Turn The Page

Slamming the door, once and for all, on “closure”

I saw it again last night, on some show called Missing Person on one of the Discovery© channels. Some kid in Arizona got kicked out of a drug treatment center and, high on methamphetamine, wandered several miles out into the desert. His family was distraught, but hopeful. The search and rescue team finally found him four days later, bruised and battered and riddled with frostbite (the desert out there can get pretty cold at night.) And very dead. In his delirium he had discarded his clothing, and ended up dying of exposure.

But sure enough, when they found him, one of the search and rescue guys said, “Well, at least this will give his family some closure.”

Look, I’ve never lost someone that close to me in such a horrific way, and certainly not a child, but is knowing the person is dead more comforting than not knowing? Okay, probably so. Does having that person’s physical body to look at and then put in the ground ease one’s pain more so than never finding them at all? Well, almost surely. But what has any of this to do with closure?

‘Closure’ appears to be one of those buzzwords seemingly everyone uses but no one can really define. I don’t know when it came into popular usage, exactly, or where it came from. I woke up one day and – crap – it was out there everywhere. What does ‘closure’ mean, exactly? The implication is the that family and friends of the dead person can now shut the door on their rawest grief, and begin to move on. Is that what happens? Or is finding the body just another in a set of awful facts one has to process in the hopes of eventually being able to live, with some sense of equanimity, with the death of their loved one, and the facts surrounding it?

I am all for relief from grief, especially from death, and I am not prepared to argue the validity or value of some kind of closure-type thing in these sorts of instances. But ‘closure’ is used in all kinds of situations that shouldn’t be as traumatic as losing someone close. I have heard of people who need closure in every situation from losing a pet to breaking up with one’s “significant other” (another cutesy word/phrase that mildly pisses me off) to failing to draw to an inside straight with a lot of money invested a big pot to losing one’s favorite ball-point pen last Friday.

I hope I am not the only one to think this is mostly crazy. For one thing, closure – if there even is such a thing – is not something one can dial up and use, whenever necessary. As I understand it, closure or something like it is pretty elusive. And I think someone who would need it to recover from any of life’s everyday indignities, or “little deaths”, as I like to call them (anything from a broken relationship to your favorite team losing the big game or series, roughly), probably has some psychological issues they need to be dealing with before they even worry about resolving things through closure.

For most of us, most times, I suspect rather than ‘closure’, about the best we can hope for is for our wounds to scab up and eventually cover with scar tissue. The emotional trauma is not really gone, it’s just been just patched up and moved aside so one can resume functioning in a more or less normal manner. For one example, it is hard for me to imagine anyone ever putting a traumatic romantic breakup completely behind them. I know personally if you talked to me about, oh, I don’t know – let’s say Janet, the girl who dumped me for another guy back in 7th grade, it probably wouldn’t be too hard for me to churn up some of the pain from that episode still, even 30+ years later. And let’s not even bring up some of the subsequent disasters from high school and college and young bachelorhood.

I distinctly remember one particularly pathetic episode from when I was about 21. I had fallen in love with the wrong girl again, and when we split up I was typically traumatized. So my solution, and I remember reasoning my way to this very deliberately, was to purchase a half gallon of Jack Daniels Black Label, and every evening after work I would mix myself drinks of JD and water on ice and drink them while listening to The Who’s Quadrophenia LP turned up really loud (“Love, Reign O’er Me” used to just kill me, every time) and writing sloppy, bad poetry; while my roommate would be there looking on as if I were hopeless.

But you know what? It worked, in a manner of speaking. After about a week of this self-abuse and wallowing in self-pity, the fever broke, so to speak, and I was able to pick myself up and fling myself back into the social milieu, as it were.

This solution sprang at least partly I am sure from a personal belief I think I have always had – that the only way to deal with trouble is not to run and/or hide from it, but rather to jump into it and immerse oneself in it completely. If it does not do one in, one comes out better on the other side of it. But the problem with trying to drink away trouble is, first of all, there is a lot of ancillary damage. You can kill millions of useful brain cells just for starters, trying to get at the ones that make you feel socially inadequate and like a complete loser. Also, temporary alcoholism causes one’s friends to look on with pity and/or derision or worse, and of course contributes nothing toward getting to a real solution, such as another woman, for instance.

Also, whatever the problem is usually comes back, eventually. The old Southern adage that ‘the blues don’t swim, but they float’ applies here. You can try to drown your troubles, but just when you think you are in the clear, up they pop again. I used to think of my busted up relationships as dinosaurs out in California during the Cretaceous Period. Yep, that’s right. Dinosaurs. See, they got pushed or fell into these tar pits out there around west L.A., near Hollywood maybe, and then they were gone forever, surely. Except eons later, the bones starting coming back up to the surface. . .

