Walking to work, sometimes I see the cold scowls on stranger's faces, and wonder what could make people so pained, sealed off, so bitter... until I catch my reflection in a shop window, and I'm wearing the same frown.

♦ ♦ ♦

A beggar at Shattuck Street was hoping for kindness. Usually I'm fresh out, but when my luck turns I'll be homeless myself, so I try not to be rude. Usually.

Depending on my mood and the particular panhandler and what's in my wallet, depending on the weather and my recurring jock itch, sometimes I'll hand over a dime or a dollar. Lately, though, I've been poor enough to have no concept of "spare change."

This guy was slouched against a building, and he'd left his tin can in the middle of the sidewalk. Hey, bub, I was thinking, don't make me step over or around your tin can. I stepped around it, though, and noticed the cardboard sign at his feet: "Six kids, no job, please help."

Reading it made me reconsider my coldheartedness. Here was someone I could help. I reached for my wallet, opened it, watched his eyes widen with anticipation, and dropped a condom into his can.

♦ ♦ ♦

It was a dull day selling fish. Newcomers to the zine might not know, but I'll do anything legal for $5 an hour. My steady gig most days is selling sacrilegious fish on Telegraph Ave.

I'm not a natural at sales or customer relations. Most people on this planet bore me, and the few who don't anger me.

I'd be a better fit for a graveyard shift at some factory, working alone, mopping the floors, instead of smiling at strangers and pretending to laugh at the same stupid fish jokes I've heard and told a thousand times. Or snapping back at the next Christian who's offended that Jesus isn't all over all our fish.

It's a living, though, and today there weren't many customers I wanted to punch. Oh, and the city inspectors never came by, so nobody cited or scolded me for having a magnet display that's a foot and a half taller than regulations allow, or for taking the contraband Darwin fish out of my backpack and putting them back on display. Oh, I was quite the rebel.

♦ ♦ ♦

Each day has its annoyances, though, and today I worked next to Very Abdul, the Avenue's most Muslim vendor. He's cordial, he smiles, he watches my booth when I gotta pee, so what's my complaint? He's completely serious and devoutly religious about everything, from the sandals and socks he sells to whatever comes up in conversation with his customers.

And I mean, whatever comes up.

A customer mentioned the tarot card reader down the street, and Very Abdul announced, "I disapprove of tarot sellers on the Avenue. Some are sincere, some are fakers, but all are dabbling in witchcraft, and witchcraft is real. Even the fakers could stumble onto some powerful evil."

"Dogs are filthy animals," said Very Abdul to someone else. "They play in their own feces, eat their own vomit, mate in the street. They have no shame. Ah, but a cat understands the difference between right and wrong. A cat defecates in private, mates in private. Cats have dignity." Sorry, I didn't hear whatever a customer might've said to trigger that response.

And "What these street urchins need is discipline in their lives, something to respect. They need rules and limits. They must be harshly punished when they go beyond the bounds. The first rule should be, no, you cannot live on the streets."

Saddest was when his wife and daughter brought him lunch. They were both wearing what looked like ten pounds of robes and wraps, covering everything but their shoes and a narrow slit for their eyes. And he spoke to them like they were staff.

They were soon gone, and Very Abdul returned to selling and editorializing. He judged whether various products sold in stores are moral or immoral — Playboy, toy knives and guns, candy bars and non-fat milk are all immoral, and I was eavesdropping carefully but didn't hear of anything he considered moral for sale anywhere.

It's my opinion that Very Abdul is very full of shit. Seeing every moment as another decision between right and wrong, with immorality all around us, is a waste of your life. I didn't say that to Very Abdul, though.

The first time we worked near each other, I tried to engage him with my politely contrary opinions. It was futile and frustrating. Smiling but stern, Very Abdul knows what's right, what's wrong, and knows that you're wrong.

It's wiser, I've decided, and better for my own mental health, to let him babble at others all day, rather than saying something, which only gets him babbling at me.

♦ ♦ ♦

Maybe it was obvious that I needed some cheering up after work. Judith and Jake invited me and Corby, their houseguest, to see Babe. We'd heard it was good, and it was good.

A pig dreams of being a sheepdog. It's a kids' movie, but it's inventive and imaginative, warm-hearted and funny, beautifully filmed.

Judith bought the tickets and popcorn, and I don't know when I've had a better time watching a G-rated movie in one of the tiny box auditoriums inside the slimy, sticky, decrepit UA Theater in downtown Berkeley.

Breakfasted with Corby at Aunt Agnes's, and then he was gone.

Great guy, more than a little out of his mind. He's crazy about guns, and I'm not, and I might be wrong but I detect hints that he's a Republican. And yet, he accepts me and I'm mostly comfortable around him. There aren't many people I'm comfortable around, so of course he lives hundreds of miles away.

♦ ♦ ♦

Busing to my maildrop after work, I spotted the San Francisco twins. Probably there's more than one set of twins in San Francisco, but these two old ladies are iconic.

They dress alike every day of their lives, and walk the streets of the city making people's heads turn. They're such familiar sights that they've done commercial endorsements, so they're certified celebrities around here, just because they look like each other and wear matching funky fifties outfits.

I don't even know their names. Probably they're two nice old ladies, but all I can think is Christ, talk about pathetic lives. It might have been cute when they were six or seven years old, but they're sixty or seventy. Don't most twins outgrow the desire to always be a matched set?

Maybe they're very happy and I'm the one who's full of shit, but I just don't understand it. Do the twins even have lives, apart from each other? Do they live together, eat three meals a day together?

I'm abnormal and I know it, but alone is when I'm most me. They're never alone, so when do they get to be who they are?

♦ ♦ ♦

Pathetic Life got a glowing notice in the latest issue of Interview, but they got my address wrong, so I was pretty sure that if anyone read the magazine and wanted to see my zine, they wouldn't be able to reach me.

The United States Postal Service, though, almost always comes through. There's no such place as 534 Jones Street, but the mailman keeps scribbling it out and writing '537' instead, and that's me so the mail goes through. A dozen times so far, on a dozen envelopes, he's corrected my address.

I'm impressed. No USPS jokes from me, and I've sent a letter of thanks to the Postmaster, 94102.

♦ ♦ ♦

One of the letters the mailman corrected is from Little, Brown, and Company, a big publishing house. It compliments me on the excerpts in Interview, doesn't ask for a free copy but instead inquires how to subscribe, and invites me to contact Little Brown if I want to write a book.

Signed, Jacquie Miller, but it doesn't say what she does there. Maybe she's an editor. Maybe she's a janitor.

Hmmm. I don't know if I could write a book, or if I'd want to, but I'm skeptical. I don't think my writing would measure up to big time standards. I tell too many piss and fart stories, make too many snide political comments, and if they stripped those away I don't know what would be left. There's no happy ending in me, for sure.

But they pay writers, don't they? For enough money (which wouldn't be much) maybe I could knock all the 'me' out of what I write. I could make this 'Doug Holland' character much thinner, with better teeth and better hair, a girlfriend and a good job, and send him on a secret spy mission or some stupid shit like that.

My doubts could fill this room and drip out the window. What the hell, though.

I sent Ms Miller a copy of the zine, with a note accusing her of being a gag. It wasn't even a nice note, so even if she doesn't hate the zine she'll probably hate me.

In order to remain a failure, one must ever be on the defensive against any possible success.

Once again, since I wasn't working today, I should've been putting up "I'll do anything" flyers. And once again, that's not what I did. Didn't feel like it.

Turned on the radio instead, because it had been pre-announced that OJ Simpson's verdict would be announced at 10:00. They had to pre-announce the announcement, because there's no telling whether 'guilty' or 'not guilty' has a greater potential for riots.

Had to tune to NPR for live coverage, because a satellite uplink requires big bucks that Free Radio Berkeley doesn't have. As I listened, someone said "Not guilty" twice, and then in the press conference afterwards, the father of one of the victims bawled into a microphone that the verdict doesn't represent justice

Condolences, Daddy-O, seriously. Death is the most fucked-up part of living, and murder is the worst way to go.

Everybody has an opinion on OJ, so here's mine, as someone who paid scant attention to the trial: Maybe he did it, maybe he didn't. The press seems to believe he did, so I tend to believe he didn't. But I didn't sit in the courtroom for months and months, hearing the testimony and looking at the evidence. The jury did, so I'll take their word for it.

More generally, nobody should expect justice in an American courtroom.

♦ ♦ ♦

Snagged a newspaper from the recycling bin at the BART station, and enjoyed the sports section more than the news. Says here, the Seattle Mariners won the AL West with a tie-breaker victory over the Angels.

I don't go to many ball games any more, but used to be a steady customer. From the cheap seats in Seattle's cheap stadium I saw the Mariners lose hundreds of games. Reading that they finally won a big one, with stick-man Randy Johnson defeating that whiney prima donna Mark Langston, made a good morning even better.

♦ ♦ ♦

There are five of us living in this house, along with three cats and a dog. I'm not sure who owns Elton, the black and white cat. I asked Judith once; she's not sure either. She belongs to the house, I guess, but she seems to think she belongs to me.

She sits on my shoulder while I'm typing, sleeps nestled in my lap, and for the past month or so, since we became friends, Elton has been sleeping in my room most nights. We're having a trial separation, though, until I buy her a flea collar and bugbomb this room.

The fleas are everywhere in here, but they're especially in the bed. They tickle, crawling up my arm or in my hair, and they're hungry. I've been itchy and scratchy for days, but somehow hadn't seen any fleas until tonight. Suddenly, little sores and itches are up and down my legs, all over my back and belly, and a flea walked across my keyboard a paragraph ago.

Out, cat.

Today at the Elmwood Theater in Berkeley, I saw a big, loud, vaguely historical action movie — Braveheart.

It's almost three hours long, and doesn't get half-interesting until it's half over, but eventually it's OK. Between the slow-motion decapitations and numerous bloody battles, maybe there's even a message behind the mess, but it's bogus.

"Inspired by" the story of 13th-century Scottish leader William Wallace, Aussie actor Mel Gibson stars and directed. In the movie, Gibson as Wallace talks often about freedom, and says he isn't fighting against England or for Scotland, for or against any king, so much as he's fighting for the noble concept of freedom.

If it's true it's beautiful, but is it true? Sometimes people fight for freedom, but that's rare. Even in wars allegedly fought for 'freedom', people are fighting because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, or more fundamentally, because their commanding officer ordered them to kill people wearing the other uniform.

My dad was in the Army in World War II, after lying about his age because he was too young to enlist. I once asked him why he did it, hoping to hear a patriotic answer. "I wanted to be part of something big and exciting," was the gist of his reply.

Gibson as Wallace shouts "Freedom!" in the movie, and sounds like he believes it, but he's a good actor. He could deliver the line "Fresh croissants drip out of my ass," and it would sound like he believes it.

I don't believe anyone involved believes it, and I don't think freedom is even the takeaway message. No, it's a movie for my dad, and the point of it is being part of something big and exciting.

Braveheart was made by Paramount Pictures, "a Viacom company," brags the logo as the movie starts. It's from the cable conglomerate that says "Your call is important to us," and keeps you waiting half an hour to talk to someone who can't help you, and doesn't want to. Viacom also owns Blockbuster Video, your best-selling source for films with any 'inappropriate' bits snipped out.

Viacom is about making money. They don't make movies unless they smell the green, so Braveheart is big and exciting, and it's about profits, but it's not about freedom.

My idea of freedom is less big, less exciting, and has fewer bloody battle scenes.

Freedom is being left alone to do what you choose to do. That's all.

If you need a license to go fishing, you're not free. If you can be arrested for smoking dope, you're not free. If you have to pretend you're straight or your boss will fire you, you're not free. If lack of money means you're barred from seeing a doctor when you need one, you're not free.

Americans have more freedoms than people in some other countries, yes, and for most Americans that's enough. They'll pledge allegiance, and if you won't say the pledge or stand for the anthem they'll smack you in the head, because most Americans don't know what freedom is.

Freedom means the least possible interference in what you choose to do — basically no interference at all, unless you're hurting someone who isn't you.

And for all the fireworks on the Fourth of July, nobody's truly free, not even in America — unless they're rich, of course. And nobody who's rich, nobody who's in power, wants other people to be free.

If people were truly free, there'd be no billionaires, cocaine would be stocked in vending machines, doctors would make tax-funded house calls, and coffee would still cost a nickel.

I like freedom, wish we had more of it, and I am mostly serious about everything I've written today. And seriously, I wish I'd written it better, but what the hell, I'm tired of trying to make it make sense, and I've sorta said what I wanted to say.

