Intro: Like much of Hallie's work, these pieces are often a slice of life. Some spring from the sordid underbelly of our society, a place most respectable and sheltered people never go. Some are essays, some are journal entries, some are just random thoughts put to paper. But in whatever form, they sometimes serve to remind us that the real world isn't Disney...

*****

American Anthropology

We started out in Monterey and quickly burned most of our bridges. Even now, I can barely remember all the people I’m supposed to contact about money owed, belongings stored, friends and outstanding bills completely forgotten. Since we had no money, and worse, we owed, getting out and towards some kind of temporary refuge was first and foremost.

Sonora, California was our first stab at relocating. We lived rent free in a house where a supposedly quadriplegic woman needed certain hours of care-taking. We would care take her, she would care take us.

When I first met her, at our “interview”, I was taken with her physical beauty. At the nearby Alzheimer’s unit where we found additional work, I was used to changing the diapers of antique oddballs that were sweet, although completely out of their minds. Quadriplegic Alice was neither of those things.

I sat very close to her bed and surprising myself, put my hand automatically on her body. Her eyes were a striking, feline green, almost translucent. Her hair, a healthy salt and pepper combination that hung shoulder length in a lush flow, gave her the eerie glow of a mischievous, second youth. And she was entirely unapologetic about this indication. She worked it. She was bad at bullshit. The cordial chit chat at initial interviews was missing here. Her daughter in-law sat at the foot of the bed, looking haggard yet hopeful. She asked Alice, “Can we keep them?” It sounded like “are we there yet?” or “can I go now?”

Alice’s own mother was there too. She spoke with us as though she had been through an assembly line of caretakers and wasn’t about to get too personal. It had become obvious to me that caretakers often came from the cesspool of society. I’ve met my share at social services. Usually they need a place to live, and care-taking is something they grow to resent after it houses them a while.

Not all caretakers are desperate. I’m sure there are caretakers who have genuine nursing experience and live monastic lives of selfless service. Alice’s mother was not familiar with this altruistic group. She was used to the cesspool. Still, she was pleasant enough, showing us our new bedroom, where we could store our belongings and the general lay-out of the land.

Looking back on the first day, I recall the television was uncharacteristically off. All four women including the one man, were smoking cigarettes. Smoke filled the barely ventilated living room. Alice bought cartons of generic menthols that she was often proud to report, “only cost $22.oo at Cost-U-Less!” At times of absolute nicotine desperation, I sat up at night and smoked these with her. Aaron could never bring himself to do the same.

Three generations of small town women sat in that room. All pregnant by sixteen, all so young to be mothers, grandmothers and women of great personal battle. The underbrush, the as yet hidden, darker stories of death, loss and addiction, mental and physical illness, would with time, waft up like a stank fog, slowly poisoning anyone who breathed it in. As with my own past, my own demons not yet put to rest, everyone was dangerously revealed by the time we abandoned ship three months later.

In the front of our new house on Hatley Drive, someone had erected a tacky, House of Elvis-style memorial garden. A statue of the Virgin Mary stood in the center of a circular rock garden. Stuck in between and around all the rocks, were bouquets of plastic flowers. A tin, makeshift storage unit sat as the backdrop. The aluminum shack was painted in an effort to look more “country”, using whatever painted trimmings that constitute or connote the country theme.

What puzzled me about these people who really did live in the country, was why all their shops, yards and homes were filled with highly manufactured, highly stylized, predominately plastic, fake country trimmings. Fake flowers where there easily could have been real. Was it the effort? In a place where the phone number to Wal-Mart is listed on the fridge ahead of emergency contacts, doctors and family members, low-cost convenience was king.

After that first meeting, I never shared a single moment with Alice in her living room where she rested twenty-four/seven without the constant presence of either Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer or any variety of the popular Court-TV television shows that serve up morality-fast food style.

