Didja Feel It?

So I was at a friend's house up in the hills last night and the earth began to move. Fifteen seconds of rock 'n roll, but not one thing fell off a shelf. When it all died away, the magnitude game began:

"I'll bet that was a five."

"Maybe. Might have been a four."

"Hmmm. Depends on how far away the epicenter was."

And we nattered on like the earthquake professionals that we are. We had all been in Santa Cruz for the '89 Loma Prieta quake -- magnitude 7.1 on the Richter scale, give or take -- and so we had attitude: been there, done that, swept up the glass. There were probably 100 significant aftershocks in the month after Loma Prieta; quakes became routine.

That's how the magnitude game was born; you made your guess, and checked it in the paper the next day if you really cared. To this day, everybody in town likes to play it.

But last night's shaker was the first really serious quake we'd had since '89, so we were a little rusty. I was very close with my magnitude 5 call (yah! yah! yah!), but a lot of it's luck. A magnitude 5.6 with an epicenter 30 miles away in San Jose (like this one) may feel the same as a 4.3 whose epicenter is under your feet.

Anyway, the San Jose and San Francisco papers hunted up first-hand accounts from twenty-something convenience store clerks and coffee house barristas who'd been freaked out by the moving earth. Well true, some of them had been too young to pay attention during the last one. But earthquakes aren't that scary, c'mon.

So I went to work and asked a young guy how he felt about his first quake. "Dude, after it start to shake, I was like, ROCK ON!" he said, punching his fist into the air. "It was great!"

All the other teens and twenty-somethings responded with the same amped-up enthusiasm, except for one poor kid who got stuck in an second-floor apartment cantilevered out over parking spaces; he really rocked and rolled.

(Of course me, I was walking around the house checking for gas and water leaks after I got home. Home ownership just takes some of the fun out of quakes.)

So all I can say is that they've got some wimpy young people up in San Jose; or newspaper reporters know what kind of story they want, and choose their quotes accordingly. You decide. Well, when the Hayward fault finally lets go, they'll be the earthquake professionals up there. Lucky them...

That's it for now. On the way home from work tonight I saw cops in body armor gathering in a parking lot in preparation for tonight's annual, totally disorganized downtown Halloween street party. The city expects 20,000 people, which is about average. There'll be a hundred cops downtown; triple penalties have been threatened for any infraction. I'm about three blocks away, and so far I hear no sirens or gunshots so maybe we'll get off light this year.

But the cops have been throwing their weight around so much lately on this and related matters -- they helped destroy a city councilman who mouthed off about racial profiling at last year's Halloween -- that I'm wondering if sheer hubris will mess them up.

Update, November 1. Apparently not.

Avenue Ghosts II: Harry Prophet

We called him Harry Prophet, because he sprouted hair from every orifice. And because with him, the end of the world was always nigh. Today's weather: light rain of blood in the morning, followed by a 50 percent chance of Armageddon.

This was ten years ago or so. At the time Rhumba and I belonged to the Church of the Holy Dividend in downtown Santa Cruz. Holy Dividend is run by and for well-to-do businessmen and university professors who like to zone out to slow, boring, 19th-century hymns. Other people can attend as long as they make themselves useful and don't cause trouble.

A bunch of us ran a once-a-week homeless supper out of the Holy Dividend meeting hall. You didn't have to pray to get your meal, the food was good, and we served dessert. So every drifter, drunk, druggie, and deadhead on the street headed to Holy Dividend on Saturday night, along the mentally ill, the maladjusted, and a fair number of people who just didn't have the money to eat very well. They lay all over the grounds while they waited for us to open, sometimes as many as 200 of them. It was colorful.

But in the middle of all this, Harry Prophet stood out. He had presence: he had height and burning eyes, a wild shock of beard, and a piercing voice that rose and fell precipitously in the middle of a sentence.

Harry ranted almost constantly whether anyone was listening or not, although he'd turn up the volume if he caught you watching him. And the thing was, the rants were interesting, creative, even well-informed. They could suck you in; you couldn't believe what he'd just said, and you couldn't imagine what he'd say next.

Earlier I mentioned rains of blood: they were a common theme. The mighty would meet grisly downfalls for their sins, the proud armies would be vanquished, fear and misery would rule the land, all according to Harry.

Moreover, vast conspiracies of the rich and powerful had set their sights on him. Harry had secret dealings with the political and corporate elites, knew Howard Hughes, and even had a "thing" going with Princess Margaret of the British royal family, although some others from the House of Windsor were among his greatest enemies.

