No Place to Own a Fruit Stand

​

​

This piece originally appeared in The Threepenny Review.

 

Before I got mixed up in the movie business I got mixed up in the music business, spending my first two years out of college working at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank. (I had the hair but not the guitar. I wrote liner notes.) One morning I got a phone call from Jonathan Kaplan, the only movie director I knew then, who was on the Warners movie lot next door. He was making a picture called Truck Turner, starring Isaac Hayes, who’d also composed the score. There was to be a recording session that afternoon, with Mr. Hayes conducting, and did I want to come watch?

 

It sounded like fun and turned out to be thrilling. An orchestra the size of some Biggest Little City’s symphony sat on the scoring stage, surrounding Mr. Hayes, who in recent years had killed the people with the theme from Shaft and an emotionally pummeling cover of “Walk On By.” The session was like a normal recording date at the record company except for the movie screen on the wall, where clips from the Truck Turner work print were shown so that the music could be timed to them. “Bassoons,” said the Barry White-trouncing bass voice that had moaned its way through Hot Buttered Soul, “you need to be out when the car door closes. Again.”

 

Again, baby! The car door on the screen closed several more times, the bassoons at last caught up with it, Mr. Hayes went on to the next cue, and I was in heaven. As a bonus, the route to the scoring stage had taken me down Warners’ New York Street, a beautifully detailed block of fake Manhattan, complete with little staircases leading down from the street to basement apartment entrances. As I walked back to work, it occurred to me that some of the inspiration for Disneyland must have come from Walt’s seeing the delight of civilians taking their first walk down a back lot’s ersatz avenues.

 

Later, as I say, I got mixed up in the movie business. Like the showbiz columnist Army Archerd’s fictional studio correspondent Onda Lotalot, I was on the lot a lot. Each day I walked from my car to the office through a dusty village that was Cuzco one week and China the next. I ate at the commissary. I wrote monster movies.

 

I would say that I became intimately familiar with the New York Street during that period, but in fact I was intimately familiar with it before I ever set foot there. Everyone is. It’s the setting of a million crime pictures, musicals, TV episodes, and commercials. It’s basically 1940s, but with a little signage and some show cars its age can be pushed back or pulled forward by decades. Gangsters tommy-gunned one another from running boards there, and dozens of young strivers burst simultaneously out of their below-grade apartments to do dance numbers about hope up and down the fire escapes. The car chases on New York Street accounted for half the crime in the Valley. It was no place to own a fruit stand.

 

Years after my first visit, my wife and I went to the Warners lot one night for a screening. “The lots are full,” the guard at the gate said. “Park on New York Street.” We got the last available space.

 

As we got out of the car my wife said, “We’re next to a hydrant.”

 

“No, no,” I said, “That’s not a real hydrant.”  My wife is brilliant and all, but she’s never been in show business. If our marriage had been announced in Variety, the item would have listed one or two of my monster movies and, despite all her achievements, added, “Wife is a non-pro.” If Larry from the Three Stooges had married Marie Curie, she would have gotten “Wife is a non-pro” too.

​

Nothing on the New York Street was real, I told her. The apartment house façades looked like gritty real life took place inside, but there was nothing behind them. Gritty real life happened on soundstages, a hundred yards away. I closed the car door, without bassoons, and said, “We’ll be late.”

 

When we got back from the screening, there was a ticket on the windshield for parking by the quite real hydrant. I was mortified and didn’t know what to do with the ticket, or even who had issued it -- studio security? the Burbank police? Karl Malden in The Wrong Man?

 

I showed it to the guard at the gate. “You can’t park by a hydrant,” he said. “What if there was a fire?” I nodded, cringing at the thought of years of America’s memories going up in flames like an over-insured furniture store because some idiot, me, had blocked the fireplug, and with a rented Cavalier at that. 

 

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “How do I pay it?”

 

“Pay it?” He took the ticket from me and dropped it in the trash. “No, no. That’s not a real ticket.”

​

❧

​

Lou Rawls

​

Lou Rawls comes on the radio singing, "Groovy people / I like to be with groovy people / I don't like nobody / That's got an ego." That's really narrowing the field, I think, but then I picture him sitting around with some ascended spiritual masters who giggle and levitate every time he says, "That wind was really socking it to me, Jim," and then I wonder if Donny Hathaway ever got in on that. 

