BALTIMORE, MD-

When I was growing up in California, my parents had a fairly loose policy of not driving me, my sister, or my brother around town. We biked to the dentist and doctor. To go anywhere else—school, the beach, the movies—we walked, rode the bus, roller skated, and hitch-hiked (the method of choice in high school).

The no driving policy was cemented sometime before my sister, Becca, went away to college, when we were both in high school together.

On that particular day, the rain was coming down like an unbroken wall of water. Becca had whined and complained, cajoling our dad to drive us to school so we wouldn’t have to walk through the rain to the bus stop (where we’d stick out our thumbs to hitch-hike). My father relented, grumbling and moaning as he picked up his car keys from the kitchen counter and walked out to the garage. He was barefoot in his threadbare blue bathrobe that reminded me of an overused, shredded tissue.

Becca pushed the garage door open from the inside, then quickly got into the front seat of the old station wagon. I sat in the back. My sister was relentlessly bossy when it came to priority seating in the car. I always thought she acted as if the family owed her for her having to put up with bird shit (from my brother’s un-caged bird who lived in our family room), clutter (covering every flat surface in the house), overflowing ashtrays (cigarettes and pot), nudity (my parents didn’t own bathing suits and always swam naked), moldy food in the refrigerator (cheeses that smelled like butt-holes) and moths flying out of the cereal boxes in the cupboard (which resulted in the aromatic branches from bay trees in the cupboards as a form of organic insecticide). What I didn’t understand in this equation was why Josh and I were owed nothing for putting up with it all.

Dad drove us all the way into school—the rain was so thick, I didn’t worry about anyone peering into the window of the station wagon and seeing that he was in his ratty bathrobe.

That afternoon when Becca and I got home from school, Dad came bounding down the stairs still in his bathrobe, hollering, “I WILL NEVER DRIVE YOU GIRLS ANYWHERE AGAIN, YOU HEAR?!” Oddly, my father often seemed inured to the little things that drove most people mad (traffic lights, rude sales clerks, finding a parking spot) but could be outraged at the things that most people didn’t think about (an orange that wasn’t perfectly ripe, the movie Fiddler on the Roof, a dog shit on the lawn). So it didn’t seem surprising that he would be ranting about having driven us to school.

“Do you know that I ran out of gas!” He bellowed.

“Where?” Becca snarled. Of course she was wondering exactly what I was wondering, and that was if our father had run out of gas near the school and if he got out of the car in the raggedy bathrobe under which he was completely naked.

“On Cathedral Oaks Road, just after I dropped you off!”

“Dad! Come on!” Becca said. I imagined my friends driving to school and passing my father loping down the road, his penis probably flopping out into the rain through the sheer flaps of his robe.

“Do you know how far I had to walk for gas!?”

The only thing between the house and the high school was acres and acres of lemon, orange, and avocado orchards. He would have had to walk toward the school, then past it, to get to a gas station.

“About a mile?” I guessed.

“Dad!” Becca said. “Did you see any of my friends? Did anyone see you walking to the gas station?” Her face was a dark stain of worry.

“How the hell do I know! It was fucking raining out! I was fucking naked under my robe!”

“We know,” I said, quietly. I was worried about my latest crush having seen my father. We had gone on only one date and I was hoping for a second.

“Dad!” My sister’s body was clenched as if she were trying to contract her entire being into one tiny, dark lump. “Why don’t you get dressed before you leave the house!? Most people do this—they put on clothes before they walk out the door.”

“I didn’t even go to work today, I was so outraged!” My father was pacing the entrance hall.

“Why didn’t you take off the wet robe?” I asked.

“I took it off and put it in the dryer, but then I was so fucking pissed off, that I just put it back on when it was dry.”

“You were too mad to get dressed?” I imagined my father working naked while he waited for the robe to dry. Would he have answered the door naked? Who knows.

“What is wrong with you!” Becca pushed past Dad and walked down the hall toward the kitchen, her giant backpack sitting on her like someone riding piggyback. I followed.

“Never again!” Dad shouted down the hall at us. “Find your own rides from now on!” I could hear his footsteps thumping up the stairs.

“It’s not like you’ve ever driven us anywhere before!” Becca shouted to the ceiling. Dad must have heard her, but he said nothing and simply slammed shut the bedroom door.

