THE FOLLOWING appeared in my Facebook feed this morning:
“My name is Galina [Trefil]. “For so many years now, I have lived a double life; carried an impossible secret. This is not a joke. This is the cold reality, which has been strictly on a need-to-know basis. Now everyone needs to know. I am the daughter of a serial killer--a serial killer who knew the identities of two other uncaught serial sex killers, Michael Fries and Julia Strnad Houser. Dr. Jon Charles Trefil, my father, has admitted for almost a decade, giving a consistent story, to being a serial killer ON TAPE, graphically. FBPD, the Sheriff's Department, the Mendocino County DA's Office, they are all aware of his confessions. This is the secret that the authorities in Mendocino County are not sharing with the public.”
IF I WERE any more skeptical of Galina's claims I'd be cross-eyed and even more splavined than I am.
SHERIFF KENDALL told us today [Friday] that his department can't confirm any of it, but they're taking it seriously. No DNA hits on the alleged victims, some of the particulars don't add up, etc.
I believe Galina's father, Jon Trefil, functioned for years as a therapist working out of Fort Bragg. If he's a serial killer he's probably a retired serial killer at age 86, and as of Saturday morning, he is a patient at Sherwood Oaks. He has been married to Kande Trefil for many years.
I met the Trefils' daughter Galina when she was just out of high school. She was a plump, pretty girl dressed all in black, Goth, I believe the style is called, and madly in love, she said, with a young man from Fort Bragg named Aaron Channel, convicted of murder in 2001, whom she later married while he was in prison.
THE MURDER in 2001 involved Channel, August Stuckey, and Tai Abreu, none of the three old enough to legally buy beer when they murdered Donald Perez, 41. Although Perez's murder was a group project it is not known which of the three cut his throat, if that's how he died. His corpse was too deteriorated when it was found to know with any certainty how exactly he died, whether from exposure or a slashed throat.
CHANNEL has been out of prison for some time. He regularly posts accounts of prison life. Abreu, as of early this year, was still confined to High Desert Prison in Susanville. We understand that Stuckey has also been released from prison, where he underwent a sex change, and has returned to live on the Mendocino Coast.
THIS is the first part of a five-part story I wrote on the case:
Two days after the September 11th 2001 that everyone will always remember, a lithe 39-year-old ex-Marine named Donald Perez took $200 out of his savings and headed north for Mendocino County. Perez was on the road in anticipation of another sexual romp with an 18-year-old Fort Bragg man-child named August Stuckey.
By 10am Friday, September 14th, Perez was dead, his slumped remains sagging from an alder in a brushy margin separating the Noyo River from the A&W logging road less than two miles from central Fort Bragg and less than one mile from the Fort Bragg Police Department. What was left of Perez was below the first bridge over the Noyo before the road gradually climbs east into the forested hills separating the Mendocino Coast from Willits and Highway 101 some 30 miles distant.
The dead man was 525 miles from his rented room in Santa Ana, one mile from the Fort Bragg Police Department, and 19 feet from the rutted pavement of the heavily traveled recreation and logging road.
Donald Perez would be pinioned to his last tree between the road and river for more than three weeks, and he might still be there if August Stuckey hadn't talked about it in front of another young Fort Bragg man named Michael Johnson.
It was an implausibly beautiful place to die that perfect early fall morning, at a junction of river and forest on a day made for life, and it was also an implausible place for all that happened there because even in bad weather that section of the road and its old bridge is humming with traffic, much of it on foot or by bicycle with kayakers, a frequent sight on the adjacent Noyo. There's almost always someone around day and night, the area also being a convenient nocturnal party site. It's not a place that rational criminals would choose to do all they did to Donald Perez.
But somehow, in a prolonged series of murderous events mostly occurring on the bridge itself, Perez had been carjacked, robbed, hit over the head with a rock, dragged down off the bridge, forced into the riverside brush, duct-taped to a tree, and probably stabbed in the throat.
And not a soul saw or heard any part of this prolonged death dance.
The pathology report from UC Davis indicates that the “larval infestation” discovered in the area of Perez's throat was most likely attracted to the “purge of fluids” that drain from the nose upon death. But, the report cautions, “Trauma to the neck is not supported. Degree of decomposition in these areas does not confirm the presence of such trauma. Arms overhead and binding of wrists offers the possibility of asphyxiation through respiratory fatigue. Entirely conceivable that the death may not have involved any form of trauma whatsoever but was caused by abandonment. Conclusion, cause of death unknown.”
If Perez had simply been duct-taped to the tree, he was near enough to the road that his grunts and moans would soon have been heard by one of the innumerable persons who pass by at all hours. But, it seems likely, Perez didn't have time to either be discovered alive or suffocate because one of his three abductors likely drove a K-bar knife into his throat soon after he was taped to the tree.
Three young Fort Bragg men, August Stuckey, 18, Aaron Channel, 20, and Tai Abreu, 19, were arrested three weeks later when August Stuckey led police to Perez's remains after telling the police that he, Channel and Abreu caused Perez to be where he was — duct-taped to a river alder and dead.
None of the three alleged murderers had criminal records, none were known to be violent. The one common denominator they did have was their general estrangement from the society they'd inherited. Their school days had been difficult, and they were now adrift as young adults. All three had been bullied and harassed by schoolmates, all three did poorly in formal school settings, but all three tested at the gifted and talented level of natural intelligence. Stuckey had always been a special ed case, Tai Abreu, at the urging of Fort Bragg school officials, had been declared unmanageable by the schools and packed off to a children's institution by age 12, and Aaron Channel had dropped out on his own after bouncing from Fort Bragg's educational banquet to Mendocino's, at one point leaving school as a 16-year-old to make his way to Oklahoma to meet a girl he'd met on-line.
When the three young men were arrested, Stuckey told multiple stories about what had happened. Abreu told two versions of Perez's last hour. Channel said nothing at all. Both Stuckey's and Abreu's stories exempted themselves from the murder part of Perez's abduction and robbery.
