The Story of Onion and Herb

The photo shoot was over and we went back to his place. It was late. I was tired and wanted to sleep. I slept on the floor. He got the bed. His right leg pulled the sheet up into a knot like a drunken teenager. With his arms over his head grasping the brass headboard and his eyes closed, he looked more like an autopsy photo than a guy who just did a photo session for an on-line bondage site.

Next day: it was eight in the morning. Extra hot in August. A sliver of light through a crack in the curtain ran across the table, the floor and up the side of the wall. It hit me in the eyes and woke me up. Little sparkles of grains of dust and pollen slowly rising into the room like soft clouds of cocaine woke me up coughing. I didn't have a pillow. I used my coat rolled up into a ball. No blanket. No sheet. No covers. But he had a thin sheet keeping him comfortable. I could see through it. His nipples were hard and dark like Brazil nuts with fifty percent less salt. It made me thirsty just to look at him sleeping so oblivious to me, unconcerned about me. His mouth was open, lips dry, parched, breathing through his mouth. I was glad his stuffy nose clogged his head. It was good he couldn't breathe. He sounded nasally when he talked, like country singers. I was glad he was asleep and I was awake. I didn't want to have to deal with him. No talking. No conversation. Nothing but the sound of my absence is all he'd get from me.

I pulled myself up off the floor. Looked for my boots, but gave up. Too hot. No air conditioning, but a swamp cooler made the air humid and wet, like having sex with him. Water dripped from the cooling vents to the floor. Reminded me being in school during nap time after crackers and milk. About one in the afternoon we'd put our heads down and listen to the swamp cooler dripping water into pots and pans, hypnotically sending suggestions into our mind. Music to my ears. Like steel drums. It could always put me to sleep, but not today.

Heat and humidity was unbearable. Dust and dirt was finding its way into my lungs coughing my guts out, mucus in the palms of my hands. I looked for the bathroom. Took a piss. Ran the water in the tub. Took a shower. Washed my hair. Couldn't find a towel. Brushed my teeth with his tooth brush and tooth paste. Looked in the mirror, a full length mirror naked and still dripping wet. I was sexually aroused seeing myself. I started thinking about him. I should wake him. Climb on top, wrestle him, force him on his stomach, pin his arms behind him, force his legs forward while I pushed against him to force it. Do it and get it over with! I should wake him in a way he'll remember. That's the way he liked it when we were together, before the break up. We're not even friends. Going in different directions, hanging out for convenience sake, sleeping in the same room because of my photo exhibit, "The Onion Gallery of Female Impersonators." But now it was the bed, floor, food, window, the dreamy dreary highway of life hitting all the pot holes in every small town from here to there. Both of us wanting something else, someone, anyone else, determined to get away as fast and as far as a Greyhound bus could go.

I had a backpack. He had a suitcase. I liked whiskey. He liked beer. I only had enough money to get three hundred miles, but he had friends who'd send him to California. It didn't matter to me. I was hungry and I wasn't "aroused" anymore. That irritated me. I was frustrated. So I fixed a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of soda water. French fries with mayo, a peach and a candy bar. I ate lunch and watched him toss and turn pretending to sleep. He put his body in a fetal position, I suppose to protect himself from me, or from what he thought I had become. Or maybe he was afraid of what he might do.

The phone rang. Should I answer it? There's nobody knows I'm here. It's probably for him. He's hoping I'll hurry up and run out, get sacred, ignore the phone, close the door, lock it and run away, don't look back. That's what I should've done. The phone rings again. It's annoying. I can't stand it. I pick it up and don't say anything. I just listen. There's nothing there. Silence. Nobody says anything. I can hear breathing. At first it's slow and soft, then it gets louder, faster, deeper. Sounds like a man. I hold the phone and keep listening. Should I say something or hang up?

"Who's this?" the man says finally.

"Who's this?" I say.

"Where is he? Let me talk to him!"

"He's sleeping."

"I don't know you, do I?" he says.

"Who are you? You tell me!"

"What the hell's wrong with you! Let me talk to him, NOW or else there's gonna be trouble!" He asks lots of questions and makes rapid-fire demands.

"I told you he's sleeping. That's it! You got a problem with that!?"

"Yeah, I got a problem with YOU!" he says.


I hung up. I don't just hang up. I slammed it down so hard it broke one of the little push button numbers on the phone. It fell off and hit the floor, bounced under the bed. I got on my hands and knees. It hadn't been cleaned since he moved in. I found magazines, broken pencils, a mirror, a rusty razor blade, empty cigarette packs, empty matchbooks. Finally I got it. The number Nine. I put it back on the phone. Put the phone on the table. I stood there looking and feeling stupid, angry at my cowardice, because I didn't know who it was. I didn't like the sound of his voice.

Minutes later the phone rang again. This time I saw his eyes open. Then it rang again. I grabbed it and made a gesture with my other hand the way I stroke the fires of an erection when I've got nothing else to do. I put the phone to my ear and listened. Silence. Nobody says a word. I look at him in bed with his eyes open. He yawns, plays with his curly hair hanging down around his face. He rubs the sleep out of his eyes, licks his lips like a snake. I listen to the phone. I'm getting nervous. I start breathing heavier. My heart beats faster. I hear it in my throat. I feel it in my chest. I'm getting mad. I want to do something but I don't know what.

"Hey!" His voice hits me in the stomach like an electric bass through a Marshal amp turned up to ten! "I know he's there. I know where he lives. Put him on the phone or I'll be over in fifteen minutes to kick both your asses!"

I threw the phone down. The receiver hangs over the edge of the bed banging on the floor. I hear the guy's voice on the other end yelling, screaming, threatening.

"Answer it! Pick it up!" I say.

He yawns, sits up, rests his weight on one elbow and scratches his toes. He takes the phone close and personal like he was kissing it. If he could slide his tongue inside the phone all the way into the other guy's mouth, I get the feeling he's done it before.

"It's me. What do you want?" he says.

I can't tell what the other guy's saying. I can't hear him. I look around the room for my boots. I pull my shirt over my head, finish getting dressed. He's busy on the phone. He gets my attention, points to an ash tray with a cigarette in it. Snaps his fingers for me to pass it to him with a lighter. I do it. He lights up and blows smoke in my face. This morning his face is plain looking, his eyes unresponsive, white, pale, no emotion. Then his eyes widen larger filled with anger. Deep stress lines appear on his forehead.

"Like hell you will!" he says.

He squints. Puffs on a cigarette and blows smoke so hard he spits on me. I walk away. Look through my wallet, count my money, check the room for things I might've missed. He snaps his fingers again for me to sit down. I do what he says. I sat down and waited. It seems like forever. I'm impatient. Can't sit around all day.

"You can go to hell!" he screams at the phone and slams it down.
Poor little number nine push button falls off the phone again, hits the floor bounces under a table. He kicks the phone off the bed, it hits me in the ankle. He's mad about something. He gets out of bed stark naked except for his black underwear briefs and the black forest of chest hair. He goes to the bathroom, stands up, takes a piss. He turns to me and says, "What are you looking at!?"

"Nothing. I'm leaving."

"The hell you are!"

He shuts the toilet seat without shaking off and puts on jeans. Takes a t-shirt out of a pile of dirty clothes on the bathroom floor and puts it on. It's too short. Too tight. Doesn't even come to his waist. The sleeves are short too. I can see nipples pressing through thin fabric, trying to push through flimsy material, wanting to escape a tight fit like two convicts in solitary too long. His arms are long and lean. My meds are making me imagine things. I hear voices in my head. They tell me to do it right now. They say to overpower him, knock him down, slap him around, force him to submit. The voices tell me to get it done and over with and leave him in a pool of sweat. So I get behind him, positioning myself to make my move. I see myself in the full length mirror. I'm all wound up again. I was prepared to grab my left arm around his neck to chock him, pull his hair with my other hand, yank it back as hard as I can, knock him off balance, throw him on the floor. I was one step away from taking him down. The way he dressed in front of me he deserved it. He was asking for it. I was less than a foot away from the back of his head, reaching my arm around towards his neck, ready to get it done when at that exact moment I heard footsteps on the stairs outside the door. I heard the stairs creek and crack. I had heard that same sound earlier in the day when I walked up the stairs to the front door. I made a mental note of it. I knew that sound and I knew someone was there at the top of the stairs, standing outside the door listening, waiting.

