Straight Outta Inglewood by Mike Finley

Straight Outta Inglewood The Past Recollected by Danny Klecko & Mike Finley

Kraken Press St. Paul, Minnesota Copyright ÂŠ 2015 by Danny Klecko and Mike Finley

Our Stories Straight Outta Inglewood...................................................5 New Items..........................................................................6 Jug Band Hippies................................................................6 I Wanted My Father To Know Me Better............................6 Tidal Pool............................................................................7 Talking To Your Child On Acid.............................................8 Pepperdine Medical Note..................................................9 My Stepmother Phyllis.....................................................10 The Pickwick ....................................................................11 Fuller Brush......................................................................14 "Is it hot in here or am I crazy?" ...............................................29 when we were hippies in Hollywood..............................29

Straight Outta Inglewood Danny Klecko and Mike Finley have known each more than 25 years. But it not was not until a few years ago -well after they had begun to collaborate on projects -that they realized something peculiar: both of them lived in Inglewood, California, in the year 1969. Danny was a boy living with his family. He grew up in Inglewood. Mike, age 19, spent the better part of the year avoiding going to jail for missing his induction into the U.S. Army, living with his father and stepmother about six blocks from where Danny was. They never met, but it is possible they passed one another on the street, or in Century Park.. What does this mean? Who knows. It just strikes us as as one of those odd coincidences that make people suspicious of life -- a kind of poem in itself. And so we opted to reflect on the sights and experiences of our young days in Los Angeles in this, our fourth joint publishing project.

Freedom to Choose Filling out my Conscientious Objecter form in 1968, a form I eventually decided not to finish, I came to this question: Do you advocate the overthrow of the United States Government by force or violence? And after some deliberation wrote down, force.

New Items Jug Band Hippies I Wanted My Father To Know Me Better I rented a video on VHS, Zorba the Greek. An introspective movie, in black and white, about an Englishman learning the lust of life from Anthny Quinn. My dad sits through half an hour of it and gets up. "I'm not getting it," he says. I brought out some records, including 12-string guitarist John Fahey's "The Yellow Princess," a jangly, wonderful album of complex picking. "Sounds like he's playing his guitar with an eggbeater," my dad says. I remember him saying, over vodka and Fresca, "I'm open minded, I'd try pot some time, just to see what all the hullabaloo's about." The next night I hand him a rolled joint. "You said," I remind him. He looks at me, aghast. "Are you out of your fucking mind?"

Tidal Pool

Talking To Your Child On Acid It didn't happen often in the sixties, but sometimes parents had to deal with sons and daughters while they -the kids -- were tripping. It's too late to offer advice on this problem now. The moms and dads are all dead, and the kids have long since come down. But if one could offer advice, it might go a little bit like this. Expect disconnection. You may say, "You got a phone call from your Selective Service office. They want to know why you sent them an 8-pound bonito fish wrapped in the Wall Street Journal." Your child responds with "Did I really do that? Really?" Meet in the middle. You say: "Your mom is making her chicken and mushroom casserole tomorrow night. Why don't you stop by and get a hot meal?" Your child says: "I'm open to, like, any overture the universe chooses to make to me. You say, "Fine, we'll sit down around seven." Take their word for it. You say: "I just stopped by to see how you were doing." Your child says: "What can I say to reassure you? I'm seeing things today like I've never seen. I'm fine, in the most granular sense of the word."

Pepperdine Medical Note My stepmother Phyllis worked as an RN at the student health center at Pepperdine College. This was before it moved to Malibu and called itself a university. Pepperdine has always been one of the most conservative schools. they removed Pat Boone from the board of trustees because he was "too wild." The school was a good fit for Phyllis. She was a cop's daughter, a patriot, a right-winger through and through. She hated protesters and hippies and black people. So when I needed a letter from a doctor to avoid being drafted, I dreaded going through her. She came home from work that night and handed me the letter she had the doctor write: "Mike has an inguinal hernia that could cause difficulties doing heavy lifting," the doctor wrote. "But this should not prevent him from carrying an M1 rifle and pack in Vietnam." Next day I got the real letter, recommending against my being drafted at all.

My Stepmother Phyllis You drop in without warning on your father after not seeing him for 5 years. He is a manufacturer's rep living in the Vermont District with his new wife, Phyllis. You sleep that night on a cot in his home office. Around dawn, a stranger enters the apartment and grabs the jeans you have draped over yourself -- the pants with two twenties in the pocket. You never see his face, but you wake to see him leaving the room. Phyllis shouts "Get back here, you asshole!" My dad is up now, too, shouting "Let him go!" But Phyllis, 50, is off like a cheetah, flying after the thief in the red jumpsuit she had fallen asleep in on the TV couch. She chases him out onto the street, beating him on the back with her fists, until he stops, whips her with my pants, and knocks her into a parked Dodge Dart, breaking her right humerus bone on the mirror assembly. She makes her way back into the apartment and sits panting in the breakfast nook, holding up what looks like straw in her good hand. "I got that bastard's hair!" she says. "But he got your dungarees." For two days I had to wear his lime-green, hand-me-down polyester golf slacks.

