Sesshu Foster's Blog, page 5

3 by Paul Foster

list of things I like at work (for Sesshu, March 28, 2014)

wild turkeys wandering around the abandoned barracks with broken windows at ford ord.
working with Jose from guanajuato who gave me an excellent recipe for chicken enchiladas.
waiting in the dark, in the rain for the 6:30 bus to work with the lady that doesn’t speak and marches in place.
my supervisor, stephanie’s beautiful laugh coming out of the break room at lunchtime. I always eat outside.
fernando cooking flautas at lunchtime, the smell reaching all the way to me and my bologna sandwich.
waiting for an hour at monterey beach after work for a bus to pacific grove, watching the boats (two small sailboats playing with each other in a strong wind) and the people.
Learning patience and tolerance and other things from the other G.A.’s (workers like me) like lola helping me get ViaCare and Medical, which had always been denied to me. (not old enough, not young enough.)
All the birds in the wetlands wooded area in laguna grande park. (saw an egret and a heron this week.)
Being able to do a job with tools and job requirements that I like and understand.
crossed out: Mark (public works boss)

workers: Stephanie

Fernando

Paul

Richard

Being outside all day

no matter what kind of weather

going to a lot of different places.

Memories of Grandma —a list

i think this is the right incident that led me to live with Grandma: i was living at the highlands inn in carmel with my father. he got fired (through no fault of his own, he was doing a good job. it was a power play on the part of another employee.) i continued to live at the highlands inn and attend carmel high school. sometimes i hitchhiked home after school on highway one, across the street from the school. one afternoon, a highway patrol car pulled up and the cop came out to talk to me. he asked me, “how old are you?” i got scared & said, “18.” then he asked me, “what year were you born?” i couldn’t figure it out. the officer drove me to the juvenile hall in salinas where they put me in a room with one other guy. i asked him, “what are you in for?” he said, “i stabbed my father.” he asked me what i was in for. i told him, “i couldn’t do the math.” i remember thanksgiving came up while i was there and we had turkey dinner on trays. a yoga guy came and tried to teach us a different way to breathe. i think somehow i ended up at grandma’s house after that.
grandma lived on the corner of rice & roni in vallejo, in a pretty big two story house. there was a big back yard and a garage, although grandma didn’t drive a car. she kept her pickled fruits and vegetables in the garage, in mason jars. we never ate them. i never saw her make any but i know she did it.
vallejo seemed like a very depressed city at that time. Things seemed run down and not much was happening. Somebody told me it was the heroin capitol of the area, which was believable. There were some pretty scary people walking around. i went to an alternative high school called “people’s high.” i don’t remember learning much there but i did develop a fear of black guys who might fuck you up, just out of boredom maybe, or because they didn’t like your face.
one thing i did learn was in english class, the teacher really liked this author, jack kerouak. I read a couple of his books and learned about his friends and experiences. i liked the frank informal character of his writing. its nonelegance.
i met a girl there named Dusty Rhodes. she was wild and sweet. she lived in a foster home, where we would go to make out. Once i brought her to grandma’s house and took her upstairs to my room. a loud voice camew booming up the stairs. “there’ll be no shacking up in my house!” i had never heard heard grandma raise her voice before. i never brought dusty back there. later i would learn that she had given me gonnereah.
at school i also learned where to get drugs. i used to smoke pot and take LSD. grandma wasn’t really a great cook, but she did cook for me and i was grateful. one evening she made spaghetti and i was high on LSD. i sat down at the table with grandma, who really didn’t smile that much, but we sat together eating dinner. The spaghetti noodles were swirming all over my plate. I liked being with grandma and i did smile and tell her how much i liked spaghetti. When i tasted it though, it seemed so wrong. I looked across the table at grandma and she was chewing her food, looking as happy as she usually did. i kept eating, wondering if i was just having a bad acid trip, or what? i didn’t want to show disrespect for grandma so i ate it all. Later she told me she made the sauce with wine but it was really wine vinegar. That was the sourest spaghetti i ever ate.
grandma kept all the shades closed. her living room window had an awning that came halfway down the window. there was a bush that came up below the window, leaving a four inch view of vallejo. This was her usual view. Grandma didn’t go outside much. I used to do shopping for her. If she went outside and worked in the yard sometimes she’d get a big rash and her face would swell up. It was like she was allergic to the outside world. She stayed mostly in her big chair in the living room looking out through four inches of daylight.
Grandma had a piano. She told me she used to play music for the silent movies at theatres. She never really played anymore. One time I took her a John Lennon songbook and she sat down at the piano and played “imagine” magically, flawlessly. that was a really good time in my life.
On one counter was a picture of ray foster, her son. He was in a football stance, in an old time uniform, probably in college. He looked dynamic and young.

 

 

 

 

Journal: A SERIOUS EXPERIMENT

4/27/11 — 4:40 PM— KFC— Seaside— Sunshine after work… Trying to go in a different direction I headed up Broadway and down Fremont, away from my ‘on the way home’ store and my spot in the woods (where I enjoyed many hours after work with my radio and a quart of beer and my thoughts).

I’ve been seriously considering stopping my drinking thing lately, mostly on account of my worsening health and other related problems.

…SYMTOMS…

…I’ve been suffering from chronic fatigue (and weakness) for awhile now.

…My muscles are shrinking and deteriorating (although I haven’t lost much weight)—I look skinnier.

…I have frequent nausea (every morning) and my “stomach” hurts alot. This is accompanied by

—Loss of appetite.

thin skin?

thin hair?

My hands are shaking/ trembling now—(although I did my usual good job at work)

…Sometimes lately my fingers have been seizing up like cramped outstraight at weird angles at work. I had fun working with the guys at Laguna Grande park today in the sunshine trimming trees and cleaning up. A G.A. spotted “the bread truck” parked at the end of the block on Alhambra so I went and got a Marie Callender’s frozen dinner for lunch, (Roast beef & mashed potatoes & greenbeans & carrots) and a sugary cinaman type roll with some kind of berry filling for break. It’s kind of hard to hold my food (fried chicken and a biscuit) with my hands shaking like this, I don’t know where this is leading… will it get worse? will it get better? I thought: maybe if I each I can have a treat after work instead of a beer and it will only cost as much as a couple of beers and I won’t be drinking and maybe I’ll get really full and I won’t feel as much like drinking (since it usually makes me feel kinda sick if I eat and drink at the same time).

I found a Korean 99 cents store on the way here and bought this notebook to write about this.

A very irritating cold wind has been coming up lately in the late afternoons and I’m thinking of taking a bus home and skipping my usual walk to the monterey bus plaza.

…I’ve been mostly always cold inside lately. (although its very warm here in this restaurant and my slightly sunburnt face feels hot now).

Well, I’m going to look for a bus stop. (5:30 PM)

The bus came right after I sat down (5:35 PM) Having bigger paper with longer lines makes me write different. Writing on a moving bus is hard.

We’re going by El Estero park —where I had another “on the way home spot” after stopping at the little neighborhood Korean Market in Monterey.

Now qwe are at MPC where Frankie (a G.A.) told me today they give away food and razors and deodorant and stuff by the student center. (by the library, cafeteria? what hours?)

So it’s been 12 hours since I work up that I havent had a beer today. Last beer I finished at 9 PM last night only drinking one quart all day yesterday, and about the same the day before, Monday, WHEN I REALLY FELT LIKE CRAP and I had NO POWER OR ENERGY and my brain was all scrambled and bad thoughts kept coming and EVERYTHING HURT, and

I WAS TRYING TO WORK.

