TALES, TESTIMONIES, AND OTHER TROPICAL FISH
Sometimes, I'm a sparkler. I'll light up like one, and bursts of pure fire spray in every direction. This is what happens in my head. So many ideas can float by without us getting a record of them. Hence, here are some of my stray experiences, ideas, and ruminations:
After this weekend, June 21, 2025's US bombing of Iranian nuclear installations, security and calls to alertness among the police and the populace have been high. Police are everywhere. In my neighborhood, an area of many immigrants from South Asia, I'm certain undercover agents are everywhere.
After this weekend, June 21, 2025's US bombing of Iranian nuclear installations, security and calls to alertness among the police and the populace have been high. Police are everywhere. In my neighborhood, an area of many immigrants from South Asia, I'm certain undercover agents are everywhere.
So. I'm entering the elevator on my bimonthly therapy sessions--when I run into two security guards. One has the gall to ask me, "Where are you going today?"
What did I tell him? "Oh, there's an international terrorist convention and barbecue taking place on the 4th floor."
Blank stares.
What did I tell him? "Oh, there's an international terrorist convention and barbecue taking place on the 4th floor."
Blank stares.
What's noteworthy is that this building contains Texas Senator Ted Cruz's Dallas offices. There have been protests there for some time. Maybe the rent-a-cops thought I was one of those.
*
The wintry afternoon was a perfect moment to take a good, long walk. I passed a shop called Vice City, and found inside a wondrous head shop. I got to chatting with the female cashier, and when she asked me what I did, I told her, "I'm a poet." Of course I did.
"You write poetry?" I nodded. "I do too!"
"Cool. You have any here you'd like to share?"
"Yeah--yes! " She looked into her cellphone until she found a poem.
Then added: "I'm scared to show you this!"
"Don't worry. I'm not going to judge you. Read it out loud."
Thus she did. Her poem had elements of rap in it, but one line remains with me. How lust can prevent love. "I like that part."
"What are your poems like?"
"Oh. Pretty much the same. On the subject of your poem, I'd probably write something about the cherries versus the cherry pits.
She and I chuckled, but what she didn't know is that I was telling her the truth.
*
Kirk assassination in Orem, Utah. I love playing with words. I used to live on Oram here in Dallas in 1980-81--back when I committed the cardinal sin of dissent against the Comanche Peak nuclear power construction project. Raised voice--a sin. Rattled fence--sin. Gave state trooper a Coke--a sin. Talked to two FBI agents about "stopping the Nookie Poo Poo." I wasn't there to attack the United States. I was there to dissent against nuclear waste. A cardinal sin directed toward a project that benefited Texas Utilities, a private corporation, likely federally subsidized at the dawn of the Ronald Ray Gun era.
Sometimes, I think about secret court rulings that "He'll never play in this town again!" Redneck verdicts on every little thing, especially Donald Trump's, um, fist.
Paranoia is fun. Spell Orem, Utah backwards: Hat U, Mero: I had leukemia right after parting company with Jennifer O'Connor, bartender at a swinger meeting place in the Southside Building in 2027. Weird, eh? Jennifer painted cowboy hats. Made a really nice American flag hat for Toby Keith. In July 2007, I contracted leukemia, possibly due to radiation exposure. Oh yeah, a special bottle of red red wine? Paranoia is awesome.
I'm laughing about the allegations Kirk's assassination had engraved tiny bullets with pro-trans slogans or whatnot. That's nutty. Who else do you know who has engraving skills that awesome?
More paranoia: U V U = 21, 22, 21--since it's a valley, it's like a wide V. I like this kind of pseudo-cryptological wordplay. 22 in Tarot indicates "universe"; 21 = "world". And it's left and right too. I've played with that as well: how the New Left committed itself to becoming a sort of lure in order to pull reactionaries further to the right, and to accelerate the dominion of capitalism over anything remotely democratic--all in order to begin the final division between bourgeois and prole. MAGA is in many ways a sort of proletarian mass movement, and like in Lenin's time, it's being led around by the nose by a group of seditious and subversive ideologues who inhabit the far right.
I read recently that David Horowitz, a major voice in the SDS in the 1960s, a man who in his memoirs tells how he "reformed" after the Black Panther murder of a white secretary in Oakland. That never sounded quite right to me. But there he was, countless times, as a Fox Pretend News expert. Reportedly, it was Horowitz who was pushing Stephen Miller hard to really crack down on the undocumented. Hmm. More cracks in a divide and conquer situation almost ready-made for subversion: North v South. That line in the sand is practically a gift to any subversive in the paranoid world I'm writing about.
"Capital must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development..." so that it "...ransacks the whole world...all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilization and all forms of society."
~Rosa Luxembourg
“It is the nature of the state that, insofar as it claims to be political, it will govern for the good of the entire community and not serve primarily the interests of a particular class or group: this is the democratic ‘truth’. But insofar as the state in question takes a particular form, say, one mainly controlled by the wealthy or by corporations, it will by virtue of its actual nature rule in the interest of a part of the society, that is, false to the democratic principle of the good of the whole community.”
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Democracy And The Political”
“The bourgeoisie, he [Marx] declared, are compelled to create the agents of their own destruction. By exposing the proletariat to the advanced culture of industrialized society, the ‘political and general education’ of the bourgeoisie is unintentionally transmitted to the workers; by inveigling the proletariat to help in the bourgeois struggle against remnants of the old regime, the workers are ‘dragged into the political arena’, rendered more politically conscious; and by associating workers in the social activity of production, their sense of common association is stimulated. Thus, the bourgeoisie is compelled to set the proletariat in motion’.”
~ Sheldon S. Wolin, “On Reading Marx Politically”
“In short, the American government ought to be unambiguously committed to a vision of a society based on freedom of expression and information; to libertarianism and pluralism with respect to culture and politics.”
~ Richard Flacks, founder of Students For A Democratic Society, 1988
*
That time when a local and very narcissistic slam poet with insecurities and the need to dominate others to fight those insecurities (apparently by projecting them, as in T.R.U.M.P) held an event in Deep Ellum's Green Room here in Dallas:
I was drinking back then, and before the big event, featuring two Scottish poets from the then-sensational "Manchester Beat" movement from Great Britain, I stopped by a spot and drank mead for the first time in my life. In fact, I drank too much mead.
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
"By their fruits ye shall know them."
~ Matthew 7, 15-16
"Capital must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development..." so that it "...ransacks the whole world...all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilization and all forms of society."
~Rosa Luxembourg
“It is the nature of the state that, insofar as it claims to be political, it will govern for the good of the entire community and not serve primarily the interests of a particular class or group: this is the democratic ‘truth’. But insofar as the state in question takes a particular form, say, one mainly controlled by the wealthy or by corporations, it will by virtue of its actual nature rule in the interest of a part of the society, that is, false to the democratic principle of the good of the whole community.”
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Democracy And The Political”
“The bourgeoisie, he [Marx] declared, are compelled to create the agents of their own destruction. By exposing the proletariat to the advanced culture of industrialized society, the ‘political and general education’ of the bourgeoisie is unintentionally transmitted to the workers; by inveigling the proletariat to help in the bourgeois struggle against remnants of the old regime, the workers are ‘dragged into the political arena’, rendered more politically conscious; and by associating workers in the social activity of production, their sense of common association is stimulated. Thus, the bourgeoisie is compelled to set the proletariat in motion’.”