The Pickwick The Pickwick Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, where I got a job as a shipping/receiving clerk in February of 1969, was not a four-star landmark, but if you lived in Southern California and read books – that's hundreds of people right there – you knew of its three stories of stories. In my memory it is right next to Graumann's Chinese Theatre, but in fact it was a block away. The Pickwick was founded by Louis Epstein in 1931, during the worst days of the Depression – Scott Fitzgerald mentioned it in a New Yorker story – and the store met is end swallowed up in 1976 by the B. Dalton chain. Even though I toiled way back in a back room, full of torn cardboard and packing slips, the place radiated glamour for me. Writers were always dropping into the store to see how their books were doing. They went to the shelves and touched them, physically, for reassurance. Fading movie stars drifted in to see their spines exposed on the biography shelves. Personalities like Charles Laughton, Bob Cummings, Peter Ustinov, Lionel Barrymore, Hedda Hopper, David Niven, Maureen O'Sullivan, Otto Preminger, Jerry Lewis, Eva Gabor, Timothy Leary, and Sam Yorty all dropped by during my shift. A colleague once pointed out Paulette Goddard, examining a book in the science and mathematics section. I didn't know who she was, but -- wow. I especially remember a self-help book by a man from Venice Beach, titled Keep Fit at 70. It featured a picture of the author on the cover, in training trunks, his hairy a 12

silvery mane, and his arms and legs and chest all oiled and quivering with dynamic tension. He looked stupendous. Problem was, he had written the book ten years earlier. Now, when he came in to estimate sales, it was clear time had taken its toll. He was now about 85, and his posture was sagging, his pectorals hollow, his shoulders rounded, and that toothsome smile replaced by something forced and only falsely happy. We had gurus and glamour queens, how-to's and hobos, every kind of writer dropping in on us. There was even a genuinely literary contingent -- screenwriters banking on a book of stories, poets and memoirists comporting themselves like film stars. One of our own floor salesmen was a slender, reedyvoiced man named Landor French, a name he hay have made up. His big claim in life was a sonnet published in the Sewanee Review, which he kept a laminated copy of on a wallet-sized card, in six point type. He whipped it out for me once â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it was the acme of his life among words. I remember the title, Amphitreon in Memphis. It was all he had Another salesman was Vincent Rossi. Small and dark-eyed and dramatic, half Heathcliff and half Davy Jones, he befriended me, seeing me as a vessel into which he could drizzle his most melodramatic thoughts. He told me he intended some day to drive out into the High Mojave, crawl under his Ford Comet, poke holes in the gas tank, and stagger off into the wavering sands to die. By summer, Vince seemed to have done exactly as he promised, driven into the desert, abandoned his car and 13

disappeared. It wasn't for five years or so that I learned he had pulled off a hoax, when, as editor of a poetry magazine in Minneapolis, I received a poetry submission from him. I never told him I sussed him out. But I thought of the wife and daughter in the Valley that he abandoned.

Fuller Brush r=end in the Curtis Hotel in Minneapolis, coatless, with new snow falling

My dad wasn't a bad person, though my mother thought he was. He was a restless, cocky man, who had always gotten away with things because he was bright, analytical, and had a profane flair that people either got with or shied away from.

Stoplight at Pico and Centinela Quitman is just getting started. “That bitch doesn’t participate, you know what I mean? I’m sick and tired of her shit, and she doesn’t let up. Yesterday it was, ‘You could drive cab and maybe make a few bucks. Drive people in from the airport.’' I’m already driving delivery for Van’s. My spinal column is fuck near sticking out from pushing that goddamn two-wheeler up and down the goddamn ramp because people gots to get their Twinkies, man. Do you hear me, man? Man needs rest. Man needs to put his feet up from time to times.” Quitman frowns to adjust the cassette machine. Muddy Waters with the Rotary Connection, “Tom Cat,” Minnie Ripperton somewhere in the mix. He scowls. “And another thing. These blondes operate under a grievious misconception. God did not create them just to lie there and be blonde. You got to participate, am I right? That is plain grievious. It’s fine and well to be beautiful, and there are moments in my life I too wish I could lay back and just be that way. But you think once in a goddamn while, just every now and fucking then, she could flour the chicken and set it on the griddle. Well I say fuck that, you gotta fuck back in this life, 17

you gotta respond to the offering made to you, and I ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t driving no fucking Checker Cab.â&#x20AC;?

The Pile in The San Pedro Forest The creek bed glittered with flecks of gold. We were high because we always were, but not so high we thought the gold was gold. We knew that there were pyrites in the world, and we did not want to get taken in like fools. Yet there it was, scores of flakes of purest gold glinting up from the sand bed. Later, Jamie stumbled in from the path uphill. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think there’s a bear nearby.” Everyone let that thought sink in. Pocketfuls of gold weighing us down, us unable to run quickly enough to escape the rampaging animal, all of them fallen, all of them bled to death, yards away from their pickup. “How do you know there’s a bear?” Quitman asked. “Because I saw the biggest pile of shit I ever saw, just up that hill and to the left. And it had berries in it, I think, and it was still soft and warm!” “I don’t think a bear did that,” Quitman said. “How do you know, are you like some sort of wildlife biologist?” Quitman threw a stone at the winking gold. “Just please, take my word for it.”

