How I Lost My Virginity and Almost Died Part 4

I've always had an iffy relationship with cars. I can remember when I was around three my sister Lauren came home from the hospital wrapped like a mummy in bloody gauze and bruised beyond recognition. She had been run off the road by a group of local boys in a truck while biking home from school on our rural road. I was horrified by her injuries and I can still clearly hear her tearfully recounting what happened... "they pushed me right into the ditch and drove off laughing, they didn't care if they killed me, ma! It was like a game to them."

Our family station wagon had its own frightening and contradictory set of connotations. My father would pile all six of us kids in for a trip to the beach or into town, and it would always start out in the spirit of a rambunctiously goodnatured jaunt. We lived on an isolated rain-forest clad mountain top, up a dirt road from the idyllic, orchard spotted Henderson Valley, and as every child in a large family knows, each journey was huge effort to get together. By the end of the day nerves were frayed and the pressure cooker of that sealed and steaming torture chamber tearing through the night was the stuff of nightmares. My father had temper issues, and when challenged in this situation, he knew he was in control and it would bring out the worst in him... "Do you want to see us all die?", he'd scream. "I swear woman, I'll drive us all off the cliff if you don't shut up!" To prove his point he would lurch the car at high speed towards the precipice of our gravelly road, only pulling back at the last second. We never knew if someday he might just take us all over, and the arguments ended quickly, but the helpless and silent terror of those evenings lingered far beyond childhood.

When I looked at my father since in moments of true anger I always wondered who that man was that could contemplate offing his whole family and himself over a disagreement... Who was that demon that possessed him and what made him stop before the edge? ... Was he a cruel and bluffing bully ... or was he just crazy and really meant it?

Regardless of his psychology, I still clench when someone gets upset while driving. Sometimes I just blame the car and the feeling of power that comes with being a driver, and what makes me shiver when I think about it now is how easily his trick could have gone horribly wrong. The gravel on the road was loose and produced a hydroplaning effect on any car going over 20 miles per hour. His threats could have easily been realized by mistake, but he must have known that and got off on it.

On the other hand I maintain that I'm a great driver -even when angry!- and I have many warm memories of my Dad setting me on his lap and teaching me to shift the gears and steer up and down that same windy gravel road as he worked the pedals.

I just never developed the love of cars that many boys my age did. I was incurious about how they were put together and was actually pretty unsteady about most things on wheels. My best friend Phillip Coppins and his older brother Michael lived about a mile down the road, and when I tried to fit in with them by collecting hotwheels toy cars or wobbling down their driveway on a banana-board, they would laugh and laugh. "It's a skateboard, not an airplane, stupid!" Philip howled, arms outstretched ridiculously, mocking my awkward attempts at balance.

They knew I would rather be building tree forts or weirdly talking to my stuffed animals, and that set me apart from the world they were born into and were forming their identities in.

My parents were good parents and they set us on the path of independent thinking and healthy bodies by not having tv or sweets at home, but they were also dedicated academics and were always working at the university. Some traditionally important things were never passed on. There is a heartbreaking story from my dad's collection of memories where I ask him at age six to go throw the ball out back with me. "I'm sorry son, I can't," he writes wistfully, "because my father never taught me." Supposedly at this point I offer to teach him how, but I have no memory of it. I suspect the story has been romanticized in it's re-telling over the years because we never got around to tossing that ball, and I can remember a strange gap in father-son relations from my early childhood. Later on we bonded over Joe Montana and the 49ers but this was borne from exhaustion over our constant conflicts . To this day I credit the healing salve of our mutual hatred for the Dallas Cowboys for keeping us from killing each other during my teenage years.

When the Korean War draft was instated my dad was eligible, but as a Quaker he made a conscientious objection, breaking his own father's heart. He was assigned as an orderly at a military hospital stateside and his drill sergeant father scoffed, calling him a 'wet-nurse' and a 'sissy'. Nevertheless, I believe it was a positive stage in his life where he learned many useful disciplines that he tried in vain to pass on to his children. He could make a bed that you could bounce a quarter off of in ten seconds, and he gleefully trained us in the joy of cleaning the toilet bowl without gloves, but I never once saw axle grease on his hands.

My image of the Coppins' dad is that he would generally be parked under the hood of his jalopy in the driveway, tweaking this or that and causing mysterious and caustic trickles of dark liquid to chase us down the hill. The boys always kept a careful distance until their father called them over to inspect some accomplishment or fetch him a tool. They'd rush over with reverent heads bowed, yet brightly alert, eagerly waiting for the latest gem of knowledge to drop from the secret world of men and their cars. I recall feeling distinctly uninvited.

Bill Zurich's panel-beating workshop would have been like an adult playground to those boys, but to me it was a baffling array of shit I knew nothing about. On prominent display in the office was a toy model of a '56 Chevy, and Bill would point out the subtleties of the paneling and paint job like an art lover describing how Monet renders light. "Look at that chrome work!", he enthused. "It's like classy jewelry on a beautiful woman with a smokin' figure. I'll tell ya Ricky, It's all about the detailing." I was more focused on the details of the naked ladies caressing power tools adorning the walls, but clearly there was some common ground to work with.

One of the things we shared was a love of marijuana, and while coffee was the officially sanctioned drug during work hours, once the day was done the blinds would be shut and the bong pulled out.

It was on one particularly grueling day that Bill and I were finishing up with one such hard-earned smoke after several hours of overtime. We had busted our asses to get these projects done and a special sense of fellowship permeated the office along with a thick weed haze. In those days repainting a car involved sanding an entire panel down to the metal and then doweling in fiberglass filler called 'bog' to fill the dents. On this day we had moved several of the cars outside to sand in the sunshine, but New Zealand weather is changeable, and as any chemist knows when it rains on bare metal, rust envelops the surface like an instantaneous skin cancer.

