Notes From A Burning House

Leonard Cohen visits the same stores you do.  Hang around mid-city and you will see him.  He is always well-dressed.  Normally he wears a suit.

Last weekend I was A.C.-hopping, as you do, and I browsed hats for a little while in a shop on Melrose.  In he came, accompanied by a young woman in black.  She said, “How’s this?” as she tried on some hat and Cohen said I’m not crazy about that for you.

The last time I saw him was at the Whole Foods market on 3^rd and Fairfax, sitting at a table near check-out.  I interrupted his conversation, with an apology, to tell him I had grown up with his songs and poems and I wanted to thank him.  He stood and shook my hand and received my compliment with hospitality and gratitude.

1.)   There’s an old joke about a couple of engineers who are speculating about God.  They took God for an engineer, but the debate was over what kind of engineer He was.  The skeletal system suggested that he might be a mechanical engineer, while the electrical impulse system made a case for His being an electrical engineer.  Then, one of the engineers suggested that God must be a civil engineer, because only a civil engineer would run a sewer line through a recreational area. 

2.)  God must use sub-contractors, because some things are designed quite well, whereas the human body has lots of peculiar design flaws. What respectable engineer would design a body so that the heaviest part – the head – sits on top while providing two legs to stand on, instead of three? 

3.)   I have always been fond of the theory that man was a first draft, and on the second try (using Adam’s rib), God got it right.  Or whoever the subcontractor was.

I have to remember that my mother reads these things!  Close friends who haven’t seen me in a while also read them.  Folks may worry.  My sense of humor gets pretty dark, I must admit.  The bats in my belfry have to use nightlights! I find the cool shadow of gallows humor refreshing and comforting. I am one who would greet the Grim Reaper by saying, “Welcome!  Come on in!  May I take your robe and scythe?”  When the hangman puts the noose around his neck, I’m the guy who says, “Hey, that’s a little tight.”  This is not for everybody.

So today: lightness!  It is summer time and a time to remember there are no failures, just more information.  If at first you don’t succeed, then skydiving might just not be your thing.  (That’s an old joke, but it still pays off and contains a bit of wisdom.) 

How about another joke?

A private eye and his desk fell into the river.  The P.I. survives the dive and swims to a desert island.  On this island, he finds another recent arrival who informs the P.I., with strange calm, that he had just been shipwrecked himself.

The private eye looks around the horizon and curses his luck.  “I can’t believe we’re stuck here!  What are we going to do?” 

The other gentleman simply laid himself out on the beach, stretched leisurely, and sighed.  This provoked the private eye even further and he kicked sand at his fellow castaway.  “Aren’t you being a bit lackadaisical??”

“It’s okay,” said the other guy.  “I pull down $10,000 every week.” 

“What’s that got to do with anything?  Do you see any ATM’s around here?  You’re stranded, man!!”

“Let me finish,” said the other guy with a smile.  “I make $10,000 a week.  I go to church every week.  I tithe generously.  Believe me.  On Sunday, no matter what, my pastor will find me.”

IN OTHER NEWS

“My Girl” sounds pretty funny on a ukulele.  (“Imagine” sounds even funnier.)

Sometimes, in the delirium of repetition and the hilarity of my fat-fingered fretting, alternate lyrics come, such as these new lyrics for “My Girl…”

I’ve got bad craaaamps

And I feel such fatigue;

And I’m bloating so bad

I need some relief…

I guess you’d say

What can make cramps go away?

It’s Midol….Midol…Midol….

Talkin’ ‘bout – Midol!

Midol!

Great.  Jokes about pain and suffering.  That’s lightening things up.

It was 9:00 PM and closing time, owing to the arrival of happy hour downstairs. The saxophone player was going at it off-camera, and doing a real number on my joy-de-veev. My bank account was down to a couple of buttons and a piece of lint. Apparently, there had been an outbreak of marital fidelity and a recession of personal grudges. Business was in a deep trough and I could see it in the lines of my face, like dry riverbeds. I had tapped into my emergency flask of distilled hope - secreted in the hollow head of my bust of McKinley - nursing my way through the drought.

