A) Picture of the first woman I ever kissed. Nalini. The one on the right. I was eighteen at the time and she was seventeen and pregnant with another man's baby. Shit was going sour in their relationship and she invited me out for a walk in the park. We walked by a horse corral where she took riding lessons when she was eight. She placed her hands on the splinter-wood fence and it felt like childhood to her. Nalini lifted her shirt without turning around and said, "feel my belly." It was firm, stretching skin that was used to being wrapped around a very thin girl. "It's going to be a boy," she said. I put both of my hands on her, one arm around each hip and thought to myself, "I could raise this baby. I could be a dad." Shortly after that, we were laid out on the concrete walk melting into one another's mouths. She bit my earlobe and whispered, "My God. It's so natural with you." Later we walked up into the hills holding hands, looking at stink bugs and talking about school. Was she going to stay in after she had the baby? Yes. Was I really going to drop out to hitch hike? Yup. When we got to the top of the hills, we sat down and watched the flat orange sun drop into the ocean and the lights of Southern California blaze on. So many light bulbs it makes the clouds glow yellow against the night sky.

I had to avoid Nalini after that because her man, Rob, was looking to fuck me up. He and I eventually became friends and smoked a lot of weed together. He was there the night that I realized I was a psychic wizard. He was there the night I was thinking so fast I couldn't speak and wound up drooling all over myself and pissing my pants. Rob took me for a walk one night and we smoked up and talked about how light bulbs had taken over the planet and how nice it would be if giant frogs with razor-sharp teeth would rise up out of the ocean and show these suburbs what was really up.  Last I heard, Nalini and Rob got married and then divorced. Their kid was a boy. Nalini worked her way through college as a model. Rob turned wino on the streets of San Francisco.

(B) When I was eight months sober, my lady Heidi gave this bracelet to me on the top of Maiden Peak, a dead volcano in Oregon. We spent the better half of a day just looking out at the clouds and the other dead volcanoes. Fed a chipmunk. Spotted a lightning strike that was still smoldering. Talked for a while with a lone hiker who had a twitch and an altimeter and a gun. Ate some gorp. Then Heidi said she loved me and cried.
Heidi was epileptic. She used to leave her body during sex and watch us from the ceiling like a ghost. It scared her to be so close-reminded her of too many things, she said. So we used to just talk and hold hands and watch the snow fall. And I would wish she didn't shake when I pressed my skin against her.
Heidi's dad was a doctor and used to write her scrips for all kinds of shit. When she finally kicked, Heidi was on so many pills that if she had stopped cold it would have killed her. When I met her dad, he took us out for a 30 dollar plate of over-cooked pasta and told me that when he encountered a problem in life, his solution was to "throw money at it until it goes away." Fuckin' champ, that guy.
Heidi wrote me a postcard a few months ago that said she had gone skiing in Oregon with some friends of hers and they stayed across the street from my old house which had a backyard that rolled down into the river. In the summers we used to jump off a bridge upstream and spend the afternoon floating our way home to lunch. My next-door neighbor on one side was a junky-Junky John. He caught the same fish every night and then set it free so he could catch it again. My neighbors on the other side were ten hippies who lived in a fog of Humboldt Kind and who liked to float down the river with us too. In her postcard, Heidi said she was working for an herbal supplement corporation. They flew her to Germany where she was greeted with champagne and fireworks. Write me sometime, she said. I never did.

