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On our way out of Tijuana Joy established the community rapport with Andy the Dandy, the talkative pescado taquero of Calle Primera, that would last for all of the ensuing years that I would visit the border town. Andy’s little stand came to occupy a similar niche to the original Oki Dog’s with early L.A. Punk – a spot for misfits like us to stop, take a breath and talk to a friendly face en route to or from whatever had impelled us to make the crossing in the first place. He seemed to have a natural instinct to feed Joy – not with entire tacos but rather the small scraps of fish she always seemed to prefer – much like I would always end up passing little sections of meat to the street cats that hung around the nearby dollar cerveza taqueria called Taco Bell when I became a frequent crosser and Tijuana resident.

Joy has a similar quality to the kind of outdoor cats that people inevitably end up referring to as the Mayor of a three or four block radius – she always knows exactly who to approach and in doing so perfectly communicates to both the newcomer and the group at large that all parties are trustworthy. This next part might be a little difficult to understand if you’ve never been a part of the kind of social animal pack that is formed by a group of adolescent punks, freaks and outcasts. Sometimes a chance encounter on the street pulls in a new comrade that fits into the pack dynamic so seamlessly it becomes difficult to imagine how the group functioned at all before their arrival, like a tiny gear inside a clock that it simply couldn’t run without. Joy was a natural magnet for these kinds of people.

Earlier in the day on Halloween or maybe a day or so before it The Beautiful Mutants crew went down to the North Avenue Kinko’s to make some flyers, zines or other photocopier based art. Joy ran into Wesley Willis on the street – he had become disoriented and lost on his way to a show he was supposed to be playing at The Double Door or somewhere similar and the Mutants ended up dropping him off in their van.

Wesley Willis was very much a mayor-like figure in 2000 era Wicker Park – his pen and marker urban landscapes were framed on the walls of the neighborhood Burger King. I went to a later show of his at The Empty Bottle, not sure if I was even twenty one yet, and his phenomenon had grown enough in scale to attract the sort of slumming yuppies who came to laugh at instead of with. I could feel his frustration with this newer crowd as he chained off numbers like Eat a Doberman’s Dick and Drink Kool-Aid with Camel Piss.

Further up Milwaukee Avenue on the block that held El Rancho and The Congress Theater the mayoral role was filled by Big and Little Richard: the aging rotund proprietor of a used furniture/antique store and his adopted transient dogsbody. Big Richard had a certain rapport with and attraction for the Schaumburg girls that somehow never seemed to cross that delicate line from charming to creepy. He gave one of them a vintage copy of Anna Karenina because she reminded him of the titular protagonist – but I can’t remember if it was Robyn or Vanessa.

He had a chair that rested behind his gated entrance that he claimed had belonged to Louis XIV even though it was obviously mid century Baroque Revival. When he repeatedly told us that he had once had The Velvet Underground in his basement for an entire week it was easy to write this off as merely another link in a chain of tall tales and just-so stories from a pathological liar.

Many years later I spent a week traveling and camping down the Oregon Coast to Oakland with a stranger from Craigslist after we passed a mutual sniff test. I stepped into the kitchen of her cooperative apartment across the street from the 12th Street Bordello for just a moment but my eye was instantly drawn to the vintage block printed rainbow gradient concert poster on the wall: The Velvet Underground at Poor Richard’s in Chicago for a solid week of dates in 1966.

Joy also had the catlike quality of being empathically drawn to anyone in emotional distress and coming to comfort them. I think I was feeling maudlin and dramatic because Robyn was being visited by the high school boyfriend she is happily married to and has a family with – and had told me I would need to avoid her bed and company for the duration of his visit. I decided that I wanted to use colored thread to embroider directly into the skin of my upper arm.

If I close my eyes I can almost feel the sensation of the impossibly thin needle and thread passing under the layers of skin and being pulled to tautness – this is generally the case for any tactile impressions I have only experienced a single time. Joy sat with me and pressed her index finger against the tiny entrance and exit wounds to allow me to make the neat little stitches without just tearing through the skin. With red, white and blue I made a triangle, square and zig-zag line – it would have been too difficult to make anything that wasn’t constructed from little line segments.

I called it ‘Abstract Patriotic Self Mutilation Piece’.

I was wearing the sleeveless shell portion of a children’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Halloween costume that belonged to Andy Hyde. He had been wearing it around the neighborhood a day or so earlier when he was verbally accosted by a pack of cholos:

“Hey turtle! Do you suck dick?”

This inspired Andy to make an original card game for 2 or more players called Turtle Suck Dick using a bunch of clipped out nature photos featuring cards like Turtle Suck Shiny Fish Instead of Dick and other puerile jokes that appealed to our idiosyncratic take on locker room humor.

I had just dyed my hair with Féria Starry Night and hadn’t rinsed it out because my hair is so finely textured that dye never permanently sets in less than twenty four hours. The Michigan hard core boys were doing a run to Bacci’s Giant Slice or somewhere fun in Evanston. I wanted to come along but Zack didn’t want me getting hair dye on his van’s upholstery and vetoed the plus one.

I was really emotional about that too.

As much as I miss having boundless energy and being genuinely excited by at least one and often two or three of the bands every time I ended up at a show I definitely don’t miss being so whiny and dramatic. Robyn used to mock my complaining voice with nonsensical little baby sounds that were actually uncannily accurate – she pretty much had my number.

Many years later I did a Bleak End at Bernie’s set at the Waterfall Arts Center in Belfast, Maine and Amy Moon told me the performance reminded her of the crying tantrums of her and Dan’s recently newborn son Olai.

At least it sounded a little better. I had a drum machine and I was screaming. That’s what you’d call experience and maturity – it can’t be faked and there’s no taking shortcuts. Trust me, you’ll know when you get there.

[Part Ten Here]

It was a few days shy of Christmas and somehow we were all staying in my bedroom at my parent’s house. After the addition there were five different rooms that could serve as bedrooms and at one point or another I lived in all of them. This was the one with the gigantic cabinet automatic turntable where I had left the Lightning Bolt side of the FORCEFIELD split on loop and hunted for Fort Thunder related mini comics during San Diego Comic Con back in late July. It’s beyond incredible to actually look back and realize that this was exactly six months later in the same exact year.

It felt like it had been at least several lifetimes.

Somebody had figured out this loophole in Chicago where being married would dramatically increase your chances of receiving financial aid, maybe it was only for The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I’m not exactly sure. I loved the museum but I wasn’t interested in going to art school or any other kind for that matter. Anyway people were getting married: Andy got married to Black Michelle and Matt got married to Kiki.

Nick and Janice were an actual romantic couple who wanted to be married for Love with a capital L but it could have been for the financial college hustle too. They must have figured that matrimony would be easier to come by south of the border in the same way that switchblades and prescription drugs were. People don’t always fully process the diverse ramifications of being under the jurisdiction of an entirely different nation. My wife, who I incidentally did end up marrying on the outskirts of Tijuana, was surprised to learn we wouldn’t be able to use our EBT card in the Mexican supermarkets.

The irony is that they must have passed through Las Vegas like me and Francois did and could have easily gotten it done in the time it takes to transfer buses.