Plus, no one had any teeth, including Alice who literally had not a tooth left. At social services, perfectly young and healthy women carried their sets of teeth, like a change of clothes, in purses or pockets. An old hooker I met in rehab told me that crack or heavy methamphetamine use could result in teeth damage or even loss. The hooker was in her forties and she too carried her teeth in her purse. She also decided to share with me that certain clients of hers preferred fellatio with toothless prostitutes because of obvious hazards no doubt a full set of teeth pose to the sexual act. I remember the day the old hooker got her teeth in the mail. I thought she looked like Dracula, but she was so excited.

I began to feel that there existed a huge underground society whose teeth were in fact fake. Young people, old people, rich people, poor people…all of them toothless. And at any time someone you knew and trusted would rock the very foundation of your friendship by horribly removing what you thought was their natural teeth.

Right away, Alice’s mother made a stab at explaining the slightly creepy, mostly plastic memorial garden. She said, “Alice’s daughter committed suicide, though she will tell you it was murder.”

I asked, “How long ago?”

“Two years exactly” she answered.

“And how long has Alice been a quadriplegic?” I tried to politely wonder aloud.

“Two years exactly” she said, not quite meeting my gaze.

Psychosomatic quadriplegia? I’d never heard of it, but then again, I could see Alice wasn’t a true quadriplegic even though the ad in the paper said so. She had feeling absolutely everywhere, enjoying frequent leg and back massages, screaming out dramatically when her toes or feet touched even slightly. She had scars all over her body, several on her stomach which was perpetually bloated from daily opiate use. She was sly as a fox, lying with ease, getting involved in other people’s business and playing them against each other. I could see a small smile begin to form across her face whenever someone like the physical therapist would come over and treat her as though she were an invalid child. It was a role she enjoyed. She liked being the center of attention. After all, she was already the center of the living room. All of life in the house passed through, or revolved around where she lay.

Lisa, Alice’s troubled daughter-in-law, defined Sonora’s geographical vortex of bad health. She was the perfect representative of a desperate culture. She had the face of damage, a smoker’s face, a methamphetamine face. The town was crawling with meth addicts. Full-functioning labs were constantly busted, adding another stain to the town’s white trash reputation. She was thirty-four and she looked awful. A former stripper and current opiate dabbler, the mother of two and grandmother of one took care of Alice certain mornings in the early week. I recognized the signs of her addiction at once, the constant trips to the emergency room for shots of Demerol, the suspiciously missing bottles of Alice’s morphine and the pill collections strewn all about the house. On top of all this, she was manic depressive as was her six year old son, Robbie. Robbie tried to kill himself twice by the time he turned eight.

Manic depression was another town trend. Everyone was taking Depakote to battle the mania. One afternoon, Lisa told us of her long, strange, tragically amazing list of past and current ailments. At age thirty-four, she had suffered grand mal seizures, three major strokes. Anemia, blood clots, a genuine heart attack, a series of continuing mental breakdowns, coma and migraine headaches. When we fled Sonora, Lisa was preparing to check herself into the mental ward for the umpteenth time. She readied herself the way a person might plan for a weekend vacation, running errands, securing a babysitter, organizing the house.

*****

Zorba

I'm in Los Angeles eating Chile Relleno. Loud salsa music comes from a dj in the next room.

We are alone, outside on the patio having dinner. The dance floor inside is empty, but the music keeps getting louder. Almost as if the dj is getting angrier and angrier.

A homeless man walked by on the street and asked Gavin for a dollar. He mouthed the request silently. "ONE DOLLAR" said his lips slowly and deliberately. I saw his face in between the wood carvings of the outside patio wall. He looked incarcerated there for a second. Like an old, incarcerated, Zorba.

A short man named Roberto stands in the restaurant parking lot. He's wearing a black suit and a white shirt in the eighty-five degree heat. He's smiling and showing us where we parked Gavin's newly acquired Volvo...in case we forgot....in case we want to tip him.

*****

Untitled

I like being away. I like being gone. I like being out of town. I like anonymous motel rooms with cable tv, ashtrays, strong shower pressure, good public transportation and quiet. I like subways.

