Scientology - kind of like 'expensive acid' ;-)
Ital
i've been reading this bio of an author named Jerry E. Smith, which is
webbed at
http://www.blazing-trails.com/jesmith/po/inside.php3?itemNum=after
it is really a good read.
here's what he says regarding his first take on the subject...
I thought it was all hog wash. Or rather, since at that time I was
taking acid (LSD) and getting "memories" of past lives, Scientology
struck me as being "expensive acid."
too funny!
later the poor guy actually got completely sucked into scientology and
ended up being a slave for the sea org.
if you think the sea org uniforms are cool, check out what he says
about the uniforms worn at the advacned org in LA back in the 60's...
The first uniform of the AO crew, back in the early '60's, was a white
jump suit with silver boots and a silver "space" helmet! The Los
Angeles Org was located a few doors away from the staff AO, across a
major street, in an old rambling spanish style mansion. And the
Pacific Area Command Estates Org (PAC Estates), where I served my
"boot camp," was just a few blocks away from both of them in a wild
gaudy Victorian Mansion build by Charles Chaplain, of silent film
fame.
hysterical!
Ital
Virgin Gasp
wrote:
> i've been reading this bio of an author named Jerry E. Smith, which is
> webbed at
> http://www.blazing-trails.com/jesmith/po/inside.php3?itemNum=after
Afterword. Copyright Jerry E. Smith
I considered making this a FOREWORD, but I decided that it
probably would be best if you read the poetry first, letting each
one stand or fall by its own merits. Now that you have read, or
at least skimmed, 'em, I will tell you the tale of how these came
to be.
I thought of introducing each poem individually, but rejected
that. There have been several distinct periods in my life, each
impacting on my writing, often utterly changing the direction of
my career. Each of these periods produced some representative
poems, occasionally dozens of them in a single day. Short
paragraphs at the beginning of each piece would not give as clear
a picture as stringing them all together in a single narrative. I
think this better illustrates how each came out of the events of
my life. This then is something of a mini-autobiography.
Why an alphabetical arrangement of these poems? I have tried
several orderings for this over the years. This is the third time
I have collected together a book of my poems. The previous books
were SOMETHING FOR MY FANS (Summer 1984), and before that
SNAPSHOTS OF A MIND (1977, or so). This book includes much of
what was in them, plus new pieces.
In those chapbooks I tried placing these works into categories,
but some pieces refused to fit into any particular "type" or
subject matter, while others could easily fit into several. One
example of the problem of trying to figure out where pieces ought
to go is OVERTURE, which was used as the frontispiece for
SOMETHING FOR MY FANS. Now, I really don't think its good enough
to be the first poem in a book. In fact, I really don't think its
good enough to be in this collection at all, but I like it for
some dumb reason -- go figure.
Some readers have suggested presenting the poems
chronologically. I considered that, but frankly, too many of my
early pieces are simply not good enough to warrant being placed
at the beginning. I have added a Chronological Listing after this
"outtro," should you wish to go back and reread them in the order
written. There have been times, such as while on a month long
rail trip, where reams of poems were turned out, poems that I
think are better distributed throughout the book, which would not
have been possible in a straight chronological arrangement. It
seems to me that this current alphabetical offering is
particularly readable. I admit, I did change the names of a few
poems to place them where I wanted them.
Perhaps I should say a few words about my childhood ... Ah,
Doctor, can I stretch out on this couch? First off, I was
adopted. I believe that if you add my adopted parents IQs
together you will find that figure just a smidge higher than
mine. Honestly, I think they bribed an adoptions officer to get
me.
My father, an Eastern Oregon cowboy who returned from WWII to
work as a machinist for a Defense Contractor, came home from work
each evening to our 1950s Southern California suburban tract
home, flipped on the TV, settled into his Lay-Z-Boy, and for all
practical purposes vanished. Weekends were spent worshipping
together -- in front of the TV. The way I remember my childhood
is, the only time my father spoke to me was to tell me what a
useless piece of shit I was. Doctor, do you think that he was
jealous of my Mother's paying more attention to me than to him? I
have never really wanted her attention, though, as she babbles on
endlessly about nothing for hours. Yeah, Bart Simpson has it way
better than I did!
For my first 5 years we lived in Perris, California, a desert
edge community 17 miles south southeast of Riverside, the county
seat, perhaps 80 or 90 miles from Los Angeles. We lived in a
trailer behind my maternal grandparents home. It was wonderful.
Then we moved closer to Riverside, first to Arlington, then to
West Riverside, which is also known as Rubidoux, where we bought
a brand new tract home. I lived there from First Grade to my
Freshman year in High School. In the mid-60s my father went
through several jobs in several towns as the defense industry
shifted from post-war, losing contracts, to Viet Nam, new
contracts for new companies. I went to four high schools in all
-- Rubidoux in West Riverside; Montclair in Montclair,
California, a "bedroom" community on the San Bernardino side of
the Los Angeles/San Bernardino county line; then to Ganesha and
finally Pomona High, both in Pomona, a city of 300,000 plus
people in Los Angeles County, about 40 miles east of downtown Los
Angeles.
I grew up in a home where The Arts and Culture (beyond that
broadcast by NBC, CBS & ABC) played no role, whatsoever. I never
saw my father read a book in my entire life (except once I caught
him reading a "one-handed reader"). Nor was my mother a reader.
She leafed through women's magazines and the TV Guide. Hanging
unframed pictures of kittens and puppies pulled from those
magazines was as close to Art as she ever got.
The only radio we owned was in the car and it was tuned to a
Country and Western station (KWOW). Honestly, I did not know
there was any music beyond C & W until I was in junior high.
Hearing the Beatles played on a transistor radio by some black
girls at the back of the school bus hit me with the force of a
religious conversion. Oh, I had heard classical music on the TV
as background, all right, but it hadn't occurred to me that
people could actually listen to it, all by itself. And, of
course, I had been forced to sit through Lawrence Welk every
Sunday night before WALT DISNEY'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR came
on, but Lawrence Welk wasn't really Music, was it? I mean,
Lawrence Welk was television, and music is on the radio (out in
the car), not on TV, right?
An only child with completely disinterested parents, I was a
nerdy, unpopular kid. Too small for sports, I had nothing to do
but read. Lacking any parental direction, I read science fiction
and fantasy, which satisfied both my need for intellectual
stimulation and gave me escape from a miserable childhood long on
boredom and verbal abuse. What I lacked in breadth, I made up for
in depth. I started reading juvenile sci-fi at age 8; by 12 I had
graduated to adult books (the hard stuff?). By the time I started
high school I had read every sci-fi book in the Riverside County
Library System and most in the Los Angles County System! By the
time I finished high school I had read over 10,000 sci- fi and
fantasy books -- and, unfortunately, little else.
My first experience with poetry was not positive. The little I
read in school I hated. Frankly, sonnets baffle me. All those
established structures and verse forms seem to me to get in the
way of making one's point. I was in high school in the late '60s.
Rock lyrics were the only "poetry" I liked. However, stuff
written in strict rhyme, particularly rhyming couplets, has
always annoyed me, and does so to this day (I am sure that there
is a reason why "rap" rhymes with "crap"). That is why I seldom
rhyme and hardly ever adhere to any established form, much less
meter. In part I got into writing poetry because I couldn't find
anything I liked -- a case of the old "if you want something done
right, do it yourself," I guess.
My earliest poetry, written while I was in high school, and a
little later, when active as a science fiction fan writing for
fanzines like the Valley Amateur Press Alliance (ValAPA), was
childish, truly awful, tripe. Some of this junk gave me chums a
larf, like MAD IS WHAT FANS BE (from 1967 or so, not in this
collection). Although my writing during this period was crap I
got hooked (... on a feeling?). One piece particularly comes to
mind. Called THE WHITE SHIP (also not in this collection) it was
a reflection on race relations. From it I discovered that I could
make weighty philosophical statements in verse form, something of
an epiphany for a sixteen-year-old. Unfortunately, it bore too
close a resemblance to a song of the same name by the acid-rock
band H.P. LOVECRAFT.
