My Blog

Peanut

Greg — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:40:46 GMT

I can't keep a pet. I had to watch my parakeet spin on it's back for eight hours before it finally went still and died. I lived at 1758 Glendon Avenue in West LA from the age of three until I was first incarcerated in a group home the day after my tenth birthday. Great violence was often my visitor in that apartment; my very first memory of my father consists of him standing over me with a belt and giving his ex-wife, my mother hell for having to drive twenty miles to whip me. The violence escalated and at the ripe old age of age six I found myself being chased around and around that apartment by my mother until I got the bright idea of finding a weapon to defend myself. I got a steak knife half as long as myself from a kitchen drawer. Weapon in hand I ran retreating to my bedroom where I went for my bed in the corner and stood my ground, pointing the knife towards my attacker now miraculously held at bay. I was terrified; knowing that I’d upped the ante and escalated the incident to a new and unknown level. Mother stopped chasing me once I’d armed myself and crossed the threshold of my bedroom, so in arming myself I successfully put a stop to the flurry of smacks, shaking, and being knocked around…for now. My demonic assailant was in an instant all calm and sugary sweetness, actually asking me to put down the knife instead of screaming demands. Beguiling and cooing niceties didn’t lull me into disarming, as I was now in even more serious trouble. I knew that the second I became vulnerable again I was in for a beating the likes of which I’d never seen. So the incident was now at an impasse, neither of us budging. All I cared about was that the blows finally had come to an end- that is until she was replaced by two of LA's finest. The pigs tried the same tact, all gentleness and tranquility, but I was far too frightened to move. I couldn’t even look in their direction and so sat frozen, head down in my chest on my bed. After a couple of minutes their patience was gone and they jumped me, having their way with all three and a half feet of defenseless paralyzed me, kicking my ass and disarming me-- then snickering to my mother that: 'We just shot a kid not much older for the same thing...' Lying cocksuckers. I had a succession of parakeets all named Peanut, and I loved every one of the little fuckers because they returned my affection, taking crackers out of my mouth and perching on my little finger. They were the only living things that didn't bring me pain and violence and so the morning Peanut the Third fell from his perch I was so traumatized I couldn't leave for school because I couldn't stop crying. My mother gave me no comfort, going to work and leaving me alone to sit bawling in the living room, unable to enter my bedroom and confront the sight of little Peanut spinning on it's back, flopping and unable to right him or herself. Spending the long day alone with him as he flopped around the bottom of the cage dying left me so shell shocked that as an adult I can't bear to own a pet because it will eventually die, leaving me alone with all the resurrected pain and sadness of my childhood.

The Road to Incarceration

Greg — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:48:09 GMT

Towards the end of my ninth year on this planet with those of you over forty-six, and before anyone under thirty-six was here, my mom and step-father drove me south from our apartment on Glendon Avenue in West Los Angeles to the Culver City section of the gigantic concrete mega polis that constitutes L.A., or as I prefer to call it and it should be referred to-- Hellay; slabby and soulless, the snuff porn capitol and dark heart of America. The street I lived on, Glendon Avenue ran from Santa Monica Boulevard north for a mile or so where it terminated in Westwood Village, a small business district which owed it's existence to the University of California Los Angeles, better known as UCLA, a political science and collegiate sport deity whose massive campus began where the shops ended. The last business, if you could call it that (it was), was the Westwood Village Mortuary. Marilyn Monroe (and later joined in rest by her sport legend husband Jolten Joe DiMaggio), is cemented into a wall there. Although I'd never seen any of her movies, or if I had I hadn't paid any attention to her sublime form wiggling across the screen, and I had no interest in sticking my junk in her as at that age as it's main purpose was playing lead pink guitar for my friends by strumming my hard-on with a rapid and furious windmill stroke like a prepubescent Pete Townsend. I knew Marilyn was mummifying for all eternity in a wall up there at the top of Glendon Avenue and I was inordinately proud of the fact. I didn't know where we were headed that hot August day, and I didn't care as I was fixated on our vacation that started the day after tomorrow with an overnight white water raft trip on the Stanislaus River, followed by a visit to Yosemite Valley and ending with camping in the Yosemite high country at Tuolumne Meadows. When the car finally came to a stop I had no idea where we were, but a man came out to our car and proceeded to show us around what appeared to be a school as a bunch of kids, almost all a good bit older than me, were milling around in groups escorted by adults that I assumed must be the teachers. I thought nothing of it, but the place seemed strange for a school as it was well past four and none of the kids had gone home yet. My tenth birthday would be 'celebrated' on the trip to Yosemite, and I was I doubly anxious to go because the last family outing with my two step-siblings, step-parent and biological mother was enjoyed without me. I was kicked off that trip the week before departure after I'd misbehaved terribly, which usually meant committing some unspeakable horror like not making my bed fast enough or without being asked in the morning. When I was left off with my octogenarian grand-aunt in Hollywood I was pissed because even though I could now stay up all night getting jacked on huge quantities of ice cream, everyone was going to Arizona, Colorado and Utah without me. In order to assuage their holiday guilt my folks sent my step-brother and sister to their mothers for the duration of this next trip. What little I remember of that week was sliding down in the back seat of the car to barely eye-level with the window somewhere on Interstate 5, and watching terrified as a mile long procession of larger than life Hells Angels roared past our puny vehicle and it's insignificant occupants. My stepfather pretended not to notice them and my mother looked down, pretending to read a map of California. I might of been clueless as to what Marilyn Monroe was all about but I knew what the Hells Angels meant. I also remember that night was spent in a motel in Modesto or Merced or some other town that started with an 'M', getting the shit seriously kicked out of me. I don't know what precipitated the beating as the maid made the beds before we got there, but I remember the onslaught came to an end only after the guest in the next room over complained to the motel manager about my screaming and a call was made to our room threatening us with expulsion. I also remember scrambling to the top of granite boulders in Tuolumne Meadows where for once I could look down on the brutal cockroach that was my step-father, and the mosquitoes that formed clouds around me in the bitterly cold mornings and evenings.

Recreational Substance Abuse While Waiting For Puberty In A Barbie Doll Prison (1971-1978)

Greg — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:02:49 GMT

The view of the ocean that Vista Del Mar was named for is long gone, veiled by a thick curtain of emphysema-friendly brown-orange smog and twelve miles of apartment buildings. Established as an orphanage for Jewish children on twelve acres that had been farm land prior to the turn of the previous century, the post World War Two rise in American juvenile delinquency saw the facility tackle a new mission and undergo a face-lift, turning the orphanage into a group home/placement for Jewish boys and girls; essentially the same thing, except that the new occupants had living parents that might of been, were much the same as, or should have been dead. Vista was home sweet home to roughly one-hundred kids ranging in age from five to eighteen and one minute (after which you were emancipated and kicked out the front gate), and of varying dispositions from normal with fucked-up parents to full blown punch yourself repeatedly in the face autistics. About twenty juvenile charges aged five to ten were housed co-ed in the 'Jacoby' unit, roughly fifty boys eleven to eighteen were divided between units thirty-four and thirty-six, and thirty or so girls were in temporary quarters as their old building, unit thirty-two, had been demolished to make way for a new facility which was to be given the folksy name 'Taper Cottage'. The co-ed nature of the Jacoby unit was based on the premise that children at or under the age of ten were as yet unaware of their sexuality, a notion put to the test and obliterated when not quite eleven year old Roxanne Sours relieved every boy in Jacoby of their virginity in a broom closet. I should have been one of the many lucky recipients of Roxanne's generosity, but I'd been placed in the segregated unit thirty-four on account of my propensity for violence, and subsequently it would be more than a decade before I would finally get my over-ripe turn and finally lose my secret shame and kill the oldest virgin ever known. I began my internment the last week of summer nineteen seventy-one feeling as though an ocean liner had appeared out of an otherwise clear and cloudless sky and impacted the ground where I was standing. Just yesterday in the different world of my former life I'd had maybe two friends my age to pal around with, and suddenly overnight I found myself living with a hundred fucked up or otherwise fucked kids, almost all of which were a good bit older and bigger than me. Seemingly without warning I'd been taken from all that I knew and dropped on an alien planet so volatile and hostile I expected the place would explode, splintering into slivers or matchsticks if not back to individual atoms. I was way out of my element and scared shitless. I was dropped off in the afternoon and introduced to my new 'Houseparents', Elaine Collier and Angelo Pesanti. Elaine was a very large woman who wore flowing robes, and if she's still alive I'm sure she's living a Wicca lifestyle somewhere. Angelo was a very tall languid man with what must have been an enormous penis. You couldn't help but see the thing in his habitually worn light blue and skin tight denim jeans. Looking back at him it's also apparent that he was very homosexual, although at the time I wasn't hip to that. He was a frustrated opera singer and would sit at the piano in the music room practicing scales for hours, 'La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la', while the kids that were his charges ran amok. The kids loved him. Angelo led me and my suitcase up to the room I would be sharing with two other kids who were in school at the time, pointed out which bed was mine and after instructing me to leave my suitcase he showed me around my new home. Unit thirty-four was a large and dilapidated two-story structure with a living room, a study hall, music room which consisted of an empty room with a tired, out of tune piano that saw no use other than houseparent Angelo's, a game room that had a broken Foosball table, two or three small unused rooms one of which was lined with lockers on both sides, a large and rarely used kitchen and lastly a dinning hall. Upstairs were bedrooms most of which had three occupants. As my tour ended the other unfortunates spilled into the unit having completed school for the day. I was introduced to my new roommates Ben Kaufman, a tall seventeen year old whose mother was black and had no influence genetically on Ben's appearance except for his hair, which was a full blown Afro of enormous size as was the style at the time, and Mike Schnitzer, who had a identical twin brother Mark next door in unit thirty-six, identical except Mark only had one eye, the other having been shot out with a BB gun by Mike. The twenty-five kids I shared my new home with were all fairly normal and reasonably well socialized, the odd man out being Larry Gould, who after school every day dried parsley in the oven, and after rolling it into a joint and smoking it proceeded upstairs to his bedroom window, from which he would jump twenty-five feet down to the asphalt below over and over again. I must have been introduced individually to Larry and the other cloistered misfits of unit thirty-four, or perhaps they were ordered to line up like the girls in a brothel for all I knew, as the rest of my first day and evening in unit thirty-four never registered through the shock and disbelief of the waking nightmare unfolding before my eyes. I was ten years and one day old, and my childhood which had survived one insult after another from my parents, peers, and society as a whole, was finally dead. After breakfast the next morning I made the short walk to the infirmary to get my Benadryl and Ritalin speedball, after which like most of the kids at Vista I walked about a block down to the on premises school, a bottom of the barrel education facility consisting of a half-dozen trailers surrounding an asphalt recreation yard that had hopscotch, four square and some other games painted on it, and a couple of tether ball posts. I carried a slip of paper my houseparent had given me that morning assigning me to classroom one, a small but clean trailer with no windows other than a foot wide strip that ran parallel to the door. Room one was under the care and tutelage of Mr. Usher Rudick, a thick bald man with a thicker salt and pepper beard who habitually smoked a pipe, and teacher's aid Mrs. Morrison, a sweet but no nonsense black lady who wore cat eye glasses and dressed like a gangster. I was to spend the next year and a half in that room finishing my grammar school education and waiting for my behavior to calm down which it did, eventually. After school let out I checked in back at unit thirty-four after which I had a couple of hours to kill before dinner. After reporting in I went outside and sat on the front steps where in short order I was approached by two kids from unit thirty-six which was next door. They looked rough, both at least a foot and maybe two feet taller than me and might have been as old as sixteen. They asked me my name, were I was from, why I was there, then volunteered themselves the task of taking me under wing orienting me to my new surroundings and showing me the ropes. I was pretty pleased with myself having these villains leading me around and I felt accepted, though in reality I was being set up as they gleefully led me here and there, at every stop asking me what I thought of the way this person looked and the way that person dressed. Wanting to let my new friends know I was no chump, I'd been around and was streetwise and tough, I ran my mouth letting fly pearl after pearl of clever commentary, and in the hours before dinner I put everything I had into making sure I left the right impression on my new companions. On that first day almost forty years back unknowingly and effortlessly I’d dug myself a very deep grave at the debut of a new life as a ward of the county and Vista inmate.

