This is all from memory, and includes only one stage of my career as an appreciator of science fiction. (The other stage was much later, and by then I’d learned to call it speculative fiction.) In the town where I grew up, the local library held, for some reason, a very generous selection of s.f. anthologies, and I must have checked out every one of them at least three times. This was when I was around 8-12 years old. Anyway, the stories are burned into my memory, whether accurately or not.

>>> Modern scientists visit a monastery in the Himalayas. The monks are reciting the nine billion names of God. They’ve been working their way through the list for millennia, and when they get done, the world is scheduled to end. The scientists scoff. I think the last line is, “One by one, the stars began to blink out.” Just calling it to mind still sends a shiver up and down my spine.

>>> A spaceman is marooned alone, and immobilized by a broken leg, on a strange planet where he may or may not be rescued by his compatriots. He plays a musical instrument (probably a flute or harmonica, it would have to be something pretty small.) To his amazement, another instrument joins him. The alien musician turns out to be incredibly hideous, but they play music together until the search party finds them and kills the ugly alien. The spaceship’s crewmen are astonished when the musician/spaceman does not thank them for saving his life. That was a heavy, heavy story, but the only way you’d ever know it is, if it happened to stick in your mind for, like, fifty years.

>>> I think this one’s called “By the Waters of Babylon,” and there’s a little girl named Sophie with six toes, which is bad news for her because of the pogram against mutants.

>>> The parents are both magicians, and they want their boy to grow up and take his place in the family business, but he’s a math geek, and of course he rebels against them. They summon up a terrible demon to scare their son into obedience, but an even more powerful supernatural entity appears, the Accountant, and he defeats the demon, and protects the boy’s autonomy.

>>> On this planet the sun shines only one day a year, and everybody looks forward to it. A mean boy locks up a girl in the school closet and she misses the brief appearance of the sun. I’m betting that it’s called “All Summer in a Day.”

>>> The kid is having a Halloween party. They play the game where everybody sits in a circle in the dark, passing around various raw fruits and vegetables, and other substances, while a story is narrated. For instance, peeled grapes – “These are his eyes…” and all the little girls go “eeewwwww.” Well, it turns out that one of the parents is a psychopath. I’m pretty sure the last line is, “Then some fool turned on the light.”

>>> A little boy named Anthony had the power to make anything happen, anything at all, just by wishing it. All the adults were his terrorized slaves, who had to always agree with him and pretend that everything was just fine. It was a reversal of usual power dynamic between parents and children in real life. But, viewed from another angle, it was an all too realistic picture of what some otherwise perfectly sane parents will do in order to keep the peace. A kid can just wear you down so much, you’ll do anything to placate him and stop the whining, or whatever kind of meltdown they threaten to subject you to. Also, it was an allegory on the relationship of people to God, who was, after all, the omnipotent Being that people were most concerned with, before Anthony came along. What a great story.

>>> A Canticle for Liebowitz is a novel, not a story, and I’m pretty sure I read it early on. I don’t even remember exactly why any more, only that I trust my earlier judgment enough that if I had to pick ten desert island s.f. books today, it would be on the list.

As a teenager I read several books by Alexander King, and they were a huge influence on my tender psyche. His memoirs formed my concept of what an artist is, and made me decide to grow up to be one. Sure, he was a heroin addict. But he was also the first one to confirm every one of the sneaking suspicions about the world which had been developing in my subconscious. And I wanted to make for myself a life that I could look back on with as much pleasure as King looked back on his.

It’s possible that Acid Heroes could have pretty much the same effect, and ruin a whole new generation of kids. Ruin them, that is, for the purposes of the military-industrial-religious-educational complex.

It’s okay to laugh ruefully at your old hippie self from the pinnacle of middle age, but to totally renounce that earlier, crazier self, as so many have done, is despicable. Ace Backwords has neatly avoided this possibility by remaining crazy, and also by pouring out for our delectation the results of years of psychedelically abetted thought processes.

Ace has been a fixture of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue scene for yonks. He used to publish Twisted Image, one of the zine era’s most widely-circulated publications. Cartoonist, musician, and writer, his mission has been to collect and present the art and music of street people. He’s published two other books, Twisted Image and Surviving on the Streets, both from the late lamented Loompanics Unlimited.

Acid Heroes is a druggy book with an anti-drug message; a detailed analysis of the downside of the counterculture which went on to become, in many negative ways, the culture. More than a memoir, it’s almost like being there – too much for comfort, maybe.

Geniuses, who often violate the rules of established society, certainly come to suffer for these deviations in various cruel ways but they are, at least, sustained in their travails by the glory of their brilliant accomplishments.
Alexander King

The Acid Heroes Buy It Page

Acid Heroes on YouTube

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Dry Hustle was published in 1977, and over the following 30 years, while Sarah Kernochan made a name for herself as a screenwriter, director, producer, singer, pianist, songwriter, and journalist, her book was on my want list. It turns out to be worth the wait.

Hippie girl Randy comes to NY with her boyfriend, and with, at his request half a pound of cocaine concealed on her person. He calls himself a neurophenomologist, but basically he’s a coke-head. Their plan falls apart, and Randy goes to work as a taxi-dancer. Kristal, a gypsy proficient in the art of getting money from men and giving nothing in return, takes young Randy under her wing.

“The first place you should never have to go is hungry,” Kristal says. Also she says, “I’m pleasingly plump. Anyone doesn’t like it can keep skinny eatin’ shit.”

“A good sadist is hard to find,” Kristal explains, after setting up a top-dollar gig with a man who wants to be abused by Kristal while Randy looks on and jeers. Kristal’s particular area of expertise is the story about why they need to be paid up front, a different story for each man. This poor sucker, like all the others before him, will arrive at the rendezvous to find no dominatrix and no apprentice.

Kristal teaches Randy all the ropes and then some. Money yes, sex no, is the operating principle. But then…. Randy meets a guy who seems to be a shining example of hippiedom, and falls for him like a ton of hashish. But when he and Kristal meet, they immediately recognize each other as master hustlers, and start talking shop. Cody is a motorcyclist in a gang of one, who says, “I don’t need any of the brother shit, just so I can ride a bike.”

