Category Archives: Autobiography,memoirs and confessions

Indian wars

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So we were at a party once and Fyl was talking about some American Indian thing, I can’t remember what. But she said American Indian several times. That was too much for one guy who told her they are not American Indians, they are Native Americans. Calling them American Indians, he explained, was repressive and colonialist. Fyl looked surprised. But we say American Indians, she said. So who exactly are you, he asked, rolling his eyes. I’m this she said, pulling out her tribal membership card and handing it to him. Yankton Sioux it said on the front, with the Yankton flag. Her tribal number and the blood quantum and other details graced the reverse. He stared hard at the card for the longest time, both sides. Then he handed it back, utterly bewildered. So you’re Native American? You? Really? Fyl said nothing and gave him the Sioux Death Stare. Against its withering remorseless glare words are useless, just sound and air. He stopped talking and froze. I had to look away to not burst out laughing and Fyl began to talk about her recent visit to the American Indian Center downtown. We had gone down there to fill out some forms but were there just at the right time and got a free lunch, she said, and described the contents, a sandwich and fruit and chips and juice. And a cookie, I said. And a cookie, she said. They gave Brick lunch too since he’s married to an Indian, she said. The lecturing guy winced at Indian. His face bore an expression of humiliation and despair. You could almost hear him thinking so this is a Native American? The one he met at college had been angry and cool. He couldn’t restrain himself any longer and suddenly interrupted her story about the Indian Center. What do you think about Standing Rock? he blurted loudly, like a kid blatting through a trumpet. Oops. Fyl stopped talking and gave him another Death Stare, even more withering and remorseless than before. When are you white people, she said in a cold Amerindian monotone, going to learn to stop interrupting? Silence. After a stunned moment he stammered an apology and fled.

She had ancestors at Little Big Horn, I said.

King of Hearts

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Saw King of Hearts again last night. It’s from 1966. I hadn’t seen it since 1974 or 75, when it was eight or nine years old which was a vast stretch of time then, equal to half the span of my long life. I saw it in a hippie movie theater in Fullerton CA between two other flicks though which I don’t remember. I do remember being confused. So I figured I’d watch it now, more than forty years later, being that l’m smarter and more sophisticated and mature. Unfortunately I fell asleep. That seems to happen to mature people. All that sophistication in exhausting.

Math

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I flunked pre-algebra so they had me retake it in summer school and gave me a D Minus even though I’d flunked it again. It must have a requirement for graduation or something. Or maybe I was a likeable kid. It was the only summer school class I ever had, and certainly the only time I ever took a class with all the other summer dumbfucks. And I was the dumbest of the dumbfucks in that class. The only one who flunked, or should have. Not that it bothered me any. All those letters where numbers should be.

Then we moved across town to another high school in another school district and I seem to remember having to take algebra and flunking it there too. Utterly mystified by all the letters where numbers should have been. It made no sense to me whatsoever. All my friends were acing calculus and trig and I couldn’t even spell hypotnoose. Still can’t. I do remember being called to a counselor’s office and asked if I had a problem with the algebra teacher. I said no, I thought the teacher was really cool. So you just don’t like math? I guess not. That ended my mathematics career. I’m great at simple arithmetic, but am the stupidest person I know at mathematics. I can’t do a single thing beyond addition, etc. Not thing even percentages. I cheat and divide by tenths and then hundreds and add them up. I’m a whiz at addition. But start mixing letters and numbers and it might as well be in cuneiform. Though I could probably figure out some cuneiform. It would make sense. Except for the goddam Babylonian algebra. It’s their fault. They invented it.

Apart from math classes I got mostly A’s and a few B’s in school. I figured out back in junior high that you didn’t have to study much if at all to ace an essay test. Teachers love pretty writing. So I wrote as much as possible in school. Wrote and watched the girls. High school was a breeze as long as I stayed clear of the math department.

A couple years ago I was digging through a box of some mementos my mother had left with me before she died and came across a certificate with my name on it. Apparently I graduated summa cum laude in English. I didn’t remember that at all. But then I remember very little of high school. The certificate looked a little goofy with its Greek words and swirls. Embarrassing. So that’s what summa cum laude means, I thought, and put it back in the box.

Banana peel

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Back when I was a teenager learning the fine art of smartassery, I decided it was time to see if you could really slip on a banana peel and if it was actually funny. Unfortunately it was not the sort of thing one could work out theoretically, So I dropped a banana peel on the hallway floor, took about ten steps back, turned round, and carefully calculating the number of strides required to reach the peel at a natural gait, I walked toward the banana peel, stepped firmly upon it and skidded several feet before falling in a humorous heap, twisting my knee. Wow, I thought, that really was funny. The three foot banana peel smear that the experiment left in the hallway carpeting was also funny. Rather than attempt to clean it up, I told my mom my brothers did it. Also funny.

All this came in useful many decades later when I was working downtown. I was walking around on my lunch break with a secretary from the office I probably shouldn’t have been walking around with when suddenly I skidded several feet and landed in a humorous heap, twisting my knee. A banana peel. Did you slip on that? the secretary asked. Apparently so, I said. On a banana peel? Yes, and I think it twisted my knee. Now that’s funny, she said. But I already knew that. And I limped back to the office awestruck at the universal laws of comedy where the secretary told all my coworkers I’d slipped on a banana peel and everyone laughed and laughed till I hated that joke.

