Dallas

The 22nd, and it becomes inescapable: the Kennedy assassination, 50 years ago. A before and after, where-were-you event.

I was a very young boy. In fact, the assassination may be my earliest conscious memory. There’s a fine way to start off a life: televised murder and national grieving before you know what death is. And people wonder why my work has a dark sensibility.

Here’s how the political becomes personal. At the time, my dad worked for the Spokane Chronicle. The news came over the TV or radio in the cafe where he ate his lunch, and, when the shock subsided, my father turned to the waitress and, in his droll way, asked: “Can I get that to go?”

I didn’t see him for the next three days. The newspaper staff basically lived at the office, publishing nonstop updates. I still recall the anxiety and confusion I felt. Adults—men and women—spontaneously, inexplicably weeping for reasons I couldn’t understand. This great man, dead. And, to my mind, my father missing.

I do have one weird, vivid memory from that time. Waking up early, while the rest of the household slept, and wandering out to the living room. Turning on the TV. Black and white, hearses moving slowly past blurred faces lining the street. And, for some reason, I put my hands flat against the screen, as though I might receive some kind of physical transmission. I don’t remember ever having done that, before or since. The screen seemed to sizzle.

It all gets muddled, of course. Did I see Cronkite announce the president’s death? It seems like I did, but I’ve seen the clip so many times since then, Cronkite removing his glasses and choking up, that I can’t separate the real-time event from subsequent footage.

It was frightening, of course, even though I surely couldn’t understand what was going on. I remember fear. And I remember trying not to show it because everyone was already upset. The event t became a touchstone for years of “oh no” moments. Bobby. MLK. Chicago. “This is a CBS/NBC/ABC news bulletin….”

Years later, I’d have my own chance, as a radio reporter, to become The Voice. I’m sure I announced a few deaths, but the only even I really remember was announcing we’d invaded Grenada. Grenada? Where? Isn’t that a soft drink? I suppose it had its weight, so close to Cuba. I ripped the story off the teletype, just like in the movies. I can’t tell you how somber…and marvelous…that felt. That sort of thing makes you a news junkie.

The killing marked another cultural change, one that took a while to settle in. Those various shoot-em-up films from the Fifties? Where a character gets shot, clutches, and slides to the floor, perhaps a thin, discreet trickle of blood showing? No more. Not after the president’s head explodes. “The pink mist” as the soldiers say. Coupled with the nightly televised carnage of the Vietnam War, a visceral reaction against the true horror of violence led to its hyperrealistic portrayal on film. “Bonnie and Clyde” probably set the tipping point, but a whole generation of filmmakers expressed their fury with fountains of blood, as if to scream: look at it, look at it, look at it!

Understandable, but now moviegoers watch gory torture flicks for entertainment, and mutilated bodies show up on network television, and every other week, it seems, someone with a gun flips into overload and goes full medieval on total strangers. So I’m not certain the aesthetic choice achieved the desired effect.

When the light faded from JFK’s eyes, it’s said a certain innocence went with it—an optimism and, as he would say, vigor. But it could also be said that a veil ripped away, and we saw a truer portrait America: violent, dark, paranoid, and vengeful.

The two, paradoxically, co-exist. And perhaps it’s ironic that a man who’d known his own share of loss and violence, war and illness, would unwittingly pass on a profound lesson. JFK turned out to be one World War II veteran who told his whole story.

Exiles

It’s just a place. Like any other. You’re there, and then you’re elsewhere. After awhile, you end up with a lot of elsewheres. A lifetime of elsewheres. Some places put a hook in you because of their beauty or strangeness or because they resonate with something inside. Some places are just home.

Home is difficult, partly because you take it for granted when you’re there. it’s only after you’ve left that you feel its absence. it’s really only when you can never go back. Homes give out on us or we on them. Before we feel too sorry for ourselves, there are whole peoples who can’t go home, who have been forced to leave, who carry the deepest of wounds because their home has been taken from them.

But homes are taken from all of us. Sometimes very quickly. One day, you turn around…and that’s it. There’s no going back. Then where are you?

Where you are now, I suppose. The home waiting to be lost. The place that will someday belong only to memory. With time, the memories belong to a smaller and smaller pool of people. Eventually, they’re gone, and those homes are forever erased.

