The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Walking Legacy

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San Anselmo, June 24, 2003: Tonight it is so hot I am unable to fall asleep, and in the wee hours encounter a black mood. Before long the mood will pass, but I think about what we leave behind in this world.

My sometime nemesis, Emmett Chapman, in my opinion, hopes to be remembered for the musical instrument he designed, and for the two-handed tapping technique he pioneered. It might be so, for a while. For forty years, or a hundred, perhaps even longer as a paragraph or footnote in music books.

For most of us, our works do not stand much chance of enduring. Perhaps the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. His works endure, but who knows his name? Perhaps the Taj Mahal. The sultan’s name can be found in history books, as can the name of the woman he so loved. But even history books will some day fade.

For most of us, we have no works likely to endure the long seasons. For a very few of us, we leave works which might last a few hundred years, maybe. The blink of an eye in our cosmos.

I have no children. Some day I will be a memory, slowly fading, and when that memory has faded, will be gone.

But I think of Adrienne who has grown daughters. I think of my brothers and sisters who have children grown and children yet growing. They leave a walking, talking legacy which might endure for a time.

Any guarantee of eternity? None whatever.

But they have a chance.

The Panther

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Denton, Texas, 1964: In my latter year in college, working as night auditor at the Holiday Inn, I finished my work, then studied or dozed till the morning shift. This particular night, around two in the morning, the lobby was deserted, and I was reading a small book of ghostly stories. It was to prove a mistake.

This particular story was about a panther. I remember nothing except that the last page scared the hell out of me, and, with an oath, I threw the book across the lobby.

The panther had been a totem for me even earlier. When I was a bellman, I took to wearing sunglasses at night, and told my roommates that I was to be addressed as “I. J. Panther.” For some reason, I didn’t want people to see my eyes. Or perhaps I was just trying to find an excuse to wear them, really just trying to look cool.

At that time the Holiday Inn tried an experiment. Liquor is illegal in Denton County, so our “bar” couldn’t operate in the usual way. So they made a “private club”, to which you had to bring your own bottles, and the bartender would make up mixed drinks for you.

My roommate Pat frequented the bar. At this time, he also claimed to be nerval, and excital, and altogether schitzy. His words. To prove it, he had a prescription for Valium. On an evening not long after, off work, I visited with Pat in this bar. He offered me a Valium. Like a fool I took it.

Soon the effect of alcohol and Valium made itself felt, strangely so. Since I felt really wierd, I went home and went to bed. That night my first dream was textured like a Turkish mosque. Not just a wall, but a carven eternity. Not just a cup but an elaborate goblet. But in my second dream, the panther appeared.

In this dream, I was walking across the lawn of my Uncle Doc’s house, when I saw the panther stalking across the lawn toward me. Terrified, I edged toward the safety of the porch, and then heard a woman’s voice saying, “I will teach you how to fight a panther.”

The panther had vanished. Near at hand a tall woman with long black hair stood, dressed in a white flowing robe. She then showed me a judo move with a sidestep. As I turned around, she’d vanished, and the panther sprang!

I ducked and did the sidestep, and the panther had missed me. And had again vanished. The woman in white stood upon the lawn, and showed me another move. In judo, this is called a ‘Hip Throw,” and you grab your opponent, load your opponent on your back, then duck your shoulders and raise your hips, throwing your opponent over your head.

Just as I had the woman in white loaded onto my back, I suddenly realized that the lady in white was actually the panther!

In a shuddering fit of terror, I threw her off, and it was the panther, which crept toward me. I backed onto the porch, and reaching behind me, opened the round doorknob of the screen door. It opened.

Still reaching behind me, I opened the front door, then leapt backward into the room, slamming the door. Uncle Doc’s wife, my aunt Margaret, was there. I told her to make sure the kids were safe in the house, to close all the doors and windows.

On my knees, panting with fear, I slowly raised the windowshade of the window to my left, to peer out. And found myself looking directly into the panther’s eyes. I saw there no intelligence, but only a burning rage, a lust to destroy.

Shaken, I jerked back, and then heard a terrible sound. Something was opening the screen door. An animal couldn’t open a round door knob. The panther was supernatural.