(C) When I decided to go to college, I moved back to my parents home and worked for nine months as a projectionist in a 12-plex to scrape up a little cash while sending out applications. Kind of a perfect job. If it paid better than minimum wage I'd make it a career. All I did was sit in the dark and watch movies and read by flashlight. If that got boring I went downstairs and flirted with Tina who worked box and had hair that looked like perfect yellow waves of plastic. She used to chew gum and say things like, "My daddy said that he won't pay to get my windows tinted. Can you believe that?" That girl made me smile all over.
Everyday I sat down and ate an avocado sandwich and worked on a novella about people falling in love in Los Angeles after an act of God fell upon the Earth like snow and reduced the global human population to 20,000. Grass growing on the freeways. Cows grazing on the 405. A lingering veil of smoke from the funeral pyres. The main characters meet at Huntington Beach. Lady had wavy red hair like Heidi. Wore cut-off blue-jean shorts, a black cowboy hat and a Superman tee-shirt with no bra. The man looked just like me. They rode up the coast together looking for a better life, making love, and dodging the giant owls that had become a major predator of humans after God's snow. I don't remember how I ended that book. I think they got to Oregon and saw ordinary snow fall and wept when they realized that it wasn't going to kill them.
Item C is a single frame of film featuring a fat, elderly Orson Welles pulling a cardboard rainbow from a tiny yellow box. I don't remember which movie I clipped this from, but I do remember that my boss built it so that the first twenty minutes played backwards, upside down, and silently. Needless to say, we got a lot of complaints and I had to gut the fucker to set things right again.

(D) I entered the county nut-house "paranoid schizophrenic," and exited a "good responder to medication." After my release I believed that all sixteen million inhabitants of the Greater Los Angeles Area were reading my thoughts. I would hide inside all day and then wander the suburbs in the quiet of night, pacing the storm ditches and railroad tracks in an attempt to avoid traffic because The Hospital was manipulating the flow of traffic so that I would see cars pass by in a specific order of color-black car black car white car red car white car black car black car-and then they would record and analyze my psychic reaction with the device they implant in my blood stream that one time when I was held down in the restraining room. They wanted to see if they could turn me into a god.
The Hospital got tired of me when I only manifested partial signs of divinity and I received strong signals that they were going to close in and kill me. It might go down as a heart attack. It might go down as an "overdose." I put all my pipes and my bongs in a pillow case and handed it to my dad. I said, "Dad, I've been smoking all along. All those times I went out to the garage and said that I was writing." He took the bag and didn't even look inside it. He just looked me in the eyes. "I want to go away somewhere," I said. "Somewhere out of state. Someplace where they don't lock the doors."
Dad made a few calls - he's got friends in the business - and got a deal on this place in Arizona called The Meadows. I remember thinking, "Christ, The Meadows, what kind of sappy shit am I getting myself into?" We didn't talk at all on the way there. I was laid out in the backseat, dozing and writing a screenplay about a group of Navajo peyote-eaters who use their psychic powers to take down the FBI. Dad checked me in. We didn't hug. Told me later he wept all the way back to Los Angeles.

In group my first day out of detox, a woman two chairs to my right was relating her story. She worked for the telephone company in New Mexico and her favorite drug was crystal meth. She'd smoke up, climb a telephone pole to dial up her buddies and blabber all day. She had four kids. Her husband beat her up and he beat up the four kids. One day she shot him in the knee and when he was passed out from blood loss she shoved a tube of wood glue into his cock and filled him up. The judge was lenient and sent her to The Meadows.
The next guy was from Philadelphia. Worked in a fabric factory. Liked smack. Said he had chronic chest pain from 27 years in prison and needed at least some Demerol, so would the counselor be so kind as to explain this to the nurses in detox? He said he was in a lot of pain. 27 years in the pen. They sent him up for shipping drugs into New York harbor. He had his own boat and packed it to the gills with thousands pounds of Indochina prime. First day in prison he stabbed a guy in the heart with a pencil. From then on he would mumble to himself constantly, eat cockroaches and smear the walls of his cell with his own shit to keep the men away from him for 27 years.
A light descended from the ceiling and entered my chest. These were my people. Everything was going to be OK. Over the next month the voices in my head grew softer and somewhat less antagonistic and I started thinking about moving to Oregon.
Item D is the lead coin they pass out at graduation at the Meadows. It's blunted on one edge so that it can stand on a flat surface thus symbolizing balance. Somehow I can never get it to stay straight.