Michael is “G.A. Baby!” Jerry’s friend.

Jerry’s other friend G.A. is Charlie who lives around the corner I think. (the guy who is joking a lot.)

6PM. At the bus plaza. People sitting around and standing around in the evening sun and long shadows mostly without speaking. Across the street is the little store with the east indian (?) guys where I would sometimes get a beer and bring it here to wait for the bus. Across the street the other way is PEET’S where they have really good expensive (2.00? same as a beer) coffee that  used to get when I was drinking coffee. They have a nice patio outside where I could sit and drink coffee and smoke. It’s across the parking lot from Trader Joe’s, where I used to buy Bul Kogiu and other delicious foods and the building where they have A.A. meetings (like the one that just ended) that I used to attend when I was going to meetings.

Tomorrow is my shorter day at work.

(6 hours)

On May Third I might have a date to work for Cam. I have to call her before then to make sure or make rearrangements.

The bus to P.G. is coming in 4 minutes.

The number 2 bus to P.G., leaving now, leaving now (6:15 PM)

This is my fourth and last bus of the day and I’m heading home.

Francis got on the bus on the way home. We talk and laugh. I come home to find the house empty except for one hungry small-face snaggle tooth cat. I still haven’t had a beer all day. My eyeballs itch. Its amazing and scary. It feels really good when strong cravings are not making me miserable, and that shaking thing… So I can’t stop drinking for a little while then have a beer to feel better (or “normal”) and then stop drinking after that, because I won’t, and these weird feelings will just continue and I won’t really adjust to being sober— because it will take a long time and abstinence ro get my brain back in tune with sobriety and my brain chemicals rebalanced in a “normal” way. I think until then it will be a constant battle requiring constant vigilance.

NPR says: IT’S 7 O’CLOCK.

Sometimes when I have stopped drinking for awhile my brain signals get mixed up, for example I can’t tell if I need to take a shit or brush my teeth, and I almost put toothpaste on the toilet paper. There is this kind of confusion and mental chaos.

…there’s been blood in my shit later. (a couple of times enough to turn the bowl water red)

…my pee has turned a dark, murky orange color that sinks quickly to the bottom of the bowl in a concentrated way.

7:20 PM. The sun is getting ready to set. I opened some windows in here to let in some fresh air, the house was all closed up smelled funky.

I fed the cat. She sits on the kitchen table, satisfied, looking out the window. The only one that got mail today (2 letters!) was Anthony, who usually doesn’t get any. (John gets a lot of mail)

My eyes are itching really alot. Some kind of knowledgeable sounding people are discussing America and the Middle east in quiet voices on NPR. There was a G.A. today, Calvin, I think, who had a really BIG incessant voice, and when we were all packed in that truck I couldn’t wait to get out, even though what he was talking about was kind of interesting.

Drinking a warm cheap soda in the fading light.

Monday I had no strength, no energy.

Tuesday i worked vigorously.

Today I did even better I think.

I wonder if I’ll be able to sleep tonight.

WASTED DAZE WASTED YEARS MISSED CHANCES GOOD TIMES TURNED BAD BROKEN THINGS WASTED MONEY ANGRY DISAPPOINTED PEOPLE LOSS LOSS LOSS LOSS LOSS

…I keep getting more and more unmotivated.

…Doing simple things ( like laundry, or taking a shower, or cooking, or brushing my teeth, or making my bed…) become hard

…My depression and anxiety increases.

…My chronic physical pain increases.

…It gets harder and harder to face and interact with peoople, so I avoid more and more opportunities and become more and more isolated.

…I miss lots of possible job opportunities because I am not interacting with and meeting and talking with people. (Because I am intoxicated, or tired, or depressed, or too full of anxiety, or full of bad feelings about myself—feelings of worthlessness.

…My relationships with family members (and friends) have deteriorated or been lost.

…My financial dependence on other people causes me guilt and shame.

…My loneliness becomes almost unbearable at times.

…Blackouts, memory problems.

8 PM: Lost my hat and glasses.  hard to find them without my glasses on. Searched the apartment. Found them. A poem on NPR. A positive review of Emmy Lou Harris and her new album.

ONE DAY AT A TIME…

ONE DAY AT A TIME…

ONE DAY AT A TIME…

ONE DAY AT A TIME…

I MADE IT!!

9:30 PM!

Bedtime. As soon as I get comfortable in bed the cat will cry at the door to go out.

“You’re stupid, stupid,” I tell her.

I went to the bank, got some money, went to the liquor store and got a quart nof cranberry cocktail (tasty pretty good, better than soda) and some smokes. Ate an orange.

I made it through one day! (so far.)

NOW IF I CAN SLEEP…?

So there are some good feelings from doing this, a lot of weirdness & discomfort and confusion, but some real good feelings too. My fingers are seizing up again, I never had that before. I hope it goes away. It hurts like cramps and I can’t make it stop right away. I’m gonna turn the radio off and try to sleep now. 9:45 PM.

4-28-11 6:45 AM— on the bus

Went to bed at 9:30. Laid there for at least 4 hours unable to sleep. I’m not sure what happened after that.

So I made it through one DAY without drinking. Big deal. Except:

I’ve been able to do that only a few times in my “adult” life. Few enough to count on one hand.

Except that this could be the necessary first step in a whole new phase of my life.

Except that it was difficult and painful and making me feel crazy inside.

  Last day of G.A. work for this month. Frankie is the G.A. with long hair. Try to remember their names. Some of these guys have good information and experience. Some of them are fun people going through hard times.

The little seizures or cramps in my hands continued for awhile into the night but finally subsided. The muscles in my hands are still sore and tight and it feels like it could happen again. I’ll find out.

Today will be different if they let me off early. I will have MORE TIME to deal with my self and my addict-mind-insanity. I’m taking this notebook with me cuz it seems to help.

12:45 PM Jack in the Box—Seaside

—Beautiful sunny Morning—

Just got off work. Mark sent me to the mechanics shop this morning.

“I thought I’d give you an easy day today,” he said. I thanked him. Joel and Xavier were there. I cleaned the shop (it was still pretty clean from when I did it on Monday) and talked to Ray about his motorcycle and also to Stephanie , who tries to help me. Joel sent me clean the parking lot so I worked on that til lunch. Stephanie brought me a perfectly sized bandaid after looking through a bunch. (I bleed easily) These two junior bacon cheeseburgers taste all dried out and flavorless, not like beef at all. ($3.04) NOT RECOMMENDED. Worst burgers I’ve had in a long time. Think I’ll go sit at the City Center and have a smoke and a cherry cola.

12:20 PM— City Center Sun— breezy. Can’t go up to social services too soon, since I got off early I’m doing OTHER THINGS.

There is this sense of heightened awareness, clarity, sharpness, like things are connecting better—it is also uncomfortable—unlike my usual somewhat numb separate dulled out state.

MY COMFORT ZONE

It’s been a day and a half now, there are definitely good things about it—not drinking—but it is still uncomfortable and I keep wanting to slip back into the comfort of that beer buzz that I am so used to.

SO NOW I HAVE TO FIND OTHER THINGS TO DO.

—I would like to get a 25.00 phone card.

—I should get back into exercizing again.

—Can’t seem to think of much right now.

The twittering birdsongs sound nice. Their shadows cross on the bricks in the sunshine around me.

