I ended up here as an assistant manager at Fenders, a music club in Long Beach California, after injuring my eye while working security at an ACDC concert at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater. It had been a one-night job to help a friend in a pinch. The near loss of vision in my right eye came just three days after finishing a two month North American tour with Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
In three days, I went from being one of the most sought-after tour security directors to oblivion. I spent a month in the hospital with the best ophthalmologists trying to save my eye, forget about the vision, these doctors were just trying to keep me from having a hole in my head.
It was five months later when I came out of a drug induced, painkilling stupor that I realized I had missed my appointment with Elton John and his manager: I was to have met them two days after the ACDC concert. Elton John was going out on a world tour, and they wanted me.
The successful twelve-hour surgery left me with an eye but with an un-adjusting iris and no lens, resulting in the light coming through and reaching my retina but without the ability to focus the light; everything was bright and blurry. With only one good eye my days as a security director and bodyguard were over. While I contemplated what I might do for a living during my months of recuperation, one thing was certain I wanted to pursue my writing in earnest. When the paramedics came to take me to the hospital one of them sat with me in the back and took my blood pressure and was surprised that it was normal, mentioning how calm I was despite my situation.
I was thinking at that moment, as the strap constricted my bicep, it was actually my second thought, the first being I assumed I had lost my vision because I was not able to see out of it, nothing, even though the paramedic had opened my eyelid wide and had shined a flashlight into it, darkness. Funny was my brain kept telling me that it should see. I could tell my brain was trying to compute but it wasn’t receiving any information. So, I had accepted my loss of vision, and what I was thinking at that moment was if I were to ever lose sight in the other eye how would I become a writer?
When a friend called and said he needed help running a rock ‘n roll club, I told him I would accept if he understood that I was really going to get serious about a writing career. Two years prior to touring with Dylan and Petty I had decided I wanted to write for a living. I had been writing poetry for eight years, although I kept it a secret, and I had written a few short stories, but when the big money came along, I put the writing on the back burner. I was having too good a time. The injury set my priorities straight.
John Fender had bought the bottom floor of the Balboa hotel which had been turned into an apartment complex for the poor and elderly. The Balboa, built in 1929 across from the beach, was known in its time to be a place for gangsters and rum runners. In the fifties Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin would hang out in the basement bar called The Dungeon. It had its own canopy entrance off the street and a back exit through a cave walkway just past the bathrooms. The bar was still there like the day it closed: glasses neatly placed in the back bar, candles on the tables, plush red leather booths and armchairs.
Upstairs the ballroom became the concert hall and the smaller rooms used for conferences and weddings. Directly above the abandoned Dungeon bar was the lobby bar of the old grand hotel, now nothing more than a dive bar called Players. It was in the Dungeon bar, drinking with Phillip after hours that he and I concocted our idea to go have a drink with Charles Bukowski.
Phillip was a friend of the owner and an ex-New York cop. He was part of our security team. Some of the guys had made fun of his misshapen face and out of aligned shoulders. Not the greatest human specimen to say the least, but that all changed when Fender told us that Phillip while on duty with his partner had been ambushed in an alley complex of some kind. Phillip shot his way out only to realize his buddy was still in the crossfire. So, he shot his way back in and carried his partner out. Phillip took several shots in the shoulder, back and two in the face. He received a bunch of medals took his medical retirement said fuck it to the east coast and came out west.
We were down in the bar drinking because I had the idea of using the space for poetry readings. It would be perfect, and Phillip agreed. We finished the few beers I had brought down and then I went up to the dive bar and came back with a couple of bottles of Jack Daniel.
I walked around the bar telling Phillip where I would put the platform for the poets, how I would set the lighting and Phillip sat on the bar and watched me walk back and forth. At some point Bukowski’s name came up. He lived just over the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, about a twenty minute drive.
I don’t know if his name came up because we thought it would be cool to have him read at one of our readings or what, but fueled by Jack Daniels we started thinking about asking him personally. The hell with sending him a letter or calling his agent, if he had one, fuck that lets just grab a bottle of Jack and get in our car and drive over there and ask him.
He likes that shit anyway, right? People coming over and sharing some whisky with him, telling a few stories just shooting the breeze, hell yeah, he likes that kind of shit, free booze, hell yeah. Phillip broke into a Bukowski poem “this is as far as we go…so I let him have it: old, withered whore of time…your breast taste the sour cream of dreaming…”
I cheered and took a chug of Jack and I jumped into a booth, and I returned the favor. “He spent the money in her purse… He bought good French wine, frijoles, a pound of grass and two parakeets…”
Phillip clapped and hooted, finished his third tall glass of Jack, and then stood on the bar “the elephants are caked with mud and tired and the rhinos don’t move… the zebras are stupid dead stems, and the lions don’t roar” Phillip bellowed, and it echoed through the bar and the far chambers of the underground.
And on we went, lines plucked from our skin, words upon words. We finished the first bottle of Jack and started in on a second. Phillip began walking along the bar to and from, recalling something. I stumbled from the bar into a booth, and I sat clinging to the table trying to avoid the inertia of falling backwards. I watched Phillip and he had gone somewhere else. I had one more in me, but I don’t think he heard “we have everything, and we have nothing and some men do it in churches and some men do it by tearing butterflies in half and some men do it in Palm Springs laying it into butter blondes with Cadillac souls…”
I woke up and it was a Tuesday morning dust was in the sunrays Phillip was gone and I remember thinking another day killed.