TWO DEAD GAY POETS, A STUFFED FROG, SANTA MONICA HOBOS & ONE BORED, WELL-READ MODEL: Transcontinental Conversations in the Key of Rod Serling...

I knew it was going to be an interesting conversation.

Conversations with Los Angelenos are always interesting

She started right into what had been on her mind the last few days, how it was affecting her normal party-all-night, sleep-all-day lifestyle, how growing up was, in her words:

Man, life's crimping my style hardcore right now... I think I'm turning into a fucking reclusive hermit... like you, ya know?

On the West Coast, in the all-night diner in West Hollywood from where she was calling, it was only 10:30 on a Friday evening. Traffic on La Cienega Boulevard was somehow too much too bare for the L.A. native. She couldn't make it all the way back down to the Sunset Strip for a night of clubbing after dropping her Girls Night Out dinner companions off at their respective homes.

Instead, some unseen force pulled her into her favorite hang-out, a place she used to dine at regularly when she didn't have much money, couldn't sleep, needed a comforting place to people-watch and read the free alternative weeklies and trade publications they always have in bins in the lobbies of those sorts of places.

Here, in Ohio, it was just after one in the morning when she first texted her usual "RU Bzy?" queue, the one she uses when she's looking to reach out and touch somebody. She uses the same message, all the time. I'd just gotten in from a nice quiet night out, contemplating life over a few beers at the local watering hole here in Oxford.

Bored out of my skull, well, I decided to return her call. Stupid me - I forgot how tired I was, forgot that it was still early on the West Coast, forgot that these sorts of conversations tend to go on for hours.

"I just don't feel like doing shit. Don't feel like dealing with fucking creepy guys or, ugh, the Lakers fans, or snotty bitches."

"Chica, everybody feels like that at times."

"But I feel that way a lot. It's fucking Allen Ginsberg's fault, I think."

"Uh...s'okay. Allen Ginsberg? As in the dead Beat poet?"

"YEAH! THAT FUCKER! You ever read his shit?"

* * * *

A pause, the sound of a woman who frequently makes those Name 10 Hottest Models You'd Bang lists of frat boys and Moose Lodge poker nights smacking her lips around a breakfast sausage link, and, finally, an answer.

Of sorts.

Bear with me. She was a bit tipsy, loaded up on Red Bull and coffee.

"You know he wrote this poem about, like, running into Walt Whitman in a grocery store. It was in "Howl," ya know...

"...Dude, so I saw a homeless guy in Santa Monica last week who looked just like that, so asked something like 'Where are you going, Walt Whitman?'...

"You know, from the Ginsberg poem, right? Anyway...the old dude gave me this, like, stuffed frog from his backpack... he said he, like, met Ginsberg once and, like, said Oh Captain, My Captain ...

"...And then he, like, ran away... I mean, that's not normal, right? I mean that's weird, right? I mean, it was a joke, sorta, and..."

I put the conversation on speaker, sat it down on the bed to undress. I forgot, momentarily, that I was actually in the midst of a conversation - I actually removed my contacts, stripped, brushed my teeth, all while she was telling her story.

I know. Very rude.

I apologized profusely and pledged to my late-night electronic cohort a free shot to the ol' nutsack next time we meet in person.

* * * *

"So, okay, lemme get this straight... Allen Ginsberg somehow made you a hermit?"

"No. Walt Whitman. But not like the pictures you see. EXACTLY like in Ginsberg's poem. And that homeless guy."

"...S'oookay. So, you've been reading a lot of Ginsberg, ran into a guy who looked like how Ginsberg described another old dude - like Walt Whitman - in grocery store, and YOUR guy gave you a stuffed frog--"

A burst of excitement, a girlsqueak.

"Man, do you believe in curses and shit? I think that crazy homeless guy put, I dunno, a spell on me or something. Is that, well..."

"Um, yeah. Chica...now that's crazy."

I suddenly felt very sorry for eavesdroppers on her side of the conversation, those poor, helpless bastards in that West Hollywood diner, with only bits and pieces of a conversation involving two American poets and a plush toy.

"YES! Dude, I keep having, like, dreams with, like, Jesus, this crazy hobo in them. I'm reading too much - is that weird? Ohmygod, I'm going crazy, right?"

How does one respond to such questions? Does one even attempt an answer? In the wee hours of the morning, half-asleep?

* * * *

From there, the conversation went from only slightly insane to downright absurd.

