Slave

I am a slave…a slave to memory…real and imagined.  

I am a thrall to bittersweet realities that I lived, subtly and overtly rewritten the way memories always are over the course of time, and a fool for the more golden remembrances of things which I know never happened but plaintively wished had.

I am a freeman and a slave just the same…a slave to my passions, as fickle and unfocused as they are so often…a slave to wanting the world…no, that’s not true…a slave to wanting MY world to make better sense…to cast me as the sage…the seeker…the lover…the blissful dreamer…the contented soul that I like to imagine myself to be when the moon is low and my scrupulously erected barriers have begun to crumble a little.

I am a slave to dreams…a slave to sorrow and bitterness…a slave to hope and laughter…a slave to the notion that all lost love was the healing love recognized just a heartbeat after it had vanished into the mist of the ever present past…a slave to recrimination, fair and too often unfair, that lingers long after it should have faded into the ether.

I am a child of fleeting light…a child of abiding shadows that I long ago stopped expecting anyone else to truly understand. 

I am a child…I am a man…a freeman of color living in a cool, sometimes cold gray world…dreaming in a warm, always welcoming world of soft, flowing color…blue and gold, red and green, burnt orange and royal violet…black and white…

I am a freeman.  I am a fool.  I am a dreamer.  I am an illusionist.  I am a master of all I imagine. 

I am a thinker.  I am an idiot.  I am a hero.  I am a coward.  I am special.  I am not special at all.

I am a slave.

Exit 11

He drove his big lazy car slowly down the highway.  He was lost again, of course.  So many avenues to explore and willfully he always chose the ones that lead to dead ends. 

He made a deliberate turn into familiar territory…the winding tunnel of love…trying to go back to find an exit that would lead him to some kind of salvation.  But he kept moving backwards…back to old roads he’d ignored…back to old roads he’d crashed on…backwards as if somehow going back would lead him forward.  Luckily he still had a fair amount of gas in the big car’s tank and a pair of rose colored glasses to illuminate the journey.

The exits were all marked “wrong way, do not attempt to re-enter” and he dutifully kept driving looking for a welcoming one.  He blew rueful kisses at the yellow brick road that splintered off into four or five branches snaking into the greater Los Angeles area.  He sang plaintive tunes down the blue road that shimmered in a mist illuminated by a lone blue star.

He paused at the exit…boarded up with a single white rose taped to its sign…that led to the road that followed the train tracks up the coast to what seemed to be a verdant valley.  He looked longingly at the exits that led to the desert…led to the sea…led to the mesa where he’d fucked up and fouled out, hiding like a scared child, in the unforgiving rubble of love’s lost offerings.

And then there it was…again…his exit.  The one that was always open…the exit that he always wanted to take…always chose to take…despite all of his protestations to the contrary.  He lit a cigar.  He turned up the radio.  He steered the big car out of the tunnel of love…out onto exit 11…and sighed without rancor or even sadness.  He was going home again.

Four Crushes (The Songs Remember When)

When I was a boy I was shy, aloof, fat, anxious, and impatient with my peer group…not the best combination for social success in the emotional cesspool that high school could be. I was also cursed and blessed with a vivid imagination, a facility for written expression, and a yearning poet’s heart that, in ways both naively expansive and painfully insular, wanted to love and be loved.

Not surprisingly I had crushes that both elevated and devastated my foolish romantic’s heart and soul. Each one had its own soundtrack...songs forever identified with specific people.

Back in those days…the halcyon days padding the halls of Louis Pasteur Junior High and Alexander Hamilton High School (Los Angeles liked to dedicate their schools to dead white men…a function of the times they were built rather than any overt racism…to the point where a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to change the name of another school to honor Marilyn Monroe rather than James Monroe, a seemingly reasonable notion to me given where we lived, was shot down with vehement disdain by the powers that be)…back in those childhood days I carried torches that warmed and seared me to the core.