Suddenly the door kicked in. It wasn't much of a door but now it was just splinters. My friend ran out the backdoor down the back stairway toward the alley to get away and I was on my own. A man was moving towards me fast. He hit me in the face. Hit me in the head with a telephone book lying on the table. I think it was the yellow pages which was bigger than the white pages. I fell back, my shoulders slammed into the kitchen table. He kicked me in my right side and I doubled up on the floor, my nose bleeding. He kicked me in the ribs. Ripped the phone cord out of the wall and threw the phone across the room. It shattered. He took off running out the back door down the back stairway toward the alley chasing after my friend. I heard a fight, a scream. I heard garbage cans and bottles smash and break, rolling around outside the alley. Another scream. More fighting. Another scream. I heard someone getting slapped around, slugged, punched, kicked. I heard thumping sounds, like steady thumping, beating, bumping noises and then footsteps coming up the stairway, up towards the back door of the apartment. I looked up from where I was lying on the floor pretending to be knocked out cold. I saw a man dragging him by his hair, each time hitting his head on the steps as he dragged him to the kitchen. He wasn't screaming now. He dragged him to the kitchen, slammed the door shut and dropped him on the linoleum floor. His head made a thud. The guy walked over to me, picked me up by my shirt and slugged me in the stomach. I couldn't breathe. Gasping for air. I fell to my knees. He pushed me backwards with his boot on my chest. I fell back and hit my head on the floor. That's all I remember.

It was dark when I woke up. Night time. It was quiet. Not a sound. There was light coming from the street next to the alley, a light coming into the room. I could see him on the kitchen floor the same place where he was before. He hadn't moved. I looked around and saw the phone busted up. My nose had been bleeding but it stopped. I had a few cuts and bruises, a bump on the back of my head. I got up slowly and called his name. The front door was busted and the porch light went thru a crack in the frame. I could see him on the floor. He wasn't moving. I called his name and crawled to him. Touched him. I took his hair in my hands and pulled it a little to see if he'd move. I pulled it a little harder. I pulled it hard enough to lift his head up off the floor and turn it to one side to get a good look. He was pretty bloody and beat up. His teeth had been knocked out. I don't know if he was breathing or not.

A jealous boyfriend. A pimp. An evangelical Christian conservative having a homosexual affair and his wife finds out and he lost his church so he's mad enough to kill: If-I-can't-have-you-nobody-will! A frantic politician gets caught having sex with a man in an airport bathroom and a drug deal goes bad. Ex-husband decides to settle an old score. Homophobe beats up neighborhood fags.

I got some money from a local church, enough to buy a bus ticket. I didn't care about the photo exhibit anymore. I wanted to get as far away as possible. It was too late for me and I was out of time. I took a seat in the back of the bus. Pulled my coat over my shoulders, wrapped my arms around me to keep warm. Put my legs and feet over the seat next to me to make more room, stretched out the best I could. Closed my eyes and listened to the engine of the big bus roaring down the highway. Conversations subdued. It was night. It was late. It was quiet. People were sleeping and we had a long way to go before the next rest stop.

THE END

THE END.

The end. Aug. 28, 1958-June 25, 2009

I remember he was too thin and tubercular. He was always somewhere on the scale of "the end" for years. Some people think he died a long time ago. Maybe he did and we won't admit it. We bought into the disappearing act. The con. We like being lied to and we do it best to ourselves. Nobody lies to us better than we do. Frank Sinatra did it to us. Elvis did it to us. Liz Taylor did it. Lisa Minnelli. Other female impersonators. Male imposters. Big fans of Mike's. We can think of many others whose careers died, they were memorialized, buried, cremated, innocence forgotten....... and then overnight they were reincarnated. And in the end, nobody dances. Not a soul. Maybe that's what "come backs" are all about. You die and then you "come back" bigger and better than before.

What happened on June 25th is nothing new. It's about time. Not that he deserved it because he didn't. He didn't earn it. It's not like earning a reward for walking across a parking lot or escaping a movie theater in the middle of a bad movie. As soon as he was out of sight it happened, like climbing stairs to a hotel room. Like the eyes of a woman standing in a doorway without moving, worried she had too much perfume. He reinvented himself with broken fingernails. He was reborn, repackaged and redesigned in the mind of a gullible public like hungry derelicts with no destination.

Highlights of his life: He curled his lips and sat on the bed. His fingers were always in my pants. He was too anxious to get my money. His soul was ripped to pieces. His mouth bit my lower lip. He danced like a great author who was a lover of man and beast. Our sickly eyes watched him starve. We never let him kiss our sister. We let him drag innocence into the sewer. He had an odor of oldness. He put his hands on his hips. Disinterested in merely sitting down, he annoyed us with the absurdity of a hopelessly bad lover. He made gestures with his fingers. He pulled off his coat. He talked too little, too much. He was scared and smiled weakly at what he'd done. It took a long time for him to breathe without rouge. He didn't know what was happening.

I thought about it, how I felt, not feeling anything. I had liquor on my breath. But it was about time anyway, meaning it was like turning out a light, sleeping in a chair, jumping off a bed, smoking a cigarette, going outside, tearing up the lyrics to a song. What took him so long to shake hands, to drink and dance? When the mask concealing his unimpressed expressions knocked on the door to deliver his invitation to the dance, what took him so long to open it? Was he pale and trembling? Was he prepared? Sad that a man's death isn't his own, that we all bought tickets to this spectacle. We were corporate sponsors. we were the organ donors dragging out the inevitable. We felt dirty and guilty the way you do when you get away with a crime. When he crossed the street in front of a speeding truck, we watched him through the window. We saw him coming around the corner but we didn't run to stop him.

Beauty & the Bukowski Chapter One

Some people have bad breath. Some people have bad teeth. Bad gums. Bad credit. Bad examples. Bad coffee. Bad drugs. Bad health. Bad marriages. Bad luck. Me, well, I've got all that and then some. The worst of it is, I have bad dreams. Nightmares! Hideous dreams that give me convulsions. Makes me want to drink myself into the dust. Makes me want to throw up my lunch in a doorway somewhere. Makes me want to go back to my room, lay in the darkness, order a beer, look at the ceiling, disappear behind a wall, jump out a window, clamp my lips to the back of a cable car, put my hands in my pockets and be dragged away. The only reason I don't is because I wanna be a photographer. Someday when I grow up, I'm gonna be one or know the reason why! But for right now, I'm in the middle of a sidewalk taking pictures of a cigarette butt I found in the gutter.

By the way, clonazepam doesnt always work. It has too many mood swings. Today's one of those days. One of those days when jazz is crude. It's either too fast, too slow, too sentimental, or too square. Sitting in a cafe nobody's there to wait on me. My thumb on my left hand is in a splint. It wont bend. It hurts if it bends. My meds arent working either and I'm feeling depressed. I've got a bottle of Jack Daniels and vicodin. That might help, but probably not. The fan on my computer is too loud for some reason, it's never this loud.

I took some more pictures and fell asleep on the sidewalk outside a bar. I went back to my room, found a note on the door. I dont know if I read it or not. Maybe I ignored it. I stood close to the wall, slid into my apartment like somebody's tongue in my mouth. I sat on the steps, my head in my hands thinking. I put the note next to me. I heard Coltrane pacing around in the room next to mine, playing modal scales over and over. I was in a bar being talked to by a woman with a dark face, big dark eyes, long white graceful neck. Full red lips. Her face torn apart, torn open like paper. I read the paper looking inside her mouth. And what a mouth it was! Her tongue had faces of women all over it like fever blisters living in the spare room from the world of tomorrow, a grim horrible vision of my wet hands wrapped around her throat, sweat dripping from her hair, lips smiling. I opened a door and looked inside for a magazine. An old dog lifted his leg and pissed on my computer. I walked across the street mad enough to kick him but I was in a robe. No, I wasn't in a robe. I was in my bed and a red light flashed on and off through the window. I remembered that I changed my mind about the photo shoot.

It was nauseating but when I thought about photography I forgot I was sick. The woman with a face like dull darkness bent over at the waist and her short skirt got even shorter. She gave me her hand, I gave her something else. She pressed her body against me. I was embarrassed that I couldn't think of anything else to do so I picked up my camera. I was furious that I couldnt kick the habit. It was unnatural. It was absurd. I sat down across the table. She crossed her legs and they fell off her body. I took a picture of them and had no repentance, not even an apology. She laughed. It was terribly funny. I felt crushed. I dropped my camera...... again. Without saying a word her skin began to crumble off her face. That gave me bad gas. My stomach was bloated. I was in a pure state of morbid illness.

I remembered what Dostoevsky wrote: "Every decent man of our time is and must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condtion." The next thing I knew i had dizzy spells. Insomina. Pains in my chest. Shortness of breath. Loss of appetite. Itchy skin. I lost five pounds in a week. Ten pounds in a month. When I pissed it burned. When I slept I had night sweats. I dreamt I saw a photograph of my father. What the hell does that mean? The psychic said I was clinging to false hope. Guilt. A happy situation in the past I wanted to go back to. Something isn't as it seems to be. Isn't that what photography is?

I began to toss and turn. It hurt. I woke up on the sidewalk. A cop was shaking me awake. I had a broken bottle of whisky next to me running, spilling out on the street corner. He was yelling at me. People were walking past taking pictures of me. My camera was gone. My money was gone. Then the answer came to me: in America, nobody listens to each other. We listen to what other people say to other people. We eavesdrop! I don't look at other people's photos; I only look at my own and admire them. I eavesdrop on myself! I con myself. I scream about my own stuff and die for photos I can't take myself!

