2/27/2006
I heard from Shawnito today. He and Juliet are going to have a baby boy tomorrow. Who would have guesed that Shawn Phillips would be living in South Africa, would make it to 60, and would be a new dad.
I had all his albums. I would say that Shawn, along with mysterious avatars of lyrics like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jim Morrison, was one of my writing teachers. I certainly had never heard records with such vocabularies before--musically or writerly. I actually used his records to make vocab lists for my English classes!
It was my rule that my pals all had to be Shawn fiends too. I used to haul my record player into the kitchen--we had a wall phone there. And late at night, after my parents had gone to sleep, and her parents, too, I'd call Prudence and play her Shawn songs over the phone. She would cry. I couldn't get over it--she was in bed, in her jammies, crying to me on the phone! I could hear her breathe in her room! So Shanwe taught me a lot about romance, too.
I first discovered him in Mark Gipe's sister's room. She was a scary revolutionary. Our neighborhood's Grace Slick. She had a plank of wood some guy had mailed her--it was covered in stamps. And the guy had painted on it: RIGHT ON, SISTER, TO THE REVOLT! You have to love the sixties!
She was never home, so Mark and I would freak out in her room--light her incense, play with her awesome ocean-in-a-bottle, and listen to her sophisticated record collection. That's where I found Leonard Cohen. We listened to Buffalo Springfield and Tim Buckley records. Mark fell asleep in a strange peace to the painful screaming of Blue Cheer. I found Shawn's first album, CONTRIBUTION, there. I was fascinated by the cover, because it looked like the guy's head was covered in cement. And he had hair down to his butt. Mark said, "That guy--all he does is moan."
I of course loved the record and made it my duty to study everything the guy had done. Later on, I had recruited the stoners and juvenile delinquents in my high school who were in the off-set printing class to help me make a book of poems and drawings. The less said about this the better, though I still like the first poem I ever wrote, which started the book:
and the child
paused beneath the oak
with the stranger
and said
I have never seen the sea
and the stranger
spreading his blue cape on the ground
said
I am the sea.
If you know Stephen Crane's poems and Cohen's "Stranger Song," you know where that came from. Maybe a little of "El Topo," too.
Anyway, The Moody Blues were on world tour, and Shawn was opening for them. he happened to be touring, I realized later, with the terrifying prog-rock band, Quatermass. They had an album cover with flying dinosaurs swooping between skyscrapers! I bought that one on sight.
We were all there at the concert, of course. Prudence was there. I was with Rockie Lee and Lyn. And I took one of these booklets to the roadies onstage and asked them to give it to Shawn. It vanished, and I took my seat on the floor with my honeys and forgot about it. But when Shawn came out, with a white double-neck guitar, he dedicated a song to me! My first day as a rock star.
Later again, we became friends, and I stayed at his house many times, traveled with him, wandered with him, laughed with him. His dad was a poet. James Atlee Phillips. He wrote spy novels under the name of Philip Atlee. And he became my first real writing teacher, corresponding faithfully as I sent him letters and stories. He schooled me but good.
I felt I owed a lot to the Phillips family. And years down the road, when Shawn was a fireman, he'd come sleep at our Louisiana house on tour. The maniac would take his EMT rescue vehicle as a tour bus, and he'd show up in his fireman's uniform. He put on his life-saving mask and scared the kids. "Skywalker, I am your father!"
I was happy to write liner notes for his last cd, NO CATEGORY. So one of the great circles of life made its rounds. I was even able to take Rockie Lee to his hotel room one night, and to sit him down with Lyn and watch her go pink as he flirted with her. Shawn even introduced me to DEVO! Another story for another day.
There's a small section about him in WANDERING TIME, by the way.
So I greet the new child with joy. It's a happy day.
XXX, L
Octavia Butler, RIP
I had all his albums. I would say that Shawn, along with mysterious avatars of lyrics like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jim Morrison, was one of my writing teachers. I certainly had never heard records with such vocabularies before--musically or writerly. I actually used his records to make vocab lists for my English classes!
It was my rule that my pals all had to be Shawn fiends too. I used to haul my record player into the kitchen--we had a wall phone there. And late at night, after my parents had gone to sleep, and her parents, too, I'd call Prudence and play her Shawn songs over the phone. She would cry. I couldn't get over it--she was in bed, in her jammies, crying to me on the phone! I could hear her breathe in her room! So Shanwe taught me a lot about romance, too.
I first discovered him in Mark Gipe's sister's room. She was a scary revolutionary. Our neighborhood's Grace Slick. She had a plank of wood some guy had mailed her--it was covered in stamps. And the guy had painted on it: RIGHT ON, SISTER, TO THE REVOLT! You have to love the sixties!
She was never home, so Mark and I would freak out in her room--light her incense, play with her awesome ocean-in-a-bottle, and listen to her sophisticated record collection. That's where I found Leonard Cohen. We listened to Buffalo Springfield and Tim Buckley records. Mark fell asleep in a strange peace to the painful screaming of Blue Cheer. I found Shawn's first album, CONTRIBUTION, there. I was fascinated by the cover, because it looked like the guy's head was covered in cement. And he had hair down to his butt. Mark said, "That guy--all he does is moan."
