A-holes and Warning Track Power

Talked to my grandparents this morning. How do you tell your grandparents you think their son is an asshole, and you don't want to spend Christmas with them at his house? I'm an asshole, too, I guess. Assholiness has got to be hereditary. Some study will come out proving which chromosome the asshole gene is handed down on. A lot of people have it.
It's like wanting to be a writer. Where does that come from? It might be intertwined with the asshole gene. It's all well and good when you think you're a funny guy with interesting things to say, but then when you sit down and actually try to make yourself write something funny or interesting, you find out that really all you are is an asshole. With shit coming out of it. And then you just want to stop. "Screw writing," you think. "I should just go have a beer and watch football at a bar, and do something worthwhile, like shoot some pool." I guess I'm enough of a narcissist, though, that I push on with it, even when, like usual, there's nothing to say. But if I waited around for something worthwhile to say before I wrote, I wouldn't be writing. So I force myself to write these three pages every day, shitty or not. Usually the former. I just want to do it and be done with it. It's weird, too, because I can see there are some complex issues that might bear exploring, but I don't want to put the psychological effort into examining any of them. I'll write, but you can't force me to write well.

Is it that my skills aren't up to my standards? Just like everything. I'm almost, but not quite, good enough. I know it's egotistical to talk about IQ, but mine, I was told in fifth grade, was 139. They sent me off to the "gifted" school, for nerds and f-gs. Anyway, 139. Genius IQ, I'm told, begins at 140. Isn't that funny? That sums me up. He's a smart guy, but 's no genius. If you have to hit a baseball four hundred feet, for a homer, I hit 'em 399. Warning track power. It's the same with my writing. Sometimes, it's good, but that's all, and good isn't good enough. Especially when the enjoyment is absent. But you can't only do a thing like writing only when you enjoy it. You have to do it when you don't feel like it. Like an olympic athlete.
In sixth grade Mr. Webb said my vocabulary tested beyond high school level, but that hasn't helped me to communicate. You've got to talk the way people talk.

I already said I'm an asshole, so I might as well say that if you've dummied down the way you talk so you can be understood by people, if you've done it to the point where it's a habit, then you can't have an intelligent conversation with an itelligent person when you're with one. You can't come up with fresh terms of expression.

I need to maintain some convictions, other than the legal kind. I've got to make a plan and stick with it. Always be moving toward my best even if it's baby steps. In 1996, I'll do whatever it takes, I'll do it long enough and hard enough to reach my goal of becoming a professional writer. I'll centralize my necessities to this end. I'll get a job closer to home and eliminate two hours of being stuck in the car from my life everyday. I'll write two short stories, and a novella, I'll get my credential and BCLAD, I'll do a part in one student film, and I'll only go on one trip this year, either Alaska or Florida. I already smell the bullshit. Should I do the Crack story or the Border or the Cold one or what? Ski bop doo diddly wop. Done.

Bald Guys

12-17-95

Everything seems so mundane. Mariachi came over complaining about his impotence. The guy cherishes his hangups. I got it a little, too: I feel empty.

I saw Jumanji with Robin Williams. I mean Robin Williams was in it. He didn't see it with me. Jeff Goldcastle saw it with me. I liked it. It was fun and imaginative, unlike what the fool critic in the Times had to say.

I've got to finish the Miracle Mile story in five days. No sweat. I think the final title might be "A Mystery Ravels on Miracle Mile. Film at Eleven". I thought that was an intersting title. (Ugh) The story is a good story. The writing is good. (Not) It's an urban fantasy, a religious sci-fi travelogue mystery about things we don't believe.

Three pages. I can't stop until I've written three pages. Empty head, though, making---it---im---possible. How Superman would talk chained to Kryptonite, or Captain Kirk whenever. One syllable at a time.

Howard's coming tomorrow. That's funny. I'll not elaborate.