​

❧

​

​​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A fan’s note, deer in the headphones division: Dave Derby

 

"Our love could be so strong / If she went back on her meds now."

​

Music break! Let’s tune our transistors to Dave Derby, the brains behind (and voice in front of) the Dambuilders, Brilliantine, and his solo self. From iconoclastic albums with an Adam Schlesinger-worthy mix of pop exhilaration and dour literary lyrics, to TV themes and soundtracks, the goodness is always there. My Life and the Beautiful Game is as perfect a rock record as I know of. But let’s start here and work our way outward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTM21vvA-Oc

​​

❧

​

Fear

​

This piece was originally published in The Threepenny Review. 

 

In 1971 I was a student at U.C. Santa Cruz, where my greatest fear was group denunciation in poetry workshop. Then I got a summer job as an ice cream man in San Jose. My pickup truck had bad brakes, no shocks, and an ancient sheet-metal box that I loaded every morning with Drumsticks, Fudgsicles, and scalding dry ice. The amplified music box played “Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?” in the distorting style of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock throughout my ten-hour shift. I fought back with the forty-five-minute commercial-free music sweeps on KLIV, so that, to this day, a few bars of “Treat Her Like a Lady” by the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose or, worse, “Sweet City Woman” by the Stampeders, will send me into a flashback worthy of vaudeville: “The Cornelius Brothers! Slowly I turned...”

 

Ice cream man was a job of last resort, open to those with spotty employment records or none at all. I’d been put onto it by a houseful of guys who sold pot and gave hang-gliding lessons, a combination that didn’t even seem problematic at the time. My ice cream man role model was Uncle Fred, an unrepentant jazzbo junkie and the most relaxed person I’d ever seen. When the kids flagged him down, his ninety-pound frame slid out of his truck like a salamander’s and he greeted the tykes in a voice like Progress Hornsby’s. They adored him.

 

One day a guy in his twenties stopped me and asked if I had change for a fifty. I said no and gave him an ice-milk bar on the house. When I got back in the truck he jumped in after me, pinned me to the seat, put a knife to my throat and requested all my money.

 

The fear I felt was pure – objective, immediate, conjecture-free. I was still shaking when the guy was long out of sight, along with my change apron and its fifteen pounds of sticky pennies. The experience left me with what felt like a revelation: that fear was for specific occasions, and that my customary terrors – of what people might think of me, or of life’s inevitable unpleasant passages – were barely worth thinking about, much less being scared of. This nonsense lasted three and a half days, and then I got back to normal.

 

Years passed. I cultivated a healthy repertoire of fears – loss, rejection, a Cessna hitting the house. I became a writer of monster movies, which people go to for the pleasure of being scared when there’s nothing to be scared of. I even wrote a movie about this phenomenon, in which a bunch of kids attend the premiere of a horror movie during the Cuban missile crisis. The horror movie’s special effects, including Rumble-Rama and army surplus motors in the seats, are mistaken for a real nuclear attack. Then it turns out that there really is danger in the theater, and the patrons’ mistaken fear saves their lives. I gave the screenplay a frontispiece with a quotation from Robert Benchley: “Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.” One critic called the movie a searching meditation on the nature of fear – that is, the sort of picture whose script has a frontispiece. The studio gave it the kind of release filmmakers live in fear of.

 

More years passed. I started writing fiction, which made me eligible to be scared of publishers and critics. I was entertaining some of those fears, waiting for news about a book I’d written, when my wife and I went to Ojai, a southern California town that saw action in the New Thought wars of the ’20s. There’s a Theosophy bookstore there, a Krishnamurti library, and an Esoteric Psychology mountaintop. The people working at these places had still-pond eyes and voices calmer than the guided-meditation CDs they were quoting prices on. They’d put their fears on a back burner in a distant county. They were cooler than Uncle Fred.

 

I picked up a book called Krishnamurti on Fear, opened it and read: “I am attached to a memory, I am attached to a piece of furniture, I am attached to what I am writing because through writing I will become famous... Because I am empty and lonely I don’t know what to do with my life. I write a stupid book and that fills my vanity.”

 

Nobody likes a wise guy, but I kept reading. Krishnamurti thought that fear was a product of thought – or, in layman’s terms, that we each make our own monster movie, all the time. Mine is corny, with its popgun scares, but it distracts me from the ones where the bomb drops for real or the guy with the knife gets careless.

