“Why are we whispering?”
I don’t know.
“I said, ‘Why are we whispering?’ “
I said I don’t know.
san francisco
1990
i was 25
passport burning a hole in my pocket
eurail pass deal changes at 26
told my boss i was taking 2 mos. off
would come back if welcome, or not.
they agreed to six weeks,
ultimately five weeks of which i got paid for
because of vacation and comp time.
also, my girlfriend had dumped me.
i planned my itinerary
amsterdam of course
germany france italy
plus the newly open eastern europe
warsaw, cracow? east berlin? sarajevo? dubrovnik?
my slavic languages and lit friend
getting their ph.d.'s at berkeley
recommended buda-pest and prague
praha
one dave had been denied security clearance
to go to moscow as an undgrad (circa 1984)
one too many drunken marxist speeches by the keg
with a part-time cia informer in the crowd?
two weeks in amsterdam
bavaria, munich, and dachau
i always have a vacation inside each trip
italian riviera
cinque terra, riomaggiore
to marseille with the australian girl
doubling back 4 trains 23 hours
to vienna
a $10 sandwich in zurich train station halfway
stayed an extra week in vienna with
the girl from the train
she shared her chocolates with me
told me it was too late to get a hostel
invited me to her 18th century apartment
that week meant no yugoslavia later, no poland
but worth it
then budapest, weird experiences
written about elsewhere,
the highlight a rock festival
very hippy
a girl braided ribbons into my hair
only there a few days, not long enough
then to prague
staying with an artist friend of dave's
best time of my life up to that point
stories of the recent past, the changes
how cops used to break up parties with loud music
but now they'd yell "it's democracy!"
which he explained most people thought meant
anarchy, no cops, no more rules
communism worked for this artist guy
he had a job being an artist, a big apartment
with a big studio attached
he got to go to austria sometimes
to exhibit
to bring back hard currency
now he had to work freelance like
artists in the west
he loved reagan
pronounced nationalism nation-alism
took me to his brother's wedding
at a church in the downtown square in prague
right by the clockwork tower
i still didn't understand a word
except that no seemed to mean yes
beautiful wedding all the same
a joint passed around among the groomsmen
and guests outside under the clock
after the wedding
the reception at a hotel as we would do it
the artist and his brother and their family
was part of the old charter 77 group. ivan
klima was there. after it broke up
the party continued in a pub nearby.
havel showed up, with two tall bodyguards
one of whom had a long ponytail.
he sat at one of the tables and drank beer
with his old friends. people were arty
and acted nonchalant but there was
an electricity in the air.
i asked someone if they thought i could snap
a few polaroids of the president.
they said, sure, but when i stood up and
took a few flash shots the nearest bodyguard
sprang up and came at me.
my friends told him i didn't speak czech.
they told me i should have asked permission
before taking the pictures.
it turned out the film got double-exposed
and none of those shots came out.
i stayed an extra week in prague too.
you could sense that this was going to be
the paris in the 20s for americans of the '90s
in those days there was a newspaper in s.f.
called calendar magazine
that started off mostly as a list of events
maybe 8 pages
and evolved into the s.f. weekly,
now part of a phoenix-based chain.
back then i thought i had already missed a shot
by not going down and volunteering for calendar
when it was still small and starting up.
after my trip (east berlin, frankfurt, and home)
i thought about quitting my editor job in s.f.
moving back to prague
while you could still get 23 crowns to the dollar
and starting or joining a local english-language
newspaper. what a great idea!
but when i got back i also looked up
this other girl. i had a beard now.
my hair was long.
i was in my jesus/lennon phase.
the road not taken,
i fell in love
opted for an inward adventure
she tamed me some
maybe sooner than ideal for me
maybe later than ideal for her
great ideas are a dime a dozen
it's the doing that counts
when i read matt's blog sometimes
i feel like i'm looking into
a nearby alternate universe
this decision, not that
this branching, not that
no regrets
aside from the bittersweet awareness
the downside to every upside
the reverse to every obverse
instead
a cockeyed optimism
new choices today
every day
thanks
top of my fucking game these guys in d--- best guys | 9 yrs comatose diabetic junkie |
| get some fuckin kid you can push pay him more money get somebody to push his crap around | |
I'll go where I can with people like me. | |
The moment I delivered the bad news, it seemed, the rain started, coming down hard right away. I looked to my right at my empty water glass and thought about how parched the back of my mouth felt right then, wondered how long I'd been this thirsty.
The sky'd been threatening all day, tempting with little patches of pure blue but mostly hovering low down to the ground with gray woollens. Still it seemed like the sky open and released its lapful of rain in sudden downpour, as I basked in her disappointment and frustration with me.
Time to close the house up.
