Category Archives: Story telling

Dream job

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Got a call last week about the perfect day gig. One of those out of the blue dream jobs. They loved the resume. Tracked me down. I aced the phone interview. The in-person went even better on Monday. I was “the perfect candidate”.  Felt good about it, I was obviously the prime contender. Went out for drinks and dinner with the wife. It was hot and the restaurant was cool, the margaritas even cooler. Tuesday began ominously…no genius grant. Again? Hell, I write good. Or would that be the Pulitzer. One of those aw shucks it was nothing awards. Whatever, I didn’t get one. Could have used that half a mill. Who do you have to fuck in this town to get a genius award? Still, the day went well. Then at 5 pm came the email. Spare, impersonal, third hand even…I was no longer under consideration.  The prose was taut and resonant. Think Hemingway read aloud by HAL the computer. I stared in disbelief. WTF? What had happened? I had dressed nice and everything. Even in the 106 degree temp there I was looking sharp, all in black, black blazer….hell, I’d hire me, and I don’t even like me. Maybe my “agent” was a prick. Agents can be pricks, even employment agents. Though mine is a really nice guy, actually. So maybe the weasely guy at the interview black balled me. You know the type. Or maybe one of my references talked trash, tho’ why I can’t imagine. Maybe I just came off as a jerk and they were way too nice to tell me so. Whatever. Poof…the dream gig was gone. Yet another good break gone bad…. A lot of those lately. Four years’ worth. I must have pissed some goddess off somehow. One of the ball breaking, unforgiving ones.

Anyway, I should have gotten drunk. You would have gotten drunk, admit it. But I didn’t. I had a PBR that was in the fridge, Then some milk. Milk. What kind of loser drinks milk when his dream job slips through his fingers? What kind of Irishman am I?  The disgrace of the family, the sober one. A long line of boozers singing Little Bit of Heaven Fell From Out the Sky One day and mumbling about Bing Crosby and then there’s me, the lightweight. Sigh…. Well that PBR wore off hours ago and here I am still sulking, awash in an ocean of self-pity and what am I doing? Writing this. I always write stuff like this when things go wrong. And lately a lot of things have been going wrong. A novel’s worth. A War and Peace. The remembrance of things pissed right down the drain.

Well, time to hit the bricks again, I tell myself and punning unintentionally. Maybe I’ll get off my creative ass and try and score a writing gig, as is such things existed, or that I liked doing them.   But money is money and money I like.

Saw a chunk of A Day at the Races today. God those Marx Brothers were funny. Even after Thalberg tamed them. Too much anarchy for Hollywood. But you watch the Marx Brothers and wish life were like that. Just like that. Anarchistic and giving it to the man. An endless blur of self referential jokes. Pianos that disintegrate and authority figures so dumb they don’t know they have their pants on. Blondes to be chased up stairs and down again. Singing Sweet Adeline and eating crackers in bed.  But you need a day gig to pull that off. And oh what a day gig that would have been. The most beautiful studio I have ever seen. Fountains, streams, a pond the size of an olympic pool. Koi the length of your arm played in its waters, living slow, perfect, endless lives and looking absolutely beautiful. I watched one rolling lazily near the surface, all gold and creamy white and tried to imagine being one. I couldn’t. All I could think of was just how cool it would be to work in a place that was more beautiful than any jobsite deserved to be. I imagined walking the grounds on some errand or another, belonging there. It was fun to think about.

But back now to reality. I promised the wife I’d take out the garbage.

And maybe another PBR before bed. Living dangerously. F Scott Fitzgerald would dig it. He and Zelda. They probably roamed these very streets. They might have staggered down the very steps outside my window after some wild Hollywood party. Raymond Chandler lived only a hill away, drinking and unable to write. Sylvia Plath tried suicide at the far end of the reservoir. Bukowski lived in squalor nearby, writing his shitty poetry. Don Van Vliet discovered words at the other end of Waverly Drive, and my brother lives in Tom Waits’ old house. Tom told him so himself.

Me? I got to take out the garbage…..

No recess

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(2011)

Just saw that  it’s been 20 years since Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. Great record. Too bad it wrecked everything.

