August 2006 Archives

Old Freud says that dreams are the Royal Road to the unconscious.  But lots of brain guys with more scientific orientations don’t think dreams mean anything; the brain while sleeping just farts now and then relieving pressure and these are dreams.  But trying to make anything of them or find any meaning in them is about as stupid as trying to tell the future by looking at the guts of a sacrificial chicken. 

But when I was going to see my therapist I decided I should look into my dreams just in case they had something to offer.  First, though, as I have said, I couldn’t remember my dreams.  To remember my dreams I had to tell my brain before I went to sleep: remember the dreams.  But I guess my brain was anxious or worried about forgetting the dream because instead of just remembering as I had ordered it to do the damn brain insisted on waking up at any manner of ungodly hours, mostly somewhere between four and five in the morning when my dream cycle hit. 

Sometimes I would wake up so suddenly that the waking up just wiped out the dream.  Sometimes I could remember a bit of a dream but it was so pathetic it wasn’t worth remembering.  Sometimes I would wake up with no dream but with an erection.  I had not told my brain to wake me up for that but apparently on this issue had a mind of  its own.

Sometimes I would get up and write the dream down in a book I kept for that very purpose.  Here’s a dream from May, 1985; it’s a little dated maybe but a bit funny I think:

“I see a woman milking an elephant.  To do this she needs a special rocking chair, very huge.  Once she gets in the rocking chair and gets it going with a special stick she pushes against the ground the momentum of the rocking chair helps her squeeze milk from the elephant’s teats.  Actually, I can’t quite see the woman.  I see her feet just under the belly of the elephant.  The chair is so huge her feet are way off the ground.  A random cycle of violence has broken out.  A kind of hysteria and children are killing adults.  They walk around like robots and have tiny pistols. I am late on the scene and have no idea why these children with their tiny pistols are so riled up.  I pull aside a curtain and enter a tent like room that has two huge elephant milking rocking chairs in it.  But nobody is seated in the chairs.  They rock violently, so hard, they leap into the air.  A child appears and shoots another child with his tiny pistol.”

I have no idea what this fucker means.  I am sure I could make something up.  For example, obviously the tiny guns are tiny penises.  Maybe the elephant’s teats are penises too.  And women are milking those teats.  Obviously there is a good deal of gender confusion in this dream.  But it hurts my brain to think about it.

Maybe dreams don’t mean anything or mean just what you want them to mean.  But I think they do contribute something.  Without this dream I do not believe that ever in my life I would have written the words “milking an elephant” or come up with the idea of huge elephant milking rocking chairs.

Farter Knows Best

This is the story of my climb to success. I hope that it will serve as example and in­spiration to all the downtrodden of America. From low and unpromising origins I rose to success as is only possible in America.

When I was two years old my mother passed the nursery in which I was taking a nap and saw a white vapor, which she as­sumed to be smoke rising from my bed. —"Help! Help! — She cried — Baby is on fire! She then doused me with several buckets of water. So at a very early age I almost died of drowning which my father often said would, have been better both for the world and my­self.

Upon a closer examination, my mother found that I, indeed, had not been on fire. The vapors remained a mystery till later in the afternoon, when she discovered their true origin. Thus my mother had strange hews to deliver to my father when he came home. Father — she said, grasping his hand and gently squeezing it — I have news — what is it beloved wife — responded my father who was a preacher. Father (we must excuse my mother's language for she was a very plain person) Baby farts colored farts — and so my deformity was made, known to the world.

Ha! Ha! — responded father.

My father did not believe my mother until the next day at church where I again revealed my fatal fault. My father was that day giving a sermon on the innocence and worth of chil­dren, when right at the close of his sermon a yellowish vapor began to surround the first pew where I sat with my mother. The yellow­ish color was due to the Gerber's carrots I had eaten.

Thus was my deformity made known to the congregation which giggled immoderately, ex­cept for the people in the first row who thought their clothes might be stained by the gas. From this day forward my father showed little affection towards me. — I wish — he would say — that the cursed infant had T.B. or cancer or something — there is just no dig­nity to this. — My father felt that God had turned against him, and then finally he de­cided that God didn't exist. And once my mother found my father teaching me how to put cellophane bags over my head.

Father soon after left mother, and then mother left me when one day one of my farts so obscured her vision that she fell down the stairs.

My aunt with whom If- then lived was wealthy and consulted many doctors concern­ing my case. All to no avail. One man de­signed a filter, six feet long, which, was strapped to my rear part and was mounted on a tripod with rollers. But the filtering device was quite hard to clean and more than once the thing ran over me going down hills.

By high school I ha developed 'great sphincter control. Then in order to gain some social status and dignity I went out for ball at which I found I had uncommon ability. I made quarterback. I then confided in my coach, for whom I had great respect, concern­ing my deformity. He told me not to drink or smoke, and to believe in God, arid that sports would make me a great American, and then he patted me on the back.  I had never before met with such understanding. I felt just like one of the guys.

The first game — all was going well, and late in the second quarter we were in scoring position. I. was calling the numbers when due to excitement I lost control and a great fart escaped me. A green ""cloud (spinach) envel­oped the line. The halfback, a tall boy, saw over the cloud and successfully evaded all tacklers. The referee called illegal procedure.

The coach quickly benched me. He called me a dirty smart aleck, said I would never be a good American, doubted if I believed in God, and hinted that I was homosexual.

I felt there was no justice in the world.

After high school, feeling I had no dignity anyway, I decided to join the army. In filling out the forms I did not mention my deformity and I might have passed the physical, except that I lost control, just as one of the doctors was examining my anal orifice. — Help! Help! — he screamed I'm blinded! Gasp! Yick! —Realizing he wasn't blinded, he was amazed. —Hey—he said, thumping me on the back —Do that again — A red one escaped me. —Hey fellows! Hey fellows! Come look! 00000 . . . Ahhhhh ... Look at all the pretty colors!

For a while I felt I might be accepted re­gardless of my defect. They locked me up and examined me. They hoped to use me as a secret weapon. They sent me out on maneu­vers, but found that I had much the same faults as tear gas, i.e., I was at the mercy of the wind. Finally they rejected me.

I was terribly dejected, but the army inci­dent had given me an idea. I decided to join a circus. Having persuaded the manager that I was not a fraud, he gave me top billing as "The Phosphorescent Farter." I dressed in a skin tight white suit with a hole cut in the crucial area. To clear up confusion I here ad­mit that my farts are not phosphorescent, nor do they corrode metal or blind like tear gas. Regardless my climb to the top was assured. After my first appearance on "I've Got A Secret," I appeared on several variety shows, and I'm now scheduled for the "Ed Sullivan Show."

My climb to the top has been long and arduous, but I have reached it.  All you downtrodden take me as an example, and remember there is no justice and all America loves a freak.

For a long time, as an adult, I didn’t remember my dreams.  And when I did they were really grim affairs.  Anxiety dreams that just went on and on repeating themselves.  I was always going somewhere and I was late or I was on the wrong street, or in the wrong town or city.  And on top of that I was late.  These would go on for a long time.  Repeating themselves.  The one I liked least was I would be down in something like the bowels of a ship going up this stairs and down that one and on and on like a mouse in a vertical maze.  That dream just tired me out.

 I also had the teeth falling out dream.  I called it the Chickletts dream.  Because my teeth looked like Chickletts in my hand once they had fallen out. 

But when I was a really little kid, before five maybe, I had a couple of dreams which if I remembered them during the day made me feel warm inside.  One was a flying dream.  I would be flying along in the forest and without thinking about it I would swing this way or that and miss this or that tree and if I came to a cliff I did not fall, but flew straight down the face of the cliff and then flew again a foot or two above the ground.

I enjoyed this dream a lot; it’s a dream of having great and magical powers.  Most little ones have that inside them, but in my case, my parent’s beat that out of me pretty quickly.  Well, they didn’t beat it out so much as beat it down and under.  If you are lucky, you get gradually weaned from the idea that you have magical powers so that you are able slowly to adjust and adapt to the loss of those magical powers.  But if they don’t get out this way and get pushed down, you go through life as an adult feeling like shit because way deep down there in the unconscious you still feel as if you have magical powers, but as an adult you are not living up to those powers.  You can’t fly and you never will.

Winston Churchill was walking across a bridge one day and there was the top of a tree not far from the bridge.  So he jumped, like he could fly, or something and almost killed himself from the fall.  He turned out to be a man with near magical powers.

The other one was about money.  I would be walking along and I would notice a penny, and then another penny, and then a dime, and a quarter and so on, a trail of money in the forest, and sometimes I would dig in the earth and find a whole cache of coins.  But most frequently the trail of money would lead to a kind of hole at the base of a tree and I would dig around in the leaves in the base of that tree and unearth whole handfuls of coins.

I guess this dream is about being lucky and striking it rich.  But there’s something about that hole in the base of the tree that reminds me of an anus.  So maybe the dream is about turds. Freud says the kid’s first gift is a turd.  Some kids in fact upon first going to the bathroom pick up their turds and take them back to mom or dad and say, Look Mommie what I have done.  Our turds are our first really big production; the first thing we make all on our own.  So if a little kid ever walks up to you with a turd and says, look what I have done, don’t yell, you fucking little perverted monster get that shit out of here.  Instead, admire the shit for a little bit, and then instruct the little one on the toilet’s flushing function.

 

That tells you a lot about the general theory of college teaching.  You talk about the subject, and it doesn’t really make any difference whether any students are there or not in the room with you.  In fact in many college lectures most of the students aren’t there because the teacher is not teaching students but the subject. So it all sort of works out in the end.

