Memories of Eastern Kentucky and the Jersey Shore: Meditations on Loss In Life-Poems by Roy Bentley

December 14, 2015 by 1 Comment
Image of "October Piece," 1969 print by Peter Milton

“October Piece,” 1969 print by Peter Milton

Railroad Depot at Fleming, Kentucky: November, 1915

It would have been a gunmetal gray rail line for snakes
to cross but no snake visible. It would have been beautiful,
the cloud-veil of locomotive breath. And starlight-struck.
Behind the depot: laurel thickets. A sign for horse feed.
Denuded limbs would gray the hills, the shadow train
in the right of way speeding alongside an actual train.

There’s horizon, and there’s red-poppy-colored light
on the platform, and a man would have patted a pocket
of his overalls for the fresh tin of Prince Albert tobacco.
I want to hold title to those rich acres in the bottomland
and I want no one to hold title to it but for wildflowers
to grow at the side of a wagon-furrowed road. I want

to watch my dear dead waltz into Paradise, spirit-
heads high, setting aside histories as they commence
stepping off distances to build houses. Towns. Cities.
In 100 years these may talk the pace of human rights
and Snow on the Mountain Fall Blooming Camellia
as a symbol of expectation in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Today, the locomotive is taking on water. Its engineer
slouches. Maybe he smells wood or coal smoke or both.
See other men rising to their full heights. Hear the voices
separate extant pain from the gorgeously swaddled world.
See the white-haired man with the scratched, blue suitcase.
Each of these has felt one recent grief fresh upon waking.

Gloryland Effect

My grandmother Potter said her son Earl died from a gunshot wound.
Said that Johnny Belcher had shot him—Earl—in a bar in Kentucky.
She showed me the 8 x 10 of Earl in army uniform, visor cap cocked
on his head, the cap more than broken in with wear on parade grounds
and on leave after battles, a glow about his handsome long-dead face.
She called that sepia glow the Gloryland Effect. I was falling asleep
the first time she handed me the photograph, and I dreamed of him,
my murdered uncle who read Zane Grey and fathered children
before a single bullet in his liver ended his dreams, if he had any.
I dreamed of him in a place I supposed was heaven or the Afterlife.
In one of those whispers for which the dead in dreams are famous,
he said I should be careful growing up. Said I should love her for him,
my grandmother, his mother with a wide center part in her gray hair.
And I woke with that 8 x 10 vanished into her Samsonite suitcase.
I called her and she came to me, having traveled at the speed of love
after many losses; some great, some less so. She spoke and I knew
each of us has a glowing soul of which we never stop speaking.

Members of the Primitive Baptist Church
Attend a Creek Baptism by Submersion

The line of worshipers collects by an August creek bank.
Their song goes Shall we gather at the river, the beautiful
the beautiful river . . . The creek isn’t much during summer,
though it will all but cover a convert to his or her waist.
A woman in white is holding a man’s fedora. Another
is wading out from the bank into russet-colored water.
Frances Collier Potter is here, hair bobby-pinned up.

In epistolary First Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says
that the hair of any woman is her glory and covering.
Her pastor says it says that. Adds salvation is no joke.
If it is a joke, grace, the punchline is accepting Christ
with the faith of a child: meaning as blindly trusting
as anyone, male or female, gets in Letcher County.

Ask anyone about Letcher County and you’ll hear
that if God plays favorites, this isn’t one of those.
Ask about the Redeemer any time but don’t ask
Frances Collier Potter about a child she lowered
into black as familiar as the slap from a brother
or husband. In the fish-slaughtering coal mine
run-off, closer to an understanding of laurels

than the supernatural, she lets go the memory
of star thistles of frost on glass after the death.
Even if it’s true that good moonshine covers
a multitude of sins, this is the wrong woman
to fuck with. Glory or no glory, she hikes up
her cotton robes and goes in to put one eye
to the task of keyholing the door to mercy.

The Universe as Drunk Girlfriend

Unchecked, she opens an event horizon of a mouth
and out it comes: the turd-in-the-punchbowl analogy
disbursing both the n-word and a sexual metaphor
involving black holes. Occasionally, a side boob
will tease in the way that the God particle does—
dancing a waltz with Mind, a roiling tango. Maybe
the reason that suffering surrounds her has to do
with a mother dropping dead in an airport in Ohio
and then a father running off with a plate-spinner

who performed before The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
Singularities and space-time rifts were born in her,
though her singular nature comes with firecrackers.
Matches with archangels on the matchbook cover.
Though there are no instructions in any language,
there are some who say the fuse is labeled After
lighting, run. If there is Spirit, hers dances—
with or without a partner and music. Hearts
like hers stagger around backstage at rehearsals

waiting for the next big bang-boom. A beauty,
she is some piece of work. Remember the time
she ran over that dog, then asked you to get out
and see just what sort of damage she had done?
Remember how much you loved her, her mystery
and how, in her wake, it collected as pockets of
absence? Lately, they say she travels with a cat.
A fat tabby she’s named The Strength of Lies.
The animal is reportedly fond of starscapes.