After reading sci-fi for a decade I felt ready to write it. As I
got older my passion for writing only grew. Today, I am happy to
say I have seen my work in print hundreds of times -- scores of
non-fiction articles and news stories, perhaps a hundred fiction
pieces (over a dozen porno novels, and half-a-hundred porno
"letters" alone) and uncounted dozens of poems. I am even happier
to say that I am cashing an ever-increasing number of checks!
Click to Amazon.com for me latest Magnum Edipus, er, Opus, HAARP:
THE ULTIMATE WEAPON OF THE CONSPIRACY from Adventures Unlimited
Press (1998).
In 1972 I left my parents home for the first time and moved to
Klamath Falls, Oregon with two hippy friends, Orion Sparrowhawk,
a fellow sci-fi fan, and his girl friend, Willow Moonwind. There
I met Ina, my "one true love," in 1973 (and lost her in '74!).
TEAR is but one of the dozens of sappy poems that I wrote that
love-demented summer. TEAR is one of the handful of
autobiographical poems that appear in this collection. Most of
the works in this book are fiction, short stories in verse form.
TEAR is one of the few that really did happen and is somewhat
self explanatory. I kept it mostly because that love affair,
short though it was, had a profound, even devastating effect on
my life and it seems to me that at least one artifact from that
era should be preserved.
I actually lived in Klamath Falls two different times, at either
end of the '70s. A few other poems from that first period are
also preserved here. RAIN AND SNOW from July of 1973 was my first
attempt at haiku. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry. Traditional
haiku has three lines, each of counted syllables; five syllables
in the first line, seven in the middle, five in the last. As well
as that structure, a traditional haiku will paint a picture, then
quickly look way, causing the reader to have a new thought or
sudden realization. Of all my haiku the only one I think that
really adheres to the traditional formula is DRY FLY HAIKU.
Like many of my other haiku RAIN AND SNOW was used as an opening
verse to set a mood for a longer piece. Snow, mountains, lakes
and other Oregon images appear over and over in my work, far more
so than scenes from the 'burbs were I grew up. Oregon, state of
my adopted father's birth (and Grandfather's and Great
Grandfather's deaths), became my true home. To this day it is to
nature, not the city, that I go to for spiritual refreshment.
THE ADEPT was written some time in 1974. It was intended as a
submission to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Somehow, I never got around to mailing it off. However, I did get
considerable mileage out of it, leaving it as a note on my door
when I went away. Tiring of THE ADEPT, I wrote EXPERIENCE in June
of '75 as a replacement note for folks finding my house empty.
About this time Jim Keith, another sci-fi fan and friend from my
high school years showed up at my home in Klamath. Back in the
late '60s Jim Keith and Larry Neilson and I had published a small
press science fiction fan magazine (fanzine) together. We never
got around to naming to it, so it was known simply as UNTITLED.
Its letter column got spun off as a zine in its own right under
the title of RAPZINE. UNTITLED received a great deal of critical
acclaim. If anything, it suffered from excess originality. Each
individual copy was unique, such as with hand painted
illustrations, cardboard cutouts and tipped in fine art prints.
Both Jim and Larry are now deceased.
We received an article for UNTITLED from an old time science
fiction fan and Dianetic "Clear" named Jack Harness (for an
understanding of "Clear" read DIANETICS: MODERN SCIENCE OF MENTAL
HEALTH by L. Ron Hubbard, and for an understanding of Hubbard
read BAREFACED MASSIAH by Russell Miller). Jack's article was
entitled NON-FICTION and was a description of incidents that he
said he had remembered from 3 billion years worth of his past
lives, with connective material of scenes from the Dianetic
"auditing" that had allowed him to remember it.
I thought it was all hog wash. Or rather, since at that time I
was taking acid (LSD) and getting "memories" of past lives,
Scientology struck me as being "expensive acid." I had known Jack
for a short while through science fiction "fandom" before
receiving his article and thought that if he was clear then clear
was something that I very definitely never wanted to be. Poor
Jack struck me as being about as clear as mud.
But Jim Keith was intrigued and launched into reading every book
on or about L. Ron Hubbard (LRH), Dianetics or Scientology he
could get his hands on. About that time UNTITLED/RAPZINE died and
I moved to Klamath Falls with Sparrow and Willow, Larry moved to
the San Francisco Bay area and Jim Keith went to Kansas City, MO.
By the time I saw Jim again nearly four years later in K. Falls,
in 1974, he was a devotee of LRH, had been on staff for a while
and had had quite a bit of "auditing" (also called "processing"
or "pastoral counseling"). Larry Neilson also had gotten into,
and out of, Scientology. Jim moved in with me and stayed on in
the Klamath area for about another decade. While being my house
guest in 1974-75 he babbled daily about his 'wins' in Scientology
and the superiority of 'the Tech.' This would have a hell of an
impact on my life, as you will read shortly.
Sometime in late 1974 I discovered the pleasure of getting drunk
and scribbling dozens of poems in a single session. While no
whole usable poems came out of that exercise I did get a wealth
of good lines and images that would be used later. For decades I
have collected lines of poetry and kept them like beads in a box
waiting for a chance to be strung into word necklaces. Examples
of using (and/or being) these bits and pieces of verse are THE
KISS, SOFT AS THE TINGLE OF, I MET YOU IN A DREAM, (A Case of
Watchers) SYNDROME, WORLDS IN THE MORNING, SONG OF THE OCULIST,
DOES YOUR HEART TAKE BRIBES?, HE STEPPED INTO THE AWAITING ...,
NEW WORLD DISORDER and, the currently under construction piece,
WHERE THE OWNER OF A LONELY HEART SHOPS.
SILVER WINGS (11/10/74, not in this collection) was my first
lengthy attempt at a short story in verse form. First I wrote a
prose story from the point of view of a seagull, then decided to
try the same piece as a poem. It had its moments but I don't
think it was good enough to be worth repeating here; in part
because it was inspired by the book and film JONATHAN LIVINGSTON
SEAGULL -- so sue me.
RED BOOK RHYME was one of the last pieces written during my
first sojourn in Klamath, in June of '75. Around this date I
began to feel like I was actually starting to get somewhere with
poetry. With RED BOOK RHYME I began to take writing poetry
seriously, although I didn't much like the sappiness of this
poem. The RED BOOK in the title is, of course, the woman's
magazine. This poem struck me as the sort of junk RED BOOK would
publish. I never mailed it to RED BOOK to find out -- at RED
BOOK's pay scale of one dollar per line, the $14.00 I would have
made on the piece never seemed worth the bother.
In 1975 I went on what was supposed to be a 1 or 2 week vacation
to San Francicso to attend a Science Fiction Convention over the
July 4th weekend. A series of highly improbably events ended with
my inadvertently joining staff at the Scientology organization
there. After 3 months of living on friend's couches I returned to
Klamath with the mission to make some money, then, when ready,
return to staff in S.F.
When I got back to Klamath Jim Keith was a few weeks short of
going to press on the first issue of a new newspaper. While I had
been in S.F. he had been hitchhiking around Klamath. When he got
picked-up he asked his benefactor if they knew where he could get
a job. One day he got picked up by this old bird named Ben Horn.
Ben was a tax protester and tax consultant who also had a passion
for free press. Over some years he had been publishing an odd
little paper called THE COFFEE BREAK, a radical rag for
octogenarians! After discovering Jim's background as a writer and
amateur publisher Ben gave Jim unlimited use of his office,
offset press and related equipment. Jim was ready to go to press
-- except he had little material and less advertising! I became
the paper's lead reporter and, as lead salesman, its main source
of income. This tabloid newspaper was called SKYLINE: KLAMATH
FALLS.