I applied for work at community colleges and I got interviews at 3, some close by, but one up in Monterey took some driving.  And I didn’t get a job.  But the fall before, just in case the junior college thing didn’t come through, I had applied to graduate schools for a PhD.  Also, having flunked out of UCLA, I wanted to prove to myself that I could get a PhD if I wanted. I was accepted at three graduate schools, one a pretty good school back in New York, one a sort of experimental college in the UC system, and the one I ended up at and where I have been as student and then teacher since 1976—30 fucking years. Who knew?

The chair of the department at the experimental university wrote a letter—hand written no less—saying I was there absolute number one candidate, and would I please come.  I mean the guy actually wanted me to come and was trying to convince me.  BUT (huge BUT) they would have not money to give me or TA job for the first year.  Gee Whiz!  Thanks a lot.

 I would have liked to have gone there.  But I had about 500 dollars, a few pairs of jeans, some work shirts and a Volkswagen…After that first year, they would find some money.  BUT… I just didn’t see how I could do it—go to a new place, find a job that paid something, take graduate classes, and keep my sanity.  I needed more structure than that so I went to the place I still am because they offered me a full TA ship because, as I later learned, they decided to bring in grad students that particular year that had previously taught so they wouldn’t have to spend money training them.  I fit the bill to a T.

Money has played a significant role in my career choices.  I supposed I could have borrowed some money some where for that first year at the place that had no money.  But what did I know from borrowing.  I had a great dread of debt and managed to get all my higher education, 10+ years of it, owing $1000.  What do they call that now, a Pyrrhic victory?

What’s this shit I’ve been hearing about Pluto?  I know this Pluto stuff is a current event and I’ve reserved this space for memory mulling, but this current event is fucking with my memories.  If my memory serves Pluto is a planet and not some fucking “planetary body.”  I learned this for a fact back in elementary school some time.  Seemed like I had to memorize the planets a number of times.  First, Mercury, then Venus, then Earth, then Mars, and after that things gets sketchy for me, but always I knew out there on the edge-- planet number nine--was Pluto. 

True, I got Pluto the planet confused with Pluto the Disney Dog on occasion, and if you had asked me like in fourth grade I might have said the last planet was Bluto, after the guy who was always stealing Wimpy’s burgers and trying to duke it out with Popeye.

But for as long as I can remember and as is currently recorded in jillions of textbooks, encyclopedias, books and magazines, Pluto is planet number nine.  But some freaking scientists got together at some international conference and decided among themselves without consulting the public at all that Pluto is NOT the ninth planet because it is not a planet at all but a mere “planetary body.” 

Seems as if one part of the this international body of planet makers wrote a report that said, if Pluto counts as a planet, then so must a number of other planatary bodies, like moons and that big piece of shit out there in the asteroid belt.  So it these radicals had there way there might be 10, 12, 18 planets, who the fuck knows?  Pluto would still have been planet number 9 I guess but it would not be the last planet.  The poor elementary school kids of the future would have had a hard time of it trying to memorize all these planets some of which don’t even have proper names.

But the other guys in this international planet making body decided not to go with the report.  So Pluto all of a sudden stops being a planet, not because it doesn’t fit the definition of a planet, whatever that might be, but because of a power struggle between the radicals and conservatives of the international planet making group.  I don’t have to be there to know that sure as shit somebody brought up the goddamn slippery slope argument. 

Whenever anybody wants to change things, the guys who oppose it bring up the slippery slope argument.  Abortion for a woman who was raped?  Hell, no, if we allow an abortion for even one set of circumstance we have started down the slippery slope, or what about euthanasia; look at those fucking Belgians; they are way down the slippery slope and letting people decide to kill themselves right and left just because they are old and sick and don’t want to live anymore.  I mean what kind of argument is that.

So to avoid the slippery slope, the fucking scientists had to cut Pluto out, had to make like a goddamn canyon, without a slippery slope, and throw Pluto into the pit of being a non-planet.  This is like fucking stupid because what goddamn difference does it make.  Some of the things scientists say make a difference; like don’t drink the water because it has cholera in it.  But what differences does it make to anybody if Pluto is a planet or not.  As far as I know there’s no Agency for the Protection of Planets that might lose some funding of Pluto is not a planet. 

So now what’s the last planet?  Is it Neptune or Uranus?  I forget which but neither one sounds right to me.  Pluto will always be the last planet for me, planet number nine.

Poor Aunt Sue.  Anyway one day I get a call from her out of the blue, and somehow she has got wind that I have practically finished my work on the PhD and in acknowledgement of the feat wants to buy me a car.  Spending time around Aunt Sue was so hard, I was remotely tempted to say no, but I couldn’t have said no in any case to her gesture, and besides my little Volkswagen was on its very last legs.

So she comes up and we spend an afternoon in a used car lot.  First this one, then that one, and really I didn’t fucking care as long as it ran, but I had to feign enthusiasm and interest, and finally she more or less settled on a powder blue Mustang 2.  It was a pretty shitty car but it was the first I had with automatic transmission and that was pretty cool.  She paid 6000 in cash for it in 1979 dollars, so I guess it wasn’t cheap.

 But by that time she had launched her own career, got a realtor’s license, and what’s that other thing—a broker’s license—so she could go completely out on her own, though she still worked with some firm, and she was making money hand over fist and had acquired multiple properties, rentals and such.  Partly she was there at the right time; the California market was making one of its whacko runs.  And I am sure she was good at it.  Pushy, but not too pushy, real smart and I do believe completely responsible.

 But it was a crazy day.  Trying to buy a car in a couple hours in an afternoon was not the way I would do it.  But she wanted to make a grand gesture I guess.  Well, maybe, it worked because I remember it, and the dinner I had to sit through with her afterwards.  She could be pretty blunt and would ask me such questions as, “Are you happy?”  “Is this what you really want?”  That sort of thing.  To the first, I had to say, no, of course since I was absolutely miserable, and as for is this what you really want, well, I had not idea what I really wanted because nobody had ever asked me.

I could have lied I guess and said I was perfectly happy but it wasn’t in me.  So she started to tell me how I could be happy and successful just like her (when all you had to do was look at her and see misery leaking out everywhere).  She had gone to some self-help group and the leader told her what to do.  It was all in the will. First you wrote down what you wanted (which she did on the spot) and then you will.  So she had done that and four years later she looked at what she had written down that day that she wanted—a Lincoln and a mink coat—and she had both. And much more.

That’s all I had to do.  Will it and it would be so.  I could hardly stand to listen to this shit and then it got really weird because sadly it had recently been learned that her husband had cancer, and well, she wondered—she had wondered deep inside herself—if maybe she hadn’t willed that.  God, I felt unhappy.  I sort of felt like crying, for god’s sake, the way people get along.  I guess she was saying that deep inside she had wished her husband dead and more than that her wish had come true. I tried to say, no, no, no, of course not; a person simply couldn’t will such a thing.  But I don’t think I had any positive effect.

I don’t know maybe five year later she developed breast cancer and died in about six months.  It was just too far along.  As a final act of will, she wrote my mother out of her will even though she had promised the old lady she would get something up till a month before she died.

So first there was Traffic and then there was Blind Faith, both with Stevie Winwood.  Every time I hear their “I Can’t Find My Way Home” I remember the time I got lost in L.A.  It had to have been in my first quarter of graduate school; that would have been the fall of ’68 and I went to visit some friends over past Pasadena, and we smoked a lot of grass, and I couldn’t find my way back to Venice, CA.

 Somehow I missed the first freeway onramp.  So I drove along by some freeway hoping I would find an onramp, but that freeway was hard to follow and I kept losing it and going off to places I shouldn’t have been.  I went into this all night convenience store for directions.  The black guy behind the counter wouldn’t even look at me.  I asked could he point me to the freeway; he said he didn’t know where one was.  So I left.

I was in a pretty shitty area of town.  There are a lot of shitty areas in LA, but if you are a white person and know what onramps to get on and what exits to get off you never have to see any of the shitty stuff.  The freeways organize LA pretty well so you don’t have to see the shitty stuff unless you get lost as I did.

I was pretty fucking lost.  I drove around for hours in my trusty 1959 Plymouth Station Wagon.  Once in a parking lot the Mexican American attendant came up to me and said he would give me a 100 dollars for it.  I said no thinks.  He said 150.  I guess he didn’t get it; maybe he thought it was my “second” car or something.  My parents had driven me off to college in that car.  For some reason my brothers had to come along too.  I sat there scared shitless and clutching Kaufman’s From Shakespeare to Sartre like it was a life buoy.

Getting lost in LA is pretty existential, I guess.  Maybe I remember that night because, in my stoned state, I really got scared and thought I might drive around forever and maybe because getting lost that night was sort of a symbolic representation of the inward lostness that was beginning to eat me up.

When the sun started coming up, I was able to orient myself.  I knew Venice, CA was near the Pacific, so what I had to do was drive west.  The sun helped me figure that out.  Eventually I hit Sunset and I took it on out to the ocean.  I had been lost in LA for about five hours.

So that song has a special meaning for me.

Aunt Sue tries to be a good Aunt.  By this time she has long left the migrant worker’s shack by the freeway and moved up to L.A. and married this Italian guy who worked cutting meat in a meat packing plant.  And they are both by this time somewhat along in years and he is Catholic and already has a bunch of kids and his wife had died, so he married Aunt Sue.  Or she married him because she always wanted a family, but mostly they were older in high school or already out of the house and they mostly resented her.  But she was a good cook and an economical housewife and pretty much filled the bill wife-wise.

When I am in college a couple of months, she actually shows up at the dorm and says she has come to get my dirty clothes to wash them for me.  I am amazed but she is right; it’s been a couple of months and I have failed to wash my clothes.  So I go with her with the clothes and visit while she washes the clothes.  I don’t know what we talked about since she couldn’t stand my mother and so didn’t say a word about her, though she did praise my father to high heavens, lord knows what for, unless it was having the fortitude to live with my mother.