Huckleberry Finn Wanders into Westeros

I was 17 and three days a runaway when I stole Life
on the Mississippi from Becky Thatcher’s Bookstore
on North Main Street in Hannibal, Missouri. The spine
of a Penguin paperback read New American Library.
Outside, it was a blue-sky May afternoon and I was
an hour too late to be admitted to the home of Sam
Clemens’ childhood sweetheart, Laura Hawkins.
All right, 40 years later I’m at Lefty’s Tavern
near the Jersey Shore. Checking voicemails.
And I want to hear above the Game of Thrones-
themed wedding they’re hosting. Third playback,
I hear Results came back negative. No cancer.
And I order a Rebel IPA. Toast the revelers.
If Jorah Mormont is battling greyscale carriers,
stonemen, his best man the dwarf Tyrion Lannister
dodging death by a thousand cuts from paper swords,
it isn’t on the Mississippi. And if Huck and Jim put in
anywhere in Westeros, Jim gets beheaded or lynched,
left to twist as a species of strange, unspecified fruit.
But at Lefty’s Tavern, the news is all good. A bride-
as-Daenerys-Targaryen, cleavaged, three firedrakes
in attendance by a spray of long-stemmed red roses,
is trying to shoplift bliss, the new American variety.
In that story, a queen walks dragon eggs from fire
and a knight-protector is mesmerized forever after,
a runaway slaver risen from the ashes of disgrace.
In make-believe, all ravens are starlight-throated;
in Barnegat, you steal cable and park a Cadillac
on cinderblocks behind Lefty’s. Fantastic is as
fantastic does. If the body is a raft, then those
borne along on it rate at least one dragon egg
above a drone of messages it’s hard to hear.

“October Piece” (1969), the illustrative image evoking John Steinbeck’s California boyhood and Roy Bentley’s memory of a train depot in Kentucky, is a popular print by the critically acclaimed contemporary American artist Peter Milton.—Ed.

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True Story: Swimming on Huckleberry Hill in the 1930s

December 14, 2015 by 5 Comments
"Lower Alvarado Street, Monterey," painting by Bruce Ariss

“Lower Alvarado Street, Monterey” by Bruce Ariss, from the collection of Jess and Laura Brown

In the days before paved roads or drains or electric power lines, the hill overlooking Monterey, California was home to little more than the roaming deer and several million migrating butterflies, the latter returning each autumn to cluster on the needles of the towering pines. At the base of the trees, wild huckleberry bushes flourished.  Robert Louis Stevenson knew the hill from his time when, as an impoverished Scots emigrant, he began writing Treasure Island. In his essay “The Old Capitol,” Stevenson described the 1879 Monterey, California landscape like this:

You follow winding tracks that lead nowhither. You see a deer, a multitude of quail arises. But the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the summit, outbreaks on every hand and with freshened vigour that same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now you are on top of Monterey Peninsula, and the noise no longer only mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and from down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole woodland is begirt with thundering surges . . . [and] a great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the inland canyons . . . go where you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific.

Only 30 years before Stevenson arrived, the Spanish conquistadores had abandoned their fort, the presidio built in the previous century on the hill overlooking the town that served as the center of Spanish and Mexican provincial government in California, until statehood in 1850. Even before California joined the Union, non-Spanish settlers were flocking to the Monterey Peninsula, a place of limitless beauty, abundance, and opportunity. Chinese immigrants who laid America’s railroads came and stayed to fish and raise families. Greek, Portuguese, and Italian fishermen arrived during the Gold Rush, discovering a different gold in the rich shoals of sardines that swarmed in the waters of Monterey Bay. Soon, factories that specialized in packing the fishermen’s catch into tin cans sprang up along the shore, and ever so gradually the quiet Spanish settlement of Monterey, California became an active American community. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, writers and painters were increasingly attracted to its charms, and it became a center of artistic as well as economic activity.

Image of untitled drawing by Judith Deim

Untitled drawing by Judith Deim

Adventurous souls who worked with charcoal and paint, those who worked with slippery hands shaping clay, others who chiseled marble and wood to make sculptures, they came together on the Peninsula seeking artistic camaraderie. There were writers and poets too, and though young John Steinbeck was not a stranger in the area—having been born in nearby Salinas—he was readily attracted to the bohemian enclave that was forming on the hill above the town. To them, the huckleberries growing beneath the pines made naming it Huckleberry Hill seem natural. Nearby, the side of the hill that looked down on Pacific Grove was, for obvious reasons, called Strawberry Flats, and the overflow of bohemian newcomers began to settle there.

Whether on the Hill or in the Flats, it was everything that Stevenson said it was, and day or night the air was clear and still: it smelled of pine and eucalyptus, and when the wind changed and came off Monterey Bay, the air would become rich with the scent of seaweed and salt. It was from there that the putt-putting sounds of the fishermen’s boats came, the cries of the gulls and the barking of the seal lions that mingled in turn with the whistles and shouts from the row of canneries now standing at the base of the Hill.

After the artists arrived, word spread that parcels of land on either side of the Hill were for sale. And they were cheap. Soon adventurous souls who were finishing their studies at Stanford or Berkeley headed south and bought 25’x60′ building lots for $25 each—though I could be wrong: they may have been 25’x100′, and the price might have been $50. The creative ones came, alone and in pairs, and houses were hastily constructed, many of them from the rough redwood boards that were harvested from the sea after barges full of redwood bound for sawmills in the south floundered in high waves, dumping their loads into the bay, where the lumber became rich pickings for those on shore.

A dozen years later, the roads were covered with asphalt, drains were laid underground, and electricity poles became evident. With natural beauty at every turn, and with near-perfect weather and excellent companionship, all seemed to be going well in that best-of-all-possible-worlds, until the economic situation beyond those pine and eucalyptus groves turned bad in the 1930s and the entire country went into a long depression. The odd jobs and cannery work that helped keep the artists and artisans in bread and wine quickly vanished. However, thanks to progressive measures like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), government-funded employment eventually became available. Artists were hired to paint murals on buildings and inside the post office in Salinas, and writers were given jobs writing recipe books, travel guides, and pamphlets explaining how to can and preserve fruits and vegetables. John Steinbeck did that kind of writing, and his friend Bruce Ariss painted murals.

