So. In 2006, a year of small changes. Jessica, Schnookie and I headed for a new house on Upper Bay Road in “The Bottoms” in Arcata, CA.
Funny thing. I just noticed. I lived in Brickbottom Artists Building in Somerville, Massachusetts back in the late eighties. We named the two side-by-side five-story reinforced concrete bunker buildings… an A&P industrial bakery and commercial cannery building… built a stone’s throw from Beacon Hill, across the Charles River, next to MIT in Cambridge, MA… a hop and a skip over the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Bridge… just outside of Boston in the roaring 20’s. We named the long-empty, monolithic buildings… several hundred thousand square feet of “livable work”… or, legal, live-in… artist loft space… which we acquired as a group of one hundred artists, for just over two-million dollars, and spent 13.2 million dollars developing… Brickbottom… as a reference to the earlier historical use of the land upon which the buildings stood. The land in the area, back in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, had been ground where clay was mined for building many of the red brick structures of Boston and Cambridge. The local inhabitants, the native Americans, had been using the clay there for ages. My father used to call it, us, the largest intentional community of artists living under one/two roofs in the USA at the time… “Foggy Bottom”.
How goes it in “Foggy Bottom”? he would ask quite often with a WC Fields’ conspiratorial grin.
From “Foggy Bottom” to “The Bottoms”… What can I say?
Were we “moving up in the world”? Well. We moved north and west anyway. We moved from a… less than desirable to some… neighborhood next to the junkyard in south, industrial Arcata. To a decades old, sprawling suburban neighborhood development near Mad River Hospital and Pacific Union Primary School. In the flood plain of the Mad River. Just across from a forty-acre wide open… undeveloped, and purportedly “un-develop-able”… cow frog and heron pasture… just outside the incorporated boundaries of Arcata city proper… in the fine green County of Humboldt.
I chose this particular house. A typical ranch style 3/2 with a two-car garage, or, rather… a four-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, with a deep, narrow garage that might have fit two compact cars bumper to bumper.
For many reasons. After looking north south east and west for over a year. With the incomparable Audrey, of Coldwell Banker Realty, Arcata!
1. Location. Walking distance to a good primary school for my young children whom I was convinced would be coming out to live with me soon.
2. Good bone structure… the house frame was built entirely of local redwood… which does not rot. And is not susceptible like fir to termites.
3. Location. The house, which was built in 1963, had survived the Great Flood of 1964, when the Arcata Bottoms was inundated by the Mad River. The home inspector told me that the cracked mud patterns of the land under the raised pier-and-post home indicated that flood waters had reached under the house, but, the house itself had not been flooded. No water damage to the home. In fact, the house was 30 feet above sea level. Flood insurance was required by FEMA up to 29 feet. I could, and did argue, as my tenant before me had done, that I did not need to purchase expensive flood insurance because of the elevation of the home. Bank of America disagreed with me for a time, requiring me to purchase flood insurance. Then they sold my original mortgage to another lender and I was able to argue my case successfully. Anyway, the point is… the house was potentially one foot above… the next five-hundred year flood. I bought a kayak as a backup plan.
4. The house had no mold present. I became expert at detecting mold after a year of looking at houses in Humboldt County. Most houses in Humboldt are poorly constructed, dank, shadowy… toxic mold pits. We have a great deal of fog year round. And shady forest in Humboldt. In fact, this house stood with a bright southern exposure. The front door and front living space faced a wide-open, sunny, airy… “empty” field… with a clear view to the distant horizon. It had multiple skylights already installed by the prior owner. It had very nice tongue-and-groove blond oak floors. Benjamin Moore Navaho White walls throughout. In fact, everything about this house… inside and out… spoke of lightness, brightness, health and well-being. This was important to me for my own health, of course. But, more importantly, for my children’s health. Both of my kids suffered from birth from allergies of all kinds. From eczema from asthma… from respiratory,
environmentally triggered illnesses. It was vital, of the highest importance, to find them a place where they could breathe easily and grow strong.
In 2006, two years after leaving a failed twenty-plus year relationship. After abandoning my two young children and their mother on the farm in New Hampshire. I was still focused on the primary objective of moving them out to the west coast. I mean. I still believed that I could convince their “dyed in the wool” New England mother to move out west so that they would have the benefits of my fatherly closeness and daily support. My “best laid plan(s) of mice and men” at that time was to acquire two homes as quickly as possible so that I could offer one of them as an enticement to my “angry ex”… mortgage and rent free.
