April 30th, 2005 Saturday

Reno is like a feather bed, dragged home from the side of the road.
Reno is like a featherbed, shitstained and feathers loose, after the bird has flown the coop.

Reno is no feather bed.

It’s not a picnic, its not a walk in the park.
Reno wants to crush you up like aluminum, call you a nickel, take the last you got.
I saw many men crinkled like a driven over beer can. Driven over, spun across the road, flat as a crepe, just a two dimensional memory, sharing the side of the road now, crushed beer cans and spent old men. Grown men leaning against buildings, or off in the dirt. They had to be out of work. Gamblers. The dirty jeans they wore, the boots. The cowboy hats and work shirts under a thrift store jacket. They smoked as they walked into the wind, part of the west now, like overpopulation, landfill, or air pollution. Just gamblers. Addicts. Shopping carts sat abandoned in the fields.
It’s Reno, “the biggest little city in the world,” it says on the sign downtown.
“Biggest little shithole”, my neighbor said. “Why you going there?”
I like the down and outers.

I like the old buildings, and the thrift stores, and the old west sheds made of redwood that are sagging, missing shingles, sprung from their studs, leaning like a drunk, just a gamble they’ll make it another year.
The Amtrak runs through town, and the Greyhound stops and hunches up for shit. Losers walk from casino to casino, table to table, slot to slot, looking for the heat, or the magic, or whatever they call their delusional hope. Some have lost too much to make it inside.

A guy missing a finger sat at the bar with his sea bag taking the seat next to him, and he fed his round cornered dollars into video poker and crunched his numbers. A grown man with a beard and bad looks trying to find the rhythm. Sensing an intelligence in the television screen dealing cards, he believed in a spirit that lived inside the wires. He was winning.

I don’t believe a machine cares about you. I’ve talked sweet to them. I’ve hit them and kissed them. Maybe they felt it, but like a cat, they live for themselves. Does it make sense to say a machine has favorites? This old man, he had thick working man shoulders, a solid paunch, mean eyes, dirty dark hair. He looked like he intended to make his living there tonight. The coins poured out in his metal hopper and I asked him if he knew a trick.
He didn’t even look up at me.
He leaned over his screen and his beer sat up to the right.

So I talked to my friends. Gambling is about rhythm, and so is chatting with the ladies. We sat at the bar and I tried to pick up women. A casino isn’t the place for that.
Not if you aren’t spilling money from your pockets.

I was drinking beer after beer and it was 3 a.m. I had a brown, blue, and white plaid cowboy shirt on, one with those mother of pearl snap buttons, and brown pants to match. My shoes were old and dusty. My straight hair was combed up like a greasy carpenter from La Honda, that California mountain town full of crank and roads with dangerous curves. I looked like Reno twenty years ago. I looked like a gambler who hasn’t learned to lay a bet yet, a drunk who just found his first bottle. I had a lot of sadness ahead that I would dress up as winnings.

Dusty Nichols sat between Mr. MacDonald and I. Dusty is 69 this year. He started flirting with an older woman next to Mr. MacDonald. I’m half Dusty’s age, so I stepped right in. I gave her a wink with a joke, and then let her catch me staring. The ring of jackpots came and went, the tinkle of coins seemed natural, like birds chirping in a bush. She was more than fifty, but not sixty. She carried twice as much weight as she should. She was old and married and hanging out in a bar in Reno, alone. I might get lucky.
I said to him, “Dusty, at your age, that one armed bandit of yours can’t pay out”.

He gave me a kick with his cowboy boots from Sears.

It was hopeless. I was getting somewhere, and that was depressing. But the old guy was wide awake, drinking his Miller Genuine Draft in a glass of ice. That insomnia he complained about might make him the winner on this contest.

“Rum and Coke” I hollered to the bartender. “And whatever that milky thing is she’s drinking”. I couldn’t remember the name for White Russians.
I should have ordered a Red Bull chaser for myself. Dusty had a twinkle in his eye. My lids were drooping. The high altitude climb from San Francisco coupled with my fear of being away from home had the stream of alcohol really kicking me in the ass. I was drinking for two – my neurosis and I.

Dusty was slow and steady, and in control of his alcohol. I played it fast and loose, hell, I was 39 years younger than him, let’s face it, I had the upper hand.
“I have a love in my pants for you.” I said to her. I wanted to level the playing field for Dusty and I. Handicap myself with arrogance. She leaned her head back as she tilted it to the right, she brough her eyebrows down and said, “What?” over the shuffle of elderly still cramming quarters in the slots. Some of the foulest women from the flophouses that stud the city were pulled together to look fuckable in the industrial pantyhose of the cocktail waitress uniform, the one that pushes the breasts up and shows the split. These women with damaged ends were dropping off drinks to the cigarette huffing retirees. There were old people all around me, my friend, this broad, the gamblers, the bartender, even the bar back was a fuck up from way back.

“Don’t ask him anything” Dusty said to me, about the bar back. I wanted to know where Virginia Street was.
“If someone dumber’n you can answer your question, you’re fucked. You’ll feel terrible.”

“What did you say?” she asked me again, her White Russian stopped in midair. Her forearms were fat. But it was that packed-in fat that would have felt great to grab. It gives beneath your grip. Her skinny fingers looked like snacks on a sandwich tray. I felt terrible about myself. I could probably fuck anything. Where would it all end?

I wanted to be normal, or just be so old I was only words, like Dusty. But I was young, sort of. 30. I was still dangerous. I could fuck her. I could come all over her. I didn’t have erectile disfunction, or any fear of disease. It also appeared I lacked morals. So anything was possible.

The ceiling looked like it was sprinkled with white kitty litter crystals. It was a disco ball spinning. The bar had piped in 70’s music. The Eagles were playing.

“What floor’s your room?” I asked her.
“And more important, is there room for us?” Dusty said.

She laughed now, and we all did. We laughed. She knew she could take whatever she wanted from us, or leave it. It was a clean game. We were dangerous, sure. But she was safe.

“I’ve got a meal comp card. 15 bucks at the restaurant. That’s enough to buy everyone breakfast.” She said. She reached into her black purse that hung from its dark strap off the back of the stool. She pulled out a large yellow card and read it to herself, then showed it to us.

I made my move as we sat down in the booth. I took a few long strides and sat down first, then with a flourish I patted the seat and said, “I reserved this one for you.”

Dusty acted sophisticated by asking for chives in his eggs. “Chives? Wow Dusty. Is the Boomtown Breakfast Café ready for a class act like you?”

“At least I remembered to wipe the chicken shit off my boots before we came in here.” He answered. The old guy was sharp. It was almost five a.m. now. I slid into her and threw my arm around her. She was a giant of a woman. My arm is long, but still it was fully extend just to get across her back. With my free hand I took her hand and held it, then set it down on my thigh. She left it there.

I considered my options. Could I get a blow job out of this in the restroom, before breakfast was served? They’d be looking around in the kitchen for chives for quite some time. I might get away with it.

Reno is a depraved place. All the crazy lust for money in everyone’s heart wasn’t the only bad spirit in the air. It’s the kind of place where even the winners come away missing something important, and like every other story that ever drifted out of Reno, I can’t say this one has a happy ending. No matter how you roll the dice, no one lost nothing. Even the winners felt stung by the fact the money in their pocket was someone else's broken dream, wrecked relationship, the strings of desperation clung to everything like a particularly sticky booger and I watched in horror, my reflection in a mirror, my friends, this stranger, and all the strangers tricked into this hell, thinking we were lucky.

April 28th, 2005 Thursday

Folks, if I can have your attention, I'll just have to say this once. Handsome Jon's Wholesome Doughnuts has delivered to market a success! The Java Junkie, as we have named our newest coffee flavored treat, has sold out to stunning reviews. Stop by our shop and have a taste on us. But if you are ready to buy, be here before noon! They sell out fast! We've also brought back our Walnut Crunch and Slivered Almond doughnuts. Friends, we mean nuts when we say doughnuts. Try one today.

April 27th, 2005 Wednesday

This morning the orders were flying in for Handsome Jon's Wholesome Doughnuts. These are handmade by a small staff that comes over to the house at 4 a.m. to start the baking. We are set up in the kitchen here at Lookout Hill. Putina has developed a sure-fire successful donut: it's coffee flavored. So simple, and yet no one has ever combined the two great tastes that taste great together. Our coffee flavored donuts are rolling off the line tomorrow for their sales debut, but I've been eating them up through the taste trials. We settled on a less acidic coffee flavor, one unlike the taste of common coffee sold at regular donut shops. More of a high end gourmet coffee flavor, and the price reflects that. We spend close to a dollar on ingredients alone, then we have the value added factored in, to come up with a final price of $2.75 each. Just for a donut! But you save the cost and time of ordering a coffee, since there is as much caffeine in our Coffee Doughnut as a cup of Espresso.

Here is a poem for you people in New Hampshire, where ever you are. (?)

Turbo Electric

The damn electric green coolant
was pouring straight to the ground
when I came up on him, gold Volvo,
hood up.

