I Don’t Give a Zhit about 9-11

Originally published 2002_11_18

I don’t give a zhit about “9-11.” It’s not that I’m a cold, heartless person (if anything I’m an over-sensitive weenie who cringes at the sight of somebody else in pain and feels guilty when I crush an ant).  It’s more that my own life is so weird, surreal, and tragic, that “9-11″ was just one more weird, surreal, tragic blip on my radar screen.

They say that everyone will Remember Where They Were on the Date of 9-11. The day that will live forever in infamy (or at least until its replaced by subsequent even more infamous days). It was a sunny morning in Berkeley, and Willow, a middle-aged street woman, came rushing up to me. “You won’t believe what just happened!” she gushed.  “They just bombed the Pentagon!”

“You’re kidding?”  I said.

“No, I just saw it on TV.” She was almost gleeful. Something exciting had finally happened in our boring lives. “I think the CIA did it,” she said.

I walked across the street and looked in the window of Raleigh’s, a local sports bar. On the TV screen above the bar I could see the smoldering World Train Center building. Then they switched the picture to the smoldering Pentagon building. It occurred to me that this was all happening live as I stood there.

Later that evening there was a big, candle-light peace demonstration on the campus. A young woman with a folk guitar kicked off the demonstration with a flat version of “Imagine” by John Lennon. (Oh no, I thought, my worst fear realized: this could launch another generation of folk singers!).

My friend J___ was in the back of the crowd, drunkenly raving to himself at the candle-lit demonstrators. “FUKKING PEACENIKS! WE SHOULD BOMB THE HELL OUTTA’ THEM FUKKING AYE-RABS FOR WHAT THEY DONE!” J___ was a long-time, long-haired, anti-cop, hippie radical type. It occurred to me that the battle-lines were being re-drawn. And that this would not be “another Vietnam.”

I took a seat on a park bench to the side of the peace demonstration. Today’s newspaper was sitting there on the bench. September 11, 2001. It was the early-morning edition, so there was nothing in the paper about the World Trade Center bombing. It was like seeing the last note from the old era, before we entered this new age, whatever it was.

The frontpage headline was about a guy in Sacramento who had went on a bloody rampage the day before. He had killed 5 or 6 people and then he held two other people hostage; forced one guy to hold a videocamera and videotape his mad spiel. Than he shot the person on camera and gave the videotape to the second person and told her to deliver the tape to the local Eye Witness News. “THIS SHOULD GET ME ON THE NEWS FOR AT LEAST THE NEXT TWO WEEKS!” he crowed, before blowing his own brains out. (His murderous rampage was inspired in part by the Columbine Killings and other high-profile media killers who he was jealous of).

THE DUMB FUKK, I thought. His story had been completely wiped off the front page by 9-11.  The dumb fukk can’t even do THAT right.

I walked over to Hate Camp, Hate Man’s circle of street people. They were all sitting around a candle, quietly lost in thought.

“So, whats happening?” I said happily.  “Anything much in the news today?”

“Hee-haw,” groaned Scooter.

I dreaded what I knew was coming next: Having to spend the next few weeks listening to everyone checking in with their very important opinions on world affairs (I made a mental note to remember the correct pronunciation of “Bin Laden” and “Al Qaeda.”)

I walked down the street. There was no wind, but it seemed like there was an unseen, swirling madness in the air. The weirdest thing of all was; each person I passed on the street, every person I could see in every direction, I realized we were all thinking about the exact same thing at the same time. It was a surreal, almost quasi-mystical feeling of unity amidst the shattering, fragmented alienation of the day’s events.

I realized that everything had changed just like that. Before 9-11 everything was really, really weird. And now, after 9-11, everything would be really, really weird.

It could have been worse:  My birthday is on September 12…

Speaking again of the Beatles

A Toot and a Snore in ‘74

Posted by JetWaveRadio on YouTube, this is a part of something called A Toot and a Snore in ‘74, a Beatleg record with the participating musicians listed as John Lennon (his name is bigger on the album cover), Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Harry Nilsson, Jesse Ed Davis and Bobby Keys. The occasion was a product of Lennon’s “lost weekend.” It was the only time we know of when McCartney and Lennon played together after the Beatles broke up.

