Smelling clean

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(2012)

A little bit ago I was washing my hands in the restroom at work, really sudsing them up good, finger nails, cuticles, down between the fingers. Even under the wedding ring. Clean hands. It felt good. Cleanliness is good.

Suddenly out of the blue I remembered one of the weirdest compliments I ever received. It was at a another job twenty years ago, downtown, way atop one of the towers there. I was a proofreader, just me and six women, all typesetters, a microcosmic Los Angeles, all colors, all accents, all everything. The place was crowded and confined and really busy, all the women were tough broads who swore like sailors and said anything they felt like saying. I eventually stopped blushing (my personal life was a regular topic of conversation, like I wasn’t even there.) One day one of the ladies suddenly stopped typing and looked at me. She sniffed. Once, twice. Then she looked me over, top to bottom. Sniffed again.

You know boy, she said, you smell real good.

I said thank you, blushing.

She nodded gravely. Yeah boy, you smell clean.

I said thank you again.

She smiled. I like a man who smells clean, she said.

I just nodded, nervous about where this was going.

Yup, she said, I bet you even wash your asshole.

I froze.

You wash your asshole, don’t you?

I nodded.

Yeah, I knew it. I like a man who washes his asshole.

I was beet red by now. Everyone was staring.

Yup, she said, I likes a man who takes the time to keep his asshole clean.

The other ladies agreed. Discussion followed. I just sat there mute, trying to smell as clean as possible.

My friend Martha was there next to me. She was wickedly funny. But for once she didn’t say anything. She just looked at me and smiled.

Bowlegged cowboy

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(Another old one, written a good decade ago at least.)

Bowlegged cowboy contest.

Bowlegged cowboy contest.

We were heading west on the 18 driving through Adelanto–that’s the upper desert, between Apple Valley and Pearblossom*–and pulled into a brand new mini-mall to pick up some cold drinks. There was new all over the upper Mojave back then, the nineties boom was underway, credit was easy, cash plenty, and the L.A. megalopolis was overflowing its basin and spilling into the surrounding desert. Here on the edge of Adelanto you could see it. One side of the highway was scrub, creosote mostly, a few poppies, an abandoned farm house with the roof burned away. And the other side was a shiny new mini-mall. Homes were going up by the hundred just down the road, and we’d passed a big shopping center a little ways back. There wasn’t a patch of land anywhere in sight that didn’t have a for sale sign. The lot across the street did. A couple hundred acres. I can’t remember how much they wanted for it but it seemed like a lot of money for a dusty patch of desert.

That’s when I saw him, the spectre. A man on a horse. A cowboy, a real cowboy, all dusty and weathered and leathery. He trots up, boots, jeans, cowboy hat, no shirt. He got off the horse and was bowlegged like you can’t believe, like he never got out of the saddle. He walks into the store, the lady says he has to put a shirt on. He’s got one in his saddlebag, throws it on, goes back in. Buys a coke. Says thank ya ma’am and gets back up in the saddle and trots off again, across the 18. I watched him disappear into the desert.

Somewhere up there in the foothills he worked a herd of cattle. They were invisible. He was invisible. Maybe I dreamed up the whole thing. But I didn’t. He was there, alright, bowlegged and all. He always was there, if not him then cowboys just like him. Their herds ate up the springtime grass and come summer they drive them up to higher ground. It was just lately all this civilization popped up, filling in the lowlands with houses and Walmarts and cars. With people and sidewalks and police. Weird how you drop a megalopolis into a desert and it’s the desert dwellers that look strange. But they aren’t the ones.

I snapped out of it. We slipped back into traffic and drove off in air conditioned comfort past row after row of brand new houses, feeling as out of place as you can be.

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* actually it’s between the more prosaic Victorville and Llano.

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Toe

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So yesterday afternoon (sometime last spring) my wife is sitting in a chair at the table and I walk by. I’ve done this  a zillion times, her sitting in that chair and me walking by. This time I walked by but the little toe on my right foot didn’t. It slammed into chair. I either sprained or fractured it, I can never tell the difference. I don’t know how many times I’ve done this. At least once a year I sprain or fracture my right little toe. I hobble and wince a bit, maybe. That’s it. I generally forget it unless I sprain the same toe again in a day or two. That really hurts. That’s when I take a few tylenol. I never tell anyone though. Big giant guys don’t make scenes about little tiny toes.

But I didn’t stub the little toe on the right foot again. No, I stubbed the little toe on the left foot this time. It was dark, in the bedroom, she was asleep, I let out a muffled curse and kept walking. Hobbled into the bathroom for a couple Tylenol then wandered out into the living room and sat down waited for the throbbing to stop. It was four in the morning. Me in the dark room with a throbbing toe. The other toe chimed in. The tylenol took effect eventually and I gingerly made my way back to bed trying not to stub anything else. And now I’m back in the living room and the sun is pouring in and both toes are a beautiful shade of purple.