Once I stayed in a house where a woman drank herself to death. She seeped into the carpet for over a month before anyone found her. After they found her, they evidently tried to clean the place up..but it wouldn't quite smell right. There was always a putrid, sweet smell..a smell I now recognize as death.

She lived with five cats. They all died in the house as well. Cat fur, cat piss, cat food...cat scratches on the wall leading up to the window..so futile...it was dark and tragic to behold. I would wipe the bathtub in the morning, clean it of cat hair, and in the evening, somehow the cat hair would be back.

I came in to house sit because the place needed tidying and it was expensive insurance-wise to keep empty. I was doing somebody a favor. The dead lady was heavily into watching The Thornbirds with Richard Chamberlin...I watched these videos at night.

Ah, memories:

Avocado green oven.

yellowed recipes from the 1960's...

old spices from the 1960's...

gold lamps from the 1950's...

cat hair....

the smell of death and Richard Chamberlin...

*****

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Home Log:

Classical music plays from a radio that sits tilted on it's side on the kitchen table. It gets better reception when it is positioned that way. There is a wire attached to the top, to help with the static. I am in another room...the bedroom. A cat and a dog lie languorously in the hallway next to each other, enjoying the sun's rays that reach from the window to the floor. The cat looks dead. It will be about ten degrees cooler today then yesterday. I am a wimp, I know. But thank God.

Watched Six Feet Under last night. The writing is so good. The characters are so rich and full of humor, contradiction and morality. I enjoy it. When characters are faced with death, they become more direct and they face what is real. Like pushing them to the edge of a cliff.

Like paintings in sharper relief. The perspective of mortality.

Migraines: Migraine yesterday. Migraine today.

*****

Monday, July 18, 2005

summer gardener

Summer:

Heat. Thick air.

I wait impatiently for night.

The sound of a roving grass mower revs higher and lower like the buzzing noises of a large insect. A man of about sixty-five years of age, dressed in a white tennis shirt and a huge, wide-brimmed, Ansel Adams hat, stares intently down the barrel of a purple flower.

I stare intently at him. His collar stands stiffly straight up.

It looks like some kind of biological showdown, man versus aphid perhaps? There he stands, with his hands on his hips, his legs dressed in white summer shorts, so neat and tidy, pleats down the middle.

An American flag hangs there all year round, and no rose bush ever grows too wild or out of control. His lawn is perfect, like a crew cut.

There he is today, inspecting this bunch of brave purple types, as they dare to emerge from the otherwise solid green hedge of contained garden wall.

He bends to meet them in person. I happen to catch this moment. If I had a camera, this moment would be the one to shoot.

*****

Saturday, July 16, 2005

pecking my way

Hello. Just a quick greeting so as not to let too much time go by between posts. Again, I am without new creative nonfiction, a temporary drought. It is very hot here and the heat zaps my brain.

Here are some words that immediately come to mind:

isolation, transformation, devastation, rot, renewal, forest, cattle, graze

limestone, fire, multitude, arrange, seedling, omit, freakish, paltry, honor,

Why those words? I have no idea...just free association in an attempt at stirring the unconscious writer soup that exists down below.

Not much to say that is profound today. But am pecking my way back to the drawing board...

*****

Thursday, July 14, 2005

short depression post

Woke up early today. Earlier than usual. Had a realization/insight about the melodrama of "my depression."

Saw it like a traveling circus that I bring with me from town to town, from situation to situation, with a toy cymbal tied around my neck, and me like a dressed up Duracell monkey, making a great theatrical noise wherever I go, strutting my hour upon the stage, and the gross ridiculousness of it...

I have always thought most clearly in the early morning.

****

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

plum appreciation

Listening to: The Brandenburg Concerto #3 by J.S. Bach

There are plums growing in the front yard. They grow from a Japanese plum tree and the fruit resembles oversized cherries. But still, I am told they are indeed plums. My landlady and her children climb the tree and pick the fruit, putting the plums in buckets usually reserved for Christmas decorations. These buckets are adorned with puppies that have green and red bows framing their general cuteness. I walk by the Christmas puppy buckets full of plums. I notice that when the plums have all been gathered, they have the most beautiful color, en masse...a muted, flesh-like shine, and the color is a warm red, so succulent.

