Brankton Walks Austin

Brankton started out the day as usual with a nasty little headache. Not enough oxygen to the brain. The majority of his family, dominated by males, suffered from the same malady, that is to say, snoring, but with Grizzly bear ferocity, capital ‘S’ snoring.

Years ago on a ski holiday to some swanky resort in Utah hanging out with all of the swells with their whiz-bang skiing accoutrement and private chalets adjoining the main run, the unfortunate souls in the townhouse next to his family actually complained to the leasing company that their trip was ruined because of the ungodly racket that he and a half-dozen of his brothers harmonized for four nights of sonorous hell. Not even the most desperate succubus would sit on the chest of any of his brothers, attempting to snatch a soul during the night. Upon hearing the horrific sound emanating from their large, undulating thorax, the noise most assuredly would drive even the stoutest of succubi away. Having been married to and driven one off, Brankton felt he should know.

He walked the Austin neighborhood by himself, with its old twisted oaks and the occasional stray cat and ubiquitous Obama/Biden yard signs. Austin might be in Texas, but it's the liberal hub of the south with plenty of state employees working at and owing their allegiance to the "sunset red" hued granite Capitol building right off of Congress Ave. Brankton was finally getting used to making his daily constitutional alone, although this trip to the big hat capitol caused him to feel a bit more out of sorts than usual. His momentary boredom had its typical result -- Brankton was feeling hungry.

Sitting alone in the multi-level mid-century house turned into a restaurant on 6^th St., Brankton ordered the “big ole pancakes” for brunch. He was beginning to regret the blue wool sweater that he put on in much cooler Los Angeles just a few short hours earlier. The typical Austin weather of 95% humidity and low 90’s temp did not agree with his sartorial norm; especially in a restaurant with two dozen obviously gay men surrounding him, dressed much more weather appropriate with assorted chambray shirts and long board shorts and snug-fitting t-shirts, now frowning upon his choice of garb, he felt, save for one very attractive co-ed “friend of the gays” who, with her masculine, deep voice, oozed a sexual confidence that mocked Brankton’s recent string of asexual years. Brankton spied her looking his way several times in a few short minutes, which of course meant she saw him seeing her.

Ten long minutes later, his heavily tatted and overly tanned waitress informed him that she forgot brunch was over and that he would have to forgo the pancakes he had been thinking about and craving for a month now. Brankton had visions of a rotund Orson Welles with white chef hat in the back somewhere saying that he'd "flip no flapjack before it's time." He also had a vision of smacking the sass off that fat man's face. His pancake cravings started right after his wife left him and took their dog along with her “big ole” pancake recipe, the one hanging on the fridge, and not much else -- though he wished she had taken the cuckold knife out of his back at least for sense of symmetry.

The twenty-something Janeane Garofalo-type with the gay men had a mouth on her that, for lack of a better emotion or description, disappointed Brankton. Her descriptions of “her gay” -- as she proudly called her homosexual best friend -- and his proclivities for certain gay sex put Brankton’s gag reflex on overdrive at the sight of the gravy-covered chicken-fried-chicken that he reluctantly ordered due to the no pancake past brunch rule. He wasn’t the only one to cringe either. There was a family of four “to his 9” – this was his grandfather’s phrase when he wanted to say “to the left” in a cool sort of grandpa way -- who looked as out of place as an Amish family with big tall black hats and long ZZ-Top beards shopping in a Fred Segal store.

She continued unabated regaling the men in her gay coffee clutch. Some occasionally tried to compete with her, but she had the floor and wasn't about to let the spotlight slip from her grasp for a moment. None really could compete; her stories had just the right combination of raunch, real life patois, and an unexpected ending. And of course, she knew her audience, and they laughed, which inspired even filthier anecdotes. She had an expert comedienne’s deft touch, though the venue and time-slot were no doubt inappropriate.

“What?!” the twenty-something "Janeane Garofalo" finally asked Brankton as she caught him glancing her direction one-dozen times too many. Her friends were caught up in conversations about Barton Springs and some festival that was about to take place. None of her friends would hear his response so he was confident, at least more confident than he would have otherwise been.

“You’re crude. Crude, but funny.” Brankton turned in his seat to deliver what he thought would be his final line more forcefully. “In fact, I’d say your crudeness is bordering on rudeness. You’re a crudeness/rudeness straddler.”