Entropy - S a closed system

What is it with bald guys who worry about their hair? What's so important about where the hair grows on your head? It seems to have to do with the way bald guys think women see them. As if it had something to do with how long they can keep it up or how much they got in the bank, which are the things women really care about. Bald doesn't matter to them if you got bucks and can go all night. But bald guys think what? It reflects poorly on their genes, that women won't select them to reproduce with. What if you were bothered about not having hair on your ass? Would that make you less attractive? Maybe I'd understand if I was bald. I couldn't care less about it though. I'll shave my head.

What else? I seem to have indented here. How can we all enjoy life better?

Can't we all just get along?

What is it about audience?

What about Route 666 with runs North and South through Eastern Arizona?

Jeff found the surrealist compliment generator.

The common message from the courts and congress and everywhere else seems to be : You as an individual can't be trusted to use your own judgement.

12-15-95 Kids on the Internet Raised by Oiuja Boards

12/15/95

Ho ho the mistletoe hung where you can see, somebody waits for you, kick 'em once for me.

Petrie was talking about the fifth veil in Skinny Legs and All, about a camel's chance of making it through the eye of a needle being better than a rich man's of entering Heaven. At the time I disagreed.

I wish I wrote prolifically. Duh. Duh. Duh. There's a lot of different writing : fiction, non-fiction, short story, poem, journalism, personal, public, essay, article, column, sports, human interest, horror, mystery, adventure, humor, travel, criticism, history, technical, scientific, cursive, printing, typing, songs, ballad, ode, sonnet, couplet, sextet, iambic pentameter, trocahic, elegy, limerick, ironic, biography, autobiography, reference, self-help, and shit. I'd like to try my hand at all of them, but so far I pretty much only do the one.

Shirelle took my lighter. Is weed a block?

I've been reading about the history of baseball in the nineteenth century.

NTN at Q's in Pasadena the other night. The bartender was unhappy with his tip. Fuck him. He cut me off, and I thanked him for looking out for my well-being. I had four beers before I got there, and then I ordered a turkey rocks when I arrived, and that didn't last long, so I ordered a double turkey rocks, and after that a couple of beers or so. It was still light when I walked outside. I decided to go back to LA.

Walters was home. We talked about setting up a recording studio in the garage. Yeah, right. Tomorrow I should see about getting the alarm fixed, and my watch, and I should ride my bike to Larchmont, and I should see a movie, and I should go Craig Johnson's and write, write, write.

I skipped the faculty Christmas party. No sense in having all of them find out what a drunk I am.

It's windy right now. The whole house rattles. Kids on the internet raised by Oiuja boards. Nuts. Ghosts in the machine. A sudden chill, a tap here and there. Spooky. Cooky. Wookie. Cookie. Bookie. Nookie.

The Robot Park

12/8/95
Bless my soul. Got Bishop Amat vs Loyola in the CIF high school football Division 1 championship game here on the TV.

I remember going to the Robot Park, we called it, in Cerritos when I was a boy and my mom still lived with us. We called it the Robot Park because the playground centerpiece was a huge (at that age) Robot that you could climb up inside to its head and scream up at the world from previously unreached heights. The robot's arms were tube slides from which you could make your emergency escape whenever the robot's innards became overrun by enemy aliens or little sisters. Behind the park was a steep concrete gully. In the spring it trickled water from I know not where. We would go down there and catch tadpoles in all stages of their metamorphosis toward toadhood. We must have been the first kids in America to catch frogs in a concrete gully.

Isn't It Magical?