“Genius is Pain” from National Lampoon Magical Misery Tour

Tony Hendra as John Lennon is brilliant. He was one of the writers, too. This is about the funniest thing I ever heard. The visuals are great, by Rick Moore.

Did you know there’s a website called SuckMyBeatles?

Thinkin’ ’bout a girl that I used to know… 2002_11_17

Wake up this morning at 6 AM, Sunday morning. Something always melancholy and wistful about Sunday mornings. Nothing ever happens on Sunday mornings…

There’s an almost unbearable sadness to it all. Like something is happening (life) that is so unbelievably incredible, but there is just something missing, some important, mysterious piece that prevents you from appreciating it; prevents you from making sense of it. Maybe that’s why I cling to these past memories. It’s this sense of something important slipping away — my life, pissing away — while something important goes down the drain. Something missing. Always. What IS that tantalizing something? I want to go back in time and do it all over again (and THIS time I’ll get it right!)

I have 2 odd memories of Katie. 1995. I’m in Arcata. The town is still fresh and exciting.  I hadn’t yet walked down the same five streets, five hundred times and realized there was nothing there. So my mind was excited with possibilities and potential. I’m walking past the parking lot of the Co-Op, by the Ride Board. And I pass a hippie school bus full of Dead Heads and Rainbow Children. And they’re associated in my mind with: KATIE!!  So they fascinate me. They’re the in-group I want to join. Later, a year later, I’ll look at them and see grubby, dysfunctional bums. But, at that moment, they had a certain magic, as if at any moment, Katie would come walking out of that bus, in her sexy, hippie gypsy Rainbow clothes, with her hemp jewelry and her smile of love and sex, and she’d dance over to me and hug me and love me.  Forever. And I scrutinized each face of every hippie street person. But none of them were Katie. It was a sunny day, in my mind’s memory.  And then, little Hippie Boy Keith comes out of the bus — not Katie but a FRIEND of Katie’s. A fleeting connection to Katie. And I ask him how she’s doing (“She’s back at her Mom’s house in Southern California, working as a waitress at Denny’s. She wants to quit her job and go on the Dead tour…”). Dying for every detail about KATIE!, even as I’m playing it cool, as always. And then Keith is gone — grubby little rip-off Keith with his golden locks and angelic face, like a pint-sized, 24-year-old Robert Plant from Long Island. And I walk down the sunny, pointless Arcata street, alone as always.

And yet, somehow, that mundane little memory, that fleeting, hazy image in  my mind, sums up that whole year, 1995. That whole period. Like when a song comes on the radio and it transports you back into your past like a Time Machine, and all the memories and moments come back…

And my other Katie memory from that period is: I’m in the shower in the morning, that crude, cement little shower stall — no bigger than a box — on the second floor down the hall from my lonely hotel room at the Greyhound Hotel. Somehow I remember the feeling as being sweaty, feverish, even as I’m in the steamy wet shower — the hard water pounding on my chest. And the weird thing was, in the year I lived there, I would never see any of the other tenants on the floor, even as there were 7 or 8 of us. It was like a ghost town. A haunted house. You wouldn’t even HEAR them in their rooms. We were quiet to the point of being the walking dead. Ghosts. Ashamed to be seen. But I’d be in the shower every morning, preparing to go out on a date with a girl who was never there.  And, for some reason, I’d often think of Katie when I was in the shower in that pointlesss lonely town of Eureka at the end of nowhere. And I’d wonder where Katie was at that moment. And what she was doing. And why I was here and she was always somewhere else, a thousand miles away. My one heart’s desire. And somehow it was her fault that I had ended up here. She could have lifted me up to superstardom (if only). And instead I had crash-landed to this welfare hotel in the middle of zombie nowhere. And I would think about Katie and the whole dream of being loved and being cool and successful and all the missing pieces in my life, as I stood in that lonely concrete shower stall.

And somehow, that banal memory sums up that whole period. Autumn. The end of 1995.

