The Life and Art of Jean-Paul Niko
Archive for July, 2009
Shane, baby, you go ahead and stick it to the man
Jul 29th
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We are going to have to rest and recover at Shane’s place for a couple of days. I can’t really use my left arm anymore because of a bad spill I took at Raging River while mountaineering with Twan. In addition, I have a fractured rib, a broken bone in my foot, and a deep laceration under my chin that probably needs stitches. For some reason, both Twan and Shane escape Sierra Nevada without serious injuries. Fuckers.
What if compromise was the definition of evil? What if hate was better than feeling nothing at all? What if the afterlife doesn’t exist and people are never punished for hurting each other?
I’m tired of the rich neighborhood with the fast-talking pretty people in their cookie-cutter clothes that give me the evil eye when I smoke cigarettes. I don’t like their high energy, no-nuance monotone, or their sleek vehicles, or their blonde girlie girl girlfriends with the fake tits. I hate the safety-first swimming pool that’s five feet deep on the deep end and the fat, old, family-style bitches that quietly cluster around it like so many bleached beached whales.
I’m tired of playing Xbox video games and eating chain-store pizza.
I don’t want to sleep on the puffy air mattress in Shane’s living room anymore. I want to sleep on the floor, or better yet, go back to beach and hang with the hippies, hoboes, and gangsters. Most importantly, I want my alcohol and drugs.
Shane had a big grin stretched across his mug when he got back from the grocery store this morning. “I cut the wires to the GPS tracking unit in my car”, he announced, “It was one of the conditions of my employment.”. Shane, baby, you go ahead and stick it to the man! I guess that means you’re all IN now. Here’s the back story for those who ain’t in the loop: Twan will split off and fly out to Kansas City with his sleeping bag and tent (more about that later), and The Shaner will come with me back to New York where he will use every business ounce of his soul to help bring PocketPowerhouse back from the brink. Nikki agreed. Hell can wait.
We became boys again, making long forks out of found wood
Jul 26th
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We pile into Shane’s car in the morning and drive to the local health food store. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a guy’s house that didn’t have a can of protein powder in it. Shane keeps his place meticulously tidy and clean. In fact his whole housing complex is like that. Twan and I agree that it feels like a resort. Shane gives us a tour that includes two salt-water swimming pools, a tennis court, and an indoor weight room. Shane says that Irvine is statistically the safest city in the country. I wonder how much the property value depreciated when we set foot in the place.
Three hours and 228 miles north of us lies the Sequoia National Forest, where we’ll be camping. Shane finds an ad on Craigslist in Santa Anna for a tent for us so we rendezvous with two Mexicans in the back of a warehouse, where they live, and they proceed to sell us all kinds of camping equipment on the cheap. Two low-rent tents and one fold-up plush chair later we are back behind the wheel of our impossibly stuffed PT-Cruiser. I keep expecting a small army of circus clowns to bust out of the back. Twan found a twelve pack of MREs on Ebay for sixty bucks including shipping, but we are going to want some now so we are going to stop at an army-navy surplus store in Bakersfield on our way to the campsite.
We became boys again, making long forks out of found wood, whittled down by pocket knife, charred at the end that holds the spitting meat. We became Druid again, feeding our fire with dead bits from the red giants in our grove of trees. I don’t know why I smoke cigarettes on the top of a mountain six thousand feet heigh, so I flick my butts into the flames with the plastic food wrappers and anything else that burns. We drink Bacardi and pepsi, and Titos handmade vodka, and ponder the nature of girls, and sex, and love.
I touch his head before falling asleep and my thoughts turn soft.
We pissed in the pisser, we shat in the shatter, and we slept in the slepper while Tito’s last dregs bid our bonfire adeu in a roaring sheet of flame. It’s time to get back on the road, gentlemen. Andiamo!
