Tag: personalnarrative

Tales from 1990: Richard’s end

I did not know Richard well — he was a friend of a friend and I met him only twice — but I remember everything about him. We were both in our mid to late 20s and our mutual friends were a circle of artistic types, dreamers, dropouts, and successful people who wished they were the first three things.

Richard was special. He was an effortlessly brilliant writer and illustrator, and he had a breadth and depth of knowledge out of proportion to his age. Talking to him was like a guided tour of a great library. He was usually doodling on something and the doodles turned out as perfect little cartoon stories sometimes. This was in the golden age of the “new comix” between Gary Panter in free weeklies and Art Spiegelman on coffee tables, when new styles of comic strip art were showing up everywhere.

Richard could have done well, made a living or better, made a name for himself. But he refused. He was not lazy, or disorganized, or dumb about money. He explicitly refused to show his work to a wider audience or to be paid for it. I remember someone joking that he was Kafka and some Max Brod was going to disobey him and publish everything, and he became very upset.

So Richard was poor. Very poor. He and his girlfriend basically cleaned toilets for a living. It wasn’t clear to me why he dived that deep into the working class, since he had no romantic delusions of proletarian slumming. I think he just hated office work and liked being left alone to do menial labor.

Richard drank and smoked, a lot. Really quite a lot. I knew some hard drinkers at the time, but Richard was a full-service beer drunk. He never seemed to lose an intellectual edge, but his eyes were heavy-lidded and he swayed a bit when he walked.

He was living in San Francisco in the late 1980s, doing but not selling a long graphic novel and working his down and out job, when he and some friends took a night off and hung out on the top of a tall building downtown. They watched the city, and drank, and smoked, and drank some more.

At some point Richard, who was having a great time, was dancing around on balancing on something and stepped where the building wasn’t, not seeing the gap between it and the next one. And that was that.

It still is not clear if there was explicit intention. Did he jump? Did he fall? Did he start to fall and then just decided to go with it? Did he even know what was going on? Was he in that situation half-hoping that something would kill him? No one knows.

He left behind a life incomplete in every way. Incomplete in years, incomplete in his art, just truncated. Everything about him was rolling along this curve towards something big — good or bad — and then stopped in mid journey.

Richard was a very sophisticated person, and the kind of artist who worked on multiple levels. Sometimes I wonder if his entire life, the shape of it and its end, could have been a work of art about truncation and incompleteness.

On the other hand, he was a drunk. And his father had committed suicide. So he might just have been a smart guy with some bad luck and some bad decisions. I don’t know.

There are so many fakes and ridiculous twits playing at “tortured artist” who say and do things that sound a lot like Richard, but he was all real. And I believe he got what he wanted as an artist. I’m still not convinced, though, that he wanted or needed to die on the concrete of a San Francisco sidewalk that night.

The Professor: an Academic Tragedy

Once upon a time there was a university.

It was a good school, and many of its departments were well-known and respected. One department in particular had international strengths in two programs and was a magnet for talent, not least because of its professors and their reputations.

One of these professors wanted to advance himself. He was already the world’s expert in a particular writer, and much in demand at conferences. He had published several books, and been promoted to a higher salary than most. Ambition did not leave this man. He needed more.

what happened then, uncle substitute?

a million little pizzas

A large-scale brain failure today caused me to believe that it was Thursday. Not much harm occurred, but I didn’t go in for my weekly in-person day at the office. I’m glad that I work with nice people who don’t scream at me for stuff like that.

I use cologne. I had two 99 cent start spray things of this stuff for a few years and then they ran out. I do not use very much cologne. The cologne was good, so I ordered an actual bottle of it. When I first bought it years ago, it was called “Prince Matchabelli New Musk for Men Under 30.” I was already over 30 but I cheated. They have since removed the bit about under 30. Vindication, cologne-wise.

This article and picture of Hillary with Scaife is something else: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/185608.php

Buy Ernest Hardy’s books. He’s a great writer, passionate and thoughtful. I don’t know who else is writing about music from a queer black perspective, but he’s sure good at it!

I probably won’t be there, but anyone who attends the last day of Dutton’s bookstore wake party please pour a little on the curb for me. It’s a big part of my L.A. life gone. LA Observed says it’s this Sunday at 5.

