THE NAKED ANIMAL

Spin Cycle - New Year's Eve and beyond: Enter the Hoop


When the sun got hot enough for me to strip off my hat and scarf, I decided it was time to go down and listen to Jon’s set, the morning slot, 8-11, which started out promising, but was nipped in the bud by a visit from a ranger: a barrel-chested silver fox with wrap-around mirrored sunglasses and a Dudley Do-Right chin. Rafael, who is the lead organizer of these gatherings, talked to him for a long time while Jon went deeply ambient on the turntables, feigning new-agey calm. Finally, some sort of deal was struck. The ranger ambled through the campsite, which I suppose held about 200 people or so by the morning of New Year’s Eve, with a very placid drug-sniffing shepherd, found nothing, and left us alone for the rest of the weekend. It’s good to get that kind of thing over with early. When I was in Goa in 1990, we always paid off the cops (and had a drink with them) long before the party even got started. Not to imply that any money changed hands here. I really don’t know what happened. It seemed much more subtle than a baksheesh exchange.

Once we had the place to ourselves again, Jon spun me into a twisted dancing marathon. I had decided to wait to dance until I could actually not stop myself, and my body dove me into deep, grinding movements for hours on end once the music overtook me. Anyone who didn’t know me probably thought I was crazy, but gently, not madman-crazy. But then again, almost everyone there was gently crazy after some fashion or another. I imagine that I must have looked like I was doing a long forgotten ritual dance from a lost civilization–and if they danced like that, it’s no wonder they got lost. Mostly, I disappeared into some cryptic, non-rhythmic track of the beat-heavy, multi-layered music, where I tangled with chords and surfed intermittent waves of barely audible spoken word snippets, or went off on a tangent until it disappeared into the brightening sky.

At dusk, I threw on my poncho from Peru, which had acted as a communal blanket at the edge of the sandy dance floor all day, and went on a comprehensive hike of the entire canyon with Will, Natalie and Elena. It was to be a casual sunset viewing, but it became a real trek, complete with serious safety decisions and on-the-spot bonding sessions, all as the sky went black and a crescent moon barely augmented our hard-to-carry lantern.

When we got back, Will and I cooked turkey dogs and chili for everyone while Natalie and Elena went to take a “nap.” Lynnie joined us. Jon and I did a touch of A; Lynnie did too, but only one drop, which she said did nothing. It was creeper stuff; stuff that made you think nothing was going to happen until you slowly realized it was happening.

For me, this was sometime after midnight, when I realized I had disappeared into one of the speakers. I spent the next two hours spelunking my way through its circuitry while this guy named Bob spun a wicked hardcore trance set, which Jon aptly called the “Rolfing” of trance (Jon’s style is more sensual Swedish). Bob had his long hair tucked up into a beige ski cap, and it curved into a stony comma atop his head so that he looked like one of those Incan priests with curved helmet-like diadems (or is it Mayan, or Aztec? Sheesh. Never trust me with world history...). I didn’t make my way out of the speaker so much as get ejected from it when Bob finished his set some time between dusk and dawn (I seriously had no idea), at which point I actually got to observe what was going on around me.

There were more people there by then, including lots of sweet hippy kids from the neighboring cities, and a few performers. Our faves were The Hoolagans, two radical showgirl chicks who spin these hefty, black-hose hoola hoops while dirty dancing [They’re superstars (hooperstars?) now!]. When they finished their show, they left some hoops out for the crowd, and Will had become an expert during my time within the speaker. I sat on a rock watching him spin the hoop, doing an economical little techno dance and hopping from rock to rock from time to time, and it was just so entrancing and so beautiful that I got a little hysterical–laughing, then crying, and laughing again. You know how I get when something really hits me (or do you?). All fluid and overwhelmed.

The next two hours were packed with images that were so irresistibly entertaining that I felt as if I were part of a secret, sacred circus. I kept remembering a soundbyte from Bob’s set, something about what was your life like, was it interesting enough to make a movie about? And I thought, oh yes, definitely–already, yes–but I’ve got an even better one planned. Stay tuned. My mind went on a gentle surf through a spiraling series of poetic twists and turns about all this as I watched the crowd: a fire spinner dressed like a silent movie diva, and another spinner, less flamboyant in performance style, dressed as a sort of medieval handmaiden, quietly looped infinity into the sky with streaks of flame. The romance of fire...

A slim, pale, tall girl with a haughty air, dressed in Russian snow-princess winter regalia, with a high-waisted black fur-lined coat and a fur hat, strode regally over to a rock, sat down and straightened her coat, then crooked each leg up daintily and removed her big, clunky, mudcaked hiking boots. Later, she took off her hat, under which she’d been harboring a little blond buzz cut that made her look like a big silly fairy instead of a severe princess of the tundra. The power of hats...

A skinny boy in big pants and a skinny girl in a tiny pink t-shirt circled around each other in Spirograph patterns, kissing when they met. But the boy’s true love was a little yellow glowing ball that he kept moving in a continuous, spiraling caress around his body. Boys and their toys...

A circle of people huddled around the fire. A circle of people huddled around a bottle of wine. A circle of people huddled around a bong. A circle of people huddled around a teddy-bear backpack. There was a big projection show on one of the canyon walls, but I barely watched any of it, I was so entranced by my immediat surroundings.

And all the while, Will spun the hoop. No, I won’t jump through that hoop, sir, but I’ll sit here and spin it around me for a while. Would that do? Of course, the hoop became an overarching all-encompassing metaphor for me, the way Lunch use to be (see my eponymous untitled novel for details), the way religion is to most people. By dawn, I was testifyin’: Hallelujah for the Hoop!

Natalie and Elena showed up, refreshed from prolonged naps, sometime just before dawn, having slept through the midnight hour. But it was no matter, since the party was still going strong. I started to wind down just as they were starting to trip. I had a nice, slow, sweet touchdown to planet earth while lounging on a furry blanket and watching the one-night-only revelers (mostly teenagers who’d probably had to tell their parents that they were going to a party in town–wait a minute, what town?) dance their final, happy-sad dances and say their good-byes.

I danced a little more as the morning made itself unmistakable, and spent the rest of the day barely moving from my poncho at the hearth camp. I shudder to think about the random junk and goodies I must have eaten that day, but it all tasted damned good. Will stopped by now and then with his latest reports on all the cute guys passing back and forth, which was entertaining, but I could not be bothered sexually, and that was very relaxing, as was nearly everything I had experienced on the entire trip. It was the best New Year’s celebration I can remember, and I’m already harboring dreams of a four-wheeler for regular desert revelry, as boondocky as it gets.

But then, as Jon and I discussed before Lynnie and I left the party around dusk on New Year’s day (the sounds my car made on the road kept up the trance soundtrack of the party, and I barely noticed I had left until I was home in bed), how much inspiration do you need before you actually take it all in and settle down to do some work? Good point, but not an ultimatum. No, I see the future becoming organic, ultimatum free, with no dead-ends or decrees. Yay for me, I’m an optimist again.

Epilogue: sometime in January, 2001
HOOP-dee-doodle-now!
Lynnie and Will each bought a hoop from the Hoolagans–Lynnie had gotten stuck in the machinery of the hoop for a couple of hours herself while the sun rose. The hoop appealed to me, but aside from a couple of half-hearted attempts, I didn’t enter the hoop until last weekend, the day after our little hearth camp family met for dinner at Natalie’s house because we couldn’t stand to part yet. That Saturday, Jan. 6, under a pale waxing moon in the ice blue afternoon sky, the hoop let me into its confidence. It did so for about five hours straight, during which I listened to a few new CD’s I’d bought, and found a few of my old ones that made good hooping music.

The hoop is good. The hoop is my friend. The hoop understands, and still it spins. I go outside for a couple of hours every day in front of Lynnie’s apartment building and hoop my head off, and when it lands back on my body it seems to be better arranged. I’ve already created a makeshift CD and water holder system with goods from the Army Surplus store on Hollywood Boulevard, but Lynnie and I are thinking along the lines of something a little more chic–how about a little cropped vest with CD holder on the front, along with a side zip and pockets for cell phone, wallets and keys, and a refillable water pack on the back, equipped with a little straw that could hook onto your headphones, allowing the fanatic hooper to sip water throughout his or her ecstatic possession by his or her hoop of choice?

His, her...wouldn’t it be nice if there were only one gender? Sheesh, how much simpler language would be. Language is responsible for the slow, ineluctable foment of many wars, I’m sure of it. I think if one were to get every person in the world to hoop at the same time while listening to the same music, peace would reign forever and ever. Not that I’m that big a megalomaniac. Just a maniac, plain and simple, and I continue to spin as I am bid.

