Puppy Love

We got more gigs after our appearance on "The Jimmy Harper Show." One of our first was playing a large party at a mansion on a lake in a rich part of town. It was a teenager's party, the first time I would be playing in front of people I didn't know. When we arrived to set up, we were greeted by the mother who showed us to the second story balcony overlooking the pool area. We would be separated from the party like animals in a cage, like circus freaks. We played our first set and took a break and walked down to get something to drink. I imagined that we would be welcomed by an enamored crowd of admirers. I was wrong. These were kids with servants and that is what we were to them. Suddenly I felt foolish in my crazy band costume among the smirking, beautiful people. I was glad when our parents showed up to take us home.

I was growing tired of band life, of Wayne and Steve. They were flying down a road I didn't even want to walk. Wayne was dating a girl who lived down the street from me, a girl in my class. She was not attractive, but when she started seeing Wayne, she began to dress in hippie clothing and acting cooler. Wayne and she were having sex. He would tell Steve and I about it. I still had not seen a naked woman, and suddenly I couldn't stop staring at Wayne's girlfriend. She could feel it, the staring, and surely she knew that Wayne had said something, but she liked the attention, I think. She had become a woman among girls, leaving behind the shabby, anonymous image of herself as she was in a drab and ghostly past. Wayne had gotten her to show Steve her breasts, they said. I was a jumble of emotions. Jesus Christ, I wished this hadn't happened. I wanted to see them, too.

Then an enormous thing occurred. I fell in love. Through a series of grapevines, I heard about a girl who liked me. Her name was Emily. When I met her, I thought I would faint. She was the cutest girl I had ever seen. Her hair was cut just like Marlo Thomas in the TV show "That Girl." She big brown eyes and a perfect smile. Why had I never seen her before? She was in my grade. She and her friend, Cindy, hung out together all the time, and I think that Emily was just beginning to come into her own. Cindy was still small and underdeveloped though she was the quicker, more aggressive of the two.

I met her after school one day to walk her home. Before we left school, though, she had to go into the bathroom and change. She walked into the bathroom in a cute, mid-thigh mini-dress like the Goldie Hawn wore on "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," but she walked out in a conservative blue dress with a high collar. She stuffed the cute dress into her bag.

"My parents won't let me wear this to school," she said.

A rebel. I was hooked.

"Her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."
James Joyce, "Araby"

Beach Crowd

Home. Depressed. Obscure shots from the hip. No focus, no framing. Just a digital click, click, click.

Cursed

Some things are too beautiful. These past days have been, days on Florida's Gulf Coast with sand so white you cannot open your eyes, sugar sand that doesn't get hot, that stays cold in even a blistering sun, and water a deeper blue than the too blue sky. And kayaking in the rivers among the mangroves and oyster shells, the waters churning with fish, water birds. And all this only a part of what it was. You must be rich now to get to these places, rich or lucky. The beaches and rivers are lined with condos for miles and miles and miles with only an occasional small parking lot to serve the rest of Florida. The rich have these wonders to themselves, now. When I was young, I came to these beaches with my family. My aunt and uncle lived here and there was nothing, really, but the cold white sand and blue water and mangroves and oysters. My mother and aunt would pick up shells piled so deep there seemed no bottom. They brought home sharks teeth by the bucket, some the size of a toy car. We fished for snook and snapper from the rocky jetties and seined for shrimp in the sloughs. We set traps for stone crabs. When I turned into a teenager, I got bored with it all. It seemed a punishment to spend weekends with my parents and relatives with the sand and salt and the smell of fish and rotten sea weeds. Youth.

I was with my mother and and aunt and cousins yesterday. I had my old Rollieflex on the jetties. I took photos of my family, then turned to the fishermen who lined the rocks. My cousins and I walked down the beach. People liked seeing the old camera, stopping and staring and asking me about it, telling me about an old camera they had somewhere. People approached me. Two women and a girl asked me if I had taken photos of the sea urchins that lined the beach by the thousands.

"No, but I will if you will hold them out to the camera like this."

"No, I don't want to touch them. Here, my niece will. She's studying Marine Biology."

A pretty young girl walked over and got a nice specimen and held it low toward the camera. I framed it close so that her arm and knees and belly button were just out of focus, a line of urchins falling off in the background from the corner of the frame.

"Wait a minute, something's wrong," I told her. My camera wouldn't wind. It was locked up completely. She waited for a few minutes and then I told her thanks, but the camera was broken.

I had the camera repaired two days before I came. It was working like new. Just two rolls of film passed through it before it locked up. I was just beginning. It is difficult to photograph people on a beach, but I was in a zone. The camera was a magnet. There were American classics there that I would never shoot.

Later, at sunset, I went to another beach with my new Nikon. The light was incredible, warm, brilliant, throwing shadows across the sand. Everything looked 3D through my viewfinder. I took my eye away. Everything looked more 3D than I had ever seen it in my life. But I couldn't take any photos, at least not of people. A man on a beach with a big digital camera is bad news. I was nothing more than a voyeur, a danger, something to keep away from the kids.

I am cursed. Two cameras that had just been repaired broken down again for no reason. They were repaired by top camera guys. No, there is no rational reason I can find for this. It is fate, pure and simple. I am cursed.

I walked the beach, my camera in its bag, framing scenes with my eye. Families building sand castles wearing bathing suits of cobalt blues and brilliant reds, long legged kids wearing hats and sunglasses. How will I ever record all that?

Teenager

All was not dramatic, of course. The seventh grade went by in a manner. Most changes were slow and subtle. I turned thirteen and left some things behind. I dropped the "y" off the end of my name and became the adult version of that moniker. I got my first pimples and more pubic hair. I looked at myself in the mirror more, getting out my mother's hand mirror so I could see myself from the side. I mortified to see my nose growing. I became aware of clothes and found myself lacking. My parents took me to Montgomery Wards and at the start of the year and bought me three pairs of black pants and one pair of green, four new shirts. I had enough clean clothing to get through four days of the week. But suddenly, there were brands. Kids had London Fog jackets and shirts had to have "fruit loops," those loops on the back of the shirt below the collar that let you hang the shirt in your locker. There were colognes and none of them were old spice. But my parents had experienced the depression and would not spend money on the silliness of brands. I got a" Scottish Mist" for a windbreaker rather than the much more expensive "London Fog." My shirts did not have fruit loops. I didn't have penny loafers.

So when eighth grade came, I made sure I had much to say about what sort of clothing I got. I was in a band and needed to dress like it. I got Beatle boots and some corduroy pants and pants with wide belt loops to accommodate my new, super wide belts.