Still on my knees, holding desperately to the doorknob of the door, I looked up. At the top of this door were three tall and narrow windows, and suddenly I realized that the uppermost had no glass, for there I saw the black paw.

The black paw stretched down, and down, and down toward the doorknob, growing longer, longer than a paw could be, and longer, and longer …

I awoke in my dark room with my eyes clamped shut. I knew it had been a dream, but terror shuddered me. For an eternity, I could not make my eyes open.

I was afraid.

In evenings that followed, when I worked the late nights at the Holiday Inn, sometimes I heard a soft patter, but nothing was there. Sometimes I saw a movement from the corner of my eye.

But nothing was there.

Nothing that I could see.

Ronald Reagan Visits

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Wichita Falls, Texas: After high school and college, my friend Donny Burkman worked at Neiman’s in Dallas, where they taught him to ask questions of customers, “Would that look good in your home, do you think?”

He learned well. A politic and skillful fellow, his skills emerged as time advanced. He’d inherited a quiet manner from his father, a district manager for Continental Oil. One Sunday afternoon, his father, in a pickup with their tiny terrier in the back window, was leaving the Continental office near the train station, when a light aircraft made a bad mistake.

For reasons long forgotten, the pilot attempted to land on a flat stretch above the train station. He didn’t realize that the huge Continental Oil radio transmitter had long guy wires stretching across the field. The pilot was very surprised when one of his wings was suddenly torn off.

Losing all control so near the ground, he should have been killed, but somehow the plane was tossed into a stand of tough mesquite trees. The plane was a jumbled wreckage, but the pilot opened the door, and stepped free, unhurt. With great bitterness he stood gaping at the wreckage.

At that moment, Mr. Burkman pulled up in the pickup, and through the open window, said calmly, “Having a little trouble, bub?”

Donny and I thought this story astounding; we rolled on the ground.

Years later, Don told me about picking up Ronald Reagan at the airport in Wichita Falls. Reagan had been invited to speak by the Junior League, a mucho-exclusive women’s club. Don was now managing the Wichita Falls Municipal Auditorium, so it fell to him to pick up Reagan, then governor of California.

Don needed a fancy car to pick up Governor Reagan. His own vintage Pontiac was not deemed fancy enough. He’d struck out several times and was getting desparate. Finally, on the day of Reagan’s arrival, Don got a brainstorm. He remembered Hargraves Mortuary. Their long white limousines were a familiar sight to everyone in Wichita Falls, from years of carrying the families of the dear departed to and from the funeral services.

Don called them up. At first they balked, The well-known white limosine.but Don threatened Hargraves that he’d never bury another Junior League member unless that car got loaned. Don reports that the car dropped from the sky, appearing magically outside his office. And just in time to rush to the airport.

The flight was on-time, and Mr. Reagan gracious, and chatty. They were driving into town from the airport, when Reagan suddenly stopped his story, and began twisting this way and that, peering out the car windows, looking first ahead of the car and then behind. Finally he turned to Don.

“Could you tell me,” he asked, “why all the cars are pulling to the side of the road?”

Mama

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Henrietta, Texas, 1958: For the big 7th grade Valentine’s party, I wore my white sport coat, Easter finery, memorable from the rocket-fuel incident. I was already stealing Kent cigarettes, and had a partial pack in my right-hand jacket pocket.

Stealing Kent Cigarettes

My mother was fussing over me, which at fourteen, annoyed tremendously. I kept brushing her hands off my jacket, my hair, but she kept at it, and sure enough, felt the cigarettes in my coat pocket. Her face froze.

“What’s that?” she demanded.

“Please, Mama!” I cried out, “Don’t ask me!” I was near tears.

She let it pass, and I ran from the room, downstairs and out in the back yard, where in a fury I tore the cigarettes into bits, scattering them in the grass. Like as not she watched from the window above, but I was in a fit of grief and upset.

Somehow, I pulled myself together for the big party. This party was in the little building on the block just outside the graveyard. No pall lay on the big party. There were kissing games. Somehow I got the exotic Linda A. into the coat closet.

I’d never kissed anyone, and didn’t know exactly how to do it. I’d come prepared with a flashlight, and so by the flashlight we gave it a try. Not bad.