This is for you, Twan the Man, half stranger to a brother
Jul 24th
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It became much easier to stretch my body during yoga when I stopped trying so hard, when I stopped thinking and fell back onto something more primitive, and vital. It’s like being slightly hungry all the time. You feel more alive, everything takes on more meaning, and subtler shades of it because you are keen. You can’t get stressed when you are traveling. You have to expect to lose stuff, for things to break for bus, or train, or plane problems. Shit happens and it’s going to happen to you.
I was in a boy’s home when I was fourteen, and it was there that I learned the value of not forming an attachment to any of my possessions. I suppose that most of the kids brought personal things with them when they first arrived. These were thieved away rapidly. I could never understand why we had lockers made of wood to store our stuff. The padlocks connected metal plates that were screwed into the wood. It did not take much force to wedge a chair leg between the lock and the locker and pop the metal screws out. After a couple of weeks of random theft (sometimes violent), you became satisfied with the same generic toiletries from the same ass smelling comissary as everyone else.
I once grabbed a clock-radio from my house on a home visit. Some kid dumped water on it two days after I got back. He didn’t have one, and I’m guessing he was too small to fight me for it (which would have happened had he stolen it because he wouldn’t have been able to use it without me finding out, and the code of conduct at that place would have required us to beat each other near to death, even if I didn’t want to.) I never owned a clock, radio, clock-radio, or TV since then.
Now I’ve got a phone and a computer, and they mean a lot to me because they are my freedom. Janis Joplin said that “freedom means there’s nothing left to lose”, so let me qualify that by saying that this is as close to freedom that I can get right now.
We take two buses to get back to Venice Beach. One from San Diego to downtown LA, and the other from massive Union Station to our beloved coastline. All in all, about 3.5 hours of traveling. The first thing I’m going to do is jump into the Pacific like Vasco Nunez de Balboa and wash the road grime from my lower legs. LA is not made for walking and we left Liz’s house covered in a sticky layer of Permethrin cream to ward off against another possible scabies outbreak. The next thing we have to do is find someone who’ll re-introduce us to Mary Jane.
This is for you, Twan the Man, half stranger to a brother. I felt you with long fingers. I see you rushing together. I see myself in past tenses. I did not know that a blade of grass could become a tree.
Cholos, jungle chicken, and low-grade meth
Jul 23rd
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So, Cali, Liz, Twan, and I decide to go for a run around the neighborhood looking for Cholos. We pass by a partially desiccated park and observe the locals barbecuing slabs of meat in the public BBQ pillboxes. I would like to leave you with a cholo love poem by Jaye-…duh- while we peacefully break for dinner.
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“In Love With A Cholo”
by ~jaye….duh~
i fell in love with a cholo all the hombois said hes a scrapa cuz he banged the opposite barrio he wasnt just my vato tambien era mi amigo that i could depend on when shit going down on me he knew when i was down and he knew how to cheer me up my jefa hated him she still does but he didnt care he still stayed next to me she would woop my ass for the vato con cable cords still she’d leave me marked she couldnt understand that i was in love shed make me leave him over the phone pero he knew que estaba pasando hed say tu jefa otra ves verdad mija i just say no its me ya no te quiero!!! then clicked itd be like this for one year straight hes a cholo sureno that since 4 years i havent seen that has been my first faithful homie a real cholo who sticked to me no matter what but one day he fucked up his vida by dealing pigs found out and now donde esta quien sabe last time i heard about him he called from a pay phine in atlanta his words were mija i love u cuidate mucho never forget about me k mami it went silent the operator if u’d like to make a call please hang up and deal again I HATE THAT SHIT i dont know where hes at but where ever he is he knows that somebody in idaho is still waiting where they met SO IF U SEE HIM TELL HIM QUE IM STILL WAITING FOR HIM….
