The thread of this picture story begins simply enough: a text message to a sunburned man in the back of a van. It ends with a poignant virtual reunion on Mother's Day. And begins again somewhere else, like right now, in this room.
Two weeks ago, heading back from the Russian River I heard via text that my FAVORITE ROCK BAND EVER, The JESUS LIZARD, were reuniting for a show at the Fillmore in October. They are a band that I've never ever seen live (my only conscious opportunity, way back in the early days of High School, was thwarted because I had Catholic youth group commitments that involved crying and coffee). Ticket procuring was mandatory no matter the price. So I went home and bought them easily enough.
The Jesus Lizard has been with me since the twilight of 8th grade. I used to go to the now defunct Tower Records in El Cajon for afternoon bouts of cultural scavenging. Their magazine selection was legendary. That was the heyday of the arty cut-up music and culture magazines Ray Gun and Bikini, which were each kaleidoscopic mishmashes of music reviews, video reviews, art, culture and film articles. It was in Ray Gun that I first heard about the Jesus Lizard. Timothy Leary was describing them as the best thing he'd ever seen live. So I went out to the Warehouse and bought a disc of theirs without having heard it first.
LIAR was the album. I was initially scared by it until I realized that its rhythmic yet demented noise rock was a perfect compliment to my nightly, free-form aerobic work-outs. The ancient hand-me-down speakers as big as jet engines pulsated with David Yow's glossolalial tales of pygmy violence, slaveships, whiskey, gladiators and holy men with evil intentions. Thereafter I listened to it repeatedly all through high school (and today and yesterday as well). Sure enough, Yow's imagery, delivery and the band's overall aesthetic of moonshine-induced roadhouse mayhem, seeped like lighter fluid into everything I wrote back then, which was mostly blasphemous prose poetry about things I really didn't know anything about.
But none of that is really important. I am sad to say that many of those notebooks from that era have been incinerated by a boy who was in the throes of adolescent shame and self-loathing. (My goal is to someday recreate these in a fictional form, to give life to everyone's long-since-destroyed adolescent diaries.)
Flash forward to Santa Cruz, a place that is the psychogeographic template for most of the fictional settings I create. I'm HUGE on SPACE in STORIES. I like CITIES that are characters. And characters that are as populous in their skulls as tiny, densely populated towns. The places that we make MAKE us just as much as our language does.What's so special about Santa Cruz? I won't list all the many, obvious reasons but I'll just harp on a point I find illuminating, which has more to do with categories than anything else. My point: Santa Cruz is not a city OR a small town. It isn't urban, suburban, or rural--at least not thoroughly. OK, I lied: the word "town" partly defines it but only vaguely. It is a BEACH TOWN--one of the oddest social conglomerates that exists. But that too, for another time...
The summer of 2001, I was in Santa Cruz, heading into the home stretch of my college life. Well, almost. That was the summer I was sharing a room that was attached to a real house. From the front, you would have thought, "Wow, this is a real nice house on a sunny, flowery block." And therein you would have been fooled. My room was like an added-on trailer, or fledgling rumpus room, that had grass growing on its fringes and mold eating the desks, a room that had a broken futon in it and a revolving cast of roommates (well, two) and a wall that was entirely sliding glass that looked out into a burned-out, weed-stricken and derelict yard. In the kitchen, garbage overflowed onto the broken linoleum. The disposal was stopped up with the remnants of a shattered shot glass.
Beyond the yard: a dark, inviting alleyway. Rusted and warped lawnchairs lay like broken skeletons in the tall grass. A tree rubbed its branches against the sliding glass until they were chainsawed by the landlord. I was driving a car that was covered in mud and birdshit, its interior scattered with gyros wrappers and notebook paper.
Good stories started here.Me and my buddy CJ found work that summer at Zanotto's Family Market, which is now a Trader Joe's. It was your standard high-end yuppie grocery store. CJ, a caustic. hard-drinking Alaskan, worked in the meat department despite his flagrant lack of experience. I was thrown in the deli adjacent to him and quickly took on something of a managerial position, a joke if ever there was one. I won't relive right now the long, dirty days of dressing raw chickens, sticking my arm shoulder-deep into buckets of pickles and mayonnaise, of evading the cameras that the managers trained on the employees, of being whacked on the thigh by frozen animal parts and having my pseudo-authority questioned by Aptos-bred, red-headed nymphets.
There were lots of hilarious parts about the job, including brazen acts of petty criminality that were fully justified and completely foreseen. I started getting a belly there from too many blackened Tri-Tip sandwiches washed down with beer. I fed a homeless poet friend of mine for days on overly-fat sandwiches. I was stained everywhere. I reeked of pickle juice and mustard. I experimented with mixing hummus with pastrami and found it to be an ingenious failure. I drank a lot of Guinness at the Poet and Patriot. I went home to my house that was full of my gallivanting, bookish friends. They were working equally ridiculous jobs. Evenings, Walken films and free food and Bacchanalia and books. And my work friends would come over too to hear about the attic ghost and steal some of our Natural Ice.
It was there, at Zanatto's where I met B., a Polish/Cajun/Texan punk-rock Bettie Paige look-a-like who became a close friend of mine, a friend that nonetheless I lost touch with for seven years.
