Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Fifty thousand

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(2013)

Did a rough calculation just now and figured that in the three decades or so since I was diagnosed as epileptic, I’ve taken over 50,000 pills. And that’s low-balling it. I don’t know if that’s cool, or gnarly, or just a helluva lot of pills.

Fifty thousand. Fifty times a thousand. Fifty thousands, really. It would have once been fifty thousands. When it finally got to the point that it was not a plural, not fifty separate thousands, it became the one fifty thousand. There went the plural, no more s, poof. Was that a mathematical poof or just a linguistic one I don’t know. Did some smart guy decide it was one thing, this fifty thousand, or did people just get lazy and drop the s the way people do? People are lazy speakers. I know I am. I can’t be bothered with consonants. Drop them all over the place, especially in the middle of words. D’s in particular. Just hint at the thing, glottalize it softly, can’t be bothered to stretch the tongue all the way to the teeth for that little rush of air off the palate that makes a d. What’s the point. People understand me anyway, mostly. Anyway, maybe that’s why fifty thousands is fifty thousand. Lazy tongues. But let’s say no, it was a mathematician. Some guy in a lab coat, a blackboard covered with x’s and y’s and no social graces whatsoever.

But back to fifty thousand. I know a guy that has fifty thousand records. He has as many records as I’ve taken pills. And I know a guy that has fifty thousand rubber bands in a big ball on his desk. It’s a really stupid hobby, but he has as many rubber bands as I’ve taken pills. And I know a guy that has fifty thousand dollars.

No, I don’t know anybody that has fifty thousand dollars. I mean fifty thousand dollars just hanging around. Fifty thousand dollars in a big fat wad in their pocket, like the Weenie King in The Palm Beach Story who gave a mess of them to Claudette Colbert who was standing in the shower in a skimpy bathrobe and driving the male half of the audience out there silently mad. There are people that have fifty thousand dollars like that, just fifty thousand dollars hanging around, but I don’t know who they are. I don’t know people who have a million dollars, or a billion, or a zillion dollars even. You don’t know these people socially unless you also have a million, billion or even zillion dollars. You can’t eat at the same restaurants, or go on the same vacations, or buy the same companies and lay off the same people. But I do know they have more dollars than I have taken pills, that’s for damn sure. I don’t even have to use my calculator to figure that out.

Then there’s that whole thing about a picture being worth a thousand words. They measured it. It’s a thousand words. I saw a photo album today that held fifty pictures. People pictures, cat pictures, baby pictures. I would rather have seen the fifty thousand word equivalent, as it was a really dull fifty pictures. And that would be as many words as I’ve taken pills. And words are something I can understand. Though I have written way over fifty thousand words. Ten times that easy, five hundred thousand words plus some. I figured that out once. MS Word made it feasible, put all those words together in a huge document. So huge it was cumbersome as a brontosaurus and took forever to open or close or edit even. I did a word search once that crashed my computer. I was afraid I was going to crash the Internet. It didn’t, and the world is safe, but now I’m on WordPress and though I like it, and that’s why you are reading this, it’s all fucked up, word wise counting wise. I just have to guess. I never guess about my pills.

Actually I’ve written way over ten times fifty stupid pictures in a boring photo album’s worth of words. Some are on this blog. Some are still in that brontosaurus of a word document. And there’s a whole mess of words tucked away in columns in the archives of the LA Weekly, maybe five times that stupid photo album’s worth of words. But the rest are hand written in a big box in the closet. Some are typed. Remember typewriters, those big clacking things that dinged? Ancient. Words that came from typewriters are made of ink, though the words you just read are made of electrons. This is the modern world, baby. I found an electric pencil sharpener at work, once. It was hidden in a supply drawer that had been locked up for year and was full of fossils. Carbon paper. White out. Rubber bands by the thousands. Boxes of pencils. Erasers in all shapes and sizes and colors. And that electric pencil sharpener. I took it out and put it on my desk. An intern asked what it was.

