Drifting Through

                 Fifteen Years Of Tobacco

I never liked tobacco,

but when I was fifteen, in 1961,

everyone else in my family smoked,

as did most of the people I knew my age and older,

and cigarette ads were all over the TV,

so the question wasn’t if I was going to smoke,

but what brand.

I never found a brand I really liked.

It got to me when I was twenty-nine.

I’d been smoking so much

that everything I ate tasted like tobacco,

and the only aroma I could smell was tobacco –

I even smelt it in my sleep –

and I liked neither the taste nor the smell.

I was determined not to quit, though,

because the people I knew who’d quit

were self-righteous and smug about it,

and I didn’t want to be like that.

So I kept lighting ’em up and then,

my senses filled with loathing, stubbing ’em out.

Fortunately, I have a genetic predisposition

against being desperately addicted –

to anything, really –

and some time just shy of my thirtieth birthday,

I didn’t realise exactly when,

I just stopped,

without actually trying or even noticing.

I never really liked tobacco, after all.

                 Cars of the Sixties

I bought a 1966 VW minibus new in 1967.

It had a single bench seat across the front

and lap seatbelts.

When the vehicle was in motion

this configuration enabled my little dog Naomi

to alternate resting her head on my lap

with sticking her snoot out

the passenger-side window.

It also enabled two different young women,

about four years apart,

to fellate me as I drove along country roads.

These things will never happen again,

and not only because they stopped making motor vehicles

with single-bench-style front seats

decades ago.

                                       The Clap

She picked me up when I was working a Fraternity of Man show.

She was from somewhere in the Midwest – Wisconsin, I think –

and had the most amazingly magnificent high-hard tits

that I’d ever seen up-close and personal at the time.

She told me about her fucking

most of the Mothers of Invention the night before.

It clearly seemed to upset her.

The next weekend I was road-managing the Fraternity of Man

at a big rock festival at a racetrack

somewhere outside of Oakland.

The situation was that I –

along with Iron Butterfly and Procol Harum

and some other Big Names that I forget now –

was on the inside of an eight-foot Cyclone fence

with a pass and passes to spare,

and large numbers of groupies were on the outside of it.

I was close to salivating.

I went to the Men’s room to relieve myself

and noticed a burning sensation as I pissed.

I looked down and saw some discharge

discolouring my grots –

I had the Mothers’ clap.

Cursing my misfortune, I knew that I had to act responsibly.

I brought three groupies into the star enclosure,

told them of my plight,

and asked them to give me neck rubs

and run errands for me and stuff.

They brought me a shitload of wine

that they’d stolen from Procol Harum.

When I told my mate Stash –

our band’s singer and the composer of ‘Don’t Bogart That Joint’ –

about it he grinned and asked me,

“Does it hurt when you spit?”

                                 Delicacies

There they are; they are there,

hundreds of thousands of them – maybe millions –

as common as dirt.

Extraordinarily ordinary people who smugly consider themselves

to be cool or hip or with-it or some variation on such a claim

not to be ordinary at all, but a more-worldly cut above.

Enemies of art and originality,

most of them in North America find their way to Las Vegas,

the clueless poseur suckers’ heaven.

He was huge – both tall and obese.

He and his short but well-upholstered wife and sour-faced mother

owned and operated a Jewish deli on Wilshire Boulevard,

just off the southern fringes of Hollywood.

He had a big pink Cadillac that he drove to Vegas every weekend.

He had a gun that he practiced shooting

outside the deli’s back door, in his building’s parking garage.

I’d been working for him for about a month

when his mother asked me why, despite the hot weather,

I was wearing a long-sleeve shirt rolled up above my elbows

instead of a short-sleeved one.

She dismissed my reply that it was a style preference

and told me that she’d been around Vegas enough to know

that long-sleeved shirts in hot weather meant junkie.

