I first started reading the ‘San Francisco Chronicle’ in the ‘70’s, picking up a copy in town with breakfast and my weekly cuppa coffee at The Woodrose Cafe. I remember the day in 1977 when marijuana growing and Garberville made the front page: I was driving to town, my neighbor Kathy stopped going the other way, waved the paper at me, and gave me her extra copy. (When a radical teenager in Indiana I had subscribed to “The Berkeley Tribe.”)
In the early 80’s my daily routine was hiking down the mountain to water my pot plants, driving into Whitethorn and buying that day’s Chron at the Whitethorn Store, then up the mountain to Shelter Cove to eat fish and chips with Hanson’s soda while reading the paper.
On the way home I stopped at the Wailaki campground to practice pitching my “sky-ball”: I set up two home plates (two pieces of cardboard cut to the official softball mat size) and practiced pitching for an hour. I threw three softballs, often thirty feet high, walked over and picked up the balls, and then threw them to the other cardboard plate, practicing for the next Sunday game. The Slow-pitch softball league was the largest weekly Southern Humboldt gathering in those days: a couple hundred players in the league and about as many friends, fans, and family. (I put on a lot of weight with all those fish and chips and sodas.)
In the mid-eighties I set up a Chronicle delivery service in Whale Gulch, 22 and a half miles from town the sign said, and my “subscribers” got the Chronicle same day, by 11 am! I set up a deal with Pee Wee, who distributed the Chronicle throughout the Garberville area, filling all those yellow boxes. He dropped our bundle of copies at the post office each day except Sunday, and the mailman brought them out to the sticks and put them in the big mailbox by the school.
I had talked it up, found about eleven Chronicle fans, and once or twice a year rode my four-wheeler up the dirt roads to their houses to collect the forty bucks for half a year, in advance, I’m no fool. (Okay, I was a fool, but that’s all the other stories.) Once I had all the money I met with Pee Wee and his wife in their kitchen in Garberville and paid him for the next six months. People came up throughout the day to pick up their paper, a daily ritual to took forward to out in the woods in the middle of somewhere.
I had my way of reading the paper, glancing at the sports pages first, then Charles McCabe, Stanton Delaplane, and later Jon Carroll, next over to check out this guy Herb Caen’s gossip column, and then over to the first page of the entertainment section. My perusal complete, I settled into the Sporting Green and read all of that, then all of Herb Caen, the entertainment section, and then tackled the front page and all the hard news.
{With The Anderson Valley Advertiser I first skim through it to see if I have a story in, then read the blurbs in “Here and There In Mendocino County,” glance at the front page, on to Valley People, the letters to the editor, and then start working through the paper. I seek the light and lively articles first, like Tommy Wayne Kramer, and finally read mostly everything by the end of the week. (I often skim through Yearsley, ignore most of the local stuff like the Teton Farm report, often skim through the Major’s county government reports, though by god, I actually do end up reading most of his assiduous observations, the Major-ity disapproving.)}
Whether he’s running out of material or just a big fan, the Editor has recently been running old Herb Caen columns regularly, just the Sunday ones I never read back in the day, as the daily gossip and dirt, the “three dot journalism,” was more to my liking. Now, after reading everything else, I’ll finally read those Sunday reprints, when Herb waxed more poetically and reflectively.
Over the years we were getting the Chronicle in the Gulch, I called in a couple “witty” items, which Caen put in his column the next day, and when I started my newsletter Gulch Mulch in ‘87, not realizing it was actually a ‘zine, I adopted (stole? borrowed?) Herb’s three dots and wrote a regular column of local gossip a la Herb. (The AVA’s “Off The Record” feature also seems to have its roots in Caen’s style: short, quick, and on to the next one. (Damn, sounds like my sex life.)
I had heard that Herb Caen was sick and one day on the beach, in Puerto Vallarta in 1997, I said to my girlfriend, “Damn, Herb Caen could’ve died.” I picked up the local English language paper for ex-pats and tourists, “The Mexico City News,” later that morning and found his obituary. Wow, almost thirty years now since Herb Caen’s last bon mots and liberal observations, the most powerful person in San Francisco for decades. (I put the Editor of the AVA, Bruce Anderson, in a class with Caen, wannabes like yours truly can dream of having that talent.)
