Is that a Shitz Tsu? he asked, pointing at Delta, my little dog, as she began to bark. He seemed a little too friendly, so I was cautious.

He came closer. I felt slightly threatened, no one had come down this street for days. I was living in what they called “Old Town,” which was really the poorest part of Bodega Bay.

The man before me was remarkably good looking and I sensed an arrogance and confidence about him that put me off. He looked perfectly stunning in the rain with a navy blue knit watch cap pulled over his head. It had a little red anchor embroider on the front.

He was tall and athletic with perfect white teeth and a dark tan. He looked like a movie star outlined by my porch light and though I couldn?t see it, I knew the bay was stretched out, sad and smooth, behind him. I didn?t know the California coast could get this cold.

He said, I used to have two Shitz Tzus. I got them from the pound.” I continued to load wood into my arms and my hands were going numb. He was coming nearer as he spoke to me. I thought he was drunk or something, but once he came into the light I could really see how incredibly good-looking he was. And he looked rich, which made me less nervous, but now he just seemed conceited.

Do you have enough wood there? he asked It’s going to be a very cold night. and I said, “Yes, thank you,” and withdrew into the house complaining of the cold.

I had been particularly nervous because my apartment was very easy to break into. The front door had no deadbolt and the top half was glass anyway, so I felt very vulnerable now that there was someone who knew I was staying there alone.

During the winter there were only two other people living on the block, the rest of the houses were empty summer homes. Another single woman lived upstairs, who sometimes didn’t come home for days on end and a hippy boy lived in a decrepit house behind mine that actually faced the next street. It was all owned by the same dyke slum ladies that ran my place.

At first the landladies had seemed really nice. My apartment had been freshly painted and though it was very small, it was clean and quiet. They asked me to please heat with the wood stove, but the wood stove turned out to be screwed-up and couldn’t heat without exuding great amounts of smoke into the room, so you had to keep a window open, which negated any heat that was generated.

There was no insulation and I ended up running a space heater for every ten square feet of space I occupied. The place was actually a barely finished basement for the apartment above. The floors were concrete and freezing cold. The whole unit was only about twenty five feet long and about ten feet wide, with a galley style kitchen at one end. It had a large window at the front end that overlooked Bodega Bay.

After just a month, the girl upstairs moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft and another woman came around to ask about the place. I?d seen her at the store a few times. Her name was Victoria. She was thin and had curly brown hair that reached her shoulders. She said she would make a good upstairs neighbor because she didn’t make any noise because she was magic. But she seemed so crazy, besides being magic she acted like she was on some sort of controlled substance and I didn’t give her any credibility.

She claimed she knew all about the man who had been to visit me, his name was Richard and that he was a rapist and had a long criminal record. She also said he lived in the abandoned chicken coop in the cow pasture at the end of the street. That really didn’t seem possible as there were no trails to the place worn in the grass.

She told me she lived out toward Bodega Head and someone had recently broken into her house through the sliding glass door and put a gun to her head. I tried to act compassionate but figured she was crackerdog.

Richard continued to come by and talk to to me and he didn’t seem scary anymore. In fact he was very kind and pleasant. I asked him once where he lived and he changed the subject. On his third visit I asked him to come in and told him my story.

I was fat and felt hideous and maybe he was hitting on me, but I don’t think so.

I told him my boyfriend of seventeen years was the pornographer who had been murdered by his brother in Marin six months before. I sobbed and blubbered as I told him my story.

I had had to get out of San Francisco for a while while the trial was going on and ended up here because I thought it would be cheaper than the city. I was living on SSI, federal money for being crazy. Amidst all the press and exposes surrounding the trial, no one even knew I existed.

I had migraines and asthma and no money and lived on starch. I told him how much I had loved Artie Mitchell and that he had told me I was in the will and I wasn’t and that only the breeders and the children had gotten anything.

Richard told me he was a minister and his patron saint was Saint Germain and that I needed healing. That seemed true enough. He told me to envelope myself in the blue flame and chant “I am,” to raise my protective powers. I figured he was probably a Universal Life Minister, or something unorthodox like that. He was very sympathetic.

He started bringing me big bags of groceries filled with the best natural, vegetarian foods; fancy yogurt, delicious, heavy breads, and sometimes, turkey eggs. They were so big and yolky they made me squirm, but I had little good food, so I ate them. If I wasn’t home he would leave his gifts of food on the doorstep, sometimes hidden under a sheet of plastic or canvas, with little notes and quotes from Christian saints, Saint Richard Germain of Bodega Bay.

Sometimes I would see him all dressed up, in a suite or nice sweater, with his thick, dark wavy hair and vibrant eyes against his healthy good looks, I figured he was a very rich eccentric. Up until then he had always been on foot.

Then one day he showed up in an old olive drab army Jeep with three huge redwood bird sculptures in the back and he told me he was a wood carver.
He was on his way to a party in Bodega Harbor, the ritziest neighborhood, and asked me to come. I declined. I was still apt to come unglued in public.

When he needed money he would drive around and sell his carvings to tourists right out of the back of his jeep and sometimes he would carve by the roadside to attract them. I was still grieving heavily for Artie Mitchell.

I will kill a crow and drink its blood for you. I will wear the hair shirt you left on the floor like it was Cashmere. I will leave your vodka in the freezer, because part of me has become you and part of me has died. Was I spared or was I just uninvited?

Let me try one more of those little white pills. Melting them under the tongue makes them work faster, though they will never work fast enough
or hard or long enough. I would eviscerate myself on the spot where you died but I always hated that house. I will never know why the sand does not hold the shape of our bodies after we leave.

I will avoid those who thought they knew you. I will not try to figure out what we had or why you pulled up stakes just now. I have nothing that smells like you.

Thank god we never made it all the way to mundanity, but I?m hoping for safety there now. I will see things that would suit you and wear them myself. Picking up the phone will no longer be emotional roulette.