One day, Wayne said that our band had an agent. He was going to get us bookings. He was an older guy with long hair and a Mustang. Wayne liked hanging out with him, but I found it weird. One of the first gigs he got us was a television appearance on a local morning talk show, the Jimmy Harper Show. We had to be there at seven o'clock in the morning. We went into a small studio and set up our equipment. A microphone hung from the ceiling. God knows what it must have sounded like. But we were on TV for three songs, just like the Beatles. It was everything. We were big.

But at school, the older guys didn't like the attention I got, especially the ones I had beaten out for a spot on the basketball team that I ended up not joining. My life was getting more dangerous. I didn't know why, really, and I wanted to retreat. But retreat was hard. Wayne and Steve were hanging out more and maturing at a quicker pace. They called me out one night to meet them at the Boy's Club baseball field. When I got there, they had quarts of beer. "We're going to get drunk," they said and handed me two of the quarts. They had already started and I was behind. I took the top off and took a sip the way I would with a coke, pulling the liquid into the front of my mouth to savor all the taste. With beer, however, this was a gigantic mistake. It tasted awful. I swallowed and flinched while Steve and Wayne laughed. "C'mon, pussy, drink like a man. You drink like a girl." I tried, but I hated it. Soon enough, they paid no attention to me and made their ways through the first quart. I hadn't drunk a quarter of mine. They had been going into the bushes to pee, and that suddenly seemed a good idea to me, too. While I peed, I was able to pour out most of my beer. But when I got back, Steve was wobbling around laughing and shouting. He was trying to drink his second quart, but it wouldn't happen that night.

Some of the neighbors must have heard him yelling, for in a little while a police car rolled by and it was time to go. I was happy, then, to steal away through the darkness back to the relative safety of my parent's home.

Choices

Steve lived with his mother,who was divorced, and his sister. Sometimes. I mean she was there sometimes. She was in high school and had a boyfriend who was in his twenties and was a professional musician. He was in a band that was playing in different cities all the time. I didn't know what to make of that. I mean the "professional musician" thing. There was something wrong with what he did, I thought. He was an adult living like a kid. He was greasy. But Steve thought he was cool and took to mimicking him.

Steve's mother was a drunk and ran a daycare center. I think the two things go hand-in-hand. She was overweight and sloppy and had bleach-blonde hair with dark roots. But on the weekends she would fix herself up and have a time. When she came home, she could barely walk and was very, very loud. For a few minutes. Then she would pass out.

So Steve pretty much got to go wild.

The band was doing well, and one day Wayne said we needed to get cards made up. He knew a place downtown. That was quite a distance from where we lived for boys without cars, but Wayne said we should hitch hike. I'd never done this before and was enamored of the ease. We simply walked to the main road, stuck out our thumbs and waited. Soon, a car pulled over and the three of us jumped in. Hitch hiking. I couldn't tell my parents about this one, but I began to do it all the time. I learned what to watch out for. One day a man picked me up. As usual, we had to make small talk. He said I looked like an athlete and asked me if I played football. Flattered, I told him I did. More flattery, then he asked me if I had a girlfriend, and I started getting the creeps. I said, "This is it right here. This is where I get off." A young boy hitch hiking alone got a lot of rides that ended up like that.

At school, I tried out for the basketball team. It was odd to be in competition to get onto a team. All my life, all you had to do was sign up, but I found that life was getting more competitive at every turn. I didn't know most of the fellows who tried out, and it was a little intimidating. What would it be like, I wondered, to be left off the team? I had always been one of the better athletes in our neighborhood and in our school. Now, this. I was trying out with older boys, too, since the junior varsity was made up of seventh and eighth graders. We ran and shot and did agility drills on an outdoor court with the coaches walking around us with clipboards making notes. It was cold, harsh, clinical. There were no slaps on the back or tussles of the hair, just the stalking of these men and the competitive anxiety of teenage boys.

A few days later, they posted the team rosters outside the gym locker room. My name was there. I was right. I was what I thought. I felt good all day, proud, taller, faster. But by afternoon, that all fell apart. The new team was to meet in the gymnasium after school. We would begin. Sitting there on bare benches in air moist from the showers, smelling of old clothes and deodorant with new teammates I did not know, the coach pointed me out and said, "First thing you have to do is get a haircut." Everyone turned to look and snicker. It was like a kick to the stomach, the air leaving my body, the blood rushing up my neck. My focus fell to only a few inches before my nose. I said nothing.

After that meeting, I knew I wouldn't go back. I couldn't cut my hair. I was in a band. We were good. People liked us.

I had to make a choice between two worlds. There was no good choice, I thought. It wasn't fair. I just wanted to go home, go to my room, turn back time.

Sort of.

Meanwhile

I can't photograph this hillbilly holiday for a lot of reasons. There will be no visual recording of it on my part. I may be sorry one day, but so it goes.


Meanwhile, the band was going well. Wayne did nothing but live music day and night. He was two years older than I and had a younger brother who also played in the band sometimes, I think at his parents insistence. Going to Wayne's house was weird for me on just about every account. For instance, I got a ride home with his father one time. He was one of those white collar dad's I've written about before, not one of the thick, big-boned fathers in my neighborhood who nobody wanted to rile, but a man with a small neck and wrists and a sort of weak face and glasses. He wore white shirts with ties and said very little. Weirder for me was the car he drove, a Mercedes Benz. There were only three car makers in my neighborhood, and the boys would argue endlessly over the benefits of owning a Ford or Chevy or Chrysler. I guess my own father went out on a limb when he bought a Rambler from the American Motors Company, but then again, he bought an Edsel one time, too. I guess that is where I get it. But these cars were all made in the United States. I'd never seen a word like Benz before. On our way home, Wayne's father had to stop for gas, but it wasn't gas, it was diesel. He had to pull up to a pump on the side of the station where trucks went to fill up his German car. It smelled awful, I thought, when he hit the gas and we pulled away with a terrible metallic ticking that sounded like bad tappets. I think I might have been a little afraid that he was a secret spy for the Nazis like the fellow and his wife who left papers in pumpkins we had just learned about in our Americanism class. That guy wore horn-rimmed glasses and looked weak, too.

Wayne's house was in a better neighborhood. Not much, but some. The first time I went over, Wayne and his brother were still in bed. His mother told me to come in, that it was time for Wayne to get up. She sat at a kitchen counter in her bathrobe, her hair a mess, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and looking the way my mother did when she was sick. She asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. No adult I knew would ask a kid such a thing. Then she started screaming at the top of her lungs, "Wayne, get up, one of your friends is here." Then, in a lower, gravelly voice, "Go get him up. He won't get up."