There’s also a bunch of words stuck in a hard drive from a computer that died a bad death, sparking and smouldering. Funny they aren’t words right now, just codes or whatever it is that sit in the memory chips, awaiting electrons that make them words again. Actually none of these words are words unless you open the file to look at them. I’ll finish this post finally, save, log out and go look at the news or pictures of ladies or something. None of these words exist then, until someone decides they really need to read what Brick says about pills. Press the link and voila!, words. And there’s all the words sitting in emails I never deleted, plus the ones I deleted are just memories of words, or would be if I remembered them. I don’t mostly.  Who knows how many words disappeared over the years on work email accounts. Then there’s instant messaging and texting and twitter and Facebook. That must come to millions and million of words. I have no idea how many cat or baby pictures that amounts to.The calculator is way over there and I’m here typing, and it’d be just a wasting time exercise anyway. We were here to talk about pills.

My pills usually come in the mail. But sometimes I forget to re-order and have to go to the pharmacy to get more. It’s in Hollywood, the pharmacy. The last time I was there a man in a Santa hat came in, sat down and ate a sandwich. He didn’t want pills, he was just eating a sandwich.The next day I went there again, and there was a man wearing Mickey Mouse ears. He didn’t eat anything. He was in line wearing mouse ears, talked to the pharmacist in mouse ears, paid for his package in mouse ears, and disappeared out the door weaning mouse ears. He probably ate later. And I saw a lady there once who was so beautiful you couldn’t believe she was here in the wrong end of Hollywood. She wore a pink cowgirl hat and had legs for days that ended in cowgirl boots. I don’t think she was a real cowgirl, though. She was just bored, and sighed, and stared. People stared back. Mostly, though, the people waiting there don’t wear Santa hats or mouse ears or any kind of head gear of any sort. They just wait.

OK, time to take my pills.

Life on Mars

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(2014)

There was a guy who lived next door way back when, a piano player. Heard him playing all the time, he was pretty good. Piano is a lonely life, and certainly was back then in the hard rocking nineties. Guitar players got the girls. He switched to guitar. He’d obviously never played before, and so began the painful process of becoming a rock star. The first thing he did was buy a full length mirror. You could look out our kitchen window and see it through his living room window. You’d be washing the dishes or getting a glass of water and look up and there he’d be checking himself out as he did his little solos. Every day in front of that mirror getting the fingering right and the look down. His favorite song was Life on Mars. In fact his only song was Life on Mars. He noodled through it slowly, cautiously, painfully, artlessly, over and over and over. It’s a god-awful small affair, he’d play, to the girl with the mousy hair. Da da da da da da da da, da da da da da da da da… I’d find my self singing along, slowly, Take a look at the lawman/Beating up the wrong guy/Oh man, wonder if he’ll ever know/ He’s in the best-selling show/ Is there life on—and he’d hang there, and I’d count off eight, or twelve, or even sixteen–Mars?  One, twice, ten times, twenty times, an entire afternoon’s worth of Is there life on………… Mars?

It was enough to drive you mad.

This went on for weeks. Is there life on……………..Mars? Eventually he put together a little trio…a  bassist and a drummer in his living room. They weren’t loud. But they played Life on Mars over and over. They would all three come to a stop, wait, then Mars? They probably played other songs, but all I can remember is Life on Mars. They really worked on that one, he wanted to get it just right. It was their meal ticket. It would make them famous. They’d be stars. Is there life on………………………………. Mars? The women would swoon. It would be the freakiest show.

Then came the Northridge earthquake. It roared in from the Valley at four in the morning. The cats on our bed disappeared, the cat on the floor jumped up on the bed. For endless seconds the quake rocked us about, and just as it seemed like it would last forever it ended. All was silence aside from the chorus of car alarms. We got up to check on the damage. We walked about waving our flashlights but nothing was knocked over, nothing had fallen. We huddled in the dark, waiting for aftershocks and listening to panicky voices on the radio.

