Caretakers

The was a guy I worked for in high school that looked out for me. When the first group of guys wanted to take me on a snipe hunt, he nixed it. (Later, I'd be took but it left me stranded within walking distance of my house. With these guys on the south end of town, I'd have been miles from home. And I'd have to face them the next time I went to work.) There also was an older car hop that was ready to eat me alive, and he nixed that as well.
I was sixteen and would have been taken for another kind of ride than the one I went on.
After I was having emotional and sexual problems after my break-up with the first ex- at nineteen., he was the one that listened. Recently found him on Facebook. He did make the best Biscuits & Gravy and Strawberry Pie. 
It's nice to know that there's always some place in the world that you can go for a job if you need one. But I don't think fry cook wages are still very good.  When I was over on campus, someone wanted to know how I handled so much so easily. I told them everything I learned, I learned working the order ticket wheel at the A & W Drive In. First in, first out. Wrangle five at once in increments.

What birds used to do in Southern Indiana

Fires

After the run down apartment building in west L.A., we ran off to Venice Beach. Found a studio apartment on the second floor in the back on the alley that was 1/2 block up from the boardwalk. I've mentioned it before in talking about coming downstairs in response to a scream to encounter the masked guy with a gun running out. We awake one morning to find that someone had walked the length of the alley behind where we lived and set fire to all of the dumpsters. A bunch of us ran out with buckets and hoses and put them all out.

Last One For A While

They didn't look like this. I was staying home with the kids, working part time here and there or at home. Took in other kids for "Camp Dan" summer and after school. There was a classmate of the twins that loved to come to our house. Mostly cause he could copy his homework from my son and there was company and kids to play with. He became a regular. The Mom worked and the Dad was off somewhere else in the world. He finally showed after a year and she took him in. There were fights and he drank and didn't work and so she and the boy moved out and in with us for a while. It was actually kind of fun. We ate dinner together around the communal table. Then after a few weeks they made up and she moved back in with him and we never saw them again. "He" didn't want them to be exposed to our influence. We had done school stuff and scouts and soccer and generally had fun. She ran into a mutual friend that was part of our group and she broke down and cried, saying she really missed all of us. The boy showed at one of my son's basketball games at the park in middle school and apparently bad mouthed my son and his team the whole time. This I heard second hand. The kid wouldn't even come say hello to any of us. Mexico Mike had met the kid at one point and wondered if he was a alcoholic in the making.

You want to wish folks well.

I think they were the last of the squatters. We're sort of a safe house for the younger set, all of the kids friends feel welcome here and pretty much can come and go as we don;t pass judgement and we would always have 'em around instead of 'em out roaming the streets. You can stay up all night at my house and sleep until three.

Been There Myself

I took a three week vacation once -all at once. My girl friend at the time didn't want to go with me. I was heading back to New Orleans to see all of my friends there and then driving up to Tennessee to see a friend and his wife and then to my brother's house and then to my Mom's house in Missouri. The girl friend didn't want to come because she didn't want to meet my family. I knew what was coming. We had already broken up and had gotten back together a couple of times. I got to New Orleans and stayed with Lana and hooked up with Jan and Cary and got to have breakfast with Fred. I was hoping one of the two women there that I felt something for might adopt me and keep me, but it didn't happen. So off I went to Tennessee where I drank too much homemade wine and got sick and went on to my brother's where I was a hit,cause I brought New Orleans sweatshirts to the teenagers in the house and it was there that I got the call. She had slept with so and so in my absence. She didn't know what we were doing any more. I knew what we were doing before I left. So I went off on a Greyhound to Missouri- the lousiest bus ride of my life.  