Postscript, 12/31/05

Another new year is upon us. Welcome. The Naked Animal cannot believe how fast time seems to be passing. The whole experience I just finished blogging seems like it took place just yesterday, and yet, it also seems like a lifetime ago. Isn’t that the paradox of time in a nutshell? I still have the hoop (as you can see in the pictures I’ve posted)–it’s been well-battered by many such gatherings and copious home use over the intervening years. During my recent illness with cancer and attendant chemotherapeutic ordeal, I hooped almost every day. I had non-Hodgkins lymphoma, so I trampolined, did yoga and hooped to get the lymph system circulating again. I’ve never been able to do anything remotely fancy with it. I just stand there and let it go. Lately, it has folded itself into my sporadic meditation practice. I’ll hoop for five or six minutes in each direction with my eyes closed (I almost wrote eyes “clothed”) while practicing a combination of deep breathing and visualization exercises. On the physical plane, it’s also great for your abs. Yes, the hoop is good. I may not still believe that it can save the world, but it is a good thing. If you plan to hoop yourself, make sure you get a real sturdy adult-sized hoop made out of heavy black rubber piping rather than one of those flimsy little toy store affairs. Even if you’re a little kid (aren’t we all?)....and a Hoopy New Year to all!

Categories: backstory, family, friends, holidays, psychedelic, music, trends, travel

12/30/00 - A peek through the interstices
Lynnie and I proceeded from Ridgecrest to spend New Year’s Eve weekend at a gathering (with a group called Integral, to which Jon had recently introduced me) in Red Canyon Wash in the far east quadrant of the southern Mojave Desert badlands. For those of you who don’t quite know what I mean by “gathering,” you can call it a rave, but with the caveat that every rave has its own unique personality, like every person who attends. The gatherings I’ve been going to lately have been small and intimate, mostly centered around psytrance music, more casual and adult than the raves you hear about in the news and such, with the implicit goal being to create a collective alternate universe during the time we have together. Another useful way to think about it in “mainstream” terms is as a miniature Burning Man without the effigy. To maintain a certain amount of privacy, these gatherings are always held in places that are out of the way and often difficult to get to. This was no exception.

We blasted Heart’s Greatest Hits on the way down to the I-10 and out to Indio. “Even it up, even it up, even it out, baby!,” we screamed along; “Ah-oooh-yeah-ah...BARRACUDA!!” At dusk we bought a styrofoam ice chest, packed it with the perishable part of a hundred-thirty dollars worth of low-prep groceries, and stuffed everything into the remaining space in the back of my teensy car. It was already filled with our luggage, camping supplies, and booty from the Goodwill in Ridgecrest, which we had raided before beginning on our way. There we had greatly enlarged our party gear trousseau with a grey corduroy blazer, a teal prom dress, a sparkly Indian tunic, a magenta and green Vera scarf, a fuzzy red Maude vest and three feather-disk wig-caps a la Liz Taylor 1970 or so, none eventually worn–but it’s always nice to have options. We’d also bought a little folding chair and a needlepoint sampler, still in its circular workframe, reading “Orange Marmalade,” with a juicy Seville in a rustic floral halo.

About ten miles off the freeway, we met up with a U-Haul and a motorhome looking for the same party on the confusing circuitry of roads, and, at a crossroads, we held a small debate about which way to go. We decided to turn right. After a mile or so, it became evident that the road we were on was actually more of a motocross track. The U-Haul and the motorhome got stuck there, but my faithful little Doris Daewoo made it out across the moon-like terrain, and we reported the lost souls to the gathering organizers when we finally arrived in the right place: a gently winding canyon about a mile or so in length, with sheer, brittle walls of a hundred feet, about a hundred feet apart. Notice the name: Red Canyon WASH. Luckily there was no sign of rain in the extended forecast.

Jon was already there, along with his friend Will and the two women we’d met on Christmas day, the potato cookers, Natalie and Elena. They fed us beef stew, and we wandered around the grounds, checking out our temporary home. At first I thought the girls were stuck up, and they thought I was obnoxious (we discussed later, with much laughter about the often erroneous quality of first impressions), but we warmed to each other by the end of the night, and the six of us formed a nice little shared hearth camp. We also had private sleeping domains far flung from one another. Natalie and Elena had settled in pristine silence way back in a tributary canyon, where the non-stop whump-thump of psy-trance couldn’t reach them. Jon and Will were at the end of the canyon in one of the few campsites where, not only were you close to the sound, but the speakers were pointed right at you. That was a little too intense for me, so Lynnie and I set up down the road. We christened our camp by hanging the “Orange Marmalade” needlepoint on our tent just as the dusky night went pitch dark. Settling down to sleep, I soon realized that our peaceful little suburb was far more hopping than I had imagined it would be, full of bubbly chatter and private late-night boombox grooves.

I decided around five A.M. on New Year’s Eve morning that I was, in fact, not going to sleep before dawn, and probably would not sleep the whole weekend. After a few dramatic moments of utter distress over the prospect of such sleeplessness, during which I wrung my hands and pulled at my hair like an actress in a bad horror movie, I bundled up and walked to the dead end of the wash, where a grove of boulders connected to the riverbed above through a damp grotto fashioned by their interstices. I sat on the highest rock and watched the sky turn pink over the faraway mountains, doing my best to fade away and radiate.

Categories: backstory, family, friends, holidays, travel, psychedelic, music

Death Valley Suite, finale
Movement 4: 12/29/00 - Moderato con brio a la notte


Lynnie and I ate our first truly hearty breakfast of the trip the morning we checked out of the Phoenix. At the Exchange Club, Travis had been replaced by a bony old okie guy with nearly the same hyper-friendly and efficient affect as our red-headed boylet. I had an Ortega and Swiss omelette that made me belch like mad all day long. We said goodbye to Beatty with long, thoughtful browses through the antique shop and the general store, then passed the thousand-mile point on my trip odometer as we headed toward the Wildrose Charchoal Kilns at the south end of the park. They were on the way to our top secret New Year's eve destination, so even though we'd almost overdosed on sightseeing, we thought we'd give 'em an ol' look-see.

The kilns were up another of those “gravel” roads. Instead of bumping along in my little hatchback with its wimpy tires, we parked at the mouth and hiked up: three and-a-half miles, straight uphill. “High profile” vehicles whizzed by at seemingly regularized intervals, dusting us with layer upon layer of desert soot. The kilns themselves were immense stone hives that were used to turn lumber into coal for a nearby mine a hundred years ago. They now serve as tourist attractions and intense echo chambers. The walk back was a breeze, of course, relaxing enough so that we could forget about the chore of going up the hill and simply pat ourselves on the back for getting so much good exercise. Yay for us, we have firm buns!

At sunset, we stopped at Panamint Springs, Death Valley’s third and most remote resort, thirty-five miles from the nearest gas, as we found out when a group of French tourists arrived in their rented Hyundai, its fuel gauge already on empty. Just before making our final pit stops in anticipation of hitting the road for a couple more hours, a huge family group of Indians arrived, about twenty of whom were women in colorful saris, and they all got in line to use the one bathroom out ‘round the back of the diner. My sister followed behind and almost hopelessly waited her turn. I, on the other hand, scrambled up a miniature mesa behind the motel and peed against a willow tree. Ah, the delights of vertical urination.

On the two-lane road through Trona to Ridgecrest, people kept flashing their brights at me even though I had my low-beams on. That was truly annoying, and another theme running through my life. I don’t care what level you think you’re existing on, but you’re too loud, too wild, too bright for the rest of us. Just knock it off, would you!? I hate it when, even reigned-in, I prove too unruly for general consumption, but of course I secretly relish it, too. Then again, we are just talking about headlights here, aren’t we?

Ridgecrest provided us with our first ethnic food in a few days–some soggy chile rellenos and gray refried beans, along with margaritas that tasted like pineapple candy. We stayed at the Budget Inn, where our friendly East Indian proprietor took our thirty-eight bucks and provided us with the “special” room because we were a “special” couple: two queen-sized beds in a large kitchenette suite that was decorated in true Indian “the in-laws-are-coming” finery, with color-coordinated scalloping on the pearlescent wallpaper, matching the paisleyed bedspreads, matching the handpainted tiles in the bathroom and the kitchen area. Oh, and LOTS of sparkles in the acoustic ceiling. I was sure that this was where mother-in-law-sahib stayed when she visited from San Diego, or New Delhi, or Ft. Lauderdale.

When I went out on the balcony to have a cigarette, I watched our friendly, bobbing-headed proprietor follow his chattering wife around, going in and out of rooms and checking license plates on the cars in their lot. The place was spotless and well-maintained, and I was sure that she was the cause of this. Though they were speaking whatever Hindi or Bengali dialect they spoke, I could hear him going, “Yes, Dear. No, Dear. All Right, Dear. Whatever you say, dear,” just as plain as if they’d been speaking English. But for all the careful attention this couple obviously lavished on their roadside moneymaker, they still could not avoid the curse of the lumpy pillows. Oh, did I forget to tell you that all of our pillows were lumpy on this trip? By this point, I had decided it was something about the desert air that rendered polyfill rocky. Usually, something like that would bother me, but the desert had lulled me into its vast, unworried rhymes and rhythms. By the time I fell asleep, I was feeling as smooth as a well-tumbled stone.

