This is the house I grew up in. 3401 SE Brooklyn Street.

I will describe this block from one corner to the next. On one corner was a large house at the bottom of a small hill. This house had a cherry tree which I climbed once and ate so many cherries that I vomited, and to this day have not tasted anything 'cherry' . This Home had bevelled glass windows on either side of the door which I peered into and saw the base of the staircase had two golden lions and I was certain it was real gold and the house was a mansion. 

 Across the street from this was a small house on a steep incline, with a rock step-bed planted in ferns. It was with my Grandfather that I planted these ferns. The old woman who lived there had at vey least eight or nine cats. Next to this home was another small one that had a Japanese Maple in front. There was a boy named Larry who lived in this house. We used to play under cover of this Maple. Once while playing there Larry told me he wanted to show me something in the house. We went inside and he had me wait while he went into his Mother's bedroom. Larry told me it was okay to come in and I saw him on her bed, writhing around in her lingerie. 

 Across the street from this was a one story pink house. I had recently learned to ride my bike without training wheels and spent hours zipping up and down the street. At one point the resident of this house was backing out of the driveway when I hit the passenger side door at full speed, putting a large dent in it. He walked me to my house and my father cut him a check for fifty dollars, which he gave me to hand to the man, which I did in tears. Here I skip down the street to the Stouffer's house. They had a few kids with whom we played. In fact at one point I counted that twenty three kids lived on our street. My favorites were the Ryersons, Jim, his little brother Joe who had nervous tic that involved him licking his lips, causing a chaffing that gave him the look of a circus clown. They had a sister, Timi, with whom some years later I would smoke cigarettes in the church parking lot. 

Once again crossing the street was the house where serial killer Jerome Brudos lived. The basement of this house had a freezer that contained the severed feet of the prostitutes he murdered, and a bathroom containing only a toilet that had raised plumbing, which he covered by building stairs, causing the toilet to resemble a throne. Next to this house was where the Roberts lived, a mid elderly couple. Mr. Roberts had a section of his head gone, making a kind of shelf supported by metal plates. It was said he lost this during a World War II battle. Ms. Roberts always wore some sort of Mumu which she would raise on occasion, revealing her overweight and naked body. They had a small dog named Blackie who one Easter Sunday attacked my brother, causing a fear of dogs he retains to this day. 

 

The Robert's house I also remember as a place for sex. It was under their back porch that the Ryerson boys and I would masturbate to porn magazines stolen from their father. I remember one time we had a contest to see who could the most clothing from a hanger which we would hold with our erections. I also drew a pencil drawing of a cross section of sexual penetration. In an event which resembles a rape/murder scenario I had stolen one of my sister's Barbie doll, and glued dog hair to her pubis area. I was soon afraid of being caught and buried her. Soon afterwords I painted male nudes on popcycle sticks to rub together as if having sex. 

This was next to our house, a three story house with a full basement. The top floor was an attic that had been remodeled as a bedroom. I spent one miserable autumn in this attic, quarantined because of having hepatitis. There was a phone up there which my uncle rigged so I could dial a certain number, hang up and it would cause the phone downstairs to ring. This is also where my parents would have guests stay. Once I remember a young man staying there. For years I thought he was being smuggled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam war. I later learned that he had committed some kind of crime and my parents were urging him to turn himself in. 

Going down one flight were three bedrooms. The largest was for Mom and Dad. It had a big bed which me and my older sister would jump into with them on the weekends. At the end of a short hallway was a bathroom and two bedrooms. The small one was mine and had two windows. The window facing east cast big shadows in a full moon. Once I woke up and saw my shadow on the opposite wall. I was convinced someone was trying to break in and went to the bathroom, where I fell asleep on the floor. My father came in, and woke me, asking why I was there. Crying, I told him of the intruder and he asked to see. Showing him, he began laughing. He shook his head, saying, 'My son is afraid of his own shadow'! 

Through the other window I had a view that went for miles. I used to look out this window at night, often going to sleep while watching the blinking traffic light down on Clinton Street. The central floor had three rooms. The living room had a large window looking out on to the porch and street. According to the holiday we would paint scenes on the window; snow, autumn leaves, etc… Next to this was the dining room with a very cosy wood stove. Before we had a long table we had our antique desk, which I now write this is a gorgeous affair of mahogany and ornately carved legs. Me and my older sister used to drape it with a cloth and use it as a tent. The wood stove I used to pretend was a Plantation house that the slaves had set on fire. 

Lastly was the small kitchen. Once after my Father had gone to work, my Mother asked me if I would like to stay home from school. Of course I said yes, and she supplied me with a sledge hammer to knock large hole in the wall to open the kitchen up. My Dad came home and just laughed. The kitchen overlooked a small backyard where we would play. Soon my folks got a waist sized swimming pool. In the winter this would freeze and I would put my dog, or the two duck we had on it and laugh as they slipped around. Poor ducks, Yacky and Daffy. Soon they were gone and later I found the corpse of one under the porch, most likely dragged in by a cat or possum. 

There was also a small garage in back. Once my dad bought me a mid fifties Chevy, and he told me I could drive it one day after it was in working order. Once he had friends over as he worked on it and I heard him say, 'I have already put 500 dollars in this car' I wondered where he put it, and was convinced there was a safe under the transmission hump where he kept it. Another time he asked me what kind of car I wanted and I told him it did not matter if it had electric windows. Soon he had bought an old cadillac painted several colors of primer and electric windows! While on cars I should mention the time he bought a yellow Ford Fairlane for my mom as a present. I forget the occasion but there was also a small lapdog that went with it. 

