Pensacola

Seeing a pair of Saudi officers in the mess hall at Pensacola Naval Air Station was a mere curiosity in 1986. My squadron had sent me there to attend something called Naval Aircrewman Candidate School. The Naval Officer Candidate School across the street from us, not long before portrayed in the film An Officer and a Gentleman, was our model. For them it was their boot camp, Officer Training School (OTS) with an aviation focus. Candidates wearing comic chrome helmets were continually harried by Marine Drill instructors, all of senior enlisted rank.

For us it was bootcamp-lite. Very light. Up early for physical training and classes and usually done and at liberty by three or so in the afternoon. The course was dominated by water survival training. You did things like swim a mile in a flight suit, tread water for ten minutes in same (not as easy as it sounds), and of course the legendary "Dilbert Dunker", a simulated water crash wherein you had to escape blindfolded from a great big barrel dropped in the water and turned upside down.



A couple of days camping hungry at Elgin Air Force base constituted survival training. The land there was spare woods of small thin trees, strafed by the sound of OV-10 Warhogs and occasionally the sinister drone of "Puff the Magic Dragon", a C-130 mounted with a 25mm gatling gun.



Pensacola was pleasant, especially compared to the giant scrub patch that is Camp Pendelton.
Spanish moss draped the trees and the architecture was colonial. Overhead you might see the bases' Blue Angels flying team practicing. We chased girls at night and talked about it in the day, without shame. Political correctness wasn't here yet.

9/11 was years away.

Summer Re-run

Summer. Nineteen eighty-something. We were parting the traffic on the 605 southbound for Huntington Beach; I was wearing nothing but shorts and sandals, one hand holding on to the motorcycle seat, the other cradling a six-pack of beer, football-style. We leaned headlong into the wind like a pair of ski-jumpers, as P. effortlessly weaved the stodgy Honda CB350 through the cars, rendering them still as haystacks. I peered into them as we passed, looking for girls. My head rocked with spontaneous energy, to some silent beat, the effect of the youth spending itself within me. The exquisite expiration of childhood. We shouted back and forth in the gale we carried along with us, laughing through mouths windswept into lunatic grins; we cheerfully harried the odd fellow who was momentarily abreast and sharing our direction. We turned with the road into a direct and endless path toward a sun that will never set...

Re-run

Memento
June 7, 2008

Memento, n.; A hint, suggestion, token, or memorial, to awaken memory; that which reminds or recalls to memory; a souvenir.
[1913 Webster]

I thought to capture my history but was surprised to find it won't stay put; I'm not sure I recognize it. Sometimes it's a faint image, like a 3-D hologram, shimmying and wavering. I reach for it and it flickers out as my hand passes through. I don't know if it isn't just a composite of experience real and imagined, some mine, some stolen from others, some culled from the cultural commons. There are those moments we all have, of sudden temporary displacement, wherein we do not recognize our surroundings, the life that sprung up around us, that is to say moments when we do not recognize ourselves. These leave behind the residue of doubt. 

I'm having trouble neatly separating the experience from the flotsam trapped in the recesses and eddies of my mind, from the residue still building up about the edges of the endless stream of electronic illusion passing through even now. The sticky fragments of no particular relevance left behind in no sensible order. I can no longer clearly demarcate the boundary between the real and the representational. I see now I never really could. Did I live this life? Perhaps I saw it all on TV.

Nothing is stranger than to look in one's past and ask: did this happen? Am I that child, connected to the present by a chain of heart beats? How in the hell can this all be? How can this world be real? All this time spent no more than a blip; inconsequential, yet everything I know.

The truth is a tear of mercury that resists containment. It cannot be seen head-on or appreciated in full. It will not be drawn in from the periphery. We are all reduced to furtive voyeurs of our own lives in the end. Your history is that light smudge in the corner of your eye, that flits away when you look in its direction.
I haven't done anything here, after all. Skirting the issue always; the story of my life, of all our lives, of humanity. All this supposed revelation just circling the periphery like a basketball "rimming out." Nothing.

The real journey I will not make.
Or maybe not. Maybe we all make that journey within, the only real journey there is, eventually. Maybe that's what death is. Going home. The incoherent babble of death's delirium is the purging, surrendering energy back into the ether, in waves of language by way of dissipating will, a chemical reaction rendering our identities inert and final. Only after it can no longer be known, only after it is lost is it made whole; only then does it lose its contingent nature and become complete. Or not. Who knows?

This, this is all just stalking, lurking about outside the fortress of reality in the forest of illusion.
No: illusion is the fortress, reality the forest.

Still Life and Live Painting

"Is that the Whiskey Bar back there?" I asked the only other guy to turn up at the wrought iron gate leading to an alley behind the bar I'd found locked earlier.

"Yeah. You don't go in this way though. The front doors open at ten."

"I see."

Someone had told me the event began at nine, so arriving a half hour late to convey a casual attitude was now arriving a half hour early, conveying the bored desperation of a loner, or revealing it, if you want the truth.

We talked for a bit; he seemed to take me for just another regular or would-be regular. Doesn't he see how old I am? Probably, but not just how old. But one thing about Portland, it's less weird here for someone my age to show up at a club. At least I think so, and have been told as much; I haven't any real frame of reference. I hadn't been out to a proper nightclub in over a decade, I surmised.

"Wednesdays are a little weird." He said.

"I don't know. A friend of a friend is doing some thing here, so I came out. I thought it started at nine."

Turned out he was one of the artists for the live-painting event.

"So you know Tasha, then?"

"A friend of hers from work. I've never been here before." I don't know why I felt the need to explain myself.

Another guy showed up, a friend of the first. He immediately starts in about his new tattoo, a calf-job under a sheen of Vaseline. He doesn't know how many tattoos he has. Maybe forty. More and more people claim to have lost count.

"I have no ink." I confess at some point. I've been talking to the second guy as if I belong here--he has no idea who I am and takes it for granted. Turns out he's another one of the artists; he's the third. I help him carry his stuff--an unremarkable pattern on a canvas with which I assume he's going to do something interesting, some effect-lights, materials. I skip the cover charge by playing roadie like this.

"You need a stamp." The first artist said, just after I had decided I would go back up front and do this, and that it would be a good move, for which I would now get no credit.

He doesn't know how to take me, I can tell. No one does. But I'm more at ease having established rapport already, and with two of the performers, such as they were. The place is nearly empty, and that's just as well, too; the music is typical current club dance music, which I have no ability to categorize. Even when I stayed current with electronic music years ago I could not, would not, bring myself up to speed on the categories. I could not tell jungle from house, and still can't. Drum and bass is easy enough, though I don't really understand that it's all built around the "amen chorus". I recognize it when I hear it. The music is as seductive as it is idiotic, throbbing through the empty club.

About a half hour in the turnout was looking to be poor for the night. A pair in animal pajamas danced at one end of the floor, a guy who looked to be in his thirties, wearing a warm-up jacket is doing break-dance moves at the other.

The friend who invited me showed up. She's young, very young. Immediately it's awkward. I had expected a full house: I would see her, maybe not right away, we'd chat a little and that would be it. I would see her a couple of times more in the evening, have the friendly, shallow exchange I was good at, and that would be it. Now, here I am, having arrived early, the place is empty and she can't escape me, maybe she didn't even expect me to show up in the first place. To top it off I went in for a hug, that she did not intend, awkwardly and all but forcing it on her, spilling my beer in the process. I feel compelled to mention the awkwardness. But it's okay. I tell her I've been hanging out with the artists, maybe that will help. It's okay. I'm not a stalker! I'm not a weirdo! She shuffles off with an apologetic air.

Later I see her at the bar and recover somewhat. It's all like a journey back in time; nothing has changed from the days when all this meant something. Nothing is on the line now--I'm just trying to get out of the house--but it feels more fraught than ever. Just like years ago, in my head it's a campaign of reverses, advances, uncertain meanings, like a war with an opponent who may not even care that one's being waged. Nothing changes, even after everything has changed.

