Tag: Daniel Clowes

San Diego 1999 : “At first I was stoked, but I still wasn’t primed”

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The classes for my second semester at San Francisco State were finally going into finals and I had definitively figured out that I was not ready to be going to college. The International Baccalaureate program I’d been enrolled in for my last couple years of High School was roughly equivalent to taking college courses early and I was burnt out and needed a break. I still didn’t drink alcohol or use any drugs but I wanted to live in punk houses, travel, go to shows, explore forbidden spaces and just generally use my creative energies for my own enjoyment instead of anything the established world placed value in.

The situation in the Japanese style house we’d been living in near the Berkeley-Oakland border had progressed from rent strike to all out war with our landlord. In a way we were probably looking for structure and boundaries but the milquetoast we’d been paying rent to had demonstrated that no matter how excessive our behavior became he would never find the strength to inflict actual consequences. We had spray painted a message calling for his literal death on the side of the house and shot at him with a bow and arrow but he continued to meekly knock on our back door to beg for rent or inform us he’d been digging through our trash.

Me and Francois were the last ones left – Jonas, Chris and Little Four had already moved on because a house without a roof, phone or electricity wasn’t even worth living in for free. We held a yard sale with all the remaining appliances and furniture that came with the house in our driveway but only a random truck driver showed up as our neighborhood was desolate and devoid of human life. We traded him the microwave and a black leather bean bag Chris used to sleep on for a ride with our bags to the Greyhound Station.

I don’t think it was the beginning or end of any month and we didn’t bother to tell Mark, our long suffering landlord, that we were even leaving. Whether the things we sold at the yard sale had been bought by him or a previous tenant they certainly weren’t ours.

I’m trying to figure out why I never tried to move into The Manor myself and the best I can think of is that I’d either already arranged with Brandi to move back to Chicago with her at the end of Summer or that I’ve flubbed the timeline and this was actually the Summer of 1998 [Note: I did, it was] and I’d be moving up to the Bay for college soon. It’s possible that neither of those things were true and I was just broke, socially awkward and content to hang around and occasionally sleep on an old couch that sat on an outside porch.

Like a lot of these stories the specific year isn’t especially important outside of placing these events in the years leading up to 9/11.

The Manor was a very large either Victorian or Craftsman style green house on the end of E Street in Golden Hills. The block ended on an abrupt diagonal cul-de-sac caused by the 94 Freeway and The Manor only had heavy vegetation instead of neighbors on the back and left hand sides which no doubt made it easier to have large parties where nobody complained or called the cops.

The kids who rented it were close to my age and had mostly gone to Point Loma High but I knew everybody from social stuff and shows. To the best of my recollection it was Nina Amour, Lhasa, Erica Redling, Dan Bryant, Ramon, Badger and Steve Lawrence had a little spot in the attic to paint and keep his records. I could be leaving somebody out or conversely saying someone who only hung around actually lived there – the house had a lot of bedrooms and I only ever passed through the ones that wound around to the bathroom and the ladder to the attic.

[I just got some corrections on minor details: Steve was in a nook in the living room, Badger shared the attic with Martina and Ramon did not live there.]

Steve and Badger were a package deal by that point, maybe had been for a couple of years already. I think they had both lived at the apartment above the Golden Dragon in Hillcrest where Rory had supposedly pushed a girl off the balcony. They were constantly making up bands and working on music together – Cutewood Mac and one I’ll go into detail about in a minute here called Stimulated Emissions.

I’m not sure how they had gotten the rocket motorcycle – maybe it was in the classifieds or they had just seen it sitting in somebody’s yard with a free sign but they’d brought it over and dumped it in the side yard by the driveway. Somebody had taken sheet metal and put it all around the body of a motorcycle so it looked like a missile with a rounded nose in front. Whoever made it might have gotten parts from the actual shell of an ICBM or something because everything was symmetrical and well shaped.

Of course it didn’t run at all when they got it and neither of them knew anything about working on motor bikes so it just sat out there collecting rust. Then me and Francois and Paul brought the bumper boat. We had just done The Natural Museum of California where we’d stolen the skeleton of a beached whale from one of the colleges and strung up the spinal column between two trees on the archery range in Balboa Park.

Everyone we’d shown that too thought it was really cool so we were pretty eager to find our next “prank” or “caper”. I wouldn’t have guessed that our next big thing would also be theft themed but Paul was the one who had cased things out and come up with the idea in both situations. It wasn’t like all of our stunts only centered on stealing things.

