Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 27: Just A Day in L.A., Part 2

.................................................................continued from Part One

Once you were out past Los Feliz, past Atwater, it was best to stay off that narrow little old Pasadena Freeway with it's non-existant on-ramps, and head right on up into Highland Park, if you could find your way. Out there on the other side of the Golden State Freeway, the roads trickle and spill uphill into the landscape you can see from Chavez Ravine, from the cheap seats at Dodger Stadium. This was really a lot like the canyonland I came from, the winding roads up to the little hilltops like where the Bobos' house sat, at the back of a circular driveway on top of it's own little hill near Mt. Washington. It was one of those white ranch-styles. White, glittery rock halfway up the sides to white painted frame and windows with white wooden blinds. White crushed rock in the planters. White trim and a black door, with a withered wreath on it, and a WELCOME mat.

I nervously rang the bell, and Mrs. Bobo nervously answered, holding her other hand like she had a lit cigarette in it. She was a small black woman, mid-sixties-ish, delicate, wearing large-framed glasses and dressed comfortably in slacks and a shirt, with a scarf tied around her hair, over her head. She asked me in and sat me in the white living room, white walls, white furniture, a cherry wood bowl full of large, white marble grapes. I felt like an interloper right away, like I had no right to be there.

There was a palpable energy of injury in the air, and she immediately began talking to me—rather out of context it seemed—about things I didn't understand, things that I knew weren't any of my business. My God, I realized, this woman's husband has just died and she's in terrible pain. I tried to be as agreeable as I could be, sipping the coffee she'd offered me, and uncomfortably agreeing with her about everything she said.

She was making me look underneath, you know—under the cover of her life—the thirty or forty years she'd spent married to a traveling latin jazz star. I wasn't at all ready for it, for the intimacy, for the exclusivity. She looked steady into my eyes and spoke like I knew just what she was talking about—like she was telling me something as familiar to me as it was to her. And then I began to believe that it was familiar, looking into that particular wound, and that this was a private disclosure meant only for the two of us and the commensurate spirits there in the room with us.

I uneasily assumed some of her injury as we shuffled through the box of photos, a box full of their life. She stopped to tell each of the stories accompanying the shiny, curling black and white photos and faded kodachromes, few of which would serve my actual purpose for being there. Blurry moments at sunny cafés. Hasty group shots at family occasions. Party goers mid-conversation. And then I realized, this was my purpose, to be present as she made her careful in-ventory, before she could put the box away.

I picked out a few photographs that might work, but not very well—my original intentions had been gently taken hostage by sharing the trauma of this stranger who sat before me, her hands quietly shaking. Now she seemed to be speaking in directions where I didn't belong, that I didn't understand, about how none of it was right, how all of it was such a shame, how a boy ought to respect his mother.

"He never showed her the proper respect...he never did!" She said, and I realized that it wasn't her dead husband she was talking about anymore, or was it? "She's my best friend, you know...we've been best friends for years," she said, "Mrs. Gaye...I was over there last night, you know. Lord, such a sad, sad thing. Such a shame for a boy to do that." Like I knew...

It was April 3rd, 1984, and I remembered that just two days before, Marvin Gaye's father, the elder Mr. Marvin Gaye, Sr., had shot and killed his son, the iconic soul singer whose voice had played such an important part of a lot of our lives, and whose "What's Going On?" album was the smooth, profound soundtrack of a country's wounded soul. Drugs and alcohol and ego were the drivers of this tragedy, like they were for so many. Mrs. Bobo and Mrs. Gaye were the very best of friends, and had been for years, and suddenly the true size and shape of that wound I'd been witnessing became clear to me... Can I Get a Witness?

"He should have shown her the proper respect," she said, as she led me back out to the door, and sent me back down the drive, back down the little road wrapping around the hill, spilling me out onto San Fernando Road, past the Eagle Rock turn, past Forest Lawn, and on up the valley towards home.

The portrait didn't come out all that well—it was sufficient I suppose. Colorful and certainly accurate, but not one of my best. The program was printed, the festival happened, and finally one day I called to check Mrs. Bobo's address, to send back the pictures, and to see if she'd like the original painting I'd done, as a gift.

"That picture was the worst thing I ever saw," she said on the phone. "No thank you—I do not want it. It looked nothing at all like my Willie. Just send me back my pictures." So that's what I did.

It had really just been on account of one phone call, that day in L.A. Just a little ride to the edge of the box, and a peek underneath it's lid.

The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 27: Just A Day in L.A., Part 1

I'd call it the heart of Los Angeles—if it has one—that narrow strip of the world that runs across from La Cienega to the Golden State Freeway, and down from the Hollywood Hills to Interstate 10. An odd golden rectangle of sorts, within which all things two-dimensional in nature are eventually bound to occur. In New York, you can feel the connection, as though you were a functioning part in some kind of or-ganism with everything happening at once right there from bottom to top, and vice-versa.

L.A. is more like a spread-out Venice—canals criss-crossing and wandering around the flatness, gondolas in rush hour gridlock. Life tends to run downhill there, and who's to say when anything will happen. It's all about a strange kind of dis-connection – a sunny, ungrounded alternative reality. The only things easily understood are those that are readily visible on the surface, it's just that sometimes life makes you look underneath. This was going to be a day like that.

