The Day is Done

The day is done. I bought my mother flowers and took her to that hippie place my friend told me about. He was rignt; it was good food. My mother liked it. "Well," she ejected, "they just took an old house and turned it into a restaurant." My mother did not feel out of place at all, I think. Everyone wore silly mismatched clothing and had bad haircuts and were slow just like hillbillies. She liked everything we ordered. When I was in college, there were lots of restaurants like this, but then I would never have dreamed of taking my mother to such places. "Are there flax seeds in this," she asked the waiter. "I don't know, but I'll go find out." And off he trotted. Suddenly she was a culinary queen.

It was a better day than if we had done something else, if we had gone to a nicer restaurant and had eaten too much.

Here's a photo of my mother as a young girl running around in a convertible. It looks like she was eating at something akin to the hippie place we went to today.

Happy Mother's Day.

Freedom and Loneliness

"Man, I don't know if I should have quit drinking. I'm not losing any weight. And I broke up with my girl," he whined.

"It takes time," I offered. "Everything does."

"I guess. I mean, its OK and all. Yesterday, I went to a vegetarian restaurant for lunch. It was a real hippie affair, you know, all yellow and orange and green with this colorful tent-like material hanging from the ceiling. I had some tonic--that's what they called it--and some humus and vegetables and crackers. I sat there and read and wrote and I thought, 'I can do anything I like.' It was so good, I went back that night."

"Who'd you go with?"

"Nobody. I went by myself."

"Yea. That's alright. It's good to have your freedom."

As he walked away, I noticed he looked heavier than before.

Delirium Tremens

“I had to quit drinking,” he said. “I’m getting too fat, and I can’t lose weight when I’m drinking. I like to drink, though.”

“How’s that working out for you,” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just started. But I think I had the DTs yesterday. I was at the gym and saw a woman who looked like my mother, but her face was sort of like my aunts. She had all her teeth pulled and doesn’t wear her false teeth all the time, so her mouth has sort of fallen in. But the woman was built like my mother and moved like my mother and was dressed like her in one of those cheap, goofy bright flower shirts over a t-shirt. I’d never seen this woman at the gym before and she certainly didn’t belong with this crowd. I was freakin’ and looking at her and trying to make sense of it all. Then she noticed me staring at her and started to get nervous, so I went back to working out in order to avoid a scene. When I looked for her again, she was gone. I don’t know if she was there or not. You think it was the DTs?”

“You look fine to me.”

Here’s a picture of my mother in Michigan the year before I was born, just married, maybe still in love.

The Mitchells (Pt. 4)

And so I send the last photos from 1976, the last photos I made with a serious camera until my life took a turn in 1999. I can’t explain what happened. I just quit using cameras. But these simple snapshots of the Mitchells were the end of it. I’ve always loved snapshots and the whole snapshot look, for they are true documentary photography.

Looking through these old, lost photographs has brought back a desire to document the world again, but I know I will never have the access I had then when I was young and the world more open to me. I want to say, “when the world was more naïve,” but I must substitute “I” for “world,” I fear.

Considering how it all turned out, I am troubled by these photographs. They appear as distorted dreams, predictors, perhaps determiners. What power do we have to change things? Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says, in part, that an observed event is changed by the observation.


What might have happened had I not photographed then? It is impossible to say. I know, however, that these photographs look more dangerous than they were.


I have not done what I set out to do here, exactly. There has been too much self-censoring. I have not included photographs that might accuse or indict. I did not know I was so benign, and maybe I am not; perhaps the finger would point to me. I don’t know how Hemingway was able to do it, to write about family and friends in such unflattering ways. But he wrote under the guise of fiction, and by doing so, perhaps he felt some ease. Here, I have presented fiction as fact and in doing so feel dis-ease.


I intended to tell what happened to the Mitchells in the following years, but I haven’t the spine. It gets far weirder than this. But I will end with a postscript. I was eating sushi one night a few months ago when J came up to my table. I had not seen her for many, many years and barely recognized her. It was her birthday, she said. I asked her if she ever saw her father again, and she said she had only a few years ago. He was living not far away on the coast. He had been working as a handyman in a condo on the beach and had met a woman who lived there, and they had gotten married. The condo, she said, is beautiful. J was not living as well herself. A few days later, I saw two tall blondes at the grocery store. It was the twins. I had not seen them since they were small. I said nothing, but watched them as they paid for their groceries. Then they were gone.



