Drifting Further

                  Not Tough Enough

The only time I can remember

that I tried my hand

at a venture that was overwhelmingly, indefensibly

stupid –

more so than my most pointless marriage and my frame shop –

was my one foray into

the marijuana business.

It was when I was first in graduate school

in Southern California,

and some people I knew

went back and forth over the border all the time.

I really don’t remember what my major motivations were,

but then there my friends stood,

with a seventy-dollar Mexican kilo.

I thought I’d play it cagey.

Right.

I didn’t store it in my house,

hiding it instead in a built-in cabinet

in an unused garage out back.

I dealt mostly to one kid,

who was maybe a couple of years younger than me,

giving him a discount so he could on-sell it.

He ripped me off.

One day my stash out back was gone.

Nobody else could have done it.

I knew that I either had to do something to him

or get out of the dope business altogether.

Realising that I’m not a real criminal,

or even a tough guy,

I took the second option

and never sold contraband again

for the forty-one or so more years

before I gave up buying it when I was sixty-three

for financial and other reasons that aren’t germane here.

                    Linda and Hits

The second band that I shlepped for

in my all-too-brief show-biz-worker career

was called the Stone Poneys,

but by the time I started shlepping for them

a more accurate name would have been

Linda Ronstadt and hired musicians.

The Stone Poneys brand had had a single hit single

a fair number of months before,

a bouncy little fuck-off-darlin’ number

called ‘Different Drum’.

When we got to the new line-up’s first gig,

at a tasteless country-club-style venue called Musicland –

because it was right across the road from Disneyland,

get it? –

I suggested to Linda that she might introduce the ditty

by saying that she was going to sing

a medley of her hit.

She thought that was funny and used it.

Months later, when she was performing under her own name,

Linda cruised into a rehearsal hall I was managing

with an acoustic guitar player

and a new song she’d just obtained

called ‘Long, Long Time’,

and I said right away that it’d be her second hit,

and of course it was.

Many years later I went to see her perform in San Antonio,

and she sang her hits solidly for more than an hour,

and neither ‘Different Drum’ nor ‘Long, Long Time’

were among them.

        Freedom of Expression

Okay, it was a blatantly sleazy place –

the women danced buck naked,

which was unusual in a club in 1970,

even in L.A.,

and three 8-mm projectors

showed hard-core porn-without-sound

on three different screens.

The men’s-room urinals

tended to be clogged with semen.

The ex-groupie wife

of a friend of mine

was dancing there,

even though he’d written

a hit song worth money.

Knowing that I was out of work,

she tipped me off when

the projectionist job came open.

It seemed to me

like a real Bukowski experience,

so I went for it.

After I’d been there about a week or two

the cops raided the joint.

A friendly detective

explained to me

that if I wanted to insist

on my first-amendment rights

he’d be glad to let me test them in court.

Otherwise I was free to walk.

I walked.

                   Ludicrous Pride

The Jew-hating German

food and beverage manager

of the Bourbon Street

luxury hotel,

who occasionally enjoyed

buggering African American busboys,

looked out onto the busy temporary bar

erected in the hotel patio

especially for Mardi Gras

and, rubbing his hands together,

gloated proudly in a loud voice

about how much booze he was selling.

I thought Big Fucking Deal –

it would take unimaginable incompetence

for a French Quarter hotel

to fail to sell

oceans of alcohol

during Mardi Gras.

               Intoxication Fascism

I was enduring one of those experiences

of being uncontrollably down in general,

and a redneck, just out on parole or something,

was living across the street.

We connected,

tangentially,

over Willie Nelson and beer and suchlike,

and then I ran into him in a nearby

student-and-those-who-hang-out-around-students bar.

I was already fairly well lit.

He came up to me with a drink he’d bought,

a double shot of 141-proof rum – straight –

and was outraged when I declined his offer.

He insisted that I had a duty to accept it

and toss it back in one gulp.

I thought I had a duty not to be stupid.

                        Two Huge Zits

My dog and I’d been on the road for a couple of weeks

in my tiny 16-year-old Karmann Ghia

flogging orders for handmade leather

belts and bags

to various types of non-chain shoppes along the Gulf Coast,

sleeping mostly in downmarket motels.

When I returned to San Antonio

after a marathon drive from Mississippi

I noticed that a large boil,

about two centimetres in diameter,

had developed on my left hip under my beltline.

Considering it to be no more than a giant zit,

I grabbed a box of tissues

to address any mess that might ensue

and gave it a squeeze.