Beauty & the Bukowski Chapter Two

I hung a sign outside on the door to my apartment, three floors up from the street: "Photographer for hire. Looking for women who want to be photographed in the worst way. Must be willing do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to get it done, or else don't waste my time. You get the experience but not the money. I get the money, I don't need the experience. Interested? See occupant inside apartment #9. Or go to Club Open 24/7 and ask for Benny the Jazz."

A few days later I woke up to some loud knocking on my door like a machine gun. I was sound asleep at 5 in the morning. Who could it be and why would they wanna see me? "Go the hell away!" – I yelled half asleep. I'd forgotten about the ad. "Hang on! Wait a minute!" - I said. I sat up in bed with a wool blanket and a white sheet wrapped around me just like in the hospital. I threw both feet on the floor with a hard thud. I pulled myself up without any help, barely standing straight. I rubbed my eyes to get the sleep out and looked around.

I walked over to the light switch and turned it on. I stood there some more, naked. I took some time to admire myself in the mirror. Winked. Flirted. "Not bad" - I thought. My tan, thin, young naked body may be all the rage but it was no way to answer a knock on the door unless I know who it is, and even then what the hell! My blue jeans hung over the back of a chair where I left them. My wallet was in my pocket but it was empty. I grabbed them off the chair and slid 'em on like slippery snake skin. I snapped the fly shut. They fitted loose but snug, hanging below my belly button to show just enough hair above my crotch to be interesting depending on who was interested. Low hangers. Hip huggers. Waist huggers. Whatever....... they fit like they belonged to a bricklayer.

There was another knock on the door even louder than the first. Didn't sound like cops. It didn't have that ominous wooden night-stick sound so familiar. "Hold on!" - I yelled, again. I didn't have a shirt but I didn't care. I liked the way I looked. I had new definition and muscle tone in my arms and chest so I didn't care about a shirt. Without a shirt it was still cold in here since I didn't have the heat on. Trying to save money. Another loud knock. "Bang! Bang! Bang!" I went to the sink. Brushed my teeth. Wet my hands, splashed my face and brushed my hair.

I looked around to check it out, turned the coffee on. Another knock. Wham! Bang! Bing! "OK! I'm coming!" - I yelled again. This time I walked to the door. Looked thru the tiny peep hole and opened it.

"Good morning!" - she said. I stood there bare foot and half naked and looked her up and down, undressing her with my bloodshot eyes. I saw she had small hands but big dark eyes with rings around them. I saw she had fake eye lashes scribbled on her forehead like a Jackson Pollack painting. I saw she had small feet with luxuriant red polish smeared between her toes. I saw she had long legs, stilettos and a lacy red French thong underneath her short skirt. I saw she had a small female body: narrow, slim, slender, white, pale and a little sickly. I saw she had teeny-tiny freckles all over her body. First impressions, I thought she had low blood platelets, about which I had some personal knowledge. I dismissed that idea as soon as she opened her mouth and wiggled her tongue. Her lips were perfectly luscious! But I wondered if she had freckles in her ears. I saw she had thick, long wavy red hair past her butt. It looked like she had a tight butt. I wondered if her pubic hair was red, too. I never trusted women with pubic hair a different color than the hair on their head. It reminded me of spaghetti in a dish of water.

Anyway, she stood at the door and glanced at my empty bed in the corner of the room, what I call my "photographer's studio". The cold air in the room hit us like a thousand needles. That made me think about Needles, California, how hot it was and how much I hated it. And that made me think about the freckles covering her face like ants covering a bowl of cat food. Needles had a lot of stray cats crawling out from the contaminated Colorado River, and everybody hated that! Which made me think about her eyes which were dark and hard to forget. I didn't hate them; I was afraid of them. That made me think about the old mattress I used to have when I lived on Van Ness. It never got wet except during sex, but after a hundred, two hundred nights who cared?

"Who are you?" I said. "Whaddya want?"
"I'm here to get my picture taken", she said.
"Whaddya talking about?"
"You need women to photograph, right? I saw your ad. Here I am"

Then I remembered. No wonder she smelled so good. She had creamy looking legs. My attention was glued to the muscles in her thighs and calves. Out of the corner of my eye I saw she looked around the room. She looked at the bed. "Where's the bathroom?" - she asked plaintively. I pointed to a door with a towel hanging on a hook. She walked over, opened it, went inside and shut it. A few minutes later she came out. Something must've pissed her off. Probably the dirty toilet seat. I felt like spitting. Everybody in the apartment building knew what she was up to except me. I wished I had a bathtub!

I felt like washing my feet. Her thighs were looking cold with goose bumps appearing under her skin. She was smooth as silk. A smooth operator. She had nightmares each night, the giant dirty hand that plucked her from her bed, carried her to the bathroom, and shook her out over the toilet...when she awoke in the morning, she realized they weren't nightmares, they were her life--the dream was that she had fallen asleep in the first place...She must have shaved her legs this morning. I ran my fingers up and down the backs of her legs, up and down the insides of her photogenic legs. I couldn't stop thinking about legs. The photo shoot would be all about legs, legs and more legs! Smooth black legs. Clean legs. White legs. No stubble legs. I figured she'd do just fine for the photos. I said - "Let's do it!"

But just to be sure she was the right one I asked her if she cried much lately. I had to know. It was important somehow. She said she cried the night before. I asked her how she did it. She stuck a fork in the bottom of her feet and sucked the tears out the tips of her toenails. She put her hand thru a plate glass window but couldn't cry. Couldn't bleed. Didn't know why. Ended up in Oakland in an apartment complex. I had friends there. As it turned out they were heroin users.

I tried it a couple times but wasn't into it. Junk was good to write poetry and stories like this one here, but that was about all it was good for. I got sick. I remember I was laid up in bed with my legs hanging outside over the side of the bed, just like in the hospital waiting for girls to come in, or nurses, or whoever...hallucinating they kissed me goodnight, tucked me in before I threw up in the waste basket. I wrote a poem about it on morphine, for pain, you know (LOL). Anyway, a shadowy apparition comes in my room, stands over me, looks down at me like the death angel or something worse. My shirt ripped open, unbuttoned to my waist. My legs hanging over the side of the bed like I'd stolen a motorcycle. My eyes blurry, wet, out of focus from dampness and fog stinging my face at a hundred miles an hour. Heroin and morphine made me look sexy. Ah! the painkillers. My good buddy, "Benny the Jazz", helped me mainline it. I couldn't go home for days. Now I'm getting off point.

I had the women ready and set up for the big photo shoot. We were in a beatnik hotel in North Beach, somewhere downtown San Francisco.... Every morning we'd walk down the hall to the showers. We'd make coffee in my room but we couldn't take a piss. We'd brush our teeth in the sink but we couldn't take a crap. We'd watch the news and polish our boots but we couldn't turn on the heat. Ms. Hotel Manager made us remove our gloves and wash our hands before getting undressed. She had a college education. It wasn't much of an education but just enough to know how to cook burritos at a carnival. Women always meant trouble for me but I couldn't help liking them for that.

Beauty & the Bukowski Chapter Three

I was bored again today. Like everyday, but today I was indifferent. It was another day as useless to me as it is to you. I decided to take photos of women - broken women, ugly women, strange women, beautiful women, women with drugs, flaws and hangups and women who liked to drink. I put an ad on Haig's List: "WANTED. Women to be photographed in bad lighting. Must have sad lives, empty, miserable and meaningless. Must have a few hours to kill. Hours that you'll never miss."

I got dozens of calls. I took them all. How lonely they all were. And then the depression came. How sad. How tragic. All together, their breath smelled like an outhouse in Montana, but another 100mls of MS Contin and I'd be alright. When I called their names one by one over the loud speaker, their sickly lovely eyes filled with tears like blood. Just then I wanted to send them all away with a flurry. It was on the tip of my tongue, but I knew I'd never say it because they shared the soul of a thief. These were starving women wearing short little sexy nurse's aprons. In their hands and arms they carried paperback books and fashion magazines held close to their chests like nursing babies sucking on their tit. I was hoping they'd find out for themselves what it was all about, because I sure as hell didnt know.

They got to my place, my "office" and walked in to my studio. I told them to sit down on the floor in the corner, to cross their legs and wait. They waited for me to kiss them, but that never happened. Instead, I made them kiss a lizard's head and something I pulled out the ocean, something that pounded in their throats, gagging them just a little. So I stroked their foreheads. Yeah, I did, that's right... I did it to each one of them to get them relaxed before the big photo shoot. I knew how nervous they were. They looked at me and I told them to close their eyes. I knew their thoughts. I could read minds. I could read palms. I studied their faces and I knew they loved somebody else, not me. But that was good news. I knew how hard it was to be with several women at the same time and talk about how great other women were.

It was hot in my studio before we went outside, and it was hot out there, too. But they sat some more, a long time really, and waited for the cobwebs to fall from the ceiling, but that didnt happen either. They waited to burn incense and drink something new from the urban jungle of a big city that tasted like a small town. It was a drink that was vague and nameless. It was stronger than lonliness.More bitter than restlessness. Blacker than a disturbance. Harder to kick than thunder, death and self-destruction.

