Bocce for Blood, Part 1

Who wouldn't rather read a straight-on story-story, involving colorful characters doing interesting things in a 'dramatic' situation, instead of yet another peekaboo story-about-storying?

—John Barth, Where 3 Roads Meet

"Strange how I keep the tone of Salinas in my head like a remembered symphony."

—John Steinbeck

"That the central theme of _Cannery Row_ is actually a rejection of this type of mindless materialism [that of Cannery Row now], and instead a celebration of the spiritual and the marginal in society, must be one of the most ironic, if not tragic, footnotes in American literary history." 

—Eric Enno Tamm,

Beyond the Outer Shores

I woke up this morning at 4 AM and listened to an hour of Morning Edition in bed before deciding I was not going to be able to fall back asleep.  I heard on repeat stories of Mitt Romney's wife, republican governors, and Hurricane Isaac blowing hot, moist air over the gulf.   Horrific visions of a storm-ravaged United States governed by President Mitt Romney taunted me, and at a quarter past five I got up and fried some leftovers and filled my grumbling stomach.  I made coffee and loaded my dad's car with things to move out of the house, deciding I would type something up when I got to their house, my computer already there.  I realized I forgot my notebook halfway through the trip.

I would have to write something new.

The 24th of this past December I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and could not fall back asleep.  I similarly laid in bed listening to Morning Edition until it repeated itself, and then began looking through a book I had just received as an early Christmas present—A Journey into Steinbeck's California—always eager to gain new perspectives on the symbiosis between the place I lived and the author it produced, the place he lived and the works he produced.  

My friend Bill worked at Steinbeck's Spirit of Monterey Wax Museum on Cannery Row (formerly Ocean View Avenue, renamed for the early '80s tourist rebranding of the abandoned strip of of former canneries) in the summer of 2006.  The great insight made that year involved Steinbeck's youth, the adrift post-graduate years, the era of a writer's life that I presently still inhabit.  He moved to Los Angeles with his wife Carol and became engrossed in what the book refers to as a “zany venture” with his old college roommate Carlton Sheffield: using a new Swiss-manufactured impression material called Negacol to create life-like busts of people.   Carlton thought the “vague but optimistic undertaking” would find “a good market for personalized masks of individuals, made and finished to order like portraits or photographs...” In spite of great enthusiasm the project, as all primary, youthful endeavors tend to fail, the heady Negacol years ended merely with creepy lifelike impressions of the seven entrepeneurs and no great effect on the legacy of California.   Steinbeck went on instead to write great books and win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But what did this untold tale mean, and why were we discovering it in the moment that Bill worked at a wax museum narrated by a wax John Steinbeck (an actor from Carmel did the recording)?  Was the museum—found in the basement of an old cannery whose upper layers were converted to candy shops and kitsch restaurants—some kind of wormhole to truth?  The pieces of the puzzle remain the same: Monterey then, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, Monterey now, me and my friend—but how did they fit together?  For Bill it seemed obvious, and he devoted a year to a film about Negacol that destroyed his academic present and future, a film whose footage still remains in the hands of his academic adviser at California State University Monterey Bay.   My destiny remains outside the visual arts, seemingly, like Steinbeck's—but I digress.  When one wakes up in the middle of the night and is compelled to encounter certain pieces of information he is easily convinced he has stumbled upon the guilded path of truth.

Steinbeck's California describes the Negacol years in LA well (I have it to thank for Carlton’s quote) and it pays tribute to their importance, although it does not mention the Spirit of Monterey Wax Museum, and certainly avoids any theories about an important connection between the Negacol mania and the museum. Of course it would be preposterous to propose at this stage any deep significance to the museum, or really read into Steinbeck’s plastered years in LA.  I began to respect the book for even mentioning it and even having a picture of some of the masks they made, and I pressed on as the sun began to rise on the day before Christmas.  

Steinbeck returned to Monterey after LA and lived on the Peninsula 15 miles from his hometown of Salinas, and that is where I learned something I did not know. 

As a segue to Steinbeck’s return to Monterey in the next stage of his biography the next chapter, “Monterey Peninsula: Circle of Enchantment,” describes the place and where it intersects with Steinbeck’s work.  I should make the point that I am an enthusiastic amateur historian of Monterey, California, and so this next section was quite enjoyable to read, the way a tour guide might enjoy taking his own tour given by someone more knowledgable than him.  Included was an article Steinbeck wrote about the Feast of Lanterns celebration for the Monterey Peninsula Herald, a piece of writing I didn’t know existed.  Over the previous sixth months I had become fixated on an unfortunate event that occurred at the border of Pacific Grove and Monterey, the destruction (supposedly accidental razing probable arson) of the Point Alones Chinese fishing village, and the still held  festival composed entirely of east-Asian stereotypes.   The event is euphemised or ign0red in most tourist-friendly accounts of Monterey, but I began to find clues to the truth and was inspired to take similar bleary-eyed expeditions to the libraries, sites and historical authorities on the Peninsula, ultimately ending a disappointing Da Vinci Code-style piece of fiction by Steinbeck’s son that struck me as a poorly-written parody of my own situation.  This is all another story.

I should here return to the point I made earlier of stumbling upon the aforementioned “guilded path of truth,” bleary-eyed and, half-awake, flying to revelatory conclusions on the still floating clouds of  my dreams—I had just finished a book about a trip to Seattle and back that I considered to be a successful abstraction of one of the great myths, of the hero’s journey, a sort of Joseph Campbell-style avant-garde deconstruction of the difference between everything from The Odyssey to The Log from the Sea of Cortez to, of course, my own voyage.  The central metaphor for this abstraction was the sport of bocce: people stopping religiously from their individual pursuits to pick up and hurl spheres with a momentary tangiable sense of purpose.  I had finished this book and planned, two weeks from Christmas eve, to retake the trip, the same dates in the same places a year later, to promote the book.  