From the perspective of age I look back and see that some of my crushes from that time…four of them in particular…added more color to the tapestry of my life than I had previously consciously acknowledged.

Those four…two older, two among my peers…linger with me in ways I would never be arrogant enough as to believe that I linger with them.

They all seemed to like me. They all saw me as harmless. They all loomed in my head with more vividness than the reality of our acquaintance should have allowed for. They still do.

One died suddenly while I was still in the process of becoming a man.

One I willingly surrendered my virginity to in an act that meant much more to me than it did to them.

One shared what turned out to be final goodbyes with me on the last day of our High School life in the parking lot of Hamilton early one morning after having spent the previous hours indulging a last gasp of childhood at Disneyland, the place where childhood never ends.

One never saw my crush because I was too scared to really let it show…it was, of course, a time when I imagined that rejection would literally kill me… and because they had a crush of their own that was not me.

Those four…one gone, two hopefully living well out in our sweet old world somewhere, one in the circle of my acquaintance once and again…none of them knowing what an indelible impact they made on my journey from then to now…linger in my soul, memory making the music of their souls ever sweeter in the golden realm of affectionate nostalgia.

It was and is a gentler, sweeter madness...the songs, like my heart, remember when...and I thank them all for that.

Painted from Memory

The softness of a warm, pliant breast…the haughty, demanding allure of a taut nipple…the sleek line of a gentle muscle…the anxious nectar of a playfully stolen kiss…the strength of graceful, ardent arms across shoulders…the wounding vulnerability of a guilelessly earnest lovers’ glance…they tumble together, they tumble together in a heady admixture of memory and fancy…they tumble together and come out in ways that suits today’s needs.

The lips that smell of jasmine and cherry wine, the smutty endearments that bring smiles and stolen breath, the soft tangle of hair on my probing fingers, the taste of strawberries and honey in unexpected crevices and tender corners…they tumble together in giddy remembrances of passion and love and dreams…they tumble together, rainbow and sepia strokes writing and rewriting the stories in ways that brings humid smiles and affectionate erections.

They tumble together…these paintings and pictures, these movies and tone poems…coming together…painted from memory…painted for posterity….they tumble together…they tumble together...

Everybody's Got the Right to Love

Playing the Supremes on a cool July morning…trying to break through the suddenly stubborn grayness within and without…reminded of summer days of my youth putting a stack of 45’s on the record player and turning the volume up and dancing along…air guitar in hand, invisible microphone at the ready…and losing myself in the music.

It makes me a little happy.

It makes me a little sad.

It makes wistful for times gone and hopeful for times to come.

A step gone…but a decent enough step still present just the same…I catch the beat, smile at the bass line, and sing along with the mighty Ms. Jean Terrell…”everybody’s got the right to love”…yeah, I’d like to believe that’s still true…and sometimes I honestly do (positive madness is the best madness :-)

(I couldn't find a video for the song but clicking on the title above will take you to a place hosting the song in question.)

A Case of You

I had a friend who once told of driving cross country…from the northeast to the bohemian expanse of Austin, Texas…with Joni Mitchell’s Blue as her soundtrack. She found mirrors and companions and solaces in the nakedly vulnerable poetry and that lingered with her years later (and, I will presume, even unto today.)

We played at love, she and I, passionately distant for a brief season…joined by poetry and comic books, by music and chastely humid late night phone calls…and then we stopped pretending and went our separate ways.

She comes into my consciousness…at odd times and from odd angles…even unto today and I choose to remember the sweet moments…a song on a heartfelt mix tape that made me feel loved and connected and safe, a “smile in a whisper” (she didn’t like that Fairground Attraction song but it always reminds me of her) in shared wistful, guileless, passionate dialogues shared in the safety of our distant bedrooms…and take the soft, magical joy those sweet moments can bring when I’m open to it.

I’ve thought about the friend I had often lately as I read a biography of Joni that sends me to my CD collection for Miles of Aisles and Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm (surprising and delighting her with “My Secret Place”...see below... on a tape was a sublimely thrilling moment for me) and, yes, Blue. Joni as a soundtrack…I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet…works for me…even unto today.