It popped loudly, but the grainy pus held its shape:

a three-millimetre wide cylinder

that extruded and retreated from its opening in the boil

as I alternately increased and relaxed the pressure from my fingers.

I felt empty in more ways than one

when I finally took a tissue and wiped it away.

About ten years later,

when I was the eighth-grade girls’ coach

at a poverty-zone intermediate school,

I realised while coaching at a track-and-field meet

that I’d developed another boil –

this one in the small of my back,

where I couldn’t see it to pop it.

The GP who did the job oo’d and ah’d

over how cool it was as he was lancing it, exclaiming:

‘Cool! It’s just like popping a giant zit!’

with obvious joy in his voice.

I was jealous.

           Remember The Movie

I used to be a cab driver in San Antonio.

Upon seeing the Alamo for the first time

tourists almost inevitably said something like,

“Oh. I thought it was bigger”

in a quietly dejected tone of voice.

                     Nothing Original

It was 1980 or thereabouts.

I was in a snooty upmarket suburb of San Antonio,

sitting at the bar of a semi-upmarket dive

favoured by advertising jerks,

schoolteachers, and other members

of the local not-quite-intelligentsia.

Beside me sat a man in his sixties

who had sparse, wispy, greyish hair, a sour facial expression,

and poor posture as he bent over his drink.

He told me that he was a retired Lufthansa pilot

and then launched into a tiresome Jew-baiting rant,

including the old saw,

‘Hitler’s only mistake was not killing all the Jews’

and similar bigoted clichés.

He cast a smirk in my direction

to check out my reaction.

It wasn’t a case of what I should have done;

I actually did it, saying something like,

‘Oh, so you’re actually proud of being

a gutless, nutless puppet

who’s ready to do anything anybody tells you to do

as long as it’s stupid, cowardly, and cruel.’

Then I spat into his drink.

Since I was about half his age and twice his size,

and a semi-buff gym junkie at the time,

all he did was look around, see no allies, get up,

and leave, muttering another cliché slur or two at me

through tight lips as he stumbled by.

I never saw him there – or anywhere – again.

          A Perfect Crime  

Our connecting flights

connected us in Houston,

where we hugged and kissed in the airport.

We then flew to Guadalajara together,

and breezed through Customs

at the Guadalajara airport with a wave.

Unpacking at our romantic hotel,

she showed me a fistful

of fat spliffs she’d had in one of her bags,

explaining that the authorities

never consider that tourists

might import marijuana into Mexico,

being obsessed instead

with people exporting it

out of the country,

across the border to the North.

                          Old Job Joke

Some of the more than fifty jobs that I’ve had in my life

have been unspeakably horrid.

Assembly-line work, operating a punch-press,

selling vacuum cleaners, selling advertising,

handling used oil barrels at a recycling centre,

waiting tables at the most expensive restaurant –

that was its conscious policy –

in a medium-large, tourist-laden city

where I had the privilege of interacting

with the obscenely rich – as a servant,

all involved considerable doses

of soul-smashing ugliness,

but I’d adjudge relief teaching –

substitute teaching when I did it in the Old Country –

to have involved what were

several of the worst moments and stretches of time

of those that I’ve spent in paid employment,

confirming and reconfirming my low regard

for the species of which I am a member.

What’s the difference between

a secondary-school relief teacher and a toilet?

A toilet only has to look at one arse-hole at a time.

                   Cerumen on the Football Pitch

In the late 80s and early 90s

my mate Dave roped me onto his team

to play social-twilight-league seven-a-side soccer –

as people in Otorohanga called it then.

Allow me to digress here.

Since early childhood I’ve enjoyed

the probably shameful pleasure

of the tactile sensation between the tips

of my thumb and forefinger

of dry, crumbly scabs, earwax,

and dried tears, or what other people –

not my parents, though –

call sleepy and what one of my daughters,

when about five, called eye boogers.

The chance to play with earwax, however,

has always been a particularly rare pleasure for me.

So there I was, trotting out onto the pitch as a substitute defender,

my ball skills being almost nonexistent,

thinking to myself, as a small child was throwing a wobbly on the sideline,

that I was glad it wasn’t my kid and I didn’t have to do anything about it,

and I felt a tickling in my right ear.

I reached up and pulled out a large ball of earwax,

close to a centimetre in diameter

that I immediately wanted to play with.

Just then, however, someone from the other team

made a break past our midfielder and it was my job to stop him

from getting the football past me

without dropping my own secret ball.