Having said all that I feel that the revelation may be slightly more comprehensible when I learned the something I did no know in the chapter that followed Pacific Grove and described Steinbeck’s relationship with the part of Monterey where I lived, that is New Monterey: Joseph Campbell came to Monterey in 1932 as a 28-year-old “footloose” young mythologist. He spent months hanging out with Ricketts and Steinbeck.  He fell in love with Steinbeck’s wife.  He referred to this visit as “those days of the great intuitions.” As Steinbeck went with Ricketts south to the Sea of Cortez, Campbell went north to British Columbia on a collecting expedition with Ricketts.   The three “glimpsed” the “great synthesizing middle-point.”  He wrote to Ricketts, “You and your life-way stand close to the source of my enlightenment.”  

When I typed Steinbeck’s words that came from Ricketts’ ideas—“It is advisable to look from the tide pools to the stars and then back to the tide pools again”—as the epigraph for one chapter of the book I meant it in the way that Joseph Campbell means that every story tells the same story, that, though he may be described with a thousand faces, there is only one hero. And Joseph Campbell clarified this thinking simultaneously as Steinbeck and Ricketts did—he discussed these things with them.  They all influenced each other symbiotically, like creatures in a tide pool.

I finished the chapter and it was eight.  I left the house and rode my bike to the hill and continued reading in coffee shops, telling everyone I saw.  You know Joseph Campbell?  He hung out with Ricketts and Steinbeck.  The most amiable café owner of Monterey bought me my coffee and bagel because the next day was Christmas, and I tried to finish my library book because it was due before returning home.  It was John Barth’s triple novella Where Three Roads Meet, a self-consciously written deconstruction of a plain incident made to tell the universal story.  It is about the brief and glorious union of three great intellects trying collaboratively and individually to get at something profound.  

At a certain point in a day that birthed itself unexpectedly out of three hours of sleep, one realizes that the euphoria is diminishing, and the realities of exhaustion take over.  He goes to sleep and lets the dream end.

Bocce for Blood

"I have fought a good fight.  I have kept the faith."

—2 Timothy 4:7

as seen in a circle in a mosaic on 

the ceiling of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis

This book is not about bocce ball.  It is about a two-week trip that commemorated a two-week trip devoted to bocce ball.  There was a book about that first trip.  It was about bocce ball.  The second two-week trip was taken as its book tour.  However, there were no physical copies of the book by the time the tour started.  It was therefore not a book tour, in the traditional sense.

The first book functioned on the assumption that it could bypass plot, action, and conflict by recounting the scores of the dozen-odd games of bocce played.  Whether it functioned, I guess, is debatable.  Can a stream of encounters and diatribes be tied together by occasional columns of names and numbers?  A sports page gets away with it.

The second trip we did not keep score nor play bocce with the same purpose and regularity.  The last game played, at courts in a park just north of downtown Arcata, devolved into a two-set, 16-ball bocce-like improvised invention that veritably symbolized the devolution of the initial premise of Bocce Balling on the West Coast.  From Arcata, this year, I was to finish the journey north myself, and I was unable to find any way of going north.  All Greyhounds went back south to San Francisco.  Rideshares to Portland were imperceivable (though, having left a request at a co-op, I did receive a phone call a month later saying "I got your ride to Portland").  And the events of my life have not convinced me that hitch-hiking is a viable option, even though I know that is partly the role that writers are supposed to play, especially those who don't have, or aren't in the process of getting, an MFA.  My apologies.  So I found a cheap plane ticket to Seattle from SFO, drove back down to San Francisco with the friends I drove up with, and left my bocce set with them and flew to Seattle.   The second half of the trip, therefore, had nothing to do with bocce, it had nothing to do with the great highways of the west, it had nothing to do with deviating from those highways when the mood struck, it had nothing to do with pulling into the next town to find an old friend or a fabled bocce court, there was no camping, there was no epic camaraderie.  I flew on a plane by myself to visit my brother in Seattle like a normal person—not that there's anything unspectacular about that in its own right.  It was just an adventure in a different vein. 

The first trip my friend and I took the last leg of the trip alone, I drove his truck a few days early to get back to a job I was offered.  This was a symbol of sorts for the beginning of my personal exodus into the writing of the book—much began cooperatively between the two of us in its formulation, but ultimately it was I who was to complete the journey.  This time that was the general motif of the book-inspiring journey; that is, the journey that was to inspire the second book was wrapped up in the first book, its incompleteness and its suggestion of another.  Thoughts of writing, solipsistic inner dialogue, traveling alone, thinking about thinking, the process of leaving the world and entering my head became the subject matter of what was to be the subject matter, that is the failed book tour turned into a productive writing session, the action was analysis without the aid of even a tally sheet to hint at the non-cerebral.  Bocce fades away and all that is left is me, alone, trying to get something across that even before I express it is muddled, like a court on a rainy day full of puddles, passed over in favor of the shelter of coherence.

I apologize if none of that made any sense.  I was riffing for most of that paragraph, flying high this Saturday night on a Heath milkshake from the Steak & Shake drive-thru.

In describing what this book is about—other than saying that it is not about bocce—I should just say it is about trying to be a writer.  It is about the specific emotions involved in deciding not to pursue a reasonable career, the doubt, the shame, the self-pity, the feelings of irrationality, smallness—realizing that a writer is someone who has a post-graduate degree, failing to get into graduate school and deciding to be a writer anyway, knowing that a writer is someone who has a post-graduate degree.  It is about wanting to express a message so idiosyncratically that it could only be for me, and even if anybody else could be feasibly interested in it, he is awash already in torrents of media—free, brilliant, accessible, difficult, colorful, well-packaged media, more than he could want, literally more than he could consume.  This is impossible, in other words.  The odds are indescribable.  The path is no different than it has always been, the alphabet still has 26 letters, and only those willing to sacrifice every ounce of their being stand a chance.  This time it's for keeps—this time it's for blood.

Foraging for Truth

 
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In September a thought process that had developing since February reached a certain ripeness, so to speak.  I had moved out of my house in Monterey and was organizing my things back into my parents’ house and had come across a ‘zine written by my best friend ten years earlier when she was 17.  It began

(this stems from experience)

I need to document my experience because everything I do us made up of previous experience and all my art reflects my outlook on external experiences so it seems pretty important to write them down

—I saw a plane suspended in midair once

—we stole lemons

—Johnny Cash died in my arms

A hand-drawn picture accompanied the text on this first page, of my friend crying and sitting on the ground embracing a dead Johnny Cash. 