The friend of a friend shows up later--I do not know her well--and there's a quick embrace. She sees it; good, see, I'm not a stalker! I'm not a weirdo! I just don't know how to act. I never learned how to act--that is I don't know how to behave--I'm acting all the time, even when I'm alone. Was it still the goal--was it ever the goal--behind all of this, "going out", meeting people, love, sex, relationships, that one should meet someone with whom they no longer had to act? Or was it just me? I don't think I had even the good sense to pursue that hopeless goal with real conviction. If it happened, it happened, I thought, as I thought about everything else. Whatever the case, I never found it.

The first two artists made desultory and indistinguishable changes to the mostly complete canvases they brought in; there was no relation to the music. I had seen something years ago on television where a guy did a quick painting of Jimi Hendrix to a playing of some Hendrix standard (probably "Purple Haze"); by the time the song's over he's finished. I had thought this would be something like that, gimmicky as it was it would be worth seeing. Tasha does much better, opening up a sketch book and improvising ink-drawings from scratch, showing more talent and imagination than the other two.

The place never filled up, but that's okay; I got to talk to a young beautiful woman for much of the night. It's also okay she had nothing better to do and I served as a sort of backstop to a disappointing evening. She tells me all about herself, the way people do to half-strangers; I don't know. I'm consumed with how I'm perceived by everyone, right now it's this person who in a few short months will be gone from my life like countless other people I never really got to know. They so outnumber the true intimates, who are so few and precious, that any single one of them--this charming, beautiful, messed up kid whose only interest for me lies in this selfish need--feels like a dread weight I can no longer carry. I wonder if this is cause or effect of my solitary life.

 She invited me to hang out with some of the other youngsters after, but I thought it would be better to quit while I was ahead. Later I excused myself and fumbled the goodnight, just as I fumbled the hello, knowing the quick hug was probably out, but the awareness of it was there in the air. I don't even like the quick hug routine so much--I just don't know how to act.

I spent the next day in a typical psychological funk--a day shorter than last time--ruminating over how I came off, how pathetic it is that I care, how it probably means nothing to these other people whose image of me is so important and so meaningless at the same time. Plus ca change.

But I will get out of the house more, and drink less.

 

Ephemera

Chris White

Chris White. His name was Chris White. The name returned to me "out of the blue" as they say--in fact it I was gazing on a gnarled grey sky, up to which ghostly ringlets of steam escaping my shower ascended like released souls returning to a primordial mass. The name only occurred to me at first, a dissociated orphan. Who was Chris White? Then the image appeared, like a spectral holograph sliding into place and animating this dead form.

Chris White was my first enemy. He must have predecessors long forgotten, but Chris White was the first person I identified as my enemy. And that he remains. One of my earliest memories is of ignoring my mother's half-pleading, half-threatening imprecations, to clamber over our back fence into Chris White's backyard and answer his dare. I don't remember the fight, but to this day I can still call up, however faint, my umbrage at the effrontery that he should challenge me.

Thus began our border war. Plundering raids, incursions, bottle rocket attacks, dried dog shit terror bombings; it could get ugly. Greater powers might intervene on occasion--teachers, parents, older kids--but never to finality. It was no use; ours was a conflict that went deeper than territorial integrity or clashing interests. We hated each other and that was all we needed to know. It was as if this hatred preceded all else. Mutual hatred was the Aristotelian prime mover of our hostility.

Peace was never sought much less declared. We remain technically at war, like North and South Korea. Hostilities ended only when they became impracticable due to his family moving away--relocated to make way for a freeway. If I saw him tomorrow and somehow recognized him, I would not be surprised if we resumed our contest without preliminaries.

Chris White was the first person I rejected on principle, that is, simply for being Chris White. To live, to not throw yourself off a building or simply starve yourself to death, after all, is to declare yourself worthy of the greatest gift. To live is to assert: this is what a human is, this is what he does. We are all really just competing versions of Man; even if we don't choose our version. We see it in the satisfaction of superiority we feel before the degenerate and the ridiculous, in the cruel human habit we have of seeking out the base for ridicule and disdain. Likewise, that same disdain indicates our recognition that shared humanity means shared shame. We're all relatives, however distant. To me Chris White was a foul ideology incarnate, and every breath he took a desecration.

He was big and ungainly, with broad hips and narrow shoulders, with dull brown hair and a face without features due to an excess of subcutaneous fat. This physique wouldn't have mattered if it wasn't so true to the personality it hosted, which seemed to me unfortunately feminine--not to say effeminate, which would have inspired in me at least condescending sympathy, for the hostile attention it would have brought him. But Chris White was mediocrity incarnate, and mediocrity has its advantages in the crab bucket that is elementary school. I may not have been anything special, but I had a knack for attracting unwanted attention.

Chris White had the unfortunate combination of a poor sense of humor and a keen sense of propriety. He took offense easily and protested shrilly. Thus I suspect the initial casus belli of our war was something I said, probably in jest. My mouth was getting me into trouble from an early age. We were ideally suited to hate each other. Chris White was the first in a long line of people, usually male, who commit the unforgivable sin of not getting Dennis Dale. Chris White rejected me on principle too. How dare he.

But it was he who managed to draw me into an early disgrace the memory of which I cannot shake despite, or maybe because, of its petty nature. Queued up on the school blacktop for some purpose or other, we found ourselves in close proximity. It wasn't long before we were taunting each other. Holding a windbreaker, I whipped him across the face with it, cutting him with the zipper. I was marched off to the principal's office by a horror-stricken teacher. In an instant I was transformed from a well-behaved student to a problem child. My mother was mortified.

The Whites moved out and their home remained behind for years, vacant and boarded up, as various lawsuits attached to the freeway construction worked their way through the snake of the legal system. A root from an oak tree cut down from our backyard sprang up in the White's backyard in the form of a great, ugly bush. One summer Japanese beetles appeared around it. I had never seen them before and took them to be some hideous form of bumble bee. I took to hunting them with an old tennis racket; the lumbering fliers came over the fence like lobs over the net that I would smash back over it, looking to achieve distance or height. Eventually they cut the house from its foundation and carried it off.

I can't help cherishing even the hated things from my past. It wouldn't be my past without them, after all. So yes, I miss Chris White. But I do not like him.

 
Ulrich Schnauss, Suddenly the Trees are Giving Way

Your Presence is Not Required

This is going to end badly.
Here I am slouching through middle-age; sexually I am hors de combat, as if by some secret but final decree. I lament it but the sentence is just--and just as well (I wouldn't join any club that'd have me for a member, and I wouldn't conjoin with anyone who'd have my member); I haven't earned any better.
It's time for a hobby, perhaps. But what the hell is a hobby? A man does a thing, or he doesn't. Me, I don't do anything.

I cannot help but see the futility in all forms of action. There is nothing I feel is better done than not done; all is a wash. The moment I take up a thing is the moment I lose interest in it. I am losing my ability to distinguish worth; everything is blending together in an unindividuated mass. Society is a great burlesque; garish, farcical, and in bad taste. Beneath "reality" some equilibrium sustains itself as sure as water finding its level, and humanity is but fodder; we are the inactive ingredient. Now don't start on me. One doesn't choose to believe such things; such things choose him. I'm not a cheerless man, and I don't envy your engagement with humanity.

I find organizations inherently sinister. I despise collective action. Concern sickens me. All men are foreigners to me, speaking nonsense. I am nauseated by the pace of time--I have temporal motion sickness. The less of it that remains the more mysterious it is. Its passage, the grinding, erosive consistency of it, is beyond my capabilities of understanding. Thus my default position--petrified immobility.

It's a congenital condition; you should see the rest of the family. Our indolence is sinful. How the hell this desultory line propagated is a mystery. We are a living refutation of evolution--and God. No logic or divinity could produce this. My family's existence is a profanation. My existence, in a world of heroism and suffering, is an obscenity. Yet we endure. Yet here I am. Still standing and pointlessly defiant. And there you are.