I of course loved the record and made it my duty to study everything the guy had done. Later on, I had recruited the stoners and juvenile delinquents in my high school who were in the off-set printing class to help me make a book of poems and drawings. The less said about this the better, though I still like the first poem I ever wrote, which started the book:
and the child
paused beneath the oak
with the stranger
and said
I have never seen the sea
and the stranger
spreading his blue cape on the ground
said
I am the sea.
If you know Stephen Crane's poems and Cohen's "Stranger Song," you know where that came from. Maybe a little of "El Topo," too.
Anyway, The Moody Blues were on world tour, and Shawn was opening for them. he happened to be touring, I realized later, with the terrifying prog-rock band, Quatermass. They had an album cover with flying dinosaurs swooping between skyscrapers! I bought that one on sight.
We were all there at the concert, of course. Prudence was there. I was with Rockie Lee and Lyn. And I took one of these booklets to the roadies onstage and asked them to give it to Shawn. It vanished, and I took my seat on the floor with my honeys and forgot about it. But when Shawn came out, with a white double-neck guitar, he dedicated a song to me! My first day as a rock star.
Later again, we became friends, and I stayed at his house many times, traveled with him, wandered with him, laughed with him. His dad was a poet. James Atlee Phillips. He wrote spy novels under the name of Philip Atlee. And he became my first real writing teacher, corresponding faithfully as I sent him letters and stories. He schooled me but good.
I felt I owed a lot to the Phillips family. And years down the road, when Shawn was a fireman, he'd come sleep at our Louisiana house on tour. The maniac would take his EMT rescue vehicle as a tour bus, and he'd show up in his fireman's uniform. He put on his life-saving mask and scared the kids. "Skywalker, I am your father!"
I was happy to write liner notes for his last cd, NO CATEGORY. So one of the great circles of life made its rounds. I was even able to take Rockie Lee to his hotel room one night, and to sit him down with Lyn and watch her go pink as he flirted with her. Shawn even introduced me to DEVO! Another story for another day.
There's a small section about him in WANDERING TIME, by the way.
So I greet the new child with joy. It's a happy day.
XXX, L
I just want to pause for a moment to note the passing of Octavia Butler. She was a great writer, and a great Presence. I was lucky enough to share the stage with her at one of her last appearances, at the Miami book fair. It was Ms. Butler's crowd, no question. They were eager for me to say my stuff so she could speak. But we all enjoyed a church experience, and affection and humor ruled the day. I'll never forget something she said: "When I read deeply in science fiction, I learned there were no black people in the future." The audience, 90% African American, laughed out loud. I looked at her and said, "You know--there aren't any Mexicans there either!" We agreed that the future was awfully exclusive. She was kind and welcoming, and her bearing was regal. Her audience loved her so hard that you could feel it coming out of that room like lightning--women brought their girl scout troops so they could see true greatness. I barely knew her, but I will miss her. I feel that a great light has dimmed out Seattle way. I hope you will buy one of her books and remember her as one who gave her best back to this world.
Morning Love Poem
2/26/2006
6:30 a.m.
in silk robes you brush your teeth--
your breasts are dancing.
Wandering Ways II
in silk robes you brush your teeth--
your breasts are dancing.
2/25/2006
Yes! People have dropped me a couple of notes about the wandering. I guess they relate all the way back to the WANDERING TIME post a few notches below this one. A note to tne anonymous poster on the last entry: you wrote about that tree with tinsel in Louisiana--I know that tree! I've seen it!
How about the dead airplane pasture in Tucson? Ghostly bombers and jet fighters and burned out helicopters. How about the creepy abandoned and gutted motel/gas station complex in TX on the east side of the Pecos River bridge? Scaaaary. Buffalo Bill's grave on top of Lookout Mtn? Garden of the Gods? The guy outside of Zion Nat Park who has buffalo and elk in his back yard?
My radio bud Jay Marvin and I are partial to Baker, CA. We like the Bunboy and the World's Largest Thermometer. I also can't help deep love for The Mad Greek's diner, where I used to have egg nog milkshakes when I still ate sugar.
The Urrea clan also likes to visit the Jolly Green Giant statue off I-90. Megan said: "That's the green bean guy." Not excitedly. At his feet, plywood Smurfs and college students twisting themselves to look like they're having a Smurk orgy for phtographers.
Cadillac Ranch goes without saying.
How about the place in the CA redwoods where the giant statue of Paul Bunyan talks to people? Have you seen that place? Where the statue will say, "Hello, lady with the red purse! Hey you! Come over here!"
Or that spot--it's near Beaver, Utah,isn't it?--where the cemetery has a sign behind it that says: TAXIDERMY.
The road from Tijuana to Ensenada has two perfect roadside gems on the right side. One is a rock painted by some holy fool to look like a big green frog. And the other is far down, at the foot of the deadly sea cliffs--a rusting freighter broken on the rocks, and the waves rushing through it like something out of a 19th century pirate story.
Surely the best roadside freakout is in Oakley Kansas. The prairie dog village. You see it as if it were an episode of The Twilight Zone. "6,000 Pound Prairie Dog!" its sign promises. "Five-Legged Steer!" And the lot has cars in it, so you pull in, only to realize that the cars are derelicts, put there to look like lots o' tourists are in the joint. A LURE! Cue the spooky music. But you go in anyway! There's a cage full of rattlesnakes, and the guy sitting there whacks it with a stick so they'll start to rattle. There are dried animal droppings with wiggly eyes glued to them called Turd Birds." And you can buy them.