The Los Angeles Times has a new “Innovation” exec and he is broadcasting motivational gibberish from Planet Zinfandel. I had no idea that journalism was the new rock ‘n’ roll.

Main Street Afternoon

Yesterday I found myself on Main Street in Huntington Beach at early dinner time, so I put all my change in a meter and went for a walk, followed by Guinness and fish ‘n’ chips.

For those who don’t know the area, Main Street is the tourist trap and party zone of Huntington. Like Newport and Laguna, it has surf shops and souvenir crap and some theme restaurants. Unlike the others, it has tough guys, mean cops, real bars, and some genuine menace at night. Also, non chain restaurants!

At six on a weekday there wasn’t much going on, but the people watching was good on my longish walk.

I walked by a guy who was parking a new Porsche. He was small and strong, with a skintight shirt and a little gold chain, and hair cut close. Not someone you’d want to mess with. As he was getting out of the car, a friend greeted him, obviously someone he hadn’t seen in a while. Porsche was in a hurry, but stopped to talk. The Friend was generic overweight white guy with goatee, t-shirt over belly, shorts and flip flops. Porsche was dark, probably Mexican.

FRIEND: Hey! I heard you were into some stuff but I didn’t know you were, well, um, [gesture at Porsche] into some stuff like THIS.

PORSCHE: Huh, what’ya mean? [starting to look annoyed]

FRIEND: Well I, uh. I heard you.. um.. had been on “vacation.”

PORSCHE: Aah yeah… [nervous, more annoyed] That was a ways back. ANYWAY. [picks up phone]

The next chapter was at the Irish bar, where I had my meal. It was almost deserted, so I got a good outdoor seat for people watching.

The inside seat on the sidewalk was occupied by two very young teenaged girls, who were completely hyperactive. They kept asking random passers-by for a dollar. They said “hi” to almost everyone, and some people stopped to talk, including a middle-aged motorcyclist with salt and pepper hair, a couple of skater boys, a couple with a cute dog, etc. They asked me how old I thought they were. “Fourteen,” I said. “Thirteen!” they declared, triumphantly.

Next to me on the patio was a party of thugs. There are a lot of tatted up guys with hats pointing the wrong away in this part of the world, but these were the real thing. One guy had the Suicidal style bandanna half over the eyes, and all of them had obvious gang tats, just not from gangs I knew of. The teenaged girls asked the thugs: “Would you date us if we were 18?” and they blanched.

They were very friendly thugs. They were discussing what assholes people were around here, and asked me if I was local. I agreed with them about the local “quality” being stuck up and tiresome, especially the ones who think they’re tough. I urged them to consider this to be Disneyland and relax and enjoy it, and they thought that was a fine idea. They were from Chino Hills. When they left we all slapped each others’ hands and exchanged names and good will. I told them to watch out for the cops.

Meanwhile, the cops were about 50 feet away giving the skater boys a massive overkill search and detainment.

Next door at Sharkeez (VERY BAD STUPID BAR) there was a party of New York Baller Types, puerto ricans and black people, having a great time being incredibly drunk and loud. They were almost out of control, but very cheerful. One of them was the Designated Funny Guy in the group and had a ghastly screeching laugh.

The teenaged girls, of course, went over and introduced themselves, making an Enrique and a Shawn very nervous. More handshakes and amusing fear on the part of the New York Ballers, who did not want anything at all to do with suburban jailbait.

As I left, the cops were finally releasing the skater boys. It was classic HBPD: they’d ignored two unattended children, a party of hardore gangster criminals, an obvious dope dealer, and an out of control loud yelling party of out-of-state brown people just to fuck with some local kids on skateboards.

Anyway, that’s Main Street at six pm. At around 11 pm on a weekend night it’s what you’d expect.

February is the adjectivest month

Influenza stalks Paradise this month. The health department has finally admitted that the flu status is “widespread,” and the emergency rooms are filling up with wheezing patients and the news crews that love them.

