I knew this guy Pete, from Austria, a little boxie, blonde haired....hobbit. I'd just moved out to LA in my Buick Regal. It was a sweet ride, and if the damn thing didn't leak oil I'd probably still have it. It was a sport edition of the Regal and had burgundy velour seats and matching carpet, a cool blue digital dash that spread across the entire front of the dashboard and down the middle to where the gear-shifter sat in-between the seats. When I was driving across country, I'd settle back, hit the cruise and prop one knee up listening to Miles Davis or Coltrane and at times it'd be like sitting in one of those IMax theatres...a panorama of the american landscape. Henry Miller called it the air-conditioned nightmare. Emerson painted the picture of an eye-ball overseeing it all. Kerouac watched it all receding from the back of a pick-up. I felt none of that.
At night it was like sitting in the cockpit of the space shuttle. A moonlit, early-winter night in the middle of the Rockies with Coltrane slow-dripping into the veins, makes a young man believe he is a king--and that's what it was like driving that old Buick 'cross country. When I came out of the Arizona desert it was hard to distinguish which impulse was stronger--getting the hell out of Arizona or getting to the Ocean.
I hit the 5 (I-5), right between San Diego and Los Angeles and pulled off at the first exit and stopped at a gas station. Bought an LA paper because the San Diego box was empty and called the first "room-for-rent" advert from a payphone and headed to Anahein where I was to meet Paul at one in the afternoon. The room I rented was one of two rooms converted from an add-on garage. It had a bed, a night-stand, a digital clock and a lamp. I hung a map on the wall...incidentally, every subsequent place I moved to I hung a map on the wall. I had my own private entrance and I'd have to walk over the drive-way and into the house thru the main door where the kitchen was located and down the hall was the bathroom...there were six additional rooms in the house, Paul's master-bedroom had its own bath. Paul didn't need to work, he was an ex-marine--and kind of an asshole, but justifiably so because his house was filled with nere-do-wells, rejects and perverts.
The first night there I was cooking up a bologna, fried-egg and grilled-cheese sandwich in the kitchen when I met Brock.
"I'm Brock," he said and stared at me with his face hanging out. "Wanna come see my big-screen TV?"
I scarfed my sandwich down and he took me into his room. It was dark, the room blacked out with curtains and a giant spacecraft of blue hovered and took up the entire room. His Lay-Z-Boy sat directly in front of the huge TV. Behind his chair was a large cardboard box. From what I could discern, nothing else existed in Brock's room...for that matter, at that time, nothing else in the universe existed.
"If you wanna borrow my porn you can," he said with his face hanging out pointing to the giant cardboard box. I went back to my room and cracked a Mickey's and tuned around on the digital clock radio listening for signs from aliens. A knock on the door and I slid the modified garage door open to my room and Pedro (not the Pete from above) stood there with his hands in his pockets. I didn't know what a sketcher was then, to me he just looked confused and shy and lacking self-confidence. After he explained that he was the tenant who previously occupied my room and that he thought he might have left his jacket here, I offered him a beer.
We drank my supply and I suggested we go get some more.
"Sure," Pedro said. "You like coke?"
That was a long time ago now and trying to convey what that night was like is impossible in this post-post-modern era without being cliched. Tom Waits said that when he writes a song he gives it to his wife so she can ferret out the cliches, which is why I like Waits' music so much.
Southern California in the mid-nineties didn't have cellphones or internet yet. I was typing on this old typewriter that my mom'd given me and had been carting it around with me since high school and it had a defective B and D--the letters would plant themselves slightly higher along the lines and I was writing and sending stuff I'd written to my friends in Ohio ( ) using this old typer. The look of the text was probably the most appealing aspect of the writing, but nonetheless I wrote about the San Pedro and Brock sagas and many more and that's where those things should remain...lodged in time, character flaws and all.
