Hidden Meanings

While I was living for those 7 years in my parents’ basement, I took evening classes off and on at the local state college.  I had heard that, if you could get an MA, you could teach in community vasefacecollege, so that’s what I was aiming for in the long run.  I took a class on Henry James because my favorite teacher in college had lectured on The Ambassadors, and while I had just the weekend before read the book (or tried to), the book she lectured on didn’t seem like the book I had read at all.

That wasn’t the first time that had happened.  Sometimes I thought maybe they were just pulling this stuff out of a hat.  In my attempt to read all of the 101 greatest books of the western world, I had set myself to getting through James Joyce’s Ulysses the summer before I went off to college.  I could not make heads or tails of that thing.  Some parts were interesting.  For example, the main character, Bloom, at one point fries up a kidney.  That was interesting because I didn’t know people ate kidneys or even that they were eatable for that matter.

When I heard a lecture on the book in my first year of college, I thought maybe the Professor was on acid (some of them were on acid) because I swear and be damned if I could figure out how Bloom walking up the steps of the Dublin Library was passing through the straits of Scylla’s and Crebedis.  I guess it might have helped had I read the Odyssey, but I hadn’t at that point.

I figured Joyce must have written the book for your worst kind of English major, the kind who thinks they are smart because they know what something “really means.”   Who else would read such a thing?  Like that poem, the Waste Land, that had like 5 foreign languages in it including Sanskrit.  I couldn’t see any reason for writing this stuff unless you were trying to prove how smart you were or to make other people feel stupid.

But The Ambassadors was different.  Stuff wasn’t hidden in it; I just hadn’t got it.  Also, at UCLA, my good buddy, who was drafted later and became catatonic, had made an observation about The Ambassadors in one of the classes, and the fucking Professor had gone out of his way to insult the guy.  I could still see him blushing.  So I signed up for a class on James at the State college to rectify my ignorance and to get some sort of metaphysical revenge on the guy who insulted my buddy.

I took my one and only ever incomplete for that class.  I don’t know why but I wasn’t working for a while and while I wasn’t I read that damn book over and over, and drew like diagrams and charts and all sorts of visual aids to figure out what this guy was going on about.  Finally, I turned in like a 50 page paper and the Professor said, should I wish to get an MA he would happy to work with me since I had already written most of a dissertation.

Life is just fucking contingency like Sartre says.  There’s this, then that, and so on.  Fate has nothing to do with it.  When you are walking through shit, you are just walking through shit, and there’s no hidden meaning to it.

Pathetic

Having arrived in CA in the mid-50s my family witnessed the great boom in development.  Things were relatively stable in Casa De Ora till the mid-sixties.  A small tract went up on our hill.  And in the 70’s the truck farmer out back sold his land for a fortune and houses went in there too.

whitetailekiteThe top soil in that area varied from about six inches in depth to, depending on the spot, a couple of feet.  Below the topsoil were rock and that stuff we called leche, meaning white like milk, a kind of soil left over from when the whole area had been under water.  You couldn’t grow anything in that stuff.  The developers came in and would terrace the land for their houses and in one afternoon clear off the top soil that had taken maybe a couple thousand years to get there.  And then they would truck in topsoil and put it around the houses so people could grow insane lawns.

One year, during my time in the basement, a white tailed kite, a kind of hawk, showed up towards spring and settled in on one particular branch of one particular tree in a gulley down back.  I guess they called it a kite because it would fly up, face into the wind, and hang there like a kite especially towards evening.  When it spotted something, it would fold its wings and drop like a damn stone and disappear in the weeds.  And then it would pop back up out of the weeds sometimes with a mouse and sometimes with nothing.  Had it not been for that bird I would have had no idea how many mice were in those weeds.

Then it would go to its particular spot on the particular branch of its particular tree.  I observed this spot through a telescope.  It was stained from the bird’s kill.  I don’t really know how the damn bird did it, but having settled in with its prey it would gut the mouse and start to pecking at the entrails almost immediately.

When fall started to settle in, the bird left and went lord knows where; and amazingly it came back to that particular spot and that particular tree and that particular branch for five years in a row.  In the second or third year, I started waiting for the bird in the spring, wondering where it was and would it show up.  And when it did show up, I felt satisfaction.

But one summer, the developers came and with their bulldozers starting filling in the gulley area where the bird had its tree.  I watched as the dirt piled up and up and finally toppled the bird’s tree.  It had been off hunting and I swear, when it came back, that it flew exactly in SPACE to the spot where that tree had been and was no more.  It tried to land in SPACE and began to fly in a troubled manner looking for its tree that lay on its side maybe 15 feet below the spot now in space where the bird always landed.