I wasn't surprised when my cellphone rang because I had already told the guy who'd sent me the query to call me the next day. It was hard enough juggling a fulltime job at an insane startup while still trying to keep up my contacts with publishers and keep my writer clients happy. I wasn't really looking for any new clients but I'm a sucker for a good pitch and I always figured I could go sit out in my car and talk on my cellphone during a break if something needed immediate attention.
Fortunately a conference room was open so I told this guy to hold a minute and went in there. I figured if I took notes on the white board people would assume I was talking to one of our crazy dotcom clients who had no idea how to run their business and were spending most of their vc money on clients like us trying to build their cockamamie schemes into convincing-enough websites to generate that next round of funding. This was well past the peak of net.boom, well into the long downward slide, but reality was taking its own sweet time reasserting itself amidst all the kerfluffle and powerpoints.
Nick was an entrepreneur who wanted to write a book either about his phenomenal - so he said - business success or about himself personally. Lots of people want to write books and tell their stories and most of them think they can do it easily. In the breach, most never even get a proposal together and others end up flaking out along the way when they realize how much harder it is to write a coherent several-hundred page book than it is to entertain strangers with anecdotes at a cocktail party
Nick was an internet entrepreneur, in fact a pornsite enterpreneur. Actually, he was kind of a metaporn entrepreneur, because he didn't actually run any porno sites himself. Instead he sold people the kits they needed to start up their own cottage porno industries. This was like ostrich breeding or opening up a franchise, all across middle america. Some of his customers were trying to exploit their own sex lives in the pro-am side of the business, but most of them were just subscribing to his seemingly limitless supply of copyright-free porn archives of dubious provenance.
I'd heard all the tent-stakes speeches before, especially during the gold rush years online. Everyone thought they'd cracked the nut and had a unique angle by selling other people the tools and services they needed to pursue their reckless plans. We knew almost nobody was going to strike gold. We just wanted to sell them pans and mules, tents and tent stakes. So I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that the same reasoning obtained in the online sex business. I gather spam works the same way. Down at the base of the pyramid none of these hapless spammers are making money, but the people selling them bulk mailing tools, scraped e-mail addresses, and ever-escalating spam-protection evasion schemes were the only ones really making money. Think Amway or any other multi-level marketing ponzi scheme. Spamway, I guess.
So Nick started off by telling me about his genius scheme. The beauty part was that he made his money up front and collected subscription fees, whether his clients ever got their cookie-cutter "see my wife naked" sites up and running successfully or not. With his tools they could launch a designed site with credit-card validation and a proto-blog tool for posting the wife's supposed daily journal to keep customers coming back for more. Nick kept insisting that his clients did make money, but I was dubious. I didn't press the point though because I was still trying to figure out what kind of book he was planning to write.
He was a born salesman, too. I've been around this type a lot. He was selling me the whole time. Everything was top of the line. His story was going to be explosive, a tearjerker, a bestseller. I just laughed that off. If people only understood the book business they'd stop thinking they were sitting on the next big title. Also, it became clear to me as it went on that he didn't want to write about his adventures in the skin trade. He wanted to write about himself.
The crux of the matter was that he had been raised Catholic and he obviously still felt there was some conflict between the values instilled in him by his immigrant parents as he was growing up and the ones he was exploiting now in his business. He kept going back and forth on this, claiming that what he was doing was good old American business and even throwing in a little bit of warmed-over free-love rhetoric from the sixties, but it didn't take a Freud to hear the denial in his elaborate circumlocutions, when it came to addressing what his clients were trying to sell.
I'm no prude. I've looked at porn. Whatever. It has its place. It was actually his dotcom-style hype that was wearing thin for me. I'd heard so many blue sky descriptions of business models and looked at so many phonied-up numbers and charts that my bullshit-meter was on a hair-trigger by then. The problem is that the people who really can sell coal to Newcastle sound the same way, and I was only spending a few nonbillable moments of Wellspring's time entertaining his pitch, so I was willing to let him go for a while, making noncommittal Columbo-style grunts in response to him whenever he took a breath. He was free to interpret that as agreement or encouragement if he wanted.
"I really think my story could be a breakout blockbuster hit," he told me at one point. "We should talk about the film rights, too." I wasn't sure why he thought there was anything unique at all about his experience, except that he was obviously having some degree of success that on some level amazed him and made him think that anything was possible and that he maybe had his fingers in an even more valuable pie. People would pay not just to purchase his kits (though he did expect the book to help cross-promote the business and vice versa) but to sit at his feet and listen to his words of wisdom about how to make it in America selling tits and ass without losing your self-respect.
