Licking

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[A Facebook post….]

The wife’s tribal records still list her by her maiden name and we’re trying to get her name changed to reflect her married name. Tribal land she owns, etc. It’s complicated. They asked us to fax our marriage certificate. Turns out we were married so long ago and in such a technologically primitive time–1980–that the state seal watermark on our marriage certificate won’t show up when faxed–faxes hadn’t been invented yet. They asked about the file number on our certificate, too–but there is no file number on the certificate, since computers hadn’t yet reduced us all to ciphers. I believe we did have electricity, however. As the Office of the Trustee of the American Indian won’t accept an emailed scan (too easy to fake) I am going through the nostalgic ritual of putting a piece of paper in an envelope and then mailing it. Licking the envelope. Remember that? All those germs sent coursing through the mail. Saliva had household purposes. We don’t lick emails. Well, I don’t. Not usually.

Of course, in 1980, I would never have told five hundred people this story. We were not fascinated by the inanely trivial then. Maybe it was the threat of nuclear war. Maybe we were too high. Or maybe we didn’t know five hundred people. Whatever. So sad to invent social media and then use it to blow sweet nothings into each other’s digital ears all day. Or perhaps that’s a sign of progress.

And no, I did not lick this before posting.

Palm Springs

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(2013)

One Saturday night a couple years ago we were out in Palm Springs watching their Christmas Festival of Lights parade. Fire trucks and marching bands and agricultural machinery and prancing queens and everything bedecked in lights and fiber optic cables, as beautiful as it is absurd. The parade goes down Palm Canyon Drive and we’d booked a room on Indian Canyon Drive a block away. Two minute walk. It was chilly, not a cloud in the sky, a bone chilling desert winter’s night. A zillion glittery stars over head, and faint smudges of galaxies unimaginably far away, so far and so vast it’s better not to think of them at all. We didn’t.  Continue reading →

Singing Christmas Tree

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(2011)

A few christmas parties ago our techie neighbor gave us a robot alarm clock….you set the alarm and when the time hit it would go berserk and roll around frantically, bumping into things, racing about, its alarm screeching and whooping and generally being absolutely awful.  He set the time for 11 pm or so, wrapped it with pretty christmas wrapping paper and put it under the tree. By 11 pm the party was truly happening, packed and loud and not out of control but threatening to. A good party always threatens to. The sofa facing the tree was full of pathetically stoned people. It’s like they showed up, sat down, and hadn’t moved since. They couldn’t. They’d melted into it, become one with the fabric. It was almost zen.

Suddenly our neighbor’s present began thrashing about in its wrapper and screeching and whooping. No one noticed but the stoners, since they were staring at the tree and had been for hours. All the pretty lights. Now one of the presents starts thrashing about and bleeping and screeching and whooping. Ummm wow, that’s fucked up. Fuck. Dude, yeah, that’s fucked up. Then stoner paranoia set in. Maybe it was terrorists. (It had only been a year or two since 9/11.) Dude, terrorists at Brick and Fyl’s party. Fucked up. The whooping and thrashing suddenly stopped. Someone fired up a bowl.  Continue reading →

Free drinks at Harrigan’s

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Signing my wife up for Indian Health Services to see if she can get a break on increasingly expensive dental care (even with dental insurance), the case worker asked my wife what tribe she was. She pulled out her tribal ID. Yankton Sioux. Don’t get many Sioux in here, the caseworker said. What tribe are you, my wife asked. My father was Lakota Sioux, the caseworker said, my mother Rosebud Sioux. They talked about South Dakota and I thought to myself in like Flynn. Sioux Nation looking out for its own. She wrote my wife’s name in at the top of the list.

If there was only an Irish equivalent. Somehow free drinks at Harrigan’s doesn’t quite cut it.

Shanty

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I remember my grandfather explaining Lace Curtain versus Shanty to me. I was probably five years old, maybe six, and was his first grandson, and he was taking pains to teach me in the ways of life. Nothing seemed more important than Lace Curtain versus Shanty. The Lace Curtain, he said, they think they’re special. They kiss a lot of arse to be special. They think it makes them better than the rest of us. He took a swig of fortified wine. But listen to me boy–and I listened intently, remembering this all these years later–lace curtains don’t make them any different from us. They’re just shanty Irish putting on airs. Don’t ever be lace curtain, boy, promise me that. I promised. You’re shanty through and through like your grandfather. He took another swig. And your grandfather’s father. And his father. Another swig. It was a smallish bottle, green, and I remember the screw on cap. Yup, he said, you’re shanty through and through, aren’t you boy. I said I was. I had no idea what it meant. Still, a promise is a promise, especially to the departed, and I kept my promise, and shanty I remain.

