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 18: The Mexican Haircut

"What lies behind us and what lies before us

are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

Emerson

In 1961, I was 5 years old. John Kennedy was President. The high point of each week was Sunday evening when Tinkerbell flew onto the TV screen and christened an eruption of cartoon colored fireworks with her little fairy-wand at the start of "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color." It was the only color TV show on any of the three networks.

My father, Eugene, was still fairly present then. Still almost a regular guy, which is to say he hadn't quite formulated his other persona, that of Gino, the mysterious international car dealer. Soon he would detach and start taking his month-long trips abroad, to England and Italy, and other exotic lands.The young man who took my brother and I for haircuts in Tijuana never really came back after that. So it went for my father, who fell head-long into the void of an alter-ego who would never again allow him to settle for a "regular" life...

Dad parked the Chevy in the Woolworth's lot just off Avenida Revolucion in Tijuana and walked us down the side street to the big barber pole. I saw myself reflected in the painted front window, in the glass of the brass-handled front door, a slightly shabby little boy on the verge of tonsorial splendor. The bell announced our entry, and the faces of neatly dressed gentlemen seated along the right wall turned to us for a moment, looking up from their Mexican newspapers as they waited their turn with their favorite of the three barbers. There was an air of conspiratorial relish, the energy of a fraternal initiation of two little shavers, made all the more special by the familiar foreignness of it. The rites of manhood crossed language and borders.

An awaiting gentleman, enjoying his paper and his cigarette, and having all day to get his weekly trim, waived us through with a smile, like a driver in a slow moving line of cars.

"Ahhh, Señor..." said the barber officiously, turning the big scrolled iron barber chair towards me, snapping the seat with a hand towel, "Por favor..." motioning to take my place. No, "momentito," holding his hand up to pause me, "Esperes, por favor..." He wheeled on one foot, dipped down, and arose holding a deep green tack-upholstered leather booster seat, which he set on the chair, re-inviting me to take my place.

The barbers looked like family, well-groomed professional men, with their white short-sleeved doctor's shirts, shiny black hair and mustaches. Mine was the youngest and portliest, with no grey at his temples, manning the far chair. He turned me to face the long mirror and marble mantle, the array of multi-colored potions, balms, and astringents, like the exotic line-up of liquors behind a bartender in a ritzy hotel. There were all sorts of gadgets and accessories, each with more possibilities than the other. Graduated vials, sculpted bottles, ornate containers; mysterious, vaguely surgical-looking devices, ostensibly for the purpose of making a man all that he could be, and more.

He snapped and whirled a sheer white cotton dropcloth around my chin like a toreador, like the framed Correos posters on the wall. It settled down on top of me with perfect gentle gravity. Sweet-smelling. Calming. He gathered the sheet up around my neck and wrapped it, once, twice around with soft white crepe paper, sealing my neckline securely with a clip. Then he went to work.

The scissors snipped rhythmically, with metallic precision. It seemed no stroke was wasted, even when no hair was cut. His fingers felt like big warm rubber knobs, pushing and turning my little boy's head like a grapefruit. He smelled of cologne himself. The electric trimmer snapped on and buzzed at my temples, lightly scraping around my ears as he folded them over. Everything so precise, so assured.

Then came the coup de grace. With all the professionalism afforded to his most mature patrons, he took his soap mug from the mantle, and with one raised eyebrow and some steaming hot water, proceeded to whip up a rich lather with his brush. He tillted my chin forward, and spread the warm, fragrant lather behind my ears, and around the nape of my neck, then quickly, setting down the mug, he reached into the front pocket of his barber's shirt, and unfolded his abalone shell handled straight razor. He stropped it to a sheen on the broad leather belt that hung from the side of the chair, and resting his little finger on the back of my head, meticulously shaved my neckline.

