I got the idea to start shooting interviews with Pastor and Linda; and Terry, who is the local’s local! and a bass’s bass-player; and me and some others to tell of our friendship with Steve, and assemble an epic documentary about our lives in Big Bear..thirty-three, almost 34 years! Shh**! it is 34 years, now!! (does not depend how you define IS). Elizabeth can contribute, too..she just got back from New York where she and Cougar were trying to relocate to Manhattan, but, couldn’t do it, God didn’t open that door, with jobs, and the apartment, &et cetera, — even though I contacted Ian Lloyd personally (the BROTHER LOUIE guy, and the last of that monolithic breed of New York City rock’n’roll musicians) asking for guidance and he’d said, –or replied, rather, to my missive, “Hey, man! it’s New York!! nobody knows anything (and something and then)..and we order in chinese!” (part of a local joke missing its transitional phrase, –I’d have to find the e-mail to get the rest of it for the whole laugh with that); and so when their time was up they managed to get back to SO-CAL, ultimately, by an alternate unscheduled flight..weather goofed up the airplanes getting in and out at Houston, their luggage got ditched (though timely returned, special delivery) and they landed with the guitar and clothes on their back, but! I always hankered to write a letter to Letters to the Editor at the Big Bear Grizzly (or Grizz-liar as we call it), say what’s on my mind, and sign it with my local Big Bear City address, and, like so many who aren’t up here full-time (which locks them out from voting on local issues), give the other address where I ostensibly live and work so I can afford my Big Bear cabin in the woods, i.e., list my dual residencies as Big Bear City/ New York City ~Love, ‘Scruffy!’, it would have been just for a lark but I didn’t even want to write those people anyway. Oh well! But now it can happen in the proposed documentary, with my daughter taking the heat for it, having been born and raised in Big Bear..”Yours truly, E.R., Big Bear City/ New York City” (something like that). So now she’s back finishing college; and taking a course in screenwriting, God help her not to get writers’ block! like her daddy did, thus taking the incomplete..and never graduating USC, to the chagrin of her grandmother, and another feather in her father’s cap signifying the prostate soul of a perpetual drop-out that he is..whatever. I guess it was my lot in life to never quite finish; and they did get their suitcases back quickly..so they had clothes.
The trouble with all the video I shot over the thirty-three years, here, is it mostly all sucks, I never was very excellent with a movie-camera in my hands; but we can fix that in the edit room..can’t we? little Hollywood magic, Oh! I just missed the moon sinking behind the hills in clouds..that maybe looks like what a girl sees lying on a beach-towel watching a sunset, seeing it over her bikini-top and suntan oil, that big, golden ball of fire, swallowed by the ocean (again). Things happen so fast around this planet. That’s why making movies is often frustrating. Me, I always run out of film right before the best thing happens! Then I’ve got all this stuff that’s junk by comparison. Or was it all junk, anyway, who knows? Maybe I should just delete all this and forget about the project. But there was the Big Bear Poetry Festival..and the last interviews with Vern Thompson, owner/operator of KBBV&KTOT local radio, and all the artifacts of his years of service to the community he left me; like the ‘Mike Nelson’ two-hose regulator he sent me back from Virginia where he moved after they ran him off from Big Bear, and he sold out and got out; and I had an idea I wanted to use it for, a movie idea, shot in the deep-end of a swimming-pool with an oversized KUSTOM pedal-steel, and amp’s, and all of the rest..underwater. He used it for shooting part of a story when he was a news cameraman in and around LA for a local NBC affiliate back in the fifties and sixties, with a submerged control station for a project at Catalina..when he’d made the suggestion about doing the remote camera out in the water looking at the command center his boss told him he couldn’t do it; but when his boss’s BOSS saw it on the monitor screen, LIVE! on-the-fly, and gushed about how great it looked, Vern’s boss told his boss that it was his brainchild, and Vern got no credit; but did not get fired (later he did have to give up a kidney). But I had an idea for using it, the Jacques Cousteau-thing, for an underwater music video; and I did shoot some footage with it in the bathtub that came out okay, for possible inclusion with a new recording of my old song, FATHOM CLUB..”Yeah, we don’t talk social issues, we just sit here, drinking, and eating our friends” (food-chain stuff; and an underwater haircut with big electric clippers plugged-in in the bathtub, I hadda wait till Mary and everybody went down the hill so I could have enough time alone at the house and get away with doing it, and hopefully not get electrocuted, it worked, nobody but me has seen that, and me wearing my vintage grey rubber Soviet UDT underwater goggles, scored on e-bay from a seller in Ukraine at the height of that conflict, Yes! and it got all the way here from there, through the mail in one piece, well, two pieces it has a strap, –SIGH! daylight already). And there’s hours and days of stuff with big,BIG snow in Big Bear. And maybe we can go out on the lake in Cougar’s boat so I can shoot some stuff on waters in Big Bear, and cross-cut with spreading Mom’s ashes – and Dad’s – over the Pacific Ocean, at Oceanside, just beyond the reef, where it’s not illegal (to do that). Just a thought. There’s so many ways to go with writing and shooting a movie i don’t know how anyone even ever finishes one. Oh well.