I went into Wayne's bedroom. He lay there heavy, eyes closed. I'd never seen a room like his before. The walls were painted a dark color, sort of purple, and there were music posters all over the walls. "Hey, Wayne," I said. He groaned. I'd never seen a kid get up like this before. He got up like an adult on the weekends, slowly, with complaint. Finally, we went back into the kitchen where his mother gave him coffee with a lot of milk and two pieces of toast. I went all to pieces when Wayne reached over and got a cigarette. He smoked, of course, but I'd never seen a kid smoke in front of his parents. I'd heard of the twin cities of evil when I went to church, but I hadn't really believed in them. Wayne lit up. God knows what I must have looked like.

They coughed and talked awhile like boyfriend and girlfriend it seemed to me more than mother and child. But I learned that both Wayne and his brother were adopted, and I could never shake the feeling that being an adopted son was not quite legitimate. It was like being a son with an asterisk by your name. It was as creepy to me as Roger Maris's record breaking home run.

Wayne's mother pulled out a thick paper catalog like the Sears' I had seen at my aunt's house, but this was something different. It was a Speigal's. The name was like Benz to me, foreign. His mother told him to pick out some clothes, and Wayne began going through a section that I'd never seen in a Sears catalog, boy's clothing like the Beatles with red bell bottom pants and shirts with puffy sleeves. And it was the middle of the year--the school year, I mean. The boys I knew got clothes once, just before the school year started, and then maybe a few at Christmas. Wayne was getting clothing at a random time, out of season. There was no rhyme to any of this for me.

What I remember most now was Wayne's mother taking her "medicine" and coming to in a little while. She was a skinny woman and it was the age of diet pills. Later on, Wayne would have us all take them. But I never liked the damn things and would fake it and throw them away.

That morning, however, was a portal to all sorts of evil demons. I would be tested.

Christmas

It is warm and damp for Christmas after a long run of perfect weather. I wake alone just before dawn, make coffee, drink water, feed the cat. A few emails, cook up some pictures from last night. The comes up but not out. I watch the outlines of solitary runners and walkers pass by the big windows that open to the street. I wonder about them, people I know vaguely, about their being alone. What inner architecture must we accomplish to be happy alone today?

Yesterday, having some presents wrapped, the man in front of me and the woman who was wrapping were talking. My ears perked up when he said, "Remember, you are not here alone." The woman was moved by this to an extent that moved me. Differently, of course.

"He didn't tell you the bad news," I said.

"What's that?"

"You're not going to like the people you are here with."

I thought I was being funny, but I might as well have slapped a happy baby.

"They've never built a monument to a cynic," he said.

Now I thought he was being funny. We just weren't on the same page.

I drank with my usual friends until dinner with my mother. It was pleasant, the last of the shoppers hurrying by. Mine is a small village in the larger metropolitan area, quaint, old, moneyed. After dinner, going home, I thought to drive down the Avenue to see the lights. It is very pretty, the entire town done up in simple white bulbs, understated and wonderful. I have lived here a long time and have had many Christmases here. I thought of the ones that were good and the ones that were bad, the ones when I was with someone I loved and when I wasn't. It wasn't nostalgia, exactly, but close. If we grew up with it, we never get over Christmas, I think.


I don't know that this is what I planned to write this morning, but it is what happened. Now I must pack. I am going with my mother to relatives for a hillbilly Christmas. Good Cheer.

Christmas Eve

Sometimes we look for omens. Maybe we find them then. And maybe that is when we make the Big Mistake.

I had decided to use my old Bronica S2a to shoot photos of the old south, those things that are disappearing rapidly. The other day, I took a little road trip with nothing to do but that. I'd see something and stop the car or turn around and jump out with that big old camera and start the whole ancient process of metering, focusing, framing, and then hearing that giant mirror's "thuwump." I was driving through a small town and saw an old gas station, the kind you can't find much any longer now that all the gas is sold at Magic Markets and 7-11s and mega Speedy Racetrack places. The station was closed, but there was an old man, a real cracker, sitting on the step. I nosed the Volvo in and jumped out with the Bronica, metering from the car. I took a long shot of him on the steps with the old 1950s pumps in the foreground, a big American flag (I should have counted the number of stars on it) in the window above his head to the left, an old deco-style Coca-Cola machine to his right, and all the good old auto parts and products stickers all over the place. I walked up and we talked a bit and I asked him if I could take a couple more, closer. After I had gotten his story, I wished him good luck and walked back to the car.

The next few stops, the camera was acting funny, then it just quit. Every time I advanced the winder, the shutter would trip. I had this same problem fixed two months ago, but it was broken again. I was awfully thankful I got the photos at the gas station. They were going to be something.

I've been looking at the Nikon D700 for awhile. One of the fellows at the camera store had me play with it, and I loved the damned thing. His name, of course, is Beelzebub. Do you ever want something so badly that you feel yourself on the edge of a cliff, all rational thought pushed to that tiny prison in the far back of your brain?

When I got the film back, half of each roll was black. The photos from the gas station were not there. They were gone.

Sick with that and the romance of using old cameras, I was thinking of the D700. It is Christmas, I thought, and I am alone. I've been a good boy all year, haven't I? I work every day, and I'm no longer a kid. There comes a time in life when your friends all buy new Porsches because they say it is time, that they deserve this. Hell, all I wanted was a camera. Forget the fact that I need a car, that my house needs some important repairs, that the economy just went south and I lost a lot of money in a mutual fund.

As I was thinking, sick with loss and desire, I picked up the mail from the floor where it had fallen through the slot. And something fell out. An envelope, manila, official looking. Shit, what have I done now, I thought, a primal chill running up my spine. Internal Revenue Service, it said. Lord, lord, lord, I had been sent an omen. It was the refund check from my November return. Quick as a cat, without thinking, I went to the camera store. I could feel no ground beneath my feet as I handed over my Amex card. I was numb with sickness. I was willful. I could not tell my mother, I knew. This was wrong.

I played with the camera all day. It did everything. The shots looked lovely on the LCD screen. The damn thing makes its own light.

Downloading the images from the card, something went wrong. They were beautiful. They were gone.

I've spent the morning figuring out the problem, but those first magic things are mere chimeras, punishment for what I've done. But surely there is much more to come.