The basement had two bedrooms, one for the girls, another just for me. In this tiny room I had a deeply recessed window where I had several houseplants. In the wall of this room once I heard a crying kitten, sole survivor of the litter. I rescued this cat and named it Smokey. Speaking of animals and this room I should also mention the sparrows I had rescued when their nest was knocked down. I placed them in a box under a lamp and fed them baby food until they had all their feathers. Once I woke to find one of them on my knee. It was time to teach them to fly! I took them outside and would gently toss them to the shrine we had to Saint Francis, watching them fumble at flight, before gathering them and putting them back in the box. Another time we had visited lake on Mount Hood, and I brought home a gell nest, watching them grow from tadpoles to little frogs. They all escaped and I found dried up frogs for a month later. 

Going to the front yard. It was small, and surrounded by a white picket fence. There was a large Azaeia tree with orange/pink blossoms, something a called 'The Love and Hate Tree' I loved it because of the way it smelled, but hated it because of the incredible itching it would cause. There also was a tiered rockery covered in Juniper where I would hunt lizards. Once I found a dead butterfly. I had been looking in the encyclopedia about Egypt, so I took a Jack in the Box, gutted it and lined it with satin. I placed the butterfly in there with flowers and gave it an Pharoe's burial. 

The front porch had two stone ledges where me and my sister would sing songs by The Archies and the Partridge Family. We thought that B-Sides of records were cooler, so we called our 'band' The Other Side Over. The day of the Father and Daughter Dance coincided with the Catholic day of getting one's throat blessed. The priest would cross candles at your throat and say a blessing. Some of us went with Dad that morning to church for this. Later that night was the dance, during which my Dad got a sore throat, which was so bad he was going to the hospital. I remember him, still dressed for the dance, loosen his tie and tell me, 'This is the last time I'm getting my throat blessed'. H died later at the hospital. Last time, indeed. 

Next to us was my Mom's childhood home. My Grandmother had married three times with two kids with each husband. The first, Jean and Joan had a father named Gilbert, who wrote a song that made the Hit Parade. It was called, 'The Shifting, Whispering Sands'. Her next husband gave her two kids, but also was a paranoid schizophrenic who spent his last days in a mental institution. With her last husband she had one kid, another from an affair with my Father's father, who was passed of as her husband's. it was on her deathbed she confessed the truth. 

 

My Grandmother was something else. She would wear knee high boots and a mini-skirt. She would say things like, 'I can dig it'. She tried to seduce her daughter's boyfriends. Down the street was a gravel road covered in pot holes, suddenly paved. Also on her deathbed confessed to having an affair with someone on the City Council, who facilitated the project. Grammy, we called her, had a sword hung above her yellow, crushed velvet couch, covered in plastic. I asked her about it once and she told me, 'Your Grandpa chopped the head off a Jap with that'. 

I used to visit my uncle who lived upstairs, in a room covered in black light posters. We would get stoned and play Frampton Comes Alive. He used to wear sweat pants outlining his crotch, the top of which would sprout pubic hair. A divergence. When the Apollo landed on the moon I waited in a convertible Corvair as my Mom was at a doctor appointment. As we listened, a shirtless guy came up to the passenger door and pulled his pants down to take a piss. My dad must have been looking the other way, because he was kind of shocked to see what was happening. Having never seen pubic hair again I asked him, 'Daddy, what's that'? His reply was, 'Son, that's a hippy', and the mystery of 'long haired hippies' was solved. 

Cross the street again Here is Grandpa Blue's house. Grandpa Blue was an 'Outsider Artist' before such a term existed. His backyard was a grotto to creativity. He had made a pyramid of Aunt Jemima Bottles which he had repainted each empty bottle of syrup as the Virgin Mary. The rest of the yard was full of replicas of wild animals and gnomes. Grandpa Blue used to also make small cars we could ride. Many kids have these, but his were a home made variety. I recall a three wheeled thing shaped like a rocket. It had a stick with which you could steer it. Grandpa Blue was a complicated character. For sure he was a racist, I can recall him telling me not to say 'Nigger" because in a strange reversal of racist activity he said that black people would hang me if they heard me say it. Most likely he was homophobic. Who was not when it was mainstream? One time he drove his truck across a neighbor's yard, spinning cookies. 

Another time the police were surrounding his house while he threw furniture all over the place. a neighbor kid said, 'That's your Grandpa', which knowing, but in an eager attempt at denial refuted the kid's claims. Grandpa had a brother Bob, who had run off with his wife. They took of to California for a bit when maybe things went sour because Uncle Bob and Pauline (Grandpa Blue's wife) asked to return and were pardoned. There is a picture in an old newspaper I am told where Grandpa Blue as a fireman was putting out a fire on a house in the dead of winter with ice cycles hanging from his head, arms and neck. 

When Grandpa's family moved in, my mother watched from her front room and saw my teen aged father moving in. She told herself one day she would marry him. At 18, (dad a year younger) she told herself that one day she would marry him. And indeed before she was twenty she had delivered both my older sister and myself. 

 

After Grandpa sold the house a young family moved in, the Pancerellis. Dorothy was the mother, Bruno was the dad, and they had a couple kids, one born with a heart defect, the other later develop multiple sclerosis. I remember Bruno was a fire fighter, like my dad was. He had a lethal cancer in his early 20s. Once Dorothy wanted to take their two tone Bronco to buy some groceries and asked my mom if someone could go and hang out with him. It must have been 73 or 74, but I went over and went inside. Bruno was a handsome guy and I think I had a crush on him WAY before I knew what such a thing was. Bruno was on the couch, and there was a hookah pipe on the coffee table. The room was full of stale weed smell. Anyway, after greeting me, Bruno ripped the IV stints from his arm, loaded his hookah and began getting stoned. We listened to the entire album of Dark Side of the Moon before his wife came back. It was my first time hearing Pink Floyd. 

