The Naked and Ugly

Eventful weekend.  And, no, I am not just talking about the NFL playoffs.  Though I do know two people who are very happy in Texas and Florida, respectfully (while far away Skip Bayless and aborted foetuses everywhere weep silently.)

We're talking about the art, man.  First up, Tom Pitts and I (along with El Cerrito Patch crack reporter Kyrsten Bean) are showcased in England at the upstart PoV. Which looks pretty fucking sharp (http://tinyurl.com/878xazh).  My pieces include two selections from the oft-mentioned, as-yet unpublished memoir, here called Candy and Cigarettes, as I try to cash in on the brand name.  It's the same memoir as Junkie Love, which I'll in all likelihood change the name back to when this experiment fails, because, tipping my hand or not, the title is Junkie Love.  The first story is called "Close Calls Pt. III," part of entire chapter devoted to near missed and almost hits.  In case you missed "Close Calls Pt. I," here you go (under the original title "One Very Important Letter"): http://tinyurl.com/7n9dyfx.  (I honestly don't remember Pt. II, but neither it, nor Pt. IV, which is about injecting mouse shit, have been published).  Pt. III, borrowing liberally from a Bruce Springsteen live into to "Independence Day" (it's called an homage), details getting roused late one night by the cops in a 7/11 in Hunter's Point (can't find a clip with the intro, but the song is still heartbreakingly beautiful and always worth hearing, especially if you didn't get along with your dad).

The second is about this night Gluehead and I were heading to the bar after my ex-wife (the one I loved, not the other one) stood me up on our first date and we found a bunch of crack in the middle of the road following a high-speed chase.  I spoke with Glue the other day.  He's doing well, living in the Midwest.  I sent him a copy of Down on the Farm.  He'll probably hate it.  Never was a big fan of Springsteen.

For this issue of PoV, which is like the third time Tom Pitts and I have appeared together in the same publication, we decided to do one another's intro, like Freaky Friday or a goddamn Kriss Kross album cover.

Be sure to check out both Tom's and Kyrsten's stuff.  Tom's two, "High Speed Chase in LA" and "Peanut Brittle" brings back lovely memories of copping in downtown LA and, yup, injecting more mouse shit, which apparently is far more prevalent within the junkie community than you might believe; and Kyrsten's "Requiem of a Street Kid" uses the backdrop of the gutter punk scene in the Haight to segue from kiddom to adulthood, without broaching patronizing or didactic, a tough order.  It's a poem drenched in the detail of someone who's lived the life and didn't merely play the part.

Goes without saying that both Tom and Krysten are terrific writers, which is why they've been featured multiple times at Lip Service West (http://www.lipservicewest.com/), where, it's true, I've never met a recovering addict I didn't like.  If I'm encountering resistance in trying to get my junkie memoir published, then I'll use what little sway I have (and, trust me, we're talking very little sway here) to provide others an avenue to get their story out.  

And to that end, I am supposed to be getting interviewed by the East Bay Express later today (another stop on the Shameless Self-Whoring Tour, 2012), which I will be certain to pimp madly when the issue comes out.  We started the interview yesterday, and the focus is going to be on Lip Service West.  When I was a part of this reading series in Miami (co-producing the event with the lovely Andrea Askowitz [My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy]), the subject matter was, admittedly, a little broader, a bit sunnier, less dank and gray.  But I am a dark mutherfucker, and while I loved working with Andrea, when I got out here and Idan "the Machine" Levin over at SPAD (http://sanpabloarts.org/) offered to sponsor a reading series, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.  And despite granting me permission to use the Lip Service brand, both Andrea and her new co-producer Esther Martinez were aghast by my new choice of logo.

This sums it up.  Bloody bug splattered on the high-speed windshield o' life. Thanks to Tracey Snelling for the design.

I am not into poetry.  Although I should mention I just had another (old) poem taken by Gutter Eloquence.  And for as much as my poetry is finding new homes these days, perhaps I should reconsider and just start writing the shit again. 