Life Is A Sexually Transmitted Fatal Disease

Greg — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:42:41 GMT

When I get asked my age I usually reply by informing the inquiring party that I have many ages that vary widely, starting with a psychological age somewhere between ten and eighteen, an apparent age of around thirty-five, a chronological age of forty-six, a physiological age that runs from thirty-three to a hundred and ten depending upon which part of my body referenced, and a couple of other ages that escape me at the moment. The day before yesterday I was standing up against the fence of my elementary school, clawed hands clutching the chain link with a death grip as I stared out at the world beyond the school and thinking to myself, 'shit, I'm only in the second grade, it's going to take forever until I'm finally in the sixth grade and then I'll be close to getting out of this hell hole'. Junior high I could vaguely imagine attending one far off day, but high school seemed like a remote corner of the universe in someone else's future. I was never going to get out of school. The thirty year reunion for my graduating class is just around the corner, an event I'll be sure not to attend as anyone I may have known in school will have morphed into an unrecognizable entity that has spent the intervening three decades succeeding in life by doing things that I'm sure to find incredibly uninteresting. For my part I don't think they really want to hear about how after being busted by twenty-one jump street (long before the hit TV show and Johnny Depp vehicle I was blissfully unaware that high school narcs existed and was taken by surprise when two long haired kids arrested me as I smoked a joint during lunch off campus), I was a homeless punk rock speed freak over the hill in Hollywood before marrying a prostitute and becoming a heroin addict after moving to London. Divorced from my addiction and split from my wife I repatriated to the US and worked in a coffee shop by day and sang in a hardcore punk band at night, until getting stabbed and seriously injured by a skinhead who was enraged because they didn't allow fifteen year olds in the bar where my band was scheduled to play. Having taught myself to paint while my wounds healed, the last decade has passed sleepwalking again heroin addicted, an artist with a propensity for dating girls in the sex trade. Not a boring story, mind you, it's just that I'd rather not have a bunch of yuppies whispering to each other and pointing at me like I have two heads. As one grows old and the metabolism slows down time accelerates and one year streaks to the next and becomes a memory almost before one has a chance to register any of it. Once you get a bunch of years under your belt and behind you one year blends into the next and takes up no more of your time than one second in the little more than a minute that constitutes your time on earth. I blinked and I was middle aged, next time I blink I'll be dead. A month after I'd broken up with the love of my life and moved to a different state hoping that twelve hundred miles between us would finally get me to stop crying, we were sitting together in a restaurant during one of two post-separation weeks we spent together, and having just kicked heroin and love I was suffering emotional post traumatic stress disorder and feeling miles and years beyond the five feet and one month between us. I'm sure I looked as shot out and pathetic as I felt. There was a great silence between us, and with eyes that couldn't see through the pain in my heart I stared unblinking into a future I didn't want. I knew that Elisa was looking at me, and after minutes that felt like hours she asked me what I was feeling. 'I feel like I'm hurtling to my death', I said to her softly. I knew I'd never get to be with a girl like her again, and in the ten years since we were together I haven't come close. I ride a bicycle because I've spent all the money I've earned over the years buying houses in Mexico for people that I've never met, and subsequently I'm too poor to buy a car. Now and then I'll be riding somewhere, and hearing a car come up behind me makes me wish the occupant had a gun and would be so kind as to shoot me in the back of the head; a painless and instantaneous exit, I wouldn't even know I was dead. I've never been a lucky person, and the car passes leaving me behind and intact to suffer another day. I get bouts of morbid clinical depression from time to time. When an episode hits me it comes on fast and strong, overwhelming my body and mind with a sadness that hits like a tidal wave and makes the rush from shooting heroin or speed weak by comparison. The depression is stupid and it pisses me off, as today is much the same as yesterday or five minutes ago, but now the idea of killing myself seems agreeable. The only thing stopping me from acting on the idea of a really thorough rest is the knowledge that as time flies when you're having fun, I'll be dead the day after tomorrow anyway so why bother accelerating it. It's a fail safe awareness that keeps me from being ultimately stupid. I'm never going to kill myself intentionally and I know it, or at least I think I do-- for now anyway. My depression has no rhyme or reason, and the reason it really fucks me off is because there is no reason. I'm a lucky fuck and I know it; shit, by dint of being born into this bankruptcy called America, and being white and upper middle class by birth, I've been able to spend most of my adult life a debauched hedonist, shooting hard drugs and decorating little canvas squares to supply my dope habit. About as bourgeoisie as one could ever hope and I know it. Still I get depressed, and the cause of my emotional roller coaster is absolutely lost on me. I'm not conflicted about my self indulgence, as I keep my shitty little mess under my own little roof and am careful not to spread it around. Even though the Ayatollah was right and America is 'The Great Satan', in most ways I'm not as much of a tool of the death merchants as most. Living under the poverty cap on SociaI Security Disability Insurance I don't pay the taxes that buy the bombs we drop on our brown, black, and yellow brothers and sisters all over the world. My only issue comes from knowing that my cocaine use supports the CIA's dirty wars throughout Central and South America. My heroin use being Mexican based as opposed to Asian or Afghani, I think puts it outside the realm of CIA support although Vincente Fox and George are certainly more or less bedfellows-- I think; not being a spook I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure I'm not putting the turkey on George Bush's dinner table. The guys a fucking cannibal.