It'll earn half a dozen angry letters and a few canceled subscriptions when this goes into the mail, but that's freedom too. You're free to disagree with me, and also free to go fuck yourself.

There's no winter to speak of here — Berkeley, California, a few miles from San Francisco. Summer can last until spring, and it's 82° this afternoon. Which isn't all that hot, but being fat is like wearing a heavy jacket you can't take off. Try wearing your winter jacket when it's 80+ out.

It's so hot, all I want to do is lie naked atop the blankets, fan blowing full blast to imitate fresh air, my legs flopped open wide so maybe the thick sweat under my balls will evaporate before it ripens into an itchy rash.

Ah, too late. I can feel the rash already, or is that another flea bite?

The only energy I mustered all day wasn't much. Got dressed in yesterday's clothes, walked to a hardware store, and bought a bug bomb for the fleas living in my room.

Back home I doublechecked to make sure the cat wasn't under the bed, then set off the fog and fumes and walked to the BART station. That's the only air conditioned space where I'm allowed to loiter.

Rode the train to Richmond, then Daly City, then Concord to Daly City again, Richmond a second time, and then home, in cool comfort all the way, reading zines and napping.

Got off at the same station where I'd gotten on, but for some stupid reason that's the most expensive ride on BART. Ah, but if you jump the gate, there's no charge. Who says there's no such thing as a free ride?

Now I'm at home, sleeping in the guest room, hoping the fleas are busy dying in my room. And it's still too hot.

There are worse jobs than selling fish — hell, I worked at McDonald's, where the bun toaster and fry scoop are essential but every employee is replaceable. I worked at Macy's, where they told us the data was vitally important, but the paperwork was usually illegible. I worked at a car dealership, and saw the bottom line on every sale, where customers thought they'd negotiated a great deal, but the dealership almost always came out thousands of dollars ahead.

Working at the car dealership actually bothered my conscience. All the other jobs only bothered my soul and my sanity.

As for selling fish, I like the part of the job where I'm selling fish. Everything else about it blows, though. I hate getting up when an alarm clock says so, hate getting dressed and wearing deodorant, hate the long walk to Telegraph, hate unpacking and setting up the fish stand, hate talking with most of the other vendors and almost all the customers, hate hearing and making the same small talk every day, hate the Christians who freak out at the fish, hate the city schmucks who inspect the fish, on and on. There's so much to hate, but that's the way it is with any job.

I'm selling fish three days a week, five hours a day, so it's only part-time work. On Mondays, I sweep and shred and answer the phones at the smut magazine. Occasionally there's one-day work generated off my "I'll do anything" flyers, so in a good week I'm working 25-30 hours, earning enough to pay the rent and keep me fat — but not enough to save up for the planned move to New York City.

Tuesday is my next day off, and I've really got to spend it tacking and pasting up more work-wanted posters… but that's what I said to myself last Tuesday, and the Tuesday before. I'm a responsible adult when someone's paying me to do a job, but in real life I'm a lazy layabout who always puts off doing whatever needs to be done.

For example, there's a package of hot dogs in the fridge, and they're my hot dogs, but it's been a month and a half since opening the package and now they're the wrong color and I'll never eat them, and every time I see them in the fridge I think I ought to toss 'em in the trash, but my hands are usually full, so they'll stay there until they're purple and hairy.

I'll put up more work-wanted flyers when I'm purple and hairy.

♦ ♦ ♦

Today was a typical day selling fish. Let's see what I remember of it, as if any of it's worth remembering, worth typing up…

Some old man started giving me guff, telling me the fish are "taunting Jesus," but I didn't even respond. Simply sat in my chair, looking him in the eye and pointedly picking my nose until he got sick of the view and left.

There were pretty women on the Avenue. Always, there are pretty women on the Avenue, but today none of them were Andrea.

Wrenched my back trying to fold up the table at the end of the day, and it still hurts. Ouch, but not Ouch! I've taken two pills so I'm hoping the pain subsides overnight.

Special thanks to Hollie in Toronto, who's been trading this zine for Tylenol with codeine — stupidly illegal without a prescription here, but legal in Canada. Definitely my painkiller of choice, and also a good sleeping pill.

Thought I'd listen on the radio to hear the Mariners lose their playoff game and be eliminated. I'd rather they win, but losing is the habitual expectation for anyone who's ever followed the team. "Going to a Mariners game" is just another way to say "Watching the M's lose," and it's the same listening on the radio.

It was different tonight, though, because the game was only being broadcast in Spanish. The only Spanish I know is abierto and burrito.

The game was still the game, though, and maybe even better in a foreign language. The banter in the booth and inane commercials were unintelligible to me. A few of the players' names jumped out of the play-by-play, a foul is still a foul, and the crowd noise told the rest of the story.

When I fell asleep, the Mariners were ahead, seis a dos.

Saturday — When I woke up my back hurt worse than it did yesterday, plus I picked up a toothache overnight.

No way am I pushing the pushcart to Telegraph. Today's a day to stay in bed, lose a workday's wages, and get a little bit closer to bankruptcy.

Listened to baseball in Spanish, as the Mariners beat the Yanquis again. The series is tied, two games apiece. Yahoo, señor.

With pain at the top and middle of my body, I'm in no mood to write, so this is all you get.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sunday — I've spent most of the day flat in bed, with a heating pad radiating warmth but not relief. My tooth hurts a little less than yesterday, but my back hurts lots worse.

Midday I dropped a poop, and it was painful sitting down, painful squeezing it out, very painful standing up again, and impossible to wipe my ass.

On the way back to bed, I stopped at my desk long enough to type this (standing up), but the heating pad beckons, full blast, to melt my skin and take the pain away please.

♦ ♦ ♦

Monday — My back feels better, tooth still hurts. How come none of you bastards have sent me a get well card?

♦ ♦ ♦

Judging myself well enough to walk and work, I BARTed to the city and breakfasted again with Mark, at The Cove in the Castro. He asked me to autograph his copy of the interview in Interview, which is ridiculous but what the what. "Thanks for the omelet and coffee. —Doug."

We talked about this and that, and the pain in my mouth exploded when my fork touched the rotted tooth. I slightly screamed, and Mark asked what was wrong, so I told him I was miserable.

"Can't afford a dentist?" he asked.

"I am proud to be an American," I answered. England has had universal health and dental care since the 1940s, but they're pussies. We're tough. We're Americans, damn it. We don't need no stinkin' health or dental care.

Or if we need it, we're sure as hell never gonna get it. Not so long as Republicans roam the earth.

♦ ♦ ♦

The food at The Cove is good, but the portions are small, so I bought two bagels at a shop down the street and ate them while walking to Black Sheets. My tooth didn't like that, but my belly did, and I chewed real careful.

Black Sheets is the magazine where I work on Mondays, and it is not exactly The Atlantic. It's a vivid, explicit, enthusiastic celebration of all things sexual, from every perspective and for any persuasion. Highly recommended for the open-minded and horny.

Imagine my surprise, then: There's a new issue of Black Sheets going into the mail, so most of my work day was sticking subscriber labels onto plain manila envelopes, and one of the stickers was addressed to my high school biology teacher. Unusual last name, same first name, same suburb where I grew up, so it's definitely him.

I was tempted to include a note with his copy, but that might get me in trouble. Jeez, though. Always thought Mr Irion was one of the most boring people on earth, but I guess he knows more about biology than how frogs do it.

Toothache better, backache gone, my plan was to post "I'll do anything" flyers all day, but instead I had to do one of the anythings.

A woman called, said she'd seen my flyers, and she needed me as soon as possible for some cleaning work. Mold and mildew, she said, and she wanted me right away. The address was way out in the Avenues in San Francisco, so I told her it would take a while to get there from Berkeley, but that I'd get dressed and be there ASAP.

ASAP took about as long as you'd expect, and finding her apartment was a cinch, and she buzzed me in and I went up the stairs and — oh my.

Her name is Marion, and that's a middle-aged, matronly name, or at least that's what I'd expected. In person, though, she was in her early 20s, with a friendly smile and great eyes and mildew in her closet and mold on her bathroom walls.

It's a job so I do whatever I'm told and nothing I'm not, but it struck me as naïve that she'd invite a strange man, and I'm certainly strange, into her very small apartment, and into her bedroom.

I'm not dangerous, but how could she know? Then again, maybe she's Ms 45, and how could I know?

Before starting the work I'd come to do, she asked me to run an errand to the hardware store, a walk of about five blocks. "Here's a list of the things we need, and here's twenty bucks," she said. So I took her money and walked away, but again it seemed naïve.

She'd told me on the phone that the work would take 2-3 hours, and I'd told her my minimum was four hours pay, so twenty dollars was what I'd come for, and she'd handed it to me. I could've simply gone home and played with the dog.

Again, that's not something I'd do or consider doing, but lots of people would. Was she a character from Tales of The City — fresh from some town someplace where people are nice?

I did the shopping, brought her the change, and scrubbed her walls with the cleaner and scubbers she'd sent me to buy. Lying flat on my back in her bedroom closet, the cleaning fluid may have ruined my jeans. Does tri-sodium phosphate wash out?

Her apartment was just a few blocks from the ocean, close enough to smell the waves and hear the gulls when I opened her window to dissipate the fumes and some of my sweat.

Got the closet de-mildewed, and then went to work on the mold in her shower. Two of (presumably) her pubic hairs were on the porcelain at the drain, which I shouldn't have noticed and maybe I should've flushed them away, but I did and didn't, respectively.

After I'd worked on the moldy shower for an hour, Marion came into the bathroom and complimented me on my work. I said I'd need another half an hour to finish, but she said nope, she had to leave, so my work was done.

She gave me the twenty bucks we'd agreed plus a five-dollar tip, and asked me to sweep the deck after she'd left. She was locking me out as she left, of course, but her building had an unusual layout, with a back deck shared by everyone on her floor, and accessible from out in the world without a key. And a broom was leaning on the outside wall.

So after she'd left, I swept the leaves from her deck. Also spent some unpaid time sweeping the walkway out to the sidewalk, not because of my marvelous work ethic but because I wouldn't mind another call from Marion.

She's an interesting dame. In addition to being fine-looking, her tiny apartment had some radical political posters, books about feminism and freeing Tibet, and movie calendars from the Roxie and Castro. She seemed like someone I might like to talk with, not just work for... but in addition to my shyness, saying anything seemed improper. I said almost nothing the whole time I was there.

As a free-lance one-day worker, I need a reputation as a guy who does the work, not someone who comes to your house and hits on you if he thinks you're cute. And she was cute.

♦ ♦ ♦

Riding the N train to downtown, the driver should've been nominated as Operator of the Month. He was Absolute Muni.

Yeah, I knew my transfer from this morning had expired but ya gotta try, and he barked at me like a pit bull. When a couple of tourists asked how to get to The Cannery, he said, "Never heard of it," and when they said it's at Fisherman's Wharf he said, "Never heard of that, either."

Rude drivers aren't uncommon on Muni. Seems like a dream job to me, driving around in a beautiful city, but there are plenty of asswipes riding, and the asswipery eventually rubs off on the drivers.

This driver had a real talent for it, though. Three times he lingered at a stop long enough to make people jog or run, sometimes waving a bag or a briefcase to be sure they had his attention, and I'm sure they did. He'd wait until they were almost at the platform, and then accelerate away. A couple of would-be passengers slapped and banged at the train's side panels as we rolled off, but by the third time the driver had left people behind, it went from outrageous to amusing. At least from inside the train.

And I wasn't exactly a Visitor's Bureau brochure for the city myself. My pants were dotted with residue of the cleaning fluid, my t-shirt was wet with my stinky sweat, and the train was uncomfortably warm so what the hell, I was topless by Ashbury Street. Utterly untanned, flabby and nipply and bouncier than an episode of Baywatch, I told those tourists where to catch the #30 bus to The Cannery.

♦ ♦ ♦

Off the train and walking through the Tenderloin toward my maildrop, I put my shirt on again, because a cool breeze was hardening my nipples. Waiting at a bus stop with my backpack full of letters and zines, I noticed an old man wearing a dozen large, wordy pins on his shirt. "Mind if I read you?" I asked.

It took him longer than it should've to comprehend the question, and when he answered "OK" he continued talking. Soon it was obvious that he was bordering on dementia, or there already, or just a lonely old man, but I liked his pins. "Outlaw the government," said one. "Smash the state," said another. Reading the chest of that old-time anarchist, I wondered whether he'd ever been in the thick of anything, or if he was just another complainer like me.