Anyway, we had our latest Lip Service West reading this past Friday at Pegasus Books up on Shattuck in Berkeley.  Another packed house, rave reception, random drunk dude telling me he is going to submit something.  The free hot dogs went quickly on this night, my friends.  Always do.  And the continued success of the series has little to do with me (or my beautiful partner in crime/life/literature, the third luckiest gal in the world, Justine).  It's because the Bay Area breeds kick-ass writers like Miami does cockroaches. Fuckers are everywhere, squirming in the dingy moistness.  

This latest chapter featured Lauren Becker, who runs the East Bay-centric (and always first-rate) reading series East Bay on the Brain (http://eastbayonthebrain.wordpress.com/, and Paul Corman-Roberts, whom I first met manning the door at the downtown Oakland event, which made me think he was a bouncer, because he looked like the kind of dude you'd find on the midnight gritty streets of a meth-soaked Las Vegas.  On Friday, he read a piece about meth-soaked Las Vegas and working in an all-nite convenience store.  Both his and Lauren's, which chronicled ball surgery, were hits.  As was Kyrsten's cough syrup confessional, and Mckay William's reportage from the front lines of Occupy Oakland and the joys of your first time getting pepper sprayed.  After everyone read, I thought (to myself as opposed to someone else) both how much I envied and admired these writers, and how lucky I am to be back in the Bay.

But there was one writer who stood out that night, not because his piece was necessarily better (or worse) than anyone else's.  It simply struck me as...ballsier...in its relation to my own work, achieving an honesty, a verisimilitude I don't think I am capable of.  The piece was called "Splatter Love" by Sean Craven, and used the stained drawing pad of a suicide to shine a light on the human condition in a way rarely seen.

Sean joked about why I wanted him to read this piece on his blog last week (http://tinyurl.com/86ocmq2), and he wasn't altogether wrong.  "Splatter Love," which I'd had the pleasure of editing earlier, is not for the weary or easily offended. The basic outline for the story: Sean finds this drawing pad, which aside from the red blotchy stain on the cover, is in pristine condition.  A poor art student, he considers it a boon, until he later learns that the pad belonged to a woman in the neighboring apartment who just shot herself.  Sean keeps the pad, unable to throw it away, and begins to form an unhealthy relationship to the pad and its former owner, as he imagines her life and the misery, insanity, vengeance that lead her to make this most final of choices; and through this exploration he is forced to admit his own unhappiness, the pull of suicide's allure, the insignificance he feels as a man and an artist, the insufficiency he feels as a human being.  He shies from nothing, however naked and ugly.

This is, of course, what all good writing is.  And everyone who reads for LSW falls into that category.  I consider myself a good writer, as well, and like to believe I am willing to delve into the same naked and ugly territory.  Except--and it's a big exception--I care too much about image.  Everything I do is concerned with image. A man doesn't spend this much time preening in front of a mirror measuring his own biceps without a unabashed nod to vanity.  This concern expends far beyond the physical, though.  We're talking persona.  This blog is a persona.  My interactions (when I leave my privileged gated enclave) with the public, a persona. Every facet of my life, from my time with my dear, sweet departed mother, to my own child, involves some degree of an act, how I want to be perceived.  And this desired effect of manufactured appearance, physical and otherwise, how I come across to the outside world, is going to manifest itself in the writing.  I don't shy from truth, and I can get as down and dirty and mired in the cesspool as anyone. But I will always pull up short when it comes to tarnishing this carefully cultivated character.  Part of the allure of Hemingway is that he was Hemingway.  Did he have private moments where he cried while watching Dancing with the Stars?  Or whatever the fuck the equivalent was in the '20s (Flapping with the Socialites?).  No, he was too busy fucking up bulls and getting drunk.  That is the story we know. And that shit is cultivated.  Don't judge; we all do it.  There is the projection we want the world to see, and if you say you don't it, then to quote John Bender, you're a liar too.

This is what struck me about Sean's piece.  He took it further than I think I'd be willing to go.  There was no worrying how it made him look to others, a step and a half beyond vulnerable.  He stood there, naked and ugly, in from of a room full of strangers on Friday, an audience which contained more than a few pretty girls, with no pretense made of hiding his flaws and warts, without giving a rat's fuck about perception.  And he did it for art's sake.  And that, my friends, is bravery.  At least in my world it is.  In fact, it's goddamn heroic.