In the early 70s it must have been a rough neighborhood because I remember the cops patrolling by two or three times a day. Without knowing the meaning of calling cops, 'pigs', us small kids used to shout out, 'I Smell Bacon'. Next to Grammy's was a rental that always changed tenants fast. At one point a biker gang moved in. Dividing that property with the next was a tall hedge of bushes where we used to climb, and on the other side of that was the Eliot House. Now in about 73 or 74 Mr. Eliot wore a full length black coat, had long painted black, and silver hair pulled back into a pony tail. In a nook in the roof of the house every year Redtail hawks used to nest. In the spring they would nest, and by summer they would terrorize the local bird population. I can clearly remember the cries they would make while swooping in on a kill. The street was littered with the bodies they dropped as summer arrived. 

Here was the other corner. There was a sewer manhole in the middle of the street where we used to fish for rats. We would hook a small chunk of cheese on string and lower it down. After a bit we would pull up the string and find the bait gone. Most likely it just fell off, but we were convinced that the crafty rats had liberated the tasty treats and gone free. On very hot days we would scrape up tar from around the manhole and press bits of it into cubes, which we would then freeze to make dice. Next them was the Clark's house, holding little, but important memory. The Clarks had a daughter, Allison. One time the parents were gone and Allison was 'entertaining' a boyfriend on her parent's bed. The parents came back early. Pop got a gun and shot the boyfriend in the back. 

There you go, a tour of the block. I could do a psychological profile. First thing that come to mind is a song by The Smiths, 'Sixteen clumsy and shy, I went to London and died'. But it was not like that. Nothing is that clear, life is a swirling mess of feelings, events actions and the consequences of those actions. If it was all bleak, or ecstatic we would be mad, insane.

Thanksgiving Dream

In my dream last night my father was alive. We went to a restaurant and had a long talk. He told me about how proud of me he was, and of things he was sad of because he could only watch his children grow from the other side of life. We walked to the house on Brooklyn, and I told him in my travels I had got many animals, among them two Cheetahs and two Wolves. We tried to get in the front door but it was blocked, finally entering through the back door. I put the wolves in the bathroom and the cheetahs went upstairs. Because my brothers and sisters were sleeping everywhere I went to find the cheetahs. One had eaten a poisoned rat and died, the other had eaten my pet rabbit. I was upset and let the cheetah outside.

Dad and I went for a walk with the wolves. They both ran away and I was devastated. Dad cried with me then he slowly vanished. I walked back to the house and pushed all these other people out. They were people from my past that I did not like, let alone have in my house. The house was clear and suddenly I was at a film festival in Berlin. My friend, Wilhelm came up to me and hugged me. “Wanna buy your Dad a Beer?”

Then I woke up. 

The Beach House

For years my Grandmother drove out to the coast to work on her cabin. I remember the sound of her Ford Galaxy scraping her driveway (which was too steep) as she backed it up. She was a wild one. Grammy did her eye makeup in a way which reminded me of Catwoman from the TV series. She wore miniskirts and boots that were almost knee high. She peppered he speech with things such as, “I can dig it”, and “trippy”. A few blocks down from us was an unpaved road, which she later told me was paved because of her affair with some City Council member or another. Grammy used to drive me out to Rooster Rock, at the Columbia River. Once swimming there something brushed up against me, and I looked and saw my first eel.  On the way we passed a Corrections Center, and I always imagined guys in ankle irons breaking rocks, as they did in cartoons.

Anyway, over the years I would get to spend a weekend there with my Uncle, who was just two years older than me. We would sit on the unfinished floor, legs dangling from the support beams, smoking joints and listening to Pink Floyd, Peter Frampton and Led Zeppelin. The work was slow, but the cabin was eventually finished. It had a very strange layout. I think it was a sort five-sided affair with a deck going about halfway around it. My last time with her, she had advanced bone cancer. I asked her if she wanted to drive to the Vista House, high above the Columbia, overlooking Rooster Rock, where we had many nice memories. She had fallen asleep next to me as I drove, and after I had parked I went around, opened the passenger door, and helped her walk to the stone wall, and with the wind blowing fiercely, we admired the view in silence. On the drive to the coast we stopped at the hospital to pick up her meds. I remember it was taking forever for her to get her insurance card, but she was determined and wanted no help. 

At the cabin I helped her up the stairs and to the bedroom. She had taken up painting before she got ill, and the walls were covered with them. I pointed out my favorite, an owl with beams shooting from its eyes. Just like Grammy, she said, “Oh that one is a trip”. The wig she wore at this point was inconsistent with the woman I remembered, and she took it off before going to sleep. I said to her, “Grammy, you shouldn't wear that thing, without it you look like Annie Lennox” She giggled, most likely knowing it was a compliment, but probably did not know who Annie Lennox was. 

As I write this over ten million acres of forest has burned to the ground. The heavy rain last night has given respite from weeks of smoke so heavy at times I could not see down the block. The air is fresh again for a moment at least, but it did not save Grammy's beach house, which was engulfed in flame yesterday.

Post Revolution Blues

While I like public declarations of love, the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage left me a bit sad, and while waiting to let the feelings come and begin to articulate themselves I thought to write out my own public declaration of love; a love for certain times, a love of many people and for a way of thinking and acting that is increasingly vanishing. In order to trace such a line of inquiry I have to visit times that were before my own, but of which I consider myself a son and heir.

