Monday, October 31, 2011

Berzerkely Blues: continued...


A party was announced at a house as previously described. There was an acid-rock garage band playing Doors and Jefferson Airplane covers on a makeshift stage. The band stopped for a bare-chested character all war-painted up in the best Jerry Reuben or Abby Hoffmann fashion. As he started his pitch Juanita, a.k.a. Etta (very drunk), was so pissed the music stopped that she slammed into the placebo warrior and knocked him over shouting, “You ain’t no Injun! I’m a mother fuckin’ Injun! You got no right to wear the war-paint you wanna-be… you white boy!” It was tragic because it was the truth meeting infantile posturing. Truth and politics; i.e., infantile posturing, don’t mix and when they do try to it is always a betrayal of one sort or another.
None of the activists knew what to do. It wouldn’t be right to shut up a real oppressed minority or red-blooded drunken Indian. They stood there in a circle around her and tried to talk her down but she wouldn’t have any of it. I left as the police were pulling up and that was about as much as I wanted of Berkeley politics.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

From A Time Ago and Then

It was in places such as the Rap Center that people picked up on whatever buzz was going on around town. If the University was trying to raze a condemned house the buzz would go around that there was a party at the condemned house's address. Free acid would mysteriously appear everywhere and street people would show-up to get it on. Someone would kick things off when the local cops inevitably arrived by tossing a bottle or a brick.  The police then busted up the party and unceremoniously escorted people off the "Liberated" property. The more stubborn resisters might have their heads busted and taken to jail to cool off for the night. The incident would then be picked-up by the Berkeley Barb as an "Occupation" of the property ... another Peoples Park situation broken-up by the "Pigs".

However, the demographics of Berkeley had been shifting. The middle-class; i.e., the tax base, was moving out to the suburbs. Students were more concerned about grades and courses as the War in Vietnam also shifted towards the end of 19 70 and protest marches had gone main-stream.. Students were barely available for minor revolutionary activism such as these. The political radicals were gaining strength and would soon (in the next few years) be electing mayors and city council folks. The street people were getting to be less of an asset and beginning to be more of a nuisance. Still, places such as the Free Clinic and Rap Center served to keep the street people available for actions deemed less affective and necessary but still utilized out of old habits that die hard. One such incident was so absurd it would have been hilarious had it not been so tragic.

Chapter: Berzerkeley Blues; To be continued....

Friday, October 28, 2011

The Battle of State Street

I was tanked up and when I was tanked up I never knew what was going to happen next. Sometimes I  merely wound my way home and crashed. Other times it was as though I'd developed Tourette's syndrome; as I made my way down State Street, letting out whatever peeve was bugging me at the moment to shocked, and perhaps frightened, tourists.This particular time it was the panhandlers (who gathered at the statue of Juan Carlos) that became the focus of my ire. I crossed the street to where they were hanging out. One scruffy character demanded spare change as I approached.
"What? You tell me what spare change is and I'll think about it."
You got plenty, part with some of it."
"It just so happens that I do have plenty..." I pulled out a wad of c-notes and peeled one off, dangling it in front of the overly aggressive panhandler. The guy's eyes lit up as he grabbed for it. I deftly snatched it away and tossed it to the hangers-on on a bench at the side of the square. Now everyone was paying attention. I had acquired an audience as I began my rant:
"What is a statue of a murderous monarch doing in a prominent place on a street called State?" I shouted, needing no megaphone. I was no longer impotent Sean McKee but I was the Mick to the max. A chord... the delicate chord that bound my sanity ... that chord that reined in the wild beast and kept me pinned to a peg... the tamed elephant had gone rogue... I had begun what I would finish... I had tried to live right but that chord had been stretched to the breaking point!
This noise raised a few jeers and a crowd started to amass hoping, I'd either heave a few more c-notes or an opportunity would arise to take from me the wad I'd displayed.
"Why do you panhandle and play games begging spare change and dealing street drugs?" I continued, "this town is wealthy enough... why don't you just take some from those who have more than they need?" I became transformed into an old-fashioned rebel, haranguing the unwashed masses. I was Jesus serving up a revolutionary version of the Sermon on the Mount. I was Thomas Paine spittin' on the Brits or Saint Paul on the Areopagus on Mars Hill. I was imbued with the not so Holy Spirit of Joe Hill, rallying the Wobblies: "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth... at six feet of it at the most!" and this was my soap box.
"That king," I raised an arm and pointed at the statue, "was ordained by a Christian God to reign over and rip-off a thousand year old civilization... yes, Chumash slave labor built the Santa Barbara Mission and you sit hear pleading for that, which by the grace of a Christian God, you are granted a nickle or two! I say, fuck Jesus Christ and fuck his bloody king too!"
I was insane with virtue and then
I tossed the rest of my wad... about five-hundred bucks into the crowd... shouting as loud as I could, "Jesus Christ did not die for my sins. He died because pigs like Juan Carlos could not abide him. Adding insult to injury, they use Christ's name to bestow regal powers on a fop like this usurper! If you had any balls at all you wouldn't be sitting here! You'd be burglarizing those houses up there in the hills above us."
One of the late-comers, who'd missed out on the cash bonanza called out from the crowd, "Why don't you shut the fuck up and throw us some more money!"
The crowd laughed as he came at me swinging... I was untouched by him but landed a few blows before we were interrupted by pepper-spray.
A bicycle cop had pulled up to see what was happening. Clearly it was a disturbance that could not be tolerated on State Street. The cop had seen the fists fly... he called for back-up and cuffed us both

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Slippery Books

Alan Watts wrote a wonderful book that, contrary to his design, I keep in my library. It is titled : The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.
I particularly enjoy this one paragraph:
Therefore The Book that I would like to slip to my children would itself be slippery. It would slip them into a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling. It would be a temporary medicine, not a diet; a point of departure, not a perpetual point of reference. They would read it and be done with it, for if it were well and clearly written they would not have to go back and do it again and again for hidden meanings or for clarification of obscure doctrines.
Ahhh, a breath of fresh air!