Dawn broke slowly, silently, still. Every few minutes the place would shake. The city was eerily silent. The occasional siren. The smell of distant smoke. Nervous dogs. The mockingbirds started up again. We had no water. No power. No Life on………………………….. Mars? Just wait till the power comes back on, my wife said. I stood at the kitchen sink looking out the window and listening. It was so hushed. The radio said there was destruction everywhere but you couldn’t tell from here. It all seemed the same. Like nothing had fallen down at all. But just then something caught my eye. Or didn’t catch my eye. Something that had been there wasn’t there. The mirror. The mirror was gone. The rock star mirror must have fallen down and shattered into a million pieces.

I never heard another note on the guitar come out of that apartment. Perhaps the earthquake had snapped its neck. Perhaps the falling mirror had busted it into chunks. Perhaps it was an omen. Or maybe playing guitar is no fun without a full length mirror. Whatever. We heard no more guitar. And no more Life on Mars.

After a week or so I heard him back on electric piano. He wasn’t a bad pianist. He’d do pop tunes, some standards, improvise a bit. He’d have no problem picking up lounge gigs. I always assumed that was how he paid his rent. And now, with guitar and mirror most emphatically gone, he went back to worrying about the rent. One night I heard him tinkling through New York, New York. Then through Feelings. He must have landed a new gig. It’s tunes like that that fill tip jars. Might even get a piano player laid.

I wondered about the passionate artist inside him, though. The one who saw the beauty in that endless delay in Life on………………………….. Mars? I admit I couldn’t see the beauty, nor could anyone else I knew who heard it. In fact, most people burst out laughing. Someone said it was like waiting for Jack Benny to say “Well!”, which of course only made it worse. I’d be hearing the guy playing Life on Mars and I’m visualizing Jack Benny being insulted by a chicken. Is there life on…………………… Well!  Still, though, I imagined our neighbor there, in the dark, his rock star career in pieces on the floor. It had been a fun dream while it lasted–he’d even had a girl in there a couple times while he had that mirror–but now he was back to the happy hour grind. All the songs that normal people want to hear when they’re drunk. I heard him going through the Billy Joel songbook one night.

Then one time, he was practicing again, running though the MOR hits and drinkers’ favorites. I heard the little flourish that opens New York, New York–dink dink dink da-dink, dink dink dink da-dink, dink dink dink da-dink, dum–and then he took the melody slow, sonorous, sad–start spreadin’ the news/ I’m leavin’ today–and maintained that tempo through the next two verses. His little town blues melted away very slowly, his brand new start of it took its sweet measured time. But he was just building us up for the signature. If I can make it there/ I’ll make it…..anywhere. Then again. If I can make it there/ I’ll make it………. anywhere. Again, a little longer. I’ll make it…………… anywhere. Finally I’ll make it………………….. anywhere.
 
We split town for a week right after that, and when we came back his place was empty. He’d moved out. I hoped to New York. He would have landed a gig, run through the Billy Joel songbook, a little Feelings, maybe I Write the Songs. Play that song about New York, New York someone says. And he would, his way, because if he can make it there, he’ll make it anywhere. Is there life on Mars?

Dick Haymes

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(2013)

Dick Haymes came up today online. Some friends were discussing their favorite singers of the crooner age, Frank Sinatra and all that, but it was Dick Haymes that got the exchange going. How he replaced Sinatra in Tommy Dorsey’s band, and what a superb singer he was, and how those were different times. And they were. People don’t really sing like that anymore. The jazz singers are much more jazz, everyone else has a lot more blues and rock and soul in there, and it’s all much more syncopated than it was back then. Sometimes in those days a band could play so softly, and a crooner croon so mellow, that you could hear the dancers’ shoes slide on the floor. Then the band would belt it out on some hard swinging number. That we can appreciate now, the wailing swing…but it’s the pianissimo passages that are so alien now. Crooning doesn’t stir the kids today. Nor in my day. Blame it on Elvis. Blame it on Basie. Blame it in the thrill of driving a big powerful automobile really fast. Those were different times. The world was at war, hell bent on self-destruction, and people needed to be crooned to. Dick Haymes was one of those who crooned to them, one of the best.

