Tag: Ghosts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Splendid, Splendid!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh for Heaven’s sake!”

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

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

Chicago 2001 : The Red House “Is That Bunny Naturally Purple?”

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The first girl that Justin Two brought home to the basement immediately imprinted on me and started following me around like a newly hatched baby duck in a cartoon. There are a couple of things about her I feel like I will never know for certain: I’m not sure if she was actually as much of an airhead as she presented herself as or if to some extent it was an act cultivated to appeal to the male gaze. Similarly I will never know for sure if she was actually infatuated with me or had merely grasped onto me as a means of escaping Justin Two’s “sex for drugs” transactional demands.

Her name was Sabrina but she was trying to change it to “Niaomi” pronounced kind of like the cute cat sounds that human characters make in anime. She wanted to move away from the “teenage witch” associations of her birth name because, in her own words, “they get burned” and her cultural background seemed to incorporate a heavy disdain for anything occult:

“My whole family hates ghosts! They think they’re devils!”

There was a very tragic pet bunny living at the Red House called Bun-Bun, I think Kiki might have brought it home. Justin Two used to put Bun-Bun inside of a clear acrylic bread box and hotbox it with crack smoke. I feel guilty in retrospect that I didn’t stop him but it somehow never gave the thing a heart attack. Bun-Bun also ended up getting fed these bright red processed hot dogs that somebody had brought home a giant bag of. After that everybody who slept on mattresses directly on the floor would sometimes wake up to the rabbit gnawing on their fingers.

The poor thing was obviously starving and looking for the closest thing it could find to the meat it had become accustomed to. Eventually Bun-Bun developed one of the sizable tumors that white laboratory bred animals such as mice and bunnies seem to be especially susceptible to due to a general lack of biological diversity. I’d like to think that Bun-Bun was humanely euthanized but I actually don’t know – I just remember the tumor getting bigger and bigger then one day it wasn’t around any more.

Anyway Bun-Bun was dyed purple on the day that Niaomi followed me out of the basement and saw it scurry across the floor.

“Is that bunny naturally purple? Does that mean that one of it’s parents was purple?”

I don’t think I actually made the obvious joke about Bun-Bun having a red father and blue mother, I don’t think I said much of anything throughout the entire encounter. That was how I constantly ended up in those kinds of situations, I never told anybody no. If someone decided to attach themselves to me and start following me around I always just let it happen. It wasn’t the best habit – it would lead to me having sex with people I would have preferred not having sex with and showing up at shows and parties with extremely sketchy random people from the street in tow.

Eventually I learned the very basic skill of establishing minimal boundaries with strangers and casual acquaintances but it took me a very long time – it wasn’t until after I was thirty years old.

On this particular day I needed to walk to the nearby DePaul University Computer Lab to check my e-mail and use the internet. Nobody at the Red House had a computer so this was one of our habitual excursions. The other one was going toward North Avenue to steal books from a Crown Books that seemed to exist in a state of perpetual disbelief that it hadn’t gone out of business yet. We would continue on to Wicker Park to sell the stolen books in the different used book stores then on to the West Side to buy drugs.

On one of the quiet tree lined streets I found an abandoned aluminum briefcase that had evidently belonged to some kind of doctor. The following exchange took place when I picked it up off the ground and opened it:

“Is that your briefcase?”

“It is now.”

“Are those your business cards?”

“They are now.”

“Can I have one?”

“Sure. Here.”

Niaomi seemed to be glowing with excitement as I handed her the card as if it represented some token of my affection in an alternate universe where it could actually be used to contact me.

“I’ll call you! You’re MY doctor!”

I didn’t have a phone. She knew where I lived. Back in the basement Justin Two had accepted the impossibility of creating any sense of sexual obligation in Niaomi and was smoking crack with her in resignation. She leaned over and shotgunned the hits into my mouth as a pretense for a kiss. I lay on the living room couch reading a Peter Sotos book as she snuggled against me in perfect contentment.

She disappeared back into her usual life and I never saw her again.

It seemed impossible that somebody who was more or less successfully navigating adult life could exist in such a state of naïveté without even an elementary understanding of cause-and-effect or the other laws governing the universe but there it was. In the sixteen or so hours we spent together she never once broke character or allowed the mask to slip. I’ve met other people with the “ditzy hot girl” persona in the intervening years but never again to such an exaggerated degree.

Our landlord lived next door to us and had introduced himself by showing up on the porch drunk and in a dress and pelvic thrusting as he delivered what we obviously took as a challenge:

“Nobody parties harder than I do!”

We called him Party Sean but he would soon learn that we actually did party alarmingly harder than he did. He could often be heard stumbling through the alley and talking about how he wasn’t usually so drunk so early in the morning. He had gotten some kind of a sweetheart deal on the house because the elderly couple that raised racing pigeons didn’t want to sell to anybody they didn’t know and apparently didn’t have kids to leave the house to. We represented an opportunity to start collecting rent without undertaking any renovations or improvements but he soon regretted it.

Justin Two had been driving through alleys at night to collect discarded wooden pallets in one of his many quick cash schemes. The pallet recycling center was closed or he ended up with a bunch that were the wrong size but for whatever reason he ended up just stacking them up around the back door of the house. I knew that change was in the air when I started to hear Party Sean and his lawyer discussing fire and liability in regards to the pallets. He had also kind of figured out that we were all on hard drugs and probably concluded that it was only a matter of time before we created major damages, a crime scene or both if he didn’t get rid of us. He vocally bemoaned his earlier decision:

“I could have rented this place to a nice Mexican family!”