“You got a leak, buddy.” I said.
“I’ve put two jugs in already.” He said.
“Your hose is loose.” I said. Then I pointed.

It was.
Just resting against the radiator.

Nothing had a name to him.
Opening the hood was like lifting up a rotten log.
It was moving
nameless horror
below.

I loosened the nut on the hose clamp, pulled out some broken plastic,
Slipped it over a shard of nozzle jutting out of the radiator, and screwed that sucker back down
Till the hose had a seal.

The shit was obvious to me.

I’ve looked at women before,
Like they came from some forest.
They told me I wasn’t connecting,
But I drove off gushing the vitals,
Afraid of them
with tools
in their
hands.

April 26th, 2005 Tuesday

I went to bed nervous, worried about trying to hop a train in the morning, from the Oakland yard down to L.A. It's been done, but not by me.

I was sleeping as the sun screamed in the window, sucking the color out of everything it heated, but so slowly it's taken three years for the toy dump truck that sits on my desk to turn from red to a mottled white, like the top of a slush cone when as a child you suck the sugar syrup out of the ice crystals. So this vampire sun is inching towards my body, my body is telling my mind to wake up and move before it is touched, but my eyes are rolled back in my head watching the drop screen projector that my brain shows my dreams on.

This one is a real Anxious Annie nightmare. I stand on a deck overlooking an ocean below. The house is huge behind me, ten stories tall. It is light pink, very calm, like the ocean. But the ocean is calmly building into a huge wall that will stand up on ocean toes, and like a greaser flipping his pomp, the whole damn thing is going to come down Hammer-time on top of me. So I run to the door to lock it out. Of course this is a dream; a little wooden door painted pink can’t stop a wave so massive that it pops clouds and knocks birds out of the sky. I am sleeping.

The symbolism is that I’d be safe if I stayed at home, and didn’t ramble about the country side hanging onto the back end of a grain hopper. In the dream I know if I can get inside, the wave won’t ever land on the house. But the door isn’t shutting right, I can’t throw the dead bolt, and the wave is now coming down like Jimmy Snuka from atop the turnbuckle, it’s the palm of God cocked back, the Omnipotent bitch slap is about to pass judgment. “Oh Immanuel give me immunity from immame impact, from this imminent immersion in this immense wave.”
- There appears to be a glitch in the online dictionary.

Suddenly, outside of theatre in my brain, on the sidewalk below my bedroom window, someone begins playing a blues Harmonica, in a loud country style. No one ever plays harmonica on the sidewalk below me. This is high up on a Richmond hill, where no one makes a noise. I woke right up. Saved from the wave. I believe this mystery musician to be the Call of the Hobo. A Saint of the Open Road, for the notes of the harp plucked me from the watery jaws of death. I woke up, still tense from the dream, my jaw muscles throbbing, and needing a glass of water. Perhaps I was just dehydrated. Time to pack and get out the door.

The bindle stick is a Hobo’s talisman, a magic stick that tells the world a harmless romantic has set out to see the country side. Mine was packed with two sandwiches. One made of almond butter, apricot jam and Siracha, that red spicy Vietnamese sauce with the cock on the label. The other, much the same, but with mustard as well. I placed them in the old fashioned plastic sandwich baggie, tucked the long flap in, then turned the short flap over, and placed them into a red kerchief, which I tied at one end of an old broomstick from the garage. Thus, my bindle was born.

I caught a ride with a flat bed trucker down to The Panhandle, where I jumped out in order to return a package to a friend before I set out for my adventure. “Don’t forget your hobo stick in the back”, the driver called to me as I climbed down from the cab.
I walked happily looking at workmen in a garage, putting in rebar to pour a floor. They looked out and saw perhaps a bum, perhaps an adventurer. I was smiling uncontrollably, as I looked at the flowers in full throttle Spring bloom.

A gorgeous young woman called to me from her door, and I stopped and looked, but did not recognize her. She came running to me in pajama bottoms and a very thin t shirt. Her long brown hair was loose as were her breasts under her t-shirt, and they were young and plump, and I had to look at her whole body as it came to me, her smile, her eyes, she was an angel of beauty, the kind woman who feeds the hobo a ham sandwich when he is between trains and out of money.

“My boyfriend woke me up to point to you”, she said in a French accent. My god this bindle stick was working its magic for me. Except for the boyfriend part. He stood in the door way and waved. Sadly smiling I waved back. The sun was warm, the day not quite noon, and the cold wind of San Francisco was held still by her charm.

“You look beautiful” she said to me, and it was her reflection I believe she saw, not me, not my old brown shoes bought used and worn out. She was another Spirit, coming to bless me, proud of my daring, reminding me of the charms of this harbor, lest I forget to return to my native home high on that lookout hill in the Richmond. Lookout Hill, where up on my rooftop I stand like Jack Kerouac watching for lightning fires in the pages of Desolation Angels, stunned by the beauty of life, fearful it may kill me.

She asked me where I was going and I told her of hiding in tall weeds by a railroad track, of running next to a slow train, of heaving the bindle up on the train and grabbing the ladder that starts chest high, how the loose gravel eats at my shoe grip, threatening to tumble me under the steel wheels. She was falling into my dream, she saw me pull myself up and she felt the relief as I was aboard and safe, and moving for free down the road, to where ever I wanted to go. My god I was magic now too, my words were gossamer, they spread a warm fire around her and I had to move on, so I pointed to my cheek and let her kiss me there once for good luck. With that, she ran back to her porch, to her boyfriend at the door, to her life in San Francisco, and I rounded the corner to Haight Street, where I stopped at a sunny corner and put out my thumb.

Haight Street before noon is like a country road. There are animals all over the place, but very few automobiles are passing by. I put my thumb in the air five times in twenty minutes. I saw good calm people sitting at café tables with paper coffee cups, sipping and talking, watching Haight street come back to life. Bus stop corners filled and emptied as the lumbering caterpillars roared with boredom down their electric lines. A kindly young gutter punk came up to me, told his dog to sit, and asked if I knew what my problem was. He had been leaned up against a store front wall, in the shade, watching for quite some time.
“Not a real busy road, is it?” I asked.
“No, that’s one problem. The other is, you can jump on the back doors of the bus and ride for free.”
“I couldn’t do that”, I said.
“Then here, I’ve got thirty five cents, just pay the minimum fare.”

This red headed stranger with a series of scabs skipping down his nose reached into his baggy pants pocket and pulled out exactly three dimes and a nickel. He was no taller than two tree stumps stacked on each other, his red hair and freckles giving me the impression he was an Irish wood sprite sent to protect me and my bindle stick.
“Thanks boss, for helping a stranger” I said to him. We didn’t shake hands, because that is the code of the street. You walk away from each other, with your words as your bond.

The Union Pacific yard was across the water divide of the San Francisco Bay. I knew it was somewhere in Oakland, near the port, but not knowing where did not deter me. Magic was afoot, and leaving footprints like a trail for me to follow. The little redheaded gutter punk in his dirty green hoodie had sent me closer to the train yards, and I settled into a seat at the back of the bus, sure I would find what I was looking for.
I rode along, seeing the Victorians leaning against each other as they gossiped about their colors, and the corner stores with their front doors open as people came in and out with sodas in their hands. A middle aged Black man came on and sat down, talking to us all about the heat, and fumbling to slide open the small window for a little fresh air.

“Must be from running to catch this bus,” he said, then looked at me.
“You in a play?” he asked.
“Oh no. I’m headed to Oakland, I’m gonna catch a train out of there to L.A.”
“For real? Just like that movie The Jerk. I didn’t know folks still did that. Mmm, mmm. You better be careful.”
“I have my magic stick, and I brought an extra sandwich to share.”
“You might just meet someone with a “Pah-da-nah!” They’ll snatch ‘em both up from ya.”
“I hope not”
He looked at me some more,
“No, you’ll be aw-ight. Just make sure you loose that red bandana before L.A., or someone’s gonna shoot your ass.”
8th and Market rolled up on me as he gave me that advice, and I stepped off, thanking him for it. Sad but true, this magic stick would only do so much in this world of devils and angels.

I stood a long time at the 8th street on-ramp to the Bay Bridge. A very long time. It was almost two o'clock now, and the magic stick seemed to not shine so bright. In fact people were trying not to look at me as they sat parked at the red light. Perhaps the overpass, the congestion, the cement and soot that was ladled like gravy over this homeless downtown artery was bad mojo for my pretty little bindle. I felt like I was holding a long daisy over my shoulder as I stood waist deep in sewer run-off. People could only think of the overwhelming effluvium as they sat in their cars, adding to it as they idled, not able to see the tiny bright hope that sparkled like a diamond on the tip of my hitchhiking thumb.
By three o’clock my daisy was wilting in the carbonized air. I walked back to Market Street and bought a Bart ticket, remembering the crusty gutter punk angel telling me it was easy to spare change a BART ticket. For some reason I was losing the thrill. No one believed in me down here, so close to the Financial District. I was in a play to them all. I didn’t want to share my magic with them, only to have them not believe in it.