Ya see, there was this underground scene before that, hopelessly uncommercial, a global thing of all these crazy little bands struggling along from gig to gig, record to record, party to party, and it was a blast and innocent and all our own and no one paid attention to us. That was the 80’s scene…amazing shows every weekend, almost every night, all these brilliant bands. It was all about creativity and attitude. It was glorious.

Then Nirvana broke big, bigger than big. They broke huge, enormous, they turned our entire world upside down and suddenly there was money everywhere and it was so fucked. The music got duller and duller and safer and safer, all the clubs and labels and tours got taken over by business. Things just got safer and safer. Predictable. Boring. All that underground music (the labels called it “alternative” and now “indie”) just disappeared.

I lost interest. Started buying jazz records. Now look at me. I’ve become distinguished, despite myself.

Nevermind was a good record, that’s for sure. But Kurt knew what he had done. Hence the shotgun. On my birthday, no less.

That was my 37th. My 40th was a total manic blow out at Al’s Bar. Absolute craziness. Like the last gasp of my punk rock life. It went out in style, though:

Fearless Leader had spent an hour putting on make-up and diapers full of chili and creamed corn and chocolate pudding and when they hit the stage the packed house was in a frenzy but they had what seemed like the worst drummer in LA and were so incredibly awful it was hysterical, Sarge’s amp all fucked up going on and off and on and off irregularly, the drummer beating away ametrically in the background, insults flying. As the band started the second song Sarge was in a fury packing up, a guy in a diaper and clown make-up, in the middle of the stage putting his guitar away in its case. Finally I sat in on drums and things tightened up somewhat but this only seemed to work up the audience even more and the food starting flying thick and fast and within seconds a large slice of birthday cake slammed into my arm and slid off slowly and grotesquely. (Bob Lee later took credit for that—”It was your birthday” he explained…) Then came more cake, beer, cups—meanwhile the contents of the various diapers came loose and poured all over the stage and the three clowns before me were sliding and falling about, Sarge—guitarless now—screamed into two mikes and began to slither across the stage like an evil serpent and bit the others on the leg. Basically it was punk as fuck—raunchy and rockin’ and fierce and funny and stoopid and scary with maximum audience participation. Finally—I looked up, trying to concentrate on these songs I had not played in a decade (if at all) and there was Alien Rock butt naked (well not completely—I’m told that he was wearing a rubber) and I started laughing so hard I couldn’t play and just sat there being pelted as they ranted and slid and danced and screamed and oozed and then I got back under control and launched into the toon again (it was their drawn out classic “Sunshine Superstar” with the classic chant “Peace / Love / War / Hate” and the chorus “it’s the way you are (x4) you’re a super star (x2) you’re a sunshine superstar, Baby”) and it ended in a huge finale when suddenly Alien Rock, nude and covered with slime and crud threw his skinny nekkid body into the drums and the kit flew apart all over me and the stage.

That was my send off to the pre-Nevermind era, I guess. Though I didn’t realize it at the time. That was the end of anarchy for me. It’s such an orderly world now.  I hate it.

Fuck you, Kurt Cobain the dead guy. I liked you way better as a live guy. No hagiography. Just a fucked up punk wondering what the hell happened. Well, it’s your fault. You wrote the goddamn song. That goddamn great song. Smells Like Teen Spirit. Did anyone even get that? No. They just got that killer riff. A whole industry was built on that riff. People started selling out in droves. Kurt Cobain the live guy sure noticed. I’ve seen you on your hands and knees, unable to walk. It was awful and sad and so punk rock. The real punk rock. I saw that fight too, in the movie. You braining some security asshole with your guitar, then that big stage melee. I loved that. Anarchy. But  now you’re dead, and all business. 100% business. How many Neverminds shifted at Christmas? A zillion? You don’t know? Maybe they aren’t keeping Kurt Cobain the dead guy in the loop on these things. Oh well. It’s all business now. You can’t even be a millionaire punk rock junkie anymore. No time for heroin in today’s rock’n’roll. Not anymore. It’s business all the time.  Career 24/7. Work work work. No recess, dead guy. No recess.

Punk rock.