Knowing that art and anarchy are sisters who were once joined at the hip.
Now they live on different sides of town. Sisters who wanted to fuck your chaos, thinking you had real estate in paradise, when it was just a plot in the valley.

Something big was brewing and you already knew its taste. Your mouth was the only home I wanted.

I watched the young ones fall for you, looking for an epiphany. I watched your chest hair turn to gray, and your head grow naked of its own accord. As wives and girlfriends came and went, time and children sweetened you.

I will make turtle soup and feed it to strangers. I will forgive everyone who got more of you than I did. Those who cooked your food and bought your underwear, who nursed you through your fugues.

Of all the women who cared for you, I could only write you poems
and visit your arms as a foreigner. When you were at my door, when you came to milk my heart, I wanted to be fast and brilliant for you but I don’t think that it mattered.

I will feel widowed for years, stuffing pain through the strainer in the sink
when wisdom tries to visit. I will ignore people with vision, they only increase my desperation. I will ferret away everything you said in the banks of a river.

I will watch the barometer and learn the tides, hoping for omens and signs.
I will learn to forgive and I will start with you. I am the last of your hostages to come home and I don’t want to be here.

Richard told me people had to hear my side of the Mitchell Bothers story, and who Artie was and that I should write to some of the papers and let them know I existed. He told me the name of someone at the Marin Independent Journal.

And then I saw the name of a man at the Chronicle and wrote it down. I sent him a little chap book of poems I had put together called “Eight for Artie.” Eight of the best poems I had written over the seventeen years I had seen him. He gave my name to another man named David McCumber who lived in Santa Barbara. He also happened to be Hunter Thompson’s editor. Artie had idolized Hunter.

McCumber called me and asked if he could interview me for a biography of the Mitchell Brothers he was doing. I was totally whacked out on Thorazine and just trying to stay off the bridge and keep walking past open windows.”

He called again a few days later and talked to me for about forty-five minutes. I remembered little of what I said. After the interview was finished I got a migraine so bad I had to get a neighbor to drive me to Santa Rosa to the Emergency Room for Demerol.

Richard the wood carver wasn’t much use in tight situations because he didn’t have a phone and slept out in nature in the hills a lot. As it later turned out, he did live in the pasture with the cows at the end of the street.

After the book came out I found I could only read the parts of it that I was in. There was too much in there I didn’t already know and had no desire to, and anyway it would trigger migraines if I read too much. The book was called ? X- Rated.”

I cannot forgive McCumber for not paying me for the interview. He said he couldn’t afford it. I later found out he had gotten a sixty-thousand dollar advance for the book.

Michael D. called. During his last schizoid episode two years ago he turned his living room into a shrine to a bunch of East Indian deities. I think he might be hot for me, but I’m not attracted to him at all. I also think he’s crazier than I am, which makes a relationship with him something I don’t want to pursue.

Peter also called. He is a very intelligent, good-looking gay guy and we got close when we did the poetry series “Literally Committed.”

He is dying of aids, but I have become determined to see him through it. He does not talk to his family and a lot of friends have backed off because of his manic fazes where he becomes unbearably confrontational.

We talk a lot about insanity. I think a lot about the connection of Genius and insanity and obviously Peter has too.

Genius means you think too much. It means you live in an altered state. Living with genius is like living with death because genius is difficult and genius doesn’t go away.

It means absolutes have to run the whole show. It means life in a circus tent and everyone wants in but just for a short visit because it?s really too hot inside and the noise is really unbearable, you’ll probably need ear plugs if you don?t want any permanent brain damage.

It means money problems and suicide attempts and neurotic need.

Neurotic need that will consume you masterfully. Neurotic need; the neurotic need of genius, the neurotic need of a brilliant child who never had to try, who was coddled and sheltered and heralded as genius and it always looked at its unscarred wrists and wondered, “Is it time yet?”

This is were it"s leading:

It"s leading to fame or death. Its leading to fame and death. It’s leading you by the nose and you wish something or someone else could lead you but you only can only kick and scream for forty or fifty years and then you start to slow down and wonder why? Why do I have these huge muscles in my legs from kicking and screaming? And then you start to forget about your body and you quit listening to your body because it’s sure made some stupid decisions in the past.

Then you start to give up the struggle and the hand cuffs you’ve been wearing seem to ease up a little and the cuffs on your shirt are frayed and dirty and you realize you’ve been forgetting to bathe and you realize you don?t go out any more and you realize you’re alone again and there isn’t really anyone you want to see and you realize you got to stop feeling so much; you?re to old for this; you’re too old for THIS.

And the realizations won’t stop, they keep cascading in and your don?t have the will power to write them down anymore and you don’t have the desire to share.

Remember how they used to tell you to share and then you learn to share and then you find out that you have way more than anybody else, no matter how much you give away.

And then people start to try to do things for you, but you don’t want the responsibility. You don’t want to owe them because you know how ugly that can get. You know how it is when they think you should be grateful and they don’t know that you haven’t even decide if you want to live. I mean it’s so ugly and hopeless and then it all comes down to money. Dirty, fucking humbling money.

And I try to care. I try to care about money and the numbers on my bills when anything less than a hundred seems small and over a thousand is conceptual. I try to eat a lot of predatory fish. I try to care that I’m not a marketable product, that I?m not an efficient unit.

I try to care about other people’s problems. I try to care that somebody got married or had a baby. I try to care about the Middle East and the price of gas. I try to care that bankruptcy is supposed to seem objectionable. I try to care that I trusted people who robbed me, that I have a weakness for misogynists, pornographers and heterosexual women. I try to care that I?m not getting laid and that my realities are becoming increasingly incompatible with any one else’s. I try to care about mortality, static cling and chlorinated water. I try to care about myth, politics and halitosis.

I try to think about a future like this. I try to stop before it hurts. I try to sleep before the sky gets too loud.

