June 1 9:06 PM Su

I thought of taking this journal for a walk up to Shirelle's house and write somewhere along the way, in a coffee shop or something, but I seem to have chickened out. I could sure use the exercise. I killed a couple mosquitos, smashed 'em with a clap, but the corners of my eyes think they still see them dart.

I put a few sentences about Catholine Ebbetsfield's pussy to Jim.

Maybe I'll walk. Maybe when [here there is a blot of mosquito gore on the page with an arrow drawn from words labeling it as such] I get to the bottom of this page I'll put on socks and shoes and a shirt and walk out the door.

or maybe I shouldn't stop 'til I've done with the three pages. And maybe after that I should read my book 'til she calls and then walk over. A siren sings outside. Should I buy a suit tomorrow? Can I get my pants altered before one? Got to call Amtrak. Got to call Kathleen. Mr. Mosquito came back from the dead, and I killed his zombie-ass again, and washed his corpse down the sink this time.

Destination Unknown. Life is so strange when you don't know your destination something could change it's unknown and then you don't know your destination I need a good light suit for a hot summer day. Though one for my formal occasions may be more necessary. I should mention in my interview UCLA and Pepperdine. What else? If I start walking now it might give me something to fill this last page. Should I have a bowl of cereal first? Shirelle made some kind of teriyaki fish dinner, but she said not to come over until the two-hour first episode of some new prime time drama was over, because she didn't want to hear me making fun of it.

I let some bum shine my shoes last night and he fucked 'em up. I don't know what was he was using for polish. Said it was some moisturizer. What else? Can't see no moon, no stars, no clouds, no nothing in the ink but distant copters and airplanes. There's another siren. What else? Ocean cool tiptoes in on little fish feet. I told Shirelle we'd take a drive up the coast to San Francisco and Berkeley to vist Steve Hosebag. He said I'd have to sleep on the floor, but Shirelle could sleep in his bed with him.

May 31 Sa 1:15 PM

Thing and his friend from Fresno and I just returned from the Hollywood Hills Cafe. Last night we took a cab up to Dublin Whiskey Bar on Sunset. I was burning, though, and my pool game sucked, so I told the guys I was leaving. "I just don't have it," I said pointing to my head. I walked east on Sunset to Gardner. I rang Shirelle's bell, but she wasn't there. I pissed between a couple of trees with two little dogs nipping at my heels. I walked down Santa Monica and spotted Shirelle and Kristina coming out of the Formosa. They gave me a ride back home, and we passed a joint around, and they left, and I wrote some and read some more Cormac McCarthy and went to bed.

The Dodgers are playing at St. Louis on Fox. The guys are reading the newspaper. Mac called and said he was coming over. Hide the silverware. We were gone an hour or so , though, and we might have missed him.

Dick Trickle drives race cars.

There's nothing to write about.

Julie Gibson left E-mail about a writer's group tonight at seven. I wrote back half joking about using up prime drinking hours. I haven't heard back. My feet could use a bath. My writing embarrasses me. There was a tarantula, a big hairy brown spider the size of my hand, downstairs reading the mail.

What the hell else?

Sweated some driving to the hoop in the backyard. Mac called about driving to the marina to a BBQ at some girl's house. Actually, I know the girl, beautiful redhead, Keri something or other, but I resent her because she's out of my league, or rather, I'm not in her league.

The first game of the Stanley Cup Finals is about to start. We're all afraid to drive. Shirelle went to the beach with her friends. What to eat? Sh'elle just called looking for a ride to get her car in Pasadena. I said I'd do it tomorrow, but that wasn't good enough.

What If Jurassic Park Had Never Been Made?

May 29 TH 7:55 PM

I saw "The Lost World" at the Beverly Connection with Shirelle at her urging. Its prequel was what had brought us together. Her date, my roommate didn't show, and my date didn't show, so we saw Jurassic Park without them and were boning on the balcony overlooking South Pas by midnight.

"Do you like white people, Zurn?"

"Huh? Yeah. Why?"

"Cuz you always seem to go away from them."

"It ain't like that."

I can barely think here at the HMS Bounty across from the Ambassador Hotel.

Non-Cosmo hot chicks.

Woops. I just tossed a mash in the ice.

It's Bob Hope's birthday.

Fuck the Westside, he figgered. There's nowhere left to go but east.

All: "My mommy...my mommy's sick."

He doesn't have a girl. It gives him less of a chance to blow his dough.

