"I've seen the best minds...."

For a couple of years in Portland in the mid-1970s I became fairly involved in poetry readings---both as a writer and as an audience/listener. I didn't read poetry; I mostly read fiction, or more accurately, prose. I had a few poems in the can but they weren't especially good enough to share except in a workshop or class. Most of the fiction I read was either in the form of short stories, fragments of longer stories, or brief, imagist one- or two-paragraph pieces that one of the other poets had dubbed "word pictures." The clipped pieces were closer to  prose poems (think Rimbaud on a bad day), but they were quite effective. I quickly discovered that not everything written for the printed page worked well as spoken word, and writings that were not especially publishable often seemed a better fit for live reading. I began to shape my material with readings in mind. I felt more like a stand-up comic, using and punching up stuff that worked, and discarding what didn't work, relying more on writings with potential to entertain, as opposed to being merely "literary."

The people who showed up at readings were often more interesting than the poems and fictions being read, and that is not to denigrate the poems and fictions---most of them were not by any means dull or poorly crafted. There were an assortment of characters and something vital about interacting with a community of poets and writers. These characters ran the gamut from the earnest academic to the raging bohemian. There were the local luminaries whom everyone turned out to see. There were older hacks still laboring unrecognized and under appreciated, and you sometimes wondered what would become of them, though you already knew. There were upper-bourgeois patrons and dabblers who veered toward the dramatic in their recitations. There were unrepentant hippies and beatniks. There were men and women of all ages, gay and straight, black and white, but mostly white. In the more informal settings many of us would get exceedingly drunk and there would arguments of great import about the merit of a certain piece, or more so regarding the worth or talents of a given writer. Sometimes one drunken poet would pick a fight with another. There were also readings where poets competed against one another---contests, slams. If you have ever read Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" he delineates these times and passions eloquently and in surgical detail, though he was dealing with Latin America and Spain, and not the U.S.

I recall one reading where I had tried out a new story that I thought was my best effort at the ripe old age of 23. The room was mostly dark and wrapped in a curtain of smoke, and I couldn't really make out any faces in an audience of 20-30 people. But at one point the room fell silent, and I had paused at a section break in my story, when I heard a female voice shout: "What a good story!" And that was enough for me. It felt like I had just done a jazz riff. I finished the story and everyone politely clapped, but I cannot describe the adrenalin surge I received from that single outburst, how in that instant everything I had done in my life with the written word was validated and affirmed. I had similar reactions reading another work.

A few months later I would tape two reading segments of 30 minutes each for the local public alternative radio station. In the second show I also included another writer. Although radio helped me reach a wider audience and gain a little notoriety, my heart wasn't in it at first. At that time I was intimidated by recording equipment, and I missed the improvising one had gotten through reading or performing live. But my radio show had started a trend: the station, having done strictly music or talk until then, was enthusiastic and soon other writers and poets were reading or recording on this station; some sharing their own work, and others reading stories or poems of mostly famous writers.

It was a time in my life I am happy and grateful to have experienced. These days you can also read your work on You Tube, and that seems fine too. I'll close this post on a personal favorite You Tube reading.

tThe Laughing Heart

Honey, I'm Home - Mix Me a Martini

Is having a bar in the home a thing of the past? Growing up I remember a lot of people had bars in their homes. It was the "Mad Men" era and drinking excessively to the point of inebriation wasn't really frowned upon during that time. So maybe Don Draper and Roger Sterling drank a little too much---an occupational hazard---but the culture of out-of-control drinking was a reality, if not a pose leading to sexually promiscuous behavior. 


Most of the family bars were located in finished basements---a kind of swinging party room with a felt turn table record player, a little floor space for dancing, and plastic guitars and saxophones tacked to the painted cinder block walls or murky paneling. We had an unfinished basement in my house, so the bar, an upright, heavily lacquered wood model, was situated in a corner of the den. The den was paneled in knotty pine, with a big color TV, two faux leather recliner chairs, a fish tank and a gun rack. 