I met Pete, the hobbit dude from Austria shortly after all that madness on a Saturday morning. I'd got a job waiting tables at a family diner across from Disneyland--most of my early days of traveling were funded via this method. Decide a general area I wanted to live, save a few hundred dollars--enough to secure a room and eat for a few days until I could get a job waiting tables. Waiting tables in SoCal was easy pickings for a young white male. I'd walk in dressed nicely, hand my resume over...Kinko's was instrumental in those days, and present myself in the most humble form I could muster, which is quite servile...I have no qualms about being a stooge, and 9 times of 10, I had the job walking out the door. I was so confident in my ability to find work that once I went into a Friendly's restaraunt fresh out of bed, resume in hand, and dressed in sweats and a t-shirt and walked out employed.
I got the job, working the dinner hours. Dinner hours is as good as gold in the food industry...plus I didn't start till Monday. I was looking at the map on the wall figuring out where I wanted to go. I went to get another cup of coffee from the kitchen and ran into Pete.
I can't say enough good things about Pete. The image I have of him is this...us sitting in the living room of the two-bedroom apartment we'd eventually found together and moved into. Pete sitting in this wine-colored, Victorian chair, perched up and leaning forward, one hand grinding into the high arm of the chair, elbow cocked at ninety degrees, his other elbow pressed on his knee and his fist extended out in front of him and he is talking intently about something important. He's wearing his shorts that he probably bought in the '80's and his blonde hairy legs and chest bursting out of his clothes. On the table next to him is a forty of Mickey's and a small straight glass which he is continuously topping off with his beer. He's pinching a tiny joint between his sausage-like fingers and working like a coal-miner trying to keep it lit. We used to talk about anything and everything and we laughed all the time. One time we were in this heated discussion, he believed that the holocaust was a fake and never happened. He was pinching the tiny joint between his fat little fingers and failing to get a draw on it, he finally pulled the thing away from his lips giving up and stared at me.
I looked at him smiling.
"What the fuck are you smiling at?" Imagine that said with a thick Austrian accent.
"Nothing," I said innocently as possible, shrugging my shoulders. On his lower lip, smoldering and smoking the tiny joint was stuck and he was buzzed enough and crazy enough I guess he didn't notice it until it had started to burn and he jumped up, furiously slapping himself in the mouth to figure out what the hell was burning him. He looked at his empty finger tips and by this time I was on the floor laughing.
I had a girlfriend at the time, she was Jewish. I had no idea what was so appalling to her that Pete denied the holocaust. I mean on conscious level I knew...yes, this should be insulting to her, but on another level, a human one, I knew that people can think whatever they want, it won't keep me from being friends with them. This is somewhat robotic. I have a friend of mine who calls it being an alien. He's an alien though and tries to superimpose his experiences onto those he comes across...a perfectly natural thing to do...I wouldn't toss him out of bed because of it, just like I wouldn't un-friend Pete because he thinks the holocaust wasn't real. Besides he's dead now anyway, and what good would I have gotten out of it if I'd ended our friendship because my girlfriend at the time didn't approve. She's still alive and happily married and probably doesn't even remember who Pete was...once again, my case is made by virtue of circumstances.
That Saturday morning I wanted to go to the San Diego Zoo. I like zoos. I know that might piss some people off. I've been to some depressing zoos. The LA Zoo for instance. The elephants in the LA Zoo have this space of about 100 square meters, two or three of them stuffed into it, and the only thing resembling nature is a crooked old destroyed tree. The one time I was there, one elephant was out in this play area and he'd curled his trunk around the last remaining branch of this tree and was banging it repeatedly against the ground like a mental patient and I got depressed and left.
I went to a zoo in the Czech Republic once and they had goats and horses, and these two monkeys that sat unmoved for the entire time I watched them, which was quite a long time, and they had a couple llamas too, and a bunch of chickens and ducks and geese as well. The zoo had a restaurant on site and the barns were all painted with scenes from children's fairy tales...like crazy images--witches standing over a kettle with two kids slowly cooking away, a wolf stalking a playground from behind a willow tree.
Pete and I went to the San Diego Zoo that Saturday, the first time I'd met him and we had a great time. He was around 50 years old I guess, but he was a fun guy and an interesting past. He'd sort of a fall-from-grace story and was still in love with his ex-wife, a hot little cougar who apparently drained him of self-confidence as well as finance. In the '80's he was an engineer and got into the coke scene, lived in Venice Beach and was flossing a red-corvette when he met his wife. I believed his stories--didn't have a reason not to.