But Dick Haymes always reminds me of a strange little jazz party in Beverly Hills. Right downtown, in fact, with Rodeo Drive a block away and city hall a few doors down. The apartment–yes, a jazz jam in a Beverly Hills apartment building–was packed with people and instruments, lots of food, too much liquor. Med Flory was there with his alto, and Barry Zweig showed up and played. There was a very dapper elderly gentleman there, a retired network executive right down to his grey suit and perfectly shined shoes, and I wound up sitting next to him. He requested the band play a Dick Haymes tune. Med laughed. Dick Haymes? Who? And he blew a frenzied chorus of Ornithology. The man requested Dick Haymes again. Med ignored him, and there were no singers, anyway, and even if there had been none of them could have sung a Dick Haymes song. So as the band argued over the next tune the old man stood up and sang “Laura”. Just a verse or two. His voice was surprisingly deep and full. But the words escaped him and he looked a little bewildered and sat back down. Then he turned to me and began telling me his Dick Haymes stories.  A few minutes later he told me the same stories. Then the same stories again. Alzheimer’s. But I listened each time like I’d never heard them before, because they were good stories–concerts he’d seen in the war days, or after the war, in posh Manhattan clubs, or the times he met him, though sometimes I wasn’t actually sure if he’d met him at all. This went on all night, between blasts of bebop, he’d come up and tell me about Dick Haymes, and each time with a genuine intensity, a youthful ardor that was stirred up after half a century. Dick Haymes is pretty well forgotten now except by swing buffs and music historians. But that day I got a glimpse into the connection he made with his young fans way back in the day. It was vivid, passionate and, like all teenaged fandom, maybe a tad ridiculous. It was unfiltered by mature, adult and slightly cynical wisdom. That’s the thing about Alzheimer’s, it loosens memories from the perspective of time, and that old man was right there at the Palladium again listening to Dick Haymes, seeing him, maybe he was even back there and not in a living room in Beverly Hills, and the orchestra played the arrangements flawlessly and the girls swooned. After a while his son came by to take him home. The old man gave me a firm handshake and looked me right in the eye, though I don’t know if he remembered me, and walked slowly out the door humming “Laura”.

Sweeping up the scraps

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The tow guy hauled our shattered Buick away at 7:45 this morning and I was out in the street sweeping up the scraps and sparkly tail lamp bits that were revealed in the now empty spot. For some reason that seemed important. Apparently I am gentrifying. I was done by 8 am and soaking in sweat, which I took to be a bad omen for the day to come. I guess this heat spell isn’t over. It’s like Milwaukee in the summer, but without the beer and brats and polkas. I used to hear polkas in Silverlake, rancheras blaring from tinny radios at all hours, Mex 2 the Max, tri-colored accordions and huge hats. Whatever happened to Patricia Lopez anyway? I loved that show, back when you could buy elotes and tamales right on Sunset Boulevard for a dollar, right there in the heart of Silver Lake, and wash them down with cheap beer and when the earthquake struck at seven in the morning, toppling chimneys and dishes, the residents of the tenement across the street poured into the street with cries of ¡Terremoto! ¡Terremoto! They wouldn’t go back inside for days, sleeping on the sidewalk, memories of Mexico City falling down around them only a year or so before. But the building didn’t fall down, and they finally went back in, but are all gone again. The place is all prettied up now and pricey and full of screenwriters and actors and other desperate wannabes, as no doubt it had been once many decades before when Raymond Chandler lived a couple blocks away and noir was new. I wonder if the tenants know a whole era that came and went in their very pads only a generation before, and that the little park where they buy the expensive produce on Farmer’s Market day was once a tragic scene, the homesick waiter from the Mexican restaurant on the corner polishing off a bottle of tequila there on the park bench, and the liquor took him into a deep sleep and he slid off the bench and broke his neck without ever waking up. I think of him every time I pass that little park, and I never even knew who he was.

