As much as I’d loved doing the show (and needed it) before then, that outburst was a turning-learning point. I don’t know how it happened—but I was going to go with it. Without a conscious plan, I changed the format of my segment entirely, and the orientation of the station at large, in my own humble way. I still played music . . . and a much wider range than ever . . . soul, R&B, funk, jazz, gospel, novelty records . . . Kerouac and the Beats . . . old doo-wop. But I made a point of extended phone calls broadcast live.
Sometimes people spoke entirely in Spanish and I had only a dim idea of what they were saying. I talked with hookers and drill sergeants, dopers and doughnut shop waitresses. I made up my own ads for places that I liked and just threw them out . . . Orange Julius on Ocean Avenue in Carmel . . . Pioneer Ribs in Seaside . . . Golden West Pancakes in Pacific Grove (order the waffles and tip Jose well). Some of these establishments actually started to openly sponsor Brock and he couldn’t have been happier—but I wasn’t in it for the money—I just pushed places and people that I believed in. I hounded the benefits of soft water to plug my friend Mike’s dad’s business. I told people what service stations were open late. I gave major time to the Stop-Go market out on the River Road in Salinas where they still sold cold milk in real glass bottles, very good for calming your stomach on the way to meet a girlfriend with a violent father . . . along with Schlitz tall boys for afterwards. I told the local late night world about the backroom gambling that no one was supposed to know about at the Italian Villa, a cinderblock bunker between two spinach fields . . . and no big guys with five o’clock shadow came for me—instead I got a tub of carbonara and a bottle of Chianti delivered by cab.
I played Curtis Mayfield, Miles Davis, Parliament Funkadelic, Mary Wells, The Whispers, Major Lance . . . and Merle Haggard. A surprise in every box.
I resurrected our family’s old story records and opened with “The Headless Horseman Song”—and I fleshed out the ghostly jamboree concept with regular spins of “The Monster Mash” . . . haunted house sound effects and snippets of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. What’s more, I pulled out the God trick that my sister had showed me when we were kids, of playing the voice of the Swordfish on Bozo the Clown Under the Sea on a different speed.
My whole sense of protocol shifted, as I read poems by Langston Hughes and Robinson Jeffers . . . and every time did another few sections of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, mixing in Sun Ra, Millie Jackson, Booker T. & the MG’s, Oscar Brown Jr. and Gil Scott-Heron. But I always allowed plenty of time to talk to people, whether they were calling from Big Sur or Chualar—the Presidio or Alisal.
My parents never knew—but I talked to the night. We had open debates about police hassles . . . discussed the logistics of moving irrigation pipes in lettuce fields and the stench of the sugar beet refinery in Spreckels. Financial assistance was organized for a single mother of three in Marina, who’d had her nose broken and teeth knocked out by her deadbeat husband, who’d fled back to Kentucky. We found a Guatemalan woman a job as a housekeeper on the Seventeen Mile Drive . . . a teenage girl in Monterey named Venezuela decided to keep her baby . . . and a man (who turned out to be one of my teachers) anonymously confessed his love for teenage boys and how the stifling of his attraction had led him to become an alcoholic. I spoke to Prunedale and Moss Landing . . . itinerant pickers in Gonzales, insomniac, washed-up celebrities in Carmel Valley . . . students at Cabrillo College . . . janitors at the Navy Postgraduate School.
With my secret after-midnight identity consolidated, it naturally started to leak out a little. Especially when I was granted another night with a slot twice as long. I became something of a hero to Doc and Mike and my other insider friends at school. Outside this inner circle, people listening to me wondered what I looked like . . . how old I was . . . what kind of car I haunted the highways with when I wasn’t the voice in the night-becoming-day. I developed a running gag about the town of Pismo Beach (where my character was supposedly from—don’t know why, just came to me). I relentlessly harped on the quality of the ice water served at the Wagon Wheel Steakhouse in Carmel (late night summons forth the ironic as well as the sincere) and I had regular raving conversations with a Seaside pimp named Lebris, who drove a fire-orange diamond-in-the-back El Dorado (with two missing hubcaps) and was known for having fat girls in his stable. He’d sit on the hood of his ride by the pay phone outside the Chicken Shed drinking Colt 45 Malt Liquor. I once freaked him out by getting him live on air singing along with “People Get Ready.” He actually had a really good bass tenor.