Sarah Kernochan is a splendid writer. The Dry Hustle characters were based on a pair of real women she hung out with in the sleaze district of New York. Here is the beautiful description of Kristal eating:

Her eyes were narrowed to slivers, as if she were on top of a mountain facing into a steady powerful wind and she were eating to gain the extra weight needed to stand fast, immutable, immune, impenetrable, against the power.

A long, long time ago, I read that Karen Black would be playing Kristal in the movie. In fact, that’s probably how the book got on my want list in the first place, because Black is a favorite actor. She would have been great, but it never happened. Then Bette Midler was going to play Kristal, and I would have hated that. Kernochan and Glenn Close were school friends – why on earth didn’t Close get this movie made, and play Kristal herself?

Kristal sums up her worldview:

You can fool alla the people alla the time. One at a time. You got to do them one at a time, that’s why it’s a life’s work.

Related:

In A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922), Ben Hecht describes a representative member of an earlier generation of taxi-dancers:

The wise, brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler. She’s it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette.

Dance Hall Racket with Honey Harlow

This is probably the first grownup book I ever read, not too long after finishing The Little Engine That Could. In fact, I’m sure it’s the main reason I learned to read. Although the stories were in tiny print, I wanted to know what that tiny print said, because of the pictures.

After a long hiatus, I found the book again, and traced back some of the ways in which I was influenced, as an artist and as a writer, by A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, this collection of newspaper columns written by Ben Hecht, with art by Herman Rosse. To call that influence profound wouldn’t be an exaggeration.

These vignettes transcend the topical: Hecht wrote for the ages. The preface, by his editor, describes the extraordinary pieces as the fruits of Hecht’s Big Idea -

…the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life….

It goes on to say that his daily columns “invaded the realm of literature, where in large part, journalism really dwells.” And he produced one of them every day.

Ben Hecht is one of the masters before whom I bow. He proved over and over that you can find a story anywhere, more stories than you’ll ever live long enough to write. He asks a policeman to recall interesting cases, and the policeman modestly demurs, saying he doesn’t really have any. Unless maybe Hecht means something like the man who had a tobacco jar made from a human skull, “and that’s how they found out he killed his wife.”

Hecht could get the essential story out of a person, and divine the defining events of the life. “Life stories are sometimes no longer than a single line–a sentence, even a phrase,” he said. That sounds condescending, doesn’t it? But Werner Erhard said pretty much the same thing. Everyone’s bio can be distilled into one line. “Your life is about……” That’s why geniuses like Hecht write cautionary tales, of people with these cramped, constricted mini-lives–as a way of warning us not to follow their example, if we can possibly help it.

He wrote of the obscure nobodies, trying to fight their way into the light. He saw the atavistic, archaic, and mythic elements beneath the surface of everyday life. He could lay down an atmosphere, like Ridley Scott did for another city in the Bladerunner movie. The urban variety, and the characters Hecht introduced, helped me know how banal my existence was. His reportage set up a template in my head, from which I learned what to look for in a city. It bent me toward wanting to live someplace full of weirdness, which I later did, in Venice, CA. When I went to Chicago, I found it there too. I found it in so many places along the way, because of being taught how to seek it, by this book, at a very young age.

Here’s one way 1001 Afternoons directly affected my life: its writer and illustrator modeled for me a way of assimilating the city that made it bearable. At 20, I spent a lot of time in downtown Buffalo, and thanks to all that Hecht/Chicago imagery that had been planted in my childish head many years before, the metropolis was not as ugly or alienating as it otherwise would have been.

I worked in a 26-story building–just four stories shorter than Rosse’s picture At the end of a wretched day, when everyone else rushed for street level, I’d take the elevator to the top floor and gaze for a while upon the darkening city. I don’t think I’d have had it in me to do this, if not for Hecht and Rosse.

I like the way Hecht would put things in context. For instance, when interviewing a renowned tattoo artist, he learned from the man’s press clippings that–surprise!–this was not a new phenomenon. Back in the late 1890s, skin art had been a wildfire fad among Chicago’s elite. The Americans were “following the lead of New York’s Four Hundred, who followed the lead of London’s most aristocratic circles…” In the early 1920s, when Hecht got around to writing about the tattoo, it was no longer a status symbol, but had become a lower-class kind of thing.

He wasn’t afraid to write experimentally. Except it’s not really an experiment when such a master does it. I wouldn’t hesitate to call this the first gonzo journalism. Although Hecht speaks of himself in the third person, as “the newspaper man,” the approach is unashamedly subjective. His tone could be acerbic, what we might call snarky. His writing has attitude. He certainly combines elements of fact and fiction, with a good deal of embroidery. What he could make, for instance, of a glimpse of a young woman buying a newspaper….

Thoughts from Ben Hecht, while wandering in the rain one night, which is different from daytime rain:

Ideas do not come so easily or so clearly. The ennobling angers which are the emotion of superiority in the iconoclast do not rise so spontaneously. And one does not say “People are this and people are that…”

Hecht listened to and recounted stories from a taxicab driver, an old watchmaker, a manicurist, a Chinese laundry man, a charwoman, a night conductor on the El. He listened to a man who’d traveled all over the world and had nothing to say about it, and a prison guard who says, “They pick me out for the death watch on account I have a way with doomed men.” A death-obsessed young woman. A vendor of roasted chestnuts. A sailor with a wooden leg.

Hecht would hang out with the day laborers waiting to be hired, or check out talent contests in bottom-feeder bars. Sometimes he went to dangerous places and mixed with desperate people. Or he would report on a formal concert in a glittering hall, and note that the admission price was “33 cents, including war tax.” Wonder why he threw that in?