Heroin Gremlins

Greg — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:16:54 GMT

I've been knocking around long enough to realize the old adage 'You're born alone you die alone', though trite and nihilist as it gets, is pretty much right on the money, unless you're a Siamese Twin or die in a plane crash, earthquake, or Iraq. I inherited my father's hyper-logical, linear mindset, and the first eight-tenths of my existence I bought into a clinical, science based and very western view of things. You're born, you die, you're food for worms-- and while death awaits us all, indisputably turning Greg Allen, junky, artist, all around asshole, into Greg Allen, food; my smug one plus one equals two understanding of exactly what-the-fuck-is-what has been thoroughly massacred by incident beyond coincidence, synchronization, or serendipity. Far beyond the Twilight Zone, things have happened in my life that are just plain stupid. One plus one equals three, and I can prove it. Aside from being visited by one ghost and several dozen UFOs, one incident happened to me where I wish as a youngster I'd done better in school so I could do the math and calculate the odds of that incident. Every time I've quit using heroin I've been tested by what I refer to as the Drug Gremlins, although the Devil may be more apropos. Though they're never subtle, sometimes the tests are relatively benign, and always involve temptation immediately after quitting heroin and the worst of the sickness is over. Usually it's something as simple as turning on the television after three or four days of wretched sickness , and the first thing that appears will be someone high on heroin or going to get some heroin, and as I've never had cable and this is happening on network television it's pretty uncanny. Another time I'd just gotten clean for the first time in four years by going to jail on a fugitive warrant meaning I was on a no bond hold, in other words I was unable to bail out so I had to sit tight for two weeks, and was released as clean as I'd been in years and ready to start all over again. Calling a cab from the pay phone outside the jail I take it straight to the drugstore to pick up a fresh ten pack of rigs. The cab waits for me, and exiting with fresh syringes I figure by the time I get to my house I'll have just enough time to call my dealer before he shuts down for the day. Running up the back stairs from the top step I glance down the alley and the first person I see out in the free world, other than the cab driver-- here comes my buddy Pat, who just happens to have a good amount of dope on him and will happily share, a once in a blue moon occasion with smackheads, or at least with Pat. I don't even have to call my dealer, the gremlins have sent me a gift. Having free dope fall out of the sky only happens after you've sucked up every last drop of courage, resolve, and whatever else you need to kick the monkey off your back. The above examples (though similar events never seemed to happen while contentedly indulging my hedonist ways), though out of the blue, were not beyond the realm of possibility. Though Pat had never come down my alley loaded with dope, at least when I was also in the alley, before I'd gotten myself clean, I'm sure he'd walked down lots of alleys carrying shit. The same can't be said about my next relapse, and it changed my way of looking back at the universe. I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico 1n '97. My half-sister Corinne, who I barely knew, invited me out there to live under the pretense of 'becoming a famous artist'. My sister, a Certified Public Accountant, doesn't know the first thing about the art world, and I wasn't going to discourage her by giving a dissertation on how my work, though technically competent, is a far cry from painting the Virgin Mary with elephant dung, painting a landscape in twenty minutes or any of the other catchy things artists do these days to get national attention. Anyway, I enjoyed my thirty-fifth birthday at her house by attending a party chock full of certified public accountants; for some reason I excused myself early and repaired to a bedroom to begin spiraling into dope sickness, as relocating from Reno to New Mexico was for me about getting away from, if not my bad habits, at least my worst habit. The next day I was good and ailing, and I called my father into my room (he just happened to be visiting from Los Angeles at the time). I told my Dad what was up with me, and how I needed to tell my sister because although I didn't want to burst her bubble and tell her her brother was a painter and a junky, I had no intention of living under her roof and lying to her. 'No, no, no no, don't tell her my Dad implores me, so I don't. I don't need to; the next day my dad tells her that 'I'm kicking heroin but didn't want her to know', of all the fucking shitty-assed moves. He's always been great to me like that, when he's been around for me, which is never. Like I've said, it would have been miraculous if I were anything other than a junky. Anyway, my sister mimicking my Dad's support tells me 'This is not a hospital!', before trundling me off to a shelter. From the shelter I move in with a Nam Vet who I worked for cleaning up the masonry and tile jobs he got. He liked to smoke cocaine (home-made crack). After taking one or two hits he would turn off all the lights in his single-wide trailer, take off all his clothes, and squat silently in the middle of the living room listening and waiting for I don't know what. His buddy 'Hatchet' Dave, meanwhile would be walking around the perimeter of the property in the dark-- with a hatchet, of course. I preferred shooting my coke and would be safely ensconced in the ten foot trailer I was living in out back. Some people have all the fun when they get fucked up. From there I got a job in a coffee house that never had any customers. The only food was the danish that the owner brought in every three or four days from Costco. He'd dump them in an uncovered bowl where they'd sit awash with flies in a display case. I was staying off heroin though occasionally shooting coke, eating danish, and serving about ten customers over an eight hour shift. One of the regulars was a musician that came in. Chris was about ten years older than me and had a gap between his two front teeth. One day he came in and kept falling asleep while he was talking to me. Obvious. I asked him if he could hook me up and my clean-ish stretch was over. We became dope shooting buddies because his wife was oblivious to his habit and misery loves company. He had a room for rent so I moved right in. This other guy, Matt, would come over once a week or so and be sociable shooting dope with us. I liked Matt, he was about my age and like me also from Los Angeles. Matt was gorgeous and so was his Norwegian girlfriend, who like Chris's wife, was somehow oblivious to his habit. I don't know how they pulled it off, explaining away to their significant others the fact that they were getting sick at least every other week and sometimes every week. I hooked up with Elisa. A gorgeous girl from Chicago, she was a former dominatrix and dope addict who took her five-hundred dollar an hour job and parlayed it into a record store. I moved in with her and fell in Love. Piece of shit that I was, I wasn't working and Elisa was having to pay for my dope so I could stay well and keep her serviced. She was in love with me as well and I put her through hell. We had lived together for about six months when she began talking about returning to her record store and Chicago. There was talk of me going with her but she was so good to me and I was such a turd that I knew I had to return to Reno. For two weeks straight I did nothing but cry (seriously), cum too fast (before she did, for a change), and generally make sure she hated me and knew I was pathetic before I kicked my dope habit again and left. I called my friend Stacey and asked if I could crash on her couch for a couple of weeks. I flew into Reno and moved into Stacey's living room where I remained for the next three months. I occupied my time by shooting dope and getting strung out again. Elisa and I called each other almost every day, and knowing I'd never have it so good again I pretty much gave up. Stacey's boyfriend was sure I was fucking her (I couldn't even get hard after my break-up, much less fuck my house mate), and it created a fun atmosphere. Stacey kicked me out, and not really giving a shit about myself, much less anyone or anything else, I moved into her basement where I lived in the dirt and shot dope. I overdosed for the third, forth, and fifth times down there, by myself, but miraculously I regained consciousness every time. The landlord clued Stacey in as to my new residence, and I ended up on the street. I eventually recovered from my break-up, and even started having sex again a year or two later. I got a place to live, kept painting and stayed good and fucked up. Years went by, four or five of them I think, when I decided it was time to get it together. I called my non-biological mom in L.A. and explained to her what was up. She's always loved me, at least since I met her when I was seventeen, and she's shown it unconditionally. I took a Greyhound to L.A., and spent three or four sick days in her spare room. I began to feel better, and decided I would venture out into the world with my mom when she went to buy dinner for the evening. Though we lived in West Hollywood, for some reason she drove through rush hour traffic into Venice, an hour away. I guess it was because she was making seafood, and as Venice is on the beach she could get it fresh (I've never understood 'fresh' seafood, as to me all seafood tastes like you're licking the bottom of an eighteenth century whaler). Pulling up to the fish store, I eye a supermarket across the street. I remind my mom that I can't abide seafood, and can't we get me something from the market to eat? We walk over to the market, and going inside standing in the first aisle the first person whose path I cross is Matt, my dope shooting buddy from New Mexico, and he can get dope. My mother leaves us so I can talk to my friend, 'the nice looking young man', she calls him. That's fifteen hundred miles, six years, and one in eight million people. Matt tells me later that night while we're cooking our dope that 'he doesn't even know why he went to that market, it's nowhere near his house'. The gremlins have brought me a present; I wish they could teach me math.

My Dead Neighbors Perfume

Greg — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:11:58 GMT

Fully occupied in a dream which had me instructing a mother (who was part of a holiday group sharing a condo with me, naturally), on how to discipline her unruly four year old boy by breaking the child's fingers digit by digit then scrawling all over his face with a black indelible marker, I was removed from this task when awakened by a knock on my door. Exiting my dream and blearily making my way from bedroom to living room serenaded by my now repeatedly discharging doorbell, with unfocused morning eyes I look through my circa 1950 peephole (a top of the line number-- not only does it telescope to better see the other side of the hallway, all of four feet away, but it swivels side to side and up and down), into an what appeared to be an empty hallway. I rub my eyes and look again, and this time I'm able to just make out an individual standing off to the side of my door. Having just recently moved only a few people know where I live and I assume judging by what I can make of the sidling individual that it must be Brian, a new acquaintance met through an old dope shooting buddy. Opening the door I assume I have an ID on the arrival, but know I have no idea really at all... In a nanosecond I'm wildly awake as opening my door produces not Brian, or anyone else I know, but one of our boys in blue. Even though I'm pretty sure I'm not in any trouble, having just cleared my slate with a five day stint in a two man toilet eating putrid food at camp 911 Parr, otherwise known as county jail. I'm sure with a pig's extraordinary sense of smell he easily picks up the pheromones my body is pumping out, his beady swine eyes lock on mine as my pupils dilate bigger than dinner plates and fear sweeps through me. 'Have you seen your neighbor the lady that lives next door?' 'No', I reply, struggling to maintain my balance as my body goes limp with relief at not hearing my name mentioned, 'I've never seen her, but she put the Halloween decorations in the window at the end of the hall and hasn't taken them down'. He thanks me and retires down the hall. Relief floods my body as I shut the door, and returning to my bedroom there's no way my adrenalin charged body is going back to sleep, so I grab a cigarette and head past the officer standing at the entrance to my neighbors, and go outside to smoke. Ten minutes pass, and cigarette extinguished, I make my way back up the stairs to the third floor. The officer is still there, head down and silent, and then it hits me. I don't need to ask, I can smell it, but I ask anyway... 'Did she croak?' 'Yup'. 'Shit, that sucks'. I say quietly, trying to sound reverential. 'We all gotta go', he adds. 'Yeah, we'll all get there someday...' I reply as I amble down the hall to my apartment. As it was now the middle of November, it was a fair assumption to guess that she had been festering in there a couple of weeks, a lonely , sad, and ignominious end. No relatives wondering why she wasn't answering the phone, no friends wondering why she wasn't at Tuesday's Mah Jong night. She'd decorated her apartment door and the window at the end of the hallway with Halloween decorations, an odd gesture as we live on the third floor of an apartment building that has no buzzer at the front door, a sure bet that no half-sized pirates, ghosts, or miniature fairies would be at any of the doors up here begging candy. I'm still spooked thinking of her dying on Halloween, the only visitor knocking the grim reaper, saying 'Trick' upon her opening the door. It's a fair guess that the landlady called the police when rent didn't appear and no explanation was forthcoming. Her remains left a lingering perfume saturating the entire upper floor, and a downstairs neighbor kindly gave me a box of Champa to chase what remained of her away. The pumpkin on her door has been replaced by a sticker that reads 'Warning! This property is sealed and is not to be entered or tampered with under penalty of law by order of the County Coroner'. When I stand outside and look up at her darkened apartment I can't help but think of her in there, lifelessly occupying the last place she knew, her only visitors green bottle flies laying maggot eggs in her eyes and bacteria consuming her from the inside out. The thought of dying alone and forgotten scares the hell out of me. Like my neighbor I live alone and have few visitors, the dearth of traffic in large by choice. As a painter I work at home, my living room serving as my studio and workspace, living room furniture consisting of a small two-seat couch and my painting easel. I can't paint when I have visitors as I can't concentrate on what I'm doing, though in the past I tried. Friends often express an interest in coming over to watch me paint, and I've learned to say no, which as a social creature by nature is never easy. To not offend I've injected my denials with what humor I can muster, usually by explaining that coming over to watch paint dry may not be all that exciting, and watching me at work really is about as far from a spectator sport as it gets. Frequently I find myself involved for hours on the same one square inch of canvas. When I go (It would be nice if I'm in my mid-eighties so I have another forty years to paint), I'd like to exit gracefully in my sleep, ideally of a heroin overdose, my head cradled in the lap of my thirty year old girlfriend who gently strokes my hair with one hand, and holds my hand with her other. If I can't have that I want to go out v-tac, a sudden, massive coronary while I'm fucking her brains out. Ideally it would hit me right as I'm blowing my load, at the same time or right after she blows hers. It's a hell of a long shot, I haven't even had a girlfriend in a year and a piece, and the only reason I got her was because she was my next door neighbor in Texas. After she moved out she was replaced by Ian, a heroin addict who I was acquainted with by dint of the fact that I'd worked with his cousin ten years previous and fifteen hundred miles away in Reno. I found out last week that Ian had died of a heroin overdose in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. I'm having bad luck, or I should say my neighbors are having bad luck. The apartment next to me should be up for rent pretty soon, and it's a real nice place with large rooms and hardwood floors, but you may want to think twice about moving in.

