Category: RELATIONSHIPS

RAKING WINTER FOR SPRING

~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

I’m raking, a meditation for writing in your head, like ironing or baking, or lavender baths. The pavement on Palace Avenue is under jack hammers and a yellow tractor is parked in front of my driveway.

Eight men, in yellow jackets, are, digging out the curbside shoulder of a two-way road, so traffic is cumulating in front of me. The sun shines on the traffic control worker, his face is crusty with an untamed beard, and bushy eyebrows.  He appears to be in his sixties, but he never takes off his sunglasses, so I don’t know for sure. A gentlemen walked by, as I was maneuvering into the driveway with groceries, an open pack of red skinned potato chips, on my lap. As I got out of the car, I turned around, and he spoke out,

“ Exciting isn’t it?” He said smiling.

“ What?”

“ All the activity on the street.”

I shook my head, like an older person who can’t believe you’d say something so

bird at piano lesson with rock
bird at piano lesson with rock (Photo credit: Terry Bain)

stupid, and marched in the house, repeating what he said, and after a few times, I had to stop myself- I am doing a lot of that,  ridiculing, criticizing, mocking  and imitating strangers.

The bird, that was born last year returned to her nest to lay her own eggs.  Spring,  is contracting up through the ground, melting the last remaining buttons of ice, and there is new life, all new, here inside my ground, my fertile ground for love, torment, adventure, challenge, relationships, achievement, conversation, travel, hiking, horses, ocean, it’s all there, I didn’t lose it like I thought I would.  You can still call me LouLou, I’m not all adult yet.

GOING GOING GONE ON ADVENTURE

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

It’s time; to go free-style-I am leaving Saturday-to sit on my beach blanket at Torrey Pines, looking to find the shells and the riptide, then I will go to LA and and drift along Sunset Blvd, and then Santa Barbara, all by train and then ………… short term non-commit-mental.

MY KENNY

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

Glaspalast München 1900 060
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The Summer of 1973. Los Angeles.

 

Ken drove a rusty VW hippie van that configured around his restless and unpredictable patterns.  He was known to drive, stop, and stay in the same spot three days. Our adventures began on Pacific Coast Highway driving along without any direction or plan.  Ken would be singing the blues, and I’d be sitting in the back, stretched out, watching him in the rear view mirror. He had cloudy blue eyes that perpetuated the intensity of his tortured soul. The only time they didn’t appear preoccupied was when he was playing the piano. I’d noticed that the first time he took me home to meet his parents, Bernie and Anna Marie.

 

They lived in hillside split level home. The first level belonged to Ken.  As soon as we crossed the threshold he darted into a dimly lit carpeted room and sat down at the piano.

“Hi, I’m here!  I have Louellen with me.”

“What! I can’t hear you Ken,” his father shouted back.  It was apparent they were a family that communicated in various tones of yelling; the kinds of people who never consider finding the person they are talking to, they just yell from one level of the house to the other.

“Bernie, I’ brought Louellen– put on a pair of pants!”

“SuEllen did you say?”

“Come on Lou, you gotta meet Bernie.  I told him about you. But he takes so many pills he can’t remember anything.”

“Okay.”

We climbed the stairs to the living room and Ken shook his head as we reached the last step. “The television is always blasting.He thinks he’s deaf.”

 

As soon as I laid eyes on Bernie I could tell he lived his retirement in front of the television, clutching the remote as one does a cigarette. His form had molded the sofa into an abstraction of his physique.

“Bernie, you look great. Can you at least get up to meet her.” Bernie rose reluctantly, rubbed his lower back, and shook my hand. He smiled as if he was happy about meeting me, but I knew he was irritated because I was standing in front of the television set.

“Anna Marie, Louellen’s here.” Ken yelled.

I stood there feeling like a new chair they were inspecting. Ken sensed my predicament; he read people before they even opened their mouth.  Anna Marie came out with a pot holder in her hand.

“Okay Lou–this is the family. Now everyone back to their places.”  I was the only one that laughed.

“Your cooking smells so good.” I said to Anna.

”It’s nothing, just dinner for us.”

“Mom‘s the best cook in the world. Did you make my potatoes?”

“Yes Ken, I made your potatoes, brisket, coleslaw, blueberry blintzes…
“Mom, there’s four of us—you’re not cooking for the German army.”

 

Anna Marie grew up in Austria during the occupation; the Germans took her family home and everything with it.

Bernie was back on the sofa, and Ken seated next to him in a leather club chair. He was bantering his Dad about watching CNN all day. Bernie talked back to the news reporters, scolded the football players, and grudgingly laughed at the comedies. It appeared Anna Marie wasn’t worth talking to any longer. She masked her sadness poorly; it was written so everyone could read her.

“What college are you going to Louellen?” Bernie asked.     “ Sonoma State.”

“Somoa what? Never heard of it. Ken’s in law school– aren’t you Ken?”
“What? Did someone say something to me?” Ken winked at me.