It just happened

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It was so show biz there. The side no one talks about. The kind of people Perez Hilton would never draw gonads on. At one point I was hanging with a legendary weed dealer (though that’s virtually legal now), a wholesale hashish dealer (“By the pound only, $3,600”) and a music journalist turned bank robber and now, paroled, a music journalist again. Well, a heroin dealing music journalist. I didn’t know that at the time, but writers all need that day gig. And I really liked the guy’s writing. The best of it he wrote in prison. All that spare time. He’s dead now though, a car accident. I liked him, but it was for the better. I hate heroin dealers. Come to think of it I have known two bank robbers, one that writer/heroin dealer/dead guy I mentioned, the other a musician. He was paroled and became a history teacher. A poetess I know was a heroin dealer. I lost track of her. It’s best to lose track of heroin dealers. It’s best to lose track of heroin addicts, too, but only because they steal your stuff and break your hearts. Dealers sell their souls to deal, it goes with the gig, they sell their souls to steal other’s. A fucked up biz. But I digress….. Let’s see, I hung out with Panama Red once at a politician’s house. He sells computer hardware now. A crazed amazing drummer I know got into the meth trade, freaked out, dumped all his guns off at a sheriff’s station because he was being followed by black helicopters and later found Jesus, became a preacher, and a damn good one. We let him preach at our 20th anniversary party and all the punks and freaks hated it. Hated it. It was beautiful. Then he beat the living fuck out a drum kit. Punk rock, baby. I knew a defrocked chemist who’d made acid for the hippies in huge quantities and then, queer as a three dollar bill, brewed meth for the boys in his kitchen upstairs, He had to be careful, he said, or he could blow up the whole building. He’s probably dead by now. AIDS, overdose, heart attack, whatever. Then there’s the defrocked Academy Award winner who must have done something illegal at some point, it’d be too romantic not too. There’s so many of these guys, too many to write down here. I had a boss who got strung out on meth and wound up dealing it and they say hustled himself around too. A bass player I played with got strung out on smack and wound up a whore in drag. The saddest story I know. I wrote about that already (“Raji’s”). And there’s a war hero in Viet Nam who cracked up, joined the Weather Underground and eventually got popped on a Greyhound bus with a duffel bag full of marijuana. Wound up in a cushy prison which did him a world of good, since he’d been crazy most of his life. Used to be he wouldn’t shake hands with anybody, and was forever at the sink with the soap and water. I liked him though. War fucks with war hero’s heads if they have to kill a mess of people at long range, people you look at through the scope, pull the trigger, and watch them die. Hard to tell what’s war and what’s murder. He couldn’t and the devil ate him up inside. I’m digressing again. A bandmate of mine once served on a chain gang. That was different. He also bit off a guy’s ear at a night club but that’s another story. Besides, it was only part of an ear, and the asshole was asking for it. Now he’s a rich kid Van Gogh. Lots of time people ask for it. This big lug of a guy I know, a real sweetheart, beat a little guy to death in a bar. The little guy was asking for it. A couple years worth of involuntary manslaughter, they said. Kind of like what happened to the father of a tough kid I knew. Pop was a boxer and killed a guy in a bar. One punch. That guy had it coming, too, but he was a cop. You don’t kill cops, so pop got a life’s worth of manslaughter. But I didn’t actually know him. I did know a pianist who got life for murdering his wife. Lost track of him, though. Good player. Another guy I know gave his buddy a little too much smack and the dude turned blue and died right there. That was murder. So he shot himself up a fatal dose and died there right next to him. Sort of an accidental murder-suicide thing. He was a lovely guy too. Not so lovely was the odd little queer we hung out with one night, he and his partner and bong loads of weed. Hollywood is full of odd little queers and their partners, though this one seemed a little odder than usual. Later that weekend he cut his partner into chunks and stuffed the chunks in a garbage bag and hid the bag in his closet and then flew to Mexico. A vacation, he said. They caught him. But that’s so disturbing I wish I hadn’t remembered it.  But I’m glad I remember the one legged jazz fusion tuba player who ran numbers for the mob…I always wondered if he ever walked into a bar and the bartender said sorry, we don’t serve one legged jazz fusion tuba players in here. And then there’s the drummer/drug dealer/gangsta rap recording engineer I met at a party who took two bullets in the skull at point blank brain for some reason he would not elucidate. Now he records jazz. I became a jazz critic. My friends were appalled. How could you? they asked. I’m not sure, I said, it just happened.