And now I think of this morning, Sunday morning, 6 AM when I woke up and started thinking about Katie and I wrote these words. Was it just 4 hours ago? Or 40 years? It’s all gone…

“Thinkin’ ’bout a girl that I used to know…I closed my eyes, and she slipped away…”

Speaking of the Beatles

….and we were speaking of the Beatles, because several chapters of Acid Heroes are about them. So here is an official, High-Priestess-Endorsed recommended article:
“The Beatles ‘bigger than Jesus’ on Google,” written by Harry Wallop for Telegraph.co.uk

Here on YouTube is 25-year old Paul McCartney being hassled by a journalist about psychedelics.
“I’m not trying to spread the word about this,” says Paul.
“I don’t think my fans are going to take drugs just because I did.”

Still Ringo after all these years

Ringo Starr was on this late-night talk show last night. The host asked him about why the Beatles image kept changing over the years, from the mop tops to the long hair and mustaches of Sgt. Pepper and etc, and what was the reason for that?

“That might have been because of Timothy Leary,” quipped Ringo.

Ringo, of course, was the consummate hammy show biz professional. Did three songs, the first two I hadn’t heard before, probably plugging his new album (as if anybody cares). Sort of generic, middle-of-the-road rock. Ringo drummed on one of them, which was great. There was always something special about his drumming — nothing spectacular but like the perfect, cozy old arm-chair. And it was mostly exciting because, well, there’s RINGO over there, live on stage, and its like watching a little bit of instant history. Even as in the back of your mind, you know that when it’s over it’s really just one more forgettable show biz moment in an endless series of forgettable show biz moments. But its Ringo, so we’re rooting for something to happen, like the possibility of magic is in the air. Along with this ever-present under-current of disappointment. Because nothing is really happening. And you can see what a weight that must have been for the Beatles to live up to. This burden of expectations. While at the same time, Ringo is getting a free pass. All he has to do is ham along and make with some semi-clever show biz patter and the audience will roar its approval because they’re just so happy to see him. “He’s alive and well!” It’s impressive how liked the Beatles are. Probably half the audience weren’t even born by the time the Beatles disbanded. The talk show host is practically shitting himself with excitement just to be in the presence of the great man, “Ringo!!” And he joins the band for the big encore, “With a Little Help From My Friends,” naturally.

And Ringo makes a corny (or is it touching?) appeal for everyone in the audience — and everyone everywhere — at the stroke of midnight on the date of his birthday, to say “peace and love” at the same time. And the Beatles are once again bringing us all together (now) and spreading waves of good vibes across the planet. Of course, I feel cynical about the gesture, this little voice in the back of my head that is scoffing at the whole thing. Even as another part of me is thinking: whats wrong with a little friendly reminder to try and make the world just a little more peaceful and loving? All we need is love, after all. Have I turned into one of the dreaded Blue Meanies or something? But it’s just such a strange stew to me. The Beatles, with their never-ending mixture of hammy show biz theatrics, Timothy Leary, and heart-felt idealistic appeals for cosmic love. I’ve been down that road before, and I guess I’m not that impressed with what the whole package, the whole message, amounted to. And yet, its like a sucker bet that I always fall for, where a little part of me still feels this little twinge of weakness. . .

More Beatles Angles

Filling today’s guest chairs are two appreciators of the Beatles, Mike Webber and David Sims, with observations that fit right in with our themes.

Webber:
What Beatle George lacked in quantity, he more than made up for in quality. The 4 principal sides of All Things Must Pass comprise the best solo work of any ex-Beatle. This song was a masterpiece – nicely delivered here by Slowhand.  (Eric Clapton – “Isn’t It A Pity?”)

Sims:
Exactly — and I’d rate All Things Must Pass over not a few Beatles albums, truth be known.  I did read a rather perceptive review, however, stating that George might have been better-served tucking a few of those songs away for later albums.

You can’t blame the guy, though, seeing Lennon and McCartney get away with recording such sub-par material as “Glass Onion” and “Honey Pie” while his own material was left off.  In his shoes I’d probably have gone for the A-bomb statement too.