So! but on the bright side there’s already two or three big bear movies in the can. There’s POP DeFECT LIVE IN BIG BEAR. And there’s The HAIRCUT, another one of my specialty hair-related fine arts projects; and one other, I think I can think of it, we’ll see, –anyway..Oh yeah! and stuff about Steve, our other Greek buddy in Big Bear along with Mike the Greek, both of whom I got lots of video. And Bob Candiotti, he’s I-tal-yen, and started the poetry thing and promoted me and my music, or whatever you care to call it, in the big show on the big stage at the PAC, –for which they literally ran him out of town; and fortunately they were out of feathers and tar at the time. They tried to run us off for thirty-three years, and almost succeeded, but couldn’t do it..that last time almost worked when they got county code enforcement to force the landlord to kick us out but we came back within a week, three days, actually (and Steve put us up at his place until we could find another rental, which wound up being quite an interesting arrangement and wholly unorthodox..but cool). Waking up with Steve and coffee; and all his heart medications. Then, I went through all that myself, with two operations, including a four-way bi-pass,BYPASS..ahem! (I don’t get a pass for that). And then the dog-catcher tried to run our dog out of town – whom she could hear barking at her provocations through Steve’s garage door – for not ah, not having a license; and called for police back-up when I didn’t..give her respect! (they’re always sniffing around the neighborhoods looking for unlicensed dogs) and the sanbernardinocounty sheriff told me to keep my hands where he could see them and i said I’m getting this out of my pocket and i don’t care, you can go ahead and shoot! (if that makes you happy) and I pulled out all my change and flung it at the animal control officer and said “there! that’s it that’s all i got, it’s yours. Well that’s what you want, isn’t it?!” and so finally the situation deescalated and we made a tentative agreement to get ‘Bagel’ her dog’s license on the honor system, that’s trust..with verification. (And James Traficant was still in this world in those days, Long live Youngstown!)
Well! Elizabeth is finishing an English major and so being as it was the last hour she got enrolled, before classes commence, I quickly found and ordered the bulk of her required books..on e-bay, to save money, of course! and a couple we of them, we found, were not the right books, but I buzzed the pages of one we’d erroneously ordered – similar, but not the exact edition – that was by the same author, a Mister GARCIA (not Lorca! Garcia-Lorca, that is) who – this Garcia I stress – whom I presume is highly thought-of in literary circles, –vs. Garcia-Lorca, famed for his plays, steeped in the surrealists’ movement, and being Spanish, from Spain! who actually is kind of good, or at least rises to that level of where my stuff does, –not him, but the other Garcia..why his book’s on her list I guess, and guess what! I see what he did, this Garcia, with his narrative dichotomies going in and outside of dreams and all, with death being a central theme, Oh! GASP! there’s a surprise. But my stuff’s better, obviously; especially the aspects dealing with death at many levels (as usual, with what they have you read in school to acquaint one with works of the masters, Ahem! maybe I’ll change my name to Gar-ci-a and see what that gets me..”Aunque la mona se vista de sed, mona se queda). So there! (had to get that exclamation point in there but it doesn’t work at the end of a phrase bracketed by parenthesis – versus brackets – requiring a PERIOD at the penultimate, ah!). Like so. (Anyway, she hates the way I write because it breaks all the rules..so?? y ni deben quedarse las cosas sobre los castors y sus trabajos, que eran viviendo conmigo, y las enfermeras que llegarse a mi apartamento, “to look in on me,” a causa de ‘los shakes’ por anoche y todo..conprendes?? de mi papel, una fantasia muy,MUY muerte-issimo! para extra-credit, como las rompecabeza’s en nuestro libro de ano dos en mi ultimo curso de Espanol..por que el maestro me dio la mirada! y la sacudida con el dedo..yo creo que el tuve una cosa con Joan Collins, –de todos modos, fue hablando mucho de ella siempre.)