Bridgette, Me and the Black Rock UFOs

Greg — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 23:02:03 GMT

So, this is no bullshit. When I was a kid I was really into climbing and would go out to the So Cal high desert to Joshua Tree National Monument (yeah it's a National Park now), every winter weekend for years, a lot of the time I'd take LSD, mushrooms, or peyote when it was too cold to climb which was often. I never saw anything beyond Joshua Trees dancing like a bunch of multi-armed ravers, rocks crystallized and broken down into spinning fractals and individual sagebrush dancing and keeping time according to their genus. I never ever saw anything that wasn't there to begin with. Years later I had my first UFO(s) sighting at four in the afternoon over the Reno Cannon airport-- three aqua-green lights in a triangle led by an amber ellipsoid (a cigar shape, layperson). As I watched with dumb, unbelieving eyes, the formation ascended with the three lights slowly contracting together, becoming one and vanishing. Looking at the ellipsoid there where now two of them, and I followed their lazy-looking, but probably bullet fast ascent up into the cloud base. No I hadn't done any drugs that day, that I remember. I was unlocking my car door when they caught my eye, of all exciting things. My second sighting was also daytime, from downtown Reno, and a triangle(s). I watched a white triangle track across the sky in about four seconds. While looking at it it split into two triangles, both the same size as the initial one. I've watched the space shuttle fly overhead at night pushing 18K. This little fucker was closer (seeing it in the daytime puts it inside our atmosphere) and blistering along at five or six times the speed of the space shuttle. That clocks it at a minimum of 100K. That ain't our technology, and cynics that think it's a military test out of Area 51, let me remind you that putting these things on exhibit over Reno, in the daytime, is not what you'd call secretive behavior. I had another solid sighting, my first night sighting, this time with witnesses, one of whom was too drunk to see, the other my girlfriend, who upon coming out of the house came too late and thought it was a plane (it had gone from two white lights that came together and become one white light, changed color to a red light, and then spit out five little white lights that surrounded the red light closely-- it did in fact resemble a plane at this point), glancing up unimpressed she barked at me to get in the car and close the door because it was cold. The most dramatic and really frightening experience came a couple of years later... Bridgette and I had kind of a thing for each other, and she invited me to go 'camping' out in the Black Rock for our first date. We decided to warm up even though it wasn't too cold, by first sneaking into Fly hot spring, the most beautiful hot spring of the many on the periphery of the playa. Because you have to sneak in under the watchful eyes of the then Ranch owner, we arrived just as it got dark, drove the last mile in the twilight at a crawl with the lights off and parked. We jumped the gate and walked the half mile or so in. It was a November night, Burning Man was long gone, replaced by a thin sheen of water that turns the alkali to quicksand thus making the playa impassible. Nothing moves out there when it's wet. I was, so I thought, in for a real romantic good time. Fly was drilled in 1903, and since then mineral deposits have built into a five foot high barnacle surrounding the water that under pressure jets twenty feet into the air. The water comes out of the ground near boiling, so you have to go to the opposite side of the prevailing wind to avoid being, well, boiled alive. Bridgette located the pool with the best temperature and called me over. It was a moonless night, and ambling over I got naked and joined her in the water. The sky was covered in a milky blanket of stars, and as the heat gelled my body and mind I was having a little reverie, enjoying the warmth while trying to gauge how much we like each other which determines how I'm supposed to initiate this thing. I mean were both naked and four feet away from each other and that's ninety percent of the battle right? But that last ten percent might as well be ten miles; I've got to gauge this just right or I can blow the whole thing-- foot touch, just move over and kiss her, or flat ask her if she wants to get down. In that twilight zone moment where time stands still and I'm staring off into space-- out in space, and dead center in my field of vision a 'star' begins oscillating, making rapid figure eights, vertical infinity symbols if you will. Fuck, they're here. Before I say anything to Bridgette I watch for a minute and a second star begins oscillating, paralleling the first. After a minute or so, thoughts of getting down with Bridgette long gone, I pipe up: "Ugh, Bridgette, I think we got us a UFO". "Naw awww", she replies. "Look down my arm", I say pointing. Bridgette moved over to me and sighted along my extended arm and finger. Her reaction was a little more than I'd anticipated, but I guess she'd never seen one before whereas I was habituated to them. She cuts loose a blood curdling scream, and before her scream reached it's conclusion one of the UFOs left it's place in the mantel of the heavens, and in the space of one second came in directly at us stopping what appeared to be about two miles away in the sky. I was panicked, and Bridgette was now silent, absolutely frozen in terror. Not really having a clue as to what to do, but me being an alpha male and not just a little pissed at the little fuckers for spoiling my chances at getting laid and realizing my powerlessness in the situation, I did the only thing I could think of, I yelled at 'em: "This is bullshit, I want to be on top of the food chain", and turning to my paralyzed date I said in a reassuring tone, "Don't worry Bridgette, I'm so full of Methadone (and I was), they don't want anything to do with us". Well fuck me if it didn't have an effect, as the UFO immediately backed off and in another second had returned to it's compatriot far far away. Bridget said "lets get out of here", but wanting to maintain control, no matter how delusional, I replied that "I wasn't letting the little fuckers spoil my good time", and stubbornly refused to leave. Any notion of getting laid obliterated I was pissed, and continuing my soak the UFOs kept at their dance-- I was more than a little fucked off by the whole situation. A couple of minutes later out in the middle of the playa a pure white light appears on the ground. 'Motherfuck, more of 'em', I thought. Another white light appears, and understand this is God white-- I've never seen a light so pure in it's brilliance. Bridgette notices them and moans apathetically "What kind of world am I bringing my son into"? The two lights leave the ground and begin a slow vertical ascent to a point about a mile in the air and vanish. 'Good', I think, just in time for them to reappear on the ground, in the same location. Keeping an eye on them the two lights suddenly become six, then all six rise up, blink out, reappear on the ground in a different color and in a different number, rise up, vanish, reappear, changing number and color over and over. 'Fuck me, they're everywhere', I thought, and glancing behind me I had the pleasure of witnessing Jupiter shift and bop around the southern sky. The problem I had with this was the fact that I didn't see a UFO move out from in front of Jupiter, when Jupiter started bopping around there was nothing but empty night sky where it had been. The little fuckers where in my brain making me see whatever the fuck they wanted me to. Bridgette repeated her desire to "Get the hell out of here", and now thoroughly spooked, I agreed it was time. We dressed fast, grabbed our stuff and bailed. Walking out we headed back west, the UFOs in the north, east, and south now behind us. I don't think either of us turned around and waved goodbye, and at one point on the walk out I thought I saw everything around us getting brighter, sending my stomach cartwheeling and standing up the hair on the back of my neck. A primitive response, and I ain't nothin' if I ain't a talking monkey. We got to the car where I had my manual 35mm camera loaded with hundred speed slide film. I set up the tripod on the hood of Bridgette's Volkswagon, looked through the viewfinder at the now again two white lights on the ground and set the shutter speed for manual. I opened the shutter, and as if on cue the lights rose to the same height as always and disappeared. I let go of the shutter, threw the camera in the car figuring that there was no point in taking another picture because you can't photograph a UFO. We didn't know if we had enough gas to make Wadsworth, about a hundred miles away and the next gas, but we weren't sticking around. It was a quiet ride, Bridgette had a lot to think about, while I counted every mile to make sure I didn't miss any time on the way back. We made Wadsworth, then Reno. Bridgette dropped me at my house and in the years following went from having a crush on me, to not saying more than ten words to me in ten years. She holds me entirely responsible for the whole episode. Yeah, Bridgette. I called my psychic friend Miss Cleo and said: "Tell my good buddies in deep space to come on down and ruin my chance of getting some..." Two weeks later I went to Costco to shoplift my developed slide film. Hurrying through the images I got to a black slide, the one I'd shot from the hood of Bridgette's car. Expecting to see nothing probably, two white streaks remotely, what I got back I've never been able to explain; maybe somebody out there can help. The slide shows an aqua and amber dot on the playa, then three braided trails rise from each light ending in seven and nine vertical ellipses respectively. From the ellipsoids two trails, one for each color, rise up ending in about thirty aqua and forty amber round lights in two formations arrayed like, dare I say it, a couple of burning men. Two individual trails exit the 'men', and rising up end in two vertical 'V' formations. I have no fucking idea why what I saw and what's on the slide are completely different things, except for like with Jupiter bopping around, they can make you see what they want you to see, remember what they want you to remember, somehow. A couple of years later I went back out to fly with some young friends and on the trip out relayed the story of my previous trip. To a person they laughed and they laughed, asked me what kind of drugs we were on etcetera. As soon as it got dark at fly they weren't laughing anymore. Two red lights, occasionally one red one aqua, were on the southern playa oscillating like nobody's business. It was a quiet ride back to Reno. Last time I went out three weeks ago they were out in the northern sky. I'm three for six out there. I'm batting 500%, which are pretty good odds if you're a gambler.

