GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

On 9 / 11 , Jay was living in an RV in a CVS parking lot in NE LA .  He finished his 4 morning S ’s (shit, shave, shower and shine) when the first AM rad io reports came in over KNX 1070 . He listened for a while until 10:00 AM when it was time to go to work.  He locked up the RV and walked 4 blocks on N . Figueroa past Avenue 56 where Jay tended bar at a dive called Mr. T 's. On any other day he might not have bothered to look up at all but to day his eye s were fixed on a cloudless sky which see med unnaturall y emp ty .   Jay found himself searching o verhead for aircraft and realized the daily perpetual lineup of SST s heading in t o LAX had vanished. Jay had not served in the military and never i magined he would ever see the sky as a potential source of danger.      Mr. T 's interior was a de pressing eighty -year old ex -bowling all ey , windowless and strewn with wreckage and made the original Barney's Beanery look l...

The Holy Family with St. Anne and St. Catherine oil on canvas by Jusepe De Ribera In episode #38 of the HBO series The Sopranos , Tony's wife, Carmela, walks into an exhibit at the Met on 5th Avenue with her daughter Meadow and is moved to tears by a painting done 400 years ago.  Mind you this is the same Carmela that is shown in an earlier episode expertly loading an AK-47 in front of an astonished family priest as she bolts from the house to check on a prowler.  The very same Carmela who finds her son Anthony smoking weed in the garage on the day of his confirmation and screams at him, "Is it so much to ask for you to be a good Catholic for fifteen fucking minutes!?"  The most startling thing about Carmela, or anyone for that matter, being so deeply  touched by a painting is the fact that it is considered unremarkable.  Why is it taken as commonplace, rather than a miracle,  that a static, man-made image composed of mere dabs of paint applied t...

My grandchildren's favorite thing about the new Broad Museum was the yet-to-be-mowed, lush grass outside.  The museum opened recently with the rolled sod as a last minute addition.  It won't remain lush for long; at least not with the summer coming on and after having had Noah and Amanda rip out a good share.  Having undergone a few hours confined inside the austere museum full of meaningless objects, they were as thrilled to discover the green patch as walking into Disneyland.   I shared in their relief having found the building's interior and the "art" quite disconcerting. How is it that the building plans were approved by the Fire Department with the only exit a lone staircase down from the main gallery on the third floor?   There wasn't a single work displayed that could take my mind off of the inevitable emergency that will unleash a  lethal stampede similar to the annual carnage at  the  Muslim Hajj in Saudi Arabia .   I can'...

Image from penny4nasa,org As far as anyone knows, no one from Earth has ever stood on the dark side of the moon.  To date, the U.S. is the only country to have successfully put people onto the lunar surface but those landings were all made on the side of the moon that faces our planet.   The U.S. lunar landings resulted from a furious national scramble to catch up with the USSR who, early on, was way ahead of us in the space race.   Russia had thrown down the gauntlet in 1957 by launching Sputnik into orbit.   The beach ball-sized satellite circled the earth every 92 minutes until it fell from its orbit three months later, burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.   This rattled everybody’s cage; creating an instant crisis for American politicians, scientists, our military and us plain folks.   I remember being on a camping trip near the Salton Sea , lying in my sleeping bag, looking up and watching Sputnik drift slowly across the night sky above. ...

Image from la.eater.com What in God’s name have they done to Mr. T’s?    Can’t they yuppie up Highland Park with at least some discretion?   Where am I supposed to go  now when I want to be depressed or Charles Bukowski; Image from salon.com score cocaine?   When there’s a long-standing black hole of a dive that would make Bukowski’s skin crawl, it should be left the hell alone.   There can be no yin and yang if you truncate one end of the spectrum.   It’s important to know what clinical depraved indifference looks like.   My first time in the place was during the 1950s when I went there with my dad to bowl.  Fifty years later I went again with my son Michael  and was glad to see  they had gotten rid of the   bowling and rededicated  the place to proper alcohol and substance abuse. Mr. T's interior; Image from justared.com Following Michael into the place my first thought was that t...

Image from goodreads.com I read a book a few months back that made me want to quit writing.  I am forever looking for something enjoyable to read.  It doesn’t have to be a best seller, and usually isn’t, but it is damn hard to find a winner.  Why are there so many books that are so mediocre?  I can only assume publishers are dumping mass quantities of new books onto the market in the hopes that from somewhere within this morass the next Harry Potter will emerge.   I found a New York Times suggested summer reading list online and took it with me to the public library.  Since it was now spring it seemed reasonable that I might find some of the titles.  I found a few to take home but can recall only  Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade.  When I finished reading her book of short stories I was so awestruck that I couldn't see any point in my writing anything ever again.  It was clear beyond words that Kristin was whe...