One time I don’t know when it was exactly, I go to her place for a visit and my good buddy, Richard, is with me.  He is a real smart guy who started out pre-med and then joined the horde of ex-pre-meds and became an English major.  He grew up in Lubbock TX where Buddy Holly came from and so we had the southern thing going, plus he was pretty much working class, his father having returned from the war not the same and ended up doing all sorts of jobs.  I think maybe he drank too and he died while we were in college.

So Aunt Sue says she is going to fix some dinner for us, and she treats us like royalty and takes us out to the back patio, and offers us beer, and after a while, she brings out the plates that are like completely covered with a steak.  The plate is like hardly visible beneath that steak, and it’s called a t-bone steak because it has a bone shaped like a T in it and  I do believe it was the biggest piece of meat on one plate I had seen to that date.  I remember thinking, damn! But this is a big piece of meat. 

I guess that’s why I remember it.  Nobody had ever given me a piece of meat that size before.  I ate all of it.  And with it came a dinky salad and a bowl of jello.  Aunt Sue had this thing about jello; she served it at every dinner.  Somewhere on the table there would be some manner of jello.  And every time, she served it she would say like clock work that jello would help your blood to clot faster should you cut yourself. I don’t know where she got that from, but it was a bit spooky because you got the feeling she was sitting around waiting for one of her family to cut themselves real bad and bleed out before their blood could clot.

One summer in high school I take American History.  That’s like three or four hours of American History every morning for six weeks and it is one of the worst classes I took in high school.  All we did was read the text book and memorize stuff for the quizzes.  Now this is the history of America, the country we live in, and from this class, you get the feeling that we must live in the dullest damn country ever created. 

My basketball coach teaches the class if you can call what he did teaching, since he mostly taught by saying read pages x through y and prepare for the quiz, and then we had a quiz and went home.  Did I say, the coach is maybe 6 feet 5, boney as hell, with a narrow boney face, and black hair worn in a flat top!  Also he wears a coat and tie to class and black rimmed glasses perched on his boney nose for reading purposes.  He wasn’t a bad guy I guess, and he took a mild interest in me since I was on the basketball team, and having had a chance to observe me outside of class had concluded that I was a bit troubled.

One day we are out running laps on the track and I have done my laps and am just standing there, and the guy comes up to me and has the nerve to ask if I have a girlfriend.  How he gets off presuming this degree of intimacy I don’t know, but to his credit he hit a significant part of my problem.  And I remember he says,” You don’t have to love’em to kiss’em.”  I was like totally embarrassed, not so much for me, as I was for him because he really wasn’t in the ballpark at all.  I wasn’t worried about love or kissing, I was like totally paralyzed with the fear that my dick might get cut off.  Oh, well, he tried anyway which is more than I can say for 98% of the teachers I have had.

I can remember the only excitement we had in that class.  In high school, unlike elementary school, we have lots of male teachers and we have movie projectors.  Mostly they don’t work, but one day he says he is going to show a movie about American Settlers and the Indians.  And while we are watching the movie we are going to notice something.  We are going to notice that the Indians are not wearing the right shoes, and when we notice that we are not to laugh and, I repeat, we are not to laugh.

Psychologically speaking, this guy was stupid.  Once he said that nobody got a damn thing out of the movie (not that there was anything in it but a pack of lies 1950’s style); all we did was sit there waiting for the Indians and looking at their shoes.  Anyhow whoever made this movie was not into realism because at one point the Indians are charging up an embankment and they are not even wearing shoes, they are wearing tennis shoes.

Sometimes, I just couldn’t help myself.  I didn’t think about it really.  I would sit in the back row of the class and let out a zinger now and then.  I didn’t try to whisper it.  I said it so that the teacher could hear it and my zingers were good enough that usually they laughed too.  So I couldn’t help myself and I say, “Look like Converse to me.”  Back then before Nike, and Reebok and Adidas and all that shit we had like two types of sneakers, Converse and Keds. 

The whole class like roars and the Coach sort of lowers his head and puts his hand to his mouth because he is laughing too.

I mean what the fuck was the big deal.

So in high school, I took three freaking years of Latin, a damn dead language.  To the best of my knowledge, unless somebody has a time machine, nobody in this day and age has heard how those Romans actually said the stuff.  So while in French and Spanish you are always talking the stuff, since people know how it is supposed to be said, in Latin all you do is translate the stuff.  And to translate the stuff you have to memorize all manner of conjugations and declinations and stuff or you can just go to the library and check out a translation if you want.

Roland took Latin in our sophomore year.  I don’t know why except maybe I told him I was taking it and so he did too.  We had a pretty interesting teacher that year.  His name was Mr. Dell and he was a full blooded Navaho or maybe Apache Indian.  Anyway he is a full blood Native American, and a good looking guy too in a pretty boy way.  He was sort of short and he always wore a suit, the complete thing.  What a full blooded Native American was doing wearing a suit and teaching Latin to a bunch of working class whites kids I don’t know.  But hey anybody can do anything.  This is America.

I think maybe he was still in graduate school or something like that because he only taught a couple of Latin classes and then he was gone for the rest of the day.  And he wasn’t around the next year which was too bad since he told us about the interesting stuff—the sex and the violence and the gladiatorial games—maybe because he didn’t have a teaching credential and didn’t know any better.

But one day he is standing up front in his blue suit and suddenly he starts waving his hands around his head and fucking screaming!  And then he runs to the side of the room, still screaming, and waving his arms around his head and then he goes right out the door.  Still waving his hands around.  We just sit there looking forward at the spot where he was and wondering what was going on, and Roland says, I think there was a bee.  So we’re muttering about what a wimp he must be, when he comes back in, looking all sweaty and tells us he has this allergy to bee stings and if one bites him he could die.

So maybe that’s why he is a full blooded Native American teaching Latin to a bunch of working class white kids.  He wants to stay away from bees as much as possible.

We like him though because he is a nice guy and a pretty lousy disciplinarian but one day he gets fed up because we are talking too much among our selves and it’s hard to miss because there are only about ten of us and he makes us sit right up front, so what are we going to do but talk right in front of him.  And then he gets angry and says, that the next person who speaks out of turn is going to get what they called a “case card,” which is a kind of form the teacher fills out saying what you did wrong that is sent to the principal and then to your parents.  So I turn to Roland who is sitting right next to me and I say, he’s kidding right? (because I can’t believe he would do that).  And Roland says, yea, he’s got to be kidding. 

And we say this right in front of Mr. Dell who has just said he will give a case card to anybody who talks out of turn and what do you know but the fucker gives Roland and me case cards for talking out of turn.  We couldn’t fucking believe it.

I hope Mr. Dell got his PhD in classics and went on to a nice professor job somewhere far away from bees.

Seems as if today parents wouldn’t have to give their kids a sex talk if they have a TV; it’s all pretty much there.  They show animals openly fornicating on the Discovery Channel.  It’s appalling the way those animals fornicate out in the open like that and that’s just basic cable.  I am not a parent, so I wouldn’t know.  But I guess it there’s a sex talk today it’s more like: don’t do it! Or if you do it, do this or that! Not so much a sex talk as a venereal disease talk.

Anyway there’s not much to explain.  The mechanics of it are pretty straight forward.  Sex obviously is pretty much idiot proof.

Back in my day, there was no cable TV or Discovery Channel, but I never got a sex talk.  I had to do research.  My father never said word one on the subject, and all my mother ever said at all about the topic was: your father is like a rabbit; and sex is good once a week like chicken.

But in sixth grade we had a sex talk hour or so that must have been mandated by the state.  It was really odd because they sent all the girls off into one room and all the boys off into another as if one sex wasn’t supposed to know what the other was up to.  But it wasn’t a sex talk as much as it was a naming the parts talk plus some discussion of what would soon—for your average teenager—be happening in those parts.  It was sort of a heads up, by way of a warning.

So all of us sixth grade guys were in one room with Mr. Tode.  He was a really popular teacher, especially with the girls, since he was the only male elementary school teacher we had.  But I didn’t like him much because one day he was playing some music in class on a record player that for some reason he stuck in the back row next to me.  And when a song ended he asked me to move the little needle to another one but I flubbed it and scratched the record and he fucking yelled at me.  He nearly fucking traumatized me because that was the first time I had picked up a record needle since we didn’t have a record player.  But he said it like I was supposed to know how and it looked pretty easy. I mean, I was game.  But I flubbed it.

Anyway, we didn’t have any visual aides back then.  No charts or graphs and no movies because we didn’t have any movie projectors at our school.  So Mr. Tode, who was not a good drawer, had to draw pictures of the parts—penis and testicles and such—up there on the black board.  And then he tried to draw a penis in an erect state to indicate what would be happening.  And I was sitting in the back row and I leaned over to John Cobb sitting next to me and said, “Looks like a zucchini to me.”  Because that’s what it looked like.  And John laugh and the guy next to John laughed and I laughed, and there went Mr. Tode yelling again, “If you are not mature enough…etc.”

So that was the sex talk except at the end he asked were there any questions, and for quite a bit there weren’t any till Lance, who was pretty robust and earnest guy though none to swift, said he had one of those nackturanal emitters Mr. Tode had mentioned and while Mr. Tode said the stuff was supposed to be sort of white, he had noted that his stuff had been sort of yellowish.  And Mr. Tode said there was nothing to be concerned about since it could come out a bit on the white or the yellow side, and I just had to stifle myself from raising my hand and asking what if it come out blue.

In my work trying to teach something to college students I have concluded there are two kinds of women: those who think all other women are backstabbing catty bitches and those who think men are ignorant, insensitive, assholes.  The latter complain that “they” never call back, and when they think they have something going, they go to a party and he is making out with that their roommate, the bitch!  While I am not much of a tisk-tisker, I wanted to go tisk-tisk at the tales of male disloyalty because I have taken up “loyalty” as a value that needs to be reasserted these days. I even tried to read Josiah Royce’s book on loyalty but he used the word loyalty too much.