Nonetheless I keep an eye on the horizon for something I don't expect and wouldn't recognize; I am open to the prospect of meaning. Still, it cannot change a thing, because whatever comes:
This is going to end badly.

re-runs

An inborn dread, a sort of latent panic familiar to my line, preceded me. This inherent conviction that things must go wrong will not be loosed by any device of socialization, rebellion, or medication. Ironically, this same fixedness in the breast of its unfortunate host makes it perfectly portable, and impervious to geography--maybe this is why my people have propelled themselves across all parts of the globe, as if in flight from this dread; maybe this is why now we seem determined to self-dissipate as a race. We can run but we can't hide.

Even this curious adaptation works as if it has its own ambition and designs, treating us as the means to our own end. A long line of dull, placid farmers crossed the Atlantic to become dull, placid American farmers, settling in square-head country in the perennially freezing dead-center of the continent, where we felt at home. At some point we were displaced from land to city, and, characteristically unaware, set upon a modest decline from modest heights. We are being deselected.
The pioneers came west drawn by horses on wooden wheels over wild country. Years later it was rubber on asphalt, a trail of noxious fumes, and little fortitude required. A group bound by no comparable shared act of passage, by nothing in particular. I am of this family.
The last leg of our white trash odyssey was the motor journey into the American West, merging along the way with the Okies and the wetbacks, with the disillusioned alongside the delusional, the failed and the ambitious, those on the lamb and them on the make, all holding in common a crisis of options; to California.

That lump in your throat is childhood passing

Summer. Nineteen eighty-something. We were parting the traffic on the 605 southbound for Huntington Beach; I was wearing nothing but shorts and sandals, one hand holding on to the motorcycle seat, the other cradling a six-pack of beer, football-style. We leaned headlong into the wind like a pair of ski-jumpers, as P. effortlessly weaved the stodgy Honda CB350 through the cars, rendering them still as haystacks. I peered into them as we passed, looking for girls. My head rocked with spontaneous energy, to some silent beat, the effect of the youth spending itself within me. The exquisite expiration of childhood. We shouted back and forth in the gale we carried along with us, laughing through mouths windswept into lunatic grins; we cheerfully harried the odd fellow who was momentarily abreast and sharing our direction. We turned with the road into a direct and endless path toward a sun that will never set...


The Dandy Warhols, Grunge Betty

ephemera

Ephemera, n.
1. A fever of one day's continuance only.
[1913 Webster]


Self Loathing and Salvation at the Seventies' End, on Acid

I am transfixed by the excessive make-up on the homely girl sitting next to me. Color has taken on a familiar and peculiar quality; things are sharpened and outlined with a current of acidic light about the edges, as if superimposed on film. Everything has a blood-filled look. The physical world is flattened out before me, I’m viewing it on a screen in my mind, and all is roiling beneath this surface, masking some teeming atomic boil. I have developed novel abilities; my focus is now superhuman. I can see the molecules binding things together; I can see the space in between.

My new screen-vision is faulty; an area of distortion moves about it, a ball rolling about on a suspended sheet of plastic. For a moment I understand, perfectly, the space-time continuum. Just as quickly it is lost to the ether. The girl’s face won’t stay still, swelling outward here and there momentarily. The ungainly contours of her face are shifting endlessly. All of this as she sits perfectly still. Later I realize it. She's terrified too!

The two of us make up the back row of the sparsely peopled classroom, where we take cover from humiliation. We never spoke; we never made eye contact. We studiously avoided giving any hint of recognition of each other. We are cowering through high school, developing strategies to avoid being caught out in the open. We fear even the sympathy of kindred souls.

I am overwhelmed by empathy for the homely girl, for the pain of humiliation that has nowhere to go and must continually consume our rapidly diminishing innocence like an electrochemical reaction. Our batteries are already low. But I haven’t named these things yet; inside it can only resolve in self-loathing and a heightened sense of this vague, maddeningly pervasive fear.

Now the walls are breathing, like we’re inside a great bellows. I can hear it; nobody else can. They don’t have my heightened senses. My hair is straw; my skin is cardboard. I marvel at their touch. I want to flee. I need to get out of the constricting room, away from the bughouse that is our school, out of these filthy clothes. I want to shed my skin. I feel filthy, right down to my core. But there is no escape because everything is implicated in the fraud. Everything and everybody is newly exposed; ugly, mean, common, false. None of us are real; we are mere representations and facsimiles. Just like the false plastic veneers all about us. We are projecting these images like holograms; they shimmy and stutter occasionally. This too I now see clearly.
The interior of the room, dusted with a film of harrowing school-room light, is a deliberate, menacing kitsch. Everything looks ugly and cheap, second-rate. It all looks as if it’s about to fall apart, to burst at the seams. Everything is about to melt into one formless, indistinguishable mass.
I'm not sure how I will be able to continue, having seen this. I'm beginning to worry. I need to move, to shake this presence somehow. I can't escape but I can keep moving. It seems like I've been sitting in class for hours, yet only five minutes have passed. And I'm starting to peak.

Mr. Hino, the Born-Again history teacher, is oblivious to my condition. Every Pearl Harbor Day Mr. Wong--being Chinese, and therefore duty-bound--recruits a class to launch a paper-airplane surprise attack on the Japanese Hino, assailing and pelting him in mid-period. He takes this like he takes most minor indignities, with slightly annoyed, patient grace.
Mr. Hino is rightfully appalled at the condition of the youth he tends, and still he has no idea how degenerate we are, the ignorant, oblivious contempt we have for decency. He has no idea how far the rot has progressed, because no one does yet; it is overtaking even itself. He doesn’t know the levee has already been breached, and it is only now a case of water finding its level. He will not be here to see its later stages; he will not suffer the realization that it has no end, no breaking point, just an infinite, endless degradation. I do hope Mr. Hino never looked down to find there is no bottom.

But, God bless him, he is forever looking upward. He occasionally tries to better us, railing, gently, against decadence. Today he announces a special guest. An alumnus from a few years prior has come to give us a talk. An eminence of a sort, he is a local legend; a gang-banger known for his oversized arms ("Chops" was his nickname) and his bravery. He is regarded, in the highest praise granted one of his milieu, as being "crazy." Chops is impressive too; squat and powerfully built, with a jet black pork chop moustache and heavy lidded eyes giving him a look of latent ferocity. He wears the basic cholo uniform of the time: khaki pants, plain white t-shirt. He’s here to tell us the tale of his redemption. In the throes of my chemically-induced paranoia, I’m about to be scared straight. I‘m panicked anew.

Apparently Chops laid waste to the dowdy suburbs of Norwalk with no lasting consequences, and it would take a purely accidental brush with death in the army to open his eyes. Something about a failing tank turret threatening to decapitate him and a prayer answered. Chops finishes his testimony by asking for volunteers to rise and pledge themselves to Jesus. A whole new dilemma! Rise and risk being torn to shreds by your fellows; remain seated and renounce God. For all but two of us, God proved less fearsome than the mob. The bell rang.

ephemera

The Girl With Flies on Her Face

"Do you have a request?"
The Okinawan bartender's accented words took a while to make their way through the fog shrouding my senses, created as a byproduct of the pleasant psychoactive interaction of sake, Kirin, and what may have been absinthe. After the import of his words welled up and revealed itself like the die in a Magic-8 Ball, after I stared at him for a moment with every outward appearance symptomatic of a catatonic, I realized he was asking if I had a preference for what movie he should play next.

It was the eighties, and my friend Ron and I were drinking in a small locals' bar outlying the part of Okinawa dominated by a large U.S. Military presence and the carnival blight of sordid amusements that always accompanies it. Okinawa is part of the Ryukyu island chain, hemming in the East China Sea from the vast western Pacific, trailing out toward Taiwan and the Tropic of Cancer in a crescent pattern, like debris falling away from the mainland of Japan.