I'd gotten a  call from Playboy Enterprises to do an illustration for the Playboy Jazz Festival, so I rolled over the Cahuenga Pass and on down to their old building in West Hollywood where at one time, I hear, Hugh Hefner actually lived up in the penthouse over-looking the glory days of "The Sunset Strip."

It was dim up in their offices, and sumptuous, like a prime rib res-taurant with a Tony Bennett soundtrack. No one seemed to be quite awake yet (it was just before noon at Playboy, after all) and so it fell upon a well-dressed underling to fetch me my assignment folder, and to direct me to my Art Director, who actually wasn't actually there. He was inexplicably working out of The Schindler House, an architectural landmark nearby.

I was drifting on a bit of that Vegas-like up-all-night atmosphere, riding the elevator back down alone, when it stopped on a floor and the actor Robert Vaughan got on with me. I felt a queer, sudden schoolboyish surge, because here he was, "Napoleon Solo, The Man From U.N.C.L.E."— one of my favorite childhood TV heroes—in close quarters on an elevator at Playboy—my favorite childhood magazine (when I could lay my hands on a copy.) What a funny world.

He looked at me furtively, then instantly back away with the pain of recognition, and then stepped right up to the elevator door and stood just inches from it, looking straight ahead, glancing sideways si-multaneously avoiding me and keeping track of me. Without speaking, he very clearly said: "Don't speak."

He had the classic look of a screen actor – a short guy with a big face, big features, and he appeared, upon observation, to be a nice enough guy if he'd given it a chance, but it didn't seem like he would, or could. It was as though he were afraid. Afraid of what, I don't know. Me? I certainly was no threat, smiling there like a stand-in. Maybe he saw me notice his platform shoes, which I'm very sorry to say I did.

Maybe he really wasn't the unassailable character he played on TV. Maybe he was really a very vulnerable guy, there with the hairspray and the lifts. I liked him, and was honored to be on the same elevator with him, but the moment the doors parted he quickly stepped out—like a racer out a gate—and there he went...The Man From U.N.C.L.E...The Magnificent Seven...safe again, at last.

I gurgled around the innercity suburb streets lined with fat palms and eucalyptus, like the jungle cruise at Disneyland, over Beverly and jogging on up Kings Road. It was a little hard to find the Schindler House at first, with it's back to the street like the best of those modern residential designs—Neutra, and the Eichler houses—like the house I lived in until I was eight. I gently pushed the door open and said hello into an empty room, when Rip Georges, the accomplished and respected designer and creative director poked his head in too. Why he was working there I never really knew, but he showed me around the classic modern residence, the home of the architect, elemental and open. It was like a mix of a cave and a beautiful japanese house, with every room facing the garden, and light angling in under the angled roof. Concrete walls like a Roman villa.

It felt a little bit like breathing to me, that house. A comfortable, anthropological aesthetic as close to the region's natural architecture as any would ever be. An intuition for not needing much that so many people had sought in those foothills—like my father, who'd tried for it in the houses I knew as a child, before he left the western world be-hind. It felt that familiar, and that empty.

We sat by a built-in desk and he gave me the low-down: They wanted a portrait of the Latin per-cussionist, Willie Bobo (famous for his cool version of the Jobim song,"Gingi"). Mr. Bobo had sadly died an early death just a few months before and the festival pro-gram would include a dedication to him, so perhaps it should be something colorful, something celebratory. The only problem was photographic reference. There wasn't any, and in those days, no internet images available at the push of a button; but they did have the address and phone number of Mr. Bobo's widow. She lived out in Highland Park, and she might have some photos I could borrow to work from. It was clearly part of my job to awkwardly call her, set up a meeting time, and get directions...

.......................continued in Part 2

see more of that architectural style here, at Atomic Splendor—a pretty cool blog

The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 26: The Road to Chetumal; Entering the Underworld

The fat, brown old '75 Chrysler that they'd rent-a-wrecked next to the airport in Cancun hovered down the road across the peninsula, from Escarcega to Chetumal, sucking up the pale, gravelly length of it. The highway seemed to extrude endlessly from a vanishing point ahead, as though oozing from an ever-retreating pipe, pulling them towards the Carribean, the low jungle creeping in along each shoulder. They weren't at all lost, they just felt like it.

It was probably because it seemed such a long ride, this second leg of the three; out past Valladolid to Merida, down to Campeche and Champoton having been the first part; now from the western blue water side to the azure east coast and the border with Belize. All he heard was wind with all the windows rolled down (the old school air conditioning), and everyone was asleep it seemed, even Koko, though he may have been driving – he couldn't say for sure. The twilight colors of the zocalo in Merida seemed so long ago, and since that silly light show in Chichen Itza they'd been sent off into their alternate world of tourism alive in the Yucatan wild.

They'd all caught that strange fever, as though drinking from the first bottomless cenote had laid out a subterranean map to follow, from ruin to ruin searching out jaguars, ufos, and entrances to the underworld. They were all there, holes in the sky and the earth, they just had to find them. Intuitively, they knew the underworld stood in for their own interior landscapes, though as usual it was never dis-cussed. The lush but arid overgrowth invading every road and each moment of life on the surface betrayed those deceptions so typically found in "paradise" – a little like the appearances of their own exteriors, flowered and casual.