I tisked-tisked with purity of heart, I though, until I remembered one day walking up the long hill—in college it was—to the dorm and up ahead of me is a young woman who has one of those double names like Ruth Anne and you are supposed to say both of them.  Her long blond locks are flickering in the sun and she is striding along wearing a skirt—some college women did that back then—cut to just above the knees, and I find myself watching her swaying behind and her bony legs, and yell out, “Wait up!”

I know her from the student cafeteria where she had worked for a while, and I haven’t seen her for a bit.  And we fall into talking and I said something that made her laugh.  And she had this nice laugh, sort of burbling like, and then she said something that made Me laugh which is sort of unusually.  So we walk along for a bit making each other laugh, and just as she is turning off to go wherever she is going, I say, “Hey, let’s go out some time.”

And she sort of smiles and looking at me from over her granny glasses, says, “Aren’t you with somebody.”  I sort of shrug.  “With? With? As if the word was ambiguous or something.  What do I know from “with.”  But then it came to me that I guessed I was with BJ since we were at that time regularly engaging in sexual congress.  I just hadn’t thought about it that way, in the “with” way, and it came to me at the moment that she knew BJ.

Well, I said, not in the least disturbed, “You’re right.  But if you don’t mind my saying so I found the idea you know of going out pleasant.”

“Thank you,” she said and went on her way.

I don’t know what the hell was with me that day or at that moment.  It was as if all my nasty and unbalanced biochemicals freaked out for a minute and balanced themselves.  Maybe it was something I ate or the way the stars were aligned.  Or maybe I was on bennies that tended to make me feel confident.  Whatever the fuck it was, I think I acted sort of like a normal guy at that moment, not one nearly dead from depression or gasping with anxiety.  But if I was for a moment there relieved of my misery and somewhat normal, I can only say, by way of apology for the way college guys act, that we are sometimes forgetful.

My brothers and I over the years took to calling the old lady—after we had recounted some new horror story—“a real piece of work.”  This phrase means something precise to me in my mind at least, but I am not quite sure how to translate into other words.  I think it means something like what people mean when they say of somebody, “he is just impossible.”

 I am not sure what that means either; for certainly to be impossible a person must first be possible.  But whatever it means, my brothers and I didn’t take to calling the old lady that until later in life and we had managed to emerge a little from her emotional strangle hold.  We had achieved a sort of distance which allowed us to express a very, very grudging respect for her abilities to make us (and herself) incredibly miserable.  I think that’s implied in “a real piece of work,” a grudging, very grudging respect.

If this applied to the old lady, it also applied to her sister, Aunt Susan, who was also a real piece of work although apparently crafted by a different craftsperson.  While the old lady was Miss Goody-Goody Two Shoes (whatever that means), oh so prim and proper with her lips that touch liquor will never touch mine holier than thou attitude, Aunt Susan was sort of large and blousy, if that’s a word, gregarious, not above hinting at cleavage and certainly not afraid of a drink. 

 So we have Saint Old Lady and Sinner Sue; at least that’s how our mother tried to make Susan feel.  Susan for her part had grown up belittling Saint Old Lady and continued to do so making remarks especially about her attire and her weight.  Although for many years, the Saint had all the leverage since she had a god fear husband and god fearing children, and my Aunt didn’t have anybody after her son, Skipper, died at the age of 13 or so of bone cancer.

And before that her career with men had been, for women of her generation, a bit of a walk on the wild side.  During the war, she met a man, had intercourse with him unmarried, became pregnant, and waited while he went off to the war after they had married in TJ.  She waited and waited; the child came along and still no husband.  Plus, the letters had stopped coming.  She got herself together somehow and went back to Arkansas where his family was only to find out he was already married.  There stood his wife right there on the porch, with one child standing beside her, and another in the oven.  And basically they just laughed at her and told her to get lost.

So Aunt Susan was a single mother.  I expect there have always been lots and lots of single mothers either de jure or de facto.  But she was one before single mothers became a topic of conversation.  And somewhere along there she had an affair with a married man, no less.  I met him once.  I got a call from Aunt Susan to come have a drink with her at a bar over in Lemon Grove.  I guess she had come back to visit her old stomping grounds and she cottoned to me because I had spent time with her dead son.

And this guy comes in—the adulterer, I mean—and I don’t know what I expected—but he is pretty tall, sort of stooped over, nothing to speak of really, and wearing one of those god awful polyester suits fashionable at the time.  The affair—that was long over—but they had remained friends.  So I finished my drink and after a bit I left.

When I had my mental collapse, I do believe my brothers were somewhat concerned that I might go completely insane or off myself.  Though I don’t believe we talked about it any.  But one brother I know did try to look after me a bit, and I think it might have been my first quarter working for the PhD, and I was down to Casa De Oro to pick up some books and he made a strong point of my showing up for a drink at the local Club 94.  So I went when he said, thinking I might not see him otherwise.

I came into the bar to find him and behind the bar itself a youngish woman with large breasts accentuate by a somewhat tight t-shirt.  She had red hair, like me, so immediately a narcissistic thing was at work, and then I realized that I knew her—and said so—and well you might, she indicated, since she had been a cheer leader when I was at high school.  Whereupon I made a roundabout libidinal connection, remembering I had sat watching her breasts bounce up and down while sitting on the bench at a basketball game.

She was quite friendly and I sensed that my brother had set me or, or should I say, attempting to set me up with Jane, let’s call her.  And she allowed, upon inquiry, that just possibly that was the case.  I felt awkward though drinking a good deal helped with that, and we established some sort of connection, so that when the bar closed down at 2 she asked did I want to come over to her place.  Sure, I said, and she drove since I was a bit inebriated.

Her place was an apartment about a mile away, and upon arrival, she shoed out her sister, maybe it was, fast asleep on the sofa, who left still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.  And then Jane said she would going to check on her son down the hall and would be back in a little bit.  I said, could I smoke, and she said yes and gave me an ashtray, and I sat there feeling sort of vaguely depressed and unlibidinal, smoking one cigarette after another, until she returned attired in come-hither night gown and not much else.

While I am generally completely stupid about such matters, the signals in this situation clearly indicated that were I to engage her in amorous activity I would not be met with resistance.  She reclined Cleopatra like on the sofa, and we began to talk a bit about people we had known in high school, and when I mentioned this one guy, she just launched in calling him an asshole and a mean mother fucker, etc.  Whereupon, we moved briefly to the subject of her husband, also a major league asshole.   And something about the way men general treated women lead her to tell me about how her brothers would push her down to the ground and pinch her breasts till they were black and blue.

I guess I talk too much because whatever remained of my libido was just a shadow of its former self.  I sat there paradoxically full to the point of breaking with a sense of emptiness.  I lit another cigarette, and noticed that she had gone to sleep.  I sat a while longer, got up, and covered her against the morning chill, kissed her on the forehead (as I remember) and left. 

Outside the sun was coming up and I found myself standing opposite the old Junior High.  I had not seen that place in years having no occasion to go down the street it was on.  I walked over to the steps of the Junior High and looked back from where I had come.  Once, looking where I was looking, there had been a big empty field and on the opposite end of it the Catholic church and school  But now the whole area, filled with apartment buildings, was just unrecognizable.

 I walked back to my car but it was only as I said about a mile away parked in front of the Club 94.

But certainly I was most powerfully influenced by stories from the Bible, especially the Old Testament.  I still think about these and over the years have written a couple of cheerful attempts at blasphemy.

An idea for one such story came to me as I was driving along a few days ago feeling mildly depressed.  I call it:

The True Story of Jonah and The Whale

            As told by Jonah.

This is an audio story in the form of an MP3.  If you have Quicken or Real Player the story should come up immediately.  Or your machine might download it and then you will have to click on the download.  Of course you must have speakers and/or earphones to hear anything.  It’s about nine minutes long.  I have made no attempt to imitate Jonah as I have no idea what he sounded like.

 If you have the time you might also want to check out an informal lecture by Doctor Peter Pedanticus, PhD (or PP as he is known by his friends):

What’s The Big Deal About the Pelvis: A ReProbing of Evolutionary Theory
 

Very little, if any, knowledge of evolutionary theory is required to grasp PP’s major point.  I have made no attempt to imitate PP either as I have no idea what he sounds like.

Because she didn’t want us to grow up to be uncouth yokels like our father, the old lady started reading to us boys pretty early.  She’d start off with the Child’s Garden of Verses which she acted like was real special since Robert Stevenson had something to do with it.  This I didn’t like as much as Mother Goose featuring Humpty Dumpy and that woman who lived in a shoe.  And some of the Grimm stuff too.  But the stories that tended to stick in my mind were by Uncle Remus and involved Brer Rabbit.

I don’t know if people read Uncle Remus anymore.  People might think it is racist.  But I am not sure what reason for that there might be.  Maybe the Tar Baby?  But as I understand it these were African Oral Tales that a white man named Chandler Harris compiled and put out under the nom de plume of Uncle Remus.  Once at some function I sat next to a young black lady in anthropology I think, and I asked her about Uncle Remus and she said there was nothing racist in it, and we had sort of a debate about what Brer Rabbit represented  She said he was a common figure in African tales; he represented the trickster.

I said, true, he did trick Brer Fox on a number of occasions, but on one occasion at least he tricked himself and that was one of my favorites, the tale of the tar baby.  Seems Brer rabbit was out walking one day—well, you know the story.  And he came upon the Tar Baby who refused to returned Brer Rabbit’s salutation and that pissed off Brer Rabbit and receiving no apology for the insult, he attacked the Tar Baby and the more he fought the more he got tangled up in the Tar Baby.  

So I said, Brer Rabbit didn’t seem to represent a trickster in this story; instead, I proposed, he had received his comeuppance for being the egotist that he was and getting so easily insulted.  The black student allowed that in this particular tale, true, Brer Rabbit had been chastened, but as a trickster he was also understood to be an egoist.  I allowed as how she probably was correct and obviously Brer Rabbit was a more highly complex character than I had supposed.