Gnawa time

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(2013)

I woke up this morning and immediately turned on the a/c. I can’t recall the last time I had to do that. Its hot! 

So posted my friend Hope. I envied her. Air conditioning. We’re in Silver Lake, in one of those California Spanish houses that Walter Neff in Double Indemnity said everyone was nuts about 10 or 15 years ago. Which would be about 1930, on the money for this place. It’s one of those pads people slow down to look at as they pass. We did. Came down our street once by mistake and turned around in the driveway. I remember saying to my wife that I wished we lived in a place like this instead of the cute but shaky bungalow we had off Sunset. We had earthquakes then, and the slightest temblor would wrack the joint and it would shudder and creak and let us know in no uncertain terms that the earth was shaking. We got used to it. But when a crackhouse opened up next door in what is now an overpriced if charming brownstone it was time to move. We couldn’t believe that the place we’d seen by mistake that day a year before was available. There had been a gang killing on the street a few months back, some innocent kid cut down, wrong place, wrong time, and that made prospective renters nervous. The landlord thought we were the nicest and sweetest married couple he’d ever seen. Gosh. I didn’t tell him about playing drums in punk rock bands. Said we hated parties. Swore we were virgins. Didn’t mention the cats. We got the place.

But this place is old school. In fact so old school that it doesn’t have the kind of windows you can put an air conditioner in. Not one. That’s old school. When Silver Lake grew from hunting lodges to rich people those rich people sweltered in front of metal fans. Raymond Chandler typed and drank and sweated over there on Micheltorena Hill. Air conditioning back then was the stuff of modern office buildings. Mulholland had an air conditioned office atop his big dam-shaped building downtown. Is the building designed to look like the San Francisquito dam? I’ve always wondered that, though no way to compare the two now. And the Bradbury Building you’ve all seen a zillion times without knowing it (though not Double Indemnity, unfortunately) was no doubt air conditioned back then. I worked there once, for a week. Worse job I ever had. When the secretary tells you on the first day that the problem with her boss is that she needs a good fuck and no one will ever give her one, you know it’s time to leave. I lasted a week. But I loved the building. I think that’s why I stuck it out a whole week. You can’t believe how ornate the place is, like walking around inside a baroque sculpture. You couldn’t help touching everything. And it was very air conditioned, unlike our place. But the Bradbury Building is in the middle of paved over everything downtown, the streets and walls and cars and buses and sweaty pedestrians all radiating heat, while we live on top of a hill, with breezes, even a zephyr or two, nearly all of the time. Plus  we have an ingeniously designed fan system, lots of fans, strategically placed. They suck out hot air and blow in cool air and swirl it around and all the calendars flap and papers are blown off the table and I stay up late writing and thinking and listening to strange African music in all that moving, flowing, billowing air. It works. Not as good as air conditioning. There’s nothing like being buried beneath the covers in a cold bedroom on a hot night. But sleeping in a continuous stream of air works too.

We moved in here on one of those hottest days in forever. We have two flights of stairs, but as I was much younger then and macho to the core, I had planned on doing it all myself. My wife hired a friend to help me, fifty bucks and beer. We tossed in a pizza and laughs. We have so much more stuff now that when we finally move we’ll probably just burn it all and pretend we lived in the hills and lost everything in a summer inferno. Easier that way. This being California I’ve met several people who’ve lost everything to the flames. They seem well adjusted enough. Of course summer infernos imply a dry wind, which would actually be nice right about now. I’d turn off the fans and open the windows and let it flow though the house. Sheets of paper would lift like little magic carpets and float about the room. The vase full of flowers would blow over. My wife would yell and pick up the flowers. I’d turn up the music and the strange sounds of Mauritanian guitar would bother the neighbors out on the sundeck next door and they’d wish I go back to jazz again. Wait till the weather breaks, I’d tell them, wait till it’s cool again. Right now it’s gnawa time. And the music drones and circles and I can’t understand a word but it blends with the wind and I disappear entirely.

No wonder I live here

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(2012)

I have a hot Brazilian babe angry at me because I owe her some writing. This stuff didn’t happen before I became world famous and then world unfamous. There’s a price for fame and a price for unfame. Is there a happy medium? Maybe the psychic in El Sereno is a happy medium. Passed her office today. It was on Huntington Drive with a big evil eye painted on the window. Malocho. Huntington Drive must have the biggest parkway in the world. Enough once for two Red Lines. Now there’s a bike path and old men playing bocchi ball. Progress. We turned right for the hell of it because the street looked so steep. It curved and curved and wound and wound and turned to dirt and a dead end with a view you wouldn’t believe. We decided to get lost in Montecito Heights. We did, aimlessly, driving all around just looking and peering over edges. Gorgeous up there, abandoned in places, Appalachian. Down a bit the moneyed people show up. At the bottom was a house with huge metallic grasshoppers in the front yard. Art. Cool. Highland Park. Silver Lake used to be Highland Park, crazy, arty, weird, gay and dangerous. Now our Silver Lake neighborhood is very nice, very quiet chockfull of gorgeous, moneyed hipster chicks. I’m nearly 56 years old and grandfatherly. Oh the irony. Bored by our pleasant surroundings, we explore, like today. We wandered home from Highland Park down historic boulevards and up crazy backroads. Our secret way. L.A. is full of mysteries, lost continents, other dimensions, freaks. No wonder I live here.