The fog is back. The San Juaquin valley must be very hot, because when it is, it pulls the fog into the Bay Area like a great suction mouth.

I wake up at night and the room seems to have no air, but if you open the window the fog makes the room cold and damp.

This is a dream I had last night:

A woman had brought me a tape of music. She was reciting poetry over it
when an old roommate came in and took over the conversation. I got mad and left the house, riding on my bed.

I was hurtling down the street wrapped in sheets. I was sailing through the Avenues in Western San Francisco going the speed limit in my bed and suddenly I was in Fresno cruising in my King Coil by the house where I grew up.

I passed the house several times because it isn’t easy to stop a speeding bed. There were a real estate agent and his customer standing on the porch.

I asked them how much the house was going for and showed them the backyard, where the grapes used to grow, where my mother had raised Bonsai trees. Where the swimming pool used to be and someone had filled it in with dirt. There was still fruit on the grapefruit tree. I peeled it and took a bite, it was incredibly sweet.

I got back in the bed and was moving with the traffic down Blackstone Boulevard, but I couldn’t find the Avenues. I couldn’t even find San Francisco. And I knew this bed would never make it through Pacheco Pass.

I got confused and started screaming. I parked at a hospital and had myself committed. They didn’t believe my bed could go thirty miles an hour. They gave me something to calm me down. I sat on a plastic chair and looked out the window, to my bed in the parking lot.

I found that room really uncomfortable. The Brothers always seemed at their most sadistic up there. The people who’d come by were all impressed they were partying with the Mitchell brothers and some of them were just normal businessmen who didn’t have a clue. They’d play really cruel inside games with some people, making them look stupid.

I always hated going up there because they’d put you on the spot at some point. The worst was when Artie would ask me to recite poetry to a bunch of assholes who were there just to see pussy. It was embarrassing, sometimes I’d do it, sometimes I wouldn’t.

When I first met Hunter Thompson I didn’t know who he was. I was that out of it. We’d done a couple of grams coke and everybody was drinking the clear hard liquors. Hunter was just heavily into the blow and everyone was hardly able to talk and Artie said, “Hunter, you have to hear Bana’s poems. Bana, read him some of your poems.”

I hadn’t done much reading in public at that point. I read him some poems in a shaky coked out voice and he listened and was really kind in his response. It was the only time he seemed really present.

He said “You seemed awfully scared, but I wish I could write poems like that.”
I always seemed scared when I was cooked out.

I went home and read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Then he really made me nervous. How could this guy possibly write so well and take so much dope? It was unbelievable. There was no way Artie or any other human being could keep up with him. It would be suicide.

At this time Hunter had become the night manager of the O’Farrell and was going to write a book about it.

When Hunter wasn’t around and Artie was really drunk he started to talk like him, doing a pretty good impersonation. Talking in a kind of speed freak mumble with occasional incoherent outbursts, subdued tirades and carrying on about incomprehensible topics. Then, after a few months, whenever he was totally out to lunch, he’d turn into Hunter. I don’t think it was a conscious thing anymore. It gave him a good persona for expressing his confusion.

The last time I saw Artie was on New Years Day of 1991. He called me from the O’Farrell at about eleven in the morning. He asked me if I’d come and get him , I said sure. At that point I could tell when he was desperate and tried to accommodate him.

I drove my burgundy sidestep pickup truck down to the O?Farrell Theater and pulled up in front. He was waiting and jumped in like he was making an escape. Once we were moving down the street, he pulled his faded blue jeans down from his skinny white butt and said, “Rub my ass.”

He was obviously complete in the bag. There was no one home in his eyes.
And I was shocked because the cab of the truck was so exposed. But there was no dissuading him from what he wanted. So I rubbed his ass with my one free hand while driving West down Geary to the Great Highway.

He told me to take off my pants and I said, “No.” He grabbed the steering wheel and almost made us crash. I grabbed it back and set us on a straight course. Like many encounters with him I was somewhere between complete embarrassment and total entertainment. Ultimately I pulled over and he got my pants down, around my ankles.

I drove back onto the road. I was wearing a long shirt and he couldn’t see that I still had my underwear on. When he realized that he started screaming that I lied to him.

“Don’t ever lie to me again! Don’t lie to me! I’m sick of lying bitches!”

Big time momentary rage. Like I had lied about my underwear. He ripped it off and slid his finger into me.

I looked straight ahead as I drove. My feet were hobbled by my jeans while I was working the gas and brake pedals. He was on his elbows with his butt in the air and his head in my lap.

He was fingering me while I was rubbing his naked ass at window level. Any other truck could look straight in the window. We finally made it back to the safety of my house.

I had been on a cabbage soup diet and had a big pot of soup on the stove. He drank soup from the bowl like it was the nectar of life, while sitting buck naked in my kitchen. He looked as skinny as an old yogi. His chest hair was completely gray, not much hair was left on his head. His eyes were out of focus.

Mike the blues singer, my roommate at the time, came out of his room and was delighted to see Artie sitting there. He’d never met him, but had followed his career. They exchanged pleasantries. He stayed all that day at my house, that night and the next day. I think it was our longest continuous strip of time together.

We engaged in a bout of unusually languorous sex on the first afternoon. The phone rang and I didn’t pick it up. The next morning I listened to my messages and found out it had been Julie, the latest live-in girlfriend. She said she was looking for him.

“Bana, will you tell Art to call home?”

His girlfriends always seem to have access to my number. He liked to see us fight.

We had had a good night. It was warm and comforting. Like the time he came and brought me Chinese soup after I’d had oral surgery. I was fucked up on painkillers and they weren’t even working.

After he came over he said “I know you were in bad shape because in all the years I’ve known you, it was the first time I ever heard you slur your words. That was something I was proud of.

There was one day in 1989, just before the earthquake when he had come over in his brother’s blue ford van. I had a beautiful thousand square foot loft on Florida Street. He reclined on my bed all afternoon reading everything I had written in the last few years, including the manuscript for Mobius Stripper. He’d never sat down and read my stuff in front of me before or been so relaxed.