It is all too odd. I have left out everything.

The Mitchells (Corrected)

I should not write sober. If you have already read the mangled prose in the first three posts under this title, I apologize. I have gone back and fixed some of the errors. I have trouble. I'm still trying to learn English.

The Mitchells (Part 3)

As I write all of this, I keep wondering how much of it is true. There is so much that is left out, so little that is spotlighted. Twins look bizarre anyway. I was under the spell of Diane Arbus at this point, I think, and was seeing strangeness in the most "normal" of things. Disco and cocaine were soon to take over middle class America and my organic, romantic sensibilities got little exercise in my hometown. I flew at every opportunity to Key West for escape. It was a long time ago now and these photos and stories may make it all seem weirder than it was. I hope so.




Still, I took these photos between troubled times, in the time of trouble without knowing what was to come. In reverse, it all looks bad, but we did not know that then. There were bucolic moments. J was old enough to talk, to tell funny tales. She made all of us laugh. I was young and this was the first child in my adult life. But I did not have to live this life. I was a visitor, an interloper, a young man with dreams not yet limited or not yet so limited. The Mitchell’s could not run to Key West for escape.

The Mitchells (Part 2)

They did, though, live the life bizarre in many ways, and I was there. It was just too much too soon for them. T went into a depresion and got sick. He ended up in the hospital for tests because his doctor could not find a cause for his various debilitatting ailments. They did a bone marrow test to see if he might have cancer. I believe the doctor did this to him as punishment for being strange.


The test has changed since then. In the seventies, they took a corkscrew device with a needle in the center, and they twisted it into the bone until they reached its middle, and there they got the plug of marrow to send back to the lab. There was no anaesthetic involved then, nothing. T had never been exposed to pain like this before, and I think it changed him in a significant way. He knew from that point on that he would not get help in feeling better, that life was going to be pain and toil and struggle.


I knew that his ailments were psychological. He managed to piss off the doctor that was treating him so badly that the doc dropped T as a patient. I didn’t know that such a thing was allowable, and maybe it isn’t, but the doctor never came back and T had someone new. D was forced to get a job in order for the two of them to make ends meet financially, but T was a mess of insecurity over it.  This all happened before he just disappeared.

The Mitchells

Here’s a tale told cold. This is a dangerous one for me since these were my friends and I am going to try and tell the truth. Much that is true. I may have to change the facts some. We’ll see. I thought to write this drinking whiskey, but I am sticking with coffee. No matter how I write it, though, hot or cold, I don’t think it is something to send out to another site, not one where decent people try to be nice. Let’s hope it turns out alright.


I took these photographs in 1976. These negatives have been lost with the others. It was the last time I would use my 35mm camera for over twenty years, I think. I don’t know exactly how it happened or why. The town I moved to was not like the town I left, and it certainly wasn’t like The Road. Somehow, I lost my spirit over it, lost both interest and courage. I had to work and I had to have strategies for survival. I read constantly. After college, I lived without a phone or a television, so I read. For ten years, day and night, hundreds, thousands of books. It wasn’t until I came to the end of my reading that I picked up a camera again. But more about that another time.


My hometown was a cracker town, a redneck town beginning to grow. It was adoslesent in its growth, backward and awkward. I went to see the last friends I had there, friends with whom I grew up. T and I had gone to school together. He lived in a house on the end of our street, the place where the houses were just getting nicer. His house was the only one with a garage. Unlike the rest, his lawn was manicured, everything clipped and green. When the other boys played, T was in the yard pulling weeds or mowing the yard. The kids all avoided his house. His father was a small, brutal man, a tyrant with a bad attitude. At least that’s how he seemed.   He was relentlessly cruel to T and didn't let him hang out with the other kids much. When T would come out to play sports with us, he didn't know how. He couldn't catch or throw a ball and he ran funny. And he was skinny. He didn't do well in school. He was always in trouble. If he wasn’t athletic, though, he was clever and the two of us became friends. He had been held back a grade, so he was older than I. I found that strange.