The problem with walking away from emotional trauma and just letting chemicals and eventually time scar over the wound and leave a cicatrix on the heart and mind is that the trauma is still basically unresolved, and will come back to haunt one eventually; usually several years on and when least expected. That is the opposite of what closure is, I am fairly certain.

But while these common, everyday things we speak of are painful, they are not nearly as profoundly painful as what the family on Missing Person were going through. Whatever they need to ease that pain and make sense of what caused it, I am all for it. As I am all for not trivializing dealing with real pain by using the same catchy word or phrase or concept ascribed to dealing with it as a prescription for dealing with every possible adverse situation, from the mildly significant to the trivial.

“Closure” should be the etymological equivalent of medicinal morphine, to be used in only the most gravely painful situations. The rest of the time, I am sorry to say, you will just have to figure a way to muddle along with the rest of us.

Blues On An Inca Night

Blues For Bootzilla

There have been times when I've thought of you

When an old letter or a picture brought you back into

view

And I'd recall what has passed and the things I've

missed

After that trip to the beach

On your front porch, our first kiss

We would get messed up with all the girls and boys

All in love with each other and our drugs of choice

And I remember all those fucked-up times

Just like the books we learned

And all the words that rhymed

And Bootzilla was my main, main man

Just a bass player in a bad-ass funk band

And on nights that were steamy and hot

I would take you out dancing

'Til we got our rocks off

And I knew

Just looking at you

I knew that our dreams would all come true

And on top of it all,

I've got the blues for Bootzilla, too

**********

I can remember those crazy nights

When I would pick you up and you'd look just right

We'd smoke a joint and go see our latest favorite

band

All obsessed with each other

Couldn't see it getting out of hand

In restaurants full of losers and cops

We would do cocaine right off the table tops

We were high and wild and without concern

'Cos we knew where to score

While all the losers got burned

There are some ghosts out there that still haunt me

And there are still demons out there to taunt me

Just like a bass line thumping through the latest hit

song

I could feel it in my bones

But my mind was all wrong

But I knew

Just looking at you

I knew that our dreams would all come true

And on top of it all,

I've got the blues for Bootzilla, too

**********

You know, funk music just died, I guess

Like rock 'n' roll and all the rest

Maybe it was killed by something like rap

Or go-go or hip-hop

Or something like that

And then you just softly slipped away

I turned around and you were gone as fast as night

turns to day

Into that sea of sorrows you took our life raft

While I drown in a puddle

And the fat man laughs

It's on nights like tonight that I'm thinking that

I wish that the earth was really flat

I'd write all the notes I could send

Go out and buy a speedboat

And blast right off the end

Out into the blue

Just thinking of you

I knew that our dreams would all come true

And on top of it all,

I've got the blues for Bootzilla, too

Remembrance of Bars Past, Vol. 2

Fear and Loathing in the Near Room

This is the second installment of my open-ended and self-indulgent virtual (OK, mostly mental) tour of some of the bars, clubs, taverns and other disreputable points of interest my friends and I frequented back in our salad days, c. 1978-1985. In addition to the “featured” location, this time I thought I might start adding an honorable mention to the end of each entry – places that didn’t make the A-list but had one or (rarely) two redeeming aspects worth noting.

This week, we look at a place that wasn’t really one of my favorites at all; but I included it anyway because it was in some ways the exact antithesis of the Cactus Lounge , and because the overwhelmingly ominous feeling and sense of foreboding I got every time I walked into the place was so powerful it is still palpable to me today.

2. Fat Dawg’s. Fat Dawg’s was located on Railroad Ave. near Lamar University, across the street and tracks and down to the southwest a bit from the Cactus Lounge. It is hard to remember where exactly, but it was generally in the area of the Tex-Joy warehouse, the old 7-Up bottling plant, and/or the Sunbeam bakery (now SE Texas Food Bank.)

In contrast to the Cactus, which was cramped and crowded and sort of reminded one of being in a somebody’s backyard storage shed, Fat Dawg’s was like a large open barn. The was a bar all along the north wall, an open area/dance floor in the middle, and restrooms at the back. The décor was sparse, and women scarce (I don’t believe I ever saw anyone actually dance in there.) To tell the truth, it was kind of a biker bar.

The place was owned by Crit DeMent, who was a local entrepreneur, I guess you could say. He wasn’t much older than us, and over the years owned a few other bars and a couple of restaurants in the area, and ended up with a string of dry cleaners in Houston, I believe I heard. I never saw Crit in Fat Dawg’s, though.

I can say with some confidence I never set foot in the place myself with a blood-alcohol content of less than .15, or before about 12:30 A.M. We only used it sometimes, as a landing place after the Cactus closed up at midnight; because it was nearby, and because they served Foster Lager in those motor oil-sized cans for $1.25 as some sort of promotion, Foster’s having just begun to be distributed in the area.