He tells poignant tales from the sales clerk at the 10-cent wedding ring counter, and from the man who won a pig and brought it home to live in a dirt-filled bathtub. He explores the reasons why another man devotes his life to being a juror, and relates the strange and funny saga of the auctioneer’s wife. He conveys the air of bacchanalia in the nightclub that played the blues and catered to race-mixing (remember, this was 1922). He interviews black entertainer Bert Williams about the time Williams found in his dressing room a huge bouquet of flowers from Sarah Bernhardt, and about how Eleanora Duse called him the best artist on the American stage.

In the midst of the city, Hecht managed to meet up with some nomadic Americans or rubber tramps similar to the ones I composed a MySpace page for decades later. All these encounters became part of the furniture of my immature, impressionable brain. There was the snake charmer, the Japanese female impersonator… This was heavy stuff for a little kid who didn’t even have TV. I was warped into a bohemian – by a book.

So, starting young, as a direct result of 1001 Afternoons, I was attracted to mavericks and outcasts. Decades later, this explained why I was fascinated by Alky Bob (who is briefly shown in this movie , occupying a bench on the Venice boardwalk, with the used magazines he sold spread out around him.)

Doll Lady Susan Moscowitz was one whose story I inquired about, following the example of my mentor. She was a boardwalk regular, making her dolls from found scraps, sometimes selling a doll to a tourist. After being widowed once, Susan chose for her second husband a big, strong man who looked like he wouldn’t die any time soon. He became ill with multiple disease processes. He drove his rickety old car around and habitually crashed into things. Living with him became a terrible burden, and then he died, that big, strong man. Susan shook her head over the irony of it, and I knew Ben Hecht was watching and listening from somewhere.

One effect of the book was almost immediate, taking place when I was a kid. I didn’t really hear any cuss words until I was about 14, but had caught on early that there were such words. I remember, as a kid, using “blankety blank” as a substitute for the cuss words of which I was still innocent. That’s a nerd story if I ever heard one.

I see that familiarity with Hecht’s perception filters contributed to my cynicism. He writes of a woman who

…belongs to the type that becomes charitable around Christmas time. She makes a glowing pretense of aiding the poor…she regards the poor as a sort of social and spiritual asset . They afford her the double opportunity of appearing in the eyes of her neighbors as a magnanimous soul and of doing something which reflects great credit upon her character.

In the piece titled “Nirvana,” he writes of one of the

wise, brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler. She’s it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette.

He reproduces quite a lot of dialogue from a flapper, and now I realize, all over again, why Inserts is a great movie. Because this piece of writing by Ben Hecht was lodged somewhere in my subconscious, I recognized the character Harlene as authentic.

In one piece, a mother is in a courtroom, trying to keep her baby quiet, waiting to know if her older daughter will be charged with prostitution. In another, a woman’s children are taken away by the juvenile authorities, because when her husband died she spent the insurance money on a big funeral for him. Thanks to Hecht, I was sensitized to stuff like this early on, and I can see the results in the things I wrote in college. I’m sure it wasn’t conscious at the time, but looking back, the influence is plain as day.

About an event that happened at lunch with author Sherwood Anderson, Hecht tells a story so strange, you wonder if they clashed over who got the material to use. Hecht must have been tempted to make it into a screenplay. He writes about the magic of a used book shop on a rainy day. He talks about a book scout finding a 30 cent book that turns out to be worth $150, a 75 cent book that fetches $200. Fifty years later I became a book scout and racked up some amazing finds, but nothing that impressive.

“Ill-Humoresque” contains his reflections on a beggar, the same kind of mental exercise I went through so often when I lived in a community full of mendicants. There’s a great exegesis of the psychology of panhandlers and the citizens who donate dimes to them. This is what is meant by the examined life

RELATED:

A Great Mystery: the Tattoo
Ben Hecht and Bill Haywood

If you think a dreamboat ex-actor from a mediocre TV series can’t write a good book, this one will make you think again. Toyer starts with a portrait of LA as evocative, in its own way, as Ridley Scott’s vision of the city in Bladerunner.

Toyer is the name given by the press to a felonious psychopath who has mutilated a dozen women. He doesn’t kill them, he just de-activates them. An impressive scene is the verbal sparring between Toyer and one of his proposed victims. There’s a moment when he says, “Your roommate’s not coming home,” and everything changes.

Toyer’s bizarre mission is complicated by the fact that the at-large killer offers to write his memoirs and let his share of the profits go to his victims. His avenging archenemy is a doctor with a psyche as convoluted and off-kilter as his own. Finally, when he agrees to meet her for a therapeutic talk, she takes along a scalpel, planning to kill rather than counsel him. On a dark night she parks at Venice beach and walks out into the sand to confront Toyer…

Gardner McKay has more than the ability to simply write a story. Lovely lines keep coming up – “It rains so rarely, that it rains without knowing how.” There’s great, almost throwaway, stuff about things like the advantages of Catholicism to the bereaved. And we have here the best ever use of a cat in a suspense story, proving that even the most mawkish, overdone cliché can still be redeemed and made art.

The details of haunting loss in a life, he’s good on that. And he reveals perhaps a bit too much about how men think, and more than a man ought to know about how women think. It’s not only that a man gets so into the mind of a woman, but that anybody gets so into the mind of anybody. With all this intelligence, perception and wicked black humor, McKay must have been a scary man to know.

One of the characters is up for a part in an 8-hour cable TV version of Justine – from the Lawrence Durrell book – for that I love the author. Another character reflects that by his age, Rupert Brooke had already died. I love him for that, for even knowing who Rupert Brook was.

The author is as interesting as the novel he wrote: the impossibly handsome actor who starred as Captain Adam Troy in the TV series Adventures in Paradise. Amidst a very strenuous life filled with physically demanding pursuits carried out all over the world, he studied journalism, won awards for writing plays, and gained some fame as a photographer and sculptor. Aside from Toyer, McKay wrote other novels and a biography. And he sure knew Hollywood.

The best way to experience this book, and I wouldn’t lie to you about a thing like this, is to listen to the Brilliance Corp. audiotape, because the novel is read by its author. He has a quirk of pausing between words you wouldn’t expect. He doesn’t try to read the female characters’ lines in a femmy way, and it works just fine. Damn, he’s good. If you possibly can manage it, do yourself a favor and listen to the story. Not while driving, or in the midst of other distractions. Just settle down in a comfortable place, slip on the headphones, and listen.

