A Crime Scene

I just got back from Seattle. I've been running scenes from Antonioni's Zabriskie Point through my head. I just watched Alice in Wonderland. My dates are incorrect, but I started with these impressions. A couple of days ago, I was in the Hyatt for a pre-wedding, so I have the HYATT on the brain. This is just your typical crime-scene, minus the details. This character, JANE, doesn't know shit. She has a terrible memory (like me) and she's pretty absent-minded (like me). Does that make this auto-biographical? I doubt it, unless it somehow plays out in my future. I give homage to the local bars (SF) The Attic and The Phone-book in this sketch. Hope you enjoy it, although its pretty slippery. It's hot off the press, something that I just rambled about, without a particular direction in mind.

There was an explosion. It was 1982 in Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland and Alice fell down a rabbit hole. The many commodities flying about looked just like the tornado in the scene of Dorothy spinning about with her house, her bed, and her little dog, too from 1954 in the Wizard of Oz. There was an explosion. It was 1972 and the house on the desert hill blew to smithereens to the soundtrack of Pink Floyd wailing on guitars and we watched, just like Daria, as the Wonderbread blew out of the refrigerator and different bits and pieces flew apart for different rooms of the house. Everything floated, mid-air once again, except for the girl, who was only day-dreaming. Day-dreams, sleep-induced fevers of explosions that send the commodities of the house spinning about, and giving three girls a few moments of uncontrolled, utter freedom. Here's my applause for the day-dreams of Daria, Dorothy, and Alice.

I'm sitting in a hotel room. It is not mine, I'm just visiting. The clock on the night-stand has large, legible numbers that read 4:50 am. I am not sober and neither is he. I suppose he has a perfectly suitable name, but I can't remember what it is. For the last hour I've been calling him Jim. He arrived at 1:37 am to the last bar I was at, having just arrived from Washington D.C. and he promptly invited me, Jones, and Parker here to watch TV. We are all watching info-mercials. He is not tired, Jones is not tired, Parker is not tired, because they are all on east-coast time. I am on west-coast time and I am barely able to keep my eyes open, although I'm discovering new nuances to the way the 1-800 number flashes before my eyes, just before putting the mechanics of the self-cleaning kitty-litter box into simple terms, EZ terms, so that I will want to BUY it. The lights go out.

This is the HYATT, Jim says. This is the HYATT, this should not be happening. They should have back-up GENERATORS for the LIGHTS.

Now worries, Parker says. I've got a light. He reveals a long-handled flash-light.

Now where did you get that light? I ask, baffled.

I'm a cop, Parker says.

No shit? I ask.

Not a shit in the toilet. Parker says.

Jones and Jim thank Parker for the light, before each finding subtle excuses to use the bathroom. Jim mysteriously grabs something, a thing that I was not previously aware of, from his duffle bag and he retreats to the bathroom. We hear several flushes. Jones goes in next. We hear several more flushes.

What's going on BOYS. Asks Parker.

What's going on, I wonder. I don't want to know. I've got to go. I say, sheepishly.

You're not going anywhere, Parker says. You're a witness.

A witness to what? I ask.

You heard them flushing, he says.

I am not a witness. I say. I do not choose to be a witness. Joe and Jones are looking at me suspiciously. I want the lights to go back on. I want to SEE the situation unfold before me. I want to KNOW what's going on. I've lost control.

Jones pulls out a gun. Jones fires a shot, aiming at Parker. The window is shatter-proof, but soon, its like the sky is falling.

I'm on west-coast time, I say. I've got to get going.

You're not going anywhere, Jones says, grabbing me and tying my wrists together behind my back.

The lights turn back on. I fall to sleep. In the morning I'm signing papers. There is no evidence except for my evidence and five new police officers are piecing together my 'story'. I don't have a story, I say. They look at me with stern faces. You don't have a story? They ask. No. I say. I don't have a story.

They want me to tell a story. So I begin. I was at the bar. I was at the Attic. WAIT. They say. What Attic? The bar, I say. It's called the Attic. Then I went to the Phone-booth, I say. Who did you call, they ask. I didn't call anyone, I say. Its another bar, I say. Go back, they say. No, its really quite simple. Two bars. I went to two bars. One is called the Attic and the other is called the Phonebooth. Then I went to the bathroom. I said. Is that another bar? the Jackass police asks me. No! I say. I had to 'releive' myself. My bladder was full, I said. Alright, let's cut to the chase, one of the men says. When did you go to the HYATT.

I don't remember. I say. It was sometime between 1:37 and 4:50am.
Go back, they say. What happened at 1:37?
I went to the bathroom. I said. And then suddenly you were in the HYATT? One of them asks, chewing gum. And boy, he's chewing. He's got quite a jaw.