On either side of the highway they saw the occasional mud hut, but never any people. "There's a smart one!" Jean would say each time they passed a mottled, meatless pig by the road. It was an ongoing bit of sarcastic fun, in response to Koko having told her about an article he'd read that mentioned how truly intelligent pigs were. It got a laugh every time in those days, when they were all asleep and still mistaking sarcasm for humor.

Any hand-scrawled sign on a dirt turn-off promising a ruin or an entrance to the underworld de-manded a requisite exploration, observed overhead by invisibly vi-brating alien spacecraft and lan-guid jaguars in the underbrush.

No stone in that respect could be left unturned, and so he'd swung the old boat down a wide dirt path and followed it to where an elderly yucateco and a dirty little boy loosely held vigil over a small opening in the rocks. They paid a quarter U.S. each, the little boy attached a raw wire to a car battery, and bare, flickering bulbs lit the way down the slippery hole.

Timelessly, the descent into the semi-darkness leaves every pro-mise, every safety behind. They clamored in an unsteady procession down the long, constricted passage until it finally opened up into a vaulted cavern. A shaft of light poured in through a break in the cave ceiling, and as their vision balanced out, the crystalline water began to glow a deep blue-green. Guillermo and Jean watched as Grace and Koko stripped and ventured into the water, carefully at first as the jagged bottom looked like you could reach down and touch it, but once they got in they realized it was only the surreal clarity of the water that made it appear so. It was really six or eight feet deep.

As Koko floated out, he realized that the center of the cenote dropped down in a circular shaft of the densest blue, plunging down beneath them as though straight into the center of the earth, to the raw, unprotected heart of every experience he'd ever hid behind. Grace floated fearlessly out over the unfathomable depth like she was teasing it, like she was offering herself up to some ancient unknown. Exposing herself to some suppressed demiurge. The water was soft with minerals, and felt familiar and healing, amniotic, while at the same time it was like some kind of time machine, rearranging their elements sub-atomically, sending them on to a different, totally silent life.

When they finally reached Chetumal they'd expected hospitality, but instead were met with furtive looks and men with guns – an air of mistrust and danger brought on by recent slash and burn class warfare and forced resettlement of the local Maya. They kept right on going. The road led them straight into the shell encrusted entry arch of the Hotel Laguna Bacalar, an oddly angled moderne-esque building perched above "The Lagoon of Seven Blues." It was peculiarly unfinished and lightly occupied by a strange assortment of windblown travelers and semi-permanent guests in various states of inebriation. After a day or two of assiduously avoiding insanity, they headed north on their last leg.

In Tulum, they parked at the end of road on the bluff above the crazy virdant sea, and strolled into the ruins. A viejo walked briskly out of a small block house, buckling his pants. He was, of course, the toll taker – every ruin had one – and after collecting his quarter from each walked briskly back to his quarters, just a chair and fan visible through the doorless doorway.

Only sage old iguanas guarded the ruined structures, still practically livable. With it all to themselves, and after what seemed like years of turning inside-out in the dust and the jungle, the ancient stone beachfront felt like home. Like they'd never left, or lived anywhere else. Diving chamber to chamber in the crescent caves of Xcaret, where the freshwater collided with the sea, and the lagoon of Xel Ha, alone again as they always magically seemed to be, they were spirits trapped in blue-green amber, their invitation to stay and move into their underworld permanently interrupted by the first busload of tourists to ever see those sacred places.

It was time to go, to move the sky back into position, and to detach themselves from the endless subterranean waterways that wove the underworld of their lives together. Time to head back into the world above, where there was no risk of revealing the broken-open places they'd stumbled across.

About a thousand years after they'd arrived, they sat outside at Don Cafetos on the dusty main street of Tulum, had an excellent meal, and rolled the old chrysler past Playa del Carmen, past Cancun, past sleeping jaguars and blinking lizards, off the end of the flat peninsula, and on out right past ufos following alongside, clearly visible out the airplane windows.

How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor is now available from Llewellyn Worldwide, and can be ordered online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available everywhere too – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 25: Finding Grace at Art Center– Departure

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

Soren Kierkegaard

...continued

Could it be his Uncle Jimmy was right, and we're all born with everything already intact, like "acorns" waiting to open and unfold into whatever kind of tree we'll be? Maybe so, because from the first day at the new school, things began to happen like they do, like the whole progression had been charted out, and he was simply showing up to play his part.

There he sat in the student cafeteria with the rest of the new students at Art Center's Orientation Day, listening to the school's dour-faced administrator, Midge Quinelle, describe how difficult their course of art education would be. It seems the administration expected, in fact encouraged as high a rate of attrition as possible. Many students would find they didn't fit in at Art Center – that they "simply couldn't cut it," and so be it – it was a necessarily efficient means of dispensing with the undeserving. The flashing would have to be trimmed off the prime casting before they could buff it to a high luster, and stamp it's bottom as an Art Center product.

It didn't bother him much, he didn't intend to be drummed out or lost overboard, but it did seem an inauspicious way to launch their fresh-faced careers. He doubted that whether a student "deserved" to be at Art Center or not would have much bearing on whether their tuition check got cashed. At that time it seemed a strangely antagonistic, and somewhat chaotic place.