 

We walked out of the library into a cold rain that hid the town from us even though we were high in the hills. Roads were flooding that week, and we’d heard a scary story of a driver being fatally swept away, so we took the cautious long way back to the hotel. When we had dry clothes on I called my answering machine at home, and the news that was waiting for me was wonderful: no Cessna yet.

​

❧

​

Seder, the Sundance Movie

​​

"Seder, The Sundance Movie" appeared in the fancy-people magazine in 2010, and may be read here.

​❧

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My office park

 

If you work at home, as I’ve done for many years, you naturally dream of an office park. Sitting out here in the garden, surrounded by a destabilizingly varied landscape of flowering plants and singing birds, I wish myself into a setting of low-slung beige buildings, algorithm-placed birch trees, and gently rolling terrain rendered by bulldozers.

 

In my office park there are kiosks for dry cleaning, drop boxes for the major courier services, and coffee stations with all the cocoa-and-Keurig speedballs your nerves can take. The slogan on the leasing signs is “Where strategies meet solutions.” The supply rooms have enough whiteboard markers to get a four-day music festival high. The Chinese chicken salad in the Building B Cafe is “surprisingly good.”

 

But then I come to my senses, back with the flowers and birds and unmatching patio furniture. No vending machines, no Parcourse, no 4:00 PM fruit cocktail. My life is one long off-site, a trust exercise with no one to catch me.

​❧

​

​

​​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These If You Care Sandwich Bags are highly recommended. Also great: Not That You Even Think About These Things Waxed Paper, I Swear to God It’s Like You Go to Another Planet When I Talk to You Aluminum Foil, and I Have Tried I Have Goddamn Tried (Deep Sigh) Never Mind Muffin Cups. Try ’em all!
​

❧

​

Marijuana

​I know marijuana is said to cause memory problems, but I'm still curious to try it.

❧

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Fan's Note: The New York Poets

​

​​​In 1966 or so I had one of those formative moments you never forget: reading the East Village Other, a New York underground paper, I came across a comic strip by someone named Joe Brainard. 

​

This wasn’t a Zap Comix kind of deal at all. Drawn in a spare, cheerful style that echoed old Nancy and Henry strips, it was a nonlinear sequence in which the thought and speech balloons belonged to animals and inanimate objects. The text, broken up among those balloons and some corner captions, read (quoting from memory because I can’t find a copy anywhere), “My friend Ron Padgett is a poet. He always has been a poet and always will be. I think it’s something deep inside of him that cannot be explained. Once I asked Ron why he was a poet and he said, ‘I don’t know.  It’s something deep inside of me that cannot be explained.’”

​

The underground papers were a big thing to me then -- bulletins of hope from a world where people were having a lot more fun than they were in my small town. To look at those papers now is to be struck by how haphazardly written, edited, reasoned,  art-directed and laid out a publication can be. It would be sobering to revisit them if so much other sobering-up hadn’t happened in the interim. 

​

But there were some great flashes of thought, humor and beauty in those papers, and Joe Brainard’s poetry comics were all that. For my teenage self, they were a gateway I walked through and never looked back. 

​

It turned out that Brainard and Ron Padgett were two of the “Second Wave New York School” poets who had coalesced around the poetry workshop at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery and The World magazine. The two of them had collaborated with the Second Wave scoundrel-patriarch Ted Berrigan on a terrific book called Bean Spasms, and there were all these other talents: Anne Waldman, Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Tom Clark, the future New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl -- I could go on, and often do till someone stops me. 

 

Though distinctive in their talents, they were, loosely, a school of like minds. (I don’t mean to include Alice Notley, who was and is a school of her own.) The voice their work often shared was surprised and delighted by life but unsentimental -- sidelong, self-distracted, jokey, non-sequitur-loaded, but liable at any moment to pivot to some moving truth. 

​

The three acknowledged founders of the New York School, the “first wave,” were Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara. Ron Padgett’s Joe, a beautiful memoir about making the move from Tulsa to New York with Brainard and Berrigan, recalls how intent these guys were on meeting and impressing those three. The scheme was that the upstarts and their friends would each start a mimeo or Xerox magazine in which they’d publish one another, so that when they met, say, O’Hara, he’d have seen their work. 

​

It worked out just that way. Over time the Second Wave people stepped into the perks of being “poetry famous” -- books, teaching appointments, readings and parties, guest slots at Naropa. Brainard became a successful painter and collagist, as well as a poet whose “I Remember” series influenced generations of writers.