- for Priscilla -

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MKW's Pop Culture ramblings: Neverending Rainbow

Nightswimming II

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night
I'm not sure all these people understand
It's not like years ago,
The fear of getting caught,
Of recklessness and water
They cannot see me naked
These things, they go away,
Replaced by everyday...

- R.E.M. -

The night was bright, given vibrant life by the light of a full, proud moon and we were just drunk enough to cast aside our common sense and strip naked and run headlong into the icy surf. Even at 2 AM there were a handful of people on the south California beach but no one paid us any attention (people tend to come to the beach at 2 AM for reasons of their own…they really don’t care or notice why anybody else is there.)

The cold sea water didn’t sober us up as much as might have been expected and we splashed around for a few long minutes before we retreated back to the sand and fell down laughing. We lay in the sand, naked but not cold (perhaps the lingering aftereffects of the rum we’d consumed at the bar a few blocks away), and looked up at the moon. The world fell away and, for those moments at least, we forgot about the heartaches and disappointments that had led us to the bar and on to the beach.

Eventually we felt the chill of the night…and we felt the awkwardness of being naked together on a public beach…and we slipped into our boxers and jeans and t-shirts and sat in the sand listening to the surf. We sighed, almost as one, as the heartaches and disappointments started to crowd back to the front of our minds.

But we shook them off. The night was still bright and the morning would be time enough to deal with that stuff again. We glanced at each, grinning knowingly, and then got to our feet and wandered off towards the parking lot where we’d left the car. We slept in the car for a while and then, sober enough to negotiate the ever bustling Los Angeles freeways, we headed home to finish the night in our own beds.

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"Nightswimming"

words and music by R.E.M.

Pop culture stuff: Neverending Rainbow

Nightswimming

It took a little while but we were both surprised to find laughter coming to us easily. Years ago we were almost something…but things happened and our paths diverged and we lost touch with each other…and now, through the most mercurial of happenstances, we were together again. Together just for an evening…but together just the same.

The lasagna was settling nicely in my belly and the wine was doing likewise in my head as we walked along the boardwalk. Our hands touched…and then tensed…and then, warily at first, intertwined.

“You remember the last time were out at this beach?”

I smiled patiently. Of course I remembered that night. “Yes, I remember it very, very well.”

“Being drunk and out at the beach at 3 AM is something that you might want to forget.”

We laughed, nervously and humidly, as the sea breezes shuddered through us. We walked onto the sand into the roaring darkness.

“It was about here I think,” I said pointing out towards the surf caressing the shore in the light of the lazy half-moon.

All those years ago when we were almost something we left David’s part feeling tipsy and silly and just adventurous enough to brave the dark night ocean on a summer’s night. We had kissed tentatively and then we’d thrown off all of our clothes and raced…hand in hand…into the icy water.

We frolicked in the icy water, laughing and kissing…night swimming…for a few long, amazing minutes. Then we swam back to shore and ran back onto the beach. We fell in the sand, our clothes as ramshackle blanket, and laughed.

Lying naked in a new moon’s light we had kissed again and then we laid back and looked up at the stars.

“We made love right here,” I said.

“We didn’t make love…we stayed on the sand until we were chilly enough and self-conscious enough to get dressed…”

“Yeah, I know,” I said with a grin, “but I created a whole other memory of that night that I quite liked and so I decided it was the true story…”

“…or at least the better story…”

“Yeah…maybe we should’ve…”

“…but we didn’t…”

I sighed wistfully. “No we didn’t…” I paused and looked out the water. “Well we’re here now…we could…”

There was a long pause. “No we could…but we shouldn’t…”

“Yeah,” I said knowing full well that the moment was back all those years ago and not here and now.

We held hands and listened to the surf until we were chilly enough and self-conscious enough to turn back to the boardwalk…back to the restaurant parking lot…back to our respective cars. We kissed…almost chastely…and then let our paths diverge once again.