Girls Make People and Boys Kill 'em

Greg — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:40:28 GMT

I should have been born a girl. My dad had two other girls with his second wife, and they're chock full of estrogen, not a lesbian in the carload, except maybe me. I fucking love woman, so scheming and non-linear, complicated and often unpredictable. I know I'm full of estrogen, my skin is smooth as marble, and I didn't start shaving 'till I was entering my twenties. I like beautiful things and I don't give a fuck how an engine works or like getting dirt mixed in with the paint under my finger nails. The only kind of grease I like is girl engine grease, y'know, poontang. It's just the lesbian in me. My shit didn't drop until I was eighteen, which made the mandatory running through the shower in public school awkward as fuck and left me subject to ridicule. But fuck them 'cause when it did drop it dropped pretty good, and I'm swinging a healthy eight, which is pretty good for a white boy full of estrogen. My last girlfriend Annie was a crack addict, and tricked with her three black crack dealers for free crack (even though she didn't consider what she was doing prostitution, as no money was exchanged and she knew the name of the dude she was blowing), and she told me I was bigger than the lot of them. I never knew whether to believe her, but she never ran off with any of them, so there may be some veracity to what she was saying. Sure makes a lesbian feel good. The one time Annie fucked around on me was with this piece of shit dude Aaron the Asshole, whose face was covered in scratch tattoos and had killed at least one, and maybe two people. Aaron was coming around and scoring junk from me. I knew they were attracted to each other, and I'm not a jealous guy at all, I mean fuck, Annie was twenty-three and I was forty-five and birds can fly right? All I asked was that she be straight with me and if I met a girl I was into I had leeway. Nothing doing. Annie got a six-hundred dollar tax return from her ex-husband, made a very transparent excuse and disappeared with Aaron. I figured she'd be gone for four or five days until the money was gone and would come waddling back sore. No such luck. Nine o'clock the next morning her insistent knock was on my door. Annie knew that I knew, and storming passed me pissed as usual she demanded that I "Finish what he couldn't do". I told her I wasn't sucking his cum out of her, that she needed to take a couple of showers and douche the shit out of her box. I felt really bad, Annie looked so sad sitting on the toilet cleaning herself out, but fuck, I ain't no cocksucker. After I'd taken care of her she told me that Aaron had been such a crappy lay that when it was over she looked at him longingly and said: "Y'know, Greg is really big". Talk about being fucking emasculated. Months later when my path crossed his he threatened to knock me out, something which has never happened to me, not even after being kicked in the face for several minutes by four Pakistanis in London who'd mistaken me for a skinhead and just pasted the fuck outta me, and I ignored his threat. He had the audacity to come around and try to score junk, and being a forgiving person, and since my shit was "bigger soft than he is hard" I let him. He tried telling me it was all on Annie, and the fuck later asked her to meet him. Annie came running up to me immediately and let me know he was still trying to nail her, but I didn't give a fuck; I knew she wasn't gonna jump on his knuckle sized unit ever again. I'm all boy, my girlfriend Elisa used to tell me. For a while I had the most gorgeous man in Reno after my shit, I guess 'cause he thought my lack of homophobia meant that he could turn me. His offers to give me a blow job and fuck him fell on deaf ears; I mean what does a dyke like me do with an offer like that? Maybe it was my fault, as I did tell him one day when he was in the final throws of his attempted seduction of me that: "If he didn't have that foreign tentacle down there I'd fuck him in a second..." but then I added "...that's a line in the sand that I just don't cross". He doesn't like me as much, or maybe just the way, that he used to. Whatever. I think if a girl wants to get with another girl that's terrific, but not in a Jerry Springer "We love lesbians" way. The clods on that show would end up lonely in the corner, furiously spanking their little pee pee, while the gals would be mackin' down and enjoying themselves-- in all likely-hood. I mean who knows a girls equipment better than another girl, it's comfortable, familiar territory. It's flavor country. I never had any interest in getting with two girls and never have. Maybe I haven't done enough MDMA, but I'd rather get one girl off twice than two girls off once. My sixteen year old girlfriend Heather (I was twenty-eight or so), would get off and get off, and her orgasms would get closer and closer until they'd merge into one long continuous one that would last as long as I would, which would be quite a while as I was young and full of methedrine. She was my favorite, although she wasn't the 'one'. I've fallen in love for money, for sex, for a great body, but the one time I really fell in love was with Elisa, a former dominatrix and heroin addict, who had not blown all her money on her boyfriends band or junk and bought a record store and gotten out of 'The Trade'. She had a little bit of everything, including a husband,a sugar daddy, and a nice arsenal of hand guns and rifles.