4:30 PM —

turned in my time card a little after 1 pm, (Ran into Charlie, the G.A., and Harvey, the G.A. with the big voice in the S.S. office) took buses home. the wind was bothering me and I felt tired, maybe from lack of sleep. So I ate a piece of chicken with some cranberry cocktail & laid down with NPR, slept at least an hour. Now I feel kind of hazy, not so awake. It’s warm and quiet in here just me and the cat. Gonna try to wake up and think of what to do.

7:30 PM

Went to Rite-Aid, Savemart, and the thrift-shop (closing for the night.)

Ran into Norma in Save-Mart— felt composed and calm, didn’t freak out. Congratulated her on her win in the housing case, “a long battle.”

—BOUGHT: —22.00 in foodstuffs (food stamps)

—25.00 phone card

—4 cans of cat food.

…including a big jug of vegetable juice (like V-8)

and a bottle of cranberry/ pomegranate/ blueberry/ apple/ pear juice

and some Blue Cheese salad dressing.

Si I put the food away, fed the cat, ate some pork skins with juice, wrote in this notebook and now restless don’t know what to do.

“things to do”

10 PM: talked with Anthony and John. Stuck the stickers on the game board from Savemart. Drank some vegetable juice with some toast and a Cadbury Egg (from John, for Easter) I made it through this day, my second day. Tomorrow (and the days following) I have no work so I have to find things to do.

I’m supposed to write to Sesshu and call Cam, maybe work for her on the 3rd of May. maybe I can make or buy Alicia a birthday gift.

Maybe clean and organize my STUFF.

—FRIDAY MORNING—

7:40 AM— sunshine, BLUE sky, breezy.

My nose just started bleeding. Watered the little tree, fed the cat.

Maybe I could clean this place up today—FOR SOMETHING TO DO. Really should be done. Can;t find anything here. What is all this stuff?

5:10 PM

I was cleaning and organizing the house this morning, I was feeling kind of shaky and irritated, like i needed something I didn’t have. John got up and started doing Johnisms and I started yelling and going off and then I went and got a beer, and then I went and got another. I was thinking I have to learn to cope with those feelings I get without drinking, but I didn’t. I kept cleaning the house, 7 hours spent so far, still looks the same, but I know it’s better. John took off. I put some lentils on with ham and onions and that’s cooking. (Cleaned out my refrigerator shelf) then I tried to take a nap but my mind just kept going and finally I got up with a headache. This is still the experiment, this is part of it, I have to deal with this part too.

SATURDAY MORNING

8:08 AM— bright sunshine coming through the window—waking up with a headache neckache bleary brain. Fed the cat, turned on NPR, poured out the last of a beer.

Last night Omar called from Tijuana, he sounded good, still working at the airport, invited me down. he said, “we can hang out with the prostitutes, get kidnapped and cut up into little pieces.” I told him I was kind of busy working on things lately.

Cooked some lentils with leftover ham, also boiled some chicken leg quarters and made some taco meat and chicken broth. I feel tired and somehow sad and like it’s hard to move.

I did write an e-mail to Sesshu yesterday.

Also cleaned out my refrigerator shelf.

Also threw out all my music cassettes except for personal recordings with Tim and the other guys, Alicia, Zeus, like that.

Threw away a microwave oven, a toaster, a coffee maker, a whole bunch of stuff.

Cleaning went really slow, finding out what is where, where it goes. Still have a long way way to go.

—the pile by the computer.

—3 bookshelves.

—the closet.

—the cupboard shelf under the microwave.

—the carport stuff.

8:52 AM —checked my e-mail, Sesshu wrote and said he’s been really busy talking about writing at lectures & things & hasn’t been doing much writing. He said somebody might want to publish ATOMIK AZTEX in France!

Drinking a warm generic Dr. Pepper and trying to wake up. Probably feel better if I take a shower. The cat is happy laid out on the kitchen table in the sun.

DOING OTHER THINGS

This big cleaning project is happening because I quit drinking. If I would have been drinking it wouldnt have happened. One time I quit drinking and got the idea to get a computer, so I got my first computer. “Doing other things.” Ideas come. Somehow things come together, things connect when I am sober. And lots more gets done. It’s ghard to get sober and stay that way. It’s hard to GET sober. Lots of times it would seem impossible for me to stop drinking, mostly most of the time. But now I did stop for 2 days on my own and I didn’t have any seizures and I should take advantage of this time because it is here now and if I lose it I might not find it again anytime soon. it’s a GET SOBER window.

9:30 —a bowl of lentils, tastes good.

It’s really quiet around here now, no trucks roaring and rumbling outside in the alley, no workers banging stuff around out there, no skateboarders yelling and cussing and slamming their boards around, no voices, no doors slamming, no people going up and down the stairs, John sleeping & Anthony took off early, very quiet…

So I am starting again—shaky, headache, nervous, doubtful, lonely in my solitary pursuit of this thing…

—-Maybe I should go to meetings. (meet some other people who are doing this too)

10:30— took a shower, cravings attempting to take over my brain. Tried to tighten the toilet seat but I started shaking too much. Better start with something easier, like smoking a cigarette.

Thanks Again

Fried chicken smell of the past when Los Angeles was a blast of car horn, beer, particulate, urine in the corners—”Hey, Dad, we’re talking about you!”—Parking lots spilled into Beaudry, Temple, Beverly, First—the streets emptied into bars, puddled in street lights necklacing avenues and boulevards all the way to the surf. Eyes shining, faces flushed with ecstasy, that five minute summary of five years. Who were you then? How did it happen? The city cooked the night. The ocean breathed. Little fish died like eyelids. They swam through your dreams, fishes and eyelids, like cars streaming the 5 freeway, and when you awoke, the fishes and eyelids dessicated, hanging salty in bags all the way from the South Pacific to Ranch 99 Market. I saw everyone who was nothing like you, but the time reference was off. Faces flipped like cards. You felt forgotten. Women made beautiful babies with the industry of cars, ships, planes. Cashes occurred. Indexes of leftover lives collated with indices of plywood partitions, statistical margins, self-delusion with a rasp of crows. They were missing you but would forget all about it. Give us this day, this day of petroleum. The historical moment aligned like cans on shelves of family markets throughout Southern Calif. Rusty pile of cans in a desertscape, the way a horny toad gives you the eye. All the wild motion of sky goes on and on. We go on, coated in the particulate, in lungs and tears, our tongues and cavities, wear buildings like worn-out ideologies, wear worn-out ideologies like sunshine divided into columns. Fried chicken smell of summer afternoons, summer nights all winter long. Fried chicken smell of dad’s ghost, the one he shadowed wherever he walked. Fried chicken smell of downtown L.A. SRO hotel hallways, murphy beds, Bunker Hill. I was talking to you. Whatever you had said drew a finger across it, left this smudge pointing the direction you’d gone.