Shock Theater

We used to hang out at night, just walking around the neighborhoods, talking, being away from the house. Saturday night. Somebody's party. Some of the older kids were drinking. I was kissing a girl two years older than me, the older sister of a girl in my class. We were leaning against the wall of a carport when she told me to turn my head, and then she stuck her tongue in my ear. 30,000 volts of lightening shot through me in a flash. I stiffened and shook like someone receiving electroshock. Holy God! Holy God! I thought, "Something has gone badly wrong." I had heard of strokes and wondered if I was having one. Luckily she took her tongue out just then, but I was paralyzed. I couldn't move. Alarmed, I wondered if this would be permanent? I was making a quick inventory of my senses, which slowly seemed to be returning, when suddenly she did it again, deeper this time. The sensation was too strong and violent. My trapezium was frozen. I couldn't pull my shoulder away from my neck. I thought I might puke. I felt like the fellow who played in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But things were just beginning. She had done all this before it seemed to me as she grabbed my wrist with a practiced hand and placed it into the top of the waistband of her pants. I wanted to pray, but it was impossible now. I was incapable. Weren't there any parents around I wondered? Would nothing interfere? But darker, deeper instincts were taking charge of me by then, a twisted, unravelling curiosity that had me plunging my hand deeper, past the top of her tight jeans that cut into the fat of her belly, then further. Suddenly, though, my hand came in contact with something awful, something rough and wiry like a Brillo pad. What the hell is that?! I thought, completely unprepared by the airbrushed photos of naked women I'd seen at Allen's house. This was nothing I knew. My own hair, even my two or three new pubic hairs, was soft and downy. I knew I was done, was finished with all of this there and then. Where was the appeal? All I wanted was to make an escape, to go home and watch tv, but she had me. I was stuck. It was a trap. Pull hard as I could, my hand would not come free of her jeans. It was like a set of Chinese handcuffs. The harder I pulled, the tighter things got. But just before I panicked, the moment before I began flopping and screaming, I heard her say, "You can't go any further. I have a friend visiting tonight." Whatever that meant. Then something gave. Maybe she sucked in her belly and released me. But I was free.

I would go home and watch an old horror picture on Shock Theater, I thought. But really, it wouldn't hold a candle to this.

A Reputation

"Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood." (James Joyce, "Araby")

I was beginning to lose myself. Things were changing. I was still a kid, but I felt that much. The boys I knew now were smoking cigarettes, and I did, too. Not often, of course, but when I was with them. It seemed as if most of them didn't have parents. Maybe a single mom who worked all the time, but they were able to do what they wanted to do without supervision. It was dangerous.

I was not like them. I would never do what most of what they did. I was sweet, not mean. Still, things seep in. As my aunt told me around this time, "If you play with shit long enough, you will start to smell like it.

"Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires." (James Joyce, "Araby")

Carol and I were at a basketball game. We sat in the bleachers on the far side of the gym. Everyone could see us. I held her hand. She leaned against me. There was nothing. There was no basketball game, only us, there, together. My nose rubbed against her neck. A whisper, the hint of a kiss. My hand went up the back of her sweater. No one could see. Slowly. My fingers felt the edge of her bra, slipped under. Spinning, hot, upward, burning.

The next day at school, she was called into the girl's gym teacher's office. There was a conference. That night, Carol called. She could not see me any more. She cried. I could say nothing. It was over. We had what was then called "a reputation."

"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." (James Joyce, "Araby")

Winter Interlude

Nature's longest night. The Winter Solstice. The first day of winter here was lovely, clear and warm and perfect. But the night is long and I can not stay in bed with the torment of winter faeries any longer. It is colder and I am alone. Winter's first night and I am awake. No dreams of what has been left undone, what I will not do, this way. Just me here with a cat, books, pictures. I know a place where a young boy sleeps under big warm blankets excitedly dreaming of winter's youth.

A Natural

But Steve was wrong. Carol Dann did like me. One night I got a call.

"Hello."

A girl's voice came on the line.

"Is this C.S.?"

"Yes."

"Do you know who this is?"

"No."

The voice went on to giggle and ask me questions which I dumbly answered. I could hear other girl voices in the background.

"What would you say if I said Carol Dann liked you?"

I didn't know what to say.

"Really?"

"Yes. She thinks you're cute."

That went on for a while, giggling, chatting, girl's shushing each other, listening. I tried to picture it in my mind, girls sitting around the phone in someone's bedroom. I was scared.

And then it was Carol to whom I was speaking.

"Meet me at my locker after second period," she said.

I did.

She was a knockout. She wasn't big even though she was older, but petite with brown hair and the figure of a girl. Carol had not become a woman in the way Olive had. Maybe she never would. She wore a khaki 'gator skirt and a plaid shirt with cordovan penny loafers on her feet. Her smile was real and perfectly natural.

"Hi," she said.

I felt the difference between us. This is a joke, I thought. People will jump out of the bushes and begin to laugh at any moment just like on Candid Camera.

But they didn't. The entire meeting took place in two minutes, maybe less. Everyone was scrambling. We had to get to class.

"You want to walk me home?" she asked, grinning.

The ground fell away from beneath my feet. I was falling without going anywhere. It sucked the air from my lungs.

"Sure," I managed.

Betrayal

As it turned out, being liked by Olive was considered a good thing. She had been a popular girl in her old school. But she had scared me with those adult titties and those strange shapes and foreign smells, and I could not overcome it. The moron who had driven us in the car turned out to be just that. He liked to take the cotton out of Vicks inhalers and put them into coffee to extract the codeine. He also liked sniffing glue. He was big and dumb, but I couldn't get rid of him. In a year he would go into the high school, but for now, I was cursed.

Carol Dann was another thing. I didn't know who she was, but I learned that she was older by a year. She was in the eighth grade and from a better family. In elementary school, we all came from the same neighborhood and were of the same class, but the junior high school was a catch all for many schools. There were kids much better off and much worse off than we were.

After winning the talent show, I was a hotter commodity. By now, my parents had gotten me a complete drum set with cymbals and a high hat, a bass drum and two tom-toms. I even had a tambourine. It didn't take long for other bands to invite me to play with them. I started playing with two older boys who were really good. One of them was the ringer in the band that beat us in the elementary school competition. These two fellows were both good musicians, but they were pretty bad characters. The bass player's name was Steve. He had a Hoffner violin bass just like the one Paul McCartney played. Wayne was two years older and had a Rickenbacker guitar and he could play anything he heard. Both of them had big, black Vox amplifiers and were both considered good looking, something they both chose to believe. They were very, very vain.

One night after band practice, I asked Steve, "Do you know who Carol Dann is?"

"Sure," he said.

"I keep hearing she likes me."

"Ho, ho, ho," he laughed. "You are full of shit. She's in my grade. She doesn't like you." His derision was harsh.

"Well, that's what I heard," I said just before he hit me as hard as he could with his fist on the fat part of my shoulder. For some reason, he was insanely angry.

"I SAID YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT!"

I hurt bad, not as much from the punch as from the wrongness of it, from the betrayal. How could you hit someone for something like that? I didn't do anything, I thought. But this was to be only the first in a litany of betrayals I would learn to endure.

