’s almost difficult to believe how patrician things like pictures of lighthouses and dried out starfish and sea shells can be. In San Diego these are the trappings of Ocean Beach which was still pretty run down and hippyish when I was growing up but for New England white people they might as well be gold chains. Everybody wore The Black Dog T-Shirts and the ladies were buzzing about this kind of straw hat that Hillary Clinton had just made popular.

The rental was on a part of the island called Gay Head near Michael J. Fox’s house. We spent a day messing around on a secluded beach because there wasn’t much privacy in the rental. This big orange dog-tick came marching across the sand to make things unpleasant for us. They don’t squish easy so I threw it as far as I could but our body heat just brought it back. I found a rock to smash it on and a smaller rock to smash it with – it’s body split perfectly into top and bottom pieces like the two sides of a hollow plastic action figure. I would have almost thought it was two ticks stuck together if the two halves didn’t stiffen up and die the moment they were separated.

Everybody was talking about Lyme Disease.

The trip hadn’t been planned around it or anything but we were fortunate enough to be in New York for a Dearraindrop opening at Deitch Projects called Riddle of the Sphinx. I had seen some Dearraindrop stuff in Paper Rodeo and there was one batch of zines that them and Paper Rad had put out together. The two collectives were almost uncanny analogues of each other: a charismatic careerist with a quiet overshadowed girlfriend and her sort of wunderkind younger brother that seemed to make slightly better stuff than the main guy.

I never knew too much about it but I heard vague whispers of a “beef” between the two groups. It was almost a theme within the Fort Thunder adjacent art landscape for a little while. Everybody was inspiring each other and working in various groups and collectives – when an idea gained traction it could be a little Rocky defining exactly whose idea it was. I actually asked Jacob Ciocci about the “beef” a few years later:

“We squashed it.”

This was the beginning of my storied history with admiring Jeffrey Deitch’s taste while carrying a mild aversion for his overall persona. He has definitely amplified and fostered a lot of artists that seem to benefit from the platform over the years. I wouldn’t say anything as dramatic as “necessary evil” but “necessary ickiness” about sums it up. A party at his Los Feliz mansion had me retreating into a closet to escape the atmosphere then immediately emerging to find out who was responsible for the Boschian embossed works I found hanging there.

It was Raqib Shaw.

At the Dearraindrop show I made an especially cringey faux pas. Billy Grant had left his prescription of Adderall on a table next to some pita chips and orange juice and because much of the group’s work is drug related I assumed they were supposed to be “refreshments”. In an overcompensatory attempt to seem “cool” I swallowed three of them. Of course that hadn’t been the intention behind leaving them on the table at all and he actually needed them and it was a problem for him that I’d taken them. They were 50 milligram extended release capsules.

I don’t actually even like stimulants that much.

I’m a bit of a talker under normal brain chemistry conditions so in this state I was an absolute menace. I was overly enthusiastic and oblivious to basic social cues and Joe Grillo had to ask me repeatedly to back up and give him some personal space while I was talking at him about god knows what. The commune I was born on had a specific idiom for this kind of behavior:

“Into the juice.”

The group Slow Jams who seem to have disappeared from the internet were performing at an after party somewhere with a piece that utilized a trampoline and I was jumping on their trampoline and generally practicing bad audience etiquette. Even without an absurd dose of Adderall I was a bit much for a big chunk of my twenties. I was always trying to get on the mic and freestyle rap and while this behavior is appropriate in some settings like freestyle rap battles and acceptable in other settings like shows and parties where people want me to rap it is almost nearly as often a total pain in the ass.

It was that moment with the harmonica at that first Make-Up show in 1998, I was shamelessly addicted to the thrill of the borrowed spotlight.

About a year later I would end up in a rap group of my own joining a motley San Diego outfit called Sex Affection and helping reimagine it as Hood Rich. Spending time on the other side of things where you bring the gear and write the songs gave me some much needed perspective but I would credit one particular rapper with showing me a hard boundary. I can’t remember where and when I first saw MC Subzero Permafrost but I remember exactly what she said when I tried to get on her microphone:

“When I was coming up I was taught to get my own mic and never let anybody else use it.”

Sometimes hearing “no” can be as transformative as hearing “yes”. I appreciate everyone who was accommodating in my early years but Wendy’s honest refusal was what I needed to grow and mature as an artist. I got my own microphone, a cheesy but iconic Shure 55 because I liked how it looked in a DJ Scooter video. I haven’t considered myself a rapper for several years although some might disagree with how they would classify the Bleak End stuff.

I’m pretty sure I’ll get back into it.

This feels short so I’ll throw in some extra details from the 2004 trip. We went to Providence and it was going through one of those extremely populist public sculpture series of the early 2000’s that arose after the success of Chicago’s Cows on Parade. In this case they were Mr. Potato Heads. There was one that looked like Edgar Allen Poe and an especially inspiring one in front of the mall that looked like an ATM with money coming out of it’s mouth. There’s actually a story about that mall from the 2000 Fort Thunder trip that didn’t make it into those chapters. I was holding the door open for a group of whatever New England calls “Valley Girls”. One turned to me as they entered and announced in a cheery tone:

“Thanks! We were just about to say something really rude about you!”

I’d rank it pretty high among all the variations I’ve gotten on “hey weird guy you look weird” over the years. Back in 2004 we went to see Devendra Banhart at AS220 and I wasn’t thrilled with it. I’ve written about this elsewhere and this installment has enough snark, directed both inwardly and outwardly, as it is. More memorable was the hotel we ended up staying at when I didn’t run in to anyone we could try to stay with. The Sportsman’s Lodge was the perfect setting for what we were getting into: sex and heroin.

Boston and Allston were the final ports of call. We ate at a popular vegan pizza place that I never miss a chance to mention was later rebranded as TJ Scallywaggles. The jaunty backstory printed on the wall reminded me a bit of the Ben & Jerry’s mythos as written by Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil. We had other business in the neighborhood. New England was getting dope from her sketchy Russian friends. One seemed to be a prostitute and the other suggested rich boy whose mother handmade him shirts with cute pictures of apples on them – quite trend forward with the oilily’s and such to come.

While we were waiting a large wind picked up. A very young mouse was attempting to cross the street but being harried by the winds. An errant gust would send him rolling backward with his comically oversized feet tumbling over his head. Still he recollected himself, soldiered on and reached his side in style.

If this little mouse serves as any allegory, avatar or simulacrum of anything else in this chapter please let me know. I’d certainly like to believe it could but more specific details elude me. It was in fact very cute.

We went to a Neil Young tribute in a Brooklyn Park. Cat Power did Needle and the Damage Done. We were happy to be there, happy to come home and I was unhappy to extend the relationship.

I needed out.

Cabazon, California 2017 : “A Garbage Bag Full Of Desiccated Flesh”

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I kind of chased my tail in a circle and ended up back where I started while doing some background research for this piece. I was trying to find out the identity of the dusty abandoned steak house that held the garbage bag from the pull quote and had convinced myself that it had to have been The Wagon Wheel from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Paris, Texas. I even found a photo of the interior after it became a dusty abandoned steak house and it more or less looked like the dusty abandoned steak house I remembered.

The only problem is that The Wagon Wheel was demolished in December of 2016 and LaPorsha was pretty sure that we did the whole desert thing in the Summer of 2017. I checked my e-mail and we had become site hosts at the Thousand Palms Oasis in August of 2017. I looked a little closer at the satellite map and remembered the chain link fence and rubble where The Wagon Wheel would have been. It looks like the dusty abandoned steak house in this story is now a brightly painted Mexican Restaurant called Los Victors.

The inside doesn’t look anything like it looked when it was a dusty abandoned steak house with a garbage bag full of desiccated flesh. It actually looks quite a bit like the Burger King which was getting me even more confused but the Burger King is definitely still a Burger King. The chairs in one of the pictures did look a bit familiar, they probably kept those. It would be easier than throwing them out. I decided to just not stick a picture on this one. I’m sure you’ve seen the dinosaurs, everybody’s seen the dinosaurs.

Our first RV was a 38 footer on the Chevy 454 chassis, a real monster. There was never much wrong with it from a mechanical perspective except that it would start running hot from time to time. We were in the desert anyway so everything was hot. Structurally it was a different story. It had a good side and a bad side. On the bad side the covers had fallen off of the storage compartments and taken the siding with it leaving bare plywood. Not that it ever actually mattered, these aren’t the kind of stories where little details like this will matter later.

We had been running hot when we first pulled off the highway into the Thousand Palms truck stop and for a while we got away with parking in the back where all the trucks were. In the beginning we used the little black diesel Mercedes we also had to go up to Joshua Tree and check out spots to rent land to park on but there’s nothing like living in the desert to let you know that you don’t want to live in the desert. Eventually they started noticing that there were a few RVs back there that didn’t move and we had to start moving around and parking on the streets.

Besides the truck stop Thousand Palms intersected with tribal lands enough to have a casino so there was a decent sized homeless population for a town its size. There were a few out of the way spots for camps but we ended up meeting the other RV people as soon as they pulled us all out from where we were hidden in the rows of trucks.

The first RV that we parked by was occupied by a friendly older white trash couple. No matter how many times we told them that we didn’t use meth, or “white” in local slang, they never seemed to get the message. They would offer it to us as exchange when they needed a jump or come by the window when they were having trouble finding some:

“Got any shit?”

One day they were visited by a woman with a car and job, probably a stripper, who needed a spot to hang out and get high. She had an entire litter of Husky puppies with her and LaPorsha was talking about how cute they were and saying she wanted one. The old woman in the RV lowered her voice to ask how much LaPorsha would be willing to pay for one.

You could see the gears turning inside her head. I’m sure if we’d offered a hundred dollars or more she would have made it happen – one way or another. We really didn’t need a dog, much less a potentially stolen one, so we said we weren’t interested. This couple wasn’t around for long. One morning their RV was gone and we never saw them again.

These guys that lived in another one used to cook meth and steal diesel from construction equipment but were getting by on just being the only RV with a working air conditioner. Whoever had gotten a social security check or other come up would buy gas for the AC and share drugs with these guys to have a spot to hang out that was out of the heat. It was like the cheaper version of a room at the Red Roof. They had a tiny television next to the door that constantly played a loop of their only DVD – some obscure hood crime movie from the ‘90s I forget the name of.

We didn’t do the same kind of drugs as everybody else but one of the guys was helping us flush our radiator on our way out of town. We were driving toward Los Angeles for no compelling reason. I mean we needed to go by the DHS Office to renew EBT and that sort of thing but we could have done that without moving the RV at all. Our RV had gotten so hot that we were having trouble starting it and we were grabbing some more water from a building where what looked like a juvenile eagle was watching us from the roof.

“Heat is the enemy of electricity.”

On the freeway things were going fine until LaPorsha’s driver’s seat suddenly turned into a sauna. Steam was rising all around her and it seemed reasonable to assume that it was probably coming from the engine as it was directly under her. I’m not much good with anything motor vehicle related but I was able to pull off the doghouse and use a flashlight to find where a hose had gotten loose, we’d left in the relative cool of night. Reattaching it was easy but there was also the issue of all of the water in the radiator having changed state and dispersed into the atmosphere.

Considering all of the issues that we’d had leaving Thousand Palms, and the surplus of empty space in our vehicle, you might have expected that we would have been carrying another radiator’s worth of the stuff but that wasn’t the case.

We had pulled off in walking distance to a rest stop so I walked down to discover that the water to all of the fixtures and faucets had been shut off as it was no longer in use. By this time the sun was starting to come up. A truck driver with three or four black chihuahuas had pulled onto the shoulder ahead of us and he did have water but only small bottles of this weird zero calorie Concord Grape flavored stuff that wasn’t even carbonated. I wouldn’t have put it in a radiator even if there was enough of it.

I did eventually get thirsty enough to drink some. It tasted like obscure new forms of cancer.

We had to try to hitchhike to the next exit to get more water. A cop pulled off to tell us that we couldn’t hitchhike but she’d drive us there. The next exit was the Cabazon Dinosaurs. Apparently the Dinosaurs were built to help bring business to the then-demolished Wagon Wheel Restaurant that wasn’t the dusty abandoned steak house. I don’t know if this is still the case but at the time they had been bought by some Christians that turned the insides of them into a Creationist Museum about how dinosaurs never actually existed.

It’s actually possible that in 2017 the Dinosaurs were no longer even owned by Creationists because I didn’t even go inside this time. I had looked inside in 2012 at the tail end of the Trapped in Reality tour. I know whoever owns them now paints them up for different holidays and stuff. In 2017 I fell asleep under the stomach of the apatosaurus as it was the only place with shade and some possibly unrelated Christians gave me a bag of food. Doritos, Gatorade – that sort of thing.

I found some of the cardboard covered plastic cubes that vegetable oil comes in digging through the Burger King dumpster so we had something to carry water with and just needed to find a ride the three or four miles back to the RV. The manager of the Burger King said that he would take us if we were still there when he closed that night and that sounded better than trying to hitchhike again.

We did notice one other RV in the upper parking lot by the gas station so we decided to see if anybody was home and ask if they knew an RV mechanic. When I approached the window a pot bellied white man with dreadlocks dressed only in basketball shorts was startled out of his nap when his six or seven pit bulls all started barking furiously. He tried to quiet them down by repeatedly yelling “dudes!” at them. It wasn’t particularly effective.

He didn’t know an RV mechanic. I got the impression his didn’t run at all and the owners of the parking lot didn’t care enough to make him leave.

It was really hot and we had a lot of time to kill so I started poking around the dusty abandoned steak house. I can’t remember what the sign said the name had been before it had gone out of business, it isn’t the name anymore. Apparently the building was built in 2001. It’s hard to imagine a year where business was booming enough at the Cabazon Dinosaurs that somebody decided it would be a good idea to build a second sit down family restaurant but apparently there was one and it was 2001.

The door in back turned out to be unlocked when I tried to open it. There were a bunch of lizards hanging out in the doorway that had all apparently had the same idea as me about using a dusty abandoned steak house to get out of the sun. I’m usually pretty on it with the herpetology stuff but I don’t know what kind they were. A few of them were pretty big – about as long as a chihuahua but nowhere near as bulky.

I went to get LaPorsha so we could try to take a nap in there or at least spend some time out of the sun. It was really dusty to the point that it made it hard to breathe. There was a table that looked like the spot that other people who had killed time or squatted in the dusty abandoned steak house had killed time at: beer cans and empty liquor bottles. Sitting on a chair was a black trash bag full of the titular weird dried out slabs of some kind of flesh.

They kind of looked like this brown fibrous stuff that comes off of palm trees but the moment my fingers touched it I knew it was Animal Kingdom. I really couldn’t begin to guess what that stuff was or why somebody had dumped a garbage bag full of it in this place. My mind went to deer and then I couldn’t help but think human and I was pretty much sure I didn’t feel like touching it, having my fingerprints on it or being anywhere near it.

The walls were mirrors for a lot of the space. The dust was thick on everything. I found.. I don’t remember what – tablecloths, aprons, curtains, some kind of relatively clean textile we could lay down to sleep on. Just barely bearable. The lizards weren’t coming around, they stayed by the back door ready for a raid. The light caught the dust in the air and looked unwelcoming. We slept.

The light from the windows began to darken, it was inching toward evening. We dusted off, collected ourselves, avoided the bag of god-knows-what and returned to Burger King. It was almost time for the manager to close but he had done a 180 personality wise. He mocked us for expecting him to keep his word – called us fools, idiots, crazy. He clearly felt guilty that he was reneging on his promise and attempting to put the fault on us to soothe his ego. We told him to just go.

One of his workers was worried about us and wanted to get us back safely. She lived all the way in Perris but had to drive the two hours to Cabazon for a minimum wage fast food job. She had never taken hitchhikers before and was worried we might hurt her but still decided to take us. She was praying the entire way. A rosary made from glass beads cut to look like crystals hung from her rear view mirror.

We got back to our RV and I refilled the water. It was dark again, cool night to fight the heat. We drove until it got hot and weird again. Pulled off into a field by an Auto Zone in Beaumont. I can’t remember what I had to buy there but I feel like it was vaguely cylindrical and someone helped me install it. What I can remember is the smell of synthetic oil and rubber inside this Auto Zone – they all have it but this one was stronger than usual.

Once we were able to drive again we decided not to try to make the full trip to Los Angeles. We parked behind a mini-mall in Banning and got a bus instead.

Banning – we’d be coming back to a whole lot of Bullshit in Banning.

Panama 2011 : “The Isla Colon Morph”

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Somewhere in 2011 my sister and her husband had been doing an extended house sit in Panama. I had just done Castle Freak at that year’s BitchPork then headed East for VOV, Taboo’s Wheel party and whatever else was popping. I was Catholic, clean from opiates, avoiding alcohol due to a recent Hep-C revelation and still had a Congress Tape Deck in top condition. They were trying to convince me to come visit but I was kind of on the fence about it. The clincher came when I discovered the house they were watching sat on top of Cerro Brujo: the Warlock’s Peak. Clearly I belonged there.

I had heard about a situation in Panama where you could theoretically hang around yacht clubs at either end of the Panama Canal and vessels in need of extra hands would take you on for the trip. Kind of like getting picked up as a hitchhiker so someone could use a carpool lane except this actually paid and you learn about boats. This bit didn’t work out for me. I was also very interested in wildlife, particularly poison dart frogs, and the experiences to be found in old Catholic Churches and the Kuna Yala tribe. All of this did work out.

I forget the exact line of events but it was probably like a plane to a bus to a ferry and then I end up in Bocas del Toro – the name given to the large southern town on Isla Colon that serves as a hub to the surrounding islands and bits of mainland. Tom and Jenny showed up in a motor boat to get me and fill up on supplies in town. The ride back to Cerro Brujo passed through lots of mangrove swamp and bits of coral that made things feel like we were passing through the maze like corridors of an early 3D Computer Game.

The house they were taking care of was made of wood and built with a circular porch around it. The owner had left behind some dogs and a variety of birds. The dogs were relatively happy as long as there was some type of human around. They liked eating fresh coconut and as the things both grew on trees and contained tasty water we were always throwing it to them.

Things took a darker turn in the bird department. First I met a green parrot and was immediately given the job of clipping it’s flight feathers so it couldn’t fly. It seemed relatively painless at least. Next came a parrot that was not so fickle about human companionship as the dogs. This species bonds for life with a human it considers it’s “mate”. This woman had been absent for some time and the parade of house sitters was cold comfort if any. It had plucked out every feather it could reach in nervous anxiety and resembled an emaciated plucked chicken with a large, overly expressive face. This thing was not having a good time.

Last was not an actual bird but a tragic cautionary tale about a former bird. The owner of the house seemed to be somewhat of a tropical bird Lothario(a?) as she had also life bonded with a Montezuma Oropendela. The males of this species are known for weaving ornate hanging basket nests for their females. It’s easy to imagine how this unlucky househusband might have felt somewhat insecure with an entire human woman as his life mate and, like so many others in a similar situation across all sexes and species, attempted to overcompensate.

The house was located near an indigenous settlement where one of the major industries was creating molas and masks using brightly colored embroidery floss. With little understanding of how personal property works the hapless Montezuma was constantly stealing this floss to jazz up his offering to his seemingly disinterested mate. Panama’s indigenous live in brutal poverty and the “sticky talons” were no laughing matter. The woman was warned that if she could not curtail the theft they would have no recourse but to kill the bird. It sounded like the perfect situation for clipping flight feathers but that wasn’t what happened.

The bird was killed.

My visit was roughly split into three basic activities: exploring Isla Colon, searching for different types of poison dart frogs and spending time beach bumming and snorkeling. Because of my Catholic period I needed to be in Bocas Sunday morning for Mass and grabbed a spot in a hostel Saturday night. The town is built up with gangplanks on top of a swamp and for centuries the residents have disposed of refuse by throwing it out their windows and letting it sink beneath the surface. A German ex-pat kept a shop of antique bottles he had found scuba diving though the mud. I bought a square shaped one with strange rainbow residue on the inside.

In Church the next morning all of the saints were dressed in brightly colored holographic garments like they were going to Carnaval.

Cerro Brujo sat on a little bay where dolphins occasionally came by to hand out. On one of the first nights there was little moon and especially high dinoflagellate activity. They are single celled organisms that glow with a slight blue tone when the water around them is agitated. We took the boat out until the water was black and the absence of light pollution made them especially clear. Simply treading water was great to look at but then we decided to try shooting hadoukens at each other. It didn’t really work – the bioluminescence fizzled out inches from one’s arms, long before the imagined fireball could reach it’s mark.

The next day we got a local who does tours to take us out to a small island known for coral and good snorkeling. There were hammocks on the beaches and a brightly colored ecosystem just under the surface of the turquoise water. Flocks of parrot fish chewing on the coral, tiny swimming squids and a type of luminescent jelly that looked like the Saddleback Graphs from Math Textbooks. Our guide was killing two birds with one stone by also doing a bit of harpoon fishing. I spotted a gigantic pufferfish hiding underneath a dome of coral – it’s huge round eyes reminded me of something from Super Mario 64. I wanted to show Tom and Jenny but avoid letting on enough excitement that our guide might decide to come kill it with a harpoon for it’s potential financial value.

He didn’t catch on.

The most exciting part for me was definitely the frog hunting. There is a poison dart species called oophaga pumilio who are about the size of a thumbnail and what you call “obligate egg eaters”. This means the mother frog puts two tadpoles on her back and climbs high into the trees to deposit them into the tiny pools of water that form inside of flowers called bromeliads – each in a pool of it’s own so they don’t eat each other. After that she eats enough to allow her to produce one unfertilized egg a day and undertakes the climb to feed these to her tadpoles on alternating days.

The geographic isolation of many small islands and isolated bits of the mainland has combined with sexual selection to create a kaleidoscope of different color morphs. The first stop was a pizza restaurant called Rana Azul run by a German ex-pat named Joseph. The surrounding ex-pat community assembled for weekly dinners and I spoke to Joseph about how to find the small blue frogs the spot was named for. He suggested that I take a walk around his banana finca or plantation, the actual business that kept his social pizza club above water.

Panama is a true “banana republic”. Anywhere you go there are tables overflowing with black or heavily brown spotted examples of the fruit on the outside edge of edibility. You would be hard pressed to find an aesthetically pleasing yellow banana anywhere in the country – they are all for export. The industry of growing them does attract many small flies and consequently the small colorful frogs. I was directed to the best spot by Joseph’s indigenous foreman. It was my first experience with the native custom of mercilessly throwing rocks into dog’s faces to make them stop barking.

The Darklands or Tierra Oscura morph is characterized by dark blues and purples going into almost black. While most color morphs are restricted to different small islands in the vicinity these are found on the portions of mainland that can only be accessed by boat because no roads have been built through the jungle. I was able to borrow a sea kayak and explore the forest leading to the nearby Indian School. Here the Darklands morph shares territory with what is called “Blue Jeans” – a red body with blue limbs. I ended up falling into deceptively deep mud that coated my entire 6 feet and 5 inches in the dark watery sludge.

The freshwater lagoon is in within eyeshot of the school, causing the children to howl in amusement as I dipped into the water to clean myself.

Next to Isla Colon is a culturally Caribbean island called Bastimientos – supposedly named for an incident when somebody crashed their ship into it centuries ago. We stopped here for a popular jerk chicken spot but I insisted we undertake some frog tourism. On the other side of the island is a beach called Wizard’s Beach or Red Frog Beach. The local children had made a cottage industry of capturing the bright red specimens and showing them to tourists for tips. They were also known for keeping them trapped in display containers until they died of dehydration so I hunted for my own. Journeying into the forest I came across red, orange and even white variants.

On a less visited stretch of beach the remains of some kind of home-made bathysphere sat decaying just within the tree line – a mix of glass windows, splintering lumber and excessive use of spray foam insulation. I could not tell if it would ever be sea worthy again or if it indeed ever had been.