When the Republican National Convention came to San Diego in 1996 we had dressed up in old suits and sunglasses like the ones in The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video and made cryptic protest placards based on the Eightball graphic novel called Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Pictures of the Mr. Jones character and snatches of text like “Value Ape” and “What’s The Frequency Kenneth?”.

That last phrase has a bit of history: in 1986 a mentally ill man who thought television networks were broadcasting directly to his brain posed the question while attacking newscaster Dan Rather outside the New York studios of NBC. Along with the reference in the Eightball comics it was used as the title of an REM song around the same time in 1994. We got some newscaster attention but none of them understood the references or what to make of us.

One of them asked me if “Value Ape” was supposed to be a kind of statement on “ape values” – maybe something like an earlier iteration of the “Reject Human Return to Monke” meme. Eventually I got bored and tried to sneak into the actual convention which earned me a brief detainment by the police. I’ve inherited an indelible streak of anti-authoritarianism from my father and when an officer asked if I had a last name my first instinct was to saucily poke his chest and say:

“Not for strangers!”, in a sing-song voice. Moments later I had my legs spread and my head slammed against a wall as I learned the first of many lessons that would have come sooner if I’d been born with a different skin color. Now I’ve had a broad enough range of police interactions that I’ve written several essays on the theme of cop psychology.

Aside from the absurdist faux-protest our usual entertainment was trespassing but when we did steal things it was never for any kind of profit or something’s monetary value. Paul had driven past a run down independent Family Fun Center spot in National City and figured out the bumper boats were unsecured and would be easy to get over a short fence. The plan was to try to ride it as far as possible until the fuel ran out in the open ocean.

When we were loading everything into the van Paul borrowed from his parents we accidentally spilled some of the gasoline from the motor. Paul made up a cover story that we had been flying miniature airplanes and his dad seemed to buy it – the stolen bumper boat didn’t end up on the news or anything. We tried to pilot it around Mission Bay but the momentary inversion had flooded the motor and we weren’t able to get it going again.

At the end of the night we brought the boat over to The Manor where the large ring shaped flotation segment was turned into a tire swing for the side porch. The fiberglass section ended up uselessly leaned against a wall and the motor met the same fate as the rocket bike – broken down with nobody with the know-how to get it going again. Between the two vehicles and the yellowing grass in the yard I used to joke that it looked like a white trash version of Batman’s Bat Cave – a bunch of busted crime fighting tools that were only gathering dust.

I just made the connection now that the Bat Cave was underneath Wayne Manor in the comics and the house was called The Manor. The coincidence makes the whole thing a little more amusing but I’m not sure how funny any of it is a quarter of a century later. It’s funny to me at least.

Me and Dan, or Nad as Steve called him, had gone to Junior High together but this was my first time seeing his impressive record collection he’d amassed in the intervening years. I had a lot of interesting oddities from Thrift Stores, library book sales and bargain bins but I hadn’t had the knowledge or money to get into very much contemporary stuff. Dan had a ton of it and he let me spend a couple of days digging through it to make myself a mix tape.

I’d just heard of Cat Power somewhere so when I saw the Psychic Hearts 7 inch on transparent colored vinyl I was excited to throw the first side on my tape. Over countless listens it became one of my favorite songs but without either the liner notes or the internet I didn’t know any of the background information – most importantly the fact that it was a cover.

A couple of years down the line I was in New York checking out a hip basement record store on the Lower East Side, maybe Bleecker Bob’s, when what I know now to be the original came on the sound system. It sounded overly aggressive to me compared to the understated quiet rage of the version I’d fallen in love with and without thinking I blurted out:

“Who’s the dick screwing up the Cat Power song?!”

The record didn’t screech to a stop like it does in the movies but every pair of eyes in the store, employees and customers alike, did whip around to fix me in a withering gaze. I got thoroughly schooled and of course I now know that the song was both written and originally recorded by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. I really like the cover art on his version of the record but I’ve still probably only heard it a couple of times.

Sonic Youth is one of those bands where while I’m aware they were hugely influential to a ton of the music I’m into I haven’t gotten around to listening to nearly any of their actual output. Another one would be Black Flag – when I think about it now the only song I actually know of theirs is TV Party. I’m not avoiding either band in an effort to seem cool or anything, I just didn’t happen to come across any of their tapes or records in the formative years where I was listening to a lot of tapes and records.

