Watch Presumed Guilty online until March 31

If you live along the border, especially here in El Paso a few minutes from Juarez, you are always hearing terrible stories about the Juarez police and Mexican army abuse of civilians, seemingly with a free reign to do what they want. This impunity extends into the Mexican judicial system where the Mexican judges at all levels act so many times without any regard to the facts. It's more about money and power and fear, the old mordida system--a system that's lost its core integrity. The movie Presumed Guilty by Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith document one such case. But what makes the movie so much important to me is that I've met and talked with Kevin Huckabee, the father of Shoun Huckabee, who has been incarcerated in the infamous Cereso Prison in Juarez now for over a year. He never got a fair trial and there's good reason to believe that the evidence that put him in jail was planted by the Mexican army. Shoun and his friend Carlos Quijas had witnesses to support their claim, but one witness was killed, the father of another was killed, and all other witnesses have disappeared. Who is to blame them? So Shoun and Carlos languish in prison, learning the hard truths of life in a prison where everything is bought and paid for. Kevin, who is in poor health, goes over as much as he can, he helps pay for bribes to keep his son safe, he negotiates with the Mexican prison system, he enlists the aide of Amnesty International and lawyers and activists--anybody who can help. Infuriating in all this madness is the U.S. government's total lack of help. Our U.S. Representative, Silvestre Reyes, totally ignores Kevin's pleas for help, saying he trusts the Mexican legal system, saying his hands are tied, saying it is not his problem. Meanwhile, the U.S. government will send Bill Richardson around the globe to extricate American citizens from similar situations, it refuses to pressure the Mexican government for release of its citizens five minutes from its border.

Below is the introduction and a link to the Wall Street Journal article by Nicholas Casey that documents the terrible dilemma that Shoun Huckabee and Carlos Quijas find themselves in. The El Paso Times has totally ignored the issue. And below that is a description of the movie Presumed Guilty. The movie is essential to anybody wanting to more fully understand the distress of the citizens of Mexico. It's available free for streaming on PBS POV. Please send the link along, especially to those able to raise a voice in support of a true justice system in Mexico.


July 17, 2010 from the Wall Street Journal by Nicolas Casey.
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico—Two Americans were driving back to El Paso, Texas, last December after an afternoon across the border in Ciudad Juárez. A few blocks from the border, they were surrounded by Mexican army trucks and pulled from their Dodge Ram.

Violence escalates in the drug wars in Mexico as a car bomb set off by a cell phone kills at least three people. Deborah Lutterbeck reports. Video Courtesy of Reuters.

Mexico's military says it found two suitcases full of marijuana in the cab of the pickup truck. Two soldiers later testified that they drove the two Americans to a military compound on the outskirts of town, questioned them briefly, then turned them over to civilian authorities. The Americans were charged with possession of marijuana with intent to sell.

Those two men—Shohn Huckabee, 23 years old, and Carlos Quijas, 36—are being held in a Ciudad Juárez jail. They tell a different story about what happened that night. They say Mexican soldiers planted the marijuana in their truck. When they arrived at the military base, they say, they were blindfolded, tied up, hit with rifle butts, shocked with electricity and threatened with death.


Presumed Guilty
Directed by Roberto Hernandez & Geoffrey Smith

In December 2005 Toño Zuniga was picked up off the street in Mexico City, Mexico, and sentenced to 20 years for murder based on the testimony of a single, shaky eyewitness. PRESUMED GUILTY tells the heart-wrenching story of a man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A friend of Toño’s contacted two young lawyers, Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete, who gained prominence in Mexico when they helped bring about the release of another innocent man from prison. As Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) legal researchers, they tracked an alarming history of corruption in the Mexican justice system (93% of inmates never see an arrest warrant, and 93% of defendants never see a judge).

Looking into Toño’s case, Roberto and Layda managed to get a retrial–on camera—and enlisted the help of filmmaker Geoffrey Smith (THE ENGLISH SURGEON) to chronicle the saga. Shot over three years with unprecedented access to the Mexican courts and prisons, this dramatic story is a searing indictment of a justice system that presumes guilt.