I had one week remaining before I was to take a trip to Oakland, then St. Louis, then Berlin, then Amsterdam, then Berlin (again) then Bremen, then Andorra (via Barcelona), then Tarragona (again via Barcelona), then Granada, then Alicante, then Bristol (again via Barcelona), then Worcestershire, then London, then Berlin (again, via Worcestershire and Bristol, again), then Prague, then Berlin (again), then St. Louis (again), where I am now.  That day I had to work my penultimate shift, and I picked, as I had been doing all week, a selection of apples from the backyard apple tree, and from another tree in a neighbor's backyard that offered dozens of ignored ripe apples across its fence into the park behind my parents’ house.   I was to go into town with my father, retrieve my bicycle, visit some friends for perhaps the last time with apple offerings, and go to work at four for nearly the last time at a restaurant in Pacific Grove.

The ripened thought process began after I returned from the second bocce journey, as fruit tends to begin to develop, in February.  I went to visit my beloved in Los Angeles for the weekend, and her Saturday involved facilitating an event at her school’s art museum.  It was for students, members of her student association, and, happily, me. 

I knew little of what to expect other than a vague notion of the artist collective’s credentials—they mapped out neighborhoods in Los Angeles and pinpointed spots in parks, between fences and sidewalks, even in medians, where fruit was “public,” where one could, at the right moment in the right season, saunter up and freely grab the definition of local fruit. 

Years before, the aforementioned best friend, another friend, and I envisioned a similar project for Monterey, a town with half a dozen historic gardens and a plethora of other ignored public mini orchards.  We never completed a map, but we did complete several reconnaissance missions.  We found mostly plums.  In one space between front yard and sidewalk we were yelled at for infringing upon a resident’s space.  In another we were amiably invited onto the patio to pre-emptively rid the resident of a sticky rotten mess of plums.  We made what we called a “People’s Plum Pie”—local, sustainable, delicious. 

Years before that, as noted above, “we stole lemons,” walking up Prescott and seeing the yellow jewels yearning toward the sidewalk, capsules of citric deliciousness begging to be consumed.  I don’t know if we crossed their property to reach them, or if they crossed into the city to reach us, but I believe it was youthful sheepishness that produced the word “stole” a decade before, not actual illegality.  Certainly, however, to teenagers, theft can be positive—thrillingly transgressive, and a representation of an incommunicable sense of entitlement.  It is just a question of inches, really.  And I doubt the lemons were missed.  When I moved, years later, into that same neighborhood years later, my 27-year-old roommate would drunkenly trespass into neighbors' backyards to grab lemons in the middle of the night.  That I did not so easily condone.

*          *          *

The collective was called Fallen Fruit, a group of three hip thirty-somethings.   They chatted amongst themselves preparing the presentation that would begin the workshop.   I sat with a coffee and pastry provided by the student association and sat with my beloved to hear and watch the background talk and slide show. 

The three narrated their years of foraging-centric projects, showing us the initial maps, videos of group fruit-picking expeditions through the streets of LA, public jam-making sessions, a fruit tree installation in Spain, and half a dozen related videos, events, shows, and pieces of writing. 

And then we took a break before the Fruit Meditation segment which is described on their website as

 

An array of meditations and visualizations designed for small groups in intimate settings.  Each sequence imagines fruit differently to raise consciousness about symbolic values, politics, social relations and fruit itself.  Working within individual consciousness as well as interpersonal relationships, the various parts reconfigure how we might think about fruit and use it as a personal and social tool.

We found, with or without a yoga mat, a place on the floor that spoke to us, a position in which we were comfortable, and we sat with or without our eyes closed, and were asked to visualize, with the help of an abstracted, mythologized description of the piece of fruit we were about to receive, the power of this piece of fruit we were preparing to consume—its sustenance, the place from which it came, its history—the essentially human, mythical task it was to eat the apple in front of us. 

I was incredibly open to the whole thing.  Thinking about what you eat is quite en vogue these days for a variety of great reasons—the health repercussions of people who don’t think about what they eat are readily apparent in this country, the environmental repercussions of pesticides, packaging, and 1,000-mile shipping are increasingly dire, and more philosophical—yet very real—disconnections between people and their food, and the people who produce their food are, at risk of sounding too new age-y (though in this context such a fear is absurd), fatal.   There is no respect for the tree that produces the fruit, nor for the land and people that produce the tree, in our industrialized food system.  Ask Michael Pollan.   The simplicity of an apple growing on a tree is a miracle, nothing less, and the bourgeois need to commodify and package and distance oneself from this natural fact is a tragedy.

It also so happened that I decided to stop drinking a week before.  This habit had become a crutch by which I could signal the end of a workday, celebrate the fact of a day off, drown the uncertainties of a bad mood, and distance myself from any real difficulties that may have been present in my life.  Also I had, because of drinking, starting smoking cigarettes again, which I had vowed to stop.  So I was also quitting cigarettes again.  For an untreated man in recovery the idea of meditating on a piece of fruit was vital.

The last fact of my infatuation with the whole thing was the socialness of their projects—people were brought outside together, to interact with their neighbors and to value the land they stood on, the place that a century of pavement, parking lots, television, and supermarkets had paved over and trained them to disconnect from.  And the objects in question were spheres.  An epiphany rolled through my toxin-free, antioxidant rich veins—I had found my soulmates in this trio, bocce was foraging for the mind, or, rather, foraging was bocce for the body, or parks were a free space for communities to eat, play, and connect with each other, the trees around, above, and beneath them, and the very dirt, grass, sand or decomposed granite on which they stood.

When the event drew to a close, and we all whispered an insecurity into a watermelon and participated in a Gallagher-esque destruction of said watermelon, I didn’t have the words to reach out to the trio.  What I wanted to say was not words.  It was a stone sphere I didn’t have.  It was the fruit that they had already given me.  I said thanks to the shorter of the three, and asked if I could send them a piece of writing that they had inspired in me—planted the seed, if you like—and I dumbly smiled at the other two.