We descended en masse onto the Plaza Viva Tijuana and took an outside table to begin asking the winking meseros to escort us toward excess and oblivion. I’m not sure if Tijuana changed drastically during the later opioid epidemic but I think we were mostly just inept and stupid. I wanted heroin but wouldn’t have recognized it if I saw it because I had only encountered the powdered form found on the streets of Chicago. I hadn’t even heard of OxyContin. I ended up buying a bunch of Somas. Andy went into a Farmacia in search of any flavor of hardcore stimulant but somehow ended up with naturopathic tablets that claimed to be made out of turtles.

Somebody bought a bag of supposed cocaine and we took turns paying five pesos to enter one of the closet like bathrooms and sniff a line off the back of the toilet tank. It tasted like powdered bleach and other assorted forms of bullshit. In those days an entire side of the Plaza had been built into a row of little bathroom stalls and there was a whole cottage industry built around getting tourists to pay to go in and use drugs. Drugs that came from somewhere else presumably because the Plaza didn’t seem to have any.

Somebody who knew the ropes a little better than I did ushered the group into two or three of the minivans called Colectivos to Rosarito. We rented a couple of very large rooms and went to drink on a beach. Everybody was taking liberal amounts of Somas or carisoprodol; it’s a muscle relaxer but seems to have higher potential for abuse than most of the other drugs in this class. Apparently it’s popular the world over as a potentiator of opiates but I have somehow never actually used it in this capacity. It came in round white tablets with an imprint that is supposed to be a flying dove but I always thought it looked like a brain and spinal cord.

Some of the crew started overdosing and became catatonic on the sand. Francois was out for sure and also Robyn, I think one more person but can’t think who it would have been. I tried to pull his eyelids open and his eye looked normal enough underneath but the lid slid back into place like the mechanism in a doorknob if you twist and release it. The bodies of our friends appeared to be breathing and everything normally; it was like a cartoon or movie when a character is traveling through astral projection and someone comes across the empty body.

Nick and Janice were off somewhere trying unsuccessfully to find a priest who would agree to perform their marriage. Kiki had decided to wander off by herself to go horseback riding. A local with a marijuana leaf belt buckle approached the group to try to sell glass pipes and handmade bongs to our unresponsive companions. We shooed him off like a seagull and lifted the bodies by the wrists and ankles to carry through backstreets and alleys back to the hotel rooms.

When Robyn came around she discovered that the housekeeping staff had decided to steal her bag. She was especially upset because the bag had contained all the prints and negatives of her bruised face from her drunken plunge down the El Rancho basement stairs. She liked the pictures because they made it look like I had been beating her. I don’t know why they would have picked her bag to steal out of everybody else’s; none of us had anything of particular value.

We must not have been getting along that night because I decided to get as drunk as humanly possible. The man at the liquor store suggested a caustic brand of local tequila called Viva Villa that came in round plastic bottles with brightly printed color labels. I choked it down as fast as possible by chasing the sting with orange juice and spent the next few hours in a spinning blur like a carousel. I fell onto my back in the bathroom trying to maneuver my pants down to use the toilet.

The last thing I saw before I fell asleep was my stream of urine arcing back through the open door and into the hallway like a rainbow.

We ended up back in Tijuana drinking in a popular Zona Rosa brothel called Adelita’s. Nick and Janice thought that these new environs might offer up a more willing officiant but nobody was having any of it. Kiki and Robyn climbed onstage and started dancing, the excited meseros swarmed over and offered to take them into the back where they would be wined and dined with all the drugs and alcohol they desired.

While our group was generally more sex work positive than the American population at large the more level headed among us couldn’t help but feel that the offer came from a place more insidious than basic hospitality. Unfortunately Kiki and Robyn would not be swayed; our ongoing lover’s quarrel had made Robyn especially determined to see the plan to fruition in the argumentative spirit of contrarianism.

In my desperation I had a flash of inspiration. I remembered that I had bought a pair of neon pink spandex bike shorts while browsing the Rosarito swap meet and that they were under my pants at that very moment. I leaped onstage and joined the girls in some gyrating, suggestive dancing before dropping my pants dramatically. The music came to an abrupt and angry stop as the DJ bellowed into the microphone:

“Oh my God you stupid fucking faggot!”

As a commercial establishment the lifeblood of Adelita’s is reflected in the rising and falling erections of it’s mostly older and American clientele. My display had the disruptive effect of a rat or cockroach in a crowded cafeteria. It also led to the forcible ejecting of our entire entourage, Kiki and Robyn included.

Nick and Janice had no choice but to admit defeat and return to the nation of their birth in an imperfect and unmarried state. We passed back through immigration with a vague plan of reconvening on the San Diego County Clerk’s Office for a final attempt on the proceedings.

Our merry band disintegrated as it’s members departed for the separate horrors of several family Christmases.

[Part Eight Here]

I feel like we would have had a lot of different shows in our basement but I can only actually remember three of them. I don’t think we actually had a PA down there but I also didn’t know what one was at the time. I imagine The Beautiful Mutants probably brought one with them and then Kevin would have taken it with him when he left. He was always either making coffee or sleeping on any available mattress with one of those frilly eye masks and then he was gone.

So to explain the second show I have to talk about Jenny Winklehake. Jenny had grown up in Schaumburg with Meg and Vanessa and Robyn. At the Halloween show one of Panicsville’s friends had shown up in a Nazi uniform and Jenny was really excited about it. Later she put a Confederate flag up on the outside of her room. I wouldn’t say she was an actual White Supremacist, or if she is now I hadn’t heard about it, she was more of your standard issue problematic edge lord white girl.

The second show was an im promptu after party for a show at the Fireside that Le Shok was playing. Le Shok was a Southern California supergroup of members from popular San Diego and Los Angeles hard core bands. It wasn’t the San Diego contingent that set this up, it was the star-struck Midwestern hard core boys. I probably watched the Fireside set and the second set in the basement but I didn’t join the after after party late night drink and chill session. I liked the Le Shok record okay but it was different social circles.

Anyway at some point in the night Joey Karam from The Locust pulled down the Confederate Flag and burned it.

The repercussions of this event and the subsequent house meeting are probably the best place to stick a pin in the exact moment that the various immiscible segments of the El Rancho ecosystem began to separate into one of those cocktails with the different colored layers. Jenny was unhappy about the destruction of her property. While the rest of us essentially agreed that the display of the flag was at heart a provocation designed to elicit the exact type of response it had gotten we also felt that the housemates who were awake and present should have intervened to prevent it from actually happening.

The debate has sowed division and blazed a destructive path through punk communities and co-ops since The Germs wore Iron Crosses and Swastikas and will no doubt continue on unabated into the future. The more clean living hard core types washed their hands of the entire thing and moved out. Those of us who remained implicitly consented to an “anything goes” house culture of constant transgression.

The weather was getting colder and the owner of the building had not figured out an issue with its heater. We could all see our breath inside and crystalline fingers of frost began to trace their way along the interior of the windows. I started wearing an oversized grey hoodie and stealing two handlebars of cheap vodka from the North Avenue Dominick’s on a daily basis. I would walk out as if my hands were simply resting in the waist high pockets and return home to fuel nonstop days of compulsive drinking. Matt Smasher and I would also frequently indulge in shoplifted cough medicines, piecing together lost weekends by counting the number of discarded packets on his floor.