I kept working on my synthesizer and a vocoder, recording stuff for tapes to go behind my poems in performances.

This was my idea of a perfect domestic scenario. He’s reading my writing, and I’m recording my voice. It’s all about me, me, me. I was blissful.

It was one of the few quiet periods we had ever spent together. He just came over to hang out. I was really thin at the time.

He spoke, while pausing to put down a handful of my stories.

Isn’t it wonderful that we haven’t gotten old and fat?”

We felt we had transcended the ordinary entropy that grinds most people down.

I think in the last year before he died it started catching up with us. After he almost drown at the beach. He got sick, he had an under active thyroid. He though it was a result of the hypothermia, but he was drinking so much, who know what all was failing.

He had to take thyroid supplements and sniveled about it. He was totally bummed that he would have to take a pill every day of his life. I had no sympathy because I’ve always had to take pills. I told him he wasn’t being very stoic.

It seems he got all of his medical information from his pal Doc Dossett, he wouldn’t go to any one else. Artie’s depression got completely out of hand towards the end of 1989. He was depressed just like me.

He would say, ” The world is a horrible place to live, I don’t want to be alive.” Straight up. I’d never heard him talk like that at all.

It was as if he was supposed to die when he almost drown and was just drugging around this hollow shell of a body.

The yard is a barren dirty patch of ground surrounded by three and four story buildings littered with the usual neighborhood garbage of the transient hotel on one side; syringes, clothing, food, rubbers.

I push opened my dirty window, it scrapes loudly as it is swollen from the damp, putty falls out from the edges. I stick out my head. A voice as belligerent as a raven but high and almost like an eagle greets me. I see the finches normally out on my fire escape dive for cover.

The loud bird is on the roof calling out, annoyed, annoying. I am craning my neck to look out of the window and I look up and he steps out onto the top rung of my fire escape. It is a hawk, maybe young, because his feathers look kind of puffy and immature. His presence casts a surreal note against the sound of cars and sirens.

I make a weak imitation of his noise back at him and he twists his head to look at me me, not ten feet away. His beak is black and curved, his broad white chest spotted with black. There is no flare to his tail and it has dark stripes. His gaze is cold and predatory. We stare at each other, here, in the middle of the city.

I decide to leave him be, maybe he’ll eat some pigeons, but I’d like to think he has more pride than that.

I dress to walk the dog. The one cadence in a life so devoid of structure that it wants to implode like a punctured television tube.

I put on sweats and a nylon bomber jacket. I’ve got these new boots I?m trying to break in. Big clunky Fry-type boots with thick soles that I got at the flea market for five dollars. They’re knee high and brand new and look exactly like a pair Nico from the Velvet Underground used to have made in Spain.

They’re big and stiff and I have to wear two pair of socks and I wonder which one is going to break in first, my foot or the boots. So I put them on with some heavy Alaskan socks and take Delta out for her walk.

It has been raining for days, months, the year of the hundred year rains. Every day mimics the last, wet, wet, wet. I am secretly grateful that my roof does not leak. I am secretly grateful for food, for my car and my dog. But only secretly.

It’s Saturday and there are just two cars parked on this industrial street; the War Wagon, the old ambulance covered with graffiti whose owner I’ve not seen in the five months, but who manages to move it almost every night for street sweeping. And my car, the Mighty Corona, still there, still intact, survivor of another night in the North Eastern Mission Industrial Zone.

I have no window to replace, though aqua beads of safety glass litter the sidewalks in both directions. I pat the Mighty Corona affectionately on the fender as I walk by. Delta and I set off around the block.

I turn onto the alley that is Treat Street, where not even the War Wagon could survive the night. There’s a body rot brown Mustang at the curb with a white hooker spilling out who has red lesions all over her face and legs. Her black nylons are ripped and she’s wearing a black leather jacket with “The Cramps,” written across the back in baby blue paint.

There’s a very grim black man at the wheel of the car. The hooker starts talking to me as I walk up, asking about my dog. She attaches herself to me by holding my arm as I walk. The mustang speeds away.

After we turn the corner she thanks me for letting her walk with me ‘cause she thought that guy was about to rip her off. She’d met him before but didn’t remember until he offered her thirty dollars for one thing and then she remembered he would take whatever he wanted once you were in the car.

She has the nose of a predatory bird, sunken cheeks, purple suede boots cuffed down and heels so worn they melted seamlessly into the debris covered sidewalk. Her thighs are big and her skirt is short. Her waist is small and I feel protective of her in my big clunky boots.

She is the the last creature to milk the night of any advantage it might bring. The sacrificial lamb cross-dressing as wolf. The placated victim of the victimless crime.

We walk down the block and reach the stoplight at Folsom.

“I think I?ll go back to bed.” she says.

“Good luck.” I say knowing luck is her only ally.

I turn and walk up the street, little Delta running ahead, and I hear the Hawk screeching, calling out again. The loud and alien sound echoes off the buildings, then fades.