My father stuck to his promise and didn’t drive us anywhere again. It wasn’t a huge inconvenience—I only thought of it when I rode in the backseat of someone else’s parents’ car, the mothers who would pick us up from the movies at night, the dads who would drive us to the County Bowl for concerts. In fact, when I rank the oddities of my childhood this one comes out normal compared the period when my father was a voluntary mute and only communicated with us by scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad that he always carried in one hand.

WOODLAND, NORTHERN CA -

I moved back to California around two months ago. What brought me back home after fifteen years? Well, a few things. Personal things. Some things not so personal. In the end, I was feeling a bit tapped out in Vegas. The bones weren’t tumbling like they used to and I was almost at the point where I didn’t give a shit either way.

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BIG SUR, CALIFORNIA -

I used to work on an organic farm in California, living in a barn full of horses and riding tractors through fields under the warmth of a gentle fall sun. I was a Beatnik then more than now – among hippies and flower children, believing everything I was told and digging all the world in some glorious young innocence.

I was obsessed with Kerouac and Ginsberg, and with the notion of wilderness. I read too much for my own good; my head full of dreams and naïve thoughts. I’d read Into the Wild, a lot of London and some Thoreau. I was obsessed with Big Sur and becoming free of the constraints of humanity. I loved the idea of the writer disappearing into nature.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

My first boom box was pale pink. It had a tape player and two speakers and an AM/FM radio. I never understood how to work the radio, but I did understand the tape player. This is what I used.

The boom box came in a package wrapped and tagged “To Lenore, From Nana.” Mind you, my grandmother had nothing to do with this gift. My parents just put her name on the tag, in order to both lighten the gift-shopping load on my mean-ass grandmother and to fool me into believing that the old bitch loved me at least a little. I wasn’t fooled, though. She’d revealed her true nature the Christmas before, when my parents wrote her name on the tag for the Pound Puppies I so desperately wanted. Upon enthusiastically thanking her for buying me what I desired most in the world, she disowned any involvement in the gifting. “I don’t even know what those things are,” she said to me, looking at my new Pound Puppies with irrational hatred.

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SOUTH COAST, ENGLAND-

‘Goddamnit woman!’ I remember thinking. ‘SQUEEZE! YES! But for the love of God please shut the hell up!”

I hadn’t travelled all the way out to California to hear a rubenesque Midwestern woman squat out a deuce. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert, and this, apparently, was log country. I was not sat in a glamorous and expensive convertible — clearly. I was on a coach, heading to Las Vegas. I had the good fortune to be seated in front of the chemical toilet at the back, able to hear the whole dirty performance.

Whilst chewing on cold curly french fries, an ill-advised purchase from a stop at Arby’s, I had an horrific and horrendous thought: What if she’s pleasuring herself?! She’s been in there a damn long time! How can I know for sure? How can any of us know? And will the mental scars ever heal?

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MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA-

I landed in San Francisco at the end of November, 2008. Home - Australia, a country I’d left for the first time - was thousands of miles away, along with my family, my friends, and every place I’d ever known. The closest friend I knew was in New York; although, luckily for me, through the magic of MySpace I wasn’t totally bereft of human contact on the West Coast. Even luckier, my MySpace contacts turned out to actually be who they claimed, and my fears of a white slavery ring vanished like a cobweb before a flamethrower. (more…)

KOREA -

Some people call it blagging, but for others it’s just being lucky. I guess you might say it is called entitlement when you achieve something that maybe you didn’t jump through all the required hoops to get.

Two years ago I was put in a position that many people find themselves in, and I wasn’t coping with it very well. I had graduated from university and was lost. My friends had all failed their first, second or third years and had thus re-sat them, and now I was the only one of a tight group of maybe fifty students to have actually reached that point where they stop giving you cheap loans, cheap housing and something to do in the daylight hours.

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SOUTH COAST, ENGLAND-

I normally always wish I were somewhere else.

Wanderlust.

I mentioned in one of my first posts a vision I have, the sort of thing that would be a recurring motif in an artsy movie.

I never said where it was; it was San Francisco. Along with an abundance of other clichés, that’s where I left my heart. I love that city; I loved every moment I spent in California. I want to roll out towards LA— perhaps soon they’ll be another TNB live event there and enough money in my back pocket to be able to fly out.

As it is, I just have to sit here and be content with a dwindling bottle of Havana Club rum and my rose tinted memories; a bitter riposte to the world of broken beer bottles, unsupervised kids who are probably drunk and willing to kill me for a cheap thrill.