Japan (2)

ACT GREAT

What is the key
To untie the knot of your mind’s suffering?

What
Is the esoteric secret
To slay the crazed one whom each of us
Did wed

And who can ruin
Our heart’s and eye’s exquisite tender
Landscape?

Hafiz has found
Two emerald words that
Restored
Me

That I now cling to as I would sacred
Tresses of my Beloved’s
Hair:

Act great.
My dear, always act great.

What is the key
To untie the knot of the mind’s suffering?

Benevolent thought, sound
And movement.

~ Hafiz ~

(The Gift – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

For those brave souls who Act Great

that others may live....

 

●

I stole this from a great website--PANHALA--I only found this week through a newsletter I receive. I've been astonished, reading about the news in Japan, the men who are walking into the inferno of those reactors, doing their incredibly dangerous job, acting great, as Hafiz has said. Hafiz was the great Iranian (Persian) poet and mystic. The Panhala website marries poems with images and the results are many times very beautiful and meaningful. 

I wish the people of Japan peace and good health.

Japan

The following five poems from Japan were translated by Kenneth Rexroth (see his beautiful book 100 Poems from the Japanese). I receive the Village Zendo Newsletter. A person who I assume is Nina K posted them this morning, having received them from another list operated by Larry Robinson of California, "who sends out poems almost daily." The poems found a place in my heart today, so I thought to share them. I wish you are all well. Peace and hope for the people of Japan. For us all.



●


I can no longer tell dream from reality.
Into what world shall I awake
from this bewildering dream?

                       — Akazome Emon


●


The fireflies' light
How easily it goes on
How easily it goes out again.

                       — Chine-Jo


●


The crying plovers
On darkening Narumi
Beach, grow closer, wing
To wing, as the moon declines
Behind the rising tide.

                       — Fujiwara No Sueyoshi


●


I loathe the seas of being
And not being
And long for the mountain
Of bliss untouched by
The changing tides.

                       —  Anonymous


●


If only the world
Would remain this way,
Some fishermen
Drawing a little rowboat
Up the riverbank.

                       — Minamoto No Sanetomo

Mas: Puro John Ross, RIP

"Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe."
--Frank Bardacke, in the Nation

"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence. Pardon me for having lived it so fully."

--John Ross, in refusing to accept recognition from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 2009. They wanted to celebrate him for telling "stories nobody else could or would tell." John defiantly created his own story that they would not want to tell. Here's the poem he read to them to conclude his bit of very public guerrilla theater.

RONCO Y DULCE

Coming out of the underground
On the BART escalator,
The Mission sky
Is washed by autumn,
The old men and their garbage bags
Are clustered in the battered plaza
We once named for Cesar Augusto Sandino.
Behind me down below
In the throat of the earth
A rough bracero sings
Of his comings and goings
In a voice as ronco y dulce
As the mountains of Michoacan and Jalisco
For the white zombies
Careening downtown
To the dot coms.
They are trying to kick us
Out of here
Again
They are trying to drain
This neighborhood of color
Of color
Again.
This time we are not moving on.
We are going to stick to this barrio
Like the posters so fiercely pasted
To the walls of La Mision
With iron glue
That they will have to take them down
Brick by brick
To make us go away
And even then our ghosts
Will come home
And turn those bricks
Into weapons
And take back our streets
Brick by brick
And song by song
Ronco y dulce
As Jalisco and Michaocan
Managua, Manila, Ramallah
Pine Ridge, Vietnam, and Africa.
As my compa QR say
We here now motherfuckers
Tell the Klan and the Nazis
And the Real Estate vampires
To catch the next BART out of here
For Hell.