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Nadya: A Taxi Romance

Oh, Nadya...
A girl like Nadya: Whew!
Living in the back of a State Street
antique store on a mattress,
She was a dish-nik* girl.

We were looking at delicate, carved oddities
and amusing ourselves in the shop.
There was laughter and touching.
She embraced me...
at first, casual for a hug,
then she pressed her body to mine.
I breathed in the sensual contours of her scent.
Her heat was moist warmth, humid,
not a fiery thing...
Then in a snap: "Stop!
nothing is going to happen here," she says.

Back to where we started.

Who is Nadya?
A girl I knew a while back:
A girl wildly boozed and coked up...
blond and lean; full of her self,
enamored of the narcissism of floozydom:

I liked Nadya.
She was in her twenties and I was just becoming "not young",
hitting on forty, newly divorced and needing the fun.
Somewhere back there I had gone through the door that
separates youth from middle age.
You don't try to hang on to it.
Somewhere along the way such efforts become more fodder
for pathos and self-pity. Lke lemmings to the cliff... they
just run headlong into disgust.

*Dish-nik 1. Too good looking to be thought of as a beatnik:
Doesn't read books: doesn't like poetry: doesn't like art; Likes clubbing: has no political knowledge or ideals but hates Republicans for ripping her off somehow.: likes staying up all night on ex or flirting coke away from strangers. She is "Beat" however... just plain beat/... but her attraction is that she doesn't know it. 2. A dinged or slightly damaged item; i.e., nick in a plate.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

A Taxi Romance

CHAPTER ONE:
ANOTHER REJECTION
Leaning over the keys of my old portable typewriter without my glasses, I strained to read the monitor screen where my e-mail posted another rejection from a New York agency. The Remington Rand typewriter I leaned over has remained my oldest and dearest friend. I have used this Noiseless Number Seven for well over three decades and, on this antique, I pound out; drunken rants, angry letters to editors and sometimes poetry. However, I consign the sweat of my labor to the cold digital reality of our age via a keyboard for manuscripts that have a greater need to be perfectly sanitary.

"Please be assured I have carefully read your project, Sean..." the e-mail read, "unfortunately I have to pass on your manuscript. One thing that concerns me is the length of the manuscript, however, I felt the voice was strong. I planned to request more but after reviewing your query and seeing that your protagonist, Max, had instigated and participated in a rape, I felt that I couldn't invest in him."

"Meeoooow," Homer stretched out on the top of the old monitor.
I relit a butt from an overfull ashtray on top of a stack of three hundred, soiled, unread and unedited pages. Holding a near empty fifth of Jack to my lips like a microphone, I tried to Marconi my voice through the wall all the way to New York City, "Hey you... yes, you over there on Agency Island! You wouldn't have been investing in me... Sean McKee, not Max!"

Then I looked up at Homer to make sure my outburst didn't upset him, "Does she think I'm the rapist?" I purred.
The phone rang. Homer didn't answer my question. He gave the phone a nod and the waited patiently for me to do something about that damned noise. I listened for my answering machine to kick in. That was one of only a few concessions I made to the twenty-first century: desk-top computer and answering machine. I don't like voicemail because I can't screen my calls...

Yes, I am a curmudgeon. I go to The Santa Barbara Roasting Company to have a cup of regular coffee and maybe a bear-claw, not to write the great American novel in less than 150 characters. Of course, there was no Facebook or Twitter back then. It was 1998 and I was a maudlin old drunk in those days. I am still a curmudgeon, pretending to be a writer, but I do it at home and not so agonizingly alone as I was when all of this took place.

"Sean, are you there? Hey, pick up the phone..." It was the Fu. I took a pull of the pint as she insisted, "Mickey, please pick up the phone."

"Okay, hello," I'm thinking, let her speak, dammit... she is The Fu after all. I dubbed her that because she calls her golden triangle, her Fou-Fous-Nette. It is a French colloquialism that loosely translates as "silly boy trap". Besides that reference, The Fu, fits her well  because  loving her has been a martial art... kung-fu: with feints and jabs all the way.

"Sean, we need to talk, " she sobbed.

"Girl, I'm too old for this," I parried. To often in the past I'd heard this phrase. It was the same phrase Celeste employed when she told me she wanted a divorce. It usually means I listen while she, whoever she is, tells me something I don't want to hear. There is no we involved.

"It's not what you think."

"Not what I think?" I was surly. She'd put me in limbo a few times before. Every time we get close I get a call like this and I get enough rejection from...

"Sean, listen to me."
Okay, what is it this time?"

"Nicky saw us... he watched us last night."

"Oh."