Personal History As Cosmic Mess Or Vice Versa: A Photo Essay Of Houses

In the interest of exploiting personal myth towards historical ends (after all, what is the point of art but self-exploitation?), and inspired by the fact I just moved again, I'd like to dabble in a photo-essay chronicling the houses I've lived in while living in the Bay Area, those post-collegiate years where, for better or for worse much of my manhood played out, ridiculously at certain times, heroically at others, most often with staid, quotidian grace, the perfect trait of the pedestrian.

And walking is my forte.

I like taking pictures and matching them with words. It's a very simple yet effective way to create a story with multiple insinuations.

So A Brief History Of Homes. . .beginning with

The Lower Haight, a cat on my gut, when I was reading Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, also featuring a cat.


Onward to the infamous Capp St., with the writing room where very little writing was done.

And the tea party where very little tea was drunk.


and there was the kitchen with the shit-clogged windows next to the Gothic Buddhist temple.


And the bicycle in harsh contrast with the checkered floors.


And then the exodus to Oakland, a dream of lake-mist and scaffolding.

Where a "house" was secured in the Far West of the City, a house with dirty windows and a red door and faded yellow bricks.

With a room that was a "fixer-upper" to put it mildly.

And the foyer was a veritable junkyard fit for a king of sorts.

And our hallway, like the loading dock behind an Edwardian dance hall, was always decked out with the most fascinating props.

Which opened up onto your standard, suburban living room.

And from the interior ship's balcony, our kitchen proved not too shabby either.


But then I moved East in Oakland to the place called San Antonio where the skyline was like this:

The water trickled ashore into fake ruins, gnarled trees, odd little copses of greenery where people rolled around and mock marriages were held.

I moved into a house that was about 140 years old, according to the commemorative plaque next to the door, a house that included weird medical-style drawers in the kitchen as well as an attic that was as big as a small church and full of tiny crawlspaces and alcoves. (Unfortunately I neglected to photograph it.)


Nearby was this weird turf that looked like a maze at night. . .

Although East of the Lake was often warm, sunny and humid, there were days when the whole lake was obliterated by fog. . .

Sometimes I dreamt of living in other houses that were nearby. . .
It was the first time I ever lived with strangers, so I spent lots of time decorating my study
walls to indicate what type of human they were dealing with. . .

I also took moody, self-portraits before I hit the town. . .

I refer to it as a"tough" time in my life, but really how tough was it?

Anyway things happened and I moved again, this time back across the pond into a house with friends, a place that was well-wooded and mariner-themed and generally felt to be a cozy container ship full of the coolest people ever, all of us set sail for a life of red wine, boisterous laughter and baroque schemes that went well past midnight, much to the bemusement of the landlord below.

Among the first ship's mates were these wonderful ladies:

Some of the rooms in the house were truly astonishing examples in mood music.

My own room let in the most oceanic light of any place I've ever lived in.


The Inner Sunset was a neighborhood with interesting twilights and good strong sea smells.

There were evenings there where things got out of hand and people walked the ceilings.


With good tidings, I went abroad and stayed in 25 hostels and came back without a house. But then I found a place and a new neighborhood which has been well documented here.

That proved to be a weird year, and so I moved again. And that's where I am now, 152 Park St., Bernal Heights. No photographs yet.

The Non-Plight Of The Honky Gringo

Here's a broken-up story for you, fragments from a longer quasi-non-fictiony thing called The Non Plight Of The Honky Gringo.

Sleep is evasive. I read till I nod off, come up for air, go back down the pit, wanting those dreams where I fly and say, I'm flying in a dream and now that I know that, I can fly anywhere, any height, disrobe, be naked in the blue air, send my love to the ants below. Flying in dreams, because I've done it before, what I remember is the thrilling coolness of the breeze my soaring body makes.

My boss sleeps soundly, but then she exudes and orchestrates more energy in any given hour than most people do in a week, a genius of her noble profession, which is noble, truly and forever.

(It is books.)

Sleep for me hinges on what I aim to face the next day. I think this is flawed logic.

A nightmare of a job I won't sleep at all. An appointment, a job interview, the dentist, I'm a little better but not much. If it's a day of leisure, maybe the best, I drown like a baby.

What's the very best though is crashing into sleep from a day that is as long and interesting as an underwater canyon. Think of the last very long, very interesting day you had and go into pin-drop detail describing it.

This last night I lay there visualizing French farms and Polish weddings, pastoral customs I wouldn't know what to do with but that I'd like to observe.