Seven months later I was in the passenger seat of my father’s car explaining this ripened thought process, its beginnings with the pilfered lemons, the People’s Plum Pie, the events of the public fruit meditation, the apples from our and the neighbor’s backyard, and, of course, bocce.

“I have a story that has to do with all of that,” he said.

I have no idea what I said to that, but in my mind right now I am making myself say, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

He told me about French colleagues of his in Nigeria.  They brought in truckloads of sand to a spot on the river to create a sort of beach.  They went there to swim—with a rope to hang on to in the swift river—and to sunbathe and relax, and to play boules (the French relative to bocce) with coconuts foraged from the area.  The Nigerians found this most peculiar, that these white foreigners would, for pleasure, subject themselves to the unyielding sun at the hottest part of the day, to the deathly river for no good reason, and that they would, in this unbearable heat, toss coconuts in the sand and walk after them for hours at a time.

Peyote Thunderbird

Upon returning from the second bocce journey/no-book book tour I began playing music with my friend Jake.  This actually happened the year before after the first bocce journey—I came back and played music with Jake.  The difference is last year I started playing music with Jake and Bob—going down to Big Sur for the night to hang out at Bob's cabin and play a varying and diminishing amount of folky the-Band-style music.

This year I started playing Jake and Lindsey.  Lindsey played the drums and Jake and I would switch between acoustic and electric guitars, keyboard, singing, the thunder tube, a train whistle, a güira, a suitcase, a plethora of shakers, and Jake had a variety of flutes to choose from that I never learned to play.  I quite respect anybody who figured out how to make flutes and woodwinds effortlessly make pleasant sounds.

They had begun a certain krautrock/psychedelic/indigenous-rhythm style that I first heard and was invited to contribute to in February shortly after returning from the second bocce journey.  We played in the basement of a friend in Pacific Grove who was also of Bob's generation, that is to say, part of the most nostalgic people to have ever remained a community, those who lived their twenties in California, specifically Monterey County, in the late 1960s, and remained in the redwoods and oak groves untouched by the deflation of the esteem of Vietnam-era bohemianism in the aesthetics of the present cultures and counter-cultures of the modern world.  Anyone who doesn't ascribe to the Rolling Stone-subscribing utopia that America failed to uniformly celebrate and become is an ewe to be adopted into the flock of the promised land, though the stories, the music, the people are past, occasionally writing autobiographies and going on stadium tours.

Having said that, I did very much enjoy and appreciate playing music in a cabin atop a ridge above the Pacific Ocean and making dinner and listening to NPR and hearing outside a painter painting a house listening to an NPR of one second later on the ridge across the way where Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers supposedly lives; and it was an ideal expression of my existence to ride my bicycle from my house with my glockenspiel and güira in the milk crate affixed above my back tire to a cabin in Pacific Grove and play music in the basement that sonically described my conception of freedom.

However, the second time—I played once with just Jake—just the second time the three of us were to play together, I was coming off of work and heading over and I received a message from Jake that the practice was off: our host flipped out over nothing and we were no longer welcome.  Jake was already back in Big Sur and our sessions were postponed indefinitely.

Weeks passed and it seemed my house was the only option that made sense.  We met again, Jake driving from Big Sur and Lindsey coming from work with her drum set in her Jeep, and we began a series of Tuesday weekly sessions that would continue through August with a few exceptions—a band visit to a postman friend of Jake's who explained to us his moonshine whiskey operation and the English composer called Nurse With Wound, a visit to Hawaii by Lindsey, and, increasingly as the summer/tourist season wound on, my inability to get Tuesdays off at the restaurant.

On Wednesdays Jake would wake up on the sofa earlier than me and I would struggle to go with him to his friends' breakfast pizza/coffee victorian house in downtown Pacific Grove and then we would proceed to "bottom feed," in the parlance of a friend of Jake's, meaning go to the half dozen charity thrift stores off of Lighthouse Avenue.  In April my first article in the Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin appeared.  It came out on the first and third Wednesday of the month and often I would hungoveredly search out my fame in the newspaper dispenser in front of Grove Market.  One Wednesday Jake found a book on backgammon, which he, recently having acquired a backgammon set, had meant to master.  Bruce Becker's Backgammon for Blood became a motif for our a no-holds-barred attack on rock and roll mediocrity. "Luck is for losers," the back cover reads.  I began to rethink the name of  the 2nd installment of Bocce Balling on the West Coast.  Instead of the working title:

Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2: Bocce Harder

a better option presented itself:

Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2: Bocce for Blood

Jake always wanted to form a band called the Peyote Thunderbirds.  As we developed our repertoire and further advanced what I earlier described as "music ... that sonically described my conception of freedom" in my living room, we began to consider ourselves as the Peyote Thunderbirds, and we considered the possibilities of this name on a spectrum of "the" and "s" inclusion:

Peyote Thunderbird
The Peyote Thunderbird
The Peyote Thunderbirds
Peyote Thunderbirds

Crushing Jake's dream of being of the Peyote Thunderbirds Lindsey and I decided Peyote Thunderbird sounded better.

One week we were able to practice twice: on Monday night and Tuesday night.   We practiced Monday night and tucked the drum set in a corner afterwards.  Jake and I did our routine Tuesday morning and it was decided the night before that Lindsey would pick us up from my house and we would carpool to the Tuesday farmer's market together, walk around, and go back to play at my house.

On the way there they saw a friend of theirs leaving work and we pulled over to say hello.  We said hello and explained we were on a band date, carpooling to the farmer's market before heading back to my house to practice.  We had not been very public about our project, so this was a bit of a first.  We hadn't considered how to describe ourselves to an outsider until she asked us what kind of band we were.  "Native American Trance Revival," Jake said.  We decided to meet downtown at a coffee shop off of the market and chat further.  We did, and, further along our visit downtown we, as on a band date, ran into more people we knew and had to explain we were a band.  "Lindsey plays the drums, we have one that starts with Jake on the thunder tube and Andrew comes in playing guitar through his karaoke machine..." We were Peyote Thunderbird: three people who sometimes played music and sometimes went to the farmer's market together.

