Wake Up and Smell the Beer
Jon Longhi
Manic D Press
San Francisco
Many thanks go to my publisher for putting up with me, Jen and Phoebe, Jim Mervine, Philip Walsh, Bucky Sinister, Miles Long, Chris Lauer, Mike Stevens, Robert Crumb, Kash, Ron Turner and the whole Last Gasp gang: you guys are like family to me. For Bernie Kaplan, who helped set me on my way, the whole SF poetry scene who kept me on my way, and all the people who ever gave me readings or bought a book from me. Thanks also go out to all the Manic D authors, my brother Mike, Truck, Jim Todd and the whole old school crew. If I left anyone out, I'm sorry, I'll thank you in the next book. Most of all, I'd like to thank the city and people of San Francisco, my home and muse: this book is little more than a long love letter to you.
© 2004 Jon Longhi. Published by Manic D Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Manic D Press, Box 410804, San Francisco, California 94141 www.manicdpress.com
Cover illustration: R. Crumb
Cover production: Josh Berkowitz
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Longhi, Jon.
Wake up and smell the beer / Jon Longhi.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-916397-83-1 (alk. paper)
1. San Francisco (Calif.)--Fiction. 2. Failure (Psychology)--Fiction.
3. Male friendship--Fiction. 4. Young men--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.O4994W35 2003
813′.54--dc22
2003014399
Also by Jon Longhi
Flashbacks and Premonitions
Everyone at the Funeral was Slam Dancing
The Rise and Fall of Third Leg
Bricks and Anchors
Prologue
That sleazy house on the corner, like a curve in a river of heavy karma, lost lives, and strange stories—that old house still filled with the leftover radiation of its past inhabitants— was the perfect place to exorcise myself through controlled acts of madness. I'd searched long and hard and even crossed the continent to find the perfect place to go insane. I wanted to fall apart, to go to pieces like some pagan orgy of irresponsibility, the ultimate slack, the snapping of the elastic that had held me so tight with real world tension through all the years of backaches and migraines back east, all the pains of reality would be washed away in a bath of drugs and moral decay. I would come out the other side purified and a better human being. These methods worked for me. I had moved from the east to feed some strange hungers.
Over the course of the late '80s me and a group of my old college friends moved out to San Francisco. We were all members of a punk rock art scene on the East Coast and had divided our time between Philadelphia and D.C. The group came together when we were all going to school at the University of Delaware for a variety of literary and artistic degrees. From the beginning we shared a special magnetism which expressed itself in paintings, poems, music, and a general madness of living. Within a couple of years after graduation all of us got restless. We shared a formless yearning, a pang for something different. It was time to make the big leap.
New York City was the preferred relocation destination, but none of us could come up with the money. Manhattan's a vampire on your wallet. So we went west. Fate pushed us to the Pacific.
I moved to San Francisco with Dada Trash and a guy named Joe who ended up hanging himself in Boston two years later. Joe just couldn't take being out west, and going back east was the equivalent of surrender. But for me and Dada Trash, San Francisco was the opening of a new life.
1
Dada Trash could burp the alphabet. Once he got a couple beers in him, it was easy. This little talent evoked drop-jawed wonder when displayed at parties. And then, just a couple seconds after that last gastric Z, Dada Trash evoked even greater gasps of awe when he burped the alphabet backwards. I shared a house with a bunch of guys and I'm proud to say he was one of them.
Dada Trash had a tattoo of Alfred E. Newman on his stomach. You remember Alfred, the goofy-looking guy with freckles and a front tooth missing, from the cover of Mad magazine. When Dada Trash was on the beach it looked like he had Alfred peeping up out of his swim trunks. Not only that, but the tattoo was placed so that my friend's bellybutton looked like a bullet hole in the middle of Alfred's forehead. The tattoo artist even threw in a word balloon that, of course, read: “What, me worry?”
My friend proudly referred to himself as The Garbage Artist. “Trash is the only raw material that is truly limitless,” he once said, and set about building a body of work from things thrown away by others. His artistic creations were celebrations of everything useless and worthless. Of course he had done all the basics - metal sculptures out of garbage cans soldered together, collages from bottle caps and used tampons - all the exercises you'd expect from someone who'd borrowed the name of that mad art movement in the '20s. “I didn't borrow the word Dada,” my friend once told me. “I scavenged it after history threw the term away.”
Well, after my friend Trash picked the name from the landfill of time, he dusted it off and reclaimed it for himself. Legally. Back in 1984, one Joe Smith went down to City Hall, filled out some paperwork, and left the building as Dada Trash. That's the name on his driver's license and his social security card.
“When I die, all it's going to say on my tombstone is TRASH,” he once said.
In art school Dada retreaded all the classic Dada and Surrealist experiments. Automatic painting. Cut-up texts. Experimental writing. He taught himself to surrender to the whims of chance, learned to avoid the noose of habit. Dada was always looking for something different and all this gave him a special sensitivity towards refuse. Things discarded, unwanted. “There's almost as much garbage around us as there is air,” he said one night at a party. So trash became his atmosphere. Rotten banana peels and rusty tin cans were his brushes and all the world became his palette.
For his senior class project, Dada submitted a pile of garbage which he claimed was heaped in an “aesthetically harmonious” fashion. He had spent two weeks stacking and restacking the smelly refuse until he got it just right.
“What about the roaches and vermin crawling all over that mess?” his perplexed professor asked. “How do they fit in with your artistic vision?”
“Those insects are symbolic of the critics,” Dada Trash said. “They crawl all over the carcass of modern life but still can't figure out where the stink comes from.”
The teacher gave him an A. In all of his courses, Dada Trash tended to get either an A or an F. There was no middle ground when it came to reactions to his work which pleased him to no end. Dada loved extremes and craved convulsive reactions. His greatest fear was that someone would find him boring or middle of the road. Even profoundly negative reactions were cherished. If someone reviled his work to the point of wanting to destroy it, Dada Trash took that as a supreme compliment.
One time Dada entered one of his more disturbing pieces into a group show. The work was a collage made from S/M porn mags and photos of deformed genitalia clipped from an old medical textbook called Sex Errors of the Body. Along the bottom of the piece he had written “Every Act Of Tenderness Is A Prelude To Violence” in his own blood.
One of the judges became so enraged at the collage that he ripped it down off the wall and threw it away.
“It all comes from the garbage can, and to the garbage can it all shall eventually return,” Dada said afterwards. “My whole life,