BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

B O N I F A C I O The weather was a little windy and the sun was beating its fists onto the desert floor. It was the day before dia de los rascacielos, the name I later heard a man on a bus give for the attacks on the World Trade Center. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

H A U N T “There will be strong memories, my brother,” smiled Bonifacio.

He held his arm around me and hovered there in the room like an archangel. Still dressed as he was while waiting tables at the local bistro, his white waiter’s uniform had big round buttons that dotted a double-breasted waistcoat. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

Can I just say now that spoken word poet Rich Ferguson is a great inspiration? Recently I wrote a rebellious poem-essay that I read at the Virgin Megastore in Hollywood and got freaky nervous because Ferguson showed up. OK, I would have been nervous anyway, but he was there looking like a poet gunslinger… (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

Recently the ex-mayor of a small town near Bakersfield called me at the news station. He’d just read my book, Lords and he was more than a bit shook up.

After we spoke for nearly an hour I asked him what he thought about the Lords of Bakersfield. Rumors were, their cult-like activities shot back to the late 1800s when dark-minded young British blue-bloods, booted out of Europe for being embarrassments to their well-to-do families (too gay in their county and city salons) ended up in the less than idyllic swamplands of the San Joaquin Valley, victims of false marketing. (more…)

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…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

My kid Lando sat in the stands and huddled in the cold with the rest of his mates from the pop punk band Dirty Spanglish. Their claim to fame? Performing their song “Hots for Hermione” on Harry Potter book seven release night at Vromans Bookstore. That was five months ago. Friday, they showed up more than two hours early to the stadium and barely got a seat in the stands. It was a night not about rock and roll legacies, but football.

(more…)