During this time I had also decided I would move out of my house, quit my jobs, and leave the area indefinitely in September.   In May it seemed perfectly natural to me that both this could be true and that the flight of Peyote Thunderbird could occur.  We would play shows and record songs by August.  We were good, we knew everyone in the area, and I already had a dozen cassettes filled with recordings from my tape recorder.  However, after I mentioned my plan a pall was cast over the evening and I sabotaged the momentum that I thought I was galvanizing.  A week later I wrote Jake this email:

Jake,

I once was told by a friend of mine that life is cyclical, like the seasons and whatnot related to the patterns of our own lives.  Everything fades away in autumn leaving us with nothing in winter, regrowth in spring and fruition in summer.  Since this bit of wisdom was imparted to me five years ago I have recognized it every year.  And I believe in riding the wave, not fighting it and drowning.  And this wave crashes with fall, September 21st.

I am not a lunatic (though I am if you follow the metaphor, moon (luna)=tides, following tides, nature, etc.=lunatic), I realize I need to compromise with how civilization and all other factors have made reality, the waves of the short term.  But I take hints from the universe.  I attempt to be natural in an unnatural world. 

My plan, considering these interpretations I have made, is to leave my house in either September or October, quit my jobs and visit everyone I know with the money I have saved, perhaps ending up in LA in January to be with Alexandra, Portland to be with old friends, St. Louis to do something else, or back here.

If this wave is (The) Peyote Thunderbird(s), then that is what I will catch.   We can get our shit together by September, record, tour, and I can plan around that.  I could travel, we could let the bird burn and resurrect it in the spring. 

As August came we still did not have enough staff to give me my Tuesdays off, and I began the process of moving out.  The day I took the train from Salinas to Oakland to start my journey, September 29th, Tristan was arriving in Big Sur from a three day hike from Arroyo Seco and hitchhiking back to Monterey to catch the train with me to his house in Oakland.  He caught a ride to Carmel Valley, sat by the side of the road for awhile, and then saw Jake waiting across the street for him.  Jake drove him to Monterey and Tristan's mom brought him to my house which is the last time Peyote Thunderbird almost came back together.

July, 2012

At work on Saturday Ramiro invited me to La Farandula the next day, now yesterday.  I said I was interested but that I had never been to La Farandula.  In the ensuing Saturday night pinballing between the front of the restaurant and the kitchen I asked others if they knew La Farandula.  I misunderstood it was in Seaside.  People said that there was no place in Seaside where they did shows, much less one named "La Farandula."  It turns out a farandula is, as Victor explained to me, the venue where all the big stars perform, the performance.  On Sunday it was to be in Gilroy.   I gave Ramiro, henceforth known as a Choco, my phone number when I left the restaurant as he was plastic-sealing fish for sous vide preparation.  I would be in Seaside where I host an open mic on Sundays, ready about ten.  He would pick me up and then we'd get José, henceforth known as Chepe, and then we'd go to el show in Gilroy.  I was excited.

I had also planned to play bocce with Kyle on Sunday, in the afternoon, before the open mic.  We worked out the logistics on Saturday when Kyle was working as a food runner.  I gave him my phone number on the other half of the paper that I gave to Choco.  Kyle would come to the open mic as well, taking advantage of his night off.  We met at 4 and played to 12 points, with Kyle winning.  Then we decided to go to 15, and I won.  We called it a tie.  

During the game I was anticipating a phone call from Victor who would be getting off from his other dishwasher job at a family establishment downtown that is generally known as the place with really big cakes.  I gave him my phone number on a scrap of paper weeks before on a similar Saturday at the restaurant so he could start some English lessons with me.   It has been hella busy on Sundays at the family establishment downtown that is generally known as the place with really big cakes, and he has not been able to call me before six when I have to be at the café to set up the open mic.  I stopped by the place with really big cakes and luckily a server was out the side employee entrance finishing a cigarette.  I caught her before she went back in and asked if Victor was still working.  She said she didn't know all their names as there are so many (that work in the kitchen).  She went down the stairs to inquire and I heard "a guero is outside looking for Victor," and a nice man came out who I addressed in Spanish and who informed me that Victor left at 3 and was coming back again at 6.  He gave a bemused smile when I said something like "but this is impossible!"  Of the two nights he doesn't work at his other job he has to come back to work again on the same day for his day job? OK, thank you, I said, and got on my bicycle to go to Seaside to host the open mic.

Halfway there, at the bottleneck created by the Naval Postgraduate School where only Del Monte Avenue, the bike path and the beach run between the ocean and the barbed-wire fenced military academic institution, I recognized Victor coming the other way in his FOX hat (yellow and white double spotlight logo, black material) and I flagged him down, turned my bike around and rode with him a little bit.  He did not look happy.  Did you get to take a nap at least? I tried to ask.  Just enough time to clean up and turn back around, I am presently paraphrasing and translating.  It sucks because I want to learn English, I am flagrantly translating emotion and my perception of it into the very colloquial speech that is the thwarted goal in question.  We calculated a future moment to host a future lesson.  I said goodbye and turned around.

I brought a bottle of rosé from Grocery Outlet to the bocce game, along with two mugs.  When I got to the lake on the other side of the freeway I poured another mugful and paused to watch a few dozen small black birds dive at the surface of the water and fly back up into the air over and over with the 6 lanes of freeway merging traffic on the other side.   There was sour apple on the nose, unripe strawberry on the front and a lemonade tartness lingering at the back of the taste.  Really it just tasted like unsweet lemonade.  It was 4 dollars.  Whatever.

Though I don't really want to get into it right now, an open mic could be a fantastic vehicle for a story.  Diverse contingents coming together sincerely expressing themselves, making friends, hurting each other's feelings, etc.  I once wrote a story that centered on a night of karaoke at  Chopsticks 2: the How Can Be Lounge, a place I would go to all the time in Portland.  It was called "Singing the Song of Someone Else."  It sounds like a joke title for a New Yorker story.  Perhaps I am giving myself too much credit.  It sounds like a headline for a small town newspaper profile on the local karaoke bar.  Whatever.

Seaside has a resident francophonic socialist rambler that mumbles loudly, always has a cane and a scarf, and attends the open mic with impeccable regularity.  I appreciate his enthusiasm and respect his politics, and I even let him speechify for five minutes or so when he asks me nicely beforehand.  His politics are much in line with the occupy movement and he calls our present political climate a "Mickey Mouse democracy."  Is that a cliché already?  I will google that at the next possible internet situation (I now have the internet and “Mickey Mouse Democracy” is not a cliché).  Point is that Claude did not come to the open mic this week. 