Wallace Smith illustration

This weird book was suppressed for many years, not without reason. Plenty of explicit sex, it goes without saying. But the really disturbing part is the beginning, perhaps the most venomous, hate-filled, manic-depressive, pathological piece of literature in circulation. It’s a book that can actually make you want to commit suicide.

Oddly, author Ben Hecht is famous for writing, among other things, screwball comedies such as His Girl Friday and Some Like it Hot. In fact, he received screen credit in 70 movies. Director John Huston admired his work ethic, saying,

Ben Hecht wrote pictures for a flat fee, with incredible speed, sometimes completing an entire script in three or four days. When he started to work, he didn’t stop, other than to eat and sleep sparingly, until it was finished.

Hecht wrote some film scripts under other names because of a spot of political trouble he got into in the late Forties, early Fifties. J Edgar Hoover called him a “fellow traveler,” in other words, a Communist sympathizer. He was boycotted by the Brits for being a right-wing Zionist.

Good grief, Hecht wrote 35 books including The Sensualists and A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (a collection of his newspaper columns.) Fantazius Mallare came out in 1922, apparently in a limited edition destined for a small circle of friends. Legend says, and I see no reason to doubt it, that most of the copies were destroyed by the authorities.

Before ever hearing of Fantazius Mallare, I’d stayed with a friend whose wall held a poster depicting a man who appears to be in sexual congress with a tree. Yes, it was the Sixties. But see, that’s the thing. This artwork from back in the Twenties made a resurgence. Illustrator Wallace Smith, who like Hecht was also a newspaperman and a screenwriter, was recognized and remembered. That’s a beautiful thing. Because when alive, he did jail time for this drawing.

I’m all in favor of people telling what books influenced them the most, especially if they are specific about why and how. In my case, one Ur-book towers above all the rest.

My grandmother’s books were kept in low, open shelves, within the reach of a crawling or toddling kid. I was allowed to take the books out and look at them. Most had no pictures, although the paper coverings were interesting. But this one was my favorite. So unlike the pastel or primary hues of kiddie picture books, its pages held the first real art in my life.

It was the early 1950s, and we didn’t have television. Visually speaking, the world was pretty dull. A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago had been published in 1922, and I was ready to discover it.

I absorbed Herman Rosse’s stylized, realistic, stark, beautiful, bizarre pen and ink drawings, and wondered what these pictures were about. In order to find out, I had equip myself to read the words of Ben Hecht that told the stories. Along with learning to read, there were many delayed-reaction side effects in my psyche and behavior on account of this book.

Over the turbulent years, when I thought about it at all, the memory was an intense one. I looked it up once, but it was way beyond my starving artist budget. I thought about it again when I saw 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, the collaborative marvel by Linda and Todd Shimoda. I was like, “Where have I seen it before, this literary/pictorial synergy, this perfect fusion of art with text?” Of course. The Ben Hecht book with the black and white pictures.

I told the Shimodas about this insight, and they bought a copy, and saw what I meant. A few more years went by. Online, I found a cheap battered copy of the 5th printing (1927) and finally acquired my own 1001 Afternoons (without a dust jacket, sad to say). But who cares about that? My interest was, to put it bluntly – did the book still hold up? OMG yes.

Rosse was head of the School of Design at the Chicago Art Institute, and an art director in Hollywood, where he designed the sets for Dracula, Frankenstein and Murders in the Rue Morgue in the early Thirties.

Revisiting Rosse’s illustrations, after 50 years, I realized many things. It was because of this influence that I recognized the quality of a friend’s work when we were in junior high school. And indeed today that precocious student is an esteemed artist back East, with one of his works hanging in Buffalo’s Albright-Knox gallery. In the Sixties, I vibed to Aubrey Beardsley because of Herman Rosse. His work in
A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago so informed my taste that I was always looking for its equivalent, for Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics. I sprang at the opportunity to publish work by such artists as Musicmaster, and Billy Mavreas, and a whole bunch of other really great ones.

One thing I realized as an adult is, how clever Rosse was in meeting the challenge of illustrating stories when mostly constrained to vertical strips. Working with these uncommon dimensions, the height so much greater than the width, the artist is both stretched and confined.

When I was a kid we lived in Niagara Falls, NY, and my dad worked in a factory. Sometimes we went to pick him up, out on that long, long road lined with factories and the occasional ancient, desolate, falling-down house that wasn’t in their way yet. The factories were enormous, dirty and stinking industrial plants that produced chemicals as both product and by-product.

Thanks to Herman Rosse’s artwork, I saw them differently. At night they were fairy palaces dotted with lights and jets of flame. When I was older and taking the bus to Buffalo, twenty miles away, the incredible evening beauty of some industrial areas made indelible mental snapshots I can still call to mind. The ability to see things in certain ways, I trace directly back to this piece of art, right here.

Today, a 1922 first edition of A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago goes for a $1000 or so, but I’m pretty sure what my Grandma had was the book club edition. (Pause for research.) Uh-oh, it seems there was no book club edition. Wonder what ever happened to Grandma’s books?
Related:
The Sensualists
Fantazius Mallare

I’m a one-person cult of Michael Ventura. One of the reasons I dig him is because of the people he digs, for example Robbie Robertson and Leonard Cohen and Eve Babitz. (Who is Eve Babitz, you may ask? See, that’s just it. Ventura knows.) And conversely, he is also dug by people I dig. For instance, Letters at 3 AM wears a cover blurb by Andrei Codrescu, who just happens to be one of my culture heroes.

Ventura is always quoting somebody interesting, like Thoreau who said, “You may do as you like, so long as it does not injure someone else.” (It’s hard to imagine two people with more different images than Thoreau and Aleister Crowley, but Crowley said, “An it harm no one, do what thou wilt.”) “The Witness Tree” is a powerful essay named after the Robertson song it discusses, which happens to also be one of my personal all-time top ten favorite songs in the entire world. I like Ventura because he talks about things that remind me of other books I’ve loved. His discussion of gambling recapitulates how it began as a shamanistic ritual that later became debased and corrupted, finishes up with unconventional conclusions, and calls to mind Bone Games, a very memorable book by Rob Schultheis.