At the break, the new students and some faculty congregated out back, on the big patio terrace with a perpetually hazy view of Pasadena, munching on crudités, and sipping seltzer – that new kind that came in blue glass bottles. He stood above by the railing, watching the crowd of his mostly doomed schoolmates schmoozing, forming early friendships and allegiances; cozying up to the teachers and department heads. The upscale kids mixed easily as though their success had been guaranteed, because strangely enough it had been, due to the politics and pay-offs common to their class. Many of them already had jobs awaiting with top agencies and the like, which was as it should be – their's was the art of the pre-existing, not of the as-yet-to-be-discovered. Kids who'd got there by the seat of their pants milled about hungrily on the edges, as did the uneasy Asians, struggling with English as a Second Language.

He walked down and grabbed a blue bottle and a cocktail paper plate of cut carrots and cucumber, and something caught his eye. The crowd opened up as though they were moved out of the way stage left and right on rolling risers, and there, alone on a concrete bench, sat a beautiful girl, her face a little bit twisted by tears. Heroic codependence swelled up in his chest. He suddenly had a purpose greater than simply engaging in the self-serving chit-chat.

He went and sat with her and asked why she was crying, but she didn't know really, it was just nerves perhaps. He put a carrot up his nose and she laughed. It was dumb, but it worked. He told her about the funny house he lived in, and the bar-b-que joint down the street, Gus's, that had neon chickens and pigs running down the side of their sign – and a Chef Pig on the menu, serving himself on a platter. With what he imagined to be the proper measure of jaunty suggestiveness, he asked her if she "would like to join his pork club?" To which she replied, "That depends on how many members there are in it" – and that about did it. That's how they met and fell in love.

The school was difficult, not because of the course load, but because of the unusually unnecessary rigidity of the the people who ran it – mostly Mormons as it turned out – insecure people whose moral foundation is knowingly built on a premise so bereft of credibility that their justification of faith and purpose must be willfully shifted to something more substantial, like commercial acknowledgment, financial success, or the canonical Jesus. They seemed to be confused about what an art school should be. No human expression was permitted on the polished concrete walls. No risky or possibly "avant garde" projects ever needed to be encouraged. Illustration and Fine Art majors required no up-to-date equipment – that was for the product designers and ad people only.

He had some good teachers who helped him see new horizons; and others who taught him more of what he had already learned in his life up to that point; but little of the good or bad of it mattered much at all when viewed through love-struck eyes. Like always, school was what you brought to it.

The two became one of the first fast and happy couples at school, which was fine, because everyone could see how well-suited they were; and it didn't seem to effect their work badly at all. She saved him from his crazy hot dusty attic, and brought him to live with her in the cozy little apartment with a pool that her father had arranged for her. And so, as in those golden-tinged dreams of youthful love anew, they ventured down the pre-ordained path that led to ten years of adventure and marriage and travel and struggle and eventually, as is so often the case with stories of the sort, emotional disaster, heartbreak, and loss.

The lessons of the hard school were stored and utilized – the endurance and the hurt. Their lives pulled them apart by the very seams that were so obviously visible when they first met that day on the concrete bench. But this isn't the story of how Grace was lost. It is – like it might always turn out to be – the story of how Grace was found at Art Center.

Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 25: Finding Grace at Art Center– Arrival

"The most important thing in life is showing up."

Woody Allen

Even though he was only twenty-one, the years seemed to weigh a little heavily on him. Disproportionately so. I suppose it was more a crisis of attitude than anything else, as he didn't think he'd witnessed any more trauma than normal (other than his childhood), or hadn't fairly well survived Life's most terrible tests so far...but then, what was merely terrible to him may have been ruinous to some, and he was pretty sure that he didn't know what normal was.

He just felt that he fit a bit obliquely into the world, and had a persistent, not totally uncommon sense of there being a transparent veil of sorts separating him from the happy, practical life of belonging-to that seemed to be other kids' birthrights. He'd read about that, that veil in the Existentialism he was drawn to when he was twelve, Camus and Sartre, Kafka...Marvel Comics. So was it simple suggestion, or acute and subtle injury that formed his youthful romantic alienation...and which is it with any disaffected kid?

The veil cast a decidedly purplish, or violet tint (on the blue side) to Life, like the childhood story he remembered about "Grandpa," who dropped his glasses into a bucket of purple paint, where "Purple fires were rising up...From a purple hill." In his case, the perception heightened an inescapable sense of exile, of being a visitor in an indifferent world, a feeling that many people experience, especially when they really are visiting someplace strange. Like tourists. It felt that real to him, like he was a tourist here, wherever here was.

All those dusty canyon years growing up, avoiding his unhappy parents; years floating along the foggy shoreline and chasing his future like trickster spirits through the west, and miles of Nevada. The years on the sales floor, pitching expensive toys to oversized kids; the grinding, clang, and molten sputter of the factory steel; the strange ways of "entitled" high society he'd witnessed – the whole envied class of people acting out like petulant teens – all of this enforced a sense of profoundly adult disillusionment, and when he'd intuitively sought the ground of Love, it too had turned over on him.