Jr. High

When I started the 7th grade, it was already established that Olive liked me. People said so, even kids I didn't know.

"You're C.S., huh?"

But junior high school was a bad shock. Every hour we changed classrooms, teachers, people. Gone was the sense of safety and familiarity that school had been the past six years. Replacing it was a new sense of danger and of excitement. You had to be on your toes. Eighth and ninth grade boys looked mean. They moved too fast, talked to loud. They were veterans. Between classes there was bedlam. At lunch, we were simply set free. "Go to the lunchroom. Get in line. Eat."

Bewildered, I looked around for a familiar face. I saw Allen who looked as bewildered as I. Together we did what we were told. We went to the lunchroom, got in line, ate. But all around us was a free-for-all. Sloppy Joe's and French Fries. We didn't have to buy the limp greens and the overcooked vegetables that had accompanied our every meal before. There was that, anyway. We found two places at the far end of a long line of tables filling the large cafeteria from wall to wall. Three boys approached us that I had never seen. It is never good when boys approach boys. There is always a chance of violence.

"I hear you play in a band," one of the boys sneered.

"Yea, we both do."

"I hear Carol Dann likes you."

"Who?"

"Carol. Carol Dann."

"I don't know. I don't know who she is."

Then they were gone.

"Do you know who Carol is?" I asked Allen. He shrugged. It was like that here in Wonderland.

After school Allen and I walked home together. He lived just down the street from my house. It was two miles each way. Allen and I had been friends since the first grade, but we didn't have any classes together that year. Jr. High School was like that. It just ripped you from your old, safe life, out of the harbor from the place you came. It was sudden like that big gust of wind just before a storm approaches. But somehow it was accepted, reified really, legal. Instantly there were new rules, new relations.

By the second week of class, I didn't see Allen very much. Neither of us waited for the other to walk home. Though we went to the same school, it would be two years before I would see him again.

Olive

As I said, there were some hard perks to being known at a new school by people you had not yet met. One of them was Olive. I'm not sure I'll get this exactly right because the memory is like one of those dreams where things are jumbled around and don't make sense. I met her in the last weeks of summer before I went to the seventh grade. I'd already met some new people I'd be going to school with. One of them was in the ninth grade. He said that we should go over to Olive's house, that she wanted to meet me. He had a learner's permit to drive and had driven, so he took the keys to his mother's car. This was bad. It was the first time I had ridden in a car with anyone other than my parents or relatives. I couldn't feel my feet, my legs. He swung the car into the street and laid a patch of rubber down the street. That was new to me, too. My parents always drove cautiously, carefully, respectfully. This boy was a demon. He took the turns like a race car driver. What was he, fifteen? But before we went to Olive's, he had to pick up his girl. I was caught up in some movie with a bad ending from which you were supposed to learn a moral lesson, a movie I didn't even want to watch let alone be in. Everything was twisted, unreal.

Olive was dark with dark hair and dark eyes and breasts like my mother's. She must have been taller than me, too, for what I remember about her is the size of her, and the smell which was deep and sweet and foreign. Thinking back on it, she must have been Greek or Turkish, but I didn't know what that was then, so I have to guess now. I remember her smiling with excitement when she answered the door. She had white teeth and wore a crisp, new dress and was very pretty, but I had never met a girl I didn't know before. I was in strange waters and didn't know the currents. We went inside her house which did not look like any of the houses I'd been in before. The colors and shapes were different, foreign, and I could not make sense of them. It was clear her parents were not home. We sat and talked for a while, and then the fellow I was with said, "Let's go for a ride." I didn't know which was worse.

Olive and I sat in the back seat. It was awul, really, though she was pretty and sweet, for I was not this mature. I thought of my baseball cards in their box on the dresser where I'd left them and of my football I thought might be laying in the back yard. When we kissed, I was terrified and excited at the same time, blood pulsing to conflicting parts of my body. She was nice about it, I thought, like a nurse who was about to give you some bitter pill or to clean your wound. But it was over soon. We had done it and it was done. Nothing, really, had happened. The boy had stolen his parents' car and we had driven illegally with pretty girls who were excited and liked us. We were something. We were heros.

But I didn't feel that way. All I wanted was to get away and go home. Olive. She was pretty and sweet, but the threat of those adult breasts was too much. I wouldn't be ready for anything like that for months.

The Beatles

I think the dye was cast then. The Beatles appeared on American TV for the first time on my birthday, and somehow that seemed an omen. We all had been listening to their records and hearing wild tales about the way they looked (those lovable mop tops), but that Sunday night Ed Sullivan show was going to be the test. I sat with my parents in our living room as we did every Sunday evening to watch Ed Sullivan, but even my parents knew that this night was different. The usual menu of plate twirlers, Las Vegas singers, and Topo Gigo was about to be upstaged. More than seventy million viewers were tuned in to see the British Invasion.

Not long after, I was in the lunch line at school when one of the lunch ladies spoke to me. She had never done this before. None of them ever spoke to any of us. "Look at his hair," she said to the other women working behind the counter. "What do you think you are, a Beatle or something?" At that time, I had a pretty standard haircut for boys, clipped on the sides, longer on top and in front, and, like my father, I used Rose Hair Oil or Brylcreem to slick it back when I combed it in the morning. But it was afternoon and I probably hadn't been to the barber for a while and we had played outside already, and I hadn't bothered to comb my hair because I was a boy of twelve, and as a result, my hair was hanging down. The snotty injustice of her comment resonated in my tender, fledgling soul.

"Yup," I told her.

I was a Beatle.

And, as I reported in my Jimmy T story, I went to a new junior high school that had just been built the next year. There were a lot of new kids there from other schools I didn't know, so I was a little nervous. But when I got there, it seems I already had a reputation, not for hitting home runs, but for playing in a band. There were sweet and terrible deserts that went with that I will soon tell. But for now, I have told the story I meant to tell, that moment when hair and rebellion became forever wedded for me. I wish it hadn't, but it had and there was nothing to do about it. I would forever suffer through it.

This photo and yesterday's were taken with my seventh grade band. I was in the seventh. The other kids were older. We were more Monkeys than Beatles, but that would soon change. We were called "The Circle of Confusion" and we won the school talent show. But I go on too far. I'll tell it tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next.

But Jesus Christ, when I think that my life may have been most profoundly shaped by the lunchroom lady. . . .



Make sure you watch the end of the clip with the Beatles in the Peppermint club, Ringo dancing with the girls.