The worst of our influenza season falls in this half-Spring every year. The season see-saws between bright sunny butterfly-and-hummingbird days and windblown drizzle under grey. This has got to be harder on the butterflies but we hate it too. Be consistent! we yell and wave our tiny fists at whichever sky we’ve got that day.

Either I’m getting the influenza myself or it’s just postmodern anxiety. Exhaustion and dissociation are associated with both conditions, so the differential will be made with a thermometer before I go to bed.

Have you ever met a ghost of yourself? I met one today, and it’s been a few years. I saw myself as a very young child — like the one in the icon for this entry — playing on the floor in this house. The tile was different then, and because at close range each tile looked like a city block, I was driving a little Matchbox car along the street with my hand. No doubt there were vrooming noises. At one point in the journey the car encountered a furniture leg and whacked to a stop. Instead of going around, I just kept whacking the little toy car against the wood until some adult told me to knock it off.

And tonight I saw that kid in the dining room.

Maybe it’s the influenza.

ELECTRICITY SPIRITS ARE ANGRY: ANYONE KNOW HOW TO FIX THIS?

Car: battery needs replacing, possible mysterious damage to electrical leads

Computers: home server blew up for no discernible reason. Big networking hardware at job is behaving erratically and goes off the air if it’s bumped or insulted.

Light bulbs: 8 blew out this week.

Toaster: died suddenly this week

Phone: my third (!) Cingular 8525/HTC Tytn died, and I’m out of warranty. Do not buy this phone. It has awesome features and runs great and then breaks. Now I have to buy a phone cash and I need a pretty good one because job and $$$.

New lamps my mom got: won’t use 3-way bulbs although they have 3-way switch.

My own nerves: conducting oddly on one side.

LA Stories: The Mysterious Gang

For the first half of the 1990s I worked at a hospital near downtown Los Angeles.

The hospital itself is an old, fine institution that provides excellent care. I was proud to work there. The neighborhood, however, was dangerous. The Pico-Union/Westlake district, otherwise known as the LAPD’s Rampart Division, had the worst numbers for population density, low income, and violent crime in the entire city.

Drug sales and gang gunfights were common, and strongarm street robberies were a constant threat. Central American, Mexican, Filipino and even Japanese gangsters were all competing for drug territory.

For the last two years of my employment I lived in hospital-provided housing. The commute was across the street and the rent was subsidized: great deal! But I had to deal with the neighborhood: not great.

Around the corner from my building (“The Pink Palace”) there was another hospital-owned apartment building. It was used as a kind of hotel for patients’ families who had to come from afar, and also housed some aged poor people per the donor’s charter. You could see these old folks lurching about the neighborhood looking frail, and I was always afraid they’d be killed and eaten by the locals.

There was a lot of graffiti. Most of it was incomprehensible but I enjoyed trying to figure it out. I knew what a crossed out name or 187 meant, but most of the rest was a blur. The gang members’ names were great too. But I was unable to predict oncoming battles or anything neat like that.

One day I noticed a new graffiti pattern. Near the hospital, on sidewalks and news boxes and transformer cases, I saw sharpie’d tags of the typical kind, but with a weird message: GRINGOS WORLDWIDE. Some of them said GRINGOS WORLDWIDE KILLERS.

What the hell? I’d never seen an obviously white gangbanger around here, except maybe some guys who got in one of the Spanish-speaking crews. And who would call themselves gringos? That’s not even proper street talk! I wondered if some college kids were commuting in to prank, or if the LAPD had finally snapped and gone into surrealist mode.

Coming back from the liquor store that week I saw one of our impoverished senior citizen tenants strolling down 6th Street He was a typical old white guy: polyester sansabelt pants, old sneakers, nylon windbreaker, fishing hat. He stopped in front of a transformer box, whipped out a Sharpie, and wrote GRINGOS WORLDWIDE FOR LIFE on the green metal. He then turned and looked at me defiantly.

I avoided his gaze and just strolled by, murmuring “sup.” Because that’s what you do with gangbangers. Otherwise, who knows what might happen?

We have dealt no great blow to the Devil by renaming him “neurosis.”

My high school biology teacher was an original. Passionate about his subject, honest and plain-spoken, and invariably good-natured, he was a hero to me at the time. I was terrible at biology but I loved the ideas and I loved him.