Although only one of these improbable thugs cut Perez's throat, it is fair to say that none of the three were overly concerned with their victim's welfare before, during or after his death.
The murder began on August 28th of 2001 when August Stuckey, stranded in Sacramento, e-mailed Perez asking Perez for money to get back to Fort Bragg. Stuckey would later say he'd fled to Sacramento because another uneven young Fort Bragg man named Shane Merritt was threatening to kill him because Merritt believed Stuckey had stolen sound equipment from him.
It seems that Perez wired Stuckey the bus fare back to Fort Bragg because the next day Perez was in Fort Bragg where he and Stuckey spent a presumably priapic three days at the Seabird Motel. A few days before their Seabird interlude, Stuckey and Perez had exchanged steamy e-mails featuring photos of Perez with his penis at present arms. Stuckey e-mailed Perez his phone number and directions to Fort Bragg.
Stuckey would later claim that he and Perez had often met at the College of the Redwoods where Stuckey, a talented artist, drew chaste portraits of Perez for small amounts of money. However, the only renderings of Perez found among Stuckey's belongings were internet photos of Perez in the nude that Perez had taken of himself. Because Perez required directions to Fort Bragg to meet Stuckey means Perez was probably unfamiliar with the Mendocino Coast prior to the fateful August of 2001.
Perez was murdered because he made the fatal mistake of returning to Fort Bragg for what he anticipated as another round of sex with Stuckey, but Stuckey had already decided to rob Perez and then kill him. Abreu and Channel apparently became involved in Stuckey's insane scheme out of a wildly misplaced but affectionate loyalty to Stuckey. Abreu would tell investigators that Channel feared Stuckey would “fuck it up” on his own.
As it turned out, it took all three of them to “fuck it up.”
The three conspirators devised a hazy plan for Stuckey to persuade Perez to drive out the A&W road on the pretext that the A&W road was a shortcut from the coast to inland Willits and Highway 101. Once Perez was three or four miles out in the woods, Channel and Abreu would jump out of the bushes and help Stuckey rob Perez. Perez had told his roommate and his landlady back in Santa Ana that he was headed for Washington State, hence his desire to get back on 101 to proceed north. Always a secretive man, Perez didn't say why he was going to Washington, if indeed he was going there.
Once Perez and Stuckey were out in the woods east of town, the three amigos plotted, Stuckey would feign car sickness to get Perez to stop his truck, but Stuckey and Perez were late arriving, not getting to the A&W road until around 9am. Victim and escort had been expected earlier. Channel and Abreu had tired of waiting and were walking back towards Fort Bragg when Perez and Stuckey drove up.
Perez was dead twenty minutes later.
Abreu now says his modified story about what happened is untrue, but it does tend to corroborate Stuckey's fluid versions of Perez's death. It also buttresses the account of Michael Johnson, the Fort Bragg youth who eventually went to the police to say he'd heard his three friends talking about the murder while the four of them were smoking pot in Johnson's backyard.
Johnson told police that August Stuckey had told Johnson, “We killed a guy,” and that “the guy deserved to die.” Johnson said he asked Aaron Channel why he did it. Channel, Johnson said, replied that he was just helping a friend who was going to do it anyway and would probably mess it up. Johnson recalled that Channel thought murder had occurred “around September 18th.” He said his three friends told him that they poured alcohol on the floor of the truck to make the cops think Perez had gotten drunk and had wandered out in the woods and gotten lost.
Johnson claimed that August Stuckey had asked him about how he might cook up some homemade napalm and go back out to Perez's body to completely destroy it. Johnson told police he remembered Tai Abreu borrowing a shovel from Johnson's house on Livingston Street that Johnson shared with his mother, to “bury something,” speculating that the “something” was cameras stolen from Perez. And, Johnson told the police, when he asked his three pot pals how they knew “the guy” was dead, Channel reportedly said, “He gurgled, that's how we knew he was dead.”
The same day Johnson came to the police with the news that his three friends had murdered someone, Stuckey, before leading police to Perez's corpse, was telling investigators that Channel and Abreu had forced him into a scheme to rob Perez or they'd harm Stuckey's sister. Stuckey said he'd only been involved out of fear for his sister's welfare, and he certainly wasn't down in the bushes when Perez died.
Investigators immediately went to Stuckey's sister, Candace, then a student at Mendocino High School, to see if Candace might confirm the most important element of her brother's story — his involvement.
Candace said she'd “rather be taking her chemistry test,” but, yes, her brother August had told her how a couple of friends of his had taken a man out into the woods, robbed him and cut his throat. Candace tearfully said her brother often lied to her but she was sure he was telling the truth this time. Candace told the police that the two friends of her brother's who had done the killing were Tai Abreu and Aaron Channel. Candace said Abreu and Channel had threatened to rape and kill her if August didn't help them rob Perez. Candace said her brother had been tortured by Channel and Abreu into going along with the scheme.
Both Abreu's and Stuckey's accounts always exempted themselves from responsibility for the murder. They both said they were up on the road when Perez got it in the throat with the K-bar knife. They both admitted that they were part of the plan to rob Perez and that Aaron Channel was the third person involved.
Abreu would later claim that his confession to detective Kevin Bailey was not only untrue but falsely obtained because his request for an attorney had been ignored. Channel would subsequently admit that he was involved well after Perez was dead, and Stuckey would say he was involved but hadn't used the K-bar military knife he wore on his belt to stab anyone.
In the three weeks that Perez's corpse was wrapped to the tree by the Noyo, nobody saw his remains, nobody smelled his remains, no dog barked at his remains, when all anybody had to do was look off the side of the road and there he was, sagging to earth between the road and the river.
The police, finally directed to what was left of Perez by Stuckey, seemed as surprised at the body's proximity to the busy road as they were at the improbability of the site as a murder scene.