His Mormon girlfriend wrapped back into her relentless indoctrination; the impish, warm-hearted neighborhood girl he'd begun to date died of a rare blood disorder; and then the one most exciting "older" woman who'd seemed to secretly know Life's promise suddenly died too, at only thirty – without even telling him that she knew she was going to. Perhaps that's why she was so exciting, she'd stripped down to her mortality...she secretly knew the end was near.

And then there were his own personal goblins growing up too, forming around and within him. It wasn't all their fault.

So, it was this state of vagabond disconnection that carried him into South Pasadena, with his sculpture-making money, a matching grant from his drowning father, and his beat-up VW. He'd wanted to go back to a school in New York City, a long ways away, but as a condition of his father's largesse, instead he had to apply to the very reputable Art Center College in Pasadena, and had been accepted.

The other students occupying the huge mission-style house he got into weren't "kids," and were all a good deal more flush than he was. They agreed to let him in despite all the bedrooms being taken, so that they could secretly reduce their rent by a hundred bucks each and pocket the difference without their paying parents knowledge. So he found himself moving up into the hot, sprawling mansion attic, unfinished, ducking through the pitched roof tilting in on every space, following the house below in all directions. He staked out his "living room," bedroom, and studio between the open raw lumber braces, and lived there with the dust and the spiders.

It seemed an appropriately strange space, and gladly kept him at a comfortable distance – and so different from the others – which was what he really wanted to be anyways.

Pulling up to Art Center in the multi-colored VW that he'd been piloting around the west like an old mail plane, with his disassembled drawing board and army green duffle bag, he felt himself like a used truck without a muffler, sticking out like that from the late-model student coupes, and various trophy cars. No one noticed...but then it turned out they did. He did not care...but then, of course, it turned out he did.

The Art Center he pulled up to wasn't the southland fixture he'd heard warmly remembered by chummy old pros, it was the new Art Center, a monolithic steel and glass bridge forced onto a rolling hillside with backhoes and cranes and Caterpillars, in the familiar chop-terrace fashion of California development blight. The lauded architecture even seemed familiar, a re-hashing of all the Gropius and Van der Rohe his father had loved so much. There was something uncomfortably egoic about it that rubbed him the wrong way. He'd wanted to be in a vaguely stinky, trodden-in old school, with warmth and esprit de corps, but instead everything was cold and new – the kids' money, the hard, black painted steel, and all that polished cement.

He still didn't think he'd found the place where he might meet himself, but he was going to...in a way.

continued...

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 24: The Western Ridge, JayBird, and the Cuyamaca Run

It was a morning like a lot of other San Diego mornings, when I first met Jay on the canyon ridge that was the western border of my hunting territory. Sunny. A little cool. A morning dove cooing that I "allowed to live," playing God like hunters do. It wasn't hot enough to start to simmer yet, for the dust to rise, or for the grasshoppers to set into their endless buzzing.

I'd gone a little farther out that way west, further than usual, but still it was turf I regarded as mine, so when I saw some strange big kid likewise carrying a rifle, it raised my hackles a little. Some poacher, no doubt. Then I guess I saw something I recognized. I knew there must've been some interior purpose weaving those oxide red trails together as we sized each other from a ways off – we were both doing the same thing in the same place together, both of us alone. I rightly guessed my west slightly overlapped his east, the ridge having been, up to that point, our natural divider.

We started walking together, about fifteen or twenty feet apart, like hunters do, through the sumac and black sage, the slender wild oat would've flecked our socks with foxtails, if we'd either of us had worn any. We traded shots, and impressed each another with the similarity of our styles; and with very little said we discovered how much alike we were.

Each of us had come from houses that were hard on the inside, and each of us were the youngest child – but that was enough of that. As kids, we sublimated that turmoil in our lives with much greater economy than we muster as adults. Our canyon stoicism balanced and calmed the subtle sense of injustice we held under—inculcated by irresponsible adults—and inspired our joint belief that there had to be a right way of doing things. In the canyon that morning we silently agreed there was, and we would bring it back with us, into the rest of our waking world.

It was in those kind of calculated approaches where we really met point for point, right down the line, planning along the same logic, or improvising with uncanny coincidence at every turn, meeting up in the same unusual places with a kind of precise tribal karma, like reunited platoon-mates on a "need-to-know" mission. The Mexican excursions, double-dates, crashing parties, a psychogenic exploration of Mount Cuyamaca – all the events unfurled as though planned in a slightly different dimension. One where we knew how to get away with everything.

By no design of our own, we ended up working together in that crazy little ski-shop across the street from one of San Diego's last neon-façade drive-ins, down on Sports Arena Boulevard. We connived, and conspired, and ate all the good jerky, and sold a lot of skiing stuff. Why, he was even dating the first girl I'd ever fought over, at age five, in the sandbox at Kindergarten – the beautiful Marylou, all grown up.

On that particular Cuyamaca day I mentioned the sun was sky-high and raging, and as we reached that state ourselves, Jay suddenly dropped everything and took off running full-speed down the side of the mountain, bounding hell-bent through the sumac, over the saltbrush, yucca, and fountain grass, boulder-to-boulder at a flat downhill dead-run. I lost my shirt following, and by the time I'd recovered it and wheeled away back down the mountain his trail was only a light luminescent whisper, a barely perceivable turbulence in the ether, but still easy for me to follow. Like in our lives, despite all the options, neither of us could have found any other path.