The BART rumbles under the Bay, and comes up out of the dark tunnel on screeching wheels into the bright sun of Oakland, a place always warmer than my City. Immediately I saw a train yard, three orange engines next to a large barn, train tracks criss crossing each other like stitching on a crazy quilt. That was where I would go. The metal river Styx, my Shanghai, the house of the ramblin’ man.
It was a long walk down streets I did not know, heading in a general direction like a pre-historic man, just looking back to the sun as I wandered down underpasses of a street called Seventh Avenue, freshly walled up with cement like the moat of a castle, it was below grade, and bobtailed semi’s, and gentlemen with Turbans pulling loads behind the wheels of Kenworth’s, Peterbuilt’s, and banged up old Cat’s looked down on me from their air-ride captain’s chairs, like I was a ghost of their home land, a gypsy, a misguided aesthetic here to bless this testosterone chugging diesel wasteland. It was highway and wall, no sidewalk or cross walk, but they let me pass through, some with a wave, as my bindle jingled as I scooted like an old man feeling spring in his bones across lanes blessed with red shrapnel of busted turn signals. I came back up to ground level right next to a long string of piggy backs, those flat bed rail cars, stalled on a track that curved off around a corner to the left, and soon would chug off through the Union Pacific yard, a hundred yards to my right. I hid my bindle in some tall grass and leaned against a cracked Jersey barrier to consider my next plan. I had arrived.

There were no trees here, but a little swatch of grass, and I realized I needed to get into that yard in order to find a kindly brakeman who would point out the south bound traffic.
I was only up to the point where I could read clearly the fine print on the Private Property signs along the fence when the white Explorer with “Security” painted across the door pulled around a corner. It stood still, like a jungle cat catching sight of a young elk away from the herd. The row of yellow utility lights across the roof sat unused, but glaring at me. I had to keep walking forward, like a wild animal born with faulty instincts. The vehicle rolled forward slowly, like stalking on big paws. In a flash it was upon me.
The driver side window was down, the windshield was tinted, and everything was dark like a cave within. It was the weak spot of the creature, but I was not one to attack it.
“You can’t be in here”, said a voice. A large man, dark skin matching the lenses of his sunglasses, had spoken to me.
“Truthfully I’m a little lost” I replied.
“Walk back out here along Seventh; you’ll come to Bart eventually. That’s the only train you’ll be taking.”

Just then Bart screamed over head on its elevated track, laughing like a jackal on the run, taunting me that it would be back to pick at my carcass.
Perhaps the magic stick was starting to work against me. How could I slip into a train yard unnoticed when I was looking like a character out of a 1930’s Hoover Ville epic? The romance was hard to pass along, people weren’t getting it. It was as though I had walked into a jewelry shop with a ski mask on. There was no pretend. What happened to Pretend?
“I was really hoping to catch out of here. I’m on an adventure.”
“You can either walk out of here or have an adventure down at the Police station. What’ll it be?”
Rats.

I turned and walked away, the V-8 animal watching me leave, and I was out of sight, back down below grade, just dust on the highway, sidestepping piss filled water bottles Over The Road truckers had flung out their cab windows. I came back up in a new place, skirting the double fenced train yard. I walked for more than an hour, my sweaty feet slipping in my shoes, rubbing away the skin. There was no grass here, just a curving road, I walked on a narrow paved embankment, my left arm running along the fence, the big rigs shooting around the corners, some loaded and humming, others empty and clanging without the dead weight of commerce on their backs. I found a break in the fence where workers were preparing a train. They were dirty, and wearing orange reflective safety vests. I walked to the fence and caught one’s eye. He came over to me, and I asked where the train was headed.
“Memphis!” He answered.
“No good”, I said. “I need to get to L.A.”
“Not till 1 a.m.” He answered in a south of the border accent. He was all smiles, happy to be a part of the game.
I thanked him and kept walking in the heat. I didn't want to take my first ride in the dark. More trucks with 18 wheels, looking small in the yard next to the train cars, the train cars looking small next to the cranes. I was a little bumble bee stumbling about for some sweet patch of grass, miles from where I should be, cement and pavement and steel track as far as I could see. After another twenty minutes, the blisters popped at almost the same time, and the liquid dried my sock to my shoe, and the rubbing stopped. Sweet relief. I came upon a large shipping contractor’s office, with a giant banner with the words “No Passengers” in big red letters in both Spanish and English. They thoughtful owners had landscaped out front by their fence, and a roach coach jockey was packing up his ice chests for the day.

"You ever see anyone catch a train out of here?" I asked. No sign of a hobo jungle anywhere I'd seen.

"No train here. Go over." He pointed far into the distance, back to the elevated BART tracks an hours walk in the distance. He spoke English well enough, but he didn't get it. He leaned back into his work, dumping ice cubes and cold water on the grass.

I walked down the fence line, then set myself down on the awkward angle of a tree limb; some kind of scrubby Spruce or something. I pulled the small bottle of Vodka from my pocket and had three large slaps. I looked across the street to another break in the fence, with tracks coming out of it. There were trucks lining in idle along the street, and trucks leaving and entering through a drop gate.

Further proof I am stuffed full of faulty genetic code, I got overwhelmed and sleepy from indecision. I decided to drop down behind the tree and sleep. It was now five o’clock. There seemed to be nothing else to do, and I hoped sleep would eventually bring The Call of The Hobo back to me, to guide me through my next adventure.
My moth eaten Fedora with the Bay Meadows losing ticket stuffed in the brim was set to the side, next to my bindle stick, and I quickly fell out after shutting my eyes. I dreamed about being in Willie Nelson’s wood shop, talking to him and his wife. It was the clanging of the tools into the metal bed of an old turquoise pick up truck that awoke me. I would later realize this 1960’s Chevy clunker was the business office of an enterprising Mexican man, who repaired flats with his portable compressor and the three giant spare tires in the back.
I wondered about his children and his wife; most likely he had both. I wondered about where he came from, and how he felt about being a little truck among all the blacktop, sitting in the shade until a driver came to him for a repair. It felt like there were only men and machines for a hundred miles out there.

I got up and decided to walk the rest of the way around the yard, which meant crossing a bridge over the tracks. From up in the air at the apex of the bridge, I looked down and saw the commuter Amtrak trains vying for rail space with freights. To the right, five blocks down, was Jack London Square, a gentrified commercial district with Barnes and Noble and Starbucks. But the first five blocks were still old sagging brick warehouses, and rubble piles and dead end tracks. Big trucks pushed the air past me, filling it with grit that wanted to cut into my face. I was just a foot away from them as they tore out of the Port Authority like bad kids leaving home.

I made it across the bridge and was now on the other side of the tracks. Close to regular people, men and women living and working together. I stood in the shade cast by an old box car untethered to anything but the rails beneath its wheels. From under the bridge I had just passed over I saw a shape. I had my eyes open for Hobo’s since I first set eyes on the train yard. But the mighty swagger of this man spoke of prison yards more than train yards. He was walking and lighting a cigarette, and I sensed a warning in his posture. As he came alongside me, twenty feet away, I made eye contact. He snarled and looked away, shaking his hand like casting me off. I didn’t push it. The truth is, a train yard isn’t a romantic place to actually live. Something told me he lived here.
I sat longer and another worker came down the line in a pick up. He got out and fooled with the compressor high up on a reefer. I approached him cautiously and called out to him.
“Do you know where I can catch a southbound train out of here?”
“I honestly have no idea”, he replied, looking at me curiously. “But you need to watch out for security.”
I thanked him and went back into some shadows. He left shortly, and I decided to investigate under the bridge, where the man with bad spirits had come from.

There is a tradition of graffiti along the tracks. It is written in coal or chalk, not paint like on subways and city streets. There was some of this and some written in paint, some declared destinations, “catching out to Santa Fe, 2-5-98”, some stated a name, “Oregon Billy”. Some was the of the crude sexual type, a dead eyed dog being buggered by a massive male organ. The pilings of the bridge came lower and lower as I walked under them, the bridging leaning back down to touch ground. Just under head level it was walled off, and I walked over to the left.
A steel door lay on its side at a small entrance into the belly of the bridges base. At the door was a plastic milk crate half filled with drug store allergy medicine. A little further in, catching a little light from where I stood outside, was a porno magazine. I stepped inside carefully, feeling a steamy heat touch my face.
There was no noise. I didn’t speak. I looked down at the magazine, and saw a young Asian woman with shaving cream still on her shaven vagina. For a crazy minute I considered masturbating standing up in the angled light from the door that looked out onto scrap metal yards. I shook off the thought, considering what may happen to me if that man came back and found me. I would be in no position to fight him off, and I was beginning to suspect the man was making crystal methamphetamine in here.

There were six car batteries in a pile by busted railroad ties just outside the door. He had looked at me and shaken me off with a paranoid twitch. The allergy medicine is a key ingredient, along with the car batteries, at a meth lab. I looked around a little further into the darkness, and saw empty boxes and a pile of cassette tapes with dirt all over them. I decided it was time to leave.

