People are never more ridiculous then when naming racehorses, chicken breeds, and restaurant dishes.
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| Crispy Disco |
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| Behave Yourself |
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| Buff Laced Polish Bantam Frizzle. seriously. |
Brad once brought me to a party at the Hells Angels clubhouse in San Francisco. There wasn't anything particularly outrageous about it; I didn't see any guns, drugs, sex on the tables or anything like that (unlike at work). Just a lot of people standing around drinking beer. But the air. It had that bumped into the wrong person at the saloon and the music stops vibe. We gave the Hells Angels special privileges at the Trocadero - mainly, let them in without checking for weapons - so if something went down at the club they would have our (club security's) back, then one night they pounded a guy's head in on stage with a ball peen hammer.
(record scratch) you're probably wondering how I got here.
Let me start from the previous year.
Macalester College had a dorm called Dupre that was famous for having been designed by an architect in a warmer climate and then right before construction, having the wall-to-window ratio swapped to better insulate from the Minnesota chill. Like the Nick Hook stories, man, I cannot tell you whether this is true. But I spent a school year in a prison sized single with a cruel sliver of a window, and I believe it.
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| Prison cell at "supermax" prison ADX Florence, 12' x 7' |
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| Dupre single, 14' 4" x 7' |
The instinct to scream in there was palpable; one afternoon I shoved my boombox sideways into that micro window and blasted Redman into the quad. I had a word processor I wrote short stories on and now can't open any of those ascii files. Tim spent the night once but wouldn't sleep because he was trying to hit peak hallucinatory sleep dep to find his spirit animal (if you ask him now, he'll say it's a chicken). The riot grrl punk chick in the room next to mine, Susan (aka Sin) kept a pet rat in her room and moved to Amsterdam AFAIK, not long after and I believe now lives there permanently (smart). I wish I had thought to do something like that then. But I had art school stars in my eyes. I couldn't be a good student at Mac. I was an artist.
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| I think this was from Bennington College when my bro worked there, but sorry to both Susans for conflating you in my memory |
In the spring of 1994 I won the annual Mac art department t-shirt design contest and with the prize money I flew to S.F. to check out the (now dead and gone, aptly, like the future of both art funding and education in America) San Francisco Art Institute. I'd applied to three art schools as a transfer student, got into all three, realized immediately I was never living in NYC due to the high cost of living there, was too impractical to choose Chicago where I'd gotten a decent financial aid package, and decided on San Francisco before I even set eyes on it, if I'm being honest. For this sham recon mission I got a Chinatown hotel room, which upon arrival was so gross I checked out of it and squatted with some punks I had just met in Berkeley who worshipped Robert Mitchum (looking at you, Ducky). The moment I got out of the subway in the east bay someone told me Kurt Cobain had died. I wasn't sure if it was true. The weather was nice, everything was in blazing color, SFAI had Reminisce art, and this was going to be my new home.
So all summer I worked at First Ave, and at the end of the summer I packed up hardly anything and moved to San Francisco. Skye's friend Gigi had a place in the Mission where I could stay for a few weeks & Skye said she was a punk chick and I'd love her. (Aye. She was a punk chick and I loved her.)
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| A married Gigi, in later years, trying "fishing" |
I lucked into my new BFF Gigi's entire bedroom while she was out of town in Colorado Springs. Met a spate of people from C. Springs for awhile and they all had a "raised on a military base, then went punk" vibe - what were they all doing in San Francisco (and, later, Austin)? Dunno but they all found me. Maybe they ran away from Colorado Springs screaming. I know nothing about it to tell the truth but I had a mohawk, and I had once run away from a small town screaming. They knew.
Anyway. 1994. I looked for my own room via ads in the back of the San Francisco Weekly and flyers pinned to coffee shop bulletin boards. One place I checked out had a book lying in the middle of the floor I recognized as having a short story of my father's in it. In another apartment, a guy was very ill, his boyfriend his apparent caretaker. I knew what he was dying of - there was no other outcome then. Nothing was right. Then the phone rang at Gigi's place, I answered it, and a guy said "Can I talk to Liz?" I said "There's no Liz here. Must be a wrong number." Dean would not believe me: "Are you sure? There's no Liz there looking for a room?" I said "No, but I'm Kate and I'm looking for a room." I took the 22 Fillmore to Lower Haight to meet three guys who had promised the bar on the corner was a punk joint, skeptical, and they took me to the Casa Loma where a girl with a blue mohawk sat at the bar. Over a warm tap beer, we all decided I should move in. A few months later I was struggling to pay my $300/month rent and had to move somewhere cheaper. Cry over that one for a minute before moving on ...