I don't remember how we happened into this particular bar, surrounded by Okinawans remarkably gracious at the intrusion of two drunken jarheads where they should have been left in peace, away from the effectively occupied part of the island (an occupation then in its fourth decade). That part, tied together by narrow alleys and streets connecting the multitude of military bases and their attendant bars, massage parlors, and police substations, was overrun nightly by American post-adolescents, bored and restless, homesick and slightly deranged, resented and resentful.
I don't know why, but the few blurry sequences of that relatively uneventful all-nighter haunt me like a benign ghost even now, almost twenty years later.

What is, after all, this process that elevates occasional random and unexceptional experiences along with the monumental events of one's life, placing them alongside more momentous experiences like awkward strangers at an intimate gathering, while cruelly and randomly submerging so many of those things that we would greedily hoard if it was only up to us after all: the contours of her face, your mother's voice in your infant ears, the sensations of your first time? Perhaps in the end it is all revealed as equally precious, momentous, absurd.

A couple of Okinawans had invited us to their table, pressing us into service with questions about America and English practice; we were paid in sake and goodwill. The bartender was proud of his state of the art videodisc system and collection, and in the spirit of Okinawan hospitality that decades enduring the uninterrupted and restless current of transient American servicemen has somehow failed to destroy, made the gesture of asking me, as a guest, if I had a preference.
I don't know why, but I thought to amuse myself by asking for the Sex Pistols. I was thinking of but couldn't name the mock-documentary from a few years before, The Great Rock & Roll Swindle.

This wasn't altogether obscure. The Japanese and Okinawans had a fascination with punk, indeed in the nineties Japan produced a garage act called Thee Michelle Gun Elephant (after one member's mispronunciation of The Damned's Machine Gun Etiquette), that can be described both sardonically as the Greatest Japanese Punk Band of All Time and, to my mind at least, justly as one of the best rock bands of all time.
Okinawan youth culture was a mash-up incorporating various American trends, current and past, at the time including punk and new wave. Transposed punk approximations were here and there, with their own peculiar decoding of the then fading away movements in New York, L.A., and Britain. On rare occasions one saw mods riding about on scooters, or leather jacketed Okinawan kids who seemed to have resurrected the cafe racing culture of sixties Britain (racing motorcycles from cafe to cafe, hence the name "cafe racers" for the Triumphs and BSAs of the time), dissecting the chaotic traffic as they dragged from one point in the city to another, daredevil blurs howling out their high-rpm madness.

Our hosts were irreverent and funny. We understood very little of what was said. After a while one tires of combining pidgen English, scraps of Japanese, and resourceful hand gestures, and just starts nodding approvingly at everything. At one point I looked over at the television and saw a punk rock girl with fake flies on her face. The bartender was playing the movie I had requested. To this day I haven't watched that film.
We found a sushi bar and ate everything they put in front of us. More sake. Later we would spill out of a bar, passing out of the blur of artificial light and noise, of strange voices speaking a foreign tongue, surprised to find ourselves in pale early morning light; as if we tripped over an invisible and dimensionless breach and stumbled upon a perfect, still dawn. Like a pair of children noisily intruding upon a sacrament. We fell silent.

And just like that, this moment embedded itself in my psyche, and it holds in its orbit these other fragmentary, blurred freeze frames. Something about the cobbled alleyway descending a graceful hill, the one of a kind hue of that morning, like every other unexceptional morning a precise composition that never before did, and never again will, occur; exceptional after all. Briefly no sound interrupted the hum of eternity that we call silence. And just like that again, it was gone.
The night had passed without taking its leave. It was time to go home. Achingly sweet and confoundingly fleet is life, as are its moments.
Do you have a request?

ephemera

Shingle Fights.

You never knew when you might come under attack. The wind-searing sound of the tightly and rapidly spinning projectile slicing through the air gave no warning until it was too close to evade: a square piece of asphalt shingle, torn from the roof of one of the vacant houses and hurled like a boomerang.

The flight of the properly sized and dimensioned shingle, about four inches square, was remarkable. Thrown at a high trajectory the projectile would do a single, slow roll of 180 degrees as it made its way to its target. Once one became familiar with the particulars of the shingle's flight he could be deadly accurate within about fifty yards and could vary widely the trajectory to either rain down from above on its target or approach it at high speed in a harrowing, corkscrew spiraling line-drive. The natural bend in the shingle's flight, manipulated by a skilled and experienced thrower, could negotiate corners.

We were sitting in the shade of a tree in the middle of a wide field, located propitiously alongside a grade variance, that is the property line that once cut through this spot had separated a row of houses that were situated a few feet higher that those they backed up against. The block wall that separated the backyards had been leveled to the higher grade; this left a perfectly sized curb on which to sit, as if on a bench. The tree's shade protected the grass beneath if from the brutal summer sun that burned the unprotected grass into a brown, dirty scrub most of the year. A kid, I don't remember his name, was seated on this natural bench, resting his elbows on his knees with his hands clasped out before him. The shingle cut through our circle in an angry flash, the slicing sound of its flight terminating in a sickening sound of struck shallow bone, as it hacked a bloody gash across the back of his hand.

In the face of such an assault we would repair to a vacant house of our own and mount the roof, tearing off shingles and returning fire. Battles were quickly engaged, as two rooftop gangs exchanged fire across a street, the shingles turning like small black birds in graceful, varied arcs. Marksmen positioned themselves behind the peak of the roof, ducking out of the way of the shingles that careened and skidded past. Soon the ground was littered with these, the street and sidewalks scuffed with their impact marks, the houses pockmarked with their black commas. Motorists would happen through warily. Sometimes an outraged adult would chase us off. We melted back into the environment like urban guerillas.

Somehow no one was ever seriously injured.

Spin Cycle

Indulge me a moment.

Images merge and blend in the memory; things once seen in stark daylight or secondhand in snapshots, melding with television programs and picture shows, coalescing around imagination and vanity, clouded by dreams; the real, the transferred, the imagined and the wished intermingle, separate, and intermingle endlessly. All these charged electrons ricocheting around in my head, sometimes colliding and transferring particles, sometimes one capturing another and becoming something new.

All I know is the sum of my experiences, a collage spinning too fast to make out its parts until one slows and stands out momentarily: an old photo of a child—I know him—astride a bicycle, a Schwinn Sting Ray. This evokes a few more memories, hits showing up like the proverbial flashes in the gold pan; memories not only of images, some faint and some clear, but of sensations, some that feel like a fist in your chest, a vise grip on your heart that demands your attention.

The scent of seasonal change in the place you grew up, the smell of its dirt, home, girls—then women and maturation crowding all these out. Nothing will hold still. I didn’t even know how much I cherished these things, some of them mundane and treated with the contempt of familiarity, now viewed by a man weakened by sentiment and regret. Look around you now, yes even this will be mourned.

A boy on a Sting Ray; a white banana seat with a half sissy-bar, sometimes we’d ride two on the seat and one on the handle bars, he has a crew cut grown out, bristly and sun bleached a grizzly-bear tan color, giving him an oversized head. His smile is hardly guileless, but blameless nonetheless. This image evokes another; riding the bicycle for the first time unassisted, surrounded by other kids, one shouting approval; and now it is the motion itself experienced in that moment that is remembered clearly. A memory so near the beginning of memory it always aches slightly of melancholic ecstasy to come upon it yet again, to indulge oneself and to hold it up to the light and peer into its cloudy, transparent core one more time. Almost afraid to look too closely or directly at it lest it vanish, like trying to observe a mote in the corner of your eye. This too will be lost.