The farthest we went on this quest was an isolated and rarely visited pair of islands called Isla Popa and Loma Partida. The frogs here are shades of blue-green going to turquoise – quite unlike any of the surrounding morphs. We discovered that the juveniles were sometimes an even more exciting shade of metallic gold. The less exciting part of the visit was that the island rarely got white visitors and there were soon hordes of local children both “watching” our boat and leading us to find the frogs.

No matter how many times I tried to explain that we didn’t need them picked up they would violently slam their hands down at any sign of movement and soon several frogs were dead. Amphibians are a totem of mine and it pains me to see them killed or injured but these children live with casually killing the animals around them as a fact of daily life. I felt particularly horrible knowing that they wouldn’t have bothered catching and hurting these frogs if I hadn’t showed up and expressed interest.

One of them handed me another small dead creature that haunts me to this day. It was a reddish-pink almost coral color and looked like a Chinese Dragon in miniature. Barely larger than the tiny frogs it had a long, slender body, four limbs, an obvious tail and a head that was vaguely puffy shaped like a lion’s mane. I can’t say for sure if it was a very young lizard or some kind of larval newt or salamander, although I do think I saw the faint suggestion of scales.

The entire scenario was putting me in a bad place mentally and I didn’t take a picture or hold on to the tiny body. I’ve often wondered if I saw a creature completely unknown to science as the island is remote and scarcely visited. If any of my readers have any ideas or suggestions based on my description please share as I am dying to know.

I did carry one of the dead frogs back to the house-sit and placed it’s body under a small stone near the dock. The next day ants had picked the bones completely clean and I thought of smuggling the articulated skeleton home in a little matchbox so it wouldn’t be a total waste. The next day even the bones were gone.

Out of all the pumilio color morphs I was most excited to see the Isla Colon morph. Living on the most populous island had caused it to be the most rare of the sub-species due to human impact on it’s environment. It was also the most visually appealing, to me at least.

A yellowish green back with even black spots, yellow stomach, and orange limbs leading to grey hands with the same fine spots. We travelled up and down the island and were told over and over that the “little green frogs” were everywhere but they never seemed to manifest. We visited a gruta or volcanic cave dedicated to the Virgin Mary where we were told they were all over the place every time it rained.

It wasn’t raining.

We thought we saw a dirty old T-Shirt hanging from a tree but on closer inspection it turned out to be a mother sloth with a near infant child clinging to the fur of her back. If you’ve never experienced these beatific creatures in the wild yourself it’s difficult to do them justice. They move as if they were living in a totally alternate universe where time is simply not the same thing. The way that forests of kelp sway underwater when there really isn’t any current.

The day came when I would be returning alone to Panama City to finish out my trip and I had just a couple of hours to kill until my first and last shot at a ferry. I had searched for my morph through every corner of the island except for a beach on the opposite end called Boca del Drago. I looked at the bus schedule and saw there would be just enough time to ride out, look around for 15 minutes and then head back. This side of the island looked completely different: the road followed sharp curves as locals and tourists alike drifted by luxuriously on beach cruiser bicycles.

It didn’t make any sense to be looking into the ocean except that it was so conspicuously different from the ocean I had been looking at. Tiny sharks wriggled through the sand in the ubiquitous shallows. There were bits of sparse forest between the curves of beach that were populated by either young iguanas or barely sub-adult brown basilisks – I can’t remember which. I was returning to the bus stop in defeat when I remembered seeing bits of cow pasture that might have hidden pockets of forest.

I grabbed a sturdy stick as the island is known for a particularly venomous snake: the fer-de-lance. When grass is waist high, as this grass was, merely tapping the ground with a stick is by no means safe but it’s safer than not doing it at all. I crawled under some barbed wire and emerged into the type of shady forest that is ideal for growing cacao and coffee. It is also hospitable for a certain tiny species of frog.

Before I saw anything I heard the sound – a kind of low rhythmic clicking croak the males use to announce their interest in sex to the females and aptitude for violence to their fellow males. I forget the name of these trees where the roots raise up from the ground like walled buttresses. Maybe it’s a type of fig or a terrestrial mangrove. I only know that’s where they were: tiny living jewels in green, yellow and orange. First one, then a couple and then as many as I could ever hope to see. The forest was alive with them.

I’d imagine everybody plays this game with themselves at one point or another. You are looking for something, it’s not guaranteed that you will find it, there’s a good chance you simply won’t. You look in the last place at the last minute and maybe the universe is essentially good and your heart is essentially pure.

But there it is

You pulse beats loudly in your ears, the skin on your scalp begins to tighten and tingle, you are transported, soaring high above you look down on your tiny human body with kindness, you’re not yourself in this moment, you’re everything and of course it worked out because honestly who the hell would live in a universe where it wouldn’t? I mean if that’s the way it works why would you even live there at all?

It’s catharsis

I had a bus to catch. There was a pay phone by the bus and I had some coins. I called somebody to tell them I found my frogs, maybe it was Tom and Jenny. I rode the bus all the way back down the island to the ferry and I climbed on board and took my seat for Panama City.

The Meaning of Zerstyrschonheit

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[Author’s Note: I’ve since changed my blog name and domain to the more relevant and easier to remember Underground America but this is a peek into where my head was at with the old name]

The name of this blog is difficult to pronounce, spell or actually Google, at first glance it is easy to assume that it was selected specifically to keep these writings obscure with a made up word. This is at least partially true: zerstyrschonheit is a new word that I created from the German words for destruction and beauty.

Strictly speaking it should have an umlaut over the “o” at the very least. I’m not particularly good at locating the characters for extra- English orthographies, a problem I usually solve by copy and pasting the word in question from the internet. In this instance this is complicated by the fact that this word doesn’t actually exist.

I invented the word several years ago while looking at the panoramic photographs of Edward Burtynsky. I was looking for a word, in any language, to describe the complex feelings that these pictures evoke. A combination of panic at the degree to which human activities are absolutely destroying essential biological systems on our planet in the rational part of the mind while the beauty of these images is soothing the aesthetic part of the mind. I ended up inventing one.

There is no real reason for this to be the title of the page at large. It doesn’t really relate to anything I write about here. I don’t even remember starting this explanation but I found it in my drafts and decided to finish it.

https://undergroundamerica.home.blog/

Los Angeles 2012 : “xiǎo fèi! xiǎo fèi!”

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I’d been thinking about doing the Hollywood & Highland Superhero thing ever since the night that a Charlie Chaplin named Ponytails jumped on the Venice bus around two in the morning and talked up the ease of the hustle and magnitude of the money the whole way to Culver City. He was pretty good as the Chaplins went – painted his face like a black & white movie and the hat, suit & cane were all high quality as opposed to the cheap costume store stuff. I don’t know how he navigated the other half of his life with what was essentially a Hitler mustache but he clearly made it work.

I spent a couple of days with Steve, Badger and Bubba when they lived at Hollywood & Orange and were making a go of things with Gamelonian LX Cruise Ship some time in 2002. It must have been early in the year because I only remember seeing Christopher Dennis as Superman and the Batman I would later learn was named Jay among the Marilyns and Chaplins. In May of that year the first Spider-Man movie would ring in the era of the Twenty First Century Super Hero Blockbuster Movie and explode the number of costume characters that could be found working the block at any point in time.

A series of events as random and disparate as the adventures that brought an immortal mutant to a Top Secret Canadian bio-weapons program would result in my own transformation to Wolverine. First I cut off my long hair and threw it into the fire during a Mojave Rave performance that was inspired by the dark magic cult from the Clive Barker film Lord of Illusions. Next came the hit-and-run bicycle incident that destroyed my Library of Congress tape player: after being knocked on my back I discovered that the only thing that seemed to alleviate the new pain and discomfort at the base of my spine was hula hooping.

I was inspired by Aaron Hibbs from Sword Heaven and his recent feat of setting a Guinness World Record by hooping for over 74 consecutive hours. I figured that if he could go that long I should at least be able to hoop non-stop for a single hour and started biking to Venice Beach to borrow a hoop from the friendly proprietors of an oxygen bar and put in my daily hour. Before this point I’d never managed to keep a hoop up for even thirty seconds but never underestimate the power of positive role models and light competition. Then I left to tour the United States as part of the Trapped in Reality tour and started adding daily Insanity (from the creators of P90X) workouts with Rain.

All of this put me in the best physical shape of my life and while I was still fairly scrawny I did have enough muscle definition to do a convincing take of Hugh Jackman’s popular version of the character. I’d spent the majority of my adult life wearing long hair, makeup and shopping from the Women’s department as much, if not more, than the Men’s department of Thrift Stores. After chopping my hair off I decided to lean into the “masculine drag” thing and was dressing as butch as possible. I was also shaving regularly but because I’m lazy I let my mutton chop sideburns grow to epic proportions in order to reduce the necessary shaving area.

All of this meant more and more people on the street had been calling me “Wolverine” or just “X-Man” throughout my many tours and travels that Summer and early Autumn and I pretty much knew that once I was back in Los Angeles I would be taking a serious shot at it. The final piece of the puzzle was beginning to cohabitate with my future wife and the love of my life who ended up having the know-how to help me with the gravity defying signature hair style.

I already had black leather pants from my time in a band called Black Light Jim Morrison, I bought myself a value pack of white “wifebeaters” and my friend Eric Landmark gave me his old padded black motorcycle jacket. I was trying to devise some kind of high quality metal claw until I learned that the cops on the block would harass you for anything but plastic. The costume shop on Hollywood Boulevard had a set of clawed gloves for the blue and yellow costume – I cut a space for the claws in the back of some black gloves I could wear on top so it wouldn’t clash with the rest of the getup.

I had already tried a little bit of busking while still in High School when I became obsessed with the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow after my friend Sean loaned me the book and some videos. I quickly taught myself the human blockhead (hammering a nail directly into the sinus cavity) and the trick where you suck a condom into your nose and pull it out of your mouth. I took my act down to Mission Beach but soon ran into a problem – while people happily held their children up for the hammer and nail routine the moment I pulled out a condom they’d cover the kid’s eyes and storm off in anger.

It perfectly encapsulated the hypocritical nature of America’s seemingly contradictory attitudes towards sex and violence. Nobody saw an issue with their children watching me do something that would probably end with injury or death if they tried to imitate me at home but the moment I pulled out an object that could potentially save their lives, entirely removed from any sexual context I might add, the act became too “extreme”.

It was making me miss out on potential tips so I tried substituting one of the balloons that clowns use to make animals. While the condoms automatically inflate upon reaching the mouth the balloon seemed to have just disappeared. I reached in and found it bunched up at the back of my throat – I’m lucky I didn’t accidentally choke on it. That idea was off the table but my act in its original form did bring in a little bit of money which was exciting at that age as I’d never really had any.

What this experience prepared me for was the always difficult first moment of showing up and announcing yourself as potential entertainment instead of just another pedestrian or spectator. In this case my costume was doing most of the heavy lifting but I did need to announce myself as a costumed super hero worth paying to take souvenir photos with and at least pretend like I believed it. It’s always hardest until you make that first dollar, from then on it’s kind of like coasting downhill except for the fact that it’s still a nonstop grind.

I quickly learned the ins and outs of the business as it was in Hollywood in the Winter of 2012. Every character on the Boulevard does it a little differently and the distinctions are a bit like alignments in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. First you’ve got your boy scouts who are Lawful Good – they don’t put too much pressure on tourists to take photos, they don’t suggest a tip amount and they carefully avoid anything that might be construed as intimidation while collecting tips.

With the exception of the dudes who build amazing Autobot costumes that light up and transform into car form the Lawful Goods make no money whatsoever and eventually shift toward Lawful Neutral, True Neutral or even Chaotic Neutral. That last one is probably where I would have placed myself: do anything short of physically grabbing folks to get a photo, flash a five dollar bill as suggestion when requesting a tip and stand close until you get it. There are lots of little nuances like whether or not you flash the five a second or even third time when the tourist proffers a single dollar but I’m not going to get into all of them.

The Chaotic Evils are the no-fucks-given total assholes. They put an arm around a tourist’s shoulder and don’t give up until the photo happens, flash a twenty then full on surround the tourist until the mark ends up shelling out a full twenty for each of the three to four characters in the photo or they are at least satisfied they took them for as much as possible. Another aspect of the Chaotic Evils is that there are locations which are considered high value – mostly in front of the Mann’s Chinese Theater and they physically intimidate the other characters to restrict access to these spots. For reasons I am about to get into they always wear a mask, sunglasses or both.

I quickly learned that the easiest way to make money is to either be a Spider-Man, which I wasn’t going to do, or work with at least one Spider-Man. The nicer part of this equation is the costume recognition: blue and red in combination are extremely visually conspicuous, the costume design is iconic and in 2012 it was the most successful franchise in recent Super Hero films and popular with every demographic of tourists – especially children.

The less nice part of the equation is the mask: when you can’t see a person’s facial expression it creates a certain amount of ambiguity where you can’t tell if they are just asking for a “no pressure” tip or threatening unpleasant consequences if you don’t give them the largest tip possible. This ambiguity creates discomfort and the quickest way out of it is to just give them money. Once out of the situation you will second guess yourself as to whether you were actually being intimidated or it was all in your head. If someone does decide that it was the former or the Spider-Man was being particularly obvious about it even with a photo there are six to a dozen Spider-Mans on the block at all times and they can always say it wasn’t them.

For all of these reasons and the additional fact that a morph suit makes for a cheap costume there was always a surplus of Spider-Mans around. This led to a few random failed gimmicks like the Spider-Man that carried a ‘50s Sci-Fi looking ray gun that only served to lose him photos as it has nothing whatsoever to do with the character and the Spider-Man that threw himself in the garbage in case anybody wanted a comedic photo with a Spider-Man in the garbage. (nobody did). This second one always had weird stubble nearly an inch long that poked out through his mask and his costume was extremely filthy.

Just as there were lots of Spider-Mans there were different types of Spider-Mans. I never worked with one but there must have been at least one Lawful Good Spider-Man. The mask is a fundamental part of the costume and you can’t say with certainty that somebody picked the character for the intimidation factor until you see their body language and behavior. Sunglasses are another matter entirely. None of the Super Heroes had dark sunglasses as an essential part of their costume so when a Hero wears them they are doing it deliberately for the intimidation factor and are probably some degree of asshole.

There were a few lone wolves and some female characters with “sexy” themed costumes that always worked in the same pairs but most of us worked in groups of three to four with whoever was around that we thought would help us make the most money. Three was ideal money wise – tourists are used to getting gouged and shelling out fifteen dollars for a souvenir photo with street performers probably sat comfortably on the better side of the acceptable/ridiculous margin. With four characters it started to seem excessive.

I worked with a lot of Spider-Mans when I started. There was a good looking French one that always lifted his mask up and winked because he was trying to find acting work and pick up women. He was okay but my other two Spider-Mans both wore the black symbiote alien costume and started to show signs of “moral drift”. Every character on the Boulevard had their own story arc with “moral drift” – the ideals that you start with versus the realities you end up with when you figure out how to make money.

They were okay individually but seemed to bring out the worst in each other. One day we took a photo with a Japanese kid, maybe 13 years old, and one of the Spider-Mans got him to give a twenty to each of us. He seemed scared, confused and like he maybe didn’t understand American money that well yet. That was a breaking point for me – I kept the twenty but I didn’t like how the whole thing made me feel and I went back to working with the “Boy Scout” types. Maybe one or both of them felt bad too but I kind of doubt it based on who they ended up working with.

Although the hustle in question was pretty “broke ass” and geeky this was the only period of time I’ve ever spent as part of a hustler subculture. Unless you think selling drugs counts, then it would just be the first time. This was the time that I learned to carry my cash folded in a certain way and hold it a certain way and count it a certain way and spend it a certain way.

I lived like I didn’t have a bank account. When the rose sellers showed up at night I would buy my wife roses to surprise her with. I’m not sure if I’m conveying what I want to say – what I mean is that there is a kind of masculine swagger subculture that centers around the precise ways you handle the cash proceeds from hustling and I am grateful that for a short period of time I got to live in that reality.

There are a lot of stories that I could tell and characters I could talk about but for now let’s talk about Christopher Dennis and Carmelita. Dennis is the original, he started coming out as Superman in the ‘90s when there were no other characters and was always Lawful Good, in character at least. There was a story that he believed that Christopher Reeves was his actual biological father. When I started he didn’t come out much but evidently ran a flophouse for other characters in his place on Orange.

Dennis was going through a divorce and constantly partying on meth around this time from what I heard. There was a Spanish girl named Carmelita and I can’t remember if she actually lived in Dennis’ apartment or just hung around but she started doing the female sidekick thing. She got a Supergirl costume and teamed up with Dennis’s Superman who was spending more time out in costume as a kind of mentoring favor. He evidently wanted favors as well: he thought she should be expressing gratitude by having sex with him.

Carmelita wasn’t interested so she got a Batgirl costume and started working with another housemate named Jay. Jay is the best Batman on the Boulevard, his costume is really well made and he does look intimidating – but in a “better not start crime in Gotham” kind of way as opposed to the “better tip me twenty bucks for a photo” style. I heard some stuff about him getting in fist fights with other characters but never saw it first hand. Same thing on the meth – never heard explicitly that he did it. He absolutely did do the try to get Carmelita to fuck him part though.

She wasn’t having that either and was Supergirl again but in the market for another mentor. I feel like Jay or Dennis were maybe walking around looking for somebody to shunt her off on. I had just walked away from the Spider-Mans and was finding myself working with this sort of annoying head trauma type Captain America who was also from Spain a lot. I suggested that they work together but he wasn’t interested. Supergirl and Wolverine doesn’t make much sense continuity wise but I was ready enough for a change to try anything at this point.

She turned out to kinda be dead weight. She wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes: blonde hair, mini skirt, reasonably thin. I mean her teeth were a little weird but that was it. Her energy was just off. It was low confidence and self doubt, when she asked people if they wanted to get a photo she gave off the vibe that she expected they probably wouldn’t. I had to pull in all our shots. She wanted to keep working with me because I was wifed up and there was no danger of me trying to fuck her, or at least if she didn’t continue the sidekick curse by switching to Jubilee. (little joke there, I never would have expected that or treated her that way). As much as I empathized with her situation I needed a partner that helped bring in money.

I was wondering whatever happened to Christopher Dennis so I looked it up. He got worse with the meth, ended up homeless and died in 2019 by hitting his head falling into a clothing donation bin while in meth psychosis. Any character on the block will tell you he had an absurd amount of support and second/third/nth chances. At least two documentaries, lots of help from Kimmel, he still found a way to fuck it all up.

I ended up living in Santa Monica so I tried the boardwalk. The Super Hero thing was not it there. I tried hula hooping but didn’t really have an act. I moved on to other hustles. I want to mention a pair of other incidents: My friend Billy from Monster Party cast replica quality Xenomorph bodysuits from Alien. One day he suited up and we tried it out. I had to line up our shots as he couldn’t see out of the suit. It was surprisingly unpopular but one Japanese tourist wanted a picture of the Xenomorph holding his infant son.

That kid would be ten years old now. I hope he likes the picture.

The Black actor with achondroplasia (dwarfism) from Gummo would come out in a Mr. T getup. Apparently he was an awful alcoholic for years but managed to get sober. He never made much money but I think he came out to people watch and have something to do. There were a couple of other smaller guys who came from the Lucha Libre world. They did things like Smurfs and Puss in Boots – the costumes were always really nicely sewn especially the wrestling boots. I wonder if they made their own.

They had no interest in working with Mr. T.

One day the whole Boulevard was slow and me and him teamed up by the wax museum. We were playing a game of shouting out sales pitches that riffed on his stature. We started with the obvious:

“Get a picture with Mr. T – Half Off!”

“How about a little tea?”

“Get a picture, we won’t short change you!”

We went on like this for a while. I think we were doing it for our own amusement – nobody seemed to notice us and we weren’t really directing it at anyone. Eventually I started coming up with ones that kind of offended him, or maybe he was joking about that too, I couldn’t even tell. I can’t remember the more offensive ones.

I don’t think we ended up taking a single picture.

I only ever saw Ponytails, my Charlie Chaplin mentor, one or two times. He would show up late and get drunk big spenders from the bar crowd. He claimed twenty was standard but once he got a hundred. Everyone out there seemed to always talk about that “one big tip”. Maybe it never even happened but was something to dream about night after night of only bringing home a few fives and a handful of ones. It’s kind of how it is for gambling addicts – that one big jackpot keeps them coming back.

I never came back.

When I was a homeless drug addict and needed money I learned that flying a sign worked better for me than most people. I looked a bit like Jesus and that always puts Christians in a charitable mood. My sign always said the same thing – feel free to use it:

“Homeless – Hungry – God Bless”

Every word was true.

Eventually I shot a video in costume for a band called Sexting. Many of the characters are visible. The Spanish Captain América pops up
to hype me and a “sexy” pair cover their faces with folding fans. Watch how Mr. Incredible, Darth Vader and Scream surround a hapless East Asian tourist. Chaotic Evil 100%
Looks like Mr Incredible only got worse. Here he is assaulting a Batgirl two years later in 2014, I don’t think it’s Carmelita but she might have dyed her hair or did a wig. His muscles are just padding but he acts like he’s got roid rage. He tried to strangle me over the Chinese Theater spot. The German Batman is what you’d call a boy scout – for the cameras at least.

Xochimilco 2012 : Christmas Special “Barrio Belen Forever”

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The overnight bus brought me back into Mexico City on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. I took the excellent subway system to the neighborhood of me and Stephany’s old hotel to see if there were any vacancies. There weren’t. I walked to 5 or 6 other hotels but every place was completely booked. It dawned on me that maybe I should have called ahead and made a reservation as it was possibly the most celebrated family holiday in the nation.

I was about to give up and try to find an even seedier neighborhood when I remembered that a nearby corner was frequented by transgender prostitutes. My Spanish was good enough for one essential question:

“Conoces un hotel que las familias no gustan?”

I was directed to the Hotel Ibiza caddy cornered from the Monumento al Revolucion. As soon as I saw the neon hearts on top of the sign and a handwritten placard listing prices for condoms and hourly rentals above the cashier’s window I knew that I would be finally getting a room. I recommend it highly to anyone that might find themselves in Mexico City: the interiors are brightly colored and wind around a central courtyard with a healthy palm garden and plenty of natural light. If you like bad pornography from the ‘70s and ‘80s there are a couple of channels on the televisions with 24 hour loops.

With my suitcase securely stashed I was ready to head to the Zocalo for the evening’s festivities. The Zocalo was the central square of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan before the Spanish Conquest. They built the main Cathedral directly on top of the Templo Mayor but have more recently opened up an archaeological site to excavate and display some of the former sacred architecture next door. For the Christmas season giant displays of lights in the form of candles, gifts and the like are displayed on top of all the major buildings.

Before and after the Midnight Mass I walked around the square to check out some of the street performers. There are organ grinders, folk and Aztec dancers and metallic statues in the forms of gaudy Bishops and Santa Muerte. I also noticed a scattering of superheroes and kicked myself for not packing my Wolverine costume as it would have been a great way to meet people and hear some interesting stories.

I grabbed a champurrado and waited with the crowd inside the Cathedral for the unveiling of the Baby Jesus.

On Christmas Day I took a train out to the neighborhood called Xochimilco – the floating gardens. I wasn’t planning on eating a big Christmas meal but after walking past several cozy restaurants offering conejo al carbon or barbecued rabbit I gave in to temptation. After that I followed the foot traffic down to the Embarcadero to get on one of the group tour boats to see the canals.

These waters are one of the last natural habitats for Axolotls but I didn’t actually see any. It did seem like interesting trees were growing on the many small islands we passed but it was difficult to pay attention. As soon as we passed the first bend in the canal we were descended on by boats full of playing mariachis, boats selling potted plants of all varieties, taqueria boats with a sizzling plancha in the center and boats offering beers, micheladas and other beverages.

There was one island I couldn’t ignore. The trees hung with stuffed animals and baby dolls in various states of disrepair like The Island of Misfit Toys. When I disembarked and found a group of local teenagers playing house music from a PA system I learned that this was known as La Isla de las Muñecas and was the favorite spot for semi-legal dance music parties. I kicked myself a second time for leaving my drum machine back at the hotel as this would have been the perfect opportunity for a last minute Bleak End set.