Afterwards, he wiped the excess lather off with a warm towel, unwound the paper seal from around my neck, and whisked around my tingling neck, ears, and shoulders with a soft, powdered brush. There was a slap of lightly perfumed hair tonic massaged into my fresh haircut, and a firm, definitive final combing. Then he turned the great chair slowly to face the mirror.

The seated gentlemen lowered their papers and looked up.

"Ahhh..." the men admired simultaneously the perfectly groomed little gentleman in the mirror that I been transformed into at the hands of this craftsman as he lifted the cloth off of me, and I basked in the sensation of a real haircut and shave.

In a way, I wished I could stay with that brotherhood of Mexican barbers, in their warmth and professionalism. The propriety they afforded even a little boy. But after I played out front, squinting on the hot sidewalk, peeking in until my brother's haircut was completed, we rode back to San Diego with our Dad, who could never quite muster the self-assured comfort around his young sons that seemed so natural to that family of Mexican barbers. We rode back in silence across the border at San Ysidro. Back to our "regular" lives.

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 14: A Date With a Star...

  

In the years as I was entering High School, my brother dated a beautiful young woman named Jane. She was fresh-faced and true, and very, very intelligent. They went to college together. She supported him – pecadillos and all – bearing witness to the craziness of our home with great grace and compassion. For a while there I had a chance to know a balanced and loving person who lived in their own skin, and while it may not sound like much, at the time it seemed a rare and curious thing to me. Through her I learned a lesson about who we are at our beginnings, and who we can be.

    She came from a close-knit family, talented and a bit eccentric perhaps like our own, but right side up. They were supportive of one another's eccentricities with obvious and enviable love (which I now recognize as Source energy), while our own family struggled along living an illusion of wellness.

    In the wake of my first teenage break-up, Jane and my brother often encouraged me to date her younger sister, but to me she seemed much too young. At seventeen, drugs and alcohol were all around me, all the time. There'd been trauma at home, and within my peripheral family. Aside from that invisible resumé, I'd been working in the world of adults from an early age and I just felt old already. In my finite teenage wisdom, I didn't see how an innocent 15-year-old girl could possibly have the necessary experience to match my worldly self-centeredness.

    I finally succumbed and picked up Jane's little sister for a date to Balboa Park in San Diego (seen as "Xanadu" in the opening of Citizen Kane). Since I've learned that the thing that often offends you most about someone else is caused by the subconscious awareness of that same characteristic in yourself (thank you, Dr. Jung), it follows that I diagnosed Annette as suffering from a case of unconscious vanity. She kept noticing herself in the reflection of store windows, which I couldn't help but notice when I was noticing myself. So she unintentionally made me uncomfortably conscious of me.

    After touring the museum, we were sitting on a big park bench making very small talk when Annette suddenly pulled her feet under herself, and stood straight up next to me on the bench. She threw her arms up over her head, rolling her wrists out to push her palms up, and agitating like some fairy princess washing machine she loudly pronounced, "SOMEDAY I'M GOING TO BE A GREAT AND FAMOUS ACTRESS, AND EVERYONE WILL KNOW MY NAME!"

    I was casually chagrined. I tapped her on the leg and suggested that she get down as people were looking. And people were looking, and they were smiling. Her future fans were already noticing as Annette was molding the plastic life ahead of her in an altogether good-natured way – and I hadn't a clue what I was witnessing.

  

    She starred in the high school drama club. She went on to the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. She broke out in Stephen Frear's popular movie The Grifters, and went on to become a great and famous Academy Award nominated actress. Among other things to her credit in a very accomplished career, she married Warren Beatty and had a family of her own. They're probably a little eccentric, and lovingly supportive of it.

 

    I liked to joke that she settled for second best, but as usual I was painting "funny" over my feelings – flummoxed and intimidated by someone so young who could create their karma with such focused intention, when for so many years I just kept feeling, well clueless. It all makes me smile now – the beautiful accuracy of her park bench prophecy.