Fuck You

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(2011)

A few years ago someone handed me a tape of my first band. It had been recorded at a university radio station in very early 1980.  A live broadcast. Those were my Santa Barbara days and I was all of  22 years old.  The tape was shocking…the band was so ferocious, so funny, so crazy, so scary, so punk. Unbelievably punk. You could hear me, hear Ron E, hear Danny and Chuck. Phyllis cackling savagely in the background. Hearing the dead guys, Danny and Chuck, so spontaneous and alive….wow.  It was midweek that 1980, I remember, about 3 or 4 am, and I was barely awake, held up only by cocaine and weed. To hear Fyl, like a live wire, pure man killing energy. We had fucked on the floor of an empty sound booth earlier. Dust and tile and wires and us. We fucked everywhere all the time back then—got caught fucking in the men’s room of a gay bar off State Street even. Some old queen caught us. You can’t do that in here! she said, this is a gay bar! They kicked us out and we laughed and laughed and laughed and probably went and fucked somewhere else. What a time. So young. I recognize myself in that old tape, that voice, low and flat, I know it’s me….but at the same time it’s completely alien…like it’s not me at all. Every one of those cells in me then has been dead for years….what I am now is many, many cellular generations later. The body has utterly changed, the brain but a fraction of its size then, and full of a lifetime of memories, experience, hardwiring. I could have been hearing my great great grandfather on that tape it felt so remote. No connection at all except a vague memory of having been there. Hearing that tape for the first time since 1980, wow…one of those stunningly profound moments. I could remember childhood then. I can imagine old age now. It was too cool a thing, that tape. Man…to be young during revolutionary times has to be the greatest thing life can offer…you live the rest of your life on that stored up high. The energy never completely disappears, does it?  Somehow it gives us an edge. People feel the electricity still coursing through our beings a zillion years later, they reach out to touch and zap, it  shocks them. Fuck you we tell them. But why? Just because, you boring little prick. Fuck you. And we cackle, slap them on the back and say come on, just kidding. Can’t you take a fucking joke? That’s the revolution talking. That’s us then still, never growing up. Getting older, but never growing up. Fuck you.

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Beautiful young things

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Beautiful young things still come to our door by mistake almost daily. Well, two or three times a week. Our street is a beautiful young thing magnet. They come up the steps looking at their iPhones, confused, peer in through the front window and see me. Now there’s a sight. Bravely they knock on the door. Sometimes they ask for so and so in a hip New Yawkese. Sometimes they have tiny little English accents. This one the latter, cute but très hip. As always I was very polite, if unshaven. I smile. Upstairs, I suggest. She thanked me and took delicate, teetering high heeled steps back down, and I watch and wonder how one gets so old. Twenty five years in one pad. How many cats back was that? How many jobs? Bands? We moved in scarcely older than she. I would jump the two flights of stairs two and three at a time. I moved the furniture in myself. The boxes of books and records. Now I hobble up and down, arthritic, from jumping all those stairs, perhaps, or maybe falling down them, and I watch too much TV. Grown men, Canadians mostly, are brawling, and young things come up the steps like poetry.

Crisco

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(2014)

Back when Silverlake was leather heaven all the corner markets had lots and lots of Crisco on the shelves. I never thought about that until I saw a totally leathered out guy my size at the liquor store getting  ready for a party.  Snacks, beer, booze, cigars, breakfast cereal (coco puffs, I remember that 30 years later), milk, juice, donuts and every can of Crisco on the shelf. Like eight cans worth. The poor kid working the counter looked absolutely horrified. The leather dude was loving it.

There are none of those guys left in the neighborhood. I bet 90% of them died. They sang I Will Survive and then died. Their bars are straight, their houses full of hipsters and irony. Chaps aren’t just for gay boys anymore. The plague came through and destroyed that whole civilization. It laid waste the land, leaving Silverlake barren with breeders. It’s raining babies now. But those were the days, the survivors sing. Those were the days. What a party. A man was a man and Crisco wasn’t just for frying chicken.

Ouch.

