My life—part 4. That which is wanting cannot be numbered

California high
California seemed like a cornucopia, of jobs, of food, of money, of beautiful women, of everything when I got here. I had been here before, several times, during my various travels around the country and I had always fled after a few months thinking how phony and hollow these people were. After my wring-out in Florida, I didn't care. The supermarkets were stocked with vegetables I only had seen in pictures in macrobiotic cookbooks. Even roofing jobs paid $15 an hour, I became a carpenter’s helper for $18, unheard of money for me, after Florida’s southern slave pay scale. I felt myself blooming; I swam in the pacific; I ran marathons; I showed adoring girls how to mambo; and this in just a few months; I sent money back, Dusty always assumed we would get back together. By sheer co-incidence, her brother lived a few miles from me and she would relocate with the kids so that we could share custody.

I realize now that the time I missed with my boys is the core issue in why they feel so gypped of their fair share of love, support, my presence. I was still in the mid life crisis. How could I have denied myself, my own needs so long? How attached was I? Did my hatred of the mother prevent me from loving my kids? No, I missed them terribly; but I didn’t want to go back. I kept asking myself, am I going to throw this all away? It seemed as if I was doomed either way.

As if to totally put the question in contrast, my lover from Florida, Marie, also arrived in Cali, with suitcases in hand, ready to reignite our hot and heavy, mutually exclusive—and racially integrated—relationship anew. Did I choose to reconcile with my fire-breathing former wife and my three boys, and plunge myself back into a living hell? Or did I go for the contentious and controversial, revolutionary adventure with Marie? Hmmm. I saw my chink in the fence, and I jumped.

I did stand by my kids, in spite of the major hurdle of their mother's undying hatred. My oldest was consumed with hate, the second son forgave me and straddled the fence. The third son was on my side throughout. As weekend fathers go, I wasn’t bad. If proof be needed, I could tell I was doing my best, because everyone was mad at me, my wife, my new concubine, my sons, my mother, and every black man and white woman in Northern California. Today I see racially integrated couples all the time, but today cops—and even regular people—don’t automatically think that they are criminals, sex fiends or narcs. Maybe I broke down the stereotypes, although I’ll admit we were guilty of two of the three. Marie and I were often involved in some criminal activity or another and also were having extremely satisying sex, emotionally as well as physically satisfying. Marie went back to collage to get her degree in psychology. I started doing plumbing, electric, finish work, and started getting more jobs, more money. Their hate and jealousy and our love and sex kept us buoyant and together. But we were always one step ahead of the repo man; My salary could not support two families, we often ended up homeless in the mad gold rush of immigration in the Yay area during the 90’s. The smallest piece of shit apartment was treated like a palace, and these bastard slumlords had a field day raping the renters, the only rent control was their own greed. The Bay area was racist in their housing, and any black in Marin County without dreadlocks was a drug dealer or hooker from Oakland. All the doors started closing on me. Our social contacts, who at first thought we were cute, realized we had so substance; we were the parasites, the newbies, the hungry id in action. We were the have-nots looking in the window at all their good shit. California sees millions of us every year; we all come here with big plans, starting over, getting it together, making a killing, whatever, and it crumples into ash if you’re unlucky or not resilient. The natives are sick of us, and their life requires us, a new stream of believers; we just a herd of buffalo.

We had it tough; all illusions about each other shattered; I cheated on Marie with an old girl friend I happened to meet from back in the day in Switzerland. Marie left me to go back home. I still couldn’t spend more then five minutes with my ex without a furious argument developing. By this time I was calling her a anarcho-fascist. She cynically ruled me through the kids. The new beginning had a familiar ring to it. My mother, incidentally, had been living the life of a well-lubed undercover drunk, right under the noses of her new kids, my half brother and sister, Rob and Liz. I repaid her hospitality (more like mind control) by blowing her cover. I had made an bitter enemy of my first love object.

So then I did what any self respecting New Yorker would do in my case. I started selling dope. Not just any dope, but this new sativa, this bone-jarring trip weed, dripping with crystals, grown by mentally deranged Vietnam vets in the hills, who had no better aim in life but to cheat these female buds of their righteous taste of male seed. So I became a mule, as it were, a people’s dealer on People’s Express—$100 one way, no reservation to New York—with 30 kilos of smelly green buds packed in three layers of 5 mil. freezer bags with the air sucked out of them in a bulging suitcase. Once in Boston or New York, the buds would expand like jack in the boxes when released from their containment, like a genii. And the people paid me top dollar and swooned like children with the rushes. What an ego trip. "I'm in the building and I'm feeling myself!"