The ashen, acidic, abattoir rot emanates from the botched piping, making me wonder what crime is being suppressed by the imbeciles below. A murder? A trainwreck of sloppy joes and ashtrays and dead rats in the walls?

When I walk now, I make sure not to go my habitual routes, not from paranoia but from a self-empowering espionage. I take unnecessary detours, I backtrack and skit down an alley as if trying to outwit an analyst who's trailing me with judgment on his tongue. Back in childhood, when I spent a lot of time in my room alone, either reading, writing, listening to music or doing generally odd, ritualistic things, I used to pretend there was a child psychologist hiding out in the wardrobe. He was a spy. (More often I made her a she.) People in his trade were forced into the position of spies and saboteurs. The most interesting children had tendencies to burrow deep into arcane alcoves of the mind, hard to pry out, hard to find.

I always thought he came in through the window, along with the coyote howls, the fig tree limbs, the smell of summer limes, sun-baked asphalt cooling under a blue moon, fuzz from lost tennis balls getting stuck in my teeth.

Food is something else.

I ate the plate called Happy Buddha but was disappointed by its lack of variety. I drank the tea called Green and felt less nervous than if I hadn't. The mangoes are delicious this part of the summer but I still don't know how to cut them properly. Their juice feels electric on my fingertips.

I had a dream last night that was more like news.
Poetry is news that stays new. My dream comes with a real-life prelude:

Another lifetime ago, when I was involved with a raven-and-nickel-haired poetess she took me, in her tiny blue clown car, to a tumbledown movie theater next to a gay blues bar, a Jewish pastry shop and a giant rotting lake that had a Christmas tree in the middle of it. This was called The San Antonio.

The theater served warm beer and cold pizza and had gutted couches for people to lounge in while they watched the movies. This movie was about Oakland, in particular about an old, notorious drug dealer who, when he died, was escorted in a massive, outlandish parade of horse-drawn carriages, top-hatted coachmen, major-domos, etc. all through the blighted areas that he had fed and ruined with addictive, powdery drugs much to his advantage, his legacy, his legend.

I used to walk past spit-polished Bentleys idling outside of crumbling SRO's.

In my dream, I was walking through a bad neighborhood that was inevitably filling up with people like me who weren't from bad neighborhoods but because of their artistic livelihoods felt like they had to live in them. In this dream, a funeral procession was turning a corner. Just as my friends and I were walking across the street

Sun blasted against the side of a brick building. Their was an old painted advertisement for bread against the side of some broken-down factory. The funeral was for a "Gangster". And it had all grandiose trappings of that real-life gangster's funeral in Oakland.

Suddenly as the funeral procession neared the center of the block, a legion of screaming police cars screeched to a halt in the opposite intersection, adjusted into barricade formation and cops, and plainclothes detectives, and strangely-uniformed volunteers all brandished rifles, pistols, automatic weapons and started just firing on the mourners, the carriages and the sympathetic onlookers. A barrage of gunfire, all of it done stoically, methodically, without too much concern.

They were aiming for the Gangster Second In Command. It was very shocking. But I awoke thinking, Cops probably do this. They go to Gangster's funerals and fire away at the other Gangsters. It's the best place to find other Bad Guys all together at once.

I know nothing about the hard life.

I talked to a nurse yesterday who had paralyzing eyes and who was jealous that I worked at a bookstore. Her job is usually sad, she said, so she doesn't need to hear about Afghanistan on NPR 24 hours a day, not that she doesn't need to, but it doesn't behoove her disposition to, so could I recommend a book maybe, a book on tape, something else to listen to on her commute?

Which is funny, because it's the kind of the thing I've talked about before. Ease of day-to-day life can sometimes inspire a darker aesthetic side. Whereas if you're a nurse, a truly brave occupation I could probably never do, the horrors of the hours need to be mitigated with something less heavy-handed, something, even, life-affirming. It's understandable actually. I realized this only later.

I read somewhere it's best to stay put now. Cultivate a place. Let your garden get interesting.
I can't stay put usually, or I can stay put in a larger context but in the smaller one, I fidget like a sugar-high waif.

I wolfed down a fried tiger shrimp sandwich at a bar. The same bar where I watched the tail-end of a no-hitter and realized that sports can unify people more than most things. There was genuine glee when he threw that final strikeout. Drinks all around. Aggressive hugs. Shouts to the skies.