Then again, maybe I'm getting carried away, since I am in desperate search of a new hero after St. Timmy took such a tumble from his gilded cloud this past Saturday (http://tinyurl.com/8xj435y).  I realize there are probably only about seven people left in the world who haven't seen Jimmy Fallon's Tebowie.  But we're not reinventing the wheel here, and I can think of no better send off for the man who made my morning exercises with Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith such a joy.  

God speed, Tim Tebow.  May your 47.9% completion percentage carry you back to Florida (Jacksonville?) where your unique skill set (capital G goodness, ability to scramble, and retarded-duck-on-crack throwing motion) will be appreciated, as you continue to divide football fans everywhere and provide endless hours of sports talk fodder for years to come.

Interview with Stifled Artist and the Last Christmas, 2001

Gave an interview for Kyrsten Bean at the stifled artist (http://thestifledartist.com/). Kyrsten sought me out after reading some of my work in assorted lowlife journals (and I mean that as the highest compliment), places like Underground Voices (http://www.undergroundvoices.com/) and Railroad Poetry Project (http://railroadpoetryproject.wordpress.com/), where she is currently featured as the Poet of the Month.  Kyrsten and I have been making the rounds together (along with Tom Pitts) in several journals (most of which, interestingly enough, seem to be located in the UK), and she recently read for Lip Service West (where we pledge to feature "at least one Pitts at every reading; this is our promise to you"), performing a rousing, spirited, depressing, yet oddly uplifting piece about life in a rehab, my favorite genre.  You'll see in the interview as I talk about the Beats that one of the things I love best about Kerouac and Co. is the tight-knit, supportive community they formed, a safe enclave where they took care of their own against a cruel and uncaring capitalist world.  Which has been happening of late with Tom, Kyrsten, and me.  I know.  How very meta.

It's always nice when someone reaches out and asks for your opinion because what you write moves them.  I was honored Kyrsten asked, and you'll be able to see all our work (Tom, her, me) next month in PoV (http://www.povmagazine.co.uk/), which I'll be sure to pimp the shit out out of.

In the meantime, here's that interview:

http://thestifledartist.com/2011/12/18/weekly-feature-interview-with-writer-joe-clifford/


*

The holidays always brings it out of me.  It's hard not to get nostalgic when you look at how far you've come. Or maybe "nostalgic" isn't the right word.  But "appreciative" and grateful" don't quite cut it either.  There's a strange mix of fondness and pride that goes with the recollection of the misery of those final few months in SF, waiting for the end to come, waiting while I cashed those phony checks to pay for a few more nights at the Casa Loma, waiting for the dope I'd need to get through another day, waiting with my girlfriend, Becky.  Just killing time...

I wrote a few weeks back about a particularly awful Thanksgiving at a soup kitchen in the Haight (http://tinyurl.com/752fhv3).  I couldn't remember the exact year, or who was actually there with me.  Like so much of that time, that Thanksgiving was a blur (besides the key detail of a nice girl and cigarettes).  When I started writing all this stuff down back in 2002, I was still in the hospital, a long-term dual diagnosis rehab lockdown ward, and the memories would come in flashes and bursts; nothing seemed to be happening on a straight line.  Which I thought might be a cool way to tell the story. (It wasn't.  But what else could I do?  I lacked perspective.)

As the years rolled on by (and we were a long way from jamming in my garage), I thought a chronology would present itself.  It never did.  I'd recall friendships and events that simply couldn't have happened in the order I remembered them.  Which is owed to a combination of the drugs, trauma, and the brain damage/memory loss that is common when you live the way I was living.  At least, that's what the doctors told me.

But the Christmas of 2001, that I remember.

I felt it all coming to a head.  And it would, less than two months later, when I'd find myself 3,000 miles from San Francisco, fresh off a Greyhound, with a warrant out for my arrest, in a strange part of Albany, NY, without shoes, about to jump...