Sex, Smack and Getting Stabbed-- Or How I learned to Paint

Greg — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:35:28 GMT

I was born in LA in '61. My first memory is sitting in my paternal grandmother Naomi's lap, my hand in hers.learning to draw. My grand-aunt always told me the only picture ever taken of Naomi smiling was a picture of her holding newborn me. She was the only one in my biological family who really loved me and she gave me art before dying when I was three, which was just as well, as that same year court transcripts described me as being 'Black and blue from head to toe'. My parents hated each other, divorcing by my first birthday, and I think they both hated me as the embodiment of the other. I was born with a condition called Congenital Lymphedema, essentially Latin for 'born with swollen lymph', the result of which my right hand has always been about twice as big as my left. The etymology is unclear as the condition is almost unknown in the US though for some reason more common in Japan, and my particular variant involving the hand but not the arm may be the only documented case of it's type on record. It made growing up fun, being labeled by my peers as variously 'fat-hand, puffy,' later maturing into 'fist' or 'hammer-hand'. Rejection by my parents and my peer group made me feel it was pretty much The World vs. Greg, and it left me with something to prove. By the time I entered Kindergarten I was being fed large amounts of pharmaceutical speed by kindly Dr. Reubin, my behavioral psychologist, which had the uncanny effect of causing me to act somewhat aggressively. I punched a kid out because he called my painting of a tug-boat a submarine, as I'd painted the water line above my boat in an effort to show perspective. I was getting beaten at home pretty thoroughly by my mother and her succession of paramours, and in turn I was doing a lot of beating up in school through first and second grades, getting expelled a lot, and at one point punching my five foot tall principle Mrs.Mallik in the stomach and doubling her over, then proceeding to destroy her office furniture; I was small for a kid of six or seven, maybe three feet and an inch, but they had to run an get Mr. Turner, the big black sixth grade teacher to restrain me. I got kicked out of LA Unified for a spell for that. Speaking of black, next year they started busing kids in from South Central LA, and I don't think I won another fight. I was a fucked up kid, not a mean kid, but those inner city kids were a whole other animal and I took my licks daily, but almost always had to give up my lunch money for the pleasure. Through all the violence I kept drawing, and it was the only thing that ever brought me any happiness, maybe a little bit of peace, and the attention of Lisa Benson and Lisa Lambert, the girls I had a crush on. By fifth grade I was deemed unfit for public education and the day after my tenth birthday I was institutionalized in group home where I consorted with a lot of other really fucked up kids. By the end of my first week there I was smoking dope and sniffing paint, and though the huffing never really took with me by eleven or twelve i was smoking pretty heavily and taking Quaaludes and Tuinols when I could get them. I was there from ten to almost thirteen, twice as long as the recommended one and a half years and then released to my mother and brand new step-father. I attended public middle school, and in the eighth grade I was the shortest kid there. That year my step-father broke my arm and after I told the school nurse who had immobilized my arm I was taken from her office by the police in handcuffs (though in deference to my size and age they cuffed my hands in front of me), and put in juvenile hall for protective custody before being put back into the institution I'd left some eighteen months previous. I took my first LSD there when I was fifteen, which had an almost magical effect on me, changing my interests from firebombing cars and restaurants and fighting, which I was never very good at, to reading books. I discovered Ray Bradbury, and quickly graduated to Robert Heinlin, Ayn Rand and Dostoyevsy. By seventeen I was the old sage of the institution, with twice as many years under my belt as the next endurance record holder, and I was rebelling pretty badly and teetering on the bring of expulsion which meant the California Youth Authority with its gang beatings and homosexual rape. If I'd of ended up there I would have been in prison to this day. Instead the heavens opened and delivered to me Diana Markes, daughter of Hollywood producer F. Hugh Herbert (parodied on Gilligan's Island as 'F Hugh Hekubah'), wife of television writer Larry Markes, who wrote for the JackParr Show, The Honeymooners, Hogan's Heroes, Love American Style and others too numerous to mention here, and a screen and stage actress herself with a list of credits as long as my arm. Diana knew it was wrong for me to spend another day incarcerated and met with my psychiatrist twice a week for three months and got me out of there. Diana told me to call her 'Mom' (which I do to this day, my biological mother being 'Louise'), moved me into her beautiful Sherman Oaks home (her house was the principle residence used for the film 'Valley Girl'), with her two beautiful sons and two beautiful daughters, and handed me the ball to run with. I attended my senior year of high school where I was annual editor until I got caught by twenty-one jump street smoking pot next door at the junior college: I got kicked out of school for the last time, which was just as well because after her eldest son Randy had taken me rappelling, then ridiculing me for not being able to follow him as he scrambled about I was pretty much ditching school every day and going climbing at Stoney Point in Chatsworth Park anyway. The powers that be at school removed my picture and all traces of me from the annual, but decided to keep the front and back covers which I'd drawn, along with every section heading and the end sheets of all fucking things. If life was supposed to get beautiful it didn't, I was bitterly jealous of her kids. Her sons attended Harvard Boys School along with such luminaries as the Billionaire Boys Club murderers, Ventriloquist Edgar Bergan's son Chris Bergan, the brother of actress Candice Bergan, Matt Bell, the son of California Governor Alphonse Bell, and Mark Rheinhardt, grandson of musician Max Rheinhardt to name but a few. Her daughters were the prettiest girls in school and Julie, the eldest, was head cheerleader, actually attending prom with captain of the football team. It was all very story-book. No longer in school and unwilling to work at McDonalds, maybe the only place I qualified for as a brand new high school drop-out, I sold LSD and ate LSD. Prodigious amounts, and this being the seventies I was lucky enough to catch the second wave of Owsley's famous 'Orange Sunshine' made by Owsley himself. I took it hundreds of times. Around this time I discovered the miracle of freebasing cocaine; this was $120- a gram stuff in nineteen-seventies dollars, Pink Peruvian, the finest the dealers at Harvard Boys School had to offer and it was an immaculate high. I quickly depleted the coin collection I'd built up since I was just a boy and soon thereafter Diana had had enough of my lackadaisical ways and very rightly kicked me out. Newly homeless I made my way over the hill to Hollywood just in time to catch the start of the second wave of California punk ('80-'83). Punk disaffection and anger was like going home, it gave me confidence and identity, and an outlet for my bitterness and intense hatred. Punk finally got me laid. It also introduced me to the myriad joys of injecting crystal meth and taking 'loads', two doradin and four codeine at once, poor man's heroin. I was still climbing, and would spend half the year in California's incomparable Yosemite Valley, where I nearly killed myself more than once on it's three-thousand foot vertical multi-day climbs. I guess you could say I was an adrenalin junky, I was also the only junky junky in that valley. Around this time I met my wife at Oki Dogs in west hollywood, a punk-turning-rentboy mecca where you could get a five pound bag of fries for a dollar. I wasn't attracted to her, but I liked her friend Angel, a tiny chicana. Angel invited me to smoke a joint to which i readily agreed. 'Over there', she said gruffly, pointing to her friend. So I went and smoked a joint with Simone who asked me out on a date. At the time I was 'living' underneath a building, so I lied and gave her my grand aunts address. When Simone arrived she was driving a mint '63 Lincoln with suicide doors. I got in the car and Simone shoved a hundred dollar bill at me and said 'What kind of drugs do you want'. I practically said 'I do' on the spot. Simone and Angel worked for an escort agency and did pretty well for themselves, turning $100 tricks (sometimes much, much more) and living in a series of Hollywood motels. I moved right in, becoming their driver and occasional enforcer. Simone fell in love with me, probably for my habit of shooting meth and nailing her to the bed for hours at a time. She was the first girl that told me I was 'big' and if anyone knew... Simone got a DUI and being an English citizen I suggested we move to England rather than pony up the $1000 fine. I got my own plane ticket by calling my biological mother and explaining to her that if she didn't get me a ticket, I'd walk right into her house and take the .380 I knew was by the bed and blow my brains out all over her front lawn. I got a ticket. I flew into Heathrow and hooked up with Simone who had been staying at a nice hotel in Knightsbridge at her millionaire step-fathers expense, and within two weeks we were married at the Chelsea office of the registrar recorder. All I remember was the magistrate, a stern looking woman, kept glaring at me over the top of her cat-eye glasses. Our wedding present was a twenty-quid note to get a motel and consummate the damn thing. I think her step-father was glad to be rid of her. It was all a greasy downhill slide from there. Simone started staying out later and later with her tricks, and coming back obviously smacked-out of her tree. She was drunk a lot of the time, and enjoyed putting away a pint of 'Southern Comfort' and then singing Janis Joplin's 'Ball and Chain' at me at the top of her ample lungs. I didn't like her doing heroin, but being unable to make her quit with all the maturity a twenty-two year old could muster I decided to join her in smack land. We were both now strung on dope, and my job became procuring us enough heroin so we could stay well and she could turn tricks. I didn't like this arrangement and decided to man-up and take the reigns. I got her fired from her agency and got a day job, first (amazingly enough), at McDonalds, an American institution I felt comfortable at, later selling climbing equipment at 'Blacks' in the financial district. This didn't suit Simone at all, who had become accustomed to a life-style I couldn't provide. I couldn't afford our habits and we had to go on methadone, free in London with the stipulation see a marriage counselor and attend NA once a week. Our marriage counselor, a stunning woman I can only describe as an 'Irish Rose' that I was secretly in love with, had the sanguine insight to inform me privately in her lilting brogue that our marriage was 'Doomed'. And it was. Simone and I kicked heroin, having gone back on it after methadone had proved too excruciating to kick. Our last week in bed together was a sleepless one, spent pouring sweat while suffering intense chills, and running to the bathroom to either puke or crap water. We got off dope together and it was over. I saw her one more time after that. She'd hooked up with my best friend whom she hated when we were married because he 'smelled', probably from his English habit of taking a Friday bath, put on about a hundred pounds, and was pregnant. She was happy and I was happy for her. I moved North to Sheffield, a depressed former steel town on the edge of The Peak District. I was doing pretty good for myself, drawing dole (monthly unemployment), going climbing, and doing magazine and product illustration for climbing manufacturers and getting paid under the table. I was also drinking a lot, having fallen in love with bitter ale, the more foul tasting the better. I was drinking ten pints a night every night-- twenty on weekends, and shooting a lot of Amphetemine Sulphate to fuel my drawing. Being newly single I also fucked a lot of girls, coming on to them with a predictable: "Aye luv, weer duh ye theenk ay'm frum" "Yeah frum livapule" "Nye luv, ay'm frum Loos Angelees" "Yeah Nevuh, tee-hee-hee-heee" It was all very easy and slatternly; I enjoyed myself immensely. I started dating Caroline Bleakely, a young hippy-ish girl attending medical school at Leeds University, an hour north of Sheffield. She was in her final year before taking an internship as an Australian flying doctor, had big blue eyes, and was dumb as a box of rocks. She would take the train down and visit me on weekends, and in turn I was a total asshole to her. Frequently drunk, although I was nice when I took her virginity (she kept throwing up over the three-day exercise), I would callously make her blow me while pinning her head to the wall. She took a lot of the anger over my failed marriage and I feel honestly shitty about the way I treated her to this day. Caroline went on summer vacation and came around a lot, and as I didn't really give a shit about her I found this annoying. I needed an out, but having taken her virginity I felt bad about dumping her cold, so I became more abusive to her, hoping she'd go away. She didn't, instead Caroline spent a lot of time telling me how her mother had died of breast cancer, and they were going to "cut off her boobs one day soon". Around this time I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday by downing an entire fifth of jack daniels, a pint of southern comfort, a few bottles of wine (though the wine I shared with friends), and endless pints of bitter ale. It was the only time in my life I had to be carried from the pub. A year later later there was a knock at my flat door. It was a dole inspector. I invited him to sit down, and opening his briefcase he began: "So gleg, tel meh weah yea frum" "Oh aye, ay'm frum lundon" "Now Gleg, tel muh weah yeah relly frum" "Los Angeles" I figured I'd better get while the getting was good and bought a plane ticket. Arriving at Heathrow the customs inspector looked at my passport and said in a voice grave with concern: "Mr. Allen, you've overstayed your visa by six years". "I know, but I'm leaving now." I was on the next flight out. I arrived back in America just in time to collect my inheritance. My grand aunt had died and knowing I had a shitty deal growing up had left me a $103,000 band aid. I bought a new truck, a '55 Chrysler and a '63 Mercury Monteray with a 383 that had been bored and balanced with a holly dual port carb and headers. It set off car alarms as I drove down the street and my sixteen year old girlfriend Heather looked good in it. I was miserable. With a seemingly endless supply of money I was drinking a lot, but mostly shooting enormous amounts of quality methedrine and staying awake for a month at a time. I got back into climbing and did some serious routes competently. I kept a nice apartment in Hollywood and divided my time between climbing and going to LA to see punk shows and have OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) speed fueled sex with my underage girlfriend. I was also pretty direction-less and occasionally sticking my Smith and Wesson 9ml in my mouth and seriously thinking about ending my days by eating a bullet. Heather had had enough of my satisfying but emotionally vacant visits and dumped me. I had a nervous breakdown and got back into heroin. I blew through my inheritance in a year and a piece. Down to my last fifteen hundred dollars, I planned on moving to Boulder Colorado with a dominatrix I'd met at a garage sale, but wary of being kidnapped emotionally I called her and told her I'd be bringing my friend Todd Morgan. She fair exploded over the phone so I balked. Todd was Vicky Morgans son, Vickie was Alfred Bloomingdale's mistress, and rumor had it that she hosted his sex parties where Ronald Reagan was a frequent attendee. Word was that she'd fucked Reagan with a strap-on, and when Reagan ran for President Vicky was conveniently enough beaten to death in front of Todd with Todd's baseball bat. The guy who did it died of AIDS in jail three months later-- pretty coincidental stuff. Vicky had been in Bloomingdale's will, the family contested, but she got a chunk of change and after she was killed Todd came away with $310,000 on his eighteenth birthday. He bought a series of lowered VW's, replacing them as they were stolen, and his inheritance ran out as fast as mine. Todd was beautiful like his mother, and I liked having him around for his effortless abilities to attract girls like nobody's business. Todd suggested we go to Reno instead of Boulder, an idea to which I readily agreed. Todd and I moved into a tiny shotgun shack. It was summer and not having air conditioning we spent a lot of time at the mall picking up girls. I liked Reno, Todd and I were jaded big city boys in a small town and within a week we had a list of seventy-five girls we could call and hang out with and stick it in. One day at the mall this tall blond girl walks by wearing pretty much nothing but black lace and obviously up for a good time. "What's you're name", I said with some interest. "Sugar". "Sugar what?" "Sugar Divine". I took her back to my place and began plying her with Old English 800 Malt Liquor, a punk rock staple. I knew she was young but when I got her down to her knickers she informed me that she was all of thirteen. This was cause for some concern and going into the living room I consulted Todd, who with great compassion said: "Look, she's thirteen and your twenty-nine, if you don't fuck her I will..." Jennifer does television ads for the adult bookstore on Virginia Street in Reno and we enjoy each others company on the rare occasions our paths cross to this day. Todd having gone through the supply of available girls in Reno went back to LA. When Todd left Reno he was suffering from blurred double vision, probably as a result of having been hit on the back of the head and knocked out cold with a two-by-four while scoring angel dust (PCP) in East LA several years before. I haven't heard from Todd in years, I often wonder about him, but fuck, he's Vicky Morgans kid, he looks like her, and wherever he is I'm sure he's doing just fine. For the first time in my life I had to get a job. I wanted to work at a bizarre coffee shop called Deux gros Nez, French for 'Two Big Noses' but was hired at the sister joint Pneumatic Diner instead. I liked my job, although the owner was one of the most aggravating, socially annoying, but talented men I've known. I could keep my hair color that frequently changed from blue to green to bright red, and have an attitude. If customers were pricks I'd offer to show them the snot draped backing of my nose ring. I closed every weekend night for a year, but come new year I told john the owner it was time to hire relief as I didn't work new years eve. He didn't, scheduling me for new years eve, the result of which I started getting smashed behind the counter around eight in the evening, and when John came in with his girlfriend right before midnight closing to order food, which he did by writing in minute detail completely filling three order tickets, I'd had it and pretty much told him to fuck himself when he handed me the tickets. Newly unemployed I spent a couple of weeks getting good and drunk before getting my job of choice at Deux Gros Nez. I dug my new job where I worked graveyard, starting at eleven at night working with one other person, then running the show solo after two. I could do what I want which usually incorporated hitting on the young girls that came in, occasionally getting lucky and making out with them on the front stairs so I could keep an eye on the till, and generally fucking off although I did a good job and the place was stocked, clean, and ready to roll when day shift got there at seven. I had a blast, I could watch the sun rise and fill the desert sky full of color, then sit at the counter and drink expensive single malt after shifters and heckle the attorneys and other professionals as they came in for coffee. It was while working here that I was almost stabbed for the first time. There was this guy in Town, Stan Cruz who fancied himself a painter (though I never thought much of his slop), and had begun tattooing by scrawling all over pretty young girls. There is an unwritten code of conduct in tattooing, and one thing you just don't do is scratch on pretty girls when you're learning. Young pretty girls would come into my work and tell me with great excitement that they were going to get a tattoo from Stan, and I would go to great lengths to dissuade them. One evening I was training a new graveyard guy when the phone rang; it was Stan, obviously high out of his tree on meth and yelling into the phone that he was "Coming down with Froto and Skip and all the skinheads to kick my ass." Being acquainted (due to Reno's smallness), and on good terms with "Froto and Skip and all the skinheads" (although I enjoyed telling them I was a "Total Jew" when drunk, which I am, sort of), this was of no concern to me. I got off shift, and sat at a table waiting to see if Stan showed and brought his minerals along. Before long I heard Stan booming up the back stairs, and evidently unable to recruit "all the skinheads" he was by himself. Stan came charging like a bull, I stood up from my seat and said "What the fuck are you gonna do?" I don't think Stan was ready for me to not run in terror, and it stopped him cold. Newly emasculated he had to do something and unwisely spit in my face. Next thing I knew stan was underneath a table, as I'd evidently reacted by slugging him in his face although I don't remember clocking him. Like i said, it's not my nature to be mean and instead of doing the smart thing and following through and beating him to a bloody pulp I stood back, fists up, to see if he wanted to get up and be nice, or get up and go right back down. Unfortunately for Stan, and fortunately for me, the new guy I was training, Tim Kirk, was about two weeks out of Desert Storm where he'd been a marine squad leader and killed a bunch of people. Tim watched events transpire, and when I didn't follow through he hurdled the counter and commando-style disarmed