While I was getting my camera phone ready to flip open, the sophisticated women waited to sit at my feet. They begged me to turn on the air conditioner, but I made them get on their knees and adore me like as if they had finally found the one true love with all the passion they read about in those paperback books. They waited for me to cover their faces in rouge and powder but I just laughed at things not amusing. They didnt understand what was happening. I didnt either, but I didnt care. I looked around for more liquid dilaudid and took a hit. I was ready. I knew that when night came I would know what to do with it. And when it was done, I knew they'd all be fatter than when they started. Their faces would look unhealthy. They'd be drunk. They'd look grotesque.

We went outside. I took out my camera phone and started taking pictures. I did it upside down, rightside up, sideways, backwards, inside out, anyway I could. The morphine made me feel like a snake crawling through a parking lot. It was madness. Some of these women were housekeepers. Maids. Some were married. Their husbands had been unfaithful to them. Some of them drank all day and became reckless. I tried to forget the ugliness, but I wasn't that good of a photographer. I tried to imagine the spirit of a woman stumbling around at night in the dark with a wet tongue, wet lips, the taunting kiss of death and sweet body oils with the fragrance of impetuous youth. I wondered if it was as ugly as the flesh.

We did the shooting on location all night and all the next day. I nailed one of the girls to this great white cross pointing to her brain. We all know we're going to die someday and there's nothing we can do about it, but when it's over, they'll be laughng and crying hysterically. So I got them lying on their faces, pulling and scratching at each other's eyes and hair. A real cat fight. I got them to scream at each other about nothing, because it was all so silly. They were persecuting themselves. They didnt listen to reasons. It didnt matter anyway whether they committed mortal sins or not. Psychologically speaking, the photos were images of guilt and forgiveness. They were myths. They belonged to fat days.

They were all starting to irritate me and I had to get the hell out of there fast. The painkillers were wearing off. I needed my daily fix of clonazepam. I could feel temptation knocking on death's door. I could see golden blond hair growing out of the heads of old women in black. I could hear the cries of young girls with no shoes, boys with no clothes, men snoring, sleeping on bus stop benches, getting wooden slivers in their legs from turning over. I saw food spoiling on the shelves of the super market.

So I told them all to wait, that I had to go down to my car (which I didn't have a car) and I'd be back in a minute or two. I told them to get dressed and comb their hair in front of the mirror. I lied. I was tired. I walked out the door and said "goodbye, take care of yourselves." But there was no escape from the odor that was on my pillow when I tried to go to sleep later. There was only the smell of sadness.

The Cafe

(Cafe with Fire Hydrant) There's something existential about cafes. They're social gathering holes that remain as ambiguous as possible. They're places where people can go without making any committments to go anywhere else afterwards. They're places to go for a quickie or to break promises over a bottle of wine and roses, maybe violins at the table if it's a real sob story. Cafe's are places businessmen can go for lunch and back out of contracts. Husbands and wifes, or casual sex partners of either sex can eat and drink at a cafe and lie to each other, cheat on each other in the middle of the day between meetings and make promises they never intend to keep it. Cafes also have several names in case you're interested: like bistro, coffee house, restaurant. The French spell it like café. Italians spell it caffè. There's also the cafeteria, the romantic sidewalk cafe, a tea shop, an informal bar that only serves beer and wine, and of course the internet cafe. Sometimes a cafe is referred to as a greasy spoon. Whatever, these are photos of cafes in San Francisco. I never ate in any of them. I never had a drink in any of them, which is not to say they water them down; I'm sure they serve nice full bodied liquor. (Cafe and Me)

(Cafe Atmosphere) The last time i was in San Francisco I didnt drink a drop. Nothing except carbonated water and lemons. And coffee. My favorite "cafe" (Vesuvio's Cafe) isnt really a cafe. It's a full-fledged alcoholic hangout beatnik bar. It serves no food whatsoever, but you can buy food somewhere else and bring it in and eat it at your table, which is pretty cool. It stays open 365 days a year from 6am to 2am everyday without fail, holidays and everything, they're always open. It's the only bar in the city that does that. They've done it that way for years. (Cafe and Wooden Chairs)

(Cafe Mainlining) The last time I was in San Francisco for medical treatment a couple months ago ($10,000 a day, for four days. No lie! luckily I had high-end insurance) I stayed at a cheap North Beach hotel just a block away from Vesuvio's. I drank my first morning cup of espresso coffee in one of the booths upstairs overlooking Columbus Ave. It reminds me of a European cafe, but it's more of a dingy beat up old jazz bar that sponsors art exhibits inside the club on the walls. I mention all this only because that's where I feel the most connection to the dead, the presence of the dead walk around that place like misty vapor coming up from the tables, or downstaitrs in the men's room, in the basement. The ghosts. The great writers all passed thru there drinking and talking. How many of them took a piss in that same location? Maybe I stood in the same spot where Kerouac shook it off and zipped up afterwards. How cool is that? Or maybe Chet Baker went down there to shoot up in the toilet stall when he was on a break from playing Enrico's or the Keystone Korner, where I saw Elvin Jones and Art Blakey play there to an SRO crowd. (Cafe and the Three of Cups)

(Cafe and Condiments) I used to cop some coke and go down there and open up my little paper and stick a straw in it and snort it up and flush the toilet to hide the sound of my inhaling it. It wasnt very good coke mostly, not from those street sources, but I'd get it from a guy named "Copperfield" and we usually had a good old time drinking and talking afterwards; it was cut with speed which was OK with me. I'd drink JD straight up doubles. The cafe is a good place for that kind of social interaction. But that was then, and this is now and fortunatelty I can still remember it without any liver damage. (Cafe and Feet)

(Cafe, Flowers and Empty Glasses) Anyway, I hung out there upstairs at a table by the windows or at a private booth and took tons of photos out thru the windows. I took photos of tables and chairs; they've got some beautiful tables. Finally, I got bored and thought I couldnt find anything else to photograph. I started changing the angle of the picture. I'd put the camera on the floor, above my head, behind my back, upside down, inside out....all photos of cafes. Cafes are places where people go, that's for sure. Some cafes stay open later than others. In Chinatown, late at night, they're almost empty. Very lonely looking places. Very sad looking people with chopsticks and tea. But anyway, these photos are pics of cafes in the city. Maybe one day some of you will visit San Francisco and recognize one of these places. Go ahead and put the bill on my tab. (Cafe with a strange man in ther window)

Honesty and Simplicity

(Cafe 1) I'm letting Hank Bukowski's writing style influence perspectives for my photography. Meaning, I want to take a photo of something just the way it is, just how the thing turned out without any touchups, without doing anything to change it or make it more appealing, or think it's more appealing, or self-edit it, or censor it, or whatever I could do to make it look different, or better than it really is. (Cafe 2) I want to take the photo and leave it alone, like if I was using a typewriter instead of a word processor, where I cant cut and paste and rewrite the damn thing and use spell checker. Like, using an old typewriter and just typing it once and letting it go at that. (Cafe 3)

(Cafe 4) These photos of mostly closed San Francisco cafes, either before or after regular working hours, are some examples of this idea to leave the photo alone no matter how it looks. (Cafe 5) Of course, I selected these and I have others and I'll probably put more up tomrrow. I like the emptiness of them, the colorful way they are designed, the way the reflections appear in the windows. There was no double exposures or any thing like that. (Cafe 6)

(Cafe 7) In some other ways, they have sex appeal and sensuous female vibes, short skirts, high heels, a feeling of transition, of passing crowds going in and out the front door constantly every day, going in and out like thru a revolving door, customers coming and going, impressing people, themselves and each other, credit cards, ordering food in different languages, spending money, cash tips, drinking, entertaining, (Cafe 8) convenience, travel, meetings, business, dating, drinking coffee black, espresso, expensive wine, hard liquor, chop sticks, napkins, bathrooms, valet parking, nice clothes, work clothes, expense accounts, sea food, no smoking, singles, gays, the theater crowd, businessmen, handsome women, repeat business. (Cafe 9) So, I'll put them up here on JPG directly from the camera like plain and honest words typed with simplicity on a piece of paper on a typer. (Cafe 10) And then we'll see. (Cafe 11)

Exhibit

Exhibit: "To put something on display."

since i've been getting medical attention, i put myself on display: i'm an exhibit and the meds make me less inhibited than ever. it was kind of like i was outside my body, up above the bed looking down on my body laying on the bed. i didnt care if i was under the covers or half naked on top of the blankets. the sheets were thin, the blankets were thin and light blue, the pillows had a fleshy hue to them and the smell of medicine. i could look down from the ceiling as i floated up above the hospital bed and look at myself laying there. nothing bothered me about my legs gripping the side of the bed and riding the sheets, waiting for the lab techies to come in and take blood. i didnt care if the blinds on the windows were up or down. the door could be open or closed; it didnt bother me either way. i got really good at taking self-portraits. i took better photos of myself than i ever had from any body else.

