In a stunning legal decision that left many legal experts discombobulated, the Supreme Court found Ace Backwords guilty of being an Asshole by a 5 to 4 margin. Backwords was sentenced to 5 months sleeping in a ratty-ass doorway on skid row. As part of the settlement Backwords agreed to never say anything about anyone ever again. And everyone lived happily ever after.
I’m getting old. I realized that quite clearly the other day.
Last Sunday, I was hanging out at my vending table on Telegraph Avenue. I sell salvaged books for 25 cents each. That’s what I do for a living, or what passes for one. This isn’t really how I envisioned my life turning out at age 46, selling junk books on a street corner. But life has a way of throwing curveballs at you. Well, at least my life does.
Actually, its a pretty good gig; I make about $50 to $60 bucks a weekend; and sometimes up to $150 or more if I can scrounge up good books. And it’s low-maintenance. I stroll by the table every 15 minutes or so to collect the dough from the “donation” cup. I don’t even have to deal with the customers, which is a plus for an anti-social type like myself.
Anyway, I’m sitting there at the vending table by myself sucking on an Old English 16-ouncer, when this young chick shows up. She’s been hanging out on the scene for the last couple weeks, and she had immediately caught my eye, as all the young chicks on the scene immediately tend to do. She was tall and gangling but with nice curves, a cute, girlish face and a short, black Napoleon haircut. She wore blue jeans and a short, black halter top that showed off her bellybutton and her nipples to good effect, and she had a sleeping bag rolled under her arm. The first time I saw her I had her pegged as a junkie/stripper. She really reminded me of the strippers I used to hang out with 20 years ago when I used to work at the Mitchell Bros. strip club. It was the way she moved her body, the way she kept striking these sexual poses. She was one of those chicks who WANTED men to look at her in a sexual way. You could just tell. Some chicks are like that.
I had talked with her briefly last weekend; she came staggering out of the bathroom of Cody’s Books, glassy-eyed and wobbly, like she had just shot up a big hit of heroin or something. She just started talking to me, like she was sort of talking out loud to herself: “I need to be loaded before I can talk to my Mom,” she explained. Then she talked for awhile to someone (her Mom I assume)on the payphones behind my table. Then she staggered across the street, sat down on the sidewalk, and fell asleep; her legs spread wide like a stripper, and her head slumped down between her legs, on the nod. I went upstairs to Moe’s book across the street and spied on her from the second story window. I’m kind of a voyeuristic bastard, I guess. But fukk, you sit there on a street corner for 12 hours selling junk books for a quarter and you’ll be looking for some way to amuse yourself also.
So anyway, the next week she comes up to my vending table again while I’m sitting there and strikes up another conversation with me. I have an extra folding chair, folded up alongside my table, so she asks if she can sit in it for awhile while she waits for her ride to show up and pick her up. “Sure,” I said.
Now, on the streets, you learn to read people very quickly. Because strangers are always suddenly materializing in front of your face and you have to deal with them. You never know who, or what, they are. And first impressions can be very deceiving. I mean, the person in front of you could be a totally whacked out, hardcore street-casualty, running from a broken home, or no home, where she’s been permanently twisted out of shape from being sexually abused by her “uncle” since she was 10 and she’ll steal everything you own the second your back is turned. Or…. maybe she’s a middleclass kid from a good suburban home who’s just playing at being the rebellious bad-girl for the weekend. You don’t know. Just like the other guy who comes up to you could be a kind, hippy, rainbow brother who will turn you on with his smile. Or…. maybe he’s a Charles Manson-wannabe whacko who will slit your throat the second he gets you alone. You don’t know. But that’s part of the fun of the streets; learning to spot one from the other BEFORE you end up with a large, cylinder-type object rammed up your azzhole.
So anyways, we sat there for awhile at the old vending table, talking. She was polite. Friendly. Soft spoken. Sort of lonely. Seemed like she was looking to connect with the world but not quite sure how to do it. I’m sitting there, hiding behind my cool shades, drinking my beer and smoking her cigarettes. I’m nervous, of course, like I always am with cute young chicks. I kept wishing she was across the street so I could spy on her from a safe distance. Which is kind of weird when I think about it. But then, I’m a kind of a weird fellow.
She was one of those chicks that enjoy talking about themselves: “My Father was in the Israeli army,” she said. “Both my Mother and Father are psychiatrists.” (So you’ve got to be nuts, I thought.)