Three recent tributes to John Ross really catch his flair and his life, so I thought I would link to them: The Frank Bardacke piece in Counterpunch linked to above; "Rebel Journalist John Ross, the Master of Speaking Truth to Power, Is Dead" by blogger John Nichols in the Nation; and "John Ross, 1938-2011, Beat Poet, Revolutionary Journalist" by Tom Robbins in the Village Voice. Each writer seems to have known John well and loved and respected him. It's nice to see John get all this attention. The Nation piece has John's complete rant of the speech to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was a Wobbly in the original sense. He spoke his truth to power, he put himself in danger, he was brilliant, he was raw, he was witty, and he loved the Lakers (why, I don't know) and probably the Knicks too if they would ever get their act together.

JOHN ROSS, 1938-2011

 

Photograph by Elizabeth Bell

JOHN ROSS: 1938-2011

Listen to him here on Progressive Radio

Rebel Journalist, Poet, Novelist, Human Shield

He was a good friend. May he rest in peace.

THE REVOLUTION IS NOT LIKE A FAUCET

The Revolution does not begin
over coffee at the Epicurean,
does not begin over gravy and grits,
in the first joint, the last hit,
the Morning Chron, your morning shit.
The Revolution does not begin
pulling greenchain on the graveyard shift,
or making the welfare line by nine.
The Revolution doesn't begin
in your mind, your heart, your liver,
your prick, doesn't begin
when you clench your fist,
The Revolution doesn't being in 1776,
1917, the depression, the dawn,
doesn't begin with gurus, Cinques,
the news from L.A.  Havana, manana.
The Revolution doesn't begin
with both barrels, at the bottom of bottles,
on the pages of bibles, with the blues.
The Revolution does not begin,
The Revolution has no beginning.
The Revolution is unending.
The Revolution is not like a faucet –
you can't turn it on and off.
The Revolution leaks all the time –
you can’t call a plumber to fix it.

Janine Pommy Vega: 1942 - December 23 2010

Yesterday Janine Pommy Vega took the journey to the other side. We found out last night, just before heading off to bed. I was doing one of my habitual tours of the internet. One stop is Ron Silliman's blog. When I saw that wild spiked hair appearing on the screen I knew she had died. Lee and I lay in bed talking about Janine, her visits to El Paso, her being so much alive. We'll miss her. Here's a video of her reading the poem "Habeas Corpus" which reflects deeply her work with prisoners, talking with them, learning about them, helping them to write. May she rest in peace. As my previous blog shows, she has been in our hearts for a week or so. We'll miss her. But her poetry is still here.

Janine Pommy Vega & the Black Sparrow

Kitchen Dream

In my room over the kitchen
in Barranco, the shadow of incense
curls across the wooden floor
I lean over the kingdom
of my possessions, and just like that
one day
the smoke will stop

A pigeon lands outside my door
and coos coming in and
out of silence
like a life
lit up for a moment
like someone at the mouth of a river
rushing out to sea.

--Barranco, Lima, Peru, September 1993

●

This is another reason I love being a poet.

Last weekend I was cleaning my office at home--always a long process because I start picking up books, especially poetry books, and opening them up to random pages and reading. So I picked up Janine Pommy Vega’s book The Mad Dogs of Trieste and opened to that little poem above. I was enchanted with the poem. Sad. Wise. Joyful. All at the same time. I forgot my cleaning-up tasks and spent an hour or so with Janine's poems. She’s a good friend and a wonderful poet. I’ve known her work a long time through Bob and Susan Arnold’s Longhouse Books. She came to El Paso twice, both times performing her poetry at the Bridge Center for Contemporary Art and we became good friends. She’s a great storyteller, and she told us about leaving her New Jersey home at the age of 15 and moving to NYC to be a poet. Like so many of us she had read Kerouac's On the Road and was, well, persuaded. She took up with the Beats and began being a poet. All those legendary times with Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Ray Bremser…you can read about it in the many books about the Beats. But like all the other poets of those times, NYC was only a jumping off place for her journeys into the world. She loved following her nose for life and vision--intellectually, figuratively, spiritually—as the poems in Mad Dogs testify. And she’s a wonderful performer. A wild and excited voice, especially when collaborating with musicians. Janine is also a teacher of the writing of poetry, and she’s done much work in the prisons. I took the photograph above on April 14th, 2004, so, if I remember rightly, Lee, Janine and I were celebrating my birthday (I would be 62 the next day--Janine also was born in 1942 but a few months before me) in the backyard. A bottle of wine, good food, good talk. She and Lee became good friends, talking all the woman stuff that is a mystery to me. I was honored they let me listen.

