1975

Whenever I think of 1975 I picture the windshield of a Dodge Dart. I’m parked at a local beach, sitting behind the driver’s wheel, reflecting. Sometimes it has rained and I watch beads of water meander down the window glass and sometimes the sun is out and I gaze at the water of Puget Sound lapping at the rocks. I had returned to Seattle after a very full decade in California. I was looking for a job. More than a job. I was looking for a job I could reasonably stomach well enough to maybe one day get a pension and a gold watch. I had a bachelor’s degree in English, which would be the equivalent of bringing a tennis racket on a climb to the summit of Mount Everest. It was more of a liability than an asset. Many people advised leaving it off of applications.

Sitting in the car staring at water really wasn’t part of my job-hunting strategy. I just liked doing it after driving around asking receptionists for job applications. And so 1975 has become synonymous with sitting behind the wheel of a car without going anywhere.

There was also that unforgettable scene on April 29^th, 1975, of the Air America helicopter helping evacuees up a ladder onto the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon shortly before the city fell to advancing North Vietnamese troops broadcast on television, which I watched while lying on the carpeted floor of my parent’s house. My parents were letting me stay in a room downstairs while I looked for work. The scene on the news felt strangely anticlimactic after all the protests and marches of the late sixties and early seventies. It didn’t seem as if the war had come to an end because of public protest, but simply imploded from its own sickeningly immoral goals. One would think thank God, no more war after this, not for a good long while.

And the country did manage to go 26 years without a war. Now we’ve got seven of them, five in Africa and two in the Middle East, and all of them blithely ignored, carried on with minimal news reportage and ignored by an apathetic public walking city streets like zombies, their attentions focused on social media and messaging services, disembodied souls connected by robotic algorithm and flashy screen graphics. Conversation has been replaced by tweets. Society has been atomized into lone individuals fixated on video games and social media, fragmented by tribal animosities fueled by economic decline and propaganda and driven into mummification as office workers sealed away in cubicles performing repetitive, routine tasks of brain-deadening monotony step over used needles and pass by tent cities full of the homeless on their way to and from work. 

Perhaps not so much the billionaire class, with their eyes on Mars and biospheres populated by shiny happy people.

I suck at job hunting. Always have. I’ve always marveled at the ease with which a lot of people manage to find nice jobs with robust salaries. All the manuals and self-help books on the shelves at the bookstores urged looking for something you enjoy doing. Ok, then I should be looking for a job reading and writing books. If not making any money weren’t a problem, that sounded like my kind of career. But I needed food, clothing, and a place to live. That required money, and unless I slapped together a best seller in a week’s time and got it published and reviewed in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, then made into a movie by Martin Scorsese, it wasn’t a realistic option.

After several months of driving from one industry or business to another – including an industrial park in Tukwila – and filling out applications, then driving somewhere where I could sit and gaze out the window and feel whatever solace was to be enjoyed in these intervals at the far margins of stillness in the momentum of time. If I turned the radio on, I was bound to hear one of several songs: “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton, “Poetry Man” by Phoebe Snow, “Mandy” by Barry Manilow or “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers. All the music was tame. All the music emanated contentment and well-being. Even songs of heartbreak seemed weirdly subdued and deferential. The turmoil and excitement of the 60s and that triumphant moment of freedom and mud and brother love at Woodstock had been taken down like a tent, neatly folded and put in the trunk of a new car. The world hadn’t changed after all. All the hippies came indoors and decided to make changes from within the power structure. All rationalizations are spun by an evil genius.

I felt very alone. Tom Robbin’s delightful novel Another Roadside Attraction kept me company much of the time. That’s what I wanted to do: write novels. Why not? Were there still enough readers available to make any kind of living at it? In its first four years or so the novel had a very sluggish sales of 2,220 copies. So no, probably not.

Joyce barely eked out a living in the years he wrote Ulysses. Ezra Pound helped him receive financial assistance from the British government, and significant financial and literary support from Harriet Weaver, a political activist and magazine editor.

My stepmother had a friend at University Hospital who helped me get a job in the hospital laundry. I had to work two weeks free as a candy striper, ostensibly to help figure out the structural intricacies of the hospital, learn how to push elevator buttons and gaze humbly at the floor in silence as the gods known as interns sometimes grabbed a ride on the service elevator.

After I was officially hired, I did well. I showed up on time and did my job cheerfully. There’s nothing like months of unemployment to make you feel grateful once you get a job, however modest the duties and position.

I started out folding towels and surgical gowns which I then delivered to the different hospital wings, then moved to the washing machines where I worked with a couple of black guys, Eddie and Rafael. Rafael liked wearing fishnet tank-tops and platform shoes to work, which I found perplexing: we worked on wooden slats designed to let the powdered detergent fall to the concrete below so that the floor didn’t become impossibly slippery, but it was still pretty slippery. This didn’t prevent Rafael from horsing around and play-boxing with me. We’d take jabs and duck and spin on the soapy slats. It was fun. I really liked these two guys. We joked around constantly. The washing machines were gigantic, but there was a space behind them where Eddie would leave a joint of marijuana burning on a shelf-like protrusion on the back of the machine. I got stoned every day for the six months or so I worked there. Not a bad way to spend the work day.