I consider myself a son of the 1960s, of its struggles histories and myth. My earliest memories contain vestiges of its turmoil. By the late 60’s I had entered first grade. The anti war movement, Civil Rights, Black Power and Feminism were daily topics on a national scale and everyday topics in the streets and homes, but as the people participating in some of these movements of social protest still believed they could change the world, our government’s leaders were waging a war to keep that from happening.

It is the marginalized that have the most to lose in such times, so when we have the margins of the marginalized rise up, it is often a thing to behold. Prior to the Stonewall Riots, what were called Homophile Societies lobbied for the acceptance of gays into mainstream America with a philosophy with a doctrine that “We are just like you”, and that if heterosexual society could see this we all could live happily ever after, meaning ENTER society, not CHANGE it. These Homophile societies were made up of largely white, middle class men.

Well it was Black and Puerto Rican drag queens and trans identified youths who were the ones at Stonewall to throw rocks and bottles at the cops for days, NOT an activity that displays a similarity to mainstream, white culture, and it was they who had the courage to finally stand up to the daily, blatant harassment and racism, and homophobia in that watershed event which is now considered the birth of modern Gay Rights.

Footage of 1972’s Gay Pride shows white, gay hippie men sitting around on the grass while one of the brave fighters from Stonewall was heckled and ridiculed. It was heartbreaking to see this footage when I did some 30 years later, and I thought, “ Here it is, the beginning of the end.

Shortly after Stonewall, two groups emerged as the dominant forces in early activist forces. One was the Gay liberation Front, and the other the Gay Activist Alliance. While the former sought cross-cultural ties with other minority group’s activists, seeking to CHANGE society, the Latter concerned itself with exclusively gay rights, as a way of ENTERING society. Throughout the early 70s those who sought out revolutionary change were violently crushed by our dear, great Democracy, however revolutionary thought was still carried out in the universities and in academia, growing into what would become great theoretical lines of thought in Feminism, in Multiculturalism, in Sexuality and the human body as they all relate to freedom.

Gay culture flourished in several different directions and gay ghettos cropped up in every big city across the continent, providing an open, social nurturing of gay people who may not have had this in smaller towns or cities. Infrastructures for public sex became established both in the private and public sectors in bathhouses, cinemas, parks and bathrooms. I have always thought even before Samuel Delaney could so eloquently put it in words, that in the world of public sex cross class contact happens more than almost anywhere else, and I believe cross class contact is very important in our country, so that people from different social strata can not only meet with intimacy, but sustain real relationships that can last years.

Flash forward to the early 1980s. AIDS and Post Punk. I was just entering my public life as a gay person, in my early 20s and people were dying like flies. It gave this country, the Government, the Churches, and the people to show just how homophobic they were. It felt like war, and it had its joys and its rage. The culture of Post Punk was utopian; it carried the revolutionary torch of the 60s and early 70s, and framed my coming of age. It also was not afraid of, or intimidated by Academia, or High Art, though its own aesthetics were low and abject. I remember going to clubs and talking over the loud music about essays like, Is the Rectum a Grave, or quoting essays that said things like, “it is our promiscuity that will save us” We were reading French Post Structuralism NOT to become snobs in our 20s, but to arm ourselves with whatever we could in a fight where the gay male body was seen by the larger culture as the home of death and disease.

With this association of the Gay Male as the home of death and disease, Gay Rights took a turn for the worse; it had returned to a discourse that echoed the Homophile Societies of the early 1960s, which was, “we are just like you”. In the mid 80s to mid 90s I saw a breach in gay culture that could really be broken down to Assimilation or Revolution. When I speak of Revolution it must not be pin-pointed to some ideology, or even violence. My own revolution has been a subjective one. I have become radicalized because of what I have experienced, because of what I have learned of life, because of the art I have seen, the music I have listened to and the books I have read, but above all because I despise hierarchies and power, I love human beings, and I am horrified by suffering and injustice.

Which brings me back to the first part of the day today when I read the Justices decision. I do not begrudge those who wish to be married, who are married, who enjoy love, But the White House, which I believe only houses sociopaths, as I think any head of state must be, lit in rainbow colors, and my bewilderment at what once began as a riot by black and Puerto Rican trans folk, in a time when people believed in revolution, culminating in THIS? I spent the morning feeling as if it was the death of an era.

To get back to the public declaration of Love. To paraphrase the late, great film maker Chris Marker, “to say I loved that time is to say I loved it unconditionally”

I woke up this morning and felt I have outlived my life yet again.

The pictures are of the demolished Trans Bay Terminal, where I had relationships with several young men of the course of several years.

Dust on the Dash

There are moments when all the senses become heightened and agitated, excited about what they perceive and time simply dissolves. At these moments a person can wander through all the lives one has lived and slippery memory hardens like polished agate.

In one of my final moments inside my car looking out of the windshield the huge, tumbling clouds allowed no sun to shine. The sky was seen through glass covered in drops from a recent and heavy rain, condensing light from the grays and white, cut with wires and poles. The scent of wet asphalt and tar rose from the parking lot in whirls of vapor.

It was in this damp warmth just such a moment came upon me and the interior of the car dissolves and reforms into car after car after car, ushering in memory after memory;

My father holding my bleeding wrist while driving me to the hospital after I had shattered a window in the back of the truck.

My sister simply falling out of the cab of another truck after her door had opened during a sharp turn. She was there, then not.

Wondering where my father had ‘put 500 dollars’ into the car before deciding a safe must sit in the floor where I now know the transmission was.

Getting stoned with a friend while parked in front of the downtown library listening to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks under golden autumn leaves lit by streetlamps.

