My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

“check under the bed”

“I know man, I copped a B&E at 14. This aint my first barbeque. Shit, VCR tapes! You know this is porn!”

“Put it on, put it on!”

The two workers work in tandem, one turns on the tv and gets to channel 3 as the other pushes the cassette into the VCR.

“where’s the remote?” one asks as they look around the room, opening bedside table drawers.

The screen comes alive with a middle aged woman, ball gag in her mouth, a man pulling her hair as they copulate like dog show canines, lacy tutu around her waist, black leather vest over the man’s beer gut.

“that’s this room!” one guy is practically screaming with joy as he laughs and grabs his coworker, turning him to see the headboard behind them.
“they’re fucking on this bed!”

The crew working the apartment next door come in with their Tyvek suits and respirators on.

The goggles come off when they see the screen.

“you found a homemade stash!” on guy says

“there’s a box of it,” the other replies as he pulls up the collection of unmarked cassettes.

By the end of the day all four teams have grabbed a couple of tapes, and more than a few guys have taken the cue and followed along with the story line. Each going to their own private apartment to let loose.

Mr. Louden, lifting an empty pint glass asks for another IPA. The barman comes down and sets it on the damp coaster. Mr Louden continues the story.

“The tenants are finally allowed to return to their homes and discover missing jewelry, bottles of booze, you name it. It’s a few days before they find the gift left behind in the VCR, video of their neighbors having very kinky sex. Can you imagine?”

Not much crime for a crime novel, huh?

Just then shots ring out and a man falls to the ground. Except in Iraq, where we are at war, but no one in the bar notices.

Some of us are so lucky the hardest thing in life is getting home safe.

How about writing a crime novel? Wouldn’t that be a slap in the face to a poetry degree…
The hero looks like a junkie, skinny white guy with red skin, must be an alcohol rash, and not enough meat on him to make a sandwich. Haunted. The cheek bones protruding so close to death. But he’s a local. Everyone knows him.

He’s always in the Hockey Haven, a crummy bar out by the ocean. We’re talking Ocean Beach. This is San Francisco, the beach is the least interesting thing in The City. Guidebooks don’t mention it. Just a fog covered stretch of dirty sand abutting a grocery store parking lot. Surfers park and suit up for the near frigid water. Gay’s tryst in the bushes where the overgrown desolate end of the Golden Gate Park runs to the sea.

You shouldn’t take travel advice from a crime novel, but don’t bring shorts when you visit us. It’s never warm and the water will kill you.

Our hero, Mr Louden, holding court at the far end of the bar. Down there you can always look up and see what’s new in town.
“PG&E had a gas line burst and the apartment building was showered in the decimated vent line’s asbestos covering.”

Mr Louden worked for The City in the District Attorney’s office for a few years before the evidence of his crack habit become unconcealable and the liability of a city investigator wired on heavy schedule 3 outweighed his eagerness to do the dirty work they needed done.

Things like stealing garbage. That was Mr. Louden’s forte. Hanging around in Dumpsters, cutting open bags of trash, looking for a paper trail.

“Congealed mother’s milk in the breast pump bags, I wretch on site. A colostomy bag, maggoty meat, yes, that’s gross – maybe a slight (he makes a gagging motion) contraction, but no, rancid mother’s milk. That was the worst.”

But he digresses. It’s the clean up crew in the quarantined apartment building. 12 units. Subcontracted labor and these guys are looting the place. Watches, jewelry, you name it. You had cash laying around? Prove it.
The city had it blocked off, the maintenance guy was incinerated in the basement. They found some teeth. Jammed into a load bearing beam. That was about it. None of the residents were allowed back in.
Now these guys from Hayward are in these apartments strip searching them, and guess what someone finds?

End part one.
( and we may never get to part two)

“Flop this over and we’ll dump it out,” I tell Noah as we stand in the back of the truck emptying buckets of dirt.

“Flop? That’s like flip?” he asks me. He’s Honduran.

“Flop is only halfway over, flip goes all the way. Plus, a flip is more graceful. A flop is kind of ugly to watch.”

“You’re very smart Mr. Jon,” he says.

“We’re digging the same ditch so what’s it matter?” I ask him.

All the coffee shop poets are on vacation or too old to ask to do this job, so I called Noah. I don’t like to hire illegals, but Noah tries so hard.

“I only went to like 4th grade in my country, so I believe anything people tell me,” he says. He’s always asking questions too. About a word mostly, or what will happen if he lifts weights and his skin stretches out. Will it be saggy?

“Mr. Jon, did you hear Bob Marley discovered marijuana by following a goat into the woods?”

Sometimes I don’t know what to say to him. But he laughs a lot, and has a good heart, and will carry buckets of dirt in the heat of the day.

An old friend came to town from New York, where she works as a nurse delivering babies. She asks incoming parents, “Have you made a decision about circumcision?”

“The worst answer,” she tells me, “is ‘Yes, of course. I think. Right honey?’”

San Francisco made the wacky liberal news for trying to ban circumcision for any male under 18 years of age. Isn’t that crazy? Why would you ban that?

Well, let me speak frankly. I’ve been circumcised. My penis is no longer an errogenous zone. I must think about killing my girlfriend in order to have a climax. Sexual intercourse is not sufficient stimulation. A doctor cut away a large part of the sensitive tissue on my sex organ. Now I have to use my mind. Fucking your wife with your mind isn’t what nature intended. The poor women must endure this insensitive inchoate jackrabbitting while you, the man, conjure up what it must feel like down there meanwhile imagining sexy thoughts from lingerie catalogs

“But look how long I can last,” says a friend. “If I wasn’t circumcised, it’d be over in 30 seconds.”