Gypsies wander because
the Ganges is so far away
and the Indus Valley tends to flood

Because their lineage is ancient
and freedom is always new
because of ocean currents,
migrating birds, date palms and desert winds
because Egypt belongs to the sphinx

Because tundra is usually frozen
Genghis Khan bred tough little horses
that didn’t eat much
and the sound of their hooves on cobblestone
became the heartbeat of the Black Madonna

Because Gypsies have found
that mortgages are excessively heavy,
a guitar takes only one hand to carry
and feet that are intimate with the road
know the steps to a very fierce dance

Because Hermes was glad he couldn’t wear shoes

Because the writhing flames of a campfire
twist the shadow of darker wisdom into witchcraft
and illuminates passion into sacred texts

Because the Jews didn’t go to the ovens alone

Because true colors grow more brilliant in the sun
because life is amorphous,
home is a relative term
and flying severely distorts the importance of time

Because nature’s law
has never built a gallows
because the bright tyranny of the stars
makes the sky a perfect master

I’m sick of knowing dead people
I’m tired of writing poems for wakes
of writing poems that eulogize their struggle

I’m sick of knowing dead people
they think only of themselves

Death makes people very boring
and no fun to gossip about

Death makes people very sad
makes them the ultimate polyplegics
like a wind-sock that has lost the breeze
and is now deflated by the conspiracy of life

Dead people are pain and useless weight
they contribute nothing to the GNP
or the blue gene pool

They swim in lambastic parodies
of someone who could once hold a pulse

Dead people run down the neighborhood
they make property values drop
they have too many children
and they don’t pay child support

Dead people go into probate
and leave me just enough money
to awaken the need for it

They are always late
way more than fashionably late

They make the living want to have babies
to erase the deficit

They were spoiled and wouldn’t cooperate
they were broken or crazy

They couldn’t JUST HOLD STILL

They didn’t understand the rules very clearly
they violated the laws of nature
violated me and themselves
betrayed me
abandoned me
and got away with murder

They never used the right fork in life
so they eat with their fingers in death

They seize my hand as I sleep
and write poems to themselves

They expectorate miracles
then whisper incantations
until the faint breath of dawn begins

Dead people make road signs in the desert
with bouquets of Indian paintbrush
dipped into little jars of Day-glo pigment

They appear on soap boxes near sunset
asking for emotional donations like bone marrow
they get in my blood like AIDS

They leave me cold
they leave me unsatisfied
they leave alone

Those motherfuckers
THEY ALWAYS LEAVE ME ALONE!

It’s a reassigning of the times
returning to Legba and the crossroads

Voodoo, Macumba, Santeria
in the Mission of San Francisco
if you’re not illegal you probably should be
for resisting the blandness of the next wave

Voodoo, Macumba in the mission
strong Latin men
and old women who know too much
roll-up the metal fronts of their shops
like mouths that open with the morning light
the parked cars armored like war-wagons
and war-wagons camouflaged as cars

Dervishes dance
and Buddhists meditate in clean sparse rooms
brown skinned children
go laughing on their bikes
over dirty crumbling pavement
like they are riding the Elysian Fields
We seek purification
we seek protection
we seek control of our lives
a burning need to feel
to transcend all of the debris

We need symbols
that can’t be computer generated
tangible icons
understandable fables

We need a history
we’ll use any culture we can get our hands on
we’ll get so absolutely clear
we’ll be able to sing the telephone book
and bring tears to your eyes

Nature is not
disappearing beneath the concrete
our own nature is not changed by sidewalks

There are cascades of color color
there is passionate belief
and the landlord waiting in is shiny new Lexus
doesn’t have a clue

Only powerful spirits prevail here
backed by the sound of congas on a cold afternoon
in a window sill sits
a coconut with a face made of cowry shells
a few sacrificial chicken feathers
blow across my feet
even the beeper guys
hear only the polyphonic syncopation of life

Suddenly it all makes sense
suddenly you feel the pulse
smell a sweet warm sweat
somewhere Mammie Wata suckles a baby pig

Hope and voodoo
seek blessings for the urban blight
while botanica shops sell reptile parts
someone smiles as they say hello
and everyone tells of prophetic journeys they have made
only to return

And the sad people at Sixteenth Street
long for their planet
while others are learning
how to make this one
look more like home

I am back in Fresno one year now
and it is raining in my yard
I have more pomegranates than I have ever seen before

I unwrapped the tree
from the desperate arms of the ivy last fall
And it grew like a wild jungle plant
and it bloomed like a young gypsy girl
dancing in the sun
at the festival of Maries de la Mer
all flush red petals and promise

The tree grew tall and bushy
and over the fence to the neighbor’s side
but they have moved
so their yard is as good as mine

And there are so many deep striated red
thick skinned orbs of fruit
hanging from long drooping, yellowing branches
suspended against the clouds as I look up

I am back in Fresno one year now
and the sky is pouring a wetness
that quakes the turning leaves
of the giant amber trees out front by the street
They are thrashed by the wind
and then pummeled by rain
and it makes them move with almost rhythmic agitation
The willow next door
moves with a fierce silkiness as the wind picks up

My neighbors eye me suspiciously
there’s no one here for me to call when I am sick
In the city there was a French guitarist
in the apartment across from mine who watched over me

Fresno doesn’t like me like San Francisco did
They think you are worthless here
if you don’t work nine to five
or if you’re crazy you must be stupid

But just outside
there is a profusion of pomegranates
and sweet orange colored lemons at New Year
and an abundance of vibrant green table grapes in summer
and big effusive plum trees
that produce with unending good will

I eat pomegranates in this fertile valley
where my pleasures are more simple
though I am not understood

Sometimes I eat three in one sitting
those with with really rich crimson insides
make me forget everything
as I beg liquid from each kernel
like a hungry scavenging animal

Every pomegranate I eat gets better
it seeds are juicy red teeth
that I squeeze with my own

I eat them faster and faster
excited by this astringent embodiment of Autumn
as Persephone goes underground for the winter
dressed in dried flowers and leaves of fiery color

Juice spills up my hands as I tear away
a bitter white honeycombed membrane
and dislodge the clear blood colored nuggets with my tongue

After the blinding heat of the summer
you forget how dark it can get at midday
you forget how short the days can be
in the infinite gray of the valley winter

What remains of the pomegranate stains the tips of my fingers
reliving the taste of lost dreams I suck them slowly

One is a birthday party for my friend Stephen, one is a CD release party for a women’s spoken word recording and one an opening for pagan/satanist/poet/painter Chris Trian. His parties are legendary, but so are Stephen’s.

I’m talking on the phone and watching TV, waiting for it to get late enough to go out. Stephen’s and Chris’ parties will probably run until very late.