A Good Day

“We had some good times too, didn’t we?’

He smiled…nostalgically, humidly…and nodded. “Yes,” he agreed, “we did.”

“Then it was a good thing.”

He nodded again. It was an awkward coming together…they had once meant so much to each other…they had once shared secret smiles and tender kisses…they had once known each other’s bodies in ways that both thrilled and terrified them. And then…suddenly and not suddenly at all…they came apart in waves of acrimony and disappointment and regret.

“Do you ever think about me? Do you remember the good days?

He nodded yet again. “I remember lots of good days. We had lots of good days.”

“Which one was your favorite?”

He took a deep breath and then he smiled again. “The day the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert was broadcast. You remember that?”

“Yes. Yes of course I do.”

“We were alone together in that great old house you used to have…the one with all of the nooks and crannies and wonderful angles…with MTV playing the show loud and the two us laughing and drinking raspberry tea…and the two of us cooking side by side in our underwear…and the two of us tumbling in and out of your big, soft bed kissing and touching and discovering new and wonderful angles at which our naked bodies could fit together…”

“Yes…”

“We heard only some of the concert…saw even less…and it was amazing. I’m not sure we were ever as utterly together as we were on that day. It was a good day.”

“Yes, it was a really good day.”

They laughed…remembering and regretting, almost but not quite touching each other…and luxuriated in the precious memory.

Making Renee Cry

When I was 11 I made a girl named Renee cry. It was purposeful thing and, briefly, I took smug satisfaction in the deed. The thing was that I liked Renee…a lot…and she didn’t seem to like me…at all.

At 11 I didn’t know quite what to do with what I would come to learn was an often recurring fact of life so I did the only thing I could think to do…I made Renee cry.

I don’t remember exactly what I said…to be honest I’m not sure that the portrait I have of Renee in my memory is accurate (it very probably is not)…but I remember that it worked.

And for a very short while I felt vindicated.

And then I felt worse…I felt like an utter bastard…and I desperately wanted to apologize…but I didn’t know how.

And so, sadly, I never did.

It should go without saying that Renee avoided me like the plague for the rest of the semester (and then she moved away.)

When I was 14 I deliberately snubbed my best friend Bobby. We were having an argument over an argument that Bobby and my brother Guy had engaged in…I had taken my brother’s part and Bobby and I stopped speaking.

The strange thing was that at the time I liked Bobby…who was like a brother to me (the short white R&B loving brother my mother could never have possibly produced)…a lot more than I liked Guy…who was a pain in the ass most of the time…and Guy was in the wrong in his argument with Bobby…and yet I still took my brother’s part. Family is a strange and paradoxical thing sometimes.

Bobby and I found our way back to each other…brothers again until time, distance, and circumstance pulled us apart once and for all…but I don’t remember ever making an explicit apology for my behavior (or, for that matter, wanting or needing an apology for his contributions to our estrangement.)

Over the years I have delivered slights…real and imagined…to people I care about, to people I loved and respected and cherished.

I like to think that I have gotten much better at making apologies when I am in the wrong.

Though, I know all too well, I am as stubborn as ever when it comes to not making apologies if I don’t think I’m in the wrong. There are those…and they know who they are…who think that I am a willful son of a bitch for this.

And maybe they’re right.

Though, in my heart of hearts, I don’t think so :-)

Namaste, y’all.

Me and Lloyd and a Good Halloween

At the risk of sounding like an old man gassing on with pompous proclamations that begin with “in my day…”, I remember the Halloweens of my childhood as kinder, gentler, more magical times than Halloweens seem nowadays.

