FIRED

I returned from a trip to Europe in ‘69 still full of myself as “world traveler” but had to move back in with my mother and her au currant in San Francisco. He was a longshoreman, alternately drunk and abusive though I think we only had one full-scale row while I was there. Perhaps I'll share more about that another time.
I probably had some money left but it couldn’t have been much. I remember selling my blood or plasma for $5 and being astounded at how long it lasted given the dire straits I was in. I reapplied at my old job, Del Monte Corp., but they weren’t interested in me. Can’t say I blame them, we had had a whopper of a going away party for me, drunken embarrassment all around. But I got hired as a clerk in an import/export office very close to moms.
My boss was a German who was evidently afraid to be seen eating. He used to duck his head down below the level of his desk, take a bite of his lunch, not that I ever actually saw this process, then bob back up chewing. He was just slightly older than I so I couldn’t write it off to senility; just a tad erratic had you asked me.
Two things come to mind about that for me. One was, as I learned a little German in Europe, emphasis was placed on the two different verbs for “to eat,” frissen and essen. Animals friss, humans ess. The difference was stressed to me, as it was more than slightly uncouth to reverse them. The second is that when I grew older, I had a long, drawn out, quite psychotic episode during which time (and still some today) much of life became symbolic and synchronistic. Behaviors, words, signs were linked together sometimes seemingly inappropriately to the rational mind but real none-the-less for one in what I will term correctly or not a psychotic fugue. I don’t want to use psychotic as a negative here, although much of it certainly was, but more in the sense that I was in the realm of ‘Psyche’, of a pre-logical passion state where the threads of meaning or even cause and effect were not always as I’d heretofore been led to expect.
One of the many thousands of out-of-the-ordinary things that I noted in this time was how much subtle activity there is around the process of eating. Seeing this in my fugue state was like deconstruction be it of book, speech or in this case activity. Nothing in our life is really as simple as it seems and sitting down to a meal finds primal urges and memories leering into the foreground whether we notice them in ordinary time or not. I guess I would call my fugue state a sort of extraordinary state, a slow-mo stream of extraordinary revelations around each ordinary act.
One of the things I noticed was how often, how uncannily often someone would look my way just as I was about to stuff something in my mouth. Just as I opened my mouth wide, their eyes would meet mine; me, jaw stretched, mouth gaping, like a predator in the act, a picture caught forever in the other’s eyes. Check the image out in the mirror; it’s rarely your best view. It happened so often I began to become self-conscious about the act of eating. I never went so far as my old boss, but I did modify my behavior as I viewed myself viewed by other’s eyes as an actor might view herself as perpetually on-camera.
If you could take a video camera and somehow record absolutely every action at a dinner party, you would find how many surreptitious glances go toward whoever is in the pre- or mid-bite mode. We want to see another’s gaping mouth almost as much as if they’d flashed a vulva or anus at us. Certainly we have a great curiosity about the mentioned orifices, but have more opportunities to study the oral.
In truth, though, a video is out of the question. It’s only the miraculous eyes and mind of us and especially of the paranoid psychotic in a fugue state who is fast enough to record all this. In addition, it was beyond chance how many times a glance at the eater would be simultaneous with the food suddenly dropping from the eater’s hand or fork. I would gladly use the word ‘caused’ here, but I know you won’t believe it. It’s true though. Akin to the evil eye, some kind of energy exits us when we look in another’s direction and it can alter events, a kind of psycho kinesis. We think of energy as only entering the eye, but it exits also, perhaps in the same way a full bottle, as liquid enters must displace. Blake: “the eye changing, changes all.”
Fortunately or unfortunately mishaps did not always occur nor could they be consciously rendered, not that I tried. The upshot is that such occurrences caused me to become way more aware of my eating process, focusing on my food so it didn’t prematurely leave my fork if someone glanced my way.
Science will someday figure that energy out. In the meantime we have scads of anecdotal evidence of the ‘evil eye’ if we’d bother investigating rather than negate or dismiss what we’d prefer not to believe, uncover, discover, thereby taking responsibility for our actions. God save me from being responsible for myself.
It’s a twin kinda thing. On the one hand, one looks like a total predator chomping, or getting prepared to chomp on something. On the other hand, there’s a paradoxical vulnerability about being caught with your mouth wide open. If another’s eyes can cause you to lose focus on your fork, maybe you could choke or bite your own tongue, so you need to protect yourself if you’re going to continue eating in public.
Else, go behind your desk.
Of course I’m not saying my boss was a psycho, though he may have been. But at some level, I’m assuming he was sensitive enough to subtle energies from others that he felt the need to hide his dinner. And isn’t that what any other animal on earth does? They all always hide it or lose it to the rest. We have changed our behavior in this regard, how long ago I’ve no idea, but dining together is still a sole human activity and often fraught with psychic peril. Hyenas, lions and vultures et al eat as a troop, but we would hardly consider it fine dining. How many times have you inwardly criticized someone at mealtime for eating too much, too hastily, too ill mannerly for instance? Or maybe, heaven forbid, thought, “I hope he chokes on it!” I can also give this stressful activity the blame for anorexia also. But that’s another and very long story. Take my psychotic word for it. The dinner table is NOT a placid place at all.
I have roamed far afield. I remember no details of how or why, only that . . . he came out from behind his desk long enough to fire me.

