The Blog

Molly the Cat was sitting motionless on the back stoop.

She’s the first cat I’ve ever had, having grown up more of a dog person, so she is teaching me all about cats. One of the things I’ve learned is that cats often sit motionless for long periods of time. When they are not sleeping, I think they are trying to demonstrate what they might look like stuffed. Most of the time, they’re sleeping.

But I am standing quietly behind her, in the kitchen, watching her through the screen door, when I detect a slight variation in her stance. Her body tenses slightly, her ears swivel toward a certain point in the backyard and her feet gather up under her as she slowly lowers herself into a crouch. Her back legs tense and flex a few times. I am about to learn something new, firsthand…

I know a girl, her name is Kristin. She’ll never see this, so I am using her real name. She is a beautiful child, just eighteen years old, or maybe seventeen, a fresh, vibrant new bloom. She is my niece’s best friend, has been for a decade. They are rarely apart. They might as well be sisters, for all the sleepovers they have had at each others’ homes. They have studied together, played together, caroused around Southern California together, and I have no doubt have drunk together and started to learn about boys together. Last week, just last week, they graduated from high school together. They rigged it so they could walk together in the procession, and then they partied together until dawn.

As long as I have known Kristin, she has lived alone with her mother, in an apartment, just the two of them. I talked to her mom twice. Once on the phone when I took the girls to Disneyland (naturally I had to be checked out), and once when I found an unrecognized phone number programmed into my cell phone. It was hers, and we spoke for a minute, not knowing each other. She figured out who I was first, before I could solve the puzzle, so I thought she must be pretty smart.

I missed the graduation ceremony myself, and I still had not met Kristin’s mom when I made a little photo slide show of the affair, using what was on the memory card of someone’s digital camera. One shot that I included was of the two graduates just after the ceremony, posing in their caps and gowns, holding their bouquets and flanked by their two proud mothers. Smiles of pride, joy, relief and mischief. Just a week ago.

Kristin’s mom was a waitress, so it can’t have been easy to get the kid through high school, and who knows what might come next? We sometimes think we know, but we don’t, really. Last night, coming home from work sometime after midnight, her car was struck by another, and she was killed.

She was two blocks from the apartment, making the last left turn. The other car rammed hers broadside and pushed it at least a hundred feet down the street, into a tree, where it stopped and caught fire. It must have been all over in a matter of seconds, and the other driver fled.

There are some older sisters, but they have been out of the nest for a long time. So Kristin won’t be completely alone. Just more alone than she has ever been. I try to think how I would handle this myself, at her age, and my mind just won’t look at it. We think we know, but we don’t, really.

It happens so fast I hardly believe it. Molly the Cat rockets off the back stoop, and in about a second she is at the cinderblock wall at the distant end of the yard, 60 feet away. She looks into the bougainvillea there for another second, then stands on her hind legs and bats something from a branch to the ground, floomp. There is the momentary peeping and shrieking of the baby mockingbird, and then Molly the Cat is running, bird in her mouth, into my kitchen. In those ten seconds, she has brought mindless, meaningless, inexplicable death, but she has done nothing wrong, nothing I can punish her for, and she is confused at my raised voice.

We think we know, but we don’t, really.

Jesus X. Fucking Christ in a gypsy cab, I am tired tonight.

Last week I drove to The University of California at Santa Cruz for the graduation ceremony of my goddaughter. If you’ve only heard about godfathers in reference to Mafia bosses, be advised that a godparent is supposed to be responsible for the spiritual upbringing of the child if something happens to the bioparents. Due to a warp in the time-space continuum, I was picked to be a godfather twenty-four years ago. Luckily, nothing happened to the girl’s parents, or else by now she would probably be a Hong Kong call girl. Regular readers will know that I am a deeply spiritual person, but during her formative years I was, shall we say, otherwise occupied.

The girl grew up to be a pretty good young woman, but I was never convinced that she would graduate from college. Frankly, I didn’t think she wanted to. A few years after I myself finished college I had a lot of friends who were still attending. Most of them never accomplished enough to trigger a graduation ceremony, and some of them are taking classes to this day, with no graduation in sight.