An Irish lullaby

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(St. Patrick’s Day, 2012)

I was watching Going My Way on TCM for the first time in ages a couple nights ago. It’s about as Irish as it gets…Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald. It so reminds me of my mom’s side, my grandfather, the whole bit. We were raised on that side. My pop was German, raised fiercely Lutheran and German speaking. Kein englisch in diesem Haus.  Immer deutsch. Even though that house was in Flint, Michigan. Catholics were verboten, too. The Thirty Years War was still being fought in those days in some places. Every German Lutheran Church was a battlefield, a besieged city.  As if the America all around it didn’t exist.

My Dad, though, met my Mom. It was at a party at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey; he had a new blue Buick. She had blue eyes, a hint of a brogue and was lovely and Irish Catholic to her very bones. The laugh, the temper, the father who drank a wee bit. Old Germans had listened to Hitler on the shortwave, while the old Irish boys hung out in bars and sang. Can’t you meet a nice Irish boy? her father grumbled. But he didn’t mean it. They never did. Didn’t even mind that Dad wasn’t Catholic. The kids were going to be going to Mass, don’t you worry Pop. They’d all be confirmed by a priest. He drank port to that and sang and a little bit of heaven fell out the sky that day. So my folks were married. In Ankara, Turkey. And then Istanbul. It’s complicated. NATO and all that. But they found a priest somewhere over there and the neighbors threw them a big wedding party. Dad had a zillion photos of it, racked up in slides. A local Roman Catholic priest pronounced them man and wife. Martin Luther spun in his grave. A black lamb was slaughtered, as if it were still ancient Greece. The blood was vivid red in the photo. Dad said some of the kids got the eyeballs. It’s a delicacy. All us kids went ewwww. Mom just winced. That poor thing, she said. The poor little lamb. The party went on for days, everyone in the village was there, plus some. Hundreds of people. Those were the days. They thought they’d never end.

Fifty some years later Dad was long dead (and died Catholic, and got a wake), and all of us were hanging out with Mom. We’d driven out to Arizona to see her. The nuns had said if we want to see her one last time we’d better get there as fast as possible. We left at four or five in the morning, driving across the Mojave as the sun was rising over it. Desert dawns are the most beautiful things you can ever see. Pastels and shadows. Birds. A zillion butterflies. Rocks in crazy piles and jagged mountains promising no water at all. Buzzards smell sweet death in the air.

The party began as soon as we got there. Five of the six siblings, a couple wives, an energetic swarm of grandsons. Plus dogs, birds, turtles, fish and a cat. The piano was played, some guitars, a saxophone, whatever made or tried to make music. We talked and talked and talked. The food was endless. We joked and talked and ate and Mom, riddled with bone cancer, talked and joke and even ate. Her imminent death was just a given, something to be discussed, even kidded about. It was normal. Sad but normal. The order of things. Not much you can do about it she told me. And laughed. Her kids were there, their kids were there, there could not be a better way to go. At one point the priest came by and all became solemn as he delivered Last Rites. We all stood around her bed. The ceremony was ancient and beautiful. Two thousand years of beauty. You could see the worry released in her face. Afterword he switched to his civvies and joined the party. Everyone talking, looking in on Mom, letting her sleep. Eventually it broke up. Mom was awake. I said so long, we’ll see you tomorrow, and kissed her on the forehead. She smiled.

She died the next morning. My brother Jon was in the room with her, playing Mozart on the piano. She slept uneasily. Mumbled about home. Home, home, home. Then she let out a little gasp, breathed hard for a minute, and was gone.

The wake began immediately, just a small wake, her kids, her brother, the wives and grandsons and nephews. It was sad, but it was nice. We had the bigger, boozy wake later, after the interment. This was just the family hanging out. The priest came by. The sisters. She just decided it was the time to go, one of the sisters told me. She worked in a hospice. We thought your mother would hang on for weeks, she said, a slow horrible bone cancer death. But she decided it was time, with all of you out here. She smiled at the thought. That’s the way it should be. I nodded.