SKYLINE: KLAMATH FALLS was not my first "newspaper" job. Two or
three years earlier I had helped a buddy, Perry Chesnut, start
his own newspaper, THE LINKVILLE STAR. Klamath Falls' original
name was Linkville, as it founded by somebody with the last name
of Link. I did all of the graphic design and layout on the first
issue, giving the zine its "look." Unfortunately, I am not easy
to work with, in fact, as a boss I am a screaming asshole. During
a production session for the second issue two of my subordinates
mutinied. As I recall, they were an upscale hippy couple, the
MOTHER EARTH NEWS back to the land, Marin County-type. They were
mellow and laid-back and my DO IT NOW!!! style upset them. They
went to Perry and told him that either he fired me or they would
both quit. We were all volunteers. Rather than loose two people,
he asked me to quit. He got out one more issue of THE STAR, then
the folks who got me sacked walked. With zero staff he was forced
to fold the paper.
As alluded to above, I began my publishing career in Science
Fiction Fandom's little "literary" magazines. After producing my
first zine in 1966 for the Pomona Valley-based Valley Science
Fiction Association (ValSFA)'s bi-weekly, "ValAPA" I was hooked.
I was active in the zine scene throughout the late '60s and early
'70s. I appeared regularly in APAs (Amateur Press Alliances, like
the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society's weekly APA "APA-L"), as
well as in many general distribution fanzines, called genzines,
like our UNTITLED and RAPZINE. One of my first sci-fi short
stories to be published appeared in ASHWING, a genzine out of the
Pacific Northwest.
APAs are a sort of trading club. Each member produces his own
zine, usually only a few pages long. The contributing member then
gives a stack of his zine to the APA's official, usually called
something like Disty (for Distribution) Collator (DC) or Official
Editor (OE). The DC then creates a table of contents, cover and
so forth and gets all the issue, usually called a Disty or
Mailing, collated and handed out. You put in a stack of your zine
and get back one of everybody's.
My stint in APAdom culminated with my founding of the fantasy
fiction oriented club, The Unicorn Society, and its Unicorn
Amateur Press Alliance (UnAPA) in Klamath Falls in 1974. I
reasoned that if one could use virgins to catch unicorns, then
the reverse, using unicorns to catch virgins should work. It did.
Jim and I did SKYLINE: KLAMATH FALLS for 3 months (six issues).
It never did all that well financially, and besides, I had become
a "true believer" in Scientology. I was thinking that the only
really important thing to be doing in this life was to "help Ron
Clear the planet." So, when it looked like Skyline wasn't going
to make me enough money to get back to S. F., I joined
Scientology's urban monastic order, The Sea Organization (The
SO).
In Klamath Falls one December night during a heavy snow storm
Jim and I sat in the editorial offices of SKYLINE waiting for our
printer to show up. He never did. I got fed up and started
digging in a shoe box I had full of fliers from Scientology orgs,
looking for the star and wreath emblem of the SO. I called the
first one I found.
I reached a Mike Lucero, the Director of Personnel (Dir Pers) at
ASHO Foundation. I had no idea what an ASHO was, but it was SO,
so what the hell. I asked him if they handled staff PTPs (Present
Time Problems) and Lucero assured me that they did provide a full
benefit package of free accommodations, free uniforms, free food,
etc. Of course he left out that the staff allowance (pay) was
$17.20 per week, or that berthing was six to eight people crammed
into a standard sized hotel room, etc.
The SO org I joined was in Los Angeles, in the District known to
the world as Hollywood. Called The New American Saint Hill
Organization (ASHO), is was divided into a day time organization
(ASHO Day, or just ASHO) and one that was open evenings and
weekends called ASHO Foundation (ASHO Fdn or ASHOF). Much to my
surprise I discovered that I had joined up with the Foundation
org.
In that first phone call from the SKYLINE offices I had asked if
they had any positions open in their publishing department or on
their magazine (ASHOF publishes a mag called CAUSE, while ASHO
Day publishes THE AUDITOR).
The Dir Pers told me that there was an opening as Editor of
CAUSE, and that if I dropped everything and got there right away,
he could guarantee that I got it. I had always dreamed of someday
being the Editor of a real mag, not some dumb fanzine, or
shoestring make-it-go-right "shopper." I dropped everything, gave
away most of my possessions and caught a bus to L. A. with just a
few changes of clothes in an old backpack, leaving everything
else behind. I arrived at ASHOF on December 7, 1941--err, 1976,
three days after placing that phone call.
After a stint in the SO's equivalent of Boot Camp I returned to
ASHOF to be assigned to my permanent position. Was I assigned to
a job at CAUSE MAGAZINE, as promised. Oh, no. I was "posted" to
duty in the ASHO "galley", the crew dining (mess) hall. But I
wasn't on a ship, the "galley" was a rented Cuban Night Club on
Beverly Blvd. It was SO messes by day, Salsa dance music by
night, and a billion cockroaches all the time! After the
leisurely pace of hippy communal living in Klamath, the uniformed
regimentation of the pseudo-military SO was a nightmare. I worked
all day and studied Scientology most of the night. I had no time
to myself, hardly ever getting more than a few hours "shore
leave" per week; barely enough to do laundry or see a movie.
In the SO there is "The Code Of A Sea Org Member." In it you
pledge, on your sacred word of honor as an SO member, to do and
to refrain from doing a number of things. One is that any SO
member will "make things go right" and trained or not, an SO
member is expected to carry out any task or duty assigned to him.
There was no way out, I had been shafted and per the Code I was
expected to "make it go right," a phrase I came to hate.
In the galley I went into a deep despair and was so messed up I
didn't know what was happening for months. I was caught up in a
routine of working in the galley all day, and forced to take
staff training courses at night I did not want. I blew course (to
blow, is to take an unauthorized leave, or make a sudden
departure from an area, i.e. go AWOL) whenever I could. Mostly I
was just tired and depressed all the time. In those days I hardly
ever got out of the galley, hardly ever even saw daylight.
Something truly remarkable happened to me in the ASHO galley one
day. I met someone I knew from thousands, or possibly, millions
of years ago! At this point I had been in Scn about a year (3
months at SFO, 3 months in K Falls then maybe about 6 months at
ASHO) and was still a wee bit of a doubter. There was a guy who
was a new recruit at ASHO Day. I had seen him around for a day or
two and something kinda familiar about him had struck me, but we
hadn't spoken. In those days the galley, like every other part of
Scientology was way undermanned and to get the job done the crew
were assigned KP (Kitchen Police) duty on a rotating basis. The
crew hated it! About his third day at ASHO this guy pulls KP
during the lunch hour, and we end up working together.
This rented Cuban nightclub did not have a dishwasher! We had to
wash all the dishes by hand. Picture if you will a cramped
rectangular shaped room. Down one wall is a sink with soapy
water, a drain board, and another sink with scalding water. In
the center of the room is a table where the dishes, after being
rinsed in the scalding water, are placed. I am at the soapy tank,
he's at the scalding tank with thick black plastic thermal gloves
on.
At one point I set some soapy dishes on the counter between us,
and as he reached to pick them up It Happened. Our eyes met and
simultaneously, we both thought the same thing/got the same
mental picture/said the same thing! We both got this vision of
our being members of the crew of a three man starship. I had a
very clear picture of the ship and what we did. Simultaneously we
both recognized each other and shouted "You were my copilot!,"
Astonished that we had both just shouted the same thing we
realized that it was true, we did know each other from umpty-ump
zillions of years ago, and our "visions" must have been nearly
identical, as we both remembered our ship as a three man ship,
for he said "Where's the other guy?" at the same time that I said
"Where's the engineer?"!!!
We embraced like long lost brothers but couldn't talk as we were
in the middle of the lunch rush and the dishes were stacking up.