It was then that Janine gave us our copy of Mad Dogs. It’s a Black Sparrow book (2000). Black Sparrow books--John Martin the editor, his wife Barbara the cover designer, the nice rough feeling cover, the colored end sheets, the generous typography inside. You could always pick out the Black Sparrow titles on the poetry shelves. A long time ago (the 70s, 80s?) I had sent John Martin a manuscript for consideration. He wrote me back a generous letter. He had thought seriously about publishing it, but in the end had to decide against it. I was honored. Janine’s Mad Dogs was probably one of the last before John and Barbara Martin sold the rights in 2002 to Harper Collins (Bukowski, Paul Bowles and John Fante) and the rest to David Godine. Oh well. All good things end. It’s the law of change. That’s okay. I still love those books. I have bunches here and there.

I’m so happy I picked up The Mad Dogs of Trieste. Such a good book of poems by a good friend. It’d be great to see her again. Saturday I start cleaning my office again.

Walt Whitman y the Huevos Racheros at the H&H

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches,
Give alms to every one that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants,
Argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people,
Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons
And with the young and with the mothers of families,
Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem
And have the richest fluency not only in its words
But in the silent lines of its lips and face
And between the lashes of your eyes
And in every motion and joint of your body.

 

--Walt Whitman, from the Preface to the Leaves of Grass

How to Eat Tacos on Piedras Street, El Paso, Texas

Eileen Myles' THE INFERNO

"I am glad I am not an artist. A poet kind of is, but really it’s like you’re like a professionalized person. Poetry. Nobody knows what the fuck it is. And what makes it entirely odd is that there’s no money in it.


So in the awards it’s worse than art. No poetry-driven economy. No critical machinery. There’s just no thing at all. Which could be Zen but instead it’s entirely the opposite. It’s so symbolic. And humorless. Awards are the only currency American writing has to describe a writer’s work. It’s almost French. But in France at least the ribbons mean something. You get dinner, a bottle of wine. People know you. Here it’s nothing. And like everything else horrible eventually it leeches into t the soil. Even Allen Ginsberg wanted an award. The week before he died he emailed Bill Clinton to say I’m Allen Ginsberg, the poet. I’ve never received any kind of award from my country. It would be great if I could get something before I die.

But it would make difficulties for you with Gingrich and the right, I understand. Clinton didn’t write back. Nothing for the man who wrote “America”? Allen knew it wasn’t remotely possible to get honored by the superpower that can’t tolerate criticism of itself.  But he was dying and he had to ask. Robert Lowell got honored but he wasn’t a queer or a Jew. He was Robert Lowell."

—Eileen Myles, Inferno, pp 165-66.

Here's a weird thought. I worry about reading too much Eileen Myles. Her writing is so seductive. It’s saying stuff the way I want to say stuff. She even enjoys being not quite accurate. Like some pants with lots of legroom. Space for the mind to feel comfortable and at home. The words could mean this thing or it could mean that thing. And that’s alright. Like those three sentences that start this passage, the last one having two similes, two likes. “I am glad I am not an artist. A poet kind of is, but really it’s like you’re like a professionalized person.” Like she’s really not sure what she wants to say, not sure she wants to tighten it up so there’s no legroom. Like she wants the reader to figure it out herself if the reader cares. And she hopes the reader does care enough to think about what the meaning of being a poet and writing poetry is all about. It’s a crucial question for Eileen. It was a crucial question for Allen Ginsberg. And it’s a crucial question for me. And, like Eileen, I want to wear my own poetry with lots of legroom. Like those pants I wear in the zendo, the ones with the drawstring. I’m always wondering if they are going to fall off. There I am bowing to the Buddha and my pants slip down to my ankles. My legs are so white. My daughter Susie says I need to get more sun.

