Non-fiction

Some People I Would Like to Thank

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I’m sitting in the coffee shop and hearing a man talking to himself. There’s nothing to see her. Just keep moving.

Anyway, I’ll take this time to thank the writers who’ve come before me.

I remember going to a company party on July Fourth when I was in my twenties—close to twenty years ago. Everyone except my friend and I sat at the pool or the jacuzzi on a hot day. We perused the bookshelf inside the house in Lawndale, a trashy little town a little south of Los Angeles.

My friend plucked a book from the shelf called Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski.

“You got to read this guy,” he said. “It’s so easy to read.”

I’d read some of Bukowski in college. A roommate had kept a book of poems on the toilet in our dorm, and I remember turning it to a page where Bukowski described a trip to Bakersfield, where I lived through high school and some of college.

My friend flipped it to a page for a short story for me to read. It was about a random couple that would have sex in the apartment elevator at random times. The story lasted maybe ten pages if that, but it was largely entertaining.

I became addicted to Bukowski after that story. It was cinematic the way it was written.

Bukowski had a knack for introducing other writers. I learned about Celine, Hamsun, Hemingway, Fante, and those were just the novelists. And I tried to read all of their books but couldn’t quite make it.

Celine was too esoteric for my liking, so I never finished a book of his.

Hamsun’s Hunger is considered to be a classic among certain readers. I read it the whole way through, waiting for a payoff that wouldn’t come, but I still respected the writing.

Hemingway was Hemingway: direct, humorless, way too serious.

Fante was Bukowski without the obscenities. I think I read all of his books except for a few. Ask the Dust was really good. I even saw the movie, which starred the Irish actor Colin Farrell. He wouldn’t have been my first choice. The main character was Italian.

Anyway, those are some of my favorite writers. I don’t celebrate a genre. I could read Thurber one day and Vonnegut the next. Some days, I’m in the mood for a good detective novel, although The Big Sleep was too slangy for me with too many weird metaphors.

My favorite Bukowski book is Ham on Rye. It’s about his childhood. In the documentary Born This Way, Charles described it as a horror story. I could see where he would say that. His childhood, if he’d portrayed it accurately, did sound horrific.

I wouldn’t put Post Office far behind Ham on Rye if it’s my second favorite book of his. Factotum might be. They made a film out of that as well, starring Matt Dillon as the Bukowski character. Again, he wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it was close enough, I guess.

I haven’t read Bukowski in many years. I’ve exhausted his books and want to discover someone else with a voice I really love, but I have yet to find that person.

But I do love what Jane Bowles had written. Two Serious Ladies is a book I would recommend to everyone. I just looked her up online. It was her only novel. She’d written mostly short stories and a play. So she’s someone I would want to explore further once I’m done with my reading list, which is arduous. Most of the writing, these so-called classics, has been painful to get through. I don’t recommend anything besides Bowles thus far.

Non-fiction

Back in Goleta

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I returned to Goleta last night after two nights in Avila Beach and can say that I’m happy to be away from that mean town. The weather is hotter here. I’m staying at the same hotel where I stayed on the first night.

It’s an awkward hotel room, especially the shower. The showerhead is one of those detachable ones that hangs in the middle of the stall. And it faces the wall. I can’t just stand there and let the hot water hit me. I have to hold the showerhead in one hand and wash myself with the other hand. It’s just as dysfunctional as the shower when I stayed on the first night, which was missing a door, but it’s something that I’ll remember in years to come.

But anyway, I kept eating yesterday. My parents and I ate lunch at a restaurant inside a hotel in Los Olivos, which is a small town off the 101 mostly for wine tasting, but they still have places to eat. All three of us ate flatbreads. Our waiter was a big man with mutton chops. He suggested the specials. Waiters always speak fast when they tell us what the specials are. I can never catch on to what they’re saying. But I did hear the word “artichoke.” My father did, too, so we ordered the artichoke as an appetizer. It was a plate full of small artichoke hearts with some sort of white cheese sprinkled on top of it, with a yellow sauce that I can only describe as tangy–if that’s the right word, but it’s hard to tell.

