A Secret Ancient Female Ritual

July 25
I was invited to a baby shower for Kristina from work. I was the only man there, among a houseful of 20 or more, feelin stupid again, mixed up, piled on, about to push up a mushroom. I don't know how it happened, but the guitar is on the floor now, leaning against the folded up treadmill.

I took my truck to Quino's to get a smog certificate. The car runs like shit now. What else?   I have got to get to page 14. Technology coordinator. The Olympics are on. I just saw a forgettable gymnastics performance. She's out of the running. She looks--What is that look?--the look of someone who wanted something and worked hard for it for years, and--Nevermind. Look, I'm sorry. I've just got to get these three pages over with, so I'm just going to feel this page with doggerel and move on, if you don't mind. I wish I didn't have this fucked up DUI on my head. Duh. The way things really are. At the baby shower, they played a game where everyone whore oops wore a little plastic clothespin on their collar or lapel or pocket or wahtever, and if you got caught crossing your legs you gave up your clothespin to the woman who spotted you. Many of them assumped postures approximating giving birth. Then they stretched a line of clothespins, the regular laundryline wooden ones with the springs that keep the legs open, it looks like, and you had to see how many you could remove and hold in one hand.
I was the only man there. A strange honor. I felt like a witness to some ancient secret female ritual for preparing for birth.

Bad luck to cross your legs

I left before the presents were opened.

(An ink and pencil drawing of St Louis Cathedral)

It's past my bedtime. I wrote a sentence for Jim. Another two lines and I'll be to page fourteen. Adam. At school today, we talked about Death Valley.

I'm the new Technology Coordinator. Sounds ominous.

So there. I went to a class last night in room 1178 of the Public Policy Building. Tomorrow the kids will copy Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. How many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?

Fiction Riff

It had sprung up through the dirt overnight, bulbous and musty. She thought of the caterpillar with his hookah from "Alice in Wonderland"(of course back then she hadn't known it was a hookah). Natural curiosity, old as people, stretched her hand down and plucked it easily from the soft dirt.
"Dare you to eat it," she said in that challenging mocking tone bigger kids use to goad little kids into doing the wrong thing, the way they always have.
When the younger child refused, the wild energy of the other children watching took hold of her and she threw the younger child down and pinned her down, knees on arms, and was trying to mash to toadstool through her tightly sealed lips when she was suddenly yanked up by the elbow and stared into the face of her mother, and, startled a moment, believed that she was staring into her own face. Only then did she hear the sobs of the smaller child, which would match her own, in her room later, as her mother went from scolding to soothing, and blue light fell through the curtains, and the voices of the children outside sung in on the breeze.

County

July 21, 1996 Sunday

I left my journal, the one I was writing in before this, in the cab I rode home in after I was released from the county jail. I also left Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Chandler's The High Window in that cab, and a folder full of papers I thought I was going to correct while I was in there, haha, and the entrance ticket to my class at the university. The bailiff took all of that from me, though.

They put us all in a cage in a bus, we the -ers: we beaners, we niggers, we few ragged, shaggy, Irish-looking white motherfucker crackers, the occasional oriental, packed we are in the first cage, and then they bring in a half dozen squabbin' hos, they screeching bitch-ass-ho at each other and from we men in the other cage comes the sounds of the heart of darkness, wild gibbering, the bugling of bulls, the whooping of primates, we. Dobbs and the Harley-head look on through their mirrored lenses, grinning madly. Dobbs hammers the cage with his billy, and the Harley-head fires up the bus and cranks up some old country music, and the jungle goes insane with howling, and in the mirror you see his grin get even bigger.