“We responded out the A&W Logging Road approximately one mile where we met deputies and search and rescue personnel. Lt. Miller directed us to a location just west of the first bridge on the logging road. We looked off the road and observed a male adult hanging by his hands, which were tied around a tree.”
Perez's wallet, containing his driver's license, his credit cards, and his ATM card, was found undisturbed in his trousers.
“Considering it happened during daylight hours,” detective Bailey would say, “to say that they were lucky to get away with all that right there is an understatement. Not only is it a pretty popular place — we have County employees who walk that road on a daily basis — for his remains to be maybe 20 feet off the roadway and not be discovered is amazing. There's nothing in the vehicle to indicate that he was killed in the vehicle. If they'd killed him some other place then transported him in the vehicle there would have been some trace evidence in the vehicle. They were very lucky.”
(Note: The day I visited the site, a man walking his dog paused to smoke a cigarette as he stared absently down at the murder tree.)
Although gay groups would immediately demand that the three be charged with a hate crime because Perez was gay, the sexual motive didn't seem to have been a strongly motivating factor; Stuckey was gay and Abreu claimed to be actively bi-sexual. Channel was heterosexual and not known to be intolerant of gays or anybody else. The sexually ecumenical hijackers, it seems, just wanted Perez's property, which consisted of two hundred dollars in cash, a hand held 8 millimeter camera, a 35 millimeter camcorder, camera lenses, four canisters of film, a battery charger for the camcorder, and music cd's including Nirvana and Suicidal Tendencies, all of it buried in Abreu's green duffel bag.
Stuckey's multiple accounts, scattered as they were, confirmed that the police had the three persons responsible for Perez's death. Abreu's and Stuckey's accounts confirmed the information brought to the police by Michael Johnson, a drug buddy of the three young hijackers and an occasional sex partner of Stuckey's. But it was Abreu's confession to detective Kevin Bailey of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department that would send all three to state prison, Abreu for life without the possibility of parole.
A wiry, restless young man who always seems in motion, Abreu sat in the stark interview room of the county jail complex in Ukiah the afternoon of October 9th waiting for detective Bailey. As he waited, the tightly wrapped young man sang fragments of a love song, rhythmically accompanying himself by slapping his hands on the interview desk. Abreu would always insist that he'd been up on the road as lookout man when Stuckey and Channel killed Perez down in the bushes. They did the murder part of the crime, not him.
If Tai Abreu had known he was about to put himself in prison for the rest of his life, if he'd known that the law says he was as guilty as whomever it was stabbed Perez in the throat, if he'd known that detective Bailey was not his friend, not some kind of surrogate daddy, but only a cop doing his job, if only he'd had the lawyer present he'd asked for, Tai might have saved himself. But he was young and dumb, and nobody was on his side, least of all the lawyer he finally got after it was too late.
It took Tai an hour to put himself in prison for the rest of his life.
(The full five part series is at: https://theava.com/archives/tag/abreu)
GALINA TREFIL COMFORTS HER FATHER, WHO SHE SAYS IS A SERIAL KILLER (from Galina Trefil’s faeebook post about her father)
NO EVIDENCE THAT DR. JON TREFIL WAS A SERIAL KILLER
On Friday, March 14, 2025, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office learned about social media posts where the subject alleged her father is a serial killer. The social media posts state the alleged serial killer is Jon Charles Trefil.
This situation was reported to the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office in January of 2023 after Trefil’s daughter reported to other local and regional law enforcement of her suspicions that her father is a serial killer.
Based on the referrals from other law enforcement agencies, Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Detectives spoke with an advocate of Trefil’s daughter, who also assisted in interviewing Jon Trefil about his alleged crimes. Recordings, scanned journals, and other investigative materials were shared with the Sheriff’s Office who conducted investigations into the claims. Investigators met with Trefil’s daughter in February of 2023, who said her father spoke about murdering several people from the 1970s trough the 1990s. Trefil’s daughter also provided a lengthy written statement to Detectives, which was retained as evidence.
As Trefil, his daughter, and the advocate spent time together, Trefil’s daughter said her father spoke about these killings and the daughter began researching unsolved murders in Mendocino County. Trefil’s daughter suspected her father was responsible for a murder in the 1970s in Mendocino County, which she specifically questioned her father about. Per Trefil’s daughter, Jon Trefil ultimately admitted to the unsolved murder in Mendocino County in the 1970s. Detectives also obtained pictures, copies of journal entries, and recordings from the meetings between Trefil, his daughter, and the advocate.
To further investigate the unsolved murder from the 1970s in Mendocino County, Detectives researched that case and compared the information provided by Trefil’s daughter to the facts of the case. Detectives learned there were numerous evidentiary items that were submitted for DNA analysis in 2006 to the Department of Justice, which resulted in an unknown male DNA source from the analyzed evidence. Detectives determined there were some consistencies in the information provided by Trefil’s daughter and the unsolved homicide case from the 1970s so they sought a warrant to obtain Trefil’s DNA for comparison to the evidentiary items sent for testing.
In May of 2023, the search warrant was authorized by a Judge in Mendocino County to obtain a DNA sample from Trefil for comparison to the DNA profile from the evidence items in the unsolved homicide from the 1970s. The DNA sample from Trefil was submitted to the California Department of Justice Bureau of Forensic Services and ultimately uploaded to the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).
In 2023, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office received reports from the California Department of Justice regarding the comparison of Trefil’s DNA profile to the evidence in the unsolved murder case from the 1970s. Trefil’s DNA did not match the unknown male contributor DNA profile from the unsolved 1970s murder investigation. The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office was also informed by DOJ that Trefil’s DNA profile was uploaded into CODIS for routine and regular comparisons to DNA profiles uploaded from unsolved cases. As of the publication of this press release, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office has never been informed of Trefil’s DNA profile being a match or potential match to any evidentiary items submitted to CODIS.
Information from Trefil’s daughter also alleged her father buried numerous people he murdered at a cabin in Comptche. The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office searched the property and cabin and were unable to locate any evidence to substantiate these claims or of possible human remains or burial sites on the property in Comptche.