“What do you want to do with your life?” I asked.
“I just graduated from high school. Eventually I’d like to be a lawyer so I can get paid to argue. What do you do?”
“Well, I was a pornographer, and a bike messenger, and a phone-salesman, and for 10 years I was a freelance cartoonist.”
“Wow, you’ve really been around,” she said, sort of impressed.
“And I was a homeless bum for the last 5 years. Some of the best years of my life actually.”
“Yes!” she declared happily, giving me the raised-fist salute of victory.
“And I recently had my first book published. ‘SURVIVING ON THE STREETS: How To Go Down Without Going Out.’ It’s sort of a how-to book for dealing with the streets.”
“So you, like, show how to keep from getting bitter and stuff.”
“Well…No. It’s a little too late for me to write that kind of stuff.”
“Oh. I guess I better write my book while I’m still young.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You wanna see my new piercing?” she said with a happy smile. Before I could answer she pulled up her black halter top and flashed me her ripe, pierced, teenage nipple.
I looked at it in wordless amazement. It was sort of a surreal moment. Right there on a crowded street corner on a lazy Sunday afternoon. She pulled her shirt back down proudly, and we resumed chatting.
Then a car pulled up to the curb and she said goodbye and rushed off. But before she left, she folded up the chair she had been sitting on and put it back alongside the table.
Later, when I thought about the whole encounter, that was the thing that really impressed me: That she actually showed the good manners to return the chair the way she found it. That is so rare on the street scene. So many street people are so course and uncouth; all they care about is what they want; they have zero consideration for anybody else’s situation. I realized: I was more impressed by her good show of manners than I was by her flashing her 18-year-old titties in my face.
Man, I really am getting old.
A Crumby interview by Eric Spitznagel, with R. Crumb, about his graphic
novel version of Genesis.
Yes, there is a chapter on R. Crumb in Acid Heroes
There have been periods in my life where there was only one profound thought in my head that kept repeating itself over and over:
“I have been hurt almost beyond belief!”
I have gone through periods of almost unbearable agony and suffering. I suspect most people do. Nobody I know has gotten a free pass in this damn life.
But geez! I have gone through intense periods of such inner pain, it was like my soul was being permanently branded by the searing heat of it. I could literally feel my soul, my psyche, being warped out of shape by the pressure of it.
“Life is pain,” said the Buddha, and he was not fukking around. Or maybe he was. You don’t really like to think about it; about pain. Just as you don’t really feel like listening to somebody else bitching and whining about their problems, unless its done in a stylish, cathartic way, like “singing the blues”; or the pie-in-the-face suffering of comedy; or a case of somebody failing in a way that makes you feel successful by comparison (gee, I thought I had it bad, but that poor slob); or if you’re a soap opera junkie/tragedy queen who gets off on weeping and wailing for the suffering of the world….. But most other forms of suffering are dreary to think about. And usually we go out of our way to dodge it; to avoid dealing with it. Gimme a handful of codeines and a fifth of Jack Daniels. I’ll out-flank that damn suffering by hook or by crook.
But suffering has a way of exploding all over your soul in a way that demands: “DEAL WITH THIS, MUTHERFUKKER!!”
My Father was a Methodist minister and one of the perennial questions he had to deal with was the suffering of man; i.e. “Why me?” In fact, many of his parishioners came to him specifically in the hopes that he could heal their suffering or, at the least, give them a prescription from the Heavenly Doctor in the Sky.
One night when I was a kid, I remember my Dad getting a late-night phone call from one of his faithful parishioners. By the grave tone of his conversation, I could tell it was “serious.” My Dad kept repeating over and over: “Tsk! It just doesn’t make any sense! Geez!” It turned out the guy’s 18-year-old daughter had just died on the operating table while they were trying to deliver her baby. The guy kept asking my Dad that one unavoidable question:
“WHY WOULD GOD DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS?”
What can you say? “Gee, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Take two aspirins and call me in the morning….”