We then ordered our flatbreads. My mother ordered the Margherita flatbread, which needs no explanation. We all know what a Margherita pizza is: salt, olive oil, mozzarella, tomato sauce. My father ordered the mushroom truffle flatbread. And I ordered something with garlic, mushrooms, pine nuts, tomato sauce, and ricotta cheese. There was no hint of garlic, even though it said garlic on the menu. It didn’t taste as good as their flatbreads, but they still gave me what they couldn’t finish, so I ate it later in the hotel room in Goleta. The flatbreads tasted better cold than they did hot. I wasn’t expecting that.

After lunch, we drove to Chumash and gambled at the Chumash Casino. It’s a fair casino, unlike the casinos in Coachella Valley, where the machines hardly ever hit. At this one, I broke even after playing a machine with the devil involved in it. When the devil shows up in the middle slot, a bunch of free games shows up, and the devil unlocks more money, including bonuses such as the mini bonus, the minor bonus, the major bonus, and the maxi bonus. The major bonus would’ve won me a hundred dollars, while the maxi bonus would’ve won me over a thousand dollars. But that never showed up. I went there with a hundred dollars to gamble with and left with the same amount. It was as if I never even played the slots.

And then I said goodbye to my parents. They’re staying for the rest of the week in Avila (God help them), and I’m driving back to the heat in Palm Springs this afternoon. It was a trip that was frustrating at times, but I got through it.

Non-fiction

At Avila Beach II

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Day three is the last day. The circus is leaving town. The one-man circus.

I’ve had enough of this beach. The people are unfriendly. Yesterday, a barista at a coffee shop in San Luis Obispo castigated me for taking up too much space at a table. I apologized and said I would clean it up, but the lady kept giving me the stink eye, so I moved outside where the b***h couldn’t see me. That was in the morning.

In the afternoon, I rented the tennis ball machine at the tennis club where my parents were staying. We were actually staying at the inn, not the hotel, next to the tennis club. I waited until one o’clock to use it.

A short guy who managed the ball machine came up to me and said, “The machine is for club members only, not hotel guests, but I’ll let it slide this time.”

Oh, gee, thanks. What a swell person you are.

At least he helped me set up the machine. It fed the balls well, but I was too afraid to hit them onto the other court, where someone else was playing. So I wasn’t swinging perfectly and, therefore, wasn’t hitting them with accuracy. A few balls flew out, while most of them skipped into the net. I used to play high school and collegiate tennis, but I’ve since lost my strokes. They’re hard to get back after I haven’t played in a while. It was annoying to deal with. Not only that, but the machine that picked up the balls was broken, so I had to pick them up myself, which consumed a lot of time and energy. I used my watch to count the calories I was burning, and picking up the balls counted for a lot of that.

The lady in the court next to me was using another ball machine, but her ball picker-upper was working just fine. She kindly said, “You can use it when I’m done.”

A nice gesture of hers, but she didn’t finish until I finished. I’d rented the court for an hour, and she’d been hitting with the ball machine longer than I had, maybe two hours. It was too late.

So I chalked that up as a negative experience. I never want to do it again.

My parents took me to dinner at a restaurant that overlooked Pismo Beach. It was one of their favorite places. The menu didn’t grab me. I wanted something like a crab sandwich, but nothing like it was on the menu. It was all entrees. There we were, gazing out at the surfers surfing the little waves that Pismo had to offer, and none of us ordered seafood. My father ordered the lettuce chicken wraps, and my mother ordered the filet mignon. I ordered the half chicken with gnocchi, green beans, and mushrooms. We might as well have eaten at the Cheesecake Factory, but I didn’t complain.

I don’t even really like chicken. I’m still wondering why I ordered it. I wanted cookies to make up for dinner. All I’ve been doing this vacation is eating in between dealing with a******s with ball machines and baristas with dirty looks.

I think today will be a better day. We’ll eat lunch somewhere and go to a casino on the Chumash reservation, where my father once won eleven thousand dollars. I’ll stay another night in Goleta and sit in my favorite coffee shop tomorrow morning before I head back to Palm Springs. I hope the same lady won’t be working there who gave me a cheese Danish that she’d never warmed up.

Non-fiction

At Avila Beach

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Here I am, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to think about. It’s only a few days here. No big deal. I’ll survive.