The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office is aware that Trefil’s daughter referenced other serial killers identified by her father, but these inferences were not substantiated by Detectives. The Sheriff’s Office has been unable to substantiate the claims of the other individuals alleged to be serial killers or their involvement with homicides in Mendocino County.
The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office has examined the scanned copies of Trefil’s diaries and journals, but did not locate any expressed confessions to any murders.
Trefil’s daughter informed the Sheriff’s Office she submitted her DNA and Trefil’s DNA to genealogical/ancestry sites, but the Sheriff’s Office has never been informed of any investigative leads from these efforts or from other agencies investigating these claims.
The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office has and will continue to investigate crimes associated with Trefil or allegations that he was a serial killer in Mendocino County. The Sheriff’s Office has not interviewed Trefil directly regarding these allegations due to his fragile medical state and information provided by his family that he will not cooperate with law enforcement. When legally justified and supported by probable cause, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office will continue to investigate this matter.
Anyone with information regarding this investigation is requested to contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office at 707-463-4086 (option 1). Information can also be provided anonymously by calling the non-emergency tip line at 707-234-2100.
(Sheriff’s Office Press Release)
IN ENGLAND you can go to jail for wasting police time, and judging from the Sheriff's press release on the Trefil case, Dr. Trefil's malicious daughter, Galina Trefil, has wasted many hours of police time. It's all reminiscent of the Recovered Memory phenomenon when neurotic young women all over the country suddenly remembered that Dad was a major pervert. As in the present case, there were thousands of sympathetic women who said that even if their fathers weren't pedos they believed the patriarchy was capable of anything!
HUGO ROOT: Kandeda Trefil — Dr Trefil’s wife and Galina’s mother — turned me in to the FBI for being the Unbomber. The FBI visited and questioned me about 2 months before they caught Kaczynski. Needless to say, I dont go around blowing people up — or harming people at all (or animals). The FBI agents were very polite and professional. I told Sheriff Craver about this incident and he was horrified someone would think I was the Unabomber. It’s my opinion that the Trefil family has their own worldview and approach to reality. This may diverge greatly from that of others.
THE CUBBISON AFFAIR, besides providing lots of big pay days for lawyers, should teach the supervisors that it’s better to hire a CEO from outside the Mendo viper’s nest. The famously ill-tempered CEO Angelo is an ongoing disaster. She put all this turmoil in motion by going along with the Eyster scheme to combine the Auditor's and the Tax Collector's two separate functions and then being allowed to name her own CEO successor. Subpoena CEO Darcie Antle's phone records and I'll bet you'll find a regular hotline between Antle and Angelo’s lush retirement lair in San Diego. There are still endlessly-pending illegal firing cases launched by Angelo's arbitrary dismissals. All of this could have been avoided by a competent board of supervisors who, at a minimum, understood their responsibilities.
MARK SCARAMELLA ADDS:
Some background:
Carmel Angelo retired after about 15 years as Mendocino County CEO in March of 2022. (She was head of the mis-consolidated Health & Human Services department before that, since un-consolidated as unworkable.) She was promoted to CEO with the express task of major budget cuts across the board to balance the County’s tight budget in the wake of the Great Recession. Angelo even imposed significant cuts on the Sheriff’s office and got the Board to approve and pay $28k for an “efficiency audit” of the Sheriff’s office in 2011.) “The Efficiency Audit That Wasn’t.”
Eyster went public with his complaints about Cubbison’s appointment and her questioning of the Broiler reimbursement requests (et al) in August of 2021 — before Angelo retired. Eyster said at that time that the CEO had already approved of his spending. Eyster said he had a special “exemption” from CEO Angelo.
From Eyster's complaint about Cubbison to the Board in late August of 2021:
”The CEO's office, since 2008, has had an exemption on those because they understand the documentation we [the District Attorney] provide is always legitimate, good, and it covers the IRS responsibilities. …”
And here was Cubbison questioning his expenditures? The gall! After Angelo had given Eyster an “exemption”? How dare she?! If Cubbison had not been an independently elected official, Angelo would have fired her long ago.
I suspect that Eyster's plot to get the Supes to get rid of Cubbison, or anyone else who didn't abide by his “exemption,” by eliminating an independent office with an elected official began when Cubbison first started asking questions, asking for back-up, not rubber-stamping them as the CEO arrangement with Eyster had called for.
In addition, we were once informed that Eyster and Angelo used to enjoy after-hours wine drinking at Darcie Antle's wine bar “Enoteca,” in Ukiah before Angelo hired Antle as her “deputy CEO/budget officer.” (“Enoteca” — from the Greek for wine closet — closed last year. But for years it provided wine and food for downtown Ukiah and the courthouse, just over a block from the DA’s office). However, within days after we posted that report, DA Eyster immediately and emphatically denied it, saying “I have NEVER scheduled a meeting or had an adult beverage with Ms. Antle at the Church Street wine bar (or anywhere else for that matter). I think the last time I was at Enoteca was in 2012 or 2013 with former Assistant DA Paul Sequeira. Likewise, any meeting I have had with CEO Angelo has always been held either at her office at the County Admin Center or at my office in the courthouse sans adult beverages, the latter location being the same place where I have had meetings (again sans adult beverages) with the AVA Editor.”
STATEMENT of the obvious, but I truly don't get television ads that aren't funny the first time and painfully unfunny from then on. I'm sure they offend millions, so if you're using unamusing visuals to sell stuff, isn't it self-defeating to repeatedly annoy would-be customers? Or am I being naive, missing the point if the point is to imprint the product on one's mind?
THE CROOKEDEST TV ADS these days, predictably, are the work of lawyers, my fave being the one where a couple, presumably lawyers, introduce themselves by their first names — the woman adding that the male is “a television personality,” against a background shot of about fifty alleged attorneys busily answering telephones from a non-existent legion of wounded citizens phoning in to see what their beef might be worth.