I pointed out that I rolled my shirts up and no tracks were visible,

but she dismissed that by telling me, Vegas-wise,

that junkies could hide their tracks by injecting shit into their legs.

I challenged her for not making sense and for making false accusations.

I also demanded an apology and she grudgingly apologised.

I told her that I forgave her and was letting her off.

As a result of this, the next day her son threatened me with his gun.

It was time to look for a new job.

                         Early 1972

She’d dumped me with horrid cruelty,

although I’d deserved to be dumped,

and I was working in a warehouse

down in South-Central

that belonged to some bastards

who had a distance-technical-education hustle:

electronic components, diesel-mechanic tools,

shit like that.

My boss, Javier, claimed to be Spanish, not Mexican,

as did so many like him,

but since he let me go

when he caught me sleeping after lunch

– he called it ‘meditating’ –

I conceded him his conceit graciously.

One of my co-workers, named James,

a short, wiry African American dude with an attitude,

kept approaching me with a savage smile, insisting,

“One of these days you an me are gonna have it out, Snow White!”

but my other co-worker, Lonnie,

a big, shambling, genial young African American, liked me

and made it clear that there’d be no having it out.

Lonnie and I went to the Friday night fights

at the shabby old Olympic Auditorium,

smuggling in a pint of Beam,

and by the third bout on the card it was all a blur,

but we shouted like idiots anyway,

feeling good for just a little while,

but not the next morning.

         Doña Emma’s Christmas Tamales

My young wife told me

that since all the Central Americans in New Orleans

bought their Christmas tamales from Doña Emma

we had to order ours and her mother’s

before the end of November.

The concept of Christmas tamales was new to me,

but I was keen.

Doña Emma conducted all her business from her home,

which was decorated on the principle

that every surface and wall space

that could house a cross –

or better still, a gory crucifix –

should.

Doña Emma herself was about as wide as she was tall,

which wasn’t all that much.

No prize for guessing that the only colour she wore

was black.

I was unable to prevent

her visual similarity to an eight-ball

from entering my mind.

The tamales were amazing,

not at all like those to which I was accustomed

from having bought in Los Angeles convenience stores.

They were, for one thing, a few centimetres longer

and more than three times as much in diameter.

Instead of just greasy masa and maybe some greasy mince,

their filling was a galaxy of masa encompassing

peas, black beans, corn kernels, unexpected vegetables,

chunks of meat, and even, in the case of one I ate,

an entire small chicken drumstick, bone and all.

I was given to understand

that no two of Doña Emma’s Christmas tamales were identical.

Each was a true work of art, indeed.

           Away From Ringside

Forget the long-story reason why –

it was the most substandard housing

in which I’ve ever resided.

I’d lived in a converted

one-car garage before,

but never one in which

the sewage backed up

and I had to pick my way

through turds

to navigate from front door to bed.

The woman I was seeing had found it for me;

she herself was staying in her mother’s

middle-class ranch-style home-with-

lawnmower.

My new landlord was somebody she knew

from somewhere,

a chiropractor

who moonlighted as the ring physician

at various professional wrestling

melodramas-masquerading-as-matches

in that part of the world.

After finally having my plumbing tended to

he offered me a free back-cracking,

or manipulation or whatever

chiropractors call it,

as compensation for my inconvenience.

I didn’t want to be rude,

so I agreed to the procedure.

It was scary, but I survived,

and even felt more or less kinda better, I guessed,

for an hour or two

after he’d finished with me.

          Tyre Store Humour

A long time ago

I spent far too many years

as an advertising jerk.

One of my customers

owned a couple of tyre stores.

We got along okay,

and he invited me by

a couple of times

for some beer and some weed.

I discovered that people

who are in the tyre business

know an amazing amount of jokes

and bon mots

about dog piss.

Not surprising, aye?

               Urban Geography

When I was working as

a freelance feature writer, artists’ model, and cab driver

in San Antonio in the early 1980s,

I decided to take an undergraduate course

in urban geography – for intellectual stimulation and fun.