I lived for those few hours each week in that smelly room down on the drowned-body, otter-stiff beach. I was the howling-dog-hours minister of Fremont Boulevard. (Today, not one sign of that old dereliction remains. The shooting range has been reclaimed as beach . . . the empty industrial buildings have either been bulldozed or renovated and now house some kind of “artists’ colony” . . . all of the speaker poles that used to stand like grave markers from the White Surf Drive-In have long been removed.)
Once Fort Ord closed down, everything changed. The Chicken Shed, Cash for Trash and several notorious motels are gone. I doubt you’d see a streetwalker in tiger skin shorts and six-inch heels on a summer night or find it as easy to score smack at 3 AM anymore. I guess you’d call that progress. I guess.
The rest of that school year, my last days of high school, passed in a blur. My gal Sal had a breakdown after her old man’s exit and was sent off to some cooldown place in Santa Barbara. I think it was really an expensive rehab facility. I wouldn’t see her again until the night of my eighteenth birthday, one of the few I remember in my life, when she took me out to the Sardine Factory restaurant on Cannery Row and we were served by a waiter with an eye patch. It was the first time I’d ever been out with a girl at a fancy place—and she paid. It was beautiful and harrowing because neither one of us could get past the image of her adoptive father’s suspended sentence over the green felt . . . with all the curtains billowing, us in the other room with Perry Como. We just kissed goodnight afterward and I left town for the summer. And I’d never see her again except in dreams.
Surprisingly, you might say, given the stuff I was up to, I continued to do well in school all that last year. I won the English and drama prizes and a host of national awards. I blitzed the SATs. On paper I looked pretty good and received full scholarships to all the colleges I applied to: Amherst, Dartmouth, Harvard and Northwestern. I don’t know why I didn’t think of Yale or Princeton. I was all over the place—having accepted early admission to Amherst and then canceled. When the radio station deal had started, it kind of eclipsed all my normal thinking. I started believing I could actually be a radio personality like Nick the High Priest of Soul. I could become more magical . . . more late night. Like Wolfman Jack with fifty thousand watts of Soul Power and a border-blaster signal. My voice in the darkness got me thinking more about going into drama. (I heard someone talking about the dramatic arts one day and I thought they said “traumatic arts”—it seemed appropriate.) So, the plan come graduation day was to go to Northwestern (another dream that wouldn’t come true). Who really knows what they want to be when they grow up, until it’s too late? Not even Mr. Very Late Night could give you the answer to that mystery.
But sometimes still . . . all these years later . . . in that deeper dark just before morning somewhere alone, I think of Sal and Brock again . . . and I hear Mr. Very Late Night—just as I used to on the headphones when the sea mist was thick around that old tin shed. The signal’s strong . . . finding me on one of the unofficial frequencies.
And he says, “It’s never too late if you can hear my voice.”
EVERCLEAR
The summer I left home I spent a hot, weird month alone in a little desert crossroads called Searchlight, Nevada.
I lived in the shell of an old camper blistered with bass and trout decals. My neighbor, a retired postmaster from Needles, California, fired his shotgun every morning and would invite me over for a col
d Olympia beer and thimblefuls of Everclear when the wind rose at dusk.
His name was Alf Milligan, but the reason why he sticks in my mind is that he had a remarkable collection of wanted posters that had filtered through his post office over thirty years. I couldn’t help but think of Gus Gus.
In the evenings, we’d shuffle through those fugitive faces, some of them famous, some of them dead or apprehended—some still at large, living in somebody’s storm cellar in Illinois, or in a crumbling bungalow on a back street of Veracruz.
There’s nothing quite like those posters—with their cryptic, ominous remarks. Travels under the alias of... has been known to wear a beard . . . last seen in Tucson.