Midway through the eviction process I ended up taking acid for what was the first time in my life. I got caught in some paranoid thought loops and convinced myself that I had been roaming inside the house completely insane for months but none of my roommates had wanted to contact my family or the authorities about it. I walked up and down the rear stairs until time broke and I saw infinite copies of myself frozen into a kind of figure eight in every possible position ascending and descending the stairs and pulsing with all of the colors of the visible light spectrum.

I tried to lay on my mattress and force myself to sleep but the strings on my electric bass (I’d left it on the bed) felt like writhing snakes that were shocking me with electricity. I ripped all of my clothes off but then immediately felt like I had to get out of the house so I pulled on the first thing I could find. This ended up being a pair of skin tight black jeans that were airbrushed with graffiti style bubble letters from a San Diego Thrift Store. They said “BILLY RAY THE BANDIT” with a large microphone by the crotch and an image of Bart Simpson as a stereotypical pimp.

I wandered into Party Sean’s house where, true to nature, he was having a crazy party. He made a flourish to present me to his guests, a mostly younger Hispanic crowd:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Jim Morrison!”

I could hear people joking about how I smelled like crack (this wouldn’t have been true on this particular day) but I was too out of my mind to be bothered by it. Everybody was smoking weed out of an old school vaporizer where it sat on a tiny sculpture of a skull in a jester hat inside a glass bubble. They tried to show me how to smoke it but I couldn’t really figure out the plastic tubes and how you were supposed to put your finger over a tiny hole. There were platters of cocaine all over the place too but I wasn’t really interested.

Party Sean said he felt bad about having to kick us all out and I told him not to worry about it. I said we were used to it. Eventually the sun came up and I realized it hadn’t actually been months and went home. I wasn’t “out of my mind” tripping anymore but I was still tripping and I couldn’t sleep. I shot a bag of heroin but it didn’t seem to do anything so I immediately shot another one. I woke up soaking wet having evidently just overdosed on heroin while still tripping on acid and then gotten narcanned.

Justin Two took me to a small neighborhood Carnival in Humboldt Park. I ate a coconut paleta and we rode the Ferris Wheel. We spent about ten minutes watching a snail climbing up and eating a yellow dandelion flower. Eventually I did go to sleep and woke up not on acid anymore but in another way it really does last the rest of your life like people say to fuck with you the first time you ever take it.

Everybody at the Red House spent all of their money on drugs and we all ate really badly. Once me and Matt found a dried out piece of cheese under the couch and we boiled it until it was soft then made instant mashed potatoes by using the water we had boiled it in as milk and the chunk of cheese as butter. Me and John found free passes to an early screening of A Knight’s Tale starring Heath Ledger. The movie theater exit passed through a kind of dry storage for it’s Concessions Stand and we stole two gigantic silver bags of nacho cheese that the house pretty much lived on. We ended up using that stuff to make instant mashed potatoes a lot, we kept it in the cabinet because it didn’t have to be refrigerated.

I can’t remember if Party Sean ever went through any of the official eviction paperwork. The pressure built up until he kicked in the front door and turned off the house circuit breaker and yelled that he would kill us if we didn’t leave. Nick and Janice had found an apartment just on the other side of the underpass that marked the beginning of the West Side open air drug markets on Chicago Avenue. We started getting all of our things together to move into this new apartment. A couple of Party Sean’s Goomba friends harassed us and made vague threats about how we and our parents would be “sleeping with the fishes” as we loaded everything into a car. I don’t think any of them were actually Italian.

I do remember one of my housemates rolling their eyes and asking one of our self styled intimidators:

“How’s that Bud Light treating you?”

Party Sean’s lawyer came to all of our jobs to drop off subpoenas. I got mine while I was working at the Italian cafe on Wrightwood. Matt and Joe had broken back into the house to see if we had accidentally left anything important behind and found a Manila envelope full of photos of the house before the mess and superficial damage we had caused got repaired marked “EVIDENCE”. They took it with them.

On the designated day we all showed up in court. Kiki had forgotten she was carrying this cool skull shaped knife so security ended up keeping it. The judge told us all that it wasn’t legal for his lawyer to have served us all at our places of employment. Party Sean and his lawyer tried to talk about damages to the house but the judge said that the hearing was only concerned with whether or not we had surrendered the premises. Somebody handed over the last copy of a key. Janice raised her hand:

“Your Honor, I don’t know if this means anything but I have a photo of our landlord wearing a dress.”

At the time I didn’t understand why she said that but I now understand how brilliant it was. Party Sean had presented himself as a fellow resident of a lawless world of hedonistic opulence then turned around and attempted to weaponize his asymmetric power in the waking world of respectability. He didn’t show up at our front door in a dress as an expression of fluid gender identity but to signify that he was a “wacky” drunk.

The judge had just told him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be able to lay a finger on us legally and Janice took the moment to remind him who he was.

I don’t know what happened with the house next but if he didn’t die young he probably made a decent stack of cash on it. I’m trying to remember his face – he was probably just hitting forty and looked a bit like a red haired Robin Williams.

I’ve met a great number of people who partied harder than he did but he did party harder (in the drugs and alcohol sense) than the only other person I’ve known with party in their nickname. Not in the knowing everybody sense though because almost nobody knows Party Sean but there’s a good chance whoever’s reading this knows who the other person I’m talking about is.

It’s Party Steve.

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