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. . . . .

Against the Wall

He saw me before I saw him.

"Sometimes you are up against the wall. No use crying about it. Everybody gets there. You just live through it. My advice is to stay away from people. If you want to be miserable, do it alone. Some people don't understand that. Keep it to yourself, I say. That's what I do."

"Well," I said, "we try to, anyway."

Yes. We try.

Bhodisatva

Being young and grown up is about the best fun one can have if the times are good. And they were. In my twenties, I had a small apartment just off the nicest shopping street in the upscale part of town and a job that left me plenty of time to hang out. I got to know the bartenders and barmaids and usually didn't have to pay for more than one drink. I had no phone and no television and so I read incessantly. Hanging out can make you smart. It felt good to be grown up.

Way leads to way, though, and I moved into a house with my girlfriend. It was a great place built in 1925 with high ceilings and pine floors, a front porch and a rear deck and the largest kitchen I had ever seen. We threw some great parties in that house. And best of all, we lived two block from the campus of an expensive private college. My daily runs always took me across the campus.

One day just before sunset, in that not quite dark purple time, I was on the last leg that took me by the junior high school, and in the half-light, a large object ran at me from out of the bushes giving me a start. It was a strange, scrawny, ghostly looking dog. I thought it was attacking, but it wasn't, at least not in that way. The dog latched on to my pace and wouldn't leave me. She followed me all the way home.

It was clear the dog was starving, but not clear if it was an old dog or a young one. I had no dog food, so I mixed up some eggs and milk and bread and put it out for her to eat. And that was it. She wasn't leaving. When my girl came home, she shouted, "there's a dog on the porch." I know, I told her. It can hang around if it wants, but it's not coming into the house.

The next day when I came home, my girl and the dog were sitting on the couch together. The dog had tags. The vet said she (the dog) was about six months old. The dog was scarred like the kids I saw in old films about babies that had not been held in orphanages. They were not able to stand much attention and no matter how much they were fed, they did not grow. And that was my dog. I fed her and named her Wiley, and she hung around, sleeping outside. One morning when I got up, she had built a nest on the front lawn out of one of my jackets and various things she had picked up running around the neighborhood including a new golf shoe. Shit, I thought, this dog is going to cause me trouble.

When I tried to pet her, she would get up and move a few feet away, but she stayed near me. I ran every day and the dog would always come along without being called. I never put her on a leash and we would go far from home. If she stopped to smell the bushes or wandered off somewhere, I'd tell myself that it was fine if she decided to go. But she would always catch up. I guess she liked living with me.

When she came into heat, I had to move her into the house. All the dogs in the neighborhood were sleeping on our lawn. A hierarchy was established and it was a big lab, an older dog, that got to sleep by the door. His real competition was a young, very macho and muscular husky. I guess the old lab just saved all his experience and energy for fucking because when he was challenged by the husky, it was really not much of a fight.

I was running at six in the morning at that time, and Wiley always ran with me. She was a German Shepherd/Husky mix, and I'd read that each breed required a lot of exercise if they were not to become mean and spiteful. I decided that she needed to run. We would chance it. I would watch and make sure that none of the boys were able to mount her.

We stepped out of the house and all the boys got up. It was cold enough to see your breathe and just turning light. We ran. All of us. And it was eerie. All there was to hear was the soft thud of a dog pack running and their heavy breathing sending up a cloud of vapor. We breathed in tandem, it seemed, Wiley understanding and running right nest to my side. A car drove by us, a young man running with a pack of perhaps eight dogs. I wish I could have seen what he saw.

We got home without incident, but those boys were not in as good of shape as Wiley and I.

But the lab had his way one day. I was in the shower and my girlfriend was leaving for work. She closed the screen door, but that was all. I heard a yelp and a squeal and came running wet from the bathroom. The lab was locked up with Wiley, she looking at me for help, he hunkered down waiting for the beating he seemed to have taken many times. He looked like he knew what came next.