A man on the 14 bus, unnerved by a gesture I made, called me a "foreign racist" and, bewildered, I looked around to find even the scantest evidence for this madman's accusation and I found instead a compact mirror a woman had left on a seat that showed me the Russian letters on my ever-present black, bleach-embellished shirt.

Which doesn't explain much.

I am not Russian. I am not foreign. I am not racist, insofar as we're all not racists but still make split-second, visual assumptions whenever a non-us comes our way. He also told an old man to "spit out the dragon, old man."

The old man didn't listen.

Reading Your Work.

I maybe should have posted an announcement here, days, even weeks before it happened, that I was going to be in a reading on Thursday May 28 at 8 p.m. at Dog Eared Books. But no matter--the reading indeed happened and it went well with a very good crowd in attendance too. A lot of my friends would have told you that they had never ever seen me read before. And they would have been correct. It was the first time I've read anything, in that sort of context, for at least 5 or 6 or 8 years. I was among an esteemed group of fellow readers, including Maria De Lorenzo and Ali Liebegott. The setting, a bookstore, was both familiar and unsettling. There wasn't a podium, for example, so I felt the need to pace a little, or do a nervous toe dance. An incredibly bright light was above my head. No microphone either which I think helped me to enunciate more clearly and pause more effectively between suspenseful sentences. Since I had to talk louder, I felt more in control. I was also wearing my Mr. Peanut Death Head shirt which some people in the front row found distracting but to me was quite empowering.

With the ten minutes I had, I read two excerpts from stories that are essentially about the same thing: what happens when people, under economic, romantic, or metaphysical duress are forced to flee to an environment that is strange, difficult and alienating for them. Usually, I'll take a real place and exaggerate its most salient features. I'll give it a new name too. In this case, I thought of Oakland and parts of Detroit I've only heard about and called it Ashland. (Actually, that was my Mom's recommendation. Shout out to her, as Palin would say.) I think this is generally a good way to make a fictional world come alive: base it on parts of other places, combine, set to mix and pour out on the page and then throw in some out-of-left-field details that you completely make up.

The first story was more polished, had been edited a lot, workshopped into the ground. The second I wrote in a sun-blasted frenzy down in San Diego for the Memorial Day weekend. It was raw, somewhat obscene and in a crisper, more sardonic tone that a lot of my other pieces. No editing, drafting or any of that was involved. Most people seemed more impressed with that second story which, for better or for worse, I called Pictures From Ashland. I only read two pages of it. It's sort of futuristic, but not really. It's cataclysmic, but too absurd to be all that disquieting. It's about people like me who want to live cheaply and do desperate things to achieve that goal. Below, I've excerpted a part I didn't read, but came after the part I did read.

From Ashland Story:

So we left on the 5 cent ferry bound for Ashland. And the others inevitably followed. The ones who had come before came out of their crawlspaces to try and have sex with us. A whole new genre of pioneer was born. I was one of them. We put down cash from hot appliances on a place as big and rotting as a turn-of-the-century zeppelin hangar. The former owner had that circus look going for him. He wanted to bring in the “new breed” he said. Fishy-sounding language, a tad Mein Kamfian. We would sow culture and harmony to the bad places and for very cheap too. It would be kristallnacht every night, I thought meanly, deliriously. He was making me hate what I was so I, of course, had to hate him even harder.

Our compound, all decimated concrete, steel and glass, was on the edge of the poorest, most bullet-riddled stretch of housing in the West of Ashland, a post-industrial boondocks known as Yardage Town. Trash-can fires. Old ambulances on blocks. Soviet-style housing. Industry had died there just like the bison. Our zest for novelty already set us apart. Days felt longer at first, impossibly long, like how you imagine the Serengeti. I needed to know where to go, what to do. I had no bearings to begin with. I was mapping every inch with my eye. Slowly. One day, I went riding on my bike just to test out space. Already, near the Zip Town projects, some kids had tried to sidewind me with shopping carts. They came out of nowhere from behind abandoned semi's. Soon bottles from passing cars went by my head. The shattering of glass was like a strange, yet familiar bird call.