“Is that so?” She turned in her seat to catch his opinion head-on. “Well who exactly cares what you think?”

“NBC does.” Brankton regretted saying it the instant the two-word reply left his half-filled chicken-fried-chicken mouth.

“NBC? What, is that supposed to impress me?” The coffee clutch was breaking up and her friends were throwing 20’s into a pile to pay for their meal. They were waiting for her to pony up as well. “Jackie, $20.00 please,” said a friend from somewhere in the scrum.

Jackie turned her head only slightly from Brankton for a moment, “Nels, can you cover me please?” “Oh, shit, girl,” was the response from Nelson who had obviously “covered” one too many times for Jackie. Her “Oh, please!” retort belied a belief that she had indeed earned her keep with her mid-morning improv routine.

“So, Mr. NBC, you were saying.”

Please find Part 2 here to continue reading

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Death Takes a Holiday ... Not (Redux)

Death is all around us. And, unlike Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black, with his one-off holiday vis-a-vis Anthony Hopkins's swanky world, death seems to be working overtime in our senior living centers, foreign war zones, and unfortunately, certain neighborhoods here in Los Angeles. I live in one such area in L.A. with nightly gunshots and the ubiquitous crime scene taped off around the liquor stores aplenty on every block. The police helicopter becomes this mechanical vulture illuminating the presence of a fresh kill or that police units are in hot pursuit. You never quite get used to the constant reminders of your mortality, the way one takes it for granted living in the suburbs from whence I hail. Maybe that's why there are five-times the number of churches in L.A. proper.

A few months ago, a young man three doors down from my house was shot and killed. He was standing with a group of young men and women early in the evening when the unnoticed coward walked up and fired at point-blank range. While everyone scattered for their lives jumping behind walls and cars, the killer jogged to the awaiting van and was driven away leaving an all-too-common scene for a heart-broken father away on a business trip to come home to. The police said it was an initiation killing and that our neighbor was in the wrong place, etc. There are just too many etc.'s in our inner cities today. Perhaps President Obama should propose a war on domestic terror and pull a few billion out of the "stimulus bill" where it might actually do some good by hiring extra police and specially trained gang units. Now there's some hope and change I'd like to see become a reality.

I have witnessed or come across three such murders while here in the 'hood, and my brothers and friends are constantly telling me to move away. But, I remind them that when I lived in the safe suburbs, my little brother and I watched early one morning as the coroner's office took away our neighbor, Mr. 'D', who had kissed his daughter (with her friend over for a sleepover) and son goodnight, sat himself down late-night in his car parked with the engine running in their closed garage, and drove himself into the afterlife. We sat there in our side yard not 10 feet away from the coroner as he wheeled Mr. 'D', who was covered in a blanket or bag, into the back of the station wagon with its windows blackened. We knew that he was dead, like kids just know or divine the truth out of a situation without really knowing. You know?

Just a few short years after Mr. 'D's departure, I went to see Rollerball, starring Jimmy Caan -- my older brother James took my little brother and me. Driving back home up the hill that leads to our parent's house, we were stunned to see bodies covered with blood stained sheets in the driveway across the street from our house. This was the aftermath of a murder, attempted-suicide (the murderer later died in a coma). Thankfully, our neighbor Mr. 'C' and other members of the family (our young friends) survived. He later remarried and has been blissfully happy for the past 25 years. But, that night, in the safe suburbs, my brother Gil became a hero. When bullets were flying, and an off-duty cop's revolver was jamming, my next door neighbor Mrs. Glenn tried to stop the onslaught; it was my 14 year-old brother who tackled her, knocking her into the bushes, and dragged her back to safety. Death doesn't take a holiday, and when it's our time, we should all be ready to give an account for the life we're living, whether we're in Happy Dale sanitarium, Afghanistan, or Beverly Hills.

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Helms Man, Watermelon Man ... Redux

Good people work hard. They work hard and rear their families as best they can, whether making $125,000 or $25,000. I've known one family making a million dollars per annum, with salt-of-the-earth parents and great kids (Hollywood types), and another family with a dad who quite literally collects recycled materials and hauls trash to make ends meet (Hauling types). Both of these families have a few things in common: they own their homes, with children who attend private/religious schools, and both are credits to their neighborhoods.