You might think this would be a typical moment for there to be a knock on the door from a dame packed into a cocktail dress and her lips painted the color of sweet perdition, but you would be wrong. She didn’t knock, she just let herself in while I was gazing into the muddy water of cheap hope in a twist-cap bottle. I looked up and there she was, lit perfect - and it takes someone who’s lit to see it. That’s a joke. I was sober, all right. Sober enough to know she was real and she needed something.

She got right to it. “I have a missing person case.”

“Who’s missing?”

“An actor. A stage actor.”

“Stage actor?” I had my top drawer open and my hands were busy rolling a cigarette. “Doll, he’s not missing. He’s extinct.”

“So you say, Mr. Angell. Yet he is alive and I have to take his picture.”

“Oh. A stage actor’s picture? Are you a historian?”

She approached the window that looked down over Flower Street. “This town has gotten to you, Mark Angell, Private Eye. Or maybe the city is just the messenger, hmm? If you let your light go out, there’s no sense blaming the world, is there?”

I lit the match and hotted up my smoke. She asked me, “Do you still have dreams, Mr. Angell?”

“I foresee a nice one with you in a featured role.”

“I’m not here to audition for your middle-aged lonely fantasy, Mr. Half-wit.”

“Doll,” I said, “When you’re at your wit’s end, half a wit will do.”

“There is a man and I need to take his photograph. That’s all you need to know.”

My feet were up on the desk just to remind whose office this was. “May I know his name?”

“Algernon.”

I took a long drag on my cigarette to keep from laughing. Finally, I asked: “May I know his real name?”

She was crouched low, and holding a camera the size of a Camaro and pointing the turret at me. “Hold it,” she said, “Hold it right there.”

I regarded her camera wondering if it might be a disguised weapon. I decided it wasn’t - she could have blown my head off several seconds ago. She was taking my picture. “Is this for my obituary?”

“Your obituary is written, Mr. Angell.”

I said, “Tell me what it says,” so she took the picture and stood up and she told me what it said:

“Mark Angell, a Los Angeles private investigator, became one with the river after going as high as he could possibly go, and then plummeted. On his way down Angell thought, “Why fall like a seagull turd when you can dive?” So he opened his arms so wide his trench coat peeled off of him and flew away with a squawk. The P.I. spiralled downward and sliced the sky like a corkscrew. The river caught him and ate him up with flashing green lips. Over the river’s banks, a trenchcoat circled the air in slack loops like the other seagulls, joining them in the day’s hunt for food.”

I had to give that one some silence. Finally I had words for my question. “Tell me something.”

“It’ll cost you.”

“Take it out of my fee.”

“Touche.”

“When you first set eyes on someone, what are you looking for with those beautiful, greedy eyes of yours?”

“Right back at you, Mr. Angell.” FLASH! Another picture. “Tell me what it is you do for a living, really.”

“I’m a P.I., ma’am. I follow people. Go through their trash. Look at their spouse’s checkbooks, cell phone bills, partners’ bank records, accounting books, receipts. I reveal stories that have been hidden. The stories I discover are stories that have already affected people’s lives - business, marriage, and more - and by telling the stories…”

“…the changes become intelligible?”

I took another drag and chased it with a swig. Drags and swigs blend nice together, like Simon and Garfunkel. “That’s what people hope when they come see me, sweetheart. But what do you know in your heart? Does knowledge make life any more intelligible? Or bearable?”

“You’re the storyteller. And Mark is your middle name. And Angell is the street where you lived until you were ten years old. And now you’re looking a little dry and it seems to you on some days like you’ve gone as far as you can go - isn’t that right?”

“Aw, dollface,” I said, grinding out the last butt end of my smoke, “We’re already falling through the air.” My coat flew up around over my head and my face, blinding me until I stretched out my arms and let the coat fly away. I looked down and saw the river, approaching fast, the salt air blowing with a rage into my ears. The gal was nowhere in sight but I had other things on my mind now.

The desk hit the water first, I landed on top of it with the river erupting around me in a splash shaped like a gigantic human ear, and down we went into the vile salt water.

Tonight’s episode of “Peach Cadillac Theatre” was brought to you by our sponsor:

“Hello there. Doesn’t this suit look good? I don’t mind saying it does. But I am not a corporate suit. I am not some soul-less marketeer - en garde! ha ha ha - no no, what I’m up to is - well, I’m a storyteller.