I’m at a coffee shop, drinking an iced espresso because they don’t serve a cold brew in this small town. I’m in San Luis Obispo because the little town where my parents talked me into staying doesn’t have a coffee shop for miles, and it pisses me off why they would want to stay here. It doesn’t make sense why they would want to stay somewhere far away from civilization like this in California. But, like I said, it’s for a few days. I can live.

But anyway, I’m wearing my gray woolen coat because it’s cold out here in June. It’s sixty degrees, and my feet are freezing inside my deck shoes. But I’m not complaining, just a little bit.

I had a dream last night when my old friend, whom I don’t talk to anymore, gave a speech in a full auditorium about himself. And I sat in the back row. Don’t ask why I was there. I can’t control my dreams. But he was there to promote his book of poetry. I didn’t even know he wrote poetry. But it was a slap in the face to me. All I know is he talks on podcasts, performs music, and produces movies. Now, he wrote a book of poems, something I’d dreamt about doing.

I never went up to him and congratulated him because he doesn’t talk to me anymore, and it would’ve been super awkward to begin the conversation. And that was how the dream ended. He finished his speech about himself, and I woke up in the hotel room I was staying in.

It’s not really a hotel—it’s an inn. I could tell by the state of its closet, in which the walls are torn, but I’m not one to judge that the old inn needs renovation.

I left my keycards inside this morning. What do I tell the inn staff? I’ve done it before. I imagine I just tell them what happened, and they open the room for me. They’ll probably have to check my driver’s license.

So what am I going to do today? My mother said that I could maybe hit the tennis ball machine at the tennis courts they have in this little village, but there are no guarantees. Other than that, what else is there to do but write? I can’t find anything else here with my time. I’m turning forty-seven on Sunday. What does a forty-six-year-old do? I’ll just sit in here until they kick me out, which won’t happen.

I’m in a coffee shop in a shopping center. It has Wifi, which is all I need to save my material to a cloud in case I lose my computer. That’s what the cloud is for. I have my whole manuscript in there, so everything is where it’s supposed to be.

I ate so much yesterday. I began the day with an iced Americano, a cheese Danish that they never warmed up, and a peanut butter milkshake for lunch. I waited until dinner to have a cup of clam chowder and an order of fish and chips on the boardwalk. The clam chowder was creamy with lots of clams but mostly potatoes. My parents ordered a basket of sourdough bread, so I would dip the bread in the chowder as if it came in a bread bowl. And then I ate a small order of fish and chips. Small, as in, they gave me only two strips of fish with an entire basket of fries. The fries were battered, just like the fish, and I could barely stomach them. They gave me so many of them because it’s cheaper to serve fries than it is to serve fish. It would’ve been a whole hell of a lot nicer to serve a bunch of fish and only a few fries, but, like I said, they were cheap. That’s why when I go to an Indian restaurant and order chicken tikka masala, they give me two pieces of chicken and a pound of rice, or the same thing happens when I order orange chicken at a Chinese restaurant. Restaurants have to be cheap.

Anyway, I complain a lot. It’s why I write. Get used to it.

Non-fiction

In Goleta

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I arrived in Goleta last night at about six o’clock. The waves were crawling along the ocean as I drove by with the sun beating my face from the west on the 101. I’d driven four hours from the heat of Palm Springs to the cool of Santa Barbara County. The hotel room was waiting for me.

I checked in with a kid named Chuck, who was probably close to twenty-three. The lobby smelled like peanuts and beer. (It was next to a lounge where folks were laughing and chatting.) Chuck was a nice kid.

He said, “How’s’ your day going so far? It’s hot. At least it’s cool in here.”

It was seventy-two degrees in Goleta. I’d just driven from the hottest part of California, arguably.

“I live in Palm Springs,” I said.

His smile changed. “Oh. Okay. Are you parking here?”

What an odd question. Where was I supposed to park?

“Yes, I am.”

He handed me an air refresher in the shape of an old-fashioned Woody car that I could hang on my mirror. “This will allow you to park here,” he said.

I’d never been given one before, but I took it.

“Thanks, Chuck,” I said.