Car-los! Ahh, Carlos..he was the student’s student! he liked words like DICHOTOMIES.
Back when I was at SF STATE, SCREWING AROUND MAKING CARTOONS..and Carlos was going for his Masters’ in PHILOSOPHY with a minor in CHICANO STUDIES at UC BERKELEY..we shared buildings and various apartments in Frisco (it was cheaper for him than East Bay rentals). We actually co-habited in three locations, as Pelosi’s homosexual mogul/ partners kept taking huge bites out of the city in massive real estate deals with private monies and democrats’ slush-funds blending in secret that emptied all us dead-beats out of the last affordable units as their fortunes rose, alongside of their deplorable baskets, after hours..at once, kings and queens. First, we rented batchelors’ apartments in a converted old Victorian by Hayes Valley, a very interesting black ghetto area, unique! overlooking the spot where the 101 Freeway terminated falling DOWNWARDS, resting on a mass of concrete pedestals, like a cement forest of an epic Greek statuary scale, below the ZEN CENTER, –emptying it’s bowels of commuter traffic at Fell and Laguna Streets, voiding the Cal D.O.T. highway bladder, as it were, of all the northbound gas-ridden monsters, down and up! through the controlled intersection, there, where the prostitutes and wino’s, drug addicted denizens and others hung out on the corner, hustling, their days beginning early in the morning, most days, –before social justice finally got here..the end, –Right??
My preferred poison, just so you know, in terms of style, is the stream of consciousness narrative, because when I tire of that, or this stream, I can hop easily aboard the next..a streetcar named ‘deplorable’ and re-begin with renewed vigour, no longer prone to the boredoms that accompany a more disciplined approach (to writing), but only the unadulterated adrenaline of the poetic..inspiration, my muse! (not yours, perhaps).
And there’s THE MAKING OF POP DeFECT LIVE IN BIG BEAR that probably has some candid shots of Steve at the stove in our tiny kitchen, handling the catering duties for the entire cast and crew..shake! rattle, and roll. Sitting with him in his former house, Steve once gave me one of his favorite Bible quotes I don’t remember what, it was from the old testament, prophetic, having the character of the eternal, with wisdom for how to live before our most holy God, and rewards thereby obtainable, –oh, gosh! Steve’s cat’s clawing at the venetian blinds, I think it means he wants food; and I don’t recall the verse but maybe if I spend more time in the Word I shall one day find it (by a revelation, it may pop out). The Ranch was a dream we dreamed together about a real place in real time, –at the time, an experience like nothing else in this world, outside of civilization, beyond the reach of kings..kings, and jerks! we had it, like a miracle. The peace! the peace in that place was beyond anything in our experience (other than), Ranch, the..magic words. An enchanting place folding in between high mountains and natural springs, the beauty of God’s creation, in a couple offset parcels of 460 acres total, homesteaded around 1880 by the Clark’s..we all shared that. “It’s God’s country.” as Steve would accurately affirm from time to time; or as I said it, It’s five miles from the county highway and a million miles from anywhere; the only reminder of an existing and not always user-friendly state, being the lagging jet-roar’s heard in the wakes left by military aircraft crawling through the clouded deep blue heaven above, betwixt us, and the moon..occasional, invisible, and totally mysterious. Now and then. Post WWll it had a new owner who added a splendid hand-built stone dwelling able to withstand hundred-mile-an-hour winds and hold in the woodstove-supplied heat, a hedge against the frigid snows, and furnished with many items from the personal estate of Theodore Roosevelt, bought at auction, including a pair of taxidermized elephant front feet, and a head from a buffalo bagged by ‘Teddy’; for which cause the place got its name, “The Buffalo House” because when you walked in, it was looking at you from the wall..also there was the ex-president’s bed, and matching furniture, which was quite a thing to see, as well (this may all be presented in a documentary, as time and ambition allows). Anyway, a few of our Big Bear friends got there during our times preparing the place which we’d planned for our permanent abode, –and they got the grand tour. There was Ron (who recently passed away); and Horn, who, nearby one day, seeing to a job for the telephone company, had a spare couple hours, and came walking up the dirt road and greeted me, like, “Surprise! surprise!” So we went down and unlocked the gate so he could drive in with the company truck. We had a fun time talking, while we showed off the place. Jan and Mark Harris’s trailer brought in a long load of our heavier stuff, including an upright grand piano with an interesting Big Bear history, when we were at the end of moving there – minus our 43′ Mayflower van (for the final push) we purchased for Twenty-five hundred.00 ($) from a guy being hassled for it, parked by his house, there, in his yard way out by March AFB by Riverside County Code Enforcement (like as if his trailer’s presence dwarfed the local impact of B-52’s landing and taking off around the clock, –providing for the general welfare; so we could use it to move all our stuff, being