“You make choices every day - lots of them. And you know, behind every choice - every time you reach for a product or a service - there is a story unfolding. The need for convenience, for goods you can depend on, that don’t require time, assembly, or excessive maintenance - this is a natural response to pressure. And pressure is the engine of ALL stories. It is the engine of history itself.

“No, I am not here to soak you for a buck. I am - if you will indulge me - a kind of minister. I am a storyteller illustrating some solutions to your. Particular. Pressures. Gather the family around one of our grills: your in-laws are coming! Our fans will keep you and your spouse cool this summer. Our stereos will make your car a chick magnet. Our Scotch will turn you into James Bond. Our tapes will make you fluent in the language where you are going to school. Our books and on-line programs will help you make you more self-assured, someone you want to be, someone who can actualize their self because, after all, you custom-made that self for YOU.

“We are thinking hard about you.

“We have been looking all over for you.

“We’re Algernon. We’ll find you eventually.”

Algernon, Inc. Don’t worry. We’re here.

For the time being, I am caring for a ukulele virtually identical to the one pictured here. 

Instead of spending all my time fretting about my life, I decided to find another kind of fretting with which to busy myself, and for the past few days I have been wearing callouses into my fingertips as I learn to play chords on this little beast. 

Since the brand name – Mahalo – appears so prominently on the instrument, I took an interest in what it meant, if anything.  Soon I learned it is translated as “thank you,” which alone would be delightful.  Another resource broke the word down further, as a single-word blessing wishing someone to be in the presence of Divine Breath.  Could this be true?  What better bumper sticker to have?  Breath is the singing voice, breath is strumming the chords, breath is listening. 

Deb warned me.

Little Wallace is named after his mother, more or less. He was delivered by a carpenter. This frisky little kitten’s arrival in the world was highly unusual.

Deb bought her house a few months ago, up on a hill overlooking Dodger Stadium in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles. Among the eccentricities of her beautiful little home are animals walking on the roof of the house. They climb up the avocado tree and pad around on the roof. The first time I house-sat for Deb, I lay in bed listening to the footsteps overhead wondering if burglars were prowling up there. That was before Wallace was born.

One day, Deb heard a persistent mewing sound and went outside to investigate. She went out and in and back out and she noticed that the mewing got softer when she was outside, and louder when she was inside, which meant she had a problem.

A few hours later, a carpenter had cut a hole in the wall and ‘delivered’ a baby kitten – young Wallace. This week, the scamp has been in my care: falling all over himself because his paws may as well be the size of his head. His eyes are still baby-blue and his dot of a nose is ham-pink, like a tiny pencil eraser. He climbs up his scratching post and perches on top. He terrorizes a little piece of red ribbon. He has not yet learned to differentiate a human being from a tree – or a chew toy. Deb warned me about that.

Training a kitten not to bite human flesh is a long process. Cats are more difficult to train than dogs. It takes time and patience, and a willingness to respond consistently to the biting.

Watch him play. Watch him walk on my chest. Little kitten, I love you very much. You are beautiful and funny and sweet in spirit. You are a piece of sunlight that fell between the roof-beams and found home. I enjoy watching you play and watching you sleep (which doesn’t happen very often). Sometimes, dear one, it is hard to spend time with you because you don’t stop biting. One day, you may learn; but right now, you persist. You do not yet understand what you are doing.

Wallace loves company – craves it. At bedtime, he loves to join you in bed. He loves the warmth of your company. Still, he cannot help himself – he still has the urge to bite and he never quits. If you want to get any rest from it, eventually you have to shut the bedroom door and leave him out, despite his confusion and disappointment. Sometimes this is hard to do, but truly it is all right. Wallace is young; and even when one is not young, it is not too late to learn.

It is the first day of summer and I have learned that a friend of mine is going to be a father.  I am happy for him and happy for the child even though I wonder what they will inherit from my generation and our history.  When I speculate about the world I might see in my old age, it is not always with wondrous optimism so much as weary hope.  Yes, there remains Hope, as she rubs her head sitting next to me on the porch swing, sipping a mint julep I made to keep her spirits up. 

“Hope,” I say, “You spring eternal, but where do you summer?”