Like all good stoners we were reactionary not precautionary and we had failed to bring the cars in before our session, so when the rain came suddenly down we panicked at the sight of the giant dollops of wasted man-hours pummeling our precious panels. Rushing outside to a red Honda hatchback I couldn't tell you whether I put my right hand on the broken headlight to push, or right above it and slipped, but either way in one instant a half of my wrist was gone. The next few minutes were like watching a horror film, frame by frame.

I raised my arm and a perfect arc of thick red blood burst from my artery and flew four feet through the air splashing across Bill's face and chest. His eyes grew stark white behind a red mask and he ran into the office grabbing a dirty towel and instructed me to bind the pulsing wound tightly. We walked quickly-not running-to his car in the parking lot, along the way realizing that all the other shops in the cul-de-sac were closed and we were the only souls there.

As we got into his sporty Mazda I noted how clean the interior was compared to our office and I laughed to myself ruefully about how that was all gonna get fucked up. My boss turned to me in shock, looking like a blood-streaked zombie.. turning the ignition on, he said almost to himself, "It's gonna be ok, yer gonna be ok..."

And then he fainted.

At that moment I had to laugh. Here I was with my boss out cold, bleeding to death with no hope of rescue. Remember kids, this was way before cellphones, and for some reason I thought it was too late to run back to the office and try and call someone. I couldn't even remember what number 9-1-1 was in New Zealand. Figuring I was a goner, I sat there with my gushing wrist in the air for a few seconds, and what came to me was the memory of a fumbling and embarrassingly brief encounter with a girl on her period a couple of years before.

As a thin smile stretched across my bloodless face I blissfully resigned myself to the one thought in my seventeen year old boy's mind that made it okay for me to die at that moment...

"At least I'm not a virgin."

New York Stories II – Popeye and the Leaning Tower of World Trade

Popeye and The Leaning Tower. Of World Trade-

There are many well known things about New York City. It's people are abrasive, the rats are legendary, almost everything is way overpriced, and it's a horrible place to drive or own a car.

But take the time to walk around the corner from the $50 breakfast joint, and you might find the soft and pleasing underbelly of the worlds most ambitious and inclusive big metropolis.

Dollar pizza slices! A perfectly designed and beautifully efficient public transportation system! Every language, cuisine, musical style, and sub-culture is represented in New York. Wander into the East Village on a Saturday night and 'melting pot' doesn't begin to describe it.

And walking and biking. All New Yorkers do it. Fast and purposeful, the life spirit and blood of the city flows on street level. One of the more common sights down here are the two thousand or so brave -and some say crazy- bike messengers tearing up and down the avenues or bustling in and out of midtown skyscrapers, all geared up and on-task, like steely-eyed urban insects.

New Yorkers abhor a delay, and due to a state of perpetual gridlock on the island, all major Manhattan businesses depend upon bike messengers to get important items across town quickly. I became a messenger in the winter of 93-94, and that job sometimes sent me downtown to the World Trade Center.

Whenever I delivered to the WTC, I could feel it was a death trap. Most buildings in the city bear the weight of history with a sort of weary patina, but in the towers there was a palpable tension. Due to the recent bombings in 1992, entry required that you go through metal detectors. To a bike messenger, time is money, and the long lines at security and between elevator banks made me lose commission every time. Some buildings you could get around the messenger access rules if you knew the doorman, or clients could call down to the front desk, but at the WTC there were no exceptions for anyone. You and the CEO of JP Morgan were both just workers in a hive, and everyone had to wait in the same queue. That made all of us equally pissed, and feeling cornered.

I've always suffered from a mild sense of vertigo, and one of the most disturbing sensations I've ever experienced was feeling the bottom drop out from under me when I finally did get into those high speed elevators. It would take at least a full minute to get up to the sky lobby on the 86th floor, and I imagined it as sort of a reverse Day of Rapture, that balls-up-into-your-stomach feeling as you realize you are being shot straight up to hell in a metal tube.

But those feelings of claustrophobia were less intense than what the busboys and other staff of the famous restaurant on top of the North Tower experienced daily. It was called the 'Windows On The World', and at one time it was the top-grossing eatery in the United States. My friend Popeye was one of those busboys.

Popeye had about 15 different jobs in the city. Everything from bike messenger and construction worker to male stripper or wedding DJ. A soft, memory-stricken smile spread across his pale and boyishly aging face, as he recounted what it was like to work in the restaurant on top of the world...

“Y'know I couldn't take it seriously, and I only lasted about 8 months. I mean, this was an old-school, high-class joint with a strict dress code and the owner was very proud of that image. The manager -we called her the 'Dragon Lady'- would line us up every morning in our uniforms like catholic school boys, and then inspect us for dirt underneath our fingernails.”

“Some days I'd go out the edge of the revolving dance floor, by the windows and stare at all the twinkling city lights spread out below and reflected on the East River snaking uptown. You can see the bridges and avenues laid out in order, and then look a 1/4 mile down onto the street at the toy cars and ant people crawling around. It's a feeling of sheer terror...

"They designed the buildings to sway about 15-20 feet in the winds, and when they keep blowing the towers lean ominously towards and away from each other, making all the tourists seasick and clearing out the restaurant, leaving the poor band playing Sinatra standards all day to an empty room. The Dragon Lady insisted that the show must go on, and she would never let us take a break. Even if there was nothing to do, the busboys would get their knuckles rapped if we were caught leaning on the furniture..."

"I'll never forget the eerie scene of the musicians diligently banging out 'My Way', this-time-with-feeling, as the bored and immaculate wait staff tried to look busy on the sides ... the slowly swaying towers keeping time.”

Popeye's a squatter on the Lower East Side and we talk about where we were on 911. I tell him about how I went to work at my bike collective in Santa Cruz that morning and was shocked and dismayed by the -“They Deserved It.”- sentiments expressed by some of my co-workers. All I could think of was the feeling of being trapped inside those buildings, and what a horrible way to die that would be.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” remembers Popeye, “when we were watching the towers fall from our rooftop, some people were shouting -“Death to Capitalism”- and I had to tell them to shut the fuck up. All I knew was that my friends were burning to death, right there in front of us.”