“You wouldn’t know if someone clubbed you on the head for Christ’s sake. Why don’t you straighten up and start taking things seriously. All you do is drive around in that heap of junk in the driveway, that leaks oil by the way, and you need a bloody haircut!”

“What was the question?”

They went on like that and I recognized the mental match between father and son. I walked through the white carpeted living room feeling it’s history; safe and predictable, like coming home would always be the same. I noticed Anna Marie’s garden;, tiny rows of perfectly nurtured flowers set inside a large freshly mowed yard that looked untouched  since Ken was a teenager.

 

I found Anna Marie in the kitchen stirring and juggling pots.

“Would you like something to drink Louellen?”

“No, I’m fine. What a feast you’ve made.  Do you always cook like this?”

“Well, it never goes to waste. I got used to cooking for all the boys–Ken has three brothers you know.”

Just then Ken came in, kissed his mother on the ear and opened all the lids of the pots.

“Kenny,don’t you dare,” she said. Ken took a bite out of a potato and she yelped as if she was surprised. It was their playful match that had been going on for years.

 

Through out dinner I watched Ken; how he deferred their questions and manipulated the conversation so it remained directionless like his driving. After dinner we went downstairs to the piano room. Ken slammed his hands on the keyboard, and starting playing some Dixieland jazz. He looked over at me and smiled triumphantly.

“ Bernie hates it, he’s always hated it. I do this to drive him nuts. He can’t stand my playing the piano-the poor bastard doesn’t have a creative cell in his body. He used to break into my classical lessons and start yelling his head off. ”

“Kenny! I can’t hear a thing! Shut the door!” Bernie hollered.  Ken let out a thunderous roll of laughter and kept right on playing.  Each time we returned to have dinner with Bernie and Anna Marie, the routine slackened,  and I felt more at home. I grew to like Bernie, and the feeling was mutual. Anna Marie would not allow herself to feel something for me, in case I had any ideas of taking Ken away. I spent the rest of that summer trying to help Ken figure out what to do, while he unknowingly was teaching me about my essence.

One day towards the end of the summer my father called me.   “Ken’s father called asking if I knew where his son was.”

“Ken’s gone?” I answered.

“Apparently that’s the situation. What the hell kind of family is you mixed up in? What a thing to ask me. Ken told his father he was driving you back to Sonoma in September. Is that right?”

“Yes, he offered to.”

“Well, you can forget about that. If the bum does come back, I don’t want you going out any longer. His father isn’t all there.”

“That’s funny.” I said.
“What’s so funny about it?”

“That’s what Ken says about him.”

“Well in any case–forget the bum–he’s not going anywhere. His father went on for half an hour and I heard everything I need to hear. He had the audacity to tell me he read about me in the newspapers.”

“What about?”

“That’s irrelevant. The point is you don’t reveal what you know about someone.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have the upper hand.”

That fall I returned to Sonoma, Ken dropped out of law school, and my father was arrested again.  Bernie and Anna Marie remained together until Bernie passed away. Ken moved to the southern tip of Baja and plays piano in a resort. Every few years he drops me a line, and we talk about Bernie and my dad.

 

ADVENTURES IN LOVINGNESS

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

Carson McCullers photographed by Carl Van Vech...
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The sky is brush stroked with rivers of grey clouds interceding the passing blue of the day. I feel breathed, my heart exhausted, and my spirit is groping for remission, like an Advil into a hangover.

I remember my childhood, my first kiss, the day I announced to a class of fellow writers that I was a writer too. Our teacher, Emily, instructed all of us to stand up and say it. I resisted internally, and afterward the effect was as she promised, it became second nature.

I don’t know how I will remember the dragon episode, which turn in the labyrinth will remain most vivid; until now, imagining a folder and how I would label it, The We of Me, the phrase borrowed from Carson McCullers short story, “The Member of the Wedding.” I read all of Carson’s books when I lived in Saratoga Springs, NY. Carson spent several seasons as an artist in residence at Yaddo Art Colony in Saratoga, and was known to escape at night down to Congress Street, and sit in a saloon sipping brandy. The story is entwined around Frankie, a young girl in love with her brother, who has just married and is moving to Alaska. Frankie wishes to go with them.  “A sweet momentary illumination of adolescence before the disillusion of adulthood,”[4wikipedia “It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”

Last summer, I was not hanging around looking out at the world, I was on the porch, serving wine and crispy chips, while Rudy loaded Pete Rodriquez in the CD player,” Can I play it one more time?” he shouted, and John basting chicken over the Barbeque, draped in my William Sonoma apron, and I am drifting through the epilogue unaware that these moments will turn into sculpted memories, of a summer in Santa Fe. But for then, we lasted until the sun melted in the horizon and Rudy ran out of Kelly’s Cove stories. We were joined, we had our own club. Sometimes Jewels joined us, or LimoLoren, and there was a ribbon around the house, all of us were tied to the harmony of the we of me.