She took me out into the middle of a field at night. This is the field I ran across when I escaped the man who put a knife to my throat. Sex and violence. Two children, furtively stealing out into the center of a shadow, dropping a bucket down into a forbidden well in the black of night. I don’t remember her face. I don’t remember her name. I remember the damp grass, the cool air on us, the scent, her; like one multi-dimensional sensation. I remember the field seemed like a mile wide expanse. I remember walking home.

The collage turns; a globe shaped mass of a million distinct, twirling particles spinning around an axis, some larger, some smaller, some surfacing in a split second to pause and reveal themselves and then submerging in the whirling mass. Here’s a girl’s face and in an instant faster than the speed of desire the heart quickens just as it did before, and this moment is now that moment of years ago, separated by a trillion moments between but connected nonetheless, and the sensation somehow travels along this chain like electrons through a wire to reach you now in an instant. The image of the face isn't clear, it won't stay put for examination, like a light smudge on your eye it skitters off to the side when you try to look directly at it, but the memory triggers a complex of emotion and desire that is real right now, even if the girl is gone forever.
But we know that electrons in a wire are lined up and waiting; flick a switch at one end and at the other one is pushed out. Instant light. Moments only line up in the imagination; in reality there is only one moment, this one.
It is bliss and heartache at once; damn, how I’ll miss this life.

Okay, I’m over it now. Back to work.

Dogs and Fish

A Sunday long ago.
When I was a kid sometimes on a weekend I used to let our dogs out late at night to roam the swath of vacant lots and abandoned houses in our neighborhood. One Sunday I went out into the delicate, sense quickening chill and stillness of early morning to collect them. I didn't realize at the time how much I loved that dawn period of respite, when the day has yet to lose its virtue and might still become anything. Brilliant sunlight illuminates everything but its heat has yet to vanquish the night's chill, and the air is still uncluttered with the sound and movement of human activity. This is when it almost seems the madness of nature might be held still; as if you might find a seam in time’s inexorable drawing-down and hide, preserving your own dawn. But this day the moment would have to give way to a pair who had no patience for such thoughts.

I turned to see the two of them, overjoyed to have discovered me, charging across a broad, sunny expanse; Oly, our German Shepard, a big handsome purebred, galloping with unrestrained glee, his mouth open in a broad, ungainly grin, his tongue trailing off to the side, all propriety lost; our small dog, the mutt, a black-coated, part collie with a face like a small bear with sharpened features and a bit of a regal mane, running out ahead. That is the moving-picture that remains sharp in my memory, as clear as the morning air in which it was captured.
That would be the one memory of them that stands out from every other, framed and frozen by that mysterious convergence of moment and eye. It serves on behalf of every other moment lost in the haze of the countless moments, mundane and meaningful, that have intervened since. A better, more worthy pair of creatures you could never find.

My father stopped by out of the blue one weekend to discard Oly onto us. He had named him after a brand of beer, Olympia. Oly was son of Bud, yes, a similarly derived namesake (imagine the biblical genealogy: …Budweiser, who begat Michelob, who begat Lowenbrau…). Oly’s lodging was to be a temporary situation that somehow my mother knew from the start wasn’t; she was nonplussed. Five kids, a full time job, and now a large dog. One of my earliest memories is of that day, running the good natured beast up and down the sidewalk in front of our house. We had no business keeping him; there was no chance we wouldn’t.
He had a golden tan coat with distinct black panels on his side, a classic German Shepard. His posture was dignified whether he was resting on his side with his upper torso propped on his elbows, sitting, or standing; his chin always remained at attention; proud but loyal. He would sit on our front porch and jealously guard his home.

Babe (the unfortunate name given her by my little sister), the brains to Oly’s brawn, was the fastest dog I ever saw. There wasn’t a cat she couldn’t catch; though when she did manage to corner one she was likely to find herself more in peril than her would-be prey. She just wanted to play, it seems. The houses in our neighborhood all had five foot tall brick walls separating their backyards that were about ten inches wide on top. A natural jumper, sometimes in pursuit of a cat Babe would effortlessly leap onto one of these walls and skitter along the top.

She too had an alert, soldier at attention posture; whether standing still or at a full run her neck remained in its forward-leaning carriage, thrusting forward her inquisitive face, all held perfectly still in relation to the churning prow of her torso that propelled her forward on legs moving so fast they seemed to spin underneath her. When she came upon you in the open she would gradually increase her speed as she approached so that when she came close she was going full tilt, and rather than pull up before you she would pass, running so fast and hard you might think she was trying to blow your hat off with her wake. Turning wide like a banking aircraft she would come at you again, for another taunting pass, within arm’s reach. If you reached or leapt out she put on a graceful move worthy of any running back, shifting out of range effortlessly and not only keeping stride but accelerating.
Her look was curious, intelligent, and friendly all at once. She was forever engaging the world in play.
Sometimes the two would spar, Oly lowering himself on wide spaced forelegs and inviting the attack, as Babe would play the lighter, quicker boxer, endlessly parrying and retreating to attempt one angle after another as Oly howled and thrashed his head about trying to lure her in for the big punch.
Great dogs.

Now we have a cat, my daughter and I. He has a skittish, paranoid personality, seeming to react to specters and phantoms that we humans can’t see. He’s aggressive and playful; sometimes if you refuse to pay attention to him he will attack your feet, running alongside you as you walk down the hall, timing your steps to pounce on a foot as it makes landfall. If you engage him in a spur of the moment scuffle, for which he seems always game, and walk away before he's sated he will pursue you, as if to chase off his vanquished foe. Several times I’ve left him on the floor in the middle of battle only to be assailed by him crashing into the back of an ankle as I walk away. Once, after I rebuffed his challenge for a good natured brawl, he positioned himself on the back of a chair and surprised me by leaping squarely into my midsection. You’ve got to admire that level of cunning and spirit.
Great cat.

A few years ago my daughter got a Siamese fighting fish; what they now more often call, perhaps out of political politeness, a Betta (from Betta Splendens). They’re common in pet shops but still amazing little creatures; ours was a blue to purple color with large, graceful fan-like fins that trailed along and beneath him like banners, and a dorsal that was like the sail on a Chinese junk. It’s amazing how much they remind one of Asian art and architecture. The males are highly aggressive, hence the name, and if you put two in a tank together they will likely fight to the death. The remarkable thing about them is their threatening and mating ritual, one and the same: the male will flare out his prodigious fins and his gills to affect a remardable transformation into a much larger, fiercer looking creature.
I would put my finger to the glass of his fish bowl and he would challenge it with this impressive stare-down. I always marveled at how unmistakable and universal is the presentation of aggressive male will; this tiny creature with a “mind” that was barely more than a reflexive sensor, yet it so resembled the same impulse manifesting itself in a human being. There was no mistaking its movements for anything other than what they intended.
After a couple of years the fish began showing signs of decline; his great fins hanging limp and withering away ever so slightly, his challenging ritual less and less impressive; his movements more lethargic. I was surprised that it affected me. I found his encroaching dotage moving; I took more care than ever to clean his tank, thinking he might rebound. Of course it was no use; he had lived a long life for one of his species, nearly three years I think. One day I found him there, lying on the bottom of his tank. Well, there you have it, I thought; life’s arc in a little bowl of water on my daughter’s desk.
Yes, even this was a magnificent creature, no less due to scale; his demise no less the same tragedy of a too fleeting peak giving way too soon to a bitterly final decline.

I was eighteen when we put Oly down. His hip went out; a problem with German Shepards. He spent a miserable last few weeks immobilized, looking up at me every time I came near with that heartbreaking total and unquestioning trust, trapped in a failing body and wanting only to draw a little more succor from the kindness of his masters. Old dogs retain their childishness to the end; their dying days are that much more pathetic to witness because of it. Dogs don’t give up; they don’t grow bitter; they don’t rage against mortality; they just continue to look to us for comfort. They trust us to the end.