I hadn't said anything more, still reading the extensive collection of radical slogans pinned to his shirt, when the old man said to me, "The only difference between the FBI and the Mafia is that the Mafia wear better suits, but they're all criminals out to steal whatever they can get their grubby hands into."

To that I didn't say anything, again, but yeah, what he said sounds like reality to me. Maybe that old man could've maybe been my new best buddy, but like I said, I didn't say anything. Usually I don't say anything.

We were both waiting for the #38 bus, but when it came it was completely packed with what looked like a hundred yuppies and yuppettes and other idiots. The old anarchist got in line to climb aboard and be squished, but I said I'd wait for the next bus, and that was our entire conversation.

♦ ♦ ♦

BARTed back under the Bay, and at home I ate half a loaf of peanut butter toast as dinner. My toothache is gone, but my back hurts a bit, and my shoulder is throbbing from so much scrubbing on Marion's walls.

It doesn't hurt enough to merit any of my illegal pain pills, so I took two dozen aspirin, six at a time, and went to sleep, with no plans for tomorrow, and no dreams.

Toast for dinner last night, and toast for breakfast this morning. It's a fine cheap alternative to cereal or eggs, if you buy the 69¢ loaf of bread and and generic margarine.

Sadly though, I must announce the passing of two fleas, drowned and waiting for me in the margarine. It comes with a lid, but I hadn't lidded it. A year ago I would've spread the margarine with a few fleas for added protein, crunch, and flavor, but now I'm mostly vegetarian, so I plucked and flushed their tiny corpses.

Guess I'll be re-bugbombing my room. Judith says I should let the cat back into my bedroom, because the fleas will all jump onto t he cat. Seems like a mean trick to play on the cat. Instead I'll spend some money on another round of bugbombs.

♦ ♦ ♦

On Solano Avenue in North Berkeley, the Oaks Theater has started showing old movies on one of its two screens, and tonight's presentation was a double feature of musicals I'd never seen. I love musicals, so I packed several bread and flealess margarine sandwiches and rode the #8 bus across town.

When I got to the Oaks, I wanted to grab and study their movie calendar, but they don't have one. This seems dumb. Theaters that show old movies for a day or two at a time always print a calendar for people to take home and tack to their walls. My bedroom has calendars from the Castro, the Elmwood, the Pacific Film Archive, the Red Vic, the Roxie, the Stanford, the UC, and I have four thumbtacks and a little space where the Oaks calendar would fit nicely, but they didn't print a calendar. There's just a list of coming attractions, taped to the front window.

I didn't feel like leaning on the glass and taking notes, and worse, with the exception of tonight's double feature, the window sign lists all the same old movies that play in any revival theater — Singin' In the Rain, A Clockwork Orange, your basic Woody Allen double features, etc. After tonight's shows, there are only two movies listed in the window that I haven't already seen, so it's unlikely I'll be back.

The next disappointment is that there were only two other customers in the theater. No loud talkers, and that's nice, but the Oaks won't be showing old movies for long if the crowd is that small every night.

Cabin in the Sky (1943) is a lightweight musical drama, with a sappy script about angels and demons battling for the soul of some schlemiel. The tunes are nice enough, and the cast is all-black, with the Louis Armstrong as a trumpet-toting devil and a young Lena Horn as temptation incarnate, and a number by Duke Ellington and his band that most definitely snap crackle pops.

As the schlemiel whose soul is up for grabs, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson gives a great performance, especially because he doesn't use his squeaky, gravely voice and endless eyerolls from playing Jack Benny's butler on TV. Given the chance to play a man instead of a manservent, Anderson makes this droll story seem dramatic.

A sadness is that the movie actually bills him as Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson. The man's name was Eddie Anderson, and on TV he played the race-based caricature of a butler named Rochester. Seems an insult added to a thousand injuries to make Rochester part of the man's professional name.

Ah, but maybe it was his choice, name recognition and all, and anyway, I have bigger complaints about the second movie.

Showboat (1935) bored me out of my seat in about half an hour. It starts with the sympathetic portrayal of a vaguely interracial marriage, a brave topic to tackle sixty years ago. That ought to be all the drama you need, right? I assumed that's what the movie and music would be about, and I was eager for it.

Maybe in the 1930s nobody would've been eager for it, because the mixed marriage is a plot device, soon forgotten. Showboat is actually a love story about a nauseously bland empty-headed white girl and an equally-empty-headed bland white boy.

I'm in favor of love, and love love stories, but I hate love stories like this, where the alleged lovers have nothing to say to each other except to chat about the weather. At no time before I got bored and left did the lovers have any conversation that wasn't shallow and empty. Literally all the lovers knew about each other was their names and faces, and we're supposed to root for such 'love'? What are they "in love" with? They've said so little of consequence, either of them could've been anybody.

Showboat does have Paul Robeson, singing the heartbreaking "Old Man River," mercifully in the movie's first few minutes, and he's remarkable. Tingled my spine and I wanted a rewind. After that, though, the song reviews the movie: "It must know something, but it don't say nothing, it just keeps rolling along."

♦ ♦ ♦

A panhandler approached me as I was waiting for my bus home. "Excuse me," he said. "Do you have a quarter?"

"Can't do it," I answered, avoiding eye contact.

He was silent for a few seconds, then asked, "You don't have a quarter?"

"I didn't say that," I said, with suddenly more eye contact than he could handle. "I do have a quarter. Probably I have several quarters, and when you walk away I'll have that same number of quarters."

He walked away, and on the ride home I wondered about the asshole I've become.

Addendum, 2022: That was me, being an ass to a homeless man again. Like it's his fault he's homeless? It's not. Like a man with almost nothing needs to be treated like nothing? He does not.
With more than twice as many years in me now, and a tiny smattering of empathy, what I'd say today is, Sorry, I don't have a quarter, but can I give you this five-dollar bill?

Today I finally wrote one of my book reviews for Black Sheets. Yeah, in addition to sweeping up and answering the phone, I write for 'em a little.

Bill had assigned me two books to read and review. One was all about penis enlargement, which everyone should know is a sham. You get the dick you get, gentlemen. The book's before and after pictures, especially the after, are so repulsive — either faked or a cruelty against the morons who'd want ten inches of beef jerky to play with and pee through — that I've decided not to review it at all, and Bill says he's cool with that.

But the other book, about the stupidity of circumcision and The Joy of Uncircumcising, is quite good. Maybe it's a sham, too, but if so it's much more convincing than the big dick book, and it made me miss the part of me that's gone.

A memo, though, if anyone's reading this who also reads Black Sheets: The review says that I'm rebuilding my foreskin by stretching it with tape, per the author's recommendation, but that's what's called literary license. The book has some interesting reconstruction suggestions, and that's one of them, and I do tentatively sorta believe it's possibly possible to restore some or most of a man's foreskin, but there's no way I'm duct-taping my penis.

Yes, I know it's a violation of journalistic ethics to write that I'm taping my schlong but not actually be taping my schlong. My diary, the zine you're reading, is where I'm mostly honest about everything, but writing elsewhere, I reserve the right to be full of shit. That's why I've confessed here, that I'm lying there.

♦ ♦ ♦

Other than writing, today was a day off, and I'm taking tomorrow off from the fish stand for a field trip. Josh and I both subscribe to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, and Josh has a car, so we're going to take a day trip to northern California, and see the small towns that the AVA reports on. We've even gotten the OK to drop in and meet the man himself, Bruce Anderson, the AVA's publisher.

I don't like meeting people, and it's dangerous meeting someone whose work you respect, because in person maybe he's an asshole. If so, I'm kinda looking forward to meeting that asshole.

♦ ♦ ♦

Jay says she called the city this morning, to inquire about any progress on the paperwork I turned in two weeks ago, forms that'll maybe (but I doubt it) change the fish stand into a "free speech" table, and allow me to sell Darwin fish again.

As always, I interrupted Jay to tell her she's going about this all wrong, and we should simply sell the fish we want to sell, without begging anyone's permission. She heard me out, again, but wants to do this her way, and she's the boss.

Anyway, the news is: Our paperwork has been misplaced by the city. They can't find the forms I delivered on September 20, so guess who's delivering another copy to City Hall?

Nope, guess again. I refused, and Jay said she'd fax it.

With a big day planned for today, of course I was too antsy to sleep well. Woke up at 2:30 in the morning, read zines and edited some of the boring crap from this zine until about 8:00, and then BARTed to Josh's place for the long drive to Boonville.

Boonville, A/K/A Small Town America, is about an hour outside of Ukiah.

Where's Ukiah? An hour from Santa Rosa.

And where the heck is Santa Rosa? It's vague to me, even with a map, but riding in Josh's car it's about an hour and a half north of San Francisco.

Boonville was worth the drive because it's the home of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, a newspaper with attitude, and the last newspaper in America with much real news. No puff-pieces pre-approved by the Chamber of Commerce. Instead the AVA runs genuine coverage, angry rants, and exposés of local swindlers and charlatans. Imagine a 12-page weekly, published by a grumpy old socialist in a backwater berg where, because it's a newspaper with news, most of the townsfolk hate him. That's the AVA: Bruce Anderson, editor-in-chief.

♦ ♦ ♦

After reading about Anderson Valley in the AVA for years, it was groovy to actually see it. (And yeah, I said groovy.)

There's the Sound Bite, home to half the valley's night life. There's Biscotti Notti. Where's Deputy Squires? Hey, that guy's wearing an Advance Power t-shirt. We'd read about all these places and people — and there's Anderson Valley Books, so Josh parked the car and we went book-shopping, and bought three novels each. Mine are all by B Traven.

The guy behind the counter in the bookstore, one Ron Davis, regaled us with stories of Boonville life, wine wars, and a grape-growing catastrophe wherein some winery sucked all the water out of the creek, leaving Ron with no source for H2O. Rural hospitality, eh?

Our plan was, we'd pop in at the newspaper, spend an hour or so hanging around with Bruce, Josh would interview him for his radio show, and then Josh and I would poke around in Philo, the local metropolis. So Josh asked Ron, "What's good in Philo?"

"There's nothing good in Philo," Ron explained.

We laughed and bid a fond adieu to Ron and the bookstore, and continued across the last few miles of town, past the cemetery, and on to the grounds on the AVA, or as Bruce calls it, "Fort Despair."

Bruce burst out of the door quick enough to shotgun we trespassers, but he only wanted to give us an enthusiastic hello.

Once we'd taken a look around the rather spartan editorial offices — a phone, a fax, a desk, a few layout tables, and hundreds of ads and spot art clipped to the wall for easy insertion on Tuesday afternoons — Josh clicked his tape recorder on, and started asking questions.

Unexpectedly, I became a participant in this, so the three of us sorta got to know each other with a microphone aimed at each man as he spoke.

When Bruce talks about the people he's figuratively battled, you'd expect him to have fire in his eyes, and he does. He enjoys walking through the valley of the shadow of stupid — that's what he calls Anderson Valley — and he fears no evil, seems to savor the job of pissing off the local loonies, and does it well.

Among those the AVA regularly infuriates, my current favorite is Anna Taylor, local loco talk show host and well-known fruitcake. She sued the AVA for libel, and won, after the paper described her with some unflattering but clearly deserved adjectives. Bruce is appealing the verdict, and meanwhile Ms Taylor is suing him again, over the AVA's coverage of the previous lawsuit. She's nuts, and maybe she'll sue me for saying so.

Of course, the creeps, crooks, and crackpots of Anderson Valley are very much like the denizens of any other town or city. Only difference is, Boonville has Bruce and the AVA's small staff to write about them. Everywhere else, the creeps, crooks, and crackpots own the newspapers.

As we chatted, the Major arrived at the compound, and introduced himself. He's Mark Scaramella, US Navy, ret'd, listed on the masthead as "major contributor." He's been a byline I've read many times, covering news I knew nothing about, and leaving me well-informed. He can make Community Service District meetings interesting, even funny.

Attending political functions, the Major said, he takes notes on who said what, and then writes twenty or so paragraphs reporting what happened. That's what reporters do, right? Well, no. At these meetings he sits next to reporters from "big city" newspapers like the Ukiah Daikly News and Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, and he says their reporters don't even take notes. Instead they get "the gist" of it, and then hobnob with the politicians and leaders afterwards, and write six paragraphs that vaguely approximate what happened, sometimes and sort of.

As the now four-way conversation continued, Mark Heimann stepped inside and joined us. He's the AVA's cub reporter, whose story in last week's paper was about an old lady who'd been swindled by her caretaker, and the authorities' lack of response. With his thick beard, balding pate, and remembrances of running away at age 14, I liked him too.