John won’t be coming back; there is too much brittleness, and astonishment in my life. As before, but not the same, Rudy is here, he just appeared in the doorway, “Come see what I did in the garage.” Our garage was transformed into a movie theater after I mistakenly poked the wrong button on the gate remote, and the automatic doors crashed into Rudy’s van. Yesterday, he strung red lights along the perimeter of the adobe building. He does these things to cheer me.

A lot of people I know are falling out of love, or have been asked to stop loving someone they thought they loved. There’s a group of us at La Posada; Victor the Cuban singer just broke up with Ruth, “ I’m going crazy–I’m Latin, without a woman—I cannot do it.” And Eddie, who just broke up with his girlfriend, “Two years-Oh well, I just move on. What can you do?” and Tobey; who has figured out how to forget his girlfriend’s fatal fall from a hillside where she was hiking, he is now the master of mingling. Then there’s Sam Shepard, whose pain is transparent, without a spoken word, it’s in his vigilant Mustang eyes, and in the angle he looks at the world. There are a lot of us; who have fallen from grace with someone who thought they could love us. Then, comes the reoccurring incident; whether it is about money, lovemaking, or the act of communicating with anger or restraint, that suddenly bloats up to the size of a thunder cloud, and bursts through all the promises and collective dreams.

After my burst with John, I went over to La Posada to escape the chattering in my head. My pal, White Zen, who I’ve named for her constant calm joined me at the bar. Raul was on duty, he’s been there since before all the Anglos discovered Santa Fe. He’s seen the white lightning of movie stars, and the Indian Shamans with feathers and folklore.  Raul takes all of us in his stride; which is slow as molasses. Don’t try and rush Raul, because he will ignore you, and your drink will be watery by the time you get it.

I was sitting there, with a glass of wine, when I recognized the man next to White Zen. At the same moment, the juxtaposition of reckoning beckoned us off our stools and we hugged. Dancing Bear, I’ve missed you I said, or something like that. Dancing Bear is a New York Santa Fe success. Unlike so many people I’ve met, he lives here,   works globally, and he’s in big demand right now.

Dancing Bear smiles even if his mouth isn’t smiling, you know he is inside. He’s in the tidal wave of dreams coming true, but not without their own claim ticket on your soul. Someone is always disposed if you’re catching big tuna. Now this night, goes like this.

“ Look if I don’t fuck up this dance–if I don’t fuck it up; it’s going to be something I’m really proud of.”  He emphasizes this with one hand, raised eyebrows and a slight bend in his neck.

“And you won’t.  How long have you lived here?”

“Do you know how I ended up in Santa Fe?  I was living in Los Angeles, driving on that freeway all day, and a friend said, ‘ Hey, you otta come to Santa Fe.’ Never even heard of it, so I came, that was 1983(I think it was 83) and bought a house, and moved here permanent a few years ago.  I could live in New York–in a minute, I love New York, Los Angeles, no- what for, my daughter’s not growing up in the Palisades.” He looks at Raul, they share another story, because they’ve known each other years, then Dancing Bear slaps the wooden bar with one hand, his face creases into a private memory; “El Farol!” he shouts. “Those are the memories, everyone was there, it was the most amazing time.”

“John and I used to go every Tuesday,” Dancing Bear wasn’t listening; he was swept into the memory. His eyes looked right through the mirror behind Raul’s bar. I wished I had seen it then. I didn’t get to El Farol until 1998.

“ Now—okay–I mean right now, after all these years,

I have my ex-wife-ex-wives, and their children, husbands, whatever, and they are in my life-okay–they are in my life.” I tried to speak, but his bear mouth wiped me out.

“They are in my life.. forever.”

“What does Dancing Dora say about that?”

“I’ll tell you what she says; they all sit down to her table at Thanksgiving. All of them. And it’s cool. Not all the time… this one with that problem, the kid with that, but in the end it works.. it works.”

“ It didn’t work with John and me.”

“ You got nothing to be ashamed of.. okay. A lot of people cannot handle it.. my friends think I’m crazy.”

“So do mine.” I said.

Lula Carson McCullers adapted the book, A Member of the Wedding to stage in 1950, then to film in 1987, and into television in 1997.  Lula wrote until her body failed her, and her hands crippled. She dictated her unfinished autobiography “Illumination and Night Glare” (1999) just before she died. She wrote her first book at twenty-three, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

 Carson’s major theme; the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love.” – Tennessee Williams.

 

MY FATHER, THE GENTLE GANGSTER

~ LouLou ~ 3 Comments

This is an excerpt from the memoir I’ve been working on many years. The first manuscript was 800 pages; about three of them were worth reading. The book mutated about 2000 times.

“What’s it like knowing your father is a gangster? Did you know when you were a teenager? Did your father kill anyone? Did you ever meet Bugsy? Aren’t you afraid of his friends? You know they kill people.”     

            I was thirteen years old when my best friend told me my father was a gangster. She didn’t mean any harm. We told each other everything.  We were standing in the Brentwood Pharmacy one day in 1966, and we turned the book rack around until we found ”The Green Felt Jungle.”