We all are refugees. This is my favorite song of late:

More Refugees

http://mexicomike.com/blogmexico/

I

I shouldn't give him a plug here, but he does fit the category. I had a little apartment in Venice, but was spending my weekends in Santa Monica at a lady friend's apartment. So when he asked to come visit, it didn't seem such a big deal. But, he didn't have any money. So he stayed about a month, I fed him. He cleaned the grout in my shower. He took off, I forget where, probably to Mexico and left his computer with me until he got settled again. I eventually shipped it back to him in Texas. I knew him from New Orleans when we were kids. We drank and chased women. I was in love with his wife. One of those things, you just let go of after a while when it becomes apparent its just a one way street. (He came back again when got hired by "Road Rules" as the Mexico guide, but this time he had some money and thought he was going to start a Hollywood career. Some woman came and got him to take him back to Texas again.)

I get to plug my poetry site now, cause there's a poem there:

http://murderer.us/MexicoMike/index.htm

Other Refugees

I don't know if the Sikh mom ever got to keep her child or what happened to her. There was another hapless soul that ended up on my floor later. I was out in the world in my-mid thirties and divorced and climbing back stairs in several different places around the city. One of the ladies I knew and had an ill-timed relationship with and was just friends with had another ill-timed lover show up on her door step. The stranger was a cute little blonde from Sweden, who had fallen madly in love with my lady friend during her last trip to Europe. And she was so smitten, that she threw everything aside to follow my friend to LA. My lady friend didn't want her (I don't think she was out to her parents about bi-nature and couldn't deal with the introductions, it was also apparent that, for my friend, this had only been a fling. So the cute stranger came to stay with me for a couple of weeks. We played a lot of Go. She moaned about her love for the lady in question. She finally realized that she was being rejected, and so went up to San Francisco to try to find work and figure out what was next. She had a couple of other friends up there. I gave her my daughter's Social Security card to use. About a year later, she mailed it back to me with a note and said she was going back to Europe. I never beat her at Go.

Famous Banjos

Thomas Hope
Still Life with Banjo   1860s

Random Things

During the time in Tucson, the ex- became involved with the community of Sikhs again. She began wearing the white outfit and going to morning yoga (which really was a form of morning mass for these folks.) There was a lady who had just had a baby and was living in the ashram. I can't remember where the husband/father was. Maybe he wasn't around or off in India studying or maybe he had no backbone and was hiding. Anyway, the lady became close with my ex- and she was over to the house a bit. This is a picture of her and her baby with my older daughter checking it out. The powers that be at the ashram decided that she wasn't a fir mother- not sure why and they threatened to take her baby away from her, so she came to stay at our house rather than let that happen. The ashram folks were afraid of me, since I'm such a big guy, but I also told the guy that showed up to take her back, that I would beat the shit out him if he touched her or her baby. I had a temper then, particularly when riled up for the underdog. They let her be. She stayed with us about two weeks. Then the ashram changed its mind and decided they wouldn't try to separate her and her child, so she felt all right about going back.

More and more apartments

We ran off from Burbank and settled in the women's house in West Los Angeles and I rode the bus to the hotel downtown every day and the ex- found a job and my daughter was put into a Sikh daycare and we all got sick with hepatitis and then my daughter came down with meningitis and was at Cedars, and survived. The house fell apart, with the women all going off in different directions. I landed a job managing an apartment building about a quarter mile away near La Cienega & Venice. I'm currently writing a play set in the building. There was a real pimp upstairs who ran his girls over on La Cienega. A cyclist (racer) recovering from a major bike crash and had multiple screws in his leg and hip. A fired old manager and his girl friend who were being evicted but in LA that took years. A bitchy little building owner that was as cheap as Scrooge. A handy man that broke things. And tenants that were all low rent and alcoholics and who had fights in the courtyard. There was a swimming pool filled with dirt and a couple of plants stuck in it. We had nothing, no furniture, no nothing, no money. The gas kept getting shut off for non-payment. You've not lived until you've had to take an ice cold shower in the morning. The ex- started fights with the tenants. And refused to accept rents if I wasn't there. She ran one of our cats off in a rage and I never did find him. We finally moved out near the boardwalk in Venice, because it was cheaper and less hassles.     