Ha.

Santa Barbara

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(2012)

Sitting here and doing nuthin’ and enjoying every second of that nothing while it lasts. It never does. All that reality and shit. Got an email about a summer solstice party somewhere in town here which got me to remembering summer solstices waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the late seventies when there didn’t seem to be so much reality and shit. It was a big hippie thing, the solstice, don’t know why, but Santa Barbara was about as hippie as it got back then and every solstice they had a big parade of hippies in Santa Barbara right there on State Street. Imagine that now. Anyway there’d be a mellow throng of longhairs with beards and hairy legs and body odor and acoustic guitars playing Friend of the Devil and Sugar Mountain and god it used to drive us punks nuts. We couldn’t stand hippies. So we’d make plans to harass them somehow, getting up early and raising hell, just to bug them.  We’d all get together the night before and conspire and get high and conspire and get higher and play loud records and get even higher and inevitably it would end up with us pairing off and spending the night screwing our brains out.  Morning would come and someone would try and get us up but we were all too hungover and fucked out to harass anybody.  Afternoon would come and we’d eat and start getting high and the cycle began anew, though the screwing part generally began first on the weekends. Then the partying. Then the getting wasted. And more screwing. Ya wonder how anything got done at all.

Come to think of it, nothing did.

Lex

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Today is the thirtieth of March, a couple weeks past the Ides, so you can stop bewaring. It’s also my brother Lex’s birthday and I don’t even know how old he is. I used to think he was older than me because his birthday came a week before mine and since my dad’s birthday is a month before mine that meant Lex was older than me (but not older than our dad, because that would be too weird.) Apparently that’s not how it works. I was born before him, I know that because I was there and he wasn‘t and I never got his hand me downs. So he’s either 51 or 52 or 17, whichever comes first. I do know that my brother Lex walked at six months. I don’t mean he left, not that kind of walked, but we were in the living room or den of a split level place near Skaggsville MD (seriously, I went to Skaggsville Elementary School in first grade, but never White Horse Intermediate or Great Shit High School) and my brother was doing this bowlegged bipedal thing down the stairs and we froze, afraid to move lest he tumble. He didn’t. Which is why he’s fifty-something years old today. So Happy birthday, Lex.

Lex

Lex

 

 

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Jazz person

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A writer just accused me of not being a jazz person. Not sure why exactly, something to do with either liking rock music or rock music fans. He sure was pissed though. I wonder what I have to do to prove I’m a jazz person? Just what is a jazz person? Am I a fraud? Now I’m having an existential crisis. What would Monk do? Well, actually Monk would mumble and spin around and not get up till sundown. Though that’s not being a jazz person, that’s being a Monk person. I tried to be a Mingus person, taught my cat to use the toilet and everything, but somebody chased me with an ax. And I tried to be a Roland Kirk person but kept bumping into things. So I decided to be a Wynton person and just get on everyone’s nerves. Which automatically makes me a jazz person. Existential crisis over.

William Holden

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Was watching Stalag 17 again tonight. I love that movie. William Holden is great in it. But wasn’t he always. A great actor and a real movie star. Not sure if he was too nuts about being a movie star. He seemed kind of conflicted. He certainly drank enough. I don’t think he was a happy drunk. He was a moody and temperamental drunk. Not a lot of fun to be around. Certainly no one was around when he fell and hit the edge of the table. It was teakwood and immoveable. He hit the sharp corner edge of that table and his scalp split wide open and gushed blood. It bled and bled. He was awake for a good thirty minutes there on the floor, thoroughly drunk, his lifeblood draining out of him. He would have slipped into unconsciousness eventually and finally his blood pressure would have dropped to a point where it could drop no more and he died. There on the television he was so tough and cynical and independent, a perfect postwar anti-hero, but I saw him on the floor bleeding like a stuck pig.

All this ran through my mind as I was laying on the floor tonight bleeding like a stuck pig. I had awoken there, or woken when I bashed my head against the corner edge of our own immoveable coffee table. I had fallen asleep and rolled off the couch and my head had crashed against the coffee table. I wound up face down on the floor. Bang. I put my hand to my forehead and felt wetness. A lot of wetness. I looked into my hand and the blood was pooling there, a deep gorgeous red. It began sloshing onto the floor. I yelled for my wife to bring a towel and tried to inch away from the sofa. Bloodstains are a drag. Meanwhile, I’m seeing Bill Holden and thinking man, what a ridiculous way to go. Him, a big movie star and me doing just what he did.