"I have no idea what anybody's doin' except myself," said the off-duty waitress.

W 5-28 7:10 PM

I'm in my night school class. My students are working on some exercises to practice the conditional tense. I meant to have already written in tise journal, but I'm a fucking sloth. The gardeners came and filled my house with noise and pollen. It was too hot to close the window, so I grabbed the newspaper and my book and journal and hopped in the car and put the top down. You might think this could make for a great day, but there's something wrong with me. I wound up driving east on Wilshire and then uptown on Union to Union Station. I thought I might be able to get some information on train fare to Idaho. All I found out, though, is that you can only get that information from an eight hundred number. It cost me a buck ten to park. The first ten minutes are free, but it took me thirteen to learn what I couldn't learn. I drove back past MOCA and Pershing Square and the Biltmore to Wilshire. I thought how one day I've got to ride the Metro downtown and see how much drunken trouble I can get into, maybe go to the library. On the way back on Wilshire, I spotted a sign that said FOOD and GROG. Grog? There was a place on the street to park in front of the door, but there was also a temporary tow-away sign. I found a garage around the corner and parked. A sign said $4.40 Max or something like that. A small price to pay to investigate rumors of grog. I walked to the door and went in. It was dark. An old man with wet red-rimmed eyes greeted me. I asked if I could sit at the bar. Some other oldtimers were sitting there with eyes on CNN reports of tornado devastation in Texas. I ordered an iced tea and got to work on my sports page. Luyendyk won at Indy. The crossword was a bitch. I had a turkey sandwich and about eight more glasses of iced tea. It took forever to read the paper, even with no pretty girls walking by. I only remarked that the Body Shop strip joint was still open on Sunset, but that it was all-nude now, when an old man said he used to work there.

I watched Hud with Paul Newman. It reminded me of my brother. I guess I better check on my students. Two more lines, though. Josephina wants to take me for a burger. I'd rather have a beer.

Tues. May 27 Noonish

A sidewalk table on Larchmont. The weather is foreign. I noticed it myself. Then while I was sitting here reading the newspaper, a woman walked in and remarked to the grocer, "What's with the weather today? It feels like Korea." "Have you ever been there?" asked the grocer, who I assume is Korean. "No," she answered. So I'm sitting here writing and looking up when it sounds like a girl is walking by. A girl I met a few weeks ago, and who came to our BBQ a few days ago, just walked by. We recognized each other, and she bent to where I'm sitting for a kiss. At one point I was wearing her sunglasses. There was a sticker on the inside that said, "Porno Star."

Two girls on the otherside of a small tree or a large plant I can't name are throwing around the word 'like' quite generously. "You know what? I, like, took a lot of vitamins yesterday, and I, like, feel totally better." Valleyspeak will never die.

Debra has gone next store for a coffee and may return for a spell before she must head up to the production job she's working on in Hollywood. Hmmm. Some commercial, she said. I bought a Kerns papaya juice. Debbie left. She said she was trying to quit coffee. A guy borrowed my newspaper. Another walked by singing "Buffalo Soldier". Last night, Shirelle and I watched "Dances with Wolves". Everyone looks Jewish today. I'm reading the book All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. A guy asks if I'm doing my morning pages. He asked about The Artist's Way. I said I'd read it, about a year ago. He spotted a buddy, called his name, and said. "See you later, man." He'd said he was a guitar player. Another girl sits at the table here now chatting with her friend about a coffee bar job for which she said the interview was like a cult recruitment. She has a diamond in her lip. I dreamt of being pierced last night. I forget where. Sounds latent homo. The other girl wants to know what the money to the DMV is used for. The other is at a loss to explain. So the first has surgery next week. She says they'll be operating on her skull. She said she went through the seven stages of death. I forgot my watch. There's plenty more to do. That stupid parking ticket. Mail Jan's card.

Smuggling Crack into Canada on Accident

May 24

Right now Johnny Bayless said proudly that, based on his religious convictions, he'd resisted the temptation of strip clubs for seven years, and about seven minutes later, Gip had talked him into going to one, and they just left. Gip had said something about the beauty of God's creation being apparent in the shapely form of woman, and he mentioned Eve, and said that in a completely innocent and sinless state, nudity was a return to Paradise. Something like that. I might have embellished it a little.

I was talking about when I got inspected crossing the border into Canada with crack and weed and knifes and syringes in the truck and they let me in anyway.