Still Unclear on the Concept

First I got this:

Dan McNay

mcnay@usc.edu 

19 October 2010

Dear Dan

Thank you for sending us your manuscript, The Truth About Treasure Island. Our process is to send all manuscripts to professional readers for a thorough assessment. As we receive a large number of submissions, this assessment process takes anywhere between two and four months. We will be in touch as soon as possible.

We appreciate your patience.

Yours sincerely

Caitlyn Ellwood

Production Assistant

Random House New Zealand

Phone: 09 444 7197

Fax: 09 441 2714

www.randomhouse.co.nz

Then I got this:

Dan McNay

mcnay@usc.edu

21 October 2010

Dear Dan

On 19 October, you may have received the following email from Caitlyn Ellwood, a new staff member at Random House New Zealand.

‘Thank you for sending us your manuscript, The Truth About Treasure Island. Our process is to send all manuscripts to professional readers for a thorough assessment. As we receive a large number of submissions, this assessment process takes anywhere between two and four months. We will be in touch as soon as possible.

Unfortunately this email was sent in error and should therefore be ignored. My sincere apologies for any confusion its receipt may have caused.

Yours sincerely

Nicola Legat

Publishing Director

So I wrote them:

From: Dan Mc Nay [mailto:mcnay@usc.edu]
Sent: Friday, 22 October 2010 4:49 AM
To: Lipshaw, Stuart
Subject: Re: Apology

Dear Folks,

Now I'm confused. You send me an email from Stuart Lipshaw and its signed
Nicola Legat. And tell me a previous email I received was in error. What does
that mean? You did not get my submission? You are not reviewing it? You are
not sending it anywhere for evaluation? You don't want to tell me anything?

I'd appreciate some clarification.

Thanks

Dan McNay

Then I got this: 

Dear Dan,

I'll do my best here to answer your questions one-by-one.

The apology message was written by Nicola, who is our publishing director,
however as I have been managing the manuscript submissions until last week,
it is my inbox which is linked to all the submissions, thus the email was
sent from my account.

The message you received earlier in the week from Caitlyn was an
administration error whereby acknowledgement emails were sent out to people
whose manuscripts have already been received a long time prior. This was
human error which has created confusion and we apologise for that.

We did receive your submission in May, and as I recall, I contacted you to
suggest you try other publishers as your manuscript did not fit our list
because of the lack of New Zealand content. That advice still stands and I do
wish you the best of luck with publication.

Apologies once again for the confusion,

Sincerely,
Stuart Lipshaw

I had posted his response to me in May. They didn't want to look at the book because it was set in Samoa and I had a return address outside of New Zealand. I was turned down by two other New Zealand idiots for the same reason. Take a look at Random House New Zealand's web site http://www.randomhouse.co.nz/Fiction_11.aspx and tell me who the New Zealand authors are and which books are set in New Zealand. 


Same ole same ole

More & More Apartments

My ex had come to Los Angeles to work as a Sikh au pair for a rich follower of the religion who wanted a vegetarian cook with motherhood experience to assist her with her new baby. She brought our daughter along.
It was going well, and she thought she could make a career of it. I was exhausted in Tucson, so I gave up again at school. Put our things in storage and flew to LA with two cats in carriers. I stayed with my sister and her boy friend in Burbank. They didn't care too much for the cats. I found work right away at The Bonaventure Hotel downtown and then quickly moved into an apartment in Burbank near my sister. My sister didn't like the Sikh thing too much either. the ex and my daughter moved in there. It was a very noisy apartment building. Next door was a Cuban with a big Cuban flag over his front window. When I knocked on his door one evening to ask him to turn his music down, he told me that he would kill me if I ever knocked on his door again. Underneath us was a large Armenian family with about 12 kids. I actually became friendly with them and would sit out in the courtyard below and share espresso with them after dinner.
The ex's job died and she couldn't find another (she was dressing as a Sikh, she had started in Tucson) and we had no furniture, no household items, etc. My sister and her boyfriend came over once and then I didn't see her again for three years.
The women's ashram where my ex had been staying invited us to move into the house in West LA because the needed help with the rent. They must have been desperate, because I was still smoking cigarettes and ate meat. I agreed to go out back to the alley, if I wanted a cigarette.

