I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.
Even as I read these lines from Charles Olsen’s Maximus Poems for the first time at the instigation of poet and playwright 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, regardless.
Two years later, from a tiny Haight Ashbury apartment beneath whose windows the hybrid rubber tired, electrically powered Muni trolley buses rolled by in the fog with a sparking crackle from where their trailing wands skittered along the overhead wires, I deluged the little magazines with my poems, edited and published, with a boost from the NEA, my own such journal (Meatball), returned to college at San Francisco State for a long-postponed Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, and then resumed shuffling through a series of day jobs as checkered as any writerly curriculum vitae I’d ever romanticized, including driving a cab, brewing espresso and cappuccino at an eagle-topped coffeehouse Gaggia, and cranking out marketing tracts from the high-rise world headquarters of a major financial institution, herein to remain anonymous.
When inspiration and opportunity beckoned too irresistibly for me to ignore, I wrote: A profile of an Irish publican at work in his singles’ bar, a day in the life of a homeless railroad hobo negotiating city streets with his dog, dumpster diving and holding forth about hard traveling and the perils of crystal meth, feature articles on the art and business of filmmaking for a prominent Hollywood guild magazine. Now and then, the occasional poem would force its way out of me like a retired, delusional thoroughbred slipping through the unlocked gate of his corral for one last, nostalgic, riderless gallop.
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 barely translucent patches of bacon grease.
Thus began the series of 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 inexorably 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 megaurban 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 Mexican saying, here I remain, never uttered without at least the hint of a bemused and fatalistic shrug. Go figure.
Photos of Joel Deutsch by Micah Rivina.