When I met her, the first thing she said to me, in her thick, Texan accent was, "You like the Jesus Lizard! I LOVE THE JESUS LIZARD!" and a peculiar friendship was born based on working, happy hours, bars, music and talking and telling tales. Most of the tales came from her. I had nothing really to tell. The first thing I learned about her was that her tattoo on her right arm depicted a scene from the Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. (Of course, the amorous part of the friendship made it more serious than other friendships but predictable drama was somehow avoided. Strangely more of an un-predictable sort of drama, that was potentially threatening and yet the butt of endless bar jokes, took its place.)B. was the first person I befriended who had seen and done things that I couldn't even imagine. Dangerous things. Seedy things. Glamorous things. And thus she was more real for all that. Her life, at times, sounded like the lyrics from unreleased Jesus Lizard songs. (Later, perhaps I would say she could have figured in a handful of Gun Club songs.) She had been through hard times and lost not a few loved ones. She had been betrayed, suffered setbacks and navigated the poisons of the city and the flesh with grace and humor.
But it was interesting, all of it, and she had clearly maintained a good attitude about it all. She laughed often, and musically, with that Southern lilt I had never heard before. She loved life in a less analytical way than I did. I envied her for that. I was just a wide-eyed college boy dreaming huge dreams and barely supporting them with my own earnings.
I kept a notebook then, one I would never have the fortitude to write these days. My penmanship was hysterically miniature, like that of an obsessive-compulsive scribe. Back then, I think I was more self-consciously "literary"--without having much in the way of finished works to back up my effrontery. I supplanted "experience" with lots of words and thoughts. I just had rambling, overly-analytical sentences in a big black book.
But that summer, my writing changed. It got looser, wilder, less of a tight and nervous, madman's scrawl. An avid scrapbooker ever since I was a little kid--one of the neuroses of the archiver-- I also started putting pictures in the books, usually on top of old outlines for school papers I had long since turned in. May B. forgive me this trespassion (if the chosen image is not to her liking) but I can't resist this photo of a photo from the same black book above. It's of her a year or two before I knew her, I think. Along side it, are my marginalia and my drawings of demonic angels. I just cracked the book open recently. It's barely held together.
Other photos in the BOOK had been mailed to me in suspicious parcels by friends of a more Dadaist bent.
A gift from the immortal Chris Sparta above. . .
Reading Hopscotch that summer, I figured I had made it to some enviable place of hedonistic, pseudo-intellectual self-involvement spiced with absurdity, intrigue, easy romance and a drunkard's love for words. My friend B. validated these suspicions--but she also threw them into question and laid bare my naivete. I hadn't experienced enough, that much was clear. I was still learning. And not even that. I was pretending at learning. I needed to live.
A page from the diary of that long summer. . .obscenities excised.Stand-out phrases: "pursued in the shower by a gang. . ." and "drinking Duvels by candelight"
The summer quickly became September. The job had grown more distasteful. I couldn't eat sandwiches all the time. The managers hated the thieving employees. The store was suffering too. Most of the customers were racist. Nobody was buying the expensive meats except for my Communist professors. My Born-Again shift leader liked calling us "scum-bags" with a medicated grin on his face.
B. and I's friendship became more platonic--a decision both mutual and beneficial. With my blessing, she had met a man who wanted to take her back to Texas with him. She was debating it seriously. She was in love with him. He was in love with her. I flinched at first at the news, and felt pain and fear and pre-emptive loneliness as the prospect of her leaving my life became ever more real. More than anything, I'd be losing one of the best friends I had ever made. And I certainly couldn't stomach another day of work without her laughter and mischief to keep me sane.
I went home to San Diego for my birthday to think things over, to celebrate. Two days later, I was awoken by my mother, as she tearfully told me that something bad, unspeakably bad had happened in New York City that day. People are attacking, she stammered. I stumbled awake and went to the television set and watched the signature event of my generation smoldering and replaying on the television screen. It was the first time in my life that an event had occurred that I was obliged to look at, over and over and over, until it had been singed into my brain. A Symbol as heavy and leaden as God had been born and I'd do well to memorize what it looked like.
Later that day, I walked to the park near my house with my notebook in hand. I found my usual picnic bench next to the golf course that had a decent view of the outlying lake and hills. I was joined out of the blue by three mailmen who were on their lunch break. They joked about the "attacks" as something "only a mailman could have done." I thought maybe that I was hallucinating. I went back to Santa Cruz with weirder, darker thoughts in tow, an involuntary member now of "Generation 9/11/," a prospective inheritor of crises I was too ignorant to understand.
Yeah, I guess I am...I was sad for months when B. left. I was happy for her because I had the hunch that her boyfriend was a good guy and would make her happy. We wrote each other letters, and then one day, they stopped coming. I tried the telephone number she gave me. It worked a few times. And then no more. It had changed. A new one wasn't provided.
Life moved on. Relationships, jobs, houses: the triumvirate. I found myself in San Francisco one morning re-reading Hopscotch, feeling chastened by this new, difficult and profoundly beautiful city and wondering if I wandered around at random would I find La Maga standing on some bridge, just like Horatio does in the novel.
For seven years I heard nothing of her. And found out nothing. I actually was worried. And I tried many times to find her on the Internet. After all, if someone's not on the internet??! Then what?
And then, just last week, on Mother's Day I "searched" for her name and it came up on the facebook. And we talked and sent messages and tried to fill in the years with hastily written emails. I was relieved to know that she was indeed happy and had married the guy and they were raising a family in Texas.
Will the Internet be the thing that finally makes it impossible to forget our pasts? In this case, with B. I am grateful for it. Barring the internet, there would have been little conceivable way I could have found her again, short of hiring a private detective.
The Long Summer of 2001 became a text that took itself seriously, as Bruno Schulz would say. I have it to thank for the endless reams of prose that followed. I found inspiration in B., in my job, in the events around me, not just in Santa Cruz but in the world at large. Perhaps I could live after all, and not just dream and scheme about it. I could take myself more seriously. But not too much. Because that would be bad.
Wow. This essay is excellent, Mr. Michael.
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