At this point I was ready to head back to the train but as luck would have it I wandered into a booming block party for the Barrio Belen neighborhood. The hospitable residents wouldn’t hear of me leaving and made sure I had a full glass of Squirt with tequila and a seat in the clearly honored vicinity of the oldest among them. This turned out to be extremely lucky as the festivities included a type of artisanal fireworks called a Castillo.

A Castillo is a temporary tower covered with what is traditionally known in Europe as a Catherine Wheel. Brightly colored charges cause specially constructed wheels to spin and throw off sparks in the forms of stars, suns and moons and occasionally words and letters. A small group of technicians dressed in head-to-toe protective leather scale the edifice and use their body weight to prevent the centrifugal force from causing it to topple over. Everybody cheered as the sculpted peacock at the tower’s crown exploded into color and launched itself upward into the air:

“Barrio Belen Forever!”

I had just enough time to catch the last train toward Centro and return to my Hotel. I actually did meet up with Stephany one last time but spent the majority of my last two days exploring on my own. I was hoping to see the Leonora Carrington sculpture garden in Chapultepec but it turned out to have only been temporary. There was a large sculpture of hers on Paseo de la Reforma. The National Anthropology and Archaeology Museum did have a couple of her paintings along with the imposing Aztec statue of Coatlicue and too many other wonderful things to list here.

Just go if you ever get the chance.

I spent my final day visiting what may be the largest occult swap meet in the world – the Mercado Sonora. There are separate sections for candles and incense, dried herbs, every type of devotional statuary, amulets and talismans and I found some really nice window decals in the form of the Seal of Solomon to be used as a protective ward. It also has a section devoted to the sale of exotic live animals. While I imagined that things like Chameleons were probably bought as pets I could harbor no illusions about the puppies I saw another shopper put directly into his car trunk.

Those things were getting sacrificed.

On my way out of town I boarded the subway one final time for the bargain price of three pesos and bought a bootleg CD of Jose Jose songs from one of the vendors that walks the trains and blasts the music from a backpack speaker system.

It was time to return to the United States and my life as a married man.

Palenque, Mexico 2012 : “I Had To Go To Oxford Street And Buy Another Pair!”

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Rolling into Palenque marked my first time navigating a Mexican city on my own – I don’t think I had even done any solo runs to Tijuana at this point although I’d spent a few days exploring Panama City. The streets were overrun with hippies in town for the Rainbow and at least two sectors of the local economy were booming. Every single hotel, hostel or guesthouse was at full capacity and I would hear a boast repeated several times that the attendees had “bought all the drugs.”

Before finding transportation out to the Rainbow I needed to walk to a Post Office to send a letter to LaPorsha. The complexity of this errand was made especially comical by the fact that I was with her in Santa Monica on the day it arrived nearly a month later. I needed to buy an envelope and the Post Office didn’t sell them – I remember walking to several little shops and repeating this query until I found satisfaction:

“Tienes sobres?”

With that out of the way my next errand was especially easy considering at least half of the people on the street at any given time were trying to do the same thing. I was directed to the corner where a fleet of heavy duty black pickup trucks were making the ten mile trip for 50 pesos in each direction. The road was rougher than I had expected – winding through thickly forested mountains and across several streams. The driver was hamming it up for the mostly European passengers:

“He says he has just eaten a mushroom and God has spoken to him to tell him that we will arrive safely!”

In the chaos of loading and unloading passengers and luggage I became separated from my turquoise colored rolling suitcase. Of course I felt some degree of panic but the citizens of Mexico are far more altruistic and honest than negative stereotypes would have most Americans believe. I feel far safer about my belongings in the Mexican cities that I’ve visited than I ever would in an American city of comparable size and most visitors would tell you the same thing. I waited around the entrance tent until the next wave of arrivals brought my suitcase with them with no sign that it had been opened or tampered with.

I wasn’t in much of a mood to be social or find a group of people to camp with so I found an out of the way spot to stash my suitcase and lay out my sleeping bag at the base of a tree. Attendance was in the thousands at this point, maybe even as high as ten thousand, but I didn’t have any concern that someone might come across my suitcase when I wasn’t around and steal my stuff. Rainbow Gatherings have several clearly defined taboos and theft is one of them.

Another one of these dogmatic prohibitions would bring me into minor conflict with almost everyone I interacted with. My Congress tape deck was charged up and I hadn’t really gone anywhere without a background soundtrack for the last year. I just really wanted to play some Donna Summer with Giorgio Moroder but I turned the volume down to a 3 out of 10 in respect. It turned out that there wasn’t a volume level that would be viewed as acceptable – every person I passed repeated the same generic chastisement:

“No electronic music at Rainbow brother!”

I understood the spirit behind the proscription – I’ve been to more remote parties or gatherings than I can count where what should have been communion with nature was violently jarred by the buzz of generators and the booming bass of dubstep or whatever else the hippy techno flavor of the month was. Still I felt that there was some room for subtlety: alcohol is forbidden but every brightly painted bus most likely held a resident herbalist with an array of tincture bottles. Eating meat is forbidden but in the humid, tropical weather there’s no way that some kind of tiny insect wasn’t finding its way into the otherwise vegan meals.

Rules are never totally black and white. They exist as ongoing negotiations where all the involved parties reach a consensus on what level of strictness and enforcement will be actually tolerable. In a way I did find and define this line with all the people around me because Donna Summer on 3 wasn’t getting me kicked out or asked to leave – it just meant that I would be quietly yet constantly reminded that I was in the wrong. A group of Italians who had brought and constructed a pizza oven near my camp spot tried to explain it in a way that would become especially poignant in light of future events:

“You wouldn’t go to church in your underwear right?”

The afternoon of the final day of the thirteenth Baktun came around and I had to decide how I wanted to spend it. A group of people from both the Gathering and the nearby Mayan village were going to walk through the night until they reached the ruins of Palenque. This is normally the kind of activity that would appeal to me but I didn’t find myself in the mood. The same could be said for psychedelic drugs at the event – there was constant chatter that they were around but nobody was outright offering and I didn’t feel like jumping through the social hoops to get somebody to give some to me.

I think a major part of my decision to skip the epic trek was the knowledge that if I did undertake it I would have to make the journey without the soothing strains of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder.

The arrangement was frowned upon but a group of locals had installed themselves just outside the entrances to do a brisk trade in cold beer. This turned out to be exactly what I was in the mood for, especially as nobody on the opposite side of the Festival entrance would be wagging their fingers at me for listening to Disco. I took my caguama over to the nearby arroyo and made myself comfortable. A local species of large brown hummingbird arrived to convey its displeasure with my newfound presence, flicking its distinctively shaped tail like a feathered war flag.

I was considering relocating my camp to this spot and either drinking through the night or seeing what the beer vendors were going to get into when it started to rain. From what I heard from the locals later it hadn’t rained for a fairly long time before this and the weather wasn’t typical for this time of year. It had only been falling for a few minutes when it started to course through the arroyo bed in a way that clearly indicated moving my camp here would mean waking up under a full blown river.

I went back to my tree and found that although the canopy did help to reduce the rain I would probably need to seek out more substantial coverage. I hadn’t actually made any friends and I wasn’t in the headspace to impose on the Italians so I made my way to the only shelter I knew of: the white entrance tent. It was one of those portable pavilions like you would see setup at a Farmer’s Market or to go get your wristbands at a Festival.

As the downpour continued to rage through the night this asylum became more and more crowded with what can only be described as the dregs of the Rainbow. Like myself my companions had neglected to bring any tents or other coverings for themselves and lacked the social graces to convince any of the thousands of other attendants to share one. They all more or less fell under two major classifications: sketchy, annoying old dudes and cringey, overly enthusiastic young dudes.

The rain was extra: cataclysmic world ending rain. We were protected from above but the ground beneath us became a vicious mud slide that somehow pulled the black snakeskin and leather shoes directly off my feet. I had been searching the ground for them but there was one spot I hadn’t been able to search because the obnoxious old guy sitting there absolutely refused to move for five seconds so I could search it. I’m sure you’ll know the type as there are one or two of these dangling on nearly every regional music scene in America.

The type of old guy that never produces anything of value, isn’t interesting to talk to and seems to be incapable of empathy because any problem that somebody else might have just reminds them of a similar situation when they were the victim:

“I lost my shoes at a London Backpacker’s in 1988! I had to go to Oxford Street and buy another pair!”

I forced myself to be as cordial as I possibly could under the trying circumstances:

“I truly empathize brother but I just lost my shoes right now and unfortunately we are a long way from Oxford Street. I happen to wear a size 12 and can tell you from experience that the shoe stores of Chiapas only go up to a 9 in Men’s. Under these conditions do you think you could please move out of the way for just a second so I can search for my shoes?”

He finally did but my shoes weren’t in the mud underneath of him either. Even in the light of the dawning era of the next morning they never manifested themselves. The only explanation I can think of is that the Fourth Sun, after years of being fattened on blood sacrifices by the priests of the Mayan and Aztec empires, required one last offering of paltry leather.

The younger guys who were most likely tripping on whatever they could get their hands on through the night offered constant commentary in the form of cliches. As the storm built up into supernatural strength this consisted of vocalizing the most obvious of anxieties: what if it never stops raining? What if the sun never rises again? Eventually the sun did rise and the rain did stop. Water started to evaporate off the surface of a newly birthed world. Somewhere under the tent somebody was quoting hippy scripture:

“What a long, strange trip it’s been!”

I walked barefoot back out to the road which was now covered with a waist high rushing River that would prevent the trucks from arriving for several hours. The chief of the Mayan village had arrived on horseback in roughly Western looking attire and was high fiving everybody in genuine excitement that the rain did stop and the sun did rise and we were looking outward at a world fresh with optimism and wet from birth.

The center of the Rainbow camp had also been transformed. What was dry land the night before was now a series of pools crawling with smiling, naked hippies like the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. There were some downsides as I heard that several people had left their tents and passports in positions that had been swept away by the surging waters but nearly everybody was having a good time.

Somebody had suspended acrobatic silks from a sturdy tree branch high above the largest pool and I got to give a clownish performance: grotesquely parodying the burlesque movements of the curvy female performers with my own scrawny frame and masculine morphology.

I ended up running into somebody I knew – Clay from Tucson who I met at INC and his friend Danny. They were into a non-profit organization called Clowns Without Borders and levitating street performances respectively. Danny had his car with him and was driving to the ruins at Palenque so I decided to tag along.

It was my first time visiting this site and I was excited to see Pakal’s elaborate sarcophagus, jade mask and other funerary artifacts. I saw a lot of things that were less exciting. The Rainbow hippies had crowded into the temples and were sitting on the floor singing songs from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. With hundreds of voices and the natural acoustics of the buildings it just felt like they were taking up an obscene amount of space in a sacred location where Mayan families were attempting to have culturally appropriate experiences.

Someone had decided to strip completely naked and was being arrested by the Park Rangers as it is against the rules and considered disrespectful. Some hippy girls were screaming at these guards and calling them fascists for upholding a certain level of decorum and doing their jobs. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the comments I had heard about going to church in your underwear a day or so earlier.

I ended up barefoot and soaking wet on the streets of Palenque. I had just confirmed that not a single shoe shop or second hand store in town had anything approaching my shoe size and was feeling serious misgivings as to when I would ever find shoes again. I also would have really liked to get a room and shower as all of my clothing and the contents of my suitcase had become soaked the night before.

I was buying a 200 peso ticket that would take me all the way to Mexico City on the following morning when I came face to face with a little bit of Rainbow Magic. Some other travelers in the bus station had managed to get a hotel room but wouldn’t be able to use it as their bus was leaving that night. They gave me the key to their room and mentioned somebody had left a pair of shoes behind as I was visibly barefoot.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when they turned out to be size 12 skate shoes, soaking wet and not exactly my style but an absolute godsend considering my predicament. I aired out my suitcase and hung all my clothes on the shower pole to dry as I snacked on a bag of candy that had been left on the bedside table. It was the type of Hershey Kisses that they call Hugs because milk and white chocolate had been twisted together. The whole situation had me thinking of the Gathering a lot more charitably although I still wish they hadn’t given me so much grief about vibing to Donna Summer.

I got the old Congress good and charged up for my trip to Mexico City.

I filled the time waiting for my bus the next morning by sketching the mural for a local business called Bar La Bestia. It featured a kind of chimera: a Jaguar with a lion’s mane, a unicorn’s horn and imposing claws. I stopped in for a beer and the proprietor got excited when he saw my sketch. Apparently they would be moving locations soon and had to find somebody to recreate the painting as the original artist was no longer in town.

I wouldn’t be able to do that unfortunately but drew them up a sketch they could give to a painter if they wanted to switch out for a more full body view that incorporated parts of even more imaginary animals. I can’t remember exactly what it looked like but I think I gave it wings and a snake for a tail.

I slept through all of Oaxaca as the bus pulled me on to Mexico City in time for the Midnight Mass on Noche Buena or Christmas Eve.

Xpujil, Mexico 2012 : “All I Have To Do Is Dream”

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I decided to finish writing the piece from last night in a setting where the storm would feel more immediate. I have explained in other pieces some of the more esoteric reasons that I enjoy spending inclement weather in liminal spaces but I should add that it is also conducive to creativity. I immediately think of a thousand comic strips featuring a beagle hunched over a mechanical typewriter on the roof of his wooden doghouse:

“It was a dark and stormy night…”

I actually ended up weathering the downpour in what is essentially a doghouse stretched out with Hesher on a fold-out sofa in our detached garage. The wind spurred the rain into successively more aggressive waves until an important line was finally severed somewhere in the outside world. We found ourselves sitting in the dark. I was writing about a series of internal storms that had impelled me to seek out shelter of a more metaphysical nature beneath the unlikely eaves of the Roman Catholic Church.

I wanted to add a caveat or qualifier to something I had written yesterday when I referred to the Body and Blood of Christ as “spiritual methadone”. I realized that this could be misinterpreted in a way that actually highlights one of my biggest issues with Twelve Step and Recovery Culture: that drugs remain the central focus of the self-described addict’s life, identity and lived reality.

For that reason I wanted to clarify that I was never thinking about heroin in the moment of receiving the Eucharist.

I was thinking about God.

The excesses of last night’s weather reminded me of the last occasion where I had to experience a deluge of comparable ferocity: the final night of the final baktun of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. I was at the Rainbow Gathering outside of the town and ruins of Palenque, Mexico after having consciously decided to split off from Stephany so that we might each trace out our own path in a spirit unsullied by compromise.

We had planned the entire trip around the idea of observing this occurrence together but it turned out that the end of a world is a deeply personal thing. When a Sun must die in order for a new era to be born we all have to find our own way in the darkness. One wants to find one’s self in the surroundings desired and dictated by one’s heart: the one true center of the universe.

The time that I spent as Stephany Colunga’s roommate remains my fondest remembered era of platonic cohabitation but it placed us into narrowly defined and rigid roles – I roamed the Earth and she kept the Hearth. Traveling through Mexico together was probably her idea and it was a good one. It rapidly aged and matured our friendship like a musical training montage in a Sports Underdog movie.

We met a Mayan woman who lived in a hut outside of the entrance to the Ek Balam ruins and sold coconuts. It seemed like she lived in exile from the nearby village because she was a single mother and her son’s father was most likely involved in drug trafficking. He was going to be performing in a Christmas Pageant with his class from school and she invited us to come and see it and, more significantly, spend the night in a spare hammock as it wasn’t happening until the evening.

The culture of the Mayan Village appeared to be socially conservative and extremely insular. The only people who were friendly with our host were the other residents who based their survival around constant interaction with outsiders: some older cab drivers and a pair of young men who dressed and painted themselves like Mayan Warriors to take souvenir photographs for tips inside the ruins. Everyone else seemed to be preoccupied with maintaining the illusion that she didn’t even exist.

The Christmas Pageant was fairly similar to what you would see for a comparable age group in the United States or any other Christian country. Dressed in Santa hats the children played air guitar to Jingle Bell Rock and concluded the song by either donning sunglasses or posing with crossed arms to convey the “cool” nature of Rock Music – I can’t seem to remember exactly which one. Maybe it was both.

I had forged a quick friendship with the “Mayan Warriors” earlier in the day based on the camaraderie of working in the same business. For the past month I had been hustling up cash by dressing as Wolverine and posing for tourists with the other superheroes and costumed characters at Hollywood and Highland. I tried to give my new friends some pointers on how to more effectively drum up consumer interest but realistically my most successful technique wasn’t something they’d be able to implement.

You can’t bring along a Spider-Man when the archaeological park only tolerates your presence on the pretense of historical accuracy.

The Ek Balam ruins feature a cenote, or aquatic sinkhole, but they asked us if we might be interested in visiting a “virgin cenote” that had managed to elude being developed for tourism. It turned out that they owned a car – something Japanese and from the ‘80s like you usually see in the more isolated parts of Latin America. Within these closer quarters I noticed that one of them had an absurdly rudimentary tattoo of a nude woman’s torso: the kind of thing a Second Grader might draw on the wall of the bathroom – a curvy W with two dots for the boobs, an hourglass waist and belly button and a tiny v to represent the vulva.

The artist hadn’t bothered with afterthoughts like a head or limbs, I could easily draw up a facsimile but I wish that I had thought to ask Stephany to take a photo.

The cenote was a decent drive away in the middle of nowhere deep in the jungle somewhere. The water was black and dotted with bromeliads as well as probing roots and vines from the forest surface at least a hundred feet above. An ancient spiral staircase allowed a quick and relatively safe descent – some of the steps had rotted off and it was held together by auto straps and the metal buckles used to cinch them in place. I got excited and ran straight for the water leaving Stephany alone with our guides which she was justifiably nervous about. I feel like I’ve come a long way in situational awareness over the last ten years but I also have a tendency to just automatically assume that most people have good intentions – thankfully this turned out to be the case.

They were still in the body paint of their Mayan Warrior costumes and didn’t want to pollute the water and risk harm to the native fauna. I wasn’t in the water for very long as dusk was fast approaching. Just as we were getting ready to leave thousands of starlings came pouring out of the sky and plunged down to quickly skim the surface of the pool for insects or a drink of water before continuing on their way. You could tell that it was the kind of thing that must have happened every single day around the same time although I’d never seen anything quite like it and haven’t since – nobody commented on it aloud.

Back at Vicki’s (the coconut woman) we were introduced to the peculiar Mayan bedtime custom of cafe. The huts don’t have an actual roof and the floor is just bare earth compacted from habitual use so a fire is built directly in the middle of the room. Everyone gets a cup of instant coffee (not decaf) with plenty of sugar and a handful of animal crackers that dissolve in the hot liquid to create a kind of porridge that is eaten with a spoon.

The sudden consumption of caffeine, sugar and an excess of calories directly before it is intended to fall asleep does feel a bit odd but it wasn’t giving anybody insomnia either. The coals from the fire get swept underneath the sleeping hammocks to help keep the sleeping people warm.

I later came to know the makeshift devices used for illumination as “squat candles” but this was my first experience with the invention. It’s basically a coil of thin cardboard saturated with wax and placed inside a cylindrical container – either a coffee can or aluminum can with the top cut off. You can light it on top and it burns for a while without consuming the cardboard, you’re basically constantly recycling the wax. Vicki said a prayer to Ek Balam “dueño de la montaña” – in order that this entity would protect us from spirits, intruders, wild animals or any other threat.

Her son seemed like he hadn’t gotten to experience very much positive attention from adult men and was going to make the most of it. He dug out a photo album with a few rare shots of his father when he was still around and proudly showed me. It had dropped in conversation that I worked as a teacher and for some reason he had a copy of an old science textbook. It was hard to read by the fickle light of what weren’t exactly candles but we reviewed and discussed a page on the principles behind the type of compass that is used for navigation – that we lived on the surface of a gigantic magnet with static charges between the Cardinal Directions.

Stephany was starting to get sick, the way she remembers it we stayed in Vicki’s hut because of this development but it makes more sense to me that it was in spite of it. We definitely had a hotel room in Valladolid with most of our belongings in it that we had already paid for and had left that morning with the intention of returning by nightfall. Whatever the exact line of reasoning we slept in the hammock and she was mostly over it by morning. There happened to be a meteor shower that night – viewed through the open ceiling far from the polluting influence of city lights and under the protection of a God or Ancestral Ruler.

Stephany had travelled into Mexico ahead of me and we met up in Mexico City without a clear itinerary. I had packed my drum machine in the hope of playing some Bleak End shows but nothing was set up. Stephany was flying to Cancún with a cheap domestic flight and I hadn’t heard back from any of my music scene contacts so I came along. The moment we landed in Cancún I had a message that I could jump on a show in Mexico City but of course that didn’t work out. I’ve had bad luck with shows in Mexico almost as a rule – a few years earlier I was supposed to play in Monterrey with CAVE but they turned back when they couldn’t get insurance for the borrowed tour van.

After thoroughly exploring the Yucatán Peninsula we needed to decide where we were going next. There was a website for cheap long distance bus tickets called ticketbus.com.mx that allowed us to see all the options from any given city. In an Internet Cafe in Playa del Carmen we discovered a route to a city called Xpujil we had never heard of in the little visited state of Campeche. Playa del Carmen has a large modern bus depot but this particular coach was at a smaller one on the corner of Calle 20 and Avenida 12.

With the temporal theme of our entire trip the whole thing felt like kismet.

Xpujil is what I would call a “ciudad de carretera”, it basically exists as a swelling of the Highway that winds through it. There are Late Post-Classic Mayan ruins there where the temple facades had been carved to create a trompe l’oeil illusion of actual staircases. It reminded me of the classic book on architecture Learning From Las Vegas – almost as if it had been built as a roadside attraction before MesoAmerica even had roads or draft animals. Because it was almost Christmas the trees along the road had been cut into the topiary shapes of birds, animals and houses.

Across from the ruins sat Los Cabañas Don Jorgito. For only 80 pesos a night we stayed in a small pink stucco cottage surrounded with lush tropical vegetation. We hung around Xpujil for days, sneaking into the poorly guarded Mayan ruins at night and one morning when they sat blanketed in fog. I discovered a local dish called relleno negro created by allowing cooked pork to slightly ferment in buried earthenware jars. I figured out how to call the United States and talked to LaPorsha from inside an indoor plexiglass phone booth.

I wandered through the jungle until I came across beehive boxes that had been scattered and plundered by some marauding animal I didn’t know enough Spanish to learn the identity of. Maybe it was some kind of anteater or badger. My original Library of Congress Tape Recorder for the Blind had disappeared during a hit-and-run bicycle incident a lifetime before that in April of the same year but I had gotten a replacement that hadn’t managed to break on me by this time. The machines feature a powerful rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery so as long as I could find an outlet I had a constant soundtrack wherever I went.

I was walking along a runway for airplanes that seemed to have fallen into disuse. The cement had cracked and given way to vegetation in many different places. I’m sure it still would have been completely possible to land an airplane on it – people probably did it all the time but I didn’t see any. I was listening to a mixtape that I’m not even sure who made it or how I got my hands on it. I hadn’t ever listened to the whole thing before.

Suddenly I recognized the voices of some of my Iowa City friends: Charles Free and Chouser and probably Sci-Fi, singing a sloppy cover of the Everly Brothers tune All I Have To Do Is Dream. Stephany and I had been discussing where we wanted to spend the end of the Thirteenth Baktun but we hadn’t come to any kind of consensus. I knew that she wouldn’t have been caught dead at the Rainbow Gathering in Palenque, it honestly wasn’t really my scene either, but I suddenly knew that I had to go.

We were at the Xpujil bus station waiting for some bus that would take us a little farther down the road so we could split up there. Kids were drinking Orange soda from little plastic bags under the flickering fluorescent light. We met a Haitian emigrant named Weston who was trying to make his way to the United States. I gave him a sparkly black sweater because he didn’t have anything for the weather. A bus was heading in the general direction of Palenque, all of the seats were full but the driver was willing to let me kneel in the aisle.