Image of "Black Madonna," painting by Judith Deim

“Black Madonna,” painting by Judith Deim

I mention Bruce Ariss because, as a latecomer to Huckleberry Hill, I lived in the house next to his, and he was the neighbor I knew best. Like many artists in the 1930s, his paintings depicted the lives of the people in the streets, on the farms, and in the factories of Pacific Grove, Salinas, and Monterey, California. A university graduate and champion collegiate boxer, he was a jack of all trades: painting, writing, editing, acting, directing, and more. Also, he was a passionate builder. He’d purchased three lots on the Hill, and he indicated that his plan was to eventually cover every available inch with a single house. The home be built was one of the first on Huckleberry Hill, and as his family grew, so did his house. Created more or less as he went along, it was not a straightforward house. John Steinbeck was to say to him one day, “Yours is an achievement over modern architecture.”

There were any number of potters living on Huckleberry Hill, and on those occasions when their creations met with disaster in the kiln, Bruce was there to collect the broken bits. From them he constructed colorful mosaics. And having an abundance of the shards on hand, he conjured up the idea of putting a soaking-pool in the middle of his front room. He began by digging a circular hole about eight feet in diameter and close to three feet deep, placing it just in front of his large stone fireplace. During the cementing process, he carefully added the potters’ bits and pieces to create a colorful mosaic tub, making sure there were no sharp edges. When it was finished he filled it with water from a garden hose. It tested well. “Never warm, but always invigorating”—that was how Bruce described the pool to me.

Image of untitled painting by Judith Deim

Untitled painting by Judith Deim

One day, Bruce and his “bride”—as he always referred to his wife Jean— were trying out the pool with Carol and John Steinbeck and a couple of other Huckleberry Hill people.  Some were in the water and some were stretched out on blankets around it, enjoying the afternoon, when there was a weak knock at the Ariss door. That was very odd, for nobody knocked on the Ariss door: anyone and everyone simply walked in.

“Come in,” someone hollered, and a man entered. He was a small man, a gentle-looking fellow with wire-rim glasses, very properly dressed in a suit and tie. He politely removed his hat. Most of those lounging around the pool immediately recognized him as the overseer of their WPA work in Salinas. He was their boss, and he’d driven his rickety old Ford to Monterey to find out why no one from the Hill had shown up for work that day.

Stepping through the door, the man drew up short noticing that, apart from himself, there wasn’t a single soul in the room with so much as a stitch of clothing on. He looked down at his hat in his hands and began mumbling—something about the work that had to be done in Salinas, about his duty as supervisor, about his just checking to see . . . .

“Well, look, I’m sorry, I didn’t know . . . ah, we’ll talk about that when I see you in Salinas tomorrow,” he said, directing his words at no one in particular and preparing to make a hasty departure.

“We can talk now if you like,” Bruce replied. “I know you’ve had a warm, dusty drive over. You might as well take off what you’re wearing and get in and cool yourself off.  And here,” he said, holding up a gallon jug. “There’s plenty of this, help yourself.”

The quiet little man lifted his head, looked around the room at the glistening bodies, then smiled. “Yeah, sure,” he said, and in a flash he was out of his attire, dangling his feet in the water and reaching for the jug of wine.

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From the Sierra Madres to The Milky Way: New Poems By Kathleen S. Burgess

December 7, 2015 by 2 Comments

Image of Monterey coast by Charles Cramer

He’s So Fine

I hum with a radio tune on a dirt road detour
through the Sierra Madres. Despite swerves
and potholes, most riders sleep. It’s clear
the Chiffons’ doo-lang doo-lang doo-lang

underlies George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord
in the way magma lifted these mountains.
The driver urges the bus around sharp curves
with no guardrails. Stars shine for attention.

George pleads, I really want to see you, lord,
but it takes so long, my lord. And as if on cue,
the headlights flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Fail.
The radio mutes. Suddenly blind the driver

searches, jiggles switches. Runs off the road.
Our hearts pound like pistons. Brakes squeal
their rabbit-voiced panic. We’re lurching
toward the cliff’s crumbling edge. We stop.

Alleluia wings of doors fold as our driver
steps off-stage to a short-lived applause.
Men follow him out looking into the gorge
with flashlights. Laughing afterjokes.

He opens a matchbook, cups the bright halo
of the match, and exhales his thanksgivings.
He lifts the hood, bends to nerves of the bus.
Fiddles and tightens loose wires. Drives on.

Soon a Milky Way of lights sprawls below.
We merge into beetling traffic. Our driver
pounds a door till a man roused from his bed
yields to our hero’s voice, insistent gestures.

We grab our gear to board the new bus. Once
on the road most passengers sleep, but I watch
bright constellations, the spinning stars, and
a meteor flaming as if to disappear the dark.

Recipes from a Colombian Kitchen

In a smoke-darkened kitchen, an Andean guinea pig
wheeking ¡cuy, cuy, cuy, cuy! is named by its cries.
I lift and cradle the highlands rodent, the cuy pup.

Oversized teeth, rapid breathing, inquisitive eyes,
like any third grader entering a new school year.
Wood flames beneath a full, bubbling enamel pot.

Though American experts will say, Never boil coffee,
the coffee cherries grown, roasted black on this finca,
make a brew smooth as cocoa. A kitchen blade carves

a corner off a brick of panela, crude sugar, to sweeten.
For lunch Custodia prepares a stew of potatoes, garlic,
onion, carrots, tomatoes, a flank steak, salt, cumin, and

a bunch of cilantro added to an ever-simmering stock.
She flings peelings into a corner where the cuyes nest
on a swept dirt floor. There’s plenty for all. Custodia

wields a machete with her right hand. In her left,
purple-brown yuca, a cassava tree root. Quick chops
from end to end, and the skin slips off. Potassium

cyanide concentrates in the rind, so she must wash
the creamy flesh, grate, dry, and grind it into flour.
Like onions or coffee, it’s not for cuyes. Housekeeper

Felicia mixes salt, baking powder, panela, egg, anise
flavor, lard into the flour. She kneads the dough and
flattens it with a rolling pin. Cuts apart the rectangles.