What I can say for certain about Harry is that he waited his turn in line, ate his food in an orderly manner, and rarely caused trouble. He lived in his own world -- seemed to barely know we were there -- but then, half our clientele were only tentatively on this planet.

There were also two of him, or seemed to be. There was another guy on the street who looked a whole lot like Harry, except that he kept a guitar slung over his back. He was as much a ranter as Harry, too, but was connected enough to do odd jobs for merchants.

Word in the food line was that the two of them were brothers, and that Harry was "the nice one;" I don't know for sure if they were related or not. I saw "Harry's brother" on a street a lot, but he never came to our dinners. And I never saw the two of them together. You rarely know anything for sure on the street.

II never saw Harry away from the Saturday dinners. He didn't hang out on Pacific Avenue, and didn't talk with the others while waiting to eat. I believe that he enjoyed coming to eat with us, though, with all the noise and warmth and activity. But he still liked his distance.

One Saturday he showed up early and so was among the first served. He settled down to eat at an empty table in the corner of the room, mumbling to himself almost silently. After a few minutes more people arrived and a couple of road-tripping college kids plopped themselves down in the seats across from him.

And suddenly THE RANT WAS BACK! In full throat and with burning eyes staring into nothingness, Harry painting a pulsing word portrait of Armageddon that completely outclassed all his previous efforts. After about 30 seconds of this, the college kids picked up their plates and hustled to another table.

Harry calmed down. He voice dropped. He glanced at the retreating college kids. And snickered.

You bastard! I thought to myself. You know exactly what you're doing and you know exactly how other people react to you. I was more impressed than angry. Harry was a lot more with it than he seemed to be.

At the Saturday dinners we had to set up chairs and tables for 200, then put them all away as soon as dinner was over; the church would need the room clear for coffee hour the next day. About half our dinner volunteers were old people with bad backs, so we always asked the diners for a little help stacking chairs at the end of the meal. Some few always would pitch in.

One evening after dinner was over, some volunteers and a few diners and I were breaking down the dining room when Harry walked out of the restroom. He just stood there and watched us blankly. I was dead tired, so I just straight out asked him if he'd help us stack the chairs.

He thought about it. Then he stacked one chair and wandered off.

The next week, when it was time to put the chairs away, Harry got up from his table. And stacked two chairs without prompting.

The next week: three chairs.

I'd like to tell you that he stacked an extra chair each week until he was putting them all away himself. But he never got much beyond three chairs. Still, that was more than most people did.

Most conversations with Harry were one way: he ranted, you listened; or, you said something, and he said nothing, or just kept ranting. Not long after he began stacking chairs, however, Harry came up to me one Saturday, made direct eye contact, and said, "I think it's wrong that anyone should ever have to sleep outside at night or not have a place to stay." What could I do but agree? But whoa, where did that come from?

It came from inside Harry. He seemed to be reconnecting with the world, though I never did learn how he disconnected in the first place. We in the food line were encouraged.

One Saturday, Harry didn't show up. Nor the Saturday after, or the one after that, or a whole fistful of Saturdays following those. Well, things happen. Drifters drift. I thought a little about him, and then moved on.

And then one day, there he was again. But he was a whole new Harry Prophet: beard removed, neatly clipped 'stache, hair slicked back, and in a nice leather jacket and Levis.
We went out to his table to say hello, and he was happy to see us. It was the first time I'd seen him happy about anything. We had an actual conversation: he'd been some place where people were helping him, and he was headed to another place where people would help him more; or back to the same place. It wasn't clear; he still wasn't Mr. Organized.

But in any case, enroute to wherever he'd decided to have one more meal with us for old times sake. Boy howdy, good feelings all around. We wished him well, he ate his food, and pushed off into the night. And I never, ever saw him again. I think.

That's one of those nice endings where nothing's known for sure but you can have hope for a happy ending. But we don't really know.

While I never saw Harry again, I did see "Harry's brother" on the street quite often. He looked a lot like Harry, but not exactly like him. And he continued to carry a guitar with him everywhere, as Harry never had. Then I stopped spending so much time downtown, and I didn't see him at all.

But lately Rhumba and I have been going downtown after work for some sort of decompression; nothing exciting, usually sweets and a swing through the bookstores. The other evening we were munching ice cream cones in front of Marini's candy store at about 6 when a familiar-looking hairy ranter with a guitar strode by, his face like thunder. He had a guitar, so it was probably "Harry's brother" ten years on -- grayer, less hair, deeper facial lines. But damned if he didn't look a whole lot more like Harry Prophet than he used to used to.