~ Sheldon S. Wolin, “On Reading Marx Politically”
“In short, the American government ought to be unambiguously committed to a vision of a society based on freedom of expression and information; to libertarianism and pluralism with respect to culture and politics.”
~ Richard Flacks, founder of Students For A Democratic Society, 1988
*
That time when a local and very narcissistic slam poet with insecurities and the need to dominate others to fight those insecurities (apparently by projecting them, as in T.R.U.M.P) held an event in Deep Ellum's Green Room here in Dallas:
I was drinking back then, and before the big event, featuring two Scottish poets from the then-sensational "Manchester Beat" movement from Great Britain, I stopped by a spot and drank mead for the first time in my life. In fact, I drank too much mead.
By that time, the late spring of 1995, I'd gotten a little frustrated by "Clebo" (his biker name,. i.e Cleburn, Texas, or some metaphorical iteration thereof) and his Trumpian tendencies to declare himself to be the best slam poet (he was pretty good) but also his need to control every little thing. For good reason, I've always had my own tendency: to "return the services" back to the bully. That may be something from childhood: One way I learned to fend off bullies is to torment them. Sometimes I tormented Clebo the bully.
Inside the Green Room I went. Found a good spot in a booth up front, right under Clebo's nose. The two Manchester Beat poets were sitting a couple of booths behind me, having been routed to the event by one Robert Trammel, another poet of questionable quality (as I was too at the time) but also a poet with an awful lot of undeserved acclaim. He was wealthy. OK....
Clebo The Bully, obviously out to "totally impress" the two poets, began some pseudo-profound slam thing, announcing this, announcing that, mostly about himself, and then he began his impresario clam spam slam. Drunk enough, every time he paused for applause, I raised my right fist, and hollered this:
Clebo The Bully, obviously out to "totally impress" the two poets, began some pseudo-profound slam thing, announcing this, announcing that, mostly about himself, and then he began his impresario clam spam slam. Drunk enough, every time he paused for applause, I raised my right fist, and hollered this:
"FIST FUCK!!!!"
All of us in the audience were laughing. Hyacinth Bouquet upstaged, continued. FIST FUCK!!!! FIST FUCK!!!!
At the end of his Hyacinth performance, he stopped by my table and to frost me with spittle-mist as he upbraided me for my behavior. He hadn't asked me to read. All the other poets got to read. I'd brought a few poems to read. Something already was deeply wrong with that. I also was "sort of a celebrity", having won the local poetry slam six times in a row. I sensed jealousy in the air. Maybe, welp, conspiracy. This always seems to happen--as if the powers-that-be don't want me to speak at all.
FIST FUCK!!!!
Then, once the event ended, I tottered out, but when I passed the two Manchester Beats, both of them high-fived me.
"That was the best part of this entire thing," one hooted.
What happened the next night at the poetry slam was straight outta Eddie Haskell from "Leave It To Beaver". The judges? Jack Myers, a nationally-known "conversational" poet, and his wife, Thea Temple. When my moment arrived, I stepped onto the stage and began a poorly-pronounced Cajun-accented slam version of "Interview With A Vampire", something I'd called "White Raisin Vampire Dude".
Honestly, the crowd was roaring in laughter as I went on and on in a fake Cajun accent (something I suggested in the text had to be Lestat's true way of speaking), and then I again won the slam.
As long as Myers and his wife were in the room, Clebo the bully was like Eddie Haskell all right: "Good mornin', Mrs Cleaver, beautiful day isn't it?"
But when they left, I mean the instant the door closed behind them, Clebo charged at me. He literally knocked me out of my chair. I could have sued him for assault. But a poetry acquaintance, Jason Carney, picked me up off the floor, laughingly, glad I hadn't broken any bones, and then we left--with two young SMU students in Scottish skirts. We took them to the Video Bar, but that wasn't right either. The two young ladies, lesbians, were playing for the wrong team--maybe two wrong teams.
Heroism in Dallas poetry 101
*
Censorship:
I tried and tried posting this comment on a thread where George Will blames the government for censoring Jimmy Kimmel. No bad words, only a truth as I see it: Censoring us groundlings must be way fun for Oliver Cromwell's New Model Newspaper.
I tried and tried posting this comment on a thread where George Will blames the government for censoring Jimmy Kimmel. No bad words, only a truth as I see it: Censoring us groundlings must be way fun for Oliver Cromwell's New Model Newspaper.
it some persuade as if it's some kind of necessity to rush this directly past us all to universalize every issue lit up by the Trump administration to this:
"Oh. By the way, I don't like the government if it's modeled to address the issues of the late 20th and now the 21st Centuries."
Here's a recipe for authoritarian mass movements:
"Things were perfect way back in the past, now they suck, but when we take over, things will be perfect again".
Really? Right here? Seriously?
Let's say there are "leftist lunatics" all over. I've been watching the call-and-response for years. Nuclear power? Or Nuclear Family Values? Oh, yeah. Square off! The left often serves the right a fishing lure, and dagnabit, the reactionaries on the right always take the bait. Then, weirdly, they openly bait the left. Which is silly. Best policy? Do. Not. React.
What's this got to do with Jimmy Kimmel? He's just gotten baited by some cretins. It's sad to see. Left versus right, and then outside, we have opportunists using the fights for purposes beyond mere fist fights.
One tactic of the New Left is this: Push the rightists (or capitalist defenders) so far to the right that eventually the people (under a class system that is determinedly not classy) rise up and react themselves.
Why do simple people need to explain simple common sense and reality to those so infatuated with left versus right that they can't see reality? Without sense that is common (not elitist), equality (even the conceit of it we tend to accept--except some people) is impossible. As is unity.
Take the Overton Window. On the top left is "leftist authoritarianism". On the bottom right is "libertarianism". Why is it that the Soviets and pseudo-conservatives always put sawdust in rice crispies to save money for the "masters"?
I'm tired of boxing matches. Why keep punching faces?
Why hold down those who speak the truth? Censors? Tell us what is wrong with us.
*
One tactic of the New Left is this: Push the rightists (or capitalist defenders) so far to the right that eventually the people (under a class system that is determinedly not classy) rise up and react themselves.
Why do simple people need to explain simple common sense and reality to those so infatuated with left versus right that they can't see reality? Without sense that is common (not elitist), equality (even the conceit of it we tend to accept--except some people) is impossible. As is unity.
Take the Overton Window. On the top left is "leftist authoritarianism". On the bottom right is "libertarianism". Why is it that the Soviets and pseudo-conservatives always put sawdust in rice crispies to save money for the "masters"?
I'm tired of boxing matches. Why keep punching faces?
Why hold down those who speak the truth? Censors? Tell us what is wrong with us.
*
Let's talk more about leftism, Weather Underground, and censorship, along with maybe COINTELPRO, blacklisting, red-baiting, and all the other stupid games provided free of charge to people like me, courtesy of reactionary paranoids.
Back in 1980, when I was a clueless 26-year-old already struggling with the low perceptive ability that comes part and parcel with Bipolar Disorder, at the behest of a couple of guys--Tom and Bill Swift, from Washington DC, and likely agitators), I began going to meetings of the Comanche Peak Life Force, a core group of activists protesting the Comanche Peak nuclear power plants (two of them) under construction and almost wittily constructed upwind from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
Why'd I join? I didn't want nuclear waste destroying me. That's it. Not anti-state, not anti-capitalism, not nothing, not even some vague "special interest" use of various issues by very real revolutionaries.