For some reason I was attracted to their green covered experimental EP Slaapkamers met Slagroom while flipping through Dan’s records and I put a song on my tape and bought my own copy when I came across it in a Reckless Records new arrivals bin in Chicago. I just listened to it again and it instantly sounded recognizable as I’ve probably heard it more than any of the band’s other work. I’m sure they have a ton of other songs that I’d recognize if someone played them for me just from being in rooms where they were playing.

During the time that I was hanging out at The Manor Steve and Badger seemed to be taking a break from hard drugs and created a set of Stimulated Emissions songs inspired by our friend Nick Feather relapsing. Or maybe they were getting high the whole time they were writing all of it – it’s not like I would have recognized the difference as I didn’t do any of that yet. They played in the living room of The Manor and made a bunch of copies of a tape called Future of 88.

The band’s name is a reference to the word laser which is actually an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, something I knew from writing a paper on lasers in grade school, but it was also intended to share the initials for “straight edge”. The songs were short, catchy and rode the line between being a total joke and absolutely serious:

“At first I was stoked but I still wasn’t primed

Then I was primed but I still wasn’t honed

Now I’m honed and I’m gonna kick your fucking ass!”

I might be mixing up the order on those and the year in the title. It seemed like everyone had a copy of the tape for a minute but now we’ve all led chaotic lives and moved around and lost stuff and there doesn’t seem to be a copy uploaded to the internet anywhere. It went amazingly well the last time I mentioned not having the tape for a semi-jokey San Diego genre band from this era so I’ll try it again.

Anybody got a copy they wanna put up for streaming somewhere or send me? That would be cool.

Whatever year this was the Summer at The Manor was when I first met and became close with Andy Panda. Everybody called him “jailbird” at the time because he’d often wear a black and white striped prisoner costume. I thought that was cool because I had been wearing the same thing to sneak off school grounds after San Diego High changed its open campus lunch policy to closed in my senior year.

I’d run around downtown and pretend to run and hide from cops who would gamely pretend to chase me – it was a lot of fun.

I had just graduated but Andy was still going to El Capitan High School in El Cajon. He’d been selling weed at school and was nervous because the following school year was supposed to introduce drug sniffing dogs. He also had a heavy sounding punk band called Heathen Azure with Jose and Fern.

We would spend a lot of time on the side of the house playing a simple game called “bread ball”. There was always a lot of rustic looking bread that was going stale – I think Badger was working as a delivery driver for Bread & Cie in Hillcrest and brought it home after his shifts. We’d take turns tearing it into little chunks and lobbing them in the air for the other person to hit with a plastic bat.

When it was starting to get hard and dry out it would explode in a really satisfying way. Eventually the game was moved to the side of my parent’s house and the bread was switched out for little dried up tangerines and occasional rubber bouncy balls. If you got a good swing on one of those it would disappear into the air above the cul-de-sac and most likely you wouldn’t be finding it again.

The whole thing was super simple without any attempt to keep score or add complexity with any rules beyond the joy of sending easy underhand pitches flying with a bat. I hadn’t really played games like this growing up and it was powerfully bonding in a way I hadn’t experienced before. There’s probably a lot to this that I can’t just explain with words in the place of lived experience but you should get the general idea.

I don’t really remember a lot of crazy parties at The Manor. For a couple weeks there always seemed to be a circle of suburban skater kids getting stoned in the living room. I didn’t pay much attention to it but there was a day when one of them was waxing philosophical and said:

“I wonder how many tokes are in a joint?”

Lhasa had been hanging out but she suddenly stood up in disgust and sarcastically said:

“I don’t know, I’ll go ask the owl!” before storming out of the room. Eventually they got the hint that nobody that lived there was hanging out with them anymore and took it to one of their own houses or somewhere where people were actually into an interminable smoke session.

There was the night that Adam got naked. Adam is a goth DJ who goes by Deadmatter now but at the time he was in a band called Thomas and the Tiddlywinkers. I don’t think they were playing that night – people just mentioned his band because as the naked guy he became the subject of conversation. Someone was also mentioning that he’d just come back from Europe as if that would somehow account for his behavior.

He got insanely drunk and lost all of his clothes around what must have been the bathroom as he’d managed to rip off one of the glass shower doors and was carrying it around to cover himself. He was so far gone that he hadn’t seemed to notice that it was just regular glass as opposed to frosted or printed glass and wasn’t doing anything to hide his nakedness – it just made him look more ridiculous.