Later that afternoon he was sent to the SO world headquarters,
The Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida, and I have never seen
him (or the engineer for that matter) since. I never even found
out what name he was going by (this lifetime). Well, you can well
imagine that this helped to convince me that I was On To
Something, and (now I realize) mistakenly thought it was
Scientology.
There I wrote the first of what would become hundreds of poems
in the Scientology mind set. Perhaps the first of my Scientology
inspired poems was WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ONE TERMINAL
COMMUNICATING? In Scientology a "terminal" is a live
communication point, that is, a staff member.
I was not happy, to put it mildly, about not having time to
write. I started scribbling bits of, and notes for, stories and
book ideas on scraps of paper and napkins. GRAVESIDE MANNER and
STORM were just exercises in word play. Likewise with the
somewhat later written POSTCARD (6/3/77). It was really just a
lengthy setup for the last line, which is a joke. Another "joke"
was THIS PICTURE IS A POEM. It was written on my 26th birthday. I
was sitting in the Cuban nightclub's bar getting drunk and
feeling sorry for myself because no one was there to celebrate my
birthday -- but unbeknownst to me a surprise party was waiting
for me to show up in the galley (a few feet away)!
YORE (6/3/76) was, I think, my second attempt at haiku. I really
didn't have much time for anything longer! Curiously, it took me
a good six months to figure out what it meant. It just came out
of me, all in a moment, leaving me to spend months puzzling out
what the damn thing was about.
IN THE SYLVAN SPOTLIGHT was written August 30, 1976. Once, while
hiking up a trail in the mountains in Southern California in the
late 1960s a group of us passed by a guy strumming a guitar while
a girl lounged, striking a provocative pose, nearby. That image
stuck with me and in a fit of "wishing I were there" I wrote
SPOTLIGHT as a variation on the theme.
Up until that point in time I had never been a coffee drinker,
in fact I probably had not had more than five cups in my whole
life (unlike today, where I have already had five cups this
morning). On the 27th of September, 1976, the Officer's Steward
made a pot of iced coffee. Having no idea of the effects of
caffeine, but delighting in the flavor, I drank the whole pot --
and stayed up all night writing poetry as fast as my pen would
go. The three haiku of DEER HUNTER TRILOGY where but three of the
couple of dozen poems I wrote that night.
Ina, the Klamath Falls heartbreaker, had introduced me to a
number of poetry styles in our brief time together. One that she
showed me was poetry written into geometric shapes, like squares,
circles and ovals. INT/EXT (11/12/76) was my attempt at a poem in
the shape of a circle. In Scientology Int (interior) means having
one's spirit, soul, or, as Scientology calls
that-which-is-aware-of-being-aware, one's thetan, inside one's
body; while Ext (exterior) means having one's thetan exterior to
the physical body, or, as New Agers call it, OBE (having an Out
of Body Experience). Note the use of an "exterior" point of view
in TWO ROMANTIC SCENES written two years later in December '77.
In the second line of the "looking at pictures," the pictures
referred to are "mental image pictures" a Scientology way of
saying memories.
INT/EXT turned out to be the first of my poems to be published
in another country. It was published in a Canadian literary
journal, called, if I remember correctly, CSP World News. When I
received a copy of the issue with INT/EXT, I sent 'em a letter
asking where the check was. The editor shot back one of the
nastiest letters I have ever received, denouncing me, and any
artist that demanded payment for their work, as Whores and
Charlatans!
Just three days after writing INT/EXT a major "sea change" came
for me. After working/studying 12 to 15 hour a day, six or seven
days a week, I was really getting fed up with no personal time. I
burned to be a novelist. On the 15th of November, while sitting
on the toilet I realized that I would have about 20 minutes free
time while there, and asked myself if I could write a complete
novel in that 20 minutes. AUTUMN AIR was the answer. It is
completely fictional. It was my first successful short story in
verse form. I was jazzed. I, again, thought I was on to
something. I will let you (and future art critics) decide if I
was.
Of course, not all my efforts in this vein were successful. HER
SONG and STAR BAR (neither are in the collection) are still under
construction. Both are/were an attempt to put sci-fi space travel
into verse. Perhaps I should have left well enough alone ...
After eleven months in the ASHO galley I was traded to The Manor
Hotel For Scientologists. The Manor was located at Bronson and
Franklin, directly below, and about a half mile from, the world
famous HOLLYWOOD sign. Next to it was an Advanced Organization
(AO) for the Los Angeles area (AOLA), both located about a mile
from where I had been bunking (as ASHOF staff) in The Hollywood
Inn (The HI) on Sunset Blvd.
The Manor also housed The Guardians Office (GO). It was the GO
that was raided by the FBI in 1976. I was there that day ... The
GO's purpose was to be the interface between Scientology and
those who wanted to destroy Scientology -- or those who
Scientology thought wanted to destroy it. This included, the U.
S. government in general, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, Richard
Nixon, a cabal of International Bankers & the World Bank, a
conspiracy of international Marxist/Communism and Psychiatry, and
the "prison guards" from the 28 planet Markabian Confederation!
The Manor had been built in 1928-29 by William Randolf Hearst,
the newspaper publishing millionaire who is remembered for his
magnificent "Hearst Castle" on the Northern California Coast. It
was built as a gift for his girl friend, the movie star Marion
Davies. It was an eight- story facsimile of an 18th century
Normandy French Chateau. Located in the heart of old Hollywood,
it was dedicated as "Chateau Elyse" by Ms. Davies, who operated
it as a hotel for movie stars until the 1950s. It was beautiful,
but rundown when I got there in late 1976. The thickly landscaped
grounds, with a Classical Greek gazebo, bubbling swan fountain
and Victorian tennis courts, were breathtaking. I felt like I had
fallen into a turn-of-the -century Art Nouveau print by Alphonse
Mucha.
After Marion Davies, it was sold to a company that operated it
as an old folks home for the wealthy. They built a modern 80 bed
hospital unit on the grounds. When Scientology bought it in the
early '70s they turned the hospital into the Public Unit of The
Advanced Organization of Los Angeles (making the building it had
been previously occupying into a staff only unit).
As you may have gathered from the above, Scientology owned a lot
of buildings in L. A. There were two OAS. One was for the paying
public only, described above, next to the Manor and the other,
for staff only, was located in a two story Victorian in the
predominantly hispanic area around MacArthur Park. That was the
first AO in L. A., set up in that same Victorian back in the
'60s. The first uniform of the AO crew, back in the early '60's,
was a white jump suit with silver boots and a silver "space"
helmet! The Los Angeles Org was located a few doors away from the
staff AO, across a major street, in an old rambling spanish style
mansion. And the Pacific Area Command Estates Org (PAC Estates),
where I served my "boot camp," was just a few blocks away from
both of them in a wild gaudy Victorian Mansion build by Charles
Chaplain, of silent film fame.
At the other end of Hollywood, beyond The Manor and The HI was
Celebrity Centre Los Angeles (CCLA) in a modern three story
office building on La Brea Avenue, a block below Hollywood Blvd.
CCLA crew had their own berthing "hotel," the Wilcox. Before CCLA
bought it The Wilcox had catered to a gay clientele and the place
was seriously seedy, painted a pealing and weird bright color
that was a cross between fluorescent lavender and tittie pink,
and was located in heart of Hollywood's "queer" district on Selma
Ave at Wilcox.
My first few months in the Manor were pure hell. Unfortunately
for me, The Manor should have had a staff of over two hundred,
but under Scientology we were running a full service hotel with
just 15 to 30 staff! Talk about make it go right! I got traded
from ASHO to The Manor because Something Big was up. This, like
practically everything in Scientology was supper hush-hush, need
to know only. The SO in fact owned 27 different buildings and was
planning to sell them all off and move all the orgs around. Most
would be moved into the then vacant, just purchased, old Cedar's
of Lebenon Hospital complex on Fountain Avenue, just south and
west of Sunset and Vermont.
