Tag: Corinthians

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…