Usually I'm nervous around strangers, but I was at ease with this bunch, all afternoon and into the night. Those three guys, Bruce and the two Marks, are the entire news staff at the AVA, and they all seemed to get along, like, maybe even respect each other. That's weird. At every job I've had, at least one worker is supposed to be the designated asshole, but these three are friends.

When Josh ran out of questions, Bruce invited all of us out for drinks, but then the phone rang. The Major answered, and took the preliminary details of a fast-breaking news story. And then the story waited. It's a weekly newspaper, so nothing's fast-breaking, and we had some drinking to do.

Our destination was downtown Boonville, but when we parked and got out, Bruce looked at the restaurant and finally shook his head no. "The guy who runs it is a bastard," he said. "He's thrown me out three times."

So instead we walked into the bar at the Anderson Valley Hotel, where the friendly wait-staff knew Bruce and the two Marks by name. We shared a few rounds and a lot of laughs and some surprisingly deep political talk, all of which was off the record — not because anyone asked for confidentiality, but because I can't hold my liquor, my head got foggy, and anyway, I wasn't taking notes.

When we left the bar, it was too late for Josh and me to see the bright lights of Philo as we'd planned, but no great loss. A reliable source told us this morning that there's nothing good in Philo anyway.

As the famous Anderson Valley shrank in the rear-view mirror, Josh wondered aloud whether we should've chipped in on the tab. We'd offered, but Bruce had said no, and we'd yielded and let him pay. Well, we did say thanks, and Bruce reads my zine so he knows I'm poor. I'm not going to let it bother my conscience.

The drive up and back, by the way, was a sight to be seen, for me. It was the first time I'd been outside the big cities of the Bay Area since 1991. Golly, look at all the trees.

And it was a great time. Heck, I spent the day with five people — Josh, Ron at the bookstore, and Bruce, the Major, and Mark from the AVA — who each have that rare commodity, a brain.

♦ ♦ ♦

Guess I owe Bruce a plug, in exchange for the beers:

Take a look at the newspaper in your home town, if you can stomach it. The news that matters isn't in there, and the news that's reported comes slanted toward business, not people.

If you'd like to read a real newspaper instead, send a few dollars for a sample copy of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, PO Box 459, Boonville CA 95415. You've never seen anything like it.

Addendum, 2022: Bruce is still there, and so's the AVA, and I still subscribe, and my recommendation still stands.

Woke up at 5:15 AM with a flea in my ear. I'm almost certain that's what it was — an interior itch that couldn't be reached with pinky or pen. Insert, twist, thrust, sideways, the other sideways; nothing could get it.

The flea was in my right ear, so I laid down on my left side, hoping it would hop out that way with an easy jump to freedom, but it didn't hop, the itching didn't stop, and it was making me crazy and furious. Ever been furious at your own head?

I pounded at my right ear with old zines (they're always scattered around the room), smashing my scalp with Sfest Ltd, until my ears were ringing and the zine was tattered (it's a good sci-fi zine, but I'd already read it). When I stopped hammering my head the itch was finally gone, so the flea must've either jumped out or got squished in the brainquake.

Sprayed Raid on the bed, inserted earplugs in both ears and both nostrils, and went back to sleep. Dreamed of fleas.

♦ ♦ ♦

Back at the fish grind on the Avenue, my first customers of the morning were a couple of nice young women strolling Telegraph topless. It's legal in Berkeley, or tolerated.

"Thank you, ladies," I said sincerely. Please dangle by again.

Almost immediately, though, a middle-aged fart of a man complained to me that the fish are horrible, blasphemous, disrespectful of God, etc. Free-bouncing hooters don't trouble that man's immortal soul, but I guess our fish will be the downfall of Christianity and society. One can only hope.

Seems to be a law of human nature, that the dumber a person is, the more easily they're offended, and that man was very offended. What he said isn't worth mentioning, because blah blah, I've heard it all and written it in the zine before, but his t-shirt amused me. It said: "This is no ordinary person you're dealing with."

Wow. The set-up was too easy, too obvious. Waited until he'd mostly spoken his minimal mind, and then I said, "You seem awfully ordinary to me," and to be sure he got the connection I nodded at his shirt. That launched him into a new rant, but I ignored it and started scissoring fish from the mylar, and singing, "I Will Make You Fishers of Men," until he flipped me off and walked away.

Gotta love getting the bird from a Christian over a fish.

♦ ♦ ♦

She'd invited me via voice mail a few days ago, so after putting away the fish cart I BARTed into San Francisco to meet Ms Loki Quinnangelis.

She's the zinester behind Bummers & Gummers, about life on an anarchist collective farm, and do-it-yourself living in general. Also met Martha, Loki's friend from Calistoga, and the three of us swapped stories of our outrageous mothers, talked about life on the farm (it's kinda laid back), and sure, we had occasional bursts of silence, not knowing what to say next.

That's how I am with almost anyone, especially anyone new to me. I'm better with zine people, because we have weirdness in common, but I wasn't at my best tonight, due to being kinda drowsy from yesterday's long road trip and this morning's flea-interrupted sleep. We had a good time, though, I think. At least I did.

For dinner, we had fancy bread and cheese, almonds, beer, and luscious homemade wine in one of the comfy cubbyholes at Loki's hostel. A little lounge off the stairwell, basically. I've never stayed in a hostel, so the aura of friendliness with tourists and hippies going up and down the stairs seemed strange to me. Everyone said hi as they passed, like they all knew Loki.

And typing this twelve hours later, aha, now I understand it. Some or most of the people on the stairs probably weren't complete strangers to Loki; she'd come to California on the Green Tortoise, and they'd probably ridden south with her.

Between the cheeses and almonds, Loki had a heck of an idea. Would I like to visit Wise Acres, their communal farm somewhere up north and near the ocean? I could stay for up to a month, she said, but I'd have to tend livestock and/or do other chores.

I don't know goatshit about tending livestock, but a month in the country with a bunch of laid-back anarchists sounds like a month in paradise.

Only drawback, same as with anything else you might like to do in life, is the money. I've got none. Even if the stay is free, and Loki says it would be, publishing this zine costs, moving to New York City costs, and even if I put everything on hold I'd have to pay rent on my room in Berkeley while I'm gone. So just due to the economics, four weeks at a commune isn't in my future.

After chow, we walked up to Lower Haight, browsed through Naked Eye, the video and zine store, and sipped tea like fancy people at the Horseshoe Café. Then we took a taxi back to their hostel (Martha insisted on the cab, and paid, and it seemed safer than walking past the projects). At the hostel, we sat on a comfy couch and babbled about better worlds until I had to leave, to catch the last BART to Berkeley.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the ride back, I wondered if I'd said no too soon, to a month on the farm. That's a life I've never lived, might love it, might hate it, but it's an opportunity that won't knock twice.

Money, though. Damn it, everything is always about money, and due to a long series of don't-give-a-damn decisions money is something I'll never have much of. I hope the guy who invented capitalism died penniless and uninsured, like we who came after.

Anyway, thanks for a fine meal and a good time and a cup of tea, Loki. Thanks too for your generous plug for Pathetic Life in the new issue of Bummers & Gummers, which, except for the page about me, is a dang fine zine. Anyone interested should send $2.50 to Loki, ██████, Lorane OR 97451.

Addendum, 2022: Still tempted by the life that might've been, but I'm damned happy with the life I ended up with.
Loki worked with us on the Zine World project a few years later, but I haven't heard from her since. I'm tickled purple, though, to see that Wise Acres is still up and running after 30+ years.

Elton, that darn cat, used to sleep with me. She'd eat cheese droppings from my sandwiches, and she'd let me pet her, always purring louder than an unmuffled Oldsmobile. Then came the fleas, so now she sits outside my bedroom door and yowls to be let in, but I'm not letting her in until I remember to buy her a new flea collar. It's not even about the money. I just keep forgetting to buy it.

Made my morning trip to the john just now, and Elton followed. When I closed the bathroom door, she'd snuck in with me, meow, there she was at my feet, then nudging my ankles as I sat on the porcelain. Then she jumped onto the sink, which put her at perfect petting distance.

I have missed that cat since evicting her from my room, and apparently she's missed me. With Sarah-Katherine so far away, Elton is the only warm furry thing I'm allowed to touch. When I flushed she fled, of course, and then I came back to my bedroom and closed the door, closing her out. She meowed and seemed so sad, I grabbed a big felt pen and wrote FLEA COLLAR on my left hand.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sold fish in front of Noah's bagelry, next to a nice lady vendor whose name I can never remember, so all day when we talked I called her Hey.

For lunch, Hey bought a bagel, then showed me Noah's latest promotional flyer. I've said things now and again about the homeless people all around the Ave, so she thought I'd be interested. Here's the deal: Purchase six 8-ounce schmears within thirty days, and you get a seventh schmear free, plus Noah's will donate a dollar to some charity for the homeless.

After years as a social problem, homelessness has become a sales gimmick.

Look, Noah's is a giant chain of bagel shops. All day long, they seem to have customers lined up out the door and onto the sidewalk. They're not struggling to get by. You'd hope maybe someone somewhere in their corporate structure might have the conscience or common decency to give a dollar to the homeless, without tying it to the sales of schmears.

♦ ♦ ♦

Speaking of scumbag corporations, an outfit called Evolution Design makes the hard plastic Darwin fish we sell, or used to sell before Berkeley said we couldn't. Mostly, though, we make and sell soft plastic fish of many varieties, including one that says Evolve.

Well, Evolution Designs has sent Jay three cease-and-desist letters over the past several months. Two of them demanded that we stop making and selling Evolve fish. Evolution Designs doesn't make an Evolve fish, but they think it's telling the same joke as a Darwin fish, and somehow stealing their intellectual property. The third cease-and-desist demanded that we stop gluing magnetic material to the back of their fish — which we buy from them — and selling them as Darwin magnets.

People are such idiots about things like this. Especially lawyers, and people who live their lives in neckties.

Jay's response is a management function, and I'm not management, so I'm not sure what she's doing with all these cease-and-desist letters. Maybe she's ignoring them, like I would, or framing them for display in her living room. More likely she's paying a lawyer to answer their lawyer.

Well, today, guess who stopped by the fish stand and talked to me? No, not a lawyer from Evolution Design. Also not the inspector from the City of Berkeley, because of course we're not selling the hard-plastic Darwin fish in violation of city edict. I'm shocked, shocked that you would think so.

Nope, today's special guest was Al Seckel, who's an inventor, he says, who has documentation proving that he first doodled the Darwin fish as a parody of the far-too-popular Jesus fish, in the early 1980s, for an atheist newsletter he was editing. That's interesting indeed, because "© 1990" is stamped onto the back of every Darwin fish from Evolution Design.

Mr Seckel says he's aware that Evolution Design is marketing his fish, but he doesn't see a penny in royalties, because the manufacturer traces the fish's evolution to someone else — someone who came up with the idea several years after Mr Seckel did, while living in the same metropolitan area where Seckel was making and marketing Darwin fish.

To his credit, Seckel told me he liked all our fish, and has no interest in going to court over a fish. He hates lawyers, and anyway, judging by the man's suit I'd say he's quite well-off already. He says his only interest is in seeing his fish spawn, spreading as widely as possible the gospel of science over religion.

I love all that, of course, but here's the part I like best: Seckel says he's been in contact with Evolution Design, sent them proof that he invented the Darwin fish, but asked for no compensation. His only stipulation was that they not block anyone else from making funny anti-Christian fish, too. And they'd agreed, he says.

When I told him about our dealings with Evolution Design, cease this and desist that, he became visibly angry, and promised that despite his strong distaste for lawyers and lawsuits, he'd contact his attorney and do whatever it takes to get Evolution Design to stop hassling our fish stand.

Being skeptical by nature, I have considered the possibility that everything Seckel told me might be hooey. I'd never met him before, and he wasn't carrying proof to back up his story. I once talked to a homeless guy who claimed that his mother owned First Interstate Bank. People do lie. But you can see truth in someone's eyes when they're truthing, and I believe what Seckel told me.

A simple twist of fate on Telegraph Ave. Seckel could've not been there at all, could've not noticed the fish stand, could've noticed but walked right past. But instead he stopped and talked with me, and maybe became the hero of our fish stand. When I called Jay to tell her what happened, she whooped in delight.

♦ ♦ ♦

Stopped at a drug store on the way home, and bought a new collar for Elton. She's not my cat, but nobody knows whose cat she is, and she's claimed me, so she's mine.