Maybe it was Harry after all, and his hopeful new beginning had gone nowhere. Maybe it wasn't Harry, maybe the other guy had changed with age. No way to know for sure.

You rarely know anything for sure on the street. That's the hell of it.

Avenue Ghosts: Dancing Man and the Worst Panhandler

I saw Dancing Man the other day. It's been years.

Are you old-timer enough to remember him? After the '89 quake, he spent years dancing in the doorway of the condemned Coffee Roasting Company building on Pacific, next to the hole in the ground that had been the Bookshop Santa Cruz.

Dancing Man wore a Walkman and headphones and, for several hours each day, worked through a smooth, precise series of motions that was not quite dance. Some said he was practicing Tai Chi. Others said he listened to tapes of talk radio shows on those headphones. Nobody seemed to know what put him there, or what made him want to do it -- or his name.

When they tore down the Coffee Roasting building, Dancing Man moved his stage to Cooper Street for a while. Then I lost track of him.

But tonight, Rhumba and I saw him downtown again, on Soquel Avenue next to the Borders -- or we think we did. He still wore his headphones, but he did not dance. He didn't look good: older of course, and heavier. He seemed dazed. We watched him from across the street until he headed into an alcove and ducked behind a potted plant.

In Santa Cruz, you have to accept street people and beggars as a fact of life: the afflicted and the addicted and the just plain eccentric. They're here because, well, we consider ourselves tolerant. We don't require them to change, or run them out if they refuse to.

But in truth, we who do pride ourselves on our tolerance like to ... distance ourselves from the lost people on the street. Even if we see them every day. There are some good reasons not to get too close. Many of the street people, especially the addicted, are manipulative as hell. They'll say anything, do anything to get money for another drink, another smoke, another dose. Who wants to be the prey in a con game, even if the predator is pathetic?

But they're not all like that. There are the eccentrics, people who don't play well with others or have some kind of demon that haunts them. There are thosewho have a genuine mental illness and rant at the air. Or just plain can't live the way the rest of us do. A couple of hundred years ago they could have been shepherds or wandering tradesmen, or just lived by themselves in a cabin 'way off in the deep woods and hunt deer and grow a few turnips for food. Today, those lifestyles don't work.

Our society doesn't know what to do with these people, be they addicted or eccentric or out of place. And neither do we personally. So we avoid looking at them as we walk past. Or we do look at them, year after year, and never learn their names. Or better yet, make up silly knicknames for them, so we can discuss them with each other without ever having to know who they are. Like Dancing Man.

Here are a few other people of the streets who I remember from years past; as far as I know, none of them are still around. But I could be wrong.

* * * *

He was without a doubt the worst panhandler I have ever seen. He blurted out his pitch in an awkward spasm of words -- "Spareanychange" -- that was decoded more than heard.
He had a rough voice; he seemed angry. He never made eye contact, never said 'thank you.' If you handed him a coin, he'd stare at it in his palm until you went away. He didn't seem to like people much.

I wasn't sympathetic to the Worst Panhandler, and I gave him no money. Others apparently felt the same, because after a while he turned his energies to gathering aluminum cans for recycling and rarely panhandled. H remained a cipher, though, and you saw him everywhere -- at least, everywhere where cans and bottles might be found.

One afternoon Rhumba and I lunched at an East Side pizzeria; afterwards, walking to our to our car, we spotted the Worst Panhandler digging for cans in a public trashcan.

Not far away, a dog began to whine and yip. Its owner had tied its leash to a pillar and left it alone; and in the meantime, the restless canine had wound its leash around and around the pillar until there was no slack left. The poor thing couldn't move.

The Worst Panhandler surfaced from the trash bin with a couple of cans and threw them in his sack. Then he spotted the dog, saw its distress, and walked toward it while making reassuring noises. He tenderly petted and soothed the dog. When he'd calmed it down, he gently urged the dog backward a bit to increase the slack on its leash and then walked it back around and around the pillar until it could move freely. We left him ruffling the dog's fur, and talking to it.

When you see people on the street asking for money, you wonder, do they only ask for things, or do they give as well? Do they care about the people around them? Well, on some level the Worst Panhandler was a giver. He cared. Maybe he didn't relate to people. But he related to a helpless, frightened dog. That counted for something.

I didn't see him for a couple of months. But the night before Thanksgiving, there he was : standing in front of the old County Bank building on Pacific, staring at the ground and panhandling. Badly, of course. It was a cold, wet month; maybe he was desperate. Anyway, I reached into my wallet and stuffed a few bucks into his hand.