But it was funny.

Fish poem

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The zebra danios are in Brownian motion, roiling like electrons, madly dashing after one another through open water and into the mass of triffids through little courses only danios know and then out again in a silver blur. It’s like they never stop but they do and when the tank is dark they lie suspended and still in piscine sleep. Do they dream? Who the fuck knows? They’re so small.

Mistral

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I looked up at the television and it said mistral in big red letters. Mistral…and a gust of wind sent the curtains billowing across the screen and it was like poetry. Wow. The gust subsided, the curtains fell back and the screen said mistrial in big red letters, as it had before. Mistrial, with an i, and I cursed learning just enough French to screw up.

I don’t feel right if I don’t write everyday.

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(from a Facebook thread….)

I’m just a working class boho living the easy life in LA. My office is this iPhone, a red folder for a few bills, a calendar I scribble notes in, one drawer of a file cabinet, a few zines to be read, a zillion books, some records and cds, and a TV my pal Sarge gave us. My desk is a rock garden and a small army of trilobites watches me in silence. One side of the room is all windows, worth the rent all by itself; the million dollar view and weather are free.

Today the weather is blustering through every window in the house and swirling madly about, warm and a little humid with hints of a more southerly Pacific. It’s all so easy and unhurried. But then so are we. We’ve been here for thirty years and a hundred parties. We’ll be here for more years and more parties. We’re Silver Lake lifers, going on four decades, watching the old Beats turn to old hippies to old punks to aging hipsters, each loathing the generation just before them and venerating the generation that came before the generation they despise. So me, I’m nuts about the Beats. Their poetry, their jazz, their asshole attitude. I can dig that. Fuck you if you don’t. The hippies and hipsters just flinched. The punks grinned. That’s how it works. You want to see me flinch start talking about goat yoga.

Think I’ll spoon a little Bustelo in my coffee maker and have a cup, put on a record since the CD player died and the monitor to the PC is on the blink, and see if I can find something in my drafts that I can finish. I don’t feel right if I don’t write something every day. But I have to be careful now because I’m epileptic and words can set off seizures and weirdness (and if that ain’t Beat, what is?)

But then this’ll do. So maybe instead I’ll just get stoned and watch the sky turn slowly pink then red then purple then black and listen to the coyotes make their crazy music. Why not? It is Saturday, as if Saturday had any relevance to a retired man. The jazz is emanating from the record player and an obnoxious little zephyr just scattered paper all over the floor. It’s the wee people’s doing, my grandmother would have said, half believing it. And the banshees howl by night, looking for sinners and Englishmen.

That’s a wrap.

Life is good

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(2017)

Forgot to take my spazz meds this morning, drank too much coffee, got a lot people pissed off on Facebook, remembered to take my meds and now sit here, neurons calm as a windless sea and watching you all yell at each other about Gomer Pyle and astrology. Life is good.

Christmas 2017

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A vast hollow boom rent the silent night, followed by a ragged series of other booms, just as loud. The first one startled me, the others just made me smile. No matter how much they’ve gentrified Silverlake, there’s still little pockets of Mexico where somebody’s tio borracho breaks out the stash of unbelievably illegal fireworks he’d smuggled up from TJ or maybe bought off an ice cream truck across the river and sets them off in a ragged volley because, hell, Christmas Eve is a holiday like any other. Now Silver Lake is utterly silent again as I write this, even in here, where the Christmas tree lights throw crazy shadows on the ceiling and the entire room looks like a Van Gogh still life. Brick needs to take his seizure meds.

Merry Christmas, all.

Fire season

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The fires up north are 600 miles away. The ones around Lake Elsinore an hour away but the winds are blowing the smoke inland, away from us. Until the winds begin blowing from the east we’ll smell very little smoke here in Silver Lake between Hollywood and downtown L.A.

But when the winds do begin blowing from the east, they’ll be bone dry and our local mountains and hillsides will go up like tinder. Our eyes will sting, our clothes will smell like smoke, ash will come down like a light summer rain. By day the sky will be filled with palls of smoke and by night the mountains will glow orange with rippling flame extending for miles. It’s weirdly beautiful. Sometimes we’ll drive the freeways that follow the foothills just to watch the eerie sight of fires burning in the mountains all around us, like we’re a city besieged. All day long sirens follow caravans of fire trucks hurrying to the front and sometimes immense helicopters hover over the Silver Lake reservoir like dragonflies drinking their fill before soaring off to drop the water on some doomed foothill neighborhood. They pass overhead in a roar every ten minutes. Flip on the local news and you can watch them drop their load with Norton bombsite precision. Minutes later they’re back overhead. The dogs bark excitedly and the neighbors watch from their sun decks awed and concerned.

Fire season is an overwhelming sensory experience, even the coyotes pitch in to howl and keen at every screaming, honking fire truck, and the local television stations follow it all day and all night and it’s all anyone talks about. Fire season is as Los Angeles as Raymond Chandler and as unnerving as The Blitz. An earthquake would almost be a relief. But that is all still to come: the air is clean now and a tad humid with the sea breeze and we sit here nervously waiting our turn.