So whenever we went in there, I was already three sheets to the wind and growing ever more bleary-eyed, as usually were most of the rest of us. Add in boredom and the Foster's, and that is a pretty good formula for trouble, especially when a group of college boys loudly stumble into a place that otherwise featured as patrons various ex-cons, a couple of drug dealers I knew, and most of the local chapter of the Bandidos motorcycle gang. Who all looked at us askance upon our entrance. Hence the frequent sense of foreboding.

Actually, the only real trouble I ever witnessed in the place was started by a friend of mine. A group of us were in there one night, including my friend and two of his brothers. We were all horribly drunk, and then at some point, for no reason I could discern, my buddy and his siblings decided it was imperative they remove the men’s room door from its hinges and toss it out to the middle of the dance floor. Even in my anesthetized state, I knew that wasn’t good.

The bartender called the cops, and then he and a few of his patrons/buddies decided to do a citizen’s arrest on the entirety of us, and hold us all until the law got there. None of the guys attempting to detain us went less than about 6’ 2” and 2 ½ bills, and I am pretty sure I remember at least two who had chains – big ones, like for towing a car – dangling at their sides. Nevertheless, it occurred to me that I was not prepared to let a few large-ish hardheads hold me against my wishes until the police could get there and haul us all away in patrol cars. I told my buddy we needed to make a break for it, and he agreed but wanted to clue in his brothers. I said, “Fuck them, they can take care of themselves.” They could, too; I’d seen both of them at one time or another in brawls, and they were pretty bad-ass.

Anyway, my friend and I were closest to the exit, so we took off, soon with two or three Bandido-types chasing us out into the parking lot. We made it to my Camaro, jumped in and romped on it, going careening out of the parking lot and onto Railroad Ave. As I hooked a left onto Park Street, in my rear-view mirror I could see the red and blue lights of the Beaumont police cars, just arriving back at Fat Dawg’s.

"See ya, dickheads," I was thinking, as we hung a right on Corley off of Park, and started back for the West End, heading slowly, carefully toward home.

**********

HONORABLE MENTION #1

Koto of Japan. Okay, I can imagine the initial response to this, but this long-time Japanese teppanyaki place on North 11th St. had a short-lived, well-kept secret: Back in the days before “happy hours” were outlawed, in their tiny, inadequate bar area, they featured 3-for-1 call drinks every Thursday and Friday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. This was a terrific value – three drinks for the price of one, and you could specify what brand you wanted. So unlike most happy hours, when an order of a bourbon and coke would bring you something like Old Heaven Hill mixed in Big K cola, at Koto you got Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola, just like you ordered.

If one was disciplined, one could get 12-15 drinks in before 7:00 o’clock. The drawbacks to this were 1.) 12-15 drinks put most normal people out of commission for the rest of the evening before it even got started, and 2.) when one walked out of the place anytime between April and October, it was still daylight out. In addition to the weirdness of being terminally intoxicated before it had even got dark, there was the fact that one’s eyes were at maximum dilation by this point, from being inside and all the alcohol, and the late afternoon sunlight would be literally blinding.

Made for an interesting drive home, most times.

The Way It Is

Smiling From The Ruins

With nearly a week to digest it, I believe I have by now mulled over the Democratic beat down of the Republicans and in particular President Bush and his policies last Tuesday long enough to have come to terms with it. I guess that is what you could call it.

Any elation over this slap in the face to the more reactionary faction of the American political spectrum – and there was quite a bit of elation, as far as I could tell, just about everywhere – should be tempered by the realization that now the Democrats are in charge. Or rather, by which Democrats are in charge.

Nancy Pelosi will be running the House of Representatives. To be honest, I have not studied her record closely enough to decide if she is really the liberal “San Francisco Democrat” the right says she is. Most sane people seem to think she is somewhat more of a centrist; but as I say, I am not sure. I am fairly certain she is not nearly as much of a zealot for the left as Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay were for the right, though. Which is a good thing, in my opinion. Zealots can be interesting from a sociological point of view; but they are worth fuck-all at getting anything done once they are put in charge.

Harry Reid, who will be the majority whip in the Senate, is to me a more interesting case. He’s hardly a leftist; he is a Mormon from Nevada, for starters. He is pro-life, a strong death penalty advocate, and basically pro-gun, though not entirely along the lines of the NRA. On the other hand, he has called measures to make English an “official language” racist, has openly questioned policy with regard to Iraq from fairly early on, voted against a federal marriage amendment (against the fervent wishes of his church, and his own belief that “marriage should be between a man and a woman”), and has called the first George Bush a “great man”, but the current one “a loser.”

Reid converted to Mormonism from Judaism, and is known at home as a tough, two-fisted brawler, who has brushed up against corruption (in Nevada, I wonder who hasn’t) but has kept his public record basically clean, to this point. A character in Martin Scorcese’s movie Casino was partly based on him, and he had a cameo role in Steven Soderbergh’s drug epic Traffic.