In one of the trickster tales, Brer Fox gets his hands on Brer Rabbit and is going to eat him.  But Brer Rabbit starts saying stuff like before you eat me please don’t stick me with a knife because there’s nothing I hate more than being stuck with a knife.  So Brer Fox would go to stick him with a knife and Brer Rabbit said something like oh don’t stick me with a knife before you eat me because even more than being stuck with a knife I hate being…and so on and so forth, till he said there was nothing he hated more than being thrown in the blackberry patch.  Whereupon the Fox did that and Brer Rabbit just laughed because there was no way Brer Fox was going to get him in there.

I was particularly fond of this story because of its mention of the blackberry patch.  There was one of those maybe fifty yards across down in the hollow beyond Grandma’s house.  I loved those blackberries.  They were free food.  Sometimes towards the middle of the summer, I would crawl out under that big black berry patch getting stuck now and then, but out as far towards the middle as I could go and find a nice spot with a bunch of berries, and lie on my back with the sun filtering through the leaves and eat blackberries, at times each one being sweeter than the next.  I guess I identified with Brer Rabbit because out in the middle of that black berry patch I felt off in my own place and safe from bigger people should they want to get at me.

Back in SC, we had no sweets around the house.  Except possibly vanilla wafers, and those quickly became tiresome.  Sometimes we had bananas, and when they went over the edge, the old lady would mash them up and put cream and sugar in with it, and then cover the whole thing with vanilla wafers, and then cook it in the oven for a while and then we would eat that.

We never had potato chips either.  That’s hard to imagine today what with all the sorts and kinds of chips wherever you look.  But I don’t remember a bag of potato chips in the place.  I guess we were deprived.  But every once in a blue moon on a Friday evening, when maybe he had a good week money-wise, the old man would stop at this place by the Laurens Drive in and buy hash and he would buy potato chips then.

That was about the whole meal unless the old lady made coleslaw which was a possibility and something she knew how to do.  So we would eat those chips, and you put that hash in the middle of a piece of white bread, and if any bread was left you used it to sop up the hash juice from your plate.  I don’t know but I loved that hash and missed it deeply when we moved to California.

Many years later when we went back to SC for a visit I was happy and proud that my Uncle Earl had gone into the hash business.  He didn’t do it on a regular basis but for holidays, especially the Fourth of July which is celebrated down south for different reasons than the rest of the country.  Fire stations would make hash too.  Uncle Earl just attached a cardboard sign to his mailbox and at one point he sold the hash at eight dollars a pint because it didn’t come by the pound but in little containers, like they have at Chinese places, with little wire handles on them.

I thought maybe I had built that hash up a little in my mind and when I sat down to eat some at Uncle Earl’s place I was prepared to be disappointed.  But I wasn’t.  Maybe it wasn’t quite what I remembered but it was near enough.  I am not entrepreneurially inclined, but I did sit around some and thought about how I might mass market that stuff.  People by that time had all become calorie counters and nutritious-wise and since that hash was probably about as God awful as any meat could be for a person, I figured I would have to market it as anti-health.  Put maybe a little American flag on the container and advertise it as “Not Meat.  The Pure Essence of Meat.”

Uncle Earle had a hash house built right next to his real house.  Inside, he had a couple of forty gallon vats.  He would put the meat in those and add some little water, and vinegar, he said, and some secret sauce, though I believe he was kidding.  His recipe as I recollect was something like 300 pounds of beef plus 300 pounds of pork and slow heat for 48 hours, stirring constantly so it did not stick to the bottom of the vat, and a whole bunch of onions. That was it.  Plus salt and pepper, and slow cooked that meat just broke down yielded up to the quivering palette the Pure Essence or Nectar of Meat.

So we ate pork chops fried.  We also ate fried chicken.  I always got a drumstick.  I have to say though there wasn’t much to these chickens.  They had been out running around in the yard a little before you ate them, and being all active like that they just didn’t build up much.  Like two bites and the meat would be all off, it seemed like.  So that’s when I got into the habit of also eating the gristle part of the drumstick.  It was chewy and if I was feeling particularly famished I would break open the bone and scoop out the marrow.  Not everybody does that. 

When we were done with a chicken there wasn’t anything left.  The old man gnawed through the neck and back and we ate the livers; about all we didn’t eat was the gizzard and what we called the Pope’s nose that was this flap of fat that was over the chicken’s a-hole. I didn’t know what a Pope was back then so I didn’t know I was insulting anybody when I called the a-hole flap the Pope’s nose.

In addition to fried chicken we ate fried ham.  I liked the ham part but not always what went along with it which was black eyed peas.  The old man liked those though; a huge pot of them was usually made up with the ham bone; and the old lady would make up a black eyed pea sauce to pour over the black eyed peas.  This was made of canned tomatoes with lots of salt and pepper and a whole cup of sugar poured into it and then boiled down.  I didn’t like that stuff at all.  And when the old man ran out of ham to eat the beans with, he would eat it with whatever there was and to get a little ham into the mix he would polish it off with pickled pigs’ feet. 

And we also had chicken fried steak.  This wasn’t chicken and I really don’t think it was steak either.  I guess it came from a cow but calling it steak seemed a bit too fancy for what was this flat flappy piece of meat with all sorts of sinews and gristle and shit running through it.  To make it eat ready, the old lady would pound it with a hammer that was made for hammering meat.  She called this “tenderizing.”  After it had been tenderized, the big flappy piece was cut up, dipped in egg and then in flour and then fried.  The only way it was like chicken was that it was prepared like chicken and fried like chicken.

All of these fried meats came with rice.  The old lady used Minute Rice, though way back then I don’t expect it was minute rice, but more like five minute or even ten minute rice.  I don’t know but I expect it wasn’t as fast as today.  And with the rice would come gravy that was made from the grease of whatever had been fried.  So technically we had chicken grease gravy and chicken fried steak grease gravey.  And you could make a gravey out of ham too though it tended to be thin and pretty watery. 

Fat or grease was not to be wasted.  Once many years later in college I fried up a pork chop for a friend who had stopped by, and I couldn’t the fuck believe it when he sat there and all dainty like cut the fat off the pork chop.  I mean, hell, doing that reduced the pork chop by a third—because he cut away the bone too and would not stoop to gnaw on it after—and besides that was the best part.  Honestly, I was a bit insulted like the guy seemed to think he was too good for a pork chop or at least parts of it.

Because of my southern heritage, my idea of soul food is a pork chop.  A fried pork chop.  I can remember staring at the pork chop plate and wondering who was going to get that last pork chop.  Usually, the old man.  But you never knew since I was a runt and perhaps needed more protein. 

We were not overflowing with food back in SC.  But I don’t remember having wandered around feeling hungry.  Once I did climb up the persimmon tree right out by the kitchen door and eat too many green persimmons and got a stomach ache.  Also it seemed like all the green stuff we had to eat came out of a can and tasted like crap—peas, green beans, and those goddamn lima beans. 

Just looking at those fuckers there on my plate next to my rice was enough to destroy my pleasure in the whole meal.  They would say, like, eat your vegetables because they would see that I was putting off eating them, and they were right. If you were going to get those fucking puckered up looking little peas down it was best to eat them with the other stuff.  But with the limas I just couldn’t do it because eating them with the other stuff would just ruin any pleasure a body might take in eating the other stuff.

So I would do what I could and sort of casually bump off a few of those lima beans unto the table and some onto my lap and if I could manage it onto the floor.  I was like fucking surrounded by lima beans, but no matter what I did there would still be a pile of them on the plate.  And of course the longer I put it off the colder and uglier those beans got.  I don’t know how many times I heard about those people in China just dying to get their hands on a fucking lima bean.  If that was really the case, I figure those people in China was either crazy or goddamn raving hungry.

So the kitchen would be empty except for me and the lima beans because I had to clean my plate since money doesn’t grow on trees.  I don’t know how long I would sit there staring at those fuckers.  I just plain hated them.  It wasn’t the taste really.  Well, maybe it was, because that was pretty bad.  But it was more the texture.  It was like the lima bean had a really leathery hide and you had to bite down on it hard and when you did and broke the leathery hide out would squish this soft shit.  I couldn’t stand it.  Like every time I bit one this shit was exploding in my mouth.

So I did what I could and I would swallow the things whole like some goddamn big green pill.  Gulp, gulp, gulp—one after the other….Anything so I didn’t have to use my teeth on the goddamn things.  And they would feel like lead in my stomach and sometimes I would get a stomach ache.  One day I noticed that these fuckers came in a can with this fellow on it that was called the Jolly Green Giant.  As far as I was concerned there was nothing jolly at all about this Green fucker, and to this day I refused to buy anything with the Green fucker on the label.

For a while, during the time I was living in the hole, Roland and his brothers lived in a place right next to the freeway over in Lemon Grove, the place with the big lemon by the railroad tracks.  This place had to have been a migrant workers shack at one time because there was nothing to it.

I found Roland and his brothers interesting not just because they were clearly strange and thus accepting of a perpetual stranger like me but because they were all smart and had thoughts on things.  True, these were strange and aberrant thoughts but they were thoughts.  For example, Roland and I are talking one day sitting on the wooden floor of the migrant worker’s shack, and he says, have you ever thought about the concept of no man’s land.  I said, no.  He said, well think about it.  So I did and concluded that it was a strange concept.  Yes, he said, like a place nobody wants to live because nobody owns it.  I feel like I live there some times, he concluded.

They also thought a great deal about religion, mostly Eastern religion.  I sort of put up with that.  When they started talking about levitation and pulled out books with pictures of people levitating I wanted to say, this is crap.  Back then I was pretty cocksure. I still don’t believe people can levitate, but who knows for sure.  I did get upset when they joined a cult led my some guy from India.  Roland and his brothers called the guy Babu or something, and I think he was a guru named Sathya Sai Baba who had a pretty big cult and performed miracles of various sorts.