The man is quite nice. He tells your kids a joke. He says, "You know what cows do on Saturday night?" And they say, No what? And he says, "They go to the moo-vies." And Eric spends all his summer cash to buy a chopped off rattler's head floating in a jar of alcohol.
That's what I'm talking about!
Tell me more of yours, weird travelers.
See you in the 13th Nebraska Stuckey's, heading west.
XOX, L
My Wandering Ways
How about the dead airplane pasture in Tucson? Ghostly bombers and jet fighters and burned out helicopters. How about the creepy abandoned and gutted motel/gas station complex in TX on the east side of the Pecos River bridge? Scaaaary. Buffalo Bill's grave on top of Lookout Mtn? Garden of the Gods? The guy outside of Zion Nat Park who has buffalo and elk in his back yard?
My radio bud Jay Marvin and I are partial to Baker, CA. We like the Bunboy and the World's Largest Thermometer. I also can't help deep love for The Mad Greek's diner, where I used to have egg nog milkshakes when I still ate sugar.
The Urrea clan also likes to visit the Jolly Green Giant statue off I-90. Megan said: "That's the green bean guy." Not excitedly. At his feet, plywood Smurfs and college students twisting themselves to look like they're having a Smurk orgy for phtographers.
Cadillac Ranch goes without saying.
How about the place in the CA redwoods where the giant statue of Paul Bunyan talks to people? Have you seen that place? Where the statue will say, "Hello, lady with the red purse! Hey you! Come over here!"
Or that spot--it's near Beaver, Utah,isn't it?--where the cemetery has a sign behind it that says: TAXIDERMY.
The road from Tijuana to Ensenada has two perfect roadside gems on the right side. One is a rock painted by some holy fool to look like a big green frog. And the other is far down, at the foot of the deadly sea cliffs--a rusting freighter broken on the rocks, and the waves rushing through it like something out of a 19th century pirate story.
Surely the best roadside freakout is in Oakley Kansas. The prairie dog village. You see it as if it were an episode of The Twilight Zone. "6,000 Pound Prairie Dog!" its sign promises. "Five-Legged Steer!" And the lot has cars in it, so you pull in, only to realize that the cars are derelicts, put there to look like lots o' tourists are in the joint. A LURE! Cue the spooky music. But you go in anyway! There's a cage full of rattlesnakes, and the guy sitting there whacks it with a stick so they'll start to rattle. There are dried animal droppings with wiggly eyes glued to them called Turd Birds." And you can buy them.
The man is quite nice. He tells your kids a joke. He says, "You know what cows do on Saturday night?" And they say, No what? And he says, "They go to the moo-vies." And Eric spends all his summer cash to buy a chopped off rattler's head floating in a jar of alcohol.
That's what I'm talking about!
Tell me more of yours, weird travelers.
See you in the 13th Nebraska Stuckey's, heading west.
XOX, L
2/24/2006
Got to move on, got to get goin', what lies ahead I have no way of knowin'. But under my feet, baby, grass is growin'. Got to move on, got to get goin'.
That's Tom Petty singing. It's a song that should be happy--the lyric sounds jaunty, and the music is a kind of country shuffle. But it's one of the saddest songs I ever heard. Perhaps because all my life I've had to get goin'. I had to move. I felt like a skunk trapped in someone's kitchen, and I'd scratch until I found a window. I think many people who tried to love me in those bad old days could attest to my need to flee.
Comes from poverty, no doubt. A restless spirit. The need for art and wandering when you're too poor to own a car. Caught in a world you can barely stand from hour to hour. This was me, in San Diego. What did Charles Bukowski say? At the corner of Terror and Agony Way? Something like that.
I wish I could call those lovers I could not love. Perhaps I try to send them telegrams in my books. I knew that I would come to ruin if I stayed there. And when I got the chance to flee, in 1982, I went to Boston and tried not to look back. I was in a world wholly new to me: the language was different. They said drinking fountains were bubblers. They said the corner market was a spa. Sodas were tonics. Things weren't bitchin', but were wicked pisser. At lunch, your sub was a grinder.
I walked those Bosstown streets like a maniac. I used to take the T to the end of the tracks, just to see what was there. Red Line to Braintree. Green Line to Chestnut Hills. I'd cry.
Now, Cinderella talks about my wandering ways. It's true--I had to keep going. I lived a restlessness that consumed me--driving maniacally all over America. I'd drop a 10,000 mile trip like it was a visit to the zoo. I started to know whole new sections of the country as if they were my neighborhood, and I had to go by them often to see what was going on. Do you know these spots? That sad trading post on I-40 at the base of a cliff? The one with plastic animals mounted on the rocks above?
The Glenwood Canyon section of I-70 where you swoop along the holy Colorado, and if you're lucky the mayflies will hatch as the sun comes up and it looks like it's snowing gold flakes only upward.
The abandoned stone house in Utah as you drive the back way from Green River to Capitol Reef.
The funky little flying saucer-themed diner down around Gila Bend. The artesian oasis on the north side of Tucson. Wounded Knee. Devil's Tower. That astonishing Virgin River gorge. The psychedelic road droipping out of Estes Park toward Loveland. The greatness and mundanity of I-25 as you crest Raton Pass. The Hatch cutoff.