That’s exactly the point. Lasting all night means your penis is basically a wooden mallet that you hammer away at with. Is this what God intended? Oh, let’s not bring God into it, because that invites religion as well. And this whole thing is a religious thing.

Or is it? “It prevents disease,” say the supporters. For 90% of males, if you wash your penis regularly and correctly, you won’t have any problems. The fact I never have a urinary tract infection is not worth the trade off of needing a crack pipe, streaming porn with six windows open, and a length of rope tight around my neck in order to ejaculate.

UTI’s are common in women and they deal with it by drinking cranberry juice. I can drink juice too. It would bring me to a better understanding of their pain if we shared this common ailment.

I’ve used some hard language and portrayed some rough scenes, but we are talking about sex and I only have a few minutes. My circumcised penis has led to a general deadening of human emotions. The most delicate, intimate touch has been removed and all is now slaps and grunts, shoving things into place and guessing what will happen.

The neighbor who normally gives me the block of cheese she doesn’t understand passed this to me on the steps yesterday.
I’ve been afraid to open it till Sophia got here. Boiled peanuts and sticky rice with seasonings wrapped in a lotus leaf tied up with string. Totally biodegradable.

If you don’t leave history alone but you won’t pay to make things nice this what you get.

Cathy, the woman in charge, had her clipboard and her receipts and I handed over the $45 rent on my spot.

The two of us stopped our transaction and looked over the tables of junk and the piles of antiques to my neighbor, an older woman who had said what sounded like vagina.

Cathy, she says to me, “he wants to know if she really said that too,” and sure enough a guy holding a lamp said, “excuse me?”

“The vagina lamp? It’s ten dollars.”

Cathy says, “She did say it.”

I walked over and had a look myself. It was a vagina lamp.

“That was my favorite place to drink a beer in the city when I was living in my car,” Will says to me as we drive past the little park by Buena Vista.
“Let’s make a travel guide about that,” I said, always trying to turn an idea into money. “Great places to go in SF if you live in your car.”

Of course, it’s action not ideas that make money, but whoever is living in this plywood truck isn’t turning action into cash, so there must be a magic balance of idea and action in order to generate some income.

Anyone have a favorite place in the city when they were homeless? I was in North Beach living in a storage area of a basement and I loved the dead end that overlooked the Financial District. I leaned against the steel rail and said, “I made it to San Francisco.”

Getting my boat towed.

Sometimes this city looks worse for having garbage collection.

Guy with a beard so long even he forgot what he looks like comes through every Sunday.
The middle aged Asian guy who wears a baseball cap without mesh or the plastic strap in the back dug through about two hundred chopsticks I had and must of found two pairs of ivory ones. He paid $15 dollars for them then left. Shortly thereafter a swarm of Chinese came through and looked only at the chopsticks but no one bought any more.
There’s a guy that always comes through looking for guitars and surf boards and you wonder how such a drunk could be awake so early Sunday morning. His nose is so purple it may attrack fruit flies and drop off his face.
There’s four or five brothers I see every time. Always makes me think of Piney Point Maryland and shipping out in the merchant marines when I work with black guys.
One guy, must be fifty, comes out with his Momma every Sunday and sets up clothes. He takes a chair and sits down with the AM on and hears a ballgame while she gets mad at people, telling me I’m in her spot when I’m not, yelling at a guy over a yard of fabric that he doesn’t come out there to tell her what her prices are, it’s 8 dollars or just leave her be.
I can’t picture a single Chinese seller. I know the Mexican couple next to me, the afghani who sells in the back row, the Russian kid who specializes in lighters, the market is like an ugly stingy version of Benneton where no one wants to give you what your sweater’s worth.

You’re looking at a pair of Isotoner gloves, quarterback Dan Marino was the spokesman in the ’80′s. These came down the waste stream a month ago and I’ve been using them as work gloves.

Chip Hawkins was a stone mason, a strong guy with a neatly trimmed beard. He had dark brown eyes that weren’t mean, they looked sad for you, like he knew you were gonna get hurt real bad and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

This was in the early ’80s, Greenland NH was farmland and forest but Chip loved his front lawn. Unlike our lawn, which was created by years of mowing over poison ivy, sawgrass and goldenrod weeds, Chip had a lawn made out of grass grass. Stuff you bought just for that reason. It looked imported from France, stolen from a castle garden and looked strange set down among the scrub forest bordering their lot.

Other facts we know about Chip:
Recovering alcoholic
2nd wife
Dressed up in a clown suit for Greenland’s annual July Summerfest parade and walked behind a fire truck throwing hard candy at the small crowd in front of the school house.

Chip wore a trucker hat with a specially designed brim, what we called the gable, named after the design element of old New England homes. He took the bill and gave it such a wicked crease down the middle the stiffening material was actually broken, creating the effect of a bottomless pyramid, or a proper snow dispersal system.

Things we don’t know about Chip:
Where he came from. Upstate New York we believe.
Why he came to a small rural town in New Hampshire.
How he talked almost from the top back of his throat, like his neck was pinched.

His son Kenneth, who we all called Kenny, became my friend when they moved to town in my 5th grade. Kenny, trying to establish some order, had pushed me down at the bus stop and threatened to throw me in the irrigation pond. I told him there weren’t a lot of kids around to play with so we might as well be friends. Then we were.

That’s how I got invited into the house (split level ranch, new construction) and had the opportunity to go through Chip’s record collection. Here I discovered an important country artist by the name of Waylon Jennings. Chip had the Dukes of Hazzard theme song on 45, and Kenny said his Dad could play it on guitar and sing it at the same time. No one else’s dad in town owned a guitar.

His father sang the national anthem before the start of important basketball games at the high school too. I was told by Kenny a Capella meant no musical accompaniment, and it was the hardest way to sing. It was looking like Kenny had a cool dad.