Jesus Christ!

NOTE: This photo essay is admittedly one-sided, but so are photographs. Photos only show one side of a point of view the photographer had at the time. So this is nothing new.

I'm not a fan of Jesus Christ. I dont think much of Fundamentalist Christianity nor any of the world's other infamous and notorious religions (i.e., specifially Judaism and Islamic Fundamentalism) -- three major aberrant sociopathic blood-thristy world religious movements on a collision course with mass destruction.

Religion is the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction". Nobody is making an effort to stop the proliferation of religious beliefs world-wide. I say, stop religion! and we'll soon see a more peaceful, tolerant, well-adjused mentally and spiritually healthy earth. Let the proliferation of religion continue unchallenged and we'll see the end of civilization on earth as we know it.

I posted these photos to express the dark semi-secret side to this blood-thirsty, death-obsessed, dysfunctionally and mentally unbalanced aberrant pathological religious phenomena: Fundamentalist Christianity. It's as much a fascist terrorist organization as Islamic Fascism is accused of being and I'm no fan of that either. Judiasm is included in my view of Christianty since our support for Israel was, initially, a religiously motivated excuse. There's more excuses now.

For decades, anti-semitism has been a good excuse for irrational, unjustified military support for all things Jewish. To say anything bad about the Jews is to be lumped in with Hitler! It's easier to get away with hanging a hangman's noose on a tree in Mississippi than it is to disrespect a Jew! Israel/USA is always right and, given enough time, the rest of the world will be dead wrong! And for what? 8500 square miles of dirt.

To keep it simple, I used Roman Catholicism to visually represent the black heart of death. Like a Trojan Horse, it comes bringing honey and sweetness with the "baby in a manger" fairy tale. As a trilogy, the Bible, the Torah (Talmud) and the collected written/verbal teachings of Muhammad are the definitive Big Book of Curses.

Make no mistake, fundamental Charismatic Evangelicalism is no less insidious and dangerous to the future existence of humanity than catholicism and Islam. It may have less recognizable symbolisms for its contempt of human life, freedom of thought, tolerance for diverse lifestyles, behavior and individual creativity, but it's no less visible and controlling.

Most powerful symbolism of social/cultural death-wish inherent in fundamental Charismatic Evangelicalism: modern religious, political and economic systems. Democracy, Capitalism and Religion: the ultimate Triad and Axis of Evil. Systems responsible for the wars we fight, the costs we pay for living, the costs we pay for dying. Hopelessness future generations can look forward to.

Symbolism of Charismatic Evangelicalism: consumerism, coal lobby, big business, oil lobby, fast food, junk food, run-away health care expense, recession, unemployment, red state-Republican-dominated bigotry and self-righteousness, blue state-Democratic-dominated governmental activism and imperialism, homophobia, gun rights legislation lobby, white fat middle-class male-dominated environmental rape, Orange County CA residential demographics as a model and goal of conservatism, the auto industry, right-wing talk radio shock jocks, Wall Street lobby, the anti-choice lobby and the failed, fatal legacies of Dick Cheney's administration and his stupid puppet George W Bush.

If I offended anyone, I'm not the least bit sorry. Read Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ. It makes me look like a Zionist!

fOOT fETISH sEQUENCE 1 thru 6

It's 3am. I'm coughing up blood. No wait. That's not right. I don't think that's blood. I think that's the color red from her short red satin skirt pulled up past her hips to make it easier to dig my way through the rock and pitch a tent inside that cave. I'm spitting out the fibers from her see-through blouse that got stuck in my teeth when I ripped off the zipper holding it together. I'm spitting out the soap and water that turned red from when she washed her short red mini-skirt with the slit up the side, washed it the kitchen sink with her red panties, her red lace stockings, her red high heels dripping dry in the bathroom hanging over the shower curtain. No, wait a minute. That must be a dream. I had a dream that I sucked all the color red out of existence because I loved it and had to have it. I was jonesin' for it like an addict who wanted to know if she had any meat. I loved the color red. Red hair. Red sunsets. Red Rodney. Red Norvo. Red Ryder. The Red River Valley. Little Red Riding Hood. Red Mitchell. Red herrings. Better dead than red. Red blood shot eyes. Red Rock Canyon, white out and blues after hours.