The girls in the house put together a slam book that floated around the coffee table and started arguments with anonymous polls like “who thinks they are hot shit but are actually cold diarrhea?” and “who will be the next to overdose?” I decided we should have a house newspaper and the single edition of a broadsheet called The Daily Crisis was born. On a piece of colorful hot air balloon stationary I pasted up contributed articles like “What’s Gotten Into Our Cats?” and “Whose That Sitting In My Chair?” Our departed housemates had apparently been feeling altruistic and spreading the word that any and all street kids, troubled youth and teenage runaways should feel free to show up on our doorstep.

This is around the time that the title El Rancho Orphanage and the less complimentary The Pit began to really take hold as a steady stream of gawking suburban kids started showing up for struggle tourism. They would laugh nervously at our rampant substance abuse and watch house members who were feeling especially exhibitionist smash old televisions and spray paint rude slogans on the walls. One night Robyn drunkenly fell down the basement stairs and Francois chased out the spectators by swinging a dead rat from its tail:

“Get out! We’re disgusting! We all have AIDS and we eat shit for breakfast!”

When we had first moved in Meg was still occasionally seeing her boyfriend Kevin (not Von Mutant) from the Belden house days, an often violent alcoholic with a sleazy pencil mustache. One night I was making out with Meg and Robyn up on Robyn’s bunk, we were all extremely drunk and they both ended up vomiting on me. Suddenly we could hear Janice arguing with Kevin who had apparently just barged in the front door. Meg quickly repositioned our intertwined bodies so that I was effectively hidden underneath the two girls. Kevin left in tears at the sight of Meg in bed with another woman but we had successfully dodged the attempted murder that would have transpired if he had noticed me as well.

Andy Hyde swept Meg off her feet from the moment he set eyes on her by talking about giving her a ride on a Ferris Wheel and feeding her a pound of butter. That was largely that for the next eight years or so although in the later years Meg would construct awkward domestic triangles that set Andy and the type of airhead Bros she had a weakness for as foils. Janice’s romance with Dave Weldzius was evaporating as she developed an immediate fatal attraction to Nick Buxton. Robyn was drawn to John with a roughly equivalent though opposing force to the one that had sparked between us upon meeting a month or so earlier. Kiki and Matt became platonic life partners.

Francois and I were printing up the ubiquitous counterfeit Greyhound passes to return home for Christmas and invited a deeply disconsolate Dave Weldzius to tag along. The drunken bravado that allowed him to make this spur of the moment decision began to flag around the Nevada border and he started using pay phones to call his worried and disapproving family. No doubt employing the mantra of guilt tripping families everywhere that he was “ruining Christmas” they bought him a return plane ticket to Chicago from the Las Vegas Airport and insisted he show up to use it.

Dave’s new found sense of freedom now had a looming expiration date mere hours in the future so Francois and I briefly decamped in Las Vegas to help him “make it count.” We conducted a furtive drug deal in a Casino bathroom with a shifty eyed hustler and the frank admission that we had no knowledge or experience with whatever he was supposed to be pretending to be selling us. We hid behind a dumpster to sniff lines of what were obviously crushed up Altoids from a hardcover copy of David Lee Roth’s Crazy From The Heat.

Francois and I realized the ruse almost immediately but still finished off the powder on the off chance that it was actually heavily cut anything. Dave peeled off and threw anyway the Rock Star autobiography’s dust jacket in a fit of paranoid naïveté. We wandered down an abandoned Fremont street under the recently restored neon cowboy and tried locked doors in a desperate search for last minute hijinks. Dave came running from some unsecured pizza kitchen somewhere with a plastic tub of thin marinara sauce. He used the ladle to throw it against a wall in impotent frustration and we dropped him off at some form of airport shuttle.

This next part seems impossible to me but after consulting various members of the cohort I’m left with the conclusion that it must be true. The innovation of complimentary long distance bus travel and a peculiar type of time dilation that seemed to effect the years surrounding 9/11 meant that none of us truly lived in any particular city for any length of time. For one brief window we were all simply citizens of the American Underground.

Anyway Andy, Kiki, Matt, John, Robyn, Meg, Nick and Janice showed up at my parent’s house in San Diego a little bit after Francois and I but before Christmas. I don’t think there had been any plans or discussion of this before we left. They had come up with an impromptu plan for Nick and Janice to get married in Tijuana and nobody wanted to stay behind in an empty El Rancho.

In an extinct phylum of logic it wouldn’t have made sense for anyone to call ahead. None of us had cellphones and cross country long distance calls cost money. Making eight different bogus passes and spending three or four days on a bus until you could call from a local pay phone for a single quarter?

That was free.

[Part Seven Here]

Many of my earliest memories come not from my waking life but the terrifying nocturnal landscapes of dreams. My mother was an interesting woman, while she shared my love for the world building potential of literature and was intellectually nourishing to an almost superhuman degree she was fundamentally unqualified to reassure a frightened child. I told her, like many children do, that I was scared of monsters. I can’t remember if this was under my bed, in the closet or lingering at the fringes of human consciousness but I will never forget the exact words of her response:

“If you think about monsters then you make them real.”

This would have been Kindergarten or even a little bit earlier. That night I dreamed about a submarine that was filled with little cartoon people. They were running around screaming about the monster that had been created from my imagination as machinery sparked and the water rose up around their knees. The monster and my consciousness were one as I saw the outside of the submarine through it’s oddly distorted vision and heard it’s heavy Darth Vader breathing.

I think I might have caught an early Godzilla movie on late night television with shots like this but it’s impossible to be certain. I felt and shared their fear, I felt guilty for not controlling my imagination and I felt the indignant rage of a monster trapped in a world that didn’t want it and where it was never supposed to exist. Invisible torpedoes of pure malevolent energy shot out and destroyed the submarine, I tried to hold them in but I couldn’t do it.

Their screams flooded my mind as the submarine exploded and I woke up crying in a puddle of my own piss.

It was definitely Kindergarten when I had the China dream. My class had gone on a field trip to China and an overweight classmate who might not have even existed had eaten the entire Great Wall of China without sharing it with anybody. We killed him in retribution and were going to eat his body. He hung upside down naked with a rope around his ankles and there was a raw and bloody spot on one of his buttocks where the grownups had cut out a chunk of flesh with a rough serrated knife.

The janitor at my Elementary School was called Mr. C, he stood with an apron and chef’s hat at a circular red tripod barbecue and cooked the butt meat like a hamburger. The teacher put it on a bun and held it out to ask who wanted the first one. I thought the adults were telling us that we were all supposed to do it so I volunteered and took a bite. My classmate’s eyes went wide with horror as they all started backing away from me as I held the offending sandwich in numb confusion:

“Wait, we were all going to eat him. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“No! Obviously we would have never taken a bite of the still bloody flesh of a fellow child! What the fuck is wrong with you!?”