 

Reading their work from that time puts me in an imagined Loisaida apartment -- white enamel paint, an iron bed, prayer candles on the nightstands and an Indian bedspread on the ceiling. Not a photo I’ve seen or reminiscence I’ve read, just a conjuring that seems to float up from the stanzas.  

​

When I went off to college, the calling card I taped to my dorm room door was Brainard’s strip about Ron Padgett being, inexplicably and irreversibly, a poet. I got my friends to join in stagings of Kenneth Koch’s plays, which share a brilliant comic outlook with his long narrative poems. I like to think that the New York School influenced my own writing, though of course the line forms to the right on that one. 

​​

Ted Berrigan died in 1983, Joe Brainard in 1994, Peter Schjeldahl in 2022. Ron Padgett, now 82, has evolved steadily but remained absolutely himself, one of the cleverest and wisest voices in poetry. There are big books of their collected works now, and (except for their physical weight) I find them hard to beat for bedtime reading. Just like that, the reader is halfway to dreamland, wreathed in the psychoactive mimeo ink of 1966.

​​

❧

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

A fan’s note, deer in the headphones division: Henry Threadgill

 

Music break! Let’s read Henry Threadgill’s excellent memoir Easily Slip Into Another World while we listen to his albums, including the one with the same title as the memoir but also the ones he made under his own name and with his groups Air, Very Very Circus, Zooid, Material, the Society Situation Dance Band, Make a Move, and more. We’ll sail through free jazz, catchy neo-R&B, and new chamber music, all by the same Pulitzer-winning composer, who writes: “There was no way I was going to stand up there like another bebop clone, noodling those same old lines -- scoobie-doobie-doobie! -- over those same old changes. I wouldn’t have been able to look at myself in the mirror.” Crisis averted. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XylgK-YI7Hc&ab_channel=mfish618

​

❧

​​

Local Hippie Shot in Stream​

​

This piece was originally published in The Threepenny Review. 

​

This is the story of my wanderlust, and how it came to a sudden end.

​

I spent the first fifteen years of my life in an East Coast town where—as I saw it at the time—nothing happened. There was no entertainment, no culture, no sense of humor. My memory of those years is of one long walk through freezing cul-de-sacs in the dark, with a transistor radio pressed to my ear.

 

And the radio was killing me, because it was the late 1960s and songs were pouring out of there about California dreaming and sticking flowers in your hair in San Francisco. There was a song where a guy sang I’ve got to find a new place where the kids are hip and I’d think Thanks for the reminder. I was dreaming of not just California but the whole world. My own youth was going on without me, someplace groovy.

​

But then I was rescued by the future.

 

My father worked for a company whose line of business wasn’t entirely clear, perhaps even to them. They made an odd assortment of products—offset printing presses, aerial cameras, and the first digital watch I ever saw. My dad brought one home for me.

 

Imagine what a wonder this was, back then. Instead of a miniature clock face, there was a screen with numbers on it. A statistic, not an illustration of one.

 

Because it was such an early model, though, the numbers weren’t there unless you pushed a button on the side of the watch. Then they’d light up, with a dim red glow. That was the breakthrough: it now took both hands to tell time. If you tried to read this watch when you were driving, you had to angle your head around your button-pushing arm so you could squint at the faint red numbers.

​

But the reason the company made these dangerous watches was that they had a small division, somewhere out in California, that was pioneering the use of crystalline wafers as a medium for computing. My dad was flying out there more and more often, and coming back saying things like “First they bake the silicon in an oven…”

​

That watch had a chip in it. Those red numbers told the birthdate of Silicon Valley and the personal computer revolution.

 

The visionaries at my father’s company were gazing at a limitless future, where one day you’d be able to read conspiracy theories at the touch of a screen, where all of us would be under surveillance day and night by twenty-five-year-old billionaires who were a little off. They looked at this future and said, “Who wouldn’t want that?” and moved their offices to California.

​

Overnight my world went from black and white to Day-Glo. I enrolled at my California high school, and found the new place where the kids were hip. They were creative, sarcastic, long-haired, and nice. I had friends! It was unfathomable, but there it was.

​

There was, of course, a catch: Mr. Whitney’s chemistry class, which several of us took first period every day.