My mother had watched over me fiercely. My father hadn’t lasted long, having left us before I could toddle. I met him later; he generally seemed a bum to me. She’d worked as a nurse for my Uncle Doc, and originally we lived behind his office. Later, she’d married the other doctor in town, Dr. Strickland, and now we lived above his office. Since we lived on the second story, I guess we’d come up in the world.

From this time on, with the ignorance and tactlessness of the young, I thought poorly of my mother, never realizing how she’d shielded me, tried to keep me safe from life’s relentless vicissitudes, comforted me when they came along. It was a shock when she was gone.

In June of 1975, I was living in San Francisco, in the studio apartment on Third Avenue, and working at the Westbury hotel. I was studying magic and meditation, and had just made some silver amulets of protection. They were to be given to a girlfriend and her daughter, emigrating to Australia. On one side the amulet said “I protect whoever knows my name,” and on the other side “Omnia Gaudium Est Presens Nunc Ipsum.” No Latin scholar I, but I meant it to say, “All the Bliss there is, is here right now.”

I got a call. My mother was in hospital. It was serious.

She’d lost a huge amount of weight some months before. She’d been generally plump, quite round, since her marriage to Dr. Strickland. He’d passed away, and she moved to the farm, my grandparents former home. There she’d somehow found a boyfriend named Herman, a retired Air Force shooting instructor who’d taught Olympians. Ostensibly, he lived in an Airstream parked below the house, and he was raising bird dogs in the field to the north of the house.

Living now in her girlhood home, this particular morning, mama had gone out to play with the puppies. She was sitting on the earthen floor of a former chicken house, playing with the hound puppies.

She said, “I’ve got the most terrific headache.”

Herman looked up. She passed out. She’d had a stroke.

The amulets went off to Australia. I made the arrangements as I left San Francisco. In the Wichita Falls hospital, she was on a machine that breathed for her. But she died.

At the funeral, tears in my eyes, I suddenly saw Judy, a former girlfriend. She’d read the news that morning. She came with me to the farm, and we spent some time together, but we had little to say. She left.

We children chose some things we wanted to keep, and I shipped my things in boxes to my new home in San Francisco. The young brothers, Paul and David, were to finish high school, staying with my Uncle Doc.

I flew back to San Francisco. She was gone.

I’d brought away some things I’d given her: a carved wooden box, a wooden perfume bottle from Spain, a Dunhill lighter, and a wooden comb.

On the wooden comb, the scent of her hair.

I wept.

The Apartment From Hell

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North Beach, San Francisco, 1974: I’d found this neato apartment and thought myself lucky. The I Ching had said “Supreme Success!”

Little did I know how much the Chinese Gods of Divination love a good joke.

It was a success, for there I found Rosie the Cat, and took her away and lived happily ever after. Other than that, it was a disaster so stupid you can’t help but laugh.

In North Beach, on the corner of Grant and Green, in the picture you see a bar, but back then it was a Hawaiian Bar, and just above that Hawaiian Bar, behind the large bay window you see on the right, along with mice and cockroaches and loud Hawaiian music on the jukebox of the bar downstairs, that’s where I lived.

Living Over a Hawaiian Bar

Strange and bizarre … all night long, loud lyrics like: “Hooka lakka shooka lakka, wikki wikky ogaloo!” Over and over again. The guys downstairs had the consolation of alcohol to take the edge off these songs; I had nothing.

However, I worked an odd shift at the Westbury Hotel at this time, from seven in the evening until three am. This saved me from several hours of Shooka Lakka Hooka Lakka, for which I was grateful.

Strange Chinese Vegetables!

It was also interesting, leaving work at three in the morning. The busses run infrequently that late, and taxis were expensive, so I’d walk through the Stockton Street tunnel and through a deserted Chinatown at three. All the shop’s trashcans pungent with strange chinese vegetables and worse, but these barricades didn’t stop me.

Home at Last, at 3 a.m.

At home at last. But two doors up at Wumpers Bar, they had after-hours entertainment with Perry and the Pumpers. I’ll give the Pumpers one thing: they were plenty energetic. So, to the strains of pumping rock and roll, it was time to hit the hay.

The bars and shops on Grant have lots of garbage, and trashcans filled with empty bottles. So much that the trash companies come every night, sometimes three times during the night. The growling trucks and the crashing din of the bottles leant an exotic ambiance to the late hours on North Beach.