Back outside and away from that strange place I sat and waited. I drank the rest of my liquor and thought about why I was here. I was doing it for everyone who had ever dreamed about something like this. For people who were curious what a train yard looks like. I did it for myself, because I like giant metal things, I like to dream about where trains are going and what it would be like to be the man up in the engine as it pulls out of town.
I wondered why I needed to drink, I wondered if I should never write about this, so it would be only in my memory, and could die simple and pure. Does it do anyone any good that I sit under a bridge and watch trains head off in an unknown direction? Am I filled up with loser genomes that send me off on Romantic Trails that end in failure? I tried to hitchhike across country two years ago, and got as far out of S.F. as Sacramento. A two hour drive took fourteen hours. I slept overnight in some bushes and took a Greyhound out of there.

I’m a bad tramp, a worthless worker, a hopeless dreamer of unsuccessful dreams. This adventure would end with me running alongside an endless string of piggy backs, holding onto the ladder with both hands, my bindle stick back on the side of the tracks, me thinking to myself, “I could do this, I could pull myself up”, and then I let go, the run slackening from my legs, and I came to a stop and just watched that endless parade of steel march out of town without me.

April 25th, 2005 Monday

Why not hop a freight train tomorrow? Go down and see that Sharp Dressed Hobo in Carlsbad? He's built himself a little cabin, and called me in for a visit. It's been since high school since I jumped a train, and that was back in New Hampshire. It went real slow on the curve and I jumped it probably the first time at age ten. It was scariest jumping off, because it was still moving. I'd ride it from curve to curve, about a mile.

Sharp Dressed Hobo got me the news...

"Ask a yard worker, anyone that looks dirty, they'll tell you what train is going where, set you up with a route. Just avoid anyone with their shirt tucked in, wearing a tie. You know the type. They'll have you arrested."

So I'll ride Bart over to Oakland tomorrow, find the train yard, and start a romantic journey that might wind me up arrested or sexually assualted by bad hoboes out behind the round house, if all goes terribly wrong.

"I hear a lot of serial killers ride the rails," a Lady Friend told me. It will be frightening, long, and boring for the most part, hopefully. A quick rush when I first enter the train yard, nervousness when I finally ask for directions, and then committing to hopping a moving train. From there, it will be who knows how many hours sitting in a rail car watching the world go by. I plan to bring a red bandana packed with an apple and a sandwich and tied to a stick. Just so the serial killers stay away. I believe in that kind of magic. I'll talk to God tomorrow, and sing "Ramblin' Man" by Hank Williams, Sr.

Wish me luck, that I'll be back in three days.

Here is little poem for my loyal readers:

I've decided to be like a Cat,

and let the Ladies hold me.

April 24th, 2005

Sunday morning.
I started off Saturday by going over to the San Francisco Zoo to help out for Earth Day. I was representing the S.F. Biodiesel Co-Op, and answering questions about sustainable local fuel alternatives. (I hate writing sentences like that. Sound like a mouthful of cold oatmeal.) I got to drive Brown Betty, my F-250 pick-up truck, into the zoo and park it by the Giraffes, for a display. Those Giraffes have such a neat looking design on their skin. It is patterned like stones set in cement, odd brown blocks with white mortar. They looked sad and bored, like I would be looking from 10 am until 2 pm, when I packed up my brochures and went home. Only about five people stopped by my table to ask me about my gas. But those five may be more effective than me later spreading the word, so it was probably worth it. If not, four hours were totally lost on a sunny Saturday afternoon. While people were avoiding me and my pickup that reeked of the dead Cormorant carcass from yesterday's beach adventure, the table next to me was high traffic as Capp and 16th Street.
The Native Plant table. Should have known. The woman at the table was wonderful. She was The Native Plant Lady, and was telling all kinds of people about planting drought resistant native plants to cut down on water bills and to preserve the native habitat. She sent me home with some wild strawberry plants and a big native sage. I liked her. She had just bought a book titled, “Sex after 50.”
Before heading back to the sunny Richmond District, I stopped by Home Depot and bought my tar paper and roofing nails, then headed home to get going on the shed/outhouse/dream home I’m building in the back yard. The Well Read Carpenter stopped by later in the evening with a saw for me to borrow when I build an addition for my beehives. He hung out and watched me work until dusk, when I put my tools down and we went upstairs to cook frozen pizza.
It wasn’t bad, to be drinking in the kitchen with The Well Read Carpenter and my two roommates on a Saturday night, fed, working, healthy. We talked about all kinds of people. Butch dykes, blacks, Mexicans, anybody we had ever run into. And we talked about them and drank our wine, and The Well Read Carpenter had accidentally bought low carb beer, but he drank it down, and I felt like, “Shit, we are doing all right. No one wants to kill us. I bought a case of Two Buck Chuck and there are six bottles left.”
I had spoken to soon.
“It’s been a very difficult year for Me, I just found out my grandfather died in Auschwitz,” The Well Read Carpenter said. “He was drunk and fell out of the guard tower.”
We were feeling so good last night we could make jokes about The Holocaust.
But Shoot, things aren’t perfect. The new roommate is here because of a split with her husband. The old roommate is quitting her low paying job caring for Alzheimer’s patients and hasn’t found work to replace it. The Well Read Carpenter is avoiding multiple subpoenas and warrants. Me? This year I made $25,000 dollars. That’s more than I’ve ever made. It also means I’m about as close to poor as it gets without hurting. $9,573 is the amount the 2003 Census set as the poverty threshold for one adult under 65. (I don’t think that National Average means the same thing in high-rent San Francisco. Minimum wage in this town is $8.50, three dollars more an hour than the Government thinks will work for the nation.)
While it’s great I make almost three times the poverty level, that doesn’t put me too far from being hungry and dumb. If we are all lined up according to income, I’d be close enough to smell and hear these dangerously poor Americans. But I wouldn’t be Them! I’m forever banging on the wall of the Section 8 apartment next door, yelling for Them to keep the Moans of Distress down. Why aren’t the faith based organizations bringing Them rice or something, to eat? I’m doing my part. I promised Them some honey if my Bees make it through the year.
Isn’t it great America is so rich you can be poor here and still have a refrigerator? I’m always bragging to foreigners about this. They want to say it is a shame one of the wealthiest nations doesn’t provide health insurance or adequate housing to its citizens. I say, “A lot of poor people here own microwaves and televisions.”
The Well Read Carpenter is reading Lonesome Dove right now. He’s completely switched genres on me since we last talked. But we don’t talk too often. He doesn’t own a phone. Not a cell phone, not a land line. This is interesting, since Carpenters normally need a phone to get business. How often do you write a note and slip it in the mail slot at your tradesmen’s home when you need a repair? I don’t think it is a smart new business model. I hope in a few months his younger brother starts handling the business end of things. The Well Read Carpenter is certainly intelligent. It was his idea to hire his little brother, The Cub, to come out from Chicago and be the “Gay Front” for his business.
“With The Cub on board, I’ll have all the remodel jobs in The Castro sewn up. No more working for Dykes. I hate working for the Bull Dykes. First of all, Bernal Heights is too far. I'm driving without a license! On top of that, Dykes make less than The Fags, so there’s always money trouble. Plus, I don’t think they have as nice a sense of style. And Another Thing. Every time I finish a job with one of them, they hurt my feelings. As I walk off the job I just grab my head and think, ‘No other subculture has EVER treated me this way’”.
My roommate (who is at times My Lovely Assistant, tonight was just her regular self, My Roommate The Hungarian Speaking Playwright), made a mind blowing aside to The Well Read Carpenter’s soliloquy.
“That just shows how much more men are valued in this society. Gay Men do typically feminine things and get paid more for it then women, while Bull Dykes do typically male things and get paid much less then men.”
The world is full of interesting observations. We should talk more about that one later.
But back to The Well Read Carpenter. He is a very Butch Hetero Male. He looks like he wants to pound the Living Shit out of you as he waves his arms to tell his stories. And his stories are quite often about Fistfights and Police Raids. But he sees a business opportunity here in Gay S.F., so he has designed a business card with the Gay Pride Rainbow on it. Except this Rainbow has the teeth of a saw blade running along the bottom of it.

BTW: If God doesn't like Fags, why'd he invent the Rainbow?

“I’ll work topless if I have to”, The Well Read Carpenter tells us.
“Get a telephone first.” I say.
I work with a lot of gay men and there are a couple of Bull Dykes as well. I find it hard to know how to interact with the Bull Dykes. A lot of times they have the macho strut with no muscle to back it up. If it were a man who was strutting like that who couldn’t back it up with some muscle, I would laugh at him, because it is hard to respect a poseur.
I think the problem is I haven’t hung around enough Lesbians to understand. It is still a foreign culture to me. I have worked with far more Femmy Gay Men, and they are men, like I am a man, so I think it is easier to understand them. I can relate to not wanting to be ultra macho, more than wanting to be.
This is bringing up a lot of questions for me. Is there a correlating role for Fag Hags in the Bull Dyke World? I mean, do nerdy straight males have Bull Dyke friends they call for an oil change or toilet problem? If so, what are they called? Fry Guys? Can someone get back to me?

and a poem for my loyal readers:

If my sperm were the size of tadpoles,
So when I looked at my fingers
When the deed was done,
Their visible tails shimmied in the gizz,
I wouldn’t masturbate so much

April 23rd, 2005

It's Friday. Work on shed/outhouse/hooverville shanty. Go to art show at dump, talk with Married Man in his van about his pregnant wife and the kid on the way. More later on that.