When the time came to take him to the vet I deserted him; I couldn’t do it, refusing my mother’s pleas to take him in. It had to be done, so she and my sisters did it. It remains as bitter a recollection as any of the countless shameful, irreconcilable moments from my past. I should have been there, for my mother, for him. My betrayal of Oly was no less for the fact that he was merely a dog; perhaps all the more so.

We become like God to these animals. We love them because they reflect back on us human characteristics; joy, humor, love, fellowship, kindness. These universal values seem to come from somewhere supernatural when they manifest themselves in the behavior of an animal. To me it explains much; about religion, about man’s eternal struggle to break free of his bestial impulses.
If these universal, unquestionably good things—these things that comprise good itself—can express themselves in the being of a dog or a cat; if an emotionally detached man can glimpse a universal will to life in a tiny fish; it’s as if there really is an almighty, but he isn’t looking down on us but through us and at us at the same time by way of every sentient creature. Maybe then there is hope.

Youth's Idyll, V

Part I ; Part II ; Part III ; Part IV

“So you’re going to tell it?”
“Yeah.”
“And why the hell would you do that? What do you hope to accomplish? Are you one of these exhibitionist types who thinks his experience is so remarkable?”
“No. My experience is unexceptional.”
“Then why tell it? Are you special? You think you’re gonna go on Oprah?”
“I just started talking, that’s all. Maybe I don’t know how to shut up. No, I’m not special”
“I’ll say.”
“I’m indulging myself.”
“I’ll say that too.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to tell your story?”
“Asshole, I don’t have a story. You don’t have a story. You want stories? Go read a book. I got reality. Don’t kid yourself. Nobody cares. Get a life.”
“Everyone has a story.”
“Bullshit. You’re a narcissist. And worse, you’re a boring narcissist. Shame on you.”
“Yes, that’s it. Shame. And ego.”

It’s all an unraveling; layers of pretense, experience, bluster, hypocrisy, self delusion, all fall away eventually. In the end one is left looking at himself, stripped to his humble origins. The little that is left explains everything, to no satisfaction whatsoever.

Drugs

I was in the back of a car, loaded on something, I don’t remember what, looking down at my scrawny arms. I was curious that they seemed alien, as if they weren’t my own. I couldn’t feel them. I was sure I couldn’t move them if I tried, though I couldn’t bring myself to try. I could feel the weight of them in my lap; but I couldn’t find them sensately, wracking my brain for their background signal. I took this all in with dull amusement.
Outside my window Interstate Five existed as a red and white blur of motion and smeared electric light as we passed streetlamps of crystalline light blooms suspended on giant concrete stalks. The cars left trails of red, stretched, as if squeezing themselves through a constricting atmosphere. If I could see them as elongated by movement, weren’t they in fact? Were we moving? I couldn’t tell. It seemed the whole world was in motion, swirling around us, its axis. We were heading north to Azusa Canyon.

It was the drugs that defined my youth; they were our currency and culture. There were the base elements: marijuana, alcohol, tobacco; hardly drugs at all. One advanced through the harder stuff, as far as his sense of adventure took him: cocaine, amphetamines, acid; PCP in its various forms: angel dust, cannebinol, sherm; an occasional specialty item like psilocybin mushrooms; free basing and crack would come later. And all the while heroin was lurking in the background, like an old pervert waiting in the shadows for the kids to get just wasted enough to have no inhibitions left.

But I wouldn’t be around for that; I had already made my own circuit through the drug culture and arrived, mostly unscathed, at something like late adolescence with nothing more than a residual affinity for smoking pot. No great tale of addiction and redemption here. I lived a certain way for a time; I stopped after a while, a rational decision, or more like a series of rational decisions becoming a new way of life, a new strategy. There was no crescendo, no plot point, no realization and triumphant march into the light of day; just eventual exhaustion and a gradual drifting away. It was boredom that drew me in, and it was boredom, as much as anything else, that delivered me from it.
We weren’t looking to escape reality, or the hopelessness of our lives. It wasn’t self destructive behavior; it was merely reckless. We were bored; rebelling against tedium. We went in for the experience. As for me, I remember being very keen on any sort of derangement of perception. “Tripping.” Drugs were the means, novelty was the end.

I first started smoking marijuana when I was about twelve. I soon realized that I could pay for my indulgence by selling joints. Back then you could buy an ounce of cheap Mexican pot for ten dollars, roll as many as forty joints and sell them for fifty cents a piece to your fellow junior high school students; leaving you ten dollars for your next bag, some pocket change for yourself, and whatever was left you smoked. I started saving up, and worked my way up to buying by the pound, selling ounces. I would eventually branch out into other product lines, all on a very small scale. I never got far. The idea that people get rich selling drugs on the street is a myth perpetuated by phony street-tough rappers.
I took pride in my business, such as it was. From the start I was known for carrying a superior product than my main rival at Corvallis Junior High. Rob, a friend of mine, was something of a freeloader, earning the nickname “Radar” because he always seemed to show up whenever there was someone else’s stash to smoke. We competed for the individual joint retail in the eighth grade. He couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, compete with me for quality, rolling smaller joints with more stems and seeds. I cleaned my stash, rolling mine a little fatter; I became expert at rolling a tight, even burning cigarette. Aside from a means of income selling for me was a way of achieving a level of social status, not high but higher than a shy and timid kid would manage otherwise.
In the early days it was a communal experience. Much of the appeal was in the event; in the conspiracy of it and in the ritual of the circle, passing a joint around. Marijuana is the ultimate adolescent high; its appeal has roots in childhood memories of the warm maternal embrace, in its tendency to enhance music and humor, the camaraderie of shared experience. If it’s good stuff and doesn’t promote paranoia, it has the effect of pushing to the margins whatever concerns a user has. For this reason it persists as a popular, less demanding alternative to alcohol for many young to middle aged adults. I certainly don’t promote it; as a parent I engage in the same hypocrisy of many of my generation, living in perpetual dread, lecturing on the evils of all drugs. In reality, I know too many potheads who hold down good jobs, pay their taxes, and support families to feel that its continuing criminalization is anything other than a costly and unnecessary prohibition.
In the first few years it was all innocent enough. The Southern California summers were carpeted with dried out golden brown grass and steaming heat softened asphalt swept repeatedly by an ever present sun; girls were starting to appear, as if emerging from the landscape, wearing cut off shorts and halter tops, their soft scent and smooth skin leaving us helpless, all of it hinting that a bottomless mystery was opening up before us. The days were endless, we lived in flip flops and ragged clothes, baked and bleached by the sun; half wild and semi-socialized. Not a care in the world. We didn’t know we lived in a brief respite anticipating an endless grind. The eighties were right around the corner.

The nights were different. The nights were sinister. The nights swept you up in a maelstrom and left you wherever you happened to be when the momentum stopped. One evening Dave, the wannabe con man who was always seeking alliances and connections, and I found ourselves in a strange apartment. Two older guys sat at a table covered with a pile of ground mint leaves they were rolling into very thin joints, “pinners.” The scent of the mint leaves mingled with a heavy chemical odor. This was my introduction to angel dust.
We took to calling the high “gumby” because of the overall numbing effect it had. Phencyclidine (PCP) was originally developed as an anesthetic, but was abandoned because of a high incidence of psychotic reactions. It would later surface as an animal tranquilizer. Three things happen to you when under the influence: you become more or less impervious to pain; you feel physical euphoria that makes you think you’re capable of great athletic feats; and you feel an increased confidence as nervousness and inhibition fade away. It is both a stimulant and a depressant at once, somehow. Legends of “dusters” experiencing violent psychotic episodes were everywhere in the early days of the “epidemic” that would sweep L.A. County in the late seventies. The stories were overblown. I personally never saw anyone have a violent reaction.
I hate to say it, but as I remember it, a PCP high is glorious. I always felt as if I was walking on six inches of air; taller, stronger, lighter. I was supremely confident. Perhaps the best part was that all fear of girls vanished. An awkward kid became Mr. Seduction. This was all an illusion, of course. PCP has a numbing effect, relaxing the facial muscles, giving one a sleepy, drooling look. Gumby.
It was true that one felt invincible when under the influence. Once a large group of us indulged in one long dust induced night of recreational fighting; we flew through the air attempting leaping kung fu kicks; we wrestled and punched each other laughing like idiots; walking along the riverbed, we pushed one another down the tall concrete bank on one side or the short dirt and gravel hill on the other. I awoke the next morning a mass of bruises, scrapes, and pains.

