I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.
Even as I first read these lines from Charles Olsen’s Maximus Poems at the behest of Le Roi Jones, soon to become Amiri Baraka, my Modern American Poetry instructor at The New School more than 40 years ago, I sensed with foreboding that they would likely be the measure of my own life, especially when it came to writing. Which didn’t dissuade me from trying,
Two years later, after a pilgrimage to San Francisco, from a tiny Haight Ashbury apartment where Muni trolley buses rolled through fog beneath the bedroom window with a sparking crackle from their overhead power lines, I sent my poems out to the “little magazines” of the day, and was widely published.
Thanks to a modest financial boost from The National Endowment to The Arts, I edited and published my own journal, Meatball., whose first cover was– what else?– a giant meatball atop a pile of spaghetti, rendered by my friend and partner in at least one unforgettable psychopharmacological excursion, , cartoonist R. Crumb.
I finally crawled out of my long academic truancy and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State, With a modicum of distinction, yet.
and then I resumed shuffling through a series of jobs. Driving a cab. Drawing cappuccino from an eagle-topped coffeehouse Gaggia. Cranking out marketing tracts from the world headquarters of a major financial institution, herein to remain anonymous.
When inspiration beckoned too irresistibly, I wrote: The S.F. Chronically magazine profile of an Irish publican at work in his singles’ bar. A day in the scruffy life of a Sacramento railroad hobo negotiating city streets with his dog, dumpster diving and holding forth about hard traveling and the perils of child abuse (his) and crystal meth. And feature articles on the art and business of filmmaking for a prominent Hollywood guild magazine.
Once and awhile, the occasional poem would force its way out of me like a retire thoroughbred slipping through the unlocked gate of his corral for one last, nostalgic, riderless gallop around the old track in a drizzling rain.
And then too many of the photoreceptor cells in my genetically misprogrammed retinas finally died off for me not to notice. I knew I had to document the trip, if only in hopes of mastering the queasy panic I felt as things began to look as if someone had shoved my head inside a waxed paper bag stained with patches of bacon grease.
Thus began the series of personal essays about my adventures and misadventures with gradual sight loss, many of which have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and its magazine, as well as in the project that the Exploratorium’s Michael Pearce (full disclosure: old friends the best, etc.) created on the Web site of that innovative San Francisco science museum, named Not Fade Away after the Buddy Holly classic song title, repurposed as a plea for mercy to the disappearing world.
Now, in the one city I used to swear, from the safety of New York and San Francisco, that I’d never even visit, let alone live in, this sprawling, gridlocked mega urban belly of the mass culture beast that sometimes reminds me of my childhood Cleveland improbably tricked out with palm trees and attitude, I’ve made myself at home. Aquí me quedo, goes the Spanish language aphorism. Here I remain. accompanied almost always by a bemused expression and a fatalistic shrug.
Photos of Joel Deutsch by Micah Rivina.