An interesting, politically sensible fellow, then. However, unlike supposed liberal firebrand Pelosi, who has been conciliatory toward Bush so far, Reid has been far more ambivalent when questioned about how things will be between the White House and a Democrat-run Senate. Reid appears to be very much his own man, which can be either a good or bad thing, depending.

Reaction to the election results from the right have been interesting in some cases, predictable in others. Conservative demigod Richard Viguerie, in a brief appearance on C-SPAN, said that President Bush and the Republican congress have betrayed conservative values, and have dragged down conservatives with them. He bitterly proposes the conservative movement no longer allow themselves to be an adjunct of the Republican Party, and even suggests they start their own independent movement.

FOX News pundits point out that since a good many of the incoming Democrats are rather conservative themselves (relatively speaking?), the election was actually a victory for conservative values. That’s a sunny view of things.

Personally, I will wait and see. Aside from the partisan political considerations, my encouragement here comes from this idea I have that the real force behind the upheaval the elections have brought is partly the Iraq situation, okay; but on a deeper level I think people have grown weary of the sort of exclusionary and cynical maneuvering and political machination this administration is increasing identified with. Its one thing to be in power; it is entirely another to make moves to try and entrench that power beyond reasonable means; to regard a large percentage of the U.S. population as “them” instead of “us”; and to systematically rape the Constitution and in general operate in a manner more akin to a military dictatorship than an elected administration, all for petty partisan political gain. Most of us understand that, winners or losers, it is not meant to be a permanent situation; that we all have to come back in two or four years and be judged again, because in our system everything is up for grabs.

This is sometimes cited as a weakness, but I rather think not. The weakness in our system is not left-wing loonies or conservative wing nuts or a sometimes unpredictable electorate. The weakness in our system is that there are people like George W. Bush and his acolytes – who think they should always have it their way, that compromise is akin to political and ideological treason, and that any opposition to them is not only unprincipled but maybe even unpatriotic and not worthy of Constitutional protections – and that they can sometimes be put into power. Well, the fact they get voted in is not a weakness, per se; that it is like exterminating roaches to try and get them out once they are in, is.

I don’t know that the new Congress will be any better than the old one, or will last any longer than two years. To the degree that they represent an impediment to Bush and Cheney and Karl Rove’s wildest dreams, though, they will be a service to their country, and will have a longer and absolutely more positive legacy than the man currently in the White House and his minions ever will.

Time Warp

THE BALLAD OF JOHNNY "WAD" HOLMES
February 9, 1998

"Do it, do it, do it 'til you're satisfied
Whatever it is. . ."

It had to happen.

What with Seventies nostalgia in full swing – with everything 70’s now fully metastasized throughout the culture -- it had to come to pass. There is now a niche market for what can only be called XXX porn nostalgia. That is right. It seems the longing for everything Seventies has, in its sweep, brought in with it at least a smattering of folks who pine for the good old days of smut films. Those XXX films are now viewed as artistic, the furtive guys who shot them six at a time in dark warehouses and lofts using junkies and wastrels off of the streets for actors and zero production values are now viewed as auteurs. It just goes to show that anything, anything can be viewed favorably in retrospect, if given the patina of age.

Some make the argument that the '70s films had plots, and the actors were actors, who had nuance and range and were trying to do something artistic between taking off their clothes every five minutes and humping like snakes. These people refer to the current films shown on the Playboy® and Spice® channels as well as those available for rent in the video stores as nothing more than one "cum shot" after another; whereas the 1970’s works were almost Bergman-esque, or at least Fellini-esque, by comparison. Which sounds good on paper. . .

If you went back and actually watched the films, though, I think you would be hard pressed to find any budding Brandos or Newmans or Streeps or Closes (urge here to say budding breasts.). I never was much of a consumer of smut, but like everyone else, I suppose, I came across it from time to time. I know that lo those many years ago I saw at least parts of The Devil And Mrs. Jones and Behind The Green Door, which are considered the classics of the genre, and while I recall several performances that were, well, stimulating, I do not recall anything bordering on what could be characterized as an Academy Award performance. But that is just my view.

Proof that 1970’s smut has “arrived” is that Hollywood is now making mainstream movies about XXX films. Boogie Nights, released last year, is one. I have not seen it, but I have read that the protagonist is based loosely on legendary porn star Johnny "Wad" Holmes, he of The Big 12-Inch. Holmes was, of course, in hundreds of XXX films; along with Marilyn Chambers, he was considered a star of the genre; and, of all the Seventies porn icons, only he and Chambers (and perhaps Linda Lovelace) have had any resonance or staying power in the general culture down through the years.

