“Hello, Kitty!” And Other Matters

So it wasn’t too long ago that I destroyed my copy of Matt Ruff’s latest imaginative novel, Bad Monkeys, by waking in the middle of the night, fumbling on the bedside table for a glass of water and, in the process, spilling a small tumbler of fine Kentucky bourbon all over the paperback. That was sometime in November, a little after Thanksgiving. Did I mention that I was one-quarter of the way through reading the absorbing book? Yeah. And I was anxious to know how the plot resolved itself but now my only copy was ruined — a copy given to me, incidentally, by my friend Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Books — and I found myself living in a retirement subdivision in North Las Vegas where there are no book stores. None. Nada. Not a fucking one but if you need a 24-hour pharmacy, man, all you got to do is throw a rock.

Well, guess what? I received a box in the mail today from one of my friends, favorite fans and frequent readers from 8763 Wonderland, Kitty Myers, and can you guess what Miss Kitty did? No? She bought me not only a fresh, clean copy of Bad Monkeys but also brandspanking new trade paperbacks of two other Ruff novels, Fool on the Hill and Sewer, Gas and Electric. From the jacket blurb, the latter sounds like it’s moving up on my list soon. But first I want to finish “Bad Monkeys” and then I need to complete Updike’s Rabbit novels and Joseph Wambaugh’s potboiler, “Hollywood Station.”

Kitty has a web presence, Briefs and Other Unmentionables, sort of an online “short book of short stories” written by Kitty. I encourage you to take a look. And oh — she threw in a bonus gift, too: a “Days of Heaven” DVD. I love that film. Hell, I pretty much dig everything Terrance Mallick has done.

Thanks, Kitty! Thanks ever so.

Now, because Kitty asked for it I’m going to post what was to be my opening entry here at Carver’s Dog but I had decided not to post it. The 896-word blurb explains what happened to me, in brief, after I left L.A. for San Francisco in late 2006 and how I wound up in a suburban niche of Las Vegas, Nevada, a little more than one year later:

Well, how do you do, L.A.? Haven’t seen you folks in a coon’s age. Been on something of a self-imposed sabbatical up San Francisco way for the last 13 months. For my efforts I was lavishly rewarded with:

1 - A worsening of my severe psoriasis. It’s now in my spine, resulting in some pretty nasty psoriatic arthritis. The doctors here — we’ll get to where exactly “here” is in a sec — have put me on methotrexate, an oral form of chemotherapy, and oral steroids.

2 - A job as a doorman. I guess we gotta do what we gotta do so when the chips were down I accepted a part-time gig as a doorman/bouncer at fabled Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach. Yeah, the one where Kerouac drank when he was in town. I’ll bet you’re impressed. The thing is I so desperately needed a boost to my income that I didn’t figure that four nights a week of standing on my feet, ususally outdoors in the cold San Francisco night air (and that shit is cold), would lead to … well, a worsening of my severe psoriasis. But other things arose from my association with Vesuvio, such as –

3 - An increase in my daily alcohol consumption. Man, was I boozin’ it up. All day. Every day. At Vesuvio. I had nowhere else to go. It was my sanctuary from the dingy, community-bathroom-down-the-hall residential hotel I was living in. But, let me tell you, with Vesuvio being right next door to City Lights Books I had literally hundreds of terrific literary discussions with both locals and tourists. People fucking read in SF, man, and they take their books seriously. And speaking of things literary –

4 - A new credit for my resume. Two actually. You might’ve already heard that the play I wrote with Tom Flannery, “Go Irish”, was produced at a playhouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania (Jason Miller’s hometown) but that was nowhere near as exciting as the live theatrical event I produced, wrote, and directed for Vesuvio in September to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s “On The Road.” The 70-minute show was called “The Ragged Promised Land” — from one of the phrases Kerouac uses to describe the west coast — and we played to a capacity crowd. Which would be about 300. I was then asked to reprise the show for San Francisco’s Beat Museum in October. It was easier the second time around because the cast already knew their lines and the emotional resonance of their roles.

But I had to get out of North Beach. It was killing me. Literally. Not just with the exacerbation my tour of duty was doing to my severe psoriasis but one day after my docotor got the results back from some blood tests, we had the following pleasant conversation:

DOC: How old are you?
RODGER: Forty-eight.
DOC: Do you have anyone in your life who loves you enough to want to see you live past 54?
RODGER: Well … yeah.
DOC: How much do you drink?
RODGER: Six, seven beers a day –
DOC: (angrily jotting notes in my file) Maybe eight, maybe nine, maybe ten. What else?
RODGER: Wine or maybe a few mixed drinks in the evening.
DOC: If you don’t quit drinking like this you’ll be dead by the time you’re 54. Your liver is not doing well.

I wanted to jump down off the exam table, vigorously shake his hand, and say, “Gee, thanks, Doc, you’ve given me at least four more years than I thought I had”. But I didn’t think he would appreciate my humor.

The thing is, though, how do you curtail your booze flow when you hang out every day in a fucking bar? A cool bar but, I mean, it’s still a bar. So, the day I landed where I am now — that reveal is coming shortly — I immediately went back to my pre-San Francisco limit of absolutely no booze before 5:00 PM, except at social gatherings, and anything after five is now carefully rationed. Besides, methotrexate is notorious for thrashing the liver and kidneys so, you know, there is that “no alcohol while taking this medication” thing to contend with.

Here, then, is irony for you. Two weeks ago I’m sitting in Vesuvio reading “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” when I get a phone call from … Las Vegas. And that’s where I am. A full bedroom in a beautiful house near a golf course in a quiet residential community. All the things I never had in San Francisco: adequate heat, a kitchen, a private bathroom, 200 channels of crap on the TV to choose from, and a reliable internet connection. And no rent to pay, just utilities and groceries. How could I say no?

It’s not permanent, though. Las Vegas is the place where dinosaurs come to die and if I live here too long, what with my health already shattered, I’ll begin to feel like my extinction, too, is in the offing. For shit’s sake, they’ve already put me on a dangerous cancer drug.

But, hey, I’m a lot closer to you guys down there now than I was in NorCal. I’m right here in the desert, in this carny town that Ross MacDonald called “L.A.’s most far-flung suburb”, on a sand dune with a pair of binoculars, and I’m looking down on you. I’m watching you.

That was when I was thinking of making Carver’s Dog an L.A.-centric site like 8763 Wonderland had been. Of course, there is a decidedly emphatic bent toward exploring Los Angeles in the new fiction I post here. In any event, there’s the story, Kitty. And thanks again for the thoughtful gifts. I cannot think of any better gift in the world to give or receive than a book.