Buzz and the Pelton Wheel
I was ailing, lame with a bad hip, so I got a friend to go down to Whale Creek to bring my pelton wheel 250 vertical feet up the steep mountainside. I gave him specific instructions: “Just cut the two electrical wires coming into the barrel, then cut or unscrew the water lines coming in.” Hydros are amazing the way they spin twenty-four hours a day sending power through 600 feet of wire up to charge the deep cycle batteries under the house. Voila!, off grid living.
When I got the pelton wheel to the shop for the repair and rebuild the engineer said, “Look! They cut all these wires on top. That will be another 20$ for this one, and another 20$ for that one. Those kids didn’t know what they were doing.”
“It wasn’t kids,” I said. “It was a grown man, seventy-one years old actually.”
“Well, he sure didn’t have to cut all those wires,” Derek said. “I’ll have this done in a few days.”
When I asked Buzz why he cut all those extra wires he first denied it, then he said BLM probably did it. Next he attacked the engineer. “How does Derek know? What does he know anyway?”
“Umm, he’s only the local go-to pelton wheel guy,” I said. Seriously I could tell he was about to blame aliens for his mistake next. Finally he said he probably did cut them and why did I care so much?
“Because this just doesn’t seem like you. You’re fucking replacing the engine on your thirty year old jeep and you just unnecessarily cut whatever wires you see on the pelton wheel? If you were replacing the distributor cap on your jeep would you clip the battery cables also? If it were your hydro wouldn’t you be more aware of what you cut?”
He kept defending himself and blaming imaginary forces that had come to that isolated spot just above the creek where he had had to let himself down the last thirty feet with a nylon rope tied to a tree.
“Hey man, you’re insane!” I said. “Just admit you made a mistake. I know it’s hard for you because you can fix about anything while I can’t fix shit but this time you fucked up. It’s not even that big a deal, just another 40 or 50 bucks on a six hundred dollar rebuild.”
“So why are you making it one?” he said.
“Because you’re fucking insane! My definition of insanity is trying to defend yourself against the indefensible. Blaming Derek, BLM, big growers and probably aliens when it was you, you who fucked up!
“I’m a seventy-one year old man!” he pleaded, the final excuse, age.
A week or so later I scraped the side of my truck on the gate at the Community Park and he came over and pieced the fender back together with a strand of baling wire. When he had finished the job I said, “Well, you want to hacksaw the rack in half too?”
“You had to say that,” he said.
The Sandbox
When a friend recently told me she was depressed again I offered some suggestions: Time to get distracted by something fun? Like a funny show or comedian on Youtube? Try to figure out how to be less self-obsessed? Then I apologized for giving advice without first asking, something she often did which I found annoying.
“I’d rather have sympathy,” she said.
I don’t like sympathy, it makes me feel uncomfortable, that I may have manipulated it. Praise and sympathy often don’t feel sincere, as if someone is just robotically saying what is expected, or maybe it’s feelings of unworthiness incubated long ago, a symptom of a dysfunctional family? It reminds me of when my therapist suggested I “go into the sand box,” which I presumed was a euphemism meaning delving very deep, and I was resistant to going so deep that I might never get back out?
Maybe I should have gone into the sandbox, maybe I should still go into the sandbox, the scary thing being she actually has a sandbox in the corner of her office, within which her presumably troubled toddler clients (or big sad confused adults?) get to play, or get therapy?
I haven’t seen Carmela in at least eight years (maybe I got tired of whining about loneliness), she’s in her seventies by now, and I recommend her to everyone. A girlfriend, to whom I referred her once, said she was kind of old- fashioned, though she does have a lot of common sense. It seemed like almost any issue, for any client, was resolved, or at least made clearer, by asking yourself one question: “Which decision should I make, what path should I take, to have the least amount of pain?”
I have learned that to handle anxiety (the word Carmela wrote on the bottom of every bill) you need to know yourself, accept yourself, and maybe even like yourself. (My emotionally disturbed friend, in her thirties, reminds me of me in my thirties: insecure, can’t handle criticism, a hopeless pothead, and often depressed.)
Crashing
I suppose I lead a pretty easy life if the most stressed out I get is when I’m lying in bed in the guest cabin in the backyard at my hosts’ house wondering about the bathroom situation.
Peeing is no problem, I can go behind the bushes in the backyard but what to do when things get more serious and there’s three people in the house? I have no backup plan, ie, no toilet paper or newspaper.
I wake up around six, listen to the radio for awhile, and go back to sleep knowing the house will clear out around eight for half an hour when they are taking one of them downtown to the bus station.