All 72 employees and managers of The Windows On The World died that morning because they were trapped above the impact zone of American Airlines Flight 11. The owner wasn't there that day, but afterwords he set up a fund to help the victims families. The controversial picture of 'The Falling Man' plummeting to earth face down to escape the smoke and flames was identified as restaurant worker Jonathan Briley.

Today there is a gleaming new 'Freedom Tower' under construction where the World Trade Center once stood. As workers have built to the 107th floor they've reached the height where employees of Windows On The World looked out and saw the jumbo jet hurtling towards them.

Some say that up there on a cold night, you can still hear band playing 'Fly Me to the Moon' on the wind blowing in from Hoboken.

'Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars ~ Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars. In other words .. Take my hand..'

After all, the show must go on.


--

The Old Trashman's Lament

The first butt falls so much harder
than the twenty-third....
One by one
Lined up by brand
Salem, Parliament, Marlboro Lights...

Clustered around the safety of eachothers litterbugs
Always returning to the same, pristine spot...
Where someday, a thinking person
might place a tin can.

How I lost my virginity and almost died... Part 3

Psychologists tell us that we replay old stories in our lives by assuming and projecting three archetypical roles onto ourselves and all those with whom we interact. They have identified these players as The Victim, The Hero, and The Villain.

What role you play or put on your friends and family depends on what is most convenient for your ego and it's twisted rationales for your behavior-- hell, all human behavior. These scientists hypothesize that we are constantly reinforcing these categories upon situations in life in order to feel safe within the familiar. That the only way to discover our true identity and to grow as a human beings is to recognize these preset roles, and try to live beyond the boundaries of their constantly recurring stories.

Some shape-shifters can comfortably toggle between identities or find clever combos to play with, but to me the purest and most interesting moments in life are when you have no idea who you are. When you head out into the unknown without any story to rely upon.

The morning when I rolled into the dark cul-de-sac of my new job at Bill Zurich's workshop was one of these moments. The sun hadn't risen yet and the dank mist buzzed at the flickering streetlights as if trying to invade their cracked domes and shut them down for good. Noone was around so I checked the wind up alarm clock perched on the peeling dashboard of my $100 jalopy. 6:55, five minutes early.. great start!

Not knowing what else to do I sat my butt on the cold concrete in front of the roll-gate for workshop #C and waited. Half an hour later the deafening roar of an approaching Harley split the silence. Hairy Mike pulled in, and it was like the world parted to make way for his motorcycle. Perfectly scuffed boots planted firmly in front of me as he pulled off his helmet. Even though there weren't obvious patches on his leather you could tell by his carriage and grizzle that he was affiliated. My best friend's father-in-law had claimed to be with the Ghost Mountain Riders back in the day, but you could tell he was lying. In Mike I had met the real deal and he was instantly my hero.

“Parkin' on that wet concrete'll give ya piles, yank.” he snarl-chuckled. “Get off your ass kid, it's time to work. The boss'll be in late.”

When Bill did arrive it was with full bluster, as if we hadn't been waiting half the morning for him but rather, “why the hell are you standing around, and where is the coffee?” I could tell by Mike's smirk that this was the norm, and I soon learned that keeping the coffee pot full and bubbling was the most important thing in the shop. Whatever happened in the the two years I worked there, the boss's answer to was to proclaim, “Well! Time for a cuppa then eh, Ricky? Get on that.”

This ritual was useful either as a celebration of a job well done, or to break tension after a disaster, but mostly it was our only escape from the endless top forty blasting from the radio in back and the acrid paint fumes searing into our lungs all day.

My first job was something we might call an initiation, but really it was the shit work no one else wanted, or could be paid to do. This is a good job description for any apprentice, but someones gotta do it, and its true that you must learn how to crawl before you fly. An old Aston Martin had to have all it's rusty paint taken off and the most toxic paint stripper was required, something akin to agent orange but more vile. All the sleeves to my jump suit had to be sealed with rubber bands that also cut off the blood flow to my extremities forcing me to loosen them halfway through. When my putty knife would scrape one of these dollops of toxic waste into my sleeve I would scream out from under the car and dance around like a circus freak trying to get the burning chemical cinders out of the suit and off of my blistering skin.

Needless to say, this provided immense amusement to my co-workers, raucously cheering me on and dubbing me “Michael Jackson” due to my “smooth moves.”

As I hacked up streams of green paint at the end of the day, Bill shook his head and looked derisively at my attempts on the car. “Well, I guess we know what you'll be doing for the next couple weeks,” he chirped.

Bill Zurich was the perfect mentor for me at the time, his juvenile demeanor, yet adult standing provided the perfect paradox for me to ponder how this all works. He was of the Yugoslavic tradition which dictates that all boys are Mama's boys until they get engaged. He was in his mid twenties but still lived at home, and on the days he was actually at work he would call his mother and demand loudly that she deliver him lunch without a shred of embarrassment.

In the world of men, power is measured in inches if you know what I mean, and one of the best ways to compare is how women treat you in front of other men. This flagrant display of culturally arrested development did nothing for our respect for him, but I gather in the Deli world it is the perfect example of how to be a man-- at least until you get your wife to become your mother.

Bill wasn't necessarily a good business man, none of his projects were finished on time and he was never in the shop, but he was a good boss in that he was fun to be around, and he invested in us the knowledge and encouragement that we needed to get the job done-- then he would trust us to do it well. Unfortunately, he was terrible at spot-checking our work and human nature as it is, we often took advantage.

After a couple of months a routine developed where Bill would roll in mid-morning, bluster about for a couple of hours, then declare that he had to go look at a car or something and take off. Hairy Mike would finish off his obligatory minimum daily quota, and then split, instructing me to finish prepping all the cars he didn't want to.

