(email, 2010)

Had a great moment tonite.  Was at the Foundry on Melrose, a very hip and energetic bar with great bands.  A hot, sexy, maybe five foot tall, kinda butch leather babe at the bar pleaded with her friend, the dude I was talking to, to introduce us. He did so. I said hi my name is Brick. She said “look at you, you’re gorgeous. I love the long hair”, running her fingers though my thinning locks. I don’t know who she thought I was, but she was lucious. I smiled back, slid past her, and escaped.

(Written 1996 from a story my wife told me in the mid ‘80’s)

Wednesday morning at 8 a.m. My wife gets on the bus.  As she steps on there’s a man sitting near the front, a skinny black fellow in a bright red wig.  Barking.  Bow wow!  Bow wow wow!  Barks at her as she passes.  And at the next person.  And the next.  Bow wow wow wow!  The bus rolls along west-bound on Sunset Blvd.  At every stop people have to walk by him to get off the bus.  Bow wow!  People getting on walk by.  Bow wow wow!  Sounding just like a little dog.  A Dog Man.

My wife took a seat near the back.  Across the aisle from her was another guy, praying quietly to himself, big stack of religious tracts in his hand, oblivious to the canine goings-on.  Time to spread the Word.  He gets up and begins working the aisle from the back of the bus.  Everybody gets a Praise the Lord! and a pamphlet.  It’s rush hour and the bus is busy and it’s slow going up the length of the bus with all the riders coming and going.  Way up front the man in the orange wig bow wows.  Finally the itinerant preacher reaches the front where Dog Man sits.  Bow wow!  Other riders try to warn him, but Preacher is on a mission.  Dog Man eyes him warily, and barks a warning.  Bow wow!  Preacher gives him a big smiling Praise the Lord! and hands him a pamphlet.  Bow wow!  Dog Man just glares from under that bright orange wig.  Preacher looks at him and thrusts the pamphlet toward him again.  Praise the Lord!  Bow wow wow!  Bow wow wow wow!  Dog Man is upset.  Bow wow wow!  People are staring.  Preacher tries another Praise the Lord! but—bow wow wow!—this Dog fella ain’t taking.  Bow wow wow!  The driver looks back in the rearview kind of irritated.  Passengers are starting to giggle.  Preacher backs off, tract still in his hand, praising and praising.  Bow wow!  Dog Man glares after him as he disappears into the back of the bus.  Bow wow!  People getting on the bus.  Bow wow!

Preacher sits back down across from my wife, clutching the last of his pamphlets and praying.  The Word just takes him on up, and he’s praying aloud, rocking in his seat, Praising the Lord! and clapping his hands.  Praising the Lord! and clapping his hands.  Praising and clapping.  Praising.  Clapping.  Clap. Clap. Clap.

Up front, Dog man stops barking and listens, cocking his orange-wigged head.  Listening.  Then he takes in a deep breath and bellows—“Stop that clapping back there!”  The whole bus falls silent.  Preacher freezes mid clap, and folds his hands in his lap and looks around sheepishly.  “That brought out the Devil in him” he grins.

My wife’s stop was next.  She stood up and walked to the exit.  Dog Man sees her.  Bow wow!  Bow wow!  Bow wow wow!  All the way to the front of there bus.  As she stepped off she looked back one more time at that skinny little man in that bright orange wig.  He gave her a canine stare.  Bow wow!  And as the doors shut behind her, the bow wows disappeared in a cloud of exhaust and the sounds of rush hour traffic.

(unpublished essay, 2009)

Last nite we were at a bbq up in Lincoln Heights, way up on a hill, digging the panorama of a zillion backyard roman candles and rockets and pyrotechnics. The whole city looked wild, out of control, pyromanic. It was gorgeous. Crazy gorgeous. Then I get home to do some writing and check the email and find out a lady we know, a regular at all the summer bashes, was killed in our neighborhood when her house caught fire very early this morning, apparently from an errant firework.  Jesus…

She was at all the summer’s parties. Tall and mild, in black, hair a wild fauvist red, she’d hang with Gus, with Bob, with Josefina laughing and chatting never loud. She wore big ugly clunky shoes. It was her trademark, that red hair and those big clunky shoes. When I drove past her house today it was a charred ruin, all ashes and cinders. Pieces of furniture scattered on the lawn. There were heaps of clothes and a single clunky shoe. I wish I’d not scene that shoe. I wish I’d not driven down her street.