I don’t know why but I found the whole thing fucking heartbreaking.  I wanted to say, stupid bird, stupid bird, go away.  Your tree is not there.  But it kept trying to find the tree and finally it did.  It even went to its particular spot on its particular branch.  But now it was way too close to the ground.  That day it left and never returned.

I wrote a short story about the incident trying partly to explain to myself why it had affected me so.  I mailed it off and the editor wrote back that it was one of the most overdrawn and hysterical (in the unfunny sense) story he had ever read.  Obviously, I had taken some creative writing courses—which I hadn’t—and had taken from them the worst possible lessons.  And as a final gratuitous insult, said I had the worst pseudonym he had ever seen.

Odds and Evens

oil embargo

Probably the best car I have ever owned was a 1953 Buick Roadmaster.  By “best” I mean it was the best used car I have ever owned at the date when it was first sold, back in 1953.  Howard Hughes owned one so it had to have been expensive.  Mine had a straight 8—eight cylinders in a row.  It had a radio that didn’t work, and a bunch of buttons across the dash that were supposed to adjust the suspension hydraulically for the kind of surface you were driving on: rough, smooth, bumpy road.  Those didn’t work either.

 I got the car from Roland. He had been busted for pot and was going to the county work farm for six months.  I asked him was there no way he could get out of it, and he laughed and said he was caught red handed and dead to rights having sold directly to an undercover cop.  He was parting with his earthly possessions and he had some debts he said to pay off before going in and ask did I want the Buick, owned he said by an old lady.  I drove it around, no black smoke came out the pipe, and the oil was pretty clean.  So I offered him 100 dollars—which I thought was low—and he said, I’ll take it.

 One day I was out front working on something on that car and the next door neighbor, Mr. Hunter, came over and said mighty nice car and started talking about the cars he and his buddies had back in Hattisburg, Mississippi.  Yep, he knew that car because it had a special suspension.  He and his buddies would get on the ends of that car and get it to bouncing clean off the ground, and one night he had his buddies bounced one of those cars into an alley sideways.  You should have seen the owner’s face he said.

 And he had a car like that too, not that one exactly, but one like it, and to save on gas he had figured out how to turn the engine off more than a mile away from home.  He would get up speed and top this hill, and shut off the engine and it would fly down the hill passed the Miller place, and passed the old abandoned gas station where as a child he bought Nihi Grape Soda, and down a gulley and up the other side, which was always a bit touch and go, and the car would roll right up the drive and stop right in front of the house without him even putting his foot to the brake.  Damn amazing, I said.

Mr. Hunter worked down at the zoo taking care of the gorillas maybe because he was about the size of one.  He was 6 feet six and maybe 330.  He still had the thick southern accent.  And I was sitting around maybe two hours later when it came to me like a bolt out of the blue that he had been jerking my chain with that car story.  What cued me was that last bit about not even having to touch the brake.  Mr. Hunter liked to spin a yarn.  I doubt the backbone of the story was original, but he filled it up with so much local color as he went along that you pretty much suspended disbelief without knowing it and maybe his being six six and 330 helped too, because I wasn’t about to call him a liar had I any suspicion he was pulling my chain.

I drove that car for a year during the time I worked as an assistant manager in training at a Newberry’s Department Store.  But then towards the end of 1973, the Arab Oil Embargo hit and the price of gas went from 25 cents a gallon or so to a dollar or a dollar and a quarter.  I hadn’t paid any attention till then but that Roadmaster got 11 miles to a gallon.  And it wasn’t easy to get gas either.  Cars stretched around the block to get gas and then they went to the odd number, even number license plate system where people with odd numbered license plates went on odd number days and people with even numbered license plates went on even number days.

So I had to park my luxury vehicle down back with the other wrecks, and I went back to driving the 59 Plymouth Station Wagon.  Eventually, one of my brothers sold the Roadmaster to a car collector for 400 dollars.

The Egg Factory

When I was getting low on money, I would go down to the unemployment office and look for a day job or temporary fill in work.  Once I got a job driving around and administering medical questionnaires to people out the boonies, and another time I got a job at an egg factory.  Many, many eggs and not a chicken anywhere in sight.  But the eggs were brought in on racks in big trucks.  Then they were cleaned because they had chicken shit all over them.  Then they were candled to make sure the eggs weren’t bloody or didn’t have a little chicken in them.  These eggs were sold to people who make cookies and stuff like that, so who knows, maybe every now and then a person gets a little ground up chicken embryo in a cookie.

Uuuummm, uuummm good!