I got a phone call from Choco at 10:05 and said goodnight to the show, which by the end was everyone left following Tiffany, who began a "Goodbye, Andrew" song as I took my bike out the back door, to lock it across the street in front of La Tortuga where Ramiro was to pick me up.  I left one mug and the empty bottle of rosé in my basket, not worried about either.  I sent my friend Jaymee a text message referring to an art project she did 5 years ago where she agreed to be taken anywhere an acquaintance decided would be meaningful.  The only person who took her up on the project was our friend Bill who made her climb a water tower.  I asked her what the philosophical implications are of such a project. 

Choco's 4 Runner pulled up and I got in the back—his tía was up front—coming with us to la farandula.  We picked up Chepe, who I'd never seen out of his busser uniform, and we went to a gas station to get something to drink.  I got a coffee in the mug I kept.  Chepe bought it for me, another for himself, and 2 red bulls for Choco and tia.  When we got back out to the car Choco gave me the keys and told me I was driving.  Alright, I said in Spanish.  Tía held my coffee.

This was the first time I had a particular mix of feelings since I was in the Dominican Republic, those of an outsider who, with a sense of irony, is being accepted.  This irony is palpable in my speech, the stuffiness and awkwardness of my Spanish.  The patience and respect showed to me and my bumbling along in Spanish is a special kind of love for which I am eternally grateful.  To the people of the Dominican Republic: thank you for your kindness.   This is not to say that the way that people treated me was not the patronizing maternal supervision that an adult would bestow upon a wayward child.  I was respected, but also I was a cute foreigner with the vocabulary of a 7 year old.   In other words, I frequently did not know exactly what was happening because I did not understand everything, but also because, out of pragmatism, I was not informed of everything, and I never knew exactly which it was—if I misunderstood, nodded to something I did not agree to, or if I was not consulted, figuring it would be best simply to show me what was happening as opposed to trying to explain it.   Any independent action I took was always the subject of scrutiny, and not without good reason.

My point is, I don't know if I agreed unwittingly to being the designated driver for the evening, or if that was why I was enlisted in the journey, or how to say "designated driver" or if that's even in the lexicon.  These were my thoughts, not "I drank a beer watching the European Championship final game with my folks this afternoon, then I had the greater half of a bottle of wine between 4 and 6 while playing bocce and commuting to Seaside, and then I had a beer while hosting the open mic.  Honestly I had two, as is my compensation for hosting the thing, an allowance of 2 beers.  It was now 11 PM.

I was merging on that same section of freeway when they were asking me about my job, and explained I got paid in beers and only then, when Chepe asked if I had a beer earlier, did I think, "shit! I have been drinking all day and now I am driving someone else's 4 Runner to Gilroy."   ¿Estás bien? Chepe asked.  I said I just had one.  That I was fine, which I did believe, which anybody believes, which is another story.  The point here has to do with the need to be accepted, to pretend like communicating in Spanish is easy, natural, not a constructed identity, a painful, embarrassing process of pretending. 

Jaymee texted back to me at 10:30, I think the appeal is Surrender, Reliquishing control (& the freedom that can be paradoxically found by doing so).  Gilroy!

I safely guided us across the Salinas River, through Castroville, over to Prunedale and onto the 101.  I established with Choco that the steering wheel shaking was normal.  I said it was like a massage for my hands.  Chepe said that's good after the guitar playing.  Agreed. 

Passing San Juan Bautista the highway gets dark.  I slowed down and pulled the stick that I turned on the lights with, thinking it was the brights.  The music flickered and the car started acting funny.   We crossed the Pajaro river and ended up in the Santa Clara Valley a few miles out of town, not yet the cherry stands that mark Gilroy's periphery.  The pedal was responding strangely and I said so as best as I could.  I was understood and Choco told me to pull over, so I did.  He popped the hood and messed with some things with Chepe.  I realized that the battery he said he had installed that day was in this car.  I asked tía, still sitting next to me, where he learned about cars.   He taught himself.  The engine cut out and Choco and Chepe pushed us to a better spot further on.  

Tía and I sat up front while Chepe and Choco called and texted people already at the show and others back in Monterey. 

Jaymee had sent me another text, Our culture mandates that we always be on top of everything/have our shit together all the time.  Letting go of that responsibility & giving it over to someone else could very well be considered a subversive act.

The humor in the situation was apparent.  We talked to el viejo from work, a lovely and strange man always happy to riff with me at the restaurant, usually in English.  He calls me Andrecito, the diminutive that the kitchen uses for the most part.  I said to Choco to say hello for me.  ¡¿Andrés está con ustedes?! he asked incredulously, like it was a joke. 

Choco starting joking that this farandula, this event that he kept telling me he was going to take me to, was this.  This was el show—the four of us parked next to the highway that divides the rolling dark hills between us and the ocean from the unseen fields of what is known as the Silicon Valley.

Andrés va a escribir en su diario...Choco began imagining, ¿Andrés tienes un diario?  I said that I did in fact have a notebook that I had in my bag from the day before when I was getting ready to cover an event for the local paper that it turns out is not for another 3 weeks.  Andrés va a escribir en su diario "este día yo fuí al show."  This was hilarious to me, of course, because I try to write every day, generally about my own perceptions, and I vaguely had decided I would write about whatever happened this night, on this adventure to Gilroy, a town I only knew because you had to get through it to get to Morgan Hill which you have to get through to get to San Jose which you have to get to to get on a plane or go through to get to San Francisco or Oakland or anywhere really, a town that Joan Didion described as an agricultural town now "vanished...having reinvented itself as a sprawl of commuter subdivisions for San Jose and the tech industry.”  Last 4th of July I drove there with friends to see fireworks.

Andrew is going to write in his diary, this day I went to the show. 