Maybe if it had been fogged up like he was taking a hot shower it would have done something. He wasn’t taking a hot shower though – he was carrying around a perfectly transparent glass door that only emphasized his nakedness and drew more attention to it. Now that I think about it he was probably the first “naked guy” I saw at a party and as such he set the bar pretty high.

I saw a lot over the years and eventually ended up as the “naked guy” at the party a few times myself but nobody ever topped the bit with the glass shower door.

San Diego 1993 The Loft Part Three : The Gospel According to Rex Edhlund

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Part One

“Intermission”

Part Two

I hope to eventually get more information but I decided to write this up while The Loft story still has a little bit of momentum. My theory last time that typing up what I got from my conversation with Steve would possibly spur others to get in touch did pan out but not exactly the way I’d described it. Rex actually messaged me the moment I started typing the last chapter up as opposed to after I’d shared it – kind of like an invisible brain wave serendipity thing.

It seems like Rex and his partners primarily moved into the building because they needed offices for their magazine but it also doubled as a living space. Using the property as an event space for parties would have been a third concern but I doubt it was too far from anybody’s mind. What young artist would look at two floors and 10,000 square feet worth of space and not imagine throwing a rager?

Nobody’s given me an exact figure for rent but I’m sure it was relatively low. In the 1990’s Downtown San Diego was full of porn theaters, SROs and cheap hotels known as “flophouses”. The Museum of Death was still in the Gaslamp Quarter and the area toward 12th and Imperial had Sushi Performance Art and The ReinCarnation Project. Ironically the moment developers started calling this area the “East Village” roughly coincided with when a lot of it’s art spaces were being displaced by Petco Park.

[I actually just heard back about the rent and it’s pretty amazing. 600 a month for all 10,000 sq. ft. on two floors and the first six months for free. That wasn’t the initial offer but something Edhlund was able to get through renegotiation.]

Photo courtesy of now closed Owl Drug Co. Restaurant

Rex was able to tell me that the building had originally housed a location of West Coast retail and pharmacy chain Owl Drug with a third floor bowling alley and a fourth floor archery range during World War II. By the time him and his partners moved in the fourth floor had already been converted to a boxing gym. The second floor had been used as storage.

Before moving into The Loft Edhlund ran a store in North Park called The Store That Cannot Be Named. It sold underground comics, clothing, art books, spray paint caps for graffiti art and had a screen printing studio in the back. Ironically I had come across that name somewhere while digging around for clues on what I eventually found out was The Loft and assumed they literally didn’t want to mention a store’s name because of a legal or copyright dispute – I never would have guessed it was actually related to what I was searching for.

The store was on 30th Street next to legendary leather bar Wolfs and open in 1992.

https://dangerfactory.com/pages/about-this-thing

The magazine was called Sin until a legal dispute over that name necessitated changing it to Hypno. I read somewhere that it was the first print magazine in the world to be entirely edited on computers and have no reason to doubt that’s true. It made such a splash that Larry Flynt Publishing began distributing it almost immediately allowing it to reach the then-vital newsstand market.

The magazine was definitely ahead of it’s time covering a mix of underground music, comic books, both fine and street art, alternative cinema and things like car clubs and club kid fashion contests. They were the first to cover Shepard Fairey and the mix of graffiti and design work he was doing with Obey Giant. Sin, which started in 1992, and Hypno were no doubt influences on The Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal magazine launched in 1993 and the art publication Juxtapoz that began in 1994.

Here’s a reproduction of a 1995 article from Fairey’s website.

https://obeygiant.com/articles/hypno-magazine-things-october-1995/

A popular theme and style inspiration on the magazine and lots of art, music and comics of the ‘90s is the aesthetics of lounge/exotica music, tiki bars and Hot Rod/Kustom Kar design. I have a theory that waves in the tastes of young artists/hipsters are influenced by the die-off of older generations and the proliferation of their knick knacks in thrift stores. By the early to mid 2000s the hot thing was 1970s decor with owls and mushrooms.

Me and Francois used to play a game to kill time at San Francisco house parties called “find the owl” – it didn’t matter that we’d never met the hosts and knew nothing about them – we could always count on at least one being on display.