This was awful fishy to me.  These guys had no money at all to speak of; they never made any effort to hold down a steady job.  And here they were giving their money to this cult guy who came over from India now and then just to drum up some money as far as I could tell.  One day they were talking about how much they could give because their guru—whoever the fuck this guy was-- needed a new carburetor for his Lincoln.  In mean at a recent gathering of the faithful, the guru had actually asked for contributions for a new carburetor because he lived over in India where the roads were dusty and he needed a special carburetor to keep it from getting jammed up.

This time I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut and asked if they had ever thought this guy was not a holy man at all but a charlatan who just wanted to take their money.  They looked at me like I was stupid.  Of course, they had thought about it.  How many people would follow Jesus Christ, I asked, if he came down and asked for a carburetor for his Lincoln?  They said Jesus Christ was not a guru.  They said a guru was not about other worldly stuff.  A guru could drive a car and have sex and eat fruit or whatever just like anybody else.  So how the hell then did they know if he was a guru or not, except that people gave him money when he asked for it.

I had no effect on them on this guru issue.  Part of having a guru seemed to involve questioning whether the guy was a guru or not and when he didn’t act like you thought a guru was supposed to act you were supposed to find some guru like message in the action and if you couldn’t find that to question whether you had the right conception of what a guru was supposed to be.  They were with this guru a long time, and at one point to show their allegiance to this guru they all changed their names.  Roland became Ezekiel and since he didn’t seem to have any of his usual sense of humor about this I started calling him that.  He wouldn’t settle for Zeke either.  It had to be the whole thing.

So Roland’s dad was some sort of genius like I said.  Roland—my junior high locker mate--said his father was trying to make--and this was 1962--a watch with no moving parts.  I was consternated.  I thought the guy must be nuts.  But now everybody has watches with no moving parts.  So maybe the guy was unto something of an electronic or digital nature.

He also wanted to invent other things.  Following Buckminster Fuller he had built a hyperbolic dome right there on there lot.  They had made it out of WOOD, mind you, and had been hell to build since wood does not bend all that easily.  It was set on a concrete foundation, and rather than buy gravel to pour the concrete the old man had the kids (eventually, as I said, there were ten of them) go out and pick up rocks and pebbles from the dirt on the surrounding hillsides. The house itself was ramshackle, sprawling and in need of paint.  They made no pretense whatsoever to landscaping. 

 Roland and three of his brothers lived in this small room with bunk beds on both sides.  The only other stuff in there was a radio on the window sill, a stack of muscle magazines and bar bells.  I would set on the floor or on the edge of a bunk if it was vacant, and we would talk and occasionally one of them would get up and go grab a barbell and huff and puff for a while lifting it and then sit back down.  I didn’t participate in the barbell stuff and they never asked me to. 

 The barbell stuff didn’t seem to be macho compettive stuff, though they did have any manner of masturbating contests, involving who could do it fastest, or who could do it most repeatedly, and who could not do it for the longest time.  They were also into experimental masturbation what with fruit and such.  Like making a hole in a water melon and fucking that.  Or putting tuna oil on their cocks and getting a cat to lick it.  Stuff like that. They were way beyond me masturbation wise.  I did tell them about a book I read that talked about some Russian that fucked trees.  They thought about it for a while and agreed that, while it might be somewhat painful, depending on the bark, a tree could be fucked.

One day we are talking and I ask Roland where he had been born.  I knew they had lived back East and wondered what state, but he mistook my question and said he had been born in the house.  House?  Yes, he said.  After the first three his father had decided to screw the hospital bills and so he had delivered all the other kids himself.  This disturbed me a little bit but then I remembered that people used to do that all the time.  Though usually there had been a nurse of some sort present. And I wondered did they have birth certificates, and Roland said he didn’t know but would ask some time because we agreed it was important to be fully documented.

Then Roland said all of the babies had not lived or maybe had been born dead; he didn’t know.  How did they know this?  He laughed and said, well, his mother would get pregnant which was highly visible and then about nine months later there would be all this screaming and yelling when she delivered and then that would stop, and if the baby was dead, his father would come out with it wrapped up in something and then burn it in the incinerator out back. 

I could see that incinerator from the window.  It was made out of concrete block about waist high with a little metal door in the front and a metal chimney coming out the back that was painted red for some reason.  I found this all a little strange as if I had strayed off into the forest and gotten a bit lost.  I asked Roland did he think that was legal.  Who knows? He said.

One day when I am living in the hole under the house, we get a call from a relative.  I believe she was the daughter of one of the brothers of my grandfather, William Berner Tingle, Sr.  She wasn’t calling from Georgia where she lived; she was already here and on a terrible mission.

It turned out her son had been in the Navy and had served a year or so over in the area of Vietnam or the water thereabouts, and while he had been over there everything had been fine.  When he got back he still had time to serve and maybe too much time on his hands because he got into drugs as they say and also joined a motorcycle gang.  

I never did get clear on the detail, like what happened exactly, did he hit a wet spot or whatever, but he was rounding a corner and the bike slid out from under him and he hit his head on the curb.  That was about it.  He was in a coma in the VA hospital near Balboa Park and it did not look good at all. 

 But she, his mother, had come out to sit by this bed.  The father didn’t come.  I don’t know why, but I think the whole thing might have been a financial strain because my parents talked me into going to pick her up several times at this cheap motel where she was staying and drive her to the VA hospital.  It was the family thing to do.  

So I would park out in the back lot behind this big old, depressing, 10 story building that was the VA hospital while she went in.  I never went in.  She didn’t invite me and I didn’t invite myself.  I never knew how long she would be.  Maybe an hour usually, sometimes more.  Then she would come out and I would drive her back.  What could I say?  I don’t remember having spoken with her, but I must have because one day she said she was upset because the members of her son’s bike gang had come and hung their colors all over her son’s room.

I would sit there smoking one cigarette after another staring at that big depressing building.  I would try to read something.  I remember, maybe it was just the circumstances, but one day I read some of Nietzsche’s Will to Power.  I remember trying to figure out why he said Buddhism was nihilistic.  Because, I guess it was so other or unworldly, maybe.  Because I associated religions with morality I hadn’t thought of them as being nihilistic exactly….but of course Nietzsche was arguing that some so-called moralities, especially the Christian slave morality, is nihilistic.

So there I sat smoking one cigarette after another, waiting for my relative’s son to pass on, as he did after a couple of weeks, in my beat up 59 Plymouth station wagon, with springs that came up right through the front seats and would stick into your butt if you didn’t watch out and thinking about nihilism.  It was all pretty fucked.

The son’s mother gave me the bike because they never wanted to see it again.  It was a Harley, a hog in fact, with those long old extended forks up front and a tiny, dinky little handle bars.  I sat on it once, started it, and the damn thing scared me to death.  So I sold it to a friend who, at that time was driving a trash truck, and he fixed it up quite nicely.

When you’re a gunner and shot the ball 75% of the time when you get your hands on it sometimes you have a hard time getting the ball.  This is especially the case if you have other gunners on your 3 on 3 pickup team.  But sometimes if I didn’t have gunners on my team or we were down and needed to get ahead, I would get the ball.  Since however I did not make plays for myself I was dependent on the other guys on the team and had to train them in the course of a game, if we had not previously played together.

To get my hands on the ball, I would run the baseline, cutting constantly behind the guy who was guarding me, and then I would stand there with my hands out, jumping up and down to indicate I was open.  After I did this a while, somebody would throw it to me, sometimes close to the basket.  Then I would use my back-to-the basket game and do a turn around on them.  Or I would just run out along the base line till where it nearly ended and stand there.  And when they passed it, the guy guarding me would either not be anywhere around or he would dare me to shot it which, being a gunner, I would.

That was part A of my two part game; the other part, part B, was to go to the top of the key and shot from there.  Sometimes I would shot a turnaround from there; and if I had trained my guys properly one of them would set a pick and I would get off the shot.  As you may have noted I had no drive to the basket game at all.  

The game of the varsity team was built around the play of our guards as I have said.  With our full court press and constant fast breaking are game was mostly controlled mayhem.  But when we got stuck and had to go up against a set defense, our offense was incredibly stodgy.  We ran patterns.  One involved me cutting to the basket and trying to brush off my guy on the center who had posted low; then I would cut directly for the free-throw line and put out my hands to get the ball which I almost never did since actually I was just a decoy and I would then go set a pick for one of our guards.

I did on one rare occasion get to display parts of my game during what is called “garbage time.”  In this particular game, garbage time started somewhere in the second quarter.  The final score for this game was 120 for us and 77 for the other guys; that’s a hundred and 97 points scored in a 36 minute high school game.  I don’t know what the fuck we were doing.

 But in the third quarter, the coach put me in at one guard and my old catcher from little league at the other.  He was a pretty good ball handler and I would run down and he would pass me the ball and I made five shots in a row—the other guys were completely discombobulated.  That was my all time high scoring game.  22 points in about ten minutes.  I could hit ok when there was no chance we were going to lose and I could play my game which was to shot it 75% of the time that I got my hands on the ball.

Traditionally, when a guy gets a letter for a varsity sport, he puts it on something.  A jacket, usually known as a letterman’s jacket.  So I got my letter for a varsity sport, basketball, in the spring of my junior year, and along with the letter they give me a little pamphlet with a form to order a letterman’s jacket or sweater.  I guess I must have showed this to my mother, but anyhow, I remember her indicating that she thought the letterman’s jacket was awful expensive though maybe they could afford a letterman’s sweater.