The urban geography wasn’t because of the cab driving;

it was sort of the other way around.

Maps have fascinated me since I was a small child.

Some of my earliest memories

are of drawing maps of imaginary towns and cities,

first on the wallpaper of my home’s upstairs hall,

then on sheets of plain white typewriter paper

that my parents taped to the wall.

It’s as if I have maps in my head,

and I’ve almost never become lost  in an urban environment,

except when I lived in New Orleans.

I’ve always had unrealistically low

self-esteem, self-confidence, and sense of self-worth,

so at the time I took that course

I was relying heavily on amphetamines

to provide me with false

self-esteem, self-confidence, and sense of self-worth.

By far the worst thing about speed, in my opinion at the time,

was the people who sold it,

and just before my research project was due

my connection went out into the country to get his head together

until after my exam.

I stopped taking speed when I went back to school for real

to get my teacher’s certificate,

not wanting a repeat of the scenario with my just-for-fun course.

The ease with which I pulled down high grades without it,

including when I re-took urban geography,

flabbergasted me.

Dog Stuff

                                   Hard-Wired

Consider dogs:

When she was alive I ran my fox terrier

almost every day at the dog exercise park,

where, of course,

other dogs also run free,

and I could appreciate the beauty of dog behaviour.

The pure-breds are the most hard-wired,

determined by their DNA.

Fox terriers have to react to everything and to chase anything

with unbridled enthusiasm

and never back down.

Miniature schnauzers have to make friends with everybody.

Retrievers have to jump into the river and galumph when they’re on land.

And so on.

Of course, mixed-breed dogs have greater flexibility,

although they might inherit a tendency to dig or to jump up,

but all dogs, of all breeds and crosses, and on every continent

love funky stuff,

and are either a leader or a member of a pack, however small –

there’s not a democrat in the species; dogs don’t share –

and they know how to greet each other.

If people only greeted people

the way that dogs greet dogs, well,

all human interactions would be remarkably different.

Dogs dig it funky.

The behaviour for which all humans are hard-wired,

by the way,

no matter what our location, ethnicity, culture,

gender, status, or family background,

is bullshit.

It must be in our DNA.

Neuroscientists point their fingers at the amygdala.

It’s what sets us apart from other species.

Without bullshit life would be at least as different

as it would be if we sniffed

each other’s nether regions

when we met.

         Dog Shit

Dog shit is funky.

No surprise and no argument, aye?

It is, however,

also problematic –

at least in the city.

The law’s clear on the topic:

those of us in control of dogs in public

have to pick up their shit –

preferably in a plastic bag –

and dispose of it in a bin,

if anybody who looks as if

they might complain

is watching.

No complaint, no offense.

Some brainbox in Christchurch

came up with the idea of DNA testing,

but get real –

who’d want a job testing dog shit all day long?

The tricky part,

in which finer distinctions prevail,

is what to do when nobody’s watching.

One bloke I knew at Day’s Park

never picked his dog’s up.

He said that it’s unfair to pick on dogs.

“Everything shits,” he said,

“and nobody has to pick up duck shit.”

I take a more nuanced position.

I picked it up even when nobody was looking

if my late dog squeezed out her nuggets

on nice stretches of lawn

where people might enjoy a bit

of relaxation or play,

and when she did it at the edge

of the riverbank’s precipice

I bat it down toward the river

with a stick,

always throwing the stick down after it.

It’s the responsible thing to do.

                   Rhonda and Ducks

The first time that Rhonda, my late fox terrier,

then just a wee puppy,

chased a flock of ducks

was at Lake Rotoroa,

Hamilton’s town lake.

She froze in obvious amazement and stared

when they took off in a flash

and flew into the water

with much noisy flapping and quacking.

It was clearly the most magnificent something

that she’d ever witnessed at that time.