“That’s the book, let me look first and see what it says.” She whispered. I waited while she flipped trough the pages.

“Oh my God, there he is,” she said grasping my shoulders.  We hunched over the book and read the description of my father beneath his photograph.

“Allen Smiley was the only witness to the murder of Bugsy Siegel.”

“What does that mean, who is Bugsy Siegel?” I asked.

“Shush, not so loud, I’m afraid to tell you this Luellen, it’s awful. I don’t believe it. “

“What is it? Tell me.”

“Bugsy Siegel was a gangster, he killed people. Your father was his friend.”

I don’t think I should read this, “I said replacing the book on the rack.

“Don’t tell your father I told you,” she warned.

“Why not?”

“My mother told me not to tell you, swear to me you won’t tell your father.”

“I swear, come on let’s go.”

My father called himself Allen Smiley. The FBI tagged him “armed and dangerous.” The Department of Justice referred to him as the “Russian Jew.” I called him Daddy.   e had salty sea blue eyes blurred by all the storms he’d seen.  When I said something funny, his eyes crystallized and flattened like glass, smoothing out the bad memories.  He was always a different color, dressed in perfectly matched shades of pink, silver and blue. My small child eyes rested cheerfully on his silk ties, a collage of jewel tones. The feel of his fabric was soft like blankets.  He was very interesting to look at when I was a child and open to all this detail.

ADVENTURES IN LOVINGNESS.

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

AARON

The course we choose to study doesn’t begin in school; it begins the moment we recognize that life is our teacher.  I chose the course of love between a man and a woman.  Yet all I’ve learned from Anais Nin, Joan Didion, and Lawrence Durrell, about love isn’t guiding me.   I   have to start over, and develop wisdom based on my own experiences.

The morning is crisp as iceberg lettuce, a day of clarity and stillness. Outside my bedroom window, the light illuminates portions of the pine tree, and the walls of our neighbor’s home. On my side of the glass, there are shadows and dissonance.  It feels like months since the last column, and unwinding what events took place since, is going to be as piercing as the southwest sun when it shines in my eyes.
A few days before Christmas, I was in the kitchen with two friends, visiting from Boulder.   Aaron, whom I’ve not seen in four years, and Lilith, whom I’ve just met.  Aaron was the subject of one of my columns, the lone man standing on a mountain top, climbing the rocks of life and nature, as he ascends to the distant and dangerous vistas of life.  Lilith, an angelic petite woman, with eyes wide as moons, and uncontrollable affection for what is reachable. I am preparing dinner, and our discussion is about love, about me and John, and about Rudy, whom Aaron has rendered  a mentor since we all met in Saratoga Springs, 2000. We celebrated Aaron’s twenty-first birthday with him.  He was ignited by individual far from conventional thinking even back then.
          “Remember the time you and Rudy moved the farm table outside the window, over the second story roof, and down to the porch. How did you do that?” I said.
          “Ropes. I couldn’t believe this guy– half my size and he’s carrying this eight foot wooden farm table over one shoulder. “
          “ Yea, and now he’s carrying a Dragon. Oh Aaron, those were innocent days weren’t they? ”
          “ Yea.  Was that really eleven years ago; it feels more like a century.”
          “ That’s because you live without any boundaries.”
Lilith picked up the camera and started shooting  a video. I put on a hat and sunglasses for the camera, and began using the pots as instruments.  They frivolity reached a high note, just as the phone rang.
          “ Hi, it’s me. I’m coming back. It’s over.”
          “ I’ve heard that before Rudy. “
          “ I’m almost in Flagstaff, I’ll be there tomorrow.”
 I sat down on the stool, and looked to Aaron for something wise and assuring to settle my  spoon-stirring anxiety.
          He was expressionless. The intervention of  Rudy, who moments ago I was raking with hopelessness was on his way here, arriving the first night of Chanukah, which had a similar mystical tune to it.
          “ John’s coming in on Friday — Oh God! I don’t know, this sounds too much like a Hallmark movie. I don’t believe this. When is it going to end?”
         “ Lue, you amaze me. “
         “ I wish I’d stop amazing people.”
Lilith and Aaron took off the next day and I busied myself with brooms and sponges; the activity most relied upon when life is messy.  I did not want to shell-shock John with the news, because he was in the final stages of his script, and Rudy was on the road, where at any point, the Dragon might reappear, and whisk his tail back to her nest.  Until he drove up, there was still a screen of fuzzy details.
I’d just come from Luminara Lounge where I’d met Jewels, my confidante and baby-sitter through the last four months of Dragonfaire.
    “ Is he here?” She said breathless from rushing.
    “ I saw him pull in the driveway.  I left earlier and drove around until I could reach you. I don’t want to be in the house when he arrives.”
    “How are you going to handle things with Rudy?”
   “ Beats me.  I know I  have to suppress my anger; that’s like suppressing my appetite after a week of starvation.”
   “ Which reminds me, are you eating?”
   “  More or less?”
   ” LouLou. You have to eat! How do you think he’ll feel?”
   “ Like a turkey on Thanksgiving.”
    “What do you think John will say?
    “ He’ll be speechless.”
Jewels lifted her thirty pound life jacket that a mother of two children, wife, business owner, and adventurer swings with the ease of  a dancer and  wrapped her arms around me.
I returned to the garden path at La Posada and in the moonlight, paced the icy walkway waiting for John to answer the phone. “ Hi baby.”
   “ Hi sweetheart–how are you?”
   “ I’m still working.. but it’s going really good.  I got the latest storm report, and it looks like I’ll have to drive out Christmas Eve day.”
   “  I made reservations for five, is that too early?”
“ I’ll be there way before that. Got to get up early and load up the car with presents.”
I grinned, and kicked the stones in the pathway.
    “ John… Rudy’s here. I didn’t want to tell you until he actually arrived.”
    ” John. Are you there?”