Gravity being as it is I knew that shit rolls downhill, and if the jobs didn't get done I would receive a heaping of abuse, but a seventeen year old apprentice is not equipped to run a body shop on his own, and I would often find myself helplessly facing the purple rage of customers who had come by to see WTF was going on with their car. After a while whenever I would see feet approaching the office I would scoot further under the chassis of whatever car I was working on and start furiously grinding away, hiding behind a shower of sparks and flying metal until they left. If they caught me in a vertical position, I would point at my respirator and goggles as if they were locked onto my face and there was no way I could talk to them.

At some point I could no longer dodge them all, and this became the worst part of my job; not the grinding of rusted metal centimeters from my face, not the inhaling of colorful, cancerous fumes all day.. but the cloying disappointment of these unsatisfied customers, desperate to extract from me some assurance that all was well with their babies entrusted to our care.. that they weren't being lied to and avoided.Of course that was exactly what was happening and I decided that I couldn't effectively cover Bill's tracks by my attempts at looking busy, so I had to follow his lead and find a way to disappear myself during the middle of the day when people would walk in.

One day I went to get some supplies from the storage loft above the shop. The area was obscured from view by long hanging sheets of opaque plastic and as I rummaged around the corner of one wall of stacked boxes I discovered my boss's secret Shangri-la. Behind a pile of rags was a bong and tin of weed, and next to an oddly placed throw pillow were a dozen or so Penthouse magazines.

Jackpot! I wasn't gonna steal his marijuana, but I had my own and I knew that noone would smell it over the chemicals. Also from this vantage point I could see if anyone was driving into the cul-de-sac and recognizing my boss's tires I could run down the stairs in time to get back to work. As I gleefully pulled a smut mag off the pile, I set about my first experience in getting paid to smoke and jack-off. Good work if you can get it.

The most harrowing part of this whole scam was putting everything back exactly the way it was afterward so that I wouldn't be discovered. Every flake of ash had to be blown away, the Penthouses stacked in perfect order, and the pillow placed back in it's weird starting position. Every time I would enter our scummy little oasis I would scour the area for minute changes that I imagined were subtle traps set for me by Bill to expose my activities. The more I smoked the more paranoid I became that he was on to me, yet anything was better than facing the random customer outrage below, so I soldiered on.

I don't know if you have ever read Penthouse Forum. It's the section where readers supposedly write in about their outrageous sexual experiences, but it's really written by professional smut smiths, and was a staple of many an adolescent boy's first wank sessions at the time. The letters always started out with premise of two strangers meeting in public, eyeing each other up, and then slipping off to have sex in the most craven and implausible way possible. Or perhaps a bored couple agrees to get a third party involved and of course it goes incredibly well the first time out. Heavy on the “oh fuck me with your gigantic rod, you hot stud,” etc... Good stuff for the first few times-and it sure beats scraping paint-but after a while the stories all blended together and became less of a turn on. I began to look for any deviation from the formula, devouring the advice columns for hints of perversion beyond the ol' in-and-out.

I came upon a letter that was definitely different. In it a man described his confusion at being attracted to his best friend, how they had gotten drunk together and somehow ended up in the bathtub. He talked about there being a moment of looking into his friend's green eyes and realizing that he had to kiss him deeply.. that nothing could stop what was happening. He then went into a graphic description of their 'love-making' that was far more romantic and exciting than anything I had read in porno up until then. I think this must have been before the AIDS crisis because the letter was obviously written to appeal to a bisexual audience. I doubt you would ever find anything like it in Penthouse today, if it still exists.

There was a glitchy pattern emerging. I found my sessions starting out with the usual fodder to get going without guilt, and then always returning to that one page of the magazine towards climax until it became well-worn and dog-eared. After ejaculation I would become immediately wracked with remorse and OCD, attempting to smooth the pages over and over so that noone would ever know.

One day I climbed into what I now thought of as my spot, and turning to my favorite letter I discovered in horror that it had been torn out. Panicking, I scanned the surroundings but nothing else was out of place. Sick to my stomach, I realized the jig was up and that my relationship with my boss would be forever changed. But fight or flight is a funny thing and at the same time I grew amazingly empowered with the knowledge of all the things I could blackmail him about. I also resolved then and there that I would never be embarrassed of who I fall in love with, whether they be a woman or a man. I don't think you can choose, and not giving a fuck is golden.

I never went back into the loft after that, and my boss never mentioned it, but we were soon to clash in the most heterosexual way you can imagine. Over a beautiful woman his own age, and he never saw it coming...

How I lost my virginity and almost died... Part II

Shortly after turning 17 I began to worry that I wasn't gonna make it to adulthood. Among other problems I had developed a bony growth in the middle of my forehead which I joked was my third eye exploding, but when it grew alarmingly fast and started throbbing I knew something was up.

My parents made an appointment to have it removed but I was nowhere to be found, hiding in a stupor somewhere. The hospital charged them a hefty cancellation fee and when they did finally catch up with me everyone was furious.

Of course, like any good nihilist I thought the whole thing was hilarious, making jokes that they were taking away my alien brain as they dragged me into surgery. In fact what they removed was the size of a walnut and did look remarkably like a little alien brain, with two distinct halves and it's own capillary system.

I was informed that it was a benign cancer called a bony growth, and no I couldn't keep it, as it was now the property of 'science'. I thought about my sister who had miscarried a year before I was born. If she had come into this world alive my parents would have stopped at six kids, essentially denying my existence. I imagined this -along with my extra row of bottom teeth- as a spectral echo of her lost being. My supplanted, semi-parasitic twin, reminding me of how close my soul had come to oblivion.

After this incident my parents broke down and decided that I needed an intervention. This came in the form of a stern sit-down and an ultimatum:

“Son, we're afraid you're gonna hurt somebody, we're afraid you're gonna hurt yourself. So we're gonna send you to live with your brother in New Zealand where you can get the perspective you need and learn to earn your own way.”

I could tell by the way that they looked at me that I didn't have a choice. It was get out of Santa Cruz or die.. and I knew it.

This was their old-fashioned way of caring, tough love and all that. “You gotta throw 'em outta the nest before they can fly”. They couldn't have forced me to go, but agreeing to take the one-way ticket and get on that 15 hour flight was the best decision of my life thus far.