Nov. 28, 1995
Jeez I've been busy. Much has gone on since the last entry, though little of consequence. Back from Baja and life is a routine bore. I'm waiting to download something called a "World Wide Web browser" onto the internet of my computer. Cyberspace, here I come. Says it'll be another twenty-five minutes. The movie "Nuts" with Richard Dreyfus and Babs Streisand is on. I'm not watching it, but I can't think of anything else to say. I smoked a little just now. Ealier this evening I was talking with Joe Kennedy at school. He had been playing the piano, quite well, along side the Christmas tree. A girl named Ashley, who is a grown woman, walked in and said, "Look at the tree! It's SO cute. Isn't it magical?"
"I guess that means I've gotta go to the fecking mall soon," I said to her. She was horrified and turned away from me without comment.
Yesterday at the California Buffet, they were playing Christmas music through the speaker in the ceiling. I said to one of the other teachers, "What's with all the Christmas music? I don't even want to hear about Christmas til about December fifteenth or so."
So, Joe was playing the piano so well even the Christmas songs sounded good. I was trying to sneak my folder into the file so I could go home early, but all the Site Coordinators were in there listening to Joe play the piano. I sat down and he played something I'd never heard before. "Do you write this stuff yourself, ur...?" I asked.
"This? No, no. This is an old standard. 'Autumn Leaves'. But I write, too. He switched to something new. "I wrote this on acid," he whispered to me.
Halleluejah.

Home

The gas station opened around eight in the morning. Among the people waiting for gas were the mom/daughter combo who had pulled us out of the sand in Mulege what seemed like long ago. I said nothing to them when we saw each other. I was ragged. Some strange stress had taken over. I just wanted to get back home. We finally got our gas and crept back up the peninsula at a turtle's pace. The sense of wonder was gone. It took agonizingly long hours to get to the border, which we reached late afternoon. Tension had taken over my jaw and chest. "Fuck Mexico," I kept saying. I don't know why, though, because I love Baja. I guess like with all my loves, though, if you don't get a break from her, you start to hate her.
The traffic to get back over the states was brutal, worse because the trip was over, the promise of adventure was gone. The bill and the workweek awaited. The drive from San Diego to LA also took place in some phenomenon of time in which two hours lasted much longer than it should have, and the traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway was absurd, but it was comforting, because it was home.

Intestines Full of Rattlesnakes

We quietly loaded up the car. My intestines were full of rattlesnakes. Whether we were paranoid or prudent, I'll let you decide, but instead of risking alerting anyone to our departure with the noise of the car starting, I whispered to Carlos and the G.I.P. that maybe we should push it into the road beyond the town first. They agreed. Bits of gravel crunching under the tires was all the noise we made, and I wondered if even that would be detected. I also wondered if someone stopped us, might it be worse trying to explain why we were sneaking out of town at three in the morning. Once we were far enough away from the town, we got in the truck, gently closed the doors, and tried to start the truck. Naturally it turned over and over again a dozen times before the the engine wheezed to life. Back up through the low mountains we rode slowly with the headlights off until we were sure we were out of sight of Bahia de Los Angeles.
We bumped over the ragged road and across the desert. Weird tendrils of fog undulated like ghosts between the cacti. I kept having to pull over while Moctezuma exacted his revenge, and since we were out of toilet paper, I left a trail of soiled socks along the road throughout the Vizcaino desert. The Pepper and I were in the front of the truck, tripping out on the weird fog when suddenly an orange light flamed across the sky in front of us, sparks shot from the hood of the truck, and instantly the lights went out and the truck stalled. The Pepper and I both screamed, "Yaaaah!" What in the hell was that? It was like Close Encounters. Like a UFO just went by and sucked the energy out of the truck. I tried starting it again, but it wouldn't start. Ugh. I took my flashlight from the glovebox, wondering if the space ship had zapped the energy from that, too, but it worked. I popped the hood and got out of the truck, telling myself that it was ridiculous to think I was about to be abducted by either drug smugglers or aliens, but the enormous gulf of what I could not see behind my back was populated with both, or so I imagined, and it took great will power not to keep looking over my shoulder as I looked under the hood. The battery had come loose from its mount. The metal brace which should have held it in place was broken clean in half, and what had happened was the battery was floating around in there and the terminals made contact with the metel fender, causing the sparks to fly from under the hood and and the power to cut out. I still couldn't stop looking over my shoulder for aliens and smugglers, though, even if there did seem to be a rational explanation. I went back to the cab and took some plastic quart containers of oil and put them between the battery and the body of the car as a buffer to keep the terminals from spaking against the steel fender. I got in the truck and she started up again. Teeth clenched, I drove hours through the dark desert, and back on the highway.
We had to get gas. We made it to Catavina on fumes, but the gas station was closed. Already a line of cars and trucks had formed at the pumps waiting for it to open. We got in line and tried to sleep, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking that Mike the Aztec, and the Sheriff were coming for us.