DICAELUS PURPURATUS postcard

3 stars fall on Sand Creek

3 stars fall on San Gabriel Mission

Selected Poems of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Jayne Cortez on Mp3

Selected Poems by Frank Stanford

3 stars fall on  Juárez

3 stars fall on Ayotzinapa

agave blooming, agave dying

17 year old killed in the crosswalk, Highland Park

lights of the San Gabriel Valley, lights atop Mt Wilson

3 stars fall on Deer Creek

3 stars fall on Hells Canyon

Marina found a scorpion in her bag before leaving AZ

she left it on the counter in a jar

3 stars fall on Los Angeles

3 stars fall

 

2 pictures from the mountains of death

 

 

they walked among you, you stones.

these walked among you, you lonely trails.

they walked among you, dim plains.

these walked among you, down long shores.

they walked among you, misty trees.

these walked among you, cities of forgetting.

they walked among you, fallen petals.

for Paul

for a moment, i sat on the top step and looked three stories down ransford avenue

i rode my bike to the rose bowl (three times around)

i looked up at the agave spikes about to flower on the high hillside

i looked at the people jogging and walking

i drank iced coffee out of my steel bottle

i waited at the crossing for the light rail train to pass

i looked at the white clouds over the mountains

i thought they were beautiful, just like my wife said

i kissed the small of her back while she cooked chile beans

i scratched her back as we watched a dvd about sebastiao salgado

i scratched the dogs head and muttered something to him

i washed the dishes with soap and hot water thinking that it’s some kind of privilege

each thing increases with wonder when you see the main stem crushed and broken

i drove 900 miles to clean out your place and make your final arrangements

it’s an honor and a privilege to have shared this life with you

thank you for 57 years, my brother

Letter

rain blowing through the cypress and pine forest across the peninsula/ but it was sunny the day we went to wendy’s memorial atop jack’s peak, first time i’d been up there/ i told wendy’s sisters i was very moved by their testimonial at the church in salinas/ you were tired, chose to rest in the car when dolores and i walked in the woods/ we looked south along the coast/ carmel valley below/ post-op, no chance for your stomach to heal, you were drinking again/ exhausted, napping in the front seat/

someone said you looked ten years older/ beard gone gray/

monterey bay unfurling to the north/ open to the pacific/ light and shadow on the water/ haze across the north/ i gave your computer to alba and little omar/ alba said big omar, deported to oaxaca because of dui’s, is drinking his life away/ little omar took the laptop to his room with his little buddy/ sabro and i delivered orchids to neighbors who helped you out, brought you food, filled your fridge, carried a new bed to the third floor for you/ gave you rides to doctor’s appointments/ helped you finally secure disability/

you felt better about your situation for the first time in five or more years/ you wouldn’t have to ask me for rent/ you’d be getting your own money (from disability) for rent and food/ taking some loose ends of your life in hand/ finally you had some luck/

a month later, you died/ that was always your luck/ sabro and i walked upstairs to the third floor/ you often sat there at 5 or 6 AM smoking/ no more/

berta brought your drawing of andrea and a photograph of andrea so i could see the fidelity of your work on the drawing/ alba and berta had returned to the apartment repeatedly because john told them we were coming/ alba was in tears/ did i hug her? i don’t remember/ i didn’t know exactly what to do/ what to do first/ people had asked if i needed help/ i said no/ it’s too late for help now/ there’s nothing to be done now/ on the website for hope services, it said they offer “end of life electronic recycling”/

we took your dead electronics (dvd and vhs players, remote controls, boomboxes, a big TV that must’ve weighed a hundred pounds lugged downstairs, dead computers and keyboards, an old round iMac) to the office in seaside/ clothes, dvds, cd’s, boxes of boots, shoes, socks (neatly washed), to the goodwill truck in an alley off broadway in seaside/ a full load of trash bags of clothes from under your bed and the closet to st. vincent de paul in p.g./ the little boutiques and cute shops of downtown p.g./ del monte avenue/ past the parks, where you worked on clean-up crews 4 days every month to qualify for “general assistance” checks of a couple hundred dollars/ homeless people, families, encamped in the underbrush of the ravines/ homeless family sitting on a pile of redwood chips as if for a picnic/

dozens or hundreds of hours of cassettes you recorded with friends (some with zeus from the 70s or 80s) poured into the recycle bin/ sabro and i spent the day cleaning out your place/ denim jacket that you never left the apt. without hanging by the door/

debbie had boxed up most of your things/ she was there while i asked john about your last days/ john burke, who found your body and called 911, didn’t want to be found, he disappeared/ according to john, 911 told john burke, “we don’t deal with that.”/ john burke told them, “there’s a dead body here!”/ john got out of bed after paramedics and police arrived/ john burke had put your body on the floor “to make you more comfortable”/ your last 2 days spent in bed, in pain/

your body is still at salinas coroner’s office/ unlike on TV, they wouldn’t let us see you, not to identify the body or say goodbye/ detective schumaker said, “we’re not set up for viewing the body. that’s an arrangement that will have to be made with the mortuary.”/ she—like the people at the mortuary, said, “we’re sorry for your loss.”/ the transfer of your body might take till next week because of the holidays/ (“I was PUSHED out into this world. I didn’t asked to come. I didn’t choose my name, my body, my time or place.”)/ overcast, fremont avenue seaside ca, business strip/ all changed since you were a teenager, now ford ord closed, the bars, strip joints and heroin dealers have moved on/ there’s one “adult bookstore dvds” across the ave from the quality inn where we checked into #108/ hot motel shower/ steam/

my hair wet after the shower/ at the door of 108, looking out on the parking lot at night/ new houses under construction across the street/ a few rundown old bungalows/ oaks/ teenagers back and forth to the motel vending machine/ teen crosses the parking lot on a bike/

once, we gave rides to the lonely soldiers hitchhiking around town looking for girls and parties, sharing white boys’ marijuana/ by then i’d stopped smoking, you were just getting started/ debbie told me you said, “he turned out all right, why did i turn out like this?”/

in those days we were the same/ the sea lions barking from the breakwater at night/ lights of fisherman’s wharf/ lights on the water/ seagulls in the dusk/ i had a lot of anger/ i told you, “what’s the point of happiness when there’s revenge?”/ uncle bill standing over you when you were 12, he knocked you down—whipping you with your stars & stripes shirt that he ripped off, screaming—fucking kids like you were destroying this country!/ on your own from age 13 on after dad took tina and carmen north, fired for no fault of his you said/ still, when he moved out he left you behind alone/ hitchhiking from carmel inn to carmel high school age 13, living by yourself in basement room/ doing groundskeeping to pay rent/ highway patrolman asked you, “how old are you?”/ “eighteen,” you told him, but when he asked what year you were born, you couldn’t figure it out./ in jail your cellmate said he was in for stabbing his father/ he asked you what you were in for/ you said, “because i couldn’t do the math.”/

psychedelic jimi hendrix mural at marina high school/ that photo still pinned to your wall/ the mural itself long gone, though nobody has checked/ it was something you were proud of/ before the devastation of the last decades/ the shame of it/ shame/ to drink yourself to death/ and fail/ struggle to get your life back together/ and fail/ die/ stomach and organs ruined by alcohol/ heart affected by malnutrition/ two days of pain/ many days of pain/ then another night/ like any other/ then the morning/

seagull cries/ misty halo street lamps/ cypress/

i kept boxes of your papers/ i gave john your raincoat, the new green one i gave you, never worn, tags still on/ mom wanted your sketches or drawings/ sabro’s keeping your paint brushes and art supplies—he took up painting after ethan died/ we gave your musical instruments to alicia/ drove north, slowed by traffic accidents in the rain/ pickup truck upside down on highway one by the freedom exit/ we headed back to l.a. in the rain, sabro on his cell phone the whole way playing games as i drove/ rain blowing through the cypress and pine forest/ of course, the clouds unraveled in a chill night wind before we hit the grapevine/ by the time we crossed over at lost hills road, 46/

Letters from Paul

Paul Foster, 1956 – 2015

Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2015

11:30 AM

Myopia, part 741

 

Sesshu

Thanks for the postcards.