How do I word his laughter, a long winded guttural explosion without pause, that struck my humor and I joined him, and our laughter sort collapsed into one, like making love or something, and it felt so good, I didn’t want to stop.

 “ Never a dull moment at Gallery LouLou.”
 “ I haven’t seen him yet, he’s in the house. “
 “ Call me later, I need a drink.”
 You couldn’t cut the tension with a semi-truck head on, as Rudy and I stood feet away in the Staab House at La Posada. I was leaning against the bar, observing his new leather Puma’s.
    “ Well, I’m here.” His crooked smile faded when I didn’t step forward or greet him with a smile.
   “ Yes, you are.”
Then the staff engulfed him in warmth and greetings and I just about threw my head back and howled from the absurdity, and the bedazzlement I felt lifted me out of myself, because I couldn’t really stand there and be a part of the abstraction of life.
    “ Can we have dinner together?” He uttered.
    “ I’ll be here.”
I got through half the dinner, and then suddenly felt the drum beating in my rage cage and dashed out.   The next few days were like waiting for a frozen chicken to thaw out.  I poked at him, and he was solid, I poked a day later, asking questions, and he released a mumble of words, “ I can’t open up yet.  I will in a few days. Just tell me what we need to do.”
    “ John’s not coming out. He changed his mind.”
    “ Why?”
I glared at him with blade sharp eyes.
   “ Because of me. That’s not what I want to hear. I’ll call him.”
   “ NO. Do not call him.  You have no idea what your … dragon episode did to us. Are you sorry Rudy? Are you truly sorry or are you still pining for the Bird. And I would like to know the chances of you going back before I get any ideas about smiling or laughing. ”
   “Yes, of course I’m sorry.  I don’t think I’ll go back.. but I have to be honest.”
I turned my back and kept walking. The next turn came from John, “I’m coming out; I just pray that we’ll have a chance to be together, and have a peaceful Christmas.”
To be continued.

 

NEW YEAR RESOLUTION

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

SMILEY’S DICE   Adventures in Livingness

Adventures in beginnings, starting over, and rewriting a story you’ve lived many years is the same as re-writing a story. It takes the same blind courage.

Behavior change (James)About half between forty and fifty years old, you hear people say, “It’s too late to start over,”  It’s not true. I hope it never feels like that when I wake up. Just thinking about it makes me run in circles. Behavioral change is essential to living a full life. In the middle of the night I woke up as if it was morning.  When I looked out the window, the moon was white as a  laundered tablecloth, staring back at me. It said get up and write.

I retreated to my corner of the world, a tiny room bathed a blush pink and gold, and wrote from beneath the goose down comforter. The moon watched.   Now that the lights and decorations are placed in the cartons, the wrapping and ribbon tossed away, a landfill of disturbing, distressing, and terrifying global news is dumped on us.  I do not understand the external world of political and international power, wealth, and motivation.

I fled that world a long time ago when I learned that men who controlled the paths of others were dangerously self-serving.  I recall my father sitting on that green velvet sofa, holding the remote in one hand and watching a news program. He turned it off and said to me, “Luellen, everything that goes on is fixed; you cannot hide your head in the sand and think otherwise.” I nodded my head in understanding, while internally I thought my father was suffering from his usual psychosis.  Eventually I crossed over, and forfeited my interest in politics. The forces of evil have shattered that glass of indemnity.

This year is not about vapid resolutions catering to our comfort, it is about survival. It’s about transforming behavior and habits, excesses and denial. Doing it in a group, makes us feel less traumatized. Imagine, all the thousands of people paddling the same current; forcing back the mortgage lender, relinquishing precious possessions, driving a car with a shattered windshield, wearing coats without any down feathers left, and wondering when the pink slip will arrive. Alienation and neurosis are at the root of people’s aggression and discontent. It can lead to unexpected violence, and then to massacre and war. It is a collection neurosis that grows worse every year.

The inner world, where each of us faces a truth no one else knows, is ruptured. All I can think of is bringing a little bit of light to someone you know is in darkness.