See there. You can see why Eileen’s writing is so seductive. Maybe infectious is the better word. Like Creeley was for guys like me growing up poet in the Far West 1960s, not many people to talk to. Those little delicate Creeley lines with the heavy breath stop at the end of the line. Such little poems. Creeley said it was okay to write short poems. Poems the length of your sheet of typing paper. That was okay. Then computers came along and we can go on forever. Sometimes I want to go on forever. Sometimes I’m happy writing little short poems. Shorter than haiku poems. Like I said: You can see why Eileen’s writing is so seductive.
POSTSCRIPT: Eileen underlines words in this novel INFERNO which is so much like a memoir it could be a memoir. But she said it's a novel so that's okay with me. Maybe she'd rather be a novelist than a memoirist. Who wouldn't? Especially if you're a poet. But back to the underlining of words. Like she’s writing on a typewriter and not a computer. She doesn’t italicize words. She underlines them. In some places she strikes through words. She didn’t like this or that sentence but she doesn’t delete it she strikes through it. Again like she’s using a typewriter. It has an old-fashioned look. But Eileen is not old-fashioned. She wants the reader to see what she took out and wants the reader to think about what she took out and why she took it out. Style or meaning? Whatever. It’s important to her. Sort of flip and fun. And important. At least in my head. Yeah, infectious is a good word. Like laughter. That kind of infectious. And seductive is a good word too. One or the other. Take your pick. But read the book. Especially if you are a poet. You can choose between one cover or the other cover. That’s odd, huh? Independent presses are always doing interesting things to make you think. So O/R has these two covers. And Eileen underlines words and strikes out sentences. Interesting publishing kind of stuff. I chose the white cover. Sometimes I wonder if many poets are out there buying books anymore. No wonder there’s no poetry-driven economy.

If you want to read a regular review of INFERNO, Liz Brown did a good one at Bookforum. Also, here's a video of Eileen reading from the novel. She reads the part about why she calls it a novel. "Writing a novel is like being buried alive." Etcetera. She's a very good and fun reader.

Charles Olson live @ the Kitchen Table

Below are some great videos of Mr. Maximus Charles Olson reading two of his wonderful poems. Watching these kitchen-made movies really lets you understand how Olson cast such a big light over the workings of the New American Poetry when I was getting into that world. Shy. Unsure. I must have read Olson's "Projective Verse" essay 15 times trying to figure out exactly what his complicated prose was talking about. (It's actually quite simple, I discovered, but I wouldn't trade that journey for an Idiot's Guide.) Barney Childs said one day in class, "Well, Byrd has a good ear. He knows how to do it. He just has to find something to say." Ha. I remember another home movie that I saw in Tucson must have been 1964. It was after a Creeley reading and there was a party up in the hills. The moon and the stars. Lots of booze and talk about poetry. Dreamy. I walked into one room and Creeley was showing a movie of him and Olson in Gloucester. They were walking down a road, hands in their pockets, talking, Creeley looking up to see this big man, his friend. Man, I thought, this is where I want to be. Thanks to Ron Silliman's blog for posting the videos, and to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute archives which is where I copped the photograph, one of my favorites. 

In Memory of Luis Jimenez

Note: In a few weeks I'm going back to Memphis for the 50th Reunion of my graduating class. I graduated from Memphis University School, a prep school. It's a long story how I got there, but my mother who was widowed when I was two was desperately trying to find a male role model for me. I was a hell-raiser, not a happy young man. Public school wasn't working, she felt. I tried CBHS, a Catholic boys school. I got deeper in trouble. So finally for my last two years she bit the bullet (indeed, our whole family bit the bullet) and off I went to MUS. I don't think I've seen any of these guys (except Kingsley hooker) since 1960, so I'm nervous. One classmate I'm very much interested in seeing again is Todd Slaughter, who has become a very fine artist, with an emphasis on public art. I asked him if he knew my friend Luis Jimenez, and he said yes, so I thought I would post this piece on my blog. It originally appeared in El Paso's Newspaper Tree, which is in limbo now, and the Texas Observer.