My mother had a passion for illustrated children’s books and I had been reading a collection of Grimm’s Fairytales where parents abandoned children and characters wandered through caves. I dreamed that I had been left in a cave and couldn’t find my way out. As I made my way around some large stalagmites a man jumped out with impossibly long arms and legs that turned and spun like the “Jumping Jack” paper dolls that are made of brads and string. His nose was long and pointed and a tiny fish dangled from the end of it.

He held out one of the red and blue plastic boats I played with in the bathtub and gloated that because I had already accepted this magically charged object in my waking life I would have to spend an eternity in the dream world as his slave. His laughter followed me as I ran away through the winding cave passages. I reached an exit that opened outward to the ocean in the shape of a pointed capped pixie in profile. The water stretched out to infinity as I stood there feeling impossibly small, helpless and alone.

Another dream had me trapped inside a latticed cylinder with my back against a bonfire as a witch danced just outside this prison and mocked me once again for being bound for eternity. I tried to climb upward but the tower grew with me and stretched upward to a vertical vanishing point. I realized that the square openings I had been using as hand and footholds could stretch out large enough to allow me to crawl to my freedom.

Suddenly I was sitting on a galloping baroque piano stool while rollicking barrelhouse music played and we moved down an ornate corridor. Lords and ladies in powdered wigs and embroidered ball gowns and frock coats came running out of a sequence of adjoining doors. I would point at them in turn and they would scream in agony as they transformed into statues of solid gold. It felt innocent and harmless, like a game.

When I woke up I realized with a sinking, heavy and guilty feeling that I had murdered them.

There are so many things I can’t explain like the reason that all three of my earliest memories are viewed from different vantage points and some details of these and later dreams that continue to confuse and bother me. For some reason it feels significant and important that so many entities that felt as real and alive as I was told me over and over that I would be trapped with them forever. Maybe they were right.

Maybe the child is still with them and the monster got out. For some reason actually articulating and typing this thought has got me crying again and I can’t come up with a rational reason why.

I’ve written about how certain art and artists always felt especially important to me because in the words of Russian Tsarlag it “Let Your Dreams Touch Air”. Nothing obvious like Nightmare on Elm Street movies; this would be the darker works of Dr. Seuss, certain records by The Residents, comics by Mat Brinkman, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, David Hockney’s sets for a production of Turandot and many of the films of Clive Barker. These things made me feel like certain places I had visited in my dreams were real and other people had seen them too. I would never say that this felt comforting in any way but it felt relevant.

After El Rancho imploded for reasons I will get to in another piece we all moved into a little three story red house in the Old Town neighborhood by DePaul University. The tone of this period was set on the very first night when our alcoholic landlord and neighbor came to the front door in a women’s dress and performed the type of pelvic thrusts that are international sign language for reckless abandon while thirstily draining a bottle of Old Style. The nihilism that had been experimentation at El Rancho installed itself here as a way of life.

The house was so old it had the kind of light switches that are two round buttons and used the kind of glass fuses that look like the bottom of light bulbs. The former elderly neighbors had been avid breeders of racing pigeons and built an attached pigeon coop that we converted into extra bedrooms. When the weather warmed up some of it’s former inmates would return in numbered ankle bracelets and spend several days regarding the “changing of the guard” in disgusted silent disapproval before inevitably flying off to greener pastures.

I lived in the basement with Justin Two next to a slatted off crawl space like the one in The People Under The Stairs and a short hallway that had been labeled in chalk on the wooden lintel piece in an archaic hand as Old Spanish Trail. I could never shake the feeling that this was a portal of some sort but also never built up the courage to attempt to use it. There was a beautiful antique wooden chest at the end of this passage that members of the previous owner’s family eventually came back specifically to retrieve no doubt for some hidden occult power. Years later when I lived in Joshua Tree I would encounter a short street with the exact same name in nearby Yucca Valley that held a single apartment complex where bad things happened.

I live in a house right now where the former tenants died but this basement in Chicago is the only place I have ever lived that felt haunted. It’s important to note that I was injecting cocaine and heroin, smoking crack, had my terrifying first experiences with LSD and methamphetamine but I also did all of these things in many other places and this place felt different. I was in an often toxic and volatile relationship but once again I have been in many others and this place felt different.

On to the hauntings.

I would experience sleep paralysis where I was seeing through the eyes of a searching, floating presence that moved the basement until it saw my sleeping body and would rush toward it until I would finally wake up and bolt upright at the moment of contact feeling terrified. I would have dreams that bordered on sleep paralysis where I was standing or floating against a plane of glass with dark shifting waters on the other side.

I could feel a psychic presence that felt alien and hostile and then the waters would slowly reveal the shape of an aquatic amphibious humanoid floating exactly opposite me and meeting my gaze, coldly staring with black eyes that held small white pupils like hollow circles. Suddenly I realized that I could barely catch glimpses of additional Lovecraftian Deep Ones swimming through the ichorous black waters and then finally, mercifully, I woke up.

The last and worst of these experiences was not in the basement but rather in Robyn’s room upstairs. Our couple hood in the Red House was even more off and on and more of a triangle with John than it had been at El Rancho. On this particular night and the following morning things were natural and comfortable and nice. She left in the morning to go to college and I fell back asleep and I forgot she left.

We were waking up together and the sun was pouring through the window in that perfect way and we were stretching and looking at each other and saying “Hi” the way that lovers do when they’ve had the perfect amount of sleep and slept comfortably in each other’s embrace and feel safe and giddy and perfectly in love with each other and their own beautiful youthful bodies. We leaned in for a kiss.

The moment our lips touched I remembered that Robyn had already left and an alarm went off in a deep animal part of my brain that something was extremely wrong.

Robyn had transformed into a swirling dark void of nothingness. I felt my life force being pulled out through my lips as my consciousness was violated by a sensation of laughter that conveyed complete and utter malevolence. For what I believe to be the only time in my life I woke up screaming with my heart thundering in my chest.

I’m completely used to weird dreams and fucked up nightmares. Outside of the hare and tortoise triptych they pretty much constitute my earliest and strongest memories. But all of these dreams took place in dreamworlds that are insulated from the physical aspects of my reality by the impervious walls of sleep.

This thing was in the fucking house.

Hi thanks for remembering this name. I’ve moved over to a new, easy to remember domain at:

There are certain details that just end up confusing me when I concretely pin them onto the correct part of the timeline using details from live shows or other things that can’t change. For example I know that when I still lived with Shana East on California Avenue on the other side of the building that Brandi lived in I already had a miniature grandfather clock that Papa had given me. It was the kind with a plastic pendulum and silver globe that says “TEMPUS FUGIT” on it. I had either already starting working for Papa or we were already the kind of friends where he gave me small antiques. The only reason I even know this is because I remember the exact words I said to my on/off girlfriend Robyn before we went into my room on the night we met:

“Hey, you wanna see my clock?”

Anyway I’ve covered how I found a way to give that room up as soon as possible so I could move into El Rancho but I’ve got some little details about living there in July and early August that will fit as well here as anywhere else. I don’t know how I became pen pals with Ben Jones from PAPERRAD but I was making him a little construction paper collaged zine called “Alf meets Alfe”. I remember that brown and grey were really hard to find in construction paper packs back then but I went to a lot of stores because I needed brown for Alfe and grey for Roba.