This was my best day yet at Black Sheets, the sex mag where I work on Mondays. After doing my traditional chores — trash and recycling, literally scrubbing the toilets, filing and filling orders — Bill had me read through the stack of unsolicited submissions. My assignment: Give everything a fair chance, and mark each submission with either a smiley face or a frowny face.

Four hours of reading poetry, short stories, and non-fiction, all on assorted sexual subjects, was hardly what I'd call work. Sure, lots more frowns than smileys were drawn, but some of it was so awful it was funny, and are few of the short stories were quite good. Too bad the room I was reading in didn't have a door.

Oh, and Bill paid me cash, for accumulated hours worked. Payday is always the best day of the week, and now I'm rich, or will be until I spend it all on stamps for the next issue of PL.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the BART station, two of the gates were out of order, so everyone was lined up behind the one gate that was working, but your average white man in a silk suit was fumbling for his ticket and blocking the way. Not known for my patience, I groused out loud, "Are you going in, or are you just thinking about going in?"

"You don't have to be so smart about it," he said, but he stepped aside, let people through, so I should've said thanks or said nothing.

Instead I said, "It's not very 'smart' to stand in the way," and inserted my ticket in the gate, walked through, walked away. Ha! I got the last word!

But no, in the distance behind me I heard him say, "Blow it out your ass, fatboy."

Without pausing, slowing, or breaking stride, I mimed scratching my butt, then turn a little sideways so he could see that I was licking my fingers. This, of course, triggered another insult shouted at me, and well deserved.

He's right, of course. I am a big fat jerk, or at least I was to him. He caught me at a bad moment, I guess. Usually I'm Mr Zen, unflappable, but sometimes something silly will set me off, like a man in a nice suit blocking access to the subway.

I shouldn't have complained. What, like I'm so important, and it's urgent that I get into the train station without being forced to wait for 15 seconds?

At the platform, it was five minutes until the next train came, so it made no difference anyway. If I'd said nothing to that man, we both would've been in a better mood, but instead he stood toward the back of the platform, I stood toward the front, and we discreetly glowered at each other.

♦ ♦ ♦

Got a letter from Sarah-Katherine, with an unusual request in the fourth paragraph:

My dad is extremely interested in the zine phenomenon, but I'm not sure he understands the whole concept yet, since all he's read has been my zines. I think he'd enjoy the current issue of Pathetic Life_, because it's got me in it but doesn't contain any, well, graphic scenes. I told him I'd contact a couple of my favorite zinesters and have them send him samples, and gee, Wally, you're definitely one of my favorites…_

She included her father's address, so I'm sending him a copy of the current issue. It feels awkward, because I've boinked his daughter, and the corny note I enclosed probably made it worse.

Also weird, in my family we have nothing but secrets. None of my relatives know what a zine is, or that I write one, and they never will. But I'm sending my zine, my diary fer cripes sake, to Sarah-Katherine's dad. She must have a saner family than mine.

♦ ♦ ♦

Also in the mail came a pretty good zine called Oblong. I hadn't sent for it, never heard of it, and it didn't come with an ordinary zinester-to-zinester note asking for a trade. In fact, there was no note at all, just Oblong in an oblong envelope. Your basic un-asked for freebie.

And I liked the zine. I'm not sure it's for public consumption, so I won't list an address, but it includes a well-written write-up of last year's film noir series at the Roxie. I'm planning to attend at least two double features at the Roxie next week, so I did something I've never done before. I wrote to Bruce, the Oblong author, and invited him to join me.

How utterly anti-anti-social. Don't know what came over me.

Today's plan was to ride around posting "I'll do anything" flyers, but that's usually the plan on Tuesdays, it usually doesn't happen, and again it didn't happen today. I like doing free-lance work, but don't like putting up the flyers that might bring in the free-lance work.

Anyway, my toothache came back, so I drugged myself, but an hour later someone left a message, so I had a gig and BARTed into San Francisco, still a little groggy from the codeine.

Marion had recommended me to a friend of hers, a man out in the Avenues, so I washed his dishes, swept and mopped his kitchen, scrubbed his toilet and sink, and swept and mopped his john.

The man was well-off, well-mannered white guy, living in a shared house but clearly not poor. Even his slacking-off clothes were silk or fancy, looked like brand new Nordstrom stuff. Banker-type dude, is my guess, and probably the leaseholder for the house. He has three flatmates, and they have a system for rotating the chores, but he has the money to hire me to do his share of the work. I wanted to dislike him, but despite his laziness and expensive clothes, he wasn't an ass.

I couldn't remember his name, though. Forgot it the moment we shook hands. Maybe it was the painkillers messing with my mind, or maybe he was just an extremely boring man.

So I did that boring man's chores, while he stretched out on the sofa and watched a baseball game. For a few hours work, he wanted to pay me $25, which would be a $5 tip, but being an idiot I confessed that I'd broken a highball glass, and said maybe $20 would be enough.

"Yeah," he said, "thought I'd heard something, but those are cheap classes, easy to break. Don't sweat it." Then he gave me another five dollars for being so honest.

"Jeez, thanks," I said, genuinely surprised. Thanks, man whose name I've forgotten. He even asked for a few of my flyers, to share with his flatmates and friends. I might add breaking a glass and confessing it to my regular routine.

♦ ♦ ♦

At home, wearing only my shorts, I went into the guest room to use the phone, and was immediately overrun with fleas. They've overrun the carpet, and almost as soon as I sat down and dialed, they were all up my legs, seemed like dozens of them.

Drenched the carpet with a can of Raid, and sprayed it up and down my legs, too. Then I banged on Judith's door, and told her we gotta do something about the damned fleas.

BARTed back into the city this morning, expecting to go flyering in the Castro and Mission, but a little old lady changed my plans. I was stapling one of my "I'll do anything" flyers to the bulletin board in only my third laundromat of the morning, when she came up, looking over my shoulder, and said she'd hire me then and there, to carry her hot laundry home.

It was only a couple of blocks to her house, so I wasn't even going to charge her, but when we got there she wanted me to vacuum her living room, and later I wiped the dining room table, wash some griz off the walls, swept and mopped and did everything else to make her home into something from House Beautiful.

Now, I don't mind doing housework, not at all, not if someone's paying me. Beats changing prices at Macy's. I prefer some advance warning, though, to build up a head of dread before all the hard work. Scrubbing dried milk and coffee off some stranger's linoleum isn't my favorite last-minute surprise.

But hey, I need the money. Always need the money, so I did the work. Here's what I don't need, though:

All the time I was working, granny was watching me work. She sat, and watched, and talked, and talked and talked. Her name is Gertrude, and she's one of those old people I hope to never become, who talk so much it's agony to be in the same room.

It was like she hadn't had a conversation with anyone in ages, so I got all of her pent-up output. Maybe all her friends are dead — she did seem very old.

I usually don't have much to say to anyone, but even if I'd been feeling bizarrely chatty I couldn't have inserted anything more than a "Yup" or two between her busy ramblings. Her children never call, she said. One's a banker, divorced; one's a hairstylist, gay; and one's dead, which seems like a good excuse not to call.

She told me about her grandchildren, showed off her knitting and knickknacks, poured us each a glass on lemonade, explained why the news on channel 7 is better than the news on channel 4, and complained about her arthritis, her doctor, that darn Bill Clinton, and the price of her prescriptions.

Every time I finished a chore she found another, and I probably could've worked several more hours, but I wanted to escape before she brought out the inevitable photo album, so I said, "I gotta go."

She paid me, tipped extravagantly, and as I was strapping my pack to my back she said, "Can you come back next Wednesday? There are so many things to do around here, and I'll make more lemonade."

I weighed the bigness of her tip against the dullness of her talking, and said OK, so next week I'm going back to Granny Gertrude, for more work, more stories, more complaining, and more general Gertrudosity.

Last thing as I was going out the door, she called me back into the hallway to grouse that I'd missed a corner when I'd vacuumed. And OK, I'd missed a corner. I apologized, and plugged in the vacuum cleaner and attacked that corner, because my work comes with a guarantee, I guess.

And while I vacuumed (on my own time) she told a few more stories, including one from when she was in high school, which must've been around 1880.

♦ ♦ ♦

After listening to an old lady's mind-numbing monologue for hours, I needed a good horror story to kick-start my heard and return me to consciousness. Well, a very nice reader of this zine recently sent a stack of Red Vic movie passes — Thank you, Todd! — so I stopped in for Susperia (1977) and popcorn.

It's a delightful mess of inventive camerawork, garish sets, macabre music with a beat, bloody murder and the threat of bloody murder, bad dubbing, and lots of pretty actresses, most of whom can't act, or if they can it got swallowed in the dubbing.

The story is something about a big-eyed girl from New York who's enrolled in a German dance academy. She knows something is off from the moment her plane touches down — there's bad weather and spooky music, she doesn't speak the language, the cab driver is rude, and, oh yeah, all the teachers at the academy are witches.

I'm typing like a smartass now, but it seriously scared the juicy bejeebers out of me. Usually what I want to do at the movies is forget I'm at the movies, just sit back and be absorbed into a good story well told, but Susperia had the opposite effect — for the last twenty minutes or so, to ward off a coronary in my chair, I was silently telling myself, This is only a movie, This is only a movie. Yeah, it's only a movie, but it's a very frightening movie indeed.

As always at the Red Vic, the popcorn was perfect, the film was perfectly focused and framed, and the sound was loud enough to shake constipation loose without being too loud. Someone from Berkeley's UC Theater should make a field trip across the bay to see how a theater should be run.

I would like to file a small complaint, though. For at least a year, every time I've seen a movie at the Red Vic, its been preceded by a preview for Latcho Drom, a documentary that seems to play at the Red Vic monthly — so it's always "coming soon." It's something about folk-singing Gypsies, and maybe it's a fabulous film, but by now I have the preview memorized. Every close-up of every folk singer with a look of sincere indigestion on her face just reminds me of a line from an old folk song, "If I had a hammer, there's be no folk singers."

To the good people running the Red Victorian: Show Latcho Drom as often as you like, cuz God you must love that film, but please please please stop showing the preview.

♦ ♦ ♦

After busing back downtown, I stepped into the BART station, and again like the day before yesterday, some schmuck stood in the gateway blocking the entrance while fumbling with his ticket. Again I wanted to say what a fool he was, but instead, being a better man than the day before yesterday, I waited behind him silently… for about ten seconds, but jeez.

Just as I was taking a deep breath and selecting the obscenities I'd shower him with, a voice barked out behind me in fluent Brooklynese, "Hey, whut duh fuck is yuh fuckin probluhm?"

And I remembered that soon, if the funds and logistics work out, I'll be in Brooklyn with Sarah-Katherine, hearing that charming accent every day.

♦ ♦ ♦

Speaking of language barriers, on the subway platform I helped some lady who spoke not a word of English get where she was going.

At night, two of BART's four routes don't run, and you might have to transfer to get where you're going. If you don't speak English and don't know your way, you're screwed, because all the signs and maps are only in English

From that lady's worried and frustrated expression, she'd been waiting and waiting for a train that wouldn't come until tomorrow, so I motioned her over toward the map on the wall. She pointed to where she wanted to go, and I pointed to the train she'd need to take, and to the station where she'd need to transfer. Did it all without words, too.

There are many thousands of people in San Francisco who speak only Mandarin, only Spanish, only Japanese, only Korean, only Russian, etc. I'm the opposite of that racist "English only" rule the Republicans cry out for. Every sign in San Francisco ought to be at least octalungual.

A man left a message on my voice mail, saying he *maybe* wants to hire me, but he'd have to meet me first.

Maybe that makes sense. I'm sometimes surprised that people are willing to hire me sight unseen, even for working in their homes. The man's tone of voice, though, seemed shady or skeptical. It's hard to explain, but the way he said what he said didn't sound quite like most people who call to inquire about hiring me.

Called him back, though, and asked about the work. He said it involves handling food, so he needs to see me before hiring me, to ascertain that I'm not Typhoid Doug or whatever.

Which, again, maybe makes sense. Where I'm from, though, you have to pass a test and get a food-worker's permit or "health card" from the county, for any job that involves handling food. I have no such proof of cleanliness from any agency in California, though, and the man on the phone wasn't asking me to obtain such proof. He just wanted to meet me and inspect me.

"Whatever you're offering, it has to be illegal," I said, "or you'd simply tell me I need a health card."

Click. He'd hung up, so I don't get that gig.