A position as a hospital messenger came up and I got the job. The job was easy: a canister would come shooting down a pneumatic tube with orders in it for items ranging from emesis basins to IV poles. I loved watching those tubes shoot out. I’d be given a cart with all the items arranged on it and take them to their allotted destinations in one wing or another of the hospital. There was a nice rhythm to my day, and at the end of a shift I’d drive home in the Washington drizzle to which I was growing accustomed. The new stage set of my life had switched out palm trees and sunlight for moss and ferns and gray Cimmerian gloom. It was no wonder why coffeehouses were so popular in Seattle.

My first apartment in Seattle was a large studio on Capitol Hill. It had a large kitchen, a spacious living room with a stone fireplace and was directly in front of a bus stop, one of the direct lines to the University District, where I worked. I paid $125 a month.

Capitol Hill had the densest number of apartments in Seattle, and partly as a consequence of that and a consequence of Cornish College of the Arts – where John Cage had taught from 1938 to 1940 – Capitol Hill had a highly diverse and colorful population of students, artists, writers, gays,  bohemians, and the early manifestations of punk. I felt completely at home there. It was a nice break from the cybernetic juggernaut of the Bay Area. I was blithely unaware that another giant in the computer industry had been birthed in Albuquerque, New Mexico called Microsoft. It wouldn’t move to Bellevue, Washington until 1979 and so it would be a full decade before anyone in funky Seattle felt the effects of that. This would be a decade of affordability, literacy, community and rock posters stapled to telephone poles.

My job allowed me to chat with people on my daily rounds. I liked that. There was room for playful conversations and repartee. I even managed to get a couple of dates, although one of my dates took a very strange turn. I went out with a woman in her late twenties who just been divorced. We went to Red Robin, a fern-bar that stood high on a bluff overlooking Portage Bay and served killer hamburgers. She asked me why I used such big words all the time, and if I did that to put people down.

I was stunned. What? Put people down? God no! I just like words.

The date did not go as planned.

I decided to hold back on my playful conversations. Or be a little more circumspect when I unloaded big polysyllabic monsters like ‘serendipity’ and ‘gargantuan.’ For some reason, the few people I came across who enjoyed linguistic extravagance were also heavy drinkers. Most of them divorced, lonely, and ready to create havoc.

I discovered a great little used bookstore several blocks south of my apartment called Horizon Books. It occupied an old house with a big porch. The floorboards creaked and the bookcases were arranged by genre with narrow spaces between them. It is here that I discovered two books that would be highly influential for me: The Sonnets, by Ted Berrigan and Great Balls of Fire by Ron Padgett. The two books had been paired together although they were out of alphabetical order. I’m guessing someone must’ve been reading them and put them back on the shelf together. I bought them and brought them home and the poetry inside their covers had a huge impact on the direction my writing took.

The Sonnets was a small thin book whose cover featured a red background with densely patterned rows of black dots. I was intrigued by the structure of these sonnets. Each line had a unique character, sometimes overtly lyrical (“slow kisses on the eyelids of the sea,” “column after column down colonnade of rust”), sometimes blunt and aggressive (“I like to beat people up,” “Too many fucking mosquitoes under the blazing sun,” sometimes quietly intriguing (“Everything turns into writing,” “Each tree is introspection”), and quite often a little bizarre and psychedelic (“Vast orange dreams wed to wakefulness,” “Blood ran like muddy inspiration”). Many of the lines were repeated and recycled in different formations. It made me realize the poem as an object – a machine – with moving parts, and that abrupt non-sequiturs and shifts of idea gave the work an added dimension, a sculptural feel, as if you could walk around the poem and view from the back, like Duchamp’s The Large Glass, or the Cubist sculpture of Lipchitz or Archipenko. It also triggered a flow of free association in which nothing was blocked or encumbered by logic or conventional linearity.

Padgett’s Great Balls Of Fire was just as balls-out full of creative energy as the title suggested. The poems were sometimes conversational and so popping with thoughts and insights that it wasn’t long before my own brain ignited with its cerebral meanderings and adventures. You didn’t have to brace yourself for the great formality and exaltation of words that is found in a lot of poetry and probably one good reason a lot of people don’t like poetry. Nobody likes getting dressed up to go to church. These poems weren’t like that. These poems wore faded jeans and T-shirts. They radiated the lively bop spontaneity Kerouac urged. They had élan. They were fresh and eccentric and full of humor. Oftentimes there was a cartoonish, syntactical silliness to the structure of the lines: “The great shoe prediction sigh clock,” “The lice looked up in astonishment,” “My dog sag knee,” “The genitals run amok.” I loved this stuff. It altered my approach to poetry. Poetry felt much more approachable and pertinent to the actual living I was doing in my life.

I especially liked a long work called “Some Bombs” which was a homophonic translation of poem by Pierre Reverdy. It was hugely liberating. Many of the lines might be perceived as nonsense by the uninformed, but to me they were magnificent millipedes of quirky garrulity. It was a pure way to enjoy language.

The result of these two books was immediate: I wanted to be a New York poet. Not that I wanted to move to New York City. But I could imagine Seattle as a Manhattan of the west. The geography was incidental. The essential thing was the light that got turned on my brain. Reading either of these two books was like feeling the first euphoric glimmer of an amphetamine in the bloodstream. Or Jerry Lee Lewis going nuts on a piano bench.