I thought that would be the path my goddaughter would take. I mean, when she traveled to Spain to study, it was only a matter of weeks before she moved out of the safe boarding house arranged by the university and into god knows what dive. Then she stopped going to classes, and instead joined an itinerant street theater troupe. When I got the news that she had broken her arm falling off the table she was dancing on in a Madrid bar, I was pretty sure I’d never be attending a graduation, and, spiritual guru that I am, I became one with that.

When she returned to the U.S. and enrolled at Santa Cruz, the Hippie Campus, I still felt I had nothing to worry about. I mean, the school mascot is the banana slug. Need I say more?

But life has its twists and turns, and eventually she found a calling and not only earned a degree, but with honors, and a job offer to boot. And the whole procedure took less than seven years, which is less time than my friend Mike took to pass English 1A. (Note: I am jealous, because I am still looking for my first job offer related in any way to my major, which was Semantics.).

Since it costs the same to fly to Santa Cruz from L.A. as it does to charter a jet to Antarctica, I decided to drive up there for the big weekend. So I had a nine-hour drive the Friday before last, including three hours of traffic jams in the middle of fucking nowhere, which is what central California looks like. I don’t know why there would be traffic jams when we were so far away from anything that we could see the curvature of the earth, but there you go.

To add to the fun, all the rooms in Santa Cruz and environs were booked, so I had to be smuggled into someone else’s motel room for the weekend. The last time this kind of pajama party/sleepover was actually fun was Cub Scouts. But I was 35 then, and a lot of things were more fun in those days.

The town was alive with freethinking and strong coffee, and I got very little sleep, except during the graduation ceremony itself. Governor Schwarznegger, our answer to Jesse Ventura, did not speak at this affair, which took place in an open meadow, so the quiet drone of the various valedictorians and faculty members combined with the hot sun and a lazy breeze to create the perfect nap time, and I nearly fell off my folding chair three times.

Following the ceremony there was a forced march several miles up a steep hill to some sort of quad, where we attended a reception, which, I think, was mainly a chance for our rather large group to get separated from one another over and over as we kept telling ourselves that we were leaving as soon as Uncle Jack (or cousin Mildred) came out of the bathroom, or got back from the food concession, or had their picture taken in one previously untried permutation of relatives, graduate and friends.

When we finally overcame this inertia and got the hell out of there, we had to wait for a shuttle bus to take us back to the parking structure concealed some miles away in the redwoods. When the bus arrived, there were too many people at the bus stop, but we all got on anyway, and the little tram got as crowded as a municipal bus in Baja. I must compliment the manners of the students who were on that tram, however. One of them actually stood to let me have his seat, although it is possible that he was influenced by my Crazy-Eyed Killer stare. Still, he got out of my way, and that’s what counts.

Then there was a drive to another small town nearby, a dinner at an Italian restaurant with heavily accented waiters (no Mafia bosses, though), several toasts, a session of gift-opening, a great deal of earnest after-dinner conversation and a drive back to Santa Cruz where I was re-smuggled into the room for a refreshing four hours of sleep before getting back on the road for Southern California.

You’d think that sitting in a comfortable car seat for eight hours would be easy and restful, but there is nothing like hurtling down a freeway in a vibrating steel box at ninety miles per hour, a hideous death only seconds away if you lose your concentration at any time. There is nothing like that to get you all stressed out and fatigued, which is what I was by the time I got home on Sunday night (the Sunday before last).

It was a wonderful weekend with great sights, the electric buzz of young brains and a pretty coed who wanted to discuss Linguistics with me, and I can have no complaints, but jeez, the driving and the eating and the speeches and the not sleeping, well, it wore me out. And I was only halfway through the graduation festivities. The following week (this past week) I had another graduation, this one right here in my town, with me acting as the host for out-of-towners and throwing a party for the graduate and her rowdy teenage homies.

But I see that I have been typing so long now that probably no one is still reading, so I will just say that I have survived two graduations in a row, I am thoroughly burned out, and I am thankful that I have no dad and I am not myself a dad, or else I would have had a Father’s Day thing added on. Luckily I started back to work today, so I will be getting some much-needed rest there.