Day trip

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Rented a Dodge Ram pick up yesterday and headed out to the desert. No CD player. The low point had to be east of Pearblossom in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a 38 Special rock block to listen to. Hold On Loosely has been earworming its way into my skull since, breaking me down like my own personal Room 101, southern rock. Freedom is slavery, war is peace, you see it all around you, good lovin’ gone bad. The high point musically was…well, there was no high point. A lot of high desert hard rock and ranchera. We had dropped by Charlie Brown Farms in Little Rock for a date shake, then the long drive out to Barstow. The desert is great from the cab of a climate change special, you feel like Mike Dukakis in a tank. I watched the ruins of Job Harriman’s Llano Del Rio disappear in the rear view mirror, probably the only time all day I thought about politics. The 18 was closed, and they dog legged us along the 138 and then up another desert road to rejoin the 18 near Phelan. They farm a lot of meth out in Phelan. Cook it right on the rocks. A guy explained it to me one night, unbidden. I don’t think he had slept in years.

We passed through Barstow, picked up the 40 for a couple miles and got off at the Calico exit. Calico Ghost Town has been a slow favorite since I first went there when I was a kid. Hell, that was over half a century ago. Back then I thought it looked like a less fun Knotts Berry Farm (apparently Walter Knott had grown up in Calico, and used the proceeds from the mine to recreate Calico in Buena Park) but I didn’t know then that you could take your beer right on the train. Doubtless some of the appeal for me is how the old pre-Snoopy Knotts Berry Farm was cloned from the place, somehow redolent of ancient times in Southern California. Fantasy world and Calico girls I’m coming back. But to be honest my single favorite thing there is the extraordinary display of tortured seismology looming over the parking lot. Sedimentary layers bent all which ways, even straight up vertical. It screams earthquake, but all you hear is desert silence.

After Calico we went over to Rainbow Basin Natural Area, the reason for the pick up truck and 38 Special, it was perfect for driving the back roads. Not a bit of pavement in the place, just badlands bisected by narrow twisting graded road, gullies, loose rocks, and the occasional diamondback rattler. It is a perfect riot of geology, the land eroded for so many eons was absolutely gorgeous. This was once–actually several times–a large Miocene lake bed. Winter rains carve it anew every year, and tectonics torture the area–there’s a syncline to die for–though the black layers of ash are from better days, when nearby Amboy and the Cima Dome were alive with volcanos. Nearby are layers packed with fossils–most of the large mammal fossils you will see in our local museums that were not plucked from the La Brea Tar Pits came from the Rainbow Basin and thereabouts. The striations are vividly colored, everything from deep sandstone red to a brilliant green clay. So many colors, it would be a ball high on psychedelics and not driving or being way too old and epileptic for that kind of thing. Somewhere in the middle a Foreigner rock block came on and I turned off the radio. There was no other sound at all. Not a bird, not a bug, not even a breeze. Nothing.

After a glorious couple hours in Rainbow Basin, we tooled back on down Irwin Road towards Barstow in our giant pick up truck, trying not to go too fast. It’s the hemi, I explained to the wife, just to actually use hemi in a sentence. We hopped a left onto Old Highway 58 for Idle Spurs, still my favorite steak house ever. Incredible steak and a couple Jamesons. (You can pretend I took a picture of our food here.) We took our time eating, thoroughly enjoying it, and it was nearly dark as we climbed back into the cab of the pick-up, a little too late to drive all the way home on the 66. I love that old trestle across the Mojave, linking the two sides of Barstow, north and south of the tracks. Nearby was the old Harvey House, and I can only imagine the disappointment of Judy Garland fans who pilgrimage here. For a moment I thought On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe was going to stay in my head forever, like The Trolley Song did one terrible year after hearing it on a Palm Springs radio station twice in one weekend, but it disappeared back into the closet.

We turned right onto the 66 and as we headed west Barstow faded into Lenwood and then into nothing. It was too dark for sightseeing, and the excursion was nearing the twelve hour mark anyway, so we made for the interstate. All seemed perfect, the last of the light disappearing behind the mountains as we got back on the 15 heading south, nestled contentedly in the cab of our gas guzzling monster truck. There was just the night, the road, and us. There is something profoundly reassuring about driving through the desert in the dark, just you and the wheels and the stars. Then a rock block of Boston interrupted my philosophizing. Egad. People livin’ in competition, the singer complained, and all he wanted was to have some peace of mind. Bad seventies memories came flooding back and I realized that I was entering my 59th year to a soundtrack of lame classic rock. I hate these songs, with all their inane lyrics and uninspired riffs and soulless guitar solos. Can’t I find any good driving music out here in the desert? More Than a Feeling came on, and as the singer watched Marianne walking away, away, awaaaaay, I asked the Lord in a moment of existential crisis why, oh why, had He forsaken me. The Lord let the guitar solo finish before answering. The desert is beautiful but cruel, He said, like good lovin’ gone bad.