Chepe got through to a friend who agreed to pick us up.  He would be there in half an hour.  It was already getting on midnight.  The show would go to 1, maybe 1:30.  As it turned out he had been working all day so we just piled into his car and went back.  Choco would be back tomorrow with a new battery or transmission or whatever to pick up his 4 Runner.  Chepe sat up front and chatted with his friend, and Choco and tía napped next to me in the back.  They got dropped off first, then me at my bike in front of La Tortuga.  I had to insist that I would be alright riding my bike alone late at night in the cold.  It's like a car to me.  I didn't want to leave it overnight, but was touched at their preoccupation for my wellbeing.  Chepe gave me his sweatervest to wear for extra warmth.  I would give it back Wednesday at work.

They watched me unlock my bike and put on the sweatervest and my helmet.  They drove off, I got on my bike, and noticed that the mug was gone.  Why would someone take a mug from my bike basket?  The empty bottle of rosé was still there.  I rode down the street and noticed a man walking with a cane and scarf.  He sat down on a red bus stop bench.  I stopped and said hello to Claude, asked why he didn't go to the open mic.  He asked if I wanted a mug, looking guilty. 

You took my mug, Claude! Right out of my bike basket?

This is America!  You can't just leave something and expect somebody not to take it!

I know, I don't really need it.  Do you want the mug, Claude?  You can have it if you want it, no hard feelings.

I want the mug.

Alright, it's yours, Claude.  Enjoy. 

The mug has lots of animals anthropomorphized as young children at school, crawling over desks like the classroom is a jungle gym.  The joys of teaching are without number, the mug says.  Looked at cynically (kids=misbehavior=headache), it is a stupid mug.  When one decides, however, that to really learn is to let yourself go entirely into the world of your teacher, and create a new one together, it is rather the opposite.

1/3, 1/3, 1/3

1/16/12 Café Arabica, Seattle, Washington, afternoon

Sitting here reading Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn for the second time, the first time this side of 20 years old (26), I realize from where I received the notion and love of collaborative literature, how this vague concept developed into a purpose ingrained in my self like a spice infused and inseparable from a dish. 1/3, 1/3, 1/3.  

Reader, writer, text. Past, present, future.  Idea, writing, revision. 

Brautigan's frankness, innocence, transparency—whatever you'd like to call it—beckons collaboration.  His epigraph to the Abortion —a novel I read at age 18 in several sittings upstairs at the Monterey Public Library, and again in Big Sur last August—reveals he finished it, left it for a friend, and would be back in a few hours to discuss it.  And the story itself reinforces this notion of a social reciprocation between author, reader and publisher: the narrator works full time (that is 24 hours) unpaid (he receives food, lodging) at a library that accepts and houses the works—what we are led to believe are the only copies—of everyday people.  In other words, the voice of Richard Brautigan asserts a responsibility to read unfamous work, to give it a dignified place in the world, and, in the case of the narrative, a literal place.  The more that is read, in general, the better, of course, the greater the mutual understanding, empathy, connection.  But what is argued here is not rushing to Barnes & Noble for the new John Updike, or any other traditional notion of reading more—it is receiving, understanding and editing the work of a neighbor, starting a literary scene on your block; it is valuing uniqueness, localness over "genius," "significance," the national literary fad.

BUT IT SOUNDS SO FUCKING NAIVE!

This is Richard Brautigan.  And "1/3, 1/3, 1/3" is quintessential RB—an innocent voice, indistinguishable from that of the author himself, narrates how he submits to a hair-brained scheme to do the typing in a 3-way partnership:

It was to be done in thirds.  I was to get 1/3 for doing the typing, and she was to get 1/3 for doing the editing, and he was to get 1/3 for writing the novel.

The editor is on welfare, in her late 30s and on her last ideas.  All we know of the narrator/typist is that he has been heard typing at night on his typewriter by the editor (also he is 17 and obviously RB).  "The novelist lived in a trailer a mile away beside a sawmill pond where he was a watchman for the mill."  He is also borderline illiterate.  So there they are.  1/3, 1/3, 1/3.  As we learn of the content of the novel we are transported via misspellings into the world of the novel—a "young logger" meets a pretty waitress in North Bend, Oregon—and suddenly the voice returns to RB and ends with a line that unsettled me in that it was once a—now forgotten—personal credo indistinguishable from who I considered myself to be.

While we were all sitting there in that rainy trailer pounding at the gates of American literature.

"...pounding at the gates of American literature."

In the process of forgetting that I internalized this short story as a part of myself, I have reworked its motif a half a dozen times. In chronological order (starting 3 years after first reading "1/3, 1/3, 1/3")

1. "Hooray!  We're gonna write a novel"

A short film starring me and my friends about our collective fictional decision to write a novel.
A. Epiphany B. The Submarine Thought Closet (stop motion metaphor for creativity in my closet) C. Journey for supplies (me on bike buying paper and beer) D. Coffee break E. revision 

2. Apples to Apples

An improvised version of Apples to Apples leads me to proclaim that our random pairings of home-scribbled words and phrases were avant-garde poetic compositions.  My friends' enthusiasm for the game quickly transferred to other things.  

3. Swimming Lessons/Radio Showlocke Holmes

1/3, 1/3, 1/3... Greg, Marina and I held meetings every Tuesday for three months ultimately creating The Swimming Lessons, the abstracted account of the creation of a non-existent television series.  We went on to do a weekly improvised mystery radio show for a year.

4. Tom and I

Exactly as RB was enlisted to type this older man's story, I agreed to transcribe and Ed-it the life story of a homeless man (Ed) to disastrous effects on my nerves. 

5. One time I went to Eugene, Oregon with a friend.

We went to her friends' house.  After getting settled and before going out we smoked pot and decided I would write down everything my new friend said. All I can remember now is all that is left of this spontaneous absurd project— "We're going to the honey comb of life—the sweet stuff." And  

Kill poetry with a rusty knife.
Kill it with a monster truck.
No!
I love poetry.

6. Bocce Balling on the West Coast

In January 2011 I journeyed with a friend to Seattle and back to Monterey for to collaborate with old friends, first, with a game of the ancient sport of bocce, and then with a collaborative narrative containing the perspectives and voices of all involved.  I ended up writing the thing mostly myself.

