Chapter 2, Bits Removed

This second chapter has taken me forever to write. I started it in Montana over a year ago. I usually edit while I'm writing, constantly going back and forth between the two, but was never happy with the results. I finished it today after reading some of my older Heretics posts, in particular "Hope" and "May Day", and Mikey's comments on them.

Zo and The Tzipper and I went out to California a few weeks back to introduce the nugget to the family. On the trip, I got the opportunity to go running in Towsley Canyon with Mikey. Do you remember Rocky IV? The fight between Apollo Creed and Drago? Well, I was Apollo Creed (I do look a bit like Carl Weathers, actually), Towsley was Drago, and Mikey was Rocky. But instead of Rocky trying to throw in the towel, he was asking if I wanted to run another one and a half mile spur. And Apollo Creed was killed by Drago.

But overall, it was an incredible chance to push myself beyond comfort and look at rocks while hallucinating and discussing the influence of cosmologists on a healthy childhood. Reading Mikey's comments reminded me of the run, and the relative importance of sometimes accepting what you are momentarily capable of and just pushing through to the end. You can always go back and re-write.

Having said that, I was easily able to traverse the hills. And since Mikey was attacked by a mountain lion along the way which I heroically fought off and stuffed with a bit of honeycomb, it was also neccessary for me to carry him upon my majestic shoulders nearly 37 miles which did include a volcano, killer bees, and multiple math problems involving trains hurtling from one place to another.

These are not excerpts from the second chapter. They are actually bits that I cut out, because they didn't fit. But I really liked them.

. . .

I remember reading that William Burroughs became a fence and a junky to gain the life experience that his affluent youth and Harvard education had failed to provide for a young writer. I was pretty impressed by that at the time.

But really, how silly is that? I remember getting the shit kicked out of me in the bathroom at a Denny’s one night. I didn’t make me a writer. It made me a crap fighter who couldn’t stop a guy from kicking the shit out of me. Willing yourself toward hardship makes you stupid, not heroic or brilliant. I can’t imagine that there was some perfect moment where young Billy sat on the sofa in his dirty one-room with a needle, a dropper, and a vial of morphine and thought, “Well for fuck’s sake, I sure don’t want to be a junky, but it beats the hell out of getting a teaching job.” Maybe he did. Affluence and privilege do very odd things to a man.

. . .


I used to live outside of Oxnard, the strawberry capital of the state. Here, “strawberry season” was a marketing concept, an excuse to momentarily drop prices to reignite the excitement about the small berry every spring. The berries, no less red, no less sweet, grew from the ground in long ribbons for miles from the back roads of Oxnard in the hardest of California winters. Sometimes the rows would be covered with a sort of semi-circular tent on very cold nights, the fields planted with great long caterpillars stretching to the foothills in the distance, luminescent in the reflection of the lights of passing automobiles.

California is a half reality. We don’t have winter. Our climate is a zip code, an area code, a neighborhood. From Los Angeles, the nexus of California, the second largest desert in the world is an hour drive. The Pacific Ocean is the western boundary. The Sierra Nevada Mountains, the great rocky spine of the state, are a two hour drive. The lush green of Southern California is landscaping, a paradise stolen from desert oblivion. Despite our vast resources (oil, mineral deposits, agriculture), our greatest export is a kind of carefully distilled reality. We speak in a television accent, we manufacture hope or escape, turmoil and peace. Los Angeles is a city of up to 15 million people with no real downtown. You can spend the day driving through Los Angeles, making eye contact with tens of thousands of people and not talk with a single one. It is a desolation curiously populated by millions of strangers, eager to exist compartmentalized from humanity.

San Francisco in the north exsists curiously detached from the rest of the state. It is the theoretical soul of California. It is an intelligent city, beautiful in its architecture, thoughtful in its cultural resonance. Its liberal brilliance is hardly echoed in the scared and desperate conservatism of the rest of the state, the nervous xenophobia or narrow middle ground cautiously and methodically dry humped to mediocrity out of fear and greed.