Becky and I had a room at the Casa Loma Hotel, over there on Fillmore, in Hayes Valley.  This was upscale for us, about as good as it got, and a far better option than the Sixth Street, SRO Hotels of Crack Central.  There was a shower that worked down the hall, and relatively little blood on the ceiling.  We could never afford to stay there long.  A whole month cost somewhere around $800.  We easily generated that much income, especially because we'd been doing the check scam for so long, each one of those bogus things coming in at $795 a pop (more than $800 bumped the crime into a much more serious category).  But there's no way people like us were shelling out $800 for a place to live.  Which is kinda like not paying more than $25/hr. for a housecleaner or $20 for a pie nowadays; you may have it, but there is something offensive about forking that much over for goods and services for which you've already set an irrational, arbitrary price.  Which reminds me of something Tom Pitts once said.  I was complaining about the cost of heroin, and Tom laughed. "It wouldn't make a difference if heroin cost a penny, Joe," he said.  "It just means we'd have bigger habits."

But we'd been popped, both Becky and I, for the check scam.  And we'd plead out. 30 days of SWAP.  That's the Sheriff's Work Alternative Program.  All things considered, it was more than a fair deal, considering the money we'd stolen.  But like being incapable of coughing up $800 for a place to stay, we were incapable of showing up at 7 a.m. to sweep the side of the road.  And once we violated the conditions of the deal, we'd be locked up.  In a prison.  A real prison, not county.  I didn't look then like I do now.  I was about 40 lbs. lighter.  The only way you were getting 17-inch biceps out of my arms in those days was if you taped them both together and shook me really hard.  If I were sent to prison, I'd be sold for a deck of playing cards before midnight.

I had to leave the city or I'd be going to jail.  The deadline for this decision was January 1st.

When time is ticking down like that, you become hyper-aware of every moment.  I loved Becky very much.  It was a sick, sad, twisted and desperate love.  (But stalking is still love, and psychos still hurt.)  And I knew I was losing her.  Like I'd lost my wife.  Like I'd lost so many others I'd loved.  And it hurt.

We woke up sick and broke.  And being Christmas Day, well, that's sort of like blogging on the weekend. In the words of Greg Kim: everything shuts down.  There was no scam we were running on Christmas Day.  No CDs or clothes to sell.  No old friends to drop in on and conspire with.  We were stuck, with at least 24 hours more until we could get some game rolling again; and dopesick, emaciated, and hungry is no way to spend the holidays.

I know I tried to call my mom and beg for money ("But, Mom, it's Christmas!"), and there was this rich Russian douche named Andre who almost needed me to score for him (which was always a nice payday).  But neither of these panned out.  All I could do was call my guy, tell him I had money, and refuse to get out of the car until he gave me something.  This wasn't an ideal option since it could only work once, if at all, and the deeper I got into that life, the rougher and meaner the dealers were; and there weren't many left who'd still deal with me.  It was a scorched earth approach.  This last guy I was working with, Paco, he didn't like me much.

When I got in his car and he soon realized I had no money, he began screaming and making like he was reaching for a gun in the backseat.  I wonder if he eventually gave up because he thought I realized he didn't have a gun back there.  But that wasn't it.  At that point, I just didn't care one way or another.

Two outs in the bottom of the 9th, the ol' midget play.

*

I think that's why that particular Christmas sticks with me so hard, why I can still see the off-white, cracked walls, the cans of soup Becky's mother had sent in a care package and which we were forced to open with a screwdriver and eat cold because the clerk downstairs wouldn't let use the microwave in the office; why I can still see the brilliant clear winter blue as I walked along those dead Christmas streets on my way to meet a connection.  Because one way or another, go to prison, clean up, live, die, it didn't matter; that life was ending, and whatever came next could not possibly be worse.

Tom Pitts & Hepatitis Heights Pt. III

Yesterday's post covered being solicited (again) by the awesome folks in England (http://tinyurl.com/8a7eugr).  Ben Turner and Chris Pilkington are starting up a journal over there, PoV (http://www.povmagazine.co.uk/), which stands for Passing Out Victorious.  God, I love the English.  Jack Kerouac used to say the prettiest girls in all the world are English girls.  And I ain't arguing with Jack.  The English seem to like me, women especially.  I remember when I went over there when I was 19, girls used to eye fuck the shit out of me quite often.  But they did so politely, classy.  'Cause, y'know, they're fucking refined and shit.  I was hardly the bastion of self-confidence you see before you today. I think the first time a girl smiled at me in London, I started to cry.