Upon arriving, I settled into the converted chicken-coop that I was to stay in, and the enormity of my isolation began to sink in. Here I was on an island at the bottom of the world, a million miles from anywhere, with no prospects or money, and a brother that needed rent right away. I had grown up on the same rural property as a child and I remember having fun wandering the rainforest and building tree-forts all day, but as a teenager, living out in the boonies was just a pain in the ass. Somehow the five miles I used to cheerfully barge to school every day on my stubby little child legs, now seemed an interminable distance to get to work. I needed a car, and quick.

In desperation I called my Grandmother to ask for a loan of a couple hundred dollars for transport to find a job. Her response shocked me into reality and was one of the best doses of tough love I have ever received.

“Dear, when I was your age it was during the Great Depression *insert Grandson sigh* and I had a job as a kindergarten teacher to put myself through college.” I was exasperated and whiny. “But Grandma, you already had a job. I'm trying to get one.” She wasn't listening. “Well, I had to bicycle all the way to my job and I remember having to scour the dump for spare rubber to patch the tires. You know.. rubber was very scarce in those days and...” as her words faded into my disappointment I stopped listening, but the lesson of what she was saying hit like a thunderclap. “Young man, you are on your own.”

There is a great Doc Watson song 'Walk on Boy' ~ “Walk on boy. Walk on down the road. Ain't nobody in this whole wide world gonna help you carry your load...”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikW8D4fncoI

I didn't know about Doc Watson at the time but when I listen to it now, it always reminds me of that moment in my life, when I felt so sorry for myself and angry, and yet empowered by the dawning realization it was all on me. No one was there to commiserate with and coddle me, or to kick my ass into gear. If I was to survive, I had to turn my downward spiral upside down.. all by myself.

Luckily, Henderson had a pretty good unemployment office, and within two weeks I was placed as a hole puncher in a sheet metal factory that manufactured BBQ parts. Hole punching was the least dangerous part of the assembly line, and after you had mastered the art of piercing and stacking thousands of sheets a day, they moved you to the massive sheet folding machines, where one wrong move could easily leave you missing a finger, either by the angry, stamping presses themselves, or by the ever-slicing razor-sharp sheets of metal flying around. The company required work gloves but it was impossible to pick up the sheets fast enough to make your quota while wearing them, so you just acquired dozens of fresh cuts in your hands every day. Always the foreman was screaming at someone to get their numbers up, and the endless.. Bowmmp!.. Screee!... Shssss... of the sheet metal folding machines and their fingerless, humpbacked attendants contributed to an environment that I imagine approximates hell.

Every Friday the manager would gather us in the office to give us our checks, but before that happened there were cases of beer lined up that you could buy directly from the company. It was a tradition to polish off quite a few cases before heading home for the weekend. This system insured that the company owner would keep the workers in his pocket, and some of them went to the factory solely to pay off their beer debts to him. This was my first real eye opener to cut-throat capitalism. Keep 'em down, keep 'em indebted, and keep 'em addicted to your supply, and you've got the next most profitable thing to slavery.

My brother's friend Terri saved me from that job, and along the way saved my spirit from shriveling. He and his wife Vicky who lived with their infant son Rueben in the property rental cottage took me under their wing and smoked me out when I would be just dying after a day of pounding metal. He would load up a round of 'tips' into his honeybear bong, crack some beers, and slip some cerebral New Wave into the stereo. As a hardcore punker I hadn't really opened my ears to some of the artsier music going on in the 80's, but Terri's influence broadened my tastes in a whole new direction with bands like The Cure, Joy Division, and The Art of Noise.

Vicky soothed my soul in a different way, insisting that I help her tend and learn everything about her immaculate veggie garden out back. To this day I am thankful for my friendship with her as I remember to use every inch of garden space for my family's sustenance.. as I slow down my day to a merciful crawl with the perfect meditation of pulling weeds.

They had a friend, Bill Zurich, who owned a panel-beater business, which to you yanks is auto-body work, and he was looking for an apprentice full time for $150 a week. I had never heard of such fantastic money, and not knowing anything about the job, I was excited to sign up.

Kicking my dilapidated and uninsured Datsun into gear, I headed out into the cold morning full of naïve promise. Little did I know that this workshop would be the unforgiving forge of my early manhood, as well as a cauldron of workplace and social hazards conspiring to kill me...

from me to you

If I held your heart with mine..

I'd protect it with my life

And if I had your heart for just one day..

I'd hand it back to you a bigger size

I'd pour my love into your soul

allowing you to just let go..

Knowing you are safe with me

And this is all that's meant to be.

The madness of love turned inside out

reveals the truth we seek

The depths of which we know no fear of

for trust in both our hearts we keep..

Part of an old song I wrote recently called "Compassion and Indifference."

I was forced to believe

it was if she had died

even though we still walked the same streets

and our eyes were forbidden to meet

and unkindness a strength that we keep

in defeat of ourselves.

And all the old stories retold...

How I lost my virginity and almost died.

At sixteen I was embittered, probably not more so than any other teenager, but less than I was at fourteen or fifteen. It was my senior year, and I had achieved a sort of a cheerfully jaded outlook. I knew the system was set up to squash my freedom and kill my spirit, but I also knew how to work it.

Because I had started school in a foreign country I was a year younger than most of my classmates, and as a son of academics I was precocious as well. This served me well in middle school when I was still adjusting to American culture and I could retreat into my studies, but by the time I hit high school I was just a small, nerdy loner who didn't know how to spit or fight, two skills apparently essential to manhood in the USA.

I went from a small country school to an institution of thousands completely socially unprepared and unfamiliar with all the cultural touchstones, as my family did not 'believe in' TV. In a way this was perfect preparation for my future life as an outsider.

About halfway through my freshman year I realized that all the algebra, chemistry, and literature classes were ancillary to the real lesson I was supposed learn here. 'Conform or you will be bullied.' This had the opposite effect on me, and awakened my inner rebel. I refused to be cornered and I figured the best way to work the angles was to simply not show up to class.