Stan of the rusty railroad spike he'd been armed with ready to stab me. This brought Stan to tears, and he began blabbering about "How we were all brothers" and "In it together". Later on Stan would be stabbed within an inch of his life, as would I, although I only came within a few inches. It was during this time I was recruited to sing for a band. I hung out at a place called the Zephyr bar, and for the first time since I'd moved to Reno three years previous I began to see other punk rockers around. I became acquainted with them, and soon a couple of them were asking me if I wanted to sing in a band. "No, I can't sing". "Do you want to sing in our band?" "No, I can't sing". "You should sing in our band". "No, I can't sing" "Well, you can shout, can't you?" Their rehearsal 'house' if you could call it that, was about four blocks from where I lived, so I figured what the fuck, I'll give it a try. The place was so small the band played in the dining room and shoving a microphone at me I stood in the kitchen ready to do what for me was the unthinkable. As the band tuned up I looked out the kitchen window, just in time to see the largest and most beautiful full moon I'd ever seen rise over the Virginia mountains. I knew this singing thing, in it's convoluted way, was going to work. Lord knows why they let me sing, attitude I guess, because I couldn't sing then and I although in time I learned to fake it pretty good, I can't sing now. I liked writing funny songs with titles like 'Peewee's Other Playhouse', 'Your Sister My Bed', 'Tunneling Earworms', and performing. I never got laid so much, at one point having a different girl every weekend for twelve weeks and later on juggling three relationships at once, which for an average sized guy with average looks like me was a lot. After the band had been together for about a year I got serious about a stripper named Monique, who had a brown bag face but a rocking body. Her and I became engaged and it was shortly thereafter that I got stabbed, which although I didn't know it then, it would be the best thing that ever happened to me. The night I got stabbed started out promising enough, it was the first time my band 'Baby Oil Hand Job' (a true story) and the other reno punk band, 'Short Fuse' had been given a weekend show in town because there were always brawls at our shows, usually involving my drummer Jordan, a tree-sized human, and 'Wog' or bass player. If ever I had to go up against ten guys at once it would have been with Wog, who tipped the scales at a solid two-hundred pounds and was absolutely impervious to pain. They were both a couple of big, mean fuckers and I'm glad they were on my side. At one show I watched them beat a guy so badly it nearly made me sick. I got to the venue and the place was jammed with hundreds of Renoites. It would have been our biggest show ever, but after Short Fuse played and my band was on stage tuning up Monique came running up to me telling me that there was "Some guy in the parking lot threatening to kill her". Never one to shirk, I went outside and immediately got into it with some skinhead, a two-hundred pound kid I later learned was strangely named Simeon Able McDonald who was all of fifteen years old. I thought the fight was going pretty good considering I was engaging a guy who had a lot of reach and weight on me, although at one point I got punched in the stomach and I thought 'Wow, I actually felt that'. A friend of mine Loni came outside and seeing what was happening immediately came over and started scrapping with the gorilla, which allowed me to break off. While walking away I noticed something and looking down at my arm I saw blood shooting ten feet out of my arm every time my heart beat; my arm was a bloody mess. 'The motherfucker stabbed me', I thought and I went over to a set of steps to sit down so I could staunch the flow of blood. Pushing my arm into into my lap I noticed something under my shirt, and pulling up my shirt I was greeted by the sight of my very own glistening blue-white intestines hanging out. Knowing a little medicine I saw that no blood was being emitted from my trunk, I knew the hospital was less than two miles away and odds were I'd be alright. I had barely felt the evisceration, and it didn't hurt until after Monique ran hysterical into the club yelling "Greg's stabbed Greg's stabbed!" the result of which produced Debbie (and a couple of hundred other people), a friend whose house we practiced in and an emergency room nurse. Debbie ran outside and ordered "Get me hot towels" from anyone in the rapidly swelling knot of people around me; Debbie told me to lay back and using the towels got all my shit back in and then pushed down on my stomach with all her weight. Well my friends, this hurt like an absolute motherfucker, and I'll always remember how happy I was, laying in the ER when that mask came down over my face and sent me into oblivion. The first time Simeon hit Loni with the knife he got Loni through his leather belt and in Loni's hip, and the knife, now slick with my blood got stuck in the belt. Having lost his weapon, Simeon panicked and ran, running with the wisdom fifteen years brings into a Holiday Inn casino covered in blood. He was arrested in minutes, and eventually did about three months in county jail for two counts of attempted murder, the lightness of his sentence the result of his youth, his dad's employment as a patriotic GM assembly plant worker, and my green mohawk. I came out of general anesthesia with eighty stitches and a morphine drip. I'd also been nicked over the eye and stabbed just on the edge of my liver; if that knife had been two inches left and centered my liver I'd of probably bled out before reaching the hospital and not be writing these words. I'm absolutely convinced my grandmother, or some property of dark matter whatever the fuck that is, moved that knife those two crucial inches to this day. I lost my health, my job (I couldn't get out of bed for over a month, taking me off the schedule), and my old lady. Monique, unimpressed with my new helpless condition, had with all the compassion a stripper can muster dumped me, although her mother very generously let me convalesce on a mattress on her living room floor as unable to earn money I was also now homeless. A whole bunch of good stuff; like I said the best thing that ever happened to me which I'll get to now. As my health improved I began a process of priority reassessment. I'd always been the best artist at the many schools I'd attended growing up, and even as a kid I knew I'd be a painter one day, whatever the fuck that meant. Having come two inches from losing everything I realized I had nothing to lose. I got rid of everything I owned, cars, keepsakes and all and bought painting supplies; it was time. I couldn't sneeze for six months due to my stomach wound, but gradually I improved. I'd heard through the grapevine that Simeons equally psychotic brother was now after me, pissed off that Simeon was going to have to reimburse the hospital almost twenty-thousand dollars for my visit. I figured the best place to get away from a skinhead was Oakland, a land where no skinhead dare tread, and moved to the most violent neighborhood I've ever known. I lived in a couple of places, the last of which was a warehouse with a giant guy named Angelo. Angelo liked his drink, and being Irish-Cherokee he doubly couldn't handle it. Angelo caused trouble everywhere he went, and one night while in line at the local liquor store an older black man cut in the checkout line in front of him. "Fucking nigger" Angelo began muttering under his breath. Angelo exited the liquor store and the "Fucking nigger" put a nickel plated .45 to Angelo's temple. Angelo got lucky, if the guy had been any younger than forty he would have spread his brains all over the place. It was while living in Oakland I had my first art show with the first paintings I'd done at Bison Brewery in Berkeley, where although I had work for sale I sold not a painting. One night at Angelo's warehouse someone came into my pitch-black, windowless interior room waking me up out of a deep sleep. "Band practice is across the hall", I told the (what I thought was) misdirected intruder. Getting no response I lifted and turned my head in the direction this 'person' now stood. I've done a hell of a lot of different drugs in my day, but on this night I was sober, and what greeted me as I propped myself up, incredulous, on my elbows, I've never seen the likes of before or since. Standing at what i thought was the foot of my bed was an old man, wearing suspenders, a button down shirt, and standing with the aid of a cane. He was also milky-white and slightly out of focus. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief and looked again; still there and now picking up the cane and pointing with it. I pinched myself, yup I'm awake and he's right there, I thought. While staring at this apparition I decided it couldn't be real and reaching out to touch him my hand smacked into the wall. Reclining back on my elbows I thought 'Great, there's a fuzzy white old man standing in my wall'. You know how when a bee flies around you you think just stay calm, it's all part on nature and it won't sting you. This is the attitude I adopted as I continued to watch the old man, staring right at me and pointing with his cane. Won't sting me fuck, I'm getting the hell out of here, and I fair bolted out of the room and going into the main part of the warehouse I threw on every light I could find. Creeping back into my room half an hour later the old man was gone. Always a superstitious person I took it as a sign, and following the ghost's pointed cane I went back East to Reno. In Reno I had my second art show, where with Grandma or the ghosts intervention I miraculously sold two paintings for $2400. My rent at the time was $100 per month. I'd never work for anybody else again. Painting has been good to me, although early on I made a lot of mistakes, stepped on some toes, believed a lot of lies and got ripped off a lot. I also got high a lot, fueling my work with enormous amounts of heroin, methedrine, cocaine, crack and to a lesser extent weed. I stopped dosing (hallucinogens) around my three or four-hundredth trip. Having been shown the oneness of things, fractal visual construct and the basic idea of string theory, pre-string theory, I'd learned all I could from it and was fair saturated. The next drug to go was alcohol, not because I didn't love it but because it made me paint like merde. After thirty-five a hangover would stop my painting for a week, after forty a month. I was priortising and it had to go. No matter how strung out, fucked up I was I kept at it and put about five-hundred paintings out there over ten years. An old dope buddy friend of mine who had gotten clean, married the girl of his dreams and moved to Austin, Tejas got terminal cancer so I went and visited him and liked the place so much I moved there. I figured the place would be dry like Nevada but it was verdant like I'd never seen, huge flocks of crow-like grackles, smaller flocks of green parrots, and so many frogs my street would get slick with run over frogs. It was also hot, blistering hot in the summer but winter didn't exist. We had one freezing rain two winters ago and there were over 800 accidents within the city limits that day. Last winter three days of freezing rain shut down the freeways, roads and every business. I liked Austin, especially the cocaine which was like shiny white candy, but I loved the tar heroin. You could smell the acetic anahydride, which is a dead ringer for vinegar and chemically similar from twenty feet. Vinegar smell means quality street, at least with Mexican tar. It got to where I was doing a gram a day (enough to drop a herd of elephants), just to maintain and stay well. Annie, my twenty-three year old, hundred pound crack addicted neighbor started hitting on me, and one night after doing an enormous shot of methedrine I figured what the fuck, it's been a while, so I showered and put on my best cowboy shirt and paid her a visit. Three days later Annie was into me and into having my baby, but smack meets crack is a recipe for disaster; in fact, the last thing I said before going down on her for the first time is "All I see is disaster". It was all very story-book. Annie and I got along for about ten minutes and ten months later when I finally got her into someone else I was glad to see the back of her. Poor Annie is in jail on a heroin possession charge and she doesn't even do the stuff. She found it on someones floor and pocketed it hoping to sell it and buy crack, but the cops got to her first after she threw a knife at her new boyfriend. She might do okay in prison being incredibly mean and bisexual, although she might not like the size and appearance of her new lover. I got an email that Deux Gros Nez, the only job I ever held and the reason I moved to reno was closing after twenty-one years. I didn't think twice about taking a Greyhound three days from Tejas to Reno for the closing party. I brought five Ciboxyn ( a new miracle drug that occupies the opiate receptors in your brain) and kicked dope painlessly for the first time ever. At the closing party I hooked up with my old best friend, who is currently self-employed selling quarter pounds of meth, and had a blast, albeit a mournful one. In fact I had so much fun I changed my ticket and stayed an extra week so I could hang out with a girl I met at the party named J is for Jinger, one of the smartest, funniest and strikingly beautiful girls I've ever known. Jinger told me that if I moved back to Reno she'd stick around, but getting with her would mean scrapping a lot because she was so sardonic that when guys would hit on her she'd simply emasculate them, the result of which she got a lot of bar brawls going. I took the bus back to Tejas. Arriving home I stayed more or less clean, which was hard as my post-Annie neighbor was also a dope addict I'd met by dint of the fact that he was the cousin of a guy I'd worked with twenty-years previous and 1500 miles away at the Deux. When people would knock on his door to score and he wouldn't answer they'd turn around and knock on mine, making it difficult to stay clean, although I managed for a few weeks to hook them up without taking, or asking for a cut. In fact they just started knocking at my door because I didn't rip them off, or tell them that I'd missed (failed to get the needle in the vein) and demand more. Shortly after my homecoming my neighbor shot up a kid with too much dope and when he got tired of reviving him he kicked him out, so the poor fucker wandered down to the laundry room and died. Never one to lie about my use, everyone in the apartment building thought that I did it which is lucky for my neighbor, because when the pigs came around everyone kept their mouth shut because they all liked me. A month after that I was a couple of blocks from my house at a coffee shop, bored and reading the flyers at five am when a lady stuck her head in the door and asked me to tell her whether the two guys across the street were fighting. Going outside to what I knew was to come theres my neighbor, manhandling yet another unconscious victim and yelling at the unhearing individual that he "Didn't have time for this..." because he had to go to work. My neighbor didn't recognize me as it was raining and I had a rainshell on, hood up. I told the lady to call 911, and as the guys complexion hadn't turned entirely blue I knew he was breathing, albeit shallowly. I waited for the paramedics and after telling them the guy needed Narcane, a drug that knocks the dope off your receptors and puts you into instant withdrawal and saves your life, provided you haven't flat-lined, I wandered home and went to bed. Enough was enough, I let the right person in my building know it was my neighbor who was leaving all the victims around, and it took about ten minutes to get back to him. Having a small seizure over being discovered he ran up to my apartment and yelled at me that I was a "snitch". My simple retort was that he was a "murderer" which sent him reeling back into his apartment. Five minutes later he returned to my closed door and mustering his lowest register said with a satanic tone that he was "Going to kill me" so I'd better "Watch my back." What an ass I thought, but knowing I could easily handle him, a few minutes later I went to his door and asked if he hadn't just threatened to kill me. "I just want you to go away" he wailed in a now very girlish voice. My neighbor packed his shit and was gone by midnight. I got my first $5K painting sale which gave me the resolve to grow up, finally. I called my non-biological sister in Reno, Nicole who had previously offered to get me "at any time" and asked her how fast could she get me. I'd managed to cut my substance abuse to nil but I brought some Ciboxyn just in case. My cab driver buddy gave me a ride to the airport to get Nicole, and we spent a day touring the produce section of the supermarket, which has nine kinds of apples and other fruits that just don't happen out west, and the neighborhood anarchist bookstore. I loaded up a Penske truck with my shit, said my goodbyes and we split. I drove the hour from Austin to San Antonio where I spent an hour running around like a chicken with it's head cut off, photographing the most depressed and architecturally beautiful city I've seen. I could also smell the heroin everywhere, decades of junk use had given me a sixth sense for the stuff, and the weird thing is is I didn't jones or give a shit. Doping and drugging was a part of my past. I pointed us West and Nicole took over, driving twelve hours straight from San Antonio to Albuquerque, New Mexico. An uneventful 1200 mile streak with the one exception of getting ripped off for gas in Bolmorreah, Texas, a gas station in the middle of nowhere, replete with a condom dispenser in the bog featuring "The Excitor", a ribbed job, the "Climax 6" and some other brand. I can't imagine anybody getting laid there, maybe the owner's wife tricks while he pumps gas. Nicole wanted to trip around Albuquerque and I took the truck up to Santa Fe, the ugliest town I've ever been in (everything looks like a mud brick due to zoning restrictions) and visited my half sister and my new niece. I had a nice visit with my sister who took me to a fancy steakhouse that gave me ungodly food poisoning. In medieval medicine you had your different types of biles and different colored humors and I discovered the miracle of each one that night. Nicole had to take a bus up to Santa Fe which made me feel like a worthless shit as she'd just run me eleven hundred miles and I couldn't manage fifty to get her. We hit the road and Nicole gunned us all the way through Vegas to Beatty, where we stayed in a really nice motel for a no-horse town. Inside the reception office was a picture of an Atmospheric Atomic Test (Beatty borders the Nevada Test Site) so I told the proprietress that my dad had worked on our nations weapons program at Los Alamos. "So did mine" she went on, "we lived at Indian Wells when I was growing up." Being a little older than me I said "So you witnessed the sun come up backwards every time they ran a test". She replied that she had and I let it drop, as my next question would of been how she'd survived, and how many members of her family she'd lost to Leukemia, Blastomas, Mylenomas, Carcinomas. Those people in that outpost were smothered with fallout, the poor fuckers. We made Reno the next day and it's good to be home. Addendum: I have nothing good to say about drug use. It's a shitty deal that ruins a lot of lives when it plain doesn't kill. Over the years I saved a lot of lives, jamming my fingers down peoples throats to clear airways, gave blue-faced people mouth to mouth, put ice cubes up rectums to shock a person into breathing, and risked manslaughter charges by calling 911. I never lost anyone that overdosed in my presence, but I know I was lucky and it was by the grace of God, whatever that is. Last year in Tejas I lost four young friends in a two-block radius, and when I got back to Reno I learned of others, and every od was the result of stupid shit, people afraid to call 911, lack of medical know-how. The government should give junkies Narcane so they can save each other and save counties enormous emergency room bills. The Republican Governor in New Mexico does it, so should every state. Drugs should be legalized across the board like they were pre-1914. People are going to get high if they want to. Legalization removes the allure, mystique and cachet-- it also removes the power base of the rampant gangs in our society by taking the money away. We're living through prohibition part 2, except the violence of todays gangsters makes Al Capone look like a mama's boy. Nobody robs a convenience store to pay the rent. We incarcerate more of our own citizens than any other nation, and ninety percent of violent crime is drug based, the other ten percent being domestic. I also have no doubt that our government is the largest drug dealer on Earth, that the CIA funds their dirty wars by pushing dope. I haven't seen a real opiated Thai stick since we pulled out of Vietnam, and it wasn't Ma and Pa Kettle's boy bringing that shit over. If I'd been doing smack in the early seventies it would have been white dope from the golden triangle, not Mexican tar. Air America brought all that shit over, it ain't no lie. Today were in Afghanistan and last year they had a record opium harvest. The Taliban, misogynist, art destroying pieces of shit that they are, are also religeous fundamentalists that don't tolerate the growing of opium poppies. We kicked 'em out, supporting drug-based warlords (Indochina all over again), and the European recipients of all that good Afghanistan heroin are dying in droves. Educate yourself, read between the lines, read anything by Noam Chomsky, read Opium, a History by Martin Booth, read Overthrow by Stephan Linzer, or read The Birth of Heroin and the Demonization of the Dope Fiend. For those that don't know, Heroin was introduced to the world by Bayer (asparin) a subsidiary of IG Farbin, the folks that brought you Birkenau as in Auswchwitz-Birkenau. The Bush family have been the largest American investors in IG Farbin since before, during and after World War Two. "Poppy" (opium) Bush 1 was head of the CIA under Nixon and brought all that white smack in, now Bush 2 is in Afghanistan. The best part about being clean is knowing that I'm no longer an ardent supporter of the import and export of death. Life is sacred, I'm lucky I got out with mine. And as far as young girls go I still like 'em, but now they're over thirty.