Luckily, the mornings are pretty quiet

Except one day, I’m awakened by a loud, repeating banging. A voice is chanting “Goddamned Phonebooth! Goddamned Phonebooth! Goddamned Phonebooth!”

Rising to peer blearily from my window at the sunny morning, below my window, a stringy unkempt fellow is kicking the back wall of the phonebooth below. A burly fellow across the street calls out “Hey!”, meaning Stop, or maybe What the hell are you doing?

Stringy guy sticks his head outside the phonebooth door, and screams, “It took my dime!” The guy across the street, a big guy, makes a fist and yells to knock it off. Stringy guy, glaring, makes off down the street.

I go back to bed.

And then …

I’m awakened by a loud, repeated banging. A voice is chanting. I rise and peer from the window. Stringy is back.

Now, the mailbox has been tipped over and lies flat on the sidewalk. Stringy guy is kicking the mailbox over and over again.

“Goddamned Mailbox!” he screams, “Goddamned Mailbox! Goddamned Mailbox! Goddamned Mailbox!”

Ah, life in North Beach.

 

A Photograph of the Future

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Denton, Texas, Winter 1964: Living in my one-room cool apartment at 1308 1/2 West Hickory, across from the English Building, somewhere, somehow I came across a book of photographs about San Francisco.
Intellectuals Drink Coffee!Taken in the Beatnik heyday, late 50’s, the photos show Chinese children playing hide-and-seek up and down the narrow, hilly streets, show the intellectuals drinking espresso in stark coffeehouses, show women dressed as models shopping grandly, and much more.

Lefevre and I had visited San Francisco while returning from the Seattle World’s Fair in Summer two years ago when I graduated high school. My senior year in study hall, I’d read about the fair in Life Magazine. Then, in San Francisco, I’d become enamored of the beautiful Victorians, the views, the exotic sights of Chinatown and Little Italy, oops I mean North Beach. So this photograph book reminds me of the strangeness and the beauty.

And, oddly, one of the photographs shows my apartment, where I will live ten years from now.

Ten years from now, I’ll be rooming with Pat Q. the photographer off Clement street. As his marriage grows near, one day he will tell me that I’ll need to find another place to live. When I complain, he will say, “It was always there.”

He will be meaning that it was always obvious that someday he’d marry Andrea and that I’d have to go. So accept this I will, and I’ll begin to search the paper for apartments. This will be in the days of writing my novel of Texas, when I am beginning to study the Tarot.

I took up the Tarot when living in an eyrie room atop Mrs. Douglas’s house in view of the ocean. I meant it to provide a way to generate plots for stories and novels. I found much more. When living with Pat Q., I started studying magic and Tarot. I became disgusted one day, and said, “If there is anything to this Tarot, then let the next card be the Page of Cups!” I cut the cards.

Yup. Page of Cup.

Whooah! So, given my mystical frame of mind, perhaps it’s not surprising that one day, I say, “I’m going out right now and find my apartment!” I walk from the house, and catch the first bus I find, which takes me to North Beach. From the bus I walk up Grant street, and there, on a window above the Hawaiian Bar on the corner, the red and white sign says, “Apartment for Rent.”

Quickly, I ran back down the hill to City Lights Bookstore, where I grabbed a copy of the I Ching, and picked a page at random. “Supreme Success!” is the name of the Hexigram.

I rented the apartment immediately, from the lady manager of the Hawaiian Bar, and moved in. The apartment was a vast success in one way, because my neighbor was giving up his kitty whom he called Gish. He said he had two cats and only needed one, and he was taking Gish to the Humane Society.

At the time, I believed they killed the cats there. Later I discovered that most cats at the San Francisco Humane Society get placed with new homes, but at the time I thought it was a death sentence. I’d not had a cat because I thought life in an apartment wasn’t much compared to wandering free.

But I figured life in an apartment would be better than being killed, so I took young Gish and named her Rosie the Cat, and we spent the rest of her life together, but that’s another story.

As regards living in the apartment, Rosie liked it because there was a mouse to chase, and cockroaches to eat. There was also plenty of late-night Hawaiian music from the apartment, and a number of other unique features. In fact, thinky back, it was The Apartment From Hell.