The book, ‘AUSCHWITZ AND AFTER’ is great. (Charlotte Delbo)

I haven’t gotten all the way through it.

Sidetracked into ‘THE GREAT GATSBY.’

Sidetracked again into ‘LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING’ by Tolkien.

Got stuck on that, through 388 pages —3/4 of the book.

Intermediately: Bukowski, like a fresh hot pizza.

John just took off for MPC, the community college, to play on their library computers.

Last night I made boneless pork ribs, browned them and then stuck them in the oven with barbecue sauce, on low heat for hours, covered with aluminum foil to keep the moisture in. With rice. The guys liked it. 3 lbs. of meat gone.

I’m waiting for my computer to come back from Ohio or some place like that, wherever Toshiba lives. Paid thirty bucks for postage and the box. They said it would take maybe two weeks.

Can’t really eat too much since the recent surgery. My belly is all swollen up and it looks like a basketball stuck in the middle of a stick figure. When they took my intestines out, I don’t think this body liked that.

But I still enjoy cooking.

I ask John: “My baby is coming out soon, do you want a boy or a girl?”

John says: “It’s probably an alien.”

Refugees and migrants tramping across europe, drowning in rickety boats, running into fences and guns In Hungary, trying to make it to somewhere… They are really “Getting Out.”

Artichoke Bruschetta on totopos de maiz, hummus and Ritz crackers. Little pieces of this and that. A little at a time. Salad with baby spinach, leaf lettuce and tomatoes with a good vinegrette. Animal flesh. I cooked a large rib steak (1 1/3 pounds) for John burke the other day. It was the biggest and best steak I ever cooked. John Burke at it all. $18.00

Social Security gave me some money—

bless their little federal heart.

I took John out for fish and chips at The Crown and Anchor, a British pub. It was excellent. 50 bucks for the two of us.

I remember when fish and chips was $1.75 but that was thirty years ago. (Still tastes good)

Hummingbirds come and sit in the avocado trees outside the kitchen windows, their necks shining metallic ruby and green.

I don’t get out much.

If I get 3 blocks from home

it’s an adventure.

Mostly I go to the grocery store—

—Tomatoes,

—Lettuce

—Eggs

—Black pepper

—Garlic

—Ice cream (for John)

That’s my list for today.

hope you are doing well, I’m always grateful for you writing,

Paul

*Good Morning—                                                  Thursday, Oct. 8 2015

It’s always morning somewhere,                         9:30 A.M. Sunshine

Sometime. It’s beautiful here                                on the kitchen table,

except for the guy with the blower                        zucchini, tomatoes,

doing the parking lot and alley next                      bananas, french

door. I just finished killing fruit flies.                    and rye bread,

a daily ritual. I smack them.                                       Corn tortillas.cookies,

I got 47, not all of them.                                               cornflakes, carrots,

I called mom this morning,                                          a can of “sprats”

she sounded good.                                                            some kind of fish

Washed and dried Amir’s dishes.                                 from Latvia.

He brought me dinner last night.                                  John Burke’s herb

On a tray: a bowl of rice                                                     collection. A box

a bowl of beans, some steak,                                            of See’s Candy.

some pickled green lemons or                                          A new book I

limes (with the peel still on)                                              bought yesterday

and pickled carrots and turnips.                                        for 1 dollar.

The pickled lemons are especially

good, strange and tasty.                                                      “Contemporary

John agreed to stay here today                                           FICTION – 50 Short

to help me clean the kitchen table,                                   Stories Since 1970.”

Organize everything, all the stuff                                      A bottle of

in boxes under the table, canned                                        Chardonnay from

food and boxes of food and who knows                             my neighbor

what else. Under my bed Alba put                                       Amir (from Egypt).

a whole bunch of boxes full of my stuff                              Jello. Earwax

while I was at the convalescent place.                                 removal aid.

I don’t know what’s in all those boxes.

(Carbamide peroxide.)

Today I’m going to pull them all out                                      Potato chips.

and find out what’s in there.                                                     Raisins.

John’s got a three o’clock appointment                                 Breton health

with Zacharia to take the plastic                                               food crackers.

bottles and aluminum cans up the hill.                            brushes + pencils…

What else?

13 large black plastic bags full.

Some lady is singing a Neil Young song on K-PIG. I am enjoying the Bukowski collection very much. My computer stopped working, I probably broke it somehow. I’ll call Anthony this evening and ask him about it. I had found a free internet connection at the laundromat when I was doing my laundry. It worked fine for two days, and then NOTHING. It won’t do anything now. Jackson Browne and Bonnie Rait singing “Kisses Sweeter than Wine.” The avacado trees have lost almost all their leaves outside the kitchen window, over where Debbie and I buried my cat.

Thanks for the postcards, I just got a new one yesterday.

Yesterday I went to the shopping center, turned in a medicine bottle for a refill, bought some artichoke bruschetta, something like a dip. It tastes really good. Then I ran into a shopping cart full of books outside the thrift store, anything for 1 dollar. I bought one and went to Subway for a pastrami sandwich that I ate in the quiet wooded patio behind the bank (with my new book). Then I went to the grocery store and bought John some hummus dip, that’s what he wanted. And some rock cod fillets that I’m gonna cook for lunch.

My cat would have gone crazy over that.

Hope you are doing well.

Thanks for the books.

I need to clean this place up.

What’s in all those piles?                                                                 Paul

[on the back of the envelope: –————————IMAGINE]

 

HEY SESSHU————                             TUESDAY MORNING SUNSHINE

OCTOBER 23, 2015

 

John Lennon’s voice is coming out of my new laptop.

John Slobodin is sleeping.

Yesterday two Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door. I didn’t recognize them. One was Russian, one was black. That was a suprise. They asked me if I was a Slobodin. I said no. I told them I have a friend of theirs that comes and does bible studies with me once a week but Brent hasn’t shown up for two weeks. Hope he’s alright.

How are you? Are you alright?

I got to check out facebook a little bit this morning, I’m still learning how to work this machine.

Sending you a small token of my gratitude to you for all you’ve done. Next month I will be poor again and my carriage will turn into a pumpkin, my horses into mice.

At midnight.

Just want to say thank you while I still can.

No prince charming coming in my direction…

Hope you have a good day.

Hope you are writing.

Paul

 

Monday, October 5th

Hey Sesshu—

Thank you for the CHARLES BUKOWSKI book.

Went to the Bagel Bakery at noon today with Debbie, got a cup of coffee and asked for their internet password. (bakery PG)

It only works over there it seems.

Went to the laundrymat next door and asked the busy, impatient guy for his internet code. He typed it in for me. That one works at home in the kitchen. (At least for today.) The slumlord bitch lady Elizabeth called me today on the phone (She refuses to talk to John). to tell me she hadn’t received the rent for this month, and that we would have to pay a 50.00 late fee if she didn’t get it today. I told her John mailed it on the 2nd. She said it should have got to her but if it doesn’t by today we have to pay the fee. I’m going back to the laundromat to wash my clothes. It’s breezy and cool. Had a nice conversation with mom on the phone yesterday. “I’m slowing down,” she said, but she sounded good. Cooked Bul Goki and white rice for John & I with Kim chee and some for our neighbors downstairs, Zacharia y Selsa. Zach, has done us numerous favors but he won’t take any money (for his time, using his truck & gas) but I wanted to say thank you somehow. Checked out facebook— there were some nice photos of you and Alicia and Umeko.

Hope you are doing well.