So now it’s a couple years later and I’m watching Going My Way. At one point Bing, the young priest, is trying to get Barry Fitzgerald, the ornery old priest, to fall asleep for chrissakes. So he sings the old Irish lullaby “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral.” Some of my earliest memories are of my mother singing me off to sleep with it. The melody sways in the breeze, the words loll, and sometimes it sounds like the most beautiful tune you ever heard.

And it took me back to the morning Mom had died. She was still in the bed, looking peacefully asleep. We had each of us slipped in alone throughout the morning to bid her farewell. No one made a big deal about it, we’d sort of break off from the chatter and walk in for a few minutes. At some time that morning I entered and there she was sleeping, looking beautiful. Just like you want the dead to look, just how we want ourselves to look. I gazed at her a minute, and began singing “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral” in a hushed voice, so as not to wake her. Just a couple choruses. Then I said Goodbye, Mom, kissed her forehead one last time and stepped out again to join the living.

Bandini Mountain

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(2014)

There is a vast concrete plain where Bandini Mountain once stood. An awesome pile of dung a hundred feet high, it was the only topographic feature in all of Vernon and has disappeared into history. No more skiing down Bandini Mountain. No more nothing. Just wind and a big empty fertilizer factory and the ghosts of long dead commercials. Did Huell Howser ever ski down Bandini Mountain? He would have. Golly.

I remember driving by in a Santa Ana wind and not rolling up the car windows in time. Bandini Mountain was blowing west right through my car, covering me in a fine coat of fertilizer. What was in that stuff? I tried to think of it as dust, not cow shit. I had dust in my eyes. I was tasting dust. Brushed dust from my hair. Sweet smelling dust everywhere, on everything. A block or two down was row after row of rendering plants. Now that was an aroma. It annihilated all the sweet smelling Bandini Mountain molecules in the air, replaced them with the rankest smelling molecules ever. What nearby Farmer John didn’t turn into bologna wound up there, in great vats. I pictured hides and bones bubbling and fizzing and expelling great clouds of deadly fumes. The odor clung to you. The air along Bandini Boulevard was full of rendered pig and fertilizer. The exhaust of a zillion trucks. Burrito wagons too numerous to count. Cows.

Once in the middle of Vernon I saw a bull escape. An enormous longhorned beast. It made a mad dash from the cattle carrier into a parking lot. White coated workers backed away. The bull charged one way then another. The workers scattered. Another white coat showed up with an enormous hunting rifle, aimed it. The bull faced him dead on, snorting, magnificent, ready to charge. The light turned green and I moved on. I passed the place on the way back a few minutes later. The man with the rifle was still there, and the lifeless bull was scooped up by a skip loader. It lifted it up into the air, the head hanging limply, the massive horns harmless. It disappeared behind the gates. The light turned green and I drove on. Bandini Mountain loomed ahead. I rolled up the windows.

I tried to find a picture of Bandini Mountain. I couldn’t. I tried to find a Bandini Mountain commercial. I couldn’t. I googled Bandini Mountain. There’s was almost nothing there. Several sites even referred to it as apocryphal. Said it never was. But it was. I breathed it.

Mr. Coffee

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(2012)

I cannot remember the last time I used a typewriter. 20 years ago? And a manual typewriter? 35 years ago? An adding machine…. I don’t remember. Decades and decades ago. I remember seeing slide rules in high school. They were beyond me. I learned to use the abacus in Maine in the 3rd grade……

Then there’s Polaroid cameras…that was wild. Going to Disneyland with a Polaroid camera. Everyone smile and there you are with Mickey. Magic.