chased out of Big Bear by sanbernardinocountycodeenforcement..like wheels turning, inside some cosmic, bureaucratic clock! last leg of the move hauling the trailer, it blew out a re-cap, en route to Barstow, and had to limp it back to Lucerne and wait for new tires; and praying about it, decided God had plans we hadn’t noticed and planned on, entirely. And so, we directed the return of the trailer to our truck-driver back up the hill to Big Bear; and here we still are (in Big Bear). I went to a political meeting last night. All of our congressmen and fire-chiefs and local politicians are hosers. But they didn’t get to go to Gilligan’s Island with the big fish, so that’s the difference with them. (They each probably would have gotten their junior globalists’ K-ration – delivered by AMAZON – of adrenachrome, however; life-extending elixir..of devils!)
Steve, Steve and me, we were hanging out outside of the side of the house one fine morning around noon. Maybe we were getting ready to go do some satellite dish job I would have been helping with. Suddenly, Steve jerks his head towards the side door, as I follow, re-focusing, my attention welding to his as he cries out, “Elizabeth, NO!” Yep, she was coming out alright, for the umpteenth try at it, in her Fisher-Price plastic automobile with the big yellow doors and red body and bright blue hard-top roof, out the side door of the house with it, white knuckles gripping the wheel and this time she was determined to make good! driving it down the stone steps for certain! and there she went, flipping it and hitting the sidewalk by the concrete hand-rail, Ka-Thump! thump! before anyone could stop her from achieving her purpose, No! on this occasion no adult interloper and no common sense traffic law would hinder her will. She made it..a little shaken, but MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! as Mary appeared on the landing, appraising the situation. Stunned, we rushed to her side and checked her out. She was OK. Thank God.
Q: How do you tell God “Thank-you” for a friend like Steve?
A: Be a friend to others like Steve was to us.
Then there’s that other Greek person of immense importance to us Mike-the-Greek..we can still shake! He, like that other Greek was, is a good friend. Maybe it’s just something about the race. Da Greeks! He was in BB forever, and everybody’s friend; till the vicissitudes of local vicissitudes – of town&county – got him all jacked-up; now, he is in (Marilyn) Monro-via living with his mum, HI! Georgia (‘Ya-ya’). We share facilities and resources at Loma Linda Hospital for our age-related things..me and da Greek. I guess I should blow my tenor saxophone just a little in his honor. Birthday coming up soon. Happy borthday to you, Happy boirthday to you! Happy birthday, dear Mike-the-Greek..happy et-cetera to you! INdelibly siamesed, Greek is, with memories of VILLAGE MUSIC in dem good old days, the only really cool place in BBL’s The VILLAGE where you could only hang out if you’re cool..Fangs for the memories, as they say. Mike never made it up to see us whenever we were at the ranch, never could budget the time, but he would have loved it there..he blew by on his bike by the road that led there a couple of times, oh well. Him and Shaun converged on us in the parking lot as we were about to head out for it one time, making our move we planned, incrementally, –it’s, it’ll be in the video if I ever sit down and start editing. I imagine it would be fantastic, especially in these days. Shaun is a man of few words; and ‘Greek’ always has something smart to inject, sharp, and to the point; and always out the car-window at ya, from behind dark shades. So then we took off (in the Pinto pulling the trailer) and went up there about half a day’s journey from Big Bear so we leave around noon and get there just around dark..to prepare a warm house for the first night’s rest, of about a two-week respite, from Big Bear pressures living in Big Bear. Up there, we saw no bears, but they were there, every where..da bears. We saw their poop’s on the trails in the mornings, on our morning walks, with all the berries, from the nights before. When we finally were kicked out of our place on The Boulevard, and it was near the end of our 60-day-notice I hadda sell all my electronic pipe organs, including the mint HAMMOND B-3 Shaun had found for me from this local lady he knew about who bought it new quite awhile back and was planning on dying from her cancer so she wanted to sell it (I guess that video of the guy who was really,REALLY good playing it in the shop will surface, for some LIVE! action in the movie, and use for background music on the soundtrack, probably..I got these KORG’s that they say imitate HAMMOND’s so I’ll probably vamp on some crap for the soundtrack myself because MY MOVIE, –I just have to make sure I got an interesting picture up there and then nothing else matters anyway, right??) My one and only B-3 the kind instrument, which Steve cultivated in me a deep appreciation for..yeah, he ploughed them furrows deep; and, as i may have shared earlier he gave me his CV model from out of the bedroom which was my very first Hammond; and right up there with the best specimens of the breed as it turns out under the long shadows of time (here beneath the overpass). I never could play one much at all, the more I try, the worse it gets; but I always seem to feel better having one around. Mike