I had to move on, had to get goin'.
Now I tour! I'll be in many places soon. I'll be looking for you. Let's have some coffee, compare notes. I'l have my honey with me!
L
The Mystery of the Hummingbird, II
That's Tom Petty singing. It's a song that should be happy--the lyric sounds jaunty, and the music is a kind of country shuffle. But it's one of the saddest songs I ever heard. Perhaps because all my life I've had to get goin'. I had to move. I felt like a skunk trapped in someone's kitchen, and I'd scratch until I found a window. I think many people who tried to love me in those bad old days could attest to my need to flee.
Comes from poverty, no doubt. A restless spirit. The need for art and wandering when you're too poor to own a car. Caught in a world you can barely stand from hour to hour. This was me, in San Diego. What did Charles Bukowski say? At the corner of Terror and Agony Way? Something like that.
I wish I could call those lovers I could not love. Perhaps I try to send them telegrams in my books. I knew that I would come to ruin if I stayed there. And when I got the chance to flee, in 1982, I went to Boston and tried not to look back. I was in a world wholly new to me: the language was different. They said drinking fountains were bubblers. They said the corner market was a spa. Sodas were tonics. Things weren't bitchin', but were wicked pisser. At lunch, your sub was a grinder.
I walked those Bosstown streets like a maniac. I used to take the T to the end of the tracks, just to see what was there. Red Line to Braintree. Green Line to Chestnut Hills. I'd cry.
Now, Cinderella talks about my wandering ways. It's true--I had to keep going. I lived a restlessness that consumed me--driving maniacally all over America. I'd drop a 10,000 mile trip like it was a visit to the zoo. I started to know whole new sections of the country as if they were my neighborhood, and I had to go by them often to see what was going on. Do you know these spots? That sad trading post on I-40 at the base of a cliff? The one with plastic animals mounted on the rocks above?
The Glenwood Canyon section of I-70 where you swoop along the holy Colorado, and if you're lucky the mayflies will hatch as the sun comes up and it looks like it's snowing gold flakes only upward.
The abandoned stone house in Utah as you drive the back way from Green River to Capitol Reef.
The funky little flying saucer-themed diner down around Gila Bend. The artesian oasis on the north side of Tucson. Wounded Knee. Devil's Tower. That astonishing Virgin River gorge. The psychedelic road droipping out of Estes Park toward Loveland. The greatness and mundanity of I-25 as you crest Raton Pass. The Hatch cutoff.
I had to move on, had to get goin'.
Now I tour! I'll be in many places soon. I'll be looking for you. Let's have some coffee, compare notes. I'l have my honey with me!
L
2/13/2006
Poor Bear.
He's in a coma now, beat down by savages in the biker bar he liked to frequent in eastern San Diego county. He was actually trying to break up a fist fight in the parking lot, and a fighter sucker-punched him in the temple. Horrors ensued, and a brief recuperation, then a bleed in the head sent him far away. No one knows where. Though his sweet-heart sent me an email that she was reading Hummingbird to him, and even in his coma, he has grimaced (smiled?) and stirred as he seemed to understand parts of the book. I have The Bear on my mind because he has been coming to me in dreams. I have known him since 1978, and only now have I dreamed of him. I awaken uneasy--as if he's been offering me a message from whatever twilight world his spirit is inhabiting now. But I can't quite decipher his messages. If you have lived with Teresita long enough, you will begin to listen to these dreams.
We worked in Mexico together during those "relief-work" years with the orphanages and the Tijuana garbage dump dwellers. He was a big man--a biker himself, a hunter, with a huge beard, a huge gut, a bunch of guns, and a pirate's bandana tied around his head. He drove, I rode shotgun--we shared the mike on the cb radio. We shared a serious jones for Springsteen music and The Wild Bunch. Some of the Baptist missionaries in our group thought The Bear and I were agents of Satan--once, a troubled Christian girl fled from our van in tears because we were listening to evil music--"Rosalita" and "Born to Run."
And then he fell on troubled times, crisis and heart-break, and his church turned on him. Those he loved judged him "back-slidden" and "un-spiritual." His wife was "discipled" by a man who considered himself a spiritual giant, and The Bear was not. Her heart hardened. There is no doubt, The Bear was no Fourth of July picnic. But not even a hard-time prisoner in San Quentin enjoys feeling lost and forgotten. And utterly discounted.
Bad Christian juju cursed Bear until he flailed in his rage and confusion. It was a hideous melt-down. And he ended up on the street. He lived at Mission Bay and took showers in the bathrooms there. The only people who cared about The Bear--the only ones--were Hells Angels, druggies, trailer park folks, witches. It's no wonder he turned to pot and beer. Lots of pot. Lots of beer.
We had been estranged. He once tried to fool me into mailing a pound of drugs for him after I had taken him in and given him a room. That kind of thing.
Still, he was a stalwart friend and a human army tank. No dangerous situation bothered me when The Bear could pick a guy up with one hand (I saw him do that on more than one occasion). He was pretty sure he could pick up demons, too, and fling them like The Hulk flings evil-doers. He drove ten thousand miles with me, scouring basement archives, working sputtering microfilm machines, thumbing through dusty files and ancient newspaper cuttings for stories about Teresita.