I was lost deep in sleep, sloppily slurping (?) the juices of forbidden kinky pleasure. I rested my head on her thighs, my face hidden by the shadow of her legs. I was as happy as an alcoholic at an open bar with my tongue hanging out waiting for another round. I was alone and content to dream about her short red skirt and red high heels with little metal clasps like handcuffs that pinched her ankles making bruises. There were tiny hooks painted red piercing her skin, which always got my blood to boil over. Large drops of blood found their way into my spoon. Little balls of cotton floated in water.

In my dream, I grabbed her ankles, sucked her toes. Suddenly I heard a loud knock on the door like I'd expect from cops. I woke up, sat up and looked at the door waiting for a big foot to come crashing through it without a warrant based only on a suspicion or a tip from a snitch. The last time this happened I was staying in a southern California resort town, a temporary resident of a cheap motel near the San Clemente pier. Coppers stormed in unexpected-like, planted stuff in my shoe and found works in the closet in a shoe box. It was a bum rap. The stuff wasn't mine. I was holding it for Benny the Jazz.

Anyway, there were no cops this time but a big brown manila envelope was shoved under my door. It was from someone I didn't know. He thought I'd be interested in his foot fetish. I was doing undercover work for deep background. Since he had a foot fetish he sent me pictures to prove it. (See JPG photos posted as "fOOT fETISH sEQUENCE 1 tHUR 6") He numbered them from one to six. That was the sequence he used to ignite the sparks of his perspiration. According to him, he only sweated on the right side of his body. Without his meds, his right armpit would heat up with a burning sensation usually when urinating. The hair under his right arm would be as tangled and matted as a wet mongrel dog. Strange as it sounds, his left side would be as cold as ice. In fact, his left arm pit had no hair at all. He looked and smelled like a Chinese Crested hairless.

In the package he sent there was a letter in a plain white business envelope simply addressed to "Dear Film and Tape Music". I opened it carefully. It could've been a stink bomb. I read it slowly, but first I poured myself a shot of whisky. Then I made myself a sandwich. Avocado, peanut butter and organic alfalfa sprouts with honey mustard dressing and soya sauce with artichoke hearts on the side. I had another shot of whiskey and sat in the chair to read the letter.
He asked me if I wanted to make a movie about his whole life. He said he would sell me the movie rights. He wrote, "I have 40,000 points of power. The C.I.A. gave me finding power. I can find anyone in the world. Sanction power. Market power." He told me to contact Homeland Security to find out when they're going to rent him a loft in New York. He wants to sell me some power. Foot fetish power. Power of the feet. Pisces power. Neptune toes. Saturn soles. He also told me he wants to get started in the porn industry or else.... and he writes this underlined with a bold red magic marker: "I can destroy it (i.e., the porn industry). You either my friend or my enemy (sic). My enemies I will destroy. I am serious." I get it he's serious. I have another shot and cough up some more phlegm. I spit it out into the envelope he provided. The letter's hard to read. I can't keep my hands still. (They twitch a lot more now since I was held against my will at the convalescence home in San Francisco.) Getting back to the letter: he says he'll put sanctions on me and "shut me up permanently!" if I don't do what he wants. He ends his letter and signs it, "May God bless you. Contact me. I am a God. Sincerely, L.L.S."

I sat there for a minute or two in dumb silence. Maybe it was an hour. I just stared ahead, looking out the window with a bland expression on my face as usual. I saw the morning paper spread out in front of me opened to the want-ads. I looked at the first ad; it was the only ad. I pushed the paper away and threw the shot glass in the sink and broke it. But before I did that I had another drink or two. I looked around for the spoon and the works and got ready to get high. I got high. The stuff was really fresh. Little sharp crystals dissolved in water instantly and so clearly I could see my face smiling at me, waving from a great distance and drifting further away. I was hot. Sweating. Breathing hard. I tried to get up from the table but something was different. I felt strangely connected to all living things. Consciousness itself was an odorless substance that I could touch and taste. It was bitter like lemon juice and sweet like a sugar baby. I saw my body with a creature living inside reach out its arms from the centers of all my chakras. Fingers of an alien being living on another planet pulled matter, energy, space and time into my body and pushing it out again worse than it was before. Transforming Kundalini. Renewing a sick feeling of something unforgiving and yet easily forgotten five minutes after it left my body. I saw that my feet had changed and now they had long thin beautiful toes instead of short little hairy stubs with toenails that were falling off. My feet were finally part of a cosmic holism Beyond Good and Evil.

