by Ken O'Steen
It didn’t take that long, learning to sleep with waves breaking against the rocks. Best of all was fog that tumbled in from the sea at night, hanging like a muslin curtain, and securing our sense of isolation a good part of the morning that followed. There were the occasional withdrawal symptoms associated with the giving up of smog inhalation, in exchange for salty, fresh air; but I had the strong support of a surrogate family. As if a reminder of my smog eating past there was just a little west of us, and a little ways out to sea, an oil platform at the end of a long, thin pier; though we had yet to see any activity on the platform. While ineffective as an actual pollutant, it was often extremely picturesque late in the afternoon viewed in relief against the sun setting in a mauve sky.
Reaching our little oceanfront homestead required one to do nothing more than take the narrow and worn asphalt road from Pacific Coast Highway, drive about a quarter mile, then turn again onto a short dirt road to the plot of coarse grass surrounded by sand on which were located the rectangular house Bob inhabited, and the smaller outbuilding Lila and I were in. Further down the dirt road, and further down the hill, there were several other properties a distance to our east. On the ocean side of “our” plot, there was a wooden porch behind the main house, a slender yard, and then wide wooden steps that descended to the sliver of beach. Our only door was on the side of the highway, while the wall on the ocean side of our little cottage was comprised almost entirely of a bank of windows looking out to sea. There were rocks that began to rise from the shallow water slightly off shore.
We had something of a small windfall at our disposal now, with money not spent on deposits and rent and furnishings. The plan was to live austerely, and utilize the time. Austerity was not something we would be forced to learn. “Now with artists, austerity is a lost art,” Lila had memorably told me. She was taking complete advantage of the time afforded by ours. An overbearing fragrance of paint thinner in the cottage was testament to her devotion to buckling down to painting. We had discussed our plans to work “outside the home” again. But we intended to think about exactly where we would do so for a good long while first…approximately until a week before the budget expired. My work initially consisted of reading in quietude, though I began fiddling around again with my new avocation as a writer of encyclopedia entries, for an encyclopedia of political history extant only in my own mind. I got in the habit of driving every few days up to the market, a small one on the road one reached after taking the second exit up the PCH on the way to Carpinteria. The market was surrounded by a sandy parking lot and was across the street from a shady grove of eucalyptus.
I liked the walk from the car through the parking lot into the market, which was located on a windswept hill, making you feel as though you were afloat in a grand expanse, and with the illusion of clouds close enough to nuzzle, lending you the fleeting approximation of Olympian perspective. But both inside the market and out, things were slow moving. There was a mixture of people from the coastal hamlets, the occasional tourist or traveler strayed from PCH looking for gas or food, and well heeled visitors from snazzy homes in the adjacent mountains and foothills.
There were times when I would pick up groceries, and others when I would get a bottle of water or a box of raisins and then go stand outside ten or fifteen minutes watching cars go by and the occasional shopper going in or out of the store. Appropriately, given my recent migration, I began to see what appeared to be a homeless gent hanging around in the same general proximity I was hanging in. Eventually, he began to ask for change, from me as well as other customers. He looked more like a superannuated surfer or a castaway living on a desert isle than those leading the freestyle life over in Hollywood. He was the most dignified spare changer I’d ever encountered. Naturally, he reminded me of the old neighborhood. Eventually we established the understanding that I would say hello in passing on my way inside, and hand the coinage over on my way out. He no longer made a request for a contribution as I walked in, but only said, “hello.”
One afternoon as I stood outside the door of the market fighting my way through a barrier of impenetrable plastic protecting an assortment of nuts I had just bought, I watched a man in a red golf shirt and yellow pants scuffing up a lot of dirt walking hastily to his gargantuan ride, then spinning up a great deal more wheeling around in the parking lot at fifty miles per hour or so before blasting out of it onto the road. I held the open bag of nuts out to my friendly neighborhood panhandler with one hand, while scooping a mound of silver out of my pocket with the other. As I handed him the money, and stared at the spreading mushroom cloud of dust at the edge of the parking lot I said, “That dude sure was in a rush. Maybe he’s on a pilgrimage of some kind to pay his respects to the course at Pebble Beach?”
“The hill people usually are in a hurry, from what I’ve seen.”