even now, when i'm alone, i can see shadows move at the corner of my eyes, they move around the doors and windows, i can see them. i look really fast but there's nothing there. in the hospital room, it was dark sometimes, and i could see shadows move across the walls, i could feel my hands touch my skin like as if it was the skin of some other thing. i started to listen and in the dark, against the wall, i could hear whispering sounded like my own voice talking to myself. i'd take photos of my feet, my hands, my legs, my eyes, my face and hair, my shoes, my arms...i'd take photos from above on the ceiling floating around up near the walls and put the photos in an exhibit, like a public display that was better than anything else i could do. and i couldnt stop. there was always something more to see. more to do. more places to go at night alone. i took long walks out in the garden wearing nothing but a robe, and carrying roses and a camera phone. i wouldnt even wear shoes and socks. i would go down the hall and nobody would even see me or hear me breathe. i went to the hospital library and took out books that were written about narcissism and nihilism. i read them in bed. i memorized them in the shower. i recited them to my nurses and doctors and lab techies when they took blood.

i took photos of the hair on my toes, little gentle slightly sensuous hairs on my toes, my hands and fingers, very soft hairs that photographed well. in the dark, in bed, there was a light behind me, behind my bed that i kept on all night in case i woke up and wanted to read or take photographs of my bed. i took hundred of pictures of my body in different positions on the bed, on the floor, in the shower, in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, shadows on the wall, in the hallways, hanging from the ceiling. i took pictures of the blood being sucked out of me by the lab techies in the middle of the night, around 2am, or 3am...they'd come in one at a time and tie me off and pull the blood out and we'd talk and i'd take photos. self-portraits. i got good at doing different angles and colors. the light from outside would make great shadows against the back of my head. i could read with my eyes closed. and i could listen to jazz all night. the photos got better and the jazz got louder. the legs on the chairs werent as attractive as my own legs, but i took photos of all of it. i was preparing an exhibit of my body and my mind and i was going to stay up late every night until i had the photos put together in a complete package. but i never could stay awake long enough.

i fell asleep and had dreams. always dreams. my hands and arms grew longer and my fingers were able to reach everything and hold onto the doors. i went into the shower and the water was so hot. i took off my clothes and sat on the floor of the shower and let the water slice my body in different shapes. i took the camera and snapped photographs of my legs falling off and clinging to the side of the shower wall. they looked so sensuous hanging there. beautifully shaped. the skin tone is beautiful and dark, like a tan from mexico in the summer laying on the heavy salt water. i was still in the hospital in the morning and the door was unlocked but i didnt care if anyone saw me or not. i didnt have any clothes, and so i was on the bed under the white sheets and i could see my skin through the thin sheets and i could hear the drummer next door pounding and beating his drums, playing a solo with the bass player. it was so good. my photos came out great and i could eat whatever i wanted, whenever i wanted, as often as i wanted to eat. little portions of food, fruit, meat, water, coffee......whatever i wanted, whatever food made my body hard and tight and beautiful to look at it.

i got dizzy. i got hot. i couldnt stand straight up. i couldnt walk in a straight line. my mind was thinking backwards, like the words were being pronounced backwards. but it didnt matter to me as long as i could see the mirror that was hanging on the wall in front of my bed. it was so quiet at night, even with the window open. even with the sirens screaming and the girl next door making noise. i think she had her boyfriend over there with her banging her head against the wall, banging the bed against the wall right by my head where i put it on the pillow and tried to sleep; but i didnt try very hard. i tried to sit up in bed but i'd slip down beneath the blanket. the sheet was wet because i was sweating. the heater was too high and i couldnt turn it off. this wasnt a dream, either. this was the normal stuff that happened every night and every day. the only thing i could do to pass the time was to take photos of myself, photos of my legs, my boots and my feet, my hands, my stomach, my head and my face. i'd find ways to take pictures using different lighting effects. i'd go down the hallway, i'd walk to the bathroom, climb in the shower night after night, and find ways to get a new viewpoint. i'd find ways to let the damp night air climb into the room and get in bed with me and massage my legs until i'd drift off to dreamland. i took so many drugs, so much medication, so many pills in little plastic cups.

i had a calendar in the closet and i'd look at it every day or so to see where i was at, to see how many days i had left before i'd get out. i marked off the time with little marks on the wall using a small pocket knife, marking little notches in the wood, in the wall so i could count the days and the nights. my body was getting thnner and thinner. i was losing weight. i was getting fevers at night. my shoes didnt fit me anymore. the drugs were making my eyes blurry and the money in my wallet was turning into sand. i had piles of sand in the drawers. the bathroom mirror was full of sand. my shoes wouldnt fit me. my fingers were getting too big for my hands. i had to wear gloves but the only ones i could find were red. my room was red. everything was red. i tried to call my doctor and get more meds. i tried to get in the elevator and go to the 6th floor and play the piano but it wouldnt go that high. i tried to climb the stairs but the doors wouldnt open. nothing worked right. the pills were making me dizzy. i couldnt sit up. my legs looked long and lean and i thought about buying new blue jeans, but thinking about it gave me a headache and made my ears ring, buzz, hiss. it was really bad.

Hotel Jazz

I'm in a hotel in San Francisco. I call it "Hotel Jazz" because it smells like jazz, it smells like body odor and bad breath, it smells like dirty socks, lipstick, sex and perfume. It smells like dope and wet kisses slowly dripping down my face, dripping down to my boots. I can polish them with the spit from leftover lip locking the night before. If it's lucky, the club smells like money, like history, like a museum. That's the first thing I notice when I open the doors and walk in, the smell of the past, not only the night before but weeks and months and sometimes years before. It's not a fragrance; that's too good a word for it; women wear fragrances, men wear aftershave spray, but a bar has a smell it can never get rid of. "Smell" is like somethng you want to forget but you cant; it gets in your skin, on your clothes, in your hair and in your mouth. There's a smell of a jazz club 6am when the bar opens. It's wet and damp and salty, and always sticky in there; and it's cool, before the sun comes in the tinted windows from the eastside looking across the street where it's still shady and windy and heats up the place. But in the morning the inside of the bar is comfortable and empty. The tables have been wiped up, chairs pushed in, feels quiet and safe. That early in the morning, there's only a few local drunks sitting around talking too much, looking at their drinks like charlatans staring into a crystal ball looking for their fortune, holding their glasses, slowly spinning that crystal ball around on the tips of their fingers. That's how you can tell alcholics from drinkers who arent: they'll hold onto their glass while they sit there, between hits; they wont let the glass sit there without holding onto it. They wont let go of it till it's empty. They'll nurse it along, holding it, protecting it, mothering it, guarding it, keeping it safe. At my favorite bar, the bathroom is downstairs and that's where I go before I order my first drink. After I walk from my hotel to the bar, by the time I get there I need to piss. I feel so relieved afterwards and accepted. I belong there. This is my home. The hotel is just a stop on my way to the bar. It's a place for me to sleep it off or sleep with it and shower, shave, clean my teeth, change my clothes and try to look like I know what I'm doing and why I'm here.

My room is small. I've got a bed big enough for me to throw my legs around and pull on the blankets, pull them up, yank on them, get tied up in them, and messed up. My bed faces a color TV in a wooden box. It's got a remote control. I've got three pillows and I sit myself up so I can sleep or watch tv at the same time. There's a wall right next to my right hand, a blue wall, cool and freshly painted with a painting nailed to it to give it a home atmosphere. I wonder whose home it's supposed to be. I've got a bed table next to my left side of my head. It's got a lamp, a phone, and an ash tray. I dont smoke, so I put it in the drawer. There's bible in there and some information about the hotel. I put my wallet and small change in there. I've got a window with blinds on it. It opens good and the blinds work. I can lock it, and I do lock it whenever I leave, which is all the time, everyday I leave and go out. I'm like a homeless person with a shelter at night and I wander the streets during the day, like I'm getting ready to play my jazz gig at night, to do my hot improvization, or get my blood looked at in the blood lab where I can pick up my perscriptions. There's a desk and I put papers on it and cans of tea and towels. There's a sink next to that, with a mirror. I put my stuff in there and hide it. There's a closet with my clothes hanging. I'm a very neat guy. Very organized. I keep everything straightend out, almost obsessively. But it works for me. I keep the key to the room on the wooden tv box where I wont lose it.