Some deal, huh? It’s weirdly beautiful, though. Perfect in its imperfect way. Time is not our friend, but it does grant us a store of experience, which becomes all that much more precious as it gathers attendant loss. Eventually, we pay for it. Forever moving forward. But the past follows, and as painful as it can be, bearing its weight, we should be grateful for the things we’re allowed carry. Because they belong only to us, until we must relinquish them, and they cease, altogether, to exist.

That's when they take us with them.

Whistling Through the Graveyard of Forgotten Vinyl

In downtown Grants Pass, Oregon, not far from Dirty Bird Sporting Goods (notable for the cartoon vulture in its logo and advertising), where you could purchase most firearms known to man, was the Trading Post, but a few long blocks’ walk in the rain. A narrow, slightly stooped building with weathered siding that gave it the look of an old west outpost (very popular in the new west of a certain period), mostly it was a junk shop. They’d also sell you a firearm or two, of mostly untraceable origin, but I was a regular for the used records. Rows and rows of plastic mike crates full of orphan vinyl.

Long before there was an alternative anything, the Trading Post offered up a parallel history of popular American music: the formerly known, also rans, third-tier, never heard from agains. Radio-only pressings never broadcast. Small-label bankrupters. Vanity projects with cover art done by a relative. Just out of the law of averages, a gem or two could be had for a dollar or less, which was pretty much my budget.

Maybe it was just one or two songs—the ones that probably clinched the contract—but someone had poured their aspirations into those recordings, and you could find wonderfully weird music you’d never hear on the radio. That is, unless you’d tuned into some alien AM signal reflecting back broadcasts sent a couple decades earlier.

I particularly fell for the swinging bachelor pad music, the best know purveyor of such being Esquivel (one name long before Cher or Sting), but the real magic came from those trying to make their mark by ripping off Esquivel. I suppose it made sense at the time, at least for 15 or 20 minutes. The covers always looked like a Jetsons outtake, wrapped around a come-hither catalog model with a mid-thigh skirt, hair a half-undone beehive, and a martini in each hand. (One for me…and one for you.) If you searched through the Trading Post’s clothing and accessories sections, you could probably find the quilted smoking jacket, cigarette holder, and chrome-plated ashtray to go with the record. The ladies would no doubt follow, though, when I attempted to sway young women friends with Esquivel’s pre-synth swoops and whooshes, the humor didn’t make the translation, and they’d ask if I owned any Pablo Cruise. I did not. If we couldn’t bridge the distance with The Doors, the evening was pretty much over.

After awhile, the scratches and pops became part of the sound—you memorized the songs with surface noise intact—and you would wonder who had so well played such obscure records. Cowboy songs, swingin’ hep jazz, generically handsome crooners, and doo-wop groups no one had ever heard of, but someone still managed to gouge a skip or grunge up the vinyl with unknown substances that had to be carefully scraped off with a fingernail. Drop the needle, and suddenly it was all orange western skies and ten-gallon hats and neon cocktail signs (the martini glass flashing back and forth) and backyard barbeques with fireworks and folding nylon-webbed chaise lounges and huge convertibles with fins running red lights and empty longnecks flying out and shattering on yield signs and satin sheets and TV dinners and rabbit ears and Brownie cameras and yellowed family pictures with serrated edges, and a country of the upwardly mobile losing altitude—the blood barely dried on their uncles and cousins who never came home from Guadalcanal or Inchon.

The Dirty Bird’s gone now, replaced with a furniture store or something equally forgettable. So’s the Trading Post, refinished with appropriately vinyl siding and turned into some business no one needs. But it once served as an assisted living facility for lost American dreams, and I prefer to remember it with an ill-fitting wig and a martini in each hand. Come up, sometime, and listen to my hi-fi, baby.

All in brand-new, glorious stereo.

No Words...

...currently can adequately express my heart's turmoil over the Gulf oil spill. So, for now, I offer this.

S

Sean Flynn and Dana Stone Still Missing in Action

Well, the forensics have been run, and it looks like the bones recently discovered in Cambodia were of "non-caucasian" origin. In other words, they were probably those of some of the one million people killed by the Khmer Rouge when Nixon and Kissinger had their Excellent Adventure in Cambodia.

Here's reality:

War reporters pay tribute to Cambodia lost

To Stone and Flynn--gents, goodnight and travel well.

S