Competition

I was quite a good baseball player when I was young. I pitched a no-hit game one season and was moved up to a bigger league. The team I got on made it to the championship game that year. It was a no-hit game by both pitchers each of whom went the distance. The final score was 1-0. There was only one man on base in the entire game, and he got there on a walk. On a pop-up out to center field, he got to second. He was able to steal third on the next pitch, and got home on another pop-up out. But it was all my fault. The pop-up to center was hit to me, and before throwing the ball, I pump faked. He did not hold and my throw to second was too late. Had I just thrown the ball, he would have turned back to first. Nobody said anything about it, but I was haunted.

The next year, my game fell apart. I was the best player on the team, but something else was in the mix. I got into a band. My parents bought me a snare drum and a cymbal for Christmas. My friend down the street had gotten an acoustic guitar. Another friend had an electric Fender. And the fourth fellow was someone I'd gone to school with since first grade but never hung around. Paul, however, was the only real musician in the group. He had been taking guitar lessons for a while and could read music and play entire songs. And that was our band.

We played in the school talent show that spring. We were the first act, and our opening song was "House of the Rising Sun." I didn't play the drums on that one, but I stood out front with the acoustic guitar I didn't know how to play and sang. I don't think I knew what the song was about, and I'm not sure the school officials did, either. We played four songs in all, and surely we were awful, but the crowd cheered wildly, and I felt like a star. Next came the kid who played the accordion, and then a quartet of singers, etc. And last was another band--ringers--for the guitar player was older and didn't go to our school. But they were good and they won the talent show.

That was the beginning. Kids started having parties on the weekends and I missed some because I played baseball. But I was miserable. Then one of the kids asked our band to play at her party and I said yes. I had a game that night, but I didn't care. I had found a new and better way to get attention. That night, in my post-performance high, I "made out" with a girl in a closet. This was more than kissing; this was serious kissing for a long, long time. She wouldn't let me stick my tongue in her mouth, but I was still dizzy with the experience. I knew it was dirty.

When I went back to baseball practice that week, my coach suspended me for missing our game. We had lost, and he said I would have to sit out a week. It was miserable sitting in the dugout while my team took another beating the next game, but it was worse that my parents found out. My father looked at me with disappointed eyes, never saying anything about it, but just looking at me. I sat out the beginning of the second game that week, too. We were losing again for the third straight game, and I was making some break. I sat in the corner of the dugout and drew doodles in the dirt no longer interested in any of it. And that, of course, was when the coach decided that he would put me into the game. We were behind but had men on base and my at bat was critical. You'll say I'm lying, but I hit a home run that turn at bat, and as a result, we won the game. It was good and it was healthy. I would be selected to the All-Star Team. My father looked happy and proud. The natural order, it seemed, was restored.

But at school, it was not about that which the kids were talking.

Almost a Beating

OK. I have a 6th grade photo of Jeanette that I will put up sometime later, but I don't want to connect the image to the story. This is not a literal blog, anyway.

Jeanette, as I said, was the first girl in our class to get breasts. It didn't really do any of us any good, though, because her boyfriend's were older. Jeanette just looked fast. She wore her hair in an adult way and was the first to get some bleach in it, "frosting" is what they called it, I think. She had short bangs and the top of her hair was teased. If you don't know what that is, you are young and need to look it up. And she was one of the first to wear short dresses that hit her legs mid-thigh. I never dreamed of Jeanette. I mean if I did, it was a dream where I was in trouble. She was just not a kid like the rest of us. I think her father or brothers or someone must have been after her all the time because she wasn't very open or forthcoming with us.

When the sixth grade was over, half of us went to a new junior high school and the other half to the high school that was an all-encompassing seventh through twelfth grades. It was a different experience for those kids, I'm sure, being around kids with cars, etc. Jeanette was one of the ones who went there.

One night, though, I went to a basketball game that pitted our team against theirs, and I saw Jeanette. Somehow--and believe me, I haven't a clue how--we ended up talking outside, and it was the first time she had ever showed any interest in me. It is all a dark memory. We were talking and leaning up against the metal poles that held up the roof of the walkway. I don't know who kissed whom, but we kissed briefly. And then she told me she had a boyfriend. I figured he went to school with her and so I didn't think I'd have to see him, or her again, for that matter.

But he didn't. On Monday, I was standing in the hallway with some fellows when an older boy came up mean and fast. "I'm JImmy T________" he said, angry as hell. He was about my height, but he was different. He was a grade higher than I, but he had failed once and so was two years older, and those two years had hardened his muscles and ligature a bit. But there was more to it. His face looked hard. There was something mean in his eye. He wore a letter jacket with leather sleeves and had his greasy hair combed with bangs, but even that looked like a challenge. I didn't know what was going on. Who the hell was Jimmy?

And then I knew. "I hear you like kissing my girl?" he said. Shit, oh shit, I was in trouble now. Everyone had gathered up in a circle and all the faces seemed to push into some fisheye space claustrophobically. I couldn't breathe.

I stalled. "Who's your girl?"

"You know who she is you asshole. Jeanette."

"Oh. Jeanette. Yea, I know her, I went to school with her last year."

"She said you kissed her Friday." He was gathering himself up for some great violence. I had to think quickly.

"What? Oh, no, nothing like that. I saw her at the basketball game, but we just said hello. She was kidding you." All this delivered with a sweet voice but hands and legs shaking like vibrators.

"She said you kissed her. You calling her a liar?"

"Nope. Not me. But man, she's just fooling around. I didn't kiss her."

Somehow, it seemed the time had passed for him to gracefully hit me. Somehow, I had stalled long enough. The truth, though, was that he had enjoyed being tough and facing me without a fight. Had I maintained face? Hell, I didn't care. I didn't get an ass kicking. And that was enough for me.

I don't remember ever seeing Jeanette again.

But I saw Jimmy get quite a beating a little later. Another story.

Cramps

We were late starters then. I had my second kiss in the sixth grade. We began kissing, then, the adventurous ones. Bad kids, I guess. But there was a clear line between kissing and French kissing. I would not have the latter for awhile.

We didn't know much about anatomy. What we knew came from a stack of Playboy magazines that one of the kids' father had. It was dangerous, but we'd sneak over to his house when no one was around and look at them. Since there were no shots below the waist, we used to argue about what was there. One of the kids with an older brother astounded us, and nobody believed him.

One day during our usual play period, the boys and girls were separated into groups, the boys going out to play kickball, the girls being herded into the cafeteria. "Hey, what's going on Mr. Roach," we asked. He was the only male teacher in our school. He taught sixth grade and kept us pretty much in line most of the time. Roach just gave us a stern look and wouldn't tell us anything except to get out there and play. Of course, we were all curious to an illegal degree. The windows of the cafeteria had been covered and a couple of the boys tried to sneak over to look in, but they were dealt with quickly and strongly.