April 22nd, 2005

I was at the beach at 6:30 a.m. this morning, there at first light to see what the night washed in. Five dead water birds, maybe Cormorants. They were large with dark brown feathers and straight slender beaks. Most were still intact; I brought home one that was fairly decomposed, so I can save the bones of the wings.
Thick planks battered from the sea with giant rusty spikes driven through them found their way into the back of my truck. I want them in the garden, or to make a long planter box out alongside the driveway.
My typing window, the window I look out as I sit and type, provides a glimpse of the Golden Gate not quite long enough to see a departing Container Ship in full view. I’m up high on a hill, and look down on Rooftops and Trees. Directly across the street is a long white wooden fence with the paint chipping off and a lone tag, “TM”. Then there is bare sidewalk, four squares wide. Do you see where I’m going with this?
I ought to build a planter box down there, so I can look out and see my Bees at work across the street making the flowers bloom, instead of spoiling my view with twelve feet of concrete. I could even head down to Rusty Peach’s place and pick up some dark fertile dirt.

April 20th, 2005
There is an abandoned military hospital in the Presidio of San Francisco. It stands 8 stories tall at the base of a large hill infested with old weeping pine trees; from my kitchen window I see one leg of its horseshoe shape among the drooping conifer limbs.
I lived here two years before I found the courage and a friend willing to ignore the “No Trespassing” signs and hop the barbed wire rimmed fence. Those of you from New Hampshire remember the famously handsome Stephen Ravioli, of course. For those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure, he’s moved to New York to continue his handsome-ing of the East Coast. But don’t let the good looks fool you. He loves to break and enter.
The basement of an abandoned military hospital is terrifying. I’ve never walked so slow. No lights, just long corridors with shapes that you can only sense, or are perhaps a little darker than the other dead lightless air that has pressed up against you. Electrical conduit is hanging like roots from the ceiling; they snake along the floor like tentacles grabbing at your legs. You come upon open doors you can only sense; your skin can feel the difference in the air flow in the room versus the hallway. Every little hair on your body stands up and reaches out, trying to give you that much more notice when something is grabbing you. This is no place for a normal person to be, and you wonder what type of creep has chosen to come here to hide and wait for you. How many times will he rape you before he kills you? How many times after?
You have a lighter. You flick it on in room after room. It casts terrifying shadows on walls marked with satanic graffiti. Beer bottles and old clothes are in a pile in a corner. Smashed glass and broken chairs occupy some rooms. Bathrooms glow eerily with their lime green tiles, stall doors hanging at fractured angles, ancient shit in the basins, a heroin needle here and there. A row of six floor-to-waist urinals standing against the wall like soldiers in formation. Lunatics have lived here.
It is a strange sense to know this place seems empty, but most likely is not. It is too big to ever know. The paint has puckered off in big flakes, leaving the walls looking scabby and syphillic. Then you come to a bedroom sized square room with a tiled floor. It stands empty save for the stainless steel locker doors along one far wall. The morgue.
Holy Shit.
Old killers, men who shot other men in terrible battles, men who have seen and done gruesome things in war zones have gone to their grave through this room. If there is a place that has twisted spirits occupying it, this is the room.

It is time to go up, upstairs where natural light spills in through windows, where pigeons live above the acoustical tiles of the drop ceiling, and terrify you with their movements and surprise attack when they are startled and fly out from a hole. Climb the stairs, 8 flights up to the roof. You feel free and safe as you look across the hills and rooftops to the mouth of the Golden Gate. But you have to walk back down through all of that to get out. So you linger, reading Graffiti, making out landmarks across the city. UCSF, another hospital, Golden Gate Park. You don’t want to go back down, not through that air that feels gritty in your throat, old germs grabbing at you like microscopic zombies with the chance to live again. But you do want to get out of there.
Suddenly, a giant man with ripped clothes steps out from behind a wall. He has a large knife and comes towards you. Do you stand your ground? Turn to page 24. Or do you jump over the side? Turn to page 12.

April 17th, 2005

Sunday came around, a Lady Friend wanted to go for a hike. I prefer to go for a walk in the woods, rather than hiking. Hiking sounds like it will require much more energy and expensive equipment than a walk. A hike has a beginning and an end, and people are loath to turn back. A walk can follow any old path, and you never feel like a quitter when you turn around from a walk. On a hike, I may be expected to tell due North by looking at moss. My life may rely on my ability to do so. So I don’t hike.

What I don’t mind is going ten feet off the road and turning over logs, looking for skinks. However, a skink hunt was not the invitation extended to me, so I went for a hike. In an effort to combat any image of me as a hiker, I wore a shirt and tie, and a sleeveless cashmere sweater. When they find my body, perhaps in a ravine or a bear’s gut, they will know I didn’t have any Survivor pretensions. I am a skink hunter. Nothing more.

Big Basin is a State Park down by Santa Cruz. It would seem to me that we just about drove through the entire forest just to reach HQ. I was ready to turn back at the little toll booth in the parking lot. It had been a nice drive on a lovely little one lane road with deadly curves that have surely sent lesser drivers than the Lady Friend out into the fresh air, freefalling to the bottom of the Big Basin. How many more wrecks before the basin fills up with twisted metal?

Thank God we borrowed a map. We used it as we took trails to the upper and lower parking lots, getting lost and frightened, only to come upon a new Mercedes glistening its chrome in the sun, hunkered down beneath the fronds of a three hundred foot tall Sequoia. We stopped by a party of French hikers in boots and blended polymer breathable fabric shirts and shorts. They were having a cigarette break, and talking amongst themselves.

(In French) “Did we fight with or against the Indians in the French and Indian War?”

Lady Friend, in her fluent parlez, asked how to get on the trail that led to where the hiking was done. I was already exhausted and ready to turn back.

“Cross this parking lot, follow the trail that is alongside the paved fire road for half a mile, cross the picnic area and the swingsets, and you will see a little marker. That is where the hiking is done.”

These State Parks are less and less romantic. Gauloises fumes, Cheeto’s carelessly dropped on the trail, and not a skink in sight. The sun appeared to be setting quite fast, and I considered building a lean-to in the last remaining drips of light, just upwind of the public restrooms.

“The sun sets at 7:30. We have two and a half hours to make two miles.” The Lady Friend is courageous. If only she wasn’t reckless as well.

On this hike, it of course came up, as it always does, that I don’t watch movies. One time after another, Lady Friend asked if I had seen this or that. “No, but I read about it in the paper. People say it was good.” Or just, “No, what happened.”

I don’t watch movies. My roommate, an honest man, told me, “I always hated that about you.” We were drinking, so I didn’t think to ask him what he meant. Nonetheless, I think it is time to validate my stance, and throw a little light on the logic. The argument rests on three points.

One: I don’t want to have movies as my cultural reference point. When things happen at work, or I meet new people, I don’t want to describe my life or hear theirs described in terms of a film. People don't talk about themselves, or feel that they have to do anything interesting other than sit in a living room watching a movie. No one is challenged to get out and do something interesting on the weekend so they have a personal story to tell. Instead people tell other people's interesting story. It stifles creativity and makes people feel their lives only mimic a movie, rather than the fact entertainment is based on reality. It is too easy to say, “He looks like that guy from MASK”. That can be funny, but what would be funnier, is if the person could say, “He looked like his mother worked at a poison’s factory, and the resulting genetic damage was passed on to him. His head is swollen like he stuck it in a hive of killer bees. The poor dude looks like someone force-pumped liposuction discharge into his ear till his face puffed up like a mushy Mr. Potato Head.” Things like this that require concentration and originality on the speaker’s behalf will only improve our creative minds.

Movie refrences are the easy way out, and for the weak and timid, they must try to watch all the stupid movies that the boring and lazy will be quoting. It creates a larger market for these disturbing fairy tales of the American Way because people are afraid to ignore them.

Two: I haven’t been exposed to enough independent films. Some movies out there actually have unhappy endings, or talk about bad people in a good way. I’m just so frightened of the whole medium I stay away and don’t find them. The big ones advertised on the sides of busses do horrible things to me. I was flying back to New Hampshire two years ago, and the in-flight movie was “Two Weeks Notice”, starring Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. I watched it. Against my will I started having an emotional involvement in these characters. It started to move me. I then realize life isn’t like that. That people aren’t that beautiful, first of all. And no one I know and love is that rich. Sunsets don’t look like that unless you shoot them through a filter, I’ll never see the city from that angle. Then I begin to crack the code, I saw the secret messages, saw how I began to think like they want me to. I feel duped when i watch these things. I feel like when I saw through religion, saw the big lie. These moving pictures want me to believe in love, believe that power will be used for good, that money isn’t corrupting, that America does it right every time. It doesn't help me navigate reality, it gives me false hope, it stops sort of molesting me, but it encourages me to do so to others. Think about how many times Adam Sandler plays a celebrated stalker role, hounding a woman until she falls in love with him. Then we all cheer about how sweet life is. Then I follow the woman in front of me out to her car in the parking lot, everyone is nervous, I get pepper sprayed and kicked in the balls. Thanks again Hollywood.