Trick-or-Treating was a (mostly) carefree endeavor where children went from door to door in a neighborhood that was safe and full of people you knew (and, perhaps more importantly, full of people who knew your parents :-) We compared costumes…some store bought, some homemade…and collected treats delightful (those little bitty chocolate candy bars) and mildly disappointing (those rock-hard ribbon candies that linger in our bags until we could pawn them off to younger siblings or until everything else was gone.) And we could happily take fruit and homemade delights without fear of them containing poison or razor blades or anything else like that (the idea of taking our Halloween treasure to a hospital to have them x-rayed for dangerous things wasn’t part of our childhood experience.) The worst thing that could happen, we assumed, was a childish prank.

When I was in the 5^th grade I made the Halloween rounds with Lloyd, my best friend at the time. We were both shy boys but we were quite at ease with each other. Lloyd lived across the street from the north side of Manual Arts High School and I lived about four blocks to the west. Most school mornings Lloyd would be waiting for me and we would walk the six blocks between his house and Menlo Avenue School together talking about things that 5^th grade boys talked about.

On the Halloween evening of that year, Lloyd and I made the rounds of the neighborhood together (my brother Guy was off with his bratty little friends which was just fine with me.) I was dressed in my plastic Batman helmet, my vinyl Batman cape, my cool Batman t-shirt, black pants, and my stylish Batman sneakers; Lloyd was decked out as a cowboy.

We went to my block of 40^th Place first making a beeline for the vaguely spooky house of the old lady who lived across the street from me. She was one of the few white people left in what had at one time been an all-white middle class neighborhood and she mostly kept to herself; but every Halloween she made the most amazing little cakes, meticulously decorated, and handed them out. I knew to go to her house early because there were only so many that she made each year and when the last one was handed out she would shut off her porch light and apparently go to bed. Lloyd and I got there in time and took the precious little cakes over to my house to stash them in the refrigerator for safekeeping.

We circled the blocks we were allowed to visit collecting candy and gum and fruit until our bags were loaded down with sugary, chocolaty goodness. Having collected as much as we could…if not, being 5^th grade boys who didn’t always know what was good for them, as much we wanted to…we stopped back by my house. I took off my helmet and my cape and stashed my loot on my bed while Lloyd retrieved his little cake.

As the hour was growing late I offered to walk Lloyd halfway home and he agreed. We sat off…the cowboy and the unmasked Batman…but as we reached the corner two teenage boys came running out of the darkness howling like banshees. Before we knew what was going on they had snatched Lloyd’s bag right out of his hands were running back into the darkness laughing.

Lloyd was devastated. I offered to share half of my candy with him but he adamantly refused so I took him back to my house and got another bag and we went out again. Trick-or-Treat time was winding down so many houses…including the house of the old white lady across the street…had already switched off their porch lights but we went to every house that still lit. I was, as I said, quite shy but I screwed up my courage to explain to people at the doors what had happened. Lloyd was tight-lipped, afraid that he might cry if he said anything he told me later, but the people were happy to give him more treats even though we’d been to their houses before (a couple gave him the remainder of what they had left in their bowls.

By the time we were done, Lloyd’s bag was almost as full as the first one had been. We went back to my house so that I could get my cousin Philip, who was in High School, to walk us to Lloyd’s house. Though part of me really didn’t want to, I tried to give Lloyd my little cake…sitting in its little box in the refrigerator…but, again, he refused. But when he wasn’t looking I slipped it into his bag anyway.

Philip walked us all the way to Lloyd’s house and then walked with me back home.

The next morning, I met Lloyd across the street from the north end of Manual Arts High School. He handed me a little box with exactly half of the little cake in it. We didn’t say anything about it, we just walked on to school.

It was, all things considered, a good Halloween.

Mrs. Zimmerman

I was not a very good student in High School. I am neither proud nor ashamed of this, it is simply a fact. I made good grades (I graduated “with honors”) but I really didn’t push myself as hard as I could have. Mostly, however arrogant it might sound, I was bored. Mostly, however foolish it might sound now, I was itching to be done with school and childhood and get to the promised land of adulthood. Being a grownup, I found, was okay but not nearly as magical as it seemed when I wasn’t one…but that’s the way of things when we are young and running too fast to not be young.