TRUMP is forever claiming he's in mortal combat against “radical left lunatics.” He often amends the meaningless boogeyman term to “radical Marxist lunatics,” a redundant and self-canceling phrase but essential to the orange lunatic's campaign to conflate liberals and the non-existent American left. And at the mo, Trump has the lunatics pretty much confined to his side.
BUT TRUMP'S RAMPAGE may revive the left as an organized opposition, and he's already, in two short months, managed to alienate whole sectors of our previously slumbering population, now denouncing him, and massing for a Spring Offensive. How incompetent does an aspirational fascist like Trump have to be to estrange veterans? He's done it. (Schicklgruber, a veteran himself, depended on vets as his base supporters.)
THE MURDEROUS Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, has been taken into custody at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he will face charges of crimes against humanity for presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings during his rampaging war on drugs.
ANY CHANCE the ICC will snatch Netanyahu any time soon? The Israeli fascist has murdered a lot more people than Duterte. Where Duterte pretty much confined his killings to adult males, Netanyahu is murdering a whole nation of people with, of course, American-supplied bombs, weapons, money and the full-throated support of the non-combatant in the White House, the latter also busy with a crypto-fascist coup against US.
LATELY, I've been tuning in the CBS News at 4pm, anchored by an unintentionally hilarious salt and pepper news team, the white guy lunging at whomever he's interviewing, the black guy feigning interest when he isn't looking totally bored. I expected by now some CBS big shot would have restrained the white guy's crazy presentations, which I guess he thinks makes him look fascinated by the interviewee, but I keep watching in the hopes he'll do a full lunge some afternoon when, just before the screen goes dark, we get an almost subliminal glimpse of him with his hands around the throat of, say, Marco Rubio.
WAITING for the CBS News, I catch the final minutes of a much wackier show presided over by someone I'd never heard of before, Drew Barrymore, who, if she isn't on a little too much pharmaceutical speed, certainly does a good imitation of a female tweeker. Then, to my utter horror, I pick up the latest edition of the Geezer Gazette — AARP, the magazine — and who's on the cover, Drew Barrymore! “From ET to Talk Show Fame, the Actress Riffs on Her Five Decades in the Limelight.”
BOYOBOYO, am I glad I'm old. What I don't get about this lady is her frenetic pace before it shrieks to a close with a shot of the mostly female audience cheering and clapping, on cue obviously. Isn't it still possible to fake enthusiasm calmly? Truth to tell, I've never been able to bring myself to watch the thing prior to its final moments when the hyperactive hostess paces around mugging and screaming fake delight at her captive Moonies, so I repeat the Jesus Prayer a couple of times and wait for the next televised insanity.
BROCK PURDY, the 49er quarterback, is in the news every day because he's in “contract negotiations,” as two teams of sharks decide how many millions the kid will make this season. The bargaining is said to begin at $45 mil, in a market where a couple of quarterbacks are making two hundred mil.
THE LAD could strike a major blow for big time sports if he simply announced, “As a Christian, and in the spirit of Christ, the greatest quarterback of all time as he threw the big money boys out of their counting houses, I say this money is crazy. Therefore, in protest, I will accept no more than half a mil a season, in cash, less if I have a bad year, which is likely because management has traded many key players so they can pay me.”
BROCK will probably get at least a hundred mil and live ever after in thrall to lawyers and accountants. I bring it up because big money has ruined sports, for this fan anyway. Unsavory owners have ruined baseball as the bloated owners of sports franchises buy up the best players, making a mockery of uneven contests in, of all things, stadiums built for them by the taxpayers.
SADDER YET are the millions of proles cheering the owners on. There are a hundred facebook pages featuring Niner fans urging, “Pay Brock the money he deserves.” The funniest one I've seen is a guy at his backyard grill, togged out in the Niner gear he probably wears year round, when his wife appears to tell him the Niners have traded “Dre and Tufanga.” The guy is stunned before he says, “If they get rid of George [Kittle] I'm going down there with my gun!”
CITY NOTES from long ago. One warm Saturday in July I ran straight into then-Mayor GAVIN Newsom. He was greeting passersby in connection with a petition drive whose purpose I didn’t note. The Mayor looked me manfully in the eye and said, “Hello, nice to see you.” I said, “Hello, good to see you, too,” and walked on about my business — the purchase of a pork bun. I’d never seen The Mayor live. If I hadn’t known he was a famous (or infamous) professional officeholder I would have been surprised he pretended to know me, and he would have wondered why I pretended to know him, but I was just being polite, and who am I to break the great circle of pretense? He seemed unnaturally pale, with one of those unhealthy, dead man pallors you see on serious juicers. He didn’t look well, but then how could he given the givens of his career path? I beat back an impulse to urge him, “Flee, kid. Run. This is all very bad for you. You’ll get cancer walking around faking it all day. You’re young. Get out while you can.”
ON THE NEXT corner my then-supervisor, Jake McGoldrick, was standing with a couple of middle-aged men in short pants. In the San Francisco of my youth all grown men wore trousers, but youth has since become eternal in America, and youth older than ever. Anyway, McGoldrick, up close, also looked like a serious boozer. His face was turning purple and he had an emergency room gut. He also greeted me like he knew me. “Great to see you,” and I replied I was happy to see him, too, not that I was particularly, but he had greeted me first, and with a superlative yet! I’m old school when it comes to manners.
McGOLDRICK was fending off an attempt to recall him by people who couldn’t beat him in an election. I said I looked forward to voting for him against the recallers, adding that I hoped he’d consider closing Golden Gate Park to all motorized traffic forever, not just the Saturdays and Sundays the recallers were after him for doing. He laughed the laugh people laugh when it occurs to them they’re dealing with a nut of some kind, and I moved on. The recallers also wanted McGoldrick out of office because he was for a speedo bus lane the length of Geary. I didn’t see the need myself because the Geary buses run often and more or less on time. They, like all other vehicular traffic, bog down east of Van Ness because there are too many vehicles downtown for SF’s small-size. A rapid bus lane would make no difference in bus speed east of Van Ness where everything is slowed by congestion. Neither issue, of course, was grounds for a recall election, but Frisco, like Mendo, is teeming with contentious citizens certain they can do it better.
