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The Abandoned Road

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Dallas, Texas, 1966: On this particular day, my girlfriend and I decided to take the psilocybin before heading out. Driving the Morgan from Dallas to Shady Shores was an odd adventure. It was about thirty miles, and seemingly many days driving.

I knew of this place from years earlier. College roommates and I had lived nearby, and some scouting trip discovered an abandoned roadway that had once run atop a dam built across Lake Dallas. In a concrete building halfway out, remnants of the dam’s machinery remained, huge wheels and vast pipes, going nowhere.

Whoever these mysterious builders were, they were fickle, for after building the dam across the lake, they’d cut a hole through it, so it was no dam any longer. Just a finger of elevated land reaching toward, but not touching, a finger of land from the other side. On the elevated crest, earth and stone and even trees, and the once roadway ran, and stopped at the cut.

Just the spot for our picnic.

I recalled a time from college when the gang of us, plus the girl gang too, hiked beyond the road’s blockade, and spent an afternoon with beer and burnt hotdogs and more beer, on the crescent moon beach that formed at the end, beside the cut.

Now, above the Morgan, the day was turning overcast, the air keen and wild. I parked beneath the trees, and we hiked. It was a strange journey. Past the old spillway’s jumbled boulders, and there among the mesquite trees, we stumbled across a horrible and alarming black and orange snake, which proved to be a fragment of nylon rope.

The ground was heaving, and the trees whispered. The sky darkened, and a breeze began to blow. As we sat beside the abandoned roadway, to the west the sun peeked out, low across the lake.

The water between sparkled with flashes of God and the unseen heavens beyond this Earth. Bright flashes, as bright as the sun, and the water’s chop swirled them round and round in a pattern we could sense, and could almost see clearly.

And then clouds came in from the northwest, and the sun was covered, and the clouds drifted, a million miles above the earth, and slowly across the lake. The breeze returned, lifting the grasses around us, whispering. Then, from the clouds, rain.

Falling in parallel streaks like a Hiroshige print, going on eternally, and the lake turned its face up to receive the gentle rain.

I’m sure we returned to our homes later; unless, of course, we are still there.

Bishop Nippo Syaku

03.13.2011 by bloggard // 1 Comment

San Francisco, 1975: I saw the flimsy poster, but it was quaint rather than crude. Bishop Nippo Syaku would give some short talks about Zen. In the rawboned Victorian near Filmore street, poor lighting made the room seem drab, but Bishop Nippo lit up the place. The Bishop was a round-faced, cheerful fellow, very chipper he was. He spoke often of the nature of things.”We say, ‘Oh the flower is pretty!’” He beamed, “But flower does not care!”

On this evening, he spoke of how the True Buddhist is without fear. This amazed me, and made me ponder. I raised my hand.

“Yes?”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. I pointed to an empty chair. “Let’s say the True Buddhist was sitting right there.”

Bishop Nippo nodded.

“And let’s say that a Sabre-Tooth Tiger came through that door.” Everybody looked at the door. I continued, “Now the True Buddhist would feel no fear, but he would jump up and run like hell, correct?”

“Ah!” said Bishop Nippo Syaku. “That is True Buddhist!”

April’s Mystery Avocado

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

>San Francisco, 1983: April R. was a pretty girl with red hair and pale skin. She and Madonna M. started work at Network Answering Service at the same time. Madonna was a beautiful black woman, and the two of them were physical opposites in every way. April was thin, quick, shrill. Madonna was voluptuous, languid, calm. They went through training together and became best of friends.At Network, operators worked in pairs, according to an eccentric scheme I’d developed with Bob back when we were the only two operators. With your team partner you develop a coordination, passing calls back and forth. The training was extensive, including training in how to communicate effectively with another human, as well as how to operate the telephone machinery. April and Madonna worked together with style, wit, and humor.But today April was in the kitchen, very unhappy. She was hungry, and somebody had stolen her avocado.

The system in the kitchen was that people didn’t need to label their food. Although you might not know who owned something, you knew darn well that it wasn’t yours, so you weren’t to eat another’s food. This generally worked.