It is instructive, I think, that Holmes died of AIDS a few years back. And also that the lightweight who was chosen to play him in Boogie Nights, former underwear model and rapper Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg, had to wear a prosthetic penis in the sex scenes, just to approximate the breadth and range of a real pro like the legendary Johnny "Wad".

At least Holmes had the honesty to live and die by the rules of XXX, and he only ever used what God gave him. Marky Mark with a fake dick is just that -- fake. Just like Seventies nostalgia. You shoulda' seen the real thing, baby. . .

****

I WANNA BE SEDATED
April 20, 1998

This past week saw the passing of Wendy O. Williams (of Plasmatics fame), not to mention that of Rob Pilatus of Milli Vanilli. Williams was 48, Pilatus 32. They both died by their own hand. And there the similarities end. Say what you want about Williams (and I will say a little bit more here), I will not insult her memory or her life by ever mentioning Pilatus again, and especially in the same sentence with her.

"You wanna play mind-crazed banjo
In the druggy-drag ragtime U.S.A.?
In Parkland International
Hah! Junkiedom U.S.A.

Where procaine proves
The purest rock man groove
'Rat poison,'
The volatile Molatov says,
'Go straight to hell, boys.'"

Some of us are old enough to remember when punk rock came tumbling out of the ruined economy and rigid class system of merry old England c. 1976 and then, about two years after the fact (an eon in punk rock time), washed up on the American shore.

Remember Wire? Killing Joke? Gang Of Four? Or the greatest punk rock band of all, one of the greatest rock bands of all, The Clash? Ah, the good old days.

All the good to great punk bands were English, it seems, and why not? It takes a certain sort of ruined country and blasted hope to produce something like The Sex Pistols. Not too many of the American punk rock bands had much merit to begin with, and who can still remember any of 'em now? The Ramones, okay. New York Dolls? Eeeh. . . too glam, I’m thinking. X? Yeah, X, who made one great LP, Los Angeles. And, oh yeah, The Plasmatics.

I cannot recall a single Plasmatics song, although I remember from hearing many of them at the time that they were mostly unlistenable cacophony and white noise. . . as was most punk rock, at least in its early stages.

The primary attraction of The Plasmatics was visual, and especially the lead singer, Wendy O. Williams, a former stripper and topless dancer who went out and in the great tradition of American garages everywhere, started her a band. The Plasmatics were too vulgar for television, and thus never made it on to The Midnight Special, with Wolfman Jack; or In Concert, with that idiot Don Kirshner. I saw them a couple of times in the flicks we used to go watch at the Gaylynn Theater way back when. . . The ones shown at Friday midnight, which KWIC-108 used to sponsor. Where you lugged in a case of beer in the lining of your coat, and as soon as you sat down, your friends all around started firing up spliffs in great profusion.

Damn! People belittle the Seventies sometimes, but it had some good things, too. Just try that in a theater nowadays and see what happens.

Anyway, what I remember about Wendy O. Williams on stage was a tall, lithe woman with a bleach-blond Mohawk and wearing nothing much more than long black high heel leather boots, a g-string, and black electrical tape placed over her nipples for pasties. This was her attire as she performed, performing various atrocities on her guitar while bleating out unintelligible lyrics. In the background her band, somewhat less scantily-clad, went thrashing about out of synch while doing things like chain-sawing their instruments.

Ah, The Plasmatics. . . great band! I remember someone, possibly my old friend Chris O----, telling me he had purchased a Plasmatics album, and I thought, Why? I could not imagine sitting in a dark room, listening to the music (which was basically unlistenable), with no visuals for reference; and trying to make any sense of it. Comprehending it in a literal sense was totally beside the point, anyway. But then Chris often missed the point, God love him. May he ever rest in peace.

And may Wendy O. Williams rest in peace, as well. I do not know why she chose to put a gun to her head and pull the trigger; possibly there were lingering effects from all the drug abuse and wildness back in those days that stayed with her, long after punk rock and The Plasmatics were long gone. All of us have had to deal, to one degree or another, with the detritus of a wild life long after the wild living and youth was over; and it takes some people longer than others to come to terms with it, if at all.

Wendy O. Williams never made it, dammit, but I do not think any less of her for it. And I will see her again.

I will see her again. In that place where all the punk rockers and hell-raisers are going, when its all over.

Sic transit gloria. Rest In Peace. And keep me a spot warm, baby.

Remembrance of Bars Past, Vol. 1

Recently, a long time friend of mine and I were sitting around sharing a few cold ones, just shooting the breeze about nothing in particular, and somehow or another we got on the subject of the clubs and bars in Beaumont we hung out at in our college and after- college bachelor days; and how almost all of them are gone now.

No big surprise there – clubs and bars come and go with regularity, always have and always will, it is the nature of the business. And we are taking about places we patronized 20 years ago, or more. Nevertheless, we went on to compile a list of a dozen or so of our ‘favorites’, and I thought it would be fun, it being Friday and the traditional start of the weekend and all, to list a few here.