I sat in meetings, quietly questioning how such a thing as a privately built nuclear power plant could mean anything more than questioning the use of nuclear power. Some seemed quite agitated. Many were leftovers from the antiwar movement of only seven years earlier. Why did those numbskulls co-opt a rising national protest?
I sat in meetings, quietly questioning how such a thing as a privately built nuclear power plant could mean anything more than questioning the use of nuclear power. Some seemed quite agitated. Many were leftovers from the antiwar movement of only seven years earlier. Why did those numbskulls co-opt a rising national protest?
Because that's what they do.
I went along. I sat in a circle with some agitators, along with some people just like me: innocents, people who were politically naive, people who wanted to protest nukes. Sigh. I went to a rally, and rattled a chain-link fence, sat around guarding a camp at 113 degrees. I even offered a County Officer who was in a laying position just over a small rise, actively training a rifle at my head; I walked over and offered him a Coke. Here's a Coke please don't kill me for exercising my First Amendment rights OK?
Paranoia is the number one product of the State of Texas.
The rally, on July 4, 1980, looked to be a bust to me. Worse, parasites called the Revolutionary Communist Party, sought to inflame the crowd in hopes of generating violence under the myth that violence would start a communist revolution. What did I help to do about them? I helped guide them away. We told those idiots to go home.
All fine and good. Until, at later meetings, some CPLF members began chattering about "monkey-wrenching" the nuke. By taking jobs at the plant. Sabotage from the inside.
Me no likee! Courtesy, a peasant.
At the time, when I had befriended Robert Compton, books editor for The Dallas Morning News, at one meeting, one that took place in his car as he brought me back home to my apartment on a mysteriously-named street called Oram, I told him about the planned monkey-wrenching. I told him, "I think I've had enough."
Later, several days later, a woman, apparently suspected of being FBI by the group's leaders, called me to tell me of their loud accusations and that she'd been kicked out of the CPLF "for informing".
I sympathized. The FBI? What about the hotshot training a rifle at my head as I sat talking to two likely FBI agents who were teasing me with STOP THE NOOKIE POO POO!
She was accused for what I did right: I was the informant.
She was accused for what I did right: I was the informant.
I started getting books to review like Abbie Hoffman's "Square Dancing In The Ice Age", or Russell Banks story collection ( I don't even remember the name of the goddamned thing), a well-known member of the SDS. Or Ken Kesey's "The Demon Box". All "the commie novels".
Was I being baited? Why yes I was being baited. Even though I was the one who turned in the flapjacks who decided to get violent.
Paranoia is the number one product sold by The State of Texas. I hear paranoia, the product, is going national.
Hey! Good times for paranoia!
*
Needless to say, I cannot help but wonder how many decent if innocent citizens have been beaten half to death, sometimes for their entire lives, simply because someone big, fat, nasty and bigoted found it propitious to silence them, to redbait them, to blacklist them, to impede every single thing they do for themselves to make their own life better.
Dallas is full of those big-time victimizers. Some are even famous real estate developers and oilmen.
What does it mean to yam-scram another human being simple to protect one's ideological bigotry to the point no other viewpoint can get through? Apparently, it means a lot to some of those idiots, especially the ones who have built vast monuments for themselves where they can sit, pretend to be intellectual or all-knowing while they sit at the very bottom of their very own bat cave: crass little batmen. Morlocks who have to have more, more, more--while locking humanity, the competition, clean out.
I have a very strong suspicion that sooner or later, those poor cud-chewers are going to be quite surprised when they know the jig is up for them. What happens if some wiseguy pulls the plug on the international economy? What then? What if little King Midas' piles of gold, which they may have received as a reward for buying their own rainbows, lose first the money, and then the power that goes with it? What happens then?
I don't mean to belittle men and some women who have already self-belittled by assuming money means even one damned thing in this world. I don't believe in some vacuous, nebulous afterlife. No one is saved unless, as was told to Jesus, "You have to save yourself!" Maybe Jesus, the thief in the night as said in the Bible, what if he cones and goes undetected because (this is what the best thieves do,; they don't steal everything on earth because they're "sacred") he is here to judge, not turn Christianity into a cult all about salesmanship? What then? Thieves come and go in the night, never heard nor seen.
OK, plutocracy, go now: get strung out on the Lord. What? You mean even the Holy Ghost is merely a physical sensation?
Please. Tell me more. Tell me how good you used that concept of physical sensation to pull many many desperate people away from anything but more of the absolutist nihilism you so desperately need to make yourselves look Great and Big.
*
Now I'm laughing. According to the sponsors of this blog biz, this post has been given a dire warning to readers for "content", citing, once again, "community guidelines".
Maybe the vast vast majority of the world is "of the wrong community". Hitler ran on "decency".
Maybe the vast vast majority of the world is "of the wrong community". Hitler ran on "decency".
*
That time in 2001 when the Dallas Homeless Coalition met, a wide circle of all the service providers--food banks, clothing banks, homeless shelters, women's rape crisis shelters, and more and more.
Yeah, that time when The Dallas Morning News sent out a metro reporter to cover the meeting. She sat next to me.
That time she turned to ask me, "are you a leftie?"
"Yeah, I write with my left hand".
I'm sure some snazzy editorial board director made her ask me that question--probably because he or she was (and likely continues to be) too flippin' dumb to know this:
Liberalism is not leftism.
The woman, with whom I spoke by telephone several times, confessed to me: She'd quit her post because she had an important story on offer, but the editors unrighteously refused to approve it.
Paranoids are simply convinced: Everyone not in their family or friendship circles (like the Rotary Club or the not-really Lions Club) has got to be a communist.
Liberal is not left.
As a friend of mine once observed of such snotty sad sacks: Stoop-fucks. When he said that, we laughed and laughed and laughed.
At the ones who have earned the title.
*
I always laugh at the press whenever I pitch an opinion and their reaction is: Do us the homeless thing again! It reminds me of the time Joni Mitchell commented to an auditorium of people that she too was tired of people constantly asking her to do "Both Sides Now". "Do Starry Night again!" she scoffed at their wishy-washy obsession with packaging her.
Airheads will be airheads, right rightists?
*
When I wrote a feature story for the street newspaper Endless Choices, I recalled the incident with the Dallas Fire Department that led me to become homeless.
I called the story, "The Cat On The Roof Incident". I don't know if I got any "ravenous reviews", but I'm glad I 'fessed-up.
In December, 1993, only six months after I'd left the first appropriate treatment for Bipolar Disorder--an SSRI--I had another manic episode.
The stressor? No money. My unemployment insurance had finally ended. Right before Xmas. In 1993, after I "called in dead" to the offices of Gardere and Wynne, a prestigious Dallas-area law firm, after Christie, the firm's receptionist and a friendly, called the police to try and rescue me from my destroyer of choice: Advil.
While I was only in the psych ward for 12 days, I returned to find this: My apartment had been ransacked while I was away, the drawers of the fireproof file case where I stored my journals were all over the ling room, and my poor cat Loopy was terrified and absolutely freaked as she called out to me and jumped into my arms, quivering.
Welcome home from your life-saving experience!