The dead. We party and laugh still, but think of them. We think of the dead when we see a few extra beers still in the cooler. We think of the dead when there’s a few extra pulls left on the joint. We live, thinking of the dead. We party, thinking of the dead. We laugh, and the thoughts dispel into the night air.

I learned to drive a standard transmission when I bought my buddy’s Opel for $350. Think it was a ’68 coupe. Amazing car. Too small to fuck in, but you could grow a crop of corn in the shag carpeting. Which I did.

A ’68 Buick Opel Kadett. Mine was canary yellow.

I passed out on the couch before 11 last nite and woke up three hours later. Fully dressed, lights on, I think the weather channel on the tube. Took my seizure meds which kept me up for hours. Lynn posted a clip from the news in the middle of the night and there was the one girl breaking down and then Greg being brilliant, nervously playing with his hair, parsing “angel”. Damn. For some reason that dragged me back into the middle of last August, the nights home, back from my wife’s side in the ICU, not knowing what was going to happen, what the future was going to be, frantically running about the house doing chores, radios and TV blaring, talking to her cats, cooking, cleaning, playing music loud, not eating and smoking a little too much weed. Raw memories, crystal clear. Reliving those days. And feeling guilty, too, as my story was long and had a happy ending, and theirs was just a paragraph or two that ended horribly.

(2009)

I dig music. I used to play drums, which was awesome, the crazy gigs, crazy times, getting high, getting laid, getting paid sometimes, raising holy hell and fucking with people. The more anarchic the scene, the better. Blood on the floor, sounds in the air. Think a hockey game, but with notes.  And weirder.

I’ve been writing since as far back as my memory goes.  I used to write articles about strange bands. They’d appear in doomed little magazines, or online somewhere.  I always sweated the writing, broke my back on the things, making written English sound real and not like the crap they taught us in English classes. I had a writing class once and the teacher turned us on to John McPhee. Holy shit.  That was it. That was writing. That was so real. I still think so. Bruce Catton’s This Hallowed Ground  did that to me when I was in high school, or was it junior high? Or 5th grade? A beat up old Penguin edition of Thucydides kicked my ass one summer in college. My mind was really blown by Fernand Braudel’s History of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. I was stuck inSanta Barbara, bored to tears, and I could see the little cities he described up and down the coastal plain there. Feel the same winds. It changed my life, I guess, somehow. Later I picked upLawrence Durrell…damn. The moonlight on the cobbly desert floor just beyond the Delta. I guess those are the influences, the inspirations that I remember. Toss in Cole Porter, Merle Haggard and Don Van Vliet. Maybe well written commercials, film noir, neurology, and of course a life of epilepsy. That’ll fry your brain, epilepsy. All of you normal people see the world one way.  An epileptic sees it his own way, two dimensional, big thick lines, quivering auras, a Van Gogh. A Van Gogh looks real to us. Absolutely real.

I love jazz. I write about it. About the players, the scene, the notes pouring out of their horns, and why people might dig it.  I like the local, the little joints, the unknown. I like a guy playing his axe like there’s nothing else out there but the music. The smell of weed somewhere, the clink of empties, sweat glistening under a bare bulb. Cool.

 This gig dropped into my lap, out of the blue. I never wanted to be a jazz journalist. Never ever. Jazz writing is so fucking dull. The worst. Unreadable. I mean, if you write about music, you ought to try and write as well as the players are playing the music you write about. People should be able to feel the experience of hearing the music through the experience of reading about it. That’s how you get people interested.  That’s how you pack a jazz club on a Sunday night. That’s how you make a difference.

 Otherwise it’s just bullshit. Just facts, names, trivia, bullshit. A phonebook of facts. I try not to do that every week. I try and turn people onto jazz who hate jazz. I try and fill clubs. I try to make jazz fans, one at a time.  Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

 Me? I’m married, thirty years now. We met as berzerk punk rockers in 1979. I’ve had various day jobs. I like day jobs. I rarely play drums anymore, but I love drums. My passions are linguistics, neurology, evolutionary science, lots of history. I love seeing music, all kinds of music. I like old movies. I love really good writing.  I love natural history museums, zoos, historical sites, anything with dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs. I love throwing parties. Wild, noisy endless parties full of smartasses. I love books. And hockey. And LPs for a dollar. And solid colored ceramic coffee mugs. And getting things in the mail. And wearing blazers. I love the desert. And maps. And talking. And women. I love the view out my front window. And driving the freeway late at night with the windows open and the music blaring. God I love that. I love words too, and accents, and languages, and grammars, all kinds of grammars, and people that say fuck in polite company. I love dictionaries.

That’s it.

Brick

(2010)