They're fucking paintings, not photos (a rant)

Greg — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:28:16 GMT

I'm supposed to not get any stupid porn ads on this here 'Tribe', and I sure as shit hope so. They annoy the fuck out of me on 'MyDisgrace'-- I make porn, soliciting bubble-brain, I don't watch it, or you, unless you want my home address and that picture really is you; but I've got a pretty good idea you're a dude somewhere with an incredibly hairy ass. Hot. But in it's way I like MyDisgrace, I've been on it less than a year, and not only have I made a whole slew of 'friends' that I neither know a damn thing or give a shit about, but I'm now friends with supermodels, including...I forget her name, but she's nineteen and lives in Milan and is the most ridiculous looking woman I've seen-- makes a young Sophia Loren look like a mutt. If you go to MySpace/Search/Display Name: 'Greg the Painter' and make me your friend, and if your not trying to sell me your genitals I'll accept you and maybe she'll be your friend too; you can print her picture and put it in your wallet and tell your friends a bunch of lies about how smooth you are and how you hooked it up with her long before she met her equally genetically prepossessing boyfriend, say when she was fifteen. You'll impress friends and family, trust me. But the good thing about MyFace is that friends I haven't seen nor heard from in pert near twenty-years or more have reappeared from the ether and mysteriously found me, and whether they say so or not, to a one they were convinced I was long dead, as even back before they became alcoholics, tweakers, or smackheads, I was a hard-core poly-addict of many years. The fact that were all still here finding each other means we've all quit doing hard drugs (unless they're using the computer at the library to contact me, which is highly unlikely), although most of my ' clean' friends are sloppy drunks. When I was a booze hound I was one happy drunk; I've moved places for the beer including my current 24 hour liquor selling home town of Reno, but I had to give it up. Not for the blackouts that made me invariably forget whats-her-name's-name in the morning, but because it made me paint like merde-- almost as bad as perhaps Pollock with Alzheimers. Don't get me wrong, I get the whole 'first American painter' thing, and I like a fair bit of abstraction (I'm just saying that because some of my best friends are abstractionists), but El Pollo Pollock will never grace any living space of mine. In fact just about every painter I know is better-- and they're all better than Rothko. You, want a Rothko, gimmie a minute and I'll roll one out, a Pollock, I'll pour you one (like a fucking drink,right?). I know my paintings represented under my photos are derivative, an exercise in replication, but at least I paint with a brush GtheP