I take photos of this room and me in it. I found all sorts of things to take pictures of, close-ups of things, weird angles, weird shapes, weird shadows. And I started taking pictures of me, of myself, my body, legs, my back, my hands, face, hair.....using a camera phone. I really got into it, listening to jazz and taking it with me to the bar, which I should call the Jazz Bar. Jazz does something to my mind and I work with it all the time and walk with it, everywhere I go I have it with me in my head and I hear it everywhere, that beat, that feeling, smooth, fast and hard and sharp like glass piercing my feet as i walk, like ice covering my body with a numbing sensation. Makes me want to sleep or stay awake for days, like jazz speed, speeding like a jazz drummer. that's what I do, I play jazz drums. I like to play hard and spontaneous anmd move hard with a piano and bass and go outside and never come back. So I get my breakfast ready to eat and I lay out my meds to get the day started, before I walk up to the bar and do my writing or whatever. I put the meds out on the table in a nice orderly line according to color and size: Zolpidem, Clonazepam, Hydrocodone, Morphine Sulfate, MS Contin, Naproxen, Cyclobenzaprine, Lexapro, Propoxyphen, Flomax, Trazodone, Lisinopril, Promethazine, more Morphine Sulfate, Methocarbamol, more Hydrocodone, Meprozine, Oxycotin, Dilaudid, liquid Morphine and water. After breakfast I grab my drums and keyboard and I head on up to the Jazz Bar to do my jazz sets and read some poetry.

Dream Images

I'm in an old volkswagon with no gas but i'm driving trying to get out of the parking lot. It's an apartment building parking lot and i've been here before but now i cant get out. cant find the way out of there. im driving behind the buildings, where the cars are parked and the signs tell me to go in circles so i drive up onto people's yards and dig into their front yards and pull out some of the grass and plants and finally i find the main highway, which is a strip of hotels and motels with flashing neon lights. im running out of gas again. i get in the right lane and it's blocked. there's a cop behind me because i got fired from my job as a drummer in a band because i'm a crystal meth addict and i didnt show up to the gig so i go driving around in the old volkswagon with no gas and i go to one bar after another till i get to the outskirts of town trying to sit in with other bands but they all have drummers and nobody wants to hear me play. they talk behind my back and i feel threatened. i cant pay for the drinks. i'm drinking a lot. putting it on a tab that i cant pay. i start to leave i want to go but i cant find my way out of the parking lot. the lanes on the highway i drive in get blocked with construction work. i move into the next lane and i hit a car and the radio is playing really loudly. i move back to the other lane but the cop stops me with a big flashing red light and a white light and he searches me and finds a syringe and a bag of dope and tells me to follow him to the police station but i dont do it instead i drive in another direction to get away but i get lost again because now i'm in the apartment building parking lot again and cant find my way out of the parking lot where my friend used to live but he killed himself driving off a cliff in california. the car i'm driving is out of gas but it keeps running anyway and i get hot and sweaty and feverish, i think i'm in las vegas and i hate being there but i cant get out cant find my way out of the vegas parking lot and the car has no gas and i dont have any money to buy any. i wasnt using drugs. i was framed. it wasnt mine. i dont know how that stuff got there. she must have put it there in my sleep.

i said goodbye to her and cried. The tears felt like stones and rocks, like iron chains unforgiving and bitter hanging around my neck. i couldn’t leave her even if i wanted to but I walked away. Never looked back. Never spoke about it again. Never saw her except when i got drunk. Thinking about her made me sick. In a dream i saw her crossing a street in San Francisco walking into the wind. The fog was thick. The wind tossed her hair in different directions like a field of wheat. The slender fingers of her hands gripped life in a suitcase. She got on a bus. i ran to catch it. She looked up and saw me standing next to the liquor store. She opened her mouth to speak. She pushed the door of the bus to open it. It slammed in her face and closed. The bus disappeared around the corner. i stood there in the fog.

she hates shadows and fog, hates being alone listening to voices. hates everything and believes nothing. hates growing up. hates it when nobody talks to her. hates thinking she’s ugly. hates the dry heaves making her blind. hates rich thick almost black ultra dark deep purple blood. hates slamming it. she hates missing. she hates expensive habits. hates that it cost her everything and everyone she loved. she hates using. hates losing. she hates flirting. she hates kissing. hates being naked. hates her sexy tan. hates the smell of flesh. hates perfume. hates her arms covered with long sleeve shirts. hates walking around not knowing if jazz was sick or if he was just refusing to hate himself. hates average people. hates ordinary sacrifices. hates crawling in disgrace. hates the collection plate. hates attending an ordinary church. she hates the bible. hates him, too. hated it that she lived with one abuser after another. hates her brother for dying. hates ultra rosé. she hates rock for being an idiot. hates being concerned about anything! hates it that having all the money still wasn’t enough. she hates thinking she could get away with cheating. hates drug deals that go bad. hated practical jokes. hated the magicians who thought they had the answers. she hated zenn and the magic circle. hated other females and all men. hated spiders under her bed. hated answering every question with yin and yang. she hated children who let snakes eat them. she hated the virtual kundalini. hated innocent lives cut short. hated poisonous venom. hated funerals. she hated weddings. hated having no one to talk to. hated having nothing to do. she hated it that no one listened when she talked. she hated adagio for building an ark of ideas. hated him for killing the garden. hated him for destroying his mind. hated him for not being able to laugh: alcoholics are angry sad people who get drunk more often than other people. they laugh like drummers who have no groove. we make connections with other human beings who are the most powerful force of all. methedrine was hidden in a condom. the police can arrest us if they want. what do we care? adagio composed an eclectic performance of silence and it exploded inside the ark and blew a hole in our soul. dance condemns everything we couldn’t get out of eden. it was dead anyway frozen by words on paper. belief defended the barking dog the way of the dog went barking to a baritone sax. but the tao was how things would go when we first realized we were gods.

Sadness

I'm unbelievably sad today. I dont know why. I feel cold in my body. Shaking inside. It's like I'm gripped with sadness. Like a hand of sadness is around my throat squeezing it. I just want to cry but I wont let myself. I cant even work on photos. I cant look at them or think about them; nothing new at least. I put up three new ones but they're months old at a time I was in the hospital. The flowers were from Nico. Maybe it's the drug I'm on, and I'm trying to get off it, and I'm having a bad time with it today (clonazepam) I dont know........this is my essay contribution for the day. I'm done for now.

Then I slapped myself in the face once or twice and got a nose bleed. Then I said, shape up you twisted whimp and pull yourself together. So I did. Now I'm righteously pissed off at the world and I'm ready to slam some more photos, really ugly photos, photos of people dying in hospitals and crossing streets and people looking out for themselves. I cant wait to put 'em up for all to see.

Better Red than Dead

I grew up during the Cold War, in the 50's. Nuclear war was a real possibility as far as my dad was concerned. He got involved in a company that sold fallout shelters and he had one built in our backyard, free of charge, as a demonstration model, as a showroom model for making deals to sell them to people in the community, which was Henderson, Nevada at the time. There was a big war-manufacturing plant there, a Titanium plant, a horribly ugly smelling stinging black sooty thing in the middle of the desert and everybody was convinced it would be a target for nuclear attack and we should all have fallout shelters. (Number 1)

(Number 2) During this period, between 1948 and 1960, the phrase "Better Red Than Dead" referred to the "red" Soviet Army. The John Birch Society was big at the time and people were pretty much whacked out on the extreme right wing, Republican Christian conservative world view. It sucked then and it sucks now, but I was too young to know that it sucked back then. (Number 3)

(Number 4) I got to see the atom bomb tested out in the Nevada desert maybe three times, maybe four times. The first couple tests, we would all drive to Boulder Highway and sit up there and wait and watch. Las Vegas is in a desert valley and Henderson is above it, up above it on the way to Boulder City. So we'd sit up there on the Highway with a picnic basket and sit in the car, or get out and sit on the hood of the car and wait for the test. Then we'd hear the countdown on the radio and then we'd see the airplane bomber flying over the desert if we had binoculars and then we'd see the blast, feel the earth shake, and watch the mushroom cloud rise up higher and higher and blow away over towards Utah. We didnt really care about the radioactive dust since the cloud blew towards Utah where greater numbers of people got cancer than anywhere else. (Number 5)

(Number 6) We watched the tests for a few years. I saw maybe three more. Then they started doing underground tests and we'd sit up there on Boulder Highway and feel the earth shake but we wouldnt see the mushroom cloud anymore. We were disappointed. My dad used these tests to stir up interest in his part time fallout shelter business. Some of the principals of the company got arrested for fraud and for swindling old people out of their money by selling the shelters but never installing them. My dad was OK. He didnt do anything illegal. He ended up selling his house many years later to his other son and they used the fallout shelter as a spare guest room for friends when they come to visit. (Number 7)

Impressions of Bukowski

Dear Nico:

Been reading Bukowski. A little depressed. Not feeling all that great. Havent been eating much, it's hard to eat sometimes, hard to fix something, hard to care that much. Maybe i'm just lazy. I'm off the clonazepam, but i'm taking the vicodin substitute. Not so humid now. I love you and i miss you and i wish you were home. It's too quiet when you're gone. The cats miss you, too. Please call.