I brushed him off, finally, with the hurdle that filters out 90% of my queries. I told him to write a proposal, and offered to send him some guidelines. If he could distill his pitch into a convincing business case, sure I'd consider representing him. I had my own raised-Catholic guilt issues to consider but then again I'd be one further step removed from him in my own little pyramid of obligations and responsibilities and I'd already offered to represent writers with much more crass or vile ideas. I'm all about free speech anyway, right?
So I wasn't lying when I told him that I'd honestly consider repping his book proposal if he got it together and sent it to me. By now there were people milling around the little conference room about to start a meeting, so I needed to wipe the white board clean and cut it short anyway. He was launching into another extended hyperbolic pitch when I cut him short (I love doing that to salespeople) and told him to go ahead and take that next step.
I never heard back from him.
mustachioed ham sandwich
fake over-the-top anna nicole smithalike
at bob holmann's open mike monday night crowd
more comedy than poetry
microphone tantrums
summer braless boner talk
mutual admiration standup
mostly shouting
shock value
adolescent poop talk
dick cum rude rapid penetration
plus yelling
the routing about chafing and jock itch
reminds me of the time I accidentally
put baking soda down my shorts
when I meant to use talcum powder
on one of those sweltering heat wave nights
when i was tired or drunk or both and
never could figure out all night
why i wasn't drying out and cooling off
but was instead staying slimy and hot
like i was cooking something down there
and instead of the silky talc texture I expected
this gritty sandy slick.
It could be the late afternoon light or the cooling air, but out my taxi window everyone is looking beautiful right now, even the mobile phone chatterers and the hunched-over old man methodically finishing his cigarette.
I'm not sure how to spell paraphernalia, but I remember when Bucky's younger brother Brad had been going through his desk and announced to all of us, including his parents, that "Bucky has an LSD pipe!"
At that point I'd smoked a few supposed doobies (bought already rolled from some shady guy in the Burger King on 87th street), but I hadn't seen a pipe yet (or a 'bowl' as we liked to call it in the '70s). Nonetheless, I'm sure that whatever little Brad had found rummaging around was a pot pipe. I'm pretty sure you don't smoke LSD. Also, this was too early for crack and stuff like that.
Sadly, Bucky went off the deep end. As with a lot of the kids in my 8th grade class of 1978, he didn't make it two years through his exclusive private high school before being kicked out and starting onto his downward spiral.
Years later I ran into him on the street and his stutter was a lot worse. He seemed pretty spaced out. Could have been he was wasted at the time or that all those pipes of LSD had had a permanent effect.
Reading is the first escape, the gateway drug, the charming autistic abstraction. Reading is a crutch. Just say no. The kids are all right. TV is EZ.
It's storytime. Now sit and be read to.
Smart alecks up front where I can see you, writing 50 times "I must not be so."
That picture I sent you isn't me. I liked your picture. Is that really you?
This new picture is me. It's a little old. My hair isn't that color anymore. I may not be quite as thin now as I was in that picture, but it still looks like me. You'll see.
If you can make it to breakfast, I can meet your significant other, he had written.
Thing about that is, she probably won't come, not early on Sunday morning. See, she and I have this kind of tacit agreement. She's pretty tolerant about me doing what I need to do, all hours of the day and night, writer's life, but she doesn't necessarily come out on my schedule. It's not like the thin man.
I spent all day making that poop and you just throw it away with a "something smells stinky" look of disgust on your face?
"Would anyone be offended if I cleaned this bong?" said Heather to no one in particular.
"Totally not," said Bruce.
Everybody talks about Biggie Smalls but how come nobody ever talks about Smally Biggs?
"Is anybody here for the genius bar," a quavery voice. "Anyone on the list?"
"Bueller?" nobody said.
Clogged pores, chafed skin, unreachable itches, a hammering in my ears, perpetually damp nostrils, grease accumulating around the rims of my scratched-up plastic lenses. Shoes too loose, pants too tight. A hair ingrowing on my neck, driving me mad. The slightest noises, voices flowing in oscillating waves of volume from down the hall, the bathroom door flying open and latching itself closed. Inane telephone chatter. Sluggish, inefficient digestion. Technology failing to work, no longer even bothering to promise to work. Unselfconscious banter from slightly addled burnouts who repeat themselves and speak in earnest and never seem to notice that I don't give a shit and am giving them only the barest minimum of a civilized nod of attention hoping they'll wind it down and go away already. All my old scars prickling. The seizing up of my back muscles in a T shape pointing to my underdeveloped trapezius. Slick, slippery ear canals and whorls, fingernails bitten to the quick, an old torn anterior cruciate ligament injury acting up in perfect weather, body language worn down by bucket seats and computer postures, an extra ten pounds, now twenty, now thirty. Hour upon hour in this same place, staring at a tiny moving cursor. Jokes that waste time. No sense of humor left.