Once in a while I have to disagree with Ventura. For instance, when considering the increased possibilities offered by the modern world for a relentlessly mobile lifestyle, I think he goes too far in saying the ability to move around is “a fact unique to contemporary life, and alien to every previous society.” There have always been nomads, troubadours, samurai, gypsies, cowboys, actors, and many other subcultures of people who refused to settle.

There is a lovely memoir of Stevie Ray Vaughn in here, and some quite important thoughts on topics familiar to such writers as Robert Bly and James Hillman, having to do with the true meaning of adolescence and the initiatory moment and what it takes to be a male in America these days. There is autobiographical material where we meet various disturbed members of the author’s family, and learn about their breakdowns and his own. We share his experiences and meet his friends on a cross-country road trip, and find out all about the real significance of oil.

Especially recommended are his reflections on the Vietnam memorial in Washington, titled “Standing at the Wall.” Not only is it a great piece of writing, but again I take it personally because the name of my first lover is on that wall. There’s so much in Ventura’s stuff to take personally, always. He comments on the wide open spaces and the relative importance of things in the West, “with its endless, beckoning vistas,” where he has driven “70 miles for a pizza, 500 for a party, 1,000 for a girl.” This got to me, since when I lived in Texas there was a fellow who more than once made the trip between Amarillo and San Antonio for a weekend with me. About something said by a concerned citizen on a radio call-in show Ventura remarks, “If I had the time or mental energy I’d try to differentiate between all the different kinds of ignorance needed to make that statement.” I sure know the feeling.

A major piece in this book is about one of America’s endless wars, and it explains how being against a war “doesn’t insulate you from its demonic properties.” We see how other dichotomies work hand-in-hand in an inexorable yin and yang configuration : police need criminals, social workers need dysfunctional families. Ventura points out the same diabolical symbiosis between peace activists and war. “As a protester you, like the soldier, are not quite yourself. You are yourself plus the war. If you lean too heavily on that role of protestor, when your movement has no more war to protest, you too will feel diminished, lost, less.”

Ventura observes that most Americans could not care less whether the Gulf War was right or wrong, worthy or ignominious After all, our own wonderful country was created with “tactics identical to Saddam’s lies, broken treaties, surprise attacks, atrocities, and the mass dislocation of former residents.” No, the morality of this particular war was not a concern of most Americans – the only issue was whether we pursued it successfully. “If we can’t be happy or good, perhaps we can be, in the street sense, ‘bad.’ This is not a feeling to be underestimated in a people hooked on violent entertainment, arrogant music, and the conflict of sports.”

Ventura quotes Kierkegaard and agrees with the idea that thought without paradox is as foolish as love without passion. Paradox is meat and drink to Ventura, and I greatly admire his ability to let his own ambivalence show. Writing about strip clubs, he gets down to the nitty gritty: “Are you going to go home and think of that naked dancer while you hold the woman you live with? Don’t imagine for a minute that your lover doesn’t know. Not in her mind, where she doesn’t want to know, but in her flesh, where she can’t help but know.” Yet this kind of ethereal emotional damage is, as he admits, a kind of harm that is difficult to prove, and harm that certainly shouldn’t be actionable at law. Speaking of an activist anti-pornography housewife who appeared on TV he says, “She was talking about how bad it was for husbands to stop into places like the Kitty Kat on their way home from work. That was the ‘crime’ she felt so righteous about quelling.” At times like this I feel justified in claiming Ventura as a fellow ‘mystical libertarian’ – someone who doesn’t want to pass legislation to try and make people act differently, but who wishes and hopes they would be better.

Most of the time, however, he appears to be a liberal who sees things like socialized medicine as good solutions. Ventura is the only writer under whose influence I have trouble holding to my libertarian principles. For instance, as a libertarian I feel that people should be able to do what they want to with their own property, including their business if they own one. In the unlikely event that I were ever in a position to hire someone to sharpen my pencils, I’d want them to do it to my satisfaction or forget about being paid. According to strict libertarian interpretation, the owner of a business should able to run it as she sees fit. But Ventura reminds me that without workers, there’s nothing. “I’m willing to take my lumps in a world in which little is certain, but I deserve a say. Not just some cosmetic ‘input,’ but significant power in good times or bad. A place at the table where decisions are made.” It’s hard to find a decent argument against that.

In another place Ventura quotes Article IX of the Constitution and reminds us, “Just because a right isn’t stated in the Constitution doesn’t mean you don’t have it,” something any libertarian can definitely agree with. Then there’s his essay about Las Vegas, the most libertarian place on earth, and one which was destined to come into existence because the Spanish Conquistadors intuitively knew it four hundred years before, as they searched for El Dorado, the “city of gold and light, incredible riches, eternal youth, exquisite pleasures – an intoxicating city of riches and dreams.”

As Ventura sees it, “that’s the promise of Las Vegas : Anything.” (Once again, we’re back to “An it harm no one, do what thou wilt.”) “If, in Puritan America, you dedicate a city to the pursuit of Anything, and you put that city far enough away from everywhere – then Puritans will find a way across one of the most dangerous deserts in the world just to rub shoulders with Anything without ruining their safe lives.”

Ventura is against the concept of safe lives on principle. He is a devotee of wildness and chance, a unique brand of rowdy mysticism. “I have a passion for Anything and would love to write a piece saying the more Anything the better, because it’s what I feel in my bones. But the statistics on teen suicide say my bones may be bad wrong.” His ambivalence shows through again in another essay which approaches Anything from another angle, as a very large problem, in fact. He is forced to realize and to admit that Capital-A Anything is not only what keeps people sane but what drives people crazy. “Our everyday world is one of dreamlike instantaneous changes, unpredictable metamorphoses, random violence, archetypal sex and a threatening sense of multiple meaning.” We aren’t constructed to go that fast and handle that much contradictory input. “For a quarter of a million years we experienced this only in sleep, or in art, or in carefully structured religious rituals.”