Webber:
When you think of John and Paul’s somewhat dismissive treatment of “Isn’t It A Pity” and “All Things Must Pass” when offered during the Get Back sessions, one could easily understand his feeling quite all right about the demise of his former band.  Listening to the 100+ hours of Get Back sessions, the much-maligned McCartney at least continued to engage Harrison’s songs while Lennon just couldn’t have been bothered.  It’s not surprising that George and Paul had their falling out, given the contrast in personalities, but I’ve always thought Lennon’s contribution to the toxicity of those sessions has been swept under the carpet to the detriment of McCartney.  Paul would work tirelessly on his own songs – more than anyone else wanted – but then was equally ready to work on George’s and Ringo’s (Octopus’s Garden) songs.

Sims:
It jibes with what I’ve heard about Lennon and McCartney’s personalities. John was described to me by the most devoted Beatle fan I’ve ever met as “a thoroughly nasty person.”   I don’t know nearly as much about them as he or you do, but that thumbnail impression seems about right to me. You don’t have to be a good person to produce great art.

Webber:
I think of him as anything but a nasty person, but he was very human and the truth is probably ill-served by the lionization that has been done to him.  In those last 18 or so months of the Beatles, he was a bit of an anvil – drug-addled and self-absorbed. To his credit, marginally engaged he was still contributing songs like “Come Together” to the band he’d started.  But once Plastic Ono Band was heard, it was easy to understand why the Beatles were no longer the right vehicle for his vision.

2002_11_12: The Art and Science of Ground-Scoring

Today was a typical day for Ace Backwords: Professional Homeless Person.  My morning started walking down Shattuck: spotted half of a fancy fruit-filled croissant sitting on an unoccupied table at an outdoor cafe’;  grabbed it ($1.50 value) and scarfed it down as I walked down the street.  Up the street I spotted a to-go cup of coffee sitting on a ledge by the BART station.

“Is that yours?” I said to the black guy sitting about 10 feet from it (just to be on the safe side).

“Hell no,” he said.

“Great!” I said, grabbing it.

“Are you actually gonna drink that?” said the black guy with disgust.  “You don’t know who drank from that!”

“Hell yeah I’m gonna drink it,” I said, happily.

I heard the guy and the black chick he was sitting with laugh derisively as I left.  I turned around and gave the chick a happy thumbs up and she smiled back like she’s thinking:  “Them crazy-ass white folk!”

The coffee was two-thirds full, still warm, and mixed with chocolate ($1.75 value).

I went to the Med, found today’s Chronicle in the bin below the dirty dish hamper (50-cent value), and I also spotted an untouched thick sausage on the top plate in the hamper, the remnants of a just-eaten eggs breakfast.  I quickly stashed the sausage ($2.50 value) in between the pages of my newspaper so the grouchy guy that works at the front counter who hates me (and hates just about everybody else on the planet) doesn’t see me.  I take a seat in the back at a table with a full cup of coffee on it ($1.20 value), which is one of my regular gigs — the guy comes in like clockwork twice a day, orders a cup of coffee to claim a table while he reads his paper, and then leaves without taking a sip out of his coffee.  I sit there, read my paper, eat my sausage, and drink my coffee.  A typical Ace Backwords breakfast.

I scrounge around a bit on Telegraph, find a box of cheap paperbacks that have been discarded at the Library Annex Bookstore — I’ll sell them at my 25-cent vending table on Saturday ($10 value).  Up the street at the Campus Textbook Store, I find 20 expensive hardcover books in the recycling bin — I’ll sell them later at Moe’s Used Bookstore ($15 in cash, and $25 in trade-slip value).

Later around noon, on the steps of the campus I find a barely-touched discarded container of chili-beef cheese fries, still warm; they’re curly fries, my favorite!, with melted cheddar cheese mixed in ($3.25 value).  Up ahead, I find a to-go salad that a student has left, for somebody like me, on the side of the top of the garbage can.  I’m not interested in the salad, but I pick out the delicious strips of Monterey jack and cheddar cheese as well as the hardboiled egg and avocado half ($1.50 value).

As I’m walking along I pick up about 10 crumpled cigarette packs that I spot on the sidewalk, and peel off the coupons on the side — I’ll trade those with HateMan later for 2 cigarettes (50-cent value).