Sets them on a cookie sheet. Scores each with a fork.
I make full moons, crescents, diamonds. When I leave,
Felicia reshapes my efforts. Some of the crisp cookies,

the baked panderos, she saves for the household, then
walks to town, dozens nestled in a basket linen-lined.
At the market, her customers take all but the crumbs.

Game

Under a lantern’s hiss of white gas, at a small bar
on a river, the owners challenge Ted and Yukihiro
to gamble on an Inca game we’ve never played,

Sapo. A brass frog, the sapo, tops a console box.
It’s Peruvian tornillo wood overlaid with leather.
A tropical sky flashes veins of fool’s gold and

rumbles all night with fools’ wishes. From seven
meters the players pitch tokens to twirl the brass
spinners, zing into holes, or the wide brass mouth

for a win. The coins channel and collect below
in square pigeonholes numbered with scores.
After a practice round, they start. And Ted’s bet?

Enough for us to live two months. That burning
water, aguardiente, empties into flushed faces.
We get the hustle. Confident they’ll outshine

these tourists, the local hotshots toast to spirits.
Swell with their coming fortune. Ted and Yuki
miss the sapo, the two- and four-sided spinners,

most holes. Mala suerte, a hard mouth grins.
Too bad. Emilio’s moustache curls upward.
Carlos slaps Yuki’s back. Offers a new game,

new chance. Taunts, Doble o nada, gringos.
They begin. I watch for bottles and knives.
Who wins last matters in the fog.

Pacific

Long days, short rides. Ted and I trudged Atacames flats
close to the equator, and just past sundown we topped
the estuary bank. Below, on the beach, silhouettes
erupted: coconut palms, tents, compadres about a fire.

Later, fiddler crabs probed at leftovers. Sally lightfoots,
reddened by a Coleman lantern, skittered into holes—
theirs or their neighbors’. Too dark to put up our tent,
we lay all night in a shack sieving rain onto our heads.

By daylight we raised our pup tent in sand. Stakes bit
and let go, too short to hold. So Brad and Joanna helped,
wrapping the guy ropes around stones. When the poles
toppled anyway, we strung the lines between two trees.

Around us legs and claws, the remains of crab wars,
littered the shore. We climbed eucalyptus-scented hills,
descended to a one-dock fishing port where we lunched
on fresh catch—luscious and round, tasting of lobster,

and tropical fish pulled in by Ecuador’s trawlers who vied,
three miles out in waters our northern nation contested,
with industrial ships that caught, cut, packaged, iced fish,
and threw back. Sharks trailed in water so reddish gray

all hours that local men feared to swim along the coast.
The sea held them all: blue, lemon, nurse, whitenose, bull.
We didn’t know sharks hunted in shallows, not yet.
So we body-surfed to shore. Tumbled, heads down,

feet up, choking and laughing, skinned, crusted in sand.
Most afternoons we walked to a café and store for beer
and Manicho bars. The chocolate was as full of peanuts
as the sky of stars that night when phosphorescent waves

washed around us. Suspended in stars, we whispered
with the Pacific. The slow sea pulse was the rhythm
of our bodies, the rocking of the whole world,
as we floated, disembodied, invisible in umbra.

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“José Clemente Orozco in New York”: Roy Bentley’s Poem about Political Art

November 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Image of Gods of the Modern World, by Jose Clemente Orozco

José Clemente Orozco in New York

It’s like this, light spills at a time
and place, and we cheer it as beautiful.
We jaywalk crowded streets that bum-rush us
into pulse stutters of traffic, which we do not cheer.
Why doesn’t a candle-white building with the late sun
gilding it stay that way, gilded, the watcher wonders—
rain sheeting down but stopping so gladness can rise
into pastel clouds, a democratic republic of runoff
founding governments-in-exile in the storm drains.
All the biographers agree Orozco dressed oddly,
that he was distracted and talked loudly to himself
on the street where, walking Brooklyn, day or night,
he learned that, in America, faces of the hopeful
constantly turn away since seeing obligates the seer.
Crossing from Mexico that first time, border guards
seized 60 of his paintings, as if brown naked human beings
were not a proper subject matter or art itself was illegal
or there were two kinds of hearts in Gringoland.
In the years just after the Great Crash,
and working in the shadow of Diego Rivera,
Orozco painted Gods of the Modern World
where the bones of dead ideas like Democracy
give birth to—what else?—more dead ideas.
Orozco’s “birthing” occurs on a bed of books
in a room of robed men where skeletal fetuses
ask, Where is the hope in repeating their mistakes?
The artist has painted faces that aren’t turned away.
Slits for eyes. In Modern Migration of the Spirit
a piss-yellow Christ has descended the cross, afoot
and wild-eyed, and sporting an ax. Later, in Mexico,
he creates wall murals with tanks and dive bombers—
his way of reminding the Afflicted who’s to blame.
When he falls in love with an American ballerina
named Gloria, it’s because the heart that fails
and fails trumps that other heart any day.

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“Bill”: Monterey, California Short Story by Steve Hauk

November 1, 2015 by 7 Comments

Portrait image of Bill of Monterey, California by the artist CKline (Caroline)

Bill

I

Bill has swept back blond hair, lazy blue eyes, sucked in cheeks, a gaunt, leathery look from years of house painting. He spent decades balancing on ladders braced by collapsing gutters or rotting sideboard, but never fell far or broke a bone. Other than part-time bartending in a place called Segovia’s in Monterey, California, Bill’s retired now. He still drives the paint-smeared pickup truck he used in his work. Though he’s working less, he’s still gaunt.