The house described in the Surrealist Manifesto certainly comes to mind—"Hooray! We're gonna write a novel" certainly captures this enthusiastic notion—but collaboration, community and feedback isn't all about bringing the subconscious and the unexpected into the process of composition.  There is something greater to the Surrealist processes and games—something that stems from how integral creativity is, and sharing a sense of play, linguistic, visual, philosophical, with those around you.  A writer doesn't have to be famous, or even good, for you to devote your time to the work created—that notion leads to the reading of vast amounts of mediocre writing passed off as "good" by a broken publishing system—and, to deconstruct and interact with a work, its author doesn't have to be bad, easy to pick apart, or a personal acquaintance who you can imagine making certain literary choices for reasons you understand.  All writing is the product of social processes.

Prelude to an Argument for Literary Authenticity via Natural Winemaking

It seems natural—to me at least—that I should start a piece of writing away from a computer in a setting that I would describe with basically meaningless words like "authentic" and (one I have already used) "natural."  This piece of writing (by which I mean this introduction) is already once removed from "authentic" experience (by which I mean the previous moment of writing in a notebook), so it seems natural—so to speak—that I should be composing it on a computer directly into a blog (by which I mean this blog).  And indeed I am writing it right now, as opposed to later when I actually would have more free time, because I have joined a facebook group that challenges me to write every day for 40 days.  This is the 3rd day and, for unrelated reasons (non-literary, nothing to do with technology, facebook, etc.), I did not have the time to sit down and write something else I have been meaning to write; but I have been meaning to type up things already written in the more authentic—if you like—setting of a notebook.

This piece of writing occurs at the end of the notebook. It is very aware that in concluding this notebook it is finishing what is decided to be a necessary stage in the writing of a book (the notebook began before and encompassed a period of time that was the basis for the book that this writing is to be).  It is the transition point between nothing and something.  And for something to be something—in this case writing—it must be groomed, it must be tailored to fit the mold of things that it is supposed to be like. And so the notebook phase was ending, in the notebook, and the computer phase begins, on the computer.

The previous piece in the notebook was an argument for a (post-post-)feminist, hyper-compassionate (David Foster Wall-esque?) critical study of pop culture, specifically Courtney Love and an ultimately dissatisfying Chuck Klosterman essay.

The title of the writing in question that followed was THOUGHT FROM WALK HOME ABOUT WHAT I WANT TO DO IN ANALOGY:

and it reads as follows:

I guess the thought began when I thought about wine-making—something I do not pretend to understand—and the notion of traditional natural methods that ideally take the vintner's (and technology's) hand out of the process, expressing the truth of the grape and where it comes from.

So—how do I express the terroir of experience with the grapes of words, and in what barrels of what material does the truth juice develop and ultimately please and intoxicate the conossieur?! (In the notebook it reads "develop and get the conosieur [sic] drunk," in the interest of transparency).

An illustration of this analogy follows:

I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I believe something important is happening here—so important that I am going to change the now-silent record and empty my now-full bladder in order to commit full concentration to its transcription.

[I had let the record player fall silent and ignored my need to urinate for 15 odd minutes while enwrapped in my drawing]

Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2—Bocce for Blood has begun.

12/29/11 initiated a decision that I would keep a journal.  And so I did.  And therefore I had one—and I resolved to fill it—while en route to and in return from Seattle, thus making the trip all the more about re-visiting and writing, returning to something with words as a mediator.

Between January 6th and 21st—the time frame of Bocce Balling on the West Coast—there are three brief entries.  This was a week after I had resolved to—and days after I had managed to successfully—write every day.  There was no reason to write—I was doing, I was playing bocce, I was traveling, I was also playing frisbee golf and wall ball and Apples to Apples, I was walking in snow, I was prioritizing post cards, I was drinking, I was being driven, I was on an airplane, I was on trains, I was on buses, I was in zip cars, I was at a grocery store wine tasting, I was moving a dining room table shipped decades ago from Pennsylvania up three narrow flights of stairs with my brother, I was watching a hockey game, I was comparing pixillated penises on screens in a bar in Seattle, I was meeting a mother and son in Live Oak Park in Berkeley, the name of which I remembered because I deemed it one of the top five parks I had ever visited, and I was playing with them their first game of bocce (there are no bocce courts at the park, just to clarify), I was composing a spontaneous poetry cycle aboard and about the Coast Starlight train south from Seattle, I was watching kitsch cinema at a theater in Arcata, and then I was, awake first, making coffee when the doctor who has the same name as my friend who was hosting us, the doctor who was the landlord who lived in Alaska and was exercising the agreed upon term that he stay at the house for a week of fly-fishing, the doctor was declining to have any coffee before it was entirely brewed because coffee is about the balance between the rich flavors of the initial drip and the bitter hints that come at the end.  The doctor told me he was out in a foreign country medically intervening for humanitarian purposes.  He had been awake without more than two hours of sleep for two days.  He had a moment to make coffee and was seriously anticipating it.  Jamie came and hurriedly grabbed the pot and poured himself a cup before it had finished brewing.  The doctor declared the pot ruined, was pissed off about the whole thing for the reasons mentioned earlier, and dumped the pot, spilling coffee onto and ruining the pants he was wearing, pants of which he was quite fond.  The next day, he continued, Jamie was dead.  A motorcycle accident.  I never got to redo the last thing I said to him and I ruined my pants.  There's a double lesson here.  The doctor left the room and two others corroborated the truth of the account, that it had happened, they were on the floor, awaking to the value of patience.

What I mean to say is that the story has fermented into mythology in this notebook, and the self-conscious drive to fill it has bestowed its meaning;  now, as I did a year ago, I will begin to write about the two-week span of adventure in January that defined itself with the idea of rolling balls toward an ever-expanding cluster of other balls.  And then turning around and doing it in the other direction.

*  *  *

And with that the journal is over.  I began to write bocce stories on my computer, bypassing pens, notebooks and handwriting.  A few days ago I was desperately looking through all of my files, emails, blog posts for an account that I am sure that I had typed up about Doctor Bill and his story of coffee and patience.  I checked all the computers I had used, all email accounts, all blogging accounts.  Then I remembered I had yet to type it. It was written in the transition to technology, not yet able to be shared with millions with the click of the mouse.