I didn’t want any damn sweater.  That’s what guys who lettered on the JV (junior varsity) team got if they were stupid enough to wear their JV letter on anything.  And fuck the jacket was like 25 dollars, a good bit of money back in 1963.  I knew that much, so later when the old lady asked me if I really, really wanted a letterman’s jacket, I said no because no was the answer she wanted and if I said yes there would be no end of shit about the jacket.  Just getting her to sew the letter on the jacket would be a fucking agony.  

And maybe in some way I was relieved because I had this feeling that, if I did get a letterman’s jacket, I wasn’t sure I would wear it anyway.  Maybe I didn’t want to stand out or something or maybe I didn’t want to be identified with the jocks.  Hell, I didn’t know a single guy on the football team.  Or maybe people would think I thought I was special if I wore a letterman’s jacket and get the idea that I thought they were all a pack of shit eating idiots. 

 So I didn’t get a letterman’s jacket and fuck me, if I cared.  But years later, I got to thinking that things might have been different.  What if I had a father (or even a mother) who said something like:  “Damn, you got a varsity letter!  Now isn’t that great.  Where do we get the jacket?  Oh, you have a form here.  You’re right….that is a bit of money.  But what the hell? We can scrape it together.  What do you mean you aren’t sure you will wear it?  Sure you will wear it.  OK! OK!  I see the problem.  But it’s a warm jacket right.  You can wear it in cold weather.  That’s a good reason.  Right.  When people get cold they wear a jacket.  This one will just happen to have a fucking varsity letter on it.  Your letter!”

So what, things could have always been different.  They could always have been better or even worse for that matter.  Maybe I didn’t want a letterman’s jacket.  Maybe I wanted a different father.  Hell, he simply couldn’t talk like that to me, since he hated me and wanted to kill me, I guess.  Who’s going to spend 25 bucks on a letterman’s jacket for a kid you would just as soon kill.

Anyway, by now—if I had got the jacket—it would be long gone, in tatters, I guess, with moths flying out of it or whatever.  Just another piece of crap—in what does Yeats call it—the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  I wonder what’s worse.  A nearly empty rag and bone shop?  Or a nearly full one?  Goddamn, with that echo in here I can’t hear myself think.

The varsity game was made around the game of our two guards.  One of these was regularly all league and the other was 2^nd team all league, and they could run the hell out of the court with our fast break.  I’d grab the rebond and fling the ball down court towards one of our guards who would cherry-pick at the drop of a hat.  Once the coach came in at halftime and said Tingle had got 13 rebounds.  That’s quite a few rebounds for a 16 minute high school half.  I had no idea that I had got 13 rebounds and knowing me I probably didn’t get a single one in the second half.

I got a rather comical picture of myself getting a rebound in the Daily Nixon, as I continue to call the rag that passes for a newspaper in San Diego:

That’s me getting a rebound by sticking my leg up in the air. Sometimes, I don’t know why, getting a rebound one of my legs would go up a lot higher than the other.  And kicking out like that was a pretty effective way of keeping people at a distance.  For some reason, as you will note, while the other team, Helix High, had cool uniforms that look like uniforms, our coach for some reason ordered uniforms with short sleeves.  I don’t know what the fuck he was thinking about.

Maybe somebody at the Daily Nixon had it in for me because they put another picture of me in the paper doing something comical again:

This time I am apparently attempting to take the rebound away from my own center, though honestly, I think he is the one acting stupidly by jumping on my back like that.

I am paranoid to a fault.  Paranoia has and continues so much to permeate my subjectivity that really I am unable to see it or to see around it sufficient to characterize it.  I can say what it is not.  I don’t believe that aliens control my brain or things come out of the TV tube and infiltrate my brain.  I don’t even believe in conspiracy theories out of principle; conspiracy theories are just ways of protecting one’s self from what I am paranoid about: the general malignance of both the human and the natural universe.

To think that a cabal did this or that malignant thing is to protect one’s self from the awareness that no cabal did it.  Rather if it appears that a cabal did it, one should understand this appearance as suggesting the operation of either social or natural laws that cause certain persons or entities to act so much like synchronized swimmers that they appear a cabal.  Human beings might protect themselves at least partly against these synchronized swimmers by making basic changes to the social structures and the fact that we do not or are incapable of doing so is that malignancy to which I previously referred as the source of my paranoia.

Once for example, I bought a car from my brother.  It was a Volkswagen and he had managed to put a significant dent in three of the four fenders.  We joked about ramming the untouched fender into a tree so that I might have a complete set of dinted fenders.  I paid about 500 dollars for it as I recollect as it had just received a new engine and I was getting my gear together for departure from Casa de Oro.  As I was going into register the car, somebody mentioned that I would have to pay 10% of the purchase amount to register the car.

That comes out to 50 bucks.  I couldn’t believe it and was fucking outraged.  I suppose I had the 50 bucks but I surely couldn’t spare it.  So I got my brother to sign a bill of sale that said I had paid a buck for the car meaning I would have to pay a dime at worst to register the car.  I stood there casually with my fake bill of sale and walked out with my car registered, and this horrible feeling in the back of my head that some people at the statewide level were going to seek me out, take me to trail, and send me to jail to make a point about such casual grifting of the government.  I imagined the trial and my poor brother trapped between having to perjure himself or say, yes, yes, in fact he paid me 500 dollars, the bill of sale was a scam.

 I do not exaggerate when I say this feeling severly trouble me at odd moments out of nowhere.  I was not ready like Raskolnikov to go to the authorities and confess my crime so that I might relieve myself of my guilt.  But I thought about such things.  In this fog, I tried to reason with myself and eventually came to a thought:  Now, why the fuck would they come after me for 50 dollars when it would cost them far more than 50 dollars to come after me.  This supplied me some relief of a rational order though it did not dispell the deeper fear since governments daily do completely irrational things like paying 200 dollars for a hammer or attempting to gain peace by waging all out war.

But to pit the value of my 50 dollars against the value of their efforts was a step in the right direction.  It allowed me to see I was chump change, gum on the bottom of a shoe, shit on the stick and so on.  In short I was worth nothing, a zero in short, invisible and non-existent.  Thus the paranoid seeks to get out of his paranoia by feeling people can see right through him…And thus are very well positioned to gain control over him by whatever manipulative means.

Yes, it’s true.  People are out to get me.

Sometime I will try to consider why I have a soft spot for philosophy and why had I been a precocious child, when asked that question—what do you want to be when you grow up—I would have said, why a philosopher of course as if that were a worthy and respected occupation like being a fireman or baseball player or financial tycoon or any of the other things that little boys want to be. As it were though, I don’t recall ever having been asked what it was I wanted to be by anyone least of all by my parents.  Perhaps that is what made me philosophical.

But I have read quite a bit of it.  I have even read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit whole and in parts on several occasions.  This book is so incomprehensible that other books have been written about it that are nothing but line by line or paragraph by paragraph exegesis, or retranslations of it into other words.  Unfortunately these books are more incomprehensible than the original.  And while I would never say I understood anything of what this book says, by which I mean I would never dare to claim to say the book says this or that, I did by dint of immersal come to sense the general drift of the argument.  In fact I do believe that this may be one of the most repetitious, in a profound sense, works ever written, the only problem being one is not at all sure of what is being repeated.

In any case, one day while reading Hegel, I began slowly to chuckle and then to laugh deep down into my belly.  I do believe I am one of the few persons alive who has ever laughed at Hegel.  Not that I believe Hegel was capable of telling a joke or if he was capable,  that one would no doubt have walked out from sheer fatigue, midway through it.  No, and I mean no disrespect, but I found myself laughing at his bringing to bear, with all manner of pulleys, hoists, gyros, tubes, levers and cranks, his massive Teutonic apparatus upon the topic of Phrenology and its claim to be a science.

 Nobody today—or at least I hope not—believes that phrenology that claimed one could know the character of a person by reading the lumps, bumps, pits and curves of the skull is a science.  But during Hegel’s day, phrenology had become quite scientific looking what with all manner of charts and graphs.  That’s why I laughed I think to see Hegel all strenuously and seriously bring to bear his gigantic Teutonic apparatus on something as transparently stupid—one now feels—as phrenology.  It was, I strain for an analogy, rather like watching the entire American nuclear force depositing itself on a hapless flea.

 Perhaps as is frequently the case with a laugh, one has to be there, and while the following can in no way supply the full sensation of the movement of his Teutonic apparatus, it may supply at least a glimmering:

 The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor even a `speaking' movement. We neither commit theft, murder, etc. with the skull-bone, nor does it in the least betray such deeds by a change of countenance, so that the skull-bone would become a speaking gesture. Nor has this immediate being the diminish the organ, whether it would make it coarser and thicker or finer. From the fact that it remains undetermined how the cause is constituted, it is equally left undetermined how the effect is produced in the skull, whether it is an enlarging or a narrowing and falling-in of the latter. When this influence is defined, as it were, more imposingly as a 'stimulation', it is still undetermined whether this takes place by swelling, like the effect of a cantharides plaster, or by shrivelling, like the effect of vinegar. All views of this kind can be supported by plausible grounds, for the organic relation which just as much plays a part accommodates one view as readily as another, and is indifferent to all this cleverness.

Now if this is not good for a laugh, I don’t know what is.  I mean,  The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor even a `speaking' movement!  What a hoot!

Mary and I, as I have said, were both auburn hair (though hers was nicer than mine) and, as I haven’t previously said, we both wore granny glasses and smoked.  And though I didn’t know it when I first met her she had grown up not more than a mile or so from the Tingle house in Casa De Oro too.  So she knew about things like the Hire’s Barrel, but she had gone to Catholic school.

But she wasn’t Catholic anymore having gone, as she said, a bit sex crazy when she got out of there and went to college.  Then she had married and had two kids and then got a divorce.  One night she asked me, did I think it was right for a husband to wake his wife at two and the morning and scream at her because there was some tomato paste on the kitchen wall and make her go and clean it up at two in the morning.  I said, no, because that didn’t sound right to me.  And she said it had gotten to the point where she just couldn’t stand it and felt like she was suffocating and didn’t exist anymore.  So she had left him.