His ex-would call him occasionally and on those days he'd sit in his chair and drink and eat this thick hearty bread. He'd put a layer of butter on the bread and on top of that a thick layer of Philly Cream Cheese and then he'd watch Ricky Lake or Montel and drink and eat. I'd come in and rouse his tail-feathers. He was like that...a peacock...proud and at the same time, he forgave me my youthful indiscretions and he talked with me as if I were a valuable friend. I know people in their fifties who hardly acknowledge your existence because their so wound up in their own worlds they hardly recognize anything else is going on. People who are talking themselves into a cave, people who, if you can get a word in, don't even notice you've said something. It's not like they don't notice you...it's like what you've just said only served as an interruption of what they were trying to say. These people are so weird, and not just relegated to 50 somethings, you see it in younger people, but a lot of time in these cases it's recovering heroin or meth addicts...these people are so out of tune that in order to break off a conversation with them you need to just come right out and say something like...
"So, I have to go now."
And then they look at you and say ok and continue going on with what they were talking about...Pete was not like this.
We spent the whole day at the zoo, he had some good Cali-gold and we smoked a joint sitting in the butterfly terrarium, an amazing wet jungle of a place that seemed to go on forever, yet closed off from the world. Nobody was here and we sat under the California sun and watched all the butterflies. I was really happy at this moment and glad I'd never again heard from Pedro. I've had a long time love/hate relationship with drugs and I honestly believe fate has had its hand in my ability to stay relatively clean and sane. If I'd had less of a disciplined upbringing or an excess of funds I would have fallen prey to the demonic elements. My dad must have suffered raising me, and I only know this because of age and experience. There's a lot of value in experience...someone said an unexamined life is not worth living and that is a reflection of experience.
You can't have gotten an adequate picture of my friend Pete though. I used to carry around this hand-held tape recorder and record random stuff...conversations, spontaneous street scenes, vagrant ministerial rants, the usual stuff. Once, me and Pete were sitting out on the balcony. We lived in this four-plex and it faced another, identical four-plex and in between was a grass field, closer to what you could imagine, as I did, a courtyard. And in the summer time, 3 of the balconies were friendly and would sometimes convene on one or another's balcony, and it was good fun. Community. A community of the oddest mish-mash of people that sometimes we all laughed out loud about the absurdity of the combination.
Me and Pete'd been drinking the forties and smoking and I started laying out this gag we could do. Pete was such a crazy dude that he agreed to let me record him giving me permission to beat the shit out of him with a broom stick. I wanted it to be a kind of radio drama where this guy is so depressed and wants to kill himself, but his roommate gets this idea that because he gave permission to get beat the hell out of, his shifty lawyer could get the settlement for the assailant---pain and suffering...truth was I hadn't planned the entire scenario out and Pete...the crazy bastard played along and let me record him giving me permission.
Later that night I came rushing out onto the balcony from my room wielding a broom stick and Pete's immediate figurative....possibly literal, pooping of his pants, I couldn't go on for all the laughing I was doing.
One time my friend Dave came out to visit. Actually, it was more like stopped in for a visit on his way from Las Cruces to Tacoma. It was reminiscent of the electric kool-aid acid tests. Pete got just as much a row out of it as we did and it was good fun.
Pete and me'd get in these heated discussions. When he'd start going off on wild ideas like the holocaust was a fake, I'd start making up outlandish tales about shit..."Oh yeah man, they filmed the moon-landing outside Vegas."
Right, I know, the moon-landing was filmed outside Vegas...but the more preposterous my claims the more offended he'd become. We'd push each other's buttons, swilling back beers and the discussions turned to infuriating lashings of character and humanity were slandered onto the other and when he couldn't take it anymore he'd say, "You know what man?" (again, austrian accent) "You are nothing but a verbal masturbator...you know that...you're verbally masturbating right now...that's all you're doing..."