I Made Them Dot Their "I"s and Cross Their "T"s

What does heaven look like to the clerks of the world? I recently had to call one over on main campus because a graduate student had flown to a conference in Singapore (on a foreign airline) and even though she and my person had submitted the justifications for using a Non-American Airline (Fly American Memo, that you have missed no doubt) all the paperwork was returned because we did not identify what the class "K" meant on the ticket stub. We were required to get an email from USC's contract travel agent explaining that "K" meant economy class. All of this is on your dime, government money awarded to USC for research. Out here we're shooting lasers at living cells to see what that does.

The same kind of Memo once instructed a certain kingdom in a far away land long long ago that they had to buy American manufactured vehicles. So they started leasing vehicles instead.

Would he (the guy above) really want an epitaph that expressed his real relationship with the world?

"If I need to meet with someone in Disbursement Control for assistance, when can I visit?Disbursement Control & Accounts Payable has daily walk-in office hours from 2:30 pm - 4:30 pm. Appointments are also available by calling (213) 740-9794."  -quote from the web site of the same department that I had to call for guidance on the "K" issue. Did I call during the correct hours? I don't think I did. What happens if you show up in the morning with a problem? Will they make you come back? Is this really the DMV?

"On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." The mythical W.C. Fields marker is more my style.

Who would encourage the worker bees of the world to treat the "K" question as a serious one? Me thinks I know them too well and have worked for them. A government auditor would certainly question "K" if anyone could find it. Years and years of government audits regarding spending of government money and no one ever asked to look at grad students reimbursable travel expenses?

Gee, there will be a first time, right?

Senility In Setting In

I brought the dry-cleaning from the cleaners into the bedroom on Saturday, put away my clothes and left the one pair of my wife's pants on the bed for her. She apparently came in, thought they were mine and hung them in my closet. This morning, she can't find her pants. Monday morning, I pull a pair dress pants out and roll them up and put them in my backpack, since I ride my bike to work. This morning, I drove her to the bus and drove the car to the mechanic and pulled my bike out of the back and rode the rest of the way in. I go to get dressed when I reach the office and discover I have a nice pair of capris to wear if I want. I'm hanging out in my bike shorts today. Where are those Traveling Pants from the book and movie that fit all?

Things We Collect- More than you could image

I am a genre book collector. I collect books on inland water travel, mostly non-fiction. I didn't start out thinking, oh boy, river travel! I read a book called "Drifting" by Stephen Jones in my early twenties and loved the book. I've read almost everything Jones has written. And just started randomly picking up a book here and a book there. The are the classics: Life On The Mississippi, A Week On The Concord & Merrimac Rivers, and lots of other interesting things. Its a bit of a random nonsensical hobby that takes you to odd places and odd times and odd voices. Just finished "Floating Island" by Emily Kimbrough (1968) and "Houseboat on the Seine" by William Wharton (1996). The first is a dated humorous account of a a trip on a river barge down the Seine and canals with a group of obviously middle-aged American sightseer types in the sixties. The book opens with the women complaining that they would have to wear slacks out of necessity on the trip.

The Wharton book is a history of his family's houseboat which he and his family lived in in Paris for a good portion of his later life. If you want to learn about houseboat maintenance and upgrade- this the book.

Neither were quite what I expected, but both entertained and made you smile.

She looks just as you would expect for the time. She also was the co-author, with Cornelia Otis Skinner, of ''Our Hearts Were Young and Gay,'' which was made into a movie. And she wrote for "Ladies Home Journal" (of course) and had a humorous radio program.

Wharton was a painter, his real name was Albert William Du Aime.