FARTHER down Clement towards 10th there was a Mexican guy working a fruit and vegetable stand who speaks fluent Chinese, or a dialect thereof. A Chinese guy said to him in English, “You speak Chinese better than I do.” The Mexican guy replied, “I speak better English than you do, too.” They both laughed.
LIVING in the city, as I did for many years going all the way back to infancy in 1941, you do a lot of scuttling. You walk sideways with your garbage cans through narrow passage ways, ducking beneath overhead plumbing, locking the sidewalk door coming and going. “Ten years ago a burglar got into the building.” That’s the lock box rationale I’m constantly given because the lock box people know I secretly hope someone will break in simply to confirm a decade’s worth of pre-emptive suspicion. So, we all scuttle in and out of our expensive spaces, hyper-aware of all movement at all times, assuming menace everywhere.
I KNEW the people in my building, half of whom were related to me, and the Korean family across the street, and a young couple who lived next door, and a Chinese woman in her middle sixties who also lived next door. This woman watched the street all day from her upstairs window. She introduced herself to me only, I suspect, to scope me out for my criminal potential, although that potential is about in the middle of the pack, but undoubtedly much greater than hers. I must have passed muster because she was very friendly ever since. But I never saw a single person on our block who even looked like he or she might be malevolently disposed, but everyone on the block was perpetually on high alert.
ON GARBAGE DAYS, before dawn, an ancient Chinese couple systematically rooted through the trash containers for items of cash value. 150,000 San Franciscans depend on various kinds of “food assistance.” Lots of old people who’ve had hard lives scrap right to the end no matter how prosperous they become. The Depression scared hell out of my parent’s generation. Few of them threw their money around even after they had some. I knew Arkies in Boonville who kept all their cash hidden in their homes, and they had the best vegetable gardens I’ve ever seen, large enough to live off of, long before the small farm movement got rolling.
RUMMAGING through the Friends of the San Francisco Library, always fascinating book store at Fort Mason, I found a monograph called, “The Actor from Point Arena,” excerpts taken from the ‘Memories of an Old Theatrical Man,” by Frederick G. Ross.
ROSS'S family moved from San Francisco to Point Arena when the actor to be was still a child. The year of the Ross family’s move from the city to the untamed Mendocino coast was 1868.
YOUNG FRED, as a city kid, had already been bitten by the theater bug. He’d spent his formative years hanging around the numerous show biz venues then-clustered around Portsmouth Square, dreaming of one day becoming a performer himself. The lad was not eager to leave the excitements of San Francisco for frontier Point Arena where, still not quite into his teens, the boy became a ranch hand. “My father was a believer in hard work; he worked hard himself. So, from the age of twelve or thirteen, my time at first was spent with the roughest woodsmen. I soon learned to swear as well as the best of them. Let me say right here that with the men it was but a habit, for they were real men.
“LATER, it was my lot, after my father closed the years of his mill career, to do about everything on the ranch a young fellow was able to do. And let me say right here that ranch and farm life is real hard work. But how to attain my ambition to act was the question. I mustered courage to ask my father for permission to leave home and go to work in San Francisco. He was a just man, and finally, after a long talk, he agreed, with the proviso that I learn a trade, and preferably his own trade, that of carpenter. This was agreed upon.”
BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO, Ross became an apprentice carpenter at fifty cents a day. He soon parlayed his newly acquired skills into work as a stagehand then, when various performances required emergency replacements, Ross got his first roles, all of them temporary. But he had talent, and before long Ross was earning a handsome living as a full-time thespian, going on to become nationally famous with long runs in character roles on Broadway, some of them in plays starring the Booth brothers, one of them John Wilkes, Lincoln’s assassin.
I’VE NEVER SEEN so much as a reference to Frederick Ross, Mendocino County’s most famous actor, in any of the local histories, but then Frederick was still Little Freddy when he labored like a man in Point Arena, a town then not much older than he was.
A NICE LADY, who turned out to be just as nice in person, called Boonville from the county's tax office to tell me that as a veteran I didn't have to pay the business license fee. (Yes, the Boonville newspaper was a business. Why do you ask?) I was anxious to get the license because without it I am unable to open a bank account for the many thousands of dollars in new subscriptions arriving in Boonville at the rate of six mail bags a day.
BUT to get the exemption a veteran must produce what’s called a DD-214, a form proving he or she served and was discharged unblemished. I haven't had to produce the crucial document in years. The hippies, led by my little sister, stole all my military stuff years ago, including my DD-214. I had no idea where the thing was, so to avoid a lengthy search for the doc I simply paid the extra $42 non-vets pay for a biz license.
BUT DARNED if the grand County of Mendocino didn't have my old form on file! And double darned if the nice county lady didn't call me to tell me the good news, and triple darned if she didn't hand me my cash refund the very next day when I stopped in at her county office!
I TAKE IT ALL BACK, government, the years of abuse I've heaped… well, one positive interface in 60 years shouldn't carry me away off to Superlative Land, but the County's Treasurer/Tax Collector Office has always been A-OK with me.
SO, BACK IN FRISCO with a fistful of checks, I jogged a block to my all-Chinese neighborhood branch of the Bank of America to open my AVA account. There were some communication problems. “What kind biznest is this?” the manager asked, enunciating it, “What kine biznest is dis?” I explained the biznest was a weekly newspaper based in Mendocino County. “You live here, not there?,” he asked, puzzled. “You want an ATM card?”
I LIVE THERE much more than here, I explained and, no, I don't want an ATM card. Behind the manager was a huge print of Maplethorpe's pornographic Calla Lily. “You don't want an ATM card?” the manager asked. And asked five more times over the length of the transaction during which he also muttered skeptically several times to himself, “Biznest there, you here. Newspaper. Huh!” Then he’d say, “Meno what cowny? You want ATM card? Where is Meno Cowny? How far?”