Categories: backstory, family, holidays, travel

The Death Valley Suite, continued
Movement 3 - 12/28/00: Allegro non troppo, con molti scherzini

Lynnie and I decided to wake up early and have a full day of valley-combing. I was dressed and out by seven to check out the continental breakfast in the lobby. On offer were glazed or jelly donuts and coffee that tasted like it was made from twice-used grounds from a never-cleaned machine. What did I expect? Betty, the white-haired proprietress, in an influenza-induced stupor, coughed up loogies dramatically and swallowed them back down while I paid for another day. I spent a long time calibrating dried milk and sugar levels for maximum coffee drinkability. A brain-dead couple around my age were manning the continental breakfast table, but Betty kept having to tell them what to do.

“You get them donuts?” she said. “We out a’jelly already? You got that decaf goin’?” The woman manning the coffee makers started making more coffee, and Betty said, “don’t use that one over there” (indicating the coffee maker in the corner) “because the water leaks on that one and you’ll have a big nasty wet mess on your hands.” Right after she said that, the coffee helper woman went directly to that coffee maker and started pouring water in. Her husband (I presume), who was still sitting in an easy chair beside a plastic ficus and most decidedly NOT getting the new batch of donuts from the shop across the street as had been suggested by Betty, said, “Hey, are you sure it’s all right to use that one?” And the coffee woman went, “Yeah. Just shut up and sit there.” He shrugged, and cracked a dopy grin at me as I exited with my heavily doctored java.

Our first stop in the park, after listening to Rickie Lee Jones warble while we rolled across the hilly highway for an hour, was Ubehebe Crater, a large geological anomaly surrounded by a bevy of smaller anomalies, like a pimple and its attendant blackheads. We ran straight down into the gaping hole left by the volcano's last eruption (millenia ago, darling!), where the temperature dropped about twenty degrees. We then decided that one of the sheer walls on the opposite side of the crater looked like it was plenty scalable, and that we were going to climb it. In fact, there seemed to be a little staircase leading all the way up one of the slim gullies.

“Seemed” would be the operative word here. It was doable, but pretty scary, and about a third of the way up, it became less plausible to go back down than it was to continue climbing. We kept grabbing onto rocks that would come detached from the wall itself, and crumble apart down the cliff. There were one or two places where Lynnie and I had to stop and figure out how to keep going on our own terms, each taking a different route, but we finally scrambled our way to the top, and took a picture of the wall after walking around the crater to the other side again. We were sure it had been, oh two, maybe three thousand feet, but we later found out the wall was about 800 feet tall. Still, that’s about eighty storeys, and that’s pretty good for two city kids in trendy sunglasses and walking shoes.

From Ubehebe, we headed to Scotty’s Castle, where I learned that we were on one of the few discernible circuits in the Valley: Ubehebe, Scotty’s Castle, the Dunes. This was our, and obviously a host of other small groups’, plan for the day, so familiar faces kept popping up here and there, and it started to feel at times like we were all being slowly shepherded into someone else’s conceptual art piece.

I like the story behind Scotty’s Castle, which was definitely “Death Valley Scotty’s” own conceptual art piece. He was a known con artist who was a stunt rider in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and basically squatted on public land in Death Valley while trying to con bankers and such back east to back a non-existent gold mine, for which he had created an entire narrative and cosmology. He finally landed on this guy Johnson, a wealthy insurance broker in Chicago, who liked him, believed him, and sunk a whole lot of money into his “mine.” Scotty figured Johnson would never come out to Death Valley, but he did the very same year. He was immediately aware that Scotty had swindled him, but he fell in love with the place, and felt he had struck a good bargain anyway. He also liked Scotty for some reason, as did his wife Bessie, a tiny little thing of good old California breeding, who had graduated in the first graduating class of Stanford and become an erudite Methodist preacher. Scary. There’s a picture of her sitting on a rock with a parasol along the spring at Scotty’s Castle, age 50 or so, in the 1920s, with a little chiffon ribbon around her salt-and-pepper bob and a sly, coquettish smile on her plump, tiny face....

But back to her husband. So here’s this clean-cut old-school robber baron type who just falls in love with Death Valley and sees in it the promise of solitude (even back in the 'teens of the last century, people were loathing the hustle and bustle of the city–how things have changed, right?). In order that his wife will join him, he’s gotta build a house, and he decides to build this Spanish gothic monstrosity with all the modern amenities for millions of dollars, and let Scotty say it’s his, built on the profits from his gold mine, so that Scotty can deflect all the public interest and be left in peace. The Castle was never actually finished because the Johnsons lost all their money in the crash of ‘29, but this weird symbiosis between Scotty and Johnson went on for something like thirty years, while Bessie tended to guests and preached three-hour long sermons to the workers of the castle’s land and grounds. Wicked weirdness in the west.

The tours of Scotty’s Castle are conducted by true history geeks who dress up and pretend it’s 1939, the year Bessie Johnson started giving her own tours of Scotty’s Castle to defray upkeep costs. Just imagine the comments. I know you can. I gleefully joined in, coming up with the answers to our guide's little interactive questions when the rest of the crowd was too dull, and nodding a lot and chuckling politely at his tongue-in-cheek-ad-extremis explanations. The place is a trip, full of odd Spanish and Flemish antiques and custom made furniture, plus a zoo of wild artisanal tiles, dishes and textiles, all in their original states, just as they were lived with. It’s all very Thurston and Lovie Howell in the desert instead of on Gilligan’s Island, circa 1920s instead of 1960s. I guess Scotty would be Gilligan. I mean, it wasn’t actually Gilligan’s island, right? My favorite feature at Scotty’s was the opposing fireplace and fountain in the living room, creating fire running up the west wall and water running down the east wall. Totally western Zen.

Of course, nothing can compete with the Zen of dunes. From a distance, say about twenty miles away, the Death Valley Dunes lie on a southern slope like a sprinkling of sugar, like someone sifted out a few artful handfuls across the alluvial fan. Closer up they are monuments to organic geometry: Intersecting, three-dimensional sine waves curving on multiple axes, changing with the wind and the weather but remaining in sync, always occupying the same amount of space, if not the same exact space, sharing a stranded supply of velvety, post-Pleistocene sand. We trod across them for almost an hour before reaching the highest one, whose back we scaled as if it were a sleeping brontosaurus. A German family was at the apex of this great dune, talking very loudly, until one by one the children of the family unit slid down the face, and the parents marched in tandem back down along the ridge. Lynnie and I stopped at a mid-back hump, and watched a pair of air force SSTs spiral around each other in the sky, trailing long, thunderous moans that ripped through the purpling furl of the heavens.

Back in Beatty, we hit our third casino, the Exchange Club, smack in the middle of town, across from a never-opened coffee and candy place that had constantly taunted us with the promise of espresso during our stay and a bar whose neon signs read: “Cock” and “Beer.” Hmmm. Lynnie decided to break her burger and dinner salad routine, so we both ordered the special–All You Can Eat Spaghetti–from the plodding waitress...that is, we did so after she took almost half an hour getting us a glass of water, then took the orders of a couple who had come in after us. After a few minutes of consultation with various clueless kitchen personnel, the waitress advised us that they were out of the special for the night. Guess what the people who came in after us had ordered. That’s right: spaghetti. I had a BLT and a cup of chili, and, of course, another glass of that fine Burgundy they serve out in them parts. Despite the spaghetti fiasco, or perhaps because of it, we were rewarded with Travis.

Travis was about thirteen, with feathered red hair, round glasses and a hauntingly professional manner, and he hostessed that coffee shop to within an inch of its saltines. He was so heartbreakingly intelligent and efficient and friendly that everyone in the whole restaurant was following him around with their eyes, half-amused, half-tragic smiles on their faces–even the rednecks who didn’t quite understand where that smile was coming from. I wonder if Travis will make it out of Beatty, and where he will end up, finally, and what all the bovine waitresses of Beatty will think of it.

Categories: backstory, family, holidays, travel

The Death Valley Suite, continued
Movement 2 - 12/27/00: Largo, stacatto e bianco
It feels almost sinful waking up late in the desert, where people rise with the sun and the free “continental” breakfast in the motel lobby is cleared up by nine. We microwaved bland, mealy breakfast burritos at the Union 76 Mini Mart (Beatty’s jumpin’est joint, 24/7), and were on the road by noon.

Our first stop was Furnace Creek Ranch, where we stayed when we were little; the first people we saw there were a little boy of about eight and a little girl of about six playing together in the date palms. The place was hopping with tourists from all over the world. Just standing on the veranda outside the steakhouse I heard Italian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Hebrew and Spanish. I decided the Valley must be in the midst of a very serious international P.R. kick. After buying a twelve-dollar bottle of bad Coppertone for my face, we went to check out the Furnace Creek Inn, a madcap, pink 1920s oasis a little further down the road, with a terraced garden that must use up millions of gallons of water a week in its quest for eternal greenness in the midst of the dust. The place had been redone recently, a little too Hilton-esque for our taste, and the grotto-like underground restaurant with a natural spring and waterfalls running through it had been replaced by a formal dining room on the second floor that looked like a swanky Sizzler, so that was another comestible establishment crossed off our list. It would be back to Beatty for dinner again for the Campbell kids.