I decided that it would be better to just rip off the band-aid.

For the first time I was traveling through the night in Mexico alone, kneeling in the aisle of a bus and looking at the highway through the windshield.

The lights looked different. It all looked different.

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Los Angeles 2011 : “Death Where Is Thy Sting?”

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I didn’t have anything against the members of DADFAG or the band itself but at the same time it was the catalyst for my decision to move away from the Bay Area. They were a punk band of recent emigrees from Athens, Georgia and for my last few months in Oakland they seemed to be playing at every single show I went to on both sides of the bridge. I just felt like every artist I knew in town who was doing anything more experimental or theatrical almost never got asked to play at anything and when you went out it was always punk bands and it just felt monochromatic.

I realize that on paper this is all going to sound like some kind of grievance and it really wasn’t like that. They were my friends, I liked watching them play, I set a show up in San Diego when they came down with Brotmann & Short where the bar owners complained that none of the night’s artists were commercial enough for their regulars:

“That really isn’t my problem. I sent you links and videos for every single artist on the bill tonight. If you had wanted a Top 40 Cover Band you probably should have hired one.”

By the time I headed out from my final living situation in West Oakland to do a US Tour with Generation (then Teen Suicide) in the early summer of 2010 I knew I wouldn’t be coming back. I just didn’t feel like living there as a performing artist anymore. It’s kind of like a relationship – you don’t necessarily think aloud about when it isn’t working for you anymore but you know when you finally realize it’s over.

I spent my 20’s in what was basically a triangle between San Diego, Chicago and the Bay Area. I spent extended periods of time in Providence, St Louis, Portland, New Orleans and New York but I never actually lived in those places. I’d been going to Los Angeles for shows since High School but hadn’t ever thought about moving there. The way I explain it is that the city always made me feel like an astronaut or deep sea diver with only a limited amount of oxygen. It was always fun to visit for a few days or so but eventually I would need to go back to wherever the air was to take off my helmet and refill the tanks.

The very first time I ended up at a show at Women of Crenshaw house I realized that I had found an air pocket in Los Angeles and actually the whole city must be full of air and whenever I was ready to switch cities next I could probably just switch to this one. The first time I was there I think the collective house was headed by Grace and Brian from rose for bohdan and then it was Brian and Eva and finally Eva and Brock. By the time I was looking for some kind of nook or niche that I could maybe move into, there had been a major shift in house dynamics.

There isn’t a pleasant way to say the things that I’m about to say and I’m not going to explicitly throw out names but there is a pattern that I’ve seen repeated in collective houses over and over again throughout the years. When a truly unpleasant person or couple moves in it is a lot more likely that everyone else will just move out or leave instead of ever directly confronting the problem. A big part of this is that a decision like evicting or ejecting a house member generally has to be decided by unanimous vote and the composition of these houses is usually split between people who are super active in the music scene and people who are more caught up in work or school and almost never even around.

The second type of housemate will almost never vote to kick anybody out because they aren’t really around enough to know what’s going on with interpersonal politics and they wouldn’t want anybody to ever vote to evict them.

At Women house the problem was loud emotional abuse that generally manifested after long nights of drinking and the acoustics of the house were set up in a way that it affected everybody who lived there and it was dark and it felt bad. In a way every one of us was in some small degree culpable because we all listened to it night after night and none of us ever said anything. Of course I wouldn’t have learned about this just coming to shows or parties but I had poked around and discovered that I could lay a folded futon mattress through a propped open doorway on a landing that led to the basement and put a curtain in a hallway and call it a bedroom.

The couple in question were happy to rent this formerly unused space to me for one hundred dollars a month but when I talked to my other friends living there I learned that nobody else’s rent had been reduced. The house had always been a collective where all expenses were evenly distributed between housemates but evidently this was no longer the case. There was a big argument over lack of transparency concerning utility bills. The house stopped throwing shows.

I’m not saying all this to be a bitch or to fuck with anybody’s reputation but I also think it’s extremely unlikely that anybody reading this who knows who I’m talking about wouldn’t already know. I’m actually sincerely hoping that things have just gotten better – I know that some health things came up and the drinking had to change. I know that nobody’s relationship is perfect and that if people are committed to positive change it is absolutely a thing that can happen.

I was messing with heroin again when I left for Generation tour and then I was on tour and I’m not usually much of a drug tourist. A friend in Colorado split a 100 mg morphine pill with me but that was it for the tour. I didn’t go out looking for drugs and I didn’t notice being in any kind of withdrawal. In rural Nebraska we stopped in a park to stretch our legs and I picked up a wounded dove that was limping around the park and then I felt bad – like I couldn’t just set it back down on the ground to die.

We already had a dog on tour in the car with us, we were going to deliver Kloot to Dave in Chicago, it didn’t seem like nursing a dove back to health in a shoebox would fit in with the rest of the tour itinerary. The only thing that was open was a gas station so I went in and asked if the town had one of those residents that always likes caring for sick and wounded animals, that sort of thing. Coincidentally it was supposed to be the guy who had just pulled away in a pickup truck the moment before I walked in but you can’t do much with that sort of serendipity.

The bird guy was the local Veterinarian which in that kind of grain belt town meant a tiny building connected to some silos and a fenced off paddock for selling cattle. Nobody was in the office so I put the dove in a cardboard box with a t-shirt to keep it warm and labeled the outside with a felt tipped marker so anybody that looked inside would know what they were in for:

“HURT DOVE”

I figure it probably died in that box at some point in the night but then again it was summer and the nights didn’t get too cold and we left some crumbs and a little dish of water. Maybe it still lives in that office and sits on the truck guy’s shoulder when he walks out to the paddock to try to figure out what just went wrong with somebody’s cow. It was 2010 – how long does a dove live if it was already on the brink of death?

So in Los Angeles I started to get restless and got to looking for heroin but instead found a steady source of prescription pain pills. Purdue Pharmaceuticals had just reformulated the 80 mg OxyContin to the weird plastic texture that makes them harder to abuse and suddenly nobody wanted them anymore so they were cheap and easy to find. The guy I got them from also had really cheap green morphine pills – he worked on my block and could pass me the pills through a shared fence. The whole thing was absurdly easy.

Heroin had been self regulating for me because the culturally stigmatized nature of acquiring and consuming it meant it would pretty much be the only thing I ended up doing on that day and I had to do a lot of other things on days. Pills were different. I could just carry them around and take them the moment I had finished with the responsible or social parts of my day. I would swallow an Oxy 80 as soon as I got done tutoring and end up starting to nod out as I was coasting down the downhill sections of the Ballona Creek Bike Trail.

I vividly remember snapping in and out of consciousness the moment that I would be passing another cyclist or need to suddenly turn on the path. It was reckless. I was lucky I never hurt myself or anybody else.

I lived on Crenshaw and Washington and I worked on Slauson just before the Holy Cross Cemetery and the Fox Hills Mall. I first experimented with every possible route of biking to work including going past the RV that was painted up to advertise colonics at Crenshaw and Slauson that always made me wonder who in their right mind would get a colonic in a random RV. Eventually I started taking Washington to Ballona Creek, getting off at Overland and taking that until I could cut through Holy Cross to Slauson.

Holy Cross has a Grotto which is an artificial cave made of volcanic rock and dedicated to a miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary that appeared with yellow roses on her feet to a fourteen year old girl in Lourdes, France in 1858. This was my first Grotto but since this time I have become something of a connoisseur. I went there to shoot photos with Lux for our death-rock band Voiheuristick Necromorph but eventually I just started spending lots of time there: listening to music, reading and eventually praying.

In an earlier piece I referred to a ritualized ceremony I performed to manifest partnership as my first act of fully intentional Magic but now that I think about it praying and participating in a Mass both probably also count as Magic even if that isn’t the name we ordinarily apply to Religion.

I started to realize that it seemed like I was taking pills more often than I might have preferred – my friend Chiara asked me why I was fucked up every single time she saw me and it seemed like she had a point. I think she had a lemon tree in her front yard. The only reason I mention it was that I was starting to notice where the citrus trees were as I biked around Los Angeles and they always seemed like they were around to help.

I can’t remember if I asked for help the first time that I used the Grotto to pray but I do remember exactly what happened the moment that I finally did. I heard a voice in my head answering back, or not really a voice – the thing that’s always in my head. I guess you could just say that it was a thought but it was uncharacteristically clear, direct and unambiguous:

“Then throw away the rest of the pills that you have in your pocket.”

I didn’t do that. I guess that I didn’t want to waste them or I wasn’t ready to stop. I did stop taking pills as frequently as I had been and I continued to spend time in the Grotto and continued to pray. I knew that pretty soon I was going to have to take another shot at it.

There were two different books I was reading at the time that played a major role in what I would decide to do and the way I would decide to do it. Chiara had been kind enough to loan me her extremely hard-to-find copy of Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren. In the book Deren talks about how for the practitioners of Vodou the question of faith is secondary to the reality of service. Essentially that you don’t need to believe in the Religion behind a ritual to benefit from participation in it and you don’t need to believe in a God, Spirit or Saint for that entity to answer your prayers.

The other book was Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. This one was pretty straightforward. I liked the idea of a vow of abstinence with a built in expiration date. I never would have been able to stop the recreational use of opiates if I thought it would have to be for the rest of my life. Even now I haven’t used them for going on four years but look forward in pleasant anticipation to a future day where I might once again have the opportunity.

Any of my readers who are familiar with the novel might find it notable that the title character lost every one of the positive improvements he had made in his life when he reached the end of his vow and resumed his old habits but to me it doesn’t seem terribly important. Life is worth living regardless of what it brings you and I look back on the subsequent years I spent in homelessness and deep addiction as productive and full of beauty.

Anyway I had a specific plan in place: on the Summer Solstice of 2011 I would pray at the Grotto then bike to the Griffith Observatory in time to pledge a year of abstinence from all opiates and kratom to the setting sun from the special balcony that had been marked with its specific position. I had prepared myself – I had weaned myself down on the off chance that I might experience any withdrawal or discomfort and exhausted any surplus supply of the relevant drugs.

I also started going to weekly Mass, usually Roman Catholic, and taking communion as a kind of “spiritual methadone”. I am well aware that the fact that I had never been formally Confirmed in the Church and did not participate in Confessions or any other duties required to be a Catholic in good standing meant that my actions were a mortal sin. I wasn’t particularly worried about it. It helped me reinforce my vow and the commitment to see it through to its conclusion.

I was also about to begin traveling for the Summer and seeking out Sunday services wherever I wound up showed me parts of the world I never would have seen otherwise, especially as I usually had to hitchhike. Some of my favorites were a 16th Century Adobe Cathedral in rural New Mexico, Eastern Orthodox services in Chicago, New York’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, a small Lutheran church near Voices of the Valley in Pentress, West Virginia and a gold-leafed altar in Panama City that had been painted black to protect it from being looted by the pirate Captain Morgan.

I started reading a lot of Corinthians particularly the celebrated passage that begins with 15 55:

“O Death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?

For sin is the sting of Death and the power of sin is the law”

I had enjoyed reading the Bible for most of my adult life even though I had renounced God and declared myself a heathen in the Second Grade. I started to view the Passion as a powerful allegory similar to Enlightenment in Buddhism. Not a literal Resurrection but a conscious decision to renounce mortality and live without the fear of Death. It seemed like all human selfishness stemmed in one way or another from a painful awareness of the inevitability of Death; the idea that anything could be finite…

In this version of Christianity sin was not a specific act but the consequence of spiritually conceding to mortality. In the letter to the Corinthians Paul often talks about how the finite can not inherit the infinite. I saw salvation not as something that happens after death but a beatific state reached by acknowledging the infinite within one’s self while renouncing the finite.

After the first year I renewed my vow in the same spot on the following Solstice but half a year later Mass and Communion weren’t hitting the same and I just stopped going. I ended up in Princeton, New Jersey helping my sister and her husband clear out the house that had belonged to my grandparents. My grandmother had been dragged out by social workers in HazMat suits after she refused to call a plumber out of fear that he would steal the jewelry she had hidden in a couch. With broken pipes she’d started urinating and defecating in buckets full of kitty litter.

I was supposed to get a hotel room but I preferred sleeping in the overgrown backyard and spending my nights wandering Princeton’s parks and swimming its lakes. I found some codeine from the 1970’s in a medicine cabinet and decided to go ahead and take it. The tablets had dissolved into an oddly shimmering crystalline powder but the potency of their constituent chemicals didn’t seem to have diminished.

A year and a half had brought my tolerance down to almost nothing. I got high. I threw up.

For better or worse I was back on my bullshit…

Los Angeles 2009 : “It’s OK, Woods Already Played. Is there any chance either of you might have an extra pair of pants?”

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I’ve been really wracking my brain and I can’t seem to figure out how I ended up with the cassette copy of the Woods album At Rear House. I know for a fact that I have never seen the band live but I did look up the label Fuck It Tapes and I was definitely at shows for a lot of the artists releasing music on the imprint around the same time. Somebody might have been selling it along with their own tapes and records or maybe I picked it up as a distro situation when I did a big mail order from Not Not Fun or maybe somebody just gave it to me.

I only know that it became one of my favorite tapes from the first time I played it, the kind of tape that you just flip back over to the first side after the second side ends and keep doing this until when you finally do get into the mood to put something else on you wouldn’t even know how many times you had actually looped it.

I went to the ArthurFest in 2005 to see Yoko Ono, Earth and SUNN O))) but the “freak folk” phenomenon of the mid aughts had been largely a dud for me. I ended up in Providence for a Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom show at AS220 and felt nothing but second hand embarrassment. He felt like an uninspired Marc Bolan clone in imminent danger of eating his microphone; she seemed to be putting too much effort into coming off as fey or ethereal to actually do so. A creepy social climber with Rod Stewart hair from the El Rancho days was their road manager.

They ended things with a “family style” Rusted Root cover. I’d imagine this all sounds glorious to at least one of my readers but it just wasn’t my cup of San Pedro…

The Woods album was the rare kind of singer-songwriter work in the folk/acoustic vein that grips me. The styles are quite different but in terms of effect the closest thing would probably be the Palace Brothers album Days in the Wake. I have mentioned before that I view the acoustic guitar as somewhat unsavory by nature – my prejudice toward the instrument can only be offset by heroic virtuosity or an aptitude for writing “hooks”.

However I got my hands on the tape the period of time where it became a constant soundtrack was on board The Miss Rockaway Armada and more specifically The Garden of Bling. After most of the other project members had thrown in the towel and retreated to other realities the collection of catchy tunes accompanied our increasingly desperate attempts to rend our vessel River worthy in the face of the approaching winter.

A combination of the elements, the constant wakes of passing barges, successive beachings and the slipshod quality of the initial construction were beginning to take their toll. We transferred responsibility onto an aquatic mammal frequently spotted near the raft with the added fiction that it was secretly aided by one of our number; altering the lyrics to one of the Woods songs to reflect this:

“Night Beaver, Night Beaver, Where did you come from?

As I sit you are awful quiet now, when will you be gone?

And I’ve seen it now, you left your tooth marks on the bow, who-oo-oo helped you? Jacki! Who-oo-oo helped you? Jacki!”

One day while my ex-fiancée I’ve been referring to as Rocky was visiting we were driving near the Chain-of-Rocks Bridge when Harrison spotted a tiny kitten that some monstrous sadist had abandoned on one of those circular patches of grass enclosed by a Freeway on-ramp. The poor little thing was so hungry she was trying to catch and eat butterflies. Me and Harrison caught her by throwing a sweater on top of her and I started wearing it with her tucked inside until all the feral was out of her.

I named her Night Beaver and she became a member of our crew and my traveling companion until my hectic itinerary made it clear she would be better off living with Stephany, my room-mate in Chicago at the time. This arrangement was clearly the best thing for her as they live together still. It would have been Autumn of 2007 when we rescued her making her a little older than fifteen years old now. I talked to Stephany on the phone for the first time in forever recently and she briefly put me on speaker.

Night Beaver seemed happy to hear my voice again.

In early September of 2009 I had moved back to San Diego to help my father with end-of-life care. On September 5th I had ended up in Los Angeles and heard that Woods would be playing at an event called Fuck Yeah Fest. This was the first year that the festival grew large enough to require the move to Los Angeles Historic State Park near Chinatown and the only time I was interested in attending as a spectator. In later years when it moved to Exposition Park I would end up working at it on my birthday a couple of times for a pizza company called Spicy Pie.

I was hanging out with Rocky and another female friend I’ll call Snake and the three of us decided to try to sneak in to see Woods. Rocky actually found parking somewhere in Chinatown and we walked down through the Metro Station to sniff out a point of ingress. I had been to Coachella one time but the headliners were bands like Radiohead and The Cure – this was my first time seeing hordes of overly excited millennials thronging to watch bands I had always thought of as “underground” in a festival setting.

It was somewhat disorienting watching what happened when there was too much youthful enthusiasm in one place. Lightning Bolt, who were essentially headlining the festival, offer a simple way to demonstrate this. They had always preferred forgoing stages and setting up in the middle of the crowd but when thousands of kids all want to be the ones standing right there this sort of thing is simply no longer safe or practical.

The thing that always sticks with me was the kid who had just bought a pair of tiny red-eared sliders. We dressed and carried ourselves like cooler, older kids so he was super excited to show them to us:

“This one is called Slime and this one is called Fuck Yeah!”

The acute knowledge that both of these creatures would be dead by the end of the day was palpably painful – the weight of wisdom. You can’t just explain that to somebody in this situation where there is a visceral need to have anything to stick out, distinguish one’s self and appear more interesting. I mean similar turtles are sold and die in Chinatown every single day but I never thought it was something I would see in what I thought of as my community. Maybe I just sound like a condescending, pretentious asshole.

It was getting close to the time that Woods was supposed to perform so we quickly climbed over a fence and attempted to disappear into the crowd. This plan failed for two reasons: we were dressed for the opposite of anonymity and I had ripped the seat of my pants, a bright turquoise pair of Gloria Vanderbilts, while scaling the pokey barrier. Security was, quite literally, on my ass.

We were plucked from the crowd and escorted to the outside of a trailer while the festival’s authority figures most likely had a pow-wow concerning the exact method of ejecting us. You would think that people would have been sneaking in by a similar manner all day but the way that they handled us made it feel like the situation was unprecedented. Maybe we were just the only ones that had gotten caught.

The security trailer happened to be right next to the trailer where the bands checked in or did something else official and we immediately ran into the Brians of Lightning Bolt. Chippendale was surprised to see me:

“Oh! I didn’t know that you were playing this festival too!”

“I’m not. We just got caught trying to sneak in and they’re kicking us out.”

He quickly conferred with Gibson and a person I didn’t recognize who was most likely there in an official capacity then informed our gaoler that they intended to make us their guests. Authority is a drug that certain types of people, this guard for example, seem incapable of ever getting enough of:

“Unfortunately they’ve already demonstrated a disregard for the rules of the festival by trying to sneak in so there’s no way they can be allowed to be here.”

I reassured him that we were content with our current relationship with impending consequences:

“It’s OK, Woods already played. Is there any chance either of you might have an extra pair of pants?”

I will always love Lightning Bolt and have seen them play at least two times since the events of this story but my enthusiasm has not sustained itself at the level of when I was twenty years old and they were my favorite band in the world. I imagine that both of the Brians, to at least some degree, have gone through a similar experience with their band. In 2009 I was most excited about their work as a printmaker and animator respectively. On that particular day while I absolutely would have stuck around and most likely had a wonderful time during their set I was most excited to see Woods.

Major Festivals are just all around weird experiences anyway. The next year I would end up performing at a Michigan Festival where Kool Kieth was set to perform the entirety of his Dr. Octagon album but ended up leaving before his set because the environment was making my tour-mates uncomfortable. That record was really important to me the year it had been released but the experience of watching a band at a major festival is comparable to having a drunken friend call you and hold up their cell phone at a concert across the country.

My brother actually did call me drunk and hold up his phone from a big U2 concert once. I became oddly obsessed with a cassette of The Joshua Tree around 2009 when I lived at Apgar but besides that I was never too interested in the band. The split seven inch on Narnack where Friends Forever and Young People both cover Where the Streets Have No Name would have helped. I kind of remember the song that was playing through the phone though – it was about as exciting as watching anybody at Coachella.

Neither of the Brians had any extra pants.

All of the bands that happened to come by during the absurd amount of time that was spent deciding how to kick us out ended up being friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, of mine. I went through more or less the same routine with vetoed guest-listing and a futile plea for replacement pants with the members of Eat Skull and Japanther. In retrospect I probably should have just walked around outside until I recognized somebody who could get us in but it wasn’t the best thought out plan.

I was really in a situation with the pants though. They had been skin-tight and I wasn’t wearing any underwear. It wasn’t a little tear either, the whole back was as open as a New Orleans Liquor Store. I think Snake or Rocky eventually gave me some kind of scarf or extra shirt I was able to crudely tie over the offending area.

It was an especially hot day and as the process was taking forever I started asking for some water. The Security Guard said that I was in no position to ask for anything but I countered that we would become an even bigger headache for them under the effects of dehydration or heat exhaustion. I didn’t think to mention the Geneva Convention.

He angrily handed us a couple of bottles.

Finally a decision was passed down concerning which of the exits we were going to be walked to and cut loose from. This involved walking across a large expanse of the Park that was not being used for the Festival. The vegetation was sparse and more or less typical of Southern California: mugwort, anise, datura and Hopi Tobacco. There were a few rows of corn that appeared to be off season.

Up until this year I had managed to resist ever getting a cell phone but my parents felt that I would be more helpful to them if I started to carry one. My dad had given me an older one of his, it was whatever you call the kind that’s even smaller and cheaper than a flip phone. It had one of those little leather holsters with the clear plastic that clips onto your waist. It was the kind of cell phone that somebody would have gotten if they were already used to carrying a pager.

Anyway after the long wait and the long walk across the field I noticed that this cell phone had fallen out of its holster somewhere along the way. The way I look at it there are two possibilities: either the Security Guard had spent so much time in our company he was starting to enjoy it or he had learned enough about me to realize that I wouldn’t stop being a problem until we found my cell phone.

Either way he walked me back through the field and we found the thing. It materialized on the ground the way that things do when you’ve accidentally dropped them and you know that you’re about to retrace your steps and find them again. I feel like I can tell the difference the moment that I realize I’ve dropped something – like I can feel whether it’s gone gone or just waiting to snap back into existence when my eyes scan over its new location.

Once I retrieved the cell phone we were finally ready to go on with our lives and put the Festival behind us or at least its 2009 iteration. I can’t remember for sure but I think I bought myself some other pants at the Chinatown store that sells irregular pieces and samples from the many sweatshops of the garment district. I would be heading back down to San Diego where it would turn out that my father only had days to live. I’m not sure where Rocky or Snake would end up going next.

I’ve still never seen Woods live but I would very much like to. I don’t have that tape anymore but every now and again I listen to it online again. I checked out some of their other stuff but none of it hit me in quite the same way.

I’d like to think that I will never again have reason to set foot in another Major Festival for the rest of my life but at the same time I’m pretty fond of surprises.

If I’m ever in a band famous enough to headline I’ll make sure to always carry a couple extra pairs of pants with me. Just in case. Neither the expression “pay it forward” or “pay it back” quite fits here. I just like to help.

Chicago 2001 : The Red House “Wanna Try Again? Maybe Next Time I’ll Take The Whole Hand.”

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LaPorsha and I spent the final hours of 2022 in bed playing a game called Monster Hunter Rise. We were trying to defeat a giant flying dragon that seemed to be at last partially based on the Weedy Sea Dragon from the Sea Horse family. It creates tiny floating platforms that are sometimes equipped with cannons and ballistae and that we are supposed to gain access to through the use of flying insects that excrete elastic cords. We lost.