TWO HOURS NORTH, I said. It’s very beautiful, beautiful like your Calla Lily, I said, pointing at the Maplethorpe behind him. The banker turned to look at the picture, its straining pestil leaping out at his forehead. The manager seemed to be seeing the painting for the first time. “San Francisco better,” he said. “You sure you don’ wan’ ATM card?”
A COYOTE is alleged to have attacked a 100-pound Rhodesian Ridgeback dog in Golden Gate Park. Signs warning passersby of the coyote menace were immediately posted. The owner of the two assailed dogs said the coyote bit one Ridgeback and “lunged” at the other one. Both dogs were leashed. The attack occurred, if it occurred, near Speedway Meadow. I say “if” because coyotes seldom attack things bigger than themselves and Ridgebacks, bred to fight lions on the African veldt, are very big dogs. I also say “if” because I've seen dogs in the park that I've had to look twice at because at first glance I thought they were either coyotes or wolves. I also say “if” because there's plenty of likelier coyote prey in the park — rabbits, squirrels, tiny winos, tame ducks. We need photo ID if we're going to blame this one on a coyote. And it's a pretty wimpy Ridgeback owner who won't off-leash his beasts to see what those big babies can do when confronted by urban wildlife in the form of a coyote.
WHEN THE SUPES MEETING WAS ENTERTAINING
(November 1, 2011) — Allysum Weir, Executive Director of the Arts Council of Mendocino County, introduced a harpist at the Board of Supervisors meeting in Ukiah: “Today, we are bringing live music to the County Administration Center to celebrate Arts and Humanities month and to honor the art champions we are recognizing today. Allow me to introduce musician, Arts Council member, and Good Arts In The Schools Program grant recipient Jessica Schaefer to play a short piece for us.”
Ms. Schaeffer, fetchingly clad in the consistent red dress, told the Board that she would be playing one of her favorite tunes, “Merengue Rojo” (Red Merengue). Positioning her harp directly in front of the Supervisors' dais, she proceeded to pluck out a listenable version of the Paraguayan standard. After the performance, Supervisor John Pinches remarked, “You are a lot more entertaining than we are.”
(Mark Scaramella)
REMEMBERING Occupy Wall Street, Frisco branch. The idea, and its ensuing slogan, anticipated Trumpian events, but were aimed at making it even clearer that roughly One Percent of Americans own… a lot, and that right now that One Percent, which is more like 20 percent, is aiming to own a lot more, mopping up you might say.
IT WAS A FALL AFTERNOON at Justin Herman Plaza at the foot of Market Street where a colorful array of tents and variously clad enemies of Wall Street had established themselves. They were barely distinguishable from the nearby open air stalls hawking tourist stuff, which has camped for years at the foot of Market Street.
THE WALL STREET OCCUPIERS at Justin Herman enhanced the usually vacant and always unadorned concrete of the plaza. But then all of Market Street at its east end is an uninviting dankness of sun-blocking skyscrapers and unwelcoming concrete. For a long stretch of Market you don’t get back into the sun until you get to the Ferry Building or, in the opposite direction, the Castro Safeway three miles to the west.
JUSTIN HERMAN’S plaza implies sunshine and public merriment but, like the man it commemorates, its shadowed expanse perfectly matches Mammon’s skyscraper forest that surrounds it.
THE GRIM concrete plaza is aptly named after Herman, one of the most destructive persons in city history, although there’s plenty of competition for that honor.
THE monkeybiz mayor that brought us Candlestick Park, George Christopher, working all the angles in 1959, the year Willie Mays could not buy a house on the foggy side of Twin Peaks because of real estate covenants forbidding black ownership, appointed Herman to head up the Redevelopment Commission, dubbed at the time by the black residents who lived in the area to be redeveloped, as the “Negro Removal Commission.”
THOUSANDS of black residents were soon redeveloped out of the Fillmore homes they’d occupied since the homes of their Japanese predecessors were impounded and packed off to their very own World War Two low-intensity concentration camps, one besieged minority succeeding the other.
WITH HERMAN leading the bulldozers, hundreds of black-occupied Victorians were destroyed, and in their place San Francisco got a tactical freeway — Geary Boulevard — and four blocks of concrete bunkers called the Japanese Culture and Trade Center where, once a year some young people who are probably Chinese, beat on big drums and dance around a struggling cherry tree, and that’s Japanese culture for another year. The rest of the alleged culture center consists of vaguely Asian-themed gewgaw shops and restaurants.
THANKS TO HERMAN, and perhaps by design, the disruptive four lanes of Geary Boulevard serves as a strategic barrier between the potential marauders the rich have always suspected of lurking along lower Fillmore and the mega-marauders of Pacific Heights, the target of Occupy. The Fillmore, only now, is just beginning to come back to life nearly 70 years after Herman destroyed it. In a way, then, to name an expanse of concrete at the dreary foot of dreary Market Street after Justin Herman and call it a plaza is just about perfect irony.
SEPARATING HERM’S PLAZA from the abomination of the Caltrans-like rubble of the Vaillancourt Fountains, an alleged sculpture — for all its self-certified sophistication, Frisco is pretty much run by rubes — is a motley collection of transient stalls selling stuff like flattened plastic beer cans and peace sign belt buckles. People complaining about the Wall Street Occupiers being unsightly and smelly overlook the ongoing fact that the whole area is unsightly, as is the rest of Market Street all the way west to at least Valencia.
THERE’S A LARGE banner over the Occupy camp that says “Occupy San Francisco: A Living Example of a Better System.” I wouldn’t go that far. If I thought I had to spend the rest of my life with twinklers and call and respond politics, however righteous, I think I’d take an early out, but it was definitely gratifying to see so many people with a clear grasp of who owns and runs the motherland.