Paul

 

 

(last week)

 

HEY SESSHU:

——-dead fruit fly blood (SMACK.)

thanks for the books.

i got to page 78 in “the Great Gatsby.”

it’s fun to read.

Nothing’s really happened in the book so far. affluent indulgence on the east coast, 1920s. John Burke said, “spoiler alert: nothing does happen.” But I like his style. Maybe Fitzgerald is just setting up the scenario. Rich people hanging out on the east coast in the 1920’s.

I’ve been making sure John gets breakfast and dinner. He left a little while ago to see his sister Katy in Watsonville, or maybe Castroville.  They have a big restaurant there called “The Great Artichoke.” They serve deep fried artichoke hearts, one of the best foods I’ve ever eaten.

I’m thinking about seeing a dentist.

I used to have a list of dentists my doctor gave me. I have to find one that accepts new MediCal patients. That will probably be in Salinas somewhere. That option is more limited than ever, although Obama finally got me MediCal coverage. And he got me a free phone. So I can’t say he didn’t do anything. He helped me out.

I’m working on a portrait of a 9 yr. old girl. Andrea. Been working on it for a week. Not Happy with the results yet. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses an amazing vocabulary, adjectives and stuff. It’s an interesting story of jaded life from back in those days. I hope he’s setting me up for a STORY.

Hope you are well.                                                                Paul

 

9/22/15

Got your postcard—Talked to mom for too long on the telephone and she hung up on me. Like Zeus sang “A bicycle is a mighty fine thing.”

Sesshu: an overcast Tuesday morning 10 AM breaking the heat wave of recent days— I was reading Dylan’s lyrics from the early days, I don’t have that music. Got up to “Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” and I closed the book.

Have to take a shower and wash the dishes and clean the bathroom sink and kitchen, the toilet: John Burke throws up in there a lot and doesn’t clean it up.

John Slobodin is supposed to come back today from the bay area after a week and a half. I bought some T-bone steaks to cook when he gets back. (We eat so much chicken.) Last night I was walking back from the grocery store, I came by Debbie’s apartment and a black cat ran up the stairs. He looked at me. “Hi Dylan,” I said. I knocked on Debbie’s door. She asked who was there. I said “It’s Paul, there’s a guy out here waiting for you.” (Dylan’s not supposed to be out.) She opened the door and he ran in. “Good night.”

I had bought some good pastrami sliced deli style and some french rolls. Made a sandwich, a fat one, ate it and went to bed.

The avacado trees—their brown leaves shiver in the breeze. Hope you are well!                                                                                                    Paul

 

 

When I was young (part two)

I was PUSHED OUT into this world.

I didn’t ask to come.

I didn’t choose my name, my body, my time or place.

I stumbled through Los Banos, Sebastopol.

I fell off a bridge and landed

stuck in a trash can in East L.A.

Always confused.

Always scared.

Hungry for love and acceptance.

I bought terrible clothes.

My uncle tore the shirt off my back.

He said it was a desecration of the

American flag.

I tried to fit in.

He kicked me out.

Sixto gave me a postage stamp.

“Write to me” he said.

I left my friends and family..

I was gone.

Years later I went back.

Uncle Bill said:

“I told you never come back.”

I said, “Uncle Bill—

it’s Christmas.”

 

 

Thursday 8/8/15

(Marcia’s birthday)

Sesshu—

It’s noon in Pacific Grove,

overcast with rainshowers

yesterday… full moon in the

western sky at 5 am…

 

How many roads must a man?

How do you barbecue a

chicken?

How is Jimmy Lew?

How I love my new toy,

my laptop, that I spent

260.00 yesterday to get it

fixed by microsoft—

How is it that Windows sucks

when it is everywhere?

How the loquat trees bloom

outside the window!

How I miss not feeling pain!

How big and smiling Umeko looks!

How fast the time goes by!

How are you?

 

tick       tick      tick…

Paul

 

CAULIFLOWER!

9/15/15

Sesshu: I LOVE BROCCOLI—

It’s very grey outside this morning.

No gulls. Small birds dart across the sky, chirping.

Yesterday I carried John’s 200 lb. suitcase downstairs, walked with him to the bus stop and watched him get on.

He’s gone to be with his sister in the bay area.

Anthony left me a big jar of kim chee so I’ve been eating kim chee and rice.

It’s quiet here. NPR: A new poet laureate for the United States, reading from a scrap of paper. The son of Mexican farmworkers.

Watching a movie John Burke gave me, “The Giver.” I think it was made for teenagers.

It reminds me of “The Maze Runner,” a series of books Alicia gave me while I was at the convalescent place. For young readers.

It was at my level, I could understand it.

I miss Charles Bukowski. Walt Whitman. Allen Ginsberg. You had a beautiful collection of Bukowski poems somebody bothered to bind in custom paper. When I read that, it felt like he was talking to me.

I woke up at 6 AM, took my medicine, went outside to smoke a cigarette.

I counted the lights in the apartment windows. Five people seemed to be up.

Maybe getting ready for work.

I listened to the birds.

Sat by the geranium blooming happily despite my constant neglect.

Hope You Are Doing Well!

Paul

 

“You believe what you want to believe…” —Tom Petty Song. A lot of people believe what is convenient for them. Something that doesn’t disturb the furniture of their mind. Things that don’t recall change, or action. The easy path, ignorance is bliss, but not really. 

9/12/15

Sesshu:

It’s Saturday morning— 8:30 AM

No gulls crying outside, a few songbirds—

John is sleeping, til noon perhaps.

John Burke has gone to work, my room still smelling of his tasty toast from trader Joe’s

Some kind of bread with every kind of grain and nut in it

Yesterday I cut up a bunch of vegetables, carrots onions celery zucchini and made friend vegetables, with some bulgogi beef from trader Joe’s.

Mimi and Anthony had come down from the south bay to visit us. Anthony took me shopping for a laptop, I got a good one I think, thanks to his computer expertise and shopping prowess. Mimi made way too many spaghetti noodles. “She always cooks too much,” Anthony said.

So I mixed the stir fried vegetables with pasta sauce to serve over spaghetti pasta. John’s going up to see his sister Jennifer in the bay area maybe tomorrow for a week and a half. Have to eat the pasta myself.

I’m supposed to draw a portrait of Andrea, the nine year old from downstairs. Maybe I’ll work on that while John is gone and the apartment is quiet.

John just woke up, breathing heavy, shuffling around the kitchen in his drool drenched pajamas, slamming the dishes around, putting them away. I listened to NPR—what’s happening with the migrants, the refugees from Syria? What did Obama say? What kind of shit did Donald Trump come up with now? How are you?

Paul

Tuesday August 18, 2015

A List

SESSHU:

—Walter Mosley talking ’bout the riots in Watts 50 years ago (he used to live there after moving from the south) on NPR.

—i lost my glasses so most things are blurry now, but i can still read. Living with eye-strain.

—the giant baby seagull cries incessantly for food from the flat top of the apartments across the street where it was probably born.

—i made pork and beans (first time) with pork and beans and ketchup, mustard, brown sugar, green hot sauce. The Johns liked it.

—Debbie came to visit me the other day, last time I sent to visit her at her apartment her husband came out and yelled “YOU’RE A PEST! A PEST!” So I haven’t gone back, I don’t want to bother him.

—The welfare dept. cut off my food stamps, so I’m learning to buy food with money. I send John to the store with a list. I always ask him, “what do you want to eat? I can put it on the list.” It’s interesting. He comes back with strange stuff.