He was a park ranger in the summers, and he took us out on field trips in, well, the fields to find out what our local ecosystem had to offer.

His experience stretched beyond life science. He had been a seminary student and on a serious track to the priesthood at one point, and he was also an expert in several Native American spiritual traditions. He wouldn’t eat meat without apologizing to the animal, for example.

One day in class the subject of the occult somehow came up. I’m not sure, but I think it was related to a classmate of mine who scared the pants off herself with a ouija board. Some bit of aleatory coincidence made her think a dead relative was speaking and she flipped. Our teacher looked thoughtful at this and said “I have a story.”

“When I was in the seminary, I had a lot of trouble with the idea of the Devil. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the idea that an individual, some fallen angel, was permitted to exist and to hate us. And I couldn’t wrap my mind around the dogma of evil, especially personified evil. My supervisor told me to fast and meditate about it and I did.

“So I didnt eat much at all, and prayed and meditated for three days. This is difficult and I do not suggest you do it yourself without a good reason and a supervisor. Near the end of the third day, I got up to go into the other room and there was someone sitting in there. He introduced himself as the Devil, and said he’d heard I wanted to know about him. He didn’t look evil or have horns or anything. But it was clear somehow that he was the genuine article, you know. Not some prank.

“So I talked with the Devil for a few hours, and he explained his role to me, and why there was evil in the world. He himself didn’t know why God permitted him, but he was quite serious about evil and his hatred for everyone. Very calm conversation, but obviously very chilling.

“And then he didn’t leave. I hung around wondering what to do, and he just sat there. I realized then that the problem with inviting the Devil in is that he doesn’t have to leave unless he wants to. I gave up on getting rid of him and went for a long walk, because that’s solved so many problems for me. When I came back there was no Devil, and I had breakfast and went to sleep.

“And yes there is a moral to this story, right? Because there always is with me. Yeah, the moral is that you shouldn’t play with things you can’t understand or control. As much as it may look like a good idea, you’re risking everything. And really it doesn’t matter whether the Devil exists or I was hallucinating after all that fasting. In either case I couldn’t get him to leave and it was terrifying.

“So, yeah. If the ouija board does that to you, leave it alone.”

He had a picture on his wall of the Voyager message plaque, you know the one with the planet map and the humans and the symbols. The right-wing super-fundamentalist creationist smbiology teacher down the hall (yes, I know) got in the room one night and painted it over because it had nakeds on it. He also removed and destroyed the part of the anatomical charts that had genitalia on it. They had a little war, or rather the religioso waged war on my teacher. I think you can guess who won.

Moon over unincorporated areas of Anaheim

The full moon probably does cause more crimes and craziness. It just makes a person feel weird having that big glowing orb up there. And here it was a warm summer night the week after the schools got out. Looney tunes.

I saw at least five bicyclists without light or helmet, heard a call on the fire radio about an accident, and then saw the emergency people rushing to the scene after one of the bicyclists was run over down by the Frog House.

I saw a guy just standing on the top of a bus shelter, looking reflective.

Punk Rock Tom told us the story of how he had a blowout in the work truck and slammed into the safety rail on an overpass. He was bleeding from the chin and trying to cut the rim off to get loose of the rail when the Metro guys came and forced a tow off, then dumped him in a parking lot in Carson which was full of CHUDs. He duct taped his chin wound shut and finished the repair so the CHUDs wouldn’t steal his tools. Punchline is that he didn’t consider the stitches in his chin to be an injury and wouldn’t have told the story at all unless we’d insisted. An injury for Tom is a broken leg from skateboarding. Tom has a ’52 Ford Victoria which he has sculpted into a genuinely beautiful work of art. He had to cut the steering wheel to a half moon shape because otherwise he was always bobbing his head to see out the slit-like front window.

The “Fritz’s That’s Too” strip club had a marquee sign that communicated: IT’S “DUCK” SEASON! Yes, the name of the place is “Fritz’s That’s Too.”

I think tonight was also Some Kind of High School Party because the county was full of nervously glamorous teenaged girls dressed in their first grown-up summer night out dresses.

I am reading Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. It is a magical book and this is the fourth time I’ve dived into it.