We started selling it, buying ounces and retailing grams at ten dollars a go. After dust had been on the market for a while some started showing signs of repeated use: slurred speech, vacuous stares, slack jaws. We took to calling them “mummies.”

Geezing

“Tighter.” My brother said, leaning in toward me, through a peculiar sort of bad breath. I noticed that all the geezers had the same type of sour breath, which seemed to come out of them once they had shot up. Was it possible that the drug was leaching out of the blood vessels in their lungs, that quickly?
“Tighter.” He said again. With both hands I was choking his upper arm, between what was left of his bicep and a bony shoulder. I was serving as a tourniquet, restricting the blood flow to the vein he was injecting with heroin, or maybe a cocaine/heroin mixture, a “speedball.” I don’t recall exactly.
My friend Pete and I had stumbled into the gathering, taking place in the garage of my mother’s house in Norwalk. Years before I had converted the garage into my room, lining it with mismatched wood paneling I had stripped out of vacant houses in the wastelands. After I started spending most of my time at a girlfriend’s it would be taken over and trashed by my brother and his companions. When blackened spoons started showing up in the garage I at first didn’t know what it meant. This was new; the opening of the sinister final chapter of the volume that was our pointless, failed adolescence. Those spoons were like the early indications of a terminal illness.
The one thing I never allowed myself to consider was injecting anything. Heroin was offered to me, but there was never any question; I knew I wouldn’t go that far. We had our own local vernacular for intravenous drug use: geezing, junkies were geezers. Pete and I jokingly referred to my brother’s crew of nascent junkies as the “Geezinslaw Brothers”, after a country & western band.

Pete and I stumbled out of the dank, gloomy garage, disoriented and squinting in the harsh light of day. Pete insisted he had somehow acquired a contact high just from being in there. It can’t be true, but Pete isn’t known for getting crazy ideas.
I had withdrawn from it all by that point; whether by dumb luck or intuition, it was just as things were getting ugly. People started overdosing.

Bub

Bub was, in the words of one of his fellow slack-jawed types, the “craziest white boy I ever met.” It was apt. Growing up in a mixed Latino/white neighborhood one learns early on that Hispanics, generally, possess a higher degree of physical bravery. A few of them appear to be naturally fearless. Bub was the only white kid I remember from the neighborhood to have that kind of courage. He was as noble and brave in his way as he was vulgar, dim, and incurious. He had a sense of honor; he also had distaste for all things intellectual, seeing them as effete. He lived with his mother, a scatter-brained prescription junkie herself. Shortly after I stopped hanging around, he started geezing. He died of an overdose one night, a speedball. He was probably about twenty one years old, leaving behind an infant. He was the first to go. He’s been gone now about as long as he was alive.

Even before it all began there was one incredibly stupid thing that kids were doing: sniffing paint, which was popular with some of the cholos for some reason, most comically it seemed because they already had the paint cans handy for graffitti. You would occasionally see an ese breathing through a balled up sock saturated with paint, sometimes sniffing with one hand and tagging with the other. Glue and paint sniffing might be the single most idiotic example of human behavior, and seems a natural concomitant of graffitti.

Years later in Okinawa my friend Harry and I were sitting on the seawall down the hill from our base in Futenma, polishing off a bottle of something and lying to each other about all we would accomplish when we got out of the service. Some Okinawans showed up; kids, friendly and curious with a little English at their command. We started talking. Another group of Okinawans appeared; more kids, carrying large, clear plastic bags containing some sort of colorless liquid. They were inhaling from the bags, and were obviously very high. Our new friends exchanged words with them, things got heated, and before we knew it we were standing in the middle of what resembled a Hong Kong action film. All about us five foot tall Okinawan adolescents were throwing roundhouse kicks and precision blows. Our kung fu friends vanquished the glue sniffers.

I was a couple of years and half the circumference of the earth removed from the neighborhood. It was a fitting, belated denouement.

Memories of Youth's Idyll, Part II

(Second in a series begun here)

Who were my allies in this insurgency?
There is a type of humor; bland, base, darkly vulgar, which is common among white males of the criminal subculture. These are people who are often referred to as white trash. They usually have done some time in prison; their time outside of an institution is often more reprieve than release, and their return is, usually, inevitable. There comes with it an accent and inflection that transcend region. Incorporating black slang and rhythm unselfconsciously, filtered through ineradicable residue of deep seated lumpen-proletariat origins, it is the sound of the penitentiary. This posture is completed by a certain look, as unmistakable and inimitable as the foul effects of poor hygiene and diet which mark someone long homeless. This look is where we get the phrase slack-jawed from, and the phrase is remarkably apt. Someone somewhere must have a theory explaining the tendency of the lower jaw to hang slack from the face of the pathologically delinquent.
The attitude these traits garnish is one of unfocused defiance. This defiance is not political though it resists the rule of law. It is an unconscious recognition of one's lack of morality, one's base nature, one's narcissism. It mocks conventional morality. It is the socialization that takes place outside of the mainstream, in the wretched outback of poverty and ignorance, akin to that of the geographically remote such as hillbillies, though it flourishes in our midst.
There is another, closely related type of humor: mirthless, taunting, disturbingly deprecatory of everything, which is common to the vato, the Chicano gang banger. It is less humor than a brutality of manners, seeking to strangle any and all that is remotely foreign to the narrow conceptions of the barrio. This is the humor of the cholo, and it is little more than a gob of spit in the face of the culture and manners of the gavacho, or Caucasian.
Strangely, you would find these types, the white trash and the vato, mingling with one another on the streets of my old neighborhood, striking up alliances and even friendships as they found common criminal cause. It wasn't uncommon to find a disheveled white punk with "White Power" tattoos partnered up with a Mexican gang banger in chinos and plain white undershirt. What they had in common was a more or less complete lack of amenability to society. Learning was not only undervalued; it was discouraged and denigrated as, depending on one's particular point of view, selling out or as effete. Physical bravery and audacity were valued above all else with the approving label, crazy, as in, "you don't want to mess with him, he's crazy." The cholos would claim their superiority in their graffitti taunts with the ubiquitous term mas loco; as in lil' Boxer, Varrio Neighborhood, 13, mas loco. (The lil' abbreviation meant little and was normally given to a junior gang member who took up a name already claimed by a veterano, or simply to a very young or small member. There was a time when I was, jokingly, called lil' Dennis because of my small stature, and before that lil' Groucho because of an entirely unfair comparison to Groucho Marx that was the result of my getting an unfashionably short haircut one summer.)
Most of us who would drift into this subculture would eventually find our way out. Some, however, were destined to die in it, and usually at a very young age. These were marked early on, and it was plainly evident that they weren't going to settle down to a quiet life. They would end up incarcerated or dead by violence or drug addiction well before middle age calmed them.