Wiley got an abortion and the lab stayed. He would be sleeping by the door when I got up and I took to feeding him so that he would not starve. Wiley liked him and he her and we all ran together every day. People came to think he was my dog, but he would come and go. One day an angry man brought him to my house and complained that the dog had broken down his back fence and screwed his little pooch in heat. I told him that the dog was not mine.

I had learned where he really lived and what his name was. He went home from time to time, but he spent most nights on my porch. One day when we were on our run, a pickup truck stopped and called his name. The dog reluctantly jumped into the bed and the driver rolled away. The next time I saw him, he was chained up in the yard. I was heartbroken. He never slept at my house again.

Last week, a fellow introduced himself to me at the gym. He said he had seen me around the neighborhood for years. He told me that he was the fellow who owned the lab. For all those years, I had never met his owner. I told him that his dog had gotten mine pregnant and he gave a belated apology. We laughed and told stories about his dog. The damned thing led quite a life of fucking and fighting for a long time.

Wiley lived with me for seventeen years, the last five of which she was diabetic. I had to give her two shots of insulin every day, at eight and eight. In those five years, it was rare that anyone else took care of her. She got cataracts and couldn't see well enough to run in the end, but I walked her for miles every day. In the end, I gave her a codeine tablet to take away her pain and called a friend of mine who was a vet. She came over that night and put her down.

That was years ago, but I still find her hair stuck in some fabric from time to time. I kept her and took care of her because I thought she was a c bhodisatva come to teach me great lessons. She wasn't. She was just a dog. But she was a good one.

Into Great Silence

Into Great Silence

"A prize winner at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, director Philip Groening's study of the Grande Chartreuse monastery introduces a world of austere beauty, following the daily activities of the resident monks, whose silence is broken only by prayer and song. With no other sound save the natural rhythms of age-old routines being carried out, the film captures the simplicity -- and profundity -- of lives lived with absolute purpose and presence."

I found this on Rhonda Prince's blog.

"There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny." Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973)

I spent much of my Thanksgiving break alone. I did this because I was tired. I was invited to stay with my friends in California for the week. They have a house inside Yosemite National Park, a lovely place where I go every summer. But I couldn't muster the energy. I was just worn out. I've worked too much and worried more, and work and worry have isolated me from most other parts of my life. I am not alone in this. It is going around. The upshot is, though, that while my isolation this Thanksgiving was voluntary, it was also inevitable. My social life, for various reasons, has become non-existent.

During my break, I watched the movie "Into Great Silence." Whenever I get world weary, I think of going to live in a monastery. When I was a young teenager, I saw an hour long special on one of the big networks, say CBS, about a monastery. It was phenomenal, literally. What I remember most about this documentary was the faces of the monks. They owned a power and certainty that made them more beautiful than a movie star. I don't think that any of them blinked. When asked by the reporter if after all the years of contemplation and meditation they had any direct evidence that God existed, each and every one of them said "No." Beautiful. The follow up question was, of course, did they ever wonder if they had wasted their lives cloistered there away from the outside world. One monk answered yes. He said that he had thought of that, but then again, he didn't know if life could have been any better. One of the old monks was dying, he said, but he couldn't imagine a lovelier place to leave the earth, nothing greater than to be surrounded by people who cared for and loved you.

It was the honesty and intelligence of the monks that impressed me, the certainty and thoughtfulness and directness.

When I watched "Into Great Silence," the lack of those qualities in the bearing of the monks struck me most, the oppressive rituals and routines of one of the most ascetic monasteries in the world. And I got the horror.

Still, I am trying to find something sacred in every act. I don't have time for wasted actions any more. And, perhaps, it is easiest to find this in solitude, easier to concentrate on every movement and morsel, to see and to hear what is not you and to attempt to make some. . . connection. I put the ellipses in there because the statement sounds so pukishly corny and mundane, something straight out of a self-help course. I don't want to be cynical, but I can't say spiritual or artistic without a hint of a smirk. I need another word that will transcend self-deprecation.

That is what I'm working on. In solitude and silence.

Or was. Today I must return to the world of worry and of work.