My High School (dear old Alexander Hamilton High in a western corner of Los Angeles) was culturally diverse…blacks and whites in abundance with a good number of children of Latin and Asian descent making the school a racial stewpot; a good percentage of the white kids were Jewish as we were reminded anytime a Jewish holiday coincided with a school day (lots of filmstrips and independent reading time on those days because so many of our classmates were away and teachers didn’t want to go over the same material twice)…but full of the same schoolyard politics (cliques and gossip and the like) as any other school.

I found all of that political stuff tedious beyond words and I ignored it as much as I could. I sought out isolated corners of the sprawling campus to read and be to myself but I rarely had them to myself as a stalwart circle of friends…social outcasts, by choice or by happenstance, like myself…gathered and we created an inclusive clique all our own.

Our principal…a diminutive silver haired, eagle eyed woman named Mrs. Jimenez…ruled Hamilton with an iron fist in a velvet glove, easily alternating between nurturing grandmother and unrelenting tyrant as required.

I did the homework for one class while half-listening to teachers talking in another class so that I didn’t have to lug books on the half-hour walk from the school to my house any more than I had to.

I had a small circle of loyal friends (a state of being that continues to this day) and secret crushes that are part and parcel of the existence of a teenaged boy (I think Gina knew that I was smitten with her but I don’t think she ever took me seriously.)

And I had Mrs. Zimmerman. I was blessed to be taught by several motivated and motivating teachers in my school days…Mrs. Levy in the 3^rd grade, Mr. Daniels in the 5^th grade, Mr. McIntosh in the 6^th grade, Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Allen in Junior High, and Mrs. Zimmerman. Mrs. Zimmerman was an English teacher and she kind of took me under her wing and taught much about the one thing that did really engage me back then…that being writing, of course.

I ended up taking 5 or 6 classes with Mrs. Zimmerman over the course of my 3 years at Hamilton and she always challenged me to dig deeper, strive harder, to put my reality into the things I wrote. More than any other teacher I ever had I gave my all to reach for the bar that she kept raising higher…and I loved her for that.

I never told her that, of course…teenaged boys don’t have the words to tell teachers how much they appreciate making them reach for the fullest potential they can…but I hope that she knew it somehow just the same.

that boy

I remember that boy…he was a favorite of mine. That boy who lost himself in words and pictures and ideas…in comic books and Greek mythology, in the words of Dr. Seuss and Mark Twain and Robert Heinlein and Ralph Ellison, in images on the boob tube and the movie screen and in the halls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art…that boy…that inquisitive, imaginative boy…he was a favorite of mine.

I remember that boy…he danced to his favorite 45’s and he danced out in the autumn rain late at night…he soared in the clouds and kept his feet on the ground…he fell in love gracelessly but earnestly and he had secret, improbable crushes on friends of his mother and others too old to take him seriously…he loved his mother and tried to understand his father and see all the good that he could in his brother...that boy…that odd, fanciful boy…I remember that boy very well.

Yeah, I remember that boy…he was often a best friend when he wanted to be a boyfriend…a dreamer when he wanted to be doer…he was often a shoulder to lean on when he wanted to be a heart that was longed for…he knew all the words to the theme from Gilligan’s Island and the real names of all of the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes and all of the lyrics to the long version of “American Pie”…that boy…that strange, mundane, amazing boy…yeah, he was a favorite of mine.

I remember that boy…that shy, arrogant, easygoing, stubborn, illogical, utterly practical boy…he was a favorite of mine…he is a favorite of mine still. That boy…hopefully I will never lose sight of that boy no matter how far back down the road he seems. Yes, that boy…that simple, complicated boy…he is, now and forever, a real favorite of mine.

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More MKW Blogstuff: Neverending Rainbow

April

The first time I fell in love, I was 10, a shy 5th grader attending Menlo Avenue Elementary in Southeast Los Angeles (not too very far from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.)