But first, a visit to the lowest point in the western hemisphere: Badwater, an immense salt flat in the basin of the valley, 282 feet below sea level. This is one of Death Valley’s major attractions, so the little parking lot off the road by the outhouses was packed with cars, and the near end of the flat was teeming with people for about half a mile out. But we had already decided to hike all the way across the flats (five miles each way), and we left the crowds behind after fifteen minutes. Half an hour later, the people looked like ants, and soon they disappeared altogether. Time passed secretly as we crunched across the salt, which had cracked into a series of fragmenting discs, curled up at the edges, sometimes inhabited by hordes of tiny stalagmites. It looked like a mega-magnified image of dry skin under a microscope. Sometimes, corners of discs would break and crumble, but it was impossible to leave footprints on the salt. There was no telling how many people might have navigated the discs before us. For all we might have known, we were the first.

Suddenly, something caught our eye way off to the south. Lynnie thought it looked like a sculpture of a horse. As we approached, it became clear that it was no such thing. Instead, it was a rudimentary scientific instrument made out of PVC piping, wire and metal boxes, designed by a team at the U.S. Geological Survey in order to measure the rate of water evaporation in different parts of Death Valley. Lynnie took its picture, and it soon disappeared behind us as we continued across the flats, swallowed up by the vast white glitter of the salt.

On the other side, after two more hours of crunching discs, we came upon something that looked like a placid lake from afar, but turned out to be another spread of salt, this one flat and curved at the edges, uncracked and pristine. We lay upon it and listened to the most intense silence I have ever experienced, disappearing into the salt. When one of us finally moved, it sounded like an avalanche, and the outside world jumped back into its cloak of reality before I could slip through a rip in the fabric. The walk back, like all walks back, was shorter for some reason. Our car was one of the last left in the parking crescent, and we drove back through the Artists’ Pallette (near the Devil’s Golf Course) at sunset while a tiny sliver of moon appeared in the sky like the Cheshire Cat’s grin.

We spent our cocktail hour in the bar at the Furnace Creek Ranch. More hardrock from the jukebox courtesy of Lynnie, including “Fat-Bottomed Girls” by Queen and “Tube Steak Boogie” by ZZ Top, in which the vocal track had been tuned down so that easily-offended travelers couldn’t decipher the lyrics.

Stoney was our cordial and capable bar manager. We stood by while he had a long discussion with two blonde dykes about how white wine was not supposed to be served at refrigerator temperature, which was usually a frosty mid-40s (Fahrenheit), but at a cool, not icy, 56 degrees, at which their “wine cellar” (a waist-high fridge with a glass door) was faithfully set. Stoney’s wine offerings went far beyond the usual burgundy, chablis and rose (wine-in-a-box) to include several California cabernets, merlots, chardonnays and sauvignon blancs, and anyone could tell that Stoney was proud of his expert ways with the nectar of the grape. The lesbians conceded huffily and retreated to their rooms with their 56-degree chardonnay, which was strictly against house rules. Stoney rolled his eyes and shook his head as they left. There was this old guy who looked like George W. with a bouffant staring at me a little too intensely from across the bar the whole time, with that expert mixture of curiosity and fear that people like the George W. clones of America have developed in order to scrutinize people like me (i.e. “weird,” according to them) in public. Outside, a tiny Chinese couple in a huge rented Land Rover smoked cigarettes and looked at pictures of their day on their digital camera while an Italian family stood on the stoop between the steakhouse and the coffee shop arguing about which one to patronize that evening.

As for us, we went back to the Phoenix, watched a dorky reality show on the Learning Channel about friends setting up (soon to be ex-)friends on blind dates, bundled ourselves up and walked to the Stagecoach, Beatty’s premiere casino, whose searchlight could be seen from a hundred miles away, a white shadow swaying on the dark desert sky. Our way was lit by the stars and three or four streetlights, each of which was decorated with a heartbreaking little Christmas doodad, my favorite being a single red candle meekly glowing in a ring of holly.

The holiday quickly evaporated in the every-day’s-a-holiday monotony of the casino. Something unmistakably groovy was going on in the far corner: A bearded man in a black suit and hat sat on a low, dimly-lit stage at the far side of a large, empty dance floor, playing the theme to the Pink Panther on two slide guitars splayed before him like a harpsichord, with lots of puckish slips and glitzy slides. The walls were punctuated with pink-lit columns filled with water, tiny bubbles constantly rising upwards, wiggling to the wa-wa of the music. We dissolved into those tiny bubbles for a few minutes, then went to Rosa’s Diner for dinner, where the usual cows were tending the pasture, and my “petite filet migon” was a not-very-good New York strip folded up to look thick and wrapped with bacon to hide the seams.

I was rewarded however, with eighty dollars off a five-dollar investment on the Triple-Seven slot machine. And then the universe gifted me the spectacle of Dora, the floor manager, gruffly paying off a jackpot on a Wild Cherry slot, taking a Polaroid of the winning spin for the bulletin board with a cigarette hanging out of her eternally frowning mouth. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Categories: backstory, holidays, travel

Post-Christmas:
The Death Valley Suite
Movement 1: 12/26/00 - Andante non specifico

twas the day after christmas
and all along the road
not a creature was stirring
not even a toad

the desert was intensely beige
the panorama vast
the highway, lined with desert sage,
made me drive too fast...

...the desert is a sleeping leviathan, the Loch Ness monster encrusted in sand. Sometimes it becomes so quiet that you can hear its shallow breathing...

We made our way north up I-127, which slices through eastern California, breaks free into Nevada, then dips back into California somewhere just north of Death Valley, our destination. The drive, as with all drives in the desert, was monotonous and trance-inducing. Somewhere in the upper right quadrant of my brain, a cryptic twist of circuitry was making sense of the ragged tattoo my tires were rolling out on the erratically rutted road.

Lynnie said Eric had stayed at the Phoenix Inn in Beatty, Nevada, just northeast of Death Valley, and it goes without saying that I was leery of the prospect due to Eric’s previous praise of the sulfurous Royal Hawaiian in Baker. But the Phoenix turned out to be an okay joint: basically a plot of well-maintained double-wides, with three moderately spacious rooms on either side of each. Beatty is an almost transparent tiny desert town, full of people adept at hiding in plain sight. It’s the kind of place with a bulletin board at the general store with notices reading, “Excellent double-wide with redecorated wet bar on 1.5 acres: $12,500.” Double-wides are the thing in Beatty. The really poor people live in the ramshackle 19th century houses that line the few streets, relics of Beatty’s shortlived heyday as a silver mining town in the 1880s. My favorite dwellings, though, were a heady grouping of really old mobile homes just west of our motel, squatting biomorphically amongst 50-year-old weeds, adventure pods grounded for good on an alien planet, their hopeful floral curtains faded and frayed, TV antennas growing out of them at odd, jointed angles like eyes on long-forgotten potatoes.

Before checking in at the Phoenix, we went a little further on to Rhyolite, a ghost town/outdoor art gallery a few minutes south of Beatty, where, in the 1980s, a visiting European artist created a series of white fiberglass molds of flowing robes around non-existent bodies that float like ghosts above the rubble of the slowly decaying townsite. I almost got stuck in one, as the model the artist used for these robes was deceivingly much smaller than I. Lynnie took a picture of me in my confined state. When I was little, my mother took a picture of me when I got stuck in the pots-and-pans cupboard. Trapped Rob–a photographic theme in my life.

Back in town, we had lunch at the Burro Inn, one of Beatty’s three casinos, and its most down-home of the batch. Country music blared over the ring-a-dinging of slot machines, and obese strip miners in Harley shirts downed their post-shift burgers and six packs while a stone-carved retired couple stared at us apprehensively over their grilled cheese sandwiches. I had a glass of “burgandy” (two dollars) and a spicy chicken sandwich, while Lynnie began her desert marathon of hamburgers and dinner salads with “blue cheese” dressing, which more often than not a little too closely resembled the house standard, ranch. Waitresses in Beatty, we found, were uniformly bovine. They’d stand around chewing their cuds, and if you happened to be lucky enough to catch one of them scanning the room from the corner of her eye, she’d give you that scared, but aggressive, cow stare, then pretend she didn’t see you and resume rumination. It’s all part of the plodding haphazardness to which desert life is prone, especially Nevada desert life, which is far more abstract than its California counterpart.