No. I say. There was a brief explosion. I went into a dream. It was like a daydream. It looked a lot like a bunch of other explosions involving innocent women, life-chancing explosions, surreal explosions. It was like I was in a movie. And then all of a sudden, I was stuck on the end of the bed, next to Jones, Parker and Jim. We were watching infomercials.

So how did you get THIS in your pocket? One of them asks, holding up a plastic baggy. It's holding a gun. That's not mine. I say. That's Parker's.

Listen, they say. This is EVIDENCE. And furthermore, we don't have a Jones, we don't have a Jim, and we don't have a Parker. We have YOU. A Jane. Now, we found you on the railing, holding this in your pocket. You were tied to the railing. We need to know what happened, because as far as we can tell, it was something IMPORTANT.

Sure, sure. I say. It was probably important. I hear Pink Floyd in the distance. They were probably important, too. I see road-signs to Death Valley outside the window. Is this VEGAS, or what?

Running in the Family

The following mix of thoughts and visions and images was inspired by Michael Ondaatje's book "Running in the Family". I've started using things I'm reading to inspire writing excercises. The following written material is basically an excercise to re-invoke the past. To see the more essay-like impression I had of Michael Ondaatje's work, go here.

There is a file in my drawer that I haven't looked at since last year. I've been holding off. I don't know how to approach family history. I come from Sweden, Ireland, Scotland, Bavaria, and Croatia. How can I try to understand those pages that describe my lineage, linking me, this piecemeal American to those distant parts. I can still recall the brittle dried out thistles, feel them scraping on dry skin in the summer and smell the grit of dust that would rise up from our driveway when my dad raced his pick-up home after a long day of work. Inside, he'd unhinge his feet from his work-boots and strip off his faded blue jeans to go wash off engine grease from his hands in the downstairs sink before stepping into the shower. I could hear him blow his nose, even through the sound of running water, from the kitchen. The summer in Spokane has always been both maddening in its boredom and glorious for its piercing hot days and warm nights that enable you to scavenge through the woods for ghosts in the shadows. In the summer, one always knows that hidden stickers might cling to your toes in the grass if you step too absent-mindedly with bare-feet, stabbing pain into the nerves like a hidden insult. I remember waking up so early one morning at 4:30am. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't yet play the piano because I would wake up my parents. I decided to go watch the sunrise through the pine trees in the front of my house, sitting on the cool cement walkway. The colors of the sky in Spokane are crystal tones that cut like razors over your eyes. The light there flares so crisp it haunts.

But I only remember in faded colors. Distant as fog makes things seem. I only remember through gauze. With each new memory, a thin sheath of gauze rolls across the others, placing them back, back into a hall of mummified imagery, sounds, smells, and the numb feelings that belong to them. The things my mom used to say that would make me angry have shriveled into dead corpses wrapped under layers and layers. To say she was and/or is that way limits her, makes her real, makes her true, and bred of nightmares. Give us the stock footage of natural disasters, and we'll make mummies out of them. But with the colors, the vivid colors, I long to lift the veils. All of them. Spin the reel.

I tried to paint my Dad's Cessna 210 in Arizona. The crinkle of the red-rock in the background looks like toothpaste plastered onto papier mache. I'm no Michaelangelo. And regardless of how juvenile my painting appears, I know what it is and for whatever reason, it lifts something up from the recess. Dad, the pilot, the man who rarely failed to remember about testing for water in the gas and yelling "CLEAR PROP," or filling up the cabin with the smell of lysol, from cleaning both the inside and outside of the wind-shield. Up we went. Lifted out of Newman Lake, Washington, out of the Spokane Valley following South along the Snake River towards Boise, eventually Reno, then Las Vegas, Death Valley, and at last, Arizona. The houses were mere pebbles from so high up. Scabs on a cross-section of divvied up land. I would count the pools and dream of which house I would live in some day, or pick which house in each of the neighborhoods was my favorite. I'd point out the biggest, most ornate buildings to anyone of my family members who would listen, usually this was Grandma, although she was hard of hearing. And the noise of the prop often blotted out any communication anyway. We learned to thrust our voices over and beyond the decibel threshold of the engine and make our thoughts heard, our needs met. Powerbars. Mom brought bulk Costco-boxes of Powerbars and when the hunger crept up, itching out of the noise, it was met with the grainy, chewy, pasty texture of a Powerbar. This kept me awake enough to read and at that time, I was reading about Oz. Without knowing that all of my memories of those airplane rides would one day be jumbled together, thrown into a pile and shaken, scattered, rearranged, and blurred. My future is often turbulent, and I have no safety switch for my memories, to smooth the transitions, hold them in clear precision.

Thanks to my sister, my precision is not necessary. She re-writes history to her own liking. Because she articulates set of facts, figures, dates and names with more conviction than me.