She didn’t live far away over in Lemon Grove most famous to my mind for having a huge old yellow chicken wire and plaster of Paris Lemon stuck right next to the railroad tracks so when you drove by it you knew you were in Lemon Grove.  I would come over pretty late usually and we would drink beer and wine and hang out a bit.  I got along ok with the kids because I usually do get along ok with kids and dogs and animals generally.  They were still young and went to bed pretty early and then Mary and me we would retire to the bedroom.

 Coming from a Catholic family, she had plenty of brothers and sisters, and her favorite Sister had married a Mexican American who worked at the place for the Sons and Daughters of Migrant Workers.  That’s how Mary had got the job there, and he was a good guy and looked out for everybody he was related to.  So Mary had her own family and then this large Mexican American family.  And what with birthdays and barbeques something was always going on that involved eating and drinking. 

These were a really friendly people or let’s say they hugged a lot.  Maybe it was a cultural thing, but I had never hugged people so much in my whole life.  I sort of liked it, and my theory is that the Mexican people introduced the white people to hugging and that’s where all the one hug a day thing came from.

 I don’t know if Mary thought our relationship had legs or not. We didn’t really talk about that.  There are lots of things I will never know because I didn’t ask.  And I do regret that.  But since I am generally honest, I had made sure she was clear about what I was up to up front.  I was going off somewhere to graduate school.  So not to make too fine a point, but  the relationship had a sort of time-line attached to it, at least to my mind.  In fact, even in spite of my overwhelming desire to get laid and be normal again, I don’t believe any of that would have happened had I not known there was a time line.

Because if she had her fears of being suffocated, I had mine of being swallowed up. 

(I wrote a song about one incident we had.) 

One day while driving around in the Great Northwest, we drove down a country road, found a memorable looking mailbox, stashed our weed in the culvert by it, and drove into Canada.  That was Vancouver, and I don’t remember anything about it except that the money was different and it was real clean.  I have noticed that cities where there is lot of rain or snow tend to look clean.  Nature does the dirty work.

Unlike Tijuana.  I went there once, or I went through it once later when I was living in the hole under my parent’s house.  My mother’s Aunt by this time had made a lot of money selling real estate and she had married into a large Catholic, Italian family though she was neither Catholic nor Italian.  So she bought this “house” I guess you would call it on the beach in Ensenada.  I say “house” in quotes because it was more like a beach side bunker.  Block walls, concrete floors, a bathroom, a kitchen, and some empty rooms. 

You could call it a summer home I guess.  They locked it all up with padlocks when they weren’t there in the hopes nobody would break in and vandalize when they weren’t there, though there wasn’t a whole lot to vandalize, and there were other places all around my Aunt’s place that looked like they might be better to vandalize than her place.

So once me and my good buddy were invited to tag along with the rest of my Aunt’s clan to one of their weekend outings.  I have to say I was impressed by the cheapness of the wine.  We found a winery right there and could get decent stuff for 2 dollars a bottle, keeping in mind that my idea of decent stuff was Thunderbird, Ripple, and Red Mountain, by the gallon.  But this stuff was real wine with like a cork in it and not a screw off cap. Also the clan bought plenty of beer, though they all had to call it cerveza because they were in Mexico I guess.

 This was, to my mind, a pretty strange family weekend.  No doubt I was in a bad mood as usual.  But the weekend seemed to consist primarily of lying around in the sun and maybe running out into the water for a bit and sleeping either in the concrete house or in the sand and then getting up and starting to drink again.  So the recreational goal, if I may call it that, seemed to be to get as blotto as possible for a 48 hour period.  If so this was the ideal place for it, since the booze was cheap, and what with no TV there was nothing else to do.  Maybe some of my aunt’s stepsons went into TJ to fuck some whores, but that was about it.

So I have been in Canada, Mexico, and the USA.  That’s it.  I guess I am a pretty provincial, parochial, and totally unsophisticated guy.  I am USA all the way.  I have thought about going to Europe, but according to my Aunt’s husband who visited there during WWII Europe is a pretty fucked up place.

Eventually, my aunt and her clan stopped going down there because the concrete house was built on sand and eventually the ocean came closer and the house fell into it.

I don’t know how I met Mike.  He was a fraternity guy, but I did and somehow BJ and I ended up driving around with Mike and his wife, Pam, through the great Northwest.  I had never been there before and Mike lived up there in Oregon, and BJ was going to go to college up there in Portland. So that seemed the logical place to go.

We drove around for three weeks maybe.  Going from one camp ground to another and to Mike’s parent’s house and to a place by the Puget Sound.  I don’t know where I got the money to do such a thing but we ate mostly hot dogs and chips and the campgrounds weren’t that expensive back then.  One night we camped near Mount Rainier.  This is one impressive mother-fucking mountain, sticking up out of the middle of nowhere.  And it rained that night on us—which you might expect camping next to a mountain with the word Rain in it—and we woke up all sodden in our sleeping bags because we had been sleeping in the open.

I woke up in a puddle and being a hypochondriac was sure I was going to catch my death of a cold.  But near by, were these sort of houses.  Well they were four poles sticking up about eight feet each, with a roof like a house on top, so you could get out of the rain, but no walls.  And at the back of each of these strange abodes was a huge fire place.  We collected wood from all over the place and lit a rip roaring fire and just sat there all day long in front of it getting stoned and watching the flames and the coals as they cooled and crumbled.  Basking in the heat of those flames on one side of your body, while cool air blew through the house with no walls, and the rain poured down—well, it was sort of a mystic experience.

I thought the Northwest was pretty Great.  But this was back in 1968; I got no idea what it’s like now.  I expect there are a lot more people.  We stayed at a house of some friends of Mike’s wife, like a summer home I suppose you would call it, and it was on a flat bit of land and two steps out of the house, your feet were in the sand and you were looking across the Puget Sound towards an island way the fuck off over there somewhere like in Canada with wind and fog and rain and shit blowing through.

The people who owned the house had grown corn and tomatoes and they would go out  along the beach and come back with clams and oysters.  And one day, we trek up into the backwoods, and down a canyon and came to this crystal clear stream and caught trout and saw deer.  And I got to thinking that maybe this is what the first settlers in America had seen: a fucking land of milk and honey.  You could live off the damn land or near to it.  Bison used to roam the woods and deer. 

Of course, all this good stuff to eat seems to have over stimulated us because back in the days when passenger pigeons darkened the sky for days on end, we Americans would load up cannons with buck shot, point them towards the sky to produce a veritable deluge of dead and dying pigeons.  They couldn’t eat all those, any more than that mother fucker Davy Crockett could when—he bragged to his biographer—he shot six buck in one afternoon.

Too much of a good thing seems like too much of nothing.  We started out as a nation of goddamn wastrels and we continue in that tradition with a fucking vengeance.

At the end of the summer of 68 I am up in Portland where BJ is living in a big old house next to a railroad yard, and I have got to get down to LA to start school.  I have no car, and I don’t remember why but there’s a guy there I know and he has a car and he is going down to LA... I think this guy’s name was John and he was preparing to go into the Peace Corp in a country called Botswana.  

He was a pretty funny guy and somehow he had got warts on his penis.  He is talking about his problem, and when I show doubt, having never heard of such a thing, he flops it out and the poor flaccid, sick looking sucker has, warts all over it.  A good half dozen anyway.  Later he goes to a doctor and they burn the fuckers off, if you can imagine, and they wrapped his cock up and all the time he gets the bandages stuck in his fly.  He says he has learned his lesson because these warts are a venereal disease.

So we get in John’s car and start driving.  That’s the last time I ever see BJ.  It’s a pretty long way from Portland to LA.  I always forget how much California there is above San Francisco. We drive from dawn and hit San Francisco about dusk.  The car is a pretty late model job but it has a problem.  A couple of times before Frisco, the electricity in the car cuts out as you are driving and without electricity a car just stops.  So mostly we drive in the right lane in case this happens.  Sometimes it cuts out for just a few seconds and before you coast to a stop, it kicks back in again and off you go.  But when we stop to get something to eat we can’t get the car started again unless you lay a screw driver across both poles of the alternator and that gets the electricity going again.

For some reason John is stoned and fucking tired and a little after Frisco he says, do you mind and crawls into the back seat and goes to sleep.  I say I don’t because I have some Dexedrine and the radio.  I wait to hear “Take a load off fanny, take a load for free, take a load off fanny and put the load right on me.”  But the central valley is so empty in spots you can’t get anything on the radio when all of a sudden something comes in like from Utah or something like that, like from outer space, and a song comes on and then disappears.  Somewhere in there I get pulled over for weaving in my lane.  I don’t know what the fuck cops have to do with themselves.  I am weaving in my lane and there is nobody in any of the others, so what the fuck.  The cop tells me to get some sleep.  OK, I say and drive on.

As dawn approaches we hit the grapevine.  And—what the fuck—all of sudden we have two lanes and the right hand, slow lane, is jam packed with a caravan of trucks, one after the other, filling the right lane and going about 30 miles an hour.  So I get in the fast lane, and what the fuck but the electricity cuts out.  I got trucks to the right and some car bearing down on me fast and I am driving a dead car.  So I check the mirror and swing sharply to the right and swing right between two trucks, by inches, and like a race car driver I am swinging up a pretty steep dirt embankment, so I am out of immediate danger.  But just as the car is slowing to a stop, what the fuck but the electricity goes back on and rather than waste the opportunity I floor that fucker kicking up dirt and gravel and swing back onto the road, just missing another truck, and get into the left lane, and maybe twenty minutes later as I cross the pass into LA, I suddenly realize I could have fucking killed myself.

And all the time John is asleep in the back snoring and drooling on himself.

Aw youth!