We used to watch home movies at home a lot. Even better we looked at slides. Dad had boxes and boxes of slides. Dad would put up the movie screen, the light would go out and we’d all sit around the living room and watched slide after slide. The slide projector would whir and click and Niagara Falls. Whir, click Niagara Falls again. Whir, click and Dad pretending he’s falling into Niagara Falls. We loved it. I imagine there was popcorn and soda. We were a big family and that was cheap entertainment. There was a big chair I liked. I’d settle into it, curl up, and we’d eat popcorn and watch slides for hours. Wherever we were living at the time. Orange County, Tacoma, Maine, San Diego,Virginia, Maryland, or maybe a motel in Amarillo with the roads to icy to drive on—there’d be slides, whir, click, Niagara Falls.

I’ll have to start looking through our photo albums again. They’re very late 70’s, and all through the 80’s and most of the 90’s. Maybe a bit beyond. We threw a lot parties. There’ll be a TV and no VCR, there’ll be records spinning and no CD’s;  there’ll be piles of cassettes and a ghetto blaster. We’d be heating up party snacks in a little oven and not the microwave (talk about revolutionary…an old technology that suddenly became essential.) Maybe one of those ghastly coffee pots….though I liked the percolating sounds. Our last one died, thank god, so we got a Mr. Coffee in the 80’s. It died the same night as Joe DiMaggio. Joe was always on TV somewhere, sixty seconds of him and Mr. Coffee. He was to Mr. Coffee what Mrs. Olson was to Folgers. Then the late news said Joltin’ Joe was dead and next morning my Mr. Coffee wasn’t working. It was still and cold. I jiggled the on off button and waited. Nothing. I unplugged and replugged it. Nothing. I checked the outlet.  It was fine. Mr. Coffee was dead. It was my favorite coincidence ever.

The Irish, you know, anthropomorphize their machines. I’ve argued with tea kettles all my life, like my mom did, and my grandmother. I talk to my coffee maker. Talk to all kinds of inanimate things, like they could talk back. I thought everybody did this till my wife caught me bickering with the tea kettle. She looked at me like I was nuts. I had no idea she didn’t talk to tea kettles. She thought the whole notion was so stupid. I said, umm, it’s an old Irish thing. She said sure. I hate it when she says sure. There is something humiliating about being called irrational by a Sioux Indian. You guys with your dream catchers? And talking to a tea kettle is stupid? I didn’t say that of course. But when she walked out of the kitchen I gave the tea kettle a quick shake and it whistled in protest. Don’t listen to her I said.

Anyway, Mr. Coffee’s were gloriously noisy things, they grumbled and groaned, they had a personality. So when our Mr. Coffee died brokenhearted after hearing about Joe, well, it was very sad. I felt sad throwing it into the recycle bin. I’m sure I didn’t throw it at all, but dropped it carefully. I had to fight the urge to keep it. It still makes me sad to think about the poor thing.

My mother would understand.

Joltin’ Joe brewing joe.

No one remembers dead trees

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(2015)

I remember when we first moved here in 1980 I had a temp job in Beverly Hills and would commute there from East Hollywood down Santa Monica Blvd because I didn’t know any better. It was a pretty homely drive east of Vine St., dull, commercial, beat up, old hotels and ugly sixties apartments. But then there was this stretch where Hollywood Memorial Cemetery (now Hollywood Forever Cemetery, beautifully and respectfully maintained) came right to the street, where tall, lithe palm trees, maybe two dozen of them, had been planted decades before in the lush green parkway that ran along the Boulevard. It was the loveliest sight, the lone and level ugliness of 1970’s Hollywood dispelled by these two city blocks of graceful, towering palm trees. They were magical. They were perfect. They were once what this town was. I loved those trees. I wish I could find a photograph of them. I couldn’t. No one remembers dead trees.