Another day trip

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Heading east from Santa Maria yesterday, we watched a guy in a nice SUV at 75 mph passing on blind curves on two lane Highway 166. Quite impressive. He had been passing while going uphill just before the crest, and it was so exciting a flock of other cars joined in. We slowed way down to avoid any unnecessary annihilation and let them get far ahead of us. At one point we crested a hill and had a spectacular view of the white SUV, without any accomplices now, occupying the oncoming lane as it rounded a curve between cliff and canyon. Any second we could have had a cinematographer’s dream of a fiery head on collision. But no, by sheer luck the white SUV pulled ahead of the other cars and over just as a another SUV came round the bend, its driver never knowing how close he came to being on CNN.

Blood Alley, someone at Jocko’s in Nipomo had warned us over lunch. All the three day weekend beach traffic trying to get back to Bakersfield asap. It had been calm and bloodless for the most part. The drivers had been behaving. I remember crazy scenes on the 126 (in Ventura County) and the 138 (in the upper Mojave) in their two lane days, blood alleys both, but nothing so far on the 166 equaled either. Then appeared the driver in the white SUV. He took reckless passing to a whole new level, made all the more exciting because our view was so cinematic. I felt like Sir David Lean about to watch the train plunge into the River Kwai. Madness, I would have said, madness. Alas, the moment passed without death and violence and nightmares for who knows how long, and the drive was safe and groovy and from thereon quite sane, and we made Maricopa with 8 miles to spare in the gas tank.

Gorgeous drive, the 166, one we’d never done. One waits a lifetime for perfect days on empty highways in the middle of nowhere. This had those moments, only three or four hours from L.A. and in the middle of nowhere. It had been 64 on the coast and 95 in Cuyama. 93 in New Cuyama. 95 again in Maricopa and 95 all the way down deep into the Central Valley. So flat that, the Valley. A perfect graben. Right there, in fact, on the Antelope Plain just north of Buttonwillow might be the flattest surface on the face of the globe. The horizon seems to extend northward forever without any topography at all between you and the curvature of the earth.  The land is empty of people but lush with carefully arranged vegetation. Vineyards stitch away into the distance, almond groves stand silent and thirsty. The 166 ends without flourish at the 5 and we headed south. The 99 folded into the traffic flow. Suddenly, brake lights. The Grapevine was a parking lot, you could see cars parked all the way up the grade. So we got off at the last exit in the San Joaquin Valley, turned round and headed back towards Bakersfield and headed east on the 58, up and over the Tehachapi Mountains. Lots of trains there. Trains going round and round in tight circles, engines passing over cabooses. The Loop, they call it. You hang around Keene, California and you see little knots of Englishmen in engineer caps with binoculars watching those trains go round and round the Loop. Trainspotters. Every nation needs their hobbies. They watch trains, we play chicken on a two lane road at 75 mph.

At the top of the Tehachapi Pass the land levels out into a wide plain. We stopped for coffee and a stiff wind blew over us and into the arms of giant turbines. Another train passed, bound for the Loop. We got back in the car and headed east on the 58, plunging headlong into the Mojave desert in the dark.

Silver Lake adjacent

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I see a Filipino has made it onto the FBI’s ten most wanted list. I believe that is a first. You know you have made it when one of your own makes it onto the ten most wanted list. For years it was all Irish and Italians. We knew we’d made it. Anyway, this guy committed a particularly heinous murder right in the neighborhood, just a couple miles away, on Virgil Avenue. South of Sunset, as they say. It’s actually smack dab in the middle of Virgil Village, but they’re calling it East Hollywood in the news stories. To be honest that stretch of Virgil is a lot closer to Silver Lake and is road dieted and everything, two big empty bike lanes just like in my part of Silver Lake, but it’s only Silver Lake adjacent when you are trying to sell a house or open a Vegan restaurant there. If it’s homicide, it’s East Hollywood. No need to drag the good name of Silver Lake into it. Anyway, the guy split for the Philippines where the new president will probably want to hang him. He was driving a BMW. That’s right, he drives a BMW and makes the Ten Most Wanted List. If that ain’t Silver Lake adjacent then nothing is. Astig!

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.