I know some people who get very bitter at God for interjecting the suffering bit into what otherwise was a very wonderful blueprint. “I mean, what’s the deal here, God?! I could be sitting here enjoying nectar and manna and lolling around on fields of golden grain for all of Eternity with nubile virgins with large breasts and endless supplies of Old English Malt Liquor. But no! You had to add this damn ’suffering’ thing to the mix. Mind you, its not that I’m questioning the wisdom of Your over-all plan, Oh Great Lord, and praises be to You and all the rest of it, etc., etc. But geez Louise! What’s the deal with that suffering thing? I mean, plagues, and locusts, and cancer, and painful rectal itch, and bad TV sit-coms. Talk about over-kill. What were You thinking, Big Guy? And another thing: that death thing. I could have lived without that, too”
I know some people who get so warped by the pain of life, they take the attitude: “There is no God! No God in His right mind would create a world as sick as this!” Others get so pizzed, they refuse to believe in God out of spite: “I don’t care if You are the Heavenly Boss! I ain’t getting down on my knees to You! You can’t break me. You’ll never take me alive! Um….”
The Greeks and the Romans sort of had the attitude that the gods play with mortal man for sport. The Hindus take it one step further by maintaining that God Himself is playing all the roles, that you are God, and He really isn’t doing anything to anybody but Himself.
But one thing’s for sure: It’s mostly pain and suffering that drives us to the spiritual path in the first place. “No atheists in fox-holes,” that bit. I know when I’m sailing along in a fat and happy state, the last thing I want to be bothered with is wrestling with the existential issues of Life. It’s only when I’m driven to my knees in absolute despair that I truly start asking the fundamental spiritual questions. It’s not so much that I’m looking for Heaven. It’s more a matter of: “GET ME OUT OF THIS HELL!”
And maybe that’s part of the answer too: “Why suffer?” If life is basically a game. And the game is basically Get Back to God. Suffering is the prime game rule that keeps us from veering too far off course. Suffering snaps us back to attention right quick.
Also, too, to continue with the Cosmic Sport analogy: Take basketball. Sure, you want to win the game. But you also secretly want to lose, too. I mean; imagine if you won every time. That would get boring. Sure, you could design the hoop so its 100-feet around; every time you threw the ball up you’d get it in. Yes! I’m shooting 100%! But how much fun would that be? Secretly, we want to lose half the time. It’s what makes the game work. Secretly, we WANT a game that’s difficult and full of suffering and frustration. We want to be puzzled by it all; otherwise there’s no fun with figuring out the puzzle.
Maybe this all sounds stupid, but that’s the only “meaning of suffering” that I’ve been able to come up with. And now I’m done with this column. You know what they say: “I’ve suffered for my art; now it’s YOUR turn.”
I don’t know why I do this: send out my thoughts to thousands of strangers at the other end of my reality. I’ve been doing it off and on for 20 years; I’m compelled to do it in a way, but there’s always been something a little weird about the whole deal.
At one point, I couldn’t come up with any good reason to do it, so I stopped doing it. I sat under a tree in the woods and mostly kept my damn thoughts to myself. But doing nothing really didn’t work either, so I went back to doing it again.
I suppose I do it for a lot of reasons; both good and bad; both noble and ignoble. Fame, glory, and money. And self-expression and self-knowledge. To impress chicks. And to understand my soul a little better. It was an odd hodge-podge of motivations for sure.
Joan Rivers once said: “You have to be a little screwed up in the first place to have this need to stand up in front of thousands of strangers and win their approval.” I suppose you can look at anything from a neurotic side. “Sure, you’ve created this artistic masterpiece, but you’re just doing it to over-compensate for your lack of self-esteem and your tiny dink.” On the positive side you could say you’re trying to offer other people something worthwhile to feed on: food for thought or whatever. I know a lot of people on the street scene who don’t contribute anything to the world. They don’t produce; they just consume. I doubt that’s healthy.
At the peak of my so-called cartooning career in the early 90s, I was reaching about a million people every month. Minor-league stuff compared to real media celebrity. But it was too much of an over-load for my fragile psyche. It was one reason I ended up sitting under a tree in a daze for a year or six. Its no wonder all the truly famous people are mostly nuts. Communicating to even a minor-mass audience was like talking into a powerful microphone hooked up to an echo machine. Words you said 5 or 10 years earlier would come flying back at you when you least expected it. It was a lot like carrying on a conversation with thousands of people simultaneously. And if your work has a “personal” edge, or a weird cutting edge to it, the audience feedback can be doubly jarring. You can get lost in the feedback loop of it all. I mean, jeez, just regular life alone can be enough of a mind-fukk. Having intense personal relations with the mindless beast known as Your Audience added another layer to it.
I’d have people come up to me and say: “There was something you wrote 5 years ago that totally changed my thinking! It totally changed my life!”
“Aw gee shucks!” I’d say, all bashful and humble.