The trail ended in the shade of a weathered fir tree, where a young buck had lost his antlers. Jay stood there holding them, panting, his mouth open huge, twice the size of normal, his arms, much longer than they should have been. He'd truly reverted to a Paleolithic state, covered only with dense hair in place of his clothes. At that same moment, he told me later, I'd become "a reptile"– kind of a snapping desert tortoise-man. You could say psychogenic substances are funny that way. Very elemental.

Like it was always to be for the both of us, we had to go to those extremes to lose ourselves from the world of structure, and to find ourselves, our authentic selves, our true selves – even for just a few moments there in the wilderness.

...and there never seemed to be any consequences until we each ran long and hard enough to finally catch up to.

Years later, the paths would unravel, spin off, and lead us each with the same urgency in very different directions; but in that canyon dimension where our spirits met [and still inhabit], the morning sun stays low out on that western ridge. A little further out that way west, or east, than usual.

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"

doesn't make any sense.

Rumi

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 23: The Saturday Matineé

A full-on hellacious meleé is what you could call it, and you'd be right.

That would be a very fair description. There would be about a thousand screaming kids, 98% of them boys from the ages of six to twelve, packed into the indescribable moderneity of the old State Theater on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, somewhere back around 1962. It was like that every Saturday, at the weekly triple-feature matineé. All the kids' moms dropped them off, like mine did, watched for us to purchase our tickets – thirty-five cents back then – waited for us to go in, and then rumbled off in their classic Chevys, Fords, and Plymouths, that weren't even classics back then. Every mom had one, and apparently, some place to go in it.

I would stop at the snack bar and get a red-striped tagboard box of popcorn for fifteen cents, and a Nesbitt's orange for a quarter. For seventy-five cents, my mom could drop me at the theater for almost six hours. A teenaged "usher" (often with a challenged complexion), wearing a very official dark blue, gold-trimmed uniform would push the lobby doors open into the main theater, and reveal the utter insanity within. In those days, they took you to the seat they chose for you, pointing it out with their flashlight, but once they chased some other kid back up the aisle, you got up and moved to where you really wanted to sit. I liked to sit slightly up from the middle, down the right-hand aisle.

If you looked past the teeming kid mass – the flailing arms, kids standing on the seats, kids crying for their moms, kids running full speed down the aisles pursued by the harried teen ushers – you'd behold the intense decorative splendor of the stately State Theater interior, whose tropical Botticellian paisley flourishes fluoresced slightly when the lights went down.

They were the strangest mass baby-sitting spectacles ever, those Saturday matineés, made possible by Warner Brothers cartoons and Italian sword and sandal spectaculars, stacked up in technicolor trinities like: The Thief of Baghdad, with Steve Reeves; Duel of the Titans, with Reeves and Gordon Scott; and Mole Men Versus The Son of Hercules, with Mark Forest. Or: Son of Spartacus, with Steve Reeves; Son of Hercules, with Ed Fury; and the classic Hercules Unchained, with Steve Reeves and the beautiful Sylva Koscina.

The show started up with an animated snack bar bumper, and a card offering the "smoking and crying baby booth in the rear," just before the golden Warner Brothers frame bounced the screen into life, and the kid-mob, at least for a little while, calmed down to watch the cartoons. About half way through the muscleman marathon, the kids would get restless and started taking the place apart at the seams, starting with the inevitable winging of the flattened popcorn boxes with their wickedly unpredictable trajectories, and ending up in an all-out pandemonium that necessitated the turning on of the house lights and the theater manager walking up on the stage to sternly announce: Any unruly or destructive children would be ejected from the theater. The kids could care less, but everyone quieted down so the lights could go back off, the movies could start back up, and the insanity could build again to another fine state of perfectly frenzied hellaciousness, launching the whole cycle all over again.

The last two or three hours were always ragged like that, the over-taxed theater staff shouldering the Herculean task of containing a thousand agitated boy-children, all ready to break their slave's chains, and slay the Minotaur. I didn't take part in the antics much, I was too deeply immersed in the incongruously lip-synched world of quasi-myth, rife with nascent formative sexual stereotypes, and the enhanced and simplified life onscreen, complete with it's clear and predictable moral resolutions. Why wasn't my life more like that? It confused me, I'm sure (like everything did), and I just wanted to be Steve Reeves in my jaunty dress-toga, there by the statuary-lined reflecting pool, saying my sad, heroic goodbye to the beautiful Sylva Koscina. Why would I ever leave her? Oh yes...slaying the minotaur always took priority – in place of any real, committed relationship...it's not easy being a hero.

The show let out late in the still heat of the afternoon, and all the moms idled up in their massive Impala or Fairlane or Country Squire wagons to collect their kids as they poured out onto the too-hot, too-bright sidewalk. I walked myself the five or six blocks over to Adams Avenue, to my Grandma Minnie's apartment, the little place of her own my Dad had set her up in. She was worried there, waiting for me to show up, questioning her daughter's judgement – a poor little boy walking all that ways alone.

She made me "supper," usually some canned corn beef hash, or succotash and fried baloney, a piece of white bread warmed in the bacon grease she kept in a coffee can by the stove. I pretended to eat, or hid it when she wasn't looking, waiting for the reward at the end of the sad little pioneer-style meal, and she never failed me. After I'd pushed the meager little meal around my plate long enough, she'd make me a piece of bread with her famous peach and pear jam on it — still the best jam I've ever eaten.