The office guy at the Phoenix had told us about this spectacular canyon that we had to see at sunset, which is when we found out that you really need a four-wheel drive (a “high-profile vehicle” in local parlance) if you want to do Death Valley right. We went about a mile on a “gravel” road, according to the map, whose large jagged rocks could have been considered gravel, I guess, by some race of beings about fifty times our size. After much bone-rattling we eventually turned around and enjoyed the sunset from the freeway, whose gentle dips and curves we got to know like our own nervous systems (which is to say sporadically, in spurts of recognition), over the next few days. We explored Stovepipe Wells, one of Death Valley’s three mini-resorts, and had a drink in the bar, where Lynnie played a selection of raunchy 70s hard-rock on the jukebox, but decided not to eat in the restaurant: Death Valley’s version of good food runs the suburban haute cuisine gamut from Chicken Cordon Bleu to Trout Amandine; my mind filled with unpleasant images of extra-large Lean Cuisine packages in industrial-sized microwaves.

To escape the upscale redneck tone of the Wells, we left the park and went way low down, to dinner at the Sourdough Saloon, Beatty’s answer to Cheers, where everbody knows your name--because they're all the same: The bartender was a butch number named Deb, the resident cute n’ giggly chick went by Debbie, and the dark-haired siren with the leathery tan and slim cigarettes at the end of the bar preferred Deborah. Deb made killer Bloody Mary's with tons of horseradish, and we sipped them between bites of a large sausage and jalapeno pizza, of which I ate the lion’s share. Conversation at the bar was halting and monosyllabic, but somehow full of camaraderie, and we became momentary stars when Debbie asked us where we were from, sending the whole room into an inexplicably frenzied hoot and holler over the fact that we hailed from L.A. At least we left them laughing.

Thirty degrees was the temperature, I’d guess, as we walked back across a few vacant lots to the Phoenix. The sky was full of stars, but what did my eyes land on first in the midst of this great sparkle? Orion. Why do I always see Orion, no matter the season or time of night--or even part of the world? “Plastered to the sky with dislike” is what I used to say about him, meaning me. It wasn’t quite dislike, though, that night; no, something more like patient watchfulness.

Categories: art, family, holidays, travel, backstory

In 2000, my sister and I went to Death Valley for the holidays, then hooked up with friends for a New Year's eve gathering even further out in the boondocks. Over the next few days I'll blog my journal entries from the trip, 5 years ago to the day, starting with Christmas day:

1. Runners

On Christmas day, My sister Lynnie and I decided to go to my friend Jon’s house because he couldn't go on our planned pre-new year's Death Valley jaunt. We ended up at his hideaway in a Studio City canyon around two. There was a full Christmas dinner, complete with gourmet-level turkey, the recipe for which Jon told me he got from a trick after fucking his brains out. Always multi-tasking, that Jon.

We watched Logan's Run as our alternative to It's a Wonderful Life. Farrah Fawcett is sooo bad in that, and the whole thing gets cheesier and cheesier and triter and triter every time I see it, yet so heartfelt; so in a way I do get the same sensation that most people do from watching IAWL. The concept of Carousel still tickles my mind, though. Where do they go when they explode, back into the energy supply somehow? I want to have Michael York's body in Logan's Run as my next physical look.

Just before we left, as it was getting dark, Natalie and Elena arrived and cooked potatoes. Elena sat in a corner by herself, but I couldn't tell if she was shy, snobby or high. Natalie is a bona-fide mad-woman of the highest caliber. More on them later.

We departed around six. It was pitch dark by then, and we stopped for coffee at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Laurel Canyon before leaving town. It was packed with loners and stray pairs, defectors from family drama, like us. My whole molecular structure changed as soon as we got to that first gap between civilizations on the I-10. I like space, I decided, and I like it empty.

2. Bun Boy

After a couple of hours, we decided to stop in Baker for the night instead of going on to Death Valley and arriving at 11 or something like that. As we discussed this, we passed a billboard with a piggy little cook-boy with a chef's hat humping a big phallic thing. It was hard to tell that this thing was supposed to be the World's Tallest Thermometer–134 feet tall to commemorate the hottest recorded temperature in the western hemisphere: 134 degrees in August, 1914. Why this commemoration took place was not clear, but the thermometer was erected by the Bun Boy Motel, Restaurant, General Store, two gas stations and gift shop just a few years ago. Basically, Bun Boy is about half of Baker, and the thermometer’s their big power symbol. Pretty primal, huh?

Back to the Bun Boy himself, the one on the billboard, the mascot of this captain of Baker industry: Here was this elfin cook climbing up the thermometer with the most lascivious, tongue-out look on his face. Lynnie and I laughed about it for several minutes straight, and this began a long chain of laughing fits and silent time that ran throughout our trip.

3. Sulphur Burns

When we got to Baker, we cruised the strip and settled on the Royal Hawaiian, on the western outskirts, less flashy than the den of the Bun Boy. Lynnie said her boss, Eric, had stayed there and thought it was cool. Eric is a magnet for all things cool.

The old lady behind the counter was straight out of the Ozarks, and I couldn't understand but every other word:

"...folks...got...double...the...floor...forty-five...got...on...second...for fifty..."

"We'll take the cheaper one," we said. The woman was impressed that I knew my license plate by heart, and by this time I was able to decipher her:

"Yep, that's a man atter ma own heart. I gone out and bought a car and the first thing I did was memorize me that license plate number because so many-a those dang new cars look exactly a-like, and you can't even find it in the parking lot."

"Mm-hmm," I said.

As we walked out of the office, there was an overwhelming stench of sulphur in the air–so strong that it made our eyes water and noses burn. It smelled like about a million rotten eggs eaten by some abominable desert sandman and farted out of his nasty ass. I mean, this was bad! And so was our room, which was not in the old 50s part of the Royal Hawaiian, in the stucco bungalows that arch off the peak-roofed, palm tree-framed gate. No, ours was in the back, in a newish, crumbling dingbat structure that we decided could only be a crack house. The room was severely repulsive, from its linoleum bedroom floor to its defunct television to its stained and cramped shower. We considered it for a while. Lynnie was ready to leave immediately. The thing that finally convinced me was the fact that my box spring was completely torn and eaten up inside, nearly hollow. I imagined rats. We exited back into the sulphur and once again into the office we went.

"Some'n wrong?"
"Can we, uh, not stay here and get our money back?" said Lynnie.
"Why, what happened?"
"Nothing happened. We just don't, uh, want to stay here."
"Awright. Ya didn't do nothin' to the room now, didja?"
"No, of course not," I chimed in.
"Well some people would outta spite. There's people like that."

We got our money back, and I thought it was funny that she was probably one a’those kind of people herself.

Bun Boy beckoned. We paid eighty bucks for a room that was just a tiny step above Motel 6. Baker's a total racket. In the morning, we ate at the Bun Boy restaurant, where we paid seven bucks for eggs and bacon. I think Bun Boy needs a little more competition in dear old Baker. The gift shop had odd stuff. Example: a black porcelain-faced baby-doll in a body-hugging white fur jumpsuit complete with hood. Actually, it was more like a white fur body sock. There was a line for the women's bathroom, and you would have thought it was about 1965 judging from the
waiting ladies' hair-dos.

We bought some chilied mangoes at a funky mini-mart across the street, and got Turkish coffee at the Mad Greek Cafe, where you can get anything from a stewed lamshank with tatziki to a trio of fried taquitos. There's a picture of the guy who opened the place in there with Dean Martin; or is it Frank Sinatra? By the way, the sulphur smell (?) was only strong around the Royal Hawaiian, but it was always in the air. Baker is such a hell hole. Funny where Greeks end up. Greeks, and Jews, wandering, like me.

Categories: family, friends, holidays, travel, backstory

On Christmas Eve, I am thinking about my dear little nuclear family, long exploded and re-coalesced in an alternative form.
We were happy together, or attempted to be, for the most part. My mother tried very hard to make us happy, and we smiled when she told us to.

Even my dad and I were happy together, it seemed, until we actually had to face one another.

My sister and I, being each other's map, stars, compass and shoreline, were always happy together, especially left alone.

Christmas Eve, when I was a kid, was formally observed at my paternal grandparents' house, where everything was cool and coordinated in icy colors. The mood was icy, too, and I was never comfortable there. Neither were my parents, and their own problems always seemed to intensify by the end of the evening.

On Christmas day, however, we got to wear our comfy clothes and go to the kozy Kokinos household, where my maternal grandparents and Greek great aunts would joke and play and make the day fun for everyone. Family drama took a much-needed break on Christmas day at Grandma and Grandpa K's house.

Here's a picture of me and my sis from one of the last nuclear-family Christmases we attended. I have no idea exactly what year it is here (and I would love to recall what was in those gifts we're opening), but it's obviously the 80s!