“Yeah, it totally screwed up my head! I’ve never been the same!”
Oh. Uh. Oops.
There was another guy who came up to me a couple years ago and said: “I’ve seen you around for years, and I’m still pizzed at you for what you said in that one comic strip back in 1992!”
He was legitimately angry at me, in fact he was seething with hatred towards me. Eight years after the fact. I asked him what the strip was, and it turned out it was some lame strip that I hacked out one night in 30 minutes one night when I really couldn’t think of anything to say, and then I never thought about again until that moment. Recently I came across that strip on a random search of the web. So it’s still out there, active, its wonders to perform.
Not that I’m complaining. Is there anything more insipid than famous people who spend their lives striving to get “known” by millions of strangers, and then, the minute their dream comes true, the first thing they start crying about is: they want their damn “privacy.” Stupid fukks.
Overall, its a great game. It’s all just Show Biz, right? Whether it’s high art at the one end, or schlock journalism at the other. And I can honestly say I’d be sitting here typing the same thing whether 2 people or 2 million people were reading it. Because really, I’m really just doing it for myself. It’s nice if people like what I do sometimes, but in truth, the best I hope for is that what I do isn’t harmful. And there are times when I’m not even sure of that.
Great message by Max Cannon on behalf of cartoonists everywhere
http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/1996-12-23/index.html
Max Cannon practices his art like “rusty corkscrew acupuncture.”
I’ve been homeless now for about 2 and a half years. I’ve been homeless off and on for a good portion of my life. I once tried to add up how much time I’ve spent sleeping outdoors over the years and it came out to about 8 or 9 years, starting at age 19. I wrote about it in my previous book, SURVIVING ON THE STREETS. Which is a goddam classic. Just like my latest book, ACID HEROES. I actually wrote, edited and self-published ACID HEROES (along with the great Pat Hartman) while living out of a sleeping bag in the rainy season. It just about killed me. Try publishing a book out of sleeping bag sometime. But the thing has sold nearly 20 copies already. So I guess it was worth it. I’m still baffled as to why my stuff doesn’t sell better. One theory is that I’m a self-deluded egomaniac with an inflated opinion of my talents (in other words, a typical artist). But that can’t possibly be it. Another theory is that I’m 20 years ahead of my times. Or 20 years behind the times. Or maybe I’m a genius in some alternate dimension of reality. Alas, you can’t cash the checks in this reality.
My life is so weird. Every morning I wake up and 4 feral cats are sitting there staring at me, waiting to be fed. A mother and her 3 kittens. The mother, Blondie, I’ve been feeding for almost 2 years. She’s strictly feral and always keeps a safe distance from me. But the kittens have known me since they was born. So they eat right out of my hands, and sleep nestled at the foot of my sleepingbag. I actually saw them being procreated. About 7 months ago Blondie, the shameless hussy, went wild in an orgy of cat passion. Those cats fucked for days. Non-stop. Some mornings Blondie would be dragging herself down the hill towards that cat food dish with a tom on her back pumping away the whole time. Finally she’d get down to the food dish and brush the tom off her with disdain. Another time, the tom wouldn’t let her be so she climbed way up this tree to get away from him. He climbed up right after her. Followed her all the way out to the end of this tree branch about 30 feet off the ground. Very precariously poised. No way out except down. Then a second female, also in heat, followed the two of them out to the end of the branch. So the 3 of them are sitting up there like a log-jam of backed up traffic. It makes you realize how strong the sex drive is. Even stronger than the survival drive. Willing to risk their lives for a piece of tail. Literally. Somehow, Blondie managed to manuever herself around the tom and escaped down the tree. With the other two cats in hot pursuit. Nowadays, when I see the kittens frolicking around by that tree, I wonder: Do they have any idea that that’s where they came from?