I got out to what I thought was a safer pasture, a landscape beaten within an inch of its life.
I rode leisurely through the former syrup works of the Mr. Pibb bottling empire. Now nothing but blown-out barracks, tree-eaten asylums and autopsied terminals. This was what they called “non-residential” but instantly I knew that was a joke. A hundred, maybe a thousand unseen people cuddled up in the wreckage, with flashlights for eyes and nobody to protect them. Here you were pretty much in International Waters. Nothing but scavengers and pioneers and kids. I scanned every compass point. But I wasn’t vigilant. How could you be? He ran out of nowhere, dressed like a jogger from the ‘80s, shirtless and wearing short, tight spandex. I hit him dead on with my bike and he fell into a pile of smashed window glass. It haloed his head like dazzling blue snow. I sensed danger the moment he reared back up with the beautiful shards jammed in his cheek.
“Oh my god, I am so fucking sorry,” I moaned.

“Not half as sorry as you’re going to be bitch” he said, and he clocked me in the gut with an invisibly quick fist. It knocked the wind right out of me. A miracle it only did that. I bent double, struggling to find a breeze. In that instant, I was in grade school again, a grass-stained tomboy who loved to dress like Scout, (you know from To Kill A Mockingbird) on the day that Kate Gallagher huffing and puffing in her piss-yellow pigtails, punched me right in the kidneys. This time, the man doing it to me had more force, both scrotal and historical behind the blow. I fell to my knees, my eyes dragging down his long, muscular legs.
“That’s what we do to wild dogs around here,” he added helpfully. I got back up, feeling no less than a million things at once. For some reason he was still laying there, right in the street, staring at me and grinning, half-in-the-shadow cast by a machine-gunned watchtower, his other half in the acid light of the noonday sun. Nobody anywhere could see a thing.

The story doesn't quite go to the worst possible place it could go. Instead, I played around with the idea that everyone, in times of general cataclysm, can achieve some kind of paradoxical equity based on fearlessness. The ending is surprisingly happy, perhaps unrealistically so.

Space And Place Part 2: In "BIG" Novels.

Here I want to talk about great big novels that have become working models for what I'm trying to write. Trying to write is the key phrase.

I want to mention four of the longer works I read in the last three or four years: Shantaram, Dhalgren, Little, Big, and The Royal Family, novels that respectively evoke the underworld and slums of India, a dystopic Midwestern-Berserk America, a supernatural New England and a gritty, crime-ridden San Francisco.

Three of them are by American authors and are deliberately, vividly, and strangely about America, or what remains of that myth in our collective imagination. Shantaram is by an Australian and is about India but is really a universal tale of personal redemption, at least by my standards.


(Katy said I'm a graphomaniac, which might explain the long-winded flavor of these blog rants.
It might also explain my love for big novels.)

Big novels are like big cities and many of the big novels I've read in the last couple years, or at least the ones that have influenced me the most are books where imagined spaces become major characters in themselves.

These four books are perfect examples of this kind of textual world-making:

In Dhalgren, the city-scape that you'll never forget is Bellona, a perpetually fogged-over, rubble-strewn, bombed-out, shape-shifting city where some unnamed calamity has occurred and people live there like squatters and criminals.

In Little, Big, the eccentric, Edwardian estate of Edgewood, with all its complicated facades, evocative gardens, unquantifiable square feet and demonic edges, is the chimerical gateway to the Fairy World, or so it would seem.

In Shantaram, India is made into the most fascinating, terrifying and seductive character ever. A quick read too, its that gripping.

The Royal Family is a sex-and-drug noir set in San Francisco's Tenderloin with some asides in the most disturbing Las Vegas circus you can possibly imagine.
ALL of these fictional environments are tantalizingly real, even if they are all also extremely strange.

I read these four in the last few years, living in San Francisco and Oakland, right when I felt like I figured out what I really wanted to write about and had developed stronger editorial discipline as well as a sense of bravery in exploring things that were dark and difficult. Not that knowing makes you any more productive. (Not that heartbreak makes you any wiser the next time either.) Much of my desktop, both hard-wood and computer, is littered with unfinished projects.

I am somewhat certain that I'm on the right creative track. I feel at least perpetually inspired. And much of this is due to the influence of these four novels, three of which: Delany's Dhalgren, Crowley's Little, Big and Vollmann's The Royal Family I would love to write some critical study about. Besides the fact that two of them detail with some pretty unsavory aspects of urban life, they all read like equally enchanting experiments in a kind of American magical realism. Although fantasy, sci-fi, pulp, erotica, journalism, cut-up, adventure, fairy-tale, magic, and picaresque all play a part too.