I did call the police. Someone had crawled through the bedroom window, conveniently situated in a location out of sight of the street, and worse, shattered glass was all over my pillow. My suspects? Down the hall, in room 101, hung a local cocaine dealer. Someone had written "Toys" on a small wall also facing away from the street. That location, two identical apartment buildings facing one another, separated a parking lot that some nights was crowded with Beemers, Mercedes Benzes, luxury cars, many belonging to very pretty college students from nearby Southern Methodist University, all of whom filtered in and out of a coke and crack dealer's apartment. Meanwhile, from room 101, the fathead dealers served as the distributors. They'd buy, send a little girl with a baby buggy filled with the products across the parking lot and into an apartment on the other side of the lot.
Creepiness embodied.
Big, baby-blue Cadillac. Those cretins had Beatles haircuts. Big gangstas, eh? Perhaps they'd spotted me taking photos of the area graffiti, something I enjoyed doing with my college graduation present, a wonderful Nikkormat camera complete with a Nikon lens. "Toys" The billboard. That's a name for both coke and heroin on the streets.
Six months later, while I was still fairly isolated (at least in a sense) although I'd begun attending a big Monday night poetry reading at a bar and club called Chumleys, when the cash vanished just before Xmas, I landed on another planet: Fear, some delusions, mainly paranoia--not as serious as the episode that had hospitalized me six months earlier.
Then, as a December ice storm approached, I heard it: a cat, fearfully calling for help. I remember going outside in the frigid weather as storm clouds approached from the Northwest. I could see her: a lovely house cat with a tiny pink collar. Poor thing was terrified. I called the Dallas Police for advice. They passed the buck to Animal Control--which told me over the telephone "We don't rescue pets from roofs". I was panicked enough to even try the City of Dallas--no response, a flatline. Then, out of deluded exasperation, I even tried Greenpeace, left a message. Finally, knowing the poor, furry, white cat was going to freeze to death, I called 911 and said I had a serious emergency.
Sometimes, house cats that are not familiar with the out-of-doors get themselves into precarious situations. Who was the animal lover about to lose his or her pet?
The Dallas Fire Department arrived--with dispatched. My famous last words?
"Where's the fire?"
"CAT ON THE ROOF!"
I'm so sorry I believed in the propaganda that a fireman would kindly rescue a cat trapped in a tree or on a high roof about to turn to ice. Ha. ICE.
Three blazing firetrucks. The head of the team, on hearing that he wasn't going to get to put out a fire, angrily belittled me. Then he filed suit, convinced some silly County DA to file the "false alarm" as a felony. Lucky for me, a judge with common sense immediately knocked the charges down to a misdemeanor. I had made another false alarm about two years earlier--also under a manic episode. Context. Background, history, proximity in both time and space--those apparently didn't matter to a money-hungry DA. Or something.
In February, Dallas County Cowboy Constables arrived at my door to take me to jail. "Can I go back to my bedroom to put on some shoes? I have a wallet. I think I may have money enough to pay bail..."
"No."
Really now. They handcuffed me and shoved me into a white squad car and carried me to their version of a rescue: Dallas County Jail.
After two of the three days I was interred in Lew Sterett's Jeremy Bentham opticon-style eight-sided jail, listening to prisoners bragging about "why you in here?"
"I accidentally killed my wife with a hammer!"
"Cool! I used a butcher knife!"
"Me? Cat on the roof!" And like in the song Alice's Restaurant, they all moved away from me. Eyeing me. A ready kill or simple paranoia that I was a CO?
I bailed on that second day, pleaded suicidal ideation simply to get out of that lair of dirty, nasty, toilet-paper free weirdness, and landed in a five-by-five isolation cell. I think my parents had been drug down there to pay $250 bail for trying to get City Officials to help me rescue a feline--hell to pay for that too.
Sort of released, I landed before a judge. He seemed to figure I'd plead out and pay him some $$$.
"How do you plead?"
"Not guilty. I want trial by jury". He seemed shocked, told me that if I didn't comply he'd put out a warrant for my arrest. I demanded a pro bono lawyer, and yep, I got a corporate lawyer who was putting in time to help poor peasants like me.
With his reluctant assistance, I reset the trial around 26 times. Friction. I wasn't going to fall without a fight. When treated absurdly, resist. Never surrender.
Warrant issued, I could not find a good job. When you don't have a telephone, and you don't have rent money, and a warrant is prohibiting you from finding appropriate work, DA, what happens?
Oh yeah! The homeless shelter. For four years. I wasn't going to let go of my rights. With some help from family, I found a woman I'd known since childhood who went to Parkland Hospital, scoured files and found a document that indicated that, just before that incident, I'd been hauled to a Dallas Police observation unit because it was obvious I was having mental issues.
That took nearly four years. Of homelessness. Finally, after "agitating" as a writer for a homeless advocacy newspaper, after rocking the City of Dallas with the unexpectedness of encountering a homeless person who could write better than anyone on the Dallas City Council, with document in hand, again with the help of the pro bono corporate lawyer, I went before the same judge. With that, the DA had no choice but to drop all charges. She did demand, um...
Money. $150 for court charges. I opted for community services. Not too bad, really, in the hot July sun of 2001, I cleaned up the concrete floors of the Dallas Farmers Market. An interesting choice: I'd stemmed some lousy real estate developers from their wet dream of putting up apartments where the City of Dallas chose otherwise: a secular shelter right smack next door to the Farmer's Market. Poor puppies. Again denied an opportunity for this:
Money. More and more and more in a mentality where enough is never enough. Such invisible irony.
Finally, after nearly seven years of pointless travail, I went before the same judge who'd put a warrant out for my arrest.
"Here. I completed community service. I told you five years ago you weren't getting one red nickel out of me. How's it feel to end up out of pocket?"
He simply looked surprised. No comment. He simply signed the papers ending the dumb warrant.
The poor kitty? After the ice storm, I spotted it, a pretty pink collar studded with costume jewelry.
I think a long gone lover, the Harkness Monster, an animal rights activist and all-around agitator, would be smiling at me from Heaven. She too had been delivered stupid fate at the hands of another corrupt judge.
What had she done? As a court reporter for a judge who'd become notoriously famous for delivering a creepy press statement in support of the killing of two gay men in Reverchon Park, she'd registered a complaint.
That park was once beautiful. People picnicked there. It was also a gay meeting spot after dark. Some lunkhead had laid off and lured two gay men into the woods, and killed them. Homophobia at its worst--supported by yet another reactionary fool allowed to judge the victims in the press.
The Harkness Monster used to eat her lunch in the courtroom. She'd been doing that for months. But one day, constables ordered her out. She complied, headed for the front door, but was directed to leave by a back door.
Stepping onto slick, wet grease, she reached for a stairway handrail--which happened to be missing. She fell nearly three floors, landed on her hands, broke her wrists, survived with some head damage, and was left without the vocation she loved: As one of Dallas' finest calligraphers, she'd not only supplied graduate names on all the diplomas for Southern Methodist University, something she enjoyed, but also gained some underground countercultural fame for calligraphic designs of her own making.
All gone. In 1990, I happened to be bicycling down the street where Harkness had once lived: Kenwood. I spotted her mother, Wilta, in the front yard, and stopped.
Wilta sat down on the curb and cried to me: "I think she was murdered. She disappeared after her accident, was registered as missing, only she was found three streets over at a dead end in her lime green Toyota pickup, slumped over in the driver's seat. She had a Jack N The Box milkshake between her knees."
That hurt. What is the weather underground? Dig it? Dead soldiers. And Barbara Harkness, a woman who could brighten the weather even after she had perished. I think of Barbara every single day. She was one of the best people I have ever met.