Did He Say We Were Going to Carry Coke Over the Border?

"I'll come with you," said Mike.
"Uh, well, we're just going to bed, Mike or Roberto, or whatever. I want to get a good night's sleep so we can be out on the water at first light."
"Well, okay," he said. "Don't worry. I'll find you in the morning before sunrise. I'll come wake you up."
"Okay, man. Great. We'll see you then."
Carlos and I got in the truck and started it up. "Holy shit." We headed down the dirt road in the dark. "What do you think?" I asked.
"That guy's crazy," said Carlos.
"Do you think he really killed those people?"
"Even if he didn't, he's scary."
"Did he say he was going to arrange for us to carry coke over the border?"
"It sounded like it."
I was beginning to feel a little queasy.
Back at the motel, the GIP was sitting out front writing. "I couldn't find any post cards, so I'm just writing letters to people."
We told the Pepper about our evening up at Mike the Aztec's place.
"What do you think we should do?" asked GIP.
"I don't know. My stomach is roiling. I'm gotta take a crap, and then I'm going to try to sleep for a while."
"Oh, the toilet's broken," said the GIP.
The room stunk. I sat down over the shit-clogged toilet and discovered that after ten or twelve days or however long we had been in Mexico, Moctezuma was finally exacting his revenge. Ugh.
Forty-five minutes later I came out of the bano. The Pepper and Carlos were in their beds, and I crawled into the back of the truck. I couldn't sleep. I kept wondering if we were going to be able to just go fishing and leave afterward knowing all we did about the town. I kept thinking I heard people sneaking around the truck, and I kept peeking out the window, expecting to see the dark figure of the preacher or someone come materializing out of the darkness again. My stomach was gurgling and cramping. The clock in the truck went from two in the morning to three. I crawled back out of the truck and went to Gip and Carlos's door. It was locked and I knocked. I heard them whispering in there, and then in the voices of a couple of scared girls, they said, "Who is it?"
"It's me."
They opened the door. "I can't sleep," I said.
"Neither can we. Do you think that guy can really make us take coke or una de gato or anything before we leave?"
"I think no, but then...I don't know. Worse, maybe, the rest of the town must know that we know that this is like a major cocaine distribution center. Maybe they don't give a shit about us, but..." I was thinking maybe they wouldn't want us going back into civilization and talking. Maybe they wouldn't have any problem if three dumbass Americans disappeared or got themselves killed somehow in the middle of the desert. All the stories people told me before we left for Mexico about Americans getting kidnapped or robbed or murdered in Mexico were coming back to me. "I think we should get out of here. Right now."
"Me, too."
"Me, too."
"Let's get our shit into the truck as quietly as possible," I said.