It’s pretty savage how they fuck, too. The tom sinks his teeth right into the back of the females neck. To give him extra pumping leverage, I guess. And when the female gets enough of it, she’s not adverse to slashing the male in the face with her claws. I was embarrassed to watch them. I mean, can’t they go do their business in private instead of right in front of me and my sleeping bag. But I guess I’m kind of a feral human myself. Thats part of my identification with those feral cats, I guess. I live like a wild animal myself, sleeping in the bushes under the stars and the moon and the rain. And we both do the same thing whenever we hear a strange sound in the woods. We both freeze and stare off in the distance in the direction of the sound. And we don’t move until we’ve been able to categorize the sound as either: a.) threatening, or b.) non-threatening. You’re in total survival mode in the deep dark woods. But once the cats realize it’s no threat, they immediately go back to goofing off. They turn it on and off in a second, all day long. Basically, them feral cats act like they’re stoned most of the time. frolicking and romping and investigating and generally just playing. It’s like some weird lesson of life to me, watching them feral cats. And I’ll look at them sometimes as they’re staring at me inscrutably (like cats do). And I’ll think. “They have eyes, and noses, and mouths, and ears, and they eat food and shit it out their kitty asses and fuck … ..” and its like, whatever Force is manifesting them is pretty similar to whatever Force is manifesting me. Sometimes I imagine that its God Himself who’s playing at being them cats. This divine life-force thats eternally dancing through the woods. They’re cosmic cats all right.
When the kittens were real little and still being nursed by Blondie in her secret nest, she would sometimes take the hot dogs that I tossed in her food dish and carry it in her teeth up to her kittens. Then, a couple weeks later, she brought the kittens down to the food dish for the first time. It was so cute to see her marching down the hill with the 3 kittens trooping behind her in a line. Here comes the troops. Now the kittens are about 4 months old and getting bigger every day. The little buggers eat like horses. It’s unbelievable how they pack it away. They’re eating me out of house and home. Or should I say houseless and homeless? Well, thats enough goddam cat talk for one day. I’m already enough of an art fag as it is. Those cats really got me.
Which reminds me of another odd interaction I had with a cute young chick the other night. It made me realize I was completely losing my mind. I was packing up my vending table at the end of the night, and I’m on my hands-and-knees on the sidewalk packing all my vending crap into boxes, in my usual late-night state of drunken, stoned befuddlement. And this cute young chick walks over to me and says:
“Do you need any help?”
“No thats okay,” I said. “But its very sweet of you to offer, my dear.”
“Don’t you remember me?” she said.
“Uh, no,” I said.
“I was out here a couple weeks ago helping you out,” she said. “”Don’t you remember?”
“No,” I said. I took a good long look at the cute young chick and said: “Man, I should remember YOU.”
I thought to myself: Man, I’ve finally completely lost my mind. If I don’t even remember the cute young chicks anymore, god knows what else I’m forgetting.
Had a total nervous breakdown yesterday. This chick gave me a really strong pot cookie and I over-loaded my circuits. Sometimes pot backfires on me like that. Maybe it’s because of the hundreds of acid trips I went on, but strong pot some times trips me out like I’m hallucinating. And this one was like the bad trip from hell. I’m laying there in my soggy sleeping bag up at my crashspot just trying to figure out how my life ended up like this. 53 years old. Failing health. A homeless bum. No career. And I go on this heavy guilt trip. My mind starts playing these tapes from my memory, re-playing every bad thing I’ve ever done. It’s like my own mind turns into a judge and jury and I’m condemning myself for some irreversible cosmic crime that I’ve committed. I’m this terrible person and now God is going to punish me. It’s like being damned to hell. It is being damned to hell. For those endless moments when you’re in hell.
Later, after I’ve come down, I wonder if it was just all in my mind. What is real after all? Is it just a matter of opinion. It’s like your mind comes up with some concept, and then the outer world manifests it.
What’s weird was, earlier in the day I was styling. I smoked a joint of good Mendocino herb, and I’m pounding the first beer of the day. And I’m sitting at an outdoor table on the Berkeley campus under an awning over-looking lower Sproul Plaza. I’m waiting out the rain storm. At first I was bitching to myself. Another miserable wet homeless day. And I got my shoes off and I’m trying to dry my socks off. And I look down across the plaza and there’s this adorable little 5 year old girl standing under the Zellerbach awning with her parents and a bunch of other people taking refuge from the rain. And the little girl is just dancing with delight as she watches the storm pound down on the pavement. She’s probably never seen a storm like that in her life and she’s just tripping on the glory of the Universe as it unfolds, fresh and new, in the eyes of a little child. You know how kids are. In this state of grace, not worrying about mortgages or credit card debts or failing health. And it made me realize yet again that it’s ALL IN HOW YOU LOOK AT IT. You can’t control the pictures that life jams into your brain. But you can control your reaction to it. And then the world mirrors back your own reaction.