Anyway the holiday had me thinking about all the different ways that people generally observe it including the resolution to change themselves or otherwise improve their lives. This got me thinking about how most of the stories that I have shared so far generally feature situations in which I am being kind and helpful or at the very least attempting to do the right thing. There have been breaches in etiquette, decisions that led to unforeseen negative consequences and an unapologetic penchant for pursuing drugs that most of polite society disdains but I haven’t really shared any situations where I was being an utter monster.

I wasn’t always a nasty drunk but at times I certainly could be. My father was almost certainly an alcoholic and nearly all of my adult friends have struggled with alcoholism but it’s never actually been an issue for me. I drink in small amounts but not every day, I’m actually getting back into it after not really liking it for years. At the beginning of my drinking career I did often drink to excess and at times this would result in me saying and doing awful things.

I had mentioned in the Tijuana El Rancho story that Robyn had gotten some photos of her bruised face after drunkenly falling down some stairs stolen and she was upset about it because she liked how the pictures made it look like I hit her. In the El Rancho days this idea existed safely insulated in the world of jokes. At the Red House this was not exactly the case. I’m almost certain that I never actually struck her but there was at least one situation in which I became violent.

We were in her room arguing about something or other when I became consumed with rage. I can’t remember exactly how the physics or respective body positions worked but she was standing on her mattress and I grabbed her by the throat and caused her to flip over through the air and onto her back. Not like I knocked her from the standing position onto her back – I remember that it was one complete rotation. I remember seeing the sudden surprise and fear in her eyes. I can’t remember what happened next or if I had even been drinking in this situation. I remember the immediate feeling of shame.

The situation that I was actually wanting to write about was one in which I was extremely drunk and flew into a violent rage against nearly everybody that I lived with. I couldn’t find my portable record player, the DISCO-O-KID from some of my earlier pieces, and convinced myself that my housemates had taken it and were hiding it from me. Eventually I discovered that it was under a pillow the entire time but none of it was really about the record player. I was just unloading anger and darkness on the people close to me.

The chemicals that our brains release into our bloodstreams during episodes of unbridled wrath are supposed to make us somewhat stronger than we are under normal circumstances. Matt’s boyfriend Joe had been sitting in some kind of upholstered armchair. I picked it up with him sitting in it and flung him and the chair across the room. I grabbed a tall floor lamp with a bare light bulb at the top and flung it at Matt like a spear. There was a flash of light as it exploded on contact with his unprotected bicep and shoulder.

Andy Hyde attempted to stop my rampage by punching me repeatedly in the head. Unfortunately for him I seem to have an unusually hard head. Years later at a pre-INC show in Orlando somebody jumped from the crowd to break a wooden chair over my head after being offended by aspects of the performance I had just given on top of the bus. It was probably the bottles I was throwing in the general direction of the crowd or the very small woman I was wrestling with.

The thing with the chair surprised me but I don’t think it did any actual damage. He was a very normal looking dude – brightly colored bicep tattoos of Japanese style fish and flowers. He jumped into a pretty nice looking newer car and sped off immediately afterwards. I just realized that one of the bottles might have hit his car or even just landed near it. Somebody showed me a video of the chair attack on their cell phone immediately afterward. I was drunk to the point of seeing trails and abnormally bright colors. It was a surreal experience.

Anyway back in Chicago Andy had broken his hand punching me in the head. I was unhurt and amused. Somebody drove him to the hospital and they bound his hand without realizing that the knuckle bone had become twisted upside down. The bones healed like that and it now appears like he is simply missing a knuckle. It became something for me to tease him about every subsequent time I was in a drunken asshole mood:

“Wanna try again? Maybe this time I’ll take the whole hand!”

Robyn didn’t want to be around me when I was acting like this and was getting ready to drive to Schaumburg or at least somewhere else. We must have had parking spaces in the back of the house or she needed to circle the alley in order to leave I just remember she pulled along the side of the house. I had been watching from the roof and jumped down onto the hood of her car to scare her. It certainly had that effect, somebody got me off of the car and she sped away.

I normally trust my memory to be accurate with all the details but all of these things happened when I was borderline blacked out drunk. If anything I was probably behaving even more horribly and being more of a violent asshole than the details I can remember give credit to. If anybody who was actually there remembers something differently I’d be interested to hear it.

In 2009 I was drunk and being an asshole at a party in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco that I went to with Lux. I don’t remember what it was that I had been doing specifically but I got kicked out because of it. I thought it was really funny to keep breaking in and scaring her. Not running up to her but climbing somewhere on the walls or ceiling and just staring like a gargoyle until she noticed me and got scared again. I can’t remember exactly how many times I did it because I did spend at least part of the night in a blackout.

I popped back into consciousness or memory hanging off the edge of the building’s roof with my shirt tangled up in some barbed wire. My feet were on the building but I was holding onto the barbed wire with one hand and my body was dangling back over the alley. It was at least two stories tall maybe even three. I felt lucky that I hadn’t fallen and hurt myself and untangled my shirt and finished pulling myself onto the roof.

I used to be really good at climbing and getting onto things. I’m already tall to begin with and as long as I could grab a ledge or bar with my fingers jumping I could probably pull myself up to stand on it. Nothing fancy, just core strength stuff – I used to like to do a trick where I would grab a hanging rope and invert myself, pushing my feet upward until it looked like I was hanging from my ankles. When alcohol was sitting in the driver’s seat sometimes this power would be abused in the name of evil.

I don’t get as drunk as I used to but I think a bigger difference is that I try not to carry around ugly resentments and scars from past traumas that would want to bubble up in the form of rage or violence when my executive function is asleep at the switchboard. I don’t think attacking my friends or terrorizing my partners was cool or cute and I’m lucky that I made it through the situations without getting seriously hurt or catching serious criminal charges. I would have deserved it. Maybe it’s not so much that I changed as it is that I moved to the middle of nowhere and only really have to interact with one other person.

If you catch me on the wrong day I bet that I could still be a total piece of shit.

Los Angeles 2016 : Twenty Nine Palms “Lord Don’t Let Them Fuck Around And Give Me Diego”

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We had tried the Tijuana thing and finally gotten married on paper although we considered ourselves married after the third night we spent together. The secret to a legally binding Tijuana wedding is to just get the paperwork from the appropriate offices on the US side ahead of time and then as long as an officiant and witness signs it you are good. We tried New Orleans after that but LaPorsha never really liked it there. The thing about racism in America is that it comes in regional varieties like pizza or the name for carbonated, sweetened beverages. You can be completely inoculated to California style racism but find Louisiana style racism untenable or vice-versa.

We were starting to be on heroin and, socially speaking, that never really helps.

Back in California LaPorsha got too sleepy on an early morning Los Angeles to San Diego drive and rear ended somebody with the Diesel Mercedes. We didn’t realize the impact had destroyed the hood latch and ended up shattering our windshield the moment we got back up to the freeway’s required 60. The engine on that thing would have lasted forever – the odometer had been stuck somewhere in the 300k range when we bought it from Kelman and when he bought it from whoever he got it from too. It was an ‘81 and I’m pretty certain it had been crushing miles every year in the interim without ever sitting dry-docked.

We’d been through a lot with it. The radiator sprung a leak while we were trying to visit some kind of outsider artist sculpture garden a couple of hours outside of New Orleans. A friend came through with the Triple A connect to tow us back into town and I ended up with our radiator bungee corded to the back of a bike to visit a shop that still welded the leaks shut. Every town seems to have at least one diesel Mercedes guy – in New Orleans his name was Markus. He helped us put it back together.

We drove through rural Texas in acute withdrawal. LaPorsha finally succumbed to exhaustion and flipped us into a sandy berm. The local police got us a free motel room and in the morning it turned out that we only needed air put back into a couple tires. Imagine running onto sand from a paved parking lot while wearing flip flops and they kind of slip off your feet. That basically happened to the two tires on the passenger side. The tire shop charged me five bucks to put the air in and we were on our way.

The crazier story happened when we were living in an old motel in Joshua Tree. It had its own parking lot off the main drag with an empty swimming pool, decommissioned bus and a few dead cars and golf carts. It wasn’t actually fenced or walled off but we let ourselves get complacent and imagine that it was. It was actually just off of a kind of arroyo slash alley that served as a natural habitat for the small town’s tweakers. When we woke up to find the car missing we had probably been leaving the keys just sitting on the driver’s seat for a solid two weeks.

The thieves showed up on camera fueling it up at the only gas station in town a couple of blocks from where they took it. We were actually lucky they hadn’t put regular gas in it, potentially destroying the diesel motor, I think most random tweaker joyriders would have. The trail went cold from there until a lady deeper in the desert spotted it abandoned on her property a couple days later. There was a tense moment when it seemed like she wasn’t going to tell us where it was but we got to the bottom of it. It turned out her and the motel owner were kind of rival Pit Bull hoarders and she didn’t want him knowing where she lived – understandably really because he totally sucked.

The Mercedes had gotten stuck driving into a patch of especially deep sand but that wasn’t the real problem. The thieves had kept or disposed of the keys along with everything else in the car including an impressive collection of porcelain Venetian Clowns from the high desert’s many thrift stores. The car was a luxury vehicle when new and therefore had been outfitted with some pretty heavy anti theft features. Without an actual key replacing the ignition tumbler would have required shattering some kind of pin in the steering column after distempering it with a blowtorch.

Despite the vehicle’s age it would have technically been possible to send off the VIN number and proof of ownership to Mercedes Benz of America and receive a duplicate key in the mail but for the fact that the doors and ignition had separate keys. This meant it was no longer the factory ignition. We called Kelman who called the person he bought it from who called the person he bought it from but nobody had a spare key stashed. We decided to pull it out of the sand first and tackle the key problem later.

The Pit Bull lady had a neighbor with a tractor who became very enthusiastic about the project. This enthusiasm led directly to a series of happy accidents. He started the process by attaching a hook and chain directly to the rear bumper. Now I don’t know a lot about cars but I do know what is a reasonable part of a heavy object to attach a chain to if you are trying to move it versus what is a thing that you will just pull off of that object. I probably know this because of trying to help the United States Coast Guard tow these crazy junk rafts that had no reasonable parts to attach chains to.

There was also the fact that the tweakers had already tried tying a short hemp rope to the front license plate Mount and only succeeded in bending it out of shape.

We showed up just as he was getting started in earnest and I began to walk towards his tractor to tell him he should reattach the hook to the A-frame. Thankfully before I could do that the entire rear bumper came sailing off and landed in the sand in front of the tractor. Inside that bumper was a small black Velcro pouch, inside that pouch was a spare key. Moving the car was easy after that – we just turned it on and put it in reverse with a lot of people pushing in the front and the tractor pulling in the back. Getting the bumper to stay back on was less easy but some twisted up coat hangers did the trick.

We went through a few other misadventures like this, mostly in the seasonal marijuana cultivation laborer industry, but the shattered windshield turned out to be more than we could seem to come back from. The engine was undamaged but the radiator was leaking water again. We did a couple of dope runs in this condition, frequently refilling the water and crossing our fingers that no one in authority would take umbrage with the shattered windshield, but eventually our faithful Mercedes was left to languish under a tarp.

We sold it to one of those guys that always seems to have a partially wooden homemade trailer for three hundred dollars.

LaPorsha decided that we should try getting a van and I was excited for any alternative to living back at my mother’s house. We had been making trips up to Los Angeles anyway and just pitching a tent in different parks to avoid having to stay at anybody’s place. A van that we could actually lay down and sleep in sounded like a definite improvement. We took the last trains and buses of the day to go look at a boxy white rape van in North County that said “great for homeless” right in the Craigslist ad.

The van cost nine hundred dollars and was basically fine but we did learn a couple of lessons about used vehicle shopping from the experience. The first one was that if buying a vehicle represents your only potential way of getting home from the unfamiliar area where you go to look at it you aren’t really “looking at it”. Our only option for not sleeping on the street that night was buying the van. The second lesson was to contact the DMV and find out how much back registration was owed on a vehicle. In this case it turned out to be three and a half thousand dollars so we just never registered it.

I really liked living in a van. We lived around this park in Beverly Hills with a Sikh Temple on the block. I read somewhere recently that they always have food for the homeless but they literally never offered – they seemed like yuppy Sikhs. We parked at a couple libraries a lot. We lived around Echo Park and did the thing where you have to move once a week. This weird DMV services office in Glassell Park just gave us free registration stickers to keep us from getting harassed. I started working at my old private tutoring job again.

Eventually LaPorsha got an appointment at this dentist office on Washington and Redondo and I realized there was a methadone clinic in the same building. I had tried it in Chicago when somebody was selling water soluble wafers and always thought it felt pretty similar to heroin. We were in a weird place with our use – LaPorsha would have never started using heroin had it not been for me but I would have never started using every day had it not been for her. I had always self regulated to avoid physical dependence but using as a couple removed this option. Methadone provided relief from the pressure of needing to find money for heroin on a daily basis.

It was still possible in those days to use the internet to find a few middles, people who wanted heroin but for a variety of reasons will never find a direct connection with a dealer themselves. In my experience these people complain relentlessly about their position in the food chain but never actually want to change it. There was a kid whose name had gotten saved as “Twentynine Palms” in my phone. I had saved the number of somebody who had land for sale in the town of that name and accidentally fused the contacts while high.

We got into a routine where he would call me, come pick me up and drive me over to my dealer who had already separated his purchase into his piece and my cut. We would talk about anxieties over recent political events on these drives: the prescient fear that the election of Donald Trump would lead directly to a repeal of the landmark case of Roe v. Wade. He would also talk about missing his family and how none of them could accept or understand his use:

“I’m all by myself out here and heroin feels like a warm hug!”

Toward the end he would start to constantly complain about needing to give me a cut. He would make vague threats about recognizing my plug’s car and hanging around the neighborhoods he served to try to establish a primary connection. When we left town for a bit I actually did get the guy to agree to have his number passed along and see Twenty Nine Palms without me. I learned on a subsequent visit that he had never actually called. Despite his complaints it had been about his connection with me and having someone to talk to the entire time.

Another one of my middles was this guy from Malibu who drove and lived in a special van for grooming dogs. Him and his vehicle smelled disgusting – like freshly drained canine anal glands. We didn’t have the same friendly relationship and got into a protracted battle of ripping each other off. He bought a gram and I bulked it up with squished brown bread after taking too much. He sold me a “chunk” of dope that was actually a piece of heroin soaked cotton.

The last time I saw him I had accidentally bought fentanyl and nearly died trying to use it. I took the tiniest shot in our van outside of a needle exchange and ended up needing three full shots of Narcan to revive me. We were only carrying one but thankfully LaPorsha was able to run inside and get a volunteer to come help. I avoided the stuff like the plague after this but he had begun actively seeking it out. I guess he was ahead of the curve as it seems to be the only thing on the streets now.

I just now realized that this final transaction probably left him nervously looking over his shoulder because it was the only time I ever sold him exactly what was advertised at the proper price without tricks or subterfuge. I just wanted to unload the fentanyl so I could use the money I’d spent on it to buy tar somewhere.

Once we started parking the van near the methadone clinic and dosing on a daily basis we became involved with the surrounding community of mostly homeless patients. The neighborhood was full of alleys and close to the 10 Freeway providing plenty of areas to setup camps and park vehicles. LaPorsha often commented that methadone clinics and the surrounding ecosystem of their patients seemed to be some of the only places completely devoid of racial hierarchy or privilege. When everybody’s a homeless drug addict it doesn’t make that much difference what your skin color is.

There was this one shorter woman who went to the Clinic who seemed to have the maximum amount of hips and ass that can be achieved without some kind of body modifying surgery. She would dress in neon spandex bodysuits with a leather jacket and always dragged along her straight looking boyfriend who didn’t seem to dose or use other drugs. She would shoot up something in the bathroom, I’m assuming it was heroin and cocaine, and come out hellbent on humiliating and emasculating her boyfriend:

“Oh Freddy… You’re such a child!”

There was something about her body language and the way she pronounced the name Freddy that made him look like he felt like he was about three inches tall. She would flirt mercilessly with the male patients but not me as I was always with LaPorsha. I end up getting hit on in front of her in spaces involving our white culture friends and punk/art/noise circles but never in these methadone clinics. It’s a cultural thing. People don’t constantly ask me if she’s trans the moment she’s out of earshot in the clinics either.

Our clinic was funded by a county program instead of Medi-Cal so all of us were technically supposed to go to meetings. It was basically a business though so they made sure we could keep dosing even if we refused to go. I’ve never been into the twelve step thing but these meetings seemed to be especially bad for anyone that was actually interested in getting sober. Few people looked higher than the guys who would be picking up their 90 Day or Five Year Chip and it seemed to be a lot more than a heroic dose of Methadone.

There was one counselor named Diego who was especially uptight about trying to chase everyone to the meetings. He was covered in tattoos and wore the black framed boxy glasses of an aging hardcore scene dude. He drove a VW Beetle done up in Dune Buggy fashion with the little yellow happy faces over the lights on top. He dressed in button ups and awkwardly pleated slacks and constantly gave off hall monitor energy. Even after months of clearly showing that we wouldn’t go to meetings and the program had no intention of cutting us off he would call out vague threats about it every time we left.

Everybody got assigned a counselor they had to meet with once a month or so for as long as they were dosing. Everybody said more or less the same thing:

“Lord, don’t let them fuck around and give me Diego.”

We could miss three days in a row and after that we would have to do the whole intake thing again. The process took hours, you’d have to show up at five am to ensure that you’d actually be able to dose that day. There was a blood draw but that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was the ever present threat that they might finally assign you Diego.

Our van broke down and we parked it in front of an abandoned house. That was fine for months until an older saditty Black lady got pissed off about her husband trying to peek into the van to see LaPorsha changing. Of course she was mad at LaPorsha and not her husband. Suddenly the van was getting tickets on a weekly basis. We had to sell it for scrap before it just got towed. We moved into a tent in the alley. I made a platform out of wooden loading pallets and strung a line across the tops of two discarded Christmas Trees to hang a layer of rainproof plastic sheeting.

We started spending more time out of town, looking for an RV, going to the desert.

We got sick of coming in at five am and rolling the Diego dice.

We stopped going to the clinic.

Oakland 2009/2019 : “Property Value Probably Going Down Huh?”

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Before I started this writing project back in September or so I had actually been writing for my entire adult life but only in my head. I went through a little poetry phase when I was first introduced to regular methamphetamine use around 2002. I never liked the stuff but peer pressure, boredom and constant availability had me dipping more often than I’m proud of.

My process was similar to a rock tumbler – some emotions would trigger a structured thought and I would run the words through my head, feeling the heft of them in my hand and adding or subtracting syllables until it felt perfectly balanced. I made a few copies of a chapbook I had typed up on an old typewriter with color copies of some construction paper collage for covers – dinosaurs and a butterfly on some mushrooms. I called it P.S. Don’t Touch My Fucking Stereo.

I was going for a pastiche of how a headbanger older brother might talk – not the real one I had grown up with but an imaginary one in a movie like Home Alone or something. It had no relation whatsoever to the poetry and short fiction that was inside the covers. I just thought it sounded cool. I probably thought a little bit of cookie cutter masculine hostility would temper the inherent vulnerability of making a zine full of my poetry and allow me to have my cake and eat it too.

I started writing other things in my head – an allegorical fantasy about the sexual politics of a regional noise music scene, some rough ideas for different musicals and an obscure theatrical format called a Masque that was centered on the life of Samson, Judge of Israel. Freestyle rap of course but that was usually written aloud in front of an audience which was more or less the opposite of inside my head. Some scraps of this stuff got written on paper but it always wound up getting lost.

After a more intense period of homelessness and a brief interlude of stable employment my wife and I ended up living on an RV that was parked in an East Oakland driveway. I started to think more about writing this thing whatever this thing is. The word memoir seems, I don’t even know what to call it, slightly obscene or something and I hadn’t given any thought to writing a blog. I wrote the first piece on here, BADFISH, but it didn’t make much of a ripple as the sole representative of my writing.

I was still on hard drugs although I had given up on achieving successful intravenous injection. A year of daily use with the obviously adulterated tar of the Bay Area had done far more damage than nearly two decades of punctuated use. I was still living in a city and interacting with an assortment of its denizens on a daily basis. All of this resulted in a somewhat different writing style than the one I have now.

Reading work from this period feels like it was penned by a deceased author whose idiosyncratic style I enjoy. I was looking for a book of floral borders and motifs for a different project today. I came across a piece that I could only vaguely remember writing in a composition book. I decided that it might be fun to reproduce it here exactly as I had written it although I won’t be typing the whole thing in all capitals:

***********************************************

SACKED BY A SEARCH ENGINE : UNDERGROUND AMERICA AS A SECRET ANCIENT EMPIRE, THE DESTRUCTIVE FORCE OF THE QUANTUM OBSERVER AND 9/11 AS THE VISIGOTHS SHE TOLD ME NOT TO WORRY ABOUT

You are not going to be told who I am, it’s not very important, I wasn’t very famous, I never fought or fucked anyone who was. I lived in the grove of holly trees for some time, and obviously heard or saw some things, but this is not the Genesis of my heroic story.

I want to begin this saga with painted walls, frescoes if you’ll indulge me far enough. If you’ll suspend disbelief we can enter a contract to full on write it off as neutrally buoyant. All vital literature begins with a contract between author and reader, I’m not asking for a signature in blood here, I just want to be accountable.

Be that as it may let us return to the frescoes. Imagine me as a ghost of Pompeii, a vacuous, human shaped hole encased in a pocket of volcanic ash, speaking from beyond the grave to describe forgotten walls which will never again see the light of the sun.

As an overgrown nestling I picked colors and painted walls with my now estranged sister. We were channeling the 1970s, inspired by the mushroom emblazoned kitchenwares which were current in the Thrift Stores of our time. Years later, a married man, my wife and I decorated a nest of our own. The colors were better, we saw to the trim, and made something truly beautiful.

If we had paused to put our ears to the ground and our noses to the wind we could have easily ascertained that the logging trucks were well on the way, as it was we escaped with all lives and limbs intact, more than can be said for many.

However this is about my years as a bachelor bowerbird, and the single bower in all these years I took the time to paint. Not because I had other birds to impress but because there was an old, dead bird to inspire me. Because the thrill was in the hunt and I had sifted through endless twigs until I found the perfect one. An interest in and survey of Symbolist painters had let me to Nicholas Roerich; a spiritualist, diplomat, author and painter who created works which blend Eastern Orthodox Religious Icons with the devotional art of Indian and Tibetan Mysticism.

My next trip to New York led me to the museum in his former home and a visual buffet of his creations. One spoke to me in particular, an image of a box containing the irrepressible Fire of Truth, borne in a sealed wooden box on horseback through a bleak, dark and lonely mountain pass.

The spark took blaze and burned bright inside my mind. Everything in my room was painted the same dull blackish charcoal matte latex, transforming the space into a stage set for any 80s to 90s minimalist Theatre of the Absurd Production Company. The outside curtain for my sleeping chamber was matte grayish-black as well.

To those passing through my night theater the impression was of darkness, oppressive minimal functionality and a taste of potential, but for the few that peeked beyond the curtain lay a sunlit tomb of the brightest metallic gold, accented by prisms that scattered the spectrum of the sun, the promise of every dawning day.

***********************************************

Ok, so obviously there’s some heavy handed devices in there that have fallen by the wayside, most importantly anonymity. And commas, so so many commas – I am still addicted to commas but I’ve learned to stagger my use with hyphens to keep things interesting and avoid becoming physically dependent on them. I was using commas correctly between pairs of adjectives of equal rank back then but I don’t do that anymore.

I don’t need them.

The room I was describing was in an Emeryville Punk House called Apgar after the street it was located on. My room was the first of three interconnected ones that twisted like a snail’s shell and ended in a gigantic water heater. The house had a proud history with quirky residence applications that people had to answer earnestly because they actually wanted to live there.

That stopped being the case during my tenure but only because punk houses have a natural life span. The death of this one was hastened by the revelation of black mold inside the walls, especially as many people in the scene had seen the negative health effects of long term exposure first hand. Josh had just moved out and the bothersome station of “house mom” somehow ended up getting filled by a strange amalgamation of me and Brad.

