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:
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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.
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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.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 