Alf’s probably gone missing himself now.
Like a lot of desert people, he had a fond belief in life on other planets.
“Who knows,” Alf said, “maybe somewhere out there, there’s a kind of a small town with something like a post office in it—and in that post office there’s a poster with a face on it that looks mysteriously like you or me.”
He’d lick the Everclear from his lips and chase it with a swig of beer, reaching for a shotgun shell with a bright, strange look in his eyes, as if he expected he would one day visit such a place.
The last day I ever saw him, we collected all the wanted posters and let them loose. A dust devil swept them up over the mesquite. Lost faces. Some still wanted, some forgotten—fugitives in the fugitive wind.
FOREVER MINE
I got a tattoo on my nineteenth birthday. I figured I was old enough to get one and I was definitely still young enough to dream of waking up one twisted dawn in Singapore or Copenhagen and looking in the mirror and remembering the wasted golden days of my youth.
I started thinking about the tattoo the moment I arrived in L.A. I visited Cliff Raven’s studio. His specialty was Oriental design, but a tiny black unicorn, beautifully detailed, would’ve cost me about four months’ rent. I put the idea on a back burner until the afternoon of my birthday, when I found myself drifting around Hollywood, pleasantly pickled with my friend Matt Bauer, a would-be pro baseball player addicted to painkillers.
Mad life was streaming by. Huge fat Hispanic ladies screaming at their husbands, grotesquely powdered Jewish ladies arguing with shop assistants, car horns honking, music thumping, black kids dancing for money, cute little blondes in cut-off jeans, gays with their shirts off, old Italian men talking with their hands, old hippy ladies talking to themselves, Japanese tourists blinking in the sun after seeing Deep Throat a second time—a man in a straw hat talking about God, the Devil and retiring to Arizona.
Bauer kept saying it was important that I do something significant for my birthday. I told him about the tattoo idea. He became obsessed. I tried to fend him off. When it came down to it, I was a little nervous. He kept at me. Finally, we came across this place called the West Coast Tattoo Studio. Bauer said it was now or never. I said I had to find the right tattoo. Bauer asked what I had in mind. I thought for a second, and figured that a clown was a pretty unlikely design for them to have. And it couldn’t be a wimpy clown. It had to be cool, like one of those old circus posters. It had to have a certain look, a certain expression—it had to capture that vanished-sideshow, ghost-carnival feeling. I said, “I’ll do it, if I can get a clown tattoo.” Bauer slapped me on the back.
The place was up on the second floor in a window overlooking the street. I don’t know what I was expecting—some big, bearded fellow chewing Red Man tobacco—a lot of skulls and rebel flag designs in glass cases on the dirty walls.
What we found was a cross between a Sam Spade–type office and a veterinarian’s. A Korean-looking guy without a shirt on was working on a longhair’s forearm—putting the finishing touches on a coiled rattlesnake. The inker was locked in sweaty concentration and his own chest and back were entirely covered with an elaborately detailed series of dragons, imperial warriors, winged horses, naked women, and suns with fiery faces.
The next customer, or patient, was a vaguely Latina woman who lay back on a vinyl seat with her pants down and her you-know-what right up in another tattooist’s face while he gave her a bright pink strawberry just above her pubic hair. His back was to me. He had a hatchet-head and a white T-shirt with huge sweat stains under the arms.
The third tattooist looked like a skinhead version of Richard Chamberlain. He was wearing a white cotton madras shirt that disguised but didn’t hide the most disturbing tattoo I’ve ever seen. Fortunately, he didn’t show it to me until after mine was done, or I’d have chickened out. I was plenty ready to chicken out and of course I had my excuse all ready—they didn’t have the clown face I wanted.
Skin Man listened to my description, scowled and lit a cigarette. He pulled a ring binder off a shelf and flicked the pages. He stopped, then showed the page to me. It was exactly the face I had in mind. I looked at Bauer, who grinned hugely. Skin Man said, “The colors will fade a little in time, but when you die they’ll be nice and bright again.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I took off my shirt and Skin Man traced the outline from the stencil. The humming, sewing-machine irritation was just enough to keep me alert. Bauer went over to chat up the strawberry girl while I sat observing the swarming little dramas of Hollywood Boulevard unfold.