The Hypno guys were in cahoots with Fantagraphics and a lot of other small press comics people that were coming to San Diego for the Comic Con. When Daniel Clowes and Peter Bagge did the Hateball tour together in 1993 The Loft hosted an after party for it and put on another soirée for Comic-Con that Summer. By 1994 there was considerable buzz around repeating the tradition and planned events for Roger Corman’s film studio and Danzig’s Verotik imprint wound up being lumped in and contributing to the growing snowball.

I may have mentioned this night in passing in at least one of the previous chapters but for the sake of expediency I will attach Edhlund’s account here:

The Infamous Comic-Con Loft Party

Most of the stories around this celebration center on Glen Danzig as the combination of his diminutive stature and outsized masculine bravado seem to bring something out of people. One person said he was standing on his tiptoes to take pictures with fans which might be possible but the rumor of a drunken scofflaw challenging him to an arm wrestling match seems unlikely in light of the confirmed reality that he was accompanied by an intimidating bodyguard.

I was able to find a photo of him with a bodyguard from 1990 that I selected as the featured image of this entry but have no way of knowing if it’s the same person who accompanied the singer in 1994. My more observant readers will notice that in this image he is unabashedly standing for this photo with universally taller fans and making no attempt to obscure their relative height differences.

I was curious about the earliest days in the building and how Circle of Friends came to be involved. I’ve attached a screenshot of a message below that sheds some light on the connection and what kind of work was required to create functional work and living spaces. I also read in the Union-Tribune article that the property’s actual owner briefly fell under Murshid’s influence but I don’t know if this predated the Hypno staffer’s involvement or if it was a later development.

Edhlund told me that in the year without water they could sometimes manage to get showers in the upstairs boxing gym. Another thing he clarified was that Hypno was the only business officially headquartered in The Loft and near-solely responsible for paying the rent and keeping the lights on. He broke down the relationships with some of the other entities I’d heard associated with the place.

Home Grown Video, the first major amateur pornography company, became involved because they shared a lawyer and interest in the art scene. When Lofties wanted video editing and duplication equipment for creative endeavors Home Grown bought the gear, housed it there and allowed shared use. They also hired roommates who wouldn’t have otherwise come up with rent for freelance work like scanning slides.

Edhlund described it as “symbiotic”.

Global Underground Network, the big rave promoters, was mostly Branden Powers who also called The Loft home for a while. Ideally Branden would be the next person I’d want to get in touch with for stories. Global Underground did run some things out of and hold meetings in the space and Powers also helped with raising money and organizing events like the big Comic-Con party.

John Goff had sent me a newspaper clipping that talked about a label called Lobecandy Records and someone named Gen Kiyooka. Gen evidently took over the second floor space with all the computers after Steve Pagan moved out – an era referred to as “Year 3”. He ran the space as an artist’s collective where anybody could access the equipment in exchange for paying monthly dues.

The recording studio was on the second floor and built by the Hypno guys and members of Crash Worship who lived nearby in the church next to Pokez. It was about halfway done at the time of the ‘94 Comic-Con party as Edhlund’s account mentions using the “shell” as Danzig’s Verotik stripper room. I’m not sure if Circle of Friends provided any of the recording equipment but considering the provenance of the computers and Murshid’s knack for attracting deep pocketed devotees it seems likely.

Murshid on right

On the subject of Murshid I was able to find a picture of him after lots of digging. That was mostly the result of him having a primarily pre-internet heyday as opposed to any desire for anonymity – most cult leaders want to have their face on everything. It came from the obituary of the woman who made his wedding cake, seen here on the left, but unfortunately I captured the image without bookmarking the website and can’t recall her name.

Both Steve Pagan and Rex Edhlund talked about The Loft having weekly meetings like any collective punk house. Steve mentioned somebody at these meetings complaining about the associations and collaborations with pornographers and considering Steve’s Zone Smut work and Rex’s positive associations with Home Grown it seems like this had to have been the Circle of Friends folks.

The group most likely worried that breaking bread with a porn company might limit their ability to draw in young spiritual seekers which seems especially ironic considering that every single person that’s mentioned Circle of Friends has thrown out inferences of sex trafficking.

Edhlund said he left The Loft some time in the fourth year which would work out to 1997 according to my timeline. I also read something about Hypno eventually falling prey to a hostile corporate takeover and being published as a hollow mockery of itself with one sellout traitor sticking around. I seem to have misplaced my source on that as well but I think I pretty much got the gist of it – otherwise I’ll change it.