So I was feeling strangely up-lifted in spite of the so-called miserable circumstances of my pathetic life. Then this beautiful 20 year old chick sits at the table next to mine. She’s huddling to get out of the rain, too, waiting out the storm. And she rolls a joint and passes it to me and we strike up a friendly conversation. Which is nice, and even flattering, that this cute young chick is giving some attention to an old burn-out like me. She starts telling me how hard it is for young people today to get their lives together.
“Oh man, I agree,” I said. “When I came to Berkeley 30 years ago, all I needed was $100 to rent out an apartment. Now you need like thousands of bucks for first and last and a deposit if you can even find a place. 30 years ago the California population was like 20 million. Now it’s already doubled to 40 million. And it’ll probably double again in my lifetime. I had big dreams when I was younger. Now I’m just hoping I can find a hole to crawl into for the next 10 years.”
“My parents just bailed on California,” she said. “They gave up trying to make it here and moved to Canada. They’re very happy.”
“Yeah, I feel the same way. I feel like a rat fleeing a sinking ship.”
She told me about how she’s going to a community college in Oakland. She’s already $15,000 in debt to student loans.
“I’m a 53 year old sophomore,” I said. “I should graduate by the year 2024.”
“I’m majoring in pharmacy,” she said.
“Oh thats a good idea,” I said. “Drugs are a recession-proof industry. The worse the economy gets, the more people are gonna want to get fucked up on pharmaceuticals.”
“The only way for kids my age to make any money is selling pot,” she said. “Just about every one I know that can afford to rent out a place is growing pot.”
“You ever hear about HIGH TIMES magazine?” I said.
“Oh sure!” she said. “I love that magazine.”
“I worked for them for 5 or 6 years in the late ’80s early ’90s. I did a comic strip.” It’s pathetic. Its sort of like trying to impress somebody by showing them your old press clippings.
Anyways, we had a nice chat as we sat there smoking a joint and me drinking my beer and smoking my cigarettes in my bare feet. When you’re homeless, the whole world is like your living room. And one thing about a rainstorm: you know the cops aren’t gonna get out of their cars to give you a ticket. Plus, there’s not many people milling around. So you have this little private space in the middle of the rain. So anyways, she kindly gave me a very strong pot cookie for the road (that chick knows her pharmaceuticals). And then I slipped into a psychotic nightmare. So you don’t always live happily ever after. You never know what life is going to throw at you the next moment. I’m sure it’s a coherent plot-line to the Great Script Writer in the Sky. But to the rest of us mortals stumbling around in the rain, it all seems like luck of the draw, don’t it?
The last successful romantic/sexual relationship I had with a woman was back in 1982/83. So you could say it’s been a pretty rough couple of decades for me. Somehow, I was always doomed when it came to the women. It was a set-up. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I yearned, it always blew up in my face. Often spectacularly so.
I first met Barbara Ann back in October of 1982. She was hanging out outside this hip, trendy, so-called “new wave” club, the Berkeley Square, talking to this friend of mine. I was there to deliver copies of Twisted Image #2, a punk/art tabloid I was publishing at the time. So I talked my way past the doorman, and scammed Barbara Ann into the club with me. I hadn’t realized that my friend had been trying to pick up on her too, and that I had horned in on his act (which would lead to another weird story later, but you don’t need to know about that).
We sat in a table in the back of the club, me and Barbara Ann, this beautiful young chick. I was feeling very cool as a drank my bottle of beer and listened to the new wave rock band on stage (skinny ties, weird sunglasses, remember 1982?). Barbara Ann was cute, but kind of crazy — I could tell that right off the bat. She suffered from some weird form of dyslexia. The words spewed out of her mouth in this non-stop, gobbledee-gook jumble. Completely un-rational; she talked like an avant-garde poet, in symbols and weird metaphors, but you sensed deep emotional feeling underneath the blather. Later I would describe her as: “She had the soul of an artist. But not the talent.” Some crazy people are like that. They experience the same vivid, soaring emotions and inspirations of the great poets; they just lack the ability to capture it in a medium and communicate it to others. Barbara Ann showed me her notebook with her doodles and scribbles and song lyrics and weird poetry. She was an art girl. And I was taken with her. After awhile I stopped listening to the words and just dug her vibe. She was very cute. Girlish. She had light brown/reddish hair, with bangs that went all the way down to her eyes (sometimes she would let the hair grow down and cover her eyes like she wanted to hide behind a bush or something). And she had pink-tinted glasses. I can still see her face in the neon electric sheen of the dark club. It was one of the few times — maybe even the only time — that I had actually picked up a chick in a bar. So I felt very cool. For all she knew, I was a smooth operator who did this all the time. She took out these four little, porcelain Beatles dolls that she carried everywhere in her big purse and showed them to me. The early-years Beatles, clean-cut Fab Four. Barbara Ann’s role models were sort of Jane Asher and Marianne Faithful and the rock star girlfriend/muses of the 60s. And there was something of the fragile, porcelain doll to Barbara herself.