He didn't look up. He didn't say "thanks." He did say, "geezthisissomuchmoney."

You're welcome. And I mean that.

* * * *

Blog entries should only be so long; so I'm going to split this one into three pieces. Stay tuned for Part 2 in a day or two.

Anthony Bourdain Crept Here

If you live in Santa Cruz, and you're a foodie, know that Anthony Bourdain's coming to town next month for a lecture. He'll speak at the Rio Theater on Soquel on November 16. Capitola Book Cafe seems to be producing the show and selling the tickets; here are the details.

Bourdain is a well-known chef and author, with numerous books to his credit on food and dining. But I know him from his show on the Travel Channel, "No Reservations." It's a great food travelogue; Bourdain goes to odd corners of the world and checks out what people are eating -- the gourmets, sure, but everybody else, too: Tibetan yak ranchers, Chinese farmers, Tahitian transvestites, Namibian bushmen, Argentinian punk rockers, Icelandic bodybuilders, truckers in Cleveland, you name it. And if there's anything else to see along the way, he's there, food-related or not.

Bourdain is funny, sardonic, reflective, and something of an ass. But he's an ass who knows he's an ass, and that bit of self-doubt and self-deprecation makes him endearing.

On "No Reservations," Bourdain deals with local culture and local society as much as the local food. Or maybe the point is that you can't separate a society and its food. And Bourdain doesn't try to. And that's why "No Reservations" is so interesting.

Anyway, Rhumba and I are going to his lecture, and we'll enjoy it if Bourdain gives us half a chance. You know, I won't turn out for a Dennis Kucinich lecture, or one of Neil Young's sneak performances, or even the Asian Film Festival or the Guerrilla Drive In, which are both free. But bring a famous foodie to town, and I'm there.

We all have our own priorities, I guess. Bon appetit!

Westside, in All Its Glory

This past week Ami Chen Mills Naim wrote a great article for SFGate about her new home and new neighbors in Westside Santa Cruz.

Ms Naim's attitude is sympathetic to all and snarky to none. She just observes what happens around her: gossip, snooty vandalism, self-righteousness, eccentric civic activism, grumpy "I was born here and it's all gone to Hell" natives, and speed-bump rage.

I tell ya, if I wasn't sitting in Santa Cruz right now, this article would make me homesick. It's just all so.... typical. I say that as a Westsider. I have similar neighbors. And speed bumps.

Welcome to the Westside, Ms. Naim!

The Railroad Not Taken

Sometimes I like to walk along West Cliff Drive, where houses these days go for two million, three million, four million dollars. Rich people love the coast; they’ll pay big bucks for a sea view, fresh air, the water, boating and surfing. Go inland half a block, and the prices drop by two thirds.

But 40 years ago, the coast -- the waterfront -- was where industry lived. It was where fish were gutted, where sewage was dumped, and where the rents were low. The rich lived up in the heights above the stink and noise. Not just in Santa Cruz, but everywhere.

When I was very young, my family lived right on the waterfront in a town I'll call Petropolis, California. There was our house, then the street, then the railroad tracks, and then the water.

Yeah, we got the sea breeze; it smelled like crude oil. At least it did when the oil refinery up the coast a mile or so burned off waste gas. That only happened, oh, 18 hours out of the day.

Right down the street from us sat a little harbor, but the run-down docks and rickety buildings were the home of fishing boats and other working vessels, not weekend boaters; the fishermen flushed their bilges into the bay every day, which drove the seagulls mad. Little globs of crude oil and fish guts floated together in the water.

I stuck my finger into the bay a couple of times and tasted it; what does a three-year-old know about toxic waste? Working from memory, I would say the water tasted the kind of fish sauce that you find in Vietnamese restaurants -- in Hell.

My sister and I had no safe place to play. Our neighbor next door was a lumberyard; our neighbor across the street, an abandoned Southern Pacific depot. Railroad trains highballed by a dozen times a day. Mom kept us from going out the front gate by ourselves -- she thought.

But the train tracks were an easy stroll for a three-year-old and in truth I wandered out there when Mom wasn’t looking to play in the old depot. If that weren’t enough -- I could toddle a bit farther down to a polluted little beach where petroleum residue made zebra stripes across the sand. I could have toddled right into the water, stepped on half-buried nails, whatever. In retrospect, it was a terrible place to raise children.

But I loved it. I loved it to death. I loved the noise, the oil tankers docked in the bay, the boats and trucks coming and going, the old seaplanes that landed offshore on weekends, the men and trucks moving things in and out of buildings, and the machines. To this very day, I perk right up in industrial neighborhoods. My inner-three-year old still loves them.