I was making these tiny eyes that couldn’t be more than a few millimeters wide but they needed upper and lower lids, the white part, colored irises and black pupils. I kept accidentally dropping the pieces on the hardwood floor and having to search for them and I was working at the coffee table so I probably didn’t have a room yet. I really wanted a copy of this early Ben Jones Simpson’s Halloween comic I had seen somewhere but he ended up just sending me the originals. They were drawn with black and sky blue sharpies and it looked like he just worked in permanent marker with no preliminary pencil work whatsoever.

So like I said before there was this noise/hardcore band from Michigan called tion who were a major piece of El Rancho’s first wave and they had this intense guerilla touring style of playing in rest stop and fast food bathrooms or something like that. It was Alex Han, Dave Miller, this straight edge guy named Zack Whedon who was really square jawed and some other ones I’m probably forgetting. They were a major part of getting the really nice separate walls built and a girl named Marianne from Sheboygan built this plywood room in the shape of a coffin. She had gone with me and Francois to live at my parent’s house in San Diego when we destroyed the ‘60s Volvo station wagon he had never gotten a license for right after the Spidermammal show in May.

I had always wanted to build my room out of papier-mâché to look like the inside of the whale from Pinocchio but I was just settling into my life long routine of talking big shit about artistic ideas that I never followed through on. The walls were built on both sides of me so I just nailed up a flat piece of cardboard and cut out a door shape that could be folded open but had to be crawled through and tacked up a really nice printed textile of a Japanese Sumo Wrestler ukiyo-e piece above it. Of course I wanted this new space to be just like Fort Thunder but in reality I probably did as much to make it dark, fucked up and crazy as anybody.

I was really excited to set up experimental shows in the basement and this band from San Diego called The Beautiful Mutants was coming to Chicago and the timing was going to line up for a big Halloween show. I had seen this extremely chaotic, slapstick group of mostly older folks from the earliest Chicago punk days called The Devil Bell Hippies perform at the Fireside back in May and had e-mailed somebody who told me they would play.

I had also caught a Panicsville set that really moved me where Diane Nelson handled some knob twisting in a white latex nurse’s uniform and Andy Ortmann was dressed as a kind of black latex mosquito with a pointed, conical nose and a bunch of rudimentary contact mics he was scraping all around himself inside of black vinyl tentacles that made a crawling, static-y sound. They were performing over behind the crowd on the opposite side of the venue from the stage and might have even been the first artist’s I ever saw doing a thing like that. I booked them too.

It’s crazy how all of this stuff would have been set up on early aol, Hotmail, yahoo or Juno e-mail accounts where the servers have either been dead for years or the folders got wiped when I stopped using the accounts. It also makes me think about tons of Angelfire sites and weird early internet art projects like hell.com and tons of colorful internet art that makes me wish I was better at using the Wayback Machine. I think about how most people significantly younger than me will never lose old digital communications in the same way unless they go out of their way to delete it all and how that makes things different.

Anyway I don’t know if The Beautiful Mutants had been playing shows on the way to Chicago but they showed up a little bit before Halloween in an overflowing van that might have been part of a small convoy. I know that John showed up with Nick Buxton who had invented some kind of important innovation on the fingerboard miniature skateboard when he was younger but all the proceeds were controlled by his mother and cartoonishly awful stepfather. They had been traveling in some kind of red sports car called the Death Dog where Andrew McQueen Hyde VIII (henceforth Andy) had painted a federal eagle holding a revolver and hamburger in its talons on the hood. I think the thing died before it could set a single tire in Chicago but I could be wrong.

They definitely showed up with Joy who might have the most feral “raised by wolves” backstory of anybody I know. Her mother died of a heroin overdose and her father was incarcerated for most of her childhood but she lived with an assortment of family friends in an ancient counterculture Ocean Beach house that always felt like it was connected to biker gangs. My parent’s house always had an easygoing communal vibe that let me and my siblings feel comfortable bringing over friends to sleep over and stay from Elementary School days that eventually extended to touring bands and traveling friends the country over but Joy’s house was anarchic and lawless on a whole other level.

Of course the core of The Beautiful Mutants was the media artists and drum and keyboard players Kevin Von Mutant and Lauren Bousfeld. Kevin grew up in a house in Clairemont that was a lot like my parent’s house, his older sister was in the same theater High School circle as my older sister and had dated Francois. When I was too busy for drugs and alcohol Kevin was heavily medicated and constantly pursuing any available form of oblivion. By the time I had doubled back around to oblivion Kevin was too busy for drugs and alcohol.

We shared a love for youthful pranks but of two essentially different flavors. Kevin would get the police called for holding up “Happy Columbine Day” signs while I would do things like convincing a news crew reporting on “teenage slang” that I was part of a scene called “New Bohemians” that somehow spoke without ever using consonants.

Lauren grew up down the street from Kevin in a “Hoarders” tier filthy apartment with a mother who, while not especially invested in the disciplinary aspects of parenthood, was firmly ensconced in the BDSM scene as a dominatrix. Honestly we all grew up “free range”. I was heavily spanked for the bed wetting I couldn’t control in my early years but by High School I only went home once or twice a week. We all lived like that – we would take the last bus of the night to house parties, shows or goth clubs then spend the night nursing coffees at Denny’s or hiding behind dumpsters from the kids we had just pissed off in the farthest reaches of the county.

Halloween came around and I had to wait for an early show at the Fireside to end so I could try to usher the departing crowd toward our nearby basement. While I had booked a show in Providence I left town before it actually happened and I was a tad naive on some of the more important concepts. I didn’t collect any door money or set any other housemate to the task, I don’t think anybody wanted to leave the basement once things started kicking off. Nobody showed up from The Devil Bell Hippies. The band has apparently been composed of “whoever says they’re in it” since 1982 and on this particular night nobody said anything of the sort.

Panicsville covered themselves in newspaper with pointed heads and, while it wasn’t the only instrument employed, definitely incorporated a floor tom. For years I’ve accused Andy Ortmann of stealing the gimmick from The Residents video for The Third Reich and Roll and he has professed his innocence. With the hindsight of maturity I realize that I have probably been unreasonable on the issue. By 2000 I had spent a year at San Francisco State University where an extremely rare copy of Video Voodoo sat in the reference library. Andy, however, grew up in Saint Louis before moving to Chicago and super obscure videos had not made it to the fledgling internet by the turn of the millennium.

The Beautiful Mutants gave an exciting show. They had picked up a cornucopia of small, colorful fireworks on the Illinois border and were generally a polished and novel synth punk band by this comparatively late stage of their lifecycle. I am struggling with this vague feeling that the concert was ended abruptly by police or an angry neighbor but I probably just got too drunk too fast. The artist Camilla Ha from My Name is Rar Rar and Magic is Kuntmaster later showed me the color photo cover of a zine called Charming Violence where Robyn and I dangled nude from the latticework of pipes in the basement ceiling and appeared to be wrestling.