the Greek gave me one a little after that, when that one broke..actually it was a M-3 that had been mod’d, of a local musician who played every weekend, vamping on requests at a dive locals’ bar The PINE CONE LOUNGE up on Pine Knot and the guy was in the twilight of his Big Bear years, –that had a nice LESLIE 122, I believe it was, KUSTOM installed and finally he couldn’t keep playing anymore, because like all of the rest of us, eventually, was just getting too old for it; so he wound up giving it to Mike to sell for him in his store, what store? VILLAGE MUSIC of course. And Mike, beiong a big hearted guy that he is, and me, being cheap and without major funds, and fatally desirous of getting it, he sold me for a hundred bucks which was all the old musician guy wanted for it and be done. But it was pretty close to the B-3 by the sound of the sounds it could make, and I was trying to learn a simple version of NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE I’VE SEEN up there on the little stage at our FINE ARTS CAFE but I didn’t ever get there but it sounded good anyways to me at least being able to drag my knuckles up and down the keys for that special, crunchy-scrunchy B-3/ Leslie speaker combination sound you get no matter what kind of a bum you are at playing one. And the particular power tubes they had, with their ultra-violet glow..primordial and bitchin’! and twirling speaker gizmo’s, and smell of hot, antique lubricating oils and all of it was just amazing, greatest thing ever invented by man, –Well, I guess that covered that. Anyway, the guy that stopped by the shop to give me a little demonstration of what I had, did a few covers as well (and I might try to vamp a few covers for the documentary, since I got all the stuff, if not the skills to do anything with it). And Mike gave me all the free patchouli oil, too, there, at the VILLAGE MUSIC. We thought those days would never end; but secretly we knew they would.
I don’t know if anybody can find a script in there, but we’ll see. The DONKEYS! BIG BEAR’S BURROS..NEXT EPISODE: The Burros. Of Big Bear. They were here first. That’s the argument that was made for keeping them; instead of mass deportations..of them. And then the endless counterarguments about when they got here, and how; and all of the rest. There’s so much there, in terms of government encroachments. Big Bear is a strange brew of government. Here, in this little resort town, cut off from normal society, you have basically every breed of bureaucrat you can name and they are all represented in Big Bear..USFS; Fish&Game; City government (BBL); County, name I don’t like to repeat; State, da Fed’s; even foreign governments like Russia (Russian Big Bear’s the safe house for their agents, up on Main Street, a front operation posing as a motel; and, according to a classified source – where from? where else?? the government, government census-taker! – the U.N. And that’s probably only the tip of the iceberg, it’s just what comes to mind at the moment..there’s more, lots more! and then all of that breaks down into its component parts, which becomes like, almost-controlled nuclear fission when it starts hitting the fan. Don’t even get me started on the private sector cronies that have their own part to play in the larger corruptions that are routinely taking place on this mountain, but it all converges on the simple citizen, a single cell in the body politic, riddled with cancer. But once,ONCE! I even saw some kind of faceless globalists’ giant commercial jet taxiing down the runway of the Big Bear City Airport, getting out of here heading somewhere..a big fish! too big for FISH&GAME. It’s all a game. And we’re the little fish, the little mackerels..but they never throw us back, oh no, we never catch a break, not while the government hierarchy’s doing the capital crimes, we have to pay the price for them for a cracked windshield; or get arrested for driving on a suspended license, like Steve did, and almost get transported to county jail on a cold winter night deprived of all his essential heart medications and comforts of home – like a warm fire – because they screwed up their end of getting him out on bond because of driving on a revoked drivers’ license. And then, when the judge sorted it all out, because he was on a fixed, very low income, he..or she gave him 750 community service hours to pay back his debt to society..750 hours!! for driving without a license. All right, Steve shouldn’t have tried monkeying with the tags on the Cadillac, –some clever counterfeiting work that got spotted by an alert CHP with a chip! on his shoulder..he almost drew his weapon on me when I went down there because I saw Steve’s car next to his flashing red lights, down there in the parking lot; but the DMV..oh yes! the DMV, –Department of Motor Totalitarians, Motor-nazi’s, Motor-scum! have gotten tight with their private sector rip-off’s in the the car insurance rackets, so when they catch you in one of their drift-nets out there in the general population, next they cancel your insurance so you can’t register your car, which is more overreach by The Government and so then you can’t legally drive, which I see as being a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT! basically, the right to drive, and burn fossil fuels..till kingdom come!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IMHO..and btw, nobody respects those anymore anyway. So there!