He lived on the river for years. At one point, after graduating from UCLA, he taught art in the LAUSD school system before running off to France.

Tucson and U of A

Bad picture, but you get the idea. This is perhaps the end of the houses where I have lived series. The next step takes you to the woman's ashram in west LA which I have already written about. But there was a weird apartment in Burbank before that, let me think about that one. Anyway, we went to Tucson. It was hard. We found a fixer-uper that I understood that we were getting a reduced rate for me doing repairs and upgrades, but it turned out that they were raising the rent when school (U of A) started just like everyone else in the area did. No one had told us. We moved and I took the owner to small claims court to try to get some of our money back  and discovered after the court case that the owner was the Judge's daughter-in-law. I knew where they lived- which was only a few blocks from our new house. I went to spy and they had a huge front window covered by this plastic stuff that won't let you look in.

It prompted this:

http://murderer.us/Anger/index.htm

It was an all right place. But Cynthia got back into being a Sihk and she couldn't hold down a job and I ended up working seven days a week and trying to go to school and by the end of the stay, I was very very tired.

Drugs I have known

A bunch of us guys that worked at the A & W Drive-in on the south in of town would tell our respective parents that we were staying over night at so and so's house and then we would go camp out at a place called Shit Creek south of town and drink and smoke. Two of the guys could drive. The first night I joined them, I wandered off and sat in the end of a large drainage pipe that ran under a road and spent several hours hallucinating things that were coming in the other end of the pipe. The changing moonlight made interesting things. This, I assumed, was not your homegrown stuff. Back then they were lacing it with chemicals.

Don't try this at home.

We were actually stopped by the cops that night on our way to the camping spot. The guy that was holding, jumped in the bushes and disappeared and left us to explain to the cops why one of us had to run away. We weren't drunk or stoned yet, so they let us go. It was a different time then and a small town. These were good ole boys, who had done what we were doing.

Well, I started out looking for a picture of a house in Tucson

This was the hotel where I worked during most of my stay in Tucson. This was where the guy came in one night and tried to rob me with a stick. (The night after a liquor store clerk had been killed by a guy with a stick.)
http://murderer.us/HoldUpMan/index.htm  Click here if you want the poetic version. I still have bite scars on one arm. They hired a Security Guard after that (Wally) - he got beat up one night in the parking lot when he tried to stop a guy from breaking into cars. He carried mace, but it didn't do much. We also found a drunk on his ass priest in the parking lot one night and after figuring out what room he belonged to, Wally and I carried him most of the way and got him into his bed. (It was better than have him sleeping on the floor of the lobby and throwing up there.

The owner used to bring me cash and I would run a room through to John Doe and go open the patio door to the room and leave the room key on the dresser. We weren't supposed to go look.

I taught Wally how to do my job, and he took it when I left for LA. He had been a guard the Tucson County Jail before coming to the hotel, but quit because it was horrible working conditions.

Several years later, I drove back with a van and a couple of friends to get my stuff out of storage that my ex-wife and I had left there. The ex-wife was in Texas by then. We had a fine old time. Drank way too much, got my room comped by the owner, had to cut the lock off the storage room, skinny-dipped in the hotel jacuzzi with champagne in the middle of a summer rain shower at midnight (don't tell my kids), got coaxed by my buddies to go to a strip joint for the first time in my life and then had to put them to bed because they couldn't hold their tequila.

Wally and I and the weekend relief auditor used to play chess waiting for the dawn. I helped the weekend relief auditor study for his CPA exam, which he passed.