When my father worked graveyard shift at the paper mill, he would often arrive home at about 7:30 or 8:00, and as I watched Captain Kangaroo and dressed for school, he would stand at this bar in the den and mix himself a Manhattan, or maybe Scotch on the rocks (J.B. or Dewars). It felt a little strange to see him drinking so early in the day, but I realized it was the end of his day and he needed to unwind. After a few drinks, and a few Marlboro cigarettes, my father would sit down to eat a hybrid breakfast-dinner of steak and eggs, and then head off to bed where hopefully he'd be able to sleep undisturbed until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. But at any time of the day, this bar was always a presence. My father would pour himself drinks at the bar every evening, and on holidays he and his brothers would stand at the bar and consume ridiculous amounts of alcohol, so that by the time everyone else sat down to enjoy the holiday meal, my father and uncles would stagger to the dinner table, and often manage to quickly insult someone, usually my grandmother, their mother. 


The green bottles and brown bottles and clear bottles, the big red "7" on the Seagrams bottle, the clink of glass or ice tumbling into a glass, the shicka-shicka-shicka of a chrome shaker. There was an ice bucket. Scotch, bourbon, blended whiskey, gin, later vodka. There was always beer from the fridge in pilsner glasses. Martinis, Old Fashions, and Whiskey Sours, Screwdrivers---yes, the bar was a busy place, a place to make drinks, pour drinks, and enjoy the mildly pleasant chemistry of it.  And yet a simple glass of Scotch or a Shaeffers with a whiskey chaser was usually the drink of choice . . . and as time passed and the bar looked weathered and cheap from countless spills, there would be more Vodka included, because Vodka was easier to hide.


Years later, after my father had quit drinking alcohol and joined A.A., he may have kept the bar around for a short time, possibly for entertaining guests, possibly as a test of will power, the amber and green bottles like sirens to his Odysseus lashed to the spar. Although I no longer lived at home, I do recall at one point the bar was gone, because my mother didn't drink, and most of the guests they were entertaining were also affiliated with A.A., and it didn't seem to make sense to leave the bar standing unused. Within a few more years the habit of drinking, and especially the habit of drinking too much,  would undergo serious examination, forcing new laws and changes in our behavior: D.U.I. , blood alcohol limits, M.A.D.D. and the designated driver program would raise public awareness about alcohol abuse. I don't need to wonder where all those old, tacky bars ended up.

Age of Unreason

The ambulance would often come in the mid to late afternoon, rarely after dark. Mrs. Frick again. It took little more than a phone call from her husband, or possibly a neighbor, to summon the medics and the ambulance. Usually, but not always, there would be some prior episode: a radio blaring so loud you heard it a block away, (and it was still loud a block away) accompanied by a middle-aged woman's ear-splitting shrieks as she sang along with one of her favorite songs on the radio; or blood curdling domestic battles, and then the ambulance, the opened rear doors, the gurney, the strait jacket. Mrs. Frick wasn't removed from her house immediately. I imagined the two men in white uniforms first needed to restrain and sedate her, and soon everything would become quiet again, that serene suburban quiet which thinly masked the menace, disillusionment, alienation, insanity, alcoholism, domestic violence and a plethora of family skeletons from street to street. In the quiet the ambulance lights continued to whirl, and eventually the men in white would carry out Mrs. Frick strapped down on the gurney so that you could barely make out her face, she may have already been unconscious. Then the siren would wail momentarily as the ambulance sped away, and you knew, even as a kid, that Mrs. Frick was being taken to a bad place.


We seem to be far from the days when husbands locked their wives up in mental institutions or had them lobotomized. Due to the rise of feminism and the mental health de-institutionalization movement of the 1970s, and largely the pharmacology revolution of the late '80s and '90s that introduced SSRI's, the scene just described is something you will likely never see again. It is not just a sad story in American history; it's a sad story in human history. Mrs. Frick was not an isolated example, though she was one of the worst I'd seen. But there were a number of mothers and housewives across Wayward who'd either been forcibly removed from their families to the nearest mental hospital, or were taking tranquilizers or another prescribed sedative, occasionally chased with alcohol, and were trapped in a solemn, soap-opera Daytime-TV Hell. A hit song in 1966 was the Rolling Stones "Mother's Little Helper" which seemed more about amphetamines but was still an effect of the same tortured experience.