—it’s been very warm lately. Sleep with the windows open at night, wake up with mosquito bites. Over a dozen wildfires burning in California now due to the drought and heat.

—John doesn’t believe in the drought, because it’s inconvenient for him. He says “It’s just a political scam.”

—Even the great sequoias are showing signs of stress (although the survivors have lived through hundreds of years of changing weather and fires)

—John went to St. Mary’s Church to get a bag of free food. They gave him a can of Spam, two cans of tuna fish, five unripe pears, canned vegetables, a bag of white rice and a box of spaghetti pasta. (I like cooking with rice and spaghetti pasta.)

—The environment Protection Agency released three million gallons of water laden with heavy metals into some river that heads into lake Powell.

—Our reservours are almost empty. Our water supply comes from local rainfall in the mountains above carmel. No big pipe like they have going into L.A. from far away.

—a cool breeze blows through the window over my bed coming in from over the ocean, cooling things off, cooling me off, this evening.

—hope you are writing and doing well,

Paul

 

 

 

Notes on City Lights Books for Mike Sonksen

Post-war economic boom times gave a lift to West Coast bohemian counterculture from Seattle to San Diego, and unexpectedly vital literary scenes rose in between, such as Fresno, home of a legion of writers, including Gary Soto and Juan Felipe Herrera, Santa Barbara, one time home of once widely -read but now defunct Capra and Black Sparrow presses, all were part of a burgeoning small press network that spread from coast to coast, celebrated in events such as the Taos Poetry Circus (with its World Heavyweight Poet contest), the Bisbee Poetry Festival, and Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival, once nationally known. Later recessions, state cutbacks in support for the arts, and the ever-increasing income inequality has eclipsed and erased most of that literary history and poetic culture. City Lights Books is one of the last major small press publishers extant.
















City Lights books, their revolutionary pocket poets series—the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti—and the others, Kenneth Patchen, Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile translated by Kenneth Rexroth, opened a world of poetry to me and others. They published Nicanor Parra’s Anti-Poems in 1960! Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems in 1964! That series changed American literature!
















Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the other editors at City Lights not only picked up on the New American Poetry (anthologized by Donald Allen in his 1960 edition with that title), they broadened its reach with international linkages, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jacque Prevert, Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Ernesto Cardenal.
















City Lights Books published writing that was new, socially and politically cutting edge, international and multilingual in outlook and scope. It was really cutting edge compared to the Anglophone and Eurocentric corporate New York publishing houses. It had the scope of a New Directions Publishers on the west Coast. Unlike New Directions, which looked to Europe and overlooked homegrown talent, City Lights, fed on the San Francisco Renaissance and fueled the whole burgeoning West Coast scene.
















City Lights has not only not quit, folded nor given up on the 21st century, it has continued to publish translations from Mexico and elsewhere, cutting edge poetry like Will Alexander’s brilliant Compression & Purity, as well as current U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s most recent, Notes on the Assemblage.
















City Lights is not only a great bookstore and a publishing house with a vital history, it’s a kind of lighthouse in stormy times, and a beacon that illuminates possibilities. City Lights shows that a better culture is at hand—if we take it in hand.

Poetry Reading

SRO, actually, they’re sitting in the aisles. good acoustics,

nice room, stadium seating, nice kids, some on laptops or

cell phones. some are tired, some squint hard into a distance

behind me. they come out of fast food days, in aspect lightly fried.

i’m getting the same fee bukowski got 40 years ago, i think.

he stood at a podium on the stairs in a 1970s building no longer extant,

at csula. we sat or stood below, looking up as he chugalugged beers,

went through poems. 40 years later, the fee schedule seems stuck.

the students paying attention fix on a point somewhere behind me.

i chugalug nothing, speaking sometimes to my dad’s ghost.

it’s the same ghost as when he was alive. while i read poems to the kids

and try to get them to laugh at selected intervals, i describe for the ghost

the route here to a new campus on the hills northeast of san diego,

tract houses, malls and freeways through corona, pomona, chino and

temecula, mcmansions arrayed across the ridges overlooking these vistas.

“A Parallax View,” by Jen Hofer and Sesshu Foster, published in the Capilano Review’s “Pacific Poetries Issue,” Spring 2015

see also http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/issues/issue-3-26/

A Parallax View

Jen Hofer

Jen Hofer: What is “transPacific” in the context of Los Angeles? We share a Pacific (an intraPacific?) with Tijuana. We situate ourselves (or are situated?) in relation to a body (bodies) of water both to the west and to the south of us. We look west and face the east. We stand in the north and speak south. Is it antithetical or perpendicular? You said Antena (www.antenaantena.org) seems “intercontinental (like the name of the hotel where journalists stayed in Managua during the fall of the Somoza regime).” I would like to do an investigation of all the places called “intercontinental” (hotels, cafes, theaters, etc) to track political or skeletal linkages. A parallax view.

Sesshu Foster

Sesshu Foster: Is a north south orientation antithetical to transpacific? Although immigrants’ rights are obviously one big umbrella under which all communities sooner or later shelter?

JH: These are Los Angeles questions: our pacific, our trans. How does the immigrant umbrella (or being in immigrant status—i.e. a state of being where immigrants and immigrants’ rights are the shape of how we move—as a weather) affect what we experience as “transPacific”? Do we need shelter or exposure?

“In February of 1942, Terminal Island residents were the first Japanese Americans, on the West Coast, to be forcibly removed from their homes. They were forced to evacuate their homes within 48 hours and had to leave almost of all of their possessions behind including all of their fishing boats and fishing gear.”

SF: To be literally transPacific, to resist transPacific. In my case, one set of Anglo grandparents originally from Ohio and Illinois met in Los Angeles; my grandfather was supposedly Chief of Police of Long Beach, married my grandmother when she was a teen, sixteen or so playing keyboards with sheet music for the soundtrack for silent movies in theaters on Broadway. They moved to the Bay Area from South Central when it was whites only in the 1920s because L.A. was “too dangerous.” My Japanese grandparents were recruited as peasant farm labor from Hiroshima province (as documented later in Carey McWilliams’ excellent Factories in the Field, 1939), whose marriage was arranged around 1916. They worked the fields of the Central Coast—strawberries, etc.—living in houses they never owned, often without utilities, with outhouses, sometimes with a wooden tub (ofuro) with a tin bottom that my mother’s chore was to fill and heat with a wood fire. My grandfather soaked in the ofuro after working all day. After Executive Order 9066 they were sent to live in horse stalls in Santa Anita racetrack and helped construct the third largest town in Arizona at that time, the internment camp Poston, on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. After the war, when my grandfather was disabled by strokes, they returned to Santa Maria, to live in a room rented beside a church parking lot (churches helped relocate returning Japanese Americans to areas where they weren’t excluded). When she was not taking care of her nine children (two had died in their early twenties of TB in the 1930s) and my ailing grandfather, my grandmother worked in the fields. They ended their lives with nothing to their names—except that they did, indeed, leave a common Japanese American ethic of decency and hard work. I feel pretty much their grandson, in spite of everything.

Poston War Relocation camp on the Colorado River Indian Reservation.