As individuals we were the last people anyone would have expected to step up but in combination we somehow birthed the necessary entity. I was negotiating with our landlord Alan Cose for a peaceful transfer of power. We had stopped paying rent and I explained to him that if he didn’t formally evict us I could ensure that we would move out on a reasonable timeline and forego the customary “fuck shit up” of an eviction party. It wasn’t that I was threatening him per se – I just had an intuitive understanding of group sentiments and dynamics.

His demeanor became increasingly erratic at each of our successive parleys. After the last of these he returned to his car and sat shell-shocked, staring off into space for hours. He had tried to get me to find him newer, younger residents in exchange for free rent in perpetuity. I felt like the character styled after Eazy-E in the iconic Fuck wit Dre Day music video. I told him I wasn’t interested.

One of the corner guys from the neighboring apartments asked me about his identity as he was walking away:

“That’s y’all landlord?”

I answered that it was as he removed a tiny bag of crack from his mouth and served a passing customer. He delivered the following observation without missing a beat:

“Property value probably going down huh?”

I’m sure the house is now worth many times what he had probably paid for it. After I had honored the conditions of our bargain some friends of mine moved into the upstairs portion who some readers may recognize from some other stories: Sugar Tea and Popsicle. They had made a deal with Alan that they would work on fixing the house but couldn’t pay him any cash rent. He agreed to it so the place wouldn’t sit empty but immediately started pressuring them for money.

Popsicle had put the electricity in her name then gotten a bill a month or so later that seemed impossibly high. We were all standing outside looking at the meter but the numbers just didn’t add up. Popsicle took a closer look at the bill and realized it was Alan’s electric bill for his personal home in Walnut Creek. He had scribbled out his name and address and forwarded it to the house in an attempt to trick my friends into paying it for him.

It almost worked.

They moved out sooner after that, the dangers of squatting were preferable to this kind of deception. He eventually found other people to move in who were presumably paying him actual rent. I don’t want to get too into the details but he neglected to do the bare minimum to keep his tenants safe and a female resident ended up getting assaulted as a result.

I would really hope that he was held accountable – financially at the very least if not legally, but something tells me that probably didn’t end up happening. He probably got rich selling off the house as the tech boom devoured the East Bay or even continues to rent it out for top dollar.

Over the years many residents attempted to garden in the backyard and this led to the discovery of a cistern – left over from a bygone age for an unknown reason. You could talk, yell or sing into it and hear a voice echoed back at you, from deep within the bowels of the Earth as if it was bringing back messages from a world where nobody had ever seen the sun.

San Diego 2006 : “You’re Not Actually Thinking of Anything Are You?”

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By 2006 it felt like I had explored the whole home court advantage thing to it’s logical conclusion and I was more than ready to leave again. It wouldn’t be the last time I would end up living in San Diego or at my parents’ house but it was probably the most productive. For the first time in my life I was in an actual band that played actual shows and had actual songs – two bands technically although the song part wasn’t really true for Guest Toothbrush. As exciting as all that was I was impatient to collect my diploma and get the fuck out of Dodge.

It was without a doubt the busiest period of my adult life. I’ve already mentioned the two bands – I was also going to college full time, working in public schools full time, selling concessions at baseball games, running a cassette label, participating in a relationship and using hard drugs intravenously. That last one is known for being so demanding that it pushes all other pursuits and responsibilities from a person’s life. That wasn’t the case for me – I graduated summa cum laude, fulfilled the obligations of my jobs and made it to all the shows, although I was higher than I should have been for a couple of them.

It was actually during this period that I experienced acute opiate withdrawal for the first time in my life. I had jumped in the van with a band called Business Lady to go to a show at The Smell in Los Angeles. There’s not many liquor stores in the Skid Row area and I ended up grabbing some sake that I mixed with Squirt in Little Tokyo. I remember it tasting especially foul and carrying it around all night until the soda part was flat – this created considerable confusion as to what was actually wrong with me.

On the ride back to San Diego I needed my friends to pull off to the shoulder of the 5 Freeway so I could vomit. I assumed that my miscegenated cocktail was merely disagreeing with me but after being dropped off at the City Heights apartment I shared with my girlfriend I never stopped puking. I also was sweating, had diarrhea and once I started to feel dehydrated any attempt to swallow water made me feel like I’d been punched in the stomach until I puked it up again.

I called my dad to come get me. He had served in the Navy during the Vietnam War and knew what was going on the moment he set eyes on me. It wasn’t just my first time getting dopesick, in my six years of on and off use I had never really seen anyone else get dopesick either. People talked about it all the time but we lived along the U.S./Mexico border and they always seemed to find what they needed before things reached this point. It had been three days since I last used and I had been using at least every three days for a couple years or so. Not that it was mechanically every third day or anything like that – it just wasn’t every day but I didn’t really go past three days without using either.

I should mention that I have never heard or read of somebody getting a “three day” habit like this and would probably say that it wasn’t a thing if I hadn’t actually experienced it myself. It sounds bizarre and hard to believe. There’s an almost Biblical quality to it:

“And verily on the third day he was dopesicke…”

My father was in treatment for Stage Four Lung Cancer and had a lot of morphine in various forms and preparations around the house. There were these little white immediate release ones he was okay with me taking some of because they gave him way more of them than he ever ended up using. I would take them from time to time but I preferred the street drugs. I tried to swallow some to fight the withdrawal but immediately vomited them back up with this weird rubbery texture that was most likely the early stages of vomiting up my stomach lining.

Of course I know now that there are multiple ways I could have ingested the morphine while bypassing the vomit reflex but it wasn’t something I was aware of at the time. I tried smoking some marijuana and soaking in a hot bath and while it felt a little better I was still rejecting fluids and starting to become dangerously dehydrated. Dehydration is the only way for somebody to die as a direct result of opiate withdrawal – it happens from time to time in jails and prisons when a withdrawing addict is just locked in a room with no form of oversight or medical care. It’s hard to imagine a more agonizing way to die.

We decided that I needed to go to a hospital and the medical insurance for my job covered an Urgent Care on Banker’s Hill. The Doctor said that they could try anti nausea medications but he didn’t think they would work and tried to put me on IV fluids. I’m a tough stick under optimal conditions, I already was before becoming an IV user and that certainly hasn’t improved the situation, for hours I was painfully probed by failing phlebotomists. I begged to try the anti nausea stuff the first time it was mentioned and constantly to all the nurses and every subsequent time the doctor came by to check on me.

After it had been a few hours and nobody had been able to get an IV placed he finally agreed to actually try it. It was administered via an intramuscular injection and, true to its name, immediately cured my nausea to the extent that I was able to hold down water and begin rehydrating myself. I tried to talk to the doctor about the importance of listening to his patients and always attempting less invasive procedures before embarking on the more invasive ones.

He regarded me with brown eyes that were bright with intelligence but completely devoid of any sign of empathy and calmly asked me when exactly I had become a Physician.

If I let myself get started on that topic this piece would end up getting even more derailed than it already has been so let’s leave things at acknowledging that his attitude was both familiar to me and one of my least favorite features of the Medical-Industrial Complex.

I went back home and some friends brought me over a piece of a Suboxone which I had never seen before. It was before the strips when they came in orange tablets shaped like stop signs. I dissolved the little piece in my mouth and felt a little better. By now it was a whole new day but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to try to get more heroin. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t physically addicted to it. I continued to use it but less often so I wouldn’t get sick again. It was many years before I would experience withdrawal again.

I was working at the same High School I had attended and graduated from (always fun for a Nostalgia Buff with a photographic memory) but it was no longer the same High School. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had generously donated their expertise and capital to transform it through a program they referred to as the Small Schools Initiative. It would be rebranded as The San Diego High School Educational Complex which contained six subaltern schools with separate names, themes and student and teacher populations.

The theory was that large schools were allowing students to “slip through the cracks” because teachers and administrators were responsible for too many individual students to notice and intervene when one was struggling. The literature going around during this process was full of warm and cozy references to small towns, families and smaller groups of people where everybody looks out for each other and knows everybody by their first name and whatever other “aw shucks!” bullshit they were peddling us. I’m not even sure if the conversion improved things for the school as a whole but for the students I worked with, the struggling low income inner city kids, it absolutely made things worse.

The big thing is that San Diego High has always been at least two different schools living in a single body. It is the destination school for all of the students living around San Diego’s urban core – especially the largely Hispanic communities around the shipyards in what is called South East San Diego or “Shelltown”. It is also the prestigious destination for students who are interested in the International Baccalaureate program like I was and want to earn college credits while taking classes that are structured more like the University model. It has always felt segregated in terms of which groups of students the school wants to funnel its resources into – which students it is proudly displaying and which ones it would rather hide.

The Small Schools Initiative took the existing segregation and made it official. All of the largely White and Asian students in the IB program were in the newly named School of International Studies along with all the best teachers and programs. The inner city poverty kids were spread between several other new schools including one that was explicitly targeted to prepare its students to work in the service industry and one that was essentially the ESL school. The Performing Arts school became the “Black” school because it had a reputation for being the easiest.

Of course any student could enroll in any school but the official rebranding served to reinforce the already ubiquitous feelings that neighborhood, race and income bracket could almost completely define a child’s future destiny. My Tenth Grade History Teacher, Kenneth Williams, must have had similar feelings to some degree. His History Class had been associated with the IB program but he ended up working within the Performing Arts school most likely to not abandon the students of his own demographic.

I wish I had explicitly spoken with him on this subject, it looks like he passed away in 2019. I came by his classroom a few times to lend him my VHS copy of the animated film Kirikou and the Sorceress so that he could share it with one of his classes. I also ran into him on the BART way back in 1999, one of his children must have been graduating from Berkeley and he was dressed in an academic robe for the ceremony. My house-mate Chris was staring after him in mute wonder following our brief but friendly exchange:

“Was that Sun Ra?”

The other huge problem was that each of these individual schools needed to have a Principal, Vice-Principal and other Administrators. These positions are higher paid than teachers but the budget would have largely been the same. In practice this would lead to one unavoidable conclusion – larger class sizes. Sure the students were now separated into little clusters where they always saw the same teachers, counselors, etc. but when it came time to actually learn anything they were getting even less individual attention.

I worked there for a total of three years: one before and two after the Small Schools program was introduced. In my final year I worked in the Special Education Office as an assistant to what was essentially an employment counselor. The new head of Special Ed. was Elizabeth Ballard: a big hair and facelift Southern Woman archetype who was intensely emotionally abusive to nearly all of her underlings. Me and my superior didn’t get it because we had the basic self confidence that comes with being young, attractive men in this particular field. The women and older men got it bad, especially the spazzy idiosyncratic types that are generally drawn to Special Education.

I guess it wasn’t that different from my family of origin.

We technically served all six schools and the entire campus but I can’t remember meeting anyone at International Studies that had an IEP. I did a lot of clerical stuff and would pull individual students out of class to conduct a PCP or Person Centered Plan. The cholo kids were always incredulous that it was actually called that and thought I was fucking with them until they saw it on the paper. Among other questions this included the often difficult – What do you want to be when you grow up?

I remember one specific interview when this triggered a long, meandering response:

“Maybe I would be one of those…. What do you call a person who…. You know where they work with the…”

After a couple of minutes of this I put the question to him bluntly:

“You’re not actually thinking of anything are you?”

He admitted that he wasn’t and was trying to spur me into just finishing the sentence for him with whatever I wanted to hear. I told him that this approach wasn’t going to work with me and we switched to a questionnaire that was supposed to give us some general idea of his career aptitude. I think it was multiple choice. He didn’t end up with a concrete idea of what he wanted to occupy the rest of his life and earn a place in the world with. Most of them didn’t.

The funner part of my job came when I was supposed to track down local businesses that might be interested in hiring high school students for part time jobs. My girlfriend had already found a part time job for us selling concessions at the Charger’s games in the newly constructed Petco Park. She was into working a stand for minimum wage but I was immediately attracted to what our superiors referred to as “The Dark Side”: Vending. Walking up and down the stands to sell overpriced food and beverages for a percentage of the earnings as an independent contractor. I got to practice my carny bark:

“CAW-TON CANDY HEEYAH!”

The cool thing about this job was that it was essentially self regulating. The company was willing to hire anybody because they only needed to be paid a portion of the profits they already produced. If someone wasn’t good at it they would generally realize that they were wasting time and energy and just quit. I could pretty much get a job for anybody who wanted one as long as they were passing all of their classes and could line up the necessary paperwork.

Some of the kids were wasting their time but it gave them a sense of hierarchy and structure outside of school, had them practicing some math skills and got them into free baseball games. These would be the ones who continued to call me Mr. Winningham even though we were wearing the same uniform and were essentially equals. Some of the other ones were born hustlers that I was happy to have brought the relatively wholesome opportunity to. One of them got himself hired to an hourly position within the vending room and clicked right into the system of slipping Vendors extra product behind the company’s back to split the profits.

I’ve mentioned the City College Free Style Rap Battle in other pieces but I want to go over it in greater detail here. I had been doing this thing during lunch at work called “Four Track Club” where I brought a cassette four track, some microphones, a bass and a drum machine into the counseling office. Now that I think about it, it wouldn’t have been my drum machine because I didn’t own one yet. It would have belonged to Raquel, my band-mate in the rap group Hood Ri¢h that started out as Sex Affection.

She probably got uncomfortable with me always carrying her drum machine around and that would have been why I had to stop doing it. I mean it makes sense – I was into drugs so the contents of my backpack often wound up in sketchy situations. Anyway the Club attracted the budding noise boys and the budding rapper boys which was interesting because they wouldn’t have usually hung out together. The noise boys would make a beat and me the rapper boys would do a quick cypher.

I never got around to mixing down the sessions and eventually I lost the tapes.

Years later I ran into one of the rap boys at Twelfth and Imperial and he recited one of my freestyles back to me – word for word. Soon after me and one of the noise boys, Andy, had a band called Guest Toothbrush, it was just bass and drums improv jams punctuated by me telling some of my favorite Bible stories in a modern, urban vernacular. I put out the first tape for his pretty good ambient guitar project The Dead White on my label. It got a little bit of press and Thurston Moore called him using a text to speech generator. I guess it could have been anyone but I’m sure it was him – insulating himself from ever being genuine even as he kind of cared about something – this kid’s tape.

The movie Half Nelson where Ryan Gosling plays a young teacher who smokes crack was out and it felt like it was vaguely based on my life but all the details were different. Me and Andy were playing some shows in bars and punk houses that I set up and I just felt like: kids aren’t stupid, there’s no way he doesn’t know anything about my hard drug use or nobody’s brought it up. One day I just told him that I didn’t want to be one of the grownups that doesn’t trust him or acts like he’s stupid or whatever so if he wanted to talk about it we could talk about it. He said we didn’t need to but he’d kind of heard that I messed with opium.

I didn’t bother to correct him.

Anyway let’s get back to the rap battle. It was at City College, I can’t remember who would have set it up like a radio station or something. It started during lunch so I was on break from work and signed up thinking I would probably be eliminated and make it back to work on time. The other finalist rapper actually went to San Diego High as a student but I didn’t work with him – he was a well-to-do Black kid who was enrolled in the IB Program and went to International Studies. We both kept winning our matchups so eventually I was ditching work and he was ditching school and it was gonna have to go to one of us.

I would have still been going by the rap name Gypsy Feelings that I never really did anything better than this battle with. Eventually Erin Allen would record some weak freestyles in a studio for a split tape where I never actually shifted into gear. The whole situation was confusing, I felt like it was only happening at the time because his then girlfriend Sarah from Sixteen Bitch Pileup had seen me rap somewhere and been super into it. That’s stupid though, Erin must have dug it too and just expressed it differently.

The crowd at City College was freaking out a bit because of how I looked. I was wearing like brown polyester slacks, a striped button up, nice leather shoes and had a grown out shag haircut and a mustache. My rhymes were automatically at least 40% more hype because they didn’t think I looked like a rapper. Maybe the margin was higher than that.

A lot of the competitors weren’t really much of rappers at all but eventually I went up against some real ones. I was using some cheap shots like going up against a heavier guy:

“You’re built like a bear I’m built like a sea otter. It’d take two of me and one of you to teeter-totter!”

But I mean it’s Battle Rap. That’s all you really can do, knock how the other rapper looks unless you heard something distinctive in their delivery style to knock them on. Every verse against me would have been some variation on “old out-of-touch ‘70s Hippy Guy”. I was twenty six which isn’t even that old but I was older than the rest of the rappers or most of them.

So Chris, the kid who did win, was pretty good. I think no matter what he should have won. The prize was like fifty dollars anyway, what do I need with that? A High School kid needs that. I’m just a little bummed out about how he won. I guess in the World of Battle Rap it’s almost a cliche:

“roughnecks from Vegan Mexican Restaurant start a brawl and knock over lemonade cart giving your opponent more time to write his verse and the judges call it quickly to avoid more drama”

You look at the big names in the genre and who hasn’t this happened to?

We were supposed to get a rematch months later when this kid Caesar was able to set up a mic and PA on the quad back at the High School. It was getting close to the time of the school’s annual unofficial “Blacks vs Mexicans” brawl that goes back to my time as a student and probably farther than that. Everyone at the school was on high alert. Caesar was knocking Chris for trying to act hard when he was actually a suburban rich kid and doing well in school. He dropped the last line:

“You ain’t nothing but an IB Drama Club geek!”

One of Chris’s rap buddies took umbrage at this line and jumped on stage to try to fight Caesar. The whole thing was so stupid, I mean Kanye went to college and Tupac was in Drama Club, there was really nothing there to catch feelings over. So me and Chris never got our rematch. A few days later I was clowning on the hothead who had messed up the battle:

“Looks like you’re in the Drama Club now!”

He denied it vehemently and said that as a teacher I had access to the list of every student’s clubs and activities. Man, I needed to get away from these kids and get on with my life.

He didn’t even get the damn joke

Bay Area 1998 – 1999 : “Loss of Motor Skills”

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It was my Physics Teacher who had called in a favor and got me accepted into San Francisco State University at the last minute so I ended up as a Physics Major. He meant well but I was not ready to be tied down by higher education. I passed all the classes and found a way to make all of the credits for the random list of classes I’d picked count toward my eventual degree but it was the last thing on my mind. I don’t really remember any of my Physics classes but I do have clear memories from both semesters of Calculus.

Not the Math part – anything higher than Trig has long since atrophied because I didn’t use it in my tutoring. I do kind of remember that Calculus is the soul of Physics and I’d wished I’d studied them at the same time. Something about using Integration or Derivation to move between position, velocity and acceleration equations and the area under a curve. Anyway I remember my two Calculus Professors.

They were both from India or Pakistan and were as different as night and day. The first one had dark skin and naturally smoky eyes – kind of a Shah Rukh Khan type. He would get fired up and use out of place sounding idioms to describe mathematical operations:

“Sometimes this is like trading the Devil for the Deep Blue Sea because you will wind up with an even more complicated Integral!”

The second one was lighter skinned, had grey hair and a mustache and was completely bald on top. I would compare him to Amitabh Bachnan in Bhoothnath but mostly because I only know two male Bollywood leads. He looked like he was perpetually amused and inspired by something only he could understand. His last name sounded like getting hit in the ear by tiny pillows, when he talked it was like getting hit in the ear with tiny pillows. I started losing a lot of my passion for The Calculus.

I went to school in San Francisco but I lived off of San Pablo Avenue near the Oakland border and I worked by the UC Berkeley campus. Transit was expensive so I worked out a system for gaming the BART. Back then the gates would record where you got in and where you got out but wouldn’t register if you had been in the system for absurd lengths of time. I had a two ticket system – I would use one to get in at 12th St Oakland but when I got to San Francisco I would exit with a different ticket that had entered somewhere on Market Street the day before. After School the San Francisco ticket is used to enter again and I exit at 19th Street Oakland with the ticket from that morning.

At this point you either understand it or you don’t. If not don’t worry – neither did any of the people I tried to teach the system to. Besides it’s not like it works anymore anyway. Sometimes a ticket would “get AIDS” which meant it suddenly stopped working and would display the dreaded “SEE AGENT” message on the gate. That meant I had to run for it – I didn’t want them catching up to my hustle. When it all went smoothly I would cross the bay for the same fare as traveling a single stop.

The time I had spent working in a Chicago junk shop did very little to make me more employable. I had a cash job walking around neighborhoods and leaving flyers to ask people if they wanted to pay to have their address numbers stenciled onto the curb, to have the existing numbers touched up really. It was meditative and a good way to get to know the East Bay neighborhoods. Then at the end of the semester my boss gave me four times my usual hours for the last week and never paid. I saw him interviewing fresh kids the next semester – that was his hustle. I tried to warn them but he played the “he’s a crazy drug addict” card and picked kids that were too green to read the situation anyway.

His name was Clay. On the off chance that he is somehow reading this – you’re a piece of shit Clay. I’m sure he probably got into the business getting stiffed by an older curb address number guy in the exact same way but that doesn’t mean I’m cool with it. If we don’t break cycles of trauma and abuse who will? The next guys? I wouldn’t count on it.

My roommate Chris Pearce passed along a job he had gotten but couldn’t hang with and became a baker at Acme Bread instead. This was the one I liked. It was a little Xerox Copy shop on Bancroft Avenue called Metro Publishing. The owner was Persian, his name was Foma but he went by Frank because he thought an American name would be better for business. It was a good pattern for me – playing sidekick and underling to an eccentric ethnic small business owner. I would repeat this one back in Chicago with Papa and the Italian Coffee Bar.

Frank was well read, played NPR in the shop and moved with precise, practiced mannerisms. In short he was a role model. Our shop was tiny but the two of us did more volume than businesses five or six times our size. Frank’s personality had won him the Reader contract for the entire East Asian Languages Department. A Reader was a bound booklet that would be produced when a Professor wanted selections from several hard to find or out of print books but together in a single volume. Kind of a quasi-legal DIY anthology textbook but it would get switched up a little bit every semester. If I had to guess I’d say they probably don’t exist anymore – it’s either on the internet or an actual book.

The best part was that if my eyes scanned over anything that looked interesting I was allowed to make myself a take home copy. I encountered some of my favorite books like this – the one I always remember is the Gylfaginning from the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson.

I also ended up making photocopies of books by hand for Graduate Students who were doing research. This was my favorite part of the job. You start at the back of a book and press two open pages against the glass. You don’t have to wait for the copy to finish, as soon as the light finishes scanning you can move the book. Flip one page forward and press it back against the glass – when I got good at it I would be ready for the next photocopy before the machine even was. I was running at maximum efficiency for the machines of the era.

If you do everything correctly you end up with a copy of the book already in order sitting on top of the exit tray – double sided of course because who wants to waste paper? Our machines didn’t have the attachments to collate or staple, we did all of that by hand. Bifolds, trifolds – the only thing that mattered to me was being fast. I wanted to put on an event called The Desktop Olympics where professionals from around the world could compete to see who could assemble and staple a booklet in the shortest amount of time.

One of our regulars was Iris Chang, who had just published her ground breaking work on the Rape of Nanking and similar atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in World War II. I must have handled a decent volume of her written sources for her third book but I wasn’t able to understand the written characters. One day at work we heard her being interviewed on All Things Considered or another NPR program – Frank made me promise that I wouldn’t say anything because he was worried about upsetting her modesty.

I must have been working on my degree in Anthropology at San Diego State University when I heard the news about her suicide. It felt like she had made the ultimate sacrifice, allowing herself to become haunted in order to bring a voice and some small justice to so many ghosts. She haunts me as well – looking at her photo brings me viscerally back to the short time I spent in her presence. I can see the tilt of her shoulders and the downward angle of her head as she stood over one of the photocopiers I had spent so many hours on.

I know very many people that have died but only Iris is a ghost. What I mean is that usually if I think about, look at a photo of or speak to a person who has passed away in a dream, whatever emotions this evokes are accompanied by the awareness that this person is totally and irrevocably gone. It doesn’t feel that way with Iris. It feels like if I allowed myself to become obsessed and let her memory grow the way a hunger or resentment does in my mind and body, and decided to reach my hand across the strange diaphanous veil that separates the living from the dead then I am certain that I would feel something reaching back.