I was stoned. The room was spinning. I couldn't stand up. My ears were ringing and hissing. My eyes were blurring. Everything I saw sort of glistened and sparkled. I was shining. The pupils in my eyes were as big and black as bowling balls. I crawled over to the bed and climbed on it with a lot of effort. I was listening to Beethoven's Piano Sonata #14 In C Sharp Minor, Op. 27/2, "Moonlight" - 1. Adagio Sostenuto. It was raining. It was dark outside and yet a weird laser beam cut into my brain like a carving knife on Thanksgiving. My head was a cooked turkey. My brain, oozing the color red flowing like water out of a rock rolled down my face, rolled down my chest, rolled down to my feet. Chemicals dripped into my spoon. Floating balls of cotton were dark red with blood, almost purple from the main artery. I watched them bob up and down like red apples in water. Red nylon stockings dissolved into crystal fibers. Rain soaked her red mini-skirt hanging on the clothes line out back. Little red high heels hung over the telephone lines in the street. I was a afraid of something, but I didn't know what.

I turned off all the lights in the house. I locked all the doors. I felt like someone was in the house besides me. My head was hurting. My arms ached and were bruised. I thought about going to the Ebony Black and Blues Cafe on the corner of Columbus Ave. and Kerouac Alley. It stayed open every day of the year from 6am till 2am. I looked for my shoes. My feet begin to itch between the toes. I reached down to scratch my foot and fell off the bed. I hit the floor. Hit my head. I could barely see the photos the guy sent me. I thought that if I post them up on JPG maybe the pain in my head would go away. Maybe I'd be able to breathe again. Maybe my skin would stop crawling over my body, like rats running up and down my legs from the inside out. Maybe the light would stop blinding me. Maybe the creatures would run away. Maybe, but not this time. Not today.

CLONAZEPAM/KLONOPIN: Kicking the Underground

Coming off Klonopin, an anxiety med. Doctors in San Francisco misdiagnosed my natural interest in whether or not I was going to live and thought it was "anxiety". For six months I've been taking Klonopin and because it's addictive I can't stop cold turkey. I need to taper off slowly. So that's what I did. Now I'm taking ½ tab once a day. I stopped drinking. I exercise. I go to the gym. I drink three, four liters of water every day. I sit in a steam room or do a sauna. I shower in the nude with other men. Then we walk around the lockers showing off our admiration. If I didn't have anxiety before, I do now.

Klonopin never did anything so that I could tell it was helping. It was what I didn't feel. I didn't feel like I hated the world or people. I wasn't bitter or nervous. I didn't flip out over small things, only the big ones. I didn't feel like I had somewhere to go or something to do. I don't know if Klonopin made me calm, but it made me think I was calm. It made anxiety seem weak, cowardly and vulnerable. I could have victory with meds. I'd need another victory after that. And another after that. Discomfort comes with the withdrawals. Diarrhea. Headaches. Nausea. Boredom. Irritability. Driving in traffic. Insomnia. Restlessness. I used vicodin and hydrocodone to help get past the withdrawals. Without Klonopin, "BE-HERE-NOW" became "be anywhere but here now!" With it, being here is better than being anywhere else.

There are many days when I have no photos and no words. No creativity at all. I'm not interesting and I'm not interested. I've tried to force it, but that's stupid. A waste of time. So I find something else to do and wait for images to come to me. Taking a picture, getting the shot, right now, is as good as any other. Missing it can be better still. It's not taking the picture that makes it; it's what I do with it. A picture is taken. Shutter snaps. No flash. No focus. No thought. Camera and eye, hand and mind all moving without purpose. Or at least it seems like there's no point.