That hurt. What is the weather underground? Dig it? Dead soldiers. And Barbara Harkness, a woman who could brighten the weather even after she had perished. I think of Barbara every single day. She was one of the best people I have ever met.
OK, paranoids. Scapegoat those who have perished. How does it feel to instrumentalize your own paranoia--and all so one can fell all big and scary--even at the expense of the US legal system?
*
That time the Harkness Monster and I sat on her vinyl couch under her beloved track lights and watched Tom Snyder of The Tomorrow Show interview Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics--naked as two jaybirds--may or may not have been the summen bonum highlight of our relationship in 1981.
We grinned like two mannequins while gaping at Williams' stark weird platinum blonde mohawk. The Mohawk Nation was being born. But both the Harkness Monster and I were more interested in the arts--for while the plastic arts (get it?) have always struggled here in Dallas, we went to a few galleries. She assisted a local artist conduct his artisanal duties--you know, to feed his "creative habit--and once he even invited me to assist her to mount the nicely turned letters that spelled...
C-L-A-R-I-D-G-E
A luxury high rise condominium which overlooks the interestingly named Turtle Creek which ranges from Highland Park parkland all the way to Lakeside Park, near the formerly named Lee Park, overflow spilling over a dam, something which makes both the fountain and the spillway lovely noises. I've wandered around those places many times. I distinctly remember sitting down on a retaining wall one lovely Autumn afternoon to read Seth Abramson's excellent "meta-modernist" poetry collection, "Northerners". Abramson, by the way, is a lawyer, and a political activist. His meta-modernism seeks an angle outside of the reigning modernism/postmodernism in such a way as to question the values of both. A later collection of his, "Meta-Americana", an often-humorous series of poems about people like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. "Meta-Americana" straddles the borderlines between poetry, prose and art. In fact, one of the more fashionable genres of poetry involves outright mixtures of poetry and art. That would have been taboo in 1981.
Speaking of the Claridge here in Dallas, a place that has been home to people like Kathleen Turner and (possibly) Patricia Wettig, a female lead of the 80s-era TV series, "30-Something". Most importantly, I accompanied my Humanities manager of the Dallas Public Library to pack up books donated by local socialite/authoress Frances Moscowitz, a woman who wrote impressive biographies of some of the ancient aristocracy from before and after the French Revolution of 1789-92. And the Napoleonic era--which was a sort of pro-democracy order where Napoleon seems to have served as a janitorial service bidden to wipe out the old order to make way for democracy--which, after the US revolution of 1776, had become part of the European rage lit (literally) by Thomas Paine.
Frances Moscowitz, who had recently died and donated her literary legacy to the public library, used to reign like a queen at the Dallas Public Library's writers room. A really nice lady who may or may not be easily mistaken as a "blue-hair", but who was actually pretty down-to-earth. Her kitchen wall decor? Totally Seventies--orange and yellow stripes. Go figure. Right?
Before we'd left the library to drive over to the borderline between Highland Park and the Oak Lawn neighborhood to load up the books, my boss, Frances Bell, told me this:
"Gordon. You're a brick."
What? As usual, I had to look up the word in the Oxford Dictionary. English slang for "indispensable"
Barbara Harkness and I clowned around as we carefully drilled holes in a cloth-covered wall that would sport the name of the hotel's lobby. Hard to accomplish. Easily, one could mount a letter out of sync with the straight line preferred by the English language. Yes, at the time, as the Reagan era began swinging, the word was out: BE CAREFUL.
The Harkness Monster was all about care. Her drink of choice? Kir. Later, when I looked that up, I came across a Bolshevik era name: Sergei Kirov, famous person who became the head of the Leningrad Communist Party. St. Petersburg? Or Leningrad? What's the difference?
Who really knows about the mystery surrounding the Harkness Monster? After we had a breakup of futility the summer of 1981, both of us crying under the impression that I was of course too young for the lovely, green-eyed 35-year-old (born in 1946, a postwar baby who truly was a natural babe), but I hung in there in my own way. Her father, Carl Newell, a former US Navy Seebee stationed in Ja Pan, a man who blithely had abandoned his family and headed for Alaska for a couple of years with no reason, he said, beyond "exploration", gave me a job Barbara Harkness definitely approved of: Help the junk collector untangle his Pleasant Grove area garage, and clear out all the junk he'd literally placed in a snake-infested bamboo thicket surrounding that building. Oof! I was heartbroken, but there I was, actively working with a former lover's father who, apparently became inspired enough by me for the heart-patient to start climbing trees like a 25-year-old.
Every week, Carl and I would head to a nearby A&P grocery store to gather three-day-old bread, then to a creek to feed the wildly acclaiming duck population. Wow. Getting paid to feed the ducks? I didn't care how hot that summer was; I loved working with the guy, old gray body overalled and all. He'd have to stop to take his potassium. I always abided him with a watchful eye. But he did good. His wife, Wilta, said she hadn't seen so much life in him since he was much much younger. And Wilta? Fantastic dinners. Oh yeah.
Carl also had a yen for getting all kinds of things from the Ross Avenue Sears, and I especially found myself impressed with the grand deal he swung with Sears to buy all their mismatched paint, unsaleable, for a dollar a gallon. Thus we painted both garage and house. Grey in the front, white on one side, aqua blue on another, and so forth. His wife of course was livid. But he and I liked it.
That had taught me something. In 1987, tired of my "bomb shelter" apartment at 4422 McKinney, especially its moon-cratered kitchen, where I worked at writing poetry and prose, a friend, Tom Newman, and I ventured to sears, bought some mismatched purple and white gallons--for a dollar apiece. Then we poured all the paint into a five gallon plastic bucket, mixed the colors, and came up with a fantastically beautiful light purple. We painted the "purple kitchen". Much more relaxing on the eyes than bruised, scored white. The manager didn't like that when she saw it, but then she sold the building before I could change colors. A laugh there.
How had I met the Harkness Monster? Her next door neighbor, a former college troublemaker who continually got me in trouble at SFA in Nacogdoches (Carl Worsham, currently a MAGA man I happened to abandon 25 years ago because he liked trying to use me to get access to the women who liked me as a trusty and non-gamey person. Carl, by the way, actually hacked into my Facebook account around three years ago, I caught his telephone number, and I can only assume the sociopathic narcissist was upset I'd kept his account blocked...I contacted the FBI)...he had a big house party.
Barbara Harkness had been invited. However, she was shy, only then recovering from breast and cervical surgery, and didn't seem happy among all the social climbers--IT pioneers--and seemed sulky on his sofa. She had her "uniform": a Casey Jones striped cap. And round glasses. Later I'd tease her and call her Admiral Yamamoto. I think she liked the nickname. Because, often gentle with me, if angered, she was a banshee. Wouldn't quit. Usually won arguments. But she never seemed to lose her love and desire for me, a then-awkward and inexperienced shy person who--amazingly--knew that care if more important sometimes than love. She ate a lot of eggs. Good for halting inflammation and anxieties. Of which, close after her surgeries, which were delicate issues, and though the surgeries didn't leave much scarring on her breasts, did leave a line along her pelvis--causing her a great deal of insecurity. What can any lover do but kiss her scars all the time? Scars are what make humans real.
