When people talk about the 60’s, they often have no clue what they’re talking about - i know, i was there, and i still don’t know what happened. The ruling class, then known as the “establishment” likes to excise that period from history much like it gussied up the racial hatred of ‘merica until the truth-teller Covid-19 crashed the party. Years after the trash got picked up at Woodstock, i would try and puzzle how one’s comrades could so easily forget how close to upending the established order people were. I understand that Richard Nixon was terrified of the protests that swamped his administration, so much so he shot himself in the foot with Watergate. Humanity should have known the gig was up when he and Chairman Mao took to schmoozing over tea. I was keeping body and soul together in a crash pad that was to become a nexus to other nexuses. I couldn’t even keep the names straight of the characters traipsing through where i lived in a garage sleeping on a sheet of plywood suspended over a workbench and a discarded chifferobe - once calling the police asking if they had a Rick Ronzoni in custody (no one told me Ronzoni was his nickname after the pasta maker). One night enough into the wine to chance most things, a stranger Christina Christofferson waltzed into the kitchen and asked “would anyone like to take a hit of acid with me?” She was big and blond and charismatic, and though i prefer my women svelte - she looked like an interesting conversation, so i said “yes.” We stayed up and talked all night; by morning we had parsed the universe - although like all good LSD trips, and Las Vegas - what happens there stays there. (and what Gertrude Stein said still holds true - “there’s no there, there”)
Though this chronicle is not about Christina it’s about S_____ S_____ whom i met shortly after at the dance studio Christina lived at on the SEC of 4th and Main in Santa Ana. This dance studio was another nexus in a chain of nexuses one finds if they live long enough, and it was a hoot. She lived there there with the gay Rasputin Gerry who couldn’t have been slimier if he’d washed his laundry in petroleum. But that was then and this is now. It was in Gerry’s anteroom that i met S_____ S_____. There were many architectural wings to this dance studio that were bracketed from the Great Room out - a mock balcony, porthole double doorways into the checkerboard tile kitchen and sunburst cutout panels in its 30’ ceiling. The dance room also contained a working 5’ high fireplace and its 8’ long mantel. Showers were taken in the atrium at the top of the staircase using a garden hose into a child’s wading pool. It is where S_____ S_____ sat bold as fuck and forward to beat the band - as in “would you like a piece of candy little boy?” Of course this was 40 years ago looking through the haze of 3 marriages and too many careers to count, but you get the gist of it. I don’t know if we had sex that day or soon there after. She was a single mother of 2 boys and like most of the contingent at the dance studio worked at Fairview State Hospital in Costa Mesa, tending the “tard’s” as they liked to say. S_____ S_____ was fun to be around, but very regulated. There were certain hours to be welcome and when you weren’t, that too was quite clear. She is 7 years my senior and i couldn’t tell you if that influenced my choice with my last wife, being the same difference older.
S_____ S_____ likes to drink - which certainly had a roll to play in my own history of substance strategies, as well as my appreciation for the power of En Vino Veritas. She was an erudite woman until she sacrificed her mind on the alter of Television, the same mausoleum ma left her’s. Besides the sex that was mercurial but lush, conversation was often scintillating, however as i was to later learn of the William F Buckley variety, rather than the William Burroughs my left-handed brain groks. S_____’s mother was a college professor and that S_____ had no sheepskin, i think it left her with a chip on her shoulder that eventually crushed her. This is sad for no other reason than the fact she had spent her entire working life ministering to the ‘tard population which other members of my community could barely look at much less change diapers for; wipe tears and make a home for in the wards of Fair View State Hospital. I took a run at the occupation myself. To give you an idea how upside down that world can be; i was working in a local facility closer to the college i was attending for my credentials as a Psychiatric Technician - S______ was grandfathered in, but it eventually became an Associate Arts Degree; and was called “on the carpet” for some infraction or other; when i left that manager’s office i was feeling smug and superior in a defensive kind of way, asking myself “why work with stupid ’tards.” As i passed one room back to my station, i was beckoned by in by a young man with severe Cerebral Palsy; he wanted a game of chess - i know chess well but am no master. The short answer is this man who could not line up a straw to his mouth without assistance crushed me at the game in fewer than a dozen or so moves.
In this same facility there was a hydrocephalic case whose cranium was easily twice her body. If you have never been inside such an institution - do so · you’ll be a better human for it. S_____ S_____ worked for 25 years attending these individuals and i am lucky to have known her, and not. Like all modern relationships, people fall away and others fall into place - you can’t know from one year to the next who’s in, who’s out. I am always amazed by the changes life reeks on us all. Whilst out of touch S_____ S_____ lived an entire lifetime including a savage betrayal by someone i had just met coming into her life as i was exciting. I had been living in her garage carving my 3rd piece and sleeping on another plywood sheet - that i didn’t die from the charcoal brazier i used for heat is a wonder for the ages. It was about this time i was really beginning to have my suspicions about art and why nothing i carved resembled the subject as well as what i drew or painted. Years later after her ex had taken everything he could lay his hands on including her heart, S_____ was a changed woman - not just older but broken in spirit. I would swing by when in town to chew that fat, and commiserate, for i had by that time my own wounds which had knocked the cockiness right out - so what was there left to share - horror stories?
When i left the United States, it became increasingly difficult to arrange visits with ma, though she had a spare room, my peripatetic lifestyle grated on those in the family who were circling the wagons around her fortune and viewed my solvent however rootless existence as evidence of a flawed character. Somewhere late in my travels, i got an email from S_____ S_____ suggesting i return to the states and that we throw in together - “buffer each other” was the expression. By this time my lopsided vision was making drawing more and more difficult - and i thought what the hell. What Thomas Wolfe said about “You Can’t Go Home Again” is true. What had been eccentricities during short visits rendered cohabitation impossible. On its face, it was a great idea that might have worked were we the young questing minds that had met, oh-so-long ago, but calcification had taken its toll. The masks had come off and the presumptions were no longer assumable. I will be grateful to this grand dame who i believe genuinely thought she could play avatar for my mother and actually soothe the grief of a dead parent; however I have been grieving the loss of ma since she abandoned me 40 years ago. What i didn’t understand when i accepted the role of roommate/caregiver was the expectation i would substitute for her son who moved to the other side of the country precisely when she’d needed him the most. It is a karmic debt that is mine alone to carry - if i am to be punished for abandoning my mother to my brother’s best efforts or rewarded for helping an old friend leave-go of her sanctuary and join her son, where he had fled, where - according to her, she is welcomed and loved. I may never know; i do know if i don’t find somewhere that i am welcomed and loved, i will still try to help others find the same - just like my old friend tried to do for me - even if it is only within their own skin.
jts 16/05/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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