In SO management one of the principle tools of running the
system is a technique called "missions." In this case a mission
is a small group of SO members, usually 1 to 5, who have written
orders to go into a lower org and perform some function or
action. Missions are usually either Observation Missions (Obs
Msn), or an Action Mission. Missions are usually refereed to by
the number of the written order firing (launching) the mission
(everything in Scientology is abbreviated, the abv. for mission
is "msn"). Mission 1674 was the msn fired to perform this major
event of moving all these orgs without disrupting service or
function and sell off all these deadwood properties.
At The Manor there was a staff member named Ron Yoder. Msn 1674
needed him. He was the most knowledgeable person in PAC on the
subject of L. A. County building codes. There was a small
problem, for me. Yoder, until a few days before the trade had
been the Commanding Officer (CO) of the Manor. But just before
they traded me, three Manor crew had blown, the SO equivalent of
"jumping ship" in the dead of night. All three had been working
in the Manor's dining room. The guys at PAC Estates who ran The
Manor had busted Yoder from CO to "galley slave!" I was sent to
replace him so he could work for Msn 1674 to bring the 27 SO
structures up to code so they could be sold. Unfortunately for
me, he was doing the work of the three that blew -- which meant
that I would be doing the same! I got 45 minutes sleep my first
night there. After about a month I had gotten up to a whole 2
hours a night!
After I had been at The Manor a few months I got assigned the
position of Lead Steward and assumed a role about that of a Matre
de Hotel. There was a closet right off the dining room (that
probably was built as a washroom) being used just to store junk.
I cleaned it out and made it into a tiny living space.
The GO used to hold secret briefings in the dining room and I
inadvertently overheard a few, though unfortunately I heard very
little, and remember less. Manor staff were sometimes invited to
set in on some of these briefings and I do remember some of them.
One topic that same up regularly was "what are the Markabs
doing?." According to the GO this planet is part of the Markabian
Confederacy, and is operated by the Markabs as a prison planet!
One of the Guardians giving the briefings was to become one of
the "Scientology 7" from that FBI raid related trail. He said
that he had spent many hours in the Library of Congress (doing
what I forget) and while so engaged he had noticed the Markabs
were doing the same. He insisted that one could easily spot the
Markabians as they were wearing bodies grown in culture vats
(Hubbard called these "doll bodies") and the vat jobs were never
perfect duplicates of humans (most commonly a little too much or
too little of something, like excess forehead, or one arm much
longer than the other).
It was his opinion that the Markabs were keeping track of life
on Earth to determine what sort of intervention would be needed
and when, so as to keep things so stirred up on Earth that we'd
not be able to stage a "prison break." The GO was very concerned
that they might decided to intervene in Scientology, as it had
the Tech to undo their "implants" and release the prisoners from
this prison planet. But he was confident that we really had
nothing to worry about, as the Markabian ??beauracracy?? was so
slow, that by the time they decided to act, Scientology would
have control of this planet! My poem (A Case Of) WATCHERS
SYNDROME is from the point of view of a Markabian observer.
I lived in that little closet for a year or so before finding a
bigger room. L. A. by those days had made trash burning illegal.
The Chateau Elysse had been built in a much earlier era and had
an incinerator in the basement. The incinerator had a little room
in front of it for feeding the fire. It was just about twice the
size of a cot. Amazingly, the room was empty. I made it my
bedroom and finally got some real privacy and sleep. One curious
note about this little antechamber to the incinerator... In the
1950's three men had died in that room. They were burning trash
and the fire was sucking so much air that the door became vacuum
sealed and the three burned up ...
But life at The Manor wasn't all misery. The building and
grounds, while extremely rundown, were also very beautiful, and
being in contact with some the top people in Scientology, both
public and administrative was quite exhilarating. I have dined
with Scientology's President Heber Jentze, a former actor who had
had a role in the movie PAINT YOUR WAGON, actress Cathy Lee
Crosby (she ignored me) and a number of other, less well known
Scientology celebrities, such as Manu Topu who won an Academy
Award for his performance in the film version of James Mitchner's
HAWAII, and Micky McMeel of the kid's TV show CATPAIN KOOL AND
THE KONGS, who had also been the last touring drummer with the
band THREE DOG NIGHT.
There I socialized with the top o' Scientology's heap, an odd
slice of the rich and famous. I chatted regularly with
millionaires and movie stars, and their friends and families.
This artistic backdrop was incredibly inspirational. In addition
to all this physical beauty and intellectual and spiritual
communication was Poetry By Candlelight, a weekly poetry event
hosted by Scientologist Russell Solomon, a brilliant poet. I
attended Poetry By Candlelight nearly every Sunday -- which was
conveniently held in the Manor's dining room where I worked.
I developed the habit of writing while waiting to read. Examples
of which in this book include BEHOLD THEE, I, IN BEAUTY, written
while waiting to read at a poetry event at Celebrity Centre in
February '79; FOR INNOCENT EYES ONLY, written at Poetry By
Candlelight sometime in 1978; and, THE NIGHT IS STILL JUNG,
written at another poetry gathering of Russell Solomon's held at
New York George's Hollywood restaurant in 1984. Both of the later
being commentaries on what I thought of the poetry of some of the
others reading before me. BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A PARADIGM?
(8/26/88) was written while waiting to read at a monthly poetry
event at an actors theater on Sunset Blvd.
The time I spent at The Manor (from the Fall of '76 to the
Spring '79) was the most poetically productive of my life. At the
peak of this period I was writing poetry just about every day,
sometimes dozens per day. Which is not to say that I wrote every
single day of those years. I had a couple of spells where I went
for several months without writing a word. I captured what I was
feeling during one of those dry periods in ALL IS POETRY.
Scientology is largely about past lives. On the night of
December 12, 1976, while waiting for the last of the diners in
the Manor's restaurant to clear out, I drifted back in time,
remembering a scene from a past life. I wrote up that "memory" as
TWO DECEMBER, 1910, which was the date that that event seemed to
have occurred on. Similarly, LOOKING BACK (2/12/78, not in this
collection) is a short story in verse form about a person who's
recovering memory of past lives is making living in the present
difficult.
Scientology technology is also long on scales, such as The
Emotional Tone Scale, The Admin Scale, and so on. A few days
after writing TWO DECEMBER, 1910, I wrote my own SCALE, which was
a big hit with Scientologists.
IN THE NIGHT TIDE (2/19/77) is one of the many other fictional
poems I wrote during the Manor period. In it I explored the
boundary between erotic and aesthetic. I wanted to see how close
to the carnal I could get without loosing spiritual beauty. A few
days later on the 26th I wrote the first version of a much
re-drafted fiction piece, this one exploring American archetypes,
CENTERVILLE CITY PARK (On A Sunday). The last stanza was taken
from BOOK AND BOTTLE (12/2/76, not in this collection), a poem of
mine that I liked a great deal, but it was way too close to
Donovan's song RETIRED WRITER IN THE SUN. RAINWALKING, written a
week before St. Valentine's Day '78, was written in part to
express how I thought dating and relationships ought to be. In
January of '79 it occurred to me that "everyone" had written a
broken-hearted song/poem and it seemed to me like mine was
overdue. SOFT AS THE TINGLE OF (1/21/79) was an exercise in
blending fictional story with real emotions.
JOURNEY (from August of 1977) was almost autobiographical, in
that I was doing a great deal of cycling during my time at The
Manor. It was reported to the crew that L. Ron Hubbard had found
that chemicals of all sorts, from environmental toxins and
unhealthful food additives to psychedelic drugs, lodged in the
body and prevented spiritual gain. A pilot detox program was
foisted off on the staff. Most of us were required to run 2 1/2
hours a day. I refused to run and was permitted to ride my
bicycle for the required time -- for six or eight months! Usually
I rode up and over the top of Mt. Hollywood and/or Cajunga Peak
(both in L.A.'s sprawling Griffith Park) twice (once each way)
every day. Sometimes I tried to make it to the beach, but it
proved too far from Hollywood to Santa Monica to get there and
back in 2 1/2 hours.