So then, when they give you the hours, and a time-frame in which to complete, you have to shop around for an approved venue, some type of government agency or approved non-profit that will take a criminal genius like Steve, and let him work, and sign them off, day by day, week by week, until The State has been satisfied..that it taught you a lesson.
We all worked ‘Da Joint’ as Steve called it, “..pressing out license-plates!” one of his daily quips. It really was fun times, working there, for Vivian; who was the manager of the Senior Thrift Shop (She was the Indian of the group.) One of the sweetest people you could ever meet; and by contrast there was Marge, who wormed her way into anything if it was good and needed wrecking, a little, like The SENIOR THRIFT SHOP; but..I don’t think I want to go into that, it’s too unpleasant, she was a private sector senior citizen with an illegal cake-baking business out of her house up in Sugarloaf at an address that had too many 6’s in it (on CEDAR I think, or the street next to Cedar). And she was like the beast that comes up out of the sea near the end of The Book. And shows up everywhere to make sure everybody is in line with every law and paying everything they need to be paying; except she was making all these illegal cakes and if you bought one for your event, like a wedding or whatever, she was bound to show up and throw a wrench in things! and aksing everyone if they were enjoying the cake! But that was just another side-show feature of life in Big Bear in the good old days when what followed only made things progressively worse, as more and more controls-for-profit got laid down on our little country lives. And it all started with the burros and getting them out of the way just in time for PROGRESS (thanks, Caltrans). These are just small details in a massive tapestry, like something that might be seen hanging on the walls at the Medici’s castle, story of a city-state. (I feel like Solzhenitzyn, sitting there in the gulag, recording all of this..like when Steve’s bail finally came through and I went down to the sheriff’s department after midnight, freezing black December night, to get him out; and inside at the window behind the bullet-proof glass was John the old retired former LAPD cop! handling the paperwork and he had a cheesy little black&white TV monitor in his tiny office he was squinting at when I came there to claim my friend and he told me, “You’re parked illegally!” And I went to the door looking out a window at snow and fog and came back and said, “No I’m not.” “Yes, you’re parked illegally now go move it!” and just at about that time they were bringing Steve out of the musty old Big Bear cell-block to freedom again, and I said to john, “That is a legal parking place, go look for yourself, you’re not seeing it right.” and Steve is going, “Let’s go, Chris.” so I broke off that very entertaining conversation I was having with ‘John’ because I could see Steve had had enough of life living in sanbernardinocounty’s penal colony system for ONE day; if you call that living..but by now, John is gone.
Well..life in saNBERNARDINOCOUNTY wasn’t like that every day (thank God). But there has always been this bureaucracy to be dealing with, and all the unsolved murders which seemed to involve police a lot, but they never were able to nab a suspect (kind of like the fire department, in terms of efficiency; on the other hand, the fire-chief and his pals were able to frame a vagrant for arson, once, that so happened to result in the fire department enlarging its space to the now empty adjacent lot, its old, dry wooden structure having burnt to the ground overnight..a motive, perhaps?); and of course on the bright side, the occasional quick employment opportunities like doing maintenance down the back side of the mountain at the cement plant, for a couple of weeks, those 12-hour graveyard’s breathing pulverized granite with ‘Earl’,EARL! and his other helper, Mike-the-Greek. (Mitsubishi is owned by the Jap’s, now – used to be KAISER – who still have half the mountain to go before they turn the whole eight thousand foot high mound into Ready-mix, for convenience! just a phone-call away from your house you’re building if you are fortunate to get through the county permit process, yeah! and an amazing thing about that you may discover is if you hand someone – like the building inspector – a bill or two, things go smooth; otherwise..).