It would take me at least a decade to realize the folly of my thinking. The hair-brained scheme of growing pot to… “get rich quick”… to build an overnight business and real estate empire… “for the sake of the children”
Was a self-projected delusion. A “Grand Guignol” almost worthy of Louis Ferdinand…
Plays
At the Grand Guignol, patrons would see five or six plays, all in a style that attempted to be brutally true to the theatre's naturalistic ideals. The plays were in a variety of styles, but the most popular and best known were the horror plays, featuring a distinctly bleak worldview as well as notably gory special effects in their notoriously bloody climaxes. The horrors depicted at Grand Guignol were generally not supernatural; these plays often explored the altered states, like insanity, hypnosis, or panic, under which uncontrolled horror could happen. To heighten the effect, the horror plays were often alternated with comedies.[6][7]
Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations, by André de Lorde: When a doctor finds his wife's lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery, rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor's brain.[8]
Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations, by André de Lorde: When a doctor finds his wife's lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery, rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor's brain.[8]
Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous, by André de Lorde: Two hags in an insane asylum use scissors to blind a pretty, young fellow inmate out of jealousy.[8]
L'Horrible Passion, by André de Lorde: A nanny strangles the children in her care.[7]
L'Horrible Passion, by André de Lorde: A nanny strangles the children in her care.[7]
What might appear clearly absurd and hopeless now, this foggy morning in 2018— in the hopeful, industrious, pre-cancer year 2006… seemed reasonably doable… appeared just a little further along… over the next rise in the road… around the next dusty bend.
Had I known that upon leaving my quaint New England… “little house on the prairie” equivalent… my storybook Walton’s Family… seventy-acre certified organic, “causa sui project”, “back to the land”, “save the whale”, “no nukes is good nukes”… “Pepperidge Farm”-not… sanctimonious, world-saving homestead… in rural New Hampshire. For the inclement, uncharted wilds of the rugged, elk parsley populated northern California coast. That I was entering yet again into my own moral mortal madhouse maze—
Like the goodly pilgrim Ferdinand Bardamu in Voyage au bout de la nuit. I was embarking upon the cusp of a self-annihilating self-discovery--
Bardamu is involved with World War I, colonial Africa, and post–World War I United States (where he works for the Ford Motor Company), returning in the second half of the novel to France, where he becomes a medical doctor and establishes a practice in a poor Paris suburb, the fictional La Garenne-Rancy. The novel also satirizes the medical profession and the vocation of scientific research. The disparate elements of the work are linked together by recurrent encounters with Léon Robinson, a hapless character whose experiences parallel, to some extent, Bardamu's experiences.
Voyage au bout de la nuit is a nihilistic novel of savage, exultant misanthropy, combined, however, with cynical humour. Céline expresses an almost unrivaled pessimism with regard to human nature, human institutions, society, and life in general. Towards the end of the book, the narrator Bardamu, who is working at an insane asylum, remarks:
…I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist any genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare,
(…je ne peux m'empêcher de mettre en doute qu'il existe d'autres véritables réalisations de nos profonds tempéraments que la guerre et la maladie, ces deux infinis du cauchemar,)
— Voyage au bout de la nuit [Paris: Folio plus classiques, 2006], p. 442)
(…je ne peux m'empêcher de mettre en doute qu'il existe d'autres véritables réalisations de nos profonds tempéraments que la guerre et la maladie, ces deux infinis du cauchemar,)
— Voyage au bout de la nuit [Paris: Folio plus classiques, 2006], p. 442)
But, I did not. I did not get it. I just kept calling the kids faithfully, dutifully hopefully… and, their spiteful mother, my ex drinking partner, Debbie. Week after week, month after month, year after exhausting, delusional year… Yes. Like the incredible fool that I am!! I kept working like a mad man and believing. Believing when Debbie yammered on the phone… with undoubtedly wine-induced enthusiasm…
“Oh yes, oh yes! We might move out there… we might. This year perhaps. I wouldn’t rule it out. Work doesn’t pay all that well. The house here needs a ton of work. The roof is leaking badly. I have no money. I’m totally broke and can barely pay the mortgage. Could you send some more money or call and talk to your father? Tell him the check is late. The child support money is late again. Call him. Ask him if he will repair the roof. Or send me more money yourself. Right away. No, no… I wouldn’t rule it out entirely”…
And on and on.
Anyway. The point is. In the hopeful, fresh-faced year of 2006. Two years away from my last imaginary mission to save the planet from impending environmental destruction by making god bread on the land, building a handmade non-toxic happy home, etc. I was on yet another imaginary mission to provide food, clothing and… primary shelter. A nice, non-toxic… already built this time… new, old home. Short walking distance to a grade school. For my missing, but never forgotten family.