One thing I’ve noticed from my own time living in collectives is that they can be maddeningly ineffective at ejecting their most toxic elements. A full on eviction often requires a unanimous vote and it’s often easier to move out yourself than to try to band everyone against a common enemy. After a few years the members nobody wanted to live with are the ones in charge as it’s always possible to move in new people who won’t rock the boat.

At The Loft this was undoubtedly Circle of Friends. I’ve been marveling at the seeming improbability that I never encountered this place but I think it comes down to timing – by the time I would have been interested it was called World Evolution Loft and wasn’t particularly interesting. Of course it seems odd that nearly every one of my friends has at least one story from the place but if I’d experienced it myself there never would have been a mystery and without the mystery I never would have written any of this.

That’s pretty much where I’ll leave things. Of course I’m still interested in hearing stories and talking to folks who were actually there but things seem to be winding down and some stories are best told by the people who experienced them. I’ll leave you with one last screenshot from my conversation with Rex:

[link to conclusion]

Berkeley 1998 : “Don’t You Ever Change Your Clothes Tomine?”

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One of the first things me and Francois did upon moving to the Bay Area was take a trip to the large Sanrio Store in Downtown San Francisco. We weren’t total weebs but we were into a lot of anime and manga and Francois especially had a weakness for cute stationary. Chococat was a fairly new character at the time, having only debuted in 1996, and Francois was drawn to a particular stationary set because it contained these things called “friendship cards”.

These are small printed cards where you can write your name, phone number, address, birthday and hobbies then hand them out to people you want to be friends with. Did we actually think that if we handed these things to cool looking people we met at shows, record stores or other events they would become friends with us? I’m pretty sure we actually did. I can’t remember if we ever even got our phone turned on but I do remember spending the last few months at the Japanese house without power.

It’s humorous to imagine an actually friendship motivated person holding one of these colorful gingham cards and cheerily walking up our driveway only to find us throwing darts at each other in the dark. Unless they wisely crept away before we could even notice them this never actually happened. We handed out every single one of the cards but none of the recipients took us up on the invitation to become friends.

We were all super interested in underground comics and although we hadn’t moved to the area for this reason we did know that several of the big names lived in the area. We went to the address from the Eightball letters column only to find a mailbox spot on Shattuck Avenue. We tried to case the spot whenever we came to the neighborhood but never seemed to catch sight of Daniel Clowes. We searched the white pages for every cartoonist we had heard of and actually did find a listing for Phoebe Gloeckner.

I think it was Jonas who picked up the phone and dialed but Francois and I were probably sitting by expectantly. The conversation was short and extremely awkward: probably something to the effect of Yes I am the cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner How did you get my number? Oh I should probably change that. Considering that her most famous work, the recently published A Child’s Life And Other Stories, was mostly about childhood sexual abuse an unsolicited phone call from a random male fan must have felt extremely suspect.

Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve had recently been picked up by Drawn & Quarterly and had made a big splash at the San Diego Comic Con either earlier that summer or the year before. I can’t remember if we had seen him in person at this event, seen a photo somewhere or it was just that he really looked the way that he drew himself. Out of all the cartoonists he was actually popping up at the shows we went to and I noticed him at San Francisco’s Bottom Of The Hill for the incredibly geeky Servotron and Man or Astroman? show.

This was actually our third or fourth sighting as we had been seeing him around Berkeley in the Amoeba and Rasputin record stores and the then popular Landmark California Theater. I noticed that he always seemed to be wearing the same shirt: an avocado green argyle thing that loosely fit into the ‘50s retro trend of the time that was showcased in movies like Swingers and Tree’s Lounge. I approached him at the concert with the following completely friendly and non-confrontational icebreaker:

“Don’t you ever change your clothes Tomine?”

He responded by staring at the ground and quickly shuffling away. Or maybe I half mumbled it and he never actually heard me, I do remember spending the whole night working up the nerve to say it. If I could advise my younger self I would probably suggest something more like “Hey! You’re Adrian Tomine right? I really like your comics!” but at the time my brain hadn’t developed anything like common sense for this particular type of situation.

We spent a lot of time in the now defunct Comic Relief store on Shattuck and I ended up at was probably the 1999 WonderCon in the Oakland Convention Center and Marriott. I don’t remember Francois or Jonas being here and because we were all equally interested in comics it seems likely that I ended up here by pure chance because I would use the 12th Street Bart Station to return to the East Bay from San Francisco State. I probably saw people with the badges on and was able to convince a leaving attendee to give me theirs so I could run upstairs and check it out.