DON’T GIVE UP

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

WONDER

 

 

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”

 Anais Nin.  1931

Expecting snow, expecting pleasure… we are all in some range of expectation. Where you may be hunched under an umbrella waiting for the light to turn green, so you can find shelter inside a café, a shop, where someone else waits for the arrival of a friend, the death of a loved one, the offer in writing, the publication, the house to sell, the decision to resonate, the pain and suffering to subside.

I think of something my father used to say, “You made your bed, now you lie in it.”  And another one, “It’s your lot in life.”  I began writing Smiley’s Dice in 2002 from a desk in a Solana beach rental.  Maybe in two years I’ll have a column in a newspaper or magazine, and maybe I won’t.  It’s my lot: to not give up.

Santa Fe is blistery cold, the street dry and the sidewalks baking sheets of white snow.  Out my window is a metallic sky that hints of more snow.  This sky slows the rhythms of the body and mind; it invades the hurried motions of pedestrians, vendors and hotel staff. There is an absence of light that intercepts outward vision, so we turn inwards.  I do anyway.  And because I gorge myself on the emotionalism, and interior life, I have not slid into home base.

That is why it has taken me longer to launch my writing for worldly consumption. Some of us are not in a rush to wave the “I made it” flag.  Some favor holding back, until the other elements of our character life are lived; our destructiveness, fear, pettiness, falsity, greed, so many steps to climb.

You and I have to trust in the pattern of our lives, the invisible thread that taunts us, teases us, and even torments us. My lot, postponed progress, maturity, development.

I was an A cup until college, without direction, a major in English, Art, and Psychology, before dropping out.  My major interest was the countryside beyond Sonoma State campus walls, the roaming cows, and flock of geese over the swamps, the crooked paths winding through eucalyptus woods, the poetry pasted on bulletin boards in the coffee house, the farmers in the pasture.

“When are you going to start taking your life seriously?” My father asked this question every few years, and every few years, I lied.

I was adulterated when I was first employed at the old Gibraltar Savings & Loan on Wilshire Boulevard. I was serious about how they measured my performance, and was vicariously unconcerned with personal gratification. How excited could I be about trust deeds? I cannot even recall what I was doing; just the name of the department, the Beneficiary Demand department.

All that restrictive training, in punctuality, production, and prudence, exploded late in life. I did not discover my passionate interest in writing until I was forty.I didn’t own a home until I was forty-seven, did not stop biting my nails until I was fifty-four, did not learn to love and trust until last year.

I developed friendships late in life, now I honor a treasure chest of sterling gems that glitter from near and far. Friends that abandon tasks to listen to me talk about moving the furniture again, and consent to my absence because the victor of writing has kidnapped me.

It is a day later, the sky is unchanged; still the cloud cover is nailed to the sky. In random conversations I have heard of people’s hardships, of sacrifice and compromise during this holiday season.  No more travel talk about Paris, and the Orient. No more extended vacations or extravagances.   We have to give ourselves a holiday from lament, from error, and from exasperation.  I tell myself not to be combative, not this year, and don’t polish the guilt and remorse, just let it fade away. Don’t open those links to real estate values, retirement funds and investments; open the link to History. Remember what the greatest generation was handed; remember soup lines, suicides, and World War II.

Mostly don’t reprimand your partner for unrealized expectations; They are most fragile to your voice and touch. The adventure in livingness is to look at your lot; and ride it with amusement and wonder.

LIVING WITH TWO MEN PART TWO OF MICE AND MAYHEM

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

 
The scent and scenery of August on Palace Avenue is a perfume of Plaza push–carts selling burritos and beef skewers, afternoon thunderstorms splashing the soot and dust from weekend fiestas,low riders spinning and smoking up Palace Avenue, and the  blasting booty bump bass in tempo with the wheels as they rise and fall to the concrete, the motorcyclists on four wheels, with jet black hair flapping the wind, like long tongues, and the bicycle riders, glazed eyes, and head-phones, detached, and daringthe driver to predict their next turn, sometimes women, in street shoes, and hats, gliding by, smiling independently, and then the two grumpy men. Five days a week they walk to and from work past my house.  One wears a chef’s coat and never raises his eyes from the sidewalk, and The Walrus, whose mustache and face, are griddlded into an expressionless tolerance for all things that happen. 
I left the porch, went inside, where I felt the absence of John and Rudy.
John was in Los Angeles at a screenwriting meeting; a triumph for a guy whose waited more than ten years to get an assignment. I imagined him in a trendy restaurant, seated at a table, one foot tapping the floor,and his right hand clutching the corner of the tablecloth his own peculiar fetish to feed the nerves during suspenseful situations. He‘d be dressed in the outfit I picked out, but the shirt would be loosely tucked because that’s his style.  Rudy was on his way back to Santa Fe, and eagerly waiting to take out his new Bird, a gal he met at our Baron Wolman book signing. 
 