In this case, April had brought her lunch, an avocado, in a small paper bag, and put it on the cabinet shelf. There were about eight paper bags there. I asked the obvious.

“Did you look in all the bags?”

Miserably, she said she’d checked them all, twice, thinking that surely it was there. But it wasn’t.

I told her that the best possible solution was that it was just there in one of these bags, because if it could magically disappear, then it could magically reappear. It’s as if magic doesn’t like to disturb the physical universe. Big puff of smoke and a flash? Not the way magic likes to manifest. It likes to perform its miracles unseen, unexplainable.

Sour at my chatter, she went through the bags again, bitter because she was hungry and had no more money for food today. She asked me what I was talking about.

I told her about a small miracle I’d seen, and how it felt so natural, so unforced. “For example,” I said, “with no sense of effort at all, you’d just pick up a sack …” I crossed to the cabinet and picked up a sack. I handed it to her. “You’d just say ‘There is your avocado,’ and it would be there.”

April peeked down into the sack she was holding. She looked up at me, looking much like a siamese cat.

“How did you do that?” she said.

Was it the avocado? It was.

How was it done? I don’t know. Bishop Nippo Syaku used to ask, “Where do we go when we die? Nobody knows that.”

But of course, the avocado was there all the time, and she had just been unable to find it, while searching the eight bags carefully three times.

Sure it was.

A Tiny Miracle on Napa Street

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Lacunae — blind spots —
like black cats prowling midnight,
but just out of sight.

Napa Street, Berkeley, Summer 1977: In Christine’s room, Richard W. and I were yakking about nothing in the late morning. The windows were open; the day would be warm. A fat fly buzzed lazily around Richard where he lounged on the floor beneath the window.

Our talk turned to magic and miracles. He’d seen some; I’d seen some. I was relating a strange experience in England. How magic can happen in an instant, with no sense of effort, and as though something else is acting through you. I’d felt it before. It feels natural, more natural than most days’ living; it’s hard to describe.

“It was as if, suddenly, there’s a kind of a wave, and you’re being carried along. You’re caught up,” I said, trying to capture it.

He looked dubious.

“It’s like this,” I said. I pointed to the fly. “Suppose I said to that fly, ‘Come here.’”

The fly flew across the room, and landed on my finger.

“And then suppose I said, ‘Fly out the window.’”

The fly took off, flew past Richard and out the window.

Richard gaped. I nodded. It had come; it had gone. I felt no sense of triumph, or strength; it wasn’t exactly me that did it. It felt … right. At the time, it seemed inevitable.

Is this something that’s always in us, waiting to emerge? Or does it pass through humanity like a wind through the boughs? Why does it appear seemingly only at great need, or, like today, in no need at all? Is it a matter of attention, or, like conscious dreaming, a matter of exactly the right amount of inattention? What is it?

These things — miracles, epiphanies, synchronicities — surround us, like nebulae of faeries, visable and hiding in plain sight. Magic breathes into and out of our world, transient lacunae, trailing thin and smoky tracks like cosmic rays in this cloud chamber we call Earth. A blink of the mind; they are gone.

John and Joan

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

North Texas State University, Denton, Texas, 1965: There were two girls named Patty. I loved each of them, at different times. The one called Pretty Patty eventually ran off with a guy named Gary; I lost track of them in Santa Fe.

The other was called Patty Cake, and on the eve of my 21st birthday, completely misinformed while I was away getting the beer, threw a fit and all my records onto the floor of my apartment, and so I stopped phoning her. When next I saw her, she was abashed, embarassed. I leaned over the table, looking into her eyes, and said softly, “You scamp,” and she knew it was over between us.

But this was before all that, when life was still fresh and light-hearted. Now the deal was, there was John, and there was Joan. John was younger, because, being brilliant, he’d graduated high-school at sixteen, and now found himself editor of our college Literary Magazine.

Joan I no longer recall clearly, except that John showed us the marks she had made on his back, so I guess she had her points.

But the thing was, the two of them squabbled. Squabbilus, squabbelaste, squabbalorum. All the time. About anything. About nothing. Without regard to anyone present. Always, always, always. So annoying it was, to wade through this movable skirmish.