After play period, the girls marched back to our room looking straight ahead without talking, clutching little paper pamphlets in their arms, guarding them like valuables about to be stolen in a crowd. "Hey, hey, what'd ya do, huh, what'd ya do?" we begged, but not one of them would say anything. We tried to bargain for one of the pamphlets, but our attempts were useless. Something strange and terrible had happened, and we were determined to know.

A few days later, one of the guys told us that they had been shown a film about their private parts. "Girls have periods," he said. "My mother has them all the time." And then we got our own confusing explanation of the process.

One day, Jeanette left school in the middle of the day. "What happened to Jeanette?" we asked. "She had cramps," our new, young teacher just out of college told us. She was beautiful and caused every boy a sweet agony whenever she erased the board.

Allen and I thought it would be a great treat to go home in the middle of day, so we told our teacher we were sick. "What's wrong?" she asked. Cramps.

I remember her sniggering when she took us to the office to tell the principal, and I remember his mysterious smile, too. "OK," he said, "put them in the infirmary." And we were taken to a place I'd not seen before, a little block room with two cots in it. Allen and I were told to lie there until we felt better, and no talking. It took about five minutes for us to heal and be marched back to our classroom.

Jeanette. She was the first girl in our class to have breasts. I will tell a story about how she almost got me beaten later.

Full Cold Moon

Long night. The full moon rises over the lake, north, this time, it seems. Full Cold Moon. I go to bed looking at it and it is still there when I rise before dawn. Cold, luminous night. I left it cold in the house so that I could snuggle down deep under thick, heavy blankets on crisp sheets. Dreams. It is the year's last moon. I've not had time to think. But autumn is nearly over, winter approaching, the longest night of the year. These nights are made for staying in, having a drink, being still. Moonlight and winter faeries. And sleep. I want the sleep that Frost speaks of, that Winter's Sleep of animals "smothered in their lairs." Frost honors the poet out and that coldest night to see the snow falling in that field. I, though, in these lazy southern winters that turn cold and dark so briefly, long for sleep, long for rest. And, perhaps, a Sylvia Plath.

I am too fond of moonbeams and hoot owls. I've been told. I heard no owls, though. Only the cold tinkling of moonbeams and faeries in my yard as I slept.

First Kiss

We lived in the country in a two bedroom house on blocks without an indoor bathroom. My mother's grandparents had a small farm across the highway, and her parents house was on a piece of property next to that. My mother and father both worked in Dayton, so I spent my days with my grandmother. We watched Captain Kangaroo in the mornings and then cut pictures and made paste from flour and water, and I would make collages and color. Then we would work in the garden and we would sing "Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel" while we worked. Then we ate lunch and I had to take a nap while she watched soap operas. And when I got up, I would play.

But when I got to be a certain age, my parents decided that I needed to be around other children, and they enrolled me in a day school. My grandmother cried furiously over that.

Day school was interesting enough, though it was pretty cold and impersonal. I don't remember getting to know many kids. But it was there that I fell in love for the first time. I can't remember her name, but it seems that I can still see her face. She was a little beauty. There were colorful stick ponies, and us boys would play cowboy while the girls gathered in a playhouse near the fence line. Eventually, we began to ride our horses out to see the girls, and soon, they were giving kisses. My first came from her, and I never quit thinking about it. We began to take naps beside one another at nap time. The room was filled with cots, sheets hung between them to keep us quiet, but she would pull the sheet up and whisper and giggle. She was a little devil, I guess, because I could see the joy this gave her, though it scared me to death. I knew we would get caught and we would get in trouble, and we did. And the punishment for this was that we could not sleep beside one another any more.

It wasn't long before the great flood came that ruined out house and caused my father to decide to move us to Florida. And again, my grandmother wailed and wailed to lose her little boy.

Other than getting a terrible pain in my stomach that landed me in the hospital overnight, I don't remember much about the day school except that little girl. I dreamed about her after we moved for many years. We lived together and had our own home like that little play house only bigger. Eventually, I got old enough to wonder why I was still having those dreams, and then they stopped. I had come of the age when I was ready for my second kiss. It would not be the same, though, not so devilishly innocent as that first. Nothing ever would be.

Cards

I meant to send out my Christmas cards just after Thanksgiving, but as way leads to way, I still have not bought any. The effort seems overwhelming. Still, I must get them and send them out so that I get some in return. It has been programmed into me. I was conditioned by elementary school.

In the days leading up to Valentine's Day, we were instructed to bring in an old shoe box that we would decorate. We spent pleasant afternoon hours cutting tissue and crepe papers to cover our boxes and cutting out red hearts to glue on as decoration. The smell of the old paste and the roughness of those papers stays with me still. Once they were decorated, they were neatly lined up on shelves, slits cut into the tops awaiting the arrival of Valentine's.

We were poor kids and all of the cards we got were from the same company. They were brightly colored and came in big, crisp, transparent bags full of lots of smaller cards and four big ones. They had the usual, "Be Mine, Valentine" messages so that all we needed to do was scrawl the names into the To: and From: lines.

In retrospect, the whole exercise can be seen as a lesson in cruelty. Some boxes would fill and others would not. Susan was not only the smartest but the prettiest girl in our class. You had to get your card in early or else leave it on top because it would be stuffed full. Poor Bebe, who was not quite right, scarcely got a card. I, of course, always gave her one, but not a big one. Those were saved for the special people, usually Susan, Sherri, and my two best friends.

The horrible part came Valentine's Day when full of those little hard sugar candies, those tiny pastel hearts with red messages written on them (and god knows we only ate them through a sugar addiction for they were horrible tasting things even to a child), jerking and twitching with insulin spasms, we were allowed to open our Valentine's boxes. There and then, the hierarchy that would rule us for years to come was set. Susan, who was later promoted to a higher grade, sat among her riches in her pretty dress and pigtails, prim and proper, not looking this way or that but carefully considering each and every Valentine as if it were her favorite. And there sat forlorn little Bebe (who was later put into a special school with kids from the short bus) with nothing to do, turning her head to see the other kids before settling her gaze in her lap. And the rest of us fell somewhere in between. I got a share of the big Valentine's, mostly from my buddies and some of the girls I didn't really like, but I never got one from Susan, and I never found out who did.

So when birthdays and Christmases roll around now, I am always a little saddened when most of the cards I get come from car dealerships and bars. Bradley's in Palm Beach sends me a free drink card every year on my birthday and a Ford dealership never forgets me at Christmas. I think it is solely my elementary school experience that makes me yearn for a mantle filled with holiday wishes, something to make me seem popular, something to maintain my position in the hierarchy. Maybe I'm afraid I'll get shipped off on the short bus.