I have the idea at this point to do it as sort of a series, a new installment each Friday. This will allow me to be a little expansive about each place if I want to, and at the same time hopefully won’t bog this place down all at once with nostalgia overload. Also, it will unburden me of the sometimes maddening process of thinking of something even vaguely interesting to write about. For one day of the week, at least.

So, anyway, here’s the first of what will hopefully be several installments. This week it concerns the establishment that was sort of the “mother” of all my later bar-hopping experiences, a place I first started going to halfway through my senior year of high school (when one could still drink legally at age 18), and which probably altered my later path in life more than I would ever like to admit, even (especially) to myself.

**********

1. The Cactus Lounge. The Cactus Lounge was located on Park St., just northeast of Railroad Blvd. There was a drug store on the corner, then the Cactus. A grocery store was across Park.

The Cactus was kind of a dive, a small, two-story wood frame building of indeterminate age. There couldn’t have been more than 300 sq. ft. of usable space on the ground floor, where the bar was; a three sided bar with a wall behind it, in the middle of the room. There was a warped shuffleboard table along the south wall, and a jukebox and old style analog pinball machine on the east wall, next to the entrance. Behind the bar on the north side of the building was an area with a couple of tables and chairs, and a pool table. On the west side were the restrooms, such as they were (let’s just say I was glad I could stand up to piss; or as some graffiti in the men’s room read, ‘Go ahead, crabs can’t swim upstream.’)

The place was always dark and smoky, and decorated with all manner of promotional material from the beer distributors – neon lighted Budweiser signs, Miller Lite posters, a Moosehead clock, etc. The negative effect on one’s balance caused by a dozen or so longnecks was periodically enhanced by the rumble of freight trains going by on Railroad Ave. The southwest corner of the building was maybe 15 ft. from the tracks (Railroad ran at a 45 degree angle to its cross streets, including Park), and when the big diesel locomotives would pass by, the whole place would shake.

The proprietor was an old WWII veteran named Les Springs, who lived upstairs. He hired college-age kids to run the bar for him. Meantime, he would sit all night in the VFW hall a block or two south on Park, across Railroad, telling war stories with his buddies and getting loaded. Then he’d show up at the Cactus an hour or so before closing and hold court at the bar. He had two or three stock phrases he used over and over, issued loudly and with slurred speech, the slurring caused by all the drinks he had at the VFW earlier that night, and the giant cigar that was always jammed into the corner of his mouth. A couple of his sayings I remember in particular – when you walked up to the bar, he’d mumble, “Whadd’l’ya have?” every single time; and when he was trying to close the place down and get everyone out of there, he’d yell, “It’s Motel 6 time.” His clientele was almost entirely college age or a few years older, and most of us could imitate him bellowing these bon mots, and often did.

The Cactus’ license was for beer only, and the place closed every night at midnight, even on the weekends. Pitchers of draft beer were less than $2, longnecks were I think $1. Wednesday thru Saturday nights, it was usually packed. The jukebox was almost always blaring, and had an eclectic mix of music I don’t think ever changed the four or five years I hung out there, and most of it was not of very recent vintage – some Sticky Fingers era Rolling Stones, other assorted mid 1970’s hard rock, Jerry Jeff Walker and Hank Williams, Jr. of course, and some country songs I never knew the singers of (I’m not much of a country fan), but which are permanently burned into my brain, from hearing them a gazillion times while drinking at the bar or playing shuffleboard or trying to put a move on some sorority babe out slumming – “999, 999 Tears”, “From a Jack to a King”, “Hello Walls”, and several others.

As time went on and my crowd got wilder and wilder, the Cactus evolved from a destination for the evening into a starting point for our night time forays – whatever was planned for later on, we’d usually meet up at the Cactus around 8:00 or so and spend a few hours drinking beer and loosening up, before we embarked on more terminal activities.

For me and I think most of the people I hung out with, graduation from college roughly coincided with drifting away from the Cactus scene. I’m not really sure why. Anyway, we went there less and less, and of course the loosely allied group I ran with in school drifted apart as well, as life’s responsibilities began to intrude into the picture.

Sometime later, Les died (I used to wonder at times if he hadn’t already died awhile back, and was just preserved from the inside out by all the alcohol), and a couple of former habitués of the Cactus a few years older than I bought it and ran it for a year or two. Eventually a government grant came through to move and re-route the railroad tracks running down the middle of Railroad Avenue. The city would condemn land on the north side of the street, and widen it to a six lane highway spur with a median in the middle, and rename it MLK Parkway. They were building an “inner loop” from South Park to the north end, and easing traffic congestion around Lamar University. Some of the first casualties were the Cactus and the buildings immediately surrounding it.