But getting back to this photograph book in my college years. In this one photograph are shown a bunch of bums drinking wine, standing around the street sign for Grant and Green. In the upper left you see the bay window of the apartment on the next floor.

This was to be my window. From that window, had I been there for the photo, I could have leaned out and, with a yardstick, smacked the bums on the head.

Too bad I wasn’t there, until ten years later.

Though oddly, when I arrived ten years later, the bums were still there.

This Newfangled Daylight-Savings Time

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Changing the Time of Day?Dallas, Texas, Spring 1966: Living in Dunia Bean’s apartment on Gillespie street, I worked at the Cabana Hotel. The Cabana is a clone of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, complete with over-sized statues of Venus, David, and the rest of the crew. Inside, a vast two-story lobby with greenish marble floor and a round sunken area with sofas enough for a football team.

Overlooking this magnificance, our front desk where I worked with Dick and Earl, dignified alcoholics. Dick taught me how to get big tips at crowded times, and Earl as a young actor fought swords with Errol Flynn in the movie Captain Blood. That was a while back.

But this was in the spring, and for the first time since the war, Texas was going to have Daylight Savings Time. We were all abuzz.

Paul the Bellman was a portly fellow, balding and gabby. He made big tips because he knew about health food and horoscopes. This was years before such things were popular. His most popular health food remedy was honey and vinegar; he’d recommend it for almost anything.

On the way to the elevators with the guests, he’d ask about their birth-date and provide predictions and prescriptions all the way to the room. Then I suppose it just seemed wrong, to the guest, to tip miserly to the fellow who’d taken such an interest in their fortunes and their health.

Paul the Bellman was very opinionated, and also had an annoying habit of slapping his hand down on the bellman’s marble-topped desk when he was about to speak. This made a loud pop. I think it was his version of banging the Judge’s gavel before pronouncing sentence.

So, while we were all discussing this radical new change, Daylight Savings Time, and how we would set our clocks before we went to bed, Paul returned to the bell desk.

Slap! went his open palm on the marble desk. “Well,” he said, “I know what I’m going to do.” We all stopped talking. He continued. “I’m going to set my clock for one a.m., and then I’m going to wake up, and set it ahead to two a.m.”

We all stared in incomprehension. “Why, Paul?” I asked.

“That way,” he crowed, “I won’t lose an hour’s sleep!”

I grinned. “But Paul,” I said, “If you’re awake when you move it forward, won’t you lose an hour’s wake?”

He pondered this. “Naw,” he said, “You can’t lose an hour’s wake.” We all nodded.

Slap! went his palm on the desk. He scowled. “But those guys better watch out,” he said.

We looked at each other. He went on.

“Because when they’re changing the time, they’re messing with the sun,” he said. “And they’d better not go messing with the sun!”

Thus came Daylight Savings Time to Texas.

The Big Grasshopper Round-Up

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Henrietta, Texas, 1948: Mrs. Miller started a dayschool, and off I went. The first day, my mother walked the four blocks with me, to show me how to get there and back. We lived behind Uncle Doc’s medical office, and she worked there as a nurse.

Don't Run While Playing Bugle

During that first season, I learned about coloring books, and naps and cookies, and how you don’t run while playing a trumpet because falling down can hurt you. I was warned not to eat the castor beans growing beside the house.

In just a few months, Mrs. Miller seems to have learned her dayschool lesson. The dayschool was closed. No more herd of children in her home and backyard.

But my mother made some special arrangement, and though the mob of children had gone, still every day I walked to Mrs. Miller’s, and played with her sons Rex and Mike, until their father came home from work. He’d swing them up and down. He didn’t swing me up and down, which seemed a great disappointment. Then I went home.

That summer, the vacant lot beside their house had grown weeds as high as us boys. A man on a tractor came and mowed the weeds, and a vast torrent of grasshoppers came flying from the devastation.

Quickly we grabbed jars, and captured hundreds of them.

There was then the question of what to do with them, but Rex, the older one, knew just what to do. And so we went around the neighborhood to houses where nobody was home. Doors were generally left unlocked, so it was simple to open the door, shake out a jar full of grasshoppers, and then leave.

I suppose our belief was that, this way, everybody could share our joy.

Sure, that’s what we thought.

Us rascals.

 
 

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