Eating Mexican Food on Texas Avenue
In Memory of Luis Jimenez

Artist and sculptor Luis Jimenez is dead. The angels killed him. They had been pestering him for years. When he was a kid, walking in the alleys, he was shot in the eye with a bee-bee gun. In 1965 the angels cracked up his car and sent him to the hospital with a broken back. In the 1990s in pure malice they plucked out his left eye, the one injured by the bee-bee. They clawed enough at his right arm and hand that he needed operations. They packed him off to the hospital twice with heart attacks. But he kept working. His art kept him going. He was a blue collar workingman. He loved his tools. He wore a big, complicated utility knife on his belt. He had a nice big pickup.

Houston sculptor Sharon Kopriva says Luis was the hardest working artist she has ever known. He wouldn’t leave it alone. And he was happy when he was lost in his work, his art, using his hands--the stupid angels had left him the one eye in his head, and he saw things only a fronterizo could see. Inside that peculiar geography strange things happened--sex and death danced with the drunks and vatos, cowboys and Indians rejoiced in their legends and defied the onslaught of Manifest Destiny, automobiles made love to America, the myths of Mexico wandered the streets on the sides of low-riders and mingled with the pedestrians of Albuquerque. So he kept on working in the midst of a horrendous divorce and the battles with lawyers. The city of Denver was after him about the Blue Mustang that was to be installed at the airport years ago. The Blue Mustang was cursed.

And of course the angels chose the Blue Mustang with the beautiful eyes of fire as their murder weapon. Thirty-two feet of steel-supported fiberglass and years of labor--he was atop a ladder, hoisting a piece into place, and the angels pushed the Blue Mustang down on top of him.

"When I was young, I felt my skill was inherent in being Chicano, inherent in being Mexican, and that every Mexican not only had ability but appreciated art. It was a kind of fantasy, but certainly within the context a positive thing."

The art of Luis Jimenez was rooted in the gritty aesthetics of El Paso--that rasquache aesthetics that grows up out of the bones and dirt of the desert, an aesthetics that speaks poor Mexican and broken English so that it can somehow endure the relentless expectations of America. He worked in his father’s Electric Neon shop and helped design some of the bizarre neon signs that still are sprinkled around the city. He traveled through Mexico and saw the work--sketches, paintings, and murals of Diego Rivera, Siquieros and Orozco. They were sometimes funny, political, violent and populist. The murals especially--heroic and monumental. And in the late 1960s he strode manly Chicano into the belly of the beast, New York City, which was awash with Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe pop culture and intellectual minimalism. The New York City art world disdained American regionalism and didn’t know what “Chicano” meant. Still Luis paid very close attention, he learned what he wanted to learn, he began to make waves but he never forgot where he came from.

Sometime in the 1980s I was in downtown El Paso and was wandering through City Hall in search of some bureaucratic permit to fix my house. I turned a corner and, there on the 1st floor bigger than life, stood Luis’ huge “Border Crossing,” a Mexican man with bandana was wading the Rio Grande with a woman in a shawl on his shoulders. The woman was carrying a child in her arms. The family, pura indigena, was immigrating illegally into the United States. They obviously had their own laws to attend to--life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The piece was 12-feet tall, made of the polished fiberglass that made the form seep with deep fluid color. In the guise of art Luis had infiltrated City Hall with contraband ideology.

The piece was on loan and so it disappeared after a few months. I know because I went looking for it. It had become part of my imagination. Then years later I saw “Border Crossing” standing in the December snow near the plaza in Santa Fe. The hoity-toity walked by and nobody paid attention. I daydreamed about stealing the sculpture some drunken night and bringing it home to El Paso. I would install it on the El Paso Street Bridge. It belonged in the ferocious Chihuahua sun.