I see why there have been so many poems and writings about plums and why humans have been interested in the plum. I now see why plum is a color used on everything from couches to Cadillacs and even on crayons. And you can even use plum to identify a specific color at the paint counter at your local hardware store. And all of this plum appreciation mind you, is before any actual tasting.

Writing: For a writer, anything that thinks for you is a creativity-robber, like the TV or the internet. So I have to shake up my routine, shake up my mornings and not just immediately plug in after waking up or I won't have anything to say of my own. Need to be alone in the silence for a while with my notebook...

God I love those Plums. I love to just look at them sitting in their sensual still life, begging to be bitten into, rolled perfectly, seamed tightly up the side...three of them, spread apart from each other…

The lavender towers upright in a vase above them. My cup of coffee is near.

*****

record store

Strange elf-bohemian-artist man around seventy years old, often comes into the record store asking about Nico from the Velvet Underground and tells me how "in Berlin it was tough being a musician when the Beatles played. But they were OK you see, because of John. John was tough. He had a temper. Paul was the nice one...but Nico...oh, Nico was too fragile." He lamented this last line, as if to imply, "poor Nico. I really feel for her" It was like he was telling me about his family members, people whose names evidently gave him great comfort in the vast lonely sprawl of his existence. When you work in a record store, people offer this type of information to you. It's similar to being a bartender. Said he was a film maker, a videographer "in town for a video conference" or something like that. He went on. I looked away. He smelled like booze. He needed a shower and a change of clothes.

I avoid him because he likes to touch the side of me while talking at me. He does this for emphasis every so often, like a drummer might use a cymbal crash on a drum set for conversational emphasis. "Blah, blah, blah...Crash! Blah, blah, blah...Crash!" Except where there are crashes, that's where he is touching the side of my body.

I'm not into it.

He came by the store again.

He smelled of liquor. Once he saw me, he moved in quick. He was unshowered and his clothes stank. He came over to my side of the counter within seconds of arriving.

The sales counter is this holy separating border that protects me from being cornered like a helpless victim...most sober people don't venture behind there unless I invite them, but he had no problem feeling right at home.

The more excited he got by his own conversation, the closer he stood. It was too much for me. He began to tell me about a convention of Hells Angels who were in town. When this actually took place, if it was a distant memory, if it was happening now, there was no way of knowing, but he went on.

B. was fascinated by the Hells Angels, fascinated down to his core, like a son is fascinated by his outlaw father. When he spoke of them, his eyes lit up, and he was no longer a man of seventy. He was an impressionable boy of twelve.

The Hells Angels were generous, said B., proudly.

One Hells Angel tipped the waitress at the convention restaurant $500.

As a child, I was terrified of Hells Angels. I mean TERRIFIED. I was terrified of motorcycles because I believed all motorcycles were Hells Angels and they were all murdering rapists. When a motorcycle would drive by, I would literally hide behind a tree.

But, here I am...all grown up now...finally made my peace with the Hells Angels.

Now I'm scared of customers.

All that good weather I was raving about? Well, it has stopped.

Mother nature is giving us a good taste of cold winter...like a giant backhand slap in March. ...if we can just crawl around this next corner, summer is there. All the warmth and happy late nights are waiting.

*****

first report of spring

Today is very warm in Portland, Oregon.

The winter is ending slowly. People are so ready, wearing sandals and shorts, eating outside on the sidewalk. It feels like lifting yourself out of sludge. Like we all swam to the edge of the winter pool, dark and filled with nasty, personal demons, and now we pull ourselves collectively up, out of the sludge, into the sun, finally.

Everything's lighter. Everything blooms in unison and the cherry tree blossoms fall through the air like a Ridley Scott movie...like Legend…like Blade Runner.

*****

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