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SOMEWHERE IN MENDOCINO COUNTY, CA-

For dinner we have masa harina corn cakes with herb sauce and a dilled potato salad.  Johanna, though dejected at another day of meatlessness, eats voraciously.  We all do really.  She and I sit at a rust-painted picnic table with Lance, Crazy Jeff and Gloria, Hector, and Charlie the Mechanic.  The field crew eats with hunched shoulders, cramped forearms, aching lower backs. Johanna sits abnormally straight, exhibiting her self-described “perfect body mechanics.”   We all swat at the flies and mosquitoes as we eat with the exception of Charlie the Mechanic who seems oblivious to them.  He is oblivious also to the mayonnaise in his beard.

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BALTIMORE, MD-

My mother gave my father a Diane Arbus photo book for his birthday the year I was ten and he was thirty-four. The entire family (Mom, Dad, my older sister, Becca, and my younger brother, Josh) gathered around and slowly waded through it, picture by picture. The pages were thick and glossy and smelled remotely of plastic. Almost all the photos were portraits—people whose entire lives seemed exposed through the simplest physical details. There was the terrorizing image of the boy holding a toy hand grenade, the stoop of the Jewish giant who stood beside his small rodent-like parents, the overly-shadowed nasal-labial folds on the middle-aged woman cradling a baby monkey whose face is identical to hers.

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SOMEWHERE IN MENDOCINO COUNTY, CA-

Of course, it took more than Robbi’s job offers to bring Johanna and me out here to the marijuana farm.  Should I write about this part in any sort of detail?  Will I be defying my own vow to keep such things relegated to the realm of “backdrop?”  Should I discuss how, in 2006, I found myself living in my parents’ house in suburban Chicago for the first time since I was seventeen, this time with Johanna in tow, due to my mom’s diagnosis?  How, after having lived in Alaska, Italy, Key West, New Mexico, Arizona, and a failed attempt in Vermont, that reentering Buffalo Grove, Illinois gave me the alcoholic shakes, the soothing drink to quell them being the swallowed desire to flee to some distant mountaintop, some beach bungalow, some bomb shelter in which I could grow, with impunity, a wizard’s beard beneath which to hide?  Oh shit, oh shit.  This is one of those stories, isn’t it?

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

She was a head-injured quadraplegic at a nursing home. I took care of her sometimes. The other assistants who cared for her brought her Playgirl magazines. They’d open them up to a photo of some guy’s package, which brought a big smile to her contorting face. A former Cal Trans road worker, she had been smashed by some kind of vehicle. She couldn’t talk, only smile. She couldn’t eat except through a tube that dangled from her side. But she loved porn. You could see it in her eyes. I had to turn her constantly to keep the sores off her body.

A head-injured man shared the room. All he could do was eat. I spoon fed him and had to massage his throat so he would swallow. I changed his diapers, took him to a shower room and hosed him off while he lay on a big blue gurney. He stared a lot. That’s all he could do. I didn’t sense any thought behind his eyes. I figured any kind of reasoning was hidden far behind a veil of fog so thick that his soul was in a constant winter.

His mother, whose fingernails looked like strange spades, would come to his room once a week and rub his head. She thought he might wake up. “He’s going to come through,” she said. Her little puffs of grey hair and big glasses hid a motherly anger I didn’t ever want to rouse.

I hung out with a couple of CNAs at the nursing home. James was a large black man who would tell me lots of Bible stories. “You know Christmas trees are in the Bible,” he said one day, then launched into the old testament tale on the topic.

“Fool, that’s a bad word. Don’t ever call anybody a fool,” James said on another occasion. “People don’t know they should be afraid of that word. God will punish them.”

I was glad to be at the nursing home, far away from the clinic where the angry head-injured like Ken Svent couldn’t throw his breakfast at me, or scream until his ribs shattered, or like Herman Burger the former six-foot, five-inch-tall gay lumberjack — he couldn’t lunge at me with his razor or throw his shoe at his Alaskan wilderness lover, miss, and hit a window.

My favorite head-injured was an old timer named Tom. He pitched in the World Series back in the 1950s and still had enough wits to show me his slider and curve ball. His smashed brain could at least put together those memories. I always wondered if he made the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. Anyone who played in a World Series should be so lauded, at least in my book.

The rooms and halls of the nursing home smelled like piss. That’s the difference between a clean hospital and any senior living center. The old in the hallways constantly piss themselves, the floor, their rooms. The smell lingers in a cloud of human waste.