This exercise did put me in excellent shape. When I left the SO
in June of '79 I did so by trying to bicycle my way back to
Klamath Falls! I only got as far as Lompoc (about 200 miles),
however, before an accident trashed the bike and sent me
traveling the rest of the way by Greyhound. JOURNEY kept changing
shape and form for years -- too many syllables to be a
traditional haiku, its final form alluded me for more than a
decade.
In Scientology everyone is rewarded or punished on the basis of
their actual production measured by a statistic assigned to
measure that production. An organization is measured by its gross
income (GI). One week The Manor's GI hit an all time record high.
To celebrate this achievement the Flag Banking Officer (the
person entrusted by Senior Management at The Flag Land Base to
handle an org's funds) sprang for the whole crew (about 30 of us)
to go out on the town. We were each treated to two free drinks
(!) at the Top Of The Five, the revolving restaurant at the top
of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel (seen in the Gil Gerrard BUCK
ROGERS movie and the setting for a TV show with Ann Gillian). It
just happened that on that same night, September 23, 1977, the
Emmy awards ceremony was held at the Bonaventure. I saw many
drunken TV celebs dancing and walking around with Emmys clutched
to their bosoms. THE EMMY was how I saw them.
One night a few weeks later, a group of us were in a restaurant
on Sunset Blvd. There was a drop-dead beautiful girl at the next
table. I scribbled "HELLO!" on a napkin and passed it to her. She
invited me over and we talked for an hour or so. In the SO one
can only have sex with one's spouse, and one can only date other
SO members; fraternizing with the public was strictly forbidden.
I had not yet met my future ex-wife and was horny as hell. The
girl I gave "Hello!" to made it clear that she wanted to go out
with me, but I let the monastic rules win and never saw her
again.
The Manor, like all Scientology organizations, published its own
magazine, MANORMAG. About a month after writing "HELLO" the
editor of MANORMAG commissioned me to write YULETIDE for the
December issue. It was very well received by the mag's
Scientology public, as I recall.
TWO ROMANTIC SCENES was originally part of MATING CALL IN D
MINOR (12/3/77), a poem that I gave to SO girls in hopes of
getting a date. In fact I did get a couple of dates with it, but
nothing that went anywhere romantically.
THE KISS was a moment of forbidden fraternizing. I spent a few
hours visiting one of the Manor's guests in her room. Nothing
improper happened while I was there, but as I left she kissed me
-- with a kiss I still have not forgotten. The Rules forbade me
to follow up on her obvious pleasure in my company, so I never
saw her after her stay at the Manor.
I met my wife at Poetry By Candlelight in 1978. Each Sunday
night the restaurant would be closed and cleaned, then set up for
Poetry. The dining area was an oval shaped main room surrounded
by French doors that opened out onto a screened-in patio which
wrapped around the main hall on three sides. One night I was
running late on getting the place cleaned up. I had to mop the
patio while the others read. When it came my turn to read I
dropped the mop and, somewhat out of breath from the exertion,
gave a very breathy reading. A girl in the audience, who was a
Manor guest, found my performance way too sexy. She went back to
my "cell" (the incinerator antechamber) that night, and basically
refused to get out of my bed for the next two weeks! Well, after
three years of living by monastic rules (no sex beyond a few
chaste kisses) I was hooked. Then she gave me an ultimatum --
marry her or she would never talk to me again!
Knowing that I was breaking the rules by having sex with her, I
countered with the proposition that I would marry her if she
joined the SO (making us "legal.") I didn't love her, but had the
idiotic idea that I had to take responsibility for making her
love me. Also, I had a Tennessee Williams play, A SHORT PERIOD OF
ADJUSTMENT, in the back of my mind and kind of thought that
eventually I would come to love her. She joined the SO and we
were married just two weeks after I swept her off her feet with
that breathy reading of my poetry! No, I did not come to love
her; quite the contrary occurred.
We took our annual three weeks of vacation as our Honeymoon in
April/May 78. We hitchhiked up the California coast to Klamath
Falls. While there I wrote SUNDANCER, and a host of others not
included here: TRIBAL GATHERING, RUIN, GOLDEN AFTERNOON, CARROT
CAKE, DREAM COME TRUE, PERFECTION, etc.
MY FIRST LIMERICK was one of a number of terrible Limericks
written in May '78 in response to a challenge by one of the Manor
staff. We had something of a dirty Limerick contest that dragged
on for a week or so, with several of us writing or reciting some
of the most foul verse ever penned. I have written a few
Limericks since, such as this one that I left on a bathroom stall
in Mt. Shasta, California:
There was an old mountain named Shasta
Who threatened a nat'ral disasta
His hot spots grew hotter
Than Satan's own daughter
When she danced for the boys at Club Cannasta
In 1977 I made what I thought was a most important discovery. In
analyzing what poetry was, I came to the conclusion that all
poems were made up of three ingredients: first, physical
brick-a-brack, real universe objects that the reader can
visualize and relate to; secondly, mental universe material,
particularly emotions and attitudes; and finally, some
heart-felt, deeply held belief that tied the mental and physical
together.
Additionally, I realized that I could write poetry about people
in much the same way as caricaturists draw "portraits" of people.
Since then I have been asking three questions of people, and on
the basis of their answers have kicked out a poem portrait of
them, or of some image conjured up by their answers, usually in
about 5 minutes. The three questions are: 1) name three physical
universe objects (three things that exist in the real world); 2)
name an emotion; and 3) briefly, tell me something that is real
to you (something you believe in). I always use a surpass ending
to tie the poem together. I have written literally hundreds of
these poems, perhaps even a thousand. I am also a calligrapher,
and have occasionally supplemented my income by charging a
nominal fee for putting these virtual portraits on parchment.
The first of these "Your Portrait in Poetry in Five Minutes"
included here is THE VAGABOND written at Poetry By Candlelight
the night of May 30, 1978. After five or six months of using this
technique I shared it with the gathering. I passed out pens and
paper and had everyone pair up, ask each other my three
questions, and write a poem based on the responses. Then I went
around the room having each read their poems. Several days later
a woman who had never written a poem in her life prior to that
night at Poetry By Candlelight, came up and thanked me. By then
she had written a dozen poems or so and had discovered, much to
her surprise, that she was a poet!
Other poems in this category included here are: THE APPOINTMENT,
1857 (10/12/78); UTAH SUMMER, (2/10/81); BOBBIE, NATASHA, KARLA,
and KATHY, all written on a month long Amtrak trip in 1984; (HER
NAME WAS) SIRI (from about a month after that trip); PORTRAIT OF
A JAZZ FLUTIST (11/6/85); from July of 1987, RICK, and PORTRAIT
OF A WAITRESS, FISH LAKE, OREGON; and, the last of these, DIANNE,
of 8/8/87.
I still have a few hundred of these in my files. Frankly, most
are crap. They are so subjective, and often so oddly stilted
because of strange answers given to my three questions, that only
the person for whom they were written could like them (and, of
course, sometimes not even them).
By late 1977, or early '78, I had amassed so much good material,
between these snap answer poems, poetry night scribbles and more
serious writing efforts, that I put together my first manuscript
of verse, SNAPSHOTS OF A MIND. Jean, a beautiful silver haired
elderly lady who was a guest at the Manor typed up the mss.; then
Arpie, a gorgeous dark- skinned girl who ate regularly in the
dining room with her boyfriend, made copies of it. Unfortunately,
like THE ADEPT and RED BOOK RHYME, it never got mailed to a
prospective publisher.