While her design decision might have felt slightly more palatable if she had asked either of us for permission I identified immediately with what seemed like a shared appreciation for the romance of youth and violence. This concept had beat hard in my breast since my teenage Godard phase had shown me his under-appreciated Les Carabiniers and the better known A Bande á Part. I dreamed of waking up every day with broken glass in my hair and no idea where I was while doing savage, brutish things in picturesque desperation. Godard’s countryman Arthur Rimbaud also produced stunning works in this uncomfortably problematic artistic vein that I recently attempted to grapple with in a think piece named after a notorious NSBM icon.

We spent the entirety of our four short months at El Rancho living as a lurid diorama that was deeply disturbing to many of our working class Mexican American Logan Square neighbors. Had we been more experienced we no doubt would have hung bed sheets or newspaper in the wall to wall windows for privacy but instead we received frequent police visits whenever somebody mistook a crucified vintage plush E.T. Doll for a living pig. In the early hours of Halloween night dubious trick or treaters accused us of being lurking child molesters while Andy Hyde mocked them through the locked glass door in a high pitched sarcastic voice:

“Let’s play Peter Peter Go To School! When I count to three you go to school! One.. Two… Three!”

“You creepy pedophile! Come out here before I kick your ass!”

“You’re right Peter Peter! I would have to come out there before you could kick my ass! I think I’ll stay right here!”

We also attracted all of the neighborhood misfits who never felt at home in the puritanical surrounding folk culture. There was a part time mime called Mimo who would stroll in whenever the door was unlocked and attempt to communicate through pantomimes, not because he was in character, but rather because of the language barrier. On the night of this first show we also started attracting a sequence of neighborhood drug dealing gang members who were attracted to Kiki like moths to a flame. A Latin King whose name I think was Ricardo fell asleep in the basement while using a baggie of packaged crack rocks as a tiny pillow. Him and his friends would crowd around Kiki while patiently waiting for her to wake from her depressive day naps:

“Kiki are you ‘leaping?”

Somebody must have ended up getting these guys to share their stigmatized goods but that sort of thing would have been done extremely covertly and I never saw it first hand.

All of that would change when Justin Two showed up.

[Part Six Here]

Chapter One: The Day the Fourth Wall Died

When I was first lifted from my mother’s womb the hands that held me belonged to a type of counterculture operative known as a midwife. From the first slap the air that rushed to fill my lungs was nothing less than the heady vapors of the American Underground. As I took my first breaths the commune that bore me was beginning to breathe its last.

The utopian directives of Stephen Gaskin, The Farm’s charismatic founder, were beginning to put a strain on its actual material resources. Many parents, mine included, began to turn a roving eye toward the superior standard of living the America of normalcy had to offer. My father embarked on a scouting mission through the hippy precursors of the punk house network. Some time around, literally, 1984 we put down roots in suburbia.

I was born on the Virgo cusp of visionaries and tragic young overdoses; branded with my family’s only iteration of the “hippy name”. The mundane soil in which I found myself could do little to deter the stirrings of my nascent compass. When I began the business of phototropism it was not the warm, comforting sun of conformity my tendrils turned to. Beneath the surface, subtly at first, seeker roots twisted and turned their way toward the nourishing trappings of the underground.

Artistically speaking I was a late bloomer. Serial waves of punk, ska and hardcore waxed and waned in my orbit without inspiring me to take up an axe. Outside of a rapping cameo with one of my High School’s punk bands and a now lost four track experiment with a budding bedroom pop producer my voice was never added to the chorus. On the edges of All Ages clubs and school plays I found a few like-minded pretentious little shits and we egged each other into primitive acts of expression; usually pranks or crudely drawn comic strips. Our meetings were always punctuated with the same general challenge as greeting:

“What have you been working on?”

By 1998 I had left home, enrolled in college and taken up residence in the first of a long line of ridiculous punk houses. College was an afterthought and had nearly fallen to the wayside. My many extra curricular activities left little time for something as pragmatic as writing applications. My Physics instructor had noticed that my raw potential seemed to outweigh my aspirations and interceded on my behalf. His success in the matter of gaining my cooperation hinged on one essential pedigree. He had briefly been the bass player of Aminiature: a respected local math rock band.

While the archivist in me appreciated access to a University Library the two semesters I managed were barely a blip on my radar. Inside I was champing at the bit for experiences no brick and mortar institution could offer. Rather it was a chance encounter that would ignite my hunger and initiate the next decade’s plus travels and adventures in the American Underground. On one fateful evening the illusory and oft-fabled “fourth wall” would be irrevocably shattered and my youthful psyche propelled from “the pit” into the dizzying orbits of auteurs, idols, icons and iconoclasts.

The Make Up was a band from Washington, D. C. that conducted an extended and clandestine romance with certain aspects of what can only be called a Zeitgeist. They depicted a band of villainous foils in the seminal underground music film Half Cocked and frontman Ian Svenonius penned The Psychic Soviet, a collection of cultural essays and think-pieces that remains a near undiscovered classic. Emerging from a post-hardcore landscape rooted in the ashes of grunge and alternative, their raison d’etre has always been to shine a spotlight on the liminal, holistic space in which artist and audience become collaborators.

Their 1999 tour brought them to West Hollywood’s Troubadour nightclub: a storied nexus of both the youth oriented folk music explosion and the rise of stand up comedy as a vehicle for social change when Lenny Bruce was arrested for publicly uttering the word “schmuck”. A series of chance encounters and rotating house mate lineups had exposed me to The Make Up’s records and brought me to Los Angeles. This most likely wasn’t the biggest concert I’d so far gone to but the venue’s traditional layout and elevated stage added impact to the moment I felt a blurring in the divisions these things were designed to reinforce.

We have now reached both the climax and anticlimax of this story.

While the experiences I am about to describe galvanized and changed my life I have also discovered in my research that the entire concert in question was video recorded for posterity. My personal “Altamont Speedway stabbing” plays back as a muffled bit of harmonica in the sound mix and a fleeting glimpse of my 18 year old self in a quick pan of the audience.

Ian, in classic rock star fashion, was lending his microphone to various audience members to sing or scream into. I worked my way to the front of the crowd and remembered a Hohner Marine Band Harmonica in my pocket. Generously, Ian relinquished the mic the moment I raised it to my lips. For one long, extended break down I was bending and riffing with the band.

Watching the video now I think I can hear myself, but it’s impossible to be certain. I’ve manned my share of mixing boards at this point and, had I been the engineer that night, I’m fairly sure I would have turned it down as well. Speakers are sensitive creatures and nobody likes a hot mic in strange hands.

I remember Ian and myself slowly raised into the air by the crowd, him retrieving the mic and being tossed back on stage, then blissfully crowd surfing over the final frenzied, chaotic bars.

I assume this is more or less accurate.

The videographer never really shifts his focus away from the stage.

Around 42:30 the camera quickly passes over me with my back turned to the stage. I remember Ian closing the song with:

“Let’s have a round of applause for the fox in the striped shirt.”

Listening now, on my tinny little iPhone speakers, I strain my ears at what seems like the appropriate moment.

I can’t hear him say it.

This isn’t the part where I tell you I went on to be in a band you might have heard of. I’ve done the odd thing but neither consistency nor documentation have been my strong suits. Instead the greatest creations I have to offer are memories and now, as I march toward middle age and prepare for the adventure of parenthood, I’ve decided to share a few.