A WHITE COCKROACH, locked in among the usual darker ones, an albino mutant, never exposed to sunlight, like the fish in the deep ponds of deep Lecheguilla, crawling benignly it was, over the unidentifiable grime that streaked and splotched the walls of the closet-sized cell where I was locked with the transvestites in the courthouse on Hill Street. I had surrendered by the order of Judge Anthony Filosa, on 1:30 on Friday. We were escorted to a holding cell where we were stripped of our belongings, including my asthma medicine. While I waited in line with the gangbangers and hustlers, a deputy poked me in the chest with his billy club. "Where'd you get that shirt?" he barked at me. I looked down. My dad attends the annual relay of law enforcement teams in a run through the desert from Baker to Vegas. "My dad," I said. "Who's your dad?" When I told him, he freaked and cussed me hatefully and told me what a shit-head I am and asked if I was trying to get myself killed, and separted me from the general prison population for K10 special handling and cuffed me to a bench in a closet where they put she-males.
I spent the next 12 hours handcuffed to one bench after another, snot running over my lips because I couldn't lift my cuffed hands to my face. I watch a deputy walk by and he puts his hand on my throat and screams at me, "Listen you dumb fucking fish, you don't look at me! You stare straight ahead or I put your fucking head through the wall." He's about five foot five and his muscles are ballooning with roid rage and he's bellowing, but he's not squeezing hard. #13, Lazy, butthole inspection, the medical cunt, can't breathe, fucked up headache. I spent a couple days in a cell by myself. Black dude in the cell next to me read aloud from his Bible and offered me a toke from a joint that I was afraid to accept. They moved me upstairs to a psych ward and locked me in a room with a, I'm assuming, paranoid schizophrenic, who was locked up, he claimed, because he knew too much and he had been, and still was, under constant surveillance. I played along. Then came some voluble, black guy who couldn't stop laughing and talking and telling funny stories about the day he got the whole joint high, how he'd been busted for stealing $10,000 in an armed robbery, how his girlfriend stabbed him with and icepick in a typical female betrayal in Indiana. In Ventura he was in love with a dope whore. Then came a Latino dude, arms covered with tatooos, saying he was in for parking tickets, then saying he was in for a coke set up. All the while they talk, I say little, and the tripper keeps peppering the conversation with his paranoid delusions. The senior, the broom-pushing trusty, mucous, 13's salvation and love hanging ten feet away on the wall in the form of a payphone; they won't let him near, 25 days sofar.... The smell of old socks permeates the place. Butao, sherriffs, Weisenstein, Blake, fuckers all. When I finally got processed back out, and threw my blues in the hamper, I stood at a counter in my underwear in front of two giggling deputies who said my Levis and t-shirt had been lost. They gave me some gay dolphin shorts and a lavender tank top that covered only one nipple at a time and said if I didn't like it, they could book my ass back into the system while I looked for my clothes. I couldn't get my wallet or keys or money or any of that until business hours, so they put me on the street dressed like a gay hooker with no money. Some dick cabbie, Iranian I think, wouldn't let me get in his cab.
4:30 AM I finally got home. Shirelle paid the cabbie for me. We humped first thing. A few hours of sleep, then back to jail for my $dough. I ate french toast at Cocos. Napped all day.

Fiddle Dee Dee

Sun. 5:30 p 6-22-96
Obelkaybee, let's finish this one. It's been a distracting month. It took me a long time to get to the end of this book.
I missed the retirement brunch for Arlene Duke today. I feel like a lout. I lay in bed and read the paper, which I had walked down to the market for, photographing the sidewalk, and the bark on the trees, and the produce section, but not the old woman next door, nor the sign for the bowling alley (I wonder why not now?) while Shirelle sobbed until I relented.
She brought me a veggie burger with homemade fries to eat in bed and fiddled me while I read of Bagwell's heroics in the sports page.
Think I'll walk up to Blockbuster and rent a video. Like yesterday we drove to Westwood to see "Flirting With Disaster" and changed our minds and bought beer instead and went back to Danny's apartment where I passed out on the couch. I got a new nine-volt battery for my guitar tuner. My desk is a mess. I transcribed another page from a whacky '92 journal. Mike Piazza hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to send the Dodgers to victory over the Astros. I've got to get a money order tomorrow and head down to the district office. We're out of toilet paper. I pulled up the blinds and looked out the window for an idea. The sky is blue. It might be a good time to take my picture of the Hollywood sign. On the way to Blockbuster. There's a Dali paining in our bathroom, "L'APOTHEOSE D'HOMER". There's also a fly buzzing around in here. There's a TV aerial on the neighbor's roof, the stucco wall, the shrieks of the children from the birthday party across the street.

Benedict Canyon

Sun 3:59 AM 6-22-96
I will do this. Get it done. Do it right and move on. Bright and cheerful. I got Acid in digestion tomorning. This song "Things" by Paul Westerberg is particularly poignant. Poignant. I love this song. I'll listen to it again. "Things I don't want to tell you..."