I look around my room and I see only that which has survived the tornado called my life. The phone rings and it’s Stephen apologizing for not calling earlier. He was going to help me move a desk to my apartment.

Stephen is trying to get get ready for his party all by himself. I offer to come help. He says, “yes, come,” and it is only two blocks away but I will drive the Mighty Corona because it is starting to rain.

I am worried about being cold in Stephen’s six thousand square foot loft with no heat. I put on a complete layer of long underwear under olive drab chemical warfare pants from world war II that are voluminous. I put on some gray suede fashion combat boots, a long pink mohair sweater and a black Afghani hat that rolls up, and itches like it’s made out of goat wool so I lined the inside rim with satin ribbon, but it still kinda itches.

I gave Artie one of these hats, the fibers were gold and gray, exactly the color of his beard. He wore it for a while because it looked so good on him, even though it itched. And because it itched he developed a funny imitation of an Afghani rebel.

He’d say “The itching, it make me angry, and that anger, I turn that anger to my enemies!”

Wearing my midnight blue Afghani hat gives me this look, kinda Swedish-Russian with blond hair coming out from the edges. I feel very pretty. The medication is working.

I park the Corona a block from Stephen’s and pass numerous crack whores selling their burnt out wares. I plod up to the gray featureless three storied building that houses his loft. I pass a freight elevator and tread up a dark flight of stairs, stopping at a black fake fur covered door to ring the bell. I am buzzed in and go up one last flight of stairs before walking into his place.

Most of the space is filled from the floor to the twenty foot ceiling with industrial shelves stuffed with tens of thousands of reels of film. He collects them and runs a business selling footage.

The kitchen is far to the back and his office is up front with huge windows looking out toward Twin Peaks to the West. He’s on the third floor and down below you can watch the hookers on Capp Street. Pain is a Capp Street whore. Working the Tenderloin is a move up to these women, I mean some of them don’t even get dressed up they just wear their fluffy slippers and sweats.

They have the zombie stares and the terrible sores on their faces and bodies of junkies and crack heads. I found out that a lot of them operate on three day runs. They trick, score drugs, go home get high, trick, score, go home, for three or four days until they collapse. I wondered why I see so many in the early morning when I walk the dog.

Stephen has this new roommate who has beautiful auburn hair to his waste, but he’s so stuck-up you can’t even talk to him. Stephen wants me to go get vegetables for people to snack on, some of his guests have already arrived.

It’s about 9:30. I agree to go to the store and he gives me a twenty dollar bill. I go and get vegetables and chop them while Stephen and his roommate Zack put up projectors and video monitors and move furniture.

More people arrive. I chop vegetables and put out fruit. Then I grab my coat and I leave for the opening at the Southern Exposure Gallery for a spoken word CD produced by the Women’s Action Coalition. I’m not on it. I know I’m not politically correct, but still.

I feel really good and look better than I have in months. Kinda middle aged punk with an my ethnic hat, big boots and pale hair. I go to the gallery and there’s a big crowd. A spoken word girl group called Blood Test is performing.

They’re really good at getting press and they sound professional. Way better than the last time I heard them, I think this is a better PA.

I walk around the room looking for somewhere I can take off my thermal undershirt because I am starting to burn up even though there’s no heat in the building. I’ve definitely overdressed, but I’m really scared of getting cold.

I say hi to a bunch of poets I know and some I don’t and then there’s a break so I go up to the front of the stage to see Liz Belile who is here from LA and tell her I came to see her and tell her I’ll come to see her on Sunday at Above Paradise. I say hi to a couple more people, then leave.

Next is Chris Trian’s opening at his studio on 3rd street. Chris and his old lady Dierdra are Pagan Satanist but I’d say they lean more toward Pagan but who knows what they do in the privacy of their own home. They have a huge old house they inherited in North Berkeley.

I sit in my car and take off my sweater in order to take off my thermal shirt and then put my sweater back on. I feel much better. If I’m not comfortable I can’t even talk to people. I finally stop sweating as I drive the twenty or so blocks to 3rd and 22nd, locally called Dog Patch.

I enter the building and there’s a small room whose white walls are covered with nothing but very large portraits of people done in a very emotional, almost psychotic style. In another room to the left are more portraits, including Bill Clinton and local Satanist Anton La Vie.

Then there is a larger room with bigger portraits and a musical group with my friends, Pasha and Vampyre Mike, called the Familiars. We all join in in a song they called the Pagan National Anthem and I say hi to about ten people, including a lady who has a spoken word tape out about pyramids and extraterrestials, backed up by biramboughs and synthesizers. Her voice has this soothing new age quality to it that I can’t quite get past.

There was an OK belly dancer and Chris, the artist, going around with a video camera. A camera is a good way not to have to interact. He’s about six three with dark hair and modified Van Dyke beard and something so sweet in his eyes that’s really hard to believe that he’s a Satanist. He goes in drag a lot for his performances and parties, but tonight he is in skin tight black jeans and boots. Basic butch.

The rest of the crowd are older more middle aged witches and artists and poets, many woman with strong boisterous voices and men looking wild eyed and grinning.

The food is already all gone. You can tell when there are poets and artists around, they even eat the garnishes.

Then I run into David who’s just been in and out of three different psych hospitals trying to kick heroin. I’m completely straight and not digging it and all can find is beer so I scream to the room in general, ” I need some medication! and David asks, “How much money you got?” and I say,” Twenty dollars.” and he says, “Let’s go cop something,”

He’s been in a twelve step program but since he’s already loaded on something I don’t feel responsible, and we leave telling everybody we’ll be right back, like it’s not obvious where we’re going.

I ask him. “What can we get for twenty dollars?” and he says, “Some crack and maybe some Valium to come down with.”

We drive to the tenderloin and we talk about Danielle Willis’ new video where she drinks the blood of another woman, straight from an IV tube in the woman’s arm.