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I wake up hard. It could have been the whiskey and weed last night. The joints in my body feel sort of unglued from the Bikram. We’re going to get there at 9am today, which is one class earlier than yesterday’s. It is part of my brother’s clever plan that involves corralling the hot yoga girls from yesterday’s class into tonight’s house party at Liz’s. In truth, it’s a team effort. We are behaving like brothers…
For the first time. Five weeks of living together has brought our relationship the backdrop of shared experience. The more adventures we go on together, the closer we come being true brothers and the more I’m able to make my way around the faint edges of familial feeling. “Time is money”. “I don’t want any funny business”. My sister drops canned one-liners like they did turds in the age of cholera…
But she does it dryly. I look at myself for the twentieth time this morning. I decide I need to lose five pounds. I will have a body to last through the ages, like Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual sepuko with the same meticulous planning and obsession that characterized his writing and body building.
Mishima had trouble reconciling the illustrious past of Imperial Japan with the hardscrabble realities of post-world war II Japan. It was just one country among 193 others. The Japanese were not the chosen people. They may be fierce and have a deep culture and social cohesion, but they are just another bunch of people on a rock in the Pacific. It makes me think of the struggle of modern Israel. Soon, they will be hahaha… fuck it. I don’t know where I was going with that. We’re on the freeway (we are so stupid, we have to use two GPSs) listening to Brazilian nuggets from the ’60s that we ripped from Bijou’s iPod back in New York. Hi Bijou! We have to find some time to visit Johnnie’s bar in Highland Park. The place is owned by Zac, who was part of the social circle of Stuart and Misty back in the crazy New York social circle of the late eighties. They started taking me out when I was seventeen, so I only saw the intriguing aftermath of what had been. Coke in little dishes on the bar in place of cocktail peanuts. My life revolved around blow jobs and Dungeons & Dragons. All my friends were either rock stars, porn stars, strippers, or plain old pussy machines, either getting or giving. So Zac moved back to LA and we are..
I lost that last thought there because we had to go to today’s yoga session. Now, I’m back. We failed miserably in our plan but it was not for lack of effort. We exit the class in a pool of sweat and exhaustion and run right into the hot tattooed babe from yesterday’s class. “Hi, we took the earlier class”, I smile. Her face slides into a Jezebel like smile, “I take the this class because it is hotter”…
My brother finds his position in behind her, slightly to the right. “This is our last night here”, he says, opening with a time constraint and encouraging her to swivel to his voice, “and we’re gathering some people at our sister’s house tonight.” Before she can react I jump back into the mix, “We’re having a house party”. Back to you bro. “And you’re invited”, he throws down. The ball is in her court…My brother finds his position in behind her, slightly to the right. “This is our last night here”, he says, opening with a time constraint and encouraging her to swivel to his voice, “and we’re gathering some people at our sister’s house tonight.” Before she can react I jump back into the mix, “We’re having a house party”. Back to you bro. “And you’re invited”, he throws down. The ball is in her court…
It’s was a tag-team, but she slipped through the ropes on a technical. “I would come, but I have to go home and take care of my husband and baby daughter.” Shotgun to the head. My brother tries for a partial recovery, “What about your ((extremely attractive)) friend? Maybe she would like to come?”. “Do you mean Lindsay? She’s doing her boot camp tonight. It’s really intense. She gets to punch & kick people…
I’m convinced now. San Diego sucks. We’re only going to get laid back at Venice Beach… Okay, we just pulled over at the V.A. hospital. I took a pic of Twan fixing the car and he just took one of me typing this entry.
We have a moment of inspiration when Jello Biafra starts belting out “California über alles” on the car radio. We are going to cruise Barnes & Nobles in downtown San Diego and do cold pickups until we have enough female bodies to populate our ailing house party.