“Oh no! Oh no!” said Steve when I told him I finally found my politician/soul-mate in the congress, JAMES TRAFICANT, from Ohio’s 17th district..Youngstown. He flipped out. Steve was from Y-town; and a troubled past he seldom mentioned. This was a long, long time ago when I caught one of Jim’s One-Minute speeches going out LIVE to the world from the floor at the capitol before the regular business of the house, to which, he ripped them a new one again (as was his custom, first thing in the morning, each and every day). Steve had been in Big Bear for awhile already when we got there on September 2, 1988, fresh from our honeymoon and perpetual yard-sale at the apartment in Riverside..and a darkroom in the basement. We were going to Big Bear to start a business (Ha-ha). So we tossed around with the idea of having a coffeehouse low-class dive and sell art, so far so good; until we calculated that what it would cost for a permit to sell the coffee would wind up being 1000% more than we could ever hope to make being in the food-service category for county considerations..and the fire department came over to look in on us and see what we would need to do to pass their part of that process. And when they saw my darkroom new location, set up on a counter in the hall and lower bathroom area between the business front of the house facing The Boulevard, and the rear dwelling portion of it at the back end, they’d said something short, with words, and handed me this pile of forms that reached to the ceiling, because by having a darkroom, and all the attendant chemistries for developing and printing B&W films, that tipped us into a whole other category that put us under the HAZMAT rules and reg’s, which gave us pause to reconsider what we might, or might not be sharing with the local captains over local industry in the very near future..starting a small business, –in sanbernardinocounty! So the word they got about that when I was asked, was the darkroom got re-located to the in-laws’ at Corona, in Riverside County; which was far enough away to not involve them with that (in actuality, I moved it into a secret basement under the living room with a wall facing east that looked not original, because – as it was told to us – there had been an underground tunnel there, during the prohibition..plus a lot of other stuff that went on in that old ‘experimental’ Maltby I could tell you; but I won’t).
So, after knocking our heads together on it for awhile, figuring out exactly what kind of a business suffered under the least amount of regulations (and hindering spirits) by the county, of San Bernardino, that would cost us the least money in the short, and long run, and a minimum of hassle to get a permit for – with advice from ‘Jay’ – we settled on the appliance repair racket, with only one such similar business operating for years, half-a-block from our new, prime location; which became a launch-pad for annoying the other small businesses in the area that had somehow managed to keep squeaking by, once we started to get on a roll, and come into our own, as to who and what we were..here in Bug Bear. Big Bear. Yeah we bugged everybody. So for that kind of a business, all we needed were two things: 1) a license from – where else? – the BEAR..Bureau of Electronics&Appliance Repair, up there in Sacramento, Yay! And what did that involve? Send them $50.00, fill out a short form, and tell them I’m qualified. What qualified me? Sending them fifty bucks. And when I’m out there trying to repair a Kenmore washing-machine, say, and I don’t know what I’m doing (we sneak in a little refrigeration work, too, but that’s just between us..and the ozone-layer, right??), Jay’s just a phone-call away telling me what to look at; and 2) we hadda get a resale permit, another cursory requirement that just needed a little money for processing by The State; and we were in business! and off to the races, and the grand opening of the FINE aRT’S CAFE on The Strip in beautiful downtown Big Bear (fortunately, or unfortunately).
So after Jay helped us getting set up with moving in the fifteen-foot couch from a wall area of a bar or restaurant we had bought from a motivated seller who had it facing a main thoroughfare in front of his house back in Riverside..done in button-tucked red naugahyde – those poor naugas! – after a month’s preparation to have our first (and, as it turns out ONLY) real business, we pulled out the newspapers taped over the front window, and turned on the big, flashing aRT-sign – last thing I installed, it used to say EAT – and waited for our first customers..and waited, and waited; and waited. (The locals all thought we were drug-dealers so they were waiting for us to bring out the meth..I gueth, –and many of the meth-heads were also satanists, we learned later, after our all black cat disappeared that first halloween; they had their meeting-place in the spooky bar next-door to us with a shared parking-lot, it was called the CRAZY BEAR. And it was crazy. Some got saved (we were, but hadn’t got serious, yet, about serving Him, Glenn came along and fixed that, and since we lived next to a bar, started dragging me in there with him to make new friends, AARGHH! friendship evangelism, Glenn called it, telling people along the highways, and byways, about Jesus..Reverend Glenn, that is, one of our first and great friends in Big Bear). Before Glenn we met Steve.