It's no sweat to take a picture. I don't think about it. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to put any thought to it. I want my hand, fingers, eye, camera, thoughts, everything going on inside and outside to be a conscious unified field of experience without distinctions or classifications. That's the way it really is, anyway. I look at the photos and maybe I can make something out of them. "First you take the picture; then you make the picture." Anybody can take a picture or bang on a piano, but I have to see something to make the picture or turn the banging into a form of jazz, which is the kind of jazz I like to play best. It takes being conscious. Awareness of being aware. Klonopin keeps me a little less than fully conscious. And that pisses me off. I have to work harder at it. Go into my high metabolic zone.

The anxiety comes in not being able to make the picture how I want, when I want, because I want everything and I want it now. But it doesnt work that way. There are many days when I see nothing, when I feel like I'm on a respirator. Life support. The image comes to me only when I can see it, feel it, touch it, smell it, love it and hate it, all at the same time. Being willing to give it up. Knowing when to stop, when to wait, and when to start again. Start-Change-Stop. That's what I'm learning about photography and the metaphysical facts of life.

Every night I go to bed. Every morning I get up. Either way, it's been a bad summer for Yin and Yang, the Siamese twins and whores of Chinatown. They sing the blues on weekends at the Buddha Lounge on the corner of Grant and Washington where white is still the color of Ornette Coleman's plastic alto. Sidewalk cafés stay open late just to appease their appetite and it's still a long ride on the Geary 38. I took that ride one night back and forth from the bus terminal on Mission to the Great American Hiway, sleepless till dawn. In those days the shadows of the Golden Gate formed silhouettes of a crucifix across the city, shrouded in a scratchy wool blanket. Life as I knew it was a black and white Zen clock, but beautiful.

Stuck between the bookends of my habitual existence are photographs that articulate my life, often with ghost eyes staring back at me in my nightmares. They fill up scrapbooks either showing me doing nothing or showing me leaving nothing undone. I don't shave anymore and I don't smoke cigarettes but I don't hate them either. Death is a cage of silence to fall back on like a second job where I find things to do to keep busy. My life is really very simple and simplicity is the map for my sacred tour. It's not a very complicated tour. It begins as a numbing sensation in my fingers and goes up my arm until it scrapes the flavor of blandness off my lips. Since I don't believe in God I don't go to church and I don't go out much either. I don't think one thing has anything to do with the other but it just happens that I stay at home most of the time as much as I can. When you think about it, home's the best place for me to be for the good of everybody. Anxiety comes in all forms and sizes. It never used to bother me. I used to crave it but now I don't. I kicked the hard stress. Now I go to the gym, the liquor store and the farmer's market to smell the farmer's daughter. I go down town Nashville to take photos or else I stay home and make love to Nico until I go insane from alcoholism or we die in each other's arms from some other pleasure. Life is sooooo complete.

Today I thought about the challenge. JPG says: "My Precious stories are JPG's version of product reviews, where members write about their favorite and most precious piece of equipment. Tell us about a product or accessory you use and love. It can be new or old, a hand-me-down or the hottest thing on the market. A flash, a lens, a camera... YOUR precious......." OK. I thought about this in the steam room. I think more freely when I sweat. It burns up brain cells and washes the dead ones down the shower drain. I'm going to use a broad brush to paint the JPG guidelines because when I get an idea I'm lucky if it'll be a good one. (Please note: I wanted to submit this story to the JPG theme, but apparently it doesn't fit the parameters of its intentions and I'm unable to make that contribution. Lucky you, here it is anyway.)

Just exactly what is my "precious"? My precious what? What piece of equipment is so important its absence would deprive me of gratification? What product or accessory can I not live without, such that without it I'd merely become a male prostitute with a beard who'd give anything to live a glamorous life in order to get it? Tough questions utterly unbelievable; maybe there are no answers. Efforts to know the answers often kill it. Suddenly a silent sweat drips from my armpits down my stomach, to my legs and down to my feet. An idea, maybe an answer, hit me like a shot of chilled whiskey. There I was in a neighborhood bar drinking again and listening to sadly monotonous jazz. I remembered what it was all about: survival! That's IT! My "piece of equipment" is my impulse to survive! It's the negative of the positive side of life! It's not about kicking the habit of self-deception and self-enabling. It's clearly about photography as an accessory to a daily practice of surviving without resisting, without illness, without spraying my head with glue to keep my brains inside and without having to stumble down the stairs to the men's room. Survival is an image exposed from one world, developed from the negatives of another! Photography is an accessory of survival, plain and simple.