Bill’s from Philadelphia and grew up hearing stories about an uncle he never met, Philly fighter Eddie Cool. Eddie squandered his talent, falling down drunk in the city’s gutters. He once said his father died a drunk, and he would, too. So for a lot of years Bill steered away from alcohol. He remembered meeting and getting to know the old Philly trainer Sam Solomon, and openly crying as Solomon described again and again the handsome Cool’s demise at the age of thirty-five due to careless living and drinking.

Still, Bill was naturally sociable so he took a drink now and then, and then a few more. After a stint in the Navy, he roamed the country, hoisting beers along the way. In New Mexico he decided he’d like to live in Alaska and packed up his pickup truck. When he hit the California coastline he turned north. When he came to Monterey he pulled over and watched the waves breaking on the shore. This gave him a kind of peace. He decided to put Alaska on hold.

Bill walked away from a hotel room for twenty-seven dollars a night, got one for seventeen, then a few days later found an affordable, thin-walled fisherman’s cottage just above Cannery Row. Rent included a chair, a cot, a black and white TV – he picked up a fridge at the dump. He found piecemeal labor jobs. He installed braces and boards on the sides of his pickup truck bed and made money hauling stuff. When someone asked him if could paint, he did that, too, and graduated from interiors to more dangerous exteriors.

At a pizza bar he met an older couple, Bruce and Jean, who had been friends – young protégés back then – of the late author John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Bruce, a painter, and Jean, a writer, liked a good time to dull some dark memories. Being with people they liked helped, so their house up on Huckleberry Hill was often wide open for guests. One day, not having seen him for a time, Bruce and Jean showed up at Bill’s cottage with a bottle of Chianti.

This surprised Bruce and Jean’s other friends. They said, “Bruce and Jean don’t visit you – you visit them. What’s going on?’’ Bruce told Bill, “Do you know why we like hanging out with you? You don’t treat us like old people.’’

Bill attributed that to his relationship with the Philly trainer Sam Solomon. Bill hadn’t treated Sam as old either, he loved him too much.

Bruce and Jean had seen a lot of life – violence in the valley’s agricultural fields, Steinbeck’s life threatened, and the much-loved Ricketts killed when his car stalled on the train tracks, standing by as his broken body was lifted onto a stretcher. They’d also seen artists and writers and poets fail, while they themselves had struggled to establish themselves; they did better than most though recognition was long in coming. For every local artistic success story, there were many more of failure, a few suicides sprinkled among them.

Through Bruce and Jean, Bill became a regular at Ricketts’ old laboratory on Cannery Row. A kind of men’s club had established itself of artists, cartoonists, judges, writers, professors, business types, all of a slightly raffish bent.

Hanging over them were the memories of Steinbeck and Ricketts, giving the place an exhilarating though sometimes haunted quality. In the good times, people swore you could get high just breathing the air, simply by stepping into the lab. The lab could also be unpleasantly aromatic. Rotting kelp and dead sea life would wash ashore on the rocks just below the concrete deck that extended out behind the lab. Still, that just added to the character of the place.

Eventually Bill left the board and batten cottage and rented a larger house in nearby Pacific Grove. It was a short walk to the shoreline, a middling one to the Row. When a friend lost his job, Bill rented him a room for almost nothing. When another separated from her husband, Bill rented her a room. And so on. Bill couldn’t say no, though granted he liked receiving rent – but, he told himself, it wasn’t much and included full kitchen privileges as long as people cleaned up after themselves.

The house at various times held seven or eight people, including a charming but luckless scholar in a frayed blue blazer living in the garage, made more comfortable by carpet remnants Bill gathered from painting jobs. Bill’s became a social center to rival Bruce and Jean’s.

One night the tenants and Bruce and Jean were sitting around Bill’s half watching the Academy Awards while sipping cocktails when Bill noticed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was winning all the awards but its author wasn’t on hand. Bill asked Bruce and Jean if, in the day, Steinbeck showed up when his books made into films were up for awards.

“That wouldn’t have been like John,’’ said Jean, and Bruce nodded.

Bill sipped his cocktail and pondered. He knew Ken Kesey lived in Springfield, Oregon. So though he realized it was a long shot, he turned down the television and called information. He not only got a number, when he dialed Kesey himself answered in his crystalline voice: “Ken here.’’

Surprised, Bill said, “Bill here.’’

“Bill who?’’

“Bill of Monterey.’’

After a pause, “Well – Bill of Monterey – what can I do for you?’’

Bill explained he’d heard Kesey had had a falling out with the film’s producers and guessed that’s why he wasn’t in Hollywood, and what did he think of what was going on so far?

“Well, I‘m in the backyard shed editing a magazine article, no TV, so I don’t know what’s going on down there. But since you ask me how I feel about it . . . have you ever suddenly remembered you have something important in your pocket, but when you reach in all you find is a hole big enough to match the growing pit in your stomach? That’s how I feel. Something important to me . . . part of me . . . is missing.’’

Bill felt tears coming to his eyes.

“Like after a shock treatment?’’

“Yeah, maybe so . . . .’’

“Or a lobotomy?’’

“You don’t feel anything after a lobotomy, Bill of Monterey – that’s why they do them.’’

“Yeah.’’

When Bill got off the phone, he confused Kesey and shock treatments and lobotomies in his head with Sam Solomon and Uncle Eddie Cool lying in a Philly gutter – and wiped the tears from his eyes. Bruce and Jean comforted him. He was becoming like a son to them.

Portrait image of Bill, Ken Kesey, and Jean and Bruce Ariss by the artist CKline (Caroline)

II

Bill met a woman and fell in love and they had a daughter and the tenants had to go. When the marriage ended the tenants began returning and the daughter had many adults looking after her and getting in the way in the kitchen. There were only so many burners and pots and pans.