Performers often talk about their first moment on stage or in front of a camera when they were hooked. The thing I got hooked on was showing up and jumping in, and in the years that followed I did a lot of it. If I liked a band and their music I’d try to jump in their van and in a few cases they even took me up on it. I lived in a lot of punk houses, warehouses and temporary art adjacent lodging situations. I explored a world in which hard paper cartography jostled for space with the architecture of collective utopian expressionism.

I made a pilgrimage to a lost and legendary artist’s space called Fort Thunder. I lived on junk rafts going down the Mississippi River and toured and performed on a city bus turned mobile concert venue. I went to Germany to participate in an experimental Opera. I’ve spent time in the casual marijuana cultivation labor industry and the homeless hard drug culture. These last two may sound like they belong on an entirely different list but to me they are less idealistic instances of the same type of thing – a secret world willed into existence by the drives and desires of its citizens.

The American Underground

In 1528 a Spanish explorer named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca lost contact with the rest of his failed expedition in what is now Texas and spent the next eight years living among uncontacted cultures and traversing terra incognita. Eventually his wanderings brought him to New Spain (currently Mexico City) and he returned first to European society and finally his homeland. In English the account he wrote is known as Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America.

In my own time there was nowhere on Earth I could have travelled without comprehensive maps and a variety of guidebooks. Instead I chose to set out in search of vistas whose beauty was in part defined by their very obscurity and impracticality. In those moments with my harmonica I had crossed over into a New World and now I wanted nothing more than to hunt for every manifestation I could find of this novel, transient and urgent reality.

In all of these entries, loosely catalogued by year and city or broken into arcs where appropriate, I offer the most accurate accounting of these voyages my memory allows me – Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America.

The air was thick with ozone as the maintenance closet turned laboratory was illuminated by one surging arc after another. The smell is familiar to anyone who has worked around high power electronics, a reshuffling of oxygen atoms created every time electricity disobediently abandons the confines of its wires to dance through the surrounding air. Ozone is, of course, a necessary bulwark against the smothering power of our sun’s love when located in the upper reaches of our atmosphere. Miles below, in an unventilated work closet, it was starting to make me nauseous.

Before Tesla was the name of a multi billion dollar car company the man himself was a bona fide countercultural icon. He had struggled against “the man” in the form of Thomas Edison, and won the hearts and minds of the nation’s wall sockets. His list of actual patents and inventions was impressive on its own, but his eccentric flair for self fabulation has fostered rumors of unlimited free and wireless energy somehow always waiting just around the corner. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the man was certifiably batshit fucking insane. If dying penniless in a pile of diseased pigeons and warning the world of a totalitarian future governed by women as all powerful insect hive queens was not enough, his final writings proposed a series of electric miracles on par with the most outlandish of American Tall Tales.

A chance discovery of the agitation experienced near electromagnetic fields led to a unique, if impractical, study aid: A plan to bury high powered live wires under every classroom lest the unwilling minds of the student body might slip into torpor unless the very air was constantly charged to the level of an impending lightning strike. The latent warmth of electric fields pointed the way to another million dollar idea: a battery backpack which could cloak the body of a nude Arctic Explorer in sheets of lightning, protecting entirely against the ambient below zero temperatures. My personal favorite was quite possibly the most ambitious and least practical of all – a giant stationary ring constructed above and around the Earth but preventing from orbiting. Shuttles would ferry passengers to and from the ring, but the free rotation of the underlying Planet might allow a business traveler to ride up from Topeka only to descend back down to Novosibirsk.

Several biographies had become available by the late ‘90s and, while generous with the more outlandish details, the lion’s share was found within an oversized faded leather bound volume containing the entirety of his patents and lectures; complete with diagrams and illustrations from the man himself. Any patron with the stomach for the sinister, resonant rumblings of the old San Diego Library’s basement and archives might access such Grimoires, provided they could muster the patience to retrieve the corresponding shelving data from so many spools of microfiche.

With the master’s works in hand and unsupervised access to an arsenal of dangerous machinery the time had come to attempt to replicate a selection of impressive feats. According to Tesla, subjecting the body to extremely high voltage alternating currents should prove innocuous, so long as the frequency was also high enough to keep the current constantly changing direction before it could get around to killing you.

Having switched my major to Anthropology after only two semesters I have no idea if this glaringly suspect explanation holds water. What I can say, categorically, is that in my ozone addled state I had occasion to blunder my way into eating about 40,000 volts in Tesla Coil output and lived to share the experience. Before attempting any more cerebral experiments I had to experiment with the intensity and distance of the bolts created by my own primeval God of Thunder.

Several racks of the standard mass cylinders that accompany every High School Science Lab balance set were spread across the desk. Things started simple with a quick arc from coil to disk but soon enough a kind of Kabbalistic Tree of Life was humming along with roughly equal bolts of distance and intensity humming between the nodes. A final piece seemed just the thing to really bring it all together and in my naïveté the thickly painted weight rack was the perfect insulator to slide this piece into position.

It was, in fact, a near perfect conductor.

The bones in my right arm seemed to vibrate, muscles began to lock, and a relatively G Rated expression involuntarily left my lips.

“AYE-YI-YI!”, I yelled for no one, wrenched my arm free, and backed as far as possible away from my hero’s coil. There was no doubt I was happy to be alive. Even more so I felt a wave of sympathetic relief for the understanding young Physics Teacher who had literally given me Carte Blanche with weapons of mass destruction. A new teacher, recently married and soon to be expectant father; my lifeless body would have doubtless propelled him into a series of awkward and deeply unfulfilling conversations.

Perhaps Tesla’s explanation about the effects of high frequency is the correct one. Perhaps the mercy of a free floating left hand prevented the creation of a circuit, and the movement of the current across my heart, saving my life. Perhaps the rubber shoe covers I had chosen to wear, not for safety, but as a nod to Devo style fashion were the things that spared my life. The only thing I can say with certainty is I outran my hubris that day, and learned next to nothing from the experience.

Considering how completely my teacher had misplaced his trust in me and my better judgement I did the most reasonable and responsible thing I could think of. I never told him it had happened. Eventually I got around to actually replicating several of Tesla’s more interesting experiments. A small steel ball suspended by a copper wire is painted with rubber cement on one half of its surface. The aforementioned coil lends its current, causing tiny invisible particles in the air to become charged, then attracted, then repelled, ad Infinitum. Presumably an unaltered ball would be bombarded by such particles on all sides, resulting in total equilibrium and no discernible movement. With one side insulated this force is out of balance, the ball begins to sway then move in tiny rhythmic circles.

Having conquered life, death and at least one semi impressive parlour trick, it was time to put Nikola Tesla back on the shelf and make room for other role models. A pit stop in Colorado Springs and visit to his eponymous museum and laboratory did little to help matters. Far from the secrets of the Universe, the Gift Shop was stocked with copies of Mesmer’s “Principles of Animal Magnetism” and a ridiculous magnet-on-a-stick branded as “The Attractor”. In fact it was not until I began to visit UNARIUS, San Diego’s homegrown geriatric UFO cult, and saw Tesla depicted as one of “Four Archangels of the Universe” that his role in the pantheon was reconsidered at all.