Danielle’s been into this gothic vampire thing for years, but seems to have stepped the thing up recently by having permanent fangs put on her eye teeth and they look really cool, only showing when she smiles or bares her teeth. Her body is long and thin and her hair long and jet black. Her skin is death white. But seeing her drink blood, fresh venous blood made me realize that she’s definitely gone over the top.

I only really looked over at the video twice but she was drinking and letting the surplus blood run all over her body, which like I said is gorgeous. But I couldn’t take it. It left such a horrific imprint on my brain. You’re not supposed to see blood, it’s supposed to stay inside. I’d seen the video at one of Stephen’s parties. Sometimes he’s into some pretty weird shit.

David and I get to the Tenderloin and we stop to buy a crack pipe, which is a very specific kind of pipe, but all the stores are closed. So we go to the corner where the runners are and David sees someone he knows immediately and the guy is black and wearing a shower cap. I wait in the the car and David takes the twenty and lumbers across the street. At my age I think I should be gardening and raising little dogs.

When I first met David at the Cafe Babar poetry scene in the Mission district during the late eighties, he he was a big loud sensitive beauty and fear poet of great fire. I suppose he still is, but now he looks thirty years older and has lost all his body mass and even his hair looks weathered.

He got a chunk of money, thirty thousand dollars, about five months ago, from years of insufficient SSI payments. He went on a hellacious run of heroin and nice hotel rooms, and took some of the other poets along for the ride.

My friend Mink says your body can only absorb so much of this black tar heroin that comes to the West Coast from Mexico. Increasing your habit after a certain point only poisons you with the impurities. When you see junkies who have just come back from the Golden Triangle they look way better from having a habit of pure stuff, especially their skin. Here they all seem to have some chronic staph or some other horrible infections going on.

Anyway David cops from the black man in the shower cap and rents the guy’s crack pipe for an hour. This makes me queasy, since the prevalence of resistant tuberculosis and all.

We go back to my apartment and get a very strange high for about thirty minutes, but not a way delusional high. The stuff really hurts my lungs, so it’s not very fun. The scary thing is the look on David’s face when he takes a hit. His eyes are large, almost bulging and an obsessive dementia takes over immediately. I realize he’s strung out on crack! I thought it was just heroin. I am not really afraid of him, but know I should take him home as soon as I can.

We take the pipe back and it is an easy drive, we did so little drug. I take him back to his place and then go back to Stephen’s party, careful not to mention it to David because I have specifically instructed not to bring him. Everybody knows how strung out he is. Stephen’s party is in full force when I return.

There are video monitors monitoring and film being projected on the walls. I see that most of the food is gone here also, and then I see Angelica. She’s this beautiful woman Stephen had interviewed for one of his erotica projects. I was there while he interviewed her and she flirted with me the whole time, but I think she flirts a lot. I think she’s too thin for porn but looks like model material to me. Her bones and posture are exquisite.

You know how when you see a really great model for the first time without their makeup and how surprising it is that they look so plain, then you see them in make up and the transformation is shocking? Then eventually you learn to recognize the ones who will look good fixed up.

I could see Angelica in an evening gown with make-up doing ramp work at a fashion show. When she talks to you you feel like your being seduced but you don’t let on cause you know she’s a pro, though you aren’t sure at what.

I told her I wanted to take head shots of her, I really think I could easily make her look like one of the Big Kids. She says sure and gives me an invitation to her birthday party and then starts zeroing in on some handsome male friend of Stephen’s.

I start dancing, the crack having given me a nice energy jolt, but not enough to make me weird. I talk to people intensely which I rarely do and talk with this woman named Cara about doing a one woman show. She has a mostly shaved head and a pony tail and is in her forties somewhere. She listens to me attentively. I feel powerful and beautiful, smoking many joints and go home at two, way later than usual. It was definitely the best party night of the year.

It’s so much easier to socialize when one is not depressed. I forget how good my eyes can look when I wear makeup and a hat, forget I have power.

That night with David makes me think about the only other time I went out with him. I’d finally given-up on my battered 280 Z, which had begun to look like crumpled aluminum foil, when the clutch went out. A heavy metal bass player I knew was selling his Ford, V-8 pick-em-up truck and after I drove it around for a few days, I became delirious with power and bought it.

For some reason I’d driven this truck over from Oakland, where I was living at the time, to the City, and ended up in North Beach with my big woolly wild poet friend, David.

There was this other older poet David knew who had just gotten back from the Golden Triangle, where he had written a hundred and one vignettes to the opium poppy. They weren’t fast moving pieces, but he had been coming to the reading series at Bannam Alley to share them. Somehow even the poorest North Beach poets seem to be able to teleport themselves to exotic and distance places at will.

He’d brought back a bunch of really pure white heroin called China White and he and his wife had returned with big habits. Poets were nodding out all over town because this guy was so generous.

I never spent much time in North Beach, as I’m not very good at hanging-out and most of those people are world class. I can’t stay up late and don’t drink or put-out anymore, so really, what’s the point?

David had heard that the old traveling poet had been giving serious amounts of this heroin to friends who didn’t even have habits, and this skinny poet named Paul had been given more than he knew what to do with and was willing to share.

So we trudged up some impossibly steep hills and many concrete stairs and then more vertical wooden stairs and ended up at a monastic flat of ancient Beat origins. The place was clean and sparse even though he’d lived there for years.

Paul offered us both tiny white lines of powder. I had never tried anything but Mexican tar and had made me very sick. But this, this China White, was the stuff of Junkie legend, and I’d never tried it, so I snorted some. David did a second line a few minutes later, but I didn’t.

Right as we had really started coming on and I was beginning to loose my balance, our host said, “You know, you guys have to split because my old lady’s coming home and she doesn’t know I have this stuff and I really don’t want her to find out.”