Absence of their conversations, frivolity, dancing, feasting together, two men who share nothing in common except me, sort of like Jules & Jim, only Rudy and I have been like brother and sister, since 2003. He was the only man I ever trusted before John, and thattook many years, but once he went into the vault of truth and loyalty, I trusted him as I did my mother.
 
Then after so many days, my bounce and blush started shedding. It was as if someone tied me to an anchor and I dragged my litheness from room to room trying to fight it, with chores, writing, and then all the structure started crumbling, and I left the lights on all night, and didn’t empty the trash, or go out on the front porch to wave at the La Posada crew.  I didn’t leave the middle bedroom, the one with the big screen, and I snuggled the silence with old movies,and half read books, and Gummy Bears.  I was a heap, unlike the temporarily tide pools we fall in and out of constantly, this was a tidal wave.

The window facing west is an aquarium of pine and cotton trees, and between them, there is JD’s Tree Tee Pee, left over from Fiesta week, but he’s too busy working on his winter addition, to bother with it.  I can see the 2nd floor of La Posada, Julia’s room, the daughter that killed herself in the bedroom, and is widely known as the Ghost of La Posada.  I’ve listened in on these stories, and staff members see her. New Mexico storytelling is checkered with ghost stories. I saw the light as it transcends the hours of the day, and found the most beautiful time was four in the afternoon. The sunlight turned the light peach walls to pomegranate, and I felt like I was inside the fruit. If we stop, we see everything so clearly.

I was waiting for Saturday, when Rudy would drive up in the white van, filled with tools and purchases he’d made over the last three years.  He was officially coming home to stay. He’d completed the New Mexico Contractors License Exam and was going to start renovating adobe homes and gardens and spend his days in the place he loved as much as San Francisco.

It might have been a Carole Lombard movie, that got me untangled from the
Gummy bears and Kleenex, and I went out to dinner Friday night with the gal who introduced the Bird to Rudy.  Sipping wine with faces I like, and food that nourishes brought back a flash of light to me, and I was animatedlike an old person right before they die. You ever see that? 
    
Rudy’s room was tided: new soap, washed towels, the closet rearranged so he was able to unpack all his belongings. I was sure there would be a new rattlesnake head. 
     “I have a present for you.” he said on arrival.
 He brought out an Emporio Armani garment bag, his only brand of clothing, and out came a pair of black silk balloon pants. 
” Thought they’d be good for the Cuban Carnival party.”
I fancied them, hugged him, and then he scampered in a hundred directions, as he does, and I returned to myself. Rudy was home. To be continued.
 

MORE ON MICE AND MAYHEM

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS

The throw of the dice this week lands on Part Two of Mice and Mayhem.

“John, I found a place! Let’s go tomorrow to check it out. This will be such an
adventure! It’s next to a riding stable, and creeks, and trees… and DH Lawrence lived up the hill.”

Part Two

Highway
64 toTaos…

My anticipation smoked from the back seat where I sat, listening to Rudy and John
in conversation, the kind that ripples like a stream, as Rudy evokes his fervor
for New Mexican history, the battles, and bravery, the legend of Billy the Kid,
and Geronimo. The summer scenery galloped past as we headed up the canyon
through Pilar, as bobbing rafters walloped the Rio Grande, as tourists snapped
photographs, as hitchhikers and wayward hobos staggered on the death trap
shoulder turn-outs… a sort of carnival that makes driving to Taos interrupt the
mundane repetition of asking myself questions I cannot answer: Why do I gamble?

“Turn left here, Rudy.”  We were on the last turn into the Writer’s
Retreat in San Cristobal.
It was virgin land, spindly wild flowers, unpaved roads, no-name streets, and
the three of us, searching for some sign of life.

“This is it,” Rudy climbed out of the car,
while John and I remained seated, unbelieving.

“Rudy, this isn’t it.” I shouted. He turned
around and on the edge of hysterics, and said, “Oh yes, it is.”

“LouLou, you threw the dice off the table
this time.” John’s laughter stunned the silence as we viewed the three attached
leaning log cabins, with barred windows, beat up furniture, and week old trash,
glaring back, as if to say, “Well, whatta you expect for $600.00 a week.”

John and Rudy went off in the direction of
the barn, and that was when I had the feeling we needed to get out fast before
the owners approached us with rifles or crack needles.

The
image of Rudy and John, poking in the field, exploring the barn, two men that
rescued and wrestled with pieces of my persona, were now joined. For most of
life, I went solo, everywhere. There
was in my mind the resolution I would remain unattached, out-of-love because
“love is more painful than lust,” a phrase I took out of this mornings NY book
review of “A Book of Secrets.”

I wandered into the multifarious pasture where
I was greeted with chickens, goats, and manure, and with a sudden rush of
urgency, I shouted: “Let’s get the hell out of here,” and dashed back to the
car. I could hear John and Rudy’s crackling laughter, and that solidified the
momentary disappointment that follows a lousy throw of the dice.