This Christmas Eve, my sister's on her way to the desert, my mom's on her way to the ocean, and I'm hanging out with my cat and my other family, Philip. My dad is probably with his dad. We exchange cards via mail. My sister and I still spend Christmas together all the time, though. We used to celebrate the holidays in Vegas every year for the sheer otherness of it:

Tomorrow, I'll start a serialized blogging of a holiday journal I made five years ago, describing a Christmas and New Year's (2000-1) my sister and I spent in Death Valley, then at a gathering in the deep boonies of Eastern California. It's nice to be out in the middle of nowhere at the verge of the new year, nostalgically observing the shift in the calendar against the backdrop of timeless infinity.

And it's nice to be cozy and warm on Christmas.
Happy Holidays from the soft spot in the center of a very hard nut.

Categories: family, holidays

Every time I look at you I can't understand
How you let the things you did get so out of hand
-Judas to Jesus, a la Tim Rice

When I was little and started wondering why we didn't go to church, wondering what religion was and all that, my mom, bless her soul, took me to see Jesus Christ Superstar (the timing happened to be perfect, I was six or seven, and none of us knew we were actually Jewish yet--more on that later...). The movie left a huge impression on me, mostly because of the music and dancing--I had to have the double album immediately, and played it relentlessly. I can still sing most of the rock opera's entire libretto by heart, and often do. So it's no surprise that I was delighted when I happened to catch it on the Sundance Channel yesterday. I thought I would check in with my favorite tunes and have a little nostalgic sing-a-long, otherwise going about my business. But I was ineluctably drawn in by the amazing performances, especially by Carl Anderson as Judas (pictured), the truly rockin' score and, most of all, the woeful human truth and soundless depth with which Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice and Norman Jewison (as the film's director) infuse the ever-debated, often mangled, story. In fact, after decades of delving into all sorts of theological studies both mainstream and fringe (including further films on the subject), I find that Jesus Christ Superstar's telling of the tale, with its compelling evocations of the complicating machinations of ego, politics and mob consciousness, and its simultaneous focus on the idiosyncracies of human emotions, still holds up--perhaps the best of all. Thanks, Mom!

Sundance will continue to broadcast the film throughout the holiday season, so screw Frank Capra and his damned Wonderful Life, and get on the bus with JC and the gang for a journey to the nitty gritty of the Christmas spirit. The entire cast is on fire, the staging and sets are beyond-belief groovy, and because Norman Jewison had the clout and vision to shoot live in Israel, the landscape itself is integral to the experience--look for some astounding long shots and creative uses of natural stages. On top of all that, the words and music work in a volatile synergy--it's definitely the most well-crafted, most honest and most passionate piece that the now-hallowed duo of Rice and Webber ever created.

As for the rest of the holiday hoopla, as the soul-stirring Yvonne Elliman (playing Mary Magdalene, making me cry) sang: Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to problems that upset you. Don't you know everything's alright, yes, everything's fine....

Categories: holidays, film

yes, even more notes for an autobiographical strip search

In third grade, my best friend was a black girl named Bernetta. Every recess and lunchtime we monopolized the strip quad between the third and fourth grade classrooms with our improvised, technique-free gymnastic tumbling runs. What we did have going for us were speed and fearlessness. We even started doing handsprings and flips on the black top, just to get a rise out of someone. Sure enough, we caught the attention of the playground monitor, and were pulled aside on separate benches under the monitor’s watch for the rest of the period. Keep it on the grass, the monitor told us when the bell rang.

After school, I would sometimes go to her house to hang out. There were always plenty of people there. It was a large, plain white house with a numerous family, all with their own friends. Something good to snack on never failed to manifest, and everyone was laid back and friendly. The house was a little stuffy, but the windows were always open. I felt comfortable there.

I felt weird about having Bernetta over to my house; I wasn’t sure why, but it gave me a queasy feeling to think about it. Finally, though, I overcame my mysterious squeamishness and asked her over after school to practice our tumbling and watch TV. We took our time walking through the semi-gated community to our spacious ranch-style house, where we luxuriated in the air conditioner and ate graham crackers with peanut butter while watching old sitcoms on television.

I think my mother was napping, but at a certain point she got up, newly made up, in a colorful dress, and immediately asked Bernetta to stay for dinner. We were having pork chops, which were pan fried with Shake ‘n’ Bake; not one of my favorites, but Bernetta seemed pleased. We were out in the backyard practicing one-handed round-offs (I had to pick up the dog poop first) when my Dad came home. I could see him looking at us across the patio through the kitchen window, and talking to my mother.

Despite a nagging inkling of disaster that gave me goose pimples, I took Bernetta in through the sliding glass door to meet my dad. They said hello to each other, and my dad turned away to unpack his briefcase on the kitchen table and read some report. I looked at my mother, who was firmly turned towards the sink, rinsing lettuce, then Bernetta and I crept out the laundry room door. As we headed toward the lawn, we heard my dad through the open kitchen window whisper-yell, “I don’t care. I don’t want that little nigger in my house.” Yup, that’s exactly what he said, and we both heard it clearly. I suddenly understood my dark premonitions.

Bernetta and I could barely look at each other, but we stopped in our tracks, then took a left turn toward the rear gate. We started running when we hit the driveway, and didn’t stop until we had reached the other side of the neighborhood. We were still in shock and unable to exchange words on the walk to her house, but we laughed and pointed at things, and conversation started to flow again around her mother’s dinner table.

But we didn’t talk about it. Our eyes communicated with their liquid eloquence, but we knew we couldn’t handle putting it into words. I remember watching TV after dinner and telling her, out of the blue, that my dad thought I was a sissy. She said, “Hmmm. That's wrong," and I shrugged. Her mother asked if I wanted to stay the night, so I called my mom. She said no, after speaking to my father, whom I could clearly hear in the background, and arrived in her blue station wagon in what seemed two minutes to pick me up and take me home.

I was secretly stewing, but I let my confusion and indignation run acid through my arteries while I carefully choreographed my good-little-boy front. As long as I didn’t make any waves, the parental units seemed to behave on a more even keel. I hated being around them. I was terrified of both, though I couldn’t pinpoint why. They made me paranoid, nervous, uncomfortable. It was probably because my mother was an always perky repressed anger bomb that could detonate at any time for no reason, and my dad was a sometimes surly, sometimes overly enthusiastic alcoholic, but I only had incipient inklings of those notions at the time. In my childish wish-life of love and order, I formalized my parents’ barely contained havoc: I thought of myself as a scientist clandestinely examining the weird and wily ways of these all-too-humans, and I tried to ignore what these ways were doing to me. Instead, I imagined fantasy worlds.

I imagined that a spaceship would swoop into my backyard and, finally, after god knows how many lifetimes, pick me up from this out-of-control freak show of a culture. I wanted to escape my parents, yes, but I also felt at a very early age the cold shadow of the narcissistic patriarch looming over the planet, and I swore I wouldn’t let it get me. At heart I connected with Ferdinand the Bull, and I spent a lot of time under trees, all alone and daydreaming. But I was not inactive or unadventurous. I would go on treks around the local park by myself, bushwhacking through juniper clumps and climbing whatever tree looked most accessible. I had the usual scratched up shins and parade of bruises to show for it, of course, but I had experienced a series of three quite serious accidents when I was about five that were still fresh in my mind during grade school.

The first took place in our backyard, where we had a department store jungle gym with a red metal rod in the middle, hanging from chains. I loved to swing on it, fantasizing about becoming the man on the flying trapeze. One day I was getting cocky about my expertise, and as I jumped off for my Olga Korbut dismount, I let go too late. My chin smashed into an upper bar on the jungle gym as I jumped, and the force made my teeth rip clear through my tongue. Half of it was hanging by a string of twisted flesh when my mother found me. In my memory she is screaming and hyperventilating. It was a Sunday, but we were finally able to find a doctor who was willing to come down to his office and take care of me. I don’t know why they didn’t just take me to the emergency room. The hospital couldn’t have been that far away.... My father had to give me the local anesthesia shot because there was no nurse on duty. The doctor stitched my tongue back in place, and the thread later dissolved, leaving a slight ridge that I can still feel. I ate nothing but ice cream and apple sauce for weeks after the incident.

As soon as I was deemed fit for normal duty, I was back in action. I had a new bicycle–a red, white and blue number with a three-tone banana seat and shiny tassels on the handlebars. Christine from across the street had a brother named Russell who always wanted to “wrassle” with me, which was my idea of hell. “Wrestle,” I told him, “not ‘wrassle,’ and no, I don’t want to.” He was a year younger than us, and these days, he’d be immediately diagnosed with ADD. Back then, he was just “rambunctious.” I called him hyperactive, and got slapped by Christine for it. Russell was always coming up with hair-raising stunts for us to do, and I always went along, as long as it didn’t involve “wrassling." Once he got his own bike, it was all about jumping curbs, popping wheelies and racing in the middle of the street.

After exhausting our usual repertoire one day, we decided it would be fun to ride across the steep slope at the side of our house, from either end–a game of chicken with the added obstacle of an incline. It was tough keeping our balance at such a slant, but I mastered it after the first couple of times. Russell wanted to try it on my bike because he thought my bike was better. In fact, they were virtually identical, but Russell was the kind of kid who always wanted to use other kids’ things because he thought they were better than whatever he had. I used to notice that and wonder about it, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. My mother told me to be nice to him, with an implied “or else.”