So Patty Cake and I, commiserating over wine, hatched a plan to cure them.

First, we invited them to an evening, dinner and wine, at my tiny apartment at 1308 1/2 West Hickory, across from the English Building. We had the usual student meal in which spaghetti was featured, and red wine. And a little more red wine.

About the time everybody was feeling good, we arranged it that John and Joan sat on the sofa, out of the way. They’d bickered earlier, off and on, but were basking in a fine mood now.

However, Patty Cake and I began to quarrel. We really began to quarrel. We grew more and more heated, until we were standing mid-room, screaming into each other’s faces. Patty Cake drew back and slapped me, hard. It staggered me.

Bellowing in rage, I ran to grab a huge butcher knife, and, raising it high, I sprang at her. She shrank, screaming.

At the last moment … we stopped, and turned together to where John and Joan sat paralysed, eyes wide in horror. And Patty Cake and I said, calmly, “See? Do you see how unpleasant it is to be around people fighting all the time?”

Numbly, open-mouthed, they nodded.

Later, more wine. Sometime late, late, late, we four found ourselves in a children’s playground, in the dark, upon a grassy knoll, falling off some kind of merry-go-round contraption, and laughing and laughing and laughing.

It was very late towards morning when Patty Cake and I got cozy in my apartment, to spend some time together. Perhaps it was a long time together. My bed was next to the window, and just as we were drifting off to sleep, there was a hint of daybreak outside, and the sounds of birds singing.

I fell asleep, smiling, content.

The Men in the Rocket Ship

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

San Francisco, 1984: Back in Henrietta, Texas, the Edmonds Public Library was calm, quiet, and cool in the summer. The children’s section and the Science Fiction section had that same smell as a grade school, a scent of varnish and puppies.

I got to know those books very well. Books about secret codes, books about the Hardy Boys, and books about Rocket Ships. Those were favorites. Even today, checking the news online, whenever a new photograph appears — Jupiter, a comet, the Crab Nebula — it’s astounding, like deja vu of something never seen.

In college, I was complaining to Crazy Becky Jarvis one day, about my sorry love life. She tilted her head to one side.

“I bet you’d like Patty L.,” she said.

And I did.

A small woman, with that hair that moves all together, she wore a plaid skirt, a white blouse, and tall boots. In those days of beehive hairdos, she was a welcome relief. An infectious smile, mischievous nature, and a cozy attitude.

On a certain day, I was to pick her up from visiting her parents in Dallas. As it turned out, I was early, and, having nothing much to say to them — or perhaps, they having very little to say to me — they invited me to watch the television, where I saw Star Trek for the first time.

I no longer recall the plot, probably it was about a terrible monster.

We left, and drove the Morgan back to Denton with the top down, always fun, but I was thinking about the guys in the Rocket Ship. And now, we’ll leave Pretty Patty and move forward to San Francisco, many years after.

In San Francisco, Star Trek is still on television, but as it begins to wind down, they begin making movies. And one of these was playing on Van Ness, so Derek S. and I went.

This particular Star Trek movie, however, had them coming back in time to San Francisco, where we are watching the movie. With their space ship in high orbit, they have beamed down, and now these men from the future are walking around the Marina Green. Now they’re downtown. And now they are walking on Van Ness.

And now they are standing at the bus stop outside the theatre where Derek and I are watching them standing at the bus stop outside the theatre where we are watching them.

Yes, that’s right, these people from my past, who are from the future, at a later time in the future have come back to a time later than my past, which is in fact now, and are now standing just outside the theatre where we are watching them from inside the theatre.

The movie wasn’t great.

The mental meltdown was superb.

Does God make up these practical jokes? Or do they just happen?

Mick Jagger’s Secret

03.13.2011 by bloggard // 1 Comment

San Francisco, 1977. Disco was in full sway, as the Men’s Club — myself, Richard W., Derek S., and Phil Groves — drove to dinner. Somebody was complaining about something.

“You don’t have to do it! Oh, noooo!” I sang, mimicking BeeGees. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Derek had wrangled tickets to the upcoming Stones concert. We were jovial. We were on top of the world.