Survival isn't a game to see who or what wins or loses the most, or the least. It's not a game played really well or really badly. It might be a game in the long run, but in the short run it's not about struggling to stay alive to avoid dying just to see the sun rise one more day or to see the full moon shine another month. Survival isn't frustration besieged by circumstances fighting to breathe. Survival as I see it isn't about putting up with, or settling to be, a bored, sterilized, quarantined contradiction without life support, living on antibiotics and narcotics. (By the way, have you ever noticed that the best things you can say about narcotics are the worst things you can say about people?)

Survival is not a choice between eating out or being hungry. It's not about sleeping late on the weekend so we can sleep longer on a weekday. That's not surviving; that's a fatality and a futility. That's airplane food, hospital food, botched blood tests in the middle of the night when you don't know if you'll live to see tomorrow, but you probably will, and of course you always do for a while. Real and powerful survival from an artistic underground sub-culture point of view, as I think of it, is an existence into a future. It's a function of prosperity. It's not conquering life by being separate from it and paranoid as if we're strangers suspicious of it; it's overcoming a tolerance for the mediocre by absorbing and including weakness and flaws, and then transforming that into something simple and easy to experience. It's not defending ourselves against the unknown; rather, it's assimilating the unknown into our imagination.

Survival as a piece of equipment shapes photography. It points to artistic levels, knowable and unknown. Life is experienced through images. Life becomes an accessory of survival itself as an image, such that photography is a child of the affluent. Through photography we index our survival as individuals. Photography shows us that we're sexual beings as resilient in community as we are elastic in the unified field of a greater humanity. The products and accessories used (and photographed) by our intuition for survival are the impressions of all living things surviving as universe, spirit and infinity. Ultimately, photography represents the survival of energy, space, time and material. Using digital cameras and film, these representations eventually become self-portraits. They become images of men and women living within intimate relationships outside all barriers of sexuality and they all have their own stories. These are visual documented histories of the migration of whole generations preserving the memories of friends and lovers, young and old. Through photographs we capture survival of unpredictabe and volatile crowds and their protests. We see the survival of panoramic landscapes and the vast, unending beauty of nature. Photography is all about survival and if you don't get that you might be missing something.

JPG described the "Precious" challenge in terms of writing a review of one's favorite equipment, accessory or product. I thought long and hard about this at the spa in the steam room. I reduced the idea down to its most minimal simplicity: photography is an accessory to survival.

I want to clear up what survival is and what it isn't. Survival isn't a choice between life and death. Death isn't surviving, so that's not a choice. If you're not already dead, then living (breathing) is the default condition. That's not a choice, either. So living or dying, either one or both, is not surviving.

What survival is as I'm considering it has to do with a fundamental impulse to exist by will, or the will to power, as Nietzsche thought of it. Survival is the will to power on different levels of self-expression of life and the will to express existence with authority. Survival is a driving force. It's the source of creativity, curiousity, power and the will.

We put this insight into several areas of life every day, every time we take photographs. As photographers there are five areas of life that we can photograph, five out of eight. They are (1) self-portraits of ourselves or portraits of other individuals. This includes the nuances and atmospherics that surround us, our histories and stories of ourselves surviving as individuals. (2) Men and women surviving as a form of relationships, survival in terms of sexual intimacy, lovers, and children who are products of intimate sexual activities of survival. (3) Groups of people surviving (self-expressing) as members of communities, networks, familes and larger centers, but smaller than "mankind", thriving and interacting as groups. (4) We photograph movements and migrations of human generations in time on a global scale. This is survival as humanity, inhabitants and occupants of a planet. This includes the survival of cities, towns and dwelling places. (5) And, finally, we photograph survival as nature, with landscapes and the panorama of living things in relationships to biological organisms, plants, animals and the effect their survival has on us.