The musty smell of sex, muscle cramps and feeling as if I were turning into a lawnmower, bicycle, or other awkward and bulky object.

Stiff with fear driving through a flashflood, a landslide, or misjudging the distance of oncoming traffic while passing on a desert stretch, nearly killing a friend and myself.

Crying alone after the death of a loved one, or hours spent reading, feet out the window.

That brand new chemical smell of a new rental car after signing an agreement I would not leave the State. My brother and I drove through at least five States and two countries.

As the moment falls away, in a final moment with a car I will soon retire, I look at the dust on the dash, the floor tossed with rolling papers, water bottles and dead lighters, a spider web made just that morning, and I will know I will always remember my dog resting her head on my shoulder while driving and all the laughter with friend or family at my side.   

Moment

In describing a moment, or rather what one soul might feel at any given instant, it may well be said that the entire experience of time for that soul must be called upon, for that is what a moment is; all of time for one soul condensed, compressed and sealed in one instant. Should I say for instance, that while sitting in a car, he finished reading a novel? A novel where the final words filled him with such sadness, or should I say that upon finishing a novel in a borrowed car that the first thing he saw upon closing the book was the petals of a tree in late bloom were scattered in wind and rain, and that this image was then gently extinguished by drops of rain on the windshield, thereby obscuring it? Or perhaps I should write that he thought for years that the precise image he had just seen was the exact image of happiness and that he had always wished to film it? At any rate he watched this image unfold and become obscured as a sadness filled him upon finishing that bitter and beautiful masterpiece of a book. It might be enough to write that with the passenger windows of the borrowed car open that four teenaged boys sat on a grassy slope to his left and as he listened to these boys, these Kings of Leisure quietly laugh, bounce a ball that their pleasant patterings sent him into his own past, for he was once a Sovereign of Leisure too, who though not often bouncing a ball, had Laid Waste to Time while sitting while sitting on grass, scented in rain. No, it was the first notes of music he had once played with his brother, who he missed and therefore brought the CD of a concert they had played once in Finland to play in the borrowed car. This music from the concert in Helsinki, and the series of notes he had played and was not satisfied with and gave to his brother, who took them and worked on them as a writer works on words, or a painter does with color, and made these notes beautiful, so the concert could continue in joy. As these notes played in the car as he finished that very sad novel, his mind went to Finland, to the sunny Island where their kind host took them, to the nap they took outside the museum on a grassy slope in a park before performing the concert. As these Kings of Leisure sat to his left, softly Killing Time, those notes of music played, and that singular image of happiness was blotted out by rain, he was filled with an almost lovely sadness, and he thought all these things in a moment, at once, and he thought to write down that moment. Scrambling for paper before this moment faded like dreams do upon waking, he ripped a paper sac open and tried to describe something beautiful.

This describing of a moment is also a review of the novel, Seiobo There Below, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai 

and then I woke up

I am working at a funeral/memorial service for a recently passed poet. There are in attendance several people from my distant past who no longer recognize me. As I am watching them in bewilderment a loft bed where children sleep collapses. While sifting through the debris a boil develops under my skin. Pushing my sleeve up to examine it, I can see it growing until to my horror it explodes in blood and pus. I continue working as my status is that of a serf, and I am required to regardless of any other consideration. All the while I feel new boils growing and exploding like waves.

After a while I notice a wonderful industrial machine, like a crane, but designed simply for pleasure. There is a line of people waiting to use it. One among them is a handsome young man flirting with me. He makes eye contact with me, and accomplishes several daring and impressive feats on the crane like structures, jumps off and immediately changes race, gender and age.

I take the lumber to a waiting truck and seek assistance for my condition. While a person reads poems of the deceased to a large crowd, I turn and notice Mt. Hood collapsing in a huge avalanche. I run to it and am surprised the distance was not distance, but scale; it was only a model of the mountain and was a set piece in a theater that ran films of Mt. Saint Helens exploding in a continuous loop.

The waves of boils continue.

I run into my sister, Theresa, who says, “you know what I got Jerry”

When I do not reply, she continues, “A whore on Kirk’s credit card”

Wait wait wait wait….

And then I woke up

Ten of Fifty # 1

 One; SONG

The first impulse is to celebrate. An Image, a person, a memory. In this case SONG. Make a Joyful Noise was the title of a song I had on a white vinyl record, ‘Leaps and Bounds’ by the band Singers and Players. If by the time it was released the trump cards played by On-U master, Adrian Sherwood were almost set in stone, and the fan knew what sounds nearly every record would sound like, this one song was a revelation. The main vocal was recorded at nearly a whisper, floating in and out of the mix, suddenly falling into some back land soaked in a reverb as if it had fallen into a pool in paradise. As for the band, restraint is the motif, calmly moving not forward, but in a drift. Dub techniques developed in the early 1970s here reached a new level of artifice. The studio was a canvas and the musicians were paint.

I cannot decide this morning if Nina Simone or Townes Van Zandt is called for to officiate this cold and windy November morning. The undertone of grief in either voice often functions like a sail, and the movement along with the song as a ship makes the journey much more comfortable somehow.

Songs in the Key of My Life;

Sukiyaki by Kyu Sakamoto

Penetration by The Stooges

It was a Pleasure Then by Nico

Mind Train by Yoko Ono

Alone Again, or by Love

And my favorite songs of all time are tied;

Something for Derek Jarman by Zero Sound Liberation Organization

Aguas De Março by Tom Jobim and Elis Regina

 Two; MEMORY

Of late afternoon light forming a shadow in the indentation under a collarbone, which subsequently became a symbol for everything beautiful.