I wake up again just before eight, wait a few minutes, then make my move at 8:06. Just as I enter the main house through the back door the last household member is shutting the front door and going out to the parking lot with his backpack. (By afternoon he will be on a flight to Europe.)
I dash into the bathroom. The toilet reservoir is still filling up from the last user. Perfect timing. Everything goes well and I think shower? Really? I zoom back to the cabin, grab my towel and a change of clothes, and walk bare-footed back to the bathroom.
I start the water stream and soon it’s warm. I strip and jump in. I take my usual quick shower, soapless this time because I will not use my hosts’ soap—it just seems too personal and I don’t really need it. I did bring a bar along this trip, but it’s at the bottom of some box in my car.
I dry off, pull on my clean clothes, and race out the back door. I glance at my watch: it’s 8:16. The whole bathroom adventure has taken ten minutes. (And I don’t say “adventure” lightly. This will probably be the highlight of my whole three week trip. I hope I’m wrong but…)
I relax. Brushing my teeth in the backyard with a wine bottle full of drinking water is no stress.
I pack up to leave. I glance around the room but don’t look under the bed. That makes me think about a lover I once had who was a stewardess. She was trained to always look under the bed when leaving an hotel room. She was the best sex of my life. We almost always came together.
“You’re amazing,” I had said to her.
“It’s you,” she said.
Remembering Hugh Duggins
***Hugh was telling this story about when his brother, Buddy Brown, went down to the city and some friend of his completely dissed him. (He knew he was visiting but didn’t contact him.) A few months later the disser asked Hugh if he had a job for his nephew and Hugh said no.
“Did you have a job?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well why didn’t you just tell him the truth? That he dissed your brother and so, sorry dude, no favors for you?”
Hugh took a thoughtful pause and said, “Some people don’t deserve the truth.”
***Once a guy came by and paid Hugh and he put the money aside and didn’t count it. A few weeks later the same guy came back, gave Hugh the money, and Hugh started counting it.
“But you didn’t count it last time!” the middleman whined. (Yup, it was about a grand short.)
***When Mark was bartender at the Benbow Inn, Hugh would stop by often. One day a friend showed up and said, “You’re here a lot, Hugh.”
“That’s because he gives me free drinks!” Hugh said.
Mark came around the counter, grabbed Hugh by the scruff of his shirt, and said, “Shut the hell up!”
***One time Hugh was getting ready to climb down into my septic tank to try to fix it. He was going to try to push the bulge out with a piece of two by four and a hydraulic jack.
“Want some gloves Hugh?” Nah…
***Sometimes after a Scrabble game I’d say, “Lets go uptown for a coffee at Flavors and look at the weirdos.” He never said no, though he could get fixated on some cute girl, and once I said, “Glance Hugh, don’t stare.”
***One day my neighbor wanted to borrow my truck to haul a bunch of pot plants, and I broke the bro code and said no. Later I was talking with him up at the farmers market when Hugh walked up and said, “You can borrow my truck anytime!”
Hugh came by later that day and I said, “Why’d you have to say that Hugh? It had all blown over. You have no boundaries!”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said.
“You guess?” I said. “”Okay then let’s play a game of Scrabble.”
***Hugh was working on a project with his best friend Mark when he got a call from his girlfriend. She was breaking up with him. After work they went back to Mark’s place and found his girlfriend packing and moving out. That solidified their friendship, which lasted for decades, with just one falling-out.
***Once Hugh was working underneath his truck when a guy came by with a pound of weed to sell.
“Just put it on the front seat,” Hugh said.
Later the buyer came by and looked at the weed. “Just leave the money on the seat,” Hugh said.
Another friend came by later and said, “So how’d that weed look?”
“I don’t know,” Hugh said. “I never saw it!”
***Hugh was pretty cool. Once I was filling out an application for a show on KMUD and said, “Look, they want me to say what I can do for the station: carpentry, electrical, plumbing, and I can’t do that!”
“Just put ’em all down,” Hugh said. “I’ll do it. I like KMUD.”
***Hugh thought people he knew spent too much time making money and not enough spending it. “If I had as much money as you all do I’d be having way more fun,” he said.
“What would you do Hugh, if you had a lot of money again?” I said
Hugh thought about it, then said, “Get an old convertible and drive down Main Street with the top down.” (Hugh Duggins: 9/6/44 to 1/20/16)