It was really bleeding. Soaked a towel, soaked through several paper towels. Soaked a facecloth. I asked my wife how it looked. It looks nasty she said. Do I need stitches? I’d rather not go the ER. That would be a couple hundred bucks. She said maybe if we use compression you won’t need stitches. We tried compression. It kept bleeding. I said OK, just call the neighbor and see if he can take me to Kaiser. But he wasn’t home. My brother wasn’t home either. After all, it’s Friday night. I said OK, let’s not worry about it. She brought me ice. After an hour the compression and the ice stanched the bleeding, How’s it look I asked. It looks like a cut. How much of a cut? About an inch and a third long. Up in the hairline? No, right in the middle of your forehead. Cool, I said, I have a hockey wound.  Like I caught a high stick in the face. Blood on the ice. I’d be back in the locker room getting stitched up. That’s the kind of wound this will be. Though I didn’t get the stitches. I’ll probably regret that in years to come, though. Maybe I’ll think it’s cool. Some alpha male thing anyway. I’ll retell this story, each time with more blood. Men will say dude..that’s fucked up. Women will study the scar and coo maternally.

OK, it’s been two hours and my wife dabbed it with alcohol and I winced and she stuck a big bandage over it. I can only imagine the beautiful bruise I have coming. There’s gonna be some funny times coming up. Especially job interviews. Did you ever have one of those lives I asked a few days ago. This is definitely one of those lives. But I need to finish this up and go get a few Tylenol, I have a headache that you wouldn’t believe. Something William Holden didn’t have to worry about.

William Holden's bruised face, Stalag 17.

William Holden’s bruised face, Stalag 17.

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Letter of reference

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[Pardon this one, but I’m posting it as an online letter of reference.]
 
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“At Charlie O’s, it’s a bebop house, let’s face it. But when Brick Wahl comes in, he wants the real deal, so I open up for him. I won’t hold back! Whenever Brick Wahl’s around, I have to play no holds barred. He’ll say, ‘Oh I sure like that, man.’ He was a drummer, you know that? He’s the real deal. He’s not a jive dude, you get him in a conversation, no bullshit about him at all. I tried to thank him for giving me a pretty nice write-up, tried to pay for his wife’s dinner and buy his beer — he got PISSED! I never made that mistake again. He was just doin’ his gig.”


Charles Owens to L.A. Times writer Greg Burk, July 2011
 
 
 
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Perfect Bash

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(2014)

I gotta dig  out that Bitch Magnet cassette. Not the midwest Bitch Magnet, but Santa Barbara’s, with George Davison and Cecil B DeMille III. I’ve been meaning to do that since I heard George died. Hope I still have it. I remember loving it back then, playing it for everybody. Blasting it in the car as I took Edwin on a beer run down to a Mexican grocery in Lincoln Heights prepping for yet another party. It was Edwin Letcher’s pad where years later I ran into George on that riotous 4th of July. We recognized each other as we passed a joint. I can’t remember if he was passing it to me or vice versa. Brick? George? we spluttered in clouds of smoke. It was very Santa Barbara actually, tho’ downtown L.A. loomed large in the distance, and just added to the beautifully surreal experience, the sudden brush fire just across the street, two stoned old pals, hipsters fleeing in every direction in blind panic. What a perfect day that was. What a perfect bash.

(from Facebook)

 

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George Davison, again

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Ya know, I spent so much time reminiscing about George Davison in ye olde daze that I completely forgot to mention something I had only discovered about him via Facebook. George was a talented writer. I’m not talking music here, I already talked about that, but language. You can see that almost immediately in someone on Facebook (or in emails or tweets even) because they can spin little stories even if they’re ony a couple sentences long. When he was on the farm you could see the farm, when he was in Santa Barbara could see the streets, and the trees, and feel the sun. You don’t even have to describe it, a reader fills all the background in if you say the right words. Which he did. Towards the end his stuff got very, very dark…he told us some awful things and warned us he was going to tell more. I was glad he didn’t. Maybe he had second thoughts, maybe the drugs kicked in, I dunno, but it spared us an evil side–we all have those, I certainly do–but I don’t recall ever seeing his on display before. Not even in his most punk rock moments in the early days. Those dark stories he forewarned of us were stories that didn’t really need telling, I guess. Cancer was a world we all might face sometime, but no use letting us in on it now. If it happens–and it will, to some of us–it happens. Worry about that when it comes.

I remember how much I admired his skill with language, his flare for words, and I told him so. He was surprised, I think, most natural writers never even think of themselves as such. They just write naturally. I figured as he recovered we would see endless threads of George stories. It would be part of the recovery process. When I heard he’d finally slipped away I felt cheated that he never had the chance to spill like that, to pour it out in that breezy style of his. I didn’t say anything because, well, it was a selfish reaction and would have been just one more thing for you all to be sad about. But it’s been bugging me. So I said it here.

I don’t think there are that many natural writers. It’s a rare thing still. Writing is new, only a couple thousand years old, and it comes far less easy to people than music which is probably a hundred times as old at least. And when I spy someone with talent there’s a bond, like we’re in on a secret most people don’t know anything about. And I always hate to see them go, because when somebody goes they take a zillion stories with them, and we’ll never know what they would have been. And crazy George, like all the rest of us crazies, would have had some stories to tell.

Sigh……

 
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