I had a friend growing up who was as decent and honorable as anyone I knew up to that point in my life. He and his father were movie buffs of a sort. It seemed every weekend they went to see something (this was long before the VCR). His old man was a legendary crank; big, gruff, and scary. There were stories, unverified but believable: once when the mother of one of his kid's friends made a pretext of coming to the door to borrow a cup of sugar (this sort of thing was still possible in those days) in hopes of striking up a conversation he wordlessly shut the door in her face; he had once fired off a high powered handgun at some cats that were digging around in his garbage, cutting one in half. His love of film was incongruous in light of this image. Every Monday at school I would listen with keen interest and envy as my friend would describe that weekend's film. Fatherless myself, it never occurred to me to envy the relationship he had with his father, but now I realize it was a remarkable bond, one that most of us didn't have with our parents.
There were three sons in the family, my friend being the youngest. I would say they were as different as night and day but I need a third pole. They were night, day, and twilight. There was a classic middle son who was cowardly and thoroughly unprincipled. He was a would-be con man, always running some kind of second rate scam, and an inveterate thief. As a juvenile delinquent I would spend time hanging around with him later. I suspect he is dead now, as his need to involve himself in every manner of criminal activity combined with a complete lack of physical bravery and toughness did not bode well. There was always an air of the amateur about him. He was aspiring to things he had no business with, but it was obvious that a normal life involving work and family would never be possible for him. It was a depressing inevitability that I recognize now in retrospect. The oldest son I didn't know well. He was in jail more often than not. The offenses were serious, armed robbery and the like. He was thoroughly criminal. He had survived a stabbing that should have killed him, and lifting his shirt could show you a collection of train track scars that proved it. It happened in a bar fight and apparently his attacker did not so much stab as slash him, deeply. He had been hastily stitched back together and the welt like, cross hatched scars had a Frankenstein look to them. His older sister, unintelligent and prone to superstition, conjectured that he had been spared because he was to father a child somewhere down the line who would one day achieve something great. Hilariously, there was no question that there was no direct benefit to humanity in his survival. The last time I saw him he was headed back to prison on a parole violation. Its okay, he said, he would be rejoining his friends. It is his image I opened this post with.

The youngest and the oldest brother were as different as night and day, and the middle brother was somewhere in the nether region in between, idolizing the oldest and sadly lacking the character of the youngest. Knowing them is one of the reasons I would eventually fall on the nature side of the nature/nurture debate, in spite of a lifetime of being taught the opposite. It remains for me, like so many other experiences in my life, irrefutable evidence, a rude real life rejoinder for the misty sentiment of the blank slate thesis.

Love your children, support them, make them feel worthy and you have done well. But know that nature's torments aren't limited to disaster and disease. Sometimes the vileness she hurls at us comes in the form of a helpless infant. Sometimes that precious child is a foul bud which reveals itself gradually, in stages. The human penchant for cruelty doesn't find a neat, flat level as water in a vessel but pools up in the various recesses of our complex and uneven human nature, sometimes finding a deep pocket in the heart of a deviant.

Part III

Memories of Youth's Idyll

A typically interesting post on Steve Sailer's blog about, among other things, the criminality emanating from Compton, California as a highly marketed product taking the form of rap, movies, and television, has brought to mind my own halcyon days of youth growing up in nearby Norwalk.
Norwalk is a working class suburb in southeast L.A. County. Its demography when I was coming of age there in the late seventies and early eighties was nearly equal white and Hispanic. There were three major Chicano (Mexican-American) gangs operating there, mostly disdaining combat with civilian forces outside of the gang culture and in those days not yet heavily armed. It almost seems quaint now, their hand to hand combat usually involving nothing more than a knife or any handy heavy object; gallant even when compared with the drive-by shooting of today and its ignoble, exceedingly cruel and wreckless nature. The veteranos of the old days may have been no better than the psychopaths who lead the gangs today, but the times would reign them in somewhat, doing battle as they did before lax mores would create the feral state of some of today's vatos locos.

My neighborhood just off of Imperial Highway (a major thoroughfare running some thirty miles or so from Yorba Linda east of L.A. through our city and then the tougher quarters of Compton and Watts right into LAX) looked rougher than it was. Later when I was a serviceman stationed in Camp Pendleton, about midway between L.A. and San Diego, I would delight in showing friends the old neighborhood anytime our travels took us that way; it so resembled the image of a rough L.A. 'hood. It was sadly important to me as a young man to craft some sort of dramatic back story for myself, always a little embarrassed of how truly boring my short life's history was.

What made my neighborhood look such a mess was its cleft by the stalled construction of the 105 freeway, running from just beyond our back fence all the way to the airport ten or fifteen miles away. A swath of real estate cleared for road construction took out four streets abreast just the other side of our little backyard's brick wall. My earliest childhood memories are of this neighborhood slowly being drained of its inhabitants, selling their homes to the state and moving away. The houses weren't demolished; rather they were cut from their foundation's and carted away in the furtive early morning hours. Sometimes we would stay up late to watch. Few things are as disorienting as the sight of a home, the very symbol of stability, mounted on a trailer and hauled away. My faint, earliest memories are of a complete community of small, well tended homes lining cul-de-sacs of about a dozen homes a piece; by the time I left home years later the scar running through the center of our area would be complete, but construction on the freeway would still have not begun.
We called the vast open area of vacant lots dotted with the occasional abandoned house the "wastelands." Some owners would resist selling to the end, the last of them existing exposed in the middle of the cleared land, lonely frontier outposts of a settlement in retreat.

Our next door neighbors joined a petition campaign seeking to halt the freeway's construction, strangely undertaken midway through the leveling of our neighborhood, citing quality of life concerns. The Watts riots were a fresh memory, and while they didn't say so the talk was that they were concerned about black migration. They would succeed in holding up the freeway's construction for years, while the dismantling of the neighborhood continued; managing to destroy the quality of life they sought to protect by ensuring that the denuded landscape would dominate our home for over a decade--a period which would in fact encompass my entire recollected youth (those neighbors would scurry back to Oklahoma midway through the carnage).

The wastelands provided the ultimate environment for a youth of drug use and truancy. We laid claim to certain abandoned houses as meeting places, mounting an underground resistance against the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and their ever present helicopter. The helicopter was viewed as some kind of alien spaceship, with all manner of observatory capability. Its infrared capabilities were the stuff of legend. It would come buzzing in, a sinister, giant mechanical insect, with its spotlight sweeping the ground below as it homed in on us, and we would scatter like the mute rabble fleeing the army of gorillas in Planet of the Apes.

For the most part we were harmless. We just wanted to get high, and in the period of my adolescence there were a variety of means available for this. This was before crack; in fact I would escape to the military as the technique of free basing cocaine, which would presage the crack epidemic of the eighties, was becoming widespread. P.C.P. in the form of Angel Dust would be the first hard drug wave to encroach on our lives, and I found myself smack in the middle of it. I'm still not sure what P.C.P. is made of; elephant tranquilizer it is said, and somehow this didn't dissuade us from trying it, nor did it discourage some adults from involving us in its packaging and sale. Angel Dust was P.C.P. soaked mint leaf powder, for smoking. It gave off powerful fumes, vaguely reminiscent of a a fuel, or formaldehyde. One night we would break up a pound of it, down into the gram units that retailed for ten dollars apiece, at a friend's kitchen table, the fumes getting us all high. The next day the owner would find his parrot, kept in a cage nearby, laying dead in its cage.
It was also available in liquid form. For a price you could dip a cigarette in a vial of it. For some reason an upscale brand of cigarette, Sherman's, were the preferred type, when soaked they were called "sherm sticks." If you preferred menthol Kools, you might have a "super kool."
It tended to give one a feeling of euphoria and ease strangely coupled with a sense of invincibility that could sometimes go terribly wrong, leading to bizarre psychotic episodes. A rash of police shootings would accompany the Angel Dust epidemic; "dusters" would try to take on anybody who came close, including armed policemen, often showing a desire to strip naked and attempt physically impossible (and pointless) feats. One acquaintance of ours would try to climb a telephone pole before the police managed to corral him. No doubt the cops took some liberties with the phenomenon, for a time it seemed to happen weekly; one defense argument offered up in the Rodney King beating case was that the police thought he was a duster, and his behavior was certainly consistent with one. My experiences of the time now give me a skepticism toward the oft leveled charges of institutional police brutality as well as an appreciation of the sometimes untenable situations we place cops in on a daily basis. When I was young, however, they were the enemy.

Part II