Good people work hard, and to work is a blessing from a good God, so says the Puritan work ethic and King Solomon in Ecclesiastes (before everything became vanity). Occasionally my sons will ask me about the men we see waiting by Home Depot for work. "Dad, why are some of the workers dirty? Are they from countries that are dirty?" I tell them that these men put many of the men in suits on the same LA streets to shame with their amazing work ethic and indefatigable spirit to make a living. And, yes, they may be dirty, but their day-laborer métier is a badge of honor. That's what I tell my sons. If I had their work ethic, thick skin and stamina, then I'd be Richard Branson successful (see Ex Libris ... 2009, right) of Virgin Group fame.

When I was a kid -- 4 and 5 years old -- the Helms Man used to come through our neighborhood regularly. I can still hear the distinct "wooot, wooot" whistle of the Helms truck telling all who had ears to hear that calorie-loaded goodness was drawing nigh. And, like any good childhood memory, there was food involved.

Many times as I was walking to kindergarten (when children still walked to school), I would wave down the Helms Man and he'd stop and give me a chocolate chip cookie and a bag of M&Ms. I'd put it on our tab and then he'd charge my mom (since she always slept-in, she could not stop such mid-morning gastronomical tomfoolery). The yellow truck was modified with all sorts of doors that opened, revealing still more drawers, some which were very narrow and long, or very flat and wide. In these drawers and behind those doors were the time-tested still-warm goodies of a bygone era: pastries, doughnuts, cookies, and some store-bought candy all within steps of your home or on your way to kindergarten.

Lots of memories from that time have stayed with me: the feel-good aroma that poured out of the Helms truck every time those doors opened (like the perfume scented memory of loving grandma's bakery hug). Or, the sonic memory of clanking bottles (both full and empty) when the milkman would drop off the milk on his morning round -- which occasionally included a bottle of thick-n-rich chocolate milk after my little brother and I would mark up the order card with an extra 'X' in the box. Which I suppose was appropriate as we were the beginning of the generation tagged with moniker 'X'.

Helms Bakery at its height of popularity was a 24-hour-a-day factory that cranked out fresh baked goods, and then loaded up hundreds of trucks around SoCal for daily delivery. Helms established the brand after landing the contract to supply the 1932 Olympics. Drivers like the Helms guys, and individuals like them, made a living by working the oil rigs, doing time on the assembly line, or walking a beat in Southern California. These guys are called the "greatest generation" because of their ability to see something that had to be done, and then going about their doing it without any fanfare whatsoever (like stopping some of the grossest evils mankind has ever seen in Nazi Germany, Imperialist Japan or despotic fascist Italy). They believed in duties, not rights.

Just this last week, I heard the call of the Watermelon Man. I hear it occasionally, maybe four times in the last five years. "Watermelon Man. Fresh, cold melons. Get your melons. Watermelon man. " I can hear the octogenarian driver as he barely above a whisper calls to his former clients over his loud speaker, many who are either no longer alive, no longer hear, or have moved out of the ole neighborhood. I'm not sure what's the bigger surprise, that his truck still operates, or that he's still working at 82? What doesn't surprise me, is that good people from all walks of life work hard, and find tremendous satisfaction in a job well done. Especially if that job helps men and women with calloused hands meet the needs of their families in a very expensive City of Angels.

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Mountain Tops and Malibu Canyon

We’ve all had those wonderful moments of being away from home and literally finding ourselves encamped in some (fairly) remote mountain top respite where neither work nor ex-spouses, bill collectors or pressures from law school, can intrude upon our time, sanity, and personal space. It’s being in that new (or familiar) place overlooking the valley of the shadow of stress that allows one to recharge the ole battery and gray cells and to rethink the current (or lack of) direction of our lives. Sometimes we’re ensconced in a luxury pied a terre, and other times it’s the cozy quarters of a 2-person tent. Sometimes God takes us there, (“Er, Moses, let’s you and I have a chat”) and sometimes we find the nearest peak and climb to its apogee because, like Sir Edmund Hillary (woops!) George Mallory said, “it's there,” sitting in the midst of our vista, and we thought, “sod it all; I’ll have that finished before my afternoon cuppa.”

