Walking the earth, living on the bum...

The homeless are outside my window, plucking out used coffee cups from the trash and emptying the spent fluids into the bushes. They take in the coffee cups and pay the 50 cent refill price, which the barristas give them...they've been there most of the morning, thumbing through the old newspapers that are stuffed into the racks, so the counter people can never really tell if they bought the original drink at full price. Just another way of getting by, I guess.

I'm sketching just inside to their little circle outside on the patio. There used to be an old lady who collected the used newspapers in brown paper sacks. She was so old, so shrunken. She didn't have a tooth in her head and she flicked her tongue out in quick, repetitive jabs like a gecko sensing its surroundings...flick, flick, flick. And, damn it if she didn't clean out the used papers just before I got to them.

I heard a rumor that firemen had to clean out her apartment because she had created this labyrinthine maze with walls made out of towering newspaper stacks. I like to think that she created this mythical persona, like the Minotaur in her maze of yellowing pages...I like to think she was just eccentric...but it's more like senility or madness or old age and loneliness that create these fringe impulses.

One of the old timers is fishing about for cigarette butts in the ash cans outside. He's collected three that seem to have several puffs of smoke left in them. He arranges them by size, one next to the other, rolling them under his fingers lovingly as if he doesn't know yet which of his beloved children he wants to smoke first. He is long in choosing. Then he smokes one and the ecstasy on his face is exquisite...everything quiets down and he is content for that one second.

I used to romanticize about what it would be like to be homeless. Like Jules, the Samuel L. Jackson character in Pulp Fiction, I fantasized about "Walking the earth"...about traveling from place to place, meeting people and having adventures with my sketchbook in tow, living on the bum. But the reality of life on the streets hits me starkly, especially when I carve out a chunk of my day to sit down and draw. The homeless are always here, not by choice, but by necessity...to find that clean, well-lighted place and to feel safe and connected to decent people living decent lives and to meet their friends at a coffeehouse where there is cheap coffee and free smokes and a free, previously read newspaper if you can find one.

I Don't Do Cute...

There's a sweet, dowdy little waitress that walks around the tables at the cafe and each time she sees me sketching, she stops to check out the daily page I'm working on. Each time she comments on how talented I am in a cloying, sugary manner that just gets my hackles flaring upward in sharp, jagged spikes of disdain.

I know she means well, but lately she's been saying things like "You know (Think of a whiny, Mid-Western voice), you'd do better with your drawings if you put a nice Pilgrim hat on that one. Maybe have them standing by some pumpkins! People love holiday artwork."

It's one of those moments when you wish your eyeballs shot laser beams, or that 14" spikes jutted out each white knuckle and ripped through your enemy's jugular. One swipe, whoooosh!!!
Blood spurt and gore; nothing but ragged carcass and a puddle of viscous fluids.

I wanted to shake her meaty, hunched shoulders and shout out into her shriveled, apple-pie face and scream out "I don't draw Pilgrim hats on anything...no Pilgrim hats whatsoever!!!! No Pilgrim hats and no smiley pumpkins!"

I'm sorry, but I don't do cute. I like squalor and dirty, gritty people with a lot of soul. I like down and outers, riff-raff, and drifters dark and brooding and sinister. I always vote for the underdog. I'll bet the long shot just because I like the longshot.

I hate the average, the sensible, though I'm surrounded by it constantly. Sure and steady really bores me to tears, and perky people make me want to stab my quilled pens neatly and swiftly into their soft, blood-filled orifices. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating.

Cuteness...cuteness, I refuse to acknowledge. Give me ugly and depressing. Tom Waits in a cheap diner surrounded by misfits and miscreants. Give me sob stories told really well by those clinging to their last vestiges of dignity and hope. I like to see the struggle, like to trace the history of the scars.

Cute. Can't do it. Don't even ask. Leave pumpkins and Pilgrim to five year old kids putting their holiday projects on the fridge with magnets. Let them have cute.

Tragedy of the Leaves and the Limbo of old age...

I'm sketching at Panera Bread today, which seems the modern day equivalent of the cafeterias of the 1930's, where the entrees were sold through slotted vending windows and everything cost a nickel. This is Hemingway's "clean, well-lighted place."