  

    Some people are born with symphonies in place, ready to come out by age five. Others enter into young adulthood blossoming into their co-created karma. Annette just knew already. Some people (ahem...) don't know what their purpose is until they've had to survive every other possibility, and like a painful Sherlock Holmes deduction, whatever else remains must be the truth.

   

   Her older sister Jane went on to Johns Hopkins and became a cardiologist, I think...and I think she knew too.

  "You have your paintbox and colors. 

         Paint paradise, and in you go."  

                                                                Nikos Kazantzakis

Read about this 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, and How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond – available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

Tales of the Koko Lion Part 9: Fellini, Into the Light

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

Soren Kierkegaard

San Diego in the late Fifties and early Sixties could've been defined in a number of ways. As a border town. As a Navy town. As beta suburbia. Growing up I was saved, in part, from the delusional mindscape of nascent American TV by the more realistic attitudes and practices of our next-door neighbor to the south, Mexico. Like the wonderfully defiant listening alternative provided to the U.S. southwest by "Border Radio," there were also TV stations just over the frontera that transmitted a whole different kind of programming (than what the 3 networks had to offer) right into our uptight family rooms, with enough power to curl the FCC's hair.

There was a real variety of shows offered, many of which, thank God, side-stepped the standards of decent American programming. Wrestlers, sombrero westerns, bullfights, silly sexy skit shows. For me, as a twelve-year-old, the most anticipated of these programs was, naturally, the most potentially corrupting.

Late at night while the decent folk slept, XETV, Canal Seis en Tijuana, aired racey foreign movies. Uncensored european, and especially Italian movies. Some of which were especially Italian. Those were the ones I liked best. At six, I'd been caught in a closet with an early Playboy magazine and a flashlight, presumably looking for something that I was not going to find in those dirty, wholesome pages.

On weekends, I was baby-sat by the sword-and-sandal triple-features at the local movie palace, or on Saturday mornings at home right after the beauty of the Warner Brothers Cartoon block, I could tune into such amazing prepubescent psyche-shaping Technicolor extravaganzas as "Hercules Versus the Leopard Women," and watch the dubbed-into-english english-speaking Steve Reeves impose his well-oiled torso on a mysterious ancient sect of zippered-bodice amazons ( God bless you, Joseph E. Levine). Steve made heroic pronouncements out-of-sync while holding plaster columns over head, or while tossing aside paper maché boulders like paper maché. The Leopard Women were ultra-alluring in their panty hose of antiquity, their vibrant lips glistening; their majestic mascara-ed eyes flapping like teal-winged peacocks.

 But this was nothing compared to the surreptitious promise of the middle-of-the-night movies, where the themes were decidedly more surrealistically adult. Like the thrill of seeing the original brassiere machine gun deployed by the ravishing Ursula Andress in the pre-feminist Sci-Fi classic, "The Tenth Victim." Or the barely night-gowned Barbara Steele wandering the darkened castle grounds, stirring up mayhem and pre-adolescent libidos in "Black Friday."

You never know the package a life-lesson will come in.  Very late one night, when everyone was asleep, my paper-route alarm clock went off on low at five minutes to two. I crept upstairs and positioned myself no more than fourteen inches from the Zenith color TV, quietly popping on the tube to the promise of secret and forbidden content suggested by the night's listing of an especially Italian, decidedly adult film, La Dolce Vita. Somewhere, I'd seen the poster image of an abundant Anita Ekberg dancing in a fountain. The screen lit up with the double masks of Janus. Then something completely unexpected happened.

Yes, there were titillations. There were situations that excited me that I didn't really understand. But there was something else that I'd never felt before – an agitation and satisfaction of the most profound nature. I sat, glued by the magnetic blue glow of the screen, and spent that whole evening immersed in a separate reality, accompanying Marcello along the meridians of Rome, and deep into the passages of this attractive, anti-heroic, strangely familiar man's life. His tentative and mysterious relationship to women. The absurd humanity at the media event of the children witnessing The Virgin. The sophisticated cocktail party at his urbane mentor's moderne flat (I wanted to be at that elevated cocktail party for years after that). The heartbreak of a "wild" night on the town with his fading father. The collapse of his spirit in the shadow of a tawdry sexcapade.

