Why We Go There (and Away We Go)

"They sure as hell wouldn’t write a book which had a faint threat of becoming a bestseller that would eventually be made into a big screen movie so that everyone and their mother could analyze their utter moral degradation."

Fuck yeah I would.

That is from Kyrsten Bean's The Stifled Artist's Blog (http://tinyurl.com/7m2398y), which you may recall ran an interview with me a while back (http://tinyurl.com/7ybqusd).  Kyrsten's fate and mine have become somewhat intertwined.  In addition to the interview for her blog, she also interviewed me for the paper where she works (http://tinyurl.com/7m4uylf).  Kyrsten contacted me a few months ago after having read this blog and discovering we lived in the same town (El Cerrito) and shared a similar...background.  She's since read for my reading series, Lip Service West, a couple times, and, a musician as well, she'll be playing a few songs the night of the big LSW fundraiser, Friday, Match 9, 50 Mason Social House, SF.  See you there.

You might've also seen Kyrsten's name in some of the same online journals I've been in lately, like the inaugural issue of PoV (http://issuu.com/povmagazine/docs/pov_issue_001/1).  We are an incestuous lot.

I was reading her Stifled Artist yesterday (which is a huge compliment, since I read so few of them.  They tend to be pretty self indulgent, y'know?), and she touched on an interesting topic, or at least one that has always interested me. Discussing one of her favorite books, Jerry Stahl's junkie memoir classic Permanent Midnight, she asked a somewhat rhetorical question about why an author like Stahl, having cleaned up and left that life behind, would want to delve back into the muck and mire and relieve painful, humiliating memories.  

She speculates that "[w]riters and musicians (of this kind) are some sick fuckers. We like to go there.  Not because it feels good, necessarily, but because we feel compelled to dig in the dirt, to get to the grit of it, to cut ourselves open and peer in with a giant magnifying glass — like we’re ants who use the light of the sun to fry our own selves, and plan on documenting the experience later."

I wrote to Kyrsten that while I found her subject compelling, I, respectfully, disagree with her reasoning.  Of course, I have no authority to speak for ex-junkies everywhere, but there are a few governing characteristics of our ilk, the primary one being the incessant need for outside validation.  Which is where the drug came in in the first place.  Our self-worth is like an SUV; it gets shitty miles to the gallon, forever in need of fuel in the form of compliments and accolades to keep running, seven feet at a time.

Permanent Midnight is a terrific book, and a really good movie.  Or at least it was. I've since gone back, and like re-watching Heathers, it didn't hold up so well with subsequent viewing.

Re: Heathers, I remember reading somewhere that the writer, listed by IMDB as Daniel Waters, only listened to the Replacements and Cocteau Twins while writing the script.  You can see that influence pretty clearly.  Plus, the fucking school is named "Westerberg."

I don't know what was inside Stahl's head when he was writing.  I know a few people who've met him and say he's sort of an asshole.  Which isn't surprising.  His book reads like he's an asshole.  But there are probably people who say the same of me, and if I ever attained his level of success, I'd probably say it about myself.  The only thing that teaches humility is being humbled, and it's a lesson that can be quickly forgotten.  Permanent Midnight has had a huge impact on my work, writing, and life, regardless.

I've often asked that question myself.  Why go back and write about that past?  Or rather, I've had it asked of me, mostly by Big Tom.  But it was never really a choice. What the fuck else am I going to write about?  My life of privilege?  Want to hear what I benched yesterday? (310 lbs.)  Maybe you'll find my game of fetch with Lucky compelling? Good writing is about conflict.  I don't have much of that these days.  Except the war that rages in my head, and I pay a psychiatrist to listen to that shit so you don't have to deal with it (much). You're welcome.

The truth is I have no qualms about offering an intimate glimpse into my life, past, present, future, and clearly enough of you like reading about it (we finally cracked 10K page views for last month) that I must be doing something right.  And a lot of what I write about is the past.  What else can you write about?  Like a keyboardist who only knows one song...

It's a trade off.  A few embarrassing stories, of which my memoir is chock-full, for unconditional love.  Like Lowe and Varitek for Heathcliff Slocumb, you make that trade every time.  

It isn't that tricky, really, when you break it down.  It's what I do.  I make art.  And I share it with anyone who wants to see it.  I've been doing this shit since I was kid in grade school, drawing cartoons of classmates, basking in the attention those pictures would receive.  It's how I was known in school.  I couldn't throw a ball far, wasn't tough enough for football (I used to be a lot smaller).  Pretty girls weren't going to notice me.  The only way I could distinguish myself was with the writing and words and drawings and songs.  It got people to pay attention, and it made me feel like I mattered.  And despite my contempt for mankind (as a whole), I need to be noticed and feel like I matter.

Kyrsten proposes that there is a thrill, like returning the site of a murder, for both writer and reader, in "going there." I think that's somewhat true, but more so for the latter than the former.  When I had an agent and we were pitching the memoir, I'd written as such in the proposal, highlighting the voyeuristic qualities of the drug memoir, which, lousy current publishing climate aside, do have a long history of selling, and when they hit big, like Stahl's, they hit huge.  For the writer, however, I don't think it's that convoluted.  

And writers write.

Problem is there are a lot of us ex-addicts with a story we want to share.  The trick is convincing someone that yours offers what the others do not (and to all the publishers out there, mine has lots and lots of tits).  I'll let you know how that turns out.  And you know I won't have to go far to do that.