Actually, I got discouraged. In researching poetry publishers I
couldn't find any that were looking for book length manuscripts.
Those that paid at all were vanishingly few. Most paying poetry
publishers were magazines who would accept no more than five
poems per submission, and all poems had to be 16 lines or less.
As you know by now, few of my poems are 16 lines or less, and (by
my estimation) none of the really good ones are (except DRY FLY
HAIKU, and one or two others, maybe).
In 1972 Orion Sparrowhawk, the sci-fi fan I moved to Klamath
with, and I hitch-hiked across half of America. I wrote up one
event from that trip in January of 1978 as HELLO MOON. The second
stanza was inspired in part by a series of "Hello" poems by
Russell Solomon. Around this same time I was getting nostalgic
about my time in Klamath. SEASONS depicts an idealized version of
how I remembered Klamath.
One day in May '78, while thumbing through a spelling dictionary
FROM ILLEGAL TO IMMORTAL literally jumped off the page at me.
EVEN SO EASY (4/4/79) my homage to Dylan Thomas, is the last of
the poems in this collection from the Manor years. Don't read it
to yourself, say it aloud. It is all about the joy of the sound
of the English language.
In June of 1979 my then pregnant wife and I "jumped ship." I
returned to Klamath (by bike and bus) were she joined me a few
months later (spending the intervening time with my parents in
Pomona. I bought a half-interest in a used record store operated
by Jim Keith (who, curiously enough, had bought it from Orion
Sparrowhawk).
One night Jim and I went to a poetry reading given by a local
literary club. We asked If we could read and with a great deal of
reluctance they allowed it. Jim and I each scribbled while
members of their club read. Jim read before me. His swirling
abstract poetry was too weird for the audience. Then I terminally
offend them with (A Biker Is Born) PREMATURE? I have had
universally poor response to this piece. I have had
Scientologists threaten me with bodily harm if I read it again.
It seems curious to me that people who believe in past lives have
difficulty in dealing with the idea that not everyone who
reincarnates is all sweetness and light. Surely if reincarnation
is real, the evil ones are just as likely (if not more so) to
come back around, no?
I MET YOU IN A DREAM is my longest poem. The second longest was
a 425 line short story in verse form submitted to Scientology's
Advance! Magazine. It was entitled I AM, OR, THIS IS THE SESSION.
Like I MET YOU IN A DREAM, it was assembled largely from
previously written material. It interwove the story of a
Scientology counselor (called an "auditor," for "one who
listens"), his wife, and a person receiving the counseling, or
auditing, (such a person is called a "preclear" (PC) as they on
are their way to achieving the Scientology mental/spiritual state
of "Clear"). The series of auditing sessions took place at the
PC's home deep in a forested mountain setting. It was based on a
famous painting of an auditor auditing a PC in the woods entitled
"This is the Session." The verses of my piece shifted though
first person points of view (p.v.) for each of the three people,
plus the p.v. of a disembodied spirit (a being in "native" or
thetan state) watching it all. SUNDANCER was used to give the
disembodied entity a voice.
The editor at Advance! said he thought it was an "excellent
piece of work," but rejected it on the grounds that one had to be
an Operating Thetan (OT) to submit to them, and, that it was too
long. An OT, pronounced Oh Tee, is the highest level of
Scientology processing. An OT is described as a being who is able
to operate fully as a spirit (thetan) with or without a humanoid
body, a state allegedly high above that of mere homo sapien. I
disagreed with the length assessment, as I had counted the number
of lines in their lead stories and those usually ran a tad over
500 lines; but I was not then (and now never will be) an OT, so
what could I do? It is not included here mostly because I don't
feel like re-typing the whole damned thing (any more than you
feel like reading it, eh?).
I MET YOU IN A DREAM was written on 16 June, 1980, which
happened to be Father's Day. My son was about 8 months old and I
was sick of my argumentative harpy of a wife. I locked myself in
a clothes closet converted into an office (you may be able to
detect a pattern there ...) and, dredging through my files,
cobbled it together from dozens of poem fragments. Its core
structure was a poem called THE BABIES. THE BABIES had been
written at The Manor in October '78. It was an attempt at "jazz."
I wrote each line, or cluster of lines, on 3 x 5 cards and
shuffled the deck before each reading. The chorus, repeated
randomly, was the line "the babies," which was said with extreme
seriousness, and, sometimes, with just a hint of irony.
In what can only be viewed now as amazing stupidity, my wife and
I returned to the SO in Southern California, September, 1980. I
was there for three more years, 'till November '83. When I
returned, the pilot detox program that I had been bicycling on,
had been refined and released to the general public as the
Purification Program ("the Purif," for short). The 2 1/2 hours of
running had been replaced with 5 hours spent in a sauna. I was
required to do the Purif in '81; IN THE SAUNA (A Day On The
Purif) (not in this collection) is a snapshot of that time.
Of course, I returned to Poetry By Candlelight. Russell Solomon,
who after 15 years of presiding over it was tired and ready to
step down. He wanted me to become its emcee, but I declined,
giving the official black bow tie to Alan Graham. Alan, an OT,
also aspired to be a writer. He had written a poem that I thought
most interesting, but difficult to understand. I rewrote it as (A
Case Of) WATCHER'S SYNDROME.
SYNDROME is really Alan's story line, with perhaps a little less
than half of the words being his. Alan thought it extremely
cheeky of me to tamper with his work and never spoke to me again.
Some people are so touchy! As mentioned above, according to
Scientology this planet is a prison operated by the 28 planet
Confederation of Marcab, the piece is from the p.v of a Marcabian
observer whose duty is to report any suspicious (potential prison
break) activity to the Marcabian overlords -- but the observer is
in the process of "going native" and doesn't want to reveal to
his bosses that human spiritual technology (Scientology) has
evolved to the point where we may soon be able to escape from the
Marcabian mind control that keeps us trapped on this terrible
little world. Did you get that before reading this? I thought
not. And Alan objected to my version because it was too obvious!
DADDY is not really all that good, but, it is real. I was having
a lot of trouble keeping to my 'round the clock SO schedule,
frantically trying to get my stats up (so as to avoid punishment,
rather than to receive some small reward), and to be a father at
the same time. I failed miserably at both.
SOLEMN DANCE OF JOY was written in the Spring of '83. It was the
last poem in this collection written while I was still in the SO.
I am not sure, but I probably wrote it while waiting to read at
one of the last Poetry By Candlelights I attended.
I remained in So. Cal. after escaping from the SO the second
time. By then my wife and I had separated. She took our son to
Portland, Oregon; I moved in with my parents in Pomona. I spent
all that winter and the following spring working door-to-door in
the Pomona Valley. I quit door-to- door sales in the spring of
'84 to get out of the smog and to see America by rail. I spent 30
days in March rolling across the western third of the United
States. On that trip I wrote a couple a hundred of the "Your
Portrait in Poetry" pieces, selling a few dozen of them to cover
beer and food costs. I wrote dozens of other pieces as well, like
LOUNGE LIZARDS, a "snap shot" of some of my fellow travelers.
Shortly after I got back I worked for one day at a shopper
newspaper called The HIGHLANDER. They weren't real impressed with
my self-taught knowledge of publishing. On the way home I dropped
into a neighborhood bar. There I met a still very attractive
older lady who said she had been a star of the Ice Follies in
Europe in the 1930s. I was much taken with her and wrote BORDEAUX
BORDELLO as a snapshot of her, sort of.
Even though I was out of the SO it took several more years for
me to get of Scientology. I continued to write Scientology
inspired pieces for years -- hell! Perhaps I still do.
GRANDFATHER'S ENGINES, written the day before my 34th birthday in
'84, was such a poem. It, like TEAR, is truly, fully
autobiographical. It is exactly what it says it is.