You're Gonna Do It

The Aztec directed us up a narrow dirt road into the hills above the bay. We arrived at part of a trailer maybe, with corrugated steel and clapboard holding it together. The Aztec went about starting a campfire and put out a lawn chair and a bucket and a wood box for us to sit on around the fire. He took the lid off a bucket full of water and dipped a pot into it and put the potful of water nearly in the fire. "Come to my shop," he said. We followed him to a shed. He turned on a flashlight. It was hard to say what all the junk was in the "shop". He took down a box from a workbench and out of the box he took what looked like ordinary twigs to me. "This is it," he said. He took a knife out of his pocket and unfolded it and chopped the twigs into little bits. He scraped the bits into the lid of the box, and we went back out to the fire and he dropped the bits into the pot of water that was staring to boil on the edge of the fire. He sat down on the lawn chair and took out a pipe and had a smoke. It was weed. "You smoke?" he asked.
"I'll have a little," I said.
Carlos declined. I had a puff and passed it back. I went to the truck for some beer and came back and sat at the fire. I heard something coming. I peered into the dark hills and a dark figure walked out of the hills and said something that didn't sound like Spanish. "This is the Preacher," said Aztec Mike. "He's Cochimi, but we call him the Preacher. He lives in the hills somewhere."
The Preacher said something that I didn't understand. Mike the Aztec poured the water with the twigs into a thermos-type coffee mug and passed it around. I took a few sips, and so did Carlos and the Preacher. It kept getting passed around, as did the the pipe. The Aztec kept talking about his business back in L.A. and the Marines and doing his time. I kept thinking doing his time meant in the Corp, but then he mentioned Folsom.
"You were in Folsom?"
He nodded.
"What did you do?" It came out of my mouth.
He didn't say anything. Then he said. "You shouldn't ask that. Whether you're inside or outside, you don't ask a man that."
Within a minute though he said, "I was in the business in LA, you know. Me and my wife. It went pretty good for a while. We made good money, you know. Cocaine." Whoa, he said it. I had been avoiding that, but there it was now. "We were all into it. You don't think straight when you do too much of that shit. One night I came home and my wife, shit, I don't know, I heard her, I knew, she was going to kill me. She even told me. She said I was out and my two partners were coming over to take me out. I tell you what I did. I turned off all the lights and grabbed a couple of butcher knives out of my kitchen and I waited in the dark for them, and I did all three of them."
Huh? Whether or not he was full of shit, I wanted to get the hell away from him. But you couldn't just stand up and say, "That's it. I'm outta here." You had to play it cool. I made eye contact with Carlos and his eyes said the same thing I was thinking. "What do you think the Pepper is doing?" I asked.
"I don't know," said Carlos. "He doesn't know where we are, though."
"Yeah, we should probably be getting back." I stood up and stretched. I put out my hand to Aztec Mike. "Thanks for the hospitality."
"Yeah," he said. "We'll see you tomorrow. We'll go out in the morning. The fishing will blow your mind. I'll fix everything with the sheriff for you so you can take a shipment, man, it's easy money."
"That's okay," I said. "You don't need to do that."
"Don't worry. I'll set it up. You're gonna do it."

Do You Want to Get Rich?

"I'm hungry. Where can we eat around here?"
"You can got to Alejendra's. She'll cook for you. Her place is by the beach." I was sort of hoping Mike the Aztec might go off on his own, but he got in the truck with Carlos and me. At Alejandra's we sat at a table outside and had grilled sea bass and rice and beans and more beer. Mike the Aztec babbled all the while, and I noticed some of the other men at Alejandra's giving him hard looks. "You talk too much," one of them said.
"Callate. No te preocupes. Son buenos chingones. Son intelligentes," he said.
The man grunted.
"You're smart guys, right?" Aztec Mike said to me.
"Uh, yeah," I said. "Where do you piss around here?"
"Just go off to the bushes right there."
I stumbled over to the bushes and took a long piss looking up at the sky. There were more stars than anywhere. More than Palomar Mountain. More than Joshua Tree. Some of them darted off and turned sharp angles, and a big orange one flashed bright and disappeared.
Back at the table I tried to explain about the lights in the sky.
"Oh, yeah," said Aztec Mike. "We see those all the time around here."
I opened another beer, and so did Mike.
"So, John, you want to get rich? You want to retire early?"
"No, thanks."
"You don't want to be a mover, John?"
So I can live here for the rest of my life? "No, I'm happy being a teacher. I get good vacations."
"It can be totally legal," said Mike. "Just take a little shoebox of una de gato over the border. It's not even classified by the government yet. A little shoebox will get you five thousand dollars."
"Una de gato?" said Carlos.
"It's all over the place here."
"What's una de gato?" I asked.
"It's some kind of cactus root or something," said Carlos. "My grandmother told me about it. It's supposed to be good for all kinds of things, arthritis, cancer, diabetes."
"It'll cure your diabetes," Mike told Carlos.
"That's what my abuelita told me."
"Will it get you high? Hallucinate and all that?"
"It's all good. I got some up at my place. Come on, I'll fix you a potion."