I'm not even all that finicky about the "legal" part of "I'll do anything legal." Nobody's asked me to commit a misdemeanor for $5 an hour, but I'd probably do it if I thought I'd get away with it. Make me an offer.

Gotta trust my instincts, though, and something seemed off about whatever that man was calling about.

Gee, I wanted to listen to The Black Hat Show on Free Radio Berkeley last night. Josh had told me he'd be playing the interview from last Friday, but his show starts at midnight, and I fell asleep at 8:00.

Not counting waking up to pee a few times, I slept almost twelve hours straight through. Then I got up, typed a while, and fell asleep again.

That's two nights of sleep for me in one night, and I don't even know why. I've had a toothache off and on for a week — maybe it's getting infected and I'll be dead in a few days. Whatever.

So after all that sleeping, I got to the Avenue about an hour late, and that's weird, too. I'm late for dinner sometimes, but never late for movies or work.

♦ ♦ ♦

Felt groggy selling fish most of the day, but still had half my wits about me. Worked next to the annoying guy who'd hollered at me for being an inch into his space, who'd then another day, bizarrely, pretended we were old friends.

So today it was my turn to pretend. I greeted him with my biggest smile, laughed at everything he said all day, and by the time we started packing up our tables, had him convinced that we're best buddies for life. Now that he's not expecting trouble, next time I see him my first words will be, "Screw off, honky motherfucker."

♦ ♦ ♦

Tired of this damned toothache, I am very. Most days I can barely feel it, but some days it's all I can feel. Lower right side, toward the back, and now I'm also getting early warnings from upper left, both sides.

And I'm so damned tired, it's all I can do to type these stupid sentences. Then I'm going to eat a few soft sandwiches, peanut butter, I think, and go to bed. It's only 7:30. So much sleeping last night, and still I'm exhausted.

I wonder what bug I'm fighting. Hope it's something exotic. That would at least be interesting.

I worked next to Umberto on the Avenue today, and we tried to be sociable and friendly, but there's just no clicking between us. When we had no browsers or customers, we talked about Telegraph politics and his fiercely-, my mildly-anarchist philosophies, and we got along well enough. Usually we do. But it never felt like a conversation with a friend.

I'm so accustomed to being alone and avoiding friendships, I don't know how to go about it when there's someone I'd actually like to know.

It's not entirely on me, though. Umberto has been working on Telegraph for years, and he's famously prickly and combative. I'm one of very few people on the Ave that he's willing to talk to at all.

♦ ♦ ♦

My tooth hurt all day, and I got a little prickly myself. Sorta went ballistic mid-day, when a man who'd never be a customer looked at the fish display like it was a collection of stinky turds. I knew what was coming. He was about to say something and it was going to set me off, and he did and it did, but I was ready to ignite before he even spoke.

"Why are you making fun of—" he started, and I didn't let him finish. I launched into a flurry of profanities, gave him my opinion of religion and specifically Christianity, and the malfunctioning minds of anyone who believes in such rubbish. I don't remember what all I said or how long I went on. Mostly I was talking to his backside, and as he walked away I finished with a flourish of fuck you's. It was not a moment I'm proud of.

♦ ♦ ♦

When I got to Telegraph and for most of the day, a perfectly normal-looking middle-aged white woman stood beside a sign she'd brought and hung from a fence. She hadn't even brought a chair or a table, just the sign. It said, "Fuck the homosexual police — they killed my four children."

What the what?

Under the headline, smaller print tried to explain explain her delusion, and at the first lull of the morning I walked over to read it. It was just a jumble of words, barely pretending to make sense, and obviously horseshit.

If local cops had killed four people from one family, it would've been in the news, you know?

And probably there are gay cops, but they have to stay in the closet, or the other cops would kill or maim them. Police are not well-known for an inclusive, welcoming attitude.

Nobody spoke to that lady all day, at least not that I noticed. I certainly didn't. There are enough kooks in my life already.

At about 3:30, unprovoked, she suddenly started ranting, so I took notes: "Liberal money is dying off… Get ready to defend yourself… Don't trust the homosexual police…" and then again, "Liberal money is dying off." She repeated herself several times, and as she prattled on, she took her sign down and left. Her work here was done for the day.

There's a line in a book, Neutron Gun by Gerry Reith, that isn't meant to describe Berkeley but totally does: "Drunks and psychotics welcome. You'll feel at home among your peers."

What a splendid treat — my toothache didn't wake me in the middle of the night. First time that hasn't happened in a week. Instead, a few minutes before 4:00 in the morning, a flea up my nostril woke me.

It felt like an itch, way up at the bridge of my nose, but it was inside, and the itch moved. Ah jeez. I knew what it had to be, so I blew furiously into a generic kleenex, then twisted my pinky up in there far as it could go. The flea came out on the third try, on the tip of my moist finger, stuck on the snot.

That was the bug that done woke me from a sexy dream, so I squeezed it flat between my fingernails. The I re-Raided the bed and most of the room, and man it stunk but I got back to sleep in half an hour or so.

Damn thing must've bitten the inside of my nose, though. All day long I was scratching my schnoz to no avail. Plus, of course, the toothache came back.

♦ ♦ ♦

A teenage boy with about two dozen six-inch hair spikes was panhandling near my fish stand, when a barely adolescent girl came up to him and shyly said, "Excuse me but — I love your hair. How do you get it to stand up so straight?

"I use a 50/50 mix of semen and dishwashing soap," he said.

Her mouth didn't drop open, but it sorta drooped. "Semen," she slowly said, and I looked at her — 11, maybe 12 years old. Does she even know what semen is? And how's she gonna get a supply to follow his recipe?

"Semen," the fake punk blandly said again.

"Thanks," she said, and walked away, hunched over a little, maybe blushing.

What he said might have even been the truth for all I know, but it's a terrible thing to say to a little kid. Also funny, though. He was just messing with her, probably, but for casually saying "semen" to a 12-year-old kid, and saying it with a straight face, he won a copy of the latest Pathetic Life from my backpack.

Never handed out a freebie to a stranger before, but I felt like living dangerously, and he didn't tell me to fuck off. Instead he reached into his backpack and handed me a copy of Infected Toenail, his zine.

It's 75% punk rock, 25% drugs, handwritten sloppy and photocopied smudgy. I'd give it a good review, but there's no address listed anywhere, so I don't think it's available by mail. If I see that spikey kid again, I'll ask.

♦ ♦ ♦

As I was breaking down the cart at the end of my fish-selling day, we had a replay of a scene I reported from a month or so ago. It happens more often than that, though, so often that sometimes I don't bother writing about it.

A long-haired homeless guy was sitting on the sidewalk in front of Cody's, reading a zine, saying nothing, bothering nobody, and then two cops on bikes jumped the curb, swooped down on him, and demanded to see his ID. Perhaps surprisingly, he had a driver's license, and when he handed it to one of the cops, they radioed their head office and arrested the man on some petty outstanding warrant.

I don't know the details, and damn it, the details are irreverent anyway. No details would justify what I saw. It's simply harassment of people the city doesn't want around, because the city and the cops see the homeless as less than people.

And I said nothing as it happened, of course. Maybe one day I'll say something, but mostly I say it here in the zine instead of to a cop's face, because I don't want to be on their list.

♦ ♦ ♦

It's wearymaking, sometimes. I'm used to the long, sweaty walk, pushing the cart to and from Telegraph, and I can tolerate, sometimes even enjoy the occasional Christian who's freaked out by the fish. I'm even accustomed to being hassled by city imbeciles. All that, I've written about before.

What saddens me most is something I haven't mentioned, and that's the dull-faced stupidity of most of the people on the Ave. It's not Berkeley-specific, it's everywhere, but this is my first job since high school where I have direct interaction with strangers all day.

And jeez it's depressing. Almost all of them are sad, stupid, or blank.

Sure, a lot of people on the sidewalk are just walking from one place to another, so they're not at their sparkly best. I'm sure not.

But still, the look on most of their faces just cries out, "I'm enduring it, but how much longer?" Almost nobody looks like they're enjoying their day, any day. They all hate it here, and by here I mean life.

♦ ♦ ♦

Whoops, thought it was lights out for the night, but I've popped out of bed to add one more vignette before snoring:

This is corny, but I want to say that I miss you, Sarah-Katherine. We've only spent parts of eight days together, in May and then in July, but for me anyway, those were eight pretty good days. I'm looking forward to more.

You want to move to New York City, and I want to move with you, but I'm tired of waiting. Tired of wishing I was saving up for the expense of it all, when the money isn't accumulating nearly fast enough.

Here's an idea, an invitation for you, Sarah-Katherine: Instead of saving saving saving until we have enough money to move like responsible adults, let's go now. Let's go with the $45 that's in my wallet, and whatever you have in yours, without having everything planned. Let's pack a change of underwear in our backpacks, whatever luggage we can easily carry, and ride our thumbs to New York with nada. We can get to know that city from its smelliest alleys on up, not months from now, but now. Tomorrow morning. Or better yet, tonight.

On Mondays I come to San Francisco to work at Black Sheets, and remind myself that I used to live there. Berkeley is nice, but it's a suburb. San Francisco is loud, hectic, scummy, and beautiful.

♦ ♦ ♦

After work, I made my weekly trek to my maildrop, which is near the Tenderloin, the city's bleakest and roughest neighborhood. At a particularly bleak intersection, my former flatmate Terry was standing at the opposite corner.

I'm nearsighted, but even from across the street I recognized her defeated expression, the uncaring, unfeeling frown. She was wearing pink shorts and a shiny red vinyl top. High heels would've completed the uniform, but she was in tennis shoes.

Disbelieving, I reached into my backpack for my glasses, and put them on. To be sure. And it was her. And holy shit, sweet mother of Christ.

She was alone, simply standing and waiting, but there was no doubt she was open for business. Terry is not repulsive, possible even attractive, but always on her face is a look like she's chewing glass, and that was her expression today in the Tenderloin. It's exactly the same face as when she was in our kitchen, or on the couch with Pike.

From his phone call a month or so ago, I knew they were desperate for rent money, but I didn't know they were this desperate.

For a moment I froze, staring, but the very first thing I wouldn't want is a conversation with her, especially while she's working. She wouldn't want to see me either, so I hurried along.

Always I've sometimes wondered, what trauma or event made Terry the woman she is? Why does she stay with Pike, when they're always screaming at each other? There's no way to know short of asking, and I wasn't about to ask.

Does Pike know, I wondered? Was he down the street, watching, playing the pimp? I wouldn't have guessed him quite that low a low-life, but I wouldn't have guessed it of Terry either. Or maybe Pike was back at the apartment, high as a telephone pole and oblivious to everything.

That was his usual state, in the four months that the three of us shared that mierda apartment. I'm not sure I ever saw either Terry or Pike anything but high. A few times Terry complained that they had no coke, but they always had pot.

Should I give a damn about Terry, any more than any other woman in that profession? Probably I should. I knew that woman, saw her naked, saw her fucking Pike, because they were never much on modesty.

She and I never really talked, though. We only ignored each other and yelled at each other. She was always annoying, and I hated her when she lived in the next room. Any reason I should hate her less, after seeing her today?

It took a while to decide, but in the end, sorry but no. I can't give a damn about that woman on Jones Street in the Tenderloin. Life is cruel, and if you live every day stupidly, eventually you'll see the cruelest things life can offer.

Whatever Terry went through as a child, an adult, or just as the bitch in general she's been whenever I've seen her, where I saw her this afternoon was her choice. I don't hate her enough to wish her such a life, but don't care enough to wish her better, or do anything about it, as if there's anything I could do.

For all the sleepless nights she caused me when we shared that flat, I suppose I could simply say fuck her. That might sound like a recommendation, though, and I wouldn't wish her on my worst ex-friend. To hell with her, I'd say, but it looks like she's already there.

♦ ♦ ♦

After picking up my mail, I read through some of it while lunching alone at the Sincere Café. That was five bucks I couldn't afford, plus tip, but I was hungry and the Sincere is almost an old friend to me. The meal was delish, of course. The Sincere never lets me down. Ken, the waiter, asked where I've been. It had been months since I'd had the Number 1, and it tasted like home.

♦ ♦ ♦

Every year, the Roxie dedicates a few weeks of their calendar to the classics and curios of film noir — old movies with dark imagery and dark characters driven by dark motivations. It's a different double feature every night, and some years I've gone to every show every night, but this year the budget is extra tight so it's only tonight and maybe Wednesday.

Bruce and I met in front of the theater. He's Bruce Townley, the Oblong man. We talked for a few minutes on the sidewalk, and decided we didn't hate each other, so we went inside and sat together, and talked until the lights dimmed.