We met Charles Bowden for drinks in Tucson, and Bowden asked The Bear, "Are you a good man?" And the Bear stared at him, mouth open, unable to answer. Afflicted by the question.
After that, we drove to El Paso and mined UTEP for material, slept on Bobby and Lee Byrd's floor, visited John Wesley Hardin's grave. Headed out through the back-country wastelands and hit Albuquerque one dawn as the hot air balloon festival launched. We were in cowboy hats and I had hair down to my waist. Must have been quite a sight.
And up, up through the Rockies! Up and over Wyoming and into Yellowstone in October as the south road melted before us and the vastness was empty of humans. We vanished, walking among giant clouds of steam in the snow like a goth rock band. We saw moose and buffalo, a coyote pack surrounded my Jeep, elk trudged through the snow. I was so devastated by things in my life, not the elast of them the growing influence of Teresita, that at times I'd cry, and he'd kindly ignore it and turn the Blue Cheer tapes up really loud and drive on.
When I got to Tucson, I rented a seriously haunted adobe in the Old Barrio. The Bear was working doing air conditioning. Somehow, he found me there, and he moved in with me again. I was happy to have him. I'd been seeing apparitions at night. Something had grabbed my feet and tried to claw my ankles. It felt like human hands with long nails.
One night, as The Bear slept on the floor in the living room, I lay in my bedroom reading. I could see a reflection of the living room in a window, and I saw a dark figure move across the room. Then it fled past in a blur, going the other direction. The living room light went on, and Bear called, "Lou--was that you?"
Then the building was set on fire. Somebody ah snuck in and broken all the crosses and slit a bed. There was a fire lit on the roof over every room. We ran through the blinding smoke, trying to put out the flames.
We hiked almost every day as the sun set in the Saguaro National Monument. We took home a dead rattlesnake and kept him coiled next to the tortillas in our fridge. We fought. I got sick and passed out in the heat--he found me and took me to the hospital.
And now he's gone.
Or he's not gone, but traveling the ghost road. What does he keep trying to tell me? I want to understand what he's saying. Bear, Bear--do you copy? What's your 10-20? Come back. Over and out.
L
Vato Haiku
He's in a coma now, beat down by savages in the biker bar he liked to frequent in eastern San Diego county. He was actually trying to break up a fist fight in the parking lot, and a fighter sucker-punched him in the temple. Horrors ensued, and a brief recuperation, then a bleed in the head sent him far away. No one knows where. Though his sweet-heart sent me an email that she was reading Hummingbird to him, and even in his coma, he has grimaced (smiled?) and stirred as he seemed to understand parts of the book. I have The Bear on my mind because he has been coming to me in dreams. I have known him since 1978, and only now have I dreamed of him. I awaken uneasy--as if he's been offering me a message from whatever twilight world his spirit is inhabiting now. But I can't quite decipher his messages. If you have lived with Teresita long enough, you will begin to listen to these dreams.
We worked in Mexico together during those "relief-work" years with the orphanages and the Tijuana garbage dump dwellers. He was a big man--a biker himself, a hunter, with a huge beard, a huge gut, a bunch of guns, and a pirate's bandana tied around his head. He drove, I rode shotgun--we shared the mike on the cb radio. We shared a serious jones for Springsteen music and The Wild Bunch. Some of the Baptist missionaries in our group thought The Bear and I were agents of Satan--once, a troubled Christian girl fled from our van in tears because we were listening to evil music--"Rosalita" and "Born to Run."
And then he fell on troubled times, crisis and heart-break, and his church turned on him. Those he loved judged him "back-slidden" and "un-spiritual." His wife was "discipled" by a man who considered himself a spiritual giant, and The Bear was not. Her heart hardened. There is no doubt, The Bear was no Fourth of July picnic. But not even a hard-time prisoner in San Quentin enjoys feeling lost and forgotten. And utterly discounted.
Bad Christian juju cursed Bear until he flailed in his rage and confusion. It was a hideous melt-down. And he ended up on the street. He lived at Mission Bay and took showers in the bathrooms there. The only people who cared about The Bear--the only ones--were Hells Angels, druggies, trailer park folks, witches. It's no wonder he turned to pot and beer. Lots of pot. Lots of beer.
We had been estranged. He once tried to fool me into mailing a pound of drugs for him after I had taken him in and given him a room. That kind of thing.
Still, he was a stalwart friend and a human army tank. No dangerous situation bothered me when The Bear could pick a guy up with one hand (I saw him do that on more than one occasion). He was pretty sure he could pick up demons, too, and fling them like The Hulk flings evil-doers. He drove ten thousand miles with me, scouring basement archives, working sputtering microfilm machines, thumbing through dusty files and ancient newspaper cuttings for stories about Teresita.
We met Charles Bowden for drinks in Tucson, and Bowden asked The Bear, "Are you a good man?" And the Bear stared at him, mouth open, unable to answer. Afflicted by the question.
After that, we drove to El Paso and mined UTEP for material, slept on Bobby and Lee Byrd's floor, visited John Wesley Hardin's grave. Headed out through the back-country wastelands and hit Albuquerque one dawn as the hot air balloon festival launched. We were in cowboy hats and I had hair down to my waist. Must have been quite a sight.