During periods when Mrs. Frick hadn't been locked up and was allowed to stay home, she would sometimes cross the street to Nick's house where a group of us would be standing around and smoking cigarettes. Mrs. Frick was a chain smoker, inclined to run out of cigarettes. She would then come and visit us in front of Nick's house to cadge cigarettes. In the space of ten minutes Mrs. Frick would manage to smoke several cigarettes and between us we would donate another 10 or 15 for her to take back home. She was a frightening figure: steel wool hair wild and frizzled; complexion a sepia-ash with darker macules on her arms, wrists and hands, presumably those locations where syringes and IVs had pinched and plunged; her hazel eyes clouded over, enthralled by some distant inner visions, never looking directly at you or even at an object close by. But Mrs. Frick did talk to us, and though at first we were a bit wary of her because her conversation was disjointed and nonsensical, she would somehow manage to utter a few weird but uncannily relevant sentences that would make all of us laugh and the tension would ease up. She was trying to win us over; we had cigarettes after all. What had been done to her wasn't entirely her fault, but you still feared that she might somehow turn violent at the slightest word or action. It was her unpredictability that was most unsettling.

By the early '70s the Frick's house had been sold. The gossip at the time circulated around Mrs. Frick having been put away for good and possibly dead, which, to society, didn't make much difference.  The two children were adults and out of the house, and the husband was off to some privileged bachelor life . . . somewhere. But no one really knew for sure.

Living the Dream

I've been thinking quite a lot about retirement lately. The idea, as hinted at in the previous post, was once you were settled with a single company, you would accrue all the pay and benefits possible, and be vested, and at the end of your service you would retire with a nice fat pension. I had been hoping for something like that when I had taken a permanent full-time position with a pharmaceutical company in the late '80s . My wife and I had a child and we had bought a house. And two years later I was laid off. The game had changed and the rug was yanked out from under my feet.

The following incident occurred on the Sunday morning after Christmas in 1970. I was 18 years old and heading to the bus stop to catch the next bus into New York and meet my 16-year-old girlfriend who lived in The Bronx. It was about 8:00 in the morning and the streets of the town were empty. I walked past Mr. Dahl's house as he was stepping out his front door. He vaguely knew who I was, but he liked to talk and he must have decided that I would be his captive audience. Mr. Dahl was one of those men of the old school, who didn't leave the house without wearing a gray jacket, a vest and a tie, and a homburg, and who spoke in a breezy jazz-age language, replete with double entendre, that was sometimes difficult for a young 60s kid to decipher. But I liked Mr. Dahl, and even though I wanted to catch my bus, I lingered and listened to him talk, occasionally nodding my head, or asking him a question. It wasn't really a conversation; it was more about my bearing witness to his verbal stream-of-consciousness. Eventually the conversation veered to the subject of retirement, an idea or stage of life that, at 18, I knew little of. Mr. Dahl had worked for one company (insurance or finance) his entire life, and he'd retired from the company when his time had come. He had looked forward to retirement for years so he could be with his wife all the time. And then, without warning, Mr. Dahl started to tear up. As it turned out, his wife had died within the first year of his retirement and he'd been alone ever since. "Jesus," he said, "You work so hard, and the one thing you hope for most, to be with your loved one, is taken from you. It's not fair," he said, and then he began to cry. And I had no idea what to say, other than "I'm sorry." I saw a man's life story cling to this one theme. Our talk had hit hit a dead end. Mr. Dahl needlessly apologized. He was OK, and I soon left to catch the next bus.

My girlfriend was unhappy when I showed up late, but I had felt that my lateness was excusable. Mr. Dahl was old and lonely (it was the Christmas holidays after all) to the point where he felt the need to unpack his tired heart to an 18-year-old kid, to anyone frankly who'd been walking past his house and had the time to hear his story. And I had grown a little in that half-hour pause---the future would likely not be what you imagined it to be, and my life has borne that out. Even so, we cannot help ourselves from envisioning a happy and easy ending from a present vantage. It doesn't hurt to dream, but maybe we should keep a healthy grain of salt on hand and embrace the unexpected.