Your devoted R

Cream Crackers

I started drinking too early this morning. I dont usually drink. Not since I got out of the hospital and all that. But then, little by little, every now and then, I'll pick up a small bottle of JD, a "pony" it's called. Then the next day a half pint, then on the weekend a full pint. And then, like today, I had some left over from last night so I had some fresh hot coffee with JD mixed in to cool it off and to heat me up. I thought I'd work on these coffee house photos for a change, the ones with people in the photo. I can quit drinking again tomorrow, or some other time after that. At least I dont do drugs anymore, except the perscription kind. Those are even worse. But you know how it is: sometimes I just get bored being sober and straight, unless I'm really into meditation, and practicing clairvoyance, which isnt very often. But I can do it at the gym and really stretch my muscles and build them up, get them hard and tight so I can do my psychic readings, my intuitive counseling. Yeah, right. Does that ever happen to you? So anyway I took my psych-meds this morning, my one little daily dose of anxiety pills that are more addictive than heroin the doctors tell me (thank you, very much! Why'd they get me started on that in the first place if they knew it would be so hard to kick?) I also took three hydrocodone/lortab tabs just for fun to see how it would react with the coffee and JD. They're almost useless compared to morphine sulphate or dilaudid. I dont know if it does anything or not to take this stuff. When I mix chemicals with jazz, fast jazz, hard driving stoned hot avant garde jazz, the kind with no key, no tempo, no melody, no nothing....well, it's too much to resist! Can't do it. It just sucks me in. Ever listen closely to a sax player? Some of these guys play their phrases real easy-like. They slide each note one note into the next note sweetly, blending the notes together softly and smoothly; Stan Getz is like that and that can be OK if I'm in the right mood for it. But there are other players who hit every note hard and separately, they literally hit each note one at a time percussively, rhythmically, individually. Coltrane was like that and a bunch of others. Dexter Gordon's another one. Sonny Rollins. The list goes on. I like that harder sound better than the other smoother sound. Right now I'm listening on web radio to this New York jazz station a recording from Blue Note records, probably early 1960 and it's fast. It's hard. It's over the top and I love it. And drummers. I love it when these guys play with no repetitive rhythms, no time at all, just a lot of movement, and sound, and tight drum heads that glance off the side of their drum sticks and bounce off the walls, the cymbals that sizzle and shine and of course the bass drum that's tuned really high, really tight so it makes a tone, a "boom" "bamb" "pop" musical tone. And when I can hear the click sound of the stick on the cymbal I know that the studio engineer has placed the drum mike right up against the ride cymbal. "Click, click, click!" The heavy ride just floats away and the back hand of the left hand popping that snare drum interactive flesh and bones hitting the bass. It's too much, man. How can I NOT get inspired? My photos sing out to me some kind of scat singing. It's all improvizational. And unpredictable. And I dig it.

Street Corners

Except for the one photo in the coffee shop, these are all people walking on the same street, or crossing the same street, or close to the same corner, or whatever. And the coffee shop is near that corner. (Number 1)

(Number 2) I wish you could hear the music I'm listening to when I'm working on these photos because it makes a difference to me to work with music, with jazz. It inspires me to do certain things with the photos, or at least it inspires me to choose one photo or a set of photos to work with over another photo or set of photos on a particular day. Today, this morning, I'm listening to the Ornette Coleman Quartet, 1960....a CD called "Change of the Century" with Charlie Haden bass, Don Cherry pocket trumpet and Billy Higgins drums. One of the best examples of the direction jazz was beginning to take at the beginning of 1960, and Ornette Coleman was at the forefront of what would be called "avant garde" jazz. This was before Coltrane pulled out ahead of everybody, but Ornette Coleman is still alive today and is still far ahead of most jazz musicians when it comes to changes in direction, free form jazz composition and improvization. This CD, "Change of the Century" is one of the best demonstrations of Charlie Haden's genius and Billy Higgin's playing set a new direction for jazz drumming. If you havent heard this stuff, by all means get the CD, download it to iTunes ASAP. (Number 3)

(Number 4) "On the Road" was published in 1957, three years before this session was recorded. The "beat generation" got into its movement between 1957 and 1969, when Kerouac died. In 1959 Ornette signed with Atlantic Records and recorded a series of albums that would redefine jazz the way Kerouac and "beat" writers and poets would redefine and distinguish a new generation, before Bukowski redefined it even further, without metaphors! "Tomorrow Is the Question" came out in 1959, "The Shape of Jazz to Come" came next and in 1960 he recorded the album "Free Jazz: A Collective Improvization", which was a double quartet (4+4), featuring his regular group plus a second group with Freedie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Scott LaFaro and Ed Blackwell. In 1969 he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame. While this was going on, Lenny Bruce was performing in San Francisco in the late 50's, arrested at the Jazz Workshop Oct. 4, 1961, performed at Carnegie Hall earlier that year, and performed for the last time at the Fillmore in San Francisco, June 25, 1966. He was dead by August. In 1967, Bukowski started writing "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" for Open City, and started writing for Black Sparrow Press in 1969. Between 1957 and 1969 Ornette recorded over 26 albums which opened new directions for jazz composition, improvization and performing. He's one of my favorite artists to work with whenever I select photos to work on and post. His work, the beat writers, Lenny Bruce, Bukowski, they were all moving in the 60's in new directions and it makes it easy to get inspiration from their work. (Number 5)

(Number 6) The photos posted today were taken in San Francisco this past March and April when I was in a convalenscence center recovering from a near fatal bone infection. As I improved, I started taking long walks and hanging out at a local coffee shop/sidewalk cafe on Polk Street. I've posted several photos from there already. The photos in this collection were taken in that neighborhood, near the same street corner, the same block of sidewalk, the same area in the Polk Gulch. I used a camera phone, which was the only camera I took with me.

(Number 7) I got into the practice of taking photos by holding the camera upside down in my right hand and taking the photo of the subject behind me. I would try to see how close I could get, how clearly I could make the shot. I made a lot of shots deliberately cutting subjects heads out of the frame, deliberately getting only feet, legs, hands....most of time the shots were totally "free form" and I had no control over how they came out. Those are the ones I like the best. The photos here are examples of some of those. (Number 8)

(Number 9) I used a setting on the phone which is easily identified as "sepia" and I used that tone because it made the picture turn out the sharpest of all the settings I could use; that's the only reason. And my camera phone had some peculiar responses as it was running down, dying on me, getting worse and worse as a camera and finally it wouldnt work at all. I've had to replace it, but it worked OK in San Francisco. The effects I got in these and other photos were not deliberate; the camera produced them itself. The sepia setting made it easier to photoshop contrast, sharpness and black-and-white effects than any other setting. I had to resize all the photos, too, because the original size wasnt acceptable for JPG's standards for posting online. Anyway, I thought this might be interesting background information. (Number 10)

Untitled

The untitled photograph, i dont know if that's a title or not. "Untitled".....is that a title? i'm at home with the darker images, the darker places, spaces that dont seem to have a purpose or a point: a bottle of water, a pen, a coffee cup, shoelace, cell phone, check book, broken glass, empty shelf, man standing in the middle of the street, woman eating fish, women buying clothes, men combing their hair, sunsets, rain, jazz, children sleeping, babies screaming, old couple walking, drunks in a bar, late night crowds, cops, hotels, old streets, taxis, crowded freeways, flat tires, boredom, hospitals, drugs, suicide, wind, cold, dry heat, wrong telephone numbers, politicians, magick, cats, poetry, chinatown markets, crime, clocks, sex, old age, death, religion....these are the untitled inspirations for untitled photographs.

What i want to do is photograph what there is in front of me, not just the obvious visual image but the stuff that it's made of, the substance of the stuff behind it, around it, inside and the stuff that puts it together that i cant see but i can feel it. like jazz. like jazz improvization. i dont care anymore if the photo is a photo of people and their heads are in the picture, or their feet, or whatever. i dont care if the buildings are straight or round, or upside down, or if the people are upside down. what matters to me is the atmosphere of the photo, the cloud that hangs around the obvious image, the intangibles, the transcendental, the undefined, the lost, forgotten, the stuff with a beat, with a jazz beat that goes on forever. anyway, i want my photos to have some kind of poetic substance to them that goes beyond the image and hits something i cant see, but something that's present, a presence.

Low-tech equipment works better for me, at least so far, to get the look and feel of a darker, dreary, more dismal, gloomy side of life that's out there that i like to photograph. high-tech digital and film cameras are too clean and sharp and crisp for what i want to feel. recently i had to exchange my 5-yr old camera phone for a newer model because the old phone finally broke down. the camera wouldnt work at all. i hated to let it go. i havent used the new one yet for pictures. it's best to take photos with a camera phone in congested places, big cities, crowded places, dirty streets, alleys, kitchens, cafes, sidewalk cafes, coffee shops, gutters, crossing busy streets....it's best to use a camera phone for fast, spontaneous photos that are done in secret, hidden from view, where i can get close-up face shots of people and they dont know it. there's something about getting a natural expression on someone's face, a real expression, a real emotion that's unguarded and not safe..there's something exciting and fulfilling about it when i get the photo home and there's nothing to do to it, no processing, no manipulation, no alteration. i like it anyway....and it works good for self-portraits. i dont know anything better for self-portraits than a low-tech camera phone.