barstow sign

Voice

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A long time ago at a day job I used to leave robocalls. The company email server would fail so I had to leave a mass phone message telling everyone in the building their email was down. About 500 people would get the phone message. I could walk across the floor and hear my own voice dozens of time as people listened to their messages on speakerphone. It sounded like a series of echos. A dozen people would ring me back and tell me what a nice voice I had. I’d thank them. One time I was getting over a nasty case of strep throat. It scarred the vocal chords and knocked me down an octave or two. My voice went deep, way deep, with a sandpaper grain to it. The email server went down again and I left a mass message. I could hear it echoing across the floor. I could hear people discussing it in their cubicles. It’s an odd sensation walking across a floor and hearing people talk about your voice from inside their cubicles. None of them had any idea I was passing by. The reviews were all positive. The ladies especially seemed to love it. Some listened to it twice. I got calls from several of them. They’d giggle and tell me how sexy my voice was. I thanked them. Some came by my cubicle and told me in person. I thanked them too. Some I’d never seen before came by and introduced themselves. I said hello and thanked them. One said my voice was incredibly sexy. I blamed the strep throat. She said you ought to get sick more often. I said I’ll try. She batted her eyes, purred a see ya tiger, and slunk away.

(2008)

 

Rock dove

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We no longer have pigeons in Silver Lake. We have rock doves. Indeed, there was one on the sun deck. Just one. Very selective, our rock doves. The elite. Not like the mobs of pigeons you’d see in the Ralph’s parking lot, waiting for the crazy bird lady. But Ralphs is gone, the bird lady is gone, and the pigeons are gone, who knows where. There are other parking lots, other bird ladies. So there was just the one rock dove, gleaming after a winter’s rain. He landed on our sun deck with its million dollar view, and the mere mourning doves and finches and sparrows scurried out of its way. The rock dove carefully selected only the choicest seeds, looked about, and then, tired of slumming it, flew off to the rich people in the hills, where he can find a finer selection of avian cuisine and bird baths sculpted in Carrara marble. Meanwhile, back on our sundeck the mourning doves and finches and sparrows rushed back in, bickering, pecking, a disorder of tiny dinosaurs with no class at all. Gentrification has a long way to go among these birds.

A hoi polloi of pigeons, unwilling to discover their inner rock dove.

A hoi polloi of pigeons, unwilling to realize their inner rock dove.

Maine

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We were taught how to use the abacus in Maine. Meanwhile, the neighbor next door was writing music with a computer at Bowdoin College. This was 1965. He took us to see the computer…it was the size of Long Island. The first school I went to in Maine was on an island off the coast. We lived three islands off the coast, so we bused over an entire island to get to school. Area’s rich now, apparently, full of Boston summer homes and movie star money, but back then it was all poor lobstermen and cod fishermen on the water, farmers inland, plus the Bath Ironworks where my Dad worked. The second school I went to was a one building brick structure kids’ grandparents had gone to the same school. Winters were harsh. I remember walking home from school through sandy fields during gales, ouch. I remember snow on Mother’s Day, and the best creepiest Halloweens ever. Loved it there–3rd grade was the only time I spent an elementary school year in one school. (I’d been to five in 2nd grade…well four, went to one twice..started in San Diego, wound up in Maine with a detour to Tacoma.) Oh yeah, I remember seeing Minnie Pearl and ox pulls at the county fair, and I hated cod liver oil. Once the snow cleared kids played viciously competitive marble games everywhere. Tough bunch, Mainers, civil war monuments in the cemeteries, huge things, and they were still fiercely proud of their Abolitionism…Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in our town there. We almost settled in Maine, in which case I’d be one of the people Jeff Foxworthy jokes about and you all would never know me, or me my wife, which is too scary to think about, or weird to think about anyway. When you move constantly your life is like brownian motion, seemingly random, to a kid anyway, but always an adventure. I loved it.