And, Jessica? My infamous “ethical slut” girlfriend? My newly found partner in crimes past, present and future? My beloved Heartwoodie… Jessicali. She distinctly did not want to leave the house on G street for the house on Upper Bay. She stated emphatically that she was not happy with the idea of me… being her landlord.
I told her. I want. I need to grow pot indoors so that I can make enough money to pay off a mortgage. Firstly. I do not want to have a landlord involved while I am growing. Secondly. The garage in the house on Upper Bay Rd. seems just perfect for an indoor grow. While the bloody falling down raccoon tenement behind this tiny house…
Aaaaaa… whatever.
She was not happy with the move. But. She would have her own sunny room in the front of the house again. With her own elaborately hand- painted, turned wooden… child’s tiny single bed… bought at a yard sale off a twelve-year old girl who recently outgrew it! A quiet sanctuary where she could put on her headphones and listen to her favorite Tom Waits and Arvo Part recordings. Her own private, off-limits… nunnery bedroom nook. A much needed, sanctified workspace of her own. For her beloved journals with all of her journaling stuff!! Mucho importante! Reams of colored drawing pencils, rainbow writing pens… scissors, rulers, rubber cement, hot glue guns… her elaborate thrift shop and art store collection of arts and crafts tools and materials… for assembling complex runic, hand illustrated diaries… for accounting and charting the course of her life’s expenses… complete with colorful pie charts and zigzag felt marker graphs… Her useful, dearly loved… “happy time” and “happy place” filling… hobbying supplies then
And. Now. To make things even better. Maybe, impossible to refuse?
What a deal!
She had a new friend to go with. To the new digs. No, not the “red-haired boy” from her dream last night that she met on the bus today and brought home to G Street… and no, not the “man who picked me up hitch-hiking to work in Eureka”… who said… he thought she was pretty and… “he’s a professional photographer and he wants to photograph me… in vintage costumes!”…
My naked ass!? you mean.
No, not allowed while we are living together! If you want to suck the cocks of strange men you meet upon your dubious path through the everglades, my Pocahontas…
Did I mention that my dearest Jessica was… and perhaps still is… a fellatio artist, my good Saint…?
By all accounts… good news for mankind. Of this I am certain.
Then.
GET A GODDAMN APARTMENT OF YOUR OWN WITH YOUR OWN MONEY AND I’LL COME OVER TO VISIT YOU ON OCCASION WHEN YOU AREN’T ENTERTAINING SOMEONE ELSE’S RAGING HARD-ON!!
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!
Sorry, govna. Occasionally I get loud.
No. I meant. Her new friend and confidant. Le Baron.
Baron von Schnookieputz. El Gato Rojo. The new neighborhood bully!
You already knew that. Right, good reader.
And, the rocks.
Oh, yes. The rocks that weren’t forgotten or left behind unfortunately…
The very stones that were the demise of me for sure.
Those twenty-pound magic feng shui river stones.
They came with Jessica and the stray tom cat. You remember.
But. Now. Instead of “holding down the corners of her room”. And. Thereby anchoring her to a very specific locale within those infinite corridors of the illusory space/time labyrinthe
They were placed strategically… intuitively, ritually… at various locations in the long, straight central hallway which connected all of the rooms of our new house. East to west.
And, Why is that? you may ask. Seems like a perfect place to stub toes. Or. An ideal location to break a leg on the way from my bedroom at the far end of the hall to the bathroom late at night.
But no. No. The logic behind the Rock n Bowl… bowling alley… new location of the sacred stones was—
You’ll never guess.
“To deflect poison arrows”.
That’s right, my witchy warlock druid… Taoist immortal friends.
And not only that!? She also placed a round mirror on my bedroom wall at the end of the long central hall. Which might be seen from the other far end of the hall when my bedroom door was open. Which. Was further reputed to “deflect poison arrows”… in collusion with the impediments of the rocks… Which were designed to impede and disperse… the flow of negative energy… and—
Protect her from me? Or me and her? From god knows which assassins coming from which directions were certain!?
Good lord, padre! A wicked occult witch mistress with a dynamic floor plan to imprison me for an eternity in a redwood box!
And me, a love-struck idiot with a mission to walk blindly off the nearest cliff
Now. Go ponder the dire implications of that Chinese puzzle with your last dragonwell cup of tea for the morning.
Location location location….