When you go to school, but not to class, a whole new world opens up for you. A shadow world populated by stoners, perverts, and retards, not jocks and socialites. This was a world where maybe you could get laid by accident, without all the stupid games. It was also possible to be raped, or at least repeatedly scammed.

This was the school of hard knocks, the best school, and the one that made me who I am today. We would show up early, meeting in the smoking section, and take inventory of our pilfered goods from the night before. All was shared as we panned out across the landscape in the general direction of away from the compound-like classrooms and hallways.

Some would head up to the hills to steal marijuana crops, some of us would make out in sports equipment sheds, hiding in forts we had built from the gym mats. Still others would simply torture the resident narc all day, luring him out on long chases in his ridiculous golf cart.

This was my tribe, the punkers, misfits, and scrotes. Not the bettys and the barneys. Of course running with a bad crowd brings violence, and in order to survive you had to sub-sect. My crew was the gutter punks.

This was the 80's, before Hot Topic and the commercialization of punk, so you could still get bottles thrown at you daily for sporting a mohawk. Punkers were reviled by every group including other outcasts like the metal-heads, who teased their hair all day and wore make up, but still held you down and called you faggot while ritually punching you in the neck.

Survival meant running in a pack, which I hated, so me and my best friend would hide out off campus instead, engendering more cat calling and bottle throwing from the jocks as we slunk off from the lunch tables every day.

When my best friend turned into a junky and disappeared into that world, I discovered art, and the continuation school (name redacted to protect the innocent) I had ended up in had many free materials and no real adult supervision. In fact the school was so loose that the art teacher had been busted for selling mushrooms to her students and still kept her job.

This was ideal, I could show up to school frying on acid and just hang out by myself in the art barn, painting with expensive oils all day. And this is how I achieved my high school diploma. Perhaps through some deep seated academic guilt I still have nightmares that I have to go back and actually pass algebra, but I think just showing up for the last year of school was enough to get that stamp on my forehead. I do remember having to swallow some force fed American history about how Nixon was really a hero for opening up China, and we were made to watch the Columbia shuttle disaster live over and over again. But other than that it was all just a blur of swirling colors.

Needless to say this left me with no clear direction for my adult life, and as the youngest of six, my parents, over it, promptly kicked me out. I spent the next six months careening into homelessness and alcoholism, just trying to keep up with my peer group. We didn't know any other way to have fun. This was a very dark period of my life, pregnant with many cautionary tales, but the result was that by the end of that winter I was the most haggard sixteen year old you ever met. While other kids my age were busy getting laid I was hanging out under bridges with people you wouldn't want to touch with a rubber glove on. I had played around with some girls in school but had never been with a woman.

All of that was about to change...

taking off

Yesterday I saw a giant red dragonfly poised on the tallest bamboo shoot overlooking the garden. I thought of your spirit, Dad. Facing the sun, with wings outstretched, ready to fly..

crabby pants

Can the hermit crab trust you? As you gently pick him up and whistle at the entrance to his home, hoping that he comes out to play. "Is this the ocean calling me?" he thinks as he cautiously extends his feelers out into the cruel world.
Who's to say that you won't snatch him from his shell and quickly crush him under your boot? You, who would fool a crab just to become his friend.

ghost tree

I find myself braced against the winds of time. Like the cypress upon the cliff who knows no lofty branches will stand..

How I started out as a Bike Messenger in NYC

"Excuse me manager, can you get someone on my smoothie? I'm going to be late." My boss promptly stepped over me as I was doing the fish on the floor, electrocuted by faulty wiring in the blender of the juice bar that I worked at in Brooklyn. "One moment please sir.” She said as she shuffled my replacement into line to finish his drink. It was then I realized I had no future in retail.

The place was a hell-hole where the worst New Yorkers would come to savage you, where there was no place that you could hide behind the counter. They called themselves healthy but really they were looking to suck the life out of everything they could get in their sights. The place had the atmosphere of a Hogan's Hero's concentration camp where management was the dumkopf guards and the customers were the SS...“Vee have vays ov makink you shrivel!”.

The job didn't pay well so all the cashiers colluded in stealing from the till and that was something I had to learn to ignore (under fear of death) as I moved up to crew chief. Later on when I quit I heard that the cook was stealing from the walk-in fridge to start up his own catering business. Management had always thought he was such a good worker, staying late to come up with new recipes.

My friend Matty had been a bike messenger for this weed service called 'The Pope of Dope' for awhile and told me how cool it was. I wasn't into the pot delivery game but I liked the idea of not having a boss breathing down my neck every minute. I had also heard that it was the easiest job in Manhattan to get, so I decided to go for the legit version.

When I first moved to New York I had no idea what a bike messenger was. The first time I saw one, I guess I was in his way as he flipped his chain around his waist and took off down the avenue in a puff of disgust. I thought "what an asshole, what's he in such a hurry for?"

As a couple of years went by and I ran across more professional messengers, I realized that these guys were just working hard and trying to hustle on to the next pickup. I gave em wide berth and was sort of jealous from afar as I hated my retail job and their gig seemed so much more adventurous and fun.

After the electrocution incident I applied for my first messenger job at Breakaway, one of the larger companies in New York. Orientation was a trip, the only guy out of about ten in the room that wasn't hired nodded out half way through. He asked 'why wasn't I hired?' and the owner said, 'because you fell asleep.' Take note, grads.

I soon found out that although it might have been the easiest job to get in Manhattan, it was probably one of of the hardest to do right. But, I had set my mind to being a bike messenger in New York City, and I was going to move mountains. The problem was, I didn't know anything!

I spent the first three months sitting at red lights in the snow in a cheap yellow raincoat and a gigantic visored helmet that my Mom bought me. I was trying to ride an $18 Panasonic 3 speed with chopper sort of handlebars through four blizzards in my first winter. While I looked really cool, my bike literally fell apart under me in the fourth month. I had to carry that piece of shit 40 blocks and up three flights of stairs to throw it on the floor of home base in disgust. I was done!