These books all gave me the same sensations: the feeling of walking around inside a book physically, of basking in the mystique of a book's geography, spying the scenery, feeling the uncertainty induced by dark alleyways and parking lots, acting like a voyeur on a street full of dilapidated tenements where desperate people engage in desperate, unusual and monomaniacal acts. Reading can be as fun as voyeurism, eavesdropping or espionage. And the Big Novel is, in some ways, the ultimate act of writerly exhibitionism, so there you go, it invites you right in.
I savor the long-term sense of immersion that the Big Novel causes. Yes, it's escapism. Yes, it's an abdication of life. But so are most things in life that gives us pleasure. Recently, I experienced this absorption in Bolano's nearly thousand-page 2666. That particular immersion took me to some very dark places--but places I needed to understand. A few years back, I experienced a sort of immersion, but more like a distraction--and for the life of me, I can barely remember the book except for a few cartoonish sex scenes and countless scientific words I didn't know---in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. The best character in that book is a Russian guy but I forget his name. Maybe, after I take some more physics, rocket science and history refresher classes, I'll give the book another read and feel more rewarded.

One of the hardest obstacles facing me now, as I write fiction, is the ability to fashion fully-fleshed environments or vivid fields of action in my narrative. To create a space the reader can step into and believe in. THAT I can believe in. For me, settings become major movers and shakers, antagonists and catalysts. Mood is key. In my slowly-congealing collection of short stories, some of which are loosely interconnected via recurring characters and places, I rotate between various locales, mostly in California so far, and many involving certain buildings and institutions that are critical to character interaction and conflict. For example, in one tale that is set in a reimagined Santa Cruz meets Venice Beach, a place I call Naagula, the narrator, a junior monk lives at a monastic abbey that is separated in space by a dark, treacherous Chasm from an all female science and technology school. Antics ensue. Well kind of.

Often my fictional locales are more or less real places, like Oakland or San Francisco, Buenos Aires or Rome, small town Colorado or some steamy metropolis on the East Coast. Other times I blatantly re-imagine a place that already exists but completely shake it up like a kaleidoscope so many of its integral details are warped or modified or made impossible and weird. I used to love Legos and Sim City and Legend Of Zelda so no wonder this comes, if not naturally to me, then at least habitually....

Image Inspiration

Inspiration for me often comes from recurring images. Things in the field of vision that you just can't get out of your head. Like this picture of tree-serpents hugging Greek columns in Oakland.

Sometimes all you need is an image you catch on the fly and then catch again and again. One of my most accomplished stories, 'Hysteria In Autumn' or so I think its accomplished based on the number of drafts of it I wrote, was inspired by the site of a porta-pottie being lifted into the heavens by a crane. At the time I was going through a tough spot in my life (involving bad decision making in the romance department) and I took a lot of personal refuge in ironic images, or at least interesting contrasts that made me laugh and entertain hope at the same time.

THE holy toilet that so captured me, however, was carried aloft at the construction site for the Catholic Church in Oakland below known as Cathedral Of Christ The Light. Unfortunately, I never managed to capture it on camera there, so the above photo from a different site will have to suffice.

I did however spend many of my work breaks over a year or two watching the church evolve from glorious raw scaffolding to ovoid launch pad to its current state as iridescent glass vulval egg that some people claim is more Ikea than Holy.

I'm not alone either in noting the suggestive shape of the center part of the church. I can't tell you how many people I've overheard walking around Lake Merrit exclaiming, "Wow, that church is going to look like....look like...a vagina!" NO offense to church-goers or women; tis more a commentary on architecture than anything else.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of my reconnaissance, I was enthralled by the virginal scaffolding and the strange men that moved within that cocoon:


THE close-up was particularly inspiring.


THE WHITE CRANE was the one that lifted the porta-potties high into the sky.
FIAT LUX!



My office building is the large steel-grey megalith filling the left side of this photograph that completely dwarfs everything else in its path.
HERE is the wonderfully autumnal view from my work window:

Anyway, it all makes me curious what other landmark/thing/specter in the field of vision will provide similar inspirational fodder.

I'll keep you posted.

Sharing A Segment About Oakland

Some of you might recognize the above from West Oakland. I took that photo a long time ago. But for some reason this morning, as we spit out of the tunnel as I do every working day, I remembered how pretty Oakland is and can be, despite its delapidated, grimy, rubble-strewn character. Plus today was a perfect Oakland day: a sparkling lake, a beautiful skyline, all sort of people walking around the water.

Oakland is a muse for me, believe it or not. For lots and lots of reasons which I will talk about endlessly here and there and in my stories.