Where’s the movie about the lesson I learned regarding rape? Or having to wipe the ass of a retarded boy? Or changing the catheter on a 56 year old man with bed sores the size of a slice of bologna? There are people out there who are trying to fall in love and never will. Who are fighting the odds just by laying in bed alive another day. These happy Hollywood stories don’t probe life in a worthwhile way. Not for people like me who are angry a lot, disappointed in Democracy, ashamed of our president, disgusted with my own shortcomings. I want Blacker stars, fatter stars, weaker men, uglier women, more cripples and perverts. I want elderly action heros and homeless drug addicts on my sit-coms. Movies sway my opinions. They change my outlook on life. But I don't want to believe in standardized beauty and the importance of shopping. I want to believe Americans are so important the fate of all other creatures, human or not, rely on us. I also want to believe that other human cultures are as beautiful and educated as ours. I would love for U.S. films to investigate that. When American filmmakers start speaking to me, I'll watch. I know movies are powerful

I am easily swayed. I want to be a beautiful woman when I sit in a theatre in the dark and the lights come up and she walks with the power of femininity across the opening credits. But I’m not going to be a beautiful woman. These movies make me want things I don’t really want. Big homes, fast cars, designer drugs. It is a powerful medium and the men in control do bullshit things with that power.

Three: Movie making is still too young. Very few people think in terms of film, they think in terms of books. They don’t use the medium to its particular potential of which there is so much. Instead they rehash novels, and I would prefer they leave novels alone. Movie makers are stuck in a very old fashioned novelistic approach to story telling. They can jump and cut so quickly to different people and scenes, because it is visual. There is no need to write up the place, the dress, the time period. It is up there for us to see. I think that eventually movie making will find and believe in its own powers, but as far as I have seen, they are still cobbling there craft on an old hob nail boot form called the novel. Why not make movies longer? We will all soon have giant flat screen home theatres. We can rent a six hour movie and watch it at our leisure, like we read a six hundred page novel over the course of a few weeks. Filmmakers seem to still be inventing their pen rather than writing with it. (Or should I use a non-fiction analogy?)

Finally, I am committed to writing as an art form. I see a lot of competition from the film industry, so naturally it threatens me. I am boycotting the whole damn shebang. Can you argue with all that?

Just another day in the park. Check out what a skink looks like here.

April 16th, 2005

Vacaville is a little town sewn through by Highway 80. I headed over the Bay Bridge Saturday about ten in the morning, just me in my little truck, shooting for Vacaville to pick up my bees. The sun was radiating love and the hills were still green from the winter rains. The live oaks stood on hill tops, like toys on a train set, jaunty limbs silhouetted against the pale blue sky. The hills look so smooth from the highway in the valley, off in the distance it seems like green almond M&M's sit on the horizon.

The Carquinez Bridge with the T&C sugar mill on the river is an inspiring site. I always want to drive down there and climb among the machinery or throw rocks at things - windows or the river.

New box stores are springing up on the outskirts of the towns you pass through. Uninspired architects or designers who want to fight the curve of the hills with their squares are paid to put a hint of green tiles on a façade, or a false bell tower, and call it done.

I stopped and bought six ears of corn and five small avocadoes for three dollars at a roadside stand. The corn is boiling in the kitchen right now, and the bees look like they are swarming in my backyard as I write this.

Yesterday, I did not own beehives. Not heading north on 80. But coming on back, they were riding on the floor of the passenger side, me and 8 pounds of bees in my little pick up truck. With the windows down for some air, I couldn’t hear their buzz. They were, for the most part, clumped together in the two wooden boxes and gathered around the single queen of each cluster. The queen is kept isolated in a little plastic sheath, it is perforated, and the exit plugged by hard candy, which the worker bees diligently are eating to reach her.

“Not yet girls,” I whispered to them as the green hills scrolled by. “We need to get you in your new homes.”

I built two separate hives for my two queens. Painted them pink with white trim, like cupcakes, like a girl’s room. Most bees are females. The drones are bigger, fewer, and male. They mate with the queen in the proper season, and then are banished from the hive. Drones don’t collect honey or protect the hive, so they would be a drain on resources to keep around. I don’t connect this behavior to humans, although it is tempting to do: Let the women do the work, and simply spend a summer fucking. When the cold comes, I’ll wander into the woods and fold my wings to my back for the last time, thanking God for the beauty of life.

I made it home safely, killed the diesel, and heard the buzz again. It is terrifying in a way, captivating in another. I held the soft part of my hand close the screen and felt the heat of the cluster. I inched closer until it rested against the screen, and I felt the tiny bees legs tickle.

They needed a few hours to calm down, so I placed them in the garage until dusk, where the coolness would dull them, and make for safer transfer into the hive itself. In the meantime, I realized I wasn’t completely ready. I called to my roommate, who is my beautiful assistant on so many ill-planned household improvements. Do we remember the attempt to install the dimmer switch? Who was there when I shorted out the fuse box, who knew how to install the variable speed shower head? Who put out the grease fire when I was attempting to make my first batch of “Handsome Jon’s Wholesome Doughnuts”? She will go unnamed, but she is my roommate.

Following the verbal instructions from Tom at the bee farm, I gave the travel hive a quick rap against the ground, and the honey bees fell to the bottom. I tilted the travel hive and freed the sugar-water feeder stored in the travel hive’s top, which allowed me access to the queen inside her plastic sheath. I withdrew her and handed her to my Lovely Assistant.

I had already donned the bee veil, and left Lovely Assistant holding the queen. With the queen in her little trap, I figured Lovely Assistant would be safe from stings this way. I was going to be doing the dangerous work of dumping the bees into what is known as the brood chamber. My lack of safety preparation was perhaps compounded by the fact I started drinking when I got back from the bee farm. While my confidence was greatly increased, my forethought was as equally reduced. Lovely Assistant had come out in sandals. She wore socks for foot protection. Had I not been trying to sneak the beer bottle up under the bee veil, I would have noticed and told her socks aren’t armor enough to stop a bee stinger.

Quite a few bees made their way to the queen in Lovely Assistant’s hand, following the pheromone their leader emits. Lovely Assistant was calm as she stretched her hand farther away from her body, and thus her vital organs and the orifices exposed on her face. I managed to get a good swill and have the bottle back outside the veil before any rogues shot under. Things were safe on my end too.

The hive’s cover was off, leaning against the porch. Three frames, of which the brood chamber has a total of ten, were out as well. These frames have a thin sheet of bees wax hung like pictures in a picture frame, upon which the worker bees will “draw out” honey comb cells. Of course, they will also have cells in which the queen will lay eggs, and cells to store pollen, nectar, and water. The variation of color on a “drawn out” frame is beautiful, and reflects the activity happening inside each cell.

The bees came tumbling out of the hole left by the missing feeder in great snowball sizes, hugging onto one another and landing with a soft sound on the floor of the brood chamber. Honey bees are fuzzy with hair, like little bears, and I could hardly resist picking up one of these buzzing clusters. I had no gloves on, because bee keeper’s gloves are thick and awkward, and make drinking difficult. They were soon crawling on my hand, and after a few more shakes, the majority were now in the hive proper. I shook my hand with a sharp snap and sent the journeyers on my skin down into the hive, then took the queen out of my Lovely Assistant’s hand. She was smiling, which is a good sign. We still had one more hive to do this with. “I’ll give you the veil after I get the queen in”, I kindly offered.

I had a little masking tape and taped the queen’s sheath onto the center frame, sort of how I was told to. They didn’t say to tape it down, that was my little idea. In a few days I fear I will open the hive and find bees legs stuck to the tape, and a hive full of maimed workers, legless and wandering in erratic lines.

The second hive went faster, which was a blessing, since the bees from the first were shook up and crawling all over. When you sit back and watch seventy bees flying in circles, the normal unconditioned response is revulsion. They are little, and they look dirty. They look like they are dirtying up nature. They don’t stay still. It is air clutter. I’ve felt this way before about flying insects, crawling insects, whatever. They impinge on my sense of order. But these were my girls, and I felt like I was seeing a newborn colt up on its shaky legs for the first time. Pride of ownership they call it in the home business. I cheered and kicked over my beer. Looking down at the overturned bottle, I pinched a wayward lady in between the skin of my neck and my collar and she stung me. The first thing to do is scrape the stinger out, because it continues to pump the venom into you. I had just been christened by the ordeal. I am a beekeeper.