Tucson at night-

All Those Houses in San Fran

There were only three, but it was such a big big big deal. We inherited an apartment on Geary near the Haight that was great. My friend Tom had it before he and the girl friend took off on their around the world trip. There were paint spots on the floor where he painted. It was on the second floor and had big bay windows. The wife was working graveyard at the St. Francis and I was working days at B. Dalton (trying to get back into the book business) She started an argument with the landlord because he was doing yard work behind the apartment during the day (the only time he had to do it because he was a fireman that worked swing shift) Anyway we had to move because she couldn't sleep. We ended up moving way out down south to a fixer upper that they were giving us a discount on for fixing it up. But it was endless work. And too far away and bus ride with the hommies was horrendous. So then we found a 5th story apartment just above the hotel below Nob Hill that finally worked out. The building was old and had thick walls and there were only two apartments per floor. By that time I was working graveyard at the hotel because we needed more money, the wife was pregnant and working swing shift. The radiator heat made it a bit moist in the winter, but all in all it was ok. The baby came and I got a second job, so I was never home anyway. There were some good times taking the baby out in the stroller around the city. I wrote and never hardly saw anyone. Didn't really ever make very many friends in SF. Walked around the city through the night on my two days off. Worked at a second hotel and then at a bookstore for a while. Remember Cindy coming to the B. Dalton to tell me she was pregnant. The three midwife angels (that is a story in itself, we tried for a home birth- there was a 'married threesome' - two women and a guy that were midwives and who were with us in that apartment above the hotel on Sutter until it was very clear we had to go to the hospital and then took us and stayed with there) - I lost that train of thought- anyway, they were taking shifts with her at the apartment, trying to convince me to nap, when I was washing dishes.

I still love the city- wish it had been more than it was. I got convinced I should go back to school and off we went again.

Blatant Plug

http://boulevardmusic.com/livemusic/195.html
Come around and see us try again. Hope we sound a little better than these guys

I forgot the raccoons

I forgot the raccoons. My upstairs room in the house had a skylight and on my days off when I tried to have two normal days and nights like the rest of the world, I'd got to bed early and the two that would cavort in my skylight to warm themselves in the early morning sun would wake me up with their scratching and fooling around. I didn't hear them on the days I slept until noon. There was also deer in yard of the school just below our house that would stare at me as I rode my bike home at midnight.

And the Gilroy Radio Station at 3:00 am:

Gilroy Remembers Zany Radio Station With Co-founder's Death

Jun 1, 2007
 By

Gilroy - With the death of Laura Ellen Hopper, co-founder of Gilroy's cultish country station KFAT and its later Watsonville successor KPIG, Gilroyans are tuning their memories to a time when song and talk that defied convention issued from a tiny office on Monterey Street.

Hopper died Monday, a mere two weeks after the 57-year-old woman was diagnosed with cancer. Thursday, lifelong Gilroy resident Phil Lombardo was listening to KPIG tributes to the low-key DJ whose business savvy propelled KPIG to commercial success - success that eluded KFAT, its free-form Gilroy predecessor. Lombardo recalled the station's Gilroy days fondly.

"It was off-the-wall," said Lombardo, turning down his radio. "The sort of thing the FCC would look down on. Characters you wouldn't hear on any other radio station. People that normally wouldn't have gotten any recognition came to KFAT radio. It was a kick in the butt."

When the station landed in Gilroy in 1975, it replaced the lowest-powered radio station in North America - "a Gilroy station you couldn't get in Gilroy," former DJ Gordy Broshear once said, according to KFAT archivist Barry Porter. Originally, KFAT broadcast 20-minute songsets, unknown country singers and cornball classics such as Utah Phillips' "Moose Turd Pie" from an office above the downtown Vacuum Center, proudly proclaiming its place in "the Garlic Capital of the World," Porter said.

"KFAT put Gilroy on the map," said Porter. "That and garlic was Gilroy's claim to fame."

A few blocks from KFAT's first home, at Porcella's Musical Instruments and Accessories, owner Dave Porcella remembered KFAT's outlaw spirit. Between country-western, zydeco and blues, KFAT DJs played farcical tracks, sometimes with blue language that furrowed more conservative brows. Whiskey and brawling were just part of the fun, added Porcella, recalling some KFAT DJs who passed out, drunk, on top of their turntables. Porcella still owns a KFAT T-shirt, and a set of speakers emblazoned with a KFAT sticker.