Chuck told me where to park. Like hotel staff people do, he showed me a map of the complex by drawing a curve to the right building. I thanked him and drove there.

I rolled my suitcase to the second level, which smelled like sanitizer. It was outdoors. My room was 270. It was above the pool.

I saw a few scantily clad women in bikinis at half past six. It was cool outside, and they were lying to get a suntan.

When I entered the room, I noticed the shade was transparent. Everyone could see me in there, but then I saw another shade that was made of bamboo. I rolled that one down so no one could see me.

I dropped everything off before I went to get my favorite pizza in town. Rusty’s Pizza Parlor brought me back to my youth when I used to eat the same pizza up north. I used to drive for them as a delivery boy in college. It’s some of the best pizza I’ve ever had. I ordered it with pepperoni, sausage, and mushroom, the standard pizza I always eat.

And then I took a shower. Whoever designed it needed their head checked. It didn’t have a shower door. When I went to turn it on, the water blasted out and doused my head before I could take my clothes off, so my shirt got wet. What a folly that shower was. At least the shampoo was peppermint, and the soap had the aroma of rum, of all scents.

Anyway, I went to bed at around 9:30 p.m., which is the standard time I go to bed, and I kept waking up in the middle of the night. I’m a bad sleeper.

I awoke to the smell of a dusty air conditioner before the sun rose and brushed my teeth in the shower. I wash myself at night and brush my teeth in the morning—that’s two showers a day. I also shave in the shower. It gets things done quicker and easier.

Then, I drove to my favorite coffee shop, the Old Town Coffee Shop, where the coffee beans lured me in with their distinct smell.

I ordered the iced Americano. The lady behind the counter told me to use a password on the receipt that was case-sensitive to use the internet. I waited about ten minutes for the one guy who was making the drinks.

The iced Americano didn’t taste like espresso. It tasted sour, and I didn’t like it. But I love this place not for its coffee but for its ambiance.

It’s huge, with a large back patio with orange canopies, a wooden fence surrounding it, and violets growing over it.

The white brick wall of the building next to it has a painting of two brown hands holding each other and swirls of green, dark blue, and light blue. It’s ugly, but most paintings these days are ugly anyway. I go to a museum and leave unimpressed. People just don’t have the time to make a good painting anymore.

But anyway, what am I going to do today? Eat. That’s what vacations are all about—nothing else. It doesn’t matter where I vacation—Switzerland.

“What did you do in Switzerland?”

“I ate.”

“That’s it?”

“Yep.”

“You didn’t go on any tours?”

“Nope.”

I’m not the average tourist. I spend my time eating. Eating and writing. What else is there to do in Switzerland, Morocco, or Brussels? What else is there to do domestically in New York, in Key West, in Seattle? To me, that’s what vacations are all about. I’ll spend my time this week just eating, looking forward to the next glutinous meal.

Non-fiction

Your Thirties

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Your thirties were different from your forties. In your thirties, you had your longest relationship of one year. It ended on a sour note. You ignored her and never talked to her again because she lost her mind. Then you vowed never to involve yourself in another one again.

You became spiritual, a so-called Buddhist. You began reading books on spirituality and meditated on mind-altering drugs every day to help with your spiritual quest. (Om, focus on the present, the here and now.)

By thirty-three, Jesus’s age, you were walking around telling others about your journey as if they cared. You read Eckhart Tolle and really related to him. All the while, you worked that traumatic delivery job in the city. You started drinking at night with the mind-altering drugs to mix between getting high and coming back down.

By thirty-five, your spirituality crashed, and you grew a new surliness. Disillusionment set in. You realized that spirituality was overrated and really got you nowhere.

You continued dating other women, but none of them matched up with your ex, whom you loathed now anyway. You met your first sugar mama, who was eight years older than you. She promised the world, but you sabotaged the relationship before the world ever came. You were never that attracted to her, so you ended it before things got too serious.

And then the downward spiral began spiraling faster. The drugs and alcohol took control of you. Your only friends left were at the bar, and they weren’t really friends.

At thirty-eight, you went to your high school reunion, where you were a blackout drunk. You got in a fight there among your alumni and got kicked out of a bar for throwing a glass and cutting someone. You were lucky you weren’t arrested or taken to the hospital because the bouncer had beaten you to a pulp.