I keep hearing this noise like someone is clipping their toenails. Is that the refrigerator?

-but certainly not with a dumb idiot like you."

Jesus. We were up in Benedict Canyon,

hopeless maze in the blood-soaked hills around Hollywood Los Angeles Beverly

SUPERMAN KILLED HIMSELF in Benedict Canyon and Tom says the Manson murders at the Tate place where there. My back hurches blow me away again
An earlier more harmless party, lil drunkening blond girl wearing her pants low on her hips with a manly belt was saying someone was such and such's son of the Merry Pranksters hustlers
How much life could you live out of a P.O. Box?
I have to hurry and finish this and get to bed so I won't be a blob at this retirement brunch tomorrow. What do I wear? Hah. There's a funny question. Hearing too many things, noises, voices, birds, songs, screatches, incessantly. So do I go lie in that bed in there? Why not? Urg. Tomorrow, the sun'll come up tomorrow, and I'm pissed about it.
I'm tired. Need to finish with this and bail to sleep. Tom and I got a conversation in the car. George Reeves shot himself in Benedict Canyon, no? There's an unnaturalness to its elevation as if you were not going up and down, but arriving at valleys and peaks which pass by you without you moving. An article for LA Weekly about trick-or-treating in Benedict Canyon. That spooky party up there--the shadowy figure moving along the balustrade as we approached...
I'm close to the bottom ing
I'm too tired to think straight and that's okay. Went to Payless pharmacy. Miguel brought me, and we went to Danny's and Darren's. Megul let Derb $165 to use to buy a new car with. W went to the bank and got it. I rode in Derb's gramma's old green cadillac.
All too true.

Rasta La Vida

Thurs. June 20th
A porch in Bellflower a horse clopped down the street. Corn stalks grow up behind a fence at the house with the Christmas lights still on it in June A steel powerline tower looms above, like a giant erector set, beyond the corn. Ball called about El Cid. I drove down specifically for that. The traffic sucked the whole way. I bought a six pack of Bud light for the Ball family fridge. I rooted through crates of old books I found on the floor in a back room. Picked out some old pulp fantasies I used to read but didn't have anymore, Ed Burroughs, Robert Howard, you know, Conan, Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and a volume of poetry, and bought it all off Ball, but he wouldn't let me have the Dante. His brother was talking about going to Arizona or Oklahoma to get away from his wife or driving over a cliff.
After I left, I thought about driving to Cerritos, see the old house, visit the Yamashitas. I chickened out and got on the freeway, but then I decided what was the use in getting home? So I got off the freeway and went back. I wasn't exactly sure how to get there. I started to wonder if I'd see the apartment my mom moved to after the divorce, and the second I did, I turned down some random street and there it was. And the park where we watched 4th of July fireworks, and karate demonstrations, and the church and the library where I spent hours reading Bill Peet books and Highlights magazines. I saw Heritage Park and Loyal Elementary where I went to kindergarten through third grade. I found the Yamashita's and walked up and to the screen door and called out, "Yoo hoo," like I used to do. Jean and Ross and Keith were there. It was Ross' birthday. Henry came back from walking the dog. They asked how Shirelle was. I told Keith about my DUI while we had a smoke in the garage. Ross went to see his girlfriend, Kelly. There were little memories in the yard and through the windows of the houses, tag in the cul-de-sac, the scrape on my shoulder playing touch football in the street, the dirt clod I threw that came right down on Ross' head, peanutbutter and sugar, Pong, and Annie Fannie. Keith said how we used to catch bees all the time at the little puple flowered bushes in front of the house, and how we believed if the bee's black stripes formed an H, then it was a honeybee and would not sting you. We never got stung! We'd pull their wings off and leave dozens of them to spend the rest of their short lives walking.
A big traffic jam clogged the freeway back to LA.
I'm going to take some pictures on my street today, and tread while I listen to the game. Maybe I'll write and puff and sip. Thing says there's a big party in the Hollywood Hills this weekend.
I'm at school now. The bell rang. I have to pick up the kids. We'll be seeing "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." Wish me luck. Rasta la vida.

Thurs. June 20

A porch in Bellflower. A horse clopped down the street.