I remember her anti-smoking extremism. I smoked. She allowed that--but only with me. She'd laughingly accuse me when I'd kiss her after bicycling to her after work at a nearby Skaggs Alpha-Beta grocery store, and make me wash my face. She recalled the time she was in the very same Ross Avenue Sears shortly after her release from cancer surgery--only to catch some guy walking around the aisle while smoking. She'd asked him to stop. He refused. She reached for the cigarette--and he slugged her. Whoa. She got up and slugged back until the manager arrived to break the boxing match up. She warned me after inviting her to a non-smokers club shindig dinner she was hosting. "You'd better not have smoke on your breath!" I was really diligent about brushing my teeth. Those people were really nice, but I had a joke to pull off: I'd brought a cigarette butt along, hidden in a front pocket. Once the crowd got toasty from white whine with strawberries, I went to the bathroom, lit the cig, waved a little smoke around, then dropped the butt in the toilet.
Like any agitator, I stepped back to watch the pandemonium ensue. Harkness knew I'd done the unspeakable to those people. A ruckus began. Barbara approached me and whispered that the stunt was hilarious.
Harkness had a way with animals I still find almost unbelievable. She worked as a volunteer for Operation Kindness, a no-kill shelter in Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas. She took me along once--cats under a house--but without trouble at all, she had those cats mewling in her arms in less than 12 minutes. She had two cats herself, and when I rolled up after work, there they'd be--the watch cats--scanning the area in anticipation of what I believed might be my arrival. They'd sit like sentries--in the middle of Barbara's front yard. Her dog, Ranger, a dog with some anger issues, barked and threatened every entrant but me. Barbara, he apparently knew, had deep affection for me. So he allowed that.
That party. Insane. A bunch of self-described tech geniuses--and weirdly, a woman I knew: Kim Malin, perhaps the most beautiful woman I've ever known. She'd become a Playboy Playmate in either '80 or '81. Before that, she'd won some kind of beauty contest for a fitness obsession magazine. Kim was in tow of a little, gangy, little guy who seemed intent upon keeping watch over her. Not too happy for Kim. I never asked her how she felt about being pawed at so much. Perhaps she didn't like it. Kim, enthusiastic almost to a fault, likely didn't care about those hanger-ons at all. But I turned to Barbara.
We talked. She told me of her recent surgeries. We sat as if in the center of a drunken, doped-up hurricane. Carl Worsham's roommate, a kind of misogynist in that he liked using women for sex as if they were Big Macs, told women outright--likely including Malin--that he'd gotten a vasectomy because he wanted to have sex without worry. Definitely a "turn on" for sleepwalkers. Carl and his roommate: users.
Harkness and I exchanged numbers. Not long after, I invited her to a party I held on Oram Street, only a block and a half from the then-roaring entertainment everyone called Lower Greenville Avenue.
The walls of that four-plex had paper thin walls. I was surrounded by three retired ladies, all of them thrilled to have a man in the place. I warned them of the party I'd planned. They all were quite enthusiastic about the oncoming wildness that actually happened. A wild party with a near-empty apartment with a seen-better-times record player. What a rock-out that time was. Barbara arrived late, brought a portable black-and-white TV...so she wouldn't miss "Dallas", she said. I think she wasn't too enthusiastic about the wild-drinking partiers. Who got rowdy. I sat with Barbara almost the entire night. Watched "Dallas" with her. She demonstrated she liked that.
At party's end, as Barbara got into her oddly-painted lime Toyota pickup, I squeezed her hand, but then weirdness occurred: Tom Swift, now a sculptor in Denton Texas, leaped into the bed of the pickup and apparently tried to "take her home". He'd been doing that to all his friends. I think he thought he was recruiting women for his actual leftist campaign of well "O-ganizing". Coffee talk. When I learned he'd done that to me, I gave him the business. I told Barbara he'd done that to nearly all his friends, including his cheating on his wonderful girlfriend, Beth Powell, a woman who later became a reporter for UPI.
"Get lost! You're not doing that to me." What is a friend doing one-upping another friend like that? It was crazy. I think he had some sexual issues. I left his friendship. I carried on my friendship with Barbara. Quite protectively. I understood her issues about not feeling womanly after her operations.
"Care" was Barbara's motto. She doctored me, I doctored her. We had a wonderful friendship and love life. We lounged around together, and I always admired a folk art project of her: using a welding torch to large tin cans, scoring and opening designs in their surfaces, thus turning them into lamps she hung by chains from the ceiling. Red light. Green light. Yellow light. Those things sold like flapjacks.
Who was the Harkness Monster? She told me that she and her ex-husband had gone mobile around nine years earlier--1972--and scoured the United States in an Airstream. What a life. I didn't care about her past, but I did appreciate her confession that she had been friends and schoolmates with Anne Rice, who only recently had published "Interview With A Vampire".
Lastly, because I smoked, I had a little private fun for myself by cleaning ashes from my ashtrays and gently filling a small glass flower holder with them, then putting the sculptured class on the windowsill. Barbara offered me her signed copy of "Interview"--on loan. A Saturday night I sat in the middle of the scary book, all wrapped up with LeStat, Barbara used her key to skulk into the apartment, scared the unholy hell out of me, then tackled me on my ripped vinyl easy chair. Down tumbled the glass of ashes.
"Hey. Those are my dad's ashes!"
She desperately went for a paper to scoop them into. Laughingly I told the anti-smoking advocate she'd been punk'd.
*
So. One evening at the almost famous Mad Swirl "intermission", the one where all the poets who chose to be involved with that thing ventured onto the Southside on Lamar sidewalk in front of The Absinthe (which is greenish, an intoxicant, the full doses of which are illegal in the US) to smoke green (pot), and horse around for 23 minutes or so. I used to venture out there with the bunch. I liked the reefer. I wanted community. I was "part of a crowd" there--first Wednesday of every month, often a late-night excursion into what the Mad Swirl's host suggested (after the intermission) was "holy". Sometimes the readings lasted until two a.m. Those who worked by weekday usually filtered out of the speakeasy step-down in the old Sears building.
The year? 2013. Johnny Olson and Mike Clay, the host and his somewhat opportunistic sidekick (and friend to me at the time) began talking about women.
It must be really kind of someone in sarcastic retrospect to listen to two "studs" saying this about women: "Basically they're dickbags" (or "dicksacks"?) Both chuckled "so knowingly". As the third person objective standing on a sidewalk and feeling the typical pot uplift, still, I listened with quiet disgust. No one should refer to a woman with such a description. But Olson? A lothario who, in my viewpoint, exploited women. When his wife divorced him a few years earlier, he played the victim. But the incident which finally "broke" the two apart (they remained "friends") involved him capitalizing on an issue between a couple of friends: As Jeremy, a wonderfully kind descendant of the Mohawk in New York, began having marriage issues with his lovely, redheaded wife, he seduced her just as they were making a sort of rapprochement, a hopeful moment for Jeremy, and the marriage imploded. But Olson? Ever the victim after cheating on his wife. Maybe not cheating. Maybe something entirely different.
Should we be for this; a man-boy interrupting a delicate negotiation between two people who loved one another but needed to make adjustments? I continue to see Olson as an opportunist, a sexual opportunist. And quite grabby: Even talking to his former wife, Lisa, meant that he'd approach and say something along the lines, "Quit hitting on my wife!" When did speaking to a woman involve hitting on her? Maybe on Earth 3 that might have worked once upon a time when Snow White was shagging all her dwarfs.
Olson continued to sleep around. One woman wanted him to commit. He continued to use her: more victimology among the swingers, I figure. She'd once attended a Mad Swirl in 2012, caught my eye, and when I spotted her on Olson's Facebook page, she messaged me, told me she believed my 2012 version of of poetry, and suggested we get together "for coffee". I took her up on the offer and we did meet on a frigid January day that year.