T had an older sister who was beautiful, blonde and built like something in a teenage beach movie. She and T live with his father and stepmother who was a little fireplug.  She was different than the other women in our neighborhood. Her hair was always done and she wore makeup and smoked and drank. I was too young to put it into words, but she felt dangerous. When we were twelve, she used to buy us cigarettes and dirty magazines, telling us not to let T’s father find out.


There was a bar in the house. I didn’t know anyone whose parents had a bar. One day, we stole little bits of liquor from each bottle and drank it. We were horrible and could not stand. The day wore on and we knew our parents were coming home and we had to do something. It was terrifying.


Most of the time, we could not go into T’s house, but one night his parents were out and his sister had a friend over. They put records on and taught us to dance. We did the "Wooly Bully," and there was a lot of laughing and touching in the dark. Then his sister taught me how to French kiss. I was scared and she was a carnivore.  She said I was a good kisser, and I took it to heart.


One day, T said he was going to go live with his mother. She lived in a trailer park with her husband and T’s younger brother and sister. It was a small trailer, a ten by fifty-five footer with two bedrooms, a small bath, and a kitchen/dining room/living room. On the weekends, somehow we all managed to fit into it. When T was eighteen, he rented another trailer with a friend, but that didn’t last long. His parents moved their trailer to a piece of property that they bought and T got his girlfriend pregnant. I had graduated high school and we were working construction together building a theme park that was behind schedule. We got into the union, which was difficult, and we worked seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. I made a lot of money, but that was when I decided to go to college. And T had a baby.


She was born the day that Nixon resigned. I was there. At the hospital, not the White House. She loved me from the start. Before I took the photo courses at the university, I would take kid pictures of her. Here she is still in diapers. I had a bunch of these and still have many more than I am showing here. I wanted to show the sweetness here before I show the next photographs of that family. There was already trouble, though. They lived in a trailer when I took these photographs. Later they would move to government housing apartments.



I went away to college and saw the family sometimes on trips home. They had twins in the meantime. And when I returned from my trip after college, they had a cute house on the edge of a nice neighborhood. But T worked night and day and they had no money. Half the time I would go to his house, the electricity or water was shut off. He was working the midnight shift. I began taking photos of the family.

I Have Tales To Tell

I'm putting up two posts today and will start working on some narratives this weekend. I have tales to tell but no time to tell them. Perhaps I can work on them this weekend.

The Hippie and the Pixie

I went to NYC for the first time in 1975. It was the end of my Road Trip around the U.S. I arrived by bus, so my first vision of the city came as I exited Penn Station onto 42nd St. It was just after noon and the streets were crowded. I wore jeans and a flannel shirt and hiking boots and had a bright orange backpack. I probably didn't look like a native. But I hadn't walked a block when a pretty girl took hold of my arm. "You want a date," she said. She looked like a secretary on her lunch break. "What?" She repeated for me as if I might be slow, "Do--you--want--a--date?" I was slow alright. "Oohhhh!" I managed. Seeing that I had come to some awareness, she added quickly, "It's twenty for me and five for the room." I chuckled at that and said, "Hey, hippies don't pay for sex." And quick as a pixie, she giggled and let go of my arm. She had simply disappeared.

I didn't get a photograph.

Dancing at Bloomies

Coffee. Hurry. Work.

Sex, Welcome, No

1975.  San Francisco.  I was standing next door to the Condor Night Club, the place made famous by Carol Doda and a photograph of her dancing topless for delegates at the 1964 Republican Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater as it Presidential candidate.  Doda was the Eighth Wonder of the World after she had silicone injections in her breasts, one of the first augmentations in the U.S.A.  It is widely reported that because the silicone was not contained in bags, it would not stay in place and each night before she was lowered from the ceiling on a baby grand piano, she would have to massage the miracle liquid back into shape.  