And up, up through the Rockies! Up and over Wyoming and into Yellowstone in October as the south road melted before us and the vastness was empty of humans. We vanished, walking among giant clouds of steam in the snow like a goth rock band. We saw moose and buffalo, a coyote pack surrounded my Jeep, elk trudged through the snow. I was so devastated by things in my life, not the elast of them the growing influence of Teresita, that at times I'd cry, and he'd kindly ignore it and turn the Blue Cheer tapes up really loud and drive on.
When I got to Tucson, I rented a seriously haunted adobe in the Old Barrio. The Bear was working doing air conditioning. Somehow, he found me there, and he moved in with me again. I was happy to have him. I'd been seeing apparitions at night. Something had grabbed my feet and tried to claw my ankles. It felt like human hands with long nails.
One night, as The Bear slept on the floor in the living room, I lay in my bedroom reading. I could see a reflection of the living room in a window, and I saw a dark figure move across the room. Then it fled past in a blur, going the other direction. The living room light went on, and Bear called, "Lou--was that you?"
Then the building was set on fire. Somebody ah snuck in and broken all the crosses and slit a bed. There was a fire lit on the roof over every room. We ran through the blinding smoke, trying to put out the flames.
We hiked almost every day as the sun set in the Saguaro National Monument. We took home a dead rattlesnake and kept him coiled next to the tortillas in our fridge. We fought. I got sick and passed out in the heat--he found me and took me to the hospital.
And now he's gone.
Or he's not gone, but traveling the ghost road. What does he keep trying to tell me? I want to understand what he's saying. Bear, Bear--do you copy? What's your 10-20? Come back. Over and out.
L
2/12/2006 The Mysterious History of the Hummingbird
2/11/2006
The movie deal is progessing, and I swear, as soon as my name's on a dotted line, I'll begin telling you details and stories and gossip as we go.
So many of you have written to me--I am always delighted to get your notes. I get emails from all over the country--and I got snail-mail from Alaska! So many people want to know some of the experiences or secrets or mysteries of the process that led to The Hummingbird's Daughter. I could blog myself into a stupor for weeks on end trying to tell you all that happened. But then, if I told you all of it, the mystery would be gone.
You know, when I left the Beloved Rocky Mtns in 1995 to go to Tucson for what I thought was the final summer of research into the book, I made a pact with my friend Jonna and a few of my former writing students. I decided to keep a journal for them of what happened. I would urge a stalled writer to try it--a journal kept for another. I was sick of my own voice, sick of my life at that point, sick of my insane romances, entanglements, and misadventures; I could not or would not keep my own journal. But Jonna seemed like someone I could confess my sorrows to, so I did. Can you believe it? She ended up with hundreds (and hundreds) of strange tales. And even she doesn't know everything because there were things I couldn't talk about. I called that whole avalanche of madness The Desert Dispatches, and I often threaten to descend on Jonna and her husband Steve to try to edit the massive print-out. What a strange book that would make. Ghosts, devils, miracles, fear, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, sex, God, churches, Indians, lightning storms, Mexico City, curanderas, Charles Bowden, hikes, bikers, fires, Esperanza, medicine men, demons, magic, violence, floods, Aztec pyramids, famous writers, suffering, hummingbirds. It would be my own Carlos Castaneda book.
I was so distraught after having lived in the world of the numinous, that world of visions and strange etheric visitations, that I don't think I was prepared to go back there. It is not lost on me that I left the shamanic precincts and teach full-time in the most "intellectual" and anti-medicine school I've ever known.
Perhaps one day I'll post a few dispatches here so you Teresita fans can see the story in the shadows.
I'll give you an example of the kinds of things that happened every day. I was at a family gathering in California with Cinderella. We had been told that Aunt Elba Urrea, a healer (of course) wanted to meet me. She was dying of cancer. You wouldn't have known it to meet her. She was a riot. Hilarious. Sang ballads and baudy songs, drank up and laughed so much that one of the cranky wives blurted: "I thought you had lung cancer!" Before the party ended, Elba told me she had something for me in her car. We had struck up my traditional older-woman flirtation and romance, and she took my arm and strolled down the night street and called me "Guerito." In the trunk of her car, she had a crate full of documents. Letters, articles, photographs, reports. All about Teresita. La Cinderella, who had her doubts about all my tales of miracles and astonishments, types like a forest fire. And Elba didn't want to leave these materials for longer than a weekend. So we sped to Jonna's house and started the tireless campaign of entering the data onto our little laptop. Well, I sat around drinking coffee and reading Fortean Times while Cindy typed.
But she saw for herself, entering NY Times and LA Times and San Francisco, Arizona, and St. Louis articles, that what I had been saying was real. Witnessed. The strange part for me was that the original drafts of Hummingbird has a framing device--a younger Urrea is digging through the past like me. And a surprise crate of letters, articles, photographs, reports comes into his hands to help him write the book! Key the Twilight Zone theme.
Don't even ask me about the dreams or the shadow-people or the Wicked One who came to pound on my door at three in the morning. That night I was alone with the biggest knife I could find. It's real.
Luigy
My Last Word on the Subject
So many of you have written to me--I am always delighted to get your notes. I get emails from all over the country--and I got snail-mail from Alaska! So many people want to know some of the experiences or secrets or mysteries of the process that led to The Hummingbird's Daughter. I could blog myself into a stupor for weeks on end trying to tell you all that happened. But then, if I told you all of it, the mystery would be gone.