“The hill people? Who are the hill people?”
“That would be the wealthy types who drive the big jeeps or spor-tility vehicles, or whatever they’re called. They live up in those big houses hanging on the sides of the hills or over the edges, up at the tops…up there,” he said, gesturing toward the mountains and foothills.”
“That’s good,” I said, laughing. “That’s really good,” I added, still laughing.
“I call them hill people…other folks who live around here call them that, you see. Billy, the guy inside at the register…he calls them that.”
“That really hits the pin on the head,” I said. “You and Billy are wise and observant men, indeed.”
We ate some nuts, and then he told me, “The guy I mentioned, Billy, the guy at the register…the other day when I was inside, I mentioned to Billy…he’s the son of the owner you see, that you were always nice enough to give me more assistance than anybody else who’s ever around when I’m around. And he said something to me, like, ‘He’s of the do gooder liberal variety.’ Really though, he’s the do-gooder I’d say…not that you aren’t. But thanks for the help just the same. That’s what I really wanted to mention.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m of the NO-good liberal variety. I wish I were one of the do-gooders because they actually do some good. You can never have too much of that. I should be one.”
“Well in any case.”
“My pleasure.”
Lila and I were well settled in our habits. What started out as a deviation from our normal domestic routine but became a habit in and of itself, were the drives together up to Carpinteria, where we would stretch our legs around town. I liked the place quite a lot, even though the “downtown” was one of those that seemed built from a model of a pre-Revolutionary War settlement somewhere in Virginia. We drank, smoked and laughed obscenely in various public places, finally eating enough fish and chips to require a change of citizenship. In a nod to the pastoral life, we then would take a stroll around the campgrounds beside the ocean, giving me the chance to strut around like a country squire with my belly full.
At home, during breaks in her day there was nothing Lila liked to do more, and did do more than sit somewhere outdoors looking out at the ocean, maybe on the chaise in back, or perched on the little bluff, or planted in the sand on our mini-beach. Her pleasure came in looking out for, in observing sea birds, pelicans most of all. She was captivated by the swooping gulls, the gliding albatross, diving pelicans. I couldn’t tell one from the other. What I saw were birds flying or birds heading vertically at high velocity in the direction of the surface of the ocean. But Lila saw and understood. She would patiently await any appearance of porpoise visible above the water. She could gaze for what seemed inordinately long stretches toward the horizon at ships at anchor or passing by.
For me, living where we did stirred perhaps unexpected, but nevertheless strong associations rooted in geography. They fell under the description of what could only be called Wilsonian associations. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the Brian Wilson music from the
glorious era of Pet Sounds. This wasn’t Orange County, thank God; but it was the beach. What would transpire when the lure of the oceanfront drew me out, was that as I was sitting, lapped by a mild, yet bracing wind coming off the water, the warmth of the sun beating down and soothed by the anodyne of breaking and foaming waves, the craving for this extraordinary music would overtake me.
Among the most necessary items pulled from storage when we moved into the cottage had been the music collection…not everything in it, but quite a lot. Years back, a like-minded friend had burned a cd for me of both the Pet Sounds music already long in my possession as well as music from the never officially released, never completed Smile. The former, and even more so in my opinion, the latter was some of the most beautiful and accomplished music ever created. Remarkably, it was both a literate and confectionary orchestral pop of the highest order. The arrangements were complex, the sung harmonies as ethereal as they were transporting. Altogether it was exquisite and delicate.
So, when my desire for the Brian Wilson mini-symphonies blossomed in the sun I would retrieve the portable player, attach the headset to my ears and commence to absorb the sunnily complex tunes. On these occasions I occupied the beachfront, languid in the sand, basting in the sun, while I listened to Wind Chimes, Cabinessence and Surf’s Up. And from Wilson it wasn’t very far to the High Llamas. They were British practitioners of Wilsonesque orchestral pop, sometimes adding dollops of electronica as a bit of spicing. The Llamas were brilliant and beautiful in their own right, and as idiosyncratically their own as one could want.