So anyway, super nice guys over there, with obviously awesome taste in art, because they like my work.  The deadline to get in the first issue, whose theme is "street," is today.  Which doesn't give you a lot of time.  But check PoV out, read what they're trying to do, see what their next theme is going to be, and submit something.  You don't get a lot of chances like this, when a magazine is young, its editors excited and anxious to read your work.  Give Ben and Chris a few months of being bogged down by Happy Third Week Anniversary poetry, and they might not be quite so gung-ho.

The best part about being in the inaugural issue of PoV, slated for Mid-January, is that I will, once again, be appearing with my (former?) partner in crime, Tom Pitts. 

This won't be the first time Tom and I will have appeared in the same journal.  It won't even the first time we've been in the same issue.  But maybe it's the "street" theme that makes this one particularly meaningful, since Tom and I, quite literally, lived together on the streets, as in broke-ass homeless, sleeping in stairwells or on benches. 

Ben and Chris asked each of us for an introduction to our stories (we're getting 2 published apiece), and Tom joked, since our work is so incestuous, that perhaps we should each write the other's introduction.  Ben thought it was a great idea.  Here's what I came up with for Tom's:

I met Tom Pitts sometime in the late 1990s at a shooting gallery, on top of a very high hill in San Francisco, called Hepatitis Heights.  In a drug world filled with liars, thieves, and criminals, Tom fast became a rare commodity in my life: a reliable doper.  He was my best friend.  Even then, in the middle of all the junkie bullshit, Tom considered himself a writer.  He used to tote his computer, which contained all his stories, everywhere he went.  But this wasn’t a laptop.  We’re talking a big ol’, straight for the ’80s, bulky-ass desktop.  Tom would drag that computer with its tangle of cords and keys up these giant hills, dopesick, trying to duck the crooks looking to rip him off or the cops looking to drag him in.  I thought he was fucking nuts, but such was his commitment to his art.  He believed even then he’d get out.  I wish I’d shared his faith.  But he was right.  He got out.  We both did.  And he took his stories with him. 

I hope this bromance isn't getting too nauseating for you.  After all, this is hardly the first time I've written about Tom and Hepatitis Heights (http://tinyurl.com/3njp84t; http://tinyurl.com/6wysfq4).  The truth is, I just don't have many friends.  

The other day, I was talking with Justine about someone I know, and she could tell by my tone, I guess, that said individual didn't rate very high on the friendship meter anymore.  Nothing this person did really.  I simply don't hold onto friends very long these days; I don't need people like I used to.  This isn't any grand Facebook declaration about "cleaning up my friends list so write me and say you still love me if you want to stay" bullshit. There's no hidden meaning.  If you think we're friends, we probably are.  What has happened to me, is what happens to most people as they get older.

We have a parenting book we keep in the shitter.  Nice to read parenting books when you are on the can, since most of the info in them is pretty disposable. But this one book has a great line.  I don't think it was the author's intention to make it come out sounding like this, but this particular book comprises little pearls of parental wisdom written by moms and dads in Kansas and shit; they're not going to be worried about syntactical consistency.  It reads, "Toothbrushes are like good old friends --we hate to get rid of them.  But the truth is we should replace them every three months."  And I think that is very good advice.  After three months, most people, like most toothbrushes, have worn out their welcome. People I would've considered myself close to five, six years ago are barely in my life at all these days, and in most instances there was no big falling out, no major event precipitating a break-up; it's more that we're forty-something, with families and individual lives, and it's rather pathetic, I think, to keep meeting up at bars when you are in your 40s, especially when many of your friends are recovering alcoholics, reliving the same four moderately funny things you've done together.  

I don't dislike people, individually.  I simply find most friendships require more work than what I receive back. It's a matter of reciprocity.  I don't want to feel like a friendship is putting me out by asking me to do things. In your 20s, it's a completely different story.  One day I was talking to Gluehead.  I was probably 25 or so, and feeling self-consious (imagine that) that I was asking him for too many favors, so I said something like, "Hey, Glue, I don't ask you for too many favors, do I?"  And Glue, in classic Gluehead response said, "Of course you do.  If we didn't ask each other for favors, what the hell would we talk about?"  