By 1975, there were many topless clubs in North Beach near the corner of Columbus and Broadway.  I had gone to Ferlenghetti's City Lights Books, a mecca for bohemians as was all North Beach having served as the west coast base for so many beat poets, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg among them.  These were the streets where Neal Cassady was arrested for sharing a joint with an undercover cop.  Etc.  And so, camera in hand, I wandered, searching for roots, meaning.  

"Hey, fella, you want to take my picture."  

Sure, I said, and timidly snapped my camera into place while she struck salacious poses in the darkened doorway.  I was shy like a boy on a first date and only took a few before I struck up conversation.  I told her with nervous enthusiasm that I had just graduated from college and was traveling around the country like Kerouac.  Turned out she had a master's degree in literature and I was over my head on all fronts.  

Then a gruff voice called from inside and she got nervous.  "What are you doin'?"  One more pose, his hand on her breast, and she moved quickly inside.  

A dancer with a master's degree.  I should have learned something from that.  

Hillibillies in Paradise

I just want to clear up any misconception I may have given by posting the picture in the "about me" section of this blog. I don't drive a Porsche. That photo was taken by a friend in Red Rocks up the street from Vegas. He had rented the car. I drive a beat up old Volvo with 250,000 miles on it. The air conditioner quit working and I don't want to spend the thousand dollars to replace the unit. I do not like spending money on cars. I am a hillbilly and use clothes hangers to reattach parts that fall off. Like this muffler. I can't believe the girl in the photograph lets me get away with it.

Katerina and Alexander

I got a note from my friend in Belarus. I asked him to send an update to the Ballad of Kate and Sasha. Surely it is Spring there, I suggested. Send photos of your bohemian life, of wine and picnics and summer dresses. Sasha wrote back that it is not Spring there yet, that there is no place to go for such things. He will try, he said. He and Kate will go picnicking. In the meantime, he sent this photograph. Kate and Coca-Cola, warm clothing, an abandoned truck, abandoned countryside. It is hard to imagine. Here the weather has been too beautiful to live up to and I am blue.

Waiting for the weather. What else is there to do? Here is a poem that always tightens my throat with emotion, an invitation from Robert Frost.

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.
I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

I guess I'll wait for Kate and Sasha.

I Like It That Way

This is an old photo booth print I found in a shoe box the other day from 1978 or so. Good times. Looking through old things makes me want to tell stories. I must do some scanning. I am afraid, though, of becoming nostalgic. I hate nostalgia, the rosy, maudlin view of the past. This girl was very bad for me, but I enjoyed it incredibly. At first. After a time, there was only the addiction, the reduced pleasures, the recognition.

As one song goes (I can't remember the artist right now)

Fool me once, that's OK.
Fool me twice, I like it that way.

I began my "Cafe Life" with this girl, spending the hours eating, talking, drinking in beautiful places. That is what remains.

For me, that is. I can't speak for her. She left me for a man with money, as they say.

They Fuck You Up

I don't have any quarrel with my mom and dad, but I have always liked this poem.

"This Be The Verse"

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.


Philip Larkin

Rag and Bone

Slight cold. Too many responsibilities. Poor attitude. Sometimes you feel like an old car too long unattended. Left out in the elements. Oxidation.  Too much history.  No prospects.

Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

William Butler Yeats
from "The Circus Animals' Desertion"

I Wasted Time

I've missed some things. Full Pink Moon. I did nothing but note it. Didn't celebrate it. I missed filing my taxes. I missed paying some bills and had my phone turned off. No internet. It is not that I didn't have the money. Time. I seem to have none. And so I missed posting here. I work. I am a busy fellow.

Today is Shakespeare's birthday, I am told.

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me."
William Shakespeare



"And so it goes."
Kurt Vonnegut

Earliest Memory

My earliest memory is of legs and sunlight and the warm, friendly chatting of female voices. I didn't understand much of the language, but I liked the tone of the voices, the lilting giggles, the melody of it all. A square of sunlight fell through the window onto the floor, the mullions forming crossed shadows. Beside the square of sunlight and shadow were a pair of woman's legs crossed at the ankles. Calves and Skirt. Suddenly there was a shock of laughter and my mother picked me up. I must have done something naughty. It has stayed with me.