Then the eggs were packed in big brown boxes because these particular eggs were being sent to feed the troops in Viet Nam.

The chicken factory was pretty far inland and hot.  I wasn’t there long enough to get to know the people; they were mostly women and Mexican Americans.  The main topic of conversation in the coffee room was how nobody could eat chicken any more.  Somebody would say, “I drove by this barbeque place and it smelled good.  But then I remembered it was chicken.”  Or:  “I haven’t touched a piece of chicken in a year.”  Or: “Even thinking about chicken makes me want to gag.”  I couldn’t quite figure it since there were no chickens there; but as I said the place was hot and was rank with the smell of chicken shit.

The other topic of conversation was the woman, who quite recently, got her hair caught in the conveyer belt and was scalped.  Contrary to popular belief, the act of scalping a person, though quite painful, does not kill a person, though I supposed if one remained scalped for very long infection would set in and one would die.  But they saved this woman’s scalp and they eventually got it back on her, though she had not returned to work.

I worked there for a couple of weeks I guess for minimum wage doing whatever they told me to do.  I helped unload the trucks.  The eggs came in flats that were stuck in racks that were about six feet high and had wheels on them, so you could push them around to where they had to go.  And I did a lot of sweeping and washing stuff down with a hose to keep down the stink.  I wanted to do the candling where you stood at the end of the line and a bright light would make the inside of the egg visible so you could tell if it had blood or not.  But I never go to do that job since it perhaps required an expertise I did not have.

One day, they had to move a truck away from the dock for some reason, and as they pulled it away, the truck went up a slight incline in the blacktopped lot, and all of a sudden rack after rack after rack of eggs came falling out of the back of the truck.  Somebody had forgotten to refasten the restraining chain.  Man what a mess.  The whole lot turned into a giant omelet and within a matter of minutes, it seemed, every fly within a square mile had gotten the message that plenty of food was available.  So I was sent out to hose and started to wash down the lot.

 I never saw the owner of the place.  It was run by the “foreman,” a skinny white guy who went around telling people what to do and how to do it.  When he saw that omelet, he went berserk.  He started swearing at the top of his lungs.  Spit came flying out of his mouth.  He picked up things and threw them.  H jumped up and down and pounded his feet on the pavement. He got red in the face and I thought he was going to have a fucking convulsion.  I had never seen anything like it.

I had heard the phrase “straw boss” and really hadn’t understood what it meant.  This guy was a straw boss; he gave orders like he was the boss, but the orders, whatever they were, really came from his boss.  He had no power but what his positioned conferred on him, and if things got fucked up, like with the omelet, he could scream and curse and maybe fire somebody, but he would be the one that ultimately got the shaft from his boss.  His fury arouse from his impotence.

Me, I hadn’t been anywhere near that particular truck.

 

 

candling

 

 

Unemployment

During my seven year stretch in the green hole, I had various jobs and also collected unemployment.  That was after I got laid off from the brick layer tender job.  And because that was a union job that paid maybe seven bucks an hour, collecting the unemployment, $65 a week, was invisible manworth it.  (How much you get from unemployment is based on how much you earn)  I didn’t try to collect unemployment when I got laid off from the Newberry’s Department store because the pay was so low that the 30 or so bucks a week I would get wouldn’t be worth the agony of getting it.

You had to go to the unemployment office on a particular day of the week and sometimes the line would stretch clear out into the street.  You could stand in that line for hours as it slowly moved into the building and toward the three or four clerks, I guess they were, that stood at the their posts behind the counter.  And then you had to wait in suspense since it was a single line to see which of the people behind the counter you got, and that did make a difference because one of them, at least, made me feel like shit when I walked up to the window.  When he asked me if I had been looking for work and where I had been looking (which I hadn’t been doing), he made me feel like a lying thief.

I had enough problems in the parasite department as it was.  I had gone off to college to stand on my own two legs and flopped instead.  I paid my parents, when I had some extra, for my roach infested room and the food I ate.  But I didn’t pay them regularly and mostly used the money I made to pay for gas for the car and insurance and to buy cigarettes and some clothes now and then.  They never asked me for more money which was good of them, I guess, but I still felt like a parasite and a loser of the first order.  And my parents sure as hell didn’t do anything to assuage that feeling.  They didn’t speak once about or ask questions about my so-called “mental” problem.

But collecting unemployment I sure felt like a parasite   I was a cigarette smoking parasite that, at times, looked pretty much like a derelict, with my untrimmed beard and my hair sticking out every which away.  And I had real bad BO and also terrible dandruff both in my hair and my beard.