In the subsequent 11 years or so,

whilst chasing ducks in Hamilton’s parks,

she got the drop on one of ’em

two times that I can recall when she was younger,

and three times after she turned eleven.

When she was younger

she made flying leaps

and sailed over the sluggish poultry,

dashing on to chase others.

The last two times she just ran right by them,

woofing.

For her it was chasing and excitement that matter;

catching wasn’t on her dog-brain agenda.

               The Art of Dog Piss

People who know dogs

recognise them for being

sensitive, perceptive, soulful, and,

above all, playful personalities.

Since play and creativity go together,

it seems reasonable, then,

that dogs can be artists.

Of course, they aren’t built

to hold paintbrushes or play musical instruments,

their voices don’t lend themselves to tunefulness,

and their communication skills don’t run to words,

but that doesn’t matter, anyway,

because the sense that’s most acute

for most of ’em

is, of course, smell.

It seems to me that the reason most dogs

enjoy sniffing around

a considerable while before pissing –

unless it’s urgent –

is that they’re looking for just the right spot

to put down a harmony.

  

                      Molly

The Vege King in the Fairfield shops

is almost always busy,

but during the week before xmas

the foot traffic

on the barrow-covered footpath out front

is particularly thick.

I saw her wandering, clearly lost,

beneath that moving forest of legs –

a miniature long-haired Jack Russell,

looking-looking-looking,

apparently without success,

small and lost in a big, frightening world.

I crouched and extended a hand.

She approached me and I picked her up.

Her ID tag said “Molly”

and had a mobile number

too long for me to be confident

about memorising quickly and accurately.

I put Molly down and got out my phone,

but when I bent over to pick her up

so that I could see the number on her tag

she ran away.

Since I never saw another sign of her

dead or alive

I have to suppose that she found

the person for whom she’d been searching

and regained the comforts

of being at home in her own small, safe world.

          A Lesson In Her Eyes

It had to end, of course –

everyone’s does:

rapid and severe weight loss,

problems with balance,

incontinence,

sudden debilitating physical weakness …

plus insufficient funds for treatment

that would be unlikely

to restore quality of life,

anyway.

As the vet prepared

the euthanasia,

I fed her treats

that the vet had provided.

She couldn’t catch them

when I tossed them to her

as she’d always enjoyed doing before,

but she still enjoyed

lapping them off the floor,

and her eyes

when she looked up for more

shone with pleasure

and expectation.

She was still

enjoying each moment

to the best of her ability

to do just that,

without any idea

of how few moments

she had left.

That dog taught me something

there in the examining room

whilst waiting to die

that I hope I learnt.

                     Canine Spookage?

Starting a week or so before I began composing this,

on quiet mornings I’d sometimes hear my dog

breathing in that loud way of hers

– sighing, snorting, grunting –

but when, embarrassed, I turned around to look,

and then searched the entire upstairs for any dog at all,

I of course found nothing.

I also felt her rest her neck on my foot repeatedly,

but when I looked under the desk I of course saw no dog.

No surprise in either case,

as she’d been dead for almost a year.

What surprises me still, however,

is that my mind would create such illusory manifestations.

Although I appreciated the responsibilities

with which she presented me,

and the chance to play stick,

and she clearly expected and enjoyed

the care I provided her,

and playing stick,

we were, shockingly, never particularly close

emotionally.

           The Way of the World

My new dog

is a fluffy little fella,

about maxed out on the cuteness scale,

alert, intelligent, adventurous,

and about as friendly as it’s possible to be.

At the park he tries almost obsessively

to make friends with every dog he sees,

even those who snarl at him

with aggressive hostility.

It doen’t matter, he still considers everybody,

canine and human, to be his friend,

if they let him,

and he’s never aggressive back

if they snap instead.

About the only thing he seems to enjoy

more than making friends

is gnawing on the bones

of slaughtered livestock.

{As Performed Live by the New Millennium Beatniks}