Eventually I found out the previous tenant at my Casa Loma overlook apartment had overdosed in the bathroom. Every San Francisco apartment had a ghost in it then. Every fucking one. The curse of my next place: right before I moved in two people in a row had died (one OD and one bike messenger who got hit by a bus), and they'd lived one after another in the same room. I was offered that room initially instead of mine, but hell nope. "But we've smudged it" – no way, motherfuckers. Who knows what's going on in there. It sucks souls. (more than San Francisco itself) Maybe it's the Hellmouth. Hard no.
So days were spent at SFAI cranking out oil paintings I'm still proud of; nights I worked security at the Trocadero. Did I sleep? I don't think so. no sleep. Power bars on the bus for breakfast. Veggie burgers for lunch at the rooftop SFAI cafe. Pasta salad from Love and Haight when I got home. Coffee at the Horseshoe. Work, repeat. I got sick from Goldschlager with coworkers on a night off - that's fair. It's inadvisable to drink something with gold flakes in it that, if liquor could talk, would tell you it would rather be a lava lamp. The Trocadero was known for a couple things: Bondage-a-Go-Go (sex nite) Death Guild (goth nite) and a spate of free punk shows after Lee Ving was spat on and stormed off stage one or two songs in, ending a Fear show and causing a small riot. To make amends, Fear came back and played for free – all our punk shows thereafter were free. I made a little extra cash by flyering Upper and Lower Haight, the Mission, South of Market, Haight and Divis neighborhoods for all these shows. I walked up and down Haight Street end to end so many times I had all the cross streets memorized (don't test me now, I am an old lady). Brad taught me how to whip out a flyer, wrap packing tape around the middle, and cut the tape with a quick knife poke in about five seconds a pole. I bought a Zo bag like the bike messengers and was the town punk show crier. My staff shirt was designed by Winston Smith and said SEX POLICE on the back. Crash Worship played and left the dance floor covered with chicken feet. A Bondage dancer was dropped on her head on stage, got a concussion, I hustled to get her a ride to the ER and she found me a few weeks later to thank me for saving her life. Constant madness.
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| my first oil painting on canvas at SFAI. a classmate said of it at our first critique "this is gallery quality." |
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| "Liz Looking For a Room" |
So anyway, as exciting memories go, the Hells Angels party rates low; it was just "I got invited, so let's go." I barely remember it. The only really dodgy thing Brad and I ever did together (unless you count lines of meth off the Troc office desk) was fake a new lease to our Haight Street apartment to get the electricity turned back on. It was an old bike messenger flat with tons of people in and out of it; I had just moved in so the unpaid bill wasn't my fault, officer, I swear! Everybody needs the lights on. Stu was famously selling weed (illegal then) and when the doorbell rang, Brad would just yell into the intercom "Stu's not home!" What had once been a living room was Stu's room. Unfazed, J.T. moved into the room whose previous 2 tenants had died. He lived. Boom aspired to be the thousandth person to die by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge (present whereabouts unknown). The porch behind the kitchen became a transient bedroom. I came home from school one day and found a heroin spoon in the kitchen sink just casually mixed in with the dirty dishes. Brad once had a meltdown, destroyed everything he owned and used the debris to bang a hole in his wall so he could crawl through it into my room. One of his cats became mine, had kittens she wasn't sure how to care for and kept bringing them to me, carrying them up my loft bed ladder, dropping them into my lap. One morning I was in the shower, somebody was fighting in the hallway and broke the bathroom door down. When you're 22, enough happens in 6 months to write a book about. Eventually, I came to my senses and simply left town.
I did know: someday I will write about this.
There are a few times in my life only where I've been absolutely gutted, not by my own diabilities and limitations (which happens all the time), of the weight of the dumb world (also frequent), but by the emotionality of someone else actually reaching through the cold universe into my coal heart and grabbing it deeply and with pure intention and without mercy.