It's not fair, I suppose, to the people I met after my SF drug days, since nobody can measure up to the friends I made during that time, which goes counter intuitive to everything you hear about the friends you make when you are using.  Yeah, you meet some peripheral scammers along the way, but the guys with whom you share the trenches--the Dans, the Big Toms, the Soupys, the Glueheads and Kelpbeds, the Tom Pittses--some deep-seated shit forms.  I'm still friends with those guys today.  As close as I am with Jimmy, Petersen, and Rich, the only real friends I held onto from before I moved to SF in '92.


And I spent more time with Tom Pitts than just about anyone, at least we spent more time together when it mattered most, when I was loneliest and most lost, during the darkest days of my life.  The last couple years of my using, I'd managed to piss off just about everyone, Kelp, Glue--I attacked poor Big Tom one day for not giving me $13 (sorry, Big Tom).  I was pushing everyone away with my stealing and lying, my selfishness and manipulation.  It's not like Tom Pitts was a saint in the city.  

It's just that for some reason we spared one another our worst.  Maybe it was out of sheer necessity that you stay true to at least one person in that lifestyle, that you give him all of your trust, make yourself vulnerable, if only to reaffirm a part of you is still human.  Y'know, sorta like Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi.

*

Tom Pitts and I are both writers these days.  We don't shoot needles full of dreams into our arms anymore.  Cindy is, indeed, on methadone.  We have wives and children, and we both work very hard to get our story out there.  It isn't often when a writer friend of mine has success that I genuinely feel happy for him or her.  I'll say I do, of course, as the little knives of jealousy pang the shit out of my green-with-envy heart.  But with Tom, even when he gets accepted into a magazine that's rejected me, I am truly, truly happy.  I guess because I was there with him in the shelters, and when he had to sleep on the cold metal bed of the truck I'd stolen; because my liver never turned on me like his did on him; because I've been given a few breaks that perhaps I didn't deserve.  I don't know why, exactly.  Maybe I just really like the fucking guy.  I trusted him with my life back then, and I'd trust him with it now.

I'm sure we'll both be pimping the shit out of the issue when it comes out in January.  

Until then, here is Tom's site: http://tom-pitts.blogspot.com/

And PoV's again: http://www.povmagazine.co.uk/

  

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.

Tom Pitts & Hepatitis Heights Pt. II

Got another piece of flash fiction taken today over at my current favorite ezine, Shotgun Honey (http://www.shotgunhoney.net/).  700 words or less.  Their tagline: a blast of fiction to blow your mind.  They published my short story "Chain Reaction" a few months back, which led to my Bullet Award (http://tinyurl.com/44gymlb), a recognition of short crime fiction on the web.  It might not come with a paid fellowship or booth at AWP.  But it gets my name out there and seen by the writers I admire most these days, a list of modern noir's who's who (Todd Robinson, Thomas Pluck, Paul D. Brazill, et al).  When I got the e-mail that SH was taking my latest "Copperhead Canyon," I wrote my former partner-in-crime, best buddy, and fellow aspiring writer, Tom Pitts, who just read (a record third time) for my non-fiction reading series, Lip Service West (where we believe firmly in nepotism), at this year's Litquake Litcrawl.  I usually don't read at these things myself, since I produce the event, but this was a special occasion (http://tinyurl.com/439pp85).  Though I was careful to separate Tom and I.  Like I told the packed house on Saturday, we tell the same story.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that Tom and I were junkies together up at Hepatitis Heights, the decrepit ol' crumbly house high on the hill above SF General. But I always thought of us more like brothers in a shared, trapped misery, like a Billy Joel song (that works on so many levels).

And when I say Tom and I tell the same story, I mean it quite literally.  The story he read on Saturday night involved injecting mice feces, something I myself have done; and if you are finding yourself shaking your head in disbelief, asking why on God's green earth would anyone do that, all I can say is, you'd understand if you lived the way we did.  Not that I'd wish that on anybody.

When I texted Tom that Shotgun was taking another story, he texted back, Congrats, Fuck You.  Tom had been trying to get into that same magazine but no luck.  Until today.  Because he wrote back a few minutes later, saying to never mind the "fuck you"; he'd just got an e-mail from SH telling him they are taking one of his stories, too.  I asked him, Did you ever think all those rotten years when we living up at Hepatitis Heights that some day we'd be clean, have kids, and getting stories published in the same magazine?