Earlier that day, I’d visited City Hall. A business license, as I recall. Oddly, there was a San Francisco streetcar sitting on the sidewalk in the square across from City Hall, one of those fake streetcars that run on tires. And a TV crew loitered about.

“What’s going on?” I asked the crowd of gawkers standing on the grand steps leading up to the doorway.

“Mick Jagger and the Mayor,” somebody said. The Mayor. That would be Diane Feinstein. But I didn’t see any Stones, and I didn’t see Ms. Feinstein. My business license beckoned.

When I came out, across the street, hanging from the streetcar while TV crews shot from below, Mick and Diane were chatting it up. Big smiles flashed. Wonderful, so happy, really looking forward. Publicity for the Mayor. Publicity for San Francisco. Publicity for the Stones. Everybody happy.

Huge bodyguards in black suits frowned the casual passersby away. I noticed the long, black limousine parked down below, and made a calculation in my head. Up the block, I crossed the street, and then walked slowly back, on a diagonal crossing the street.

Sure enough, the shoot was done and Jagger, trailed by black suits, was crossing the street. Our paths intersected so we were walking side by side, two feet apart. He looked over at me. I looked over at him. There was something important that I wanted to know.

“How do you stay so thin?” I asked. He nodded.

“Don’t eat much,” he said.

At 3304 Geary Boulevard

03.13.2011 by bloggard // 4 Comments

San Francisco, 1980: We’d outgrown my studio apartment on Third Avenue. Network Answering Service, the operators who answered the phones, the Thumbtack Bugle, plus the bookkeeper, and me. Time to move.

I searched Arguello. I searched Clement, and Balboa. I searched California Street. I found a second-story flat on Geary Boulevard, on the corner of Parker across from the Post Office. I walked the wooden floors in the empty rooms; it was a vast space, cheery with sunlight, and smelling of new varnish.

On the street below, the phone company was digging up the concrete in the middle of the street, so they could run our phonelines. I watched through the sunny windows. Never before had anybody dug up a street for me. This must be the big time!

For three weeks straight, I built shelving and set up our new workspace. Rosie the Cat kept me company. I got new lamps and large plants.

In the foyer at the top of the stairs, I installed four KitKat clocks, with wagging eyes and tails. On the wall, all in a row, I had three black ones, with signs saying London, Paris, Tokyo. Then a pink one with rhinestones labeled San Francisco. Oh, we had arrived.

As it turned out, the foyer lacked light for the plants, and the operators wore out my rugs. The KitKat clocks gave out over time, and heating was a problem, as the thermostat was in one room and the heater in another; adjustment was, to say the least, tricky. Operators solved it by running the heater at full blast, while opening windows to let in the cool air. In this way they made themselves comfortable.

I explained that we would not be able to heat up Geary Boulevard. This made no impression.

I tore up some twenty dollar bills and tossed the pieces out the window, just as an example. That made an impression, of a sort, but little difference.

The cats, Rosie and Cosmo, liked the new digs.Then operator Anita found Morgan, just a tiny kitten abandoned in a paper bag, to join our crew. At first I lived in the large, dark-paneled room at the rear. There it was that I asked Lori to marry me. She said yes, we got married, we moved to an apartment at the corner of Carl and Cole streets.

I set up a development lab, and began designing the Line Seizer, an electronic device that talked with the telephone company’s central office as they sent calls to our answering service, identifying for our operators which client’s phone was ringing in to us. I took to wearing overalls like I’d seen real computer guys do.

There were excitements and triumphs, troubles and despairs, dramas and traumas. The actors came and went. Along the way, Lori and I estranged ourselves, and she ran the answering service while I took a job which carried me to Newport Beach, then Texas, then back to San Francisco, where we then sold the answering service. A manager was found for the voicemail business, I became a private investigator. Rooms were rented out.

One day, a notice from the city. Zoning problem. Time to move.

On the last day, walking around the wooden floors in empty rooms, I remembered that first day so many years earlier. The empty rooms now seemed worn and friendly. We’d traveled together; we hated to part.

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