I studied in the nursing home. I read and then fed the injured. I remember fall months and the leaves tumbling through the air outside the windows. I remember James saying he had another story for me. “It’s about God’s covenant by fire and water,” he said. He came into the room often and saw a bit of God in there. I know he did.
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N.L. BELARDES is a journalist and videographer who manages a news site in central California. His bizarre trivia book, “Random Obsessions” is due to hit store shelves in late 2009. His work has appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites all over America. You can purchase Lords: Part One, which describes the infamous Lords of Bakersfield. N.L. welcomes humorous notes and news tips to his MySpace or Twitter. He also has the twitter novel, “Small Places,” a literary micro-blogging corporate mockery that you can get a sentence at a time via the Web or cell phone.

SOMEWHERE IN MENDOCINO COUNTY, CA-

I would say: At dusk, the crops’ silhouettes held to the sky like herons cemented into the earth, leaves flapping feebly in the Northern California wind, unable to lift themselves from the forthcoming hands of the Morning Pickers, and the watchful green eyes of Lady Wanda—I would say that, but I was likely stoned.  It’s just as likely, the crops didn’t look like herons at all, there was no wind, and it may not have even been dusk.  It could have been morning.  It could have been afternoon.  Having worked on a medical marijuana farm, filling six notebooks with scrbblings of varying degrees of sense, and engaging in the attendant and standard subcultural vices, I have made of myself an unreliable narrator.

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BALTIMORE, MD-

GOOD: You are not freaked out by the human body in all its shapes and forms—you have seen so many naked people that you understand that nudity is a normal human condition.  This comes in handy when you have to help a sick hospitalized friend navigate some intimate part of her body with tubes and wires.

BAD: You know what your father’s penis looks like because he always swims naked, and when he shaves, he stands at the vanity in his bedroom, naked, with the bedroom door wide open.

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BALTIMORE, MD-

I often use events that happened to me in real life as the basis for my fiction.  In my novel, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES, I took memories from many years of my childhood and condensed them into one crazy summer where the grown-ups swim naked and smoke pot, and the kids try to figure out how they fit in to the naked-swimming, pot-smoking life.  So far, no one in my family has been hurt by what I’ve written.  I’ve discovered that most people don’t remember many of the things that have happened to them, so they simply don’t recognize themselves when they’ve been fictionalized. I am now calling this lack of memory of one’s past The Keychain Effect.  Here’s why:

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

The bus rolled out of Bakersfield and went straight to Los Angeles. We crept out of the Central Valley, past cornfields and vineyards. Alfalfa lands sprouted purple wildflowers. An ascent into the Los Padres and over the San Andreas Fault meant an eventual descent with the bus like a rocket onto L.A.’s dirty streets. The grimy Greyhound station was in neighborhoods covered with graffiti and barbed wire. I expected smoke stacks on a cutting horizon, glowing neon “Blade Runner” umbrellas held by half-Chinamen and steam-faced cyperpunks in leather and make-up. This was 1998. No 1999 party yet. No new Millennium glitter. Just the excitement of the L.A. bus station, its high interior walls, addicts, travelers, pickpockets and lost souls. We were in a reality that steps over sad-faced women huddled around piles of clothing and bums sleeping on benches covered with the L.A. Times. (more…)

TOMS RIVER, NJ-

I have strange ability to turn what I see on the television set into a distinct feeling that follows me everywhere. In last Sunday nights episode Don Draper who is MIA in California walked to the ocean and waded in, stretching his hands out Christ like, hoping to absorb something.  I’ve done this very same thing.  He’s searching for who he really is.  He isn’t Don Draper, he’s someone else, and he’s in California for a trade show, and ends up visiting a woman who has direct bearing on his past.  Why is he hiding out? Why did he reinvent himself? Why do I think I’m Don Draper? 

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I scrambled across the country in a beat car. How often have you heard such words?

But I really did.

The car was gigantic and hardly ran. The muffler fell off on a freeway. Yet, myself, the girl I was dating at the time, and my kid Jordan, he was 6 and she was about 6-feet tall, all set out from Ohio with a final destination of Bakersfield in mind. (more…)

Hollywood, CA-

Sex.

Three letters, one syllable, one tiny word, all saturated with meaning, oozing with intent, dripping with ramifications, bursting, overflowing, filled to the brim and jammed to the hilt with slippery, steaming, sodden innuendo.

Ah.

Sex.

The word starts off softly… sssssssss… and ends with a jab. Hard and pointy. Ecks.

Saying the word makes a mouth move in oddly arousing ways.

Say it. (more…)