The Best Thanksgiving Soup Kitchen

Could've been '98 or 2000.  I don't think it was 2000 because I was with Becky by then, and we were living at the Casa Loma Hotel, not the Heights, cashing the bad checks.  I think that Thanksgiving I spent in jail.  I am pretty sure the year was 1999.

I was living here.

There it is.  Hepatitis Heights.  I stole this pic off Tom Pitts's new blog (http://tom-pitts.blogspot.com/), which he's using solely to advertise his recently published work, although I'm hoping he'll start using it to write new posts, like I do here, about those dark days, because, honestly, I could use the reinforcement; my memory from back then is kinda hazy.  I can tell you this: that house used to look a fucklot worse. For one, there were no garbage bins out front.  The city took ours away because no one had paid the bill in forever.  No one paid anything there.  No trash.  No lights. No heat.  Giant black trash bags were piled high along the side of the house.  A transvestite lived downstairs, and he liked me so I got to take the occasional shower. The biggest difference, you don't see the newly released dogs from the pen waiting on the stoop to beat the shit out of you and steal your stash.  Oh, and there was no sun.

I've described the hell that was Hepatitis Heights before, both in the blog (somewhat) and in my memoir (extensively).  I am sure the sun shone at some point like it does in this picture, but the way I remember it, it was always raining and it was always nighttime.  Jerry Stahl has a line in his autobiography, likening addiction to a permanent midnight (which is also the name of his memoir), and when I first heard that title I rolled my eyes, thinking it a bit overwrought, and I was an addict.  But now that I'm not, I look back on that time and he's right: it always seemed dark.  Then again, I did so much fucking meth, I was up most nights, crashing during the day.  Kinda like a vampire.  Who also didn't get laid much. Maybe I'll get a million hits from teenage girls today.  Or randy 40-year-old moms.

So this Thanksgiving I'm thinking about, 1999, I was living at Hepatitis Heights, and I want to say I had a girlfriend, or a wife, and that she was gone.  Believe it or not, I usually had a girlfriend (or wife) back then.  Not exactly high class; top tier prospects aren't out trolling the bowery after midnight.  They were less girlfriends and more running partners.  There's not a lot of time for fucking when you're day is divided into two ten-hour, drug-hunting shifts.

I've always hated Thanksgiving.  It's a goddamn depressing holiday.  Even when I was kid.  I've never been much of a foodie, and the idea of a holiday revolving entirely around people gorging themselves fat seemed stupid to me, especially when we're talking about Thanksgiving food, gourds, cranberry and gravy, turkey, and add to that being stuck around people and that the television programming sucked, and T-giving was, by far, my least favorite holiday growing up.  But if you think it sucked when I was kid, can you imagine how depressing it is for a junkie?

Forget for a moment that I got what I deserved, that I was a bad, shiftless person and all that.  Just try to picture waking up in that shithole above, dope sick, hungry, and its being Thanksgiving.

I think I called my mom and begged her to send me some money, using the ol', "But Mom!  It's Thanksgiving!" college try.  I was fucking 30 years old.  So after she hung up on me, I must've gotten well somehow, enough so that I, this gimp, Gavin, and another guy, Paul, decided we'd find a soup kitchen that would feed us, make the day slightly less awful.  I think it was Gavin who said they had the best Thanksgiving soup kitchen in the Haight.  I, of course, avoided the Haight every chance I could, because even then I hated hippies.

So we went in search of the Best Thanksgiving Soup Kitchen.

You never get all three things you need at once when you are a junkie: drugs, food, cigarettes.  I mean, it might happen, but it's usually by accident, and not with enough frequency that you can remotely count on its ever happening again. Hepatitis Heights was on Potrero Hill, and we walked all the way to the Haight because we didn't have the three dollars apiece to ride the bus, and even if we did have the three bucks we would've bought cigarettes and walked anyway.  But we didn't have $3.  And we didn't have cigarettes.  So it didn't matter.

San Francisco is only 7 miles by 7 miles, so it wasn't that bad of a walk, but I can only imagine what we looked like to other respectable folks about to carve the bird with Junior at Grandma's, three dirtbags shlepping along, like Moses' rejects, wrapped in filthy rags, Gavin and his abnormally craned neck, like a glorious fried bird, leading the way.

We got there pretty late, but they still had food.  It was soup kitchen food, so we're not talking Chez Panisse or anything, but when you are starving, even crackers taste really good.

I'm probably conflating all this, combining six different occasions into one, like it was actually Glide Church that I went to with Paul and Gavin, and maybe this Thanksgiving I was alone or with Tom Pitts.  Either way, there was musical accompaniment, a plump woman playing a Casio.  And a lot of hobos.

But here is the part that really sticks with me.  The cigarettes.  There were three of us, so we'd probably been picking up butts from the streets and ashcans and sharing them along the way.  But after dinner, when we'd finished the canned meat and powdered spuds, this really sweet young girl who was volunteering there came to our table, and without asking or saying a word, just laid three cigarettes on our table and smiled.  They weren't doing this for any other table.  She only came to our table.  It honestly was one of the nicest things anyone had done for me in days, or maybe weeks.  Hell, months.

I remember so clearly, standing outside with Paul and Gavin (or Tom or whomever), in the sweet November carbon bus dioxide, the hoodrats and gutterpunks squirreling away spare change from strangers, and smoking that full cigarette, which I didn't have to share with anybody else, my belly full, and being genuinely thankful.  Not sure if it was the best Thanksgiving soup kitchen.  But it was the best goddamn cigarette I ever had.