I don’t think that it would be a very good idea.

I did a little bit of everything but one of my favorite tasks was proofreading field notes for an archaeologist named Crawford Greenewalt. He was the perfect stereotype of his profession – salt and pepper hair in a boyish cut, thick glasses and the tweed blazers with the leather elbow pads. He probably played a decisive role in my choice of a major when I did return to college. Frank hadn’t told me I couldn’t mention his field notes so the next time he came in I told him how much I had enjoyed the bit about some structures at a dig in Sardis with atypical terra cotta roofing material of several mixed types. He flashed a glowing smile:

“Splendid, Splendid!”

It looks like he passed away of a brain tumor in 2012.

I’m not sure what she did at the University but we had one older female customer who was extremely particular. Chris had told me a story about her from before I took over the job for him. One day she announced out of nowhere:

“I’m glad that neither of you wear cologne or aftershave, if you did put it on one day it would probably give me loss of motor skills!”

I’m not trying to mock or belittle the horrors of extreme fragrance sensitivity but her stringent list of different demands for every single photocopying job seemed to suggest that this might have been part of a list of hypochondrias based on a desire to control other’s behavior. When my two semesters were finished and I had decided decisively that I wouldn’t be going back to college I ended up closing the shop alone on the night of my final shift. It wasn’t a repeat of the Clay situation – I had already been paid in full but for some reason Frank had to leave early.

Minutes before closing time she came bursting in and began delineating the requirements for a brand new order that sounded like a good six to seven hours worth of work. I stopped her:

“When I leave here tonight I will be leaving this job forever and will never see Frank again. This new order sounds like the kind of thing that would be hard to convey through a written note. You will need to come back in the next time Frank is open and explain all of this to him.”

“Oh for Heaven’s sake!”

She threw her arms up in disgust and stormed back out again.

I left a note on the counter suggesting that he tell her he had fired me for my insolence if she ended up complaining. I turned off the lights and neon signs, powered down the photocopiers and locked the front door, dropping the key in the mail slot…

Chicago 2007 : “Everything There Was Dark And Dirty”

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In Seventh Grade my English Teacher put me at the girls’ table. It wasn’t the only table with girls at it but it was the one with the toughest girls, kind of like The Shangri-Las, and it was definitely the only table with four girls and just one guy. I think it was two white girls who were trying to get into Alternative Rock but also a little sporty and an Asian and Mexican American girl who were both pretty “hood” or “ghetto”. Whenever it got to the time when we were supposed to be working or reading but you can get away with talking as long as it’s low enough that only people at the same table can hear the conversation went straight to boys and periods and sex: girl stuff. One of the girls tilted her head toward me meaningfully but the others were unanimous:

“He doesn’t count!”

I don’t know exactly why I was instantly and instinctively othered. Maybe it was because I was quiet or wore weird thrift store clothes or because I hadn’t tried to flirt or hit on any of them or some other energetic reason that isn’t easy to put into words – I only know that it was the correct decision. I’ve been more or less comfortable at the girls’ table ever since – the bands I was in were with women, my fondest remembered living situations were with female roommates, I’m instantly comfortable gossiping and being catty but bristle at what’s generally called the “bro code”.

I realized young that a lot of the traits that got me bullied in the society of other boys, a love of reading and other indoor activities coupled with an aversion for sports and competitive roughhousing, would probably be more readily accepted if I had been a girl. I’m not trying to downplay the considerable male privilege I’ve enjoyed or the unique and many tribulations faced by adolescent girls. I also can’t pretend I’ve never acted like a creep or perpetuated and reinforced the many types of misogyny present in my communities and society at large. My only point is that “platonic male friend” is a role I click into extremely naturally.

I don’t remember how I started talking to Kim. We had been running into each other at the concerts and art events in the Bridgeport building for Ed Marszewski’s Lumpen magazine: The Co-Prosperity Sphere. She had a bright smile, small frame and a tendency toward classically feminine and sophisticated clothing and makeup. She was really obsessed with a song called Twelve Thirty by The Mamas and the Papas and would sing it to me whenever we would end up outside or somewhere quiet. She wasn’t a great singer. She was like me – emotional and enthusiastic but far from pitch perfect.

I used to live in New York City

Everything there was dark and dirty

Outside my window was a steeple

With a clock that always read twelve thirty

I was impressed with the casual and unashamed perversity of the song’s lyrics. Nothing crazy but it is written from the perspective of an older man leching out on younger female joggers. I had grown up with the music but I hadn’t known much about the Laurel Canyon scene before this point. I started reading more about it and the band’s dark and tragic backstory. I was impressed that she would always sing the entire song without ever seeming to be self conscious about how she sounded or whether it might be boring me. It never was.

Maybe it’s that I don’t go out and drink anymore but it seems like you don’t see people singing to themselves or each other as much anymore. Everybody has headphones. I sang some of it to myself today while walking the dog in a small former train and logging town called McCloud. The streets were nearly empty and thick with snow. I still felt a little out of place.

We were both interested in seeking out new experiences with rare and hard to find psychedelic drugs. There was this guy who considered himself a “shaman” and lived over by the Dvorak pool across from a house that was covered in decorative garden sculptures. I wonder if it’s still there, I couldn’t find an image when I tried to look it up. The guy’s energy was weird and he was pretty creepy with girls but he always had a bunch of entheogens from all over the world and wasn’t shy about using drugs to get people to hang out with him.

He invited me and Kim over late one night after we all had been at the same party and it was ending. When we got a quick moment alone she stared into my eyes and made the following entreaty:

“You have to help me make sure he doesn’t creep out on me!”

We had never talked much but we recognized something in each other and shared a bond. We were going over there for the same reason but she was vulnerable in a way that I wasn’t. We needed to look out for each other.

The shaman guy wanted to smoke what he said was a “DMT analogue”. All of the short acting dissociative psychedelics seem to work in a similar way in that you need to hold down a heroic amount of smoke in a single hit or you aren’t going to reach the threshold dose. I had never been much of a marijuana smoker so I didn’t really have the necessary skill set to accomplish this. I had smoked what I had been told was DMT and Salvia in the past but never enough of it for it to actually do anything.

This time I smoked enough of it.

I saw what looked like a perfectly symmetrical clown or devil face made out of red and orange shifting cartoon flames. It reminded me of characters and art I had seen in passing on albums by The Insane Clown Posse. The flames seemed to surge and flicker as it addressed me:

“come here”

My perspective seemed to zoom in closer to see it brighter and clearer detail but it didn’t actually change in size. Kind of like the trick where they zoom in and dolly out at the same time in old movies so the background falls away from a character. It repeated the command:

“COME HERE!”

Once again it seemed to thicken and focus. The flames were truly dancing and scintillating with light as the command was repeated for a third and final time:

“COME HERE!!”

Floating forward my point of view fell into darkness like the largest drop on a rollercoaster, some sort of vertigo was present – not as discomfort but as the awareness of motion. The phrase “down the rabbit hole” is a bit of a cliche in discussing the effects of perception altering drugs but that’s definitely what it was like.

I found myself in a rapidly rotating cartoon room. Every time it spun around I would see the distinctive white glove, yellow shoe and thin black tail of Disney’s Mickey Mouse as he disappeared through a door that slammed shut behind him. The room was spinning in a way that I never saw more of him than these three features but I instantly knew who he was. There was a tiny touch of the paranoia that comes with not being able to see a person or entity’s face while tripping but it wasn’t much of an issue.

On each rotation the momentum of this character’s sudden passage would upset a vase or potted cactus that looked like it had come from the fictional Coconino County of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. The plant wasn’t the same every time but it did always move in the same way: spinning slightly outward on its rounded bottom before resolving its torque and momentum and returning to rest. The other features of the room had the same bright colors and playful geometry of the iconic comic strip.

If there were other visions in store for me beyond the perplexing spinning room I would never get the opportunity to find out.

The sound of laughter began to penetrate into this subterranean bunker.

“What is that? Who’s laughing?”

I began to realize that the laughter sounded familiar and distinctly feminine.

“That sounds like my friend Kim. Wasn’t I supposed to be doing something for my friend Kim? I was! I was supposed to be making sure that shaman guy doesn’t try to creep out on her. Wait! I can’t do that from here!”

I found myself back in my regular body where I had collapsed onto my knees after smoking. Kimberly and the shaman were looking at me and laughing, everything appeared to be fine. I was kicking myself, my first and so far only DMT journey had been cut short early because I had ignored one of the fundamental karmic laws of the universe.

“If you wouldn’t go to somebody’s house for the pure enjoyment of talking and hanging out it’s probably not a good idea to go over for free drugs.”

We ran out of the DMT analogue without either of my fellow psychonauts actually managing to achieve the same scale of intoxication. This would have been a great time for Kim and I to leave but the shaman was pulling out all the stops to keep us there. He left the room and returned with some reddish liquid in a glass decanter that had been wrapped with snake skin and leather – a decoction of Ayahuasca and Syrian Rue. I tried to drink some but it tasted a bit like bile and the vomit flavored Harry Potter jelly beans.

I still managed to hold down significantly more than anybody else I was with. After a bit of time the shadows on the wooden floors seemed to be stretching and slowly coming to life. They were deeper than they had been and seemed to be building themselves up for a big reveal like the scene in Ghost when the spirits of the dead reach from the street to drag the antagonist into hell. It never happened – the energy reversed and things started moving back toward the mundane and normal.

I saw Kim off safely and biked home in the until recently rainy night. With the moisture in the air and the lingering effects of the buffet of drugs I had consumed the green and red traffic lights seemed to shine with newfound holy energy. Pulsing against the blackness and refracted light they brought a newfound urgency and relevance to their ancient wisdom concerning when to stop and when to go…

It wouldn’t be the last time I would see the shaman but I ensured our future encounters were parsed in a spiritually safer form of reciprocity: money for drugs. I bought some LSD and Fly Agaric mushrooms and ended up with a little bag of golden power called kratom for the first time. On a raucous night I followed the acid with the red and white berserker caps and convinced a party full of people to drink my urine with cherry coke and whiskey in the hope for a transference of psychedelic effects.

I saw Kim one or two times afterwards. I think she had a party at Heaven Gallery where everyone was encouraged to bring incense and green cubes of florist’s oasis foam were absolutely inundated with it – transforming the air into a riot of curling blue and grey smoke and disparate floral, herbal and wood smells.

I decided to write this piece tonight because I saw that Kim has been having trouble with someone harassing her. I wanted her to know that I’m still at the girls’ table and I’ve still got her back. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that nobody creeps on her.

Cloudy waters cast no reflection

Images of beauty lie there stagnant

Vibrations bounce in no direction

And lie there shattered into fragments

Los Angeles 2012 : “No Weapon Formed Against Me Shall Prosper”

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When I first moved to Los Angeles in 2010 I ended up in the Ojai Hot Springs with some representatives of the “Spooky New Age Chick Community” I’ve referred to in other pieces. Somebody wanted to go check out the Krotona Institute of Theosophy and after a quick tour of the grounds we ended up in the bookshop. I wasn’t expecting to see anything that interested me but my eye landed on an affordable paperback edition of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis Regis or The Lesser Key of Solomon.

I hadn’t actually read the book before and it would end up having a profound effect on my life and the way in which I would come to view the world. My spiritual history is too rocky and complicated to detail here but I had been self identifying as a Witch for several years at this point. I had briefly looked into Wicca when a girl that I had a crush on in ninth grade had told me she was a practitioner. My impression was basically that if I wanted to practice a religion that was cobbled together from a mish-mash of Pagan traditions it would be easier to just become a Christian.

When Magic did become an important part of my life it was kind of like improvised music – I didn’t really have specific source material or role models, I was making it up as I went along. In a way I think it had always been a part of my life: I was named after a mythical bard whose parents were a Giant and a Faerie woman who had been enchanted by a Druid. My dreams were bringing me directly into supernatural landscapes where I made contact with supernatural entities.

I was reading Greek, Norse and many other types of mythology from a young age, I was very influenced by an illustrated copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy that my mother bought me in third grade and adolescence brought on works by John Crowley, Neil Gaiman and other writers from the Vertigo imprint. Magical Thinking and Magical Ideation were part of my internal life but at the same time I wouldn’t have necessarily said that Magic was a thing I “practiced”. The things that brought Magic out of my head and into the physical world around me were LSD and an aesthetic enthusiasm for Folk Magic shops I saw around Chicago called Botanicas.

While I wasn’t working from any kind of concrete guide I realized from the very beginning that there were rules. I didn’t think that it was a good idea to try to use Magic to get anything specific or to make anybody specific change their feelings or behavior in any way. It wasn’t that I didn’t think these things were possible but rather that I didn’t think they were ethical. Another factor is that both sides of my family had instilled in me an insuppressible instinct for thrift and I knew that these types of Magic would simply not be cost effective.

Many practitioners of Magic talk about the importance of “intention” but for most of my practice I basically felt the opposite. If I wasn’t trying to do anything specific it didn’t seem like I should have any specific intention. While I recognize that Magic is fundamentally a tool in my case I was using it for ambience. Older readers will probably remember a form of Christmas Tinsel that I just learned is called Hair Tinsel. It comes in little y-shaped pieces that you can just kind of throw at the tree and they will hook onto the pine needles and put a little shine or glitter wherever they land.

This is the part where I have to admit that I was mostly attracted to and had a passion for Dark Magic. To many people Dark Magic is not and never will be a thing that is okay to do for any reason whatsoever. I figured that if I wasn’t actually pursuing power or trying to harm anybody it could be rationalized. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that it was something I was going to do no matter what so I needed to do it as safely and ethically as possible. I know that for many people this is still all going to sound incredibly irresponsible.

I wrote a song that I came to understand as a curse and performed it over and over again – first in Living Hell and afterwards as Bleak End at Bernie’s. It wasn’t aimed at anybody in particular but was rather a general invocation for suffering, darkness and chaos. Not that I wanted there to be more of these things or that I wanted to upset the balance of the universe in their favor – it was more that I saw these things as indelible and necessary and had felt inspired to serve as a conduit for them:

“Give me blood

Give me loss

Victory at hopeless cost

Wicked shelter

Vicious burden

Let the loose ends twist and tangle”

I had been accumulating amulets and talismans around my neck and somewhere in America a Thrift Store offered up a laminated circular badge with the words “WORLD’S WORST MAGICIAN”. I had been dressing like a cartoon witch, Baroque vampire or an assassin in an Elizabethan Play so the label was coming off a tad more suspect than it would have been perceived on someone with a top hat and sequined bow tie. People would ask me whether it was supposed to mean that I was inept or that I was evil and whether it referred to stage magic or Magic Magic.

The answer to these questions was invariably “both”.

While visiting New Orleans I brought a folding table down to Jackson Square and set up shop by the Palm Readers and Fortune Tellers. A piece of poster board advertised “BAD MAGIC” with bad luck charms, poison your dreams and unfortunate consequences offered on the underlying bullet list. I mostly got dirty looks and people asking me if I was serious or if it was a hidden camera prank show; a few people just wanted pictures as I had gone all out on a particularly colorful witch costume. One Midwestern Tourist actually took me up on it and asked for a bad luck charm. An improvised ceremony centered on wrapping burning hair around breaking twigs transferred the negative energies into a penny.

I told her to keep it in her left pocket until the next truly awful thing in her life happened after which she should throw it away. In a roundabout way I was actually trying to be helpful; we’ve all got bad luck on the horizon with or without a charm but she had a vessel to isolate and dispose of it once it had manifested. It was the most purpose-driven act of my Dark Magic career and the only one for which I received compensation. I told her to pay what she wanted and I can’t remember what she decided on.

The Lesser Key of Solomon changed everything for me. It reformed me and it gave me structure. I began to realize that the Dark Magic could be isolated within characters that I wrote musicals around and performed for brief interludes on stage instead of allowing it to permeate every aspect of my personal life. I didn’t mind talking about Astrology with friends who were interested in it but it had never exactly clicked for me. Classical Astrology was completely different. The supernatural had always presented as chaotic and lawless but I suddenly understood a system of Order presided over by Planetary Daemons and Archangels.

There is Magic in the art of Urban Planning but not all cities are equally occult. Washington D.C. stands out among the cities I have first hand experience of as the most obvious example of this. Streets are laid out in specific shapes for specific reasons and literal Temples are erected for the worship of ancestors and ideas. Los Angeles is a close second. My brother-in-law had given me a heavy beach cruiser bicycle that I inundated with talismans and used to travel at least thirty miles throughout the city on a daily basis.

Los Angeles plays a very specific role in the formation of myths and dreams within the American psyche that would not be possible without the use of Magic. The very name Hollywood refers to principles and practices the Druids had used to organize their world by nurturing spiritual power within sacred groves of trees. Of course Los Angeles is also home to The Magic Castle, the foremost destination for learning, performing and watching legerdemain and the Arts of Illusion.

With my new paperback grimoire as key and legend I was beginning to construct a system of personal wards and sigils informed by my own perambulations through the city. I lived near it’s center on Crenshaw and Washington and worked in a private tutoring center in Fox Hills next to the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery. I tried to explore as much of the city as possible but was establishing patterns between Griffith Park, Exposition Park, the La Brea Tar Pits, Culver City and a course that connected my home and place of employment along the consecrated waters of Ballona Creek.

On the corner of West Slauson Avenue and Heatherdale Drive I came upon a collection of buildings I would come to know as The Temple of Mars. An oddly shaped and upwardly sloped patch of asphalt contained a closed down shop with stairs leading to the gravel roof and ritual platform, a wall presumably built for enclosing dumpsters and a double sided billboard. The structures were painted in a bright, martial shade of red and the marquee declaimed “NO WEAPON FORMED AGAINST ME SHALL PROSPER ISAIAH 54:17” to the East and West.

I always presumed that this complex had been most recently used as some kind of church but outside of the Biblical quote there wasn’t actually any evidence for that conclusion. From a utilitarian standpoint it seemed best appointed for a tiny used car dealership. For the two years that I lived in Los Angeles and worked on Slauson it would sit entirely vacant except for brief periods around the Winter Solstice when it was used to sell Christmas Trees.

I should add that it was used by me to conduct secret rituals under cover of night but the property’s owner had not been informed of this particular function and would have most likely not approved.

My years in Los Angeles were among the most creative and outwardly social of my life. I ended up on two complete U.S. tours as Bleak End at Bernie’s and in a short lived band called Dealbreaker but I was also hitting a festival circuit where I explored the theatrical. The solo musicals Castle Freak and Diving God and an Industrial setting of the major soliloquies from Hamlet I called The Chameleon’s Dish. I was happy to be in a good place to harness the creative energy which I believe to have originated from within my fundamental biological drive for partnership.

I came from what would be called an “intact household” which only means that my parents were married and remained so their entire lives. While I don’t idealize this arrangement or disparage other ones in my parents’ case it did seem to be the correct one. The only reason that I mention this is that it most likely played a role in the formation of my romantic perspectives on relationships. I had always dreamed of being married when I was older and in my earliest crushes I would fantasize about the names and personalities of mine and my crush-object’s future children.

I strongly believe in the serial monogamy model for adult romantic relationships and mostly had either closure or civil associations with my previous partners. There was an experience at the end of 2009 that I will get into in other pieces that had left me feeling vulnerable until some time in 2012. I had had a frustrating two years for relationships and it was beginning to erode certain aspects of how I saw myself. There was a woman who I knew socially and was attracted to but hadn’t necessarily thought about in that particular context. One night a show was ending near her home and she asked me:

“Do you have any diseases? I feel like having sex.”

While I’m not opposed to casual sexual interactions the crassness of the proposal and the other things I was experiencing left me feeling wounded. I talked to her about it soon afterwards and she told me that she was acting out of an impression of what men generally find exciting and desirable. She wasn’t expecting me to respond emotionally and in a way that seemed more feminine. We decided to try things afterwards because there was still mutual attraction and it seemed that we better understood each other.

I appreciated that she wore really nice lingerie for the encounter but we ended up not being compatible in that fashion. Touch did not convey intimacy between us but rather left us feeling isolated. She said that when I touched her she “felt like a canyon” – my experience was similar although I wouldn’t have phrased it in the exact same way.

All of this led to me decamping to The Temple of Mars in early 2012 when Venus was bright in the evening sky to perform the most intentional ceremony of my Magical career. I prayed to the planet Venus in the East and toward each of the other Cardinal Directions to manifest stable partnership for the rest of my life.

I carried a Library of Congress Tape Recorder for the Blind everywhere I went so I could listen to music on it’s rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery while I was riding my bicycle. The other elements of the ritual consisted of playing the version of Prologue/Anvil of Crom from the 1982 Conan the Barbarian soundtrack with the spoken monologue and using a cube of camphor to light a knife on fire and hold it aloft as an offering to the heavens…

By the end of the year the tape player had offered itself up as a sacrifice when a car hit me from behind on my bicycle and I was with the woman I have been essentially married to for the last ten years and plan to spend the remainder of my days with.

It is of course debatable as to whether or not the two things are directly related. The secret of every Rainmaker and Weather Magician is that sooner or later it always rains. Questions of Belief and Faith have never been particularly important to me in terms of Spirituality. We shape our world and are shaped by it and nothing happens differently than the way it did in this best of all possible worlds…

When I lived in Chicago I used to go to services at the Christian Science Reading Room because of the way the futuristic building had been designed to amplify the pipe organ. From the outside it looks like an inverted speaker cone and features a small cactus garden. The first time I went to a service the Speaker read some writings by Mary Baker Eddy on the definition of the term “Spirit” in the context of that religion.

On that particular day the words spoke to me but it has been difficult in the interim to relocate the exact passage. Ultimately it was an attempt to use words to create a rough approximation of something that is fundamentally indescribable, much like the familiar story of several blind men describing an elephant. I don’t think it was about the particular words so much as that Spirit was something I felt the Presence of that day.

In my own life these moments are rare and therefore extremely valuable to me. I spent a little over a year as a practicing Catholic but I don’t think that was so much about the power of Spirit as it was about the power of Ritual. There is no way to really know when or if I will have the opportunity to feel the Grace and Presence of Spirit in the future.

I’ve written this last sentence and erased it five or six times now and I think I have to accept that nothing will sound right here.

I can’t describe that kind of state when I’m not in it and if I were in it I probably wouldn’t be able to put it into words.

I’m just going to stop here.

Vermont 2008 : The Bus Part Twelve “The Band’s Called Death, Turkeys! / A Ghost Story”

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Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven

I was touring in a band called Living Hell on an old Oakland City Bus that John Benson had converted into a mobile concert venue by installing a bank of wheelchair batteries under the stage. There’s so much that could be said about that bus and tour but I’ll mostly do it in other pieces. I will say that this marked the beginning of me being the lead vocalist in bands for the simple reason that no one else wanted to do it. Unfortunately I have never watched The Zen of Screaming, not even to this day, and my voice was instantly shredded and only got worse.

The tour took us to Vermont; I don’t know what city but it’s the one with a statue of a Lake Monster. We met up with a kid named Julian who a lot of the other band members knew already. He had a tape of this band his uncles were in – a forgotten and groundbreaking Punk/Metal/Prog group from the ‘70s made up of Black guys from Detroit. We were all completely blown away by the music and couldn’t believe almost nobody had heard it at that point. He told us a story about some record company suits telling his uncles to change the name to something more commercial. One of the band members lit a joint and put his feet up on the desk:

“The name is Death, turkeys!”

There’s actually a Richard Pryor sketch about a Black punk/metal band called Black Death playing for and then mass murdering a white audience. The fringes of comedy usually express the limits of what the society of its time would or would not realistically be comfortable with. In that decade a Black band called Death was viewed as too militant and confrontational for the major labels and independent music was barely a thing. Over the following years we would all watch the newly released album and an accompanying documentary finally bring the group the recognition they deserved over thirty years after the fact.