Cannery Row was eventually and predictably appropriated by developers. Work began on a sprawling luxury hotel project then was stalled by money problems. Cyclone fences couldn’t hide concrete pilings and rusting rebar. The lab guys didn’t mind eyesores from the past littering vacant lots – fish hoppers and caved-in boilers had character and echoes of Steinbeck and Ricketts – but contemporary pilings and rebar were another matter.

A restaurateur had the inspiration of hiding the fences and what was behind them with murals depicting Monterey life. With the city’s blessing, Bruce put out word anyone with the artistry and vigor to paint a vision of Monterey on sheets of plywood was welcome to try.

The city provided a hundred boards. Bruce coerced Bill into priming them on the lab’s deck, wisely hiring an attractive masseuse to keep Bill and the other volunteers – who delivered the primed plywood boards to artists and picked up the murals when completed – on the job. When a major earthquake struck on a fall afternoon, Bill tumbled off the masseuse’s table and some of the already installed murals collapsed. But they could be repaired and nobody on the Row was killed and the lab held together.

The mural project miraculously transitioned from an attempt to artistically cover up pilings and rebar into a symbol of the rebuilding spirit of mankind. Bruce was lionized. A walkway leading to the lab was named for him.

A year later Bruce and Jean’s house burned down. Bruce gathered himself for a final project – designing and constructing a new house for Jean. There was no shortage of volunteers to help. When the house was completed – a minor masterpiece of stone and arching wood beams – Bruce declined quickly.

On his deathbed Bruce said to Bill, “I love you – dance in the streets all night long.’’ He was prophetic. The city shut down Cannery Row traffic in his honor and people danced all night to the live music of Jake Stock and the Abalone Stompers, none longer than Bill.

Jean went on for another decade. She worried to friends that often when Bill called late at night to talk about the old times, he’d had too many cocktails. It tore at her heart. Bill wondered about this because when he visited it was usually Jean who brought out the Jack Daniels.

When someone young and smooth arrived from Los Angeles and talked an aging Jean out of important papers relating to life at the lab, Bill had to be dissuaded from traveling to Los Angeles and throttling the man. When Jean died, Bill regretted not having done it.

Portrait image of Carnnery Row by the artist CKline (Caroline)

III

Two men knocked on Bill’s door. They were wearing suits, loose ties and carried clipboards. They showed Bill identification. “We’re from the city. We’ve had complaints. Your tenants are living here illegally, have been for years. They have until four this afternoon to vacate the premises.’’

Bill worried most about the scholar in the frayed blue blazer in the garage. Over the next few weeks Bill found temporary shelter for most of his tenants. A few found housing on their own. A friend allowed the scholar to room with him across town. Bill’s daughter was already independently in her own place, so that was not a concern.

A week later Bill was evicted from the house. He became depressed, drank a little but not a lot. Memories of his uncle, Eddie Cool, and old Sam Solomon’s stories were always there to make him think hard. He would push it to the edge, but never cross a particular line he had unconsciously but firmly set in his head.

Even when Bruce and Jean had worried about him, he knew he would be okay. He would not die in some gutter like Eddie Cool. If he hadn’t learned abstinence or moderation, he had learned a kind of control.

One other thing he knew – he had to leave, he could no longer afford Monterey, the city’s rising cost of living. Philly was out. He cast about. He fondly remembered a dusty border town in New Mexico he had paused in decades earlier on his way to – he thought then – Alaska.

Portrait image of Bill of Monterey, California by the artist CKline (Caroline)

He made calls, he talked to people, he was told he could live cheaply in this town, which had changed little in the decades since. Through an agent he found for almost nothing a miner’s hut with paper-thin walls overlooking the desert. Like the sound of the breaking waves, he decided, the silence would bring him a kind of peace.

Illustrations by CKline (Caroline), who is happy to report that she is creatively pursuing multiple projects in the arts.

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“A Home From the Sea”: Robert Louis Stevenson and The House John Steinbeck’s Friend Bruce Ariss Built with Salvage from Monterey Bay

October 27, 2015 by 11 Comments

Image of Monterey Bay south of Pacific Grove

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;
‘Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.’

—Robert Louis Stevenson

A Home From the Sea

It was easy to see Monterey Bay from just about anywhere on Huckleberry Hill, and if you could see the blue of the water over the mottled roofs of Pacific Grove and Monterey then you could easily see the slow-moving tugs as they struggled through the waves towing barges of rough-cut lumber from the mills up north. The loads were destined for the lumberyards of Santa Barbara, Ventura, or maybe Los Angeles, but the only time that mattered to anyone on the Hill was when one of the tugs floundered in a storm and the restraining cables holding the lumber snapped, dumping the rich cargo into the choppy seas.

The only time that mattered to anyone on the Hill was when one of the tugs floundered in a storm and the restraining cables holding the lumber snapped, dumping the rich cargo into the choppy seas.

There was no system to alert anyone of that, just the understanding that high winds invariably led to fresh carrion being spread upon the waters of the bay and, like hungry gulls, when the storm was over they descended in their numbers onto the beaches to claim it. In crank-up Fords and Chevys, in Model-A and Studebaker pickups, they came, and in groups or alone, they came, a new kind of California coastal hunter and gatherer, scouring the beaches and hauling from the shore the salvage that the waves and the tides would deliver to their feet. Much of it was clear redwood timber cut from the massive trees that grew in profusion in the coastal forests above San Francisco: clear, sweet-smelling redwood boards perfect to build a house, a painter’s studio, or to add another room to a house already lived in.

There was no system to alert anyone, just the understanding that high winds invariably led to fresh carrion being spread upon the waters of the bay and, like hungry gulls, when the storm was over they descended in their numbers onto the beaches to claim it.