MAYBE A MAUPIN, THE TAPE LIBRARIAN AND ME

Although I whine and gripe about life and my life in particular, there are those moments, those 2% of waking hours for which to be grateful, stunned, thankful, joyous, if confused.
So it was that once upon a time I lived in San Francisco and some weirdness attended me. Small surprise, one reckons, given the city, I hear you say. Something about living on an earthquake zone creates certain gasses in the area as were produced in sibylline caves also. But I digress.
I worked for a large corporation in their computer department. Hard to believe in this day and age boys and girls, but we stored our data on magnetic tape wound around a 4-inch hub out to about a 10.5-inch diameter. This almost ½ mile or so of tape could hold about 50MB’s in today’s parlance.
The job processes of this large corporation required a large tape library and the library required a librarian to provide the correct tapes, file them away after use, clean, repair etc. I cannot remember the librarian’s name though I can visually recall her and hear again her breathy voice. It was a name both exotic and flowery, nothing as pedestrian as Beth or Chris. Although I think this name was an adopted one, a nom de scène in waiting, let’s call her Illiana.
We conversed at work, but briefly and often superficially all of us busy with our tasks. Yet she seemed way more intelligent and ambitious than her modest job title. And one day she asked me if I’d like to come over and see her place. Maybe a party, maybe not, the memory dims. I accepted and she gave me her address indicating it was over by Coit Tower.
I will explain more and better but let me interrupt just now and tell you that a lot of what I’ve just written and will say on this subject is a lie.
To continue: Even though Coit was the landmark, that fact may have made her location harder rather than easier to find, as the streets around the famous attraction were a veritable warren. I was lost easily, quickly and for a good while before I stumbled upon her doorway, lit gaily in the foggy, darkening San Francisco night. It’s hard to describe the feeling of being lost in your adopted city that you think you know. Twisting and turning, becoming more confused by the moment, I felt I’d entered an unknown twilight zone.
Her place was small and artsy with a few others there for a quiet, cozy evening snack and chat. Although I was charmed by her invitation and small glimpse into her life, I couldn’t stay long as my commute home made for a quick turn-around on a work night. While she may have been 15 blocks from our office, I was more like 15 miles. The company also confused me as I knew none of them, and we seem to have few common points upon which to connect.
That’s the end of that lie and so I’ll tell you something else. The above was 1969 or so. In 1974 while I was still living in SF, a local newspaper, The Pacific Sun started to run a thoroughly engaging serial by Armistead Maupin, not exactly a household name, but soon to become one, especially in SF. The SF Chronicle later picked up the serial and later still PBS aired a mini-series based on, as it was known, ‘Tales of the City’.
I looked forward to the Pacific Sun every week, and followed along as well as I could when the Chronicle picked it up. Then years later, when I watched the PBS rendition, what was there about the Maupin warren-like neighborhood that snuck into my memory bank yet tethered itself to nothing as far as I could tell? And the characters, did they not seem familiar to me? Well, of course, all good writers can insinuate their characters as part of their readers’ lives, nothing strange about that. But, that one lady, a main character, the one with the flowery name , , ,something about her . . .
And here is where I must reveal the lies I am telling. For all the above is an absolute mish-mash memory, of my visit to Illiana’s warren hovel with Armistead Maupin’s Tales confluenced inextricably in my mind. And much odder still, as I look back upon it, for all I know, it could have been AM himself at that small party that night! Illiana had nothing if not connections, involvements, schemes and fantastical dreams. We are all familiar by now with the reputed alter egos of librarians, and though usually they are the bookish ones, believe me, this tape librarian had one powerful alter-persona! Was I to have been a possible new recruit, new blood for some as yet to unwind Tale! Did they think an unmarried, lesbian, Midwestern hick might provide new spice? Did Illiana have sexual designs on me? I think she might have! I was absolutely blind to any sexual machinations at that time and for most of my life and would never have suspected anything other than a quiet get-together. No doubt drugs were also involved, San Francisco, the 60’s, remember? But as I didn’t use, much, my interlocutors would have summed me up as a hopeless naïf by that time and when I said I had to go home to get up and go to work the next day, knew I was of no worth. Nor did Illiana ever mention the evening or invite me back.
So. In sum, I have no idea what really happened, but believe I was interviewed as a possible entrant into a future Tale! That’s my tale and I’m sticking to it.