Anyone who talks after the lights dim earns my wrath, and I'll walk away and sit somewhere else, but Bruce knew it was movie time and that's shut up time.

We talked again between the features, and talked more on the way out, and then he walked toward his bus and I walked toward the BART to Berkeley.

He's a nice enough fellow, and he's a movie buff so movies are mostly what we talked about, but he never quite seemed relaxed around me, which is understandable. I'm a big fat funny-looking man with bad teeth and worse breath. Probably he could smell me all through the double feature.

I'm usually as nervous as he was, or more. Always I'm ill at ease first meeting anyone, like I was with Loki a few days ago, or Sarah-Katherine when we first met.

What's curious is that I was uncharacteristically comfortable with Bruce. Trying to psychoanalyze myself now, I think it's because I'd read his zine and had already decided I knew the man, but dang, I was witty, friendly, even outgoing. I kept the conversation going when it sputtered. That's not like me, not at all. I was so damned gregarious, I'm not sure I would've been able to relax if I'd just met me.

♦ ♦ ♦

As for the movies…

There's a recurring problem with the Roxie's sound system. The soundtrack occasionally disappears, especially in quiet scenes, and especially with 16mm prints. Instead of footprints down an alley, you hear nothing until the next gunshot or shattered window or scream, which brings the sound back. Usually it's only ambient noises that disappear, but sometimes it can be an entire conversation, if it's whispered.

Theater management knows about it. I've complained and heard others complain. It's an annoyance, but I'm not mad at them, cuz I know the Roxie is run on a B-movie budget. They don't rake in huge profits showing old movies, and often there are only a few dozen people in the theater, even for a 7:00 show. Fixing the sound might cost money they don't have.

So a few minutes of Murder is My Beat (1955) became a silent movie, but it was otherwise enjoyable. It's about a tough-talking by-the-book detective who, after years of devotion to "the law," decides to pursue justice instead. That's reprehensible, of course, but it's only a movie. The voiceover is droll, especially as he goes traipsing after a suspect through the snow (absolute silence), and the story gets goofy toward the end. It's an OK show, though, with swelling violins cuing the hero when it's time to fall in love.

Crime Wave (1953) stars Sterling Hayden as a typical prick cop — typical in real life, but rather rare for the movies. He's arrogant, obnoxious, an ordinary oinker who assumes all suspects are guilty, and (thought the movie doesn't go this far) you know he'd happily plant the evidence to prove it. Hayden sneeringly overplays the part, as a young Charles Bronson and his bad guy buddies force an ex-con to rob a bank. Beware of the wishy-washy ending, though.

♦ ♦ ♦

Two of the people who hang around at Black Sheets have mentioned that they're sex workers. I've chatted with hookers on the street, because you know, they're people and maybe I say hello. And once I did some "anything legal" housework for a woman who was doing phone sex in the next room.

Terry, though, is the first prostitute I've personally known. I am not a man of high moral character, so I don't know why it makes me sad, but damn if it doesn't.

After seeing Terry's Tenderloin tragedy yesterday, I dreamed about her last night. It was yesterday's scene again, only this time we made eye contact, and she approached me and said, "Holland, you're disgusting." It was just like old times.

"And you're a cheap slut," I said to her, and then out of curiosity, I asked, "How cheap?"

At that her attitude changed, and she even smiled. "Forty dollars," she said, "for anything at all."

"No," I shook my head. "Nothing less than a hundred bucks."

Her eyes brightened. She didn't get the joke. "OK," she said, and suggested a shack of a hotel at the corner.

"In advance," I said, holding my hand out and rubbing fingers against my thumb.

It should've been a funny dream, because I do hate her. She started crying, though, and cried so loud it woke me up, so it just seems sad.

♦ ♦ ♦

Here's a thought that surprises me.

I am a heterosexual man, masturbation is my hobby, and Terry isn't ugly. We lived in the same apartment, and like I mentioned yesterday, she was casual about covering up, so I saw her undressed, even fucking Pike, several times.

And yet, never ever have I masturbated to mental imagery of Terry. I don't think I've even had a fleeting dirty thought about her. I dislike her too strongly to even daydream of touching that woman.

♦ ♦ ♦

Walked into the guest room to use the phone, check my messages, and there are more fleas there than a week ago. Again I drenched the room with Raid, but it isn't working and I'm tired of fleas, so I knocked on Judith and Jake's door and got kinda cranky.

Upshot: We're going halvsies to buy several flea-specific bugbombs, targeting every bedroom and the kitchen, living room, and stairs. Yay!

♦ ♦ ♦

And another yay: My toothache seems to be fading at last.

Judith said she needed help eating some leftover meat before it goes bad, so for dinner I ate four pork chop sandwiches. This required actual chewing, and it's been a week since I've eaten anything but PBJs, but it only hurt in slight twinges.

Trains to the city were delayed this morning, due to a medical emergency. That's BART-talk for a suicide on the tracks. They don't want to tell the truth over the public address, that some schmuck went splat at MacArthur Station.

Announcements of medical emergencies are not uncommon. The Golden Gate Bridge will always be number one, but throwing yourself in front of the train must be the second most popular way to make an exit around here.

Hey, suiciders: If you gotta go you gotta go, and you have my compassion and condolences, but if you shuffle off this mortal coil on the third rail, or jump in front of a passenger train, good riddance, asshole.

It's rude to interrupt a hundred thousand people's commute and ruin a driver's day, just because you can't handle life any more. Have the common decency to off yourself someplace private.

♦ ♦ ♦

BART eventually took me under the water, and I rode a #33 bus to listen to Gertrude again, while doing her housework. She looks and sounds like a nice little old lady and she tips well, but she's a bitch, in addition to being a constant talker.

When I ask a chore-related question, sometimes she answers but more often she'll criticize something else I've done. Like, today when I asked if she had any vacuum cleaner bags, she answered by complaining that I hadn't dried the dishes I'd washed. Other than on sit-coms, who really dries their dishes?

Last week when I asked where the dustpan was, she answered by complaining about a speck I'd missed washing the window. And it was a stain, Gertrude, not a speck.

If I don't ask any questions, she'll talk and talk about her family and dead husband. Which is boring, but better than being scolded, so I'm about done asking her questions.

She had me box up lots of her crap in the basement, and while I worked she sat in a chair and told dull details of her little old lady life. Trying to be polite (I'll do anything for a tip) I listened to stories about her grandchildren, her friends at church, and the candied apples she'll be making for Halloween, and then I made the mistake of again asking a question.

"Jeez," I said, "do kids—"

"Don't," she said quite loudly, "take the Lord's name in vain."

Jeez, I guess 'jeez' is cussin'. Short for Jesus.

My question was going to be: Do kids still go trick-or-treating? In the shitty neighborhoods and slum hotels where I've lived the past several Octobers, no kids have rung my doorbell.

But I didn't ask again, even without the jeez. With no further comment, I started tossing things into boxes a bit more enthusiastically, hoping to hear something shatter.

Story time with Gertrude continued until the basement was mostly organized. Then we went back upstairs, and she brought me a glass of lemonade and paid me $25 for two hours of work. Decent tip, and thanks for the lemonade.

She asked me to come back next Wednesday, and I wanted to say no. She reminds me of my mother, with all her talking and scolding. My mother wouldn't tip, though, so I said, "Sure, see you next Wednesday."

♦ ♦ ♦

And then I walked a few blocks for another daily double at the Roxie.

Brainstorm (1965) is a sweaty melodrama, but all the good stuff is in the first few minutes. After that it's just a widescreen yawn.

Jeff Hunter (Star Trek's Captain Pike) is banging Anne Francis (Honey West), but she's another man's wife, so they decide to murder her husband. Double Indemnity it's not, though. This is so campy you'll want to pitch a tent. Richard Kiel is the movie's only interesting character, and he's only on screen for half a minute.

Experiment in Terror (1962) is about some batty bad guy who drops into Lee Remick's garage and demands she embezzle $100,000 from the bank where she works, or he'll kill her. It starts strong and the tension is taut all the way. It's not quite noir, but it works as a corny thriller, and it's only ridiculous when you stop and think about it.

Would the FBI would put their eavesdropping and entrapment of civil rights protesters on hold, to send a dozen G-men, set up 24-hour surveillance, hover a helicopter, and bring in dozens of city cops for good measure, all to protect one woman, and all on the basis on a ten-second phone call that got cut off?

Maybe they'd do all that if the woman is red-hot Lee Remick, but they wouldn't do squat to protect you or me.

♦ ♦ ♦

After the show, walking past a gay bar on Valencia, a beautiful drag queen offered me a free condom. She was the prettiest woman I've seen in October, so I smiled and said sure, and now there are two rubbers in my wallet.

Unless I give them to panhandlers, that should last the rest of my life.

♦ ♦ ♦

There are other phones in our house, but the guest room has the only touch-tone, so again I stepped in there to check my messages, and it's the fleas' metropolis. By the time I'd sat in the chair and dialed my voice mail, they were jumping across my lap.

I double-drenched the carpet, the chair, and under the bed with insecticide, though I'm starting to wonder if Raid is a flea aphrodisiac.

Judith and I will be buying a 12-pack of bugbombs and fumigating the entire house this weekend. Until then I'll be checking messages at the phone booth across the street.

♦ ♦ ♦

Got another very nice letter from Sarah-Katherine, with word that she's coming to San Francisco again. She'll be accompanying her brother on a business trip in December. No word yet on exact dates, or how long they'll be staying.

Maybe this time my temperamental erection will pop up and say hello. Maybe those condoms won't last long at all and I should've taken a handful.

I wouldn't mind not meeting her brother, though. Jeez (and I do mean Jeez, Gertrude), I do bad enough meeting women's fathers…

Thursday —

I wasn't looking for one, but found an abandoned bicycle just off Ashby Avenue. A red Schwinn, with leopard spots on the seat, and un-padlocked, just leaning on a fence. Saw nobody around, and waited five minutes to be sure I wasn't, you know, stealing it, but then the bike needed a joyride.

Dad thought bicycles were unsafe. We kids all pleaded, but bikes were against the rules, so I've never owned one. Didn't learn to ride one until my 20s, and it had been years since I'd been on one at all.

But, oh man... It was a date with a girl I thought I loved. We rented bikes and rode around Green Lake in Seattle, then ate messy hot dogs and she splotched her blouse, the sexiest splotch you've ever seen. Then we sat on bleachers and watched a sandlot ball game, some tavern against some an auto part shop, and she kissed me. I can still taste her sauerkraut. It would've been, what, 1985 or so?

That's the last time I rode a bike until today, so I was wobbly at first, and struggled with switching gears. Never got much speed, but I pedaled it all the way to College Ave, then back again, and then, sweaty, exhausted, left the bike where I'd found it.

Nobody's none the wiser except me — my leg muscles ache like I did some work, and somehow my shoulder hurts, too.

Friday —

Woke up with something in my mouth, and spat all over my bed trying to get it out, until a speck landed on an old envelope and instantly hopped away. Another frickin' flea.

We were planning to buy bugbombs tomorrow, but instead Judith and I drove to a hardware store and did the buying today. A dozen bugbombs. Overnight, a beautiful fog of sweet carcinogens will fill every room in the house, simultaneously, with another bomb in the stairwell.

Cy is spending the night at a friend's house, Joe says he'll sleep in his car. Jake and Judith got a hotel room, and took all the animals with them. Me, I have nowhere to go, so I'll snore in a sleeping bag on the sidewalk — homeless for just one night, and then tomorrow, hopefully, flealess.

The house reeks of poison, but I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It means no more fleas, I hope.

I slept fine on the sidewalk overnight, then came inside only long enough to shower and get dressed and cough a lot, and then I went to work.

♦ ♦ ♦

On Saturdays I usually set up the fish cart on the fourth block of Telegraph, near Cody's and near all the free speech vendors — the unlicensed sellers, selling politically-themed stuff without anyone's permission, because the First Amendment is a good idea.

The other blocks are always jam-packed on the weekends, and even though our cart has a license, it's easier to find some open inches of pavement by Haste Street. And anyway, the free speech vendors are more fun to be around, than the artsy craftsy vendors.

A nutty free speecher was working two stalls to my south. Most vendors sit, but he was standing, delivering a speech to nobody listening. It seemed to be pro-Clinton but anti-Gore, pro-civil rights but anti-gay, pro-war in Bosnia but anti-military. You figure it out; I gave up.