It was sometime before that happened, probably three or four years after my time as a 'regular', that one mid-week night my cousin and I got to feeling a bit nostalgic, and went by the Cactus for a few beers and I think to relive old times a bit (though this part was never mentioned between us.) When we walked in, though, there was a young kid behind the bar and maybe three customers in the place. The atmosphere was entirely dead, and to me profoundly depressing. As Thomas Wolfe said, you can’t go back again. I shouldn’t have even tried.

Then, not long after, that small piece of real estate where I and so many others had misspent a good deal of our youths was cleared for road construction, and only an empty grassy knoll was left at that spot (save for a few stunted wisteria trees the city had planted), overlooking busy MLK below. I thought they should have erected a plaque at least, to commemorate the place. ‘Here stood the Cactus Lounge, a drinking establishment where a generation of Beaumont’s youth, full of vigor and promise, spent their time; where some of them first contemplated the notion of selling their souls, thus beginning the long process of happily pissing it all away.’

Jones-ing for Willie C.

After another desultory week of watching and listening to amoral Bush and the hoodlums, strongmen, and fixers he has hired to run the country, I hope I can be forgiven for slipping a bit into nostalgia.

I miss Bill Clinton.

There, I said it. I don't miss him so much for specifically political reasons. I miss the person. If I'm going to have to put up with one anyway, I think I'd prefer a president with a real sense of humor over one with a self-interested smirk; I prefer a complicated man with a perhaps fatal taste for the wild side over an overgrown frat boy who had it all handed to him every step of the way.

I dug this up somewhere, and the most interesting thing about it to me is that as late as the summer of 1998, George W. Bush apparently wasn't even on the radar yet as far as the 2000 election goes. Well, it wouldn't be his style to start with everyone else and labor through the whole process of lining himself up as a candidate, would it?. Why do that when you can wait around until your attention wanders in that direction, then call up a bunch of your dad's friends and get them to do the work for you, and pay for it all?

Anyway, from the dustbin:

*****

THE CABLE PIPELINE VOL. I, NO. 30
May 4, 1998

THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY (OR THE LAST TWO-EIGHTHS OF IT)

EVERYBODY'S EVERYTHING. After another dreary week of watching CNN and MSNBC, I am driven once again to comment, against all my better judgment, about the abounding legacy of President Bill Clinton, and all the surrounding hoo-ha thereof.

After watching the aforementioned news networks, and reading this week's Time, which has four consecutive articles in the national news section concerning various aspects and angles of all the investigations going on at this point into the Clinton administration, it occurred to me, once again, that all this was just a bit too much to digest for the average citizen. You know, it seems like the Whitewater investigation (which is still ultimately, after all the tangents and blind alleys he has run down, what Kenneth Starr is supposed to be investigating) began almost as soon as Clinton was sworn in, and here we are, five and a half years and roughly sixty million dollars of public money later, and what do we have to show for it? However one comes down on the question of Kenneth Starr himself, whether one considers him a cheap-jack thug and inept investigator with a hard-on for Bill Clinton, or a human sump pump of taxpayer dollars, or an avenging angel come to rid the country of the single greatest scourge on man since Satan - or, if like most of us, one falls somewhere in between on the question - it is still hard to look around and not wonder just what has been accomplished thus far. What positive results has Kenneth Starr brought us? What started as an investigation into an allegedly shady land deal back in Arkansas way back when, with perhaps (allegedly) peripheral involvement of the President's (then Governor of Arkansas') wife, has mushroomed into what? Webb Hubbell, Vince Foster, David Huaing, Gennifer Flowers, Jim and Susan McDougall, Vernon Jordan, Susan Willey, Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Winkin, Blinkin and Nod, and Bullwinkle Moose. And on and on and on.

Starr strikes me as the truest definition in a long time of what a loose cannon really is. The term is a long overused adage by now, and trite, but think of Starr, rolling around wildly on the deck of the ship of state, firing off indiscriminately in whatever direction he happens to be facing at the time, doing irreparable damage in some cases, but with absolutely no regard for that, as long as he gets to keep reading his name in the papers every day, as long as he is assured a spot on the evening news each night, as long as they are holding that plum spot on the faculty of Pepperdine U. for him out in California, with the school financed million-dollar bungalow with the majestic view of the Pacific Ocean. Being a loose cannon is Kenneth Starr's reason for being, actually, and you and I are sanctioning it. Because every dollar Starr has spent so far in the six years he has been investigating the Clintons without coming up with a single indictable offense has been public money. Kenneth Starr's employers, while he has jumped at every hint of impropriety like a bass jumping at a Gig-olo lure and has completely lost his grip on his investigation and himself, are you and I and anyone else left reading down his or her paycheck stub each week or two and seeing the big chunk come out of the middle before one gets to the bottom line of what is "take-home" pay. We pay Kenneth Starr. We employ him; and I for one am ready to say, to continue the angling metaphor for a moment, "Hey, Ken, fish or cut bait. Unless you can come up with something prosecutable in the next three months, you are off the job; and you will have to reimburse us for all the money you wasted along the way indulging your personal distaste for Bill Clinton and his subordinates and friends." Whaddya say, fellow taxpayers? I say we hire a lawyer and start an investigation into Kenneth Starr, and none too soon, either.