Those are five major areas of life's interests that we photograph. I think every photo can be placed, liberally, somewhere in those five categories. Except for scientists and satellites with advanced space-age technologies, we haven't photographed (6) the universe, (7) the spirit or (8) the infinite. But five major areas of life itself are available to us to photograph. We are not separate from them. We are not strangers to them. They are not outside of us. They are where we put our survival. They are where we plant our survival. Where we live and promote our existence.

Every photo we take, every time we snap the shutter, it comes from an impulse for survival. To survive not being separate from it. We survive by being intimate with... and at One with... these five identities. Survival as life is common to all of us regardless of what we photograph or the quality of the work, or what we know or don't know. Photography is driven by impulses to survival and survival drives us together, and holds us together, as people. Every photo we take reinforces and strengthens our claim on survival as individuals. As sexual beings. As members of groups. As parts of greater unified humanity. As a co-equal with all of nature.

What started out as a joke about knowing something about photography, has become a truth for me that I cannot avoid. It stares me in the face everyday. Everytime I take a photograph I see it: "If you know the difference between a bus stop and and f/stop, you already know too much."

Survival is very simple and uncomplicated. The easier a photo can be experienced, the more profound is its emotion. The simpler the emotion, the more authentic the image, the more complete the experience of survival. At least it is for me.

Anyway, this whole thing was written in context of that challenge, "My Precious" which for one reason or another didn't work out. So if this is too philosophical for some of you, too bad.

i cant think of everything. im not a miracle worker. im not a mind reader. sometimes things just go bad. it's nobody's fault. nobody can explain it. it just happens. or it doesnt. i was living in a house in hollywood between fountain and santa monica blvd. not sure exactly. the house caught fire. everything burned except my drums and piano. the dogs died in the bathroom in a corner. i was working in long beach. drove home at three in the morning. the street was filled with fire trucks. the house was gone. i lost everything except the car and my drums and piano. the money was in the bank in a safe deposit box. it wasnt much to begin with. i worked in burbank at a cable tv company. me and this other guy sold converters. i'd get $1000 a case. went to mexico for a vacation twice. i had a good time. got a tan. floated in the salt water. drank rum and coke and snorted coke everyday between three and four in the afternoon. it was late. i was tired or sick or alone. i dont remember. i dont care. i used to play piano and write songs. i'd sing them and record them. had a dream i'd be somebody sometime but sometimes never came soon enough. it was always too late too much too soon but always late. i took my camera downtown to make photos of my shadow as it passed by but i wasnt fast enough to make it happen. my shadow went past like a comet in the sky, like the right story gone wrong too much too fast. a kid washed his car at 11pm at night and he was shot in the carwash. what was he doing washing his car at a carwash at 11pm in the first place? it sounds too stupid but it's true. if i had a son and he said, hey mom, i'd like to wash my car at 11pm i'd say like hell you are, stay home, you stay home with me, with us. but it rained last night. i woke up this morning and took my meds. i was taking one tab twice a day, then one tab once a day, then a half a tab twice a day, then i'll take a half a tab once a day, then no tabs no time a day. i watched a news report about fat people getting fatter. the skinny stay skinny and the fat get fatter. pancake batter makes people fatter. save a penny, stay skinny. eat more vegis, drink more water, kick the habit kiss the cat wear a hat. the sun was bright and i could see my shadow just like peter pan i had a golden tan my body was strong and full of muscles dancing shadows on the wooden deck. my shadow doesnt spend any money. the recession doesnt bother my shadow. there's no money. there's no time to jump start the engine. face life. foot traffic. transformation for years to come. the life and death of a private life out of sight under the influence bloodshot eyes and an odor like alcohol bailed me out. discover the body. heartbreak gridiron. prayers fall on deaf ears. nightmare's not going away. it's real. it's what happened. a lot of things happen. devasting dedication. why's it so hard to believe? get over it if you can get over it. be patient. a blond in a red dress. a blond in a black dress. driving around giving hand jobs in the front seat. pulled into an alley give a blow job in the back seat of big box chains. big box stores. it's an art. cold coffee coffee black fat belly pulled tight with a body glove. black belt unbutton your pants fake it. it's not hot. i dont feel sweaty. it doesnt itch. it's perfect to hide bra bulge. back fat. be still. take a gun and shoot me and bury me just like you. the curse of death? death is not a curse. death is the other side of the plug nickle. the coin. the two sides of the story. open and shut case. slam dunk. over and out. all washed up. clean up your act. get a bite to eat. dont stop now, first come first served. the master and the servant. yesterday today and tomorrow. get a lawyer and get it done. catch a falling star. it's all over now. not a moment too soon. red high heels. call it quits.

