WALKING ON THIN ICE

tres

can food label in store – foto by smith

oaxacan street art – foto by smith

defaced street ad – foto by smith

soup remains

poem from pasta letters from Lady K’s homemade soup – foto by smith

2 food fotos today.

top foto is a poem lady and i wrote out of soft cooked alphabet pasta letters from her latest homemade lentil soup.

bottom foto is a small slice of potato with sprouts growing out of the skin – it all sitting on a green chopping board.

visited another person’s site and found i was flanked in her ‘friends” list by Psychosis and Absurdity On The Rocks. feel quite comfortable in that slot. her “site” name is Eulalie Cholmondeley, so she’s obviously a lover of round-sound-a-lay.

sprouts growing on a potato skin – foto by smith

you’re in enough trouble

graffiti on wall around high school playing field – foto by smith

another note on lady’s and my manuscript… lady pulls stories from my past from me. says tell me about this or that or simply “tell me a story.” many times i’m unwilling, tell her there’s nothing there, but usually give in, and more often than not she gets something good. i’ve gotten so i talk the way i write, – i tell her the story in full sentences, logical paragraphs, coherent flow. i pause when i see she’s typing behind, and continue with sentence when she’s ready. at end, she’ll ask questions to fill in the holes. then she edits and rearranges and inserts it in pieces into various portions of our CRIMINAL manuscript time-line.

one last excerpt. . .

Chagrin Falls, Ohio – summer 1978

The night my bike died was the only time I combined white wine, LSD, and a motorcycle (marijuana’s a constant staple). I, my married woman, and her husband were all tripping on LSD I’d gotten from one of their friend’s sons. It was her husband’s first trip. They were suburban, and we were drinking white wine along with smoking some grass, doing the LSD in their backyard in the sunshine, by the forest. He got birds to hop up and talk to him. It was a good trip for everyone.

However, on the way home on my motorcycle with my helmet on and a half gallon of white wine in a green jar clenched between my thighs, I was high on grass, I was drunk on wine, I was still tripping, and I was going way too fast. I went around a curve and lost control of the bike. I slid across the asphalt, into a driveway speed bump which threw the bike and I into the air. We came down and both bounced back into the air again. There was a serious gash in the side of my helmet. When I came to, I was in shallow water – but the helmet prevented me from drowning. So twice the helmet saved me.

Suddenly there is this old man in pajamas standing over me. He reached down, picked up the green bottle of wine I still had, looked at me and said, “You’re in enough trouble.” He poured the wine out and threw the bottle away.

The cops came. They kept insisting I should go to the hospital. I kept insisting I was fine. I was sitting in the back of the cop car when the second cop says “You should see this.”

I didn’t have a motorcycle driver license, and my plates were two years old. I’d peeled off the previous sticker, cut it up and rearranged it for the correct year. Once I realized I was going to get in trouble, I told the cop, “You know, you’re right. I really have to get to the hospital.” They took me.

While I’m lying in emergency waiting to get examined, I realize I’m in a serious amount of pain, but they won’t give me anything for it until they do the x-rays, check for head trauma, stuff like that. While this is going on, I’m still stoned on grass, tripping on acid, drunk on white wine.

Turns out I broke my collar bone, broke three ribs, cracked my pelvis. It killed the bike. They gave me a ticket for 50 dollars for driving with an expired tag. Plus there was the hospital bill.

graffiti on wall around high school playing field – foto by smith

frisco 66

graffiti on wall around high school playing field – foto by smith

an excerpt from CRIMINAL by Smith & Lady

(this is from the summer of 1966, San Francisco):

The night after this while walking the streets at 3 in the morning, a gorgeous black lady tried to lure me up to her room, promised me marijuana. I’d been trying to find marijuana for three years, ever since I’d read On The Road. I was hesitant. I think it was just fear. I’d only had brief sex with three women by that time, and that was a couple years before.
She takes us to a coffee shop. We’re sitting there talking, and she’s still trying to get me to her room. I’m considering it for the sex, and I’m also thinking I really want to try marijuana.
Then she looks at me real, real seriously and says, “You know, don’t you…”
I have no idea what she’s talking about, so I just look at her, no idea what to say. She takes my silence for affirmation and starts telling me how she’s really a he – sort of a famous she-he because she’s in some documentary.
My shyness and fear saved me from a rather indelicate situation. I would not want to be presented the first time I’m stoned with a black man’s penis when I’m expecting a vagina. At first I thought he was a prostitute, but he never brought up money. He was just lonely.
I sure was alone, in that city, that night.