The Ariss house at the end of Lobos Street was like that, added to and built upon by Bruce and Jean over the years, constructed up and out with redwood boards gathered from the rocks near the canneries or from the wide beaches that embrace Pacific Grove. Bruce and Jean painted, but they also wrote, and when someone commented on the vast amount of building material that seemed to have gone into building so many homes on Huckleberry Hill, it was, as Bruce was wont to say, due to a perfect combination of ill wind and good fortune that had provided so many of them with shelter.

It was, as Bruce was wont to say, due to a perfect combination of ill wind and good fortune that had provided so many of them with shelter.

Apart from painting, writing and editing a monthly news magazine containing photographs, gossip, and items of interest to Monterey Bay’s fast-growing community of artists, Bruce had developed a zeal for sawing wood and pounding nails. And as the size of his family increased, one new room after another was added to his house. It had become the passion of his lifetime, friend and neighbor John Steinbeck was to say.

It had become the passion of his lifetime, friend and neighbor John Steinbeck was to say.

When Jean went into the hospital to have their fifth child, so many unwashed dishes had accumulated in the kitchen sink that Bruce, who didn’t like wasting time washing them, built a second kitchen next to the first one. And in it he added a second sink. The dishes in both were waiting for Jean when she returned home with Baby Holly. By then, Bruce had moved to the top of the house and was hammering together a box-like observation room from which he could look out over the whole of Monterey and Monterey Bay. When its construction was done, he installed a large round window and attached a salvaged ship’s wheel to the exterior. On a foggy day the house appeared to be a three-story ship negotiating its way through the towering pines.

On a foggy day Bruce and Jean’s house appeared to be a three-story ship negotiating its way through the towering pines.

From time to time John Steinbeck was there to lend a hand with a hammer, and later in the day with a jug of red wine nearby he would sit at the kitchen table to read aloud the pages he’d written that day or the day before. The house that Carol and John Steinbeck lived in was an older and much more conventional one down the hill in Pacific Grove, and it was there every morning that John, clutching a ledger book and a handful of sharpened pencils, would be led to a shed in the back garden and locked in. It had a window so he could make good an escape if necessary but, feeling that he lacked the discipline required to write, he’d made an arrangement with Carol to lock him up in the morning and let him out in the middle of the afternoon. Under those conditions he wrote The Red Pony, Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, and began Of Mice and Men.

The house that Carol and John Steinbeck lived in was an older and much more conventional one down the hill in Pacific Grove, and it was there every morning that John, clutching a ledger book and a handful of sharpened pencils, would be led to a shed in the back garden and locked in.

One day soon after Bruce’s cabin on the roof was finished, John and Bruce stood in the yard looking up at Bruce’s creation.

“It looks impressive to me, what do you think?” Bruce asked.

John’s eyes traveled from side to side and then up to the roof where a colorful flag of some sort flapped on a pole in a breeze coming off the bay.

“I can tell you this much,” he finally answered. “This house is an achievement over modern architecture.”

“Then maybe it’s done,” Bruce said thoughtfully.

“So, I guess it’s ‘home is the sailor, home from the sea,’” he chuckled, lifting his cup of wine in a salute, not just to his house but to Robert Louis Stevenson, who had at one time spent several months living just down the hill in Monterey working on the first draft of Treasure Island.

“No, it’s the other way around,” John said, turning to look at the sea over the rooftops. “Considering the source of your materials, in your case you should be saying, ‘Home is the sailor, his home is from the sea.’”

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Meditating on Miracles and Death While Waiting at a Car Wash in Dubuque, Iowa: Poem by Roy Bentley

October 20, 2015 by 2 Comments

Image of Joan of Arc hearing the voice of God

Miracles

There are the extraordinary few we hear of
like Joan of Arc, who, by some fluke of grace,
deciphered the message; had a constituency,
and gave back what they heard, regardless.
By the Men’s Room in Miracle Car Wash
in Dubuque, Iowa, I recall my cousin Bob
telling me he heard the audible voice of God.
By a turnstile in the Customer Waiting Area,
thinking of Bob and believers who overstate
in service to the cause of faith, I feel indebted,
recalling he risked censure to say there is more.
Still, I’m hoping they can get the dead bugs off,
wishing away a deep-buried scratch in the paint
where a bystander dreaming of earned heaven
or hell brushed against a passenger-side door.
I’ve been to Ohio to bury Bob who has died,
a last pronouncement that he needed to sleep
for a while. Maybe the best reason to believe
is vacuuming the interior floor of my Toyota:
the owner hires parolees and convicted felons
in service to minimum-wage second chances.
I’m thinking you have to hand it to Iowans:
with or without miracles, they get it done.
A warm, sudsy water gushes over my car
identifiable by Obama-Biden messaging
against the sea of McCain-Palin decals.
It’s as if I’m in attendance at a funeral,
Bob’s, though I recall grief is like that
and reshapes the interior self for years.
I sentinel the forced-air dryer beading
a runoff from the rinse-dry cycle, hear
Bob reminding me he sold everything
and relocated to Springfield, Missouri
on orders of vocal sounds answering,
through machine hum and grim gray,
a need to be bright silver for a while.

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In Memoriam, Martha Heasley Martha Cox: Lyric Poem by Peter Nathaniel Malae

October 14, 2015 by 2 Comments

Image of lyric poem manuscript by Peter Nathaniel Malae

Mallards

The end arrives again, as the mallards honk their way across the graying Yamhill Valley sky.

Their form is nearly flawless, lined into their “V” of avian assemblage, ingenuity of flight that every pilot worth the weight must learn at an academy.

It’s rare to witness grace, it’s rarer still to have some inner bearings where the grace is processed right, it’s rarest to look inward.

We were told to do the thing that doesn’t hurt another human being, just before the storm broke through our tortured little home, and there was nowhere you could fly.

