'Round The Block Balladeer

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Journeys 1974

Journeys - 1974

I was in New Orleans, living in a boarding house room on Rampart and working at a printing company on the streetcar line out past Canal Street. I thought I wanted to be a printer, so I was entry level, cleaning a two color press and jumping up and down and loading paper and cleaning the printing plates on this press as the Printer got it ready for the the run. It was manual labor, but the guys that hired me thought I had promise.
I was lucky, came into town with hardly any money and rented a place in the first place I walked into and got hired in the first place I applied at. The studio apartment was the worst, smelled of cigars and urine and I cleaned it a bunch of times but it never got any better. And it had a shared bathroom down the hall. The manager was this older lady with her grandchild and refused to let anyone in the building come in with overnight guests. This was not going to work for me. So I found a worst place over on Decatur Street (a block from Bourbon Street), which was one small room in the slave quarter portion of the building, but the shared bathroom was just across the courtyard. The manager there liked me a lot and put up new curtains for me and made sure I always had my own toilet paper. And wanted to share my little room sometimes I'm sure. Anyway, when I moved, the old lady manager asked if I'd be willing to drive her and her granddaughter to Nashville for pay. We worked out the details and I needed the money, so I agreed. It would just be one long weekend, maybe missing just one Monday at the printing company.
So I made the trip. She had a car and I rented a trailer and loaded it up and we took off out of New Orleans late on a Friday night for Nashville. I had really injured myself at work and had one of my fingers in a brace from accidentally running it into the print rollers on the press. A lot of this became a novel "The Smallest Creatures"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0787FWCYQ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1
published by The Book Folks, but years later. It was originally going to be called "The Cowboy and the Witch" which I carried around in my head for a number of years and then one evening with a television writer friend over wine and donuts in LA, helped me flesh it out as a dramatic thing.
The other almost little journey I was tempted to make was, in my loneliness, I had made friends with some people in a cult that were ready to send me off to Boston to get brainwashed by the home guru. Luckily, when I showed up to run off with my stuff to Boston, they revealed that their true mission was to find a new recruit that could teach the guru's sons how to play basketball. I hated basketball most of my life until I sired a basketball player. So sanity prevailed.
I finally started to make friends with other writers and artists there and got a job in a bookstore where I supposed to be. New Orleans was my Paris, I always figured. I hitch-hiked to California next to find my way. I wanted to be Jack Kerouac.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Journeys: 1971

Journeys:

1971: I was already divorced from a marriage that lasted all of 10 months. I had purchased an old Studebaker to drive from Utah back to Bloomington Indiana. I didn't know where else to go. The car was gone by the time I got it home. Sold it for parts. I found work right away in a restaurant. Found a boarding house room and thought about what to do next. I needed to face some stuff, one of which was my father. He was living over in Paris Illinois. So I hitchhiked to Terre Haute, spent the night at a Salvation Army Mission, which was basically a large room with bunk beds and a lot of smelly men snoring. I was afraid somebody would steal my shoes, but when I climbed into the top bunk the guy below me told me to take them off so I didn't dirty the bedclothes. I did reluctantly. Morning was a long line to go pee and brush your teeth and then you had to sit through prayers and singing before they would feed you breakfast, so I split and got McDonald's or something. Got to Paris about 11:00 in the morning. It was easy to hitchhike in those days.

I was downtown thinking about how to find the address I had, when the old man spotted me. He picked me up. We went to lunch and then he took me over to the apartment that he and his new wife owned and operated. The woman impressed me as a real stick up her ass type. He took me to see my Great-grandmother and Great Aunt who were still alive, though my Great Grandmother was bed-ridden and blind and deaf. He left me there to spend the night. My Great Grandmother proceeded to tell me how my Grandmother, my Father's mother, was a drug addict and had driven my Grandfather to drink. A very odd reality to me. She was high strung and a hypochondriac and had a nervous breakdown at one point and my Grandfather was a famous Alcoholic in Bloomington. They thought my father was quite admirable for surviving his childhood.

My Great Aunt was never very talkative. They fed me and gave me a bedroom to sleep in. I spent the night dreaming that my father was climbing the stairs and bursting into the room and shooting me.

I died several times that night. Did I mention that he used to beat the shit out of my mother, shoot off his pistol in the house and my brother and I got into a physical fight with him which I lost. Did I mention that he stalked my mother long after the divorce was final. And one of my memories from Junior High is her running in the door from work and slamming it in tears because he was sitting in car outside and had followed her home with a pistol in his hand. The restraining order meant nothing in those days.

So in the morning he wanted to drive me home. I couldn't figure out a good way to say no. And it was a bit of work to hitchhike. So along the way, he told me all about how he was actually a CIA agent and how there were enemies out to get him and he could show me the windshield with the bullet holes in to prove what he was saying. And that my mother had tried repeatedly to kill him by poison. And how the enemy agents were all about and I had to keep my eyes open. He had been a part time insurance claim investigator in reality so he knew how to trace people and get information about them. He wanted to know all about my girl friend and her name and where her family was etc etc. I lied through my teeth.

So after all this was over with, my mother asked how it went. I told her, he was just as crazy as he had ever been and the bottom line was that I just didn't like him. He wasn't a nice person and every conversation had an angle and he was always on the make. I'd had overheard a conversation the day before between him and a potential client for his business and it was a horribly greasy conversation.

However, the nightmares went away for lots and lots of years, until he murdered his second wife and the police called me to find out what I might know. I'm sure he gave them my contact info. I was living in LA - it was twenty year later.

The journey was to face those nightmares. I split from Bloomington without seeing him again until ten years later in San Francisco when he tracked me down because he wanted me to sign off my rights to the estate that he couldn't dissolve without my permission. I told him no, and told him to go fuck himself.

I got my first book out of this years later "It Knows You By No Other Name" and then when he died, my brother and I went and spent several years cleaning up his mess: "Under The Cold Stones" came out of that.