I looked at David in half-lidded shock. Getting horizontal was the only movement I was ready for. All stationary lines had become unstable. As I peered down the abyss that was the stairwell, I breathed deeply, moved slowly and slid my sweaty hand down the worn bannister; trying hard to concentrate; trying hard to ignore the fact that the warm Jello in my knees had begun to liquefy.

David was doing quite well, he wanted to go to City Lights Bookstore. I tried to be tough but asked to hold onto him. I gripped his arm like a last brief connection to the tangible world.

We had two more treacherous blocks to descend. Waves of nausea began to ripple through my body. The cool night air tried to soothe me, but I was having none of it.

When we got to City Lights I sat down on the curb, telling David to go on in. I’d wait there. He went inside and my stomach heaved. I began to projectile vomit into the street. A deep, loud and profound retching that sounded like my body trying to forcibly evict my soul. People gave wide berth to my crumpled form. I felt fine. I didn’t mind.

David emerged with a book in hand. He told me I looked terrible and asked me if I was all right. I said no, but somehow I didn’t care. And he said,
“Let’s go to Cafe Trieste,” and I walked fragilely along, hoping vaguely for even pavement.

We oozed into the cafe and my face began pouring sweat. I sat down and made a feeble attempt to look coherent. I had several dramatic bouts of fervent prayer before the porcelain shrine in the bathroom and told David I had to lie down, soon. My body was getting angrier and angrier at me for this latest betrayal.

I asked David if he’d drive me home to Oakland, as he seemed able to maintain, having a long opiated background and a very big tolerance because of his size.

Slowly, he led me to my truck as I puked my way through North Beach. We knew he’d be the only one driving. Once we got on the Embarcadero Freeway I rolled down the window, hanging my head out in the wind like a dying dog. After we got onto 580 I began retching again. It streaked the side of the truck and caused alert motorists to change lanes.

David said he’d never seen anyone get quite this sick and that maybe I had an allergy to opiates.

“Maybe,” I replied, as I disgorged more digestive juices toward a passing station wagon.

We made it to my house and David slept on the floor in the living room in case I died or something.

Whenever someone asks me if I want to do some heroin and I tell them that it makes me throw up and they say, “It does that to everyone.”

I say, “Yeah, sure, catch me next time.” and go home to my dog.

This morning Peter calls and asks me to have tea with him. I say I have no money and he isn’t sure if he has any and I say I can go to the store and cash a check and how about if I get store food and he can come over to my place to eat, I’ll come and get him.

He is living in a residence hotel for AIDS patients. He is also going blind from a complication of AIDS.

Someone is having church nearby and there is no parking and I have to leave my car in a white zone. I get buzzed into the building and when I go to the desk and tell them I’m there to see Peter, they say he’s with a nurse and could I come up and try to talk some sense into him because he’s been raising hell in the lobby.

He’s gone manic. I think I’ve been here before.

There was the time Artie Mitchell called me at midnight in Oakland from his strip club in San Francisco and asked me to come calm down a friend of mine who worked for him.

He said, “You told me to hire the ugly bitch. She’s ugly! I never would have hired her if you hadn’t asked.”

He had gotten in a knock down drag out fight at the O’Farrell Theater with my blood drinking Goth friend Danielle worked there, stripping and lap dancing.

The way he told it, he had groped her while she was in the dressing room. She hit him, he hit her and then she kicked him in the balls and took off a spiked heel shoe and started hitting him with it. He got the shoe away from her and threw it out the window.

He told me he was afraid she might call the cops and his brother Jim would get really pissed. He seemed to be always in trouble with Jim lately.

I drive to the O’Farrell and get buzzed into the lobby and the people working there say, “Watch out for Artie, he’s really crazy!” And that the night manager had just given up and left in disgust.

I knock on the door and Artie yells from inside, “Go away, fuck off!”

I go in and he is out of his mind. He comes over to me screaming about worthless bitches and starts to push me around.

I scream back, “Listen motherfucker, you’re crazy and I’m the only one who loves you enough to come here, so back off.”

And he does. Then he pulls out a small gun and starts waving it around saying, “I should have shot her. I should have killed the bitch.”

I sit down in one of the two comfortable black leather executive chairs. I’m not really scared. I know I have to act in control. I ask him to put down the gun and he does. He comes over to me and curls up in my lap and starts crying. I hold him and ask him what he wants me to do. He wants me to find Danielle and stop her from calling the cops.

I drive back the apartment where Danielle lives with my another of my boyfriends. She seems very calm, claiming she kicked his ass. I ask if she’s going to call the cops, prepared to make a monetary offer if she said yes.

She says,"I wouldn’t do that, I have to many friends that work there.”

I go home and call Artie, telling him everything is cool.

As I knock on Peter’s door I remember all this. He has covered the door with an insane collage of rubber gloves and boxes of medical supplies.

He says come in. Gaunt and pillow headed, I can tell by his eyes he is over the edge. I can tell by his eyes that I don’t want to be here, that I am not strong enough. There is an IV bag hanging on the wall. It is going into an port installed directly into his heart.

I try to talk to him but he is raving about being held captive. It is too much for me. I was depressed before I even got here. I tell him I will return when he has settled down.

I am flying over Southeastern Alaska
to my great aunt’s funeral
there are mountains at the bottom of the sky
ranges flying by underneath
endless snow
endless trees

Could someone really live down there?

Are you traveling for business or pleasure?
it is both
it is neither

We are encased in metal
flying throught the air

Is it business or pleasure?

Flying north
it is neither
it is my life

My life is not business or pleasure

Pleasure like fun is an accident
I eat salted peanuts at 35,000 feet

There is snow and ice below
and a glacier
blue like dreams at absolute zero

The plane drops
through an empty pocket of air
it thrashes and bucks

I smile

If we crash we will go down quickly

In Alaska
talk of the weather is not idle chatter

Out the window is a volcano covered with snow
is it business or pleasure?
it is a valcano
it is my life