Mom always showed up a little later than she was supposed to (I never knew from where), picked me up and asked how the movie was. We drove home, mostly quiet, and I just wondered, where is my chariot...and where, oh where is my Sylva Koscina right now?

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 22: Sculpture Time, and An Early Departure

Like Billy Pilgrim, Koko had become unstuck in time.

The skills he'd picked up in the chilly little factory in South San Francisco, welding and flame-cutting, had led him into a rather unusual set of circumstances. Everyday, he drove up Van Ness from the warehouse studio of Albert Nelligan, south of market (before it was "Soma"), to go back to work on the huge skeletal steel sculpture housed in Pier 2 at Fort Mason. He and Sven would open all the western rolling doors, and let the wind flying past the Golden Gate blow the clouds of tight, acrid steel smoke out through the other side. It was cold, but close to the furry sputter of the MIG welder, in a shower of sparks, with his coveralls, leather sleeves, smoldering gloves, and the incessant whining, grinding wheels GREEEEEEEning through his ear protectors, bits of slag popping off his face shield, chunks of molten-edged quarter-inch stock bouncing off his steel-toes, he didn't really notice.

He remembered when he picked up the phone, when Kathleen called him, and he was back in Del Mar again, walking up the hill with her from the little adobe house, past the train station. She was elfin, you could say, slender, slight, languid but pointed, with her straight red hair and the greenest eyes. He felt she'd never been on the level with him. Why had she held back so long? Why was she still holding back? He chalked it up to the age difference–her hesitance for the future. Then she'd coyly sent him north, like she was sending him away to camp.

Now she called to tell him about her ex-boyfriend, the sculptor from Milwaukee, to ask if he wanted out of the factory, so he could try on the glamorous world of Fine Art and high living. She could fix it. Then, suddenly, he was back on the pier, with that ocean wind blowing up his pant leg.

Nelligan was a long, ruddy-faced fellow, with high, tight jeans, and an incongruous cowboy hat. They understandably hadn't hit it off too well, he and the kid being sent to him by his ex-girlfriend, but he gave Koko a job anyway. It was a favor to Kate, as he called her.

 Months passed, there in the cold old pier building the Army had just opened up. There were still old boxes of Army stuff tucked in corners, probably all Top Secret in its day. The fabrication went slowly, just Sven and Koko and a boozy helper or two. Sometimes crazy Roger, the ex-navy engineer, would come in and fix things, but Albert was always out, chasing tail and trying to talk the upper crust out of it's money. Between whatever curious antics he was mixed up in, and Roger's model building, he somehow kept enough money coming in to keep the whole iffy undertaking afloat. It was supposed to culminate in an unveiling out on the bay, spectacularly employing a weather balloon flotilla to gently lift panels from Christo's Running Fence up and off the thirty foot tall sculpture. You had to hand it to Nelligan, he always succeeded in thinking on a grand scale.

About three nights a week it was party time at the warehouse; the hot tub, the fire-man's pole, target practice with a brushed steel Smith & Wesson, a giant neon index finger, twitching up and down, pointing at Nelligan's big brass bed, tearing down the stacked-up wall of champagne cases, a classic cast of ingenues and hangers-on ingenueing and hanging on.

After work (he could have showered with a magnet in place of a bar of soap) Koko spent most of his free time baby-sitting Jean Goldberg, an heiress with a nose jones and a crush on Nelligan, who needed her connections, but no part of her otherwise, so the job fell to Koko to escort her evenings at L'Etoile, secure her patronage, and pilot her fat little MGB GT around Pacific Heights, chasing the next "place to be," wherever that was. He was a twenty year old kid, and he already felt tired.

Then he was out on the water, on the barge that day of the unveiling, the same stiff wind from the west blowing the giant balloons sideways. They all wore the same thing, silly chrome work helmets, and custom-screened tee shirts. Sven climbed up to the top of the massive piece, caught the folding knife Koko tossed him, and cut down the giant fabric panels, revealing the huge, wonky sculpture they'd all given a couple years of their lives to.

The TV news teams lost interest and moved on when the sloppy spectacle hadn't come off as planned, leaving only the little crew and their followers to celebrate the fact that the whole thing hadn't ended up on the bottom of the bay. It was an ignominious unveiling for the happy twelve-ton toy, which sadly, it seemed, no one really wanted.

Suddenly he was much older, in a room alone, and it rose up to him on the internet, weeds growing underneath it, it's cartoon colors covered with whitewash.

Koko'd had enough, took his under-the-table cash, loaded the VW with everything he had in his life, and headed off to art school in Pasadena. Then he watched years zip by, like looking out the window of a time machine. Like watching years tumble by in a dryer. Grace went by, and Pamela, and he was at the tennis match in Forest Hills, being introduced to an "important" woman in front of them, and it was Jean – the crazy heiress who turned around and nearly spit when she saw him. She'd changed her name by marrying a Brazilian polo player, and had done a little something to her face, too. She pretended to barely know him, looking at him like...don't you dare...