Everywhere I go, I always seem to be eating chicken. We eat chicken like other countries eat pork or fish. I’m thinking of Cuba where we had “meat” for every meal and it was always pork. Ingrid was really screwed because she didn’t eat pork and all they had in Cuba was ham, cheese, and bread. Then there was also some limp cabbage they called “salad”. We ran out of protein shakes and meal replacement bars in about…
a week. After that I drank rum every night until I wasn’t hungry anymore, and we drank fruit juices in the morning because it was the best in the world. I would like to go to Hawaii and see the red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus). It is essentially a wild chicken that all of our Gallus gallus domesticus are descendants of. They thrive in Hawaii because they have no natural predators there. Supposedly, they are so stupid that if you make a loud noise in the jungle, they will freeze and fall out of the trees in fright (they take shelter in trees). Chickens are very similar to turkeys. They are both lean, non-flying birds that we eat, and they have very primitive brains like birds in general. Birds are the only living link that we have to dinosaurs. Most likely, dinosaurs wore feathers. Did you ever look at chicken’s claws? Kind of like T-Rex in miniature. Dinosaurs, and by extension, chickens are not from the same evolutionary tree that other animals and people are; and all the rest of them got wiped out by that mass extinction in the Cretaceous period. I see chicken as simply another type of vegetable.
Smoking low-grade meth with some cholos at a big Sherman UPS warehouse like it’s Christmas Eve!
Bumper to bumper under the grind of the sun
Jul 21st
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I get up early because it’s 9am in New York when it is 6am here. Who am I kidding? I got up early because I couldn’t really sleep. It seems like everyone here gets up with the sun anyway. Cali was up and almost out by 7am. Liz was out by 8am, leaving my brother and I to fend for ourselves. He folded his clothes while I treated him to a speech on leadership. Probably because I woke up and smoked with my orange juice.
One of the best things about traveling is that it helps me to live. I don’t realize how many little ruts my life is stuck in until my daily patterns are taken away from me and broken down by the new challenges of a different place. I hear the voices of children playing in the sun outside of big bay windows and I remember my Southern California of twenty years ago.
Yesterday was a day for work, only interrupted for bouts of stretching. We jockeyed our computers through the workdays of two timezones. Today, we get up early, at 7am. I’m lying on the carpet attempting some of Pavel Tsatsouline’s advanced techniques. The sun is already beaming on me and the black carpet. Nothing black makes sense here, not even my black nail polish.
My brother is preparing our morning dose of The Ultimate Meal and then we have to drive Liz to work at the bank. Between our radical diet and our studying of Pavel, dance, yoga, tantra, and basketball, I’m beginning to develop am understanding of my body in a way I never had before.
Hahaha road rage on the freeway bitches! Bumper to bumper under the grind of the sun. “How ya like me now?!”, say hay-lo to my leet-tal friend!” BLAM, BLAM, BLAM!!! Manga style.
9:20 AM: Twan finds a Bikram Yoga institute about ten minutes away from us in San Diego. We’ll be sweating like dogs in the heated, climate-controlled yoga room. We each rapidly consume a liter of water before leaving. I wonder what will happen when I see Misty in Hollywood… After lunch with Liz, we will be doing sprints on the beach with a parachute that Twan bought from a sports products company online.
I have to be careful to not stress my arms because a couple of months ago I injured my elbow joint trying to do one-armed body weight exercises like pull-ups and push-ups, and it never gets to heal properly before I enflame it all over again trying out some new routine. Even boogie-boarding yesterday made it hurt. I really want to do stuff on Muscle Beach. It would be so much fun using their parallel bars and rings!
I’m also going to run out of Blue Dream soon, so I need to get a new prescription from dispensary over there. My ideal new life: Hanging out in lounge of the international hostel on Venice Beach, eating TUM, smoking medical grade green buds, and making music with the passing traveler chicks. There was a tall Dutch one that appeared the other day who set me on fire. In the afternoon, I’ll walk across the sand to Muscle Beach and hit the bars. Then some boogie boarding (until I learn to surf) until evening when we eat fish tacos and smoke some more. At night it’s time to get creative, but I don’t want to talk about that yet because it is currently 9:40 AM in beautiful boring San Diego and we got to find us some cholo-itas and liven it up. Let’s roll.
On Ocean Beach, Twan and I take a moment of silence to honor two oversized breasts as they pass by. We are going to invite Liz’s co-worker to the house tonight to watch a movie with us.
