A seminal film in my early years was “The Lost Weekend” with Ray Milland, not because it foretold my life story, but for having informed me at a young age about the dangers of heedless drunkenness - like you don’t get that the morning of your first hangover. My first and most memorable hangover of many some over my lifetime occurred after an Arcadian Spring Night in the city of Pasadena - i was 15 or so and being warehoused in the basement of one of my 1st cousins and her then, or soon to be husband, a rakish Villonesque hero whom i owe much; this event occurred while my parents matriculated their dissolution in the quiet of ______fill in the blank. Physically i was coming into my own and had the privilege of schlepping soft water tanks up the steep driveways found in the havens of the, then modestly rich of ‘old money Pasadena’. You’d have to have been there, but imagine, i had my first domicile replete with madras bedspreads on the ceiling of the basement in an old craftsman duplex and a too fine porch of those better days; it was a spring afternoon after 6 hours of toting torpedo size canisters of soft water rock salt and being faced with a bohemian sized gallon of “Red Mountain” wine that had no parental supervision associated with it.
What could go wrong besides plenty - (the Rhesus Monkey as i recall, was out of its cage that night) · Joe was mythical and had lived in Chicago as a teenager, however well-heeled a teenager of what was then my age. By the time he became fiancee to my cousin, he’d beaten Heroin and knew the rock group “Strawberry Alarm Clock” well enough for them to play at their wedding in Altadena · heady days. But that day i’d carried much weight but knew in my quiet heart i was really facing a Sea Change which by the end of the summer would include the absence of my father, my oldest brother and my dog. I learned later it had been decided that the two oldest siblings knew of these changes which i would gather only as surprise upon my return - but back to that Arcadian Spring Night · Joe liked to laugh at me as i hoisted his job on my back trying to be a grownup about things i only sensed but felt like the ground swells one learns from growing up in “earthquake country” along the San Andreas fault lines of California.
Joe’s pride and joy was his Austin Healy, not me - however much i vyed · my thinking was that if i earned his respect, my eldest brother - the wounded one, would open to my adoration and deliver me from his sullen rancor; wasn’t gonna happen, not then not now. My responsibility as i now know is to love him to the end regardless of any benefit to me. None of this entered into the equation that night as i relentlessly matched Joe glass for glass - a man 8 years my senior, and 100 lbs my better but whom i loved as though i knew what love was. Somehow it was determined that i might get “laid” if we got to Sunset Blvd in Hollywood - a short spin down the Arroyo Seco Freeway which along with being the 1st freeway in the country was presided over, however indirectly by my Maiden Aunt, Anno - the executive secretary to the Chief Engineer of that project, and so goes my “15 minutes of fame” for those keeping count.
I was so certain that the drive we were embarking on regardless of the Red Mountain haze which made more confident than sober, and then more so, even through the blur of 50 more years of hard living remembering that night, i was out of my depth; i can still feel the physical swell of riding in that dark spruce green sports car and having good looking women ogle back - that was all she wrote · My next recollection was of a gray morning out of doors; i was bitterly cold; my face hurt, but i wasn’t sure where or why and my handsome overlarge sweater stank of vomit which also reeked within every nook and cranny of Joe’s Austin Healy. My morning did not end there, for i learned from my very angry hero-Joe there was no place for me to sleep until every speck of vomit had been cleaned from the cockpit of that conveyance which had hours earlier been a chariot of love, but became little more than a Herculean stable to be swamped, then swamped again.
No, i did not get laid - on the return trip, fortunately for me and my next day’s schlepping chores, the instant i began my technicolor yawn on the wiggling Arroyo Seco, Joe cold-cocked me with a right backhand to the jaw which i did not wake up from until the next morning. I know . .. some guys have all the luck. While you may be repulsed to the core to read of my dissipated youth, it is galvanizing to peer back into my own abyss in the midst of today's sorrow gnashing of the teeth, to know just how tender and fragile i am - very. One would think with a lesson like that, it would be over · not even close. Though today, i can say i am master of my ship and if i so choose to get sick as a dog and remember very little about how it happened, i am very nearly a fucking authority. Who search for still, is that young open-hearted youth freely giving his love and admiration to worthy leaders, however fewer and farther in-between they have become. Oddly, it looks more and more that if i am in need of leadership, it is i, myself who is left to show me the way - go ahead say again how GOD is not a broad with a wicked sense of humor · i might even believe you.
jts 11/12/2020;12/12/2020;13/12/2020
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