Much of Letters at 3 AM is about our current Age of Endarkenment. “The world is aflood with dark psychic fluid.” Ventura maintains, and “everything’s stained with it.”

One piece is entitled “You, in Particular, Are Going to Die – No Matter What You Eat, How You Exercise, or How Much Money You Have.” It’s about the pervasive sickness of everybody in what ought to be the healthiest country in the world during this or any other era. He points out (in regard to Vietnam) “in ten years of a shooting war, fewer Americans got shot dead than during ten years of ‘peace’ in their own country.” He takes on the boogieman of the moment and wonders whether Illegal Drugs really are the awfulest threat there is. “Either one of these figures,(365,000 tobacco casualties, 125,000 prescription-drug mistakes), much less the two figures combined, describes many, many more than the total number of people killed by heroin, crack, coke, PCP, handguns and AIDS yearly.”

The crime inherent in illicit drug use is not, as the government claims, the health hazard, the fatalities, or the “cost to society” but the fact that people are altering their consciousness without asking permission and in ways that they themselves choose. That’s something our government is not willing to let us do. Alteration of the mind is criminal – unless, of course, it is done by the government.

A woman I know with a large house keeps little nests of supplies – tissues, pens, scissors, hand lotion, post-it notes – at every place in the house where she might want to sit. Practical and time-saving as the idea may be, it definitely makes a cluttered environment. Hey, a person can do whatever they want in their own home, ya know? But at least one visitor to that house always feels a vague unease, amidst all the caches of goods arranged for the convenience of someone with no compelling physical reason not to get up and go fetch something once in a while. I recalled that sense of psychic discomfort when reading Ventura’s essay “An Inventory of Timelessness”, in which he makes some very interesting points about the hidden damages we wreak upon ourselves by our insistence on the continuous availability of everything. We suffer from a rapidly decreasing tolerance for delayed gratification of even the most trivial sort, and it comes with a very high price tag. Ventura counts every penny of that price.

Nowadays we tend to see our jobs as the rat race, the stressful ordeal against which, in order to survive, we must arm ourselves with good nutrition, plenty of healthful exercise, and meditational tape cassettes. Home is where we go to chill out and somehow recover for the next day’s onslaught of trauma in the workplace. But in another time, during his childhood, Ventura points out that the roles of home and work were in an important sense reversed. Home was a seething cauldron of emotional turmoil and physical violence, while work was the place men escaped to, to reclaim some illusion of order and a feeling that things made sense.

In Los Angeles I knew a husband-and-wife screenwriting team, both of them smart and hip and several other qualities that I don’t usually associate with religious zealotry, but they just up and turned into Bible-thumpers practically overnight. It was quite a shock. It set me to thinking. The spectacle of someone you know being “born again” is difficult enough to assimilate, but the possibility that it might strike both partners simultaneously is mind-boggling. It just amazes me that two people could get that way at the same time, and it probably doesn’t happen too often.

What happens instead? A unilateral conversion experience puts quite a strain on a relationship, and although many couples must have confronted such a dilemma, we don’t seem to hear much about it. One of the frightening alternative scenarios is presented in Ventura’s novel Night Time Losing Time: the unfortunate protagonist is actually deprived of his woman by Jesus as if the Naz were a rival suitor, just another guy with a cooler car or a smoother line of jive. This amatory method of dealing with the deity is reminiscent of a Leonard Cohen song that I’m pretty sure is a love song but can never determine whether it’s addressed to another person or to God. Like Cohen, Ventura ponders spiritual matters at great length. If there is a connection between religion and life, they want to know about it.

It is always a good idea for anyone to devote some thought to the relation between one’s professed beliefs and one’s practices. Are they aligned in some way that approximates integrity? Or do they barely overlap? Individually there is a gap between belief and practice; societally there is a gap between real spirituality and such clanking empty constructs as “Christianism,” and Ventura explores that difference.

An issue of Meshuggah carried his very informative look at the historical Jesus, the alarming differences between the various gospels, and the way that the Christ figure affects us today. Among the people of traditionally Christian lands, even the most confirmed atheist knows that Jesus is out there, lurking, somewhat like the AIDS virus. For anyone who has heard of him at all, the possibility always exists, no matter how miniscule that possibility may be, that some day, somehow, Jesus will get us.

Even better than his theological musings is when Ventura speaks of authentic spirituality: the intimate rituals through which friends confirm their mutual value; the spontaneously created altar; the magic that is all around if only we know how to see it.

At the end of Letters at 3 AM, prompted by readers who say he has complaints about everything but no answers, he offers Solutions to Everything – 38 of them to be exact. For instance, “Don’t chicken out about sex. Given that you’re with a consenting adult, do whatever you fantasize. This is much more important than quitting smoking.” Or have a rhododendron for a house pet. “They give much, ask little, have marvelous names, and they don’t shit where I walk.” In one of the Solutions, he devotes a considerable amount of energy to exhorting people not to drive like assholes.

Ventura can turn your perceptions inside out and present you with a whole new way of looking at something that may not totally convert you, but will never allow you to crawl back into your old way of looking at it.

Related: Leonard Cohen at Red Rocks 2009

This is an unabashed paean to one of my major culture heroes, Ace Backwords. I’ve gone on record calling him a genius more than once, and when everybody else reaches the same conclusion I’ll be already there, reclining in a hammock, sipping lemonade and grinning “I told you so.”

If music were the only thing Backwords had going for him, he’d still rank as an artist. If cartooning were the only art he practiced, he’d still be from the very top shelf. If he never did anything but write prose, he’d still be great. And if community building were the only thing he’d ever undertaken, he’d still be a star. Put it all together, and what we have here is one brilliant sumbitch with a roster of accomplishments anyone could be proud of. Especially taking into account that the guy has been on the streets for pretty much all of his creative career.