(E) This is my cousin Sam's football card. Plays quarterback for the McRae Park Yellow Jackets. Long before I started getting fucked up, I dropped out of high school with the idea of hitching around the country until I landed in a community of people who were living a life of honesty and love and defiance. My first stop was Aunt Judi and Uncle Giff's house in Minneapolis where I'd be roomed and fed for a month in exchange for babysitting my cousins Sam and Claire. When I got there the last traces of snow were still melting away in the shadows. Mornings while the kids were at school and daycare, I rode Giff's bike around the city and chilled out with gutter punks. In the afternoons and evenings, I made sure the kids ate and played and ate and brushed their teeth for bed.
One night, when Judi and Giff were out at a play, Claire hit her head on the bathtub faucet and started to scream. I moved to comfort her and she screamed louder. "NO! MOMMY!" I tried to reason with her for a while, told her that Mommy was out and wouldn't be back for a while and wasn't it better to let me kiss the booboo and help her go to bed? No way. Claire wasn't having any of that. She wanted Mommy and no one else would do. I went downstairs and paced in a circle. Fuck! I punched a hole in the drywall and walked back up to the bathroom where Claire was still screaming. Sam was watching her and going poop. He thought it was all pretty cool.
"Clarie?" I said.
She screamed real loud.
"You want to go look for Mommy?"
She got out of the bath and put her socks on and said, "Ok. Let's go." Sam and I got her dried off and dressed her rest of the way and we all went downstairs together. Sam saw the hole I'd put in the wall and the white flakes of plaster dust on the floor. He said "Woah. Did you do that?" I nodded and Sam smiled. Having a big cousin who could punch holes in the wall was cool. I put Claire on my shoulders when we got outside and the three of us toured the neighborhood looking for Judi. We wound up under a bridge down by the Mississippi calling out "Mommy?" and listening to the cars rumble over head. A little flurry kicked up and whirled around us. We sat there until Claire fell asleep in my arms, and then Sam and I walked back home and I put them both to bed.
When I saw him four years later, Sam had doubled in size. He handed me his football card and smiled when I put it in my wallet.

(F) Last time I was in LA, I bumped into one of my old anarchist buddies while wandering through the stacks of a massive corporate bookseller. We used to run a Food Not Bombs! together, stealing canned food and feeding people. Fed protests and demonstrations, anti-police brutality rallies, that sort of thing. It took him a minute to recognize me. When he did he gave me a hug and asked me how I'd been. All the anarchists I've ever known have been the kind of people to walk up and give you a hug, then they make sure that your heart is ok and that you are well fed. Good people, anarchists. A little small talk and then he told me that Food Not Bombs! in all of LA county was dead. After I'd left they disbanded and started up the Anarchist Black Cross. "Check it out," he said and handed me this business card.
He said he was living off of worker's comp checks and supporting political prisoners full-time. He told me the whole West Coast was blowin' up after the WTO protests in Seattle. There were cars following him around. A man in a black suit had approached one of his friends in San Francisco with photographs of every member in the LA anarchist scene and made some kind of vague threat. At the Cinco de Mayo antidiscrimination march, they saw some dude taking pictures of their cars and then they got beat up by a bunch of Nazis. Got his picture in the paper. Pissed his mom off. My friend told me the big conference was coming up and that I should definitely be there. All the anarchists on the planet were coming to LA for a week of workshops and camaraderie before the Democratic National Convention. There was talk of riots. Rage Against the Machine was going to play. Shit was finally blowin' up, he said. The next night I saw him on C-Span explaining that the Anarchist Conference Committee was not directly involved with any plans to riot.
Around the time I left the Whittier chapter of Food Not Bombs!, the soups were getting worse and the members were collecting guns. They had to be ready in case shit went down. I remember a Sunday morning when the soup was simmering and my friend was showing me his assault rifle and his pistols. I squirmed when he held out a gun for me to hold. No thanks. Then I told him that I was going to college in Wisconsin. I'd be gone in a month. I wanted to be a psychiatrist who climbed mountains. He put the guns away without saying anything and went to go stir the soup. Sometimes he got quiet when he was pissed.
"What?" I said.
"You're a little bitch," he said.
We got into a long argument about the revolutionary ethics of a college education. Apparently, college was a bunch of bourgeoise bullshit. The corporations were mowing everything down. The IMF was turning the Third World into slave labor. People were getting arrested for giving away food. Didn't that mean anything to me? Didn't I realize what could be done with the amount of money that I was going to give to some privatized institution? Education was just another business. It was perfectly immoral for me to go to college when most people couldn't afford it. I wanted to be a shrink in the forest? What was I going to do, dance around with a drum and make everything all better? Didn't I know that there wouldn't even be any forests left by the time I graduated? There were police in the streets every day killing people to reinforce the racist power structure and if I went to some private school out of state I was just taking part in that machine. How could I even call myself a revolutionary?
I decided not to defend my point of view. He'd never buy it. That political revolutions could never be maintained, that internal revolutions rippled throughout generations and could one day heal the planet-he'd have gone to the closet and loaded his guns. Soup burned that day. My friend tried to put in vinegar to take away the burned tasted, and then put in lots of pepper to burn out the vinegar taste. Then we decided to put in rice to mellow the whole thing out. It was quite possibly the worst tasting soup ever made. People ate it anyway.