Thing says he feels like a geek. This, he says, is only the third time in four years he's smoked pot. And he's never been to Vegas. It's seems to be a failure he wants to rectify, him being a fantasy member of the Rat Pack. Shirelle says she wants to go if we go. I say, "No how. No way."

Thing says, "C'mon, Zurn, pop my Vegas cherry."

"Not if you're going to talk like that I won't."

Shirelle is at the kitchen sink now filling water balloons. What the hell is she planning? It's practically midnight.

I was freaked. I pulled into a gas station to try to sleep in broad daylight because I was still wasted from all I'd drunk in Pioneer Square in Seattle the night before. I had a bunch of half-smoked joints in the ash tray and somewhere along the way I smoked one of them, to try to take the ache out of my hangover, and I was having a little trouble trying to figure out which way to go. In Portland, the night before Seattle, I barhopped up and down Ash Street, listening to bands and trying microbrews. I was wasted and coming out of a titty bar and had the idea that some acid or mushrooms would be fun up there in the Pacific Northwest, and I started talking to some black dude outside the titty bar who said he could get them, but he was full of shit. All he had was crack. I was drunk. I said, "All right, just gimme the crack, then." and I gave him fifteen bucks and he gave me pebble-sized crystal. I had it wadded up in a piece of toilet paper mashed in with a bunch of snotty tissues pushed into the tube of a roll of toilet paper on the front seat of my truck. While I was driving among the tall cedars trying to figure out which way to go to get into Canada, I passed a Denny's or one of those and stopped to try to get my bearings and do something about my roiling stomach and drink a glass of ice water. I ordered bran flakes, thinking that might be healthy, but the milk was warm and it only made my nausea worse. I asked the waitress if knew how to cross the border. She said there were two places to cross and she told me to go down a road and turn here or there, and I walked out of the restaurant still clueless as to which way to go. I just headed what I figured to be north, but it was overcast, and near noon, and what little sun there was seemed to be right overhead, and I wasn't sure the sun went down due west that far north in the summer, but maybe it does. I just drove around until I stumbled onto the border crossing station. I'd crossed the border in and out of Mexico a couple of dozen times including with bags of weed on me and once with a keg flowing in the back seat without incident, and I guessed getting in and out of Canada had to be even easier. I pulled up to a kiost where a woman with a clipboard asked me some questions. "Do you have anything to declare?" she asked.

"No," I decided.

"Any weapons?"

"No."

"Drugs?"

"No."

"Drug paraphenalia?"

"No."

"Alcohol?"

"No."

She checked boxes on a form on her clipboard. She gave me slip of paper and directed me to park in a numbered stall off to the side and take my slip of paper in the building there. Maybe they were going to give me some brochures or something.

I did as I was told and was greeted by a young man who asked the purpose of my visit while I followed him out to the truck. I said I was "a teacher from LA looking to do a little fishing on summer vacation."

When we got to the truck, he told me to stand on an X painted on the asphalt just tot he rear of my vehicle, and then he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves.

Uh-oh.

I had weed and crack in there and a case of beer and sheathed knives and shit,he was looking in the tackle box. There were syringes it my tackle box--One day going out to my car parked on the street in front of out apartment building in Pasadena, next to an empty parking spot on the curb was a huge tackle box full of drawers and platforms and niches full of lures and hooks and lines and sinkers and reels, really it was a magnificent collection of fishing equipment, and I thought about the poor bastard who was probably getting pretty close to the water and would soon be wondering what the hell he had done with his tackle because he sure as hell remembered bringing it out to the car, but why the hell wasn't it in the trunk or the bed of his pick-up. If I'd been a decent human being I would have held onto it and put up signs around the neighborhood about the found fishing gear, but what I did was put it in under the shell of my truck. Among all the other goodies in the tackle box were a few syringes. I've heard some fishermen use them to inject air into their bait to keep it from sinking, especially live bait, when they are targeting fish on the surface. But what was the customs inspector going to thing. By now I was sweating my ass off, and pretty woman came out to assist the first guy and donned her rubber gloves and went up into the cab of the truck where all the roaches were and the crack. Why hadn't I put that crack in my crack? I couldn't see them now from where I had to stand. I wondered if I would go to Canadian jail or American jail. Then the inspector came around to me. "You," he said, "have a nice fishing trip," and he handed me my keys. The girl smiled prettily. "Good luck," she said.

I wiped the sweat from my brow and got dreamily into the truck and drove up the road.

I never did catch any fish on that trip.