 It was storytelling of a prophetic nature for me, for while I'd never grasped the metaphoric significance of St. George and the Dragon, or the Labors of Hercules – my boyhood tales – here at last was an attractively disaffected mythology that I could base my approaching adulthood on. A night in existential armor. It felt like the story of what I was going to become, and I would go on to live my own version of that story. In a way, a small part of me is still living it.

Three-and-a-half hours later, the sun rose over San Diego, as it arose on Marcello's Roma in the film. I turned the TV off, and crept back downstairs, but Fellini's carnival collision of human motivations that I'd witnessed grew me up in a way that no superficial guidance from parents or teachers ever could.

My mother didn't understand why suddenly at age twelve, I kept pestering her to drive me to the art house theaters out by the beach every time they showed a Fellini film.

"Why would you want me to take you all the way out there to see one of those weird Italian movies?"

Mama mia!  Because in my life, in La Dolce Vita, I had discovered art, and art is living the life within you.

"What we call fate does not come to us from outside: it goes forth from within us."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct 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 it at your local bookstore!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 8: Canyon times.

"Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus should we do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World."                                                                                              Black Elk  

    The sun was hot, and my moccasined feet stuck like monkey palms down on the broad granite boulder.  The big boulders were strewn around the chaparral covered hills, jumbled atop one another like they'd been cast out with some beautiful zen intention.  Golden tan no-tan.  Grasshoppers whirred their surreal, penetrating background buzz as Santa Ana winds blew the red-clay dust off the hilltop paths.  I and my dusty compadres occupied these canyons, laying just beyond the edge of San Diego, and stretching out to what seemed like forever.  Gray squirrels rhythmically chirped away in their boulder villages.  A lizard did push-ups on a rock.  The quails' call punctuated the humming stillness:  "kee KAW kaw... kee KAW kaw..."  This was where I would choose to live, if I could... and so I did.  From early childhood on, I'd disappear out the door, and across the street, on to the dusty oxide canyon trails and into the deceivingly welcoming wilderness there, to the best host a kid could have.  Later, when we moved farther out on the fringes, to the monolithic Mies Van der Rohe-inspired house that my father built, where the land surrounded us completely, all I needed to do was walk out the downstairs door next to my room, right into my scrub-brush sanctuary.  I could move free then, around the path-cut hills, out of the sightlines of the house's big windows.

    I had my rifle or my bow, and cut the knees of my jeans out, front and back, to allow the breeze to circulate; and there was always a cat or two out in the field with me.  Like Cathy, the tawny little tiger with one tooth, who retrieved like a hunting dog- bounding back over the low scrub with a lizard in her mouth.  Or Armando, the muscular white-chested tabby I'd raised on egg yolks and road work (he trotted alongside my paper route bike like the middle-weight he was).  Eventually, they would both fall prey to the coyotes' insidious gang-tactics- the heart-breakingly repetitive fate of all of my childhood cats who ventured into the canyons on their own.  The canyons seemed placid, but in truth, they buzzed and simmered with that kind of dusty menace.

    No one really seemed to see the beauty of the semi-arid wilderness back then.  It all appeared to the unconscious developers to be a lot of nothing but potential dollar signs, and everything but a few parcels were buried by bulldozers and covered with an unsustainable layer of suburbia.  But all things change.  Most of those developers are probably dead and gone on now.  All things come and go.  One day the canyons will reclaim it all-- when the water runs out, and the sun, the creosote, and the jackrabbits and horny-toads take it back.

    But for me in that evening of childhood, the big rocks stayed warm as the sun sunk.  Cathy would pull up a boulder nearby, her stripey arms outstretched in front of her, and we'd watch the dusk descending over the Pacific horizon, like the big cats do.  

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 4: The Ape Man

"Philosophy is really homesickness."