Street Art was having one of it’s little moments in the Art World at large and San Diego was absolutely in on it. Banksy had just started painting his now celebrated murals across the pond and Shepard Fairey had either relocated to San Diego or had a hell of a local street team. I started collecting the “Andre the Giant” vinyl stickers in a notebook that meticulously catalogued the date and location of each newly discovered variation.

This enthusiasm briefly led to imitation: I found a high contrast black and white photo of Vladimir Lenin in the San Diego Central Library’s Image Archive; several file cabinets full of Manila envelopes stuffed with pictures cut from books and magazines to form a kind of low tech Google Image Search. I cut a stencil and made a few T-shirts and a surface carved Halloween pumpkin.

For me and my compatriots Graffiti offered everything that excited us about art: it was obscure, unscripted and illegal. It was inevitable that we would pick up spray cans and get in on the action. My best friend Francois had been living at my house for his final year of high school. We collected all the old paint we could find in my parent’s garage and dressed ourselves in the head to toe black of cartoon burglars. In retrospect we were only making ourselves more conspicuous but we also needn’t have bothered. Our destination was a set of sewer tunnels invisible from every possible street angle.

We graduated to actually planning pieces, buying colors and picking spots with higher risk and visibility. We also began attempting to connect with the larger graffiti culture that was blossoming around us. Before Downtown San Diego’s “Gaslamp Quarter” revitalization had fully taken hold there was an entire network of youth culture oriented boutique businesses taking advantage of the lower rents. This included a small shop dedicated to the “Four Elements” of the B-Boy Hip-Hop subculture that mysteriously didn’t seem to be selling much of anything at all. We came in looking for caps, custom spray paint tips that allow you to create different line thicknesses and other effects, and promptly failed the vibe check.

On a visit to New York we went to see the famous “Phun Phactory” in Long Island City. Later renamed “5 Pointz” and eventually demolished, this warehouse was a Street Art destination made famous by countless album covers and music videos. In the late ‘90s this extended to every paintable surface in a two block radius, creating the closest thing the movement had to a dedicated museum. We walked this hallowed ground in what seemed like total isolation until we attempted to climb one of the numerous fire escapes. From parts unknown a disembodied voice came booming out of a hidden loudspeaker:

“Yo B! No Roof Action! Fuggedaboutit!!”

Back in San Diego there was plenty of roof action. The same economic conditions that allowed stores such as the Hip-Hop Boutique to keep their doors open created plenty of empty and abandoned buildings. The El Cortez Center wouldn’t be reopened as condominiums for almost ten years, it sat empty next to a pair of disused parking structures that were popular with unsanctioned muralists. We were eager to make our debut as locally recognized street artists and thought one of these buildings would be the ideal spot. The location’s notoriety was a double edged sword unfortunately. We had barely begun our pieces when we saw the lights of an approaching security truck and had to escape to the edges of the nearby 163 Freeway.

Painting Graffiti wasn’t the only reason to explore abandoned buildings, it wasn’t even the most important one. We were effectively straight edge, not because we had any interest or connection with straight edge culture, we simply had no interest in drugs or alcohol. Urban Exploration checked a lot of boxes for us. It was something to do, it gave us a bit of an adrenaline kick and it gave us something to impress the cool kids with. Underneath the layers of weird art pranks and quirky thrift store clothes we were essentially nerds and we weren’t immune to the charms of social climbing.

All of this is to say that I wasn’t actively looking for spots to paint when I first discovered the California Theater. The California is a once opulent movie palace that has somehow avoided the redevelopment bug and remains a blight and eyesore to this day. The city has been talking about demolishing this building since 1990, even issuing a new demolition order in the Summer of this year. Like many theaters it has a small hive of apartment and office spaces perched above it, all in a similar state of disrepair. I will never forget the eerie sight of the word “SATAN” scrawled loosely across a wall with an arrow pointing to a darkened hole in the ceiling above. I never brought a chair or table to check if there was anything up there but the building had no need of invisible boogeymen.

It boasted a perfectly threatening living, breathing human being.

I must have missed him on my first visit but when I brought my friend Paul we heard the sound of a television cutting through the midday silence. Tiptoeing toward the sound we came across the sight of a slovenly, overweight man with long hair and a beard sitting shirtless and arguing with his television. His room was sparsely furnished and he didn’t look like he even owned a shirt or pair of shoes much less ever went outside.

Whether the owners of the building allowed him to live there to scare off other squatters or he had just spliced himself into the city’s power lines I’ll never know for sure. He could have been some developer’s neckbeard failson they wanted to store as far from themselves as possible or a tenant from more prosperous days that simply never left. We were able to creep away undetected but other friends said he had chased them from the building screaming. Later I even heard that someone had come across his unit while he was away and stolen journals full of rambling poetry. I never saw it in person but I was told the words “whores” and “Hollywood” were often repeated.

The truly crazy thing happened when me and Francois came back to paint and it wasn’t even face to face. At this point lots of our friends had been checking the place out and we pretty much knew how to stick to the parts of the building where he wouldn’t notice us. We hadn’t accounted for the possibility of batshit crazy Home Alone level booby traps.

We were climbing up the rear fire escape under cover of night with backpacks full of spray paint. Francois was above me and heard an elastic twanging noise in time to instinctually yell “DODGE!”. We swung our bodies outward, leaving one hand and foot on the thin, metal ladder just in time to hear loud impacts and breaking glass on the alley below. He had taken the kind of small wooden wash tub usually used to display apples at a health food store and filled it with rocks, chunks of cement and empty 40 bottles then used bungee cords to wind it around the top of the ladder. The small vibrations we created on the ladder’s edges as we climbed toward the top were enough to cause this bucket to pitch forward and dump it’s contents onto whatever had triggered the vibrations.

The complex of feelings is hard to describe if you’ve never successfully disarmed a potentially lethal booby trap that somebody had specifically set to hurt or kill you. There was a lot of adrenaline, definitely some relief, an undercurrent of anger and indignation but the top note was pure, unadulterated admiration. We were certainly happy that the trap hadn’t gotten us but we were also undeniably impressed that our opponent had thought of something so brutal and clever at the same time, especially considering that it almost worked. We had all watched the same cartoons and read the same Spy vs Spy comics in Mad Magazine. This was the one and only moment in which we were able to view the Ogre of the California Theater as a kindred spirit.

After this we got our pieces up without incident and the spots were prime real estate. We started to meet other writers who had seen our stuff and been impressed with it. Street Art was in vogue at the handful of independent downtown Art Galleries and some of our new acquaintances invited us to a group show. We were happy that we were finally making names for ourselves.

At the Art Opening there was a bit of a disagreement between one of the featured artists and one of the attendees. Their tag names were somewhat similar and Featured Artist was unhappy about the potential for brand confusion. Attendee suggested a minor change in spelling. Featured Artist grabbed a nearby hammer and hit Attendee in the face.

Suddenly it wasn’t so exciting that we were recognized in the local Street Art circles and it seemed to be the perfect time to stop making Street Art altogether…

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