Soon after returning to Pomona from that rail trip I got a job
working as an assistant to Tom Hall, an OT who was also a
Certified Travel Consultant (CTC). Back around junior high I had
wanted to grow up to be a travel agent. It was, therefore, with
considerable amazement that I found myself becoming one in 1984.
Tom was the Commercial Manager at Ferguson-Gates Travel (FGT) the
third oldest travel agency in the U.S.
Tom Hall CTC was surprised to discover that I had never read any
e.e. cummings. Tom, a fan of my poetry, was sure several of my
poems had been inspired by cummings. He gave me a book of
cummings poetry and it blew my mind. A few days after reading
cummings for the first time I wrote SPECTACLES on August 21,
1984, in obvious imitation of his poem from the p.v. of several
hats. Curiously, Tom was not the only fan of mine who had noted a
cummings-like quality to my work, long before I had read any.
WORLDS IN THE MORNING was written on the bus, on my hour-long
commute from Pomona to FGT in Mid-Wilshire, on the First of
October in 1984. I included it here mostly because I like the
chorus. Similarly, SKIING THE SLOPES OF YOUR KILIMANJARO HEART
was a snapshot of one of my fellow commuters written a year or so
later. The title of WORLDS is from a conversation between Tom and
a client. One day in the office I overheard Tom on the phone
helping someone book a trip to the Orient. While discussing which
airlines left when, he mentioned the CIA owned World Airlines,
saying "World's in the morning" -- which I thought a great line.
Frankly, I remember nothing about how DRY FLY HAIKU came about,
which is a shame, as it is possibly my best haiku, and certainly
my favorite. SONG OF THE OCULIST also draws a blank. Clearly it
was stitched together from bits and pieces out of my files. It
may have been cobbled together on one of my long bus rides in or
out of L.A., or while waiting to read somewhere, which I was
doing a lot of. KANSAS CITY BLACKOUT is a total mystery. I found
it, untitled, one day in my notebook. It was in my handwriting so
I guess I wrote it. Since I couldn't remember anything about it I
named it BLACKOUT. COMMERCIAL (A Drunken Ditty) is another
head-scratcher. I have to think that I was drunk when I wrote it
... Likewise, the origins of KITTEN are long since forgotten.
As a travel agent I did a lot of traveling, mostly for free. One
day I was given a free familiarization (fam) trip on the Amtrak
for the inaugural run of new expanded service on their Southwest
Chief from L.A. to Chicago via the southwest. I jumped at the
chance, but I did not have enough time to go all the way to
Chicago, so I turned around in Garden City, Kansas. SNAPSHOT OF
NEW MEXICO is just that, what I saw and heard on that trip while
passing through New Mexico. Like JOURNEY it took years, and four
or more radically different drafts, before finding its current
form. A couple of times I used my free travel bennies to visit
friends in Klamath Falls and do some camping and hiking in the
Cascade Mountains of Southern Oregon. One such trip was in July
of '87 when I wrote the portraits RICK and PORTRAIT OF A
WAITRESS, FISH LAKE, OREGON as well as the poem THE TASTE OF A
TOWN.
RENDERING FROM A SUMERIAN CLAY TABLET SHARD (11 Nov 87) is one
of my all time favorite poems (of mine). I had been studying the
ancient Middle East and reading Sumarian poetry for several weeks
before writing it. Sumer is the oldest civilization known to
Western Science. Sumer flowered and fell, over a thousand years
before the birth of Babylon, in the same general region. The
Sumerians, god bless 'em, never invented rhyming poetry. Theirs
was a verse form based on rhymic repeats. One day on the morning
commute to FGT I found a Sumerian poem struggling to come out of
me. I only got three stanzas written before arriving in Mid-
Wilshire, just a small piece of what I envisioned the poem to be,
hence the SHARD part of the title.
Around "the Holidays" in 1983 a poetry reading at Clairmont
College prompted the creation of my second attempt at a poetry
chapbook. I read in the local paper that a number of famous poets
would soon be reading at the college. My inquiries to the English
Department revealed that only poets who had been published in
book form would be allowed to read. So I desktop published a
dozen copies of a 20 (or so) page chapbook, SOMETHING FOR MY FANS
THIS SUMMER, that weekend at my local instant print shop. Of
course it wasn't good enough for those snooty University-types.
About six months later some copier company left a brand new, big
ass copier at FGT, with cases of paper, on trial inspection. FGT
management didn't want it, so I used it for a week to produce a
couple a hundred copies of a 74 pagAfterword
I considered making this a FOREWORD, but I decided th
Jim Keith, who would become a best-selling Conspiracy and UFO
writer before his untimely death in 1999, moved to Reno, Nevada,
while I was working at FGT. During the period that we had the
record store together we also started writing together. When I
returned to the SO we continued to critique each other's work.
Before I left the SO we began work coauthoring the still
unfinished sci-fi book, STAR JACK, under the pen name Michael
Drax. All together we were probably working on more than 20 joint
projects by 1988. During my FGT years I used a lot of my free
travel bennies to go to Reno to discuss writing projects with
him. Eventually our writing team would see print with 30 or more
porno novels, as well a half-dozen sci-fi shorts, "Fool's Gold" a
sci-fi serial in a local newspaper, and numerous non-fiction
projects.
In 1988 I moved to Reno. I am not afraid of flying, it just
bores the snot out of me. I much prefer Amtrak where one can roam
about, pick up dames and get plowed in the bar car. But, at a
mere 500 miles per day, its too slow for anything but
sightseeing. After one too many stand-by flights sandwiched
between a fat woman and a business man, I gave up and moved to
Reno. Initially I really loved Reno as a wild and crazy party
town. The novelty wore off quickly, however. The honeymoon was
over by the spring of 1989 when I wrote RENO. Oddly enough, Reno
(unlike my ex-wife) has grown on me over the years.
In 1992 I started the National UFO Museum, taking on the role of
Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of it's quarterly journal,
NOTES FROM THE HANGAR. That pretty much threw me full time into
non-fiction writing and researching UFO, political and Conspiracy
Theory issues. In 1996, while working on my first (and as yet
unpublished) non-fiction book TOPPLING THE PYRAMID: A PRACTICAL
GUIDE TO OVERTHROWING THE NEW WORLD ORDER, I wrote the poem NEW
WORLD DISORDER.
From 1988 to 1998 Jim Keith and I did another zine together,
DHARMA COMBAT. One night after an all night paste- up and
printing session at a local Kinko's Print Shop we stepped out
into the dawn, were a trick of light made it look like a tank was
parked under the trees a few blocks up the street. I was stoned
and it frightened me rather badly. TANKS ARE INTIMIDATING was
written a day or two later. I remember little about CONTRA BAND
and POMONA other than that they were written around the same time
period, and that I was stoned when I wrote 'em. (No, I have never
attended the NASCAR Winter Nationals held each year in Pomona.)
(A Question Of) DEFINITION (9/13/96) is the most recent piece in
this collection. I sent an earlier version of this book to an old
friend. His critique of it pissed me off. This was my response. I
never sent this poem to him though, because I did not wish to
offend. Bruce, I hope you're not too offended now ... And
frankly, I'm probably all wet. Poetry probably is a way to say
the unsayable. Maybe its a left brain, right brain thing. Poetry
and prose, at least for me, seem to come from very different
parts of my consciousness.
Since leaving the Manor it has been increasingly difficult for
me to write poetry. Its more a case of inspiration than
perspiration, 'cause the harder I try to force a poem out, the
less likely it is to come. Poetry, the shyest Muse, cannot be
summoned, only invited. She comes when it suites her. But I do
know a few ways to entice her. She likes to party, particularly
with Cupid's victims. Also, I think she hates to be the only Muse
at the party -- Music particularly draws her out.
Here then are seventy-odd times I have danced with this timid
Muse. Drop me a line and tell me what you think December 3, 1999
Sparks, NV.
----
Crashing sucks.
http://coyotewicca.org