The object of my affection was named April…she was, in the golden-hued halls of memory, an amazing goddess with golden-brown skin and dark, twinkling, utterly beguiling eyes.

I was smitten at first sight.

As far as I know, she never knew I was alive.

I watched her talk with the other girls during recess and I imagined what it would be like if she would talk so easily with me. I listened to her give answers to Mr. Daniels’ questions in class and knew that no music could ever possibly sound as sweet as her voice.

I never, except in the feverish realms of wishful imagining, worked up the courage to speak to her.

And then she was gone.

She left, without warning, in the middle of the semester (I believe we were told something about her father…who apparently was in the military…being transferred elsewhere but I was in a fog at the time so I might be misremembering that part.)

That evening, I was sullen and uncommunicative unto the point where my mother demanded to know what was wrong with me. “April’s gone,” I said plaintively, a tear tracking slowly down my cheek.

My mother didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry…so she hugged me instead.

April looms in my heart…shy, unrequited, illogical first “love”…and the memory of her, however faulty or foolish, warms me still.

Happy Valentine’s Day, April…wherever you are.

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Other MKW Blogstuff: Neverending Rainbow

The Love You Save

As I edit my novel Soul Deep (the story of the 12th year of a Black boy living in Los Angeles in 1968 that is sorta but not really semi-autobiographical...any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental...that's my story and I'm sticking to it ) I am reminded of the times...so very long ago (when I was a Black boy living in Los Angeles)...when my brother, my cousins, and I provided ragged but heartfelt entertainment when our parents would get together for impromptu parties.

At one point we were the Temptations (lipsynching to "My Girl" and "Ball of Confusion" while putting on dance moves so smooth that Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin would have turned a deep shade of green with envy if they ever saw us perform...in the fertile realm of childhood imagination and hubris we were fierce!) but come 1970 we gave that up and we became the Jackson 5.

My youngest cousin sang lead (he kinda looked like Michael Jackson...Michael Jackson in the pre-surgery, pre-wacko years) and my cousin Vernon, then and now the ladies' man, was Jermaine. Me, I was a Marlon...never singing lead but dancing so sweet that I inspired sighs and casually broke hearts (a legend in my own mind...)

Still makes me smile...stop the love you save may be your own/darlin' take it slow or someday you'll be all alone...even all these years later

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More MKW blog stuff: Neverending Rainbow

Mike Willis' 115th Dream

It was a beautiful, very blue and very sunny, day and we…an eclectic group of people of varying ages…were being marched (three by three) down a winding country road. The landscape was quite lovely indeed, we all had very comfortable walking shoes on, and the men and women with the guns were seemingly very relaxed and relatively easygoing (maybe the fact that they had guns and we didn’t had something to with that…)

We were led into sprawling pens filled with weathered wooden picnic tables topped with large wicker baskets filled with fruit and cold bottles of water (each of which containing a thin slice of lemon.)

I took an especially juicy green pear after the companions who had marched by my side…a bright-eyed Japanese woman with long, straight black hair cascading down to the small of her back and a strapping, stoic young man of indeterminate ethnicity…had chosen a shiny Granny Smith apple and a bunch of ruby red grapes respectively.

Across the table from us, not eating any fruit but puffing on a fat, expertly rolled joint, was Leonardo DiCaprio bloviating about world peace (which seemed strange since we were prisoners of some kind…albeit with delicious fruit, cool sparkling water, comfortable walking shoes, and, for some it seemed, access to marijuana.)

Leo wouldn’t stop gassing on…and he wouldn’t pass the joint.

We decided he was a pompous, selfish bastard but we listened patiently just the same and smiled to ourselves because we knew that when DiCaprio did get the munchies all of the fruit would be gone. Apparently we took our victories where we could get them.

I woke up before I found out where we going to sleep (hopefully Leo would have shut up by the time the sun went down…)

(Thanks and apologies, Bob :-)

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More MKW blog stuff: Neverending Rainbow

Press Your Luck

Last night I dreamt I was driving a bus over hills and dales while behind me they were taping an episode of Press Your Luck (the cheesy, kinda addictive game show from the 80's)...not sure how they got all of those people in the bus but it was a dream so I just went with it.