Every Bourbon is a Whiskey, but Every Whiskey's No Bourbon

I go to sleep and it's winter. I wake up and can't get back to sleep. I try hard, real hard. I take pills. I have some drinks. And then some more. I watch TV. I turn it down low. I turn on the fan and the air conditioning. I fall asleep. I have a dream. It's a bad dream, a real nighmare. I get a phone call in the middle of the night, like two or three in the morning. It's springtime. I answer the phone and a voice says: "This is the Sheriff's Department. We have deputies at the door. Open the door and do not have anything in your hands. I repeat, this is the Sheriff's Department........" blah blah blah So I open the door. The cops come in and search the house. There's nothing there. Nobody but me. They said I filed a false report, which is a felony. I get five years probation. I wake up in a sweat. I'm still watching TV. I'm eating fruit. The clock is ticking. Time is running out. It's the Summer Equinox. I'm living in Los Angeles, the Hollywood Hills. The Santa Ana winds are rough. So I move to San Francisco. Nashville. Where am I? I wake up. My bed is wet. My pillow is wet. I'm playing drums with Jerry Inman in Jackpot, Nevada with Garland Frady from Austin, Texas. It's a casino on the border of Nevada and Idaho. We get drunk every night and take black beauties to stay awake and party. I wake up and it's the fall. November. I'm drinking at the Foothill Club in Long Beach.

In my lifetime so far I've been a card carrying member of the Moral Majority, the John Birch Society, the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and Planned Parenthood. I was in the Cub Scouts and the Order of DeMolay's, which is apart of the Masons, which Christians's are afraid of. I was in the Naval Reserve in Nevada LOL. I went AWOL as a conscience objector which was denied, worked at the Monterey Pop Festival on my way hitchhiking to San Francisco and got out of the navy with an undesireable discharge because I used too much LSD. I guess they were afraid I'd be on watch one night and hallucinate a big flying boat coming out of the sky to attack the ship.

I've studied yoga, meditation, all sorts of magick occult practices, new age crap, and practiced hard-core fundamentalist christianity for several years. Apparently, none of it has done me any damage and I survived in spite of it. I've been pro-choice and anti-choice. I was on staff with Scientology for two or three years. I voted for Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Al Gore and Obama. I've been an atheist for ten years going on a lifetime.

I've been a musician my entire life practically. I played drums with Charlie Daniels, Doug Kershaw, Charlie Pride, Conte Condoli, Carl Saunders, Al Bruno, J.D. Manis, Rick Davis, Garland Frady, Earl Ball, Roy Clark, Pat Boone, The Imperials and a bunch of others.

I've had my fill of every drug addiction you can think of and kicked it, enjoyed my share of alcoholism, vegitarianism, fruitarianism and meat eating. I took the Rosicrucian cleansing cure and detox, studied astrology, numerology and tarot reading.

I've been politically far right, far left, centrist, anarchist and socialist. I protested the Viet Nam war, the Iraq war and I hated Bush. Every day for eight years I woke up and went to sleep hating that mo^%#r f&%@king c&*%k su&$%ker! Now that he's gone and the country's in good hands again I don't care about politics anymore.

I've been trying to be a photographer for the past few years, and before that I worked in offices with a coat and tie and no tie and no coat. I havent held a steady job in over eleven years. I've had run-in's with the law, been all around the world once. I've been married and divorced a half a dozen times or more. Luckily for me I was paying attention to destiny and fate and I finally found my one true love of a lifetime living here in Tennessee. These pictures are pictures of her. She's the best that ever happened to me.

And in all this life time of experience and education in the cities of the nation and the world..... after all the experiences I've had and have yet to have...... there's one thing I've learned that has given me a true perspective on life and the true meaning of existence, and that is this:
EVERY BOURBON IS A WHISKEY, BUT EVERY WHISKEY'S NO BOURBON!

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.