This one is in an outdoor mall, adjacent to a senior center, so the place is wall-to-wall seniors lining up for their lukewarm ladel of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup in a hallowed out round of sourdough bread. My God! Such expectant, joyous faces.

I'm listening to The Throwing Muses song "Limbo" on my ipod while I let my hand sketch over the page. It's an unconscious act, completely devoid of thought. I scan the room as the music picks up the soundtrack. All those happy, pale, wrinkled faces slurping their soup and gnashing their crusty baguettes while Kristin Hersh repeats the haunting lyrics, "nice Limbo you have here, nice Limbo you have here..." It's quite eerie, mesmerizing even. In the a-capella bridge she repeats the line to a thumping beat, "dead is next door, dead is next door." I look up at the overly rouged faces, the sagging arms, the bruised, crackly flesh and think "yes, dead is next door."

I picked up a used copy of an older Bukowski poetry compilation that I did not have, but I recognized the first poem as one that rips my heart out every time I read it. The poem is called "The Tragedy of the Leaves" and I pick it up to read it in the lull between changing the music and starting a new, fresh page. I'm fixated on the old people. So many old people here today, and they are nothing like the aging Bukowski who continued to booze it up, to womanize, to bet the ponies at Santa Anita, to write amazing poems until he died at the age of 74. He would have shot cannonballs into the center of the restaurant and laughed at the mound of rotting, charred corpses and screwed every underage waitress as the wreckage smoldered. He wouldn't have been content, never have been ecstatic for a mediocre bowl of tepid cream soup. I keep reading and re-reading the same section over and over again...

"I shaved carefully with an old razor

the man who had once been young

and said to have genius; but

that's the tragedy of the leaves,

the dead ferns, the dead plants;

and I walked into a dark hall

where the landlady stood

execrating and final,

sending me to hell,

waving her fat, sweaty arms

and screaming

screaming for rent

because the world had failed us

both "

Rips and shreds my soul apart every time I read it and

then Hope Sandoval comes on the ipod next and sends me

sinking into deeper, darker waters of despair.

My war with the cigar smokers...

I have a strange love/ hate relationship with cigar smokers. I love to sketch them...but to be honest, I want them all to die slow, lingering deaths like Freud, with their throats corroding and shrivelling with black, cancerous lesions. But I love to draw them.

I understand the hypocrisy, I just don't understand my attraction.

I think it's the phallic nature of the cigar. Maybe it's the primal clutching of the penis-like extension of the self or it's the orgasmic looks on their faces as they take their first, oh-so satisfying puffs.

When I draw them, I think I'm attracted to the intimate quietness of the fingers and the thumbs on the cigar. It's a very dainty and loving and tender gesture. As is the licking and the sucking in of the white smoke, which, incidentally, for me, smells like a dead skunk decaying on a quiet country road. It sickens me...one of the few things that triggers my gag reflex. Thus, my internal war with the cigar smokers continues to vex me.

Okay, I'll admit that they have taken over my favorite outdoor cafe where I like to sketch. I hate to think it's a male territorial imperative to protect my personal space. But there are other regulars around me, equally annoying, like the mentally-challenged giant with the too-tiny stripped shirt who whistle screams as he bites his fist with one hand and thumps his barrel chest with lowland gorilla-like force in a continuous monotone that can only be compared to a beached manatee pounded by whiffle bats. The noise is stunning and ominous. But still, I can tune him out. What I can't tune out it the wafting stench of cigar smoke under my nose.

I've tried everything to get them to stop. I've pleaded. I've threatened them with going to the Board of Health. But their arrogance and their senses of entitlement have made them cluster together in tight, self-righteous groups of smoke-spewing smugness. They won't budge and the owner is too afraid to drop kick his regular paying customers from enjoying their outdoor smoker's lounge. Our latest attempt at peace accord, is to let them smoke at the furthest tables, away from the front awning. Still, the smoke travels, and I swear that it finds my nostrils every time.

So, I have to grin and bear it. Suck it up and tune out the stink if I want to sit at my table, sketching and sipping at my bottomless iced tea. I don't have to like it. My only just revenge is to post my sketches and give them humorous subtitles that remind me of the time I suffered with my discomfort to get the money shots.