In the neighborhood where I lived at the time, the denizens of the area had three coffeehouse choices: One, right across the street where I'd once lived (Bowser and Knight), was the "gay Starbucks"; another, on Oak Lawn near Cedar Springs stood the "lesbian Starbucks". A crazy gay neighborhood by stereotype. Actually, the area provided a thorough mix of gays, lesbians, LBGTQ+ others, and then artists, "hipsters", and a wonderful bunch near Maple Avenue locally famous as an enclave of Mexican-American families and a few clubs, auto body shops, mechanic shops, tiny restaurants (some of which are wonderful) and then me. One of those none-of-the-above people.
I say that with a little jest in my heart. Lots of shut-ins as well. But I wasn't one of those either.
In the lesbian Starbucks, which I suggested, the lovely woman (Richelle Bannon) sat before me to tell her apparently sad story. Weirdness there--halfway unbelievable. She talked about wanting to forge a relationship bond with Olson, but that he was infatuated with a Choctaw beauty, someone connected to the Choctaw casinos in Oklahoma. Eh? Hear that?
That blackhaired woman could definitely turn heads. Richelle, sitting before me, told me that when she was six that her mother left her to travel with a member of Three Dog Night. Thus, I assumed at the time, she had a hole as big as a Volkswagen Beetle in her heart. Sad story. One involving dogs--again.
I did like her mien. She said she was a legal secretary somewhere in Plano, north of Dallas, where she supposedly lived. "I really want to be in a relationship with Johnny, but he's involved with [the Choctaw]."
"Is he using you?"
"No, I don't think so..."
Dead giveaway. Why is it next to impossible for some people to separate sexy time from love? Both of course pair. But with the swinger scene (The Absinthe was also a swinger meet-up location...), the two are apparently identical: physical "Christianity". And likely either conservative or leftist. Who knows? I never really got involved with those folks.
I sympathized with Richelle's story. If she really did have a hole in her heart due to abandonment (I know I do with my father's abandonment-by-suicide), she certainly wasn't dealing with it. Maybe she believed sex is therapy. Way fun therapy.
How could she be happy to be simply another "dickbag"? Over the telephone or on Facebook, she she was really unhappy. Come Valentines Day, I peppered her Facebook page with Valentine hearts, not as a "hit" but as gestures from an acquaintance. Then came the kill-shot: She was also "hanging out"with the swing scene's dear leader, Kevin Christensen: typically a leader in the swinger Land of the Midnight Sun.
"I don't know why Johnny won't commit," she pleaded to me via Facebook DM. "I have a five-year-old boy (what???) who needs a father."
"Why don't you find a man who'd make a good father?"
Richelle blocked me. Seemed a little like a sort of set-up, a recruitment game.
Earlier, when Richelle, informed by me that I had recovered from leukemia, had said that she was trying to get Olson, an avid advertiser for his motorcycle cred (hilarious, really, those steely pistons pumping away), to take her along for a Leukemia and Lymphoma Association-sponsored motorcycle rally.
"He just won't do that!" Was he "jealous"? Or was he trying to sweeten a deal?
The big baby. . .
Why get involved with an "innocent little girl on the railroad tracks"? I was glad to be rid of her once the facts came to light.
Most mature adults know women are more than what's between their legs. Much much more. The amazing parts are in a woman's mind and heart. I've never been one of the men who spot for women they believe are dumb enough to fool. But that's the way in the minds of some "entrepreneurs": Honesty is the second-best policy.
I've known people like that. Some are narcissistic like Olson. Others are full-on sociopaths.
That cement gray evening listening to two "big men" rattling off crappy asides about women. Clay, for example, has a lovely wife. She's younger than he is. She's also fine with his bisexuality. He's really a pretty nice guy when he wants to be. Olson strikes me (and many others) as a kind of robotic snake. Down there in Zombieland.
Bannon. Hilarious. Was she Opus Dei too?
Op US D (E I E I O)--Not "God's work". More like part of a deeply rightist plan for, well, something-something. Like the Matrix. Left and right become Punch and Judy, while thieves who think thievery is "Christlike" try to run away with the pie.
Some believe democracy is a daydream. As is religion. As are all human-made constructs. The daydream, the illusion, is how we shelter our civilization from the random, the unforeseen, the uncertain, and the chaotic.
Why force a conceit that has so succeeded as to bring half the world up--to fall down? The US: target for the next try for a Holy Roman Empire? Who knows? Some would buy that. Most Catholics wouldn't.
Who'd have thought the Doo Da men are both the minstrel show and the medicine show? Maybe they're also the magic show.
When pushed, I now know, it's best to put the hosts on ignore.
*
Here's how I lost my religion. It's a "totally cold story".
As a young boy forced to live in loud-voiced crossfire somewhat similar to what I hear when or if I venture onto the AM talk radio dial, I found refuge in the local Episcopal Church.
While some enjoy the "party all the time" evangelical scene, and prefer it over the older and more common style of kneeling, showing quiet reverence, and praying in a pew, or listening to a well-constructed sermon by often excellent speakers, for some odd reason, I got the meditative and the sacred. I loved going to the church. I was part of the church youth choir as a sixth-grader, sang with my friends in a special presentation thereof, enjoyed Sunday school as taught by parishioners and fathers and mothers we all knew, and generally liked that spirit so much I seriously began thinking of entering the Episcopal priesthood.
Then, after I continued going to a nearby Episcopal Church just off campus when I began my freshman year, I apparently made a mistake. No, it wasn't me picking up on dope smoking. No, it wasn't because some mock-worthy epithet called "secular humanism or liberalism", my decision to leave all churches was the outcome of the Southern Baptist Church's Baptist Student Union.
See, I had something that BSU choir wanted: I could play trombone, and had partial scholarships for my musical abilities. What did the BSU lust in me? That.
"Hey," a Southern Baptist country boy in the band suggested, "We're going to Los Angeles with our choir. The chaplain would like to offer you a spot both on the BSU choir and in a more special sort of rock group called [now get this! Haha!) The Grateful Sound."
"How much would it cost me to go there?"
"Fifty bucks!"
So I joined the BSU choir. This first semester away from home had been a lonely two or three months for my already somewhat solitary ways. I wanted to make friends with people. But I was a little too unaware (Bipolar, emergent) to really catch onto jokes, pranks, and as usual, wild drinking parties in the dormitory. When I went to my first meeting, people were friendly, but also many suggested it would be better for me if I "got saved."
Honestly. I wasn't that credulous. I already knew, from my church's teachers, including the church priest (a man who should have been a seminarian he knew so much about doctrines and Christian ideas), that a simple baptism is merely symbolic. No magic happens. No lights in Damascus.
In my church, babies were baptized. A tradition. A very old sprinkling of a few drops of water on a baby's head. Why the sprinkles and not a trip to the river? Disease. The medievals had learned that exposure to dirty water is dangerous, especially if disease ran rampant in the winter.
"Get saved!' From what? From myself? From gremlins? Who really knew? Actually, many baby-to-grave evangelicals believed more in what I now call "the magic show"--all the miracles, the amazing events, and especially the promises of the Book of Revelations and some of Jesus' words about the days of his promised return to earthly reality.
Thus, I conferred with the chaplain. He wanted me. But I had a caveat: "Sir, I was raised with a good Christian education. I don't want to be saved, or reeducated. If I'm not forced to spread gospel words, I'll go."