His funniest bit was when he wandered over to my table, glanced at the anti-Christian fish, and said, "I don't think this should qualify as a free speech stand."

"Well," I said, "guess I'm lucky you're not in charge of deciding who gets free speech." Then I pointed to our license, again obediently posted on the table like it's supposed to be. It's not a free speech table, not yet anyway, but it ought to be.

I did not explain to him our fishy backstory about bickering with the city bureaucracy, and as a kindness, I won't explain it again to you, either, at least not today.

♦ ♦ ♦

Up the street there were two medical marijuana booths, handing out literature and selling stickers calling for pot to be legalized as a prescription drug.

Half-ass horse manure, if you ask me.

Of course marijuana is good for you — it fights nausea, eases pain, holds glaucoma in check, etc. Everyone knows that, or ought to. And hemp also makes better paper, better rope, does less damage to the environment than the crops current law encourages. And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo. All such talk bores me.

Marijuana should be legalized, not for medical purposes or to keep the planet green, but simply because it's nobody's dang business what you grow or what you smoke. Period.

My body, my choice: Legalize dope and legalize freedom.

Being me, when the guys at one of the medical marijuana tables gave their spiel to someone, I walked over to (politely) tell them what I think of their candy-ass arguments for semi-legalizing a harmless weed but only as medicine.

Before I could call them spineless cowards, though, something on their table caught my eye. Next to their hemp-aware literature, there were cellophane-wrapped cookies and brownies, and that's kinda gutsy, even for Berkeley. Pot's illegal. Possession isn't much, but possession with intent to sell — they were marked $2 each — man, that's a felony. I wouldn't be brave or dumb enough to do what they're doing, selling pot cookies at a pot booth under a pot banner on the Ave, where cops are always on cycle patrol.

So the guys in that booth were not spineless cowards, and also, $2 is a good price for doped-up treats. I bought two oatmeal pot cookies. They were delicious, with perhaps a slight marijuana aftertaste, and I devoured both instantly, but felt no effects all afternoon, damn it.

♦ ♦ ♦

Later, a pretty brunette came by my stand, trying to drum up business for her massage booth across the street. "The first minute is free," she told me.

"There'll never be a second minute," I told her, because I have a few bucks for pot cookies but nothing budgeted for backrubs. I am poor.

She insisted, though, and then came around behind me, and gave me sixty seconds that felt very good indeed. Where's Sarah-Katherine when I need her?

♦ ♦ ♦

Dear Abby says to write thank you notes immediately, but I rarely follow good advice. Someone sent me an underarm rock that works like deodorant, and it really works and I love it, but not only did I not say thanks, I can't even remember who sent it.

And thanks too, to the zine reader who left a voice mail about collecting quotes, and whoever sent the pine pillow, and whoever sent the brandy, and all the macaroni and cheese, and the GCC passes, and the paperback novels. Grazi all over the place, sincerely, to each of you.

Some of you, I'm so dang grateful I'd like to tack a few freebie issues onto your subscriptions, but I seriously don't remember who you are, so please remind me.

♦ ♦ ♦

And that'll be my last word before going to sleep, here in my room that smells like Bhopal but lacks any living fleas.

Woke up with an idea, and that hasn't happened in a while. Maybe even a good idea, which is even more rare.

There's this story I've wanted to write, but the beginning has always been hazy, and the middle made no sense, until this morning. It's the story I gave up on a year and a half ago, and decided to write this pathetic zine instead.

But suddenly, soon as my eyes were open this morning, the good guy had a motivation, I knew what had to happen in the mid-section, and it clicks like a jigsaw with what I'd envisioned as the end. A eureka moment, is what they call this.

Darted out of bed, hurried naked to the typewriter, and started mapping it out. Not sure it'll ever be worth telling, but I spent two hours telling it to myself. For the first time, I can see the whole shape of the story, what I want to do with it, and I've even outlined a few key scenes.

Of course, it has no potential as an article or novel anyone might *buy. Hell, no. Too subversive, too idiosyncratic, too strange, but that's OK. I write to write, not to sell, and mostly I write for an audience of me. I'll keep crunching the plot in my head and on paper, and if I'm ever proud of it I'll share it, but not before.

♦ ♦ ♦

Today on the Ave, I worked between Hey, the woman whose name I can't remember, and Very-Abdul, the Muslim guy who always talks about Islam.

I've never seen Very-Abdul so sociable, though. He flirted with Hey, said a few kind words to me, and laughed out loud when a dog peed on the leg of my table. He barely even talked about Islam, and his smile didn't disappear when I told him we're soon coming out with an Allah fish.

A few stalls up Telegraph was another vendor, some middle-aged man whose name I can't remember, same as Hey. He said "Hi, Doug," came over and talked to me for a while, and after he'd walked away I discreetly asked Hey his name, but she said, "Gee, Doug, I don't remember."

That's when I should've asked Hey her name, but I forgot.

♦ ♦ ♦

On my walk home, I witnessed two more arrests of harmless street people. It must be crackdown time. Nobody in charge ever does anything about all the causes of homelessness, and they never do anything really to help the homeless, but when there get to be too many people on the street there's always another round of crackdowns.

Two street people, late teens or early 20s, were sitting on the sidewalk, out of everyone's way, not even panhandling. What's the problem with that?

Well, here come two of Berkeley's bastards with badges, who sternly demanded to see their IDs. One man had no license, so a cop read him his rights. The other man showed them his license, but he was borderline drunk and didn't want to take a breathalyzer test, so the other cop read him his rights. Two sets of handcuffs, and into the squad car.

Is it illegal to not have ID on you? And that second guy, "You appear to be drunk," said the cops, but he wasn't drinking and if he was drunk he wasn't very. He was simply sitting there talking to his buddy, until him and his buddy were arrested and hauled away.

And again it made me angry, but I didn't have any ID either, so I said nothing. I only watched, so there'd at least be a witness if the cops got too rough.

There was no struggle, though. Not even an argument. As ordered, the two men got into the back seat, and the cop car rolled away.

More and more, I think, that'll be the last line when America is over: There was no struggle.

I am plagued by psychosomatic fleas. There are dead fleas everywhere, but I haven't seen any living fleas since the Great Bugbombing a few days ago. And yet, it feels like I'm being eaten alive.

After so much time with fleas, so many times bitten, every breeze against the hair on my arms feels like it might be a flea. I scratch all my skin — wrists, elbows, forehead, between the toes. No new bites. It's only in my mind, but it's enough to keep me awake.

♦ ♦ ♦

Lugosi wants to keep me awake, too. Barely slept at all last night, because the dog who thinks he's a moose was pacing the hall all night. Something's bothering him too, I guess.

Every few minutes, heavy dog footsteps from the porch to the laundry room, passing directly in front of my door. Floomp floomp floomp floomp floomp. A few minutes later, walking the other direction, floomp floomp floomp floomp floomp.

I got up and opened the door to let him out, but he didn't want out. I checked his food. Plenty. I checked his water. A quart low, but clean, and I topped it off.

Back to bed, and floomp floomp floomp floomp floomp goes the dog. I'm the prisoner, he's the guard. What is it, Lugosi? What are a dog's worries?

♦ ♦ ♦

On the BART ride to San Francisco, I sat next to some grumpy-looking yuppie, and chose that seat because he looked grumpy. Something was stirring within me. Gas. I let loose with three long and loud ones, and that pinstripped peckerwood said, "Excuse me," and decided he'd rather stand by the door.

♦ ♦ ♦

By now the next issue of Interview should be out, so the issue with a write-up about Pathetic Life is now a dusty back issue. Old news.

The magazine listed my address wrong, but the remarkable US Postal Service has so far delivered 21 mis-addressed envelopes to me at the right address. Thank you, USPS. I've mailed sample copies to 19 of those people. The other two sent such twit-headed notes, I'm ignoring them.

Interview didn't mention any price, but most people know that stuff in America costs money. Exactly one of those 21 people included even a dollar bill, and only two even thought to send a self-addressed stamped envelope.

One of the 19, though, sent me six bucks — three dollars for the freebie I'd sent her, and three dollars more for the next issue. One new subscriber, in other words.

If Interview is a gift horse, I am looking it square in the mouth.

Elton the cat scratched and screamed at my door off and on all night. I put her out of the room and into the hall, and she came back and yowled at my door. I let her in, and she yowled at my face soon as I fell asleep. Put her back in the hall, and she came back to the door, yowling and scratching. Let her back into the room, and she started jumping on the table and knocking things off. So I put her all the way outside, and she came to my window and started yowling and scratching at the glass to be let in.

The whole night is a blur of being awake against my will. Damn cat did whatever needed to be done to make sure I napped but never slept, and then she woke me for the day at 5:45 in the morning. That's early for me. I'm an eight o'clocker.

The cat's always interrupting my best dreams by rumbling through the trash, knocking cans off the mantle and eating my sandwiches. I do like having her on my shoulder while I'm typing, but letting her into the room only encourages her to moan and meow at the door all night long, waking me up.

So I think we're breaking up, me and that cat. It's not like she's my cat, or ever has been. She was part of the household when I moved in, and she'll still be here when I leave.

♦ ♦ ♦

Elton reminds me of a particular woman I sorta dated, Dawn. She dated me more than I dated her. Only woman who ever pursued me, more than me pursuing her, and I did not like being pursued.

I'm starting to feel the same way about Elton, like it was a mistake ever getting close to her. Maybe, sure, I'll tickle her ears when were together in the kitchen, but she's gotta stay out of my bedroom. Gotta build a wall around me and keep her out, just like Dawn.

Dawn. There's a name from the past. She deserves better than to suddenly be in my memories fifteen years later, but only to be compared to an annoying cat. I do hope she's OK, wherever she is.

I ought to tell you about Dawn. Her life had already been a hell of a story and she wanted to tell it to me again and again, and she did. Maybe next time I've run dry on my own stories, I swipe and tell hers.

There was nothing wrong about Dawn, really. She wanted to like me, is all. Maybe I was an ass pushing her away. OK, not maybe, definitely I was an ass. She was just way more complicated than I could handle at 20.

♦ ♦ ♦

Drank two cups of coffee and took two caffeine pills, and still it was a sleepy day. Mostly I spent it riding unfamiliar buses around Alameda County, to put up my "I'll do anything" flyers.

San Francisco is so overcrowded you can't ride a bus three blocks without finding a laundromat, and inside there's usually a bulletin board, so my "I'll do anything" goes up next to the lost puppies and cars for sale.

In Berkeley and most of the east bay, there aren't that many places to wash your clothes, and a lot of the laundries don't even have bulletin boards, so I glue one of my sticky-back flyers to the wall by the change machine.

Oakland has slums, though, and slums tend to have laundromats, so I spent the day getting on and off the #88 bus. Rough areas, full of tough people who seemed sadder to me than tough.

I didn't talk to any of them, and after a while the view from the bus window, and the neighborhoods I was walking, it all started making me sad, too. So I rode away, and put up some flyers in downtown Oakland, and then rode back through Hades to the little chunk of suburbia where I'm living with Judith and Jake and Elton.

♦ ♦ ♦

Years ago, before I'd completely given up on the world, I thought maybe I could be a writer. It wasn't something I noticed in school, where illiterate "language arts" teachers told me what to read, then what to write about, how to write it, and what was wrong with everything I'd written. I didn't care and usually didn't try, unless their assignments by luck aligned with something I wanted to write about.

And even then, I cared more about my grade on what I'd written, than whatever letter they wrote across the first page.

As with all things, once the teachers and what they'd taught had been forgotten, the learning began. Once writing was something *I* wanted, not what someone else told me to do, I wrote better, enjoyed it more, and occasionally I'm even proud of it.

So here I am, writing for me, just a hobby, but you're welcome to look over my shoulder.

A few hundred people will read these words when this issue goes into the mail, and then, a few weeks after that, nobody will ever read this paragraph again, nor this page, nor any of the words I've tried to polish like an apple, and printed and stapled and mailed to you.

You paid three bucks for this, so it's yours, but it's still a piece of me, you know. Most of you will toss it in the trash when you're finished reading, which might be twenty pages before what I'm writing today. The greener among you will toss me into a recycling bin. Wherever me and this zine end up, the staples will rust, the pages will mold and degrade to dust.

Every word I've scribbled, typed, erased, crumpled, rewritten, and finally pronounced "good enough" will be forgotten, which is not a great loss, but I would like to say thank you, for humoring this crotchety crank who wanted to write.

And that's the end of October, 1995. If you'd like to humor me a bit longer, please remember to send three dollars for the next issue.