That was my first walk of shame. One of many.

After that my friend and later mentor Eli took me aside. “Friends don't let friends ride junk.” He said, introducing me to another messenger that also worked at a bike shop. Together they hooked me up with a $200 Pugeot with actual road bike components. Something that would stay together and keep me from getting laughed at so hard by my fellow messengers. I learned a lot from Eli over the years, but that first lesson has stuck with me all the way. In life, as in messing and video games, always level up!

At some point in my rookie year I started to recognize, and be acknowledged by, the NYC messenger community. I noticed that some of the same guys and girls would always be out there in the worst weather. We began nodding to each-other in the way a ditch-digger might do to those from another crew. 'Diggin' ditches in the rain again, huh?'...'Me too homies, me too.'

The people I met were from all countries and walks of life but usually shared a hard-scrabble commitment to, if not true pride in the job. This was really an off the wall way to make a living and it was reflected the many unique and inspiring people that were attracted to it.

I'll never forget the time Dexter blew past me on 6th Avenue on his fixed gear. His one leg pumping unbelievably fast, bigger than both of mine put together. Flashing a smile he just shouts 'good vibrations!' and disappears down the blocks. His story of how he lost his leg under a truck and decided to keep on being a bike messenger is worth checking out here:

http://clutchcouriers.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2007-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2008-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=3

One time I stacked it so hard on the iced cobblestones in Soho I was literally seeing stars, but I knew that I had to get up out of the intersection before being run over, so I used the force of the impact to bounce myself up onto the curb. Some courier I had always thought was a snob pulled over to check on me. “Hey, you a'ight rookie?.. Y'know it's not how you fall, it's how you get up!” Kinder words had never been spoken, and they gave me the strength to hobble back to base.

Being a bike messenger in New York is almost indescribable. The horrible and amazing things you see are a numbers game. 8 million people in Manhattan, 3,000 messengers, 10,000 cab drivers all pissed at you being in their way.

I've seen bodies fall from twenty floors up and bounce five feet on the pavement, I've seen meat hanging off of lampposts that used to be human, the passengers screaming in the street. I've seen people hit by buses blowing red lights at full speed and then get up, dust themselves off and say, “nah I'm all right.” to horrified onlookers, only then to fall over dead.

I was mugged at knife-point, had a gun pulled on me, got doored and then rolled out of the way of a bus just before being squashed, but somehow, I loved it. I would get up every morning, put on my battle gear, kiss my daughter's picture and roll out with a huge smile on my face.

It was the freedom. 18 years later it still is.

New York Stories #1 The Terminal Hotel

Parenting. Selfish choices that affect your child's health. I don't know how you can write about this honestly without making yourself look bad, but here goes.

The first time I heard my daughter real scared - and I was too - was at The Terminal Hotel in New York City in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record. "Is that the bogeyman?", she whimpered at the sound of crackheads rattling bags of cans up and down the halls all night. “No honey, go back to sleep, those are just good folks trying to make a living.” I mean what do you say to a two year old in that situation?

Her mother and I had just moved to the city and were renting a room for 23 bucks a night. We had had a Mexican standoff about where we were going to live three months earlier. Our daughter Alice was born on the West Coast but Elka's father was dying of AIDS and he lived in central New Jersey. She told me if I wanted to be a part of my daughter's life I'd have to relocate to the East Coast. I told her there was no way in hell I was living in New Jersey, so that's how we ended up homeless in New York with no jobs looking to miraculously get a room in a squat. Great plan. As first-time parents in our early twenties, we had imagined that we could be the ultimate hippie-gypsy family and nothing bad would ever happen to our kid as a result. This was one of the worst places that philosophy had brought us.

From our window I could look out and see the transvestite hookers on the corner of 23rd street in the freezing snow. One tall black girl dressed only in white underwear and one pale white girl in black lingerie. They did a brisk business with long stretch limos pulling up at least every 15 minutes. I was impressed by my first exposure to their essentially NYC moxie. They must have been miserably cold, but they never showed it, stalking back and forth, gossiping loudly and snapping their fingers in the air, putting on a show for the passing cars.

Every morning we would barge our stroller down through the rotten snowdrifts of the Lower East Side trying to find some people I had connections with. I had heard they lived in these abandoned buildings that had electricity and running water. They were 'legally' home-steading them under an arcane New York law called 'adverse possession'. Mainly the law stated that if the city supplied utilities and didn't evict these squatters for more than seven years, they were essentially given permission to live there and may even have rights to ownership. This was violently disputed by mayor Giuliani and his police at the time, but that's a different story.

This was well before cell phones so if we wanted to get in to these buildings we had to yelp up to the barred windows or just hang out in the park in hopes that some of my friends would show up. For long, this was way too cold , so we spent most of our time in the public library reading Dr. Seuss to our daughter. The head librarian was a real grump and didn't take too kindly to us being there all day so whenever she was on patrol we got to play fun games like 'lets hide under table or behind the shelves!' Alice loved it but the librarian didn't, so eventually we were kicked back out onto the street.

Job prospects were dismal and we ran out of money, so I had to go up to St. Mark's Place and literally put a cup out for change. That's how all the beggars on the strip did it, you sat there shaking your paper cup and putting on your puppy eyes. You had to have enough change in the cup to make some noise but if you had too much or a dollar in there no one would give you shit. On a good day there was enough sheer numbers of people passing by that you could make about 25 bucks. Not enough to live on obviously, and we were desperate, so I called my parents.

“What's my plan?”, bluh...”Well I don't know, Mom. We're gonna get into one of these squats eventually but in the meantime there's like this book storage unit across from where I beg that's renting for only $300 a month! I mean it's like a 10x10 with a shared bathroom in the hall, but all we need is first and last. The owner says he might have a job for us selling incense, so we can pay you back in no time at all!”