Who knew a so-called Christian was lying to me?
We were hearing rumors from preachers that Los Angeles (City of the Angels) was a den of Satanism, immorality, and even, weirdly, sightings of witches high up on mountains surrounding the second largest city in North America; witches, in black, with pointy hats, casting magic spells, with wants, and will blackened intent.
I scoffed at that. I had been given a good Episcopalian education. We learned not to be too mystified by miracles because most, it seems, are mere allegories; allegories that indeed contain a great deal of wisdom and advice on how to actually be a Christian without "mystery dependence".
I don't think the chaplain and preachers who assisted him cared about my opinions at all. But smiling those Giancanda grins famous in the ever-arch South, they promised not to turn me into "another boy for Jesus".
I liked the singing. I liked playing for songs arranged by a university professor who later arranged music for Charlie Pride, and later, Lee Ann Rimes. Some of the songs actually had strong rock beats. Chicago, the rock band at the time was very popular among us "band mullets". Everyone wanted to learn to play like the members of Chicago. So. The mimicry of the big rock groups seemed to be a strategy known among insects: The Monarch butterfly has many imposters.
Also, I had a great chance to wear the sick, burnt orange leisure suit that, to my horror, seemed designed to make me look like Doc Severinsen, Johnny Carson's supposedly "mod" trumpet player:
Eeeeee-Oooooooo.
Yuck. But the flowery red and white shirt, while it clashed with the burnt orange, was, like, disco, man.
The generation gap in 1972 was a real cultural battlefield of sorts. My own mother, raised to dress formally at Stephens University in Columbia, Missouri, expected me to dress in dress clothes. She bought me two pairs of some of the most horrific pants I've ever seen. I took the entirety of my $50 buck monthly allowance on some Levis. "Oh....wearing the clothes of Levi in the Bible...."
Double-yuck.
Fly out to Los Angeles we did. Once there, we met our sponsoring families. Mine happened to be a family near Huntington Beach, a surfer paradise, and the young guy my age in that home was a surfing enthusiast. My Church Lady roommate, Jimmy Battle, snorted--at sinfulness I presumed.
Best moment of the stay: A visit to LA's then-world-famous Tower Records. Whoa. Everything under one roof. Just to spite Jimmy Battles, aesthete of whatever music (Samuel Barber) he had chosen as the only music possible to enjoy, I purchased Alice Cooper's just-out album: Billion Dollar Babies.
"Jimmy! Come listen! This song! 'I Love The Dead'. Amazing. Do you think it's about dead people? Maybe he's describing The Grateful Dead."
A sneer. On command.
We headed to East LA Community College. All the young Baptists were really excited to spread gospel among the Latino-majority population. Signs of Satanic activity? All the tags on the sides of stucco walls. I liked those. Needless to say, the 20th Century version of the betray of Jesus, perhaps, occurred when I was commanded to issue fliers. This disappointed me--badly.
But the afternoon was saved. I met a member of the Hell's Angels. Right there. Outside the university center. He had a scored black leather jacket, wild hair, and patches: Kicked Out of Nebraska '66, Kicked Out of Wyoming '67.
"Hey, man," I asked. "Do you think you'll get to wear a patch called Kicked Out Of Everywhere '68?"
"Man, that already happened."
He was kind. We drank a soft drink together. And chatted. He knew people like the late Janis Joplin. I liked the guy. He had a good vibe. Not a scary one. But, you know: I had "strayed from the path" to visit Hell with--Goshdog!--a biker. I'm laughing as I write this.
The chaplain was "on to me" or something. He'd pair me off with especially reverent kids. That was no fun at all.
Then it was off to the University of Southern California. I was excited to see the statue of the Trojan, named as I later learned "Tommy The Trojan". When I "arrived" to disappointingly sit in the shade of the Trojan warrior, I giggled: Someone had put a bra on the valiant warrior.
I had all my gosple and "Chick Comics" fliers to spread. I didn't want to spread that kind of news. So I sat and sat. Then a wonderful woman named Geneva, pert, blonde, and a hippie, sat down and asked me about it all.
"I'm supposed to spread this garbage..."
"I'm supposed to spread this garbage..."
"Let me see them!"
At that, she stood up and tossed the entire stack of weirdness into the garbage right next to the statue.
"Go back and tell them you're a Gnostic!"
"What's that?"
"Someone who believes God has given them special knowledge, knowledge to be guided by spirits when reading the Bible! Special knowledge no one else who is uninitiated or saved can possibly possess!"
Sounds good.
She and I cavorted for around three hours. We kissed a little. I liked the woman's kindness and happy attitude.
Later, I was called to the carpet for even speaking to "such a woman". Wow. I was being indoctrinated, shoved into a cult-like atmosphere. Against my will.
I complained about this to another not-so-sure outsider who had come along mainly for the fun. She and I hit it off. That's when she told me about an off-campus party: at an off-campus fraternity party. "The USC basketball team is going to be there."
So we went. We took the tram through the then supposedly infamous Watts area. I enjoyed the ride.
There, the woman, named Patricia, and I joined a wild party in the house's basement. Both of us got completely sloshed. We ended up back on the tram around midnight, hit the Tommy Trojan statue and made out a couple of hours.
Apparently, I'd missed some kind of curfew. Enraged, the chaplain and several members of Grateful Sound intervened: "YOU ARE HERE AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF JESUS CHRIST AND YOU MUST BEHAVE LIKE A GOOD CHRISTIAN!"
Really? What hurt afterwards was the horrific process of "separating someone from the flock". Now I know this is part of the indoctrination. I was singled out for blame, guilt, shame, and for my apparent kowtowing to Satan. Those freaks of nature did the same thing to the girl Patricia. We were barred from even speaking to one another. Wow. Sinfulness in a kiss. Where had I heard that one before--in the Bible?
Next day, the last day, the choir of the supposedly Chosen visited Knott's Berry Farm. The owners were allies--i.e. collaborators. Disneyland? The Devil's Magic. This to me was so laughable that, had I not felt so beaten down and depressed, I would have begun making all kinds of smart remarks about Don Knotts and Knotheads.
On the plane ride home to the ironically named Love Field, I was isolated, condemned to sit alone. It was a long, saddening plane ride for me. I was being cast out. On purpose. In hopes of "turning me". Even the chaplain took advantage of me over this idiocy. At the Berry Farm, he approached me, told me the reason I was sad was because I hadn't "found Jesus".
I think I told him, "I hope he doesn't look like you."
This, I hear, is typical cult behavior. This was the early 1970s. This was six or eight months away from Roe v Wade. That was the arsonists of the far out right's candle to burn down "secular liberalism."
I made it back to the appropriately-named Dorm 13. I had to use the restroom. I peed blood. Terrified, I called my mother, caught a bus, came home, and stayed in the hospital for nearly a week.
Stress. I have delicate capillaries up in there. The stress not only busted my guts, it destroyed my trust in churches of all kinds. Thus, you can imagine how I must have felt during mandatory, daily mandates to sit through the same old thing for nearly three years at Union Gospel Mission, conveniently located in an Irving, Texas, warehouse district. You know: to keep the sinners away from mainstream society, which, I heard time and again, is the Home of Satan.
Great to know, eh? If people claiming to be Christians draw a line between "The Chosen" self-designation and the rest of all the people, it's likely that if Jesus is there, he's standing on the side of all the other people.
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posted by Faceshaker at 3:41 PM
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