Somehow we ended up back in my apartment. I forget if it was that night, or if I ran into her later that week. I had just moved into apartment 26 on University Avenue, 26 years old. A new phase of my life was just beginning and here was this woman, Barbara Ann, who had somehow stumbled into it. She didn’t have a place to stay, was in and out of the Women’s Shelter, one step from the streets. And there she was. Somehow, we ended up standing their together in the little cubbyway/hallway that separated the main room of my studio apartment from the bathroom. We were sort of groping around. I had the top part of her frilly little-girl peasant dress pulled down, and her big, round, beautiful breasts were suddenly hanging there. I still remember that. Barbara Ann sort of pulled away from me for a second, stood there facing me, with her breasts hanging there, and said: “I’m afraid of sex.”
I could certainly relate to that. Even as I was pretending to be Mr. Cool. The odd thing is, I don’t remember much of what happened next. Its weird how the memory selectively pulls out certain images that you remember forever. But I’ll always remember me and Barbara standing there facing each other at that moment in that cubbyway.
Well, Barbara Ann moved in with me for the next two months. Love and sex. Every night. It was one of the few times in my life when I actually lived as sort of Man-and-wife. I’d go to work at my bicycle messenger job in San Francisco, and Barbara Ann would stay in the apartment, cooking deep-dish bacon quiche in the kitchen, and organizing my apartment, adding a women’s touch to my skuzzy bachelor pad; flowers in vases and candles and doilies and her little porcelain Beatles dolls. It was the closest I’ve come to that kind of Ralph-Kramden- going-off-to-work-while-the- wife-cooks-dinner thing. And she loved to fuck. What a doll she was. Oddly, the thing I remember most is lying there in the dark with her on my big, brass bed in my decrepit old apartment. There was a haunted pop song that used to play on the radio; “I hear the secrets that you keep/ ‘cuz you’re talking in your sleep.” And I’d look at this creature — this angel, this animal, this woman, this strange, strange creature — and wonder who she was. There was just something so haunted about my life…
Then one night we had a big fight. I forget what it was about. She wanted to have sex and I didn’t want to. I kept hiding in the bathroom to get away from her. And she’d come screeching into the bathroom, in her sexy negligee, harassing me. She really was crazy, and she could drive you nuts with her non-stop female prattle when you weren’t in the mood to find it cute and endearing. When she got hysterical she put out this suffocating vibe, like a high-pitched dog-alarm that was like a silent scream even though human ears couldn’t hear it. You felt it. And we both had the emotional-maturity of children. The whole scene felt like children play-acting, playing house. My nickname for her was Brat Girl. And I played at being the stern Father who dominated her. There was a definite S&M aspect to the role-playing between us. But sometimes the roles got confusion when our nerves were shot and it got too real. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, she wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t stop harassing me. We were both loners really, living in our own little worlds, but somehow we were trying to live together in this cramped little, decaying studio apartment. Finally, I just grabbed her by the arm and started pulling her towards the door. I guess I was going to throw her out into the hallway. But as I got the door open and was pushing her threw the doorway, she smashed the glass window-pane at the top half of the door with her fist, shattering the glass. CRASH. So now, we’re standing in the middle of the halfway, screaming at each other, amidst the broken glass, her in her sexy negligee, the manager and his wife are peaking their heads out the doorway; the neighbors down the hall are out in the hallway staring at us. The one nosey, old busy- body who always stuck her nose in everyone’s business was there too, of course. Just one more weird scene in the hallway of a decrepit old apartment building where people are quietly living out the madness of their lives.
So Barbara Ann packed up all her stuff in her big bags, including her little porcelain Beatles dolls. And suddenly she was gone. I sat there on my decrepit old couch later that night, and I immediately missed her. Fervently wished I could turn back the clock and start the whole evening over. But, alas, you can’t. It was over. Later Barbara Ann would tell me she spent the night riding back and forth on the BART train.
Later still, in 1984, Barbara Ann would come back, and we’d have an even more tragic Epilogue in that very same haunted doorway. But that’s another story.