Life was pretty damn sweet—I would meet the coolest people on board the airline, crash at their apartments in New York, while I doled out my precious cargo, bud by bud to the hungry masses in the East Coast. My arrival would be awaited like a Dicken’s novel, the throngs would be waiting for my goods. I was loved, respected. And people loved to hang with me. The life of a dope dealer really is the best ever; it’s almost a shame it takes the death of an entire society to make those conditions so great. Great for me, that is. To the daring go the spoils, and I got spoiled by the largesse of the money. To this day I am stunned the same way I was stunned to have seen my fingertips be sliced off; to see how so little money makes the case, the difference for life or death.

I digress. I was always dealing life; happiness; rebellion; comradeship. When we lit up it was for the group ethos; love one another. My powers were so great that I could assemble my own new family on the East Coast, my kids, who left their mother in California, and Marie, who reunited with me, this time with her 3-month old granddaughter. We traveled from Boston to Florida, connecting with friends and dealers along the way, spreading the green bud from shore to shore and to every little hamlet we hailed. I had a hookup by overnight express and rotating addresses to pick up the loads—I no longer had to fly them myself—and I would unload, and move on to the next connection. The money was flowing coast to coast. All the while we looked like the typical (expanded) vacationing family. We lounged at poolside, while my kids banged away at the video game machines. We surfed, jetted, and relaxed while the magic and power of access to this illegal mood altering herb hovered around us like we were modern day knights of the round table. We rented beach houses and ran weeks-long barbeques for our homies. I handed out money like a Washington lobbyist in the senate building. "Ya didn't want me, now I'm hot, you're all up on me!"

Suffice it to say that the house of cards collapsed, but we didn’t get busted, at least only financially. After riding high, I was not going back to whacking nails. One look at the new Mac computer and I was truly in love, so I began to learn to make money with one by doing what I had always done, layouts and graphics. It just meant doing it on computer. When I discovered Quark and Photoshop it was all over, whatever inborn skills I had came cascading out. I have had a sexual experience with many a beautiful font.

So I made a good living at this; to help support two families, my own, with Marie, who had accepted me back, but was never to trust me again, and my beautiful, if not biologically bonded, daughter A; and my old family, my resentful ex and three surly grown men posing as our teenage sons. Reagan, that old fat bastard in a girdle, may have screwed up my renaissance in St. Pete, but I sure as hell bounced back and was dancing on his grave-to-be. I had countered the counter revolution with a few tricks of my own, the same shady, deceitful shit I had always used when faced with the tyranny of authority. I am no martyr, but I will be damned if I will play the game knowing I had a way out.

California works on the honor system. When I first came here and started shoplifting, I would laugh and say, yeah, it's the honor system, and I’d be honored to take it if they left it out like that. But the honor system has a massive backlash to it when you get busted. The jails are full of chumps who thought they could beat the honor system. After I had a roster of petty crimes on my CHP data sheet, I learned to bow down to the DMV, the real ruler of California. I bowed down to many things, I got a fucking backache bowing down, and sitting down in cars as I rode the endless vapid highways of mental stagnation., getting to wherever I had to go to bow down some more.

So what have I learned after 20 years or so in California? Californians are all about cheerful subservience, (a la Ceasar Milan, the Dog Whisperer, the coolest show on National Geographic TV). You have to be happy before you can find happiness. It’s very Buddhist, although the rich don’t practice it, they make the rules only, they don’t have to follow them. For the poor, the slaves, the way to wealth is to eschew it, the way to bliss is to go brain dead. Beauty comes from a needle and sex comes from a vibrator. You cannot appear as you are; you must always be in character. If you have any misfortune, it’s YOUR fault, so don’t whine or complain. Californians are a nation of betas, looking for an alpha to emulate in order to create their own pool of betas. In each sickening nuclear family the roles are twisted into pretzels as each member goes through the ringer of social marketization. Your worth is rung up on your forehead like the 666 number from the rapture.