Missed Opportunities (or were they?)

For a long time there was only one telephone company---Bell Telephone---and to land a job with them was akin to striking the mother-lode.

I applied for a job with Bell-Tel some time in late 1976 after returning from a month-and-a-half of picking fruit in Hood River Oregon and Yakima Washington, and I recall that omnipresent logo -- on the building, in the lobby, on the stationery, and in the indoctrination film I was forced to watch. At the end of a brief interview, the job boiled down to this: You would have to work as a phone operator for for your first two years with the company (not great, but OK), and phone operators were required to work all shifts, seven days a week, including holidays (you mean I might have to work Christmas? Or 4th of July? Or Thanksgiving?) Yes, you may have to work those holidays, but you will be paid double your hourly wage.

So I declined employment with Bell-Tel because I really wasn't mature enough at the age of 24 to make a serious lifestyle change. Eventually I would come to see the wisdom of working long hours, of sacrificing time for money, and of saving while you were young---but by then I was no longer young. In the absence of any one profession in which to grow and have a "career," it made sense to work 60- or 70-hour weeks while you were able to, and earn time-and-a-half, or double-time pay, pay which you had no opportunity or chance to spend. But hey, I thought I could always try again with Bell-Tel and other large U.S. companies (IBM, GM, GE, etc.), and once you managed to get your foot in the door, you would be set for life . . . and we all know how that turned out . . . I had similar delusions when I'd begun working for a large pharmaceutical firm in the '80s.

I had another offer to make lots of money when I was living again in north Jersey a few years later. The job was with a printing firm, and again it meant working seven days a week in pre-press, stripping negatives and making plates with lots of overtime as the dangling carrot, but even by my late 20's I still wasn't interested in sacrificing all that time. And I already had a 40-hour week job as an editor, and while the editor only paid a fraction of what the printing gig would have paid, I was pretty much doing what I enjoyed and didn't want to give that up. But I do wonder how my life might have turned out differently if I'd had the maturity and discipline to have taken one of those jobs. For instance, I might have settled down earlier---married, bought a house, had kids earlier. I would have had some material success at a younger age, but then Bell-Tel was broken up, and the printing company folded, and the printing industry overall declined and was not the field to be employed in, and the skills I would have picked up in either company would not have been marketable, would have been pretty much useless, like the typesetting and copy editing skills I had which kept me employed through much of the 80's. So who really knows, things might have turned out roughly the same either way, and by not opting to work all those free hours in my 20's, I at least had more of my 20's to enjoy.

Freeway Cars and Trucks

In late 1978 I was out of a job again after the CETA-funded program I'd been working on ran out of funding. At that time, being 26, and having picked up career skills that I thought might allow me to work in magazine publishing, I no longer embraced the idea of being unemployed. Two or three years earlier I would have found some marginal way of supporting myself, like doing yard work, or picking fruit in the Hood River Valley, or selling flowers on the streets of downtown Portland, but those options no longer seemed viable. I had changed.

While looking for a new job on a magazine or local newspaper, I registered with Manpower. Everyone's heard of Manpower, and I figured I might be contacted for a temporary assignment so I'd have some cash coming in. And Manpower did contact me! I was to work a three-day job, from 6:00AM to 9:00AM each day, and I would use my own car. I was supposed to park at a designated lookout point on I-80 North and count traffic.

What were they thinking?

I was provided with two clickers, a pad and a couple pencils.  The clickers had a crude plastic tumbler that counted off a number every time you pressed a metal tab with your thumb. Because I was right-handed, the clicker in my left hand was for counting trucks, and the clicker in my right hand was for cars. From the top of the hour you worked a 15-minute interval and then stopped for 5 minutes, and then at 20 past the hour you started again for another 15 minutes, so that you ended up with 3 counting sessions per hour with 3 breaks of 5 minutes each. At the beginning of your break, you were supposed to write down the numbers from your clickers on to the pad and then reset the counters. The purpose was to monitor traffic volume because a hospital was situated close to the highway and the EPA believed there may have been a pollution risk to the patients. In 1978, late 1978,  it was hard to imagine that there wasn't equipment to count traffic---you know, those leaden boxes that the Highway and Safety Department leaves on the shoulder of the road. And I believe the equipment was available, but maybe it had malfunctioned and the people running the study couldn't get a replacement soon enough. They needed a human car counter, and so they called me.