Frankenstein Girl Los Angeles is the loneliest place to be lonely in the world. You could go months without having a conversation. People driving in their bubbles, AC turned up to high. So when you meet a girl and sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sweet as Frankie, sunsplattered and kind, with a hint of sadness in her eyes, you feel like you have dug up treasure. And at sunset in Palos Verdes you are all over each other in the front seat of the Chevy Biscayne, and you undo the buttons and you see the scars Like giant zippers zigzagging her chest, and she is crying giant greasy tears and bubbling about the windshield she shot through and the stop sign that pierced her And you hold each other and the both of you cry because too many sorrows stay secrets in the city of angels.

Fuller Brush

At the Ocean in a Bottle Factory

Lion Fish Boat left Oxnard at 7 am, no one caught a thing all day. Around two, an 11-year-old kid yanked something weird onto the deck. About a foot long, it had red spikes sticking up, and it heaved and fell, heaved and fell as if learning to breathe on the fly. “The first one to lay a finger on me dies,” it said. “I am poison and I don’t fry up delicious.” A terrified fisherman bowed in its direction. “May we beg a boon of you, magical creature?” The fish sniffed languidly. “Do you really think that is the kind of story this is?”

Blame It On San Andreas Hearing that the world would end on Easter Sunday we rented a U-Haul van and drove out to the desert to avoid the coastline slipping into the ocean. We parked on a ridge and waited for the rumbling. Around one o’clock we walked down a jagged line to a convenience store in Twenty Nine Palms. “I ain’t heard a no earthquake,” the proprietor said. “But the faultline runs right up that ridge,” he said, pointing to where we parked the rental car.

Two Fathers, Two Sons My dad and I have lunch in Ventura. Halfway home, he realizes he is missing his wallet. “Sons of bitches,” he says, pounding on the wheel. “Robbing sons of bitches.” At home in Inglewood, a phone call. “Mister Finley?” a kid says. “I found your wallet in a parking lot. I called the number inside.” “Any money in it?” “Yes, forty dollars.” “A Mastercard?” “Yes. My dad is driving me to a game at the Forum at seven. We can bring it right to you.” “Ha ha,” my dad says, hanging up. “Am I one lucky SOB!” An hour later, a knock on the door. Kid hands over the wallet. “That’s great, kid,” my dad says, and shuts the door in his face. “It’s all there,” he says, waving the wallet at us. Another knock. My dad opens the door. The kid’s dad is standing there. “You ever hear of rewards?” the man asks, and punches my dad in the nose. "That's yours."

Old Men Fight Over Old Lady With Facelift Howard and Hal were confined to a nursing home in Gardena, but they both eyed the lovely Ida, 77. Ida was the looker of the facility, with a face like a great old actress, noble and well contoured. Her secret was, she had had work done. The two men competed for her, standing at the dining room door when she entered, though the door was always propped open. With a full head of white hair, trophy-winning golfer Hal was once quite the dancer, but now had a star-shaped tumor in his chest. One-time bank officer Howard, with his bushy mustache and remarkable teeth, owned a boat somewhere, although he could no longer pilot it. The two found Ida intoxicating, always seeking her glance and approval, never mind that they had both been impotent for years. It seemed to each man that she offered a way around death, to be acknowledged by a woman with such features. Over the course of weeks the focus of the triangle began to morph, from mutual enchantment to hostile rivalry. One Tuesday, Hal elbowed Howard into the doorway to the social room. Howard, who had a new hip implanted just three months previously, cracked his glasses on the doorframe. Two days later, Howard stood at table and announced to all who were listening, â&#x20AC;&#x153;You, Harold McManus, are a 26

barbarian and a bastard.â&#x20AC;? Hal drew himself up, tipped over the table, spilling several cups of weak coffee, a plastic pitcher of ice water and three small plates of pineapple upside-down cake. Hal stormed over the table and began kicking Howard with his cleated golf shoes, which were not actually allowed in the center. The cleats struck Howard at the cheek and ear and blood began to flow. Howard scrambled awkwardly to his feet, but Hal was ready, pushing him backward into a Hummel figurine showcase. Howard sat in a daze among the cracked shelves and ceramics. Hal turned to Ida, but she was intent on the image of Montel Williams, selling long term care for seniors. Hal would live only three more weeks. They found him shaking in his bed and were unable to revive him. Howard would continue for two years before succumbing to a stroke. The beautiful Ida was still among us at age 88, maintaining that improbable straight line under her jaw, still with the shining green eyes, and deaf as a hardened post.

Tea Water For Charlie Charles Manson to the California State Parole Board, November 16, 1978 "Is it hot in here or am I crazy?"

Boomsqueak when we were hippies in Hollywood

1841 Dayton Avenue St. Paul, MN 55104 mfinley98@gmail.com http://mikefinleywriter.com/kraken