The sky was daunting then, is daunting now, even though the light, above the birds, has cracked the clouds so truly that there’s nothing left for me to see.

What guides their southbound journey save each other?

What drives them onward but the cold?

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When Word Meanings Mattered: A Lesson in English in John Steinbeck’s Monterey, California

September 22, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Image of word meanings on a napkin

I got the call at an ungodly hour of the morning. I don’t remember the exact time, but it was after 2:00. I know that for sure because 2:00 a.m. is when the bars in Monterey closed, and Sergio worked at a bar. He’d been in the country about a year, having arrived from a small town in the heel of Italy. He did other odd-man jobs: repairing things here and there, dishwashing, gardening, plumbing when called upon, but because of his size he was considered handy as a bouncer.

When Sergio was behind the bar, a person with fighting on his mind was certain to think twice before rolling up his sleeves. Seeing Sergio standing there with his enormous forearms and bulging biceps was usually enough. I’m sure that’s why Lester’s Bar rarely experienced trouble. No slugfests, everything peaceful; in my book it had to be because of Sergio.

When he wasn’t at the door looking threatening, he was cleaning tables and picking up empties. He did this six nights a week, with Sundays off; during the day he often took gardening jobs, working with Willy Hinze installing sprinkler systems in lawns around town. Willy was a dropout from the University of California at Santa Cruz, an ex-double major in psychology and philosophy. One day I saw Willy and Sergio hard at it after the municipal golf course changed hands and the new owner had them tearing out the iron pipes to put in new plastic tubing. The ground was soft from rain and Sergio was wallowing around in the mud while Willy sat in the bow of a cypress tree near the ninth green reading a book of philosophy: Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea.

“I didn’t have time to read this when I was at school,” Willy explained when I stopped my car to say hello. “Listen to this: ‘Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.’ Wow, pretty powerful stuff!”

“Does Schopenhauer say anything about getting muddy? Like Sergio over there, for instance?”

“Oh yeah, as a matter of fact he does,” Willy replied, turning the pages to find the quotation. “Here ’tis: ‘A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.'”

Maybe Arthur Schopenhauer was right, but I don’t think Willy ever asked Sergio about it. Yet in the end Sergio probably couldn’t have cared less one way or another. He loved work, and that was enough for him. Hard work explained his physical strength and powerful build.

“How’s Sergio doing with his English?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, I’m on it. Every day’s a new lesson. He’s getting there in leaps and bounds.”

Willy returned to his book and I to my car. I waved to Sergio as I drove away.

“Ciao, Sergio, come va?”

“Bene, sto bene, John. I see you a presto, Lester’s Bar?”

“Not tonight,” I answered. “I need to sleep tonight.”

That was the plan, anyway—until my telephone rang sometime after 2:00 a.m. It was Sergio.

“I am with the policia, John. In carcere. You come to get me, per favore?”

The drive to the Monterey police station from my house in Pacific Grove usually took 25 minutes, but that morning I made it in 15. I was in a hurry, dressed quickly in a track suit and flip-flops, and didn’t bother brushing my hair.

“He’s ready to go if you’ll sign for his bail,” the desk sergeant said when I arrived. “It’s not serious, so the bail’s $200 dollars.”

“What did he do?” I asked. “Why is he here?”

“He finished work at Lester’s, went over to the Coffee Cup Café for breakfast, sat down at the counter, and proceeded to use foul language with the waitress. Somebody heard it and called the police. We got him for causing a disturbance, using vulgarity, and insulting a woman in public.”

The sergeant added, “I imagine he’ll tell you the rest.”

After I’d signed the bail papers, they walked Sergio to the front of the station. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so defeated. Naturally tall and strapping. he came out looking bent and beaten.

“Scusami, John. Mi scusi,” he pleaded as we walked to my car. “We talk tomorrow? I cannot talk tonight.”

“It’s already tomorrow, Sergio. I’m going to drive you home, then I’m going back to bed. When we talk, it’ll be in the afternoon, and you’d better have a good explanation. Capische?”

“Capisco.”

Sergio met me at the Coffee Cup, the scene of his unexplained crime the night before. I drank in silence and listened as Sergio poured out his grieving heart.

“Okay,” I finally said, catching the waitress’s eye and ordering refills. “Here’s the thing, Sergio. It’s obvious that Willy isn’t helping you.”

I picked up a napkin from the counter and drew a picture.

“You see this?”

I spelled it out in large print, slowly pronouncing each letter: F – O – R – K.

“This is what you wanted,” I explained. “This is what you should have said.”

Slowly, Sergio nodded.

“Now let’s hear you say it.”

He leaned forward. Looking at the letters, he pronounced the word carefully.

“Fork.”

“And what will you say to a waitress next time?”

“Waitress, I want a fork. Please give me a fork.”

“That’s right,” I answered as I pondered the world of will and idea that causes people, if not philosophers, undeserved pain.

“If you ever say that other word to a waitress, the police will put you back in jail.”

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A Dog Lover’s Life-and-Death State of Mind: Poem of the Day by Roy Bentley

September 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Image of dog lover's pet Jupiter sleeping

Another Effing Dead Dog

Checking a plastic syringe, she asks again
whether I’m ready then does what she does.
She says that she could perform surgery now
then administers a second injection. I want it,
his death, to say we speak loss and that loss

is the first language in which we are fluent.
Go ahead and say it: Another effing dead dog.
But my presence in the room meant everything.
And fast forward to ashes in a Sosa cigar box,
the box traveling to Ohio to sit on a dresser.

They travel well, ashes, though the contents
are not him. The stuffed bear next to the box
is his. And I recall an aura around his gold fur
after he stopped breathing and what had to be
done had been done and I left him on a table

to be handled with reverence, it being Iowa.

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