In New York you can talk you way into a better class of people. If you got game, you can get game, as they say. In California, the game is controlled by the game masters, the gestalt geniuses who manipulate the great unwashed. You are a player or you are the played. Half the players are being played, and half the played out think they are going to be players one day. California lives and loves in a web of lies and self-deceit. If you don’t see it or say it, it isn’t true. Everything is glamorized, everything is a lie, but who cares? It looks good. Everyone is on the joke—right? If not, you have to get the hell out, to go back to Ohio, or Michigan, or wherever the hell you came from, defeated and despoiled.

If you make it for five years or so, then you can say you have traction; yet you are no more tenuous than the rest of these vainglorious materialists. In fact, the one refreshing and almost disconcerting thing about Cali is that this is the world of secular humanism, no god can help you in Calif; only the forces you command, what you can buy. I have never got past the lowest ranks; yet I have access to the same benefits and beauty as they do; not only that, I am more free than they are to enjoy them. I am like a foreign flora that has taken root here, displacing a weaker, native plant.

After my inevitable break with Marie, I cast my lot to the internet, and hooked up with the first woman with whom I had got past the email stage. And five years later this relationship has evaporated with the same suddenness that it ignited into such a bonfire. Whoosh, and the treetops were burned. Two fire sign tops, and did we go at it. A mission of destruction; Mutually assured destruction. Yet, instead, I chose to bend and harmonize; I figured that I could sell this little hard scrabble family the new age formulas for personal happiness. Little did I realize that I was an objective. Not a love object, that would be nice, but a destination. Once at the destination, the journey itself would be irrelevant. I was the guide (she assumes, no doubt) to bring her to her haven spot, through the enchanted forests of Marin. I did help her with her office politics, I helped her write the memo that toppled her boss, like a modern day Richard the third.

In my heart I'll always believe that she knew when and how we would break up before I did. when she said "I don't want you out of my life" she was planning a new one that she knew would exclude me. People with a plan can use the daily events as a smokescreen to advance the agenda. I was out-topped by her; she's the alpha, the one who had control of the relationship. But, you know it's always the woman who really controls it, unless she is terrified out of her mind by abuse or numbed by drugs. I supposed abused women are casting around for a handy fix, but they can regroup from those destructive relationships as they see the patterns develop. The whole freaky mania of men to control women is due to the nature of the female sexuality, how it essentially can't be controlled, and and so men are frightened and threatened by it. Female sexuality is like maternalism, it's instant, irrevocable, and cyclic. Men fear such a regime, it reminds them collectively of a time when women ruled, when they practiced polyandry, communism and medicine, when they worshipped the moon and the vagina.

Today's sun and penis worshipping society of men gives every man the patina of being a top, being the warrior, the masculine aspects of personality. In truth, how many men really posses the qualities that masculinity requires? Most of them never outgrow childhood; they are childlike until it becomes unacceptable, and then they become abusive. At some point, men decided that they hated being ruled by the vagina; it was a tyranny of familiarity. Let the tool become the task itself. In the existential world of a man's penis, form follows function, and the world could be remade using supply side economics. If men control the supply, they can control the sexuality. They have tried to privatize pussy.

So with fire and steel, men have become per force, the Tops. Any man who isn't a top is a fag. Tops get the male privilege, but they also have to live by the law of the jungle, and can be removed by another top. Women caught on to the game, and they started being tops, too. Aries, Scorpio and Sagittarian women have a hard time being a bottom, even under the best of circumstances. Every female villain in history has been a female top. A female top is the only way that you get the masculine desires in a female's physical world. That's why gays—male bottoms—are so precious, the information they have to offer straight society already has a large following and a TV show.

I am a top. Leo must rule, but in another sense, I rule to please. As a leader, if the people lost faith in me, I would resign. I'm a top and so was K, even though she had a vagina. She is, as tough, tougher than I am, since I am a watery mess of emotions. With her fire and Earth she had the upper hand and she used it to to smother my own type of masculinity ("You ruin everything!") and so it went. Meanwhile I have been working for the same boring company for four years, grinding out a meagre existence as their artist-in-captivity. Abused artist will work for food. I am a top who has forced himself to live as a bottom, and now I am free. My virgo mars makes me very conscious of my productivity and worth to society. I have to have a job. I think it's time for me to go on the offensive again, a new underground newspaper, or at least another website. If nothing else, I am a ox for the people, or at least in a very cat-like way.

So what have I learned from my time here in California? All that glitters is not gold, but there is always a market for glitter.