(G) The California DMV doesn't really care if you can drive. Once you get the license, they send you a bill for fourteen bucks every two or three years and reissue your card. This means I won't have to be retested until I roll my car on the freeway or hit someone's dog. This also means that forever and ever I will appear on my major form of identification as I did when I was 18, stoned, and trying to hide my buzz from my father. On the way down to Anaheim, we didn't say anything, just listened to the radio. He knew I was high. He always knew I was high. I was always high. I remember that the freeway was nice and fluid, the way it gets nice and fluid around ten o'clock. Everyone who passed us was driving a white car. Everyone who we passed was in a black car. There were cars that remained at the same pace around us, all of them slightly different shades of blue. NPR was classical music and then switched to a live-in-the-chopper report over the San Diego freeway. Some guy had stolen a tank and was headed our way. I started laughing and the blue cars closed in around us. Dad switched the radio off and they backed away again.
The DMV was packed by the time we got there and Dad. We were the only white people in the whole place. Latino men with their thumbs in their belt loops. Black men bantering and slapping each other's shoulders when they laughed. Asians huddled in groups. Arabs trying to stay aloof, occasionally murmuring to each other in Arabic. Everyone waiting in miles and miles of the wrong line. Dad and I cut through the masses and went up to an empty window with the only white clerk. "We have an appointment," my Dad said and as he did so the collective hatred of every human in the room poured over us. Dad couldn't feel it, or didn't care. We have an appointment. If these other people would have called they wouldn't have to wait in line. The woman didn't even bother to ask our names or check the computer for our appointment. She just pointed to the back of the room where they took the pictures.
"I lost my card," I said. "Don't I have to take the test?"
Nope. I just had to get my picture taken and pay up fourteen bucks. We walked past everyone waiting in line for the camera and I was told to stand on a strip of red tape. I could feel my skin boiling with the shame of it. Tried to smile but it hurt my face. My eyes bulged, felt heavy and lopsided. My ears burned, turned red. They hate me. Click. Fourteen bucks. It would come in the mail in two weeks. In and out of the Anaheim DMV in ten minutes. Four black cars following us all the way home like a funeral headed north on the 57.
Every time I'm pulled over, buy smokes, or go to a bar, every time I sign up for a library card or video rental account, each time I open up at a new bank or file papers at a new job, I open my wallet and pull out my driver's license. Maybe my wallet is open for all of five seconds. The clerk might see Sam's football card and hear the sound of coins sliding around. Then they take my license from me, look at the picture, look back at me. Sometimes, when I've grown a beard, they say, "Huh. You grew a beard." If I grew my hair out, they say, "You got longer hair now." Then they search around for the date of birth, grind out a calculation of my age, and hand me back the card. No one ever takes the time to search my eyes and compare them with the picture on my license. No one ever says, "I'm sorry, but this isn't you."
 

Back to Sandy River Review