Nearly 4pm - in between houses · a free fall i’m too familiar with to _______fill in the blank. There is nothing left to us as a species, but to, as Mr. Bukowski so presciently pointed out - “find what you love and let it kill you.” I enjoy having fun, always have. Early in my hedonistic career, i vaguely remember an occasion when arriving home to Costa Mesa from Pasadena - where spirits had been plentiful enough that minors purloined at will from older sister Aunt Jane, that i stood in the middle of Baker St well past midnight beckoning for more “Spaghetti Juice.” An innocent enough event depending on which repository or story you are wishing to convey, for me it just meant a love of Spaghetti with an astonishment that there was no more juice, for those who would malign and remain afraid of what specters reside deep within, an example of my wayward ways.
It wasn’t that simple, nor that scabrous - i was to later learn from a similar but less benign event the dangers of invoking Dionysus when you have no idea what you are doing. Joe, my cousin’s squeeze and friend i shall never see again - though he taught me how to heft Culligan soft water canisters as tall as i was without damaging the important parts of the male anatomy - also how to smoke, while you and your homie’s honey were boinkig without making too much noise · When Ma & Pa Kettle AKA mom & dad decided to sever the un-severable knot of matrimony, it was decided i’d spend the summer in the basement of Joe & Lisa’s craftsman-like bungalow just off Colorado Blvd, sometime circa 1969. There was a rhesus monkey in the house, Tommy and the Who; Frank Zappa and his kindly admonition to not eat the yellow snow along with Joe’s personal friends singing about “incense and peppermint” while my family was losing my Beagle “Snoopy” to dog thieves that were harvesting that particular breed for “science” that summer.
Joe drove an Austin Healy really well, and had been a Junkie in Chicago at about the same age i was losing my parents. He gave me a lot of rein, suggesting i apply for work on “dude ranches” instead of returning to the lame family i was in the process of being ejected from; had i listened then more carefully, how much differently my life might have been. But this one night my lifelong learning about how and when to stop drinking was to be fortified; it began normally enough on the porch knocking back “Red Mountain” fortified red wine from the gallon jug, me snotty, angry and only dimly aware of how much my life was about to be changed by the end of summer. In Viet Nam - the expression is “Một – Hai – Ba – dzô; 1, 2, 3, In” was channeled on that Anti-War porch · so why not¿ I’ll tell you why not, after a few, Joe thought it would be fun to take the “Arroyo Seco” in into Hollywood in the Austin Healy. What i remember besides asking “where are the girls¿” was waking up at sunlight with the Austin parked in the front yard of the bungalow; my fine knit sweater covered in vomit and a sore jaw.
Joe’s solution to my youthful inability to go the distance was to just fling his right fist across the gearshift into my jaw to stifle my “technicolor yawns.” I spent that memorable morning gaining a strong appreciation for the downside of hangovers and scouring the cockpit of Joe’s beloved sports car of any remnant of my apparently pissant puke wondering whether there would ever be a normal again. There was sort of - if you call your senior year of High School in Sussex England normal, because your father had taken a youngish, soon to become Mormon Princess and her Turkish son as surrogates for the family he had been forced from for lack of ______fill in the blank. He and prim young vixen were on the Sabbatical adventure of his lifetime to live in Greece with the echoes of the ancients.
Transitions are fraught for me, but probably a lot less than those who’ve never mustered out the chair they share with the “tit” TV and her programmers. The people i discuss are dear to me dead or alive and i have little shame that i am willing to share with you, strangers - though there be an abundance of dancing anxiety just outside of the threshold of my awareness · @ 65, i’m only just getting the gist of how ethereal that can be. The kitchen i am now vacating has a black oven hood against a white wall that is sized for a cook 12” shorter cook; when i began cooking in this kitchen i wrapped a white plastic bag around the corner of the hood i kept hitting - good for 6 months and within the day i removed this slight white bumper that had no physical role · i’ve hit the corner 3 times. As they say where i come from. “s’plain that to me.” Or more importantly ask yourself if i am lying, and investigate your own experience to discover about how sensitive the unconscious mind is, as we lurch from chore to chore in our own end days: are we having fun yet - oh fuck yes !
jts 21/07/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
∞
No comments:
Post a Comment