One was when I was working the door one very late night / early morning at First Avenue in Minneapolis on a weekend dance night, very exhausted by the crowd and by my job overall which taxed my social skills well beyond their limits, exhausted by the time of night where drunks from other clubs were spilling out into mine, people not suited for the place, people who should be in cabs on the way home. This one guy seemed to have had too many, and I was trying to turn him away. He was with a friend. Something was a bit off. What his friend explained was that he wasn’t really that drunk, that most of his state of disassociation and insobriety was the horror of the life event he’d been drinking that night to try and leave out of his mind for a few hours; and the moment I tried to turn him away at the door was when that liquid armor failed him. His mother had been killed by her partner, recently. And he was too new in this shattered world of his to go out and do anything normal, yet, but he’d misunderstood, until I stood before him accusing him of too much comfort booze. I hadn’t known.
We talked for a bit and I’m no miracle worker and nobody could get in a time machine and make the thing not happen. But I am pretty raw by nature, both abrasive and easily harmed, and occasionally a thing in my orbit meets me at that level. This was the thing, someone unlike me, but in a rare state where he was so blitzed with grief he could split time. And I turned out to be what he needed. I was wearing a watch with my artwork on it I’d had custom made, he spotted it, asked me about it, and told me never to give up my art. Took off his watch. As a reminder, gave it to me, for whatever I’d given him – I didn’t even realize I had it in me. Hope, I guess, which he’d left at the last bar. He’d spun through aggression and dissociation and into healing in the blink of an eye.
He and his friend left then, and my manager saw my imminent dysfunction, covered my post, took me upstairs to the office and sat me down with a drink so I could recover from the shock of the whole thing. It was like I’d sucked some of the grief out of him and had to sob it out myself. I’d seen right through someone’s skin. This guy was inside out. Everyone is in there somewhere. But under so many layers usually. So many layers.
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| I've lost mine, like an asshole, but here's his. |
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I’ve never had a worse year. I’m in shreds. My career has collapsed, my city is burning, I have no stability, nobody needs me, my dreams are gone. I’m out of gas.
So another gutting moment took me by surprise yesterday at noon when every David Lynch fan in the universe stopped what they were doing to meditate for ten minutes as he’d have done, on what would have been his 79th birthday a few short days after his final trip to the moon. I’d been fully immersed in a Lynch retrospective all weekend and was consumed by grief and awe. I was watching a stream of endless Lynch movies and clips. The stream paused for the meditation. And then when left alone with that in silence, it enveloped me. I sucked all the peace and love vibes from the thousands and thousands of meditating people radiating outward, and ate it up like a black hole.
yeah hi.
ok so since I wrote this post, about things closing and how that sucks and I don't know how to appreciate things right or something, two restaurants and a record store within 1/2 mile of my place unexpectedly closed. This is the vibe right now. This is a time of everyone failing despite their best efforts because money is worth pocket lint
who's doing ok? i want to know. landlords? You'll do great when everyone's homeless, you coalhearted toads you.
Meanwhile this weird thing (this thing? this?) surpassed 100k total views. The stats must be a lie, right? nobody's reading this. Anyway we're going back to bartering with goats, alright? if you don't have any goats you'll have to starve. It's goats or nothing.
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| totally stole this image from the web |
If you've read a post or two prior to now you'll know I sieze up under stress like a pillbug
I've had so much free time and I can't get anything done. A friend said to me recently "you already know how to starve. You just have to learn to make art at the same time." This is true. I don't think I'll ever learn though. Destined to live up to about 15% of my potential.
Tell me some stories of successful people who sat around and picked their nose until they were half a century old. Inspiring! this is what i need. send postcards of Grandma Moses paintings and ..just found a cute "artists who got started VERY late in life" ad forward click bait buzzword listicle (ew, ew) and one of the artists cited wasn't recognized until their 30s. no no no no no. that's not how this works
Grandma Moses and – oh boy man, it's "30 is old" articles all the way down. what the hell gen z/alpha, what, whoever the fuck you are. Is it illegal to write listicles if you can conceive of adulthood? grow up.
WHO???? find the late bloomers and send me postcards about them. I'm just getting started in life. All those bands I went to see were just candy. I didn't even entertain the idea of being an adult until now. Let me live the rest of my life in peace. jerks.
an assortment of photos I found today in an April Fools' Day google image search