As if you didn’t learn your lesson then, you continued spiraling into your forties. The big age came, and you saw that your dreams had never materialized. You heard it too often:

  1. It’s all downhill from here.
  2. Life begins at forty.

You thought those were both lies. And then you saw your parents aging. Your mother ended up in the hospital. Your one opportunity to make something of yourself was pissed away by a cruel authority.

You realized you were all alone from the beginning, so you broke down and ended up in the psych ward. The doctor there told you never to take drugs and alcohol again. So then you didn’t even have that to fall back on.

They sent you to meetings to get your life back, but you couldn’t relate to the other people there. And all the while, you looked back at your thirties and thought, man, what a wasteland they were–worse than your twenties. All that self-abuse to try and alleviate the past traumas. The traumas weren’t even real, but they ate away at you from the inside. There was nothing for you to do except continue to live without your vices. And what a lonely life that was. There was really no solution.

Non-fiction

Hotter than Bejesus

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I’m on fire as I’m writing this. It’s only six a.m., and the room is hot. It’s supposed to be over one hundred degrees in the desert today. My father said it was supposed to be 111. I can’t believe it.

I burned my ass yesterday on the curb when it was 107 at four in the afternoon. It was as if I was frying out there. It’s going to stay that way in the summer before the fall comes. Summer has just begun today. It’s supposed to be the longest day of the year, I heard. But how can that be? Anyway, I’m used to the heat. I’ve been living in hot climates for most of my life, so it’s nothing new to me. But the heat gives me a headache. I’ve been waking up with headaches every day this week, and I haven’t been able to go sleep very well.

At least I’ll go out of town tomorrow and stay in Goleta before I drive to Avila Beach where it’s cool and I can wear jeans. Otherwise, I’ll just keep burning. It’s miserable. Misery follows me like that kid in grade school who would follow you and you couldn’t be rid of him. He just tagged along and got on your nerves. What would I be without it? What would I be without worry? I have to worry constantly or else I’m out of control. And that’s no good.

The heat has followed me, too. My brain is fried. I wonder how it is in Maryland. What kind of heat are they facing? I know there are tornados in the country sweeping up cities, and I’m thankful I don’t have to live through that.

But damn this heat.

Non-fiction

What am I Even Reading?

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I’m reading a book right now, as I always do, and what am I reading? Authors from years past just loved to bore and confuse their readers. Either that, or I need more Adderall. Whatever the case, I wish I could say who wrote the book. All I know is it’s called Paris Stories. I forgot the author’s name right away. Why should I find it important if this is the only time I’ll read from him? I’m waiting for the book to end, like chewing carrots, waiting to digest it so I can move on with my life.

I wrote about my book list a few weeks ago, a bunch of classics that a woman had compiled in alphabetical order. I’ve enjoyed one of those books, and I’m only in the G’s. Needless to say, I still have a lot to read. But is any of it good?

What happened to my passion for literature? It all seems like one big chore now. But the work impresses me. I can say that much. It’s possible to praise the prose and hate it at the same time. But man, I used to read like a champion in my twenties, but my attention span has gone in the trash. I’m too worried about work. I obsess over it while I’m trying to read the author’s word soup. It’s a collection of short stories. At least I’m able to discern that. Imagine if I was incapable. I would be even more confused.

But anyway, according to my Kindle, I’ll be done with the book in a little over nine hours. I read for twenty-five minutes a day, so if my math is correct, I should be done with it in a couple of weeks. That’s too long. I want to be done with it tomorrow. Maybe I should just give up on the book and move on to the next one. Maybe I should give each book one chapter to have a chance, and if it bores the living snot out of me, I give up and move on to the next one. Life’s too short for me to read stuff that makes me want to fall asleep.

Non-fiction

Travel

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Next week is my birthday. My parents are meeting me in Avila Beach for a celebration. The drive to Avila from Palm Springs is over four hours, so I’m staying in Goleta for a night, where my favorite coffee shop is.