She smiles.  She’s heard that one before.  I hadn’t intended on making a joke, but I let her pass on the question.  Hope is fascinating but she doesn’t make a good interview. 

At my birth, according to the certificate, I was a ten-pounder.  I stayed more or less at that weight until I was 30.  Dad became a father at age 24, and my mother was just 21.  Oh, the sleepless nights I put them through.  I had a monstrous case of colic, crying and shrieking inconsolably for reasons unknown.  The artist’s disposition, perhaps.  As King Lear said, when we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.  I have always had a hard time with that. 

Nowadays, there are support groups for young parents with colicky babies.  It’s no joke when your baby cries on and on, when the cause cannot be found, when you haven’t slept through the night in weeks and your baby is suffering and no one can determine the cause.  The sleep deprivation and the helplessness can age a parent fast, wearing deep riverbeds into their faces and digging brackish moats into young marriages.  There were no such supports available to my parents on an Army base in the middle of Oklahoma in 1971.   All they could do was take turns feeding me and comforting me as best they could while I screamed bloody hell into the morning. 

One day a bottle of red wine fell off a counter and chipped, and my mother endeavored to save some of it by decanting into whatever receptacles she could find.  One of the vessels at hand was a baby-formula bottle, which she carefully pushed way, way back in the refrigerator.  This is not something you do with red wine, of course, but I suppose it wasn’t very good wine and tasted better chilled. 

Deep in the night, I howled and wailed away.  It was my father’s turn.  He staggered out of bed, scooped me up in his arms, and bounced and rocked me as he loped with squinting eyes into the kitchen.  Opening the fridge, he rooted around and finally came up with a formula bottle.  Something happened then that he took as a miracle at first: he stuck the bottle into my mouth, I drank deeply, and immediately fell asleep.  Not only that, I slept through the rest of the night. 

As I relayed this story to Hope, she tittered and sipped her julep.  Her gaze was cast out across the yard, more or less in the direction of the avocado tree that has been dropping missiles of late.

The following morning back in Oklahoma, baby woke up rather late.  I was found with a pair of dark glasses on and a cigarette in my tiny hand.   My mother understood immediately.  “Soooo,” she said, “Rough night last night?” 

“My night went great,” whispered the baby.  “This morning, not so much.” 

Hope has a laugh that kind of sprinkles over you.  This story delighted her though she never took her eyes off that avocado tree.  She sipped her drink and said, “It’s a colicky world, bro.  How do you parent it?” 

We soaked in the sun together, silent except for the sound of avocados dropping and the laughter of children somewhere down the lane. 

“Seems like you never look at me,” I said at some point.  “I want to see your eyes but you are elsewhere.”

Hope put on her lime-green sunglasses and turned her face towards me.  “When you’re ready to be changed,” she said, “I’ll be looking you square in the face.  May I have another?”

Texans take a lot of crap from those of us who live elsewhere – especially us priggish northeasterners – yet today we must acknowledge that Texas observes Juneteenth as an official holiday. 

On June 19^th, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger – a man who had long been known for bravery on the battlefield and for having a big mouth – marched into Galveston, Texas, and informed everyone there that slavery had been abolished a while ago (Galveston was a little late getting the news) and the slaves who were there were actually free.  Much rejoicing ensued that day, and the celebration is re-visited annually.  Texas is not the only part of the country to commemorate Juneteenth.  There have been large celebrations in cities here and there.   Yet Texas remains the only state to make the holiday official.  Since Juneteenth is nothing less than Independence Day for African-Americans, why should Texas be the only state?

The 2,000-year old man, as embodied by Mel Brooks, was asked to share his greatest wisdom by Carl Reiner.  The 2,000-year old man had just a few, simple lessons to expound, one of which was, “Don’t run for the bus.”

Alan Watts wrote an eccentric essay about clothing in which he called on western men to abandon our customary trousers and wrap ourselves in colorful sarongs instead. He anticipated one objection – how does one run to catch a bus if their legs are swathed skirtlike in cotton fabric? To this, he responded with a wave of the hand, “What self-respecting person would run for a bus?”