So I was a chain smoking parasite with real bad dandruff.  The appearance situation was made worse by my inability on occasion to go into the barber shop because if I did the barber would know I had come in for a hair cut.  I guess you could say that the barber made me self-conscious, but it wasn’t exactly like that.  I felt he could read my mind maybe, or see right through me, as if I were made out a very thin plastic, to my real intention which was to get a hair cut.

So I felt real shitty collecting unemployment and I guess I looked pretty shitty too.

Vets

Viet Nam vets are now old and gnarly.  They are a sort of passé cliché.  But back then they were young.  They were my age and coming back from the war.  I was working at a Broadway Departmentswift boat Store unloading the trucks and doing other odds and ends.  We got there early and all the guys on the dock as well as other people who worked there would gather by this one door and wait to be let in.

We would knock on the door, or bang on it, or kick it, and start hollering and eventually this really old guy, with a belt of keys, would come down the aisle, about as slow as he could go and let us in.  Joe waited there with us.  He had been in Viet Nam, had long dirty looking dark hair, and looked like he was wasted a lot; he worked somewhere in the store, but not on the docks.  For some reason, that old man just got on Joe’s nerves and he would start to cussing the old man when he took his time getting to the door; Joe would cuss him every step the old man took down that long aisle.

 One day, out of nowhere, Joe didn’t cuss the guy but reared back and before anybody could do a thing kicked the door with his steel tip work boot and broke it to pieces.  I didn’t know you could break a door like that, but Joe did.  He had strung telephone wires through the bush in Viet Nam.  He would creep along in the bushes with the wire so that people up at the front fighting could phone back.  One day he got shot and his left forearm was shattered.  Somebody said he was shot in two places, but I never saw the other place.

 I was a dishwasher at restaurant in a shopping center.  We had three cooks.  One big fat guy, an old lady who passed out from the heat a couple of times, and a young guy, who was mostly American Indian, who had a fine sharp featured face and thick black hair brushed back in an Elvis pompadour.  He had been back from Viet Nam for almost a year, and sometimes when I was washkng dishes, I turned around and he would be going like ack, ack, ack with a broom like it was a machine gun at me.  And once he stuck it right up to my asshole and did that and I almost jumped out of my skin.

 He had been on one of those boats that go up rivers like in the movie, Apocalypse Now, and one day they got off the boat and were checking things out, and he said he saw the guy who shot him up in a tree, and he was hit in the stomach.  But, he said, somebody on his boat had got the fucker.

He had married this white woman who, from the picture he showed me, looked like she was maybe 300 pounds.  He had a child by her, and then they had split up.  She said he had emotional problems; he said she had cheated on him and he had emotional problems.  He wouldn’t pay child support, so most weekends he would check into the county jail and put in time for failure to provide child support.

He asked me to go out drinking with him a few times, and in a way I sort of liked the guy.  But I am not a drinker.  And he told me that he had been in jail because he had been in a bar room fight and poked out a guy’s eye with a bottle, but they had put it back in. So he really couldn’t understand all the fuss. Really the guy scared me.

The MMPP

As part of my war to stay out of the draft, I tried to prove I was insane.  This was not that difficult, since I nearly was, but I needed documentation.  One could go to the LA draft board howling like crazed banshee and they would still take you.  So I took the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Profile, at that time the most used instrument for determining degrees of nuts-ness.

I have cheated on few tests, but I did on this one, not to pass it, but to make sure I failed. I answered yes to a few questions that I really didn’t believe.  I didn’t find the results entirely satisfactory.  They said a) I had massive reading defect b) I was malingering c) I was a danger to myself and others and then went on grimly for two single spaced pages explaining why.

I have a theory that about three quarters of the population is functionally insane and the rest holding on by the skin of their teeth.  Without the diverse forms of insanity society would cease to move; it is fueled however by diverse pathologies.  Sadists become Generals, and Police men, and Surgeons.

I think everybody should be required to take the MMPP. But of course the test is set up to create a normal person; if every body who took the test turned out insane then the test would lack “scientific validity.”

As I remember the test had questions like:

Do you feel that people are watching you?  (Yes, of course, why do you ask?)

Do you cross the street rather than speak to a person you know.  (Why certainly, that’s what streets are made for).

Do you examine? Study? Or eat? Your feces after taking a dump. Or: all of the above.

Do you believe in the Second Coming of Christ?

Do you believe the End is “at hand,” “somewhat close by,” in the “distant future.”

I wonder if the MMPP people have dropped the question about the Second Coming? Or maybe they have changed its value from an indication of insanity to an indication of sanity.  Because if they haven’t a large portion of the population and of persons now running the government, have a) a massive reading defect b) are malingering or c) are a danger to themselves and others.