JH: I write this in a bowl (cuenca) of desert that once was water, knuckled between Death Valley and Sequoia and Inyo National Forests. The wind dunes the dust into particulate ridges. The ocean is a dream away. A parallax view. On my dad’s side I am the child of an immigrant who is the child of an immigrant. I’m here because they made it out. There’s a lot of trans in my history, but not much Pacific, except in flight from perceived danger. My parents, of different strains of Eastern European Jewish heritage, one from the non-Pacific Southern Cone and the other from the non-Pacific Northeast of USAmerica, felt New York—where they met through the intersection of modern dance and Argentinean friends—was “too dangerous” so, like your grandparents, they moved to the Bay Area (neither had ever been west of the Mississippi—or even west of New Jersey, I don’t think) and hence I am a California kid. Though not much of a kid anymore.

Saburo Hasegawa

Sesshu: A transPacific fusion (transfusion?) occurs of course in my parents’ volatile and finally ruptured union. My parents met when my mother was a UCSB art student, mid-50s. Like my father, who’d served in the army signal corps during World War II, my mother was a Navy vet. They married in a Zen Buddhist ceremony, followed by a car caravan of bohemians to the reception party in the Santa Barbara hills. My father, born in 1922, the same year as Jack Kerouac, never liked Kerouac’s self-conscious romanticism and as a thorough-going individualist would reject any such marketing label like “the Beat Generation,” nevertheless embraced the study of Zen Buddhism, abstract expressionist art, and other wine-drenched cross-cultural practices on the bohemian 1950s West Coast. For a time (everything was short-lived for them) while dad studied painting with Clifford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, and Mark Rothko at the San Francisco Art Institute, he attended lectures on Zen and art by Saburo Hasegawa—also attended by poet Gary Snyder and radio commentator Alan Watts—and drank red wine provided at poetry readings by Allen Ginsberg and others active in the San Francisco Renaissance, fomented by Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth’s translations from Chinese and Japanese poetry are seminal landmarks in cross-cultural fertilization, and literary birthmarks of that transPacific influence can still be seen in the Chinese calligraphy used in Copper Canyon Press’s logo, in the (1999) selected and (2007) collected poems of Philip Whalen (abbot of the S.F. Hartford Street Zen Center) and in Bill Porter’s translations from the Chinese (as Red Pine, 1983 to the present) in Port Townsend, WA. There was, I feel, an important moment of transPacific cultural exchange going on. Not just Asian labor recruited to California fields, but a real open, active interest in world views countercultural to the Judeo-Christian. My dad was one of those white people reading D. T. Suzuki, Chuang Tzu, in the translations of Arthur Waley and others. In part, due to Saburo Hasegawa’s love for the work of Sesshu, fifteenth-century Japanese Zen painter, my father named me Sesshu, and later, named my younger brother Sabro. From birth, like an ancient Chinese or Japanese painting is stamped with the artist’s stamp, I was stamped with a transPacific stamp in that moment.

Terminal Island Furusato Memorial, San Pedro, CA: “The Japanese Village was stripped of anything of any value and flattened by bulldozers and completely destroyed. The fishing boats were either taken by the military, repossessed, stolen, or destroyed. On January 2, 1945, the exclusion order was rescinded. The internees were released with $25.00 and a ticket home. They returned home to find nothing. Furusato was gone without a trace. The canneries were still operating and a few people went back to work there . The rest of the former residents were scattered.”

My parents met and married less than ten years after the 1948 repeal of California’s racist anti-miscegenation laws under which their marriage would have been null. Pressures to assimilate on Japanese Americans were immense, ranging from legalized detention, internment, “relocation,” prohibition of “aliens” from “outmarriage” with whites or Asians from citizenship or owning land in Calif., to confiscation or theft of their property and violence against their persons. My father’s brother also married a Japanese American woman—and her sister married an African American, so I discovered in 2013 when I interviewed and spoke with the writer Luis Rodriguez at L.A.’s Last Bookstore, and by chance met my 85 year old aunt’s sister Eiko Fukamaki Koyama, when she showed up with her daughter and grandson (Peter Woods, who worked at the bookstore), two generations of part-Japanese African American relatives who previously had gone unmentioned in family circles. Japanese Americans are reported to have the highest rate of outmarriage among all ethnic groups, partly in response to a history of dispossession and violence against their communities, such that many of their communities such as Crystal Cove or Terminal Island Furusato were dispersed and erased, the properties “legally” confiscated by whites, with organizations such as the Western Growers Protective Association engaging in an active campaign of “ethnic cleansing” and expropriation. The “transpacific” curiously braids histories of arrogance and naiveté, wishful thinking and hopefulness, atomic bombs and farm labor, dispossession and erasure. Part of my identity as “transpacific” is looking back at histories of forced displacement, denial and erasure.

JH: The injection or intervention of a new substance, originating elsewhere, belonging to a foreign body. “Transfusion” suggests that this kind of mixing is crucial to our health, to our circulation—and it is. Which is not to say that it’s simple or simply salutary. But it seems to me that any notion of “purity” (geographic, racial, social, moral) is a total fantasy, which then must be scaffolded with more and more baroque (perhaps medieval? perhaps inquisitional?) structures to maintain the rigidity of the fantasy. To protect it from the “dangers” from which one might flee to the safety of the Bay Area.

SF: The stereotypical critique of Californians and of people in Los Angeles in particular focuses on East Coast white people Anglocentrally critiquing local whites for their supposed superficiality, their lack of historical and cultural vitality and complexity, their lack of engagement with the ideologies and ideological conflicts of Europe. Overlooked in the East-West national banter about La-la La Land and California as the land of sunshine, cults, and airheads is the Faulknerian density of local history. Maybe it doesn’t matter that the bohemia of the Barbary Coast, the San Francisco Renaissance, the People’s Republic of Berkeley, of the Back to the Land movement, and communes like Black Bear Ranch in Northern California or Sunburst by Santa Barbara, or Ken Kern (Oakhurst CA author of a dozen self-published how-to books like The Owner-Built Homestead) are gone or forgotten, and twenty-first century Californians may view such locavore small scale proposals as quixotic, if not quaint. Mention hippies to kids these days and they laugh, if they recognize the word. The transPacific for me relates these overlooked or erased mostly Anglo bohemian countercultures to an Asian American history going back to Japanese immigrant Kuninosuke Masamizu, himself the survivor of a failed gold country agrarian commune, who married Carrie Wilson, the daughter of a freed slave in 1877. Their African American descendants in Sacramento reportedly thought their great grandfather was “some kind of Indian.” TransPacific relates an Asian American history of the West that is an open secret, erased or denied or merely forgotten—say, a black and white Library of Congress photograph from 1934 titled, “Chinese Store (ruins), Coloma, El Dorado Co., CA” or the evicted and erased communities of Terminal Island Furusato or Crystal Cove or Lover’s Point (site of a burnt out chinatown) in Pacific Grove—to the living, on-going dialogue.

“Chinese Store (ruins), Coloma, El Dorado Co., CA”

JH: And that dialogue takes place in this L.A. Pacific/transPacific space in active, cacophonous, disorderly ebullience under a great and transtemporal and non-unifying and ungeneralizable and anti-universal immigrant weather system. Here is the beginning of a list of L.A. spaces/instances/phenomena I would like to study as “transPacific” and collaborative:

Cielo galleries/studios

Chuco’s Justice Center

Eastside cafe

Kaya Books

Seite Books

Tuesday night reading series

Writ Large Press

Would it have been better to structure this piece through visits to all these spaces (and/or the books-as-spaces they instigate)? Perhaps. But instead perhaps you will add to this list and it will remain part of the eternal to-do, to be done or undone as time allows, or doesn’t.

Sesshu: That sounds like the next phase, the next step.

Poston Memorial Monument, AZ