This sort of shit never ceases to amaze me.  Like running into someone from your hometown while backpacking through Europe.  It was like when I went back for my 20th high school reunion. I'd see these people I knew all those years ago, especially the girls, only now they were women, with kids and shit, but you could still see that girl inside you were crushing on at 12 (Hi, Anne & Tracy), and I wanted to be ask, Can you believe we're the same people?  But I didn't.  Because they'd think I was as weird as I was when I was 12.  Which I am.  But it's like we traveled in a time machine, or it's some sci-fi alternate universe.  It's a goddamn John Woo film.

Where I am you, and you are me (and who the fuck is that?)  Because so much changes, and yet so much doesn't.

Of course, you have the regret.

I know Tom does.  Just like me.  I hope you'll forgive an old man a little moment of melancholy and nostalgia.

Tom wrote a song a while back with his band, Short Dogs Grow, which was pretty big in the '80s.  The band.  Not so sure about the song.  But I love this title.  Or maybe it's just a line.  "I don't want the money back.  I just want the time."  We wasted a lot of both.  The first time I heard the song was a few years ago at the Eagle, when Short Dogs reunited for this DVD that had just come out, a documentary about the Chatterbox, a punk bar in SF.  I went to see him play with my then-fiance/now wife, Justine.  It was surreal, running into so many old faces, in such an old scene, everything the same yet somehow radically different.

I'm not being overly dramatic when I say I really thought we were both going to die back then.  And the tragedy of that is, it was no big deal.  Like, hey, it might rain later, or we're out of milk.  Oh, well.  Those times have been reduced to a series of anecdotes that both Tom and I tell, ("Hey, remember doing coke with David Bowie's drummer in that motel?"), but each time we tell them, we do so with less conviction, almost out of obligation, like when ex-Army pals get together over beers and reminisce about the old platoon, because, goddammit Charlie Finnegan might've been an asshole, but he was a good man and a fucking patriot.  And in many ways, there lingers this almost PTSD aftereffect.  Whenever something goes wrong these days in my life, however seemingly small, my mind can immediately spiral out of control back to that place.  If I bounce that check, then the bank will close my account, and I'll get a a disease, and eventually it ends with my living back under the bridge.

Not that I actually ever lived under a bridge.  That's just a euphemism.  Though I doubt it could've been worse than that shitburg on the hill.  No running water. Overstuffed black trash bags, reeking in the hall, because garbage men long ago stopped collecting our garbage.  Which is what happens when you don't pay the bill.  We didn't pay any bills.  We didn't pay rent, either.  We squatted, even if we couldn't actually take a shit in the house, fucking toilet so clogged with Lord only knows what.  We'd have to walk all the way down to the hospital to use a bathroom. The place was crawling with mice. They'd get in your hair, in your clothes when you slept.  There was always some ex con du jour crashing there, and as reprehensible as some of the people I'd hang out with, they were seldom dangerous. But you'd get these monsters just released from San Quentin, who'd come up there, beat the shit out of anyone holding, maybe rape a girl, y'know, a typical Wednesday.  And this was my home.  All I really had was Tom, who'd disappear for long stretches at a time, but he'd always come back.  Like a Yo-Yo. Or a foot fungus.

I remember I'd find Tom, holed in the corner on this beat-up desktop computer he hauled around with him everywhere he went, which contained all his stories, furiously typing away. Made no sense to me at the time.  I still played music, but I'd long given up on its being anything more than a hobby.  My life was scamming, stealing, scoring, repeat.  But I think Tom actually believed he'd get out one day, and that he would be a writer.

When I cleaned up and got my degrees, I was far from San Francisco.  I just assumed that like Junkie Jason and so many others, Tom was probably dead. The odds were certainly against both of us making it out of there.  That's what he said when I finally tracked him down (and I do mean "tracked"...).  I got his email address and typed him a message, something like "This is Joe from Hepatitis Heights."  He wrote back, "Oh, I see you made it out too."

Now we both have families, kids, and are getting stories published in the same magazines.  Life is some trippy ass shit.  But it sure is a nice feeling to know we both made it home.  So here's to my brother from another mother...