~ ~ ~

some folk wonder how an autobiography of me can be by both of us.

when lady k and i first took-up in september 2005, i told her some stories of my bad boy past. she wrote them down, then massaged, edited, rewrote, deleted, suggested – and we published some as collaborative poems.

she started interviewing me as well, prying more stories out. she’d get her laptop, sit down next to me and purr, “tell me a story.” she wrote, massaged, edited, rewrote, deleted, re-flowed these as well.

i’d also 20 non-fiction pieces i’d written over the years, such as “My First Armed Robbery” and “How I Met My Ex.”

Lady collected all these into a 270 page manuscript. she re-flowed my escapades into a coherent chronological time-line. again she writes, massages, edits, rewrites, deletes, re-flows, suggests, and directs. this includes changing what i write, deleting what i write, writing what i didn’t write, and more.

this book was birthed by her, flows because of her. we take turns editing it. she’s near the end of edit #11 now. while i edit pass 12, she’ll select some stuff from my late 60s journals and a blog or two to insert, and we should have a shoppable manuscript by mid-year. who knows, except The Shadow? all i know is it’s really weird reading my life in coherent chronological time. funny too. i come across as somewhat independent of the law.

anyway, no matter how you look at it, this “auto”biography of mine has 2 authors – which makes sense because CRIMINAL begins with me, ends with us.

graffiti on wall around high school playing field – foto by smith

life like

I enjoy being in a warm climate in the middle of February. The city of Oaxaca is in the middle of the mountains, and the air’s very dry. The high altitude moderates the temperature, so Oaxaca is colder than most of Mexico. At night the temperatures fall to the fifties, and during the day they’re in the eighties. It’s like this most of the year.
    We’re in the dry season now, so the grass is all dried up and brown. The trees still seem lush, though. They must have deep roots. Smith likes the trees in Oaxaca more than anything else. There are jacarandas, big trees with cup-like purple flowers. And bougainvillea spills over city walls with its brilliant paper mache flowers in red, pink or rose. There are other beautiful blossoming trees of which we don’t know the names. And banana trees, pomegranites, orange, grapefruit, lime.
  Much of our day is spent writing, creating art or reading. We have Spanish language lessons twice a week. We walk in new areas of the city most days. It’s good to keep discovering new things. Friday morning we took a cab to the top of Galagetza Mountain, where there’s an observatory. From the mountain top we could see all of Oaxaca and much of its spill into suburbs. Some of the suburbs are reminiscent of Brazilian barrios – concrete block houses made by squatters. Some people live in tin shacks. We walked all the way back home. My legs still hurt; it’s difficult to go down a mountain as well as up.
  We go everywhere on foot, so our errands occupy a lot of time. We walk to a market named the “Merced”, which is similar to the west Side Market but in a Third World kind of way. We also have some modern grocery stores but they do not have much variety. The shelves are stocked only with Mexican food. Imagine that! There’s almost a whole half aisle devoted to mayonnaise. The grocery stores do not have good produce. They have a lot of produce, and it’s convenient, but I’m much better off going to the tienda on my block if I want pretty tomatoes and ripe avocado, even cilantro.

blog blood

oaxacan graffiti – foto by smith

“We will kill things and eat them. We will turn savage. Write our blogs in blood.” – from Lady K’s cyber signature.

that was said in krakow as we were leaving for 3 months in a fishing village on the adriatic in croatia. we didn’t kill anything there, although we did steal 2 cauliflowers from a field by the sea. we cooked and ate them a couple hours later – the theft and freshness combined to make them the most delicious vegetables we’ve ever devoured.

jacaranda tree – foto by smith

yesterday’s wine

graffiti – foto by smith

empty cemetery fountain – foto by smith

large wall graffiti near secondary school – foto by smith

grave glass – foto by smith

political graffiti – foto by smith

empty room beneath bleachers – foto by smith

foto by smith