 Three; AUTOMOBILES

My father was for a time a mechanic. Because of this daily working on cars he often found an owner wanting to sell his or her car. We often had ‘new’ cars. I remember once for my mother’s 28^th birthday he bought her a yellow sporty ford with blue interior. I remember them both coming downstairs, dressed to the nines and going to celebrate with dinner and a drive. Another time he bought me a 1950s Chevy, telling me I could fix it up and one day when old enough it would be my car. There were days of the T-Bird convertible, and days of the fully functional car with no body. One time my sister fell out of the door of a very old pickup truck while we were driving. She lived. Still another truck memory is of my grandfather’s truck complete with rifle rack and 8-track tape machine that would play either Nancy Sinatra or Ray Charles. Though the automobile is most likely the worst object to befall the planet, I have loved having and driving them. When I was very young I made model cars. I cannot decide if it was due to an innate conservatism or if it was owing to a youthful queeniness that unlike most young boys I eschewed the hot rod modifications for sleek whitewall tires, clean paint jobs and luxury modifications. Currently I am driving a zippy old Honda CRX missing a front end and with a sunroof that will not close. I love it!

Four; WEATHER

My favorite seasons are Spring and Fall for the revolutions they are, sweeping away the bloated self satisfied nature of Summer and the cruel despotism of Winter. In fairness though to the other two, the clarity of Winter always impresses me, the forms of trees become their prominent feature, often clearly outlined in stark white of snowfall. And Summer days, long, bright and hot are loved by me not for their crushing heat, but rather for the swooning, delirious pleasure found in their nights.

Five; CITIES

Long have I been enchanted by this form of organizing human endeavor. At a young age I drew maps of imaginary cities, giving them exotic names and placing them in all finds of climates and geographies. I would pour over encyclopedias and look at drawings and photos of how people would dress in cities at different times and epochs. I would lament the famed loss of the ancient library in Alexandria, or picture myself as a thief or bandit in some dark, European city in the middle ages (yes even then, I suspected my lot was not among the aristocracy). I have loved Athens the many times I have visited it for its sheer chaos, the packs of wild dogs roaming the heavily trafficked streets and sidewalks, for the scars of architecture where an atrocity of a 1950s utopian housing project would share a street with an ancient ruin. I have loved Paris, London and New York for feeling as is the world had arrived, and you were not so much living in a place, but were a citizen of the world and life. Studies of cities have greatly informed my appreciation of them. Jane Jacobs, “Death and life of Great American Cities” is a wonderful read, and important in this climate of homogenization through gentrification. Lewis Mumford is a great writer on cities, with “Sidewalk Critic” being a favorite. New Orleans, Chicago are greatly appreciated by me. Tiajuana is fascinating for the way it articulates the hostility between the United States and its southern neighbor. A fantasy city is Buenos Aires largely because of Wong Kar Wai’s setting it as the backdrop to his film, Happy Together.

Six; ANIMALS

Elsewhere on this blog I have posted an essay on birds, but my love of animals does not stop there. I admire the relationships that can develop between creatures so different from us, in fact I find it a measure of compassion and empathy. I grew up with dogs, a few of which became close friends. I do not think I would have found adolescence even bearable without my dog, Shep, with whom I would take long walks, often ending at a plum tree on a rise overlooking a high School track, where we would sit next to each other, and often I would sing a favorite Pink Floyd song. Household pets aside, I love the color and pattern changing cephalopods, and the behavior of many animals I long have been curious about. A certain species of ants comes across the larvae of some other creature and becomes addicted to the defensive secretion oozing from its skin, they take this drug of a bug back to their colony and it promptly falls to ruin. There was in the Monterey Bay area once a serial killing otter. Raised in captivity, it never learned how to mate. There were reports of mutilated baby sea lion cubs whose bodies had washed ashore. No one could find the culprit until a team had filmed this delinquent otter dragging a corpse around, sometimes landing on a rock attempting to mate with the murdered sea pup. There recently have been studies that seem to show birds in the wild mourning the loss of one of their own. They gather at the body and forego food and foraging to stare sadly at their immobile colleague.

Seven; HERESIES

I love constructed systems of logic. Here on one hand we have whole theologies built around speculative thinking, which is the nature of religion, while on the other hand we have these often rigorous and complete systems altered to suit the needs of human justice. Heresies follow desire, and strain to accommodate the human need for sex without guilt, for redistribution of wealth or a leveling of power. They would not be named heresy if they were not subversive, they simply would be philosophies, faiths, codes or ways of life. But these subversive teachings and ways of living always flew counter to whatever or whoever had a monopoly on power (usually the Catholic church). Among my favorites were the Gnostics of the early Christian era, who simply rejected the whole dominant cosmology and inverted it. By letting the mythology stand, albeit inverted, EVERYTHING was to be treated with skepticism from the creator on down.

Eight; ROCK AND ROLL

Like a fucked up family, Rock music has a lineology which is difficult to trace. Who (musically) was the grandfather? Whose cousin married a sibling? The titles are also debatable. Is Michael Jackson REALLY the king of pop? The family reunion would and could still take place with many generations attending. There could be black folks who wrote the songs that made their white cousins rich while they remained poor who are still alive. The Rolling Stones could feel uncomfortable feeling as if they should sit at a table with the remaining members of Throbbing Gristle, but are not sure what is really behind the clothes. Trent Reznor could talk with Peter Murphy about how the young folks do not really know what “it” is all about. Justin Beiber could talk to his favorite Aunts and Uncles in Fleetwood Mac about hair, lighting and cover art. No, REALLY…..I love Rock and Roll. Never had an ear for Elvis until this summer when hearing “Little Sister” on the radio, but when I did I completely got it! The experimental frivolities of the Beatles were always appreciated, but I liked the danger of The Stooges, or even the Stones of the early 70s more. Still I hunt out good rock bands, contemporary or retro. Favorites of all time, and right off the head without thinking are The Velvet Underground before John Cale and Nico left, and any Throbbing Gristle.