You know, when I left the Beloved Rocky Mtns in 1995 to go to Tucson for what I thought was the final summer of research into the book, I made a pact with my friend Jonna and a few of my former writing students. I decided to keep a journal for them of what happened. I would urge a stalled writer to try it--a journal kept for another. I was sick of my own voice, sick of my life at that point, sick of my insane romances, entanglements, and misadventures; I could not or would not keep my own journal. But Jonna seemed like someone I could confess my sorrows to, so I did. Can you believe it? She ended up with hundreds (and hundreds) of strange tales. And even she doesn't know everything because there were things I couldn't talk about. I called that whole avalanche of madness The Desert Dispatches, and I often threaten to descend on Jonna and her husband Steve to try to edit the massive print-out. What a strange book that would make. Ghosts, devils, miracles, fear, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, sex, God, churches, Indians, lightning storms, Mexico City, curanderas, Charles Bowden, hikes, bikers, fires, Esperanza, medicine men, demons, magic, violence, floods, Aztec pyramids, famous writers, suffering, hummingbirds. It would be my own Carlos Castaneda book.
I was so distraught after having lived in the world of the numinous, that world of visions and strange etheric visitations, that I don't think I was prepared to go back there. It is not lost on me that I left the shamanic precincts and teach full-time in the most "intellectual" and anti-medicine school I've ever known.
Perhaps one day I'll post a few dispatches here so you Teresita fans can see the story in the shadows.
I'll give you an example of the kinds of things that happened every day. I was at a family gathering in California with Cinderella. We had been told that Aunt Elba Urrea, a healer (of course) wanted to meet me. She was dying of cancer. You wouldn't have known it to meet her. She was a riot. Hilarious. Sang ballads and baudy songs, drank up and laughed so much that one of the cranky wives blurted: "I thought you had lung cancer!" Before the party ended, Elba told me she had something for me in her car. We had struck up my traditional older-woman flirtation and romance, and she took my arm and strolled down the night street and called me "Guerito." In the trunk of her car, she had a crate full of documents. Letters, articles, photographs, reports. All about Teresita. La Cinderella, who had her doubts about all my tales of miracles and astonishments, types like a forest fire. And Elba didn't want to leave these materials for longer than a weekend. So we sped to Jonna's house and started the tireless campaign of entering the data onto our little laptop. Well, I sat around drinking coffee and reading Fortean Times while Cindy typed.
But she saw for herself, entering NY Times and LA Times and San Francisco, Arizona, and St. Louis articles, that what I had been saying was real. Witnessed. The strange part for me was that the original drafts of Hummingbird has a framing device--a younger Urrea is digging through the past like me. And a surprise crate of letters, articles, photographs, reports comes into his hands to help him write the book! Key the Twilight Zone theme.
Don't even ask me about the dreams or the shadow-people or the Wicked One who came to pound on my door at three in the morning. That night I was alone with the biggest knife I could find. It's real.
Luigy
2/09/2006
Since I brilliantly misplaced the Cabrini Green housing projects in my recent New York Times op-ed piece, I have been called some form of a-hole twenty-one times now via e-mail. Fans love me! And I love them! It's a big hug-fest in Chicago! So here's my last word on it, and I will move over to haikus about kitties and puppies from now on. I said Cabrini Green was on the southside of Chicago. I believe that a vast right-wing conspiracy moved it across town to confound me and discredit my views. Big trucks. 2,000 illegal immigrants working for 1/2 minimum wage. Halliburton. That's my story. Bye, y'all.
Hate Mail and Love Letters
2/06/2006
I've been getting my usual rash of hate mail following a weekend appearance in the New York Times. The last time I wrote an op-ed for them, I was actually called a commie. It's a thankless task--the assignment being to write about the economic situation in Chi. So this time I was called a racist for quoting a black student ("It's getting awful white up in here"--it was seen as anti-white sarcasm). Sorry about that. And I was called to task a bunch of times for being stupid--my definite problem sometimes. The article seems to claim that Cabrini Green housing complex is in the wrong place. I deeply apologize for that! That is just muddled editing on my part--the housing communities near my college are south of the loop, and that got jammed in with a lame use of Cabrini Green as an example of the projects from a different part of the piece. 600 words gets pretty tight. They got too close and created a James Frey-like weirdness. Still, the points I tried to make were real: black folks get bulldozed by the urban renewals of Chicago, whether we like to admit it or not. I am always amazed at the vitality of the correspondents. It gives me faith in America that we are ready to smack down everybody we don't like as soon as they say something we don't admire. This should keep all us word-mongers on our toes. Though I don't like being insulted, and I definitely dislike being threatened (like the patriots who write whenever I do a piece about Mexicans, telling me I have earned a "traitor's fate" for somehow betraying America), I do like the process of democratic opinion flying around, stinging everybody. The discussion feels holy and whole to me. Even when it's irritating. Still, believe it or not, I am not a big fan of controversy. I want to be pals with the world. I want to write poems. I want to plant geraniums in colorful little pots. Op-ed writers have to be better wrestlers than me. So why do I keep writing controversial books? I'll tell you one thing--the next time I write about Chicago, I'll watch my editing carefully, and I'll have a city map spread out on the desk!