I followed my interior compass, that has been
known to deliver supreme surprises, and we ended up on Kit Carson Road, in a shower of sunshine,
and cotton balls drifting down like snowflakes.

“Turn there. Look Rudy, San Geronimo Lodge.
We made an offer on it, remember?’

“Wow,
I forgot about that one.”

“How
many places have you guys made offers on inTaos?” John asked.

In the course of remembering the different
times we lived in Taos, and the real estate agents, like Linda from Texas who
accused of us being charlatans, until our friend David kicked in and warned
her, “They’re morons, they’re not that smart,” we landed at the cross bridge to San Geronimo.

“Twelve. We forgot about the Martinezplace; the one I wanted to fix up
into polished efficiencies.” I said.

“What were you planning for the Lodge?”

“The Woodstock House, concerts in the field,
performances in the dining room, musician rooms. There was a grand piano in the
main Salon.”

The
Lodge was devotedly remodeled. The slimy green pool had turned Mediterranean blue, the grounds were riddled with pathways,
the mammoth lobby was now comfortably appointed with antiques, and the grand
piano, well, that was shut-down and used as a plant stand.

The owner, a rugged beauty with brimming
passion for her turf, showed us half a dozen rooms to choose from.

“You must have spent a fortune fixing it up.”
“You have no idea! What we were told
going in, wasn’t what we got.”

I left with resumed faith in my compass, and
knowing we made the right decision not buying San Geronimo.

Decisions about traveling, joining, meeting,
and moving, drop me in the path of mental collision. Instead of applying
academic analysis, calculations, or tried and true pragmatic reasoning, I try
to beat the odds, because I am a gambler.

John and I headed up to Taoswhile Rudy took refuge in a friend’s
casita. I suppose most vacation renal owners have alternate accommodations; but
this is a work-in-progress, like a play that doesn’t have an ending yet.

For the next six days, I wandered from the Geronimo
pool, to the terrace, to Taos on foot, and
during those hours, we rewrote the script in the privacy of our steadily silent
working room, or on the second story terrace, overlooking the fields and the Jemez Mountains.

When Rudy
called and said Mike, our renter, invited us to the reception party at the
house, I called Mike to decline. He turned me down.

“Loulou you have to come, everyone wants to
meet you.”  Everyone is a lot of people;
seventy-five guests inside the house when I am not the host stirred up my
imagination.

When we arrived, the reception party was
sprouting on the front porch, in the driveway around bistro tables, on the back
porch at a buffet table, and in the garden movie theater.

Suddenly, this face comes at me, up close: “Loulou,
I’m Mike. Come-in… What are you drinking? We love it! Come meet everyone.”  Mike has a light bulb personality, one
hundred and twenty volts of unplugged warmth and sincerity. I followed him into
the living room, and was immersed with questions and praise, at rapid
fire.  Within the hour I wilted and
tugged on John and Rudy to cross the street for dinner. “Why’d you leave?” Rudy
asked. He was eyeing a pretty blonde in the driveway.

“I don’t feel it’s right; presiding in our
house while it’s their house. I’m afraid I’ll start cleaning.”

I returned to the party when a vintage Galaxy
pulled into our driveway, and I was abandoned because John led Rudy over to see
the automobile.

By now, the party was surging and as I
recommenced my socializing the trepidation vanished. In every direction were
handshakes and hugs, conversations zigzagging from Mike’s family to Erin’s, the
bride and groom, and their friends, who came from Los Angeles.
But these were not just friends; they were neighbors.

“Neighbors inLos Angeles?” I jested.

“Oh yeah, we live in the Hollywood Hills. We
have parties every weekend. Are you THE Loulou?” I nodded. “I am THE Carlos,
and you must visit us inHollywood.”

“What
do you do Carlos?”

“Everything!
I sing, act, cook, and make trouble!” In every party there should be a Carlos.
The evening crescendo curled into a wave of anticipation when Carlos took
center stage and sang arias, from Turnadot and La Boehme. His bravura tenor
voice raised the guests from every cavity of the house. Strangers out strolling
stopped to listen and guests from La Posada spilled out in the streets.  The house was transformed, in some ways to
former visions of the artist salons I imagined and once held at Follies House.

There
were times over the last two years when Rudy and I discussed selling Gallery
LouLou, leasing it long term, and even renting rooms; options that occupied
sleepless nights, and never materialized. Now we know it is a vacation home, a
party house, a reception salon… all the things that I imagined came together
here, even Rudy and John.

Any dice to throw email: folliesls@aol.com

ARTIST

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

THE artist must catch every gust of wind, and use it with the velocity the wind does in moving the clouds forward.

JUMPING THE NEST

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

This nest, is something we build on our own to give us permission to explore, and then question. We go back to our little nest, and add a bit more certainty because the dinner was great, and the party lasted longer than we thought, and someone smiled at you in a special way, and then it rained.

Some thing happened last week; that chloroformed into a mirage, of the past persons I inhabited, use to manage and direct with more certainty only because I believed I had a lot of time,,, endless time.