As often happens after a move, and one does the obligatory rummaging through things that have been in storage, I started coming up with things I hadn’t seen for awhile, but for whatever reason had lately wondered where they were, or at the very least, wondered about them in some way. One item that fit the latter category was the sheaf of old poems of mine I pulled out. I had thought about the poems at times while I popped out encyclopedia entries, curious what the old poems might sound like to me now, which led once in a while to mulling the idea of taking back up poetry writing again as Lila had suggested. I didn’t believe it was likely, but thinking about it, the prospect of writing poetry did seem fresh again, especially as another avocation like the Political Encyclopedia of My Mind.
I was just finishing scratching out an entry in said Political Encyclopedia:
Waco
David Koresh, a deranged man claiming to be the Messiah barricaded himself in a compound in Waco, Texas with a hundred or so poor, dumb souls who believed he was. They holed up there with a heavy arsenal of automatic and semi-automatic weapons and explosives. So far, so good, except for the law. The Heat, anxious about the size and legality of an arsenal approximately the size of China’s, paid a visit with a warrant to search. The Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus opened up on them with blazing firepower, inflicting four casualties, and many wounds. American conservatives, marking a turning point in their approach to law and order, reached the decision that firing on officers attempting to deliver a warrant was fair play, rather than condemnable, if the person being served was not in agreement with the reasons predicating issuance of this warrant: a novel view. One assumes, much too cynically I am sure, that it may have had something to do with the fact that Bill Clinton was the President of the United States at the time, and Janet Reno his Attorney General. For the Right, I suppose this meant the enemy of your enemy is your friend, even if he claims to be the Messiah, holds a building full of people hostage, including women and children, and goes mental with matches and gasoline.
After the initial skirmish the coppers pulled back beyond a safe perimeter, rolling in a convoy of heavy-metal armor that would have made Patton prouder than a priapic peacock. At this point, Koresh and his super-sized band of merry apostles threatened to hold their breath until they turned blue. This went on for weeks. They were staying put. The coppers begged, they haggled and they promised. But the Savior resisted resurrection out of the building. He alleged that if he and the others took it on the arches out of their little cathedral the X-Men would blast them to Kingdom Come. This is not to say the FBI or the ATF are ever likely to be confused with the Salvation Army; but purposely slaughtering people on CNN in front of half the world is less than subtle, even for them. But those crazy for the Lord would not come out. No olly olly ox in free would do the trick. Nope.
Once the Attorney General got word that funny sexual business might be underway inside, the jig was up. The Mighty Mouths of the Right poured gravy bowls of ridicule over the heads of the administration for its failure to put an end to the mess. As soon as the assault on the compound was underway, Koresh set the place ablaze. When everything was cooked, the Mighty Mouths of the Right poured gravy bowls of scorn on the administration for prematurely bringing an end to the mess. All of it was the administration’s fault, natch. You knew the stinkpots on the Right stank; now you knew how badly. Welcome again to the Clinton Years.
But a lesson was learned, at least: no breaks in this world for Messiahs. Another one bit the dust.
As I was doing so I thought about the poems, and went to pull them out of the box that contained them. I decided to take the sheaf of them out to the beach since Lila was working indoors, and I could steal her place on the rocks for a little while. It wasn’t terribly windy that day, so I assumed I could keep a handle on them, also assuming that if the wind blew them out to sea it was God’s will, or at least reflected his taste in poems, and perhaps his opinion on my future writing.
I couldn’t imagine why I would have placed the poems in the folder in any particular order, so I read each one as I came upon it. I remembered there were a number more in another folder. But these were the ones I thought deserved not to be put to death without the opportunity for a full appeal. You’d think I’d been dead for fifty years if you went by the jaundiced condition of the pages.
Wild Night at the Bistro
the balustrade gave way
mid-way through the
fourteenth round
and we all fell
and cavorted on the floor
like minnows flushed out of a pail
there were no splinters
but after a long night
of intermingling on
the lager-swamped
pine,
we awoke, wondering
how the termites had
hollowed us out
so expediently
It was apparent right away of course that in the intervening years I hadn’t made a quantum leap in terms of the matters taking center stage in my affairs.
The Occasional Evening of the Real Thing
minutes bay like coyotes
at illusory moons
while lanterns in cafes
burn for nil-
but love, the salve for seconds,
comes millenniums
apart
to heal
and to wound
and
exaggerate to light years
Beats me, I thought. I must have had a shred of sensitivity at some point, was all I could think.