In February, I suffered a fall while running. It was a footrace against Time. Time had become a ghostly train bearing down on me, and it felt urgently necessary to rush. I was the breakfast cook on a Zen retreat in Rhode Island, and had exactly 49 minutes to prepare oatmeal for 10 people. I discovered the monastery kitchen was out of rolled oats – my fault for not checking the supply. To get more, I would need to put on winter clothes, descend a hill, and raid the Zen Center’s kitchen down the road. This I did, in haste.

The first real snowstorm of the winter had left more than a foot of fresh snow on the ground, and it was no light jog down the road past the pond. The shape and size of time was transforming itself like a scene from a horror movie, in which a small creature violently distorts and grows into a raging, howling beast. If it took me three minutes to reach the Zen Center kitchen, it felt like fifteen, and my concentration was occupied with a vision of cold, uncooked oats at breakfast time. Oh, the embarrassment, to be so incompetent and to disappoint all of my brothers and sisters.

With my bucket full of rolled oats, I hit the ground again to dash up the hill and get breakfast underway. My thinking, which had been pounding away in my head along with my heartbeat, suddenly cleared up and a voice said to itself, “Everything is fine.” Ah, the relief. A big smile. Everything was fine. There was no problem. I was on top of the situation, and I knew I was in good hands myself, so everything would be fine.

BAM.

Face down. Snow in my mouth and ears. I had hit my head, and hard. I had also ripped my pants. I lay there stunned. Time disappeared. The Greek chorus shut up. I felt foolish – not in the sense of being embarrassed. It was a relief, like someone turning off a radio that had been blasting. I had been rushing around carelessly, believing everything my panic was telling me. Here was the result.

We humans are in a frenzy to catch the bus. How much do we understand about the bus we’re trying to catch? What is it about the bus that makes us run? Do we really fear that if we miss that bus, we’re not going to go anywhere? As if going nowhere was possible; as if it were possible to know for certain where we were going, spinning around on this orb and most of us ignorant of what we truly desire.

The Greek chorus in our heads is always making something. The Greek chorus is always pointing at one bus or another, yelling, “Run! Run!” For the most part, we do it. Sometimes we fall and hurt ourselves and for just an instant, when we feel foolish, we are awake. Sadly, we shake the clarity off very quickly. With a curse, I came to my knees and then to my wet feet. Even with this spontaneous exploration of gravity, the oatmeal was cooked just right at 7:30 AM. There was never any danger of missing the bus; I had been on it the whole while.

There is a time for moving fast. There may even be a time for running to catch a bus or to fetch a bucket of oats. Constricting clothing may be a hazard, but constricting thought is a hazard no matter what we are wearing. Time is not a train from which we need to run; as soon as we think of time, there isn’t enough of it. There is also no lack of it. Moving swiftly to get something done is clear. Running away from a dream (literally!) does not accomplish our goal and is unclear.

See, the dangerous thing is not running. The dangerous thing is to run for a bus when we don’t know where we’re going.

For a little while now I have been working on an invention I think will be most useful to the C.I.A..  It is my wish to contribute to the culture of surveillance, which you all know I support wholeheartedly. 

It’s a bow-tie camera that takes high-resolution pictures, then you flick a small switch in back and the bow detaches and flies away like a butterfly, both camera and its digitally-stored images intact, to wherever you program it to fly.  This comes in handy when there is a real danger of being apprehended.  James Bond wishes he had one.

For help with the design, I approached Mr. Bill Kenerson, the founder and President of Beau Ties Ltd. of Vermont, and a solid Republican.  When I visited the site and enthusiastically presented my idea, Mr. Kenerson arranged an appointment for me to speak with the local Chief of police about it.  That’s what he told me, anyway.  He even arranged for the police to come and give me a ride to headquarters.  Unfortunately, upon arrival, there was some confusion about why I was there and the Chief was unavailable to meet me.  Undeterred, I presented my idea to the highest ranking officer in the room.  He and his colleagues seemed very impressed and offered me a place to stay overnight.  We also played a fun game that involved blowing up balloons. 

Mr. Kenerson is very busy and never got back to me. For the time being, I press on alone with my design.  It is hard to get a callback from anyone in Washington.  If Raj Peter Bhakta wins a Congressional seat in Pennsylvania, he could open a door for me. 

Any other ideas?  Anyone?  Open forum here…