April 12th, 2005

Pick the girl up, drag her across the stage, spin her around, pick her up and drag her back where you started. That’s ballet at a quick glance. If you look carefully, you begin to notice dancers doing things with their bodies you never see regular people do. It is a bit alienating at first. “Why not dance normal?” I shouted.

But after the second act, I was getting into it. A woman was moving like she had two ostrich necks for arms. It was mesmerizing, the way she undulated them. I could have cut such a wicked fart it would have stopped the show, but I held it in out of respect for her. God it is uncomfortable to hold those things in. Where do they go, anyway? I felt it make a u-turn and come back inside. But where? Where does it go? Does it leak out my nose?

My lady friend had on a beautiful dress. She took fancy thin ribbon and tied it around her, like a ballerina slipper’s tassel climbing up the calf.

My former sub-letter and friend The Violin had met us at the Stage doors and slipped us inside. You may not believe it, but it was my first time at the ballet. It has an institutional feel to it of course, with the tiled floors, the same ornate sconce every twenty paces, water fountains in the halls, cement walls, toilets in stalls, it might as well be a prison. An extremely dignified prison. But when you take your seat at the auditorium, then it starts to feel grand. The most exciting part is watching the curtain fall. It is a rich greenish-gold velvet looking material, four stories tall. The fabric looks like a river as it plunges to the stage. The rows of seats are old and covered in red fabric, the floor here is carpeted. My knees were buckled to the side due to lack of leg room, but there was no popcorn on the floor.

Lady friend, during the first intermission, spoke to me of the Queer Factor. “Their bodies are so gorgeous, and you see so much of it, and the movements they make, I can’t help but think they’re all gay.”

“Is it because I can see the crease of their asses all the way from up here?” I asked.

The only thing harder than doing ballet, would be if they were doing it on ice. I can imagine the ballet dancers hate on the ice capades dudes. But step back and think about it, ballet man. You aren’t wearing twenty pounds of sharp metal strapped to your feet, and you aren’t about to land on really slippery stuff called ice. So go ahead and spin around when you jump in the air, but I’m not clapping quite as loud as I will next time I watch Scott Hamilton.

In my final analysis, Ballet looks really old. The girls are skinny, which my lady friend pointed out, “isn’t a body type that lends itself well to fertility dancing”, as she called it. “They can’t shake their bodies, they got nothing to shake,” she explained. So this ballet isn’t about fertility, it’s about futility, because every dance ends with either the guy or the girl heartbroken and alone on the floor. Gain some weight! And the guy’s gay! Ballet seems to be a dance about hummingbirds. They run here, run there, touch for a second, move their limbs really fast, then fall down dead.

It is sexy, to a degree. The guy is always grabbing the girl's crotch and picking her up. “I’d love to see him drag her by her hair”, lady friend whispered to me. So the call goes out, the audience has spoken. Can we please have some cave man ballet?

April 11th, 2005

I drive to the combustion of a different fuel. It’s an alternative fuel known as biodiesel. Since I’ve started using it, I’ve come to understand what it means when they say, “It ain’t easy being green.” Because it never is easy to go outside the norm. But I joined the subculture of running my vehicle on virgin vegetable oil. If you don’t know what that is, read up on it for a minute here.

Yes, it is one thing to give up a gasoline powered engine and decide to go diesel. It means in my neighborhood no longer being able to go down the street to fill up. Diesel is available out near the highway, and at a few of the filling stations on 19th Avenue. So one has to watch the gauge if you are out of town. You don’t want to go low in a residential neighborhood. But there is only one fuel stop for Biodiesel in San Francisco. It is open three times a week, for a total of 9 hours. Not a convenience lifestyle I'm living.

The other difference in a Diesel engine is how it operates. I know very little about engines, but I’ve heard about spark plugs. There is one for each cylinder in the engine, so a 4 cylinder has four spark plugs, and the spark plug makes a little spark which ignites the gas and causes a controlled explosion which fires the piston up and down in the engine so that the magic elves know its time to run real fast and make the wheels spin.

Diesel engines don’t have spark plugs, so the whole rest of my knowledge goes out the window as well. When I first had a problem with my truck, I couldn’t fix it. I called around to garages, but none of them worked on diesels. It suddenly felt very lonely to be a part of the subculture. Lonely and irritating.

Welcome to the dark side of Biodiesel. Last night the problem was simple. My batteries were dead. Batteries. There are two in my Ford F-250, because it takes a lot of juice to get the motor started. Diesel doesn’t burn as easily as gasoline, so the batteries provide power to little heaters that heat up the diesel so the cold engine can burn it. Basically. (or should I say, I think.)

So getting a jumpstart from the little Honda Civics parked nearby wasn’t an option. Not unless I had three of them lined up running cables to my batteries. There just isn’t enough Cold Cranking Amperage, my friends. I don’t let these things wear me down. I was dead in the water, but my spirit was still afloat. I had parked downtown to pick up a Lady Friend at her restaurant. So we got a bottle of wine and decided to drink it in the cab while we waited for Triple A man to come get us going.

I called the number. “Are you in a safe place?” the woman asked. My gosh, how nice. “Yes, I am very safe. The keys are out of the ignition and I’m starting to feel the buzz. Lady Friend and I are passing the bottle back and forth; can you hear the wine dripping on my cell phone? No? Good.”

It was a forty minute wait. Enough time to let the drinks process. At least one of them. I was planning on letting the truck run for about half an hour, to let the batteries recharge. I reckoned I'd be ready to drive by then. But the tow truck operator was far more rational. He arrived, only to refuse me a jump. I don’t know if you have ever assaulted a tow truck guy, but they are generally fairly big and often wear work gloves. I don’t know if you’ve ever been punched by a work glove, but the suede is rough and really tears at that soft skin on your face. Then the open wounds have the grease and grit caked on the glove dragged across them. I don’t know if you’ve ever run away from a guy hitting you in the face, but it isn’t the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.

It was dumb to leave the bottle of wine in the pick-up, because this particular Lady Friend has a real taste for the stuff. For sure it would be gone if I didn’t circle back quick. The cut wasn’t so bad, and I could see out of both my eyes. I picked up a brick from someone’s sidewalk garden, just to roughen up my hands should I be lucky enough to land a punch again. I came back around the block and Tow Truck Man was up in his cab, leaned over to the passenger window, shouting at Lady Friend, who was leaned over the driver’s seat of my truck yelling back at him. She had a lot of fight, I was thinking, as I heard some unusual phrases emanating from her mouth. I stopped to listen, but the driver threw it in gear and roared off, no doubt realizing his effect with the work gloves was no match for Lady Friend’s tongue.

The sad thing about human relationships is when you need comfort and consoling the most, you are least likely to get it. Somewhere it registers on your face, (perhaps the gouges) that you have been told of your shortcomings, and now the floodgates are opened. Everyone wants to tell you what your problem is. The passenger side door was open. Lady Friend just kept talking, the last cuss followed the truck to the stop light and she turned with a new one for me. She held the bottle in one hand and waved the other, I heard the words, and looked down at the wine, knowing to reach for it would be futile.

Meetup.com is a forum for people to find groups to join in their area. Knitters, Pagans, dodge ballers all have meetup groups in different cities. I became the Organizer for the San Francisco Dumpster Divers when I noticed they didn’t have one. I tried to get folks to meet me at the beach for a bonfire of wood pulled from dumpsters, or to meet up at a dumpster downtown, but nothing ever came of it. But I had fun talking online about it. Now Meetup.com has announced a plan to charge Organizers a monthly fee of $9 a month, which will jump to $19 a month next year. As the organizer, I would then collect the group fee from members. Well, I know that isn’t going to happen, so I am bowing out. But here is some of the text I had online at the Meetup.com site, just for the record.

San Francisco Dumpster Divers Do Good

Welcome to our Meetup Group. Dumpster Divers believe in saving a buck and the environment. They are also pack rats, compulsive hoarders, explorers and thrill seekers.

If you would like to meet with people who enjoy climbing into giant metal garbage cans under cover of darkness to see what goes on in other peoples lives, you should attend a meetup. We can meet to talk about past treasures, or where the good scores are.
Every dumpster has a personality. Like rows in a garden, they each produce a specific crop. Maybe you know where to get bagels, but want shoes. Someone out there has found a shoe dumpster and can help you out. That's why we meet.

We also meet because we have rescued too much stuff. There is so much good junk out there we can't personally use it all. So we can trade amongst ourselves, find good causes to donate things too, and hopefully bring awareness to our country's over-consumption of resources

Here is my profile statement:

"I grew up in New Hampshire and my favorite thing to do was go to the dump with my father on Saturday. Then I moved to San Francisco and realized I could "go to the dump" right inside those big metal boxes. I haven't been back to N.H. since."

The welcome letter to new members:

Hi, thanks for joining up. I became the organizer in January 2005. I think this is a good way to meet people that want to be involved in a strange tribe of nomads.
I am personally interested in preventing landfill, pollution, and reckless consumption.
I also love to decorate my house with old stuff.
I hate to spend money on something I can find.
I get a rush from dumpster diving.
Perhaps some of this rings a bell. Come by a meeting sometime, and tell us what you've found. Thanks.