Clinton has remained cheery through all this, no doubt at least partly because for some odd reason not even his supporters can really adequately explain (though many pundits, both pro and con, have tried), his poll numbers and popularity have remained high, and even increased in some cases. The conservatives and Clinton-haters are going crazy at this; which almost makes the whole sorry mess worth it to someone like me, who enjoys watching the reactionary Nazi element of the American political spectrum go nuts every time it cannot figure out why the rest of the country will not go along with it's thinking. It is almost as fun as it was watching the left- wing nuts go crazy every time Reagan's numbers went up after he said something particularly ill-advised and patently stupid, which was practically all the time.

I tend to think that, politics aside, Clinton is a lot like Reagan in some, no many ways; and people just liked the both of them, and did not particularly care what all else went on, as long as we did not get steered into some stupid war, and as long as the economy stayed booming. And there you have it. It is tempting to write off the whole mess of Kenneth Starr's administration-long and apparently fruitless investigation as just a low-ball, sleazy (albeit expensive) sideshow to what has otherwise been a pretty great eight years, if you look at it from the narrow view that we have fought no wars and our economy and markets, against long odds, according to a lot of "bears" lurking out there, have just kept booming and booming.

I am personally a little more sanguine about all of this. For what we are reduced to now, and apparently will be for the rest of Clinton's term, is marveling at his ability to again and again face the firing squad of public scrutiny of his most personal and morally ambiguous – to say the least – doings, and to walk away each time unscathed and smiling and more popular than ever before. This is great theater, as they say, but kind of takes us away from the reason why we get together as a country every four years and elect a President in the first place: To get things done, to make changes or to keep things the same, but at any rate to have a vision for where the country is going and to do what is possible to get us there. We do not elect someone to publicly dodge bullets to amuse our most base and prurient interests, which is about the only function Bill Clinton serves nowadays, and it seems all he will do for the next two-and-a-half years, while serving out his lame duck term. And it is a shame. And one cannot blame Kenneth Starr alone for this (although in my personal opinion Mr. Starr deserves to be beaten in the kidneys with sticks, to have lumps pounded on him, and then to be thrown into the bottom of a deep, dark sewer somewhere, left to the fat green flies), or the "moral degeneration" of our society, as it seems to be popular for network commentators to point out lately. Bill Clinton's own dark heart and moral shortcomings are contributing factors to the circus that has now been made of his administration, and why he will never be able to pursue some of his really brighter ideas, like reforming our public health system, or trying to make public education something more than a rat hole we throw money down and a politicized, politically correct mess that has little if anything to do with what should be it's primary focus, educating our children. Because of his personality flaws and peccadilloes, Clinton will not get to do any of this, and because of it, we all lose. And that is the saddest aspect of this whole thing.

And what will the future bring? I mean, what happens after Clinton? I do not think many of the pundits have thought much about this, but I have. Because Clinton has to leave after 2000, regardless, and I for one look at the prospect of a Clinton-less future more or less like a stone junkie dimly views the news on the street that the DEA is about to crack down big time on his neighborhood, and heroin will be extremely hard to come by from now on, and what he does get will be a pale imitation of the stuff from the "good old days." All these Geraldo wannabes and cheap Mike Wallace imitators better brush up their resumes, because once Bill is gone, so too goes the fun.

Think of it. Let's look at our current prospects for the race in 2000. On the democratic side, we have Vice President Al Gore. Earnest, boring, plodding. . .morally a bit shady, we find out, after he was caught fund-raising from his VP desk and (I thought) after he shamelessly used his dead sister as political fodder in his anti-tobacco speech at the 1996 convention. . . but I do not think you will find much sexual contretemps in his past (or present). Dick Gephardt? Well, call me prejudiced, but I never thought a guy with no eyebrows could be much fun (not to mention trusted). Republicans? Newt Gingrich? Give me a break! Lamar Alexander? Pleeease!

Republicans do not have sex, anyway. They are not known for it. They are too interested in policy, I guess. Picture a guy like John Kasich, alone in a darkened room, stroking himself over some position paper on supply-side economics he just read.

Anyway, whatever happens after 2000, no matter who or which side wins, it will be extremely dull as compared to now, and I think all these people who so earnestly want to run Bill Clinton out of the country on a rail ought to think about that a little, before they start constructing little altars to Kenneth Starr in the corners of their living rooms.