To wit, I will get my cards today. And for you, my friends, here is my first card of the season. Happy Holidays from Cafe Selavy.

Bird Bath

My scanner seems to be working again, so maybe I'll make some new images. I shot this with my old Bronica SA2, and man, do I like the way it looks. I don't mean that there is anything special about the image, but the camera works. Now the photographer must.

Encounters

"Bad ju-ju. I'm in trouble again. Too much stress is all I can think. That or the Joker product. I got into two shoving matches tonight, once in the grocery store, once in the parking lot. People in my way. What do they think? My temper has been on a hair trigger of late. I know it and try to stay out of harms way, but you have to go to the grocery store, right? So this group of people are standing in Whole Foods, four of them, blocking the isle. You know how narrow they are to start, but this fucker is leaving no room to get by, so I walk through him. I'm just about gone when he shouts out, "Excuse you." I stop and make the dramatic pause before I turn around, you know? And the whole group is looking at me, but I'm just looking at him, and I say, 'You don't really want to go down this road, do you?' And he turns away real fast like he needs to.

"Later, I'm trying to pull through this parking lot and a car is blocking the way, so I stop. I'm trying to tell what he wants to do, plus I don't feel like backing up since he is just sitting there. So I sit there, getting madder, and I turn out my lights and motion him to see if he is wanting to park. I suspect he doesn't, but what the hell. He keeps sitting there and a lady in another car pulls out, so I pull up and to the side, but it is useless and no one can go anywhere. Then he starts screaming at me, so I jump out and run over to his passenger's window. 'What the fuck are you yelling about, asshole,' I scream back, and he says I'm about to hit his car. It is a Porsche and he is about thirty and sounds like a fraternity guy, so I hate him just for that and I say, 'Fuck you, moron,' 'cause there is about two feet between the car. I can tell the guy is about six inches taller than I am and I get a little nervous about that, but he's dressed too much like an M.B.A. to worry too much about. But I get nervous any more when I get out of a car and there are people watching, so I give him the obligatory 'Fuck you,' and get back into my car and back up like an asshole, and when he gets beside me, he has to make a comment. I can't believe this shit, but he is on the move now and I would have to chase him, which I am known to do, but I just feel tired and yell out, 'You're a fucking pussy and a moron,' and let it go at that. Then I think about how recognizable my piece of shit car is and think he'll see me again before I see him, and I worry about that a little, but fuck him, right? But he'll probably be drunk and with friends and I'll be in a fight with the bunch of them.

"Anyway, that is how it is going lately. I'm wound tight. I have to stay away from people 'til this passes. Right? I mean, what do you think?"

"Yup, you'd better stay away from people," I say. The world isn't like it used to be.

I'll Be Back

I'll be back.

"You can always come back,
But you can't come back all the way."

Dylan

Weekend's Failure

Working with plaster, paint, spatulas, clay tools, fabrics. I didn't have an idea of what I wanted to do or how to do it. Fun stuff, like being a kid, but it wore me out, too. The others in the workshop were painters who wanted to learn to texture, so the colors and shapes in their works were wonderful. And I did this. I embedded the ferns to suggest some pagan forces, but the whole thing turned out looking like a Christmas card made by a sixth grader. I couldn't fit the whole piece on the scanner, so you are missing the lower part where the cut jewels will go.

It is awful but I learned some new things. One is that I must learn more about mixing color. The other things I did won't fit on the scanner, so you can't see how muddy I made things. In this one, I limited my colors to two. Not muddy, just plain. But just wait and see what happens when I combine this with encaustic. At least I have hope.

I see stuff like this hung in the local funky coffee shop. Hippies taste in art was always horrible. The new bohemians aren't much better.

Workshop

I'm at an art workshop all weekend, so these are brief. I've been busy making some truly bad stuff. But with work, my piece has gone from truly awful to merely horrible. I will try something new today. The instructor keeps telling me not to think, not to listen to all those voices in my head, but to let my true self come out in the art. I laugh and tell her I don't want my work to look like mine. I want it to look like somebody else's, someone with talent. I'm old enough to disagree with all the inner self stuff. It might be true, but it might not. Postmodern theory that talks of the self as a construction of cultural voices has its own truth, its own appeal. It is all true, the death of self and the old romantic ego. I like it all.

But it sure is hard on me to show so little talent.

Weekend

"Whatever they were looking for, they were not going to find it. . . ."

Fetishes

One day years ago in the East Village, I saw a fellow with long hair and torn jeans and two dressed-down women in model makeup walk into a coffee shop. Around his neck, he had a Leica M7 with a Leica flash mounted on top. He was handsome, and he was cool. From that moment on, I was desperate to have that Leica. I don't know if I thought that I would be handsome and cool, too, or not, but after that, every time I saw somebody with a Leica M, I was desperate.

But the damned thing was too expensive. I kept trying to buy around it. I tried everything. I watched the movie "Pecker" and bought a Cannonet 17 like the one he used in the movie. It was often described as "the poor man's Leica." That didn't do it, so I bought a series of old rangefinders including my first Leica, the CL.

That didn't do it, either.

I am from a hillbilly family that does not spend money on any luxuries. Growing up, I had enough clothing to go to school four days a week. I had to make a decision which day I would wear something I'd already worn. It wasn't a matter of putting it in the washing machine. We didn't have one. My mother went to the Laundromat once a week. Etc. So there was really only one reason I didn't buy the camera I wanted. Guilt.

I worked through it. I found a demo Leica M7 online for ONLY more than I could afford but less than a brand new one. I bought it. I would still have to get lenses, but once you've committed a cardinal sin, the rest is easy. I sweat through my clothing when I gave the store my credit card number. But the die was cast, the deal done.

The day my Leica arrived, I was having my air conditioning/heating unit cleaned. I was sitting on the couch carefully fondling my new icon when the repairmen came down to give me bad news. My unit was shot. There was no repairing it. I would have to spend xxxxx thousands of dollars to replace it.

I know why this happened. I am not a believer, but I still know why this happened. There are things some people are allowed to do in this universe and others are not. I won't pretend to know why, but it is true.

I am now thousands and thousands of dollars upside down in things, and I don't look any more handsome or any cooler. And the Leica works just like all the other cameras.

So here's the punch line. I'm crazy to get the new NIkon D700. I can't stand it and I am trying to keep from it with all my might, but the damned thing keeps popping into my mind. I won't tell you the price. If you are a photographer, you already know. If not, you don't care. But I swear, this camera is more than a fetish for me. You won't believe the things I'll be able to do with it. It is all I need to be able to. . . . .