Traffic was light and easy to record between 6:00 AM and 7:00 AM, mostly trucks at that hour. But between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM I was clicking away like a fool, a perverse and frenetic Morse code. At first I tried to be honest with the numbers, but, hmm... no one was watching me, and I quickly learned that I could extend my 5-minute breaks by averaging how many cars/trucks passed in a minute and then accounting for the half hour in which that minute occurred. It was a little tricky because during the first half hour (6:00 - 6:30) more trucks than cars were counted, but in the final half hour, cars outnumbered trucks approximately 12:1.

The best part of this easy but absurdly demeaning work was that I was treated to watching the sunrise every morning for three days in a row. It was still dark when I arrived at my post to count cars, but in the next couple hours I would study the world as it gradually filled with light, observe the nearly imperceptible changes of shades in twilight, the creeping certainty of dawn and the miracle of each daybreak. What more could one ask for than to witness the beginning of each day? I would bring a thermos of tea or buy coffee. On my 5-minute breaks I'd drink the tea or coffee and read "The Magic Mountain" which usually prolonged the breaks by a few minutes and I'd have to compensate as mentioned for the missed cars and trucks.

And by the time I finished each day, I had already done a little work, gotten a little money, and I still had the whole day ahead of me. When Manpower gave me my next assignment---a dreary bank job downtown checking stacks of computer printouts for a programming bug and numerical errata---I asked them if they still needed anyone to count cars . . . and trucks . . .

Bicycle Inspection

It was always the Monday or Tuesday following Easter. You had to ride your bicycle to the nearest school and have it inspected by the police, and then you had to take a short riding test, and if you passed the police would affix a tin license plate around the steering column of your bicycle.


I cannot specifically recall when kids were no longer required to have an annual bicycle inspection, but I'm pretty certain this ritual faded out sometime in the mid-to-late 60s if not sooner.

It may have disappeared, like other civic duties of the time, from a lack of cooperation from families and/or the bureaucratic strain. When I was growing up a number of these organized civic activities existed, and town residents, families, were expected to comply, mostly for reasons of public health and safety. I suspect this model of civic responsibility was largely left over from World War II and the first decade of the Cold War. The great polio vaccine was one of these activities, and on a lesser scale the fire house held dog and cat vaccinations for rabies, and there were collective safety programs, and the aforementioned bicycle inspections. At school we all watched astronauts fly into space, and we were also indoctrinated about The Enemy. We had all learned early on that Communism was The Enemy and Khrushchev was The Enemy and that Communists didn't believe in God or Freedom. But mostly we wanted to play our 45s, or listen to transistor radios, or watch Soupy Sales on TV.

One bicycle inspection year I had to stand before the police lieutenant for an oral quiz. I must have been eight or nine years old. The lieutenant was a tall, large and menacing crew cut figure with sharp eyes and a gun and bullets and badges and all kinds of medals and metal clinking and jingling on his starched uniform. The ultimate authority figure. The only equally frightening authority figure was the school principal. Anyway, I had taken the road test---a quick execution around a painted figure-8---and then the brake test, which was to pedal fast and then stop on a dime. (It is worth noting that back then no one wore helmets for bicycles or motorcycles). I was terrified of the police lieutenant, and as I was seated on my bike, he crouched down and asked: "How many can you ride on a bicycle at one time?" I sensed a trick question, but didn't know the right answer. After all, I often rode with two, or even three kids on a bicycle, and while I suspected it was wrong, riding this way didn't strike me as an evil or criminal act. So I took a safe guess and answered "two" which certainly seemed innocuous compared with "three" or "four"

The lieutenant's face turned to stone. "One!" he thundered. "Never, never ride a bicycle with more than one person! Riding double is against the law! And you can get killed or get someone else killed! Do you want that to happen? Do you understand? Now . . . " and the lieutenant asked me the question once more, and the second time I got it right..