The mountain top experience offers a new perspective to those now ant-like problems (and people and cars) waaaaay down below. We can look at those pressures and problems anew, with a step-back, one-two-cha-cha move that gives us a new rhythm and quick step to looking at nagging problems or problem people who nag. With renewed vigor we make those tough decisions about leaving certain relationships behind and move onward toward tomorrow where each day is no longer filled with the same fights over the same issues. With fresh ideas from that great new book we finished in Lake Tahoe we attack work with the giddiness of a new-hire out of grad school. The mountain top is a good place (I’ve never had a bad experience above 5,000 ft -- unless of course you count a Southwest Airlines cattle car 3-stop at 35,000 ft.) and the mountain-top experience is usually a good thing.

Some mountain top experiences do stink, however. When I was a 9-yr old kid, I can remember Marlon Brando coming to my neighborhood to give away a large parcel of land to a local American Indian tribe. I hiked/pushed my bike around the rim of the canyon that over looked our housing development in the Santa Monica Mountains and from my lofty perch spied the news vans that drove from the freeway off ramp -- waaaaay over on the other side of the canyon -- as they meandered through the tract to finally line up with the other news wagons and vans replete with all sorts of cameramen and news guys and gals pulling on garish gold and brash blue jackets (the ones with 7’s or 4’s or 2’s on lapels indicating station and channel no.). After a quick check of a mirror hung on an open van door inspecting hair, teeth, and lipstick application, they were preening for the “important” news conference where Mr. Marlon Brando was announcing his “gift” to the American Indians.

In the crowd, if memory serves, were Robert Blake and also Iron Eyes Cody who did some commercials with a tear running down his cheek, crying over the horrible white people trashing “his” America. Even as a child I saw the hokum of this sort of PSA, though to this day I have a visceral reaction whenever I see anyone throw trash out a car window (especially a moving vehicle, where trash lands atop tasseled moccasins). In the 1940s, thirty years before and one mile away, Iron Eyes Cody was at another ceremony, where a Polish immigrant constructed a rather large, 10-ton cement statue sitting atop “Mt. Estrella” (which was actually a smallish rocky hill, a crag really), sculpted with flowing headdress. To this day, the statue of “Chief White Eagle” stands overlooking the 101 freeway (which was just a 2-laner back then). I wonder if ole Iron Eyes had any reservations about that ceremony as well? Either way, his hand and foot imprints are said to be at the base of the mini monument. I haven't been up there in 20 years, but I'll climb up there with my sons to confirm.

Back to Brando. Turns out that Marlon was actually unloading a crappy piece of land, that was for the most part, undevelopable as it had a mortgage of several hundred thousand dollars, plus there were some back taxes owed as well. Knowing the reputation of Brando, I have no doubt that he figured he’d give the land away, land some nice national pub for his efforts, and then let the banks and/or tax authorities try to take legal action against the tribes. Talk about your real definition of Indian giver; Brando embodied the ultimate tool who decided to hang an albatross around the necks of our native peoples with an indebted real property imbroglio. Jackass says “what?” “What?” That’s what I thought, Marlon.

Some mountain top experiences are long overdue; about a century overdue. Not far from the Brando fiasco, stands the formerly named “Old Negro Mountain.” This week the LA Times reported the mountain has been renamed in honor of the man who settled there in the late 1800’s, from whence it’s racial slur nickname was derived. Mr. Ballard, a former slave, first came to Los Angeles in the mid-1800s after getting his freedom from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. After successfully setting up a business and working in L.A., he finally settled in the Agoura area, and he and his daughter homesteaded two fairly large contiguous parcels of land. These weren’t Spanish Land Grants, mind you. But, to have a 2,000 foot mountain named after you is pretty cool, nonetheless. His descendants, some of whom were in their 80’s, made the trek out to the Seminole Hot Springs area in Agoura and participated in a ceremony that saw this mountain renamed to Ballard Mountain.

There are two main canyon roads that lead down to the Pacific Ocean and each have tunnels. Ballard Mountain is located right near the first tunnel off of Kanan Rd. On the first tunnel on Malibu Canyon is the former home to another local legend: "the Pink Lady." She was painted by a female artist above the entrance to the tunnel, and for a few days her naked visage caused traffic jams on Malibu Canyon road the likes of which haven’t been seen since. She was eventually painted over by the county, and even today there is still a pink hue atop that tunnel reminding us of her birthday suit strut.

"The Pink Lady" and John Ballard. Marlon Brando and 10-ton “Chief White Eagle” (they are sometimes confused one for the other). These the few colorful individuals that make up part of the history of a sleepy little burb nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains near some canyon leading to Malibu. Bonus points if you visit the area and can find two of the three, Dear Reader.

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