It seemed like he'd barely settled into school in Pasadena, but then it must've been longer than he thought. Almost like everything in an entire life had just gone by. He called Kathleen, to tell her about the sculpture ending, that he was coming back to the beach to see her, but her phone had been disconnected. When Koko returned, and right away asked after her, a friend looked startled and said, "How long have you been gone?" 

Suddenly he could see Kathleen's sad, pretty face drifting south, smiling a bit, the dull sparkle...that wistful resignation. It wasn't hesitance. It had never been her hesitance. In an instant he was with her again, just for that last second it took to realize. She'd never told him about the brain cancer that had been in remission, that was her story before they met. She hadn't wanted to upset him when it came burrowing back. "...didn't anyone call you?" His friend asked.

She was only thirty years old, and she always would be, and suddenly Koko was back here again, much, much older than that.

"We are close to waking up when we dream that we are dreaming."

Novalis

The book, "How To Survive Life (and Death)," is available from Conari Press, or at all major booksellers––but ask for it from your local bookshop.

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 21: Two Feathers, Second Feather

............................................................................read about the first feather

Koko stood on the deck, looking across upriver to New York, to the promontory at the bend, but he didn't know why. He didn't...but then he did.

It had been a couple years. A couple difficult, challenging years in every way, except in the ways it mattered most. His work had gone disappointingly, one remarkable opportunity after another had taken a sudden turn south, until it seemed that you just couldn't even make the stuff up anymore. His big breaks had all broken. How could he be put in such unique and impossible rooms, only to have their possibilities evaporate? He worked his tail off, and yet nothing had taken flight, except his capacity for Love, which drew in the sky. His heart was full and open. She was always there. Food was always on the table. They lived a frugal life of sheer abundance, which didn't seem possible to them either. But it all worked out, somehow.

He knew the lessons he'd learned from the river, just sitting and listening to the wind, the songbirds, the bullfrogs, the sundance writing on the passing water, and the eagles' calls from the top of the white pines; it all taught him how to live a different way. An impossible way.

Now, he was being tapped on the shoulder again, by the unseen. It was telling him, the same way it had before, that the eagles had another feather for him. Another feather? Another feather. A different one, for a different reason. Look over there, they whispered in his ear, where you're looking now.

His neighbor had offered the loan of his kayak, whenever, so he took him up on it and set out upriver, rowing against the lighter current close to the bank, and then cutting across to the shallows on the other side. The sheet of water over the smooth river rock field got so thin his butt dragged and hung up on the bottom; so he hopped out, and ported the kayak up to a channel near the far side. New York.

Almost as soon as he arrived at the point, he knew he wasn't going to find anything, even though This is where you have to look for it, was what he kept hearing, with that same insistence as before. He floundered around in the lush, leafy undergrowth on the bank, looking up into the virdant cave trails that the animals had made, but he wasn't going to find anything but deer ticks in his hair, if he was willing to look for those. Or if Suzy would.

Why do they tell me something that's right, but not right? he thought.

About a week later, he repeated the futile exercise again, and then again, until his neighbor asked him what he was doing with his kayak, and all he could think of to say was, "Oh, nothing, really...just going for a paddle..." And now it was loud again in his ear, making him a little crazy, making him walk back out on the deck, peering purposelessly across the river to see what was much too far to ever see. This is crazy, he thought.

Right at that moment, a big female eagle hopped out of her New York tree on the point, and wheeled down south over the river, heading his way. She flapped her huge wings a couple times, gaining altitude and just as she did, a single white tail-feather fell from her fanned tail, fluttered lightly down, and set atop the current in the middle of the river. His heart stopped. There! They silently hollered in his ear.

"Hey!" Koko hollered back.

"What?" replied Suzy, who was planting flowers in the Vole's Garden. "Did you want me?"

He ran in, changed into a swimsuit, and ran down the rock steps, yelling crazily, "Watch that white spot on the river and tell me when I'm close to it!" and he dove straight in.

"Keep going out!" She yelled. "Keep going!" He could see it, when he craned his neck up above the little waves in the river. It was coming right to him, bobbing along, and when it arrived, he was right there for it. He put the quill shaft between his teeth, and swam in through the suddenly cold water, to his big sitting-rock. He held it up in front of his face, fourteen inches of a perfect, snowy white feather, just deposited magically before his eyes by the great female eagle whose awkward, oversized "chicks" would spend the summer learning how to fly out over that same piece of river.

Koko amazed, How and why, in the entire world, could a man be standing where I was standing, looking where I was looking, and see that, if it isn't for me?

The white feather is for having survived the years that so many never survive to see. The years until your head and tail strike pure white. Now, you know just how big this vision of life is. You've learned the lesson of Action and Repose. You can wait for it, and watch for it, but then you must dive in and swim to reach it. Have faith in the unfailing wind, in the abundance of the river, in the heavens in your heart. Now you know how to grow. Now you know how to fly.

Later, at the little town's street festival, Koko told the abbreviated tale to a woman at an Eagle Conservation booth.

"It's against the law for anyone but an Indian to have an eagle feather!" She snapped with authority. Koko could only think, I don't think she understands how it happens...

"My great-great-grandfather was Kickapoo," Koko said softly. He knew it was okay, in his heart. His grandfather tapped the woman on the shoulder.

"Oh...well..." she sidled and smiled a bit, "then it's okay, I guess."

.....................................................................this just popped up the other day