Saturday
2/04/2006
It's Saturday, and Chayo is glued to the television. Just like I used to be when I was a kid. Of course, I was glued to a 20" black and white, then a color TV with that bizarre color we knew and loved back then--the pitcure was kind of creamy, and the faces were orange. We had few stations in San Diego. We had 6 (that broadcast out of Tijuana and showed all the old cowboy movies and reruns), 8 and 10. 12 was the official Tijuana station where you could watch bullfights. It never sank in that the bulls were being tortured and snuffed, and it never quite clicked that the gored horses were really getting hurt. The bull, head-down, gasping bubbles of black blood, took that final sword between the shoulder blades and fell to his knees and it was just a show. Chayo has never seen something like that, though we did watch a satellite show about Australian cats being rescued from tight spaces by noble Aussie firemen. The screen of our Famous Author TV is the size of my old mattress. Everything in my life right now--computers, iPods, cell phones, 62" screens, is so James Bond. So Star Trek. This blog, in fact, is kind of Captain Kirk. Blogger.com is driving me crazy because it doesn't recognize my return key to mak paragraphs anymore. It has gone insane! My blogs are doomed to be massive one-graph monsters! / How about that? I'll cheat it that way. Ah, Saturday. How did you spend your days? I'd like to tell you I spent every Saturday studying the dizzying prose riffs of Twain, but I did not. I probably started the day with a few comics. I spent quality time with Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Later, it was Mad. Not much later, I discovered dad's Playboys. / I lived for Saturday afternoons. Wrestling (Freddie Blassie! Bobo Brazil! Pedro Morales! The Destroyer! Man-Mountain Mike! Haystacks Calhoun! Ernie "Big Cat" Ladd!), and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, and then nirvana: Science Fiction Theater with Moonalisa. Hottie! Goddess! Yum-yum fantasy dream-ghoul! (Real veterans of trashy Saturday afternoons remember Cosmasina before her, reclining on the moon with dry-ice fumes all about her). / I want to make you believe that TS Eliot and Charles Dickens were my major influences, but any monster-freak can tell you who really got the juices flowing: the beasties of Attack of the Crab Monsters, Them, The Brain from Planet Arous, Kaltiki the Immortal Monster, From Hell it Came, The Black Scorpion, Varan the Unbelievable, Konga, X the Unknown, Angry Red Planet, Fiend Without a Face, Earth vs the Flying Saucers, The Blob, Tarantula, The Giant Gila Monster, The Fly, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, Teenagers from Space, Kronos, or perhaps the scariest and stupidest monster of all time, the Ro-Man (guy in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet) from Robot Monster!!! / One of my colleagues at UIC talks about myulch-culture. Aint that the truth. I was a mulch-pile of garbage. I was the #1 fan of Ralphie Valadares and the LA T-Birds roller derby! I was there every Sunday for Okie Bob's country western music and cowboy movie show! I loved Dick Lane's brilliant announcing on flipperty-floppy LA television broadcasts of rasslin and derby, when he'd yell "Whoa Nellie!" I knew every Cal Worthington commercial! I could sing the Pup'n'Taco commercials because Pup'n'Taco was in LA and was so exotic! Pup'n'Taco, Pup'n'Taco, three for ninety-nine. Pup.n.Taco, Pup OR Taco, three for ninety nine! / How is it that crap stuck in my brain, but the answers for most of my mid-term exams did not? / Mulch! Saturday, that's how. Mulch. So when Chayo is going insane over Scooby Doo (oh no) or The Wiggles (oh noooooo) or Gamera the giant flying turtle (all right--I'm totally with her there), I am happy. I am happy when Eric puts nine hours of System of a Down on my iPod. I'll admit, I wasn't too thrilled by Megan's boy band period, but I buy her a J14 bopper mag every month. We can't know what paths our joys open to us. We cannot guess. / My father's distress over my tacky enthusiasms didn't do a thing to slow them or change them. And they, I would swear to it in court, led me to the crooked and delightful byways of my own strange vision, my own happiness, that thing that takes me into the Word.
Rabbitt's Still Rockin' and Some Hummingbird news
2/01/2006
Boy--that AM radio memry's a strong thing. My meditation on Saint Jimmy Rabbitt at KCBQ really touched a nerve. Been getting lots of notes from people, here and on my various email accounts. My other radio hero, Jay Marvin (formerly of WLS Chicago, those lowlife scum sucking dogs) and now happily plying his trade in Colorado, posted the Rabbitt piece on a radio news website, so jocks and engineers have been reading it. Then our Man, the Voice Hisself, the Rocking Rabbitt, the Mystery Man and Master of the Moody Blues and the Moby Grape, Jimmy Rabbitt dropped me a note. How cool is that? Now the piece (below) is up on his website. It's 1968 at my house, y'all. I listened to the Chambers Brothers "Time Has Come Today" in honor of it all--the long version, the version with the scary ghosts and the end of the world in it. Just like those Slurpee afternoons on Clairemont Drive walking home with Mark Gipe and Charlie Cassens. "My soul has been psychedelicized!" A bit o' news, too: Hummingbird's Daughter has been chosen for the American Library Association's Notable Books list. Very exciting to be on a list with Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwen and Marilynne Robinson. So visit Kankakee, buy a book there, and support your local radio!
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