So there we were at opposite sides of the green strip, he on my bike and I on his. Christine chanted ready-set-go and we were off. As we passed each other, the world went wobbly. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but somehow we wound up in a tangle of legs and spokes. I felt a piercing pain in my left shin and yelled, seeing that the pedal of my own bike had jammed into my leg all the way to the bone. I yanked the bike off me, and saw an almost transparent white liquid lacing the currents of ruby blood. My mother came out, screamed, carried me to the couch, and wrapped a string of towels round and round my leg. A doctor came to the house, and I must have been given a sedative or pain killer because the rest was a blur. I remember crutches, and that the wound was too open for stitches. Even now, I often reach down and touch the scar, which is about an inch wide and shaped like Iceland.

And to complete this trilogy of kindergarten catastrophes: It is winter in Buena Park, unusually cold for southern California. Every morning the gutters are iced over solid. It is grey and cold and the trees are groaning skeletons, and no one is up and about yet. I practice my skating moves on the glassy ribbon at the curb, gliding along then turning, or jumping off the curb to land with my leg in a bent, baby spiral position. I’m going along pretty good, thinking, hey, I could be in the Olympics I bet, and suddenly my legs fly into the air and my head clunks on the curb.

I passed out for a bit, then woozily walked into the house and told my mother what had happened. Of course, there was blood, so a damp cloth was quickly wrapped around my head, and I was directed to lie down on the couch. My father said not to let me fall asleep. I watched TV, half cross-eyed and dizzy, and heard my parents talking about the possibility of concussion, which at that time I thought was something to do with an orchestra. I have no memory of any medical care, but we ended up going to Van de Kamp for breakfast. I had spaghetti, as usual–a habit that was invented specifically to drive my parents crazy, and it worked–which I promptly vomited back into my plate and all over my pants. Dinner was cut short, and I was watched carefully for several days. Again, I ate nothing but ice cream and apple sauce until I felt well.

These three episodes create a living triptych that hangs in my memory museum; it is known as “A Young Seeker’s Introduction to a World of Pain.” There are many other works in the series; so many, in fact, that a new wing had to be opened to house them. As I grew up, these injuries became far more often psychological than physical, but they pierced even deeper, dealt mostly as they were by the two people I was forced to depend upon. I continued to get myself into dangerous physical situations now and then, in later life always wondering if I were actually just taking out my anger on myself. But most of the pain I kept inside, in festering emotional quags untended but not forgotten. And a lot of it is still there--like soap scum and rust stains, that kind of pain leaves shadows even once it's scrubbed clean by therapy and time.

After the n-word incident, Bernetta and I stopped hanging out together, wondering why but letting it happen anyway, because confronting it was too painful to imagine. I became a loner, sitting outside the main playground on the lawn where we waited for the bus in the afternoon, reading two books a week.

At home, I started sneaking into the living room after midnight to watch the late late show on TV. I became a budding expert on the Hollywood classics that way over the years. I'd keep all the lights off and sit with my face about two feet from the set and its extremely low volume so that I could hear Bette or Joan or Rosalind, and hypnotically eat a whole box of sweetened cereal during each movie. I used my allowance for my stash of Captain Crunch with Crunch Berries, Count Chocula and Honey Comb, and kept the boxes under my bed. I'd go to sleep stuffed to the gills with corn syrupy goodness at three in the morning, then wake up at seven and have french toast heaped with butter and powdered sugar for breakfast. At lunch in the school cafeteria, I traded main courses or vegetables I didn't like for dessert. I stopped for a candy bar or two or three, depending on how much of my allowance I had left, almost every day after school, and I ate a huge chocolate sundae with the works nearly every night after dinner. I didn't need teachers, parents, or even friends anymore: Sugar, my first and still most ineluctable addiction, had taken sweet, safe hold of me.

Categories: backstory, bakersfield, friends, addiction

yet more notes for an autobiographical strip search

I learned in therapy recently that when a family concentrates all of its attention on one member’s perceived problem to the avoidance of all others, then that person is what is known in psychotherapeutic parlance as the "designated patient." When I was seven or eight, my father’s chronic paranoia about my sexuality went critical, resulting in an incedent that is seared into my memory like a brand is on a piece of cattle’s hindquarters. It is one of the standouts in my gruesome repertoire of childhood horror stories.

It was second grade, and aside from making the sturdiest clover chains on campus, I was also king of the monkey bars. I could twirl around the parallel bar non-stop for what seemed minutes, and skip two, sometimes three, at a time on the traveling bars. The tidy sandbox that housed the spare array of juvenile gymnastic equipment was occupied mainly by girls, but there were two other boys there all the time, one Chinese and the other Mexican. Sometimes we would sit on the rotting wood frame of the sandbox and talk. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but the three of us were somber and soft spoken. I fantasize that we talked about what it was like to be such outsiders, but I’m sure we weren’t that psychologically advanced. One day, the Chinese guy brought one of his grandfather’s newspapers for us to see, and we sat for our entire lunch hour marveling at the distinct personalities of the various pictographs.

My monkey bar days came to an abrupt end over dinner one day, when my dad told me he had heard I was playing with the girls on the jungle gym and I had better start playing with the boys. I knew immediately that Mrs. Ashbeck, my second grade teacher, had deceived me, or maybe it had been the principal or one of the other teachers, or the concerned mother of another kid who had talked about me at home. Suddenly I felt like everyone was talking about me, all the time, no matter which way I turned. You’d better play with the boys tomorrow, my dad warned, and I’m going to send your mom down there just to make sure you do. I scoffed at that, though I could see that my mother was as afraid of my dad–the dinner table terrorist–as I was. My little sister gazed intently at her plate as if she were reading messages from beyond in the swirls in her mashed potatoes. I asked to be excused, and was allowed to go, but not before my father grabbed my arm and told me to think about what he’d said.

How could I think about anything else? My dad’s words ran laps around my head while I vainly tried to read a particularly gory excerpt from the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm. I was shocked and delighted by the fact that, in the Grimm version of Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off toes and slice heels to fit into the glass slipper, but to no avail. I can see the fragile shoe filled and spattered with almost-blue blood, and sense the stepmother’s desperate disregard for her daughters’ well-being in the face of a possible royal marriage. But even this circus of craven carnage, absent from all other versions of the story, couldn’t capture my racing mind that night. Quietly, I played both records of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which my grandmother had bought me against my mother’s wishes. I huddled next to my junior executive stereo turntable with my knees pulled up to my chin, rocking back and forth to the beat.

The next day at school, I played with the boys at lunch recess just in case someone actually was spying on me. Soccer was just coming into vogue across America, and all the WASP jocks of the first three grades were engaged in a ferocious game. A few other kids jogged on the track that encircled the playing field. I sheepishly followed in the wake of one of the teams, cheering and pumping my fist when "we" made a goal. As I loped along, I saw them: my mother, in a smart dress and Jackie-O sunglasses, holding the doughy hand of my little sister, whom she had just picked up from her morning shift at kindergarten. These surreptitious sentinels stood like statues on the other side of the chain link, and though I couldn’t see my mother’s eyes over the distance or through the dark glasses, I was sure she looked straight into mine when I spotted her. My stomach leapt up to join my ferociously beating heart, and I started sweating uncontrollably. I couldn’t believe she had actually followed through with it. Absolutely sinister.

Why was I so surprised, when I knew my mother was only subconsciously on my side? Her behavior and remarks had always proven otherwise, so this was nothing out of the blue. For some reason, the collusion of my entire family made this incident far worse. Otherwise, it had been things like this: I get out of the shower, one of my first alone, and wrap a towel around my waist, then one around my head, turban style. My mother gets a queasy look on her face and says with some urgency, "Boys don’t do that." Of course, I ask why, and she is flummoxed. "They just don’t," she says; and then, apparently referring to an instinctive tropical dancehall swaying of my hips that I was entirely unaware of: "And don’t treat that towel like a skirt." She helps me dry in a hurry and rushes me into my undeniably boy-style pajamas.

Something like that–that’s forgivable. She can’t help being horrified because that’s how she’s been programmed by this psychotic, bigotry-fueled society. But this spying on me at school signified a deeper hatred of who I was and who I was going to turn out to be. At dinner, the coup de grace: "Your mother tells me you were just running behind a team acting excited at all the right times," says my dad, already red in the face. My mother can’t look at me; she strangely focuses all her attention on my father’s left ear. Of course, I denied it and after a while the embarrassing topic lost its hot status and passed away quietly like an unloved great uncle. But I was angry about that one for a long time.