Novalis

Have you ever seen the classic cartoon where an appropriately drunken stork delivers a baby to a family of the wrong species? That was how I tended to feel a lot, from my earliest memories on. Unsure whether I'd been dropped off on the right planet. Easily persuaded that this was all some kind of accident.

I began to adopt an identification with a set of heroes which I'll call The Legion of the Separate. Every one of them had experienced a profound sense of displacement. They had an inability to accept their reality, and so were forced to seek or become something other than what their surroundings would suggest to make of their lives. They had a need to exorcize the sense of a "False Self" that life had foisted upon them, and journey to the real persona that God, in his infinite wisdom, meant for them to discover. I was down with that.

I loved explorers; like Coronado, the first European to explore the American southwest, who set off looking for the lost city of gold, but instead discovered Kansas. Captain Cook, who was symbolically eaten by Nature-men of Polynesia when he discovered the Paradise that he had been cruelly separated from by an Empire of delusional ego. Marco Polo, whose travels presaged the western search for enlightenment in his quest to the Far East, only to be most famously falsely credited for bringing pasta back to Italy. Of course, the Italians already had pasta. They're Italian.

Also, all comic book superheroes; generally victims of some personal tragedy, who'd been further separated from normalcy by their misunderstood and transcendent powers. Compelled to suddenly appear dressed in multicolored tights (branding logos on their chests), save lives, and then disappear into a kind of hyper-anonymity. I tried this out as a child in my sister's dance tights (sans superpowers), and quickly discovered how profoundly confusing it could be.

Let's not forget – Knights on romantically esoteric quests. Gunslingers and samurais, who didn't want to have to kill anyone, but had gotten really good at it in case it was justified (it always was). Demi-gods and mythological heroes, especially those with impossible tasks to perform. But by far, my favorite of all was Tarzan ... ahhh, Tarzan.

It was a common evening, there in the backyard of the little house on Linfield Avenue, right up against the dusty edge of the canyon wilderness that was eastern San Diego in 1962. I was six, sitting towards the top of the pepper tree, up with the young green leaves, and little vermillion berries. I'd taken to climbing trees at an early age, because, naturally, I could not be reached there. I was dressed ( or undressed, as it were) as my favorite hero from The Legion of the Separate. A thin Mexican leather belt kept my hand-towel loincloth in place. A red rubber knife, the silver paint worn off the floppy blade, tucked into it at my side.

I was Tarzan. Displaced and heroic King of the Jungle. Master of the dark wilderness that fate had inexplicably delivered him into. Rendered parentless at birth, living by strength and guile, I scanned the rooftops of the outpost suburban tract with the cool indifference of a Great Ape, methodically picking at my toes. I was crosslegged in the upper branches.

The screen door opened, and my mother walked out, slender and lovely, with her red hair and her brow bunched. She stood beneath my tree, arms crossed, one foot pointed out just so, squinting up at the King of the Jungle.

"I see you up there." No answer.

"Time to come down now, dinner's ready"

"Tarzan no hungry." My Tarzan had little to do with the transcendent hero created by E. R. Burroughs, instead being unfortunately based on the movie character as portrayed by Johnny Weismuller, the famous swimmer.

"Tarzan has to eat dinner. You're already a pretty skinny Tarzan."

"Tarzan no eat your dinner." I imagined feeding on bloody gazelle, I imagine.

"Tarzan will especially no eat if his dinner gets cold."

With that I shifted to a less visible position in the tree, redirecting my savage gaze to the sunset in the west, all silly bright pink and yellow, in the days before smog had reduced every dusk to sad shades of coppery grey. The screen door shut behind her, and I was again, for the moment, stoically content in my treetop. And then Tarzan got hungry.

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 3: Arturo and his Visitors

"All beings arise from space, and into space they return: space is indeed their beginning, and space is their final end."