Ace Backwords went from “soft li’l suburban pup” to bum (his word) so long ago that “homeless” wasn’t yet part of the consensus vocabulary. His book, Surviving on the Streets, describes the lifestyle of a displaced and disenfranchised soul who feels like “an actor in the wrong movie” when confronted by the exigencies of contemporary American life. His purpose is not to romanticize the street life, nor to minimize the hardships and horrors, but to testify that wealth and security are not the ultimate goods of life. It may not happen this year or this decade, but at some point in the future Surviving on the Streets will be recognized as a seminal work in the areas of sociology, philosophy, psychology, pop culture, urban studies, you name it.

That doesn’t sound so crazy when you consider prolific author Colin Wilson, whose breakthrough book, The Outsider, was written in the British Museum’s reading room by a man who slept in a park. It’s enough to make you wonder how many of the aging ragamuffins hanging around the public library are undiscovered philosophers. There are some remarkable people living in squats, in alleys and sheds, and under highways. Bringing their stories to light is one of the things Backwords does. For many years he’s been the guiding spirit behind the Telegraph Avenue calendar, and he oversaw the making of a CD of street musicians’ work. He’s written a number of profiles of individual homeless folk, and the cartoons have helped raise consciousness and awareness.

Loompanics, publisher of Surviving on the Streets, also brought out Twisted Image a few years back: a collection of Backwords comic strips, most of which first appeared in his own indie publication, also called Twisted Image. For years his comics ran in Maximum Rock’N'Roll and High Times as well as in countless zines, including mine. As an editor (Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics) my appetite for his stuff was insatiable. Whatever theme issue I dreamed up, he had material to fit, and I was honored to showcase it. Even better, Ace Backwords sometimes made it known that he liked something I wrote. It knocked me out! A good word from that direction meant more to me than selling a hundred copies. Not exactly the accepted recipe for success – but I’ve always been funny that way.

Being a humorist is no joke – especially for the few who do a really spectacular job of using comics as a medium for social commentary. Not only must you draw well enough so the targets of your satire can be recognized, you must also make a point and, of course, be funny. T. S. Eliot said that when one is forced to write within a certain framework, the imagination is stretches to its limits and produces its richest ideas. Nowhere is that more true than in the cartoonist’s art. It requires great ingenuity and mental agility to take the immense, intractable stupidity of humankind and break it down into four-panel increments.

The thing is, no matter how thickly he lays on the sarcasm and the cynicism, everything radiates from a center of deep primal innocence, a dyed-in-the-wool decency that’s impossible to disguise. There’s an extraordinary level of empathy, hypersensitivity to hypocrisy, and a finely-tuned bullshit detector. Ace Backwords is not only a maestro of irony but the king of cognitive dissonance. One of his favorite targets is the person capable of believing two mutually contradictory things at the same time. It’s a trait he never ceases to be amazed by – even in himself.

And then there’s the music: hundreds of songs. The ones I’m most familiar with are on a tape of nine songs, made last year, called Really Stoned: The Jann Wenner Experience. Made on a 4-track, the album has plenty of heart, plenty of attitude, painful honesty, and honest pain. Like Jerry Jeff Walker says, “A man can’t lie when he tries to sing, it betrays him every time.” In fact this material reminds be of some Jerry Jeff Walker tunes on Hill Country Rain, and of some Edgar Winter numbers on Not a Kid Anymore. I don’t want to use a corny word like “mature,” but there’s the same kind of vibe – the unpretentious voice of a former wild child who eventually got his shit together.

I’m a sucker for lovely, melodic songs – Billy Vera’s “At This Moment,” George Michael’s “One More Try,” Robbie Robertson’s “Broken Arrow.” In other words, I love a good ballad, and “Where Ya’ Going?” definitely is one. My musical vocabulary is inadequate but I find, for instance, the plangent one-note-at-a-time accompaniment strangely affecting. The song “You Know We Will Miss You When You’re Gone” makes me smile because a reference in the lyrics takes me back to what someone once said of me: “Your problem is, you’re always lookin’ for the fuckin’ Great Beyond.”

I read a memoir once by a Russian woman who happened to learn the prisoners’ tapping code, never dreaming that one day she would be in solitary confinement with the tapping code her only lifeline to sanity. This is why it’s good to have a book that aims to help you “prepare for a camping trip that could last for the rest of your life.” If I wind up homeless, I’ll be equipped with the insights and precepts of somebody with true street cred. Surviving on the Streets is packed with practical advice on self-defense; how to use time to your advantage; what you really need and what will only weigh you down; and the identity of your best ally. And how to feed yourself – that chapter is the biggest eye-opener in the whole book.

There’s no fat here. Each line is vital, and every now and then one comes along that shines with gemlike purity. “Your relationship with Nature is akin to a relationship with a demanding dominatrix; if you learn to please Her, she will reward you extravagantly.” Never pious or shrill, Backwords is both tough and fair, and he says the things that need to be said. It is his hope “that the homeless activists’ appeals for help on behalf of the homeless will be balanced with equal appeals for the homeless to get off their asses and start helping themselves.” And he’s the man to lead the way, showing how to not only survive but thrive – how to “skate through the urban landscape, basically doing whatever the fuck you please.”

One of the downsides is being unable to escape from people. When it comes to that impulse, I’m a sister under the skin. Merely to be left the hell alone is one of the hardest things for a person in any social class to accomplish. Backwords says he’s always been a private person “…but when you’re on the streets, you live in public, 24 hours a day…your true self comes tumbling out, in all its glory and hideousness, simply because it’s just too much effort to maintain the act all the time.”

If you lack a permanent address, you will frequently be in dialog with peace officers, who often seem to give more attention to the homeless than to higher-priority offenders. “It’s a running joke on the street scene that maybe we should start killing people so then the cops would leave us alone.” The best relationship to have with the authorities is none. But if you must encounter them, the book contains helpful hints that could save your life.

The best relationship to have with housed people is, don’t go out of your way to piss them off. And give yourself a pat on the back for your contributions to society. “The nocturnal life…can be seen as a public service that we perform to help alleviate the crowdedness of city life. We’ve volunteered to go on the night shift….” Another valuable service performed by street people is to utilize some of the amazing amount of stuff that gets thrown out by this wasteful society, thus reducing its collective guilt for squandering the earth’s resources.