But anyway, I’ll have to gas up the tank entirely. It costs me fifty bucks, roughly, when I’m on empty. I figure I’ll run out of gas by the time I get to Avila Beach. So I’ll have to gas up again to drive back to Palm Springs. You do the math. That’s a hundred dollars to gas up to go there and back, which can cost as much as a plane ticket to some parts of the country.

I look at gas as something that should be free. That’s my mind for you. I guess some people value gas differently, but I would rather spend my hard-earned money on another commodity. Whatever the case, it’s gonna be a travel from here to there. I just hope there will be no traffic along the way. There have been wildfires near Gorman on the 5 freeway, which has altered the course for some people. That could be the direction that I’m going. If that’s so, I’ll just stop on the road more often.

I can take my time getting there, as I have all day to get to Goleta on Sunday. I’ll stay the night, hit the coffee shop in the morning, and work on my manuscript before I drive to see my parents in Avila on Monday. That sounds fair. I’m taking the whole week off from work. Thank God. To work is to suffer, and I love traveling anyway, especially to those parts where it’s cool by the ocean. I’ll eat my favorite pizza and my favorite Danish. It’s something to look forward to.

Non-fiction

The New Kid

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Junior high was hell. I entered the eighth grade as the new kid. They’d moved me from Florida to California, and it was a culture shock. I lived in a house in Florida with a swamp in my backyard, where the alligators roamed and ate ducks. I felt like those ducks when I went to school because I was the new kid there, too.

Kids used to tease me because I wasn’t like them. I’d come from Pennsylvania in the fifth grade and wasn’t like those southern folks. The boys wanted to fight me.

One kid punched my face in the bathroom. I saw streaking lights. The kid’s face turned red and he started to cry before he ran away. I was too stunned to cry, at least then.

Florida was the worst. I lasted through the fifth grade, the sixth grade, and the seventh grade before I was moved to California.

Not all the boys acted tough out here. They rode rollerskates and dressed in vibrant colors. They would’ve gotten their asses kicked in Florida, where everyone wanted to fight. But I was still picked on for being the new kid. There was something about the new kid that attracted bullies. And it wasn’t like the bullies were feared by everyone, just the prey they decided upon.

One kid would flick rubber bands at my head in English class. I got fed up, took a rubber band, and flicked it back at him, and it caught him right in the eye. He put his head down on his desk and kept it there. The teacher never saw us. I felt terrible. I thought the kid had gone blind. I asked under my breath if he was okay. He pulled his head up, and it was wet and red.

When the teacher wasn’t looking, he snapped the rubber band at me, and it caught me in the left eye. My self-esteem was low enough that I thought I deserved it for doing it to him, so both of us were temporarily half-blind for the rest of the period. I forgot the kid’s name. One of the few friends of mine called him Wanger. And he looked like a wanger. His nose was big, and his eyes sunk into his skull. He had a big floppy head of hair. He would chase me to my school bus, and I would always escape.

I guessed the bully illness rubbed off on me because I would bully someone as well. A skinny kid would ride our bus back home, and after the bus dropped us off, my friend and I would follow him and push him into the trash cans in front of the girls. He would crash through those cans like a bowling ball and pick himself back up.

“You two are stupid,” he would say, which only provoked us even further.

We continued bullying him through the rest of the eighth grade. I never knew what happened to him, but I’m sure he’s a successful doctor by now—maybe not a brain surgeon but someone like a gastroenterologist. I’m sure if he could see me now, he would believe he had the upper hand. What if I had ended up as his patient? He probably wouldn’t have remembered me.

But anyway, the bullying tapered off by high school, where I became invisible. I never dated any girls. My friend would ask the girls out for me in eighth grade, and the girls wouldn’t respond with an answer, which was as good as no. And high school was out of the question. All the girls I wanted were out of my league. The other ones who could’ve been in my league weren’t up to my standards. It was a rough go.

One girl showed interest by the time I was seventeen. My doubles partner on the tennis team told me, “She likes you.” It was the first girl who ever liked me, and I was stunned enough not to react. I ignored her, in fact. Now I regret ever behaving that way because I’d missed an opportunity.

But oh well. It wasn’t as if I had to face any consequences because of it. So yeah, being the new kid sucked. I still feel like the new kid every day, no matter how long I’ve lived somewhere.