Then just like that, they were gone. It was a five day orgy of destruction. Hacked down, the stumps yanked out–I watched that, like pulling teeth–and bulldozers brought in and the lawn and top soil stripped away till only a hideous gash remained. One long graceful stretch of old Hollywood, trees that had shielded Valentino’s mourners and thrown stark shadows across Harry Cohn, trees now ripped out and tossed away. In their place was erected the ugliest strip mall I have ever seen, a sin against everything good. It remains, thriving. The workers in the shops make money, they’re good people. It’s likely none of them have a clue about what stood there before, the shade, the lush grass, the fronds waving in the hot autumn winds, shaken loose, dropping to the ground with a satisfying crunch, as unique as an L.A. sound as any. Back east the maples, alders, chestnuts and scattered elms drop leaves silently which flutter harmlessly to the ground. Palm trees shed theirs with a purpose, and you jump out of the way, just not on Santa Monica Boulevard between Gower and Van Ness.

I remember driving home Friday afternoon of that week and stopping at the light. The trees were completely gone by that point. The sun bore down unbroken by their shadows. The birds were silent, gone. The parkway was an obscene strip of bare earth. Behind the wall, in the cemetery, the dead lay unaware. Out here, on the street, I thought goddamn this town is rough. It saves nothing. It eats its history for breakfast. Perhaps it was an omen. The eighties were upon us, in all their meanness, poverty, cruelty and death.

Box of wedding stuff

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(2013)

Found a box way up on the closet shelf.  Our wedding stuff. A third of a century old. Like a freaking time capsule. My my how thin I was in the pictures. And young. And dashing. And unwrinkled, my still thin wife helpfully points out. And tall, I add, being that I still am and will be forever. Infrastructure, ya know. Some things don’t change.

November 29th, 1980. I don’t remember much of that day. The weather was a perfect southern California late autumn day. A flawless blue sky.  People come out to California on days like this and never go back. And I remember my brother’s punk rock friends, one of whom, all leather and spikes, knelt like a knight of old and kissed the bride’s hand. I remember my Dad being so nervous he Cecil Taylor’d the Wedding March. And how everyone was so poor then, back in 1980, after the endless recession of the seventies. So we were married at my folks’ house and the ceremony was sweet and the feast home-made and wonderful and my other brother’s band played Beatles songs out on the patio.  Continue reading →

Dancing

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(2014)

There’s this wonderful old World War Two vet I know, well into his nineties, who I see at clubs and shows all over the place, always dancing. What a nut. I’ve seen him dancing to swing, country, blues, salsa, funk, jazz, western swing and rock. Even reggae. Always has a babe for a partner. Loves to dance, he says. Started dancing to the swing bands. Jitterbugging. All hell was breaking loose over in Europe but he was busy dancing. He was a kid. That’s what you did then, danced. Then came Pearl Harbor and his draft notice. Went through the war without a scratch, somehow, though his unit was mauled a couple times. Some of those Nazis, he said, were fanatics and would fight to the death. It’d be hopeless and they’d keep firing. Friends kept getting killed. Mines going off. Snipers, machine guns, 88’s. He was nearly blown to pieces more than once. The Battle of the Bulge was the worse, he said. They were all freezing cold, and a rifle isn’t particularly useful against a Tiger tank. Thought he’d bought it more than once. On top of all that the Nazis were massacring prisoners. If you were Jewish the last thing you wanted was to surrender to one of those SS bastards. His company had been cut off, and it looked bad, but somehow they managed to rejoin the rest of the battalion. Left a lot of friends there, he said. He saw one blown to smithereens. Should have been him but he had slipped out of the foxhole for chow or to take a leak or something–just before the mortar bullseyed his buddy. Nothing left. Somebody was looking out for you, I said. He laughed. No, just luck. That’s all it ever was, luck. Later, in Germany, all the towns were gone, flattened. The RAF had gotten their revenge. The people were giving up, meekly surrendering. But there were fanatics everywhere. Hitler Youth who kept fighting no matter what. You’d see them later, just kids in baggy grown up uniforms, dead. He kept losing buddies right to the bitter end. Still, he made it and now a zillion years later he dances every chance he gets. A lady comes by and taps him on the shoulder, and they spin slowly, lightly, across the floor.

USO dance, 1944

USO dance, 1944

 

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