Relating to other street people is what you’ll do most of, and a lot of that relating consists of hassles. In some ways the street tribe is like a big, dysfunctional family. Some are out there because they’re crazy, others because it’s the only way they know of staying sane. Many, says Backwords, “find a sense of community and belonging on the streets that they’ve found nowhere else,” which is a damn sad commentary on life in these United States. Among the homeless are vulnerable victims and violent predators, and a vast majority who just get along the best way they can. A friend who lived in Oakland once told me the public demeanor to strive for is one that subtly broadcasts the message “Don’t fuck with me – because I just might be crazier than you.” Backwords endorses this tactic of looking preventively formidable – up to a point. Look dangerous, okay. Actually be dangerous, no. He did, in his youth, experiment with carrying a very sharp knife, but when it ended up being used against him, he gave up on weapons.

As a homeless person, you want to watch out for con artists – but they’re easy to spot, because if they really possessed any expertise in their chosen field of hustling, “they’d be in the Senate attaching their parasitic tentacles to the public trough.” The analysis of the Asshole Syndrome alone is worth the price of the book. The upshot is, Plan A would always be to – walk away. “It’s a big world after all, and the whole point is to occupy a part of it that doesn’t include The Asshole.” But sometimes walking away doesn’t work. You’ve got to have a straight talk with yourself and mentally define where you want to draw the line. And be prepared to hold the line.

The same advice goes for love. As in every stratum of society, a romantic relationship can turn out to be far more trouble than it’s worth. “You very well may meet some beautiful, alluring siren and wonder to yourself what this beautiful person is doing on the streets. Sooner or later you will find out.”

Ace Backwords takes a jaundiced view of the Sixties era, all its various revolutions, and its legacy. “It cracks me up when I hear these so-called ’60s icons congratulating themselves for the greatness of the ’60s….Virtually every aspect of American life has gotten worse since the ’60s. Much worse.” He looks at the basic philosophy of every brand of counterculture from then until now, and finds them all inadequate, especially the concept that alienation from society is a badge of honor. “Can anyone explain the universal scorn I keep hearing being heaped on “yuppies” these days? It just means you’re young, you live in the city, and you’ve got a fucking job.”

Drugs? Don’t get him started. The Backwords Theory of Drug Rotation is classic. In fact there’s a lot of funny stuff in here, like the amusing riddle:
“What does the street person do when he gets sick?”
“He dies.”

Backwords reflects extensively on a subject that also occupies my thoughts: materialism. Having stuff, and the stuff you then need to store and maintain your stuff, and how many hours of precious life you want to give up to income-producing activity in order to continue storing and maintaining your stuff and getting more stuff. Backwords describes the process of paring down consumerism to the minimalist nub, where the only things purchased are socks and underwear.

I’ve been on both sides of the economic fence so many times – okay, never actually on the street. But when things get too comfortable I always find a way to cut my income. I’ve had long periods of voluntary poverty, and some spells of a bit more poverty than I had volunteered for. Interspersed with these have been more prosperous eras. (I define prosperous as being able to have a tooth fixed instead of pulled.) I’ve drawn some lines. This sounds like a ludicrous problem in our era of casual dress, but it used to be an issue: high heel shoes. There came a time when I decided to never again take a job where I had to wear high heel shoes. And I never did. And I grok the anecdote where Backwords passes a street crew and imagines a worker thinking “Man, this job might suck, but at least I’m not sleeping in the dirt like THAT poor slob!” And Backwords is thinking, “Man, sleeping in the dirt might suck, but at least I’m not standing in the middle of the street, holding up a stop sign, and listening to jack-hammers all day long like THAT poor slob!” Or wearing high heels.

I adulate Ace Backwords because he’ll say anything. I don’t mean, like, say “shit” in church, or some trivial jive like that. Here’s a writer who will reveal the bottommost layers of his psyche – like Yeats said, “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” And who will speak for viewpoints guaranteed to reduce a Berkeley liberal to tears of incoherent rage. Such as alleviating homelessness by reducing immigration. He also has plenty to say about the utter stupidity of clean needle programs.

Backwords quotes Dylan: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” He also quashes any myth about the supposed nobility of the non-materialistic lifestyle, “Fact is, most of us street people are just as greedy as your average Wall Street junk bond crook. We’re just not as good at it.”

On the street, I probably wouldn’t last a week. But in previous lives, who knows? I think there was a time when I spoke Rommany and never spent a night beneath a roof. I think in other existences I was a wandering mendicant monk in India; a naked aborigine in Australia’s outback. And life was good. Without sugarcoating the reality of homelessness, Backwords reminds us that, like any other condition of life, homelessness can have its spiritual aspects. But you have to work at it. “It is all too easy for your very soul to be twisted like a pretzel into a grotesque thing in this world of gargoyles.”

A truly remarkable thing is, all his wisdom for living on the streets also applies to those of us who are snugly housed. Here’s my favorite line: “You’ll know when you hit on The Truth, for it will soothe your soul, it will get you ALL THE WAY OFF, while Pollyanna wishful thinking will only cock-tease you to distraction. Let that be your guide.”

And in the writings of Ace Backwords, I feel that sensation again and again of having hit on The Truth. Here’s an example, from one his interviews. “I feel confident that the homeless and the ‘downtrodden’ don’t necessarily suffer one iota more than the rich and affluent. In fact, in many key aspects, the rich may suffer more.”

To me, hearing that is like a cool drink of water in the desert. I know it’s true. I’ve known some miserable rich people. And some beatific paupers. Which doesn’t mean I’m in favor of children starving or any nonsense like that. It’s just the way things are, here on planet Earth, notwithstanding any amount of PC nanny-state propaganda, and it’s a helpful precept to keep in mind. For anybody.

Call me a cultist, a fanatic, whatever: Ace Backwords is the best, and you heard it here first.

Newest book: Acid Heroes

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