Nine; 1930s-1960s

Excluding war and repression, which were rampant, my love for these years is expressed in the objects of everyday life. Furniture, appliances, cars, pop music, art; these times were the heyday of modernism, and strove to put any distance between the present and the future as far as possible by becoming the future. In design, one imagined objects not yet seen, the same impulse was enjoyed in music and in art. While arguably conservative to fetishise these times in a manner called ‘retro’, at the time the trend was anything but kitsch. The last gasp of utopianism fell into discord as the dream moved aside to make way for the lies and the shortcomings of western ideology to take center stage. From one perspective the harshness which characterized the late 1960s could be seen as this epoch reiterating its hold on power once the objects of late modernism no longer held sway over the masses.

Ten; WATER

That water is born through the formation of stars makes the dancing of light upon its surface something akin to touching the face of a beloved, or a long, lost friend. The discovery of a mass of water found near a quasar in deep space with more mass than our own earth provides another scenario in which God sees his face reflected upon dark waters, instilling him with a loneliness which can only be remedied by creating another world. The thought that all water on earth is finite, and has been here from its near origins, and has been sustaining all life since makes me wonder why it has not been more revered, more mystified, more cared for. But Water does have its place in rituals of Ablution and Aspersion, and the Koran tells us that all living things are made of Water.

Pubic Hair, and The Mystery of the Hippies

I am going to publish an irregular biography here, and inspired by something Kitty Diggings used to do, try to anchor the memories in music that meant something to me at one point or another.

Sometime between when I was born and the Year of our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Seventy a few things stand now only as a combination of visual and sonic ruin. The first is a trip, or it may be two trips to California. Memory is a slippery beast. For convenience’ sake I will make them one. I was very excited to hear of the Golden Gate Bridge, perhaps so much that I do not recall any of the trees, deserts or mountains I now know exist along the trip south. I was asleep, but my parents must have known how much I was looking forward to seeing this bridge, for they woke me from that warm, vibrating, humming sleep you only can experience in a car. I looked out the window into the fog which being so thick that the cables of the bridge seemed vanished quickly into space. The art deco style remains impressed upon me, but I recall a slight melancholy at seeing the bridge was not made of gold.

Later, at Disneyland I remember the sight of my Grandma Nell framed by the door of the camper, waving to us as we walked from our space in the parking lot towards the entrance of the famed theme park. Grandma Nell was dying of an illness I did not understand. In fact, I did not understand what dying meant outside of direct observation of behavior of those around me. People were sad and quiet when around her, and this lent the atmosphere a code of behavior that was left unspoken. We knew how we were supposed to be. The other image I retain of her, and these two are all that remain; is of her on a narrow bed inside this trailer. This atmosphere I spoke of, also dictated her behavior towards us. If all I retain from this are these two memories, than I can say that she was a gentle person who in those moments was kind to me, who did not understand a thing.

One other ruin (I will call such ancient memories such, because we can only imagine what they actually were) was the assassination of a Kennedy. I was maybe three years old. The only reason I remember certain details of this is that this event, watched by my mother on a small, black and white television caused her to act towards me in a completely new way. It was the first time I was told to be silent. Her words were not charged with anger, but maybe  I sensed a fear she felt that was carried in the command. I sat on a faux-marbled, tile linoleum floor, playing with a few toys. My gaze went from her  face to the television, and I heard two strange words in a row, Sirhan Sirhan, spoken like some magic spell.

Those were the ancient times, and there are the Ruins of them.

A few years on, the images crawl out of the mire and become harder, more tangible and take the form of what we can say are more accurate combinations of image and sound. And so came the birth of music, a companion who follows me to this day, always changing.

The house my mother grew up in was next door to our own. The house my father grew up in stood across the street. I remember my mother once telling me that when she saw my father moving in across the street from her she told herself that one day she would marry him. By the time my father was seventeen he married my mother. At thirty-two years of age, and with nine children he died. A relatively brief time in the scheme of things, but one I remember as full of struggle and love. They both came from working class backgrounds, and shortly after marrying they converted to Catholicism. For this to happen may seem counter to the zeitgeist; a young couple in the 1960s, a tumultuous social and political time for America, but their backgrounds are necessary to understand this.

Both of their own homes were volatile, at times soaked in the unpredictability of drunkenness or violent abuse. My father’s family frightened me a bit, often drunk, kisses bestowed upon my forehead smelling of stale beer. My father’s brothers scared me when I was young, but his father and mother I eventually ceased to be afraid of and came to love.  On my mother’s side, by the time I was born things had calmed down a bit, but my Grandmother was at one time married to a very abusive and mentally disturbed man. I never knew him. For that matter I never knew my mother’s father, seeing him only one time attempting a drunken reconciliation with her outside our front porch.

So my parents tried to shield us from this unpredictability and, at times violence, by keeping us as distant as could be possible living both across the street and next door. I can see their conversion to Catholicism in this context as well, seeking solace and meaning in religion.