But mainly, I loved the trains. Passenger trains, freight trains, long ones, short ones. They made the ground vibrate, they made the house shake, they were huge long hurtling machines on mysterious journeys. And if you waved at them, the engineer waved back and sounded the locomotive's mighty horn just for you. Or at least my three-year-old self thought so.

My parents, who thought baby-talk was cute, taught me to call trains "choo-choo trains." I had all the train books -- my old copy of "The Little Engine That Could" is still around here somewhere. At some point my parents heard me say that I wanted to be a choo-choo train driver when I grew up. Which was true. My mother loved that so much she they prompted me to say it whenever we had guests over so everybody could wallow in the cuteness.

Eventually we moved away from Petropolis to a blue-collar 'burb across the water where the air didn't smell like crude oil -- most days. My new neighborhood was safe. It had real playgrounds -- but lacked seaplanes or railroad tracks.

I still loved trains, but the immediacy of it all faded; they didn't rush past my front door anymore. I caught on to my mother' little game, and when she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I started saying "I dunno" in a sullen voice. Three-year-olds don't know when they're being manipulated, but four-year-olds do. Parents, be advised.

So I grew up and did not become a choo-choo train driver. My depression-era parents wanted me to have all the advantages that they didn't, so I went to college, took white collar jobs with big corporations, moved to the big city, bought nice toys, all of that. Most of my work was ephemeral: presentations, memos, manuals, plans for doing this or that.

You look back over a career like that and wonder if you've ever accomplished anything worthwhile. It's possible that I'd have been better off learning an honest trade and joining a good union. Well, what's done is done, but...

I used to do a little public access television in San Francisco, and years ago my producer and I drove over to Mill Valley to interview a visionary artist at a gallery full of oil paintings of naked women flying with killer whales through skies like astrological maps. But that's another story.

Anyway, interview done and videotape in hand, we drove back out through Tam Junction toward the freeway. There's a railroad crossing on that road, and the barrier came down just as we got there. We were the first car in line, right at the barrier, but for a change I wasn't looking at the train. Until the engineer sounded two mighty blasts of the horn, and I looked up by reflex.

The engineer in the cab was me. And he was leaning out of the cab and grinning at me. And waving.

When I say he was me, I mean that he and I were identical. He had the same face, the same hair, the same mustache, the same tinted glasses, the same build, the same grin. He even wore the same clothes that I normally wore, right down to color choices.

I have no explanation for this. Corrobation, yes: my producer will back me up on everything. And we married each other some years later, I know where to find her.

All I know is that I never became a choo-choo train driver. But somebody did.

The Curse

The story goes that a medicine man of the Ohlone tribe laid a curse on the early European settlers in Santa Cruz -- pushy Franciscan missionaries. Father Junipero Serra’s people:

“You will never be happy here,” the shaman is said to have told the priests. “And you will never be able to leave.”

By most accounts Mission Santa Cruz was the least successful of the mission settlements that the Franciscan Brothers planted like seeds up and down El Camino Real. Nothing ever went right for long. The priests and brothers fought among themselves. They treated the native Ohlone tribes cruelly. The local Spanish settlers were drunken idlers who eventually looted the mission.

So many Ohlone fled from the mission, or died there, that that priests sent the Spanish military to the Central Valley to capture new tribes of Indians to staff their mission. The new tribesmen, Yokuts, suffered as much as the Ohlone. And fled the mission when they could, as the Ohlone had.

The priests came looking for something -- maybe to make a little heaven on earth. But all they did was make a little bit of hell. Which they then had to live in.

That happens a lot to seekers. Too often, they try to make paradise without first understanding what’s in their own hearts. And because they don’t understand themselves, they recreate every kink or blemish or infection of their souls on the face of their wonderful new creations.

And so instead of serving the glory of God, you find yourself putting the whip to gangs of Indian half-slaves on a lonely, foggy shore six thousand miles from home and, Oh mi dios, somebody snuck into Padre Bernardo’s room last night and chopped off his testiculos because he couldn’t keep his hands off the Ohlone women!

Good intentions gone bad: through flawed hearts and flawed assumptions and arrogance. It’s an old, old story. You can tell it about the British. You can tell it about the French. And you can tell it about the United States, in Vietnam and elsewhere, and now once more in Iraq.

“You will never be happy here, and you will never leave.” The padres never did leave, many of them. They died here, resentful and discontent. They never understood why their dream turned bitter, because they never looked inside themselves nor questioned their own wisdom.

Will we?