Now, as listeners mourn Hopper across the Bay Area, Lombardo is awash with KFAT memories, his ear glued to the station. Porcella, too, is nostalgic.

"It meant a lot, and when they closed up, it was like a big part of Gilroy -" Porcella paused. "The soul had left."

Pacific Grove House

For a little while my friend from the boarding house and I and another guy shared a little house up on the top of the hill in Pacific Grove. Tim finished a little room off the living room and had that and the living room to use as he wanted. The other guy had a room next to the front door that was either a dining room/study kind of room and I had the upstairs bedroom and paid the most money. We had a little kitchen and a patio our front. I worked 3 to 11 at the hotel as a bellman and rode an old bicycle home at midnight and then would stay up all night to write the book I was working on and would go to sleep at 4 or 5 in the morning. I didn't hardly see anyone with that schedule. It turns out that guy below me was gay (which I knew from the beginning) but Tim was bi and having a off and on thing with him. Tim played the Vibes and I would be writing at 1:00 in the morning and find the jazz floating upstairs to my pen. My future wife appeared one day- she was a friend of the gay guy and had just moved back to Monterey from Arizona. She and Tim hated each other on sight. Relations got real strained as I became involved with her and she was around the house more. Eventually, she and I found an apartment to share, and I moved out. I've often wondered what happened to the two guys. I finished my first novel in that house.

No Time To Write- Enjoy these guys

Boarding Houses

This is fitting. I went for a look for pictures of boarding houses and found this. Thomas Wolfe's mother: Julie E. Wolfe (Eliza Gant in Wolfe’s books), abandoned her husband and somewhat the rest of the family to run a busy boarding house.

Most of the ones I lived in looked a lot like this one. This one is better kept up since its now a monument to another very tall guy. Wolfe was my height.

The first one I moved into was in Bloomington- straight from my mother's house- it didn't have a caretaker living there. It was about four blocks from the restaurant where I worked. Had two floors and communal kitchen and bathroom per floor. Lots of music students. An opera singer right over me who would sing all day long on the weekends and sometimes late at night if she had company. I had an air-tight plastic pickle barrel to put my socks in at the end of my work shift because they smelled so bad. I had to shampoo the rug to get my deposit back when I moved out. There was a second one I was briefly in before I got married that had cheaper rent cause I was trying to save money.

When I came back to Bloomington, I was back in one for a little while and then shared apartments and trailers for a while and then was back in one again before I left for New Orleans. I've already described the places in New Orleans earlier here.

When I got to Monterey in '76, I found another one up the hill from Cannery Row. It was ok. The upstairs bath had no water pressure so you had to get up early to beat the morning rush and shower downstairs. I met Tim there. He was a jazz musician and a painter. We spent an evening painting an abstract painting from the crack on the wall of his room. He found a house in Pacific Grove that he and I another guy could share.

                                                                          Lauren Bacall's Boarding House 
I had always imagined when I was young that I might some day end up back in one of these. Fred, my friend that worked at the bookstore in New Orleans lived the end of his life in one I think. Sort of like John Wayne in "The Shootist" Not so sure that will happen now, since I have an abundance of family.

To Utah

There were a couple of boarding houses between the subdivision and northern Utah, but I thought I'd do a whole riff on those. We had a little house outside of Logan. I looked like this except it was white. We had very little furniture and didn't really unpack a lot of the boxes we brought. I brought all of my books. I thought we were going to live there a while. Marti decided to bred the Miniature Schnauzer and we had puppies by winter. They all broke out of the pen or were stolen and so the money making scheme didn't work. I think they were stolen. I walked and walked out across the fields covered with snow and found absolutely no trace of them.

Before it snowed, the grew hay around us and harvested it two or three times. I had a major allergic reaction, the only time I was ever in pain from hay. I also lost a whole lot of weight, because I was told I was eating too much and we couldn't afford that much money for food.