Twenty-five years later, I confronted my mother about it in a drunken rage. She pooh-poohed it–it was all in my head–and I smashed up her kitchen with a wooden spoon. It was a messy and cathartic release of long-brewing fury; one of the...no, perhaps the only one I’ve ever allowed myself. My sister, who was there to support both of us but stayed out of the action with brilliantly finessed detachment, tore up her room, slashing posters and smashing furniture, when she was a young teenager, just to let off steam. I remember that afterwards, her face was flushed with triumph. I had always been too good on the outside to do things like that–such a big, good, smart little boy!–though I writhed and seethed inside.

Around 1995, I interviewed Harry Hay for the now-long-defunct Los Angeles Reader. He had just published a book of his collected writings, so the lasting crusades of his life of activism were fresh again in his mind, and his anger–even deep into old age–was palpable. After talking in earnest to me for over an hour about his theories regarding gay people as a third sexuality, in touch with the other side because of their very otherness and historically regarded as the shamans and healers of various civilizations, he got into the stickiness of actually claiming that place in society today, when gay people are almost globally feared and hated, or, conversely, objectified and glamorized into cultural submission. He also pointed out that, on our side, we’re clamoring for inclusion in the straight, middle-class lexicon and lifestyle, which further hampered his vision of gay people carving out a unique and useful societal role.

At the end of our interview, he turned to me and said, listen, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, and I really don’t have the steam to go forward with it, but you might be the person to do it: I think that all gay people should start a mass class action lawsuit against their parents for the entire childhoods of habitual, ritualized abuse they received, making them unable as adults to express who they are, or, indeed, to even know they are. I argued that this was like the approach of Western medicine–attacking the symptom instead of rooting out the cause. But he insisted that it would be a major step forward.

Decidedly not my style: I’m not a blockbuster activist. I prefer to make my inroads quietly, like this; what I’m doing now. Besides, all voiced ideas somehow make it into the realm of everyday reality eventually. Case in point: While rummaging around the Web to see if anyone else had taken Harry up on his lawsuit suggestion, I found this: a reported law on the Staten Island books stating that "It is illegal for a father to call his son a 'faggot' or 'queer' in an effort to curb 'girlie behavior.'" Mind you, all I've found is a listing on "dumb law" sites or "joke law" sites, so it's clear that people don't take this kind of thing seriously, and I'm not sure if it's even true or not, but if it is, I'm sure Harry's chuckling with appreciation somewhere. And so am I. Because name-calling is just dumb. Big, strong, smart boys simply don't do that!

Categories: backstory, bakersfield, glbt

further notes for an autobiographical strip search

In my handful of early memories, I feel unbearably perceptive, as if I were born with an old soul's supply of Weltschmerz. I must have appeared extremely astute to my mother as well, because she sent me to pre-school when I was only two and a half. I was big for my age, but I wasn’t nearly as verbally expressive as the four-year-olds who were my classmates. To make up for this deficit, I was hyperactive and sporadically violent. I am supposed to have started lots of playground scenes, one in which I bit a little girl on the cheek, leaving marks that she reportedly still has signs of today. I don’t remember being that aggressive. As far as I was concerned, I was a good little boy. Strange, maybe, but good. Like this:

Our task for the afternoon is to fingerpaint using various flavors of instant pudding, which we can tint with any combination of non-toxic food coloring. It is all easy to clean, and all edible. In fact, I surreptitiously take a few heaping fingerfuls in an impromptu taste test before deciding on my medium. I finally choose Pistachio for its pleasant softness and the cheerfulness of its particular green, which needs no tainting dye to enhance it. I take a whole bowl full and smear it across my newsprint painting pad on my miniature wooden easel. As I work, I pick up a gob and maneuver it downward in a zigzag or whip it into a spiral on the diagonal. Soon I disappear into the pistachio pudding, ski along its slopes, navigate its textural nuances. The teacher has to shake my shoulders firmly to break me from my spell when it is time for milk and cookies.

And then there’s this:

My mother had been asked by my nursery school teacher to come and pick me up because I had coerced a classmate of mine to touch the steaming wax paper envelope over which the teacher’s assistant had just run a hot iron in order to melt the crayon shavings contained within. This led to much crying and scolding, and apparently I was insubordinate as well as sadistic. When my mother pulled up in our 1967 olive green Chevrolet Estate station wagon, she yelled at me for acting like such a baby–I was expected to be very cognizant and adult at three years old for some reason. Not just a good boy, but a big good boy, mature for his age--or so they thought.

Now Kindergarten–that did feel grown up. I attended the after-lunch shift at a grade school about six blocks from our house, and I was allowed to walk there by myself. This was suburban Orange County, California, circa 1971. Could you imagine letting a five-year-old walk six blocks by himself anywhere these days? Sometimes I walked with the kid from across the street, Christine, who was from Alabama, and said "crowns" when she meant "crayons." You wanna play with my crowns? I envisioned a sort of beauty queen contest.

Most of the walk to school involved traversing a weedy field studded with electrical pylons. It ran about four blocks between my street and the street the school was on, flanked by fenced-in backyards. When I was alone, I shuffled slowly and stealthily through the field, catching glimpses through the spaces between pickets of people lounging by their pools or coddling their roses. I stopped and talked, for a long time, out loud, to the many curious cats who stalked the tall grasses at the field’s perimeter and, more gently, in low, conspiratorial tones, to the imperiously immovable ones who basked in the sun beneath the humming wires. I babbled with the lady bugs who napped intermittently on small leaves. I even talked to my shoes, assuring them they would soon be clean when I accidentally stepped in a mud puddle.

I was much less adept at talking to people, except for two little girls in my class. We would play restaurant together in the toy kitchen, with us as very egotistical and demanding chefs and the rest of the girls as our staff and customers. Meanwhile, the other boys would usually be playing something like cowboys and Indians or dodge ball. My teacher gave me lots of worried looks and finally, during recess one day, pulled me aside from my culinary imperatives and emphatically encouraged me to "get some fresh air" with the other boys (it was a kick ball day). I went outside and moped around the jungle gym until it was time for the teacher to read us into napland.

Some time in the summer after kindergarten, we made the trip up to Bakersfield, where I’d been born a few years earlier, and where we ended up staying for the rest of my childhood. There was some kind of party at my mom’s best friend’s house, meaning best friend from high school; maybe fourth of July–it was over a hundred and the pool was a big feature. There were about twenty people there, I"d say, eight of them children, five boys and three girls. I evened the balance by joining the girls in a Barbie fashion extravaganza–cooled almost to cold by the white noise and frosty breath of central air, while the boys played some sort of aggressive ball game in the pool.

This was well into the party. We’d already played Marco Polo and practiced our dives, eaten cheeseburgers and chili dogs from the barbecue, got in the pool right afterwards despite our parents’ boozy warnings to wait half an hour; and marveled at the new pet turtle that slowly stalked the square of lawn beside the pool while the adults downed copious liquor, lounging on the swanky new patio furniture.

By the time I was ensconced in one of the girls’ bedrooms, free of sweat and brashly pairing a magenta jacket with an orange miniskirt on my Malibu model, the adults were good and sloshed, and I knew that my dad was the most bombed of all. I could hear his loud laugh through the tightly-sealed skin of the house, desperate and adrenaline-fueled. Some sort of ruckus started up, and wouldn’t you know it, it was all about me.

Now I could hear their voices clearly. Why wasn’t I out there playing with the boys, who by that time had switched to a dive bomb contest? Where the hell was I? Seconds later, the door to Jane or Jennifer’s bedroom slams open, and my dad is there, screaming at the top of his lungs that it was disgusting that I was in there playing with dolls, or words to that effect. Boys don’t do that. His face was red and laced with strained veins as he yanked me up off the floor, toppling over one of Barbie’s dressing cases in the process, and forced me outside.

I did one big dive bomb just to please my irate father while everyone else in the whole place sat still and stony with dumbstruck grins on their faces. I tried to splash my dad, who was standing at the side of the pool encouraging me with undue enthusiasm, but I only got his bare feet wet. Most of my not dismissible splash watered the oleander hedges on the other side of the pool. I got right out, wrapped a towel around me and followed the creeping turtle around, pretending to be unwaveringly fascinated. This seemed to mollify my dad just as much as the bomb dive, so I kept it up until the party started disintegrating. I became one with that turtle, nothing on my mind but the snugness of my shell and the sureness of my exruciatingly slow progression, even if it was around in circles.

This became the dominant theme of my childhood. My parents were constantly worrying about and discussing my proclivity for playing with the girls instead of the boys and what to do about it. My father tried to teach me to fight ... once only, due to my complete unwillingness and lack of natural pugilistic talent. My mother called my little friends’ mothers to make sure I was really over at Jack or Jimmy’s house like I said I would be instead of at Ann-Marie’s. I soon realized that not only my parents, but everyone else’s parents, and my teachers--and just about everyone else in the world, it seemed--worried about and disccused my gender confusion with great concern. It became the hot topic, shadowing any other problems that may have been brewing--and there were many.

Categories: backstory, bakersfield, glbt