I'm Big in Japan

In our quest to decipher (i.e., manipulate) the demographics of who actually visits this blog, I finally got around to using the "stats" feature on blogspot, which breaks down things like Audience and Traffic Sources, which keywords are searched, all URLs leading here.  Pretty interesting stuff.  There's the shit I already knew, like that there were about 5,000 visits to this blog last month.  But lots more I didn't know. Like, for instance, do you know that after the United States, the country that visits Candy and Cigarettes the most is...Slovenia?  No shit.  Fucking Slovenia.  Now I am not above admitting that I had to Google "Slovenia" to find out where the fuck it is (it's near Austria).  The next on the list is Malaysia, followed closely by Germany. I know where those two are, but can't answer why more people from Slovenia, Malaysia, and Germany visit this blog than, say, folks from England.  (Or France.  I love the French, but they are behind Romania, Denmark and the fucking Philippines, this despite my second honeymoon's being in Paris, where the French woman eye-fucked the shit out of me.)  Not that I am not appreciative to the good people of Slovenia, Malaysia, and Germany.  I just wish I knew I knew more about these countries.  I mean, I get why Germans would love me so much; they are known for their melodic music, and terrific senses of humor. But I'm lost when it comes to the other two.

So let's break this shit down and go to where all the reliable info resides these days: Wikipedia.

Starting with Malaysia, I see there is lots of stuff about its history and government, with names I find hard to pronounce, and it's over there by China.  All very cool. But this doesn't really tell me why the Malaysians would be so keen on C&C.  Until I read about Malaysia's abundant wildlife, which comprises a lot of monkeys.  Now I get it.  Monkeys, as you know, are featured fairly predominantly on this blog, and they played an integral role in the original version of my memoir (back when the plot revolved around six very tiny monkeys in a Pinto on a mission to assassinate God while visiting the world's smallest cultural attractions.  And, no, surprisingly, that version never found representation).  Also, there's this:

  
I post a lot of Kids in the Hall clips.  'Cause KITH is fucking funny.  And it makes Jimmy laugh.  And, well, some say the sound of Jimmy laughing is better than a whole bunch of kids in a patch of sunflowers on a summer day.  Plus, Malaysia's flag looks a lot like ours:

But instead of lots of twinkling stars they have, like, only one, so it's less threatening to freedom.  (They also have a moon.  But it's only a quarter.)

But what's my appeal in Slovenia?  At first I didn't have a fucking clue.  Their flag don't look nothing like ours, even if they "technically" switched to "democracy" in "198" "7".)  Even though I can't pronounce any of the city names, I see they have the "highest GDP per capita of new members in the European state." That's sorta cool.  I guess.  And there are bottlenose dolphins along its shore, and everyone likes a dolphin.  Still, why would Slovenians be the second highest traffic source after the U.S.?  Then it hits me...Jimmy!

Jimmy Soyka is, like, the co-star of this blog (I won't say "Robin" to my "Batman," because nobody wants to be Robin.  So let's go with the Pitt to my Clooney). Jimmy helps me with my stories, supplying plot ideas, moral support, and editorial suggestions.  I am not sure he is actually Slovak.  But Soyka sounds like it'd probably be from over there, somewhere.

So let's raise a hot piping mug of bujta repa to our Slovak friends, and say, Thanks for reading!

There are other interesting tidbits to be culled from he stats page, like the Keywords that get people to this site, whatever people type into the various search engines that ultimately deliver them to this blog.  The most popular (and obvious) is "candy and cigarettes."  This tells us that people probably know or have heard about this site but don't have the URL.  Good to know.  The next most popular search words are "breaking bad very long wait netflix," no doubt in reference to this post (http://tinyurl.com/3nklrwf), in which I correspond with Netflix for making me wait for my Breaking Bad discs.  Kinda helpful.  Other keywords are "tom pitts san francisco," "heather richotte," and "80s popular candy that isn't around anymore."  I can understand these.  Tom is my best buddy out here, and I went to school with Heather at Berlin High, and lots of folks from Berlin read this (that's Berlin, CT, not Germany...oh, wait), and who doesn't remember those delightful candy cigarettes? ("Look, Grandma, I'm smoking two packs a day, just like you!").  Not sure how I can use this information to my advantage, except to write more about Tom and Heather and maybe start smoking again.

The next most popular keyword(s) is..."candy zoo solo fuck animals."

Don't ask me.