I met a group of young cartoonists working in the hand made black and white mini comic format. I don’t think I had seen any of their work before. I introduced myself on the pretext that I could use my job to help them make free or reduced cost photocopies which would have almost certainly been impossible to make good on. The owner of Metro Publishing didn’t actually own the machines but leased them from a company called Ikon Solutions that charged a fee for every page produced. Even if I had run comics for somebody while he was out of the shop he would have noticed the discrepancy on the internal counters.

The one person I remember talking to was Ron Regé, Jr. I was just looking into the timeline of his work and his first big published book Skibber Bee Bye didn’t come out until November of 1999 so he would have just had some mini comics. Something must have clicked between us or he just liked my energy and enthusiasm but he ended up coming by the house or giving me a ride home. At that time the lot that now holds Berkeley Bowl West sat empty and we referred to it as “the bayou”.

One of the buildings bordering the lot had a big sign that said St. Onge & Associates and Ron mentioned that his then girlfriend Dini was the daughter of the head of that development company. He saw that we were living like crazy people – no power, no roof, weird games and left. Not long after me, Francois and Lil Four broke into that building and came across a fancy office decorated with handmade paper kites. We stole a few of them and tried to fly them on the bayou where the wind promptly ripped them to pieces.

It’s not that we broke into the building because he said it was connected to his girlfriend’s father, we just spent a lot of our time breaking into buildings. The day that our next door neighbors moved out we snuck into their now empty house after dark and brought home the television. It turned out to be broken but what I’m getting at is that we never actually had one. Lil Four brought a record player but a typical night for us was spent burning a mattress, dropping a bowling ball off the nearby Orchard Hardware water tower or breaking into cars in the tow yard next door.

I did end up seeing Ron again either at a comic/music related social function or we had exchanged phone numbers. I just remember what I said to him:

“Hey I broke into your girlfriend’s father’s office and stole some of his handmade kites. We tried to fly them but they just fell apart.”

He said that while that was the name of his girlfriend’s father’s company he didn’t think that wherever we stole the kites from was actually his office. The point is that I didn’t say this as a challenge or provocation, I thought that I was just making conversation. It’s weird because I’ve had these memories for close to a quarter century now and this is the first time I’ve realized that I am completely incapable of identifying with or understanding this past behavior.

It would make sense to me to have told him about the kites to fuck with him or to have kept it a secret because it might have pissed him off but I really don’t understand volunteering the information for no reason whatsoever. What did I think? that if he was having dinner with his girlfriend and her father and it happened to come up that some kites had been stolen from his office Ron could then say “oh my friends stole those. they live in a house with no roof and don’t have power and spend their time breaking things” and this all would be just normal and pass the potatoes?

I don’t actually have any idea what I thought except that my memory tells me I was just sharing some potentially interesting information about a mutual acquaintance and the emotional affect was completely neutral. This can’t be true though, somewhere on some level there has to be some aggression. When I said the thing to Adrian Tomine about his shirt I know that it was aggression and it was coming from a place of social awkwardness but me and Ron were already friends.

If you haven’t read a whole bunch of my pieces you might not understand why I’m fretting so much over this small and seemingly trivial detail but my more faithful readers should be aware that I have a certain relationship with memory. I view it architecturally, like a thing I live in, and I want to be able to stick an arm out and feel a wall and then stick the other arm out and feel the other wall. When I learn that something was different or a detail doesn’t fit it makes me uneasy like the dimensions of a familiar room have shifted.

I’ve gone through that a couple of times with material details but now I’m going through it with the emotions that go along with details. It’s like if you’re reading a book where a character does bad things but it’s written in a way so that you can identify with those bad things like “oh he wanted to cause this horrible disaster to bring about world peace” like the Ozymandias character in Watchmen. I wasn’t expecting to come across memories where my own motivations are completely mysterious and inscrutable and I can’t rewrite it in a way where I do understand those motivations because then it wouldn’t be true.

I would almost worry that this level of dissociating from my past self is a sign of early dementia and serious cause for concern but I’m almost positive that the near exact opposite is true.

That if I could actually understand why I casually told Ron about stealing those kites then that would be a cause for concern and the fact that I can’t means that I’ve been extremely lucky. Like if I was looking at a bullet hole in a wall that didn’t end up hitting me and thinking to myself:

“Three inches to the left. If it was just three inches to the left it would all be over…”