Walking by the Innermezzo I don’t spot much in the way of discarded food on the table, but I see a slice of  bakery-fresh bread on one unoccupied table.  I dart in and grab it (50-cent value) before anyone sees me, and feed it to the pigeons around the corner. (I’ve developed a strange identification with the pigeons, and the other city-critters, who are likewise walking around the city streets, ground-scoring and table-diving.  The other day, shortly after a fierce rainstorm, I was walking across Sproul Plaza and I spotted an untouched fajita sandwich sitting on top of a garbage can.  Just as I was about to grab it, this huge white seagull came soaring down like a bomber-pilot right in front of me and grabbed the fajita in his beak just as I was reaching for it.  The gull u-turned back up towards the heavens making his getaway without even skipping a beat, the fajita hanging out of his mouth, until another seagull dive-bombed him, swooping alongside him and grabbing the food out of the first gull’s mouth in mid-air.  It was an awesome display of aerodynamics and ground-score thievery!)

I know some people are really squeamish about the whole idea of eating other people’s leftovers.  “Germs” and all that stuff.  And I don’t necessarily recommend this.  But in my defense, I’m very careful what I eat; if it’s not 100% fresh I won’t.  In fact, my cardinal rule is:  If you’re not sure, DON’T.

And this too: I may be a bum, but at least I’m not bumming off of anybody else:  I don’t get a welfare check, and I don’t eat at the charity food kitchens.

But the weirdest thing is:  I’m actually eating BETTER than when I used to have an apartment and buy my food.  Nowadays, virtually everything I eat is restaurant fresh, bought and cooked that day; as well as being more expensive than anything I could afford to pay for myself, even at the peak of my earnings.  Weird.

Sure, people give me weird looks sometimes, like I might get germs or cooties. Some people have funny attitudes about the germ stuff. I often think of Jim Carroll’s story in Basketball Diaries.  The junkies are all sitting around in a shooting gallery, sharing a rusty old spike that’s probably been used by every case of hepatitis in lower Manhattan.  After they all shoot up the smack, Carroll offers his junkie friend a hit off the bottle of Coke he’s drinking.  The junkie takes the Coke and wipes off the top of the bottle with his hand before he takes a drink from it.  Germs.

Around 2p.m. I sat on a park bench smoking a cigarette, and, for kicks, I tallied up the total of today’s ground-scores so far: $63.20.  And the day was still young.  Before, I used to work at a job, to get money, to pay for the stuff I wanted. Nowadays, I just go directly to the source.  I guess its kind of like a river flowing by: you stick your hands into the flowing river and see what kind of fish you can pull out.

Timothy Leary footnote

The story I got on Leary (and I kinda’ wish there was a literary device where I could preface everything I say with “the story I got” or in other words “in my opinion” — that would save me a lot of trouble, but it’s just too boring and redundant to repeat it every other sentence, so one can only hope that the reader takes it for a given…) was that when he was plea-bargaining with the Feds to get out of the joint, one of the requirements was that he spill the beans on everything he knew about Eldridge Cleaver and the Weather Undeground and all the other political freaks that broke his sorry ass out of jail in the first place, and holed him up in their various underground bunkers, etc.  And given what an amoral, opportunist huckster Leary was, with no loyalty to anything but his self-interest of the moment, I’m sure he snitched off
everything he knew.  On the other hand, if I had been in Leary’s shoes, and was quite possibly going to spend the next 20 years in jail for smoking a joint, I too might have concluded that the whole gig was bullshit from every side, so I might as well spew any bullshit that’ll get me out of this jam.

I actually saw the Timothy Leary is Dead documentary that came out in ‘97.  My friend Claire Burch shot a lot of
the footage: her interview with Ram Dass — one guy I think highly of — is the best part of the film. There was one odd scene where Leary was interviewed in prison by the local network news.  For the entire hour of the interview, Leary has this mega-wattage salesman grin plastered on his face.  Doesn’t let up the grin for a second.  It was so strange, like the painted Joker from Batman.  I couldn’t figure it out until afterwords I realized Leary knew the interview would be edited down to a 3 or 4 minute clip for the news, and he wanted to make sure he had that Leary “on-top-of-the-world” smile plastered on his face no matter how they tried to edit the footage.  For that was the heart of Leary’s fake act always, as with most salesman.  But anyway, as far as I know, nobody was ever arrested or did time because of Leary snitching them off.