So i loaded up on morphine, hydrocodone and clonazepam and john coltrane's "love supreme" and went out to find my self-portrait. i had to get dressed finally, i couldnt walk around the house or outdoors completely naked forever. i got dressed and made a drink of soda water, juice and ice cubes. i probably should go to sleep and maybe i will, but something has happened to me since this medical interruption, this "untitled" medical portrait photography, has laid itself upon me, since it laid its hands upon me like a priest, a madman type priest dancing in the black shadows of a life and death photo of incompletion, fear, the scars of uncertainty and the flesh of my body.

i've gotten really interested in the untitled meaning of narcissism. i think of it as self-love, self-absorption, self-consumption. maybe it's because my body was so ripped apart with pain and drugs, medications that killed every bacteria i carried around. i started seeing everything in terms of my body: where it was, what it was doing, how it looked, what it ate, like it was something separate from "me", which it is, like the Self and the body. i started dressing it up and weighing it everyday, and feeding it only so much small portions and cleaning it, washing it, showering it, brushing its hair like it was a child's doll, putting it in warm clothes, walking it around, showing it off. i started showing it off like it was an appealing trophy. appealing to me. attractive to me and me to it. i started listening to jazz on my headphones in my hospital bed, really loud piped in my ears, and i guess i flipped on a switch and went out thru my ears or my nose or my eye balls and sat on the edge of the bed playing with my feet, rubbing my legs, massaging my legs and photographing them with my low-tech camera phone. i couldnt stop. i was addicted to it. still am.

And everything just went faster and louder. and it was untitled. especially the drum solos. late at night there was this street light that came into the hospital room, thru the curtains, in between the curtains, right above the heater that never worked, right thru the window that i kept open just a crack so I'd make up stories, stories i'd get to say what they mean. Stories of narcissism that came from inside and outside the window passing by where it became a dwelling place where i could hear hard jazz for hours: the street light that pulled infection out of me, it's attraction that i felt magnetism with my body when it pushed out of me it's street light shape of the forbidden and the reckless, the beautiful, forgotten and things better left ignored. But it doesnt matter now. the point is, i'd lay in bed under this thin brown blanket with a sheet and the street light would light up my little area of the room just enough so i could see my feet, my legs, my arms....and i'd lay there and write, scribble in my journal and get out my camera phone to take self-portraits in the darkness with enough light to make sense. i started walking around and taking pictures. i'd go to the bathroom and get next to the mirror and take photos that would be untitled. sideways photos of my head, my face, my hair, my neck, my chest...anything that would take my mind off where i was and what i was doing. all this before the nurses would come in to take blood or hook me up to an IV drip, or whatever. it was dark but not completely. there was something warm and comfortable about it now that i think about it.

every photo i took became a self-portrait no matter what it was. i could take a photo of a bus stop and it would be a self-portrait. i could take a photo of a marketplace in china town and it would be a self-portrait. every photo was a self-portrait. the photos i took at the hotel even the ones that were blurry and didnt come out were self-portraits, even more so because they were blurry and werent any good. photos that were too dark were self-portraits. i became consumed with this experience of being material, being the substance of everything around me, being the energy and the mass and the electricity of everything that was made, of everything was made out of me, out of my body and my mind. i became possessed with the experience of being in all things, but not like spiritual gratification, more like sexual transference, or a sexual postponement of satisfaction, located in everything, not only located there but made out of it, made in it, from it, made within and without it.

i took photos of homeless people and those were self-portraits. i started taking photos of myself in mirrors, in windows, as a shadow walking down a street or up against a wall. it didnt matter what it was, or if it was even music, the music was a self-portrait. and it worked the other way, too....a photo of me was a photo of something else, someone else, somewhere else. a photo of my hands was a photo of anybody's hands. and there was sexual energy in the hair on my arm, my legs were sexual portraits of energy that touched everything around me, touched me in a conversation with the world. the more photos i took, the stronger the conversation became, the louder the words, the more the communication started to scream at me, or me screaming at it. and it was all untitled. none of it had any purpose. none of it made any sense. and my self-portraits became the essence of everything i photographed.

Universal Daughter

jen bellefleur posted a beautiful photo and commentary to which i replied. As i was reading her message to me i had the thought that some of the darkness and edgyness i want to get in my photos, and maybe the lonliness and futility i want to see in life around me, and the hopelessness i look for, and look at, and experience in human existensystems may be a result of my shitty relationship with one of my daughters, who never talks to me, who is mad at the way her life turned out, who blames me for it. maybe jen's photo opened a possibility that the darkness i obviously feel and try to photograph constantly somehow comes from that feeling i have of failure, or of life as useless, or of youth as stupidity, or of love as scarce, love as valuable because it's scarce, love as scarce because it's valuable and not abundant. and i look out in the world and i see all the not-love, the not-happiness, the not-pleasure, the not-successful, the not-joy, the not-wellness. the relationship i have with my daughter is such a deadend, that jen's photo just opened these wounds a little deeper and a little more bitterness dripped inside the open cuts. i dont know whether to thank her, or slap her. Nico doesnt think my photography has anything to do with my relationship with my daughter and she's probably right; but it makes a good story.

the photos in this collection as in others like it were taken with a camera phone.

The Hardest photos for me to take....

....are photos of my self, self-portraits; everything else is easy. Taking self-photos of myself means telling a story, showing the lines of my life and the tears fall where they may, or may not..... tears that may or may not be too strong enough to taste or touch, or maybe they're too strong to even confront.

(These are duplicates. When I post some others soon I'll replace these with current ones. But I wanted to get the story posted first.)

It means showing fear of alcoholism, drug addiction, mental and physical sickness, real and unreal. Taking a photo of myself means showing happiness, doubt, sorrow and letting it fit in, letting it find its place of balance.

It means showing vulnerability, weakness and loss. It means showing the images of funerals of family and friends written across my forehead and maybe forgotten, maybe just remembered, maybe just recently eulogized....and it means telling the stories of the weddings, the births, the divorces, all the pleasure, the unbelievable love that never ends that finds its mark on the lines and grooves of my face; and a self-portrait means a mental picture for all time and of all time come and gone, life time after lifetime. It means the passing away of my youth and the coming of old age.

A photo of me means showing the way my mind works or how it doesnt work. It means an image stimulating my art, creating my music, relying on, or being discouraged about life and hope, or hating it for its hopelessness, shallowness and uselessness. (The Eyes of March)

A self-portrait means I get to reveal the dark and the light of my inner tumultuous yin and yang that never quits, that never stops spinning, that never gives me a moment's rest; and why should it? Why should I expect it to?

A photo I take of myself is an image of grief and laughter contradicting each other and never getting resolved; and I get fed up with it. It's an image of wanting, missing and sometimes mostly of finding, if I'm lucky.

It's an image of conversations and memories of travelling companions moving across my skin on my face like shadows from clouds in the sky. A self-photo is an image of the waiting and the useless, pitiful, purposeless praying to empty nothingness of an image of stark putrified disbelief in all things holy.

A self-portrait is an image of anger, my moodiness, isolation, socialization, visualization and often my pathetic attempts at aloneness, as a hermit, as a ghost.

Self-portraits are images of ambition, drive, the down-time filled with relaxation and sleep, and it's a photo of good and bad misfortune and all the upside down relationships drawn across my face, scratched across my lips, sliding down the side of my head like blood.

When I take photos of myself it means a whole entire identification set of selfs, of my history, the crimes I've committed in the past all there on my face for all to see if they know how, hiding in secret behind the rocks and stones and behind of the soft valentines of kisses. It's an image of my secret personalities, the strange identities and the special moments filled with dreams that have come true and those that failed to make it and those that would and will never come true.

A self-portrait means I get to shine that camera lens directly into my own eyes, into my own face as deep and as hard as I can drive it in until it hurts, as far as I can let it go to penetrate deep into my brown eyes, to let it go past my soul, to get beyond my spirit (if there is a spirit), to go way back into the back of my head so far that it pierces my heart, cracks thru my mind's eye, touches my diseased body (past-present-and-future) without restrictions, without censorship, without alteration, without bias, without manipulation, without affectation, without personal affection to try to "look good" and feel good about it.

As far as I'm concerned, a self-portrait (a photo of myself) is the hardest most difficult photo for me that I'll ever want to take because it means putting that camera lens directly into the deepest places, into the deepest best and most worst spaces where I never let anyone go unless it's in a photo, where I guard it night and day, where very few people ever stay too long. And when that camera lens is pressed into that spot, then I let it snap, and snap, and snap again, and snap again as freely and as fast as I can snap it.

And what's the point of all this? Because for me, for my personal concerns and issues as a photographer/artist or whatever it is, the intimate self-portrait, (a photo of myself) that I can share with others ...it says to the world around me, "I was here. Somebody was here, somebody lived here, somebody had a life and lived it.....and that was somebody was me."

Everything else..... all the other photos I take, they're easy.