After the snow came in September, our truck started not starting in the cold mornings and our neighbor had to pull us out to get us going. Marti, it turned out didn't finish her requirements for her BA from I.U. and so the job with the Logan Park & Rec never happened and she ended up waiting tables again. I changed me major to Allied Arts Ed because I was convinced that there were too many English teachers in the world, but I was lousy at Shop and Woodworking and probably wouldn't have done it anyway. I worked 12 different jobs in eight months.

The whole thing was a big mistake. We moved into town in the last few months there, but it didn't help matters any. We rented a spare room to a girl that didn't pay her rent and then moved out.

I did climb Mt. Logan. I did have my consciousness raised by going to encounter groups at the school. Did begin to learn about self acceptance which really took me another ten years before it began to sink in. Probably would have done all that anyway, where ever I was. Except for Mt. Logan. There was a girl that I was supposed to meet in NYC the following year, but it never happened. Anna is still in Utah.

The Boring Subdivision

I sort of lied. A fifteen minute walk from my boring subdivision was a state forest. It looked a lot like this in the spring. We captured hibernating turtles and sold them around the neighborhood. A friend I went bow hunting and came back with squirrel. I built a tree house out in the middle of no where where no one but me went and spent hours out there one summer reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. There was a tree nursery in the opposite direction that had a wild duck pond. A half hour walk took you down to Griffy Lake.  

Subdivision

After the divorce and my Mom got some money, she bought a little three bedroom house outside of town in a little subdivision. We rode the bus to school, it would pick us up at the entrance of the whole neighborhood, so we had a ten minute walk down there and home in the afternoon. All the kids knew each other. There were a lot of little trees, because they had all been planted in the last three years and no bushes yet to speak of. A lot of the fathers would spend their weekends working on their houses. One boy's Dad had built their house from scratch. It was boring there. Very little to do. In the summer time, before I could drive, I would walk into town which would take about a half hour. The front windows of every house were lit by the glow of television sets in the evenings. A friend of mine and I thought it looked like some ghostly horror movie. There weren't real people there any more. just a ghostly glow of spirits that couldn't go on. I was out of there as soon as I could get.

Transition Homes

It didn't look like this and there was no motor boat out front. It was about this size in a little neighborhood near the high school. It was a rental. I was with my mother the day we went to look at it. We had to find something quick. I had the golfer's hat that I wore to annoy my brother. (He had started wearing one- a little straw hat with a tee in the brim and I had got one to copy him and so he couldn't wear it any more. It was a 60s thing.You wore it on the back of your head.)

When we went in, I took off the hat and carried it in my hand as we walked through. When we were through, my mother said she wanted to rent it. The guy said 'well, I never rent to divorced women, but the fact that your son took his hat off when he entered the house, I figure you are all right.' So this doesn't end the story.
My Mom wasn't stupid or all that much of a wilting flower. She still had keys to the house that we had been ran out of. She knew he was still going to work in Indianapolis every day. She hired a mover to show up at the house at 9:00 and had them empty everything out and put it into our new rental. I would have loved to see his face when he got home from work that day. Of course then he began stalking her. I remember her running in and locking the door behind her, because he had waited for her to get off work and had followed her home. She didn't know where else to go and was afraid he would try to hurt her if he got her alone somewhere. A Restraining Order got rid of him.

Short Stays

When we were awakened at 4:00 in the morning and told to pack a bag, my brother and sister and I grabbed a few things and loaded them into the back of a taxi with my mother's suitcase and we went to my Great Grandmother's house and moved in with her. I think I was 11 or 12. My Great Grandmother was very old and lived alone in a little house like this. It only had a central potbelly wood burning stove in the living room. There was a big stack of wood out back. My Great Grandmother had outlived her husband and her daughter (my Grandmother). She didn't outlive us. The strain of three kids running around the house did her in. She had a stroke and died while we were there. My brother liked the doctor's Cobra. He bought one later. Of course, when she died the house was left to my father, so we had to move again.