I KEPT MY nose alert for the urine smell the rightwing claims is synonymous with San Francisco generally and Occupy sites specifically, but I was only able to detect the usual faint odor of raw sewage characteristic of those areas of the city built on fill; everything east of Kearney Street was once part of San Francisco Bay, as is most of the city’s southeast quadrant. The Marina, too. In the overdue Big One, much of the City built on fill, the geologists warn, will liquify.
I REMEMBER when The City was trying to do something about the persistent sewage odor at the foot of Market Street, but perfuming the omni-present smell went nowhere because irreconcilable factions refused to give up their commitments to the options — some people demanded a strawberry bouquet, others chocolate, some vanilla, and some probably held out for rum raisin.
THAT THURSDAY, the Occupy camp at Justin Herman was clean and orderly. Pumpkins decorated the paths between tents, feral children gamboled. Tourists were wandering around taking pictures of the slogans and the more photogenic protesters; a pair of ostentatious meditators were a big draw.
THE PREVIOUS night across the bay at Oakland’s Occupy camp, at zero provocation, the cops had shot a Marine with two Iraq tours behind him, shot him at point blank range with a tear gas gun. I saw the kid get it on the Ten O’Clock News.
FIRST THING in the morning, I verified what I was certain I’d seen on the News with the inevitable clips I knew would be on the internet. Sure enough, there it was: the Marine, a young man named Olsen, 24, was standing stock still no more than ten feet from the police barricade looking straight at their massed helmets. Standing next to him was a sailor in full uniform when Olsen, in his civvies, was suddenly hit in the head with something fired from very close, essentially point blank range, which turned out to be a tear gas canister, meaning that the badged psycho who shot the thing at Olsen head-high was indifferent to Olsen’s survival and ought to be tried for attempted murder. (Another Marine protester said the cops had used “a lot more force than we used on mobs in Iraq.”)
THE POLICE mustered to break up Occupy Oakland, were drawn from several Bay Area agencies. They claimed they were being attacked with bottles and other projectiles, but in the films of the confrontation you can see what look like teenagers, apart from the main body of Occupiers, lobbing an occasional object at the cops; the Occupy protesters didn’t appear to be throwing anything except peace signs.
THE LIBERAL governments of both cities didn’t know what to do about the Occupiers. They essentially said, “Well, golly, we’re liberals, kind of, but since we can’t trust the cops not to behave like maniacs we better just leave the protesters alone.” Which they did long past the camps being overtaken by outpatients and the usual "undesirables."
AT JUSTIN HERMAN, I counted 53 tents and maybe a half-dozen problematic wildmen who looked crazy enough to engage in ultra-vi, but most of the people occupying an otherwise empty, unwelcoming space were ordinary citizens, patriots of a very high order.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] My parents live in a small street of around 15 bungalows that had a shared wooden vehicular gate at the top. The gate rotted and fell off its hinges. My dad was in charge of organising the repair. Some residents didn’t want to pay . Others argued the cost. Some wanted different designs. It took many months to finally get a consensus and book a contractor. Moral of the story: sometimes you just need a dictatorship.
[2] The radical transgender activists and their allies made a serious mis-step by trying to force acceptance of biological men competing in girl’s and women’s sports — and they advanced their agenda largely by manipulating language — so I’m not willing to play their game by buying into made up concepts like “they/them” to describe a person — no matter how much that person wants me to.
[3] FIRE, an on-line comment: Mendocino did a great job last year putting out fires and using prevention programs such as burns, road side clearances and chipping. Also, there were more arson arrests and successful prosecutions in the past few years which I suspect helped enormously. The neighborhood I now live in had at least 2 different people starting fires, and a third years back who was definitely prosecuted. It seems the other 2 may have been taken care of as well. Thank you thank you thank you for ALL of those measures taken, especially the arson investigations.
[4] Have you ever noticed that when people talk about “America the Beautiful”, they are always talking about national parks, forests, mountains, and other parts of it that remain unsullied by human hands? They're never talking about cities, suburbs, strip malls, interstate highways, chicken farms, or feed lots.
[5] The Democrat faithful will embrace a turd wrapped in a sweatsuit if it has a “D” after its name, and will accept an obviously faked primary season as a legitimate expression of the will of the people (all of the people, not just the faithful). The more the Big Guy's detractors pointed out his senility and criminality, the more the Democrat faithful embraced and defended him. The brainwashing has been that successful. The non-Democrats, of course, saw the senile grifter for what he was and reacted in disgust as the DNC tried to force it down our throats.
[6] As I watch this president and his cultish coterie of worshiping Republicans dismantle the U.S. government with thoughtless cruelty, while wiping out a century of social and economic progress and dismantling our relationship with our allies, I find myself shaking my head in painful disbelief at the scope of the global wreckage that my children and grandchildren’s generation will have to dig out from under.
[7] It’s not complicated: Everywhere, but particularly in the United States, wealth translates to political power and control over the public discourse. Billionaires don’t care about you and me; they care about accumulating more money and more power. Obviously they’ll do whatever it takes to accumulate more of both, unless or until mechanisms are enforced that give some degree of countervailing power, and a meaningful voice, to regular people — those who are not billionaires, or multimillionaires, or close friends of the 0.1% U.S. wealth has continued to concentrate into the hands of the 0.1% for as long as I can remember. It’s not complicated. The billionaires have been winning, and yet we keep handing them more power over our elections, our tax structures, our news media, and our national priorities. Most of this is in happening broad daylight , not in some mysterious secret backroom club.
[8] The only time I’ve ever seen a grizz was, in all places, New Mexico; he had wandered down from the tail end of the Taos mountains (the Rockies), and was laying dead on the shoulder of the interstate, poor thing. No idea what he was doing so far south. The sun had just just risen; what stuck me was the light on his fur as I passed. That light seemed to ripple with reds, and golds, and amber; it was absolutely beautiful, that fur, bearskin coats must’ve been a handsome sight to see.
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