Chandogya Upanishad 1.9.1

    My Czech grandparents had come to San Diego from Prague, by way of Omaha, Nebraska. They bought property and started an equipment rental business downtown, near the "gaslamp" district. When World War II came along, they cashed in on truck fleet rentals, and gas, oil, and rubber contracts with the Navy.

    After an early retirement, they became jet-setters of a sort, before jets. They moved to Palm Springs, and bought apartments with a fellow Bohemian, the Polish make-up genius (he invented it), Max Factor. They sailed the Matson Lurline to Hawaii, and shared one of the penthouse apartments of The Outrigger Canoe Club on Waikiki Beach. They lived well, partied hard, and died young – "Mac-o" (the slavic cowboy) in his fifties, and "Mumsy" in her sixties, from heart failure and stomach cancer respectively, though as is often misattributed in our culture, the cause of each of their deaths was most likely related to alcohol abuse.

    As their legacy, they passed the business on to their two sons, my father and uncle, who consequently spent half a lifetime in dysfunctional and acrimonious business together. That was Acme Truck Rental.

    My mother rarely took me to Acme when I was little, but when she did, I occasionally met one of my earliest 'spirit' guides, who may have helped me understand, as well as to have created, some of the mysteries of my very young life.

    The U.S./Mexico border was open and easy to cross in those days, and many of the men who worked for my father made the twenty-minute commute from Tijuana, Mexico to work every day. They were gracious, hard-working men, and we knew them and their families well, at a time when friendships pushed back and forth across the border like plates at a picnic table. Sometimes, on rare occasions, Arturo would show up.

    Arturo always arrived on foot – I never saw him in a car. He was a very pleasant, elderly Yaqui Indian gentleman, whose wardrobe ranged from a simple grey suit and bow tie, to the traditional loose-fitting white cotton shirt and pants, and colorful woven poncho typical of Northern Mexican Indians. His face was deeply tanned, and leathery – creased with smiling wrinkles. His eyes sparkled. His hair was snowy white, matching his pressed shirt.

    I don't recall how well Arturo spoke English, if at all, but I don't think he had to. He would set me on his knee, and describe fascinating adventures he'd had. These mostly concerned his longtime friendship with the "beautiful little people" (just like us, only smaller) who visited him in their spacecrafts – called "lightships" – and sometimes took him along on their trips above the earth and beyond, out around our Solar System. He hinted at having gone farther, but always stopped at his vivid descriptions of the views that he'd had looking down on the earth.

    I felt that I could see the opalescent earth myself, the great sweeping half-orb out of the narrow, horizontal window that tapered in at each end. The interior, made of perfectly fitted pieces of cool, deeply marbled purplish and white stone. There were no controls, only spots to touch, and indentations to lay small hands.

    I'd thought I was being held up by Arturo in my memory, because the counters were all at the right height, but I wasn't being held by Arturo at all. The counters were at my height, at our height. It was Arturo who was squatting down on one knee, cramped by the low ceiling. And while someone else was there, it was as though they were perpetually just behind us, just out of view.

    Like other unsettling memories from early childhood that sometimes bob up to the surface, I realized that these were not Arturo's recollections translated from Spanish – they were mine. And now, when I sit in silence with these memories, I'm finally able to lay claim to them as my own.

    Was I ushered around our atmosphere in a spaceship by Arturo and his friends, or had I fallen under the unconscious spell of the sixties Flying Saucer craze? However it was that it found a home in my psyche, it was something my young defenses needed to repress, and only a serious trip down memory lane had turned it back into that amazing voyage in an alien spaceship.

    In an unusual appendix to the story of Arturo: Eight or ten years after the experiences I've just described, an unmarked black sedan pulled up to the office of Acme Truck Rental. Two men in black suits and wearing sunglasses got out and identified themselves as being from the government. They inquired whether my father knew the whereabouts of the elderly Mexican gentleman known as Arturo, but my father had not seen him for years. Without identifying themselves, or giving any reason for the inquiry, they got back in their sedan and drove away.