My Grandmother (next door) was in the habit of expelling her children in their mid-teens. Why, I have no idea. But I was very happy to have our Aunt Debbie move in with us. I idolized her as a young boy, and her brother as well. I both loved them and wanted to be like them. One time I was playing in the empty school bus my father had bought, and I had a towel wrapped around my head like a wig, and another around my body like a strapless dress. Coming out of the door of the bus, my father saw me so dressed and asked me, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?” Aunt Debbie, I replied and shrieked my way down the driveway, laughing.

Debbie was, being some years older than me, very connected to pop culture. I loved sitting with her going through her record collection, which my parents forbid us to play. I remember pulling open the double sleeve of The Beatles, White Album. I looked at the pictures of the rock stars that came with the record, and thinking that Debbie was just like them. She wore sometimes-dark paisley that I loved, and her long, straight hair also mesmerized me. She played for me one time, Ob La Di Ob La Da from that record. That tale of a boy who becomes a girl, combined with the childish melody complete hooked me. Another record of hers I loved was the first record by the Stooges. In particular, I Wanna Be Your Dog. Both of these songs appeal to a sense of magic and transformation in a child. The sexual message implicit in both is sublimated, but remained unclear. What could be more fun than changing into a girl, or becoming a dog? I could see myself running rampant with my four legs, jumping at incredible speeds after Frisbees, later to retire on the lap of an adult who would pet me to sleep.

Guadalupe was a very young nun my father and mother had befriended. She was so unlike the nuns I would see at church. A small, very pretty Mexican woman, the way she spoke to us was filled with the coolness and enthusiasm typical of folks in their 20s. I remember the way she would speak of religion was also different than at church. Her Jesus was political; her faith was based in justice. It was only reading many years  later about radical, Catholic religious movements in South Los Angeles that were largely Mexican-American, that I realized this was most likely her background. At any rate, I associate her with a red corvair we had at the time. Maybe because she would go on errands with us in that car, and I was really impressed with her and that car.

The day the first Apollo mission landed on the moon, I was in that car with my father. He was listening to the radio, and we were parked, waiting for someone to finish an appointment. My father was looking absently out his window towards the street as the broadcast described the moon landing. I was five or six years old, and remember looking out the window at the moon in the daylight sky, and not seeing the people there became bored and began looking out my window at the sidewalk and houses.

After a short time a young man without a shirt on staggered towards my window. I know now he either was fried on acid or was drunk, and did not see me. But he came to our car to piss. Because he had long hair, and was shirtless, he was already in my slowly growing Pantheon of counter culture heroes. At my window he took out his cock and began to piss. I had never seen pubic hair before, and was dumbfounded. “Daddy, what is THAT?” I asked my father. Taking a look, he rolled up my window, started the corvair, and drove off in a hurry. “That is a hippy” he told me with no further explanation, and the meaning of ‘Long Haired Hippies’ made sense.

YEARS LATER A STORY WAS PUBLISHED AND MYSTERIOUSLY VANISHED

Neil Young had a hard morning. None of his vintage cars looked appealing. He stood in the garage and stared at them in the pasty gray northern California morning and felt irrevocably normal. It was if the cars had drunk an overdose of rock star glamor overnight and sat dusty and hungover. At last climbing into the 72 El Dorado, Neil started it and began the long, twisting drive to the Cala Foods at the base of the hill his mansion sat on.

Neil liked to go to Cala because he felt at once part of the world there, almost normal, but armed with the unspoken knowledge that anyone who went to this supermarket was among the richest people on the West Coast. Everyone from the check out employees to the rich patrons seemed to enjoy this quiet and calm prestige. But something nagged at Neil. His life was not like anything he would have expected 30 years earlier. Back then he actually knew real heroin addicts, and as part of Rock and Roll’s Vanguard, he felt they were against something important. What, they did not really know.

Rebelling against this sickening feeling that was overcoming him, he went to the meat department and bought every steak on display. He thought himself an Indian chief bringing a fresh kill to his tribe. Somewhat relieved, Neil drove home. He parked the Cadillac but left the engine running. He then took the keys to all his cars and started them. Opening the hoods of the cars, the muscular sound of all the engines running began to put him in a trance. Slowly, almost ritually he began putting steaks in all the motors. Some motors had already heated to such a degree that he could hear them sizzling and cooking on the engine blocks, their rich and flavorful smoke filling his nose and lungs.

Neil then did a strange thing, He backed the cars out of the garage and lined them up in a circle, their hoods open and juicy meat cooking. He sat in the center of these rare, coveted vehicles and drifted softly into trance. The Vintage cars all shape shifted into wild cats. Lions, Pumas, Jaguars and Cougars. He stared into their headlights, seeking a secret knowledge.

Across the world, a new band was rehearsing in their garage. They were called Cabaret Voltaire. Armed with a home made drum machine and a strange vocal transformer they felt as if they were going to change the world with their music. They were well aware of history. It showed in their name, referencing the long gone Dada movement. Marxism was in vogue with the young, unemployed kids of England. They felt the hippies had betrayed not only them, but also the world because they did not see themselves in a dialectical light. They hated the hippies for this, and fought society in style as they signed record contracts with the majors.

Earlier in the afternoon they had drank various cold medicines, using them like water to wash down the barbiturates. As they slumped into their narcotic daze a magic thing happened. Their machines started overheating, and the excessive heat began melting a plastic ashtray which contained several roaches of weed. The garage became more and more filled with smoke. They woke up when this slow smoldering fire sparked an electrical source and sparks mixed with the smoke of burning wires and marijuana. It looked and smelled like a great concert. The smoke cleared and Neil Young was suddenly in their midst, looking like an angry but tender Shaman. He had several greasy, half cooked steaks with him. They all smiled at each other, feeling an occult kinship. They sat down together and feasted on the flesh of wild cats. They were one.