What I became fixated on was a wino—at least I thought he was a wino—lying motionless in the doorway of the International House of Pancakes across the street. I concluded later that if he was a wino, he was a fairly well-to-do one, because at first he had on a green fedora, a herringbone jacket, burgundy polyester trousers, white leather loafers and pale pink socks. It was a bright, warm afternoon, thousands of people in the street. This guy was lying down in the doorway of a popular restaurant and people were stepping over his body to get in and out. Hundreds more were stepping past him every minute.
I looked away to ash my cigarette and when I looked back, his green fedora was gone. I turned away to answer Bauer—for a split second—and the guy’s shoes were gone. I thought I was seeing things. He was being picked clean and it was happening before my eyes. The crowds kept churning past. Then I lost sight of him again—and when he reappeared I got a glimpse—the guy was barefoot!
Finally, I watched an actual derelict steal the man’s coat. It was done cleanly, but not so fast that it couldn’t be seen by me, and about five hundred other people. I didn’t see who got the trousers. Bauer came over after the strawberry girl left, and I got distracted. When I looked back the man was lying in a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even notice that my tattoo was finished.
As if to welcome me to the fold, Skin Man took off his shirt. His chest was white, surprisingly delicate and hairless. Then he slowly turned to show us his back, which was entirely taken over by an enormous octopus—something out of an opium nightmare—Bosch meets an old Dutch map. The sheer intensity of the thing made me cringe. In each tentacle was a sword or an axe or—something. There were mermaids crushed in the grip of the suckered arms, black ink rising—sailors’ knots, sunken ships, skeletons and sharks.
“It took seventy-five hours,” he said without emotion. I nodded. He nodded. I paid and we left. We looked in a couple of store windows and watched this guy performing on the corner. He must’ve had double-jointed jaws because he was able to open his mouth, or what seemed like his whole head, just like a Pez dispenser. Anyway, by the time we got over to the IHOP, an ambulance or the cops had taken the guy in the doorway away. Completely gone. The slow fade finally finished.
It was frustrating because Bauer hadn’t seen the guy from the window and hadn’t really believed me when I told him what had been going on. What could I say? The mysterious thing is that later, whenever I tried to point out the West Coast Tattoo Studio to anyone, I could never find it again. It seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. No one even remembered where I thought it had been.
Of course I only have to roll up my sleeve to prove tha
t at least for one warm afternoon, it existed. No matter if I wake up in Singapore or in the doorway of an International House of Pancakes. Even when I’m gone, the glitter in the clown’s green eyes will still be bright. Skin Man told me.
THE RETURN OF THE SWIMMER
Now let me tell you about the water.
It was cold, a mountain lake a mile across beneath a granite ridge that ran like a serrated spine above the tree line.
Even in summer, the lake was immune to sunlight. The basin was pure glacial damage filled by waterfall straight from peaks of perpetual snow. It was a world made of words like moraine and feldspar, where the wind spoke pidgin Aspen, but very fluent Ice.
Sitting in an aluminum rowboat filled with pale green frogs that keep sliding down the slippery sides, you can feel the cold conducting through the thin metal, even in the squinting weather of full noon.
You might be curious about those frogs, but right now you are watching the water, watching the shore. You are waiting to initiate a rescue or to witness a Return.
An Easter morning in Minnesota spawned this, perhaps my father’s strangest, obsession.
The day he turned eighteen was Easter Sunday. He left the church still singing hymns, and on a bet, he swam four miles across a lake he’d intended to walk around.
The war came and he came home wounded and that cold lake bloomed ever brighter in his mind as the exact home of his elusive youth.
Twenty years and forty-five pounds later, he came upon another lake and became convinced that if he could swim across this body of water and back, he could regain the power and the purity of the day he swam with the hymns in his head, his friends on snowshoes, shivering in a cloud of shoreline anticipation.
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