As always, my heart overflows with tender joy and bittersweet affection.

Remember, tomorrow is the first day of Summer, so the deadline for the revision99 Protest Song UnContest looms. You still have time to submit lyrics and song ideas to vent your rage against The Establishment (or whatever pisses you off). Details can be found here and here.

Will you dance for me, if I play the music just right for you?

I must have forgotten how you liked it, the music. Before I saw you, before you had me, it must have been nearly perfect, else how could you have been drawn to it? That summer I made the patterns, and the rhythms. It was a trance, those hot nights, and I was in it.

You danced for me then. How did you do that thing, that look where you are shy and suggestive at the same time, innocent and nasty? All the gyrations and shimmies, the little halter, the bare brown skin, but it was that look that took me. Later you said you were a belly dancer, and maybe you were, but you would never give me a private show. You said it was too nasty. Only tramps do that, or a woman for her husband. It was the only thing you wouldn’t do, and it became the only thing I wanted.

That first night you gave me your phone number, and I had it in my pocket for months, and I still can’t say why I didn’t call. I waited until it was too late, the moment was long past, the scribbled note a dead leaf in my jacket pocket, flaked and crumbled. I could squint and read the number, but you were gone from me, and, to be honest, I was afraid, the way I am when it matters.

You wouldn’t remember me. You’d found a boyfriend. You didn’t want me to call. The number you gave me was fake, a way of getting rid of me.

How many times in these reminiscences can I get away with saying I was young and stupid? I think I’m pretty smart, but when did that begin? Surely sometime after you happened, precious dancer. I was young, but you were younger, and wiser. The second time I saw you dancing, I couldn’t believe my luck. But it wasn’t luck at all, was it, sweetheart? You simply came back and got me. Sent your girlfriend home with the car and told me I had to drive you, somewhere way the hell down Mulholland Highway, out into the Valley.

I made the music. You made the magic. I can see your storm of black hair flying as you spun, later spreading on the sheet. It wasn’t rock’n’roll sex, there was no cocaine or absinthe, no leather. You were kind of new at it, but you gave yourself so sweetly that I almost cried, and you really did cry, and we tried it many times that night, and many nights that summer.

The whole thing collapsed of course. My fault. Young and stupid. Your mother may have been right: if you pursue, you are a tramp. A piece of ass. Sorry, babe. I am so, so sorry.

I’d give anything if you would dance for me, one last time.

We are powerful and brave.

We are angry, afraid and greedy. We always want more than we have. We are ingenious.

We have invented so many superb ways to show our strength, to assuage our fear, to give vent to our anger, to take what we want.

We will hit you with rocks. We will maim you with our sword and our battleaxe. We will blow holes in your soft flesh with our blunderbus, our musket, our carbine, our pistol, our machine gun, and the life will drain from your mortal body, while we take what we want from you, your family, your home.

We will blow up your buildings, your public places, your railroad tracks, your factories, your electrical generating facilities, your airports, your roads, the very houses you dwell in.

We will organize ourselves into huge armies, and these armies will be the grandest achievements, hundreds of thousands of us in uniforms, training, planning, arming. We will tell ourselves, and you, that we only want to protect ourselves. But in our fear, our anger, our greed and our hatred, we will move to dominate you, to subjugate you, to take your treasures.

Failing that, we will kill you. We will take you in our hands and we will blacken your mind, stop your heart, wring the blood out of you, and all your kind. We will scorch the earth you live on. It is within our power. It is within our hearts.

No one of us can remember when this started. We have always done this, even before we invented our excellent weapons. Every day we teach our children to be ready for this. The marching, the taking, the killing. We do this to our children.

There is no place on earth left to hide.

This is my memorial to all of them who died. To all who killed. To all who are dying and killing even right now, as I think these thoughts. I weep for you and myself, and all who will come after us to continue the carnage. Bring glory on us. Bring your wrath and your fire. Bring peace through devastation. Bring it to every town, to every street, to every home, and we shall have peace, and our heroes at last may rest.
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Joe Frank has made an eloquent audio statement on this subject.
You can listen to it by clicking here.