The way that bus shows generally worked is John would pick a place to park unlikely to result in noise complaints then load up the local bands and audience for a show. The tour was plagued by mechanical problems – mostly regarding the system that had been installed to allow the bus to run on vegetable oil. In West Virginia we attempted to reverse our fortunes with a Viking Funeral for a mummified squirrel but the relief was only temporary. In Vermont a unique gremlin manifested: the wheelchair batteries had not charged and there was no juice with which to have a rock concert.

Ordinarily this would be a huge disappointment and mood killer but I happen to have a very limited and specific super power. I always seem to know exactly what activity to suggest when the morale of five to twenty of my peers is perched precariously on the precipice of disaffected futility. In this case we were sitting on a bus with a few weak sources of electric illumination but little else, a few brown bags were in a few hands but nowhere near enough for a drinking game.

I proposed that we tell each other ghost stories.

I’m ashamed to admit that while several of these anecdotes were proffered by the contingent of Vermont natives I can’t recall a single detail concerning the substance of these narratives but I have an ironclad excuse. It would have been bad form to steer the gathering toward this most ancient of pastimes without a macabre tale of my own as offering and I was racking my brain to invent one. I tried to concentrate on grief, dread and the supernatural; I employed the device of “this happened to a friend” for veracity and ended up with the following.

It should go without saying that what you are about to read is absolutely and 100% true.

***********************************************

Francois was my best friend in High School and he even ended up living with me at my parent’s house but we didn’t know each other at all when we were younger. He grew up in a slightly rougher neighborhood up the street from me called Lomita Village with his French Canadian mother and two sisters who were significantly older. He had a best friend who lived across the street from him named Jamie and their friendship was founded on one of the most superficial yet stable initiatives for childhood association: Jamie always had all of the best toys and video games.

It wasn’t that Jamie’s parents were rich, the entire street sat just under the line dividing poverty from the middle class, but rather that he had some kind of terminal health condition. Francois couldn’t remember exactly what this was except that Jamie stayed small, low weight and didn’t go outside much. He missed a lot of school. Francois was actually a few years older than Jamie but, as is usually the case in these situations, Jamie’s parents were just excited that he had a friend at all. When Jamie did make it to school he wasn’t particularly popular.

The late ‘80s were a bit of a Golden Age in action figures and home video game consoles and the way Francois tells it Jamie’s house was like a Toys R Us. He had all the Transformers, Thunder Cats, G.I. Joes and even the deep cuts like the short lived holographic Visionaries and Supernaturals. More importantly he had a Nintendo Entertainment System and would get all the new cartridges like the game changing Super Mario Brothers Three. When Jamie was feeling a bit healthier and energized they would play with Nerf stuff in his fenced off backyard and get Blackie, his family’s Labrador Retriever, to bring back the foam balls, darts and arrows.

Eventually Jamie had to go into the hospital and Francois was brought over to visit a few times but he had to go back to his own school and he started to make other friends. Then one day Francois came home from school and his mother was sitting by the phone with the expression of somebody who was desperate to find meaning in a vicarious expression of grief. Jamie had died.

Francois dressed up and went to the funeral with his mother and sisters; Jamie’s father hugged him and cried and held onto Francois like he was the last solid object that could protect him from falling into the yawning reality that had suddenly opened below his feet. Jamie’s mother was smoking a cigarette and staring off blankly into the distance; intently focused on an invisible landmark that nobody could ever reach.

Francois went on with his life but Jamie’s house across the street began to look like it was being swallowed by time. The car never left the driveway, evidently Jamie’s parents had simply stopped going to their jobs, and the lawn grew wild and became overgrown with weeds. White envelopes and colorful junk mail overstuffed the mailbox and the mail carrier started piling it on a little shelf by the door most people used for potted plants. A free local newspaper of coupons and classifieds started colonizing the driveway – turning yellow in the sun after being soaked by rain.

One day Francois came home from school and his mother was wearing a similar expression to the time that Jamie died although she wasn’t sitting by the phone this time. She crossed her arms and declared decisively:

“Francois! You will go to visit them!”

He tried to argue that they probably didn’t want to see him and that he had to finish his work for school but his mother was having none of it.

“You were his best friend! When they go to Disneyland they bring you and even buy your ticket! Now you can not go? You must be too busy to watch the television and use my computer also then, yes?”

There was no getting out of it. Francois nervously walked over and knocked on the door. Jamie’s father opened it instantly as if he’d been expecting him, wearing an almost absurdly relaxed smile that looked like his face had been made of clay and he had reshaped it in front of a mirror. Jamie’s mother had occasionally smoked outside before but now she sat in a cloud of haze in the unlit living room. A large crystal ashtray overflowed on the end table beside her recliner as she gazed in concentration at a television with the volume turned off.

Francois said hello but if she actually heard him she didn’t show it outwardly.

They went into Jamie’s room and it had been left exactly the way it was before Jamie had gone into the hospital. There was even fresh folded laundry sitting on top of the dresser the way it had been whenever Francois had visited in the past. The Sega Genesis had actually come out while Jamie was in the hospital and his parents had bought one in the hope that he would be able to come home and play it. It sat in it’s box and while Francois was as excited to play it as any other kid his age he didn’t quite feel comfortable enough to ask if they could hook it up.

Jamie’s father turned on the Nintendo and Super Mario Brothers Three was already in the slot. I’m pretty sure the same pattern established itself in every materially lopsided friendship of the era: whoever’s house and game it actually was played as Mario and the friend who always came over got Luigi. In my experience I was always taller and more lanky than all of my friends who had Nintendos so the characters seemed to fit. This had also been the case with Francois and Jamie but now Jamie’s father, a full grown man, was controlling Mario and the whole thing just felt wrong.

On top of that Jamie’s father either didn’t know how to play the game or didn’t feel like actually trying. He just died on the first jump or turtle shell over and over but didn’t even respond like anything bad had happened. Francois cleared a couple levels but started to feel embarrassed about how one sided it was and just switched to dying on purpose too. Jamie’s father started saying really awkward things:

“I bet Jamie’s looking down and is so happy to see us playing like this! He probably wishes that he could come play too!”

It went to the game over screen and Francois thanked Jamie’s father and told him he had probably better be going home. He figured that it would be a one time thing but the lawn and junk mail stayed exactly the same and his mother started making him go over every Friday. She did it right before the weekend so she could reward him with a trip to an arcade or a show at a museum he wanted to see but he was basically forced. He hated it every single time but he didn’t have a choice.

Things settled into a routine. Jamie’s mother never stopped smoking, said anything or even turned up the volume on her TV. Francois stopped even greeting her because he started to feel like he was being rude. He would rush to the first Game Over screen but Jamie’s father had figured out how to continue so it became three continues every time. Three continues of rushed deaths and forced smiles and oppressive grief and never moving past the first level; not even out of boredom.

Finally he decided that if he was going to have to be there anyway he might as well get to play the Sega Genesis. Nobody else he knew had been able to convince their parents to buy one and the TV commercials made it look as good as the games they had in the arcade. He turned to look at the box where it was still sitting on top of the dresser and froze.

The folded shirt sitting on top of the pile of clothing was blue. The last three times he had been there it had definitely been red. For some reason he knew instantly that something was very, very wrong. Jamie’s father noticed where he was staring and turned, somehow smiling even wider than the one he had frozen his face into for every one of these bizarre ritual visits:

“Guess what Francois?! There’s somebody here who’s very excited to see you!”

He stood and Francois had no choice but to get up and follow him. He had been raised to never say no to a grownup in a position of authority and wasn’t quite old enough for the first wave of rebellion although it would be coming very soon. They walked out of the bedroom and through the oppressive miasma of cigarettes and absence to the sliding glass door that led to the backyard.

Blackie, Jamie’s Labrador Retriever, had a child’s red shirt pulled over his head and front legs and a pair of shorts that forced his tail to run through one of the leg holes in the back. The moment it heard the glass door begin to open it pulled itself up onto its hind legs and turned expectantly toward Jamie’s father. Blackie would have wagged his tail at least a tiny bit in recognition but it could only twitch because of the awkward way it had been threaded through a leg hole. Jamie’s father called:

“Jamie! Look who’s here to see you! It’s your friend Francois, Jamie!”

The dog’s eyes looked wild and lost, as if it wasn’t exactly sure if it was being praised, punished or some sadistic combination of the two. It let out a faint whimper and started to walk forward in awkward, swaying steps. It couldn’t properly use its tail for balance and this forced it to compensate by moving its front legs in small, stiff gestures that looked like a cross between begging and the expressive movements of an opera singer. It seemed frightened, like it knew how completely unnatural everything that was happening was but some combination of training and crushing, tyrannical need left it helpless to deviate from the very actions that unsettled it.

Blackie inched forward in tiny increments but his expression was frantic. He opened his mouth and made a sound that didn’t quite register as a yelp, growl or bark. Something in between all of these but also different from all of them as well. It was like he was trying to talk.

Francois ran out of the house and no matter what his mother threatened him with he never returned again. Not too long after the car disappeared and he overheard his mother talking to someone about how Jamie’s mother had left. The grass kept growing and the mail kept piling up but he never saw Jamie’s father again.

Even years later he would catch tiny flickers of movement through the windows and quickly look away, crossing to the other side of the street.

Next Part:

San Diego 2000 : “I Put That Baby Where The Sun Don’t Shine”

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Writing all of this stuff out has done wonders for my memory. There is a borderline magical concept in the book Little Big by John Crowley called a “memory mansion”. The idea is that if you visualize your memories as an imaginary structure of some kind it will help you retain memories, make hitherto unseen connections, bring back forgotten details and even do a bit of divination – like if two walls are actual memories but the corner where they meet is something you’ve never experienced or been aware of you will acquire a sense of this thing because there needs to be a corner there.

I’ve never consciously attempted this but I did read the novel very young and several more times in the intervening years. I think my memory just kind of works in a similar fashion naturally – maybe everybody’s does, I’ve never lived in another person’s head. I’ll be looking for some music to play on a road trip and suddenly remember seeing an ad for the Lida Husik album Fly Stereophonic in this free electronica and rave culture magazine called Sweater way back in High School. We didn’t end up actually liking that album for that drive right then but her earlier one Bozo turned out to complement the empty Northern California streets perfectly.

Anyway in one of my earlier pieces I only vaguely recalled the timeline of when I started drinking alcohol but after spending so much time focusing on that era it has returned in perfect focus. It was Summer of 1999 and me and Francois had just driven to Chicago with this guy Andy Robillard we met in the Balboa Park pickup soccer games arranged by Rafter Roberts and Pall Jenkins from Three Mile Pilot. We had moved into an empty room with Brandi and her goth roommate at the time Kelly.

This girl Shana who lived on the other side of the brick building was having a Rock Star themed party. Her apartment was accessed through a different door and staircase from California Avenue but around the back by the El tracks the wooden porches were all connected. I had a huge crush on Shana and didn’t bother to hide it to the chagrin of her boyfriend who made enhanced CD multimedia content for bands like Cheap Trick and gave me my first stick and poke tattoo. It’s a bad habit of mine – at least I’m married now so whatever little flirting I still do has a safety on it.

I decided that this party would be my first time getting drunk. Francois put on loose camo pants and did heavy makeup to go as Maxim Reality from the Prodigy Breathe video. I was Iggy Pop – I had one of those platinum blonde ‘80s rocker wigs and was super proud that I could squeeze into Kelly’s black vinyl pants. She had a medical condition that prevented her from developing any real fat or muscle tissue and weighed less than a hundred pounds. I had gone through a patch of manorexia – I weighed 150 pounds when I was 14 and always wanted to get back to that number (I never actually did) and shaved all my body hair for a bit. I guess most guys look forward to puberty but I wasn’t having it.

I think I probably ended up drinking Bacardi and Coke but the more memorable part was that I ended up making out with a girl called Fashion Julie who went to the Art Institute. Outside of a brief relationship (2 months 14 days) when I was 15 romance had been a dead end for me. I was too socially awkward and didn’t have the confidence to ever make a move. I noticed immediately that alcohol seemed to solve that problem although it wasn’t exactly reliable.

She told me that she was into the rave scene. I invited her on a date to go see either Physics or Aspects of Physics at the Fireside, I thought the music would be somewhat similar to what she was into but it wasn’t at all. She invited me to a Rave at a closed down Roller Rink on the Far South Side. Delta 9 was performing with a trumpet player and looped projections of exploding robots from Sci-Fi movies. She started making out with some guy who gave her ecstasy. He was going to give her a ride back to her dorm in the Loop, I tried to get her to convince him to drop me off at the Blue Line on the way but he wasn’t having it. The rave ended and I walked the streets until the trains I needed started up again.

Anyway the fact that I was no longer a complete teetotaler shaped my experience back in San Diego for the Summer of 2000 in numerous ways. First off there was a girl in town who had had a crush on me for several years but I always insisted was too young – a glasses and pixie bob, solve mysteries and babysit type. She had just graduated from High School and I wasn’t twenty yet so I decided the age gap was doable now and started seeing her. I shouldn’t have – I wasn’t totally comfortable with her youth so I refused to remove any clothes while we were making out. We always ended up in a reverse John and Yoko – she was naked but I’d be fully clothed.

Eventually I noticed that this guy in the indie pop circuit seemed like he was actually in love with her so I told him that they should be together instead. He got mad and told me that that was disrespectful, I popped a switchblade on him and made vague threats because I thought it was funny. She broke up with me over the phone when I got to Chicago and they’ve been pretty much married ever since and have kids. My instincts seem to have been more or less correct but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t being an asshole and shouldn’t have played with her heart like that.

I also started spending a lot of time and generally behaving like a pirate with my friends Badger and Ben Jovi. They were into a thing they called “Chicken Burrito Madness” where they would shoplift an entire shopping cart full of fancy food and expensive liquor. I was supposed to run distraction most of the time – Badger told me to drop a giant jar of pickles but I found that asking for help finding obscure vegetarian or ethnic products seemed to do the trick better. We would get drunk, cook fancy steaks poorly and end up sword fighting on an almost daily basis. I remember going to visit my teenage girlfriend at a friend’s house and them insisting that they hose me down before I could come inside – I was covered in dirt and blood.

Badger had been dating this girl named Martina for a few years. Leather hat, summer dresses and pickup truck with a dog kind of girl; she looked like the sort of woman that Lee Hazlewood would record an album in Scandinavia with. She had this “I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers” kind of vibe where she would play up being small and helpless to get men to help her with things. Or maybe that was specific to me and my friend Paul – I never did see her doing it with anyone else.

Anyhow she’d somehow ended up owning a tiny houseboat in the Point Loma Marina and convinced me and Paul to help row her out to it. She didn’t actually own a dinghy but she seemed extremely confident that nobody would mind if we borrowed one from the spot where everybody kept their dinghies. Me and Paul were less convinced but she could be very persuasive so we bent our backs and rowed her out to her slip.

There were four abnormally large dried out sea horses sitting on her boat when we got there. She said they hadn’t been there the last time she’d stepped aboard so we figured maybe a cormorant or other aquatic bird species had dropped them. Like they grab the sea horses when they see a flash of movement but realize it’s an unappetizing, ridgey mess of bone or cartilage once they get out of the water and drop it. I don’t know though – they looked like the kind of thing you would buy at a beachcomber’s shells and souvenirs store and they seemed so much bigger than they should have been.

Boats are weird – there’s nothing really at deck level and you have to go kind of down and in to get to the part you would usually live in. Martina lit a candle and I looked around a little bit, it seemed to only really be big enough to fit a mattress into. I’m really tall also, 6 feet and 5 inches so it’s not the kind of space I can ever really be comfortable in. We heard a bit of commotion above decks and had to come out to figure out what was going on.

Apparently somebody had tried to go home to his houseboat only to discover that some unknown ne’er-do-wells had absconded with his only dinghy, effectively trapping him onshore. The man had found a neighbor to take him around to all the different slips to discover who had made off with his property. Martina maintained that it was no big deal which, believe it or not, did very little to placate him. He had the beard and bald spot hairstyle of Will Oldham but it wasn’t red and he was a bit on the older side. He made a few thinly veiled threats:

“Your boat could come untied and drift into someone else’s creating a lot of damage that you would be liable for legally. These things happen out here!”

Him and his less irritated neighbor talked about tipping us over or just leaving us stranded on Martina’s boat but the other guy’s demeanor pretty much gave away that none of that would be actually happening. They deposited us back on the docks because anything else could become another headache for them later and rowed away with a stern warning to not be helping ourselves to anymore unlocked dinghies. I don’t think Martina lived out there for very much longer – the boat was in pretty bad shape anyway. She stopped renting it or sold it to somebody else or it just sunk and she walked away from it.

A little bit later her and Badger were living in Encanto – a hilly low income and mostly Black neighborhood along the 94, the then youngest of San Diego’s freeways. One day she asked me if I would dig a hole for her and I actually love digging holes. She drove us in her pickup truck to a bit of no-man’s-land where I dug a decent one at the base of a gigantic white and black eucalyptus tree. She deposited a small red velvet pouch and I asked her what was in it and she said “Badger’s Soul”.

I figured that it was probably drugs or an old love poem he had written or some other kind of sentimental knick-knack. I was musing about the question aloud in the presence of Lil Four one day and she stared at me in shocked disbelief:

“You don’t know what was in there!? Everybody knows what was in there! It’s Martina’s fucking miscarried fetus! She was keeping it in the freezer and talking to it and shit!”

The revelation changed me. Ever since I’ve felt naturally drawn to some kind of combined psychopomp and gravedigger role. On some level I am just okay with people dying. When both of my parents passed I felt like it was my responsibility out of all my siblings to give them permission, to tell them it was okay and that nobody has to live forever. In my father’s case I had moved back in for a few months to help out as a caregiver and explicitly asked him if he had any fears or regrets the night before his final morning:

“No, I’ve had a pretty good life and I’m all paid up for a bed burning.”

That last bit means that he had already contracted somebody for cremation services and paid in advance so we wouldn’t have to figure that out in the midst of mourning. He was thoughtful like that.

There’s a Tom Waits song where he says “and I sleep with my shovel and my leather gloves” and a noise track called Shoveler’s Void on a cassette album by an outfit called Wretched Worst – those two do a decent job of summing up how I feel about the whole thing. I think it was part of my temperament and destiny even before this incident. In High School English class I animated the entire gravedigger scene from Hamlet and provided all of the voices.

I’m not sure if I’ve gone into it too much in any of these stories but I’m a rapper. I started in sixth grade when I wrote a rap song for my classes D.A.R.E. presentation but a super religious girl went home and told her parents about it who called the school and said they weren’t comfortable with their daughter rapping so my class had to do something else. This is the sort of thing I can barely believe actually happened but it did. The song was extremely wholesome:

“Each day on the streets another life is ended. This could be stopped if these people were defended. If they knew what to do in this kind of situation. That’s why there’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education!”

Now that it’s all typed up I’m sort of bitter about it. It’s super catchy and extremely earnest sounding – my class should have blown away the assembly audience and then gone on to perform my piece at other schools and national conferences. I’m sure that would have happened if not for that girl’s rap hating parents.

Anyway I was in a couple of ‘80s style party rap groups with two other women both times. I entered a Freestyle Rap Battle at City College and got second place but it actually wasn’t fair because the tagger crew that worked at Pokez started beefing with a rival crew during my last heat and knocked over a lemonade cart giving my opponent almost 15 minutes to compose his riposte. Even though I was in second place they put a full color photo of me on the cover of the next City College newspaper and a tiny black & white one of the kid who beat me on page 8. The caption said “Nope! It’s not a protest!” because I guess I didn’t look how rappers were expected to look like in 2005.

Some people think Bleak End at Bernie’s is rap but it’s not. It’s Industrial.

So it’s Summer of 2000 and I’m at a party with Badger and Ben Jovi. It was at this kid Jon’s house who went to my High School and his parents were well-to-do College Professors and had a nice place by SDSU. I can’t remember his last name but I think it was hyphenated. Him and his best friend Ramon were really into The Beastie Boys and skateboarding and that sort of thing. There was a very classic DJ setup that Jon was spinning from – “two turntables and a microphone” like the popular Beck song.

Badger was trying to get me to rap all night, I guess you could say he was “badgering” me. I was getting progressively more drunk, not like blackout territory because I still remember this very clearly. Spicy. Mean spirited. Vindictive. Jon started laying down a rap beat for me and I started ripping into Badger about the fact that I had buried his unborn baby in rhyme:

“I put that baby where the sun don’t shine.

I’m glad that child was no son of mine.

I put your baby underneath the earth.

I buried your baby what the fuck you worth?”

There was quite a bit more but I don’t clearly remember it. There might have been the odd slant rhyme and I wasn’t using a lot of polysyllabic words or doing the thing where there’s rhymes inside the lines instead of just at the end but it was all essentially sound. There were little slow parts toward the wind down where I’d go up to different girls in the audience and kind of take their hands and go:

“Girl, if you miscarry it I’ll bury it!”

Sort of in the style of like a romantic slow dance sort of rap track. Badger was, I don’t know exactly what to call it, sort of thunderstruck or dumbfounded I suppose. I’d imagine he was feeling some mixture of admiration, shame and a kind of “press a button get a cookie” feeling surrounding having pressured me to grab the mic and start rapping in the first place. I don’t think we had talked about this topic before and I’m not sure if Martina had told him anything or not.

It’s extremely unlikely but I like to think he was reflecting on the parable of Jupiter and the frogs.

When I wrote about feeling comfortable as a psychopomp and gravedigger I’m sure I made the whole thing sound very healthy and well adjusted. And at this stage it pretty much is but there was definitely some darkness in learning that I had been an unwitting participant in the internment of human remains. I exorcised and unloaded that darkness onto Badger during the freestyle rap session, not because I thought he should have been the one to dig that particular hole but because it had to go somewhere.

There was a point earlier that summer or maybe even before that when Badger and Ben Jovi were hanging out at a coffee shop in Hillcrest. There was a girl there who had just come back from Norway because she was addicted to heroin and her parents thought that would get her off of it. I guess my friends thought she and I were vibing. I was pretty oblivious to that sort of thing but I remember Ben Jovi making knowing eyebrows at me.

We all ended up back at her and her roommate’s apartment. Her roommate had constructed this crazy glass multi-chambered device for smoking marijuana that kind of looked like the play zones that people build for their hamsters and gerbils. Everyone else was smoking a little bit of weed somebody had but I didn’t do that yet. This new kind of gum with fresh breath crystals had been released that supposedly made visible sparks if you chewed it in the dark. Me and the girl went in the bathroom and turned off the lights to try it. I don’t remember seeing sparks or whether or not we kissed.

She showed me a copy of Emperor’s first demo tape that she had brought back from her time in Norway. The one with a many headed alchemical dragon illustration on the cover. The timeline seems a little off as it was released around 1991 but it looked legit enough. I was into Mortiis by then but hadn’t listened to any Black Metal yet and wasn’t aware of the connection.

She didn’t put it on. Ben Jovi disparagingly said that Emperor “sounds like a guitar and wind”. I really like their stuff now especially Anthems to the Welkins at Dusk.

When we ended up in her bedroom she told me that she had just had a baby but had to give it up for adoption and didn’t know how to feel about it. She put on a CD of the Belle and Sebastian Dog on Wheels EP and turned it up really loud and set it to loop. She undressed completely and laid down in her bed. Her body was covered with scars from injecting like mine is now. She told me to take off all my clothes and get in bed with her so I did.

She laid perfectly rigid, our bodies just touching at the calf and shoulder. She fell asleep like that and I laid awake all night listening to those four songs on repeat. By morning I knew all the words to every one of them and really liked the band. It’s been almost a mark of shame ever since – that I’m a Belle and Sebastian fan. A lot of people will probably look at this and think that she wanted me to initiate sex but I don’t think she did. I think she didn’t want to be alone.

I would run into her on the street sometimes when I started using the same drugs. She had lost a lot of weight. I heard that something was wrong with her heart and a doctor had told her that if she didn’t stop injecting cocaine she was going to die.

She didn’t stop injecting cocaine.