I had wanted to make a piece that was dealing with the issue of the illegal alien. People talked about the aliens as if they had landed from outer space, as if they weren’t really people. I wanted to put a face on them; I wanted to humanize them. I also wanted to deal with the whole idea of family…I went back to my experience in El Paso where this is a common sight…It was dedicated to my dad, at which point my dad said, “You know, I was never an illegal alien. I just never had my papers straight.”

When his mother was alive, Luis would come to El Paso often and he’d stop by and visit. We’d walk down to the Mexican Cottage on Texas Avenue. Luis usually got the caldo de res, and I got the chile relleno plate with the beans and rice, although I know it’s impossible to be a good vegetarian on Texas Avenue. There used to be a waitress there, a woman in her 30s, who would flirt with us. She’d call us los Guapos and los Reyes de la Avenida--both of us grey-haired 60-somethings, Luis with the one eye and me with the baldhead and the goofy hat. We’d laugh with her and do some flirting of our own. Luis especially got a kick out playing with the coy side of Spanish and explaining to me, his gavacho friend, what he was saying. The waitress would bring us special gifts from the kitchen.

The last time Luis visited, his mother only had a few days remaining in her life and Luis told me about sitting with her as she labored with her breathing. She knew she was dying. He’d try talking to her, but she’d slip away into sleep. He pulled out his sketchbook and he sketched his mother as she lay dying. His sister walked in while he was sketching. She got mad at him. Here their mother was dying, and all he could think about was making art. Luis was hurt by his sister’s anger, but he understood. All his life, he said, his art got in between him and the people he loved. “But,” he said in an almost plaintive voice, “that’s what I do. I make art. That’s how I understand.”

The making of the art cut through the crap. The confusion slipped away and all that remained was the man working.

The waitress at the Mexican Cottage has disappeared. I never even knew her name. The new waitress is nice, but she’s slow and almost as old as me. And Luis is dead. That goddamned blue Mustang. He bled to death on his studio floor.

We’ll miss him, huh?

James Ellroy: Blood's a Rover audio

Huge James Ellroy fan. Can’t help it. American Tabloid juiced me the disease. The public world as conspiracy. The JFK assassination. Mafioso. The Bay of Pigs Fiasco. Cuba dirty money and nothing else. L.A. Cops. FBI. No innocence. Hate and re-hate. We are all dumb rubes. Exotic prose. Un-prose. Re-prose. Kill the sentence dead. Zap the verbs. No adverbs. Shit out adjectives. Break and re-break all rules. Pureland of the Profane. Say what? Son Johnny Byrd sd if 10% is true, then we should walk out the front door and join a revolution. But in Blood’s a Rover, the cops change their spots. Waved little red flags. Morphed Tiger Cab. I didn’t read it but listened to a masterful unabridged recording. The master Craig Wasson and his many voices. 26 hours wandering around the streets of El Paso in my Subaru. The history of 60s & 70s 20th century America seen from the dark smelly and hairy end of the digestive tract—Herbert Hoover, Dick Nixon, Bebe Rebozo, Sonny Liston, Sal Mineo for god’s sake, Red Foxx, Howard Hughes as Prince Dracula. Wasson nails their voices. Never wavers. Emeralds and sex and voodoo. “That’s right, Baby Boy.” MLK assassins (feds and cops and peepers) go red. Guilt and shame. Cannot sleep. MLK fleshy truths dreams. Hoover wears the panties. The Red Goddess wants to have a baby. Beware Haitian voodoo black men with wings and automatic weapons. Hide and re-hide. Secrete and re-secrete. A meet and greet with Ellroy? No way. I think he’s busy scripting the narco-war in Mexico. His personal novel. Talks daily to Calderon and El Chapo on Skype. America doesn’t stand a chance. So, no, I don’t want to meet that man. But I’ll read his books. He’s the best.