Ahead of me in another bus the ever-avuncular Gene Rayburn was hosting an episode of The Match Game (couldn't tell if Charles Nelson Reilly was there but odds are he was...)

At one point we crested a hill and Gene's bus took a hard right and disappeared around a curve...I kept going forward. And the road suddenly fell away and we were in free fall going down what seemed like a hundred miles towards a rather forbidding plain.

"Damn," I said, "this isn't good."

Behind me a cute, chubby redhead was bouncing up and down and screaming "No whammies! No whammies!" as I tried to figure how exactly to tell the Press Your Luck audience that we were all about to die.

And then I woke up.

What does it all mean? Hell if I know. I've found it's better not to overthink these things (they're just dreams after all, right? Right... )

Namaste, y'all.

Guy

Today would have been my brother, Guy’s 48^th birthday. My brother loved me fiercely sometimes while we were growing up. My brother hated me fiercely sometimes while we were growing up (I don’t really blame him for that…he suffered the indignity of “why aren’t your more like your big brother” more often than I would have probably been able to handle.) Mostly, he loved me…he was proud of me…he wanted me to fly to places he’d decided he would probably never fly to.

My brother Guy was exasperating and needy and he had terrible tastes in friends and addictive behaviors. I loved him fiercely sometimes while we were growing up. I hated him fiercely sometimes while we growing up.

I don’t know if that’s the way of all brothers but it was the way of my brother and I.

My brother Guy died in 1992…a bitterly unsurprising overdose…and today…today would have been his 48^th birthday.

Yes

"Do you remember...?"

The day we sat on the outermost edge of the bridge watching the storm-swollen river rage far beneath us...tempting fate while making naive plans for the future?

"Yes."

"Hmph. Then do you remember...?"

The afternoon we stopped along that quiet backcountry road and had gloriously primal sex in a field of wildflowers because the perfume and the longing wouldn't allow us to do otherwise?

"Yes."

"Well, do you remember...?"

The night we swore fervent fidelity we both knew was a bitter, unavoidable lie...our last night together before this one?

"Yes."

"Smug bastard."

"Yes."

"I love you even though. Do you...?"

"Yes."

Magdalena

Everybody called her “Maggie” but she never seemed like a Maggie to me. I’m not especially fond of nicknames (though I’ve accumulated a fair number of them in my time) but I understand that they fit some people like a glove and I don’t fret overmuch about it.

That said, nicknames don’t fit some people at all…Maggie never fit her. Once she (kind of reluctantly) told me her given name…Magdalena…I never called her anything else because that fit her like a glove (I’m not sure if she minded…I think not because she was the kind of woman who would have said if she was bothered.)

Magdalena was an enigma to me and to most of the other people who worked in the same offices as we did. She didn’t smile that often but her dark eyes were always bright with laughing, knowing, daunting energy. They were also infused with an almost tangible melancholy that revealed itself most tellingly in her rare, unguarded moments.

She walked softly and talked softly and flitted just outside the reach of anybody trying to get inside her personal space. She used Jesus and her quietly acerbic wit to keep people at bay but she couldn’t completely hide the caring heart she guarded so carefully (it seemed like she had endured more than her share of heartache through the years but I never knew for sure since she only doled out tantalizing tidbits of her past from time to time.)

I think she thought of me as awkward but somewhat endearing buffoon…and back then I probably was…but she tolerated me graciously just the same.

I lost track of Magdalena when I quit both the company we worked at and the city of Los Angeles to move south but I always hoped she’d found happiness…the melancholy in her dark eyes was something that was as out of place as the nickname was…in a circle of love (as sexist as it may or may not sound, she seemed like a woman destined to be the firm but loving mother to a good number of children.) If there is any justice in the universe it has proven to be so.