Other good photos of my old stompin ground: West Oakland.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of sharing actual fiction on this site, I wrote this morning the BEGINNING of a potential very short story about life in Oakland. I think I want to, at least for right now, share BEGINNINGS of stories, to see if they work and if they encourage further readership. The following is more poetic, less plotted, and more rough than most things I write.
Encouragment and critique accepted graciously.

Scenes From A Story About Oakland:

Morning was like a mock birth in a freshly-ruined cathedral. Sawdust and chipped plaster stuck to my skin as I stretched away my aches.

Right around seven, the vaulted ceilings of my home began fluttering pale blue as gilded dust danced in every corner. Doves or pigeons fattened their chests against the crusty glass. You anticipated some visitor from on high, maybe a paratrooper or a crash landing.

The air was as alive as any slum, invaded by the spirits of long-dead industry, the oily dreams of cylinder merchants and steamboat conductors and peg-legged prostitutes. I’ve watched old home movies of this neighborhood and my house still stands in them. I'm connected to things that should have been utterly obliterated.

The cracked windows flooded with dirty, sepia light as Henry appeared at the top of the stairs in his polka-dot suspenders, his shredded jeans, and little else. Half-naked was the way to go around here. Or else you’d be itching and turning red more than usual. Not from illness, but from weather that has been trapped and taunted like a rare, ruby-backed moth.

I knuckled my eyes open and coughed up a part of last night. Instantly, I smelled eggs going hard in oil and my stomach remembered the boilermakers from the night before.

My sweat had almost eaten through the winter flannel on the bed.
I have to do something about the fractured headboard. I need to sweep and buy tools.
I made a note of all this on the back of a crumpled receipt as I slithered into my underwear.

A ruined cathedral?
Or a shipwreck?
I awoke to a different interpretation each day.

Day by day, I was retreating further from the things that raised me. If only those things could see me now, I thought, they wouldn’t even know me.

If the other eight stowaways weren’t already grumbling awake, they were after Henry made his boisterous, Gene Kelly on angel dust entrance down the rickety, blue staircase. We started with coffee out of a French press and sticky buns that the bakery wanted to throw away. We finished out the evenings with curry, red ales and horror films, the combination conducive to nightmares that always clarified some hysterical part of my adolescence that I had forgotten.

By day, when we were running around, there were taco trucks and stealing from the orange orchards of the filthy rich. Sometimes we’d splurge on Korean barbecue which always left us in a state of catatonia.

The summer would get so stifling I took to sleeping outside on the concrete loading dock on a piece of factory-grade silk. Above me, a pink moon hung like a pumice stone on the mottled washboard of the Milky Way.

Black cats would undulate out from the foliage as I slept, and keep me company, or else act threatening, when they were only having full-moon fevers.

Distant big-rigs, night-time helicoptors, the bleating of wild dogs, my own conjurations of future success lulled me into a twisting and turning half-sleep.

I found a newspaper and a quiet park in the late mornings. I read the names of the survivors on the plaque. The black kids would throw bottles at the lily-white joggers; the metal artists in their oil-stained Dickies scored methadone behind the boarded-up church. I looked at the facts. They looked askance. This wasn’t how it was designed. But nobody could think of anything that fit together better.

I didn’t have to imagine, but I was convinced that my caravan was forever turning in for the night at some crucial, yet hazardous crossroads. A spice I couldn’t name kept dogging me onward. A woman I couldn’t remember kept calling out my name.

The whole of the Western part of the city was an asphalt desert; all the buildings were eroding back to their original scaffolding, the color of mildewed copper, tide pools, and rotting fruit.

One word sufficed: ambergris.

Wednesdays, the parade of cement trucks broke the pre-dawn hush with the racket of churning and braking, backing-up and dumping. The lot lizards came out from their chicken-wire corners, hobbling like the elderly and suffering sun-stroke in their vinyl skirts. It was hard to feel bad for them, without feeling bad for everyone else too.

Evenings, we did our more daring runs. Rust was in. Old boat parts were in. Anything from a fire truck or an ambulance, a school bus or a golf cart. We didn’t touch chemicals except a cheap cocktail of hash and opium, called Red Rock. I learned the wiles of broken-down machinery. How to negotiate a busy street corner without attracting attention. A crowbar or a composition book rarely left my satchel. Coffee could you take deep into the day, I discovered, turn you into a camel that could cross these industrial latitudes without cramping up or going hungry.

To be continued. . .