The owner, Al had spotted us from across the street at 48 St. Marks Place. I had noticed him too. With his bright gold front teeth and hawk eye you could tell that he owned the block. This was one of the busiest crossroads in New York; every corner was jammed with tourists and street vendors haggling over high end art books, porn of every variety, and thick smoky incense with names like 'Black Love' and 'African Queen', pouring from golden amulets bouncing over thick-blanketed tables all covered in vaguely erotic-moroccan eye-candy. People in New York are always in a hurry and you'd never think that they'd have time to stop at those tables, but there are also a million tourists in Manhattan every day, all of them looking for crap to buy. Al made a lot of money off these suckers.

When Al took pity on me he was kind of cruel about it but it was what I needed to hear. “Look kid, you're pathetic over there begging with your cup. You need to be a man and provide for your family. I'm gonna save your life and give you a chance, mon. I'm gonna rent you my book box and give you and your wife a job at one of my incense tables and you can give me what you make every day until the rent's paid. Ok?”

Al was no fool and he had me right where he wanted me.

I thought it was a brilliant idea myself, I could spend the $400 my parents had sent us on food and beer, and I was sure that selling incense on the street would be a grand adventure.

The storage room was shelter and not much else. When I ask Alice about it now, she says her very first memory is watching us yelling at each other, having no space to get away, just running round and around the room. What I remember that kinda makes me cringe is the night watchman Frank who slept on a cot in the hall. Frank was alright in a Lennie from 'Of Mice and Men' kind of way, but you had to step over his cot and his gigantic feet sticking out to get to the bathroom. Frank would get drunk and masturbate and you'd have to keep checking back to see if he was done and snoring before you could go piss. Sometimes the sound of that damn cot rhythmically scraping and bumping against the concrete floor would go on all night.

Although I applauded Al's attempt at diversity in his workforce, we quickly found out that I could actually make more money begging with a cup than selling incense. Despite looking for something exotic on their trip to the city the tourists couldn't quite wrap their heads around the oddity of this scruffy, white couple and tow-headed munchkin trying to sell 'Sex on the Nile' and 'Midnight Musk' on the street corner. No matter how loud we barked, “check it out-check it out- Check. It. Out!”, and wafted smoke down the avenue into their faces - like all the other vendors - none of it worked. They absolutely expected us to be Jamaican.

Willoughbee's story

My Father is dying, or rather slowly fading away. He spends most of his time in bed these days which doesn't seem such a bad way to go out, but I guess lately everything got tiresome enough to where he wanted to end it all. Luckily the magic of modern medicine intervened and they shot him up with steroids.

"A new lease on life!", he proclaimed. "Now I know why Barry Bonds did it, I feel amazing!"

On a recent visit we got to talking about the old 'It's' Beach in Santa Cruz and how it was a god-awful mess of broken beer bottles and cans and butts and crap all over the place when we first moved there. So Dad, being the Eagle Scout-'always leave the campsite better than when you found it.'-decided that we should go down there every day and haul out the garbage by hand until it was gone.

At first we would spend hours dragging bag after bag up the cliff, only to find the beach strewn with garbage again the next day. Eventually though we began to get on top of it, and his theory was beginning to work. He petitioned the city for more receptacles along the cliff, and we found that the nicer the beach became the less likely people were to litter.

But then he took it too far. He began to patrol the beach daily, a constant fixture with his plastic bags in hand, scowering the sand for cigarette butts and approaching every group of tourists no matter how sloshed, reminding them to pack their trash.
When I expressed concern for his safety he would brush me off and point to his white hair saying, "this allows me to get away with all kinds of stuff."

But Dad never figured on Willoughbee.

Willoughbee lived on It's Beach and always had. In fact, his people-he claimed to be Ohlone Indian-owned the land. He was kind enough to loan us the beach for now, but make no mistake one day the vengeful warriors would return to exact painful retribution on the white man.

Willoughbee was totally bonkers and a huge drunk, but mostly you could tell all he really wanted to do is watch a sweet wave peeling left all day and grin and talk about it.

I liked Willoughbee and wanted Dad to leave him alone. "C'mon Dad, we can clean up his cans after he leaves!" I pleaded, but my father was determined on principle to let Willoughbee know that he could no longer indiscriminately throw his trash around because, hadn't he noticed, no one else was doing it anymore.

And so the titans of It's Beach clashed.The more purple they got the more I was sure that it would be a fist fight that my Dad was about 40 years on the wrong side of.

Finally someone broke it up and Dad stalked off but not without first indignantly picking up all of Willoughbee's trash in front of him, down to the last gum wrapper.

As my Dad walked away Willoughbee snorted and threw his latest can on the ground. What happened next is in my Dad's own words:

"So there I go fuming around the corner. I can't stand this guy! I just can't stand that no one will tell him what for! And I'm not looking and this huge wave barrels in and knocks me down, and the garbage I've collected all day goes washing out to sea. Now I'm not a religious man, and I've never heard voices before or since, but I swear to you, clear as day this voice is booming in my ears 'Your anger is as much of an offense as his garbage.'"

This incident was almost 30 years ago, and Willoughbee and my Dad became friends after that day, I'm not sure how.

Shortly after that visit I saw Willoughbee drinking beer on the westcliff and I approached him to tell him my Dad's story. Of course I never got that far, because he got so involved in ranting at me how 'Digi-Man' is gonna repel down the cliffs to his campsite at night and gouge his eyes out while he's sleeping. As I slowly backed away saying goodbye, it was clear to me that Willoughbee was still nut-bars. However I did notice that all his cans were neatly packed away in plastic bags by his side.

The Eagle Scout strikes again!

Manifest your destiny

Tone is like the breath of conversation. So much depends upon it.
Setting the tone for your day is like your attitude towards your job. You can do anything if you have the right mind-set. Like the chain gang singing old gospel tunes, eventually the group energy takes over and the sledgehammer almost swings itself.
I've set the wrong tone many days and fallen flat. On this Fat Tuesday I'm setting the pitch to 'pure joy'.
Join me.

Opening

Today is the first day of my opening. Like the royal thistle, it will shock you what lies within. Stay tuned.