A message posted on the chat board:

I love to put things out on the sidewalk that aren't garbage and time how long it takes for someone else to walk off with it. The most normal people will stop and consider the possibilities. I have one neighbor who, whenever he walks by and my garage door is open, he stops and asks if I'm throwing anything away.

I'm having trouble finding a taker for a light box that is pretty handmade looking. It works, and I even wrote "works" on a piece of blue tape and stuck it on there. It is perfect for burning silkscreens, if you can find a piece of glass to lay over it. This contraption has been out by the fire hydrant for two days. I'll give it one more day then take it back inside and donate it to Sunset Scavenger.

I have not jumped a dumpster in about two months. I drove past a renovation going on down in North Beach and saw some old redwood planks peaking over the top, but I had guests in the truck, so I couldn't stop. North Beach is too far away and too hectic for me to go back to just for a wood dumpster.

Anybody out there found anything good lately? I miss the dumpsters

This is the message from Meetup.com:

A plan to charge groups was announced in mid-April
Starting on May 1st, Meetup.com will require every group to pay a small monthly fee. Organizers will be responsible for paying the fee, but we expect most Organizers will be reimbursed by their members. Discuss.

This is my response, posted on the official discussion board:

I’m the organizer for the San Francisco Dumpster Divers. As you might imagine, a group of people who are garbage pickers are not going to pay to talk about it. With this new model you will lose a lot of fringe groups, and probably make some money from the few remaining groups that pay up. It will make things easier for you.
I have my own website, so I understand there are some serious costs involved with all this, so no hard feelings from me for wanting to charge money.
If things go well and you make some money, please donate some flow to the underdogs, the rejects, and the garbage pickers.
Thanks for letting me have some fun. Remember, the best things in life are free. Just ask a dumpster diver.

That brings to a close my reign as San Francisco's Supreme Dumpster Diver. I will occasionaly relate to my readers here some of my dumpster diving escapades. Please stay tuned.

April 8th, 2005

Bay Meadows is a horse track twenty miles south of The City. “Where the athletes pay the fans” they say. But only once in a while, they fail to mention.

A married man called my phone soliciting my accompaniment to said establishment.

"What in Hell do I want to go bet on horses for?"

“Bukowski lived at the track!” this married man said.

I don’t know if he dialed the wrong number, but Bukowski is dead and my name is Jon Fuckin’ Rolston. Sure old Hank wrote better once in a while than I write all the time. Why drag him into it? Going to the track isn’t going to make me write better, get a slim volume published, attract readers. I’ll go and look at tired old men and their cigarette smoke. I’ll lose money. Is that supposed to remind me I’m almost 33 years old and have yet to submit anything anywhere? That I’m prancing in the bedroom with a typewriter and believing that earned me the title? Writer? The last thing I wrote was a check. I’m one of the many who tries, who writes words that stack up like bodies in Dachau, so that once in a great while a fighter like Bukowski can liberate the remaining prisoners from their death camp reading program.

Okay, I’ll go to the track because maybe I’ll see his ghost, even though he played the ponies down in L.A.

CalTrain runs the peninsula, and they allow alcohol on board. The seats are more comfortable than Greyhound as well. Friday night was college night: dollar Miller’s, dollar hot dogs, and dollar entrance at the gate. The married man was coming from Emeryville, across that great water divide called the bay, and met me at the Bayshore stop at six p.m.

I boarded and noted quite a few green label Sierra Nevada’s in passengers hands, an upscale college bunch was laughing, happy they weren’t going to the track for a living like the regular losers. These youngsters didn’t have any problems. Not yet. Give ‘em ten years for things to fall into place, and they’ll wake up neurotic, hands trembling, the power of consumption so deep in their minds they feel worthless because they don’t own a home, haven’t paid their student loans, and can’t borrow enough for a new car. Maybe it will be around this time all the bad things rise to the top, the past abuse, the father issues, the eating disorders. That's when the drinking turns from recreational to fundamental. They'll be more desperate than these down and out gambler's, because they'll have the burden of hiding their failure on top of all else. They'll realize they haven’t helped anyone along the way, and it feels empty to them, like they have fucked the world too hard not to have to pay. But they don’t want to lose their new couch- it isn’t even paid for yet.

So suck up that seven dollar six pack, I’ll move to the back of the train where no one’s laughing, they are busy with the form. Busy getting through Budweiser cans; a beer that turns your stool into a hot muddy effluence. Things are going well for me, but I can’t enjoy it with the others up in that car. I’m naturally more comfortable with the unwashed desperadoes. Men like this Married Man who shares his only beer with me. He’s meeting his boss at the track to pick up his paycheck. I had to borrow 6 dollars for train fare. He lives on a sailboat with his wife and dog. He takes pride in his ability to true the drive shaft to fractions of an inch, while hanging upside down and drunk into the briny gut of his boat.

I respect this Married Man, and borrowed a twenty from him at the track. We stood by the beer concession, at a window dead centered on the board. The track was a little muddy; it had rained early in the day. It was dusk now, the lights were on, and the philly’s were leading out to the box. My mind flashed back to years ago, when I had the job of putting the racing jackets on the Greyhounds, holding them between my knees as I stood over their whipped frames at weigh-in, feeling their ribcages heave with anticipation. They knew they were about to run. Chase the big fuzzy bone on the wire. The horses were the same way; I could see it in their eyes. They were junkies just like the jockeys. They wanted to tear it up, bump into each other, get out and run like they were free. The crowd, the jockeys, the horses, we were all on a track, running in circles, glad to pretend we're free, throwing money away to chase the feeling. It made no sense, but no one blinked.

I met another old friend there, he’s another Married Man. We walked away from the action, to look at the people, to talk about our jobs, to try and make each other laugh. On the second floor a live band was covering 80’s classics. I can’t imagine where I would otherwise find such a mixed crowd. Little kids dragged along to the track by parents were out on the floor flailing limbs in their 8 year old video interpretations, high kicks, spins, and dances from some mysterious childhood place I once knew, and recognized now, after all these years. The old Asian men, Pilipino, Chinese, Vietnamese, who knows, the 80’s hits were too loud to ask. A few white couples of middle age and lower middle income were out there doing that weird and stiff white couples dance. A younger couple, rockabillied out and heavy set, were doing the spins and twists as fast as they could. Some hot college girls were dancing with each other, in that hot college girl way that keeps the lecherous old men like me at bay. Ahh, to be a married man, and looking without the question in your mind, “is that complete stranger over there who just stepped back into that man and spilled his beer the one for me?” No, these married men just enjoy the hips as they move for what they are. They watch the breast jiggle, and think of something to do with their wife when they get home. I suppose it is the easy life. We turned our attention to the little kids fueled by Coca-Cola, playing war, shooting invisible guns at the bassist with his monster hair and reflective sun glasses. There is more to life than sex, but it’s after effects are all around us. They played a White Stripes cover, and then the woman in leather shorts came forward and sang a Joan Jett classic. The other married man and I returned to the urinals, and had a moment each to ourselves. I don’t know about him, but I felt like, win or lose, the track wasn’t so bad.

April 2nd, 2005

It was cold out there tonight, and by the time I got to the BBQ, it was dark. All the various men who work for a man I’ll call The English Accent were sitting on folding chairs drinking beer and watching basketball on a TV propped up on the deck railing. A deck and railing that I helped build, and was eventually paid to build by The English Accent himself.
Of course the real carpenter on that job was a transplant and Berkeley graduate from the South Side of Chicago. A man we all know as The Well Read Carpenter. To be a part of a construction crew in The City of San Francisco is different than any where else I’ve ever worked. Perhaps they haven’t all graduated Berkeley or attended private schools in England, but they all are full of the strange thoughts that must blow in from some off shore islands and then breed here in the cool Ocean air of the Pacific.
The Well Read Carpenter was talking about the Spaniards, and the model they built for White Supremacy. I was too drunk to accurately quote him, but my understanding was this. The White Race is both genetic and cultural. At some point to avoid inbreeding, we need to copulate with a darker race. This is what the Spaniards did in The America’s. As we can see, the Spanish Culture was successfully passed on to that part of the world.
The Well Read Carpenter was claiming miscegenation as a tool of White Power. This I felt was an argument I ought to lay my former Uncle, a proud and backward racist. We fell out of contact when I told him I was dating an African American. (African, meaning not North African. Meaning a deep dark tan, a delicious dark tan, as the Coppertone ad used to jingle) If I can get in touch with him and get a comment, I will gladly share it here, with his permission.
The BBQ moved inside after the game, and conversation moved on, a couple from Australia played guitars and sang medley’s of past Australian Super Groups. Midnight Oil/ Men At Work mash-ups, dance club hits I only recognized the chorus of, thrown into the chord progression of AC/DC. Of the twelve people at the BBQ, only three had an accent similar to mine. We were all White, but the White Race, to me, seems to be totally falling apart.