Okay, so here, finally, is some currant,CURRENT events. There was a tapping at the gate outside on the deck at the top of the stairs and the dog started going nuts..so I forced her back from the door to get out there and see what’s what. What. It was the property manager, I didn’t remember her, she looks just like the last property manager we had from the big real estate company who didn’t work out, lost that job; and left town. But it wasn’t her, it was the newer one who is Charlie’s wife, friends with the owner. Deborah. Nothing ever happens around here, except THIS. The two, or however many it is by now, l-la-dies, that have the house in back of the house next to us have just planted a fence..with posts sunk in cement (my fence, in back of it I made when their complaint to Code Enforcement forced us to move our trailer out of our yard and pay storage fees for it every month thereafter; my fence as I say, has been an unspeakable abomination for their eyes, no doubt, ever since – and they even tried to get me busted for that on false charges but it didn’t work – but I made it from throw-away lumber and stuff, so all it cost was my time digging holes and screwing screws); except there’s a 3-foot gap between their new fence and the next-door neighbor’s water tank, it’s very rural out here, of course, so you have them everywhere, tanks,TANKS! –Your welcome. So with just having only that gap to secure to prevent coyotes coming and going looking for fast food opportunities, I found a pole-gate with chain-link in the backyard at the church that wasn’t being used for anything, and it just happened to be the exact, right width to cut off the predators that share our same prairie set-up here in the east valley; and feed on somebody’s pets when they can. So I took it home, and installed it, –when the lesbians’ truck was gone somewhere; which is a rarity, since they seldom venture out..out of the house, even. But they keep track of me, and what I do pretty good, so this morning, about a few days after I pounded down the cast-iron bed rail section in the soft dirt, it having rained steadily over the past few weeks, to stabilize the installation so it presumably would not disturb their property, this Deborah is at the gate..like barbarians, barbarians, at the gate, and she’s telling me about the hornets’ nest I just stirred up, i.e., da neighbors; which complained. “Well of course they complained!” I told her. “That’s what they do. That gate wasn’t touching their fence.” “Yes, it was.” “Oh..well then the wind blew it back; maybe the wind from those ladies complaining. These are the proverbial people who can’t mind their own business because they’re too busy minding everybody else’s!!” “Yes, well we have to be nice.” “What? who made up that rule??! They need to go back to their detective jobs with LAPD and get a clue and leave all the decent folks in Big Bear alone.” “They retired.” “Oh. Well they should get back to LA anyway since that is where they obviously belong..WEST LA, actually, if you know what I’m saying.” Well I took it up with your neighbor and he didn’t know anything about it, so we took care of it.” “Oh, well, okay..then there’s nothing to worry about.” And so on, and so on. And then she left. So I’m wondering, is it a HATE MEN thing, or is it something more generally gender non-pacific, as Sheila Jackson-Lee who hates everything! might say? Maybe they can loan me a couple of eggs so, for a peace-offering, I can bake them a cake; although I don’t believe between the two of them they could come up with one.
COLLECT JUNK is a human right..does not depend how you define IS. I don’t know about you but I believe our system of laws and lower codes is just plain wrong, so wrong!! when it’s re-written to criminalize me, and similar-minded folk for doing whatever makes us feel good with whatever we got..on our own lands PERIOD! Why should I be compelled by force of FAKE law to be responsible for how someone else feels about my personal behaviour? what I identify with, hmm?? I sometimes feel like I’m in a Russian novel, something out of Tolstoy! minus the slavic serfdom’s and naked coexistence with raw nature, and her most brutal elements, unleashed with the first snows for another long season of misery..welcome to sanbernardinocounty! I offended someone? and must be brought to heel?? C’mon! everybody encroaches on everybody in this town; the only difference is some of them have the juice to pull it off. They’re turning it into Orange County up here in the mountains, with all their freakish phobias at the sight of irregular lifestyles, in direct bloody conflict with the middle class and their suburban lawns..usually gravel around here. The horror..the horror!
Scruffy's..Blurgh! 