The actress Winona “shoplifter” Ryder is also one of Leary’s godchildren.  God knows how many parents bequeathed their children to this great Father Figure of The 60s.  Which is odd when you consider his OWN daughter committed suicide (as did his wife).  What a bullzhit artist that guy Leary was. Right to the bitter end.

Guest Commentator: Phil Polizatto

Finished Acid Heroes while in Mexico. Ace is a wonderful writer. Distinctive style. But the content still bothered me. I thought it was very biased. He did seem to redeem and even retract some of what he said, but only at the end and then only in his epilogues. I fear some people who read the book will never get that far, because I think most of the “good” hippies had a more pleasurable and enlightening experience with psychedelics than he did, and they did not go on to get into alcohol or other nasty drugs, and today, many are very wonderful contributors to our society. Acid did play an important role in accelerating consciousness at a time when the collective consciousness needed a boost. No matter. As I said, I did not like the content, but thought his writing style was great.

Phil Polizatto is the author of Hunga Dunga: A True Novel

2002_11_12 Interview with Loompanics Author Ace Backwords

Who are you?
Basically, I’m a 46-year-old homeless street bum.

How did you end up homeless?
Well, it’s a long story, it would take about 195 pages to answer that. Basically, I was a free-lance cartoonist for 10 years, and then one day I sat down at the drawing board and nothing was funny. The next thing I knew I was sleeping under a tree in a sleeping bag. That’s the short version. The long version is, for most of my adult life, nothing worked. No matter what I tried, nothing made me happy. So finally, at age 38, I just gave up trying , and hit the skids. And, ironically, that’s when my life finally started working. Not that I recommend the homeless street life as a form of therapy. But that’s one of the weird, ironic twists to my story. Better living through “downward mobility.”

Why did you write your book, Surviving on the Streets: How To Go Down Without Going Out?
It’s sort of a how-to book for surviving the streets, and it chronicles the many misadventures I’ve had in my career as a homeless bum. I sort of envisioned the book as all the things I wish I had known when I first hit the streets at age 17. I guess I hoped to spare some other homeless kid from learning the harsh lessons of the streets like I did; the hard way. I also wrote it to educate mainstream people about the realities of the streets. All of society is grappling with the homeless issue, so a better understanding of what’s really going on out there couldn’t hurt. Most of what I’ve read about “the streets” has been bullzhit. So I wanted to set the record straight. But most of all, I just wanted to give the people a good read. And I think I’ve done it. There’s some hella interesting stories in the book. Because what street people experience is just bizarre beyond belief.

What kind of response have you gotten to the book?
Pretty much everyone who’s read it has raved about it. And all the press reviews have been raves. Which surprised me. I thought I was going to be savaged for some of the stuff. Which disappointed me in a way, because, frankly, its boring: Nasty reviews make for much more interesting reading.

Certainly, your chapter on black crime sparked some controversy?
One reporter who interviewed me for a local newspaper said that his editor told him specifically to ask me about the “racial bullzhit” in my book. They sort of acted shocked that this was really happening. Like it’s news or something. It’s certainly no mystery to anyone on the streets that blacks are committing violent crimes at a hugely disproportionate rate. But some of these mainstream people, I think they may live “sheltered” lives in more ways than one. That said, I don’t think any race has much in the way of bragging rights when it comes to being non-violent — think World War II, Vietnam, etc. My comments were only meant in the context of street crime.

Another controversial aspect of your book was your on mass immigration, which you maintain is the primary cause of our present homeless crisis.
We’re adding 3 million people to the U.S. population every year, almost entirely because of recent immigrants and their offspring. Do you happen to know where the 3 million new homes we needed last year are? Or the 3 million new homes we need this year? Or next year? Or etc? Well, if you don’t happen to know where these endless millions of new homes are, then maybe you should listen to what I’m saying. And yet all the geniuses are scratching their heads wondering where all the housing “disappeared” to, and why we have millions of homeless flopped out on the sidewalks, their numbers growing every year. I mean no disrespect to any immigrant — my father’s father was an Italian immigrant. But if we want to do anything about the homeless crisis, this issue has to be addressed and discussed.