Mr. Whitney was a young teacher but an old soul, an intensely boring one. When he taught chemistry there were no little volcanos erupting, no zany mnemonics for the benzene ring. Mr. Whitney just... said the facts...about the chemicals...as he wrote them on...the blackboard.

​

This was first period, and some of us weren’t all that awake going in. Over and over I would sink toward sleep and then startle awake, thinking Where am I? Oh! He’s still talking! Jesus! Some of my friends didn’t suffer that turmoil. They’d get out their textbooks, their notebooks, and their sharpened pencils, and as soon as Mr. Whitney got started their faces would be flat on the desk, gone for forty-five minutes.

 

One morning my parents and I were eating breakfast and passing around sections of the morning paper. In the local news I saw a headline: WOMAN SHOOTS HIPPIE IN STREAM.

 

After seven months in California I considered that I was a hippie myself. Who was shooting us?

 

It seemed that the woman in the story lived in a house with a stream at the back of the property where hippies came to splash around, a little Woodstock outtake framed by her kitchen window. The day before, something inside her having given way, she’d gotten her gun out and plugged a guy.

 

The hippie was all right. He’d been treated for his injuries and released. The woman with the gun had some explaining to do. Her name, the story said, was Dolores Whitney, and her husband, whose name was Mr. Whitney, taught chemistry at my high school.

 

Bliss was it in that dawn to be a chemistry student. I rushed up to my friends in the quad and said, “Fellers!”—like someone in Little Lulu comics—“Fellers, I don’t think we have to go to chemistry today. We may never have to go to chemistry again. Mr. Whitney’s wife has shot a hippie.”

 

They were as excited as I was. We imagined where Mr. Whitney was right then—helping his wife face down the D.A. and a dozen courthouse paparazzi—and what we might do with our suddenly free forty-five minutes. Then we looked over at the classroom building, where he was opening his door and fixing it with the little stopper so we could come in.

 

In the two minutes before the bell rang, we decided that this was even better. Mr. Whitney was going to have to say something. He was getting up in front of a classroom where a number of people looked like the guy his wife had just shot. He would have to reach across the aisle. He might even sit down on the edge of his desk to talk to us, the way they do when things are really serious. Or he could just break down in hysterics in the middle of the period—we’d take that.

 

The bell rang, we went in, and Mr. Whitney started to talk... about chemistry... and write on the blackboard...the same as always. The difference was that, this morning, no one was sleepy. We were pinned to him like the scientific observers he’d always wanted us to be, waiting for the slightest crack in the veneer.

 

The longer this went on, the more fascinating it became. What would have been just another boring chemistry class was now the drama of a man caught between love and the law, giving a flawless demonstration of that crucial adult skill called acting like nothing’s wrong. Maybe we knew we’d need it ourselves someday.

​

❧

​

Bastards

 

Amazon has created a new rule limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day.

-The Guardian

 

Jesus, what are they, crazy? Are they serious? Three a DAY? You think maybe this is  going to put a little CRIMP in a creative person’s FREEDOM? Because look, last Wednesday, pretty typical day, four AM the alarm goes off and BOOM I’m in the shower writing a cozy thriller on my waterproof phone. I dictate the first-act climax as I dry off and BANG, by fifth espresso I’ve tied that one up and I’m writing the one about the disgraced executive who goes home to take care of her sick mother and stumbles into a harrowing conspiracy to harness the power of dark matter, which takes me till lunchtime because of all the twists, but WHOOSH, by the time I finish cooking the wind is at my back again and I’m powering through my collection of probing essays about the meaning of time in an age of trauma, and when that’s done WHAM I’m in the car doing errands and recording the one where the orphan boy joins the Elite Necromancer Corps and unlocks the secret past of the elf-wizard Crepeyskin, and when I get home I’ve got time to write The Girl Who Didn’t Narrate Reliably and then a historical romance set against the agony of the Russo-Japanese War and that air-fryer repair manual I’ve been meaning to get to. POOM, two hours’ sleep, no one needs more than that, and you get up and DO IT AGAIN, buddy, UNLESS of course some smug gatekeeper jerks who should stick to selling inflatable dishware or whatever decide to put a LIMIT on your free expression in supposedly the world’s greatest democracy and then you’re SCREWED, aren’t you, because there’s no court of appeal with these people. Can you say “RESTRAINT OF TRADE”? I guess you can’t, not if you’ve already said three other things that day. Bastards.

​​

​​

​​

​

​

​​

​

​