Dream symbolism, food interactions, even the existential nature of homelessness, Magical Hobo and Phantom Traveler tall tales, time travel, even hauntings and demonic possession.

Maybe Allen Ginsberg was an alien, a creator of a Whitman clone, a madman? Was Walt Whitman?

Or maybe her amphibian-wielding Santa Monica vagrant really was Whitman caught in some time vortex, appearing to Ginsberg back in that supermarket decades ago and now, to her? Maybe Ginsberg was an evil wizard, had trapped Whitman in a poem through some trippy peyote-filled magic spell?

Was the stuffed frog she still had in her over-sized diva purse really a frog? A metaphor? Alien technology, merely stamped with a beer company logo and Made in China label as a form of camouflage?

Was Space/Time Walt Whitman's alien gift somehow bleeding its Beatnik neutrinos into her MAC lip gloss?

Like I said.

From downright batshit insane to downright fucking absurd in under five fucking minutes.

Amazing the places the human mind wanders sometimes. Places where, thankfully, our very real, tangible world refuses our wild imaginations passage in this existence...

... Or does it?

We ended our long, rambling conversation at just past three a.m., my time, midnight in the City of Angels.

I'd dozed off twice. She'd sucked down enough diner coffee, fried eggs, and hash browns to send her into one of those FUCK.... four hours Cardio Sunday... Los Angeleno things.

I knew it was going to be an interesting conversation.

If for no other reason than the fact that all human beings lose some sense of reason every now and then.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: Of the Global Economic Collapse, Mexican Revolutionaries, Insomniac Ponderings, And Making Out with a Stranger

"Es mejor morir de pie que vivir de rodillas."

- Gen. Emiliano Zapata,
Mexican Revolutionary Hero,
Wearer of "Cowboy Stuff"

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- It's three o'clock in the morning.

And I'm neither drunk nor sober.

I'm simply enjoying a cold November storm, in fact, a lovely late night stroll through the rain, my gray Stetson sagging beneath the weight of a thousand cold water droplets.

Smoke from my thirtieth Marlboro of the day forms wispy plumes around the brim, water seeps down my jeans into my boots, the baptismal waters of a man deep in thought liberating the soul as Ariat heels clickclack down miles of sidewalk.

Good God Almighty! I say to myself, eyes closed, leaning against a telephone pole, There's just nothing quite as liberating as a man's thoughts, alone, in the rain.

Personal freedom, just like money, seems to be in short supply these days.

* * * *

I'm thinking, for some odd reason, about a different approaching storm - the shit blizzard of a failing global economy that, yep, my country's elite and their backroom financiers have unleashed, a Pandora's Box full of sub-prime demons, bailout monied monsters, and reckless, destructive capitalist devils of all shapes and sizes.

And, for some reason, General Zapata popped into my waterlogged head, a ghost from some long ago learned history, ¡Tierra y Libertad! now less of a rallying cry and more of a ominous echo against the bad debts of the Gringo Nation.

Hey, these things happen, market collapses. Especially when things like consumption as status and not of function has been encouraged for more than two decades...

Well, goddamn, you've gotta quit reading so much, dude.

Yeah. Head like a slingshot, really. Put the right pebble in, pull back, and release. It's self-loading.

* * * *

Suddenly, from nowhere, they're upon me. Two very drunk women, bundled in Northface jackets and impromptu rain gear, stagger out of the shadows from a side street, their heels clicking away an off-key collegiate chant.

"Ooooh. It's a cowboy!" One girl says.

"Ah.... ah... A CUTE cowboy!" The second girl says, too drunk to realize that the cute cowboy is right in front of her.

I stop, tip my hat, smile. A welcome disruption.

Some things, well, are just too damned depressing to dwell on for too long. And I don't know of a single straight guy or lesbian who doesn't appreciate being called cute by two mysterious, albiet drunken, hot women in skirts at three in the morning, either.

"Mr. Cowboy, I love your BOOTS! I, like, love, ohmygosh, cowboy stuff!" The first girl says.

"Yeah, I get that a lot."

The second girl bums a cigarette and begins what I call the Wasted Girl Play - the attempt to indicate, through wobbly eyes meant to be seductive, the convienient throwing of dead weight meant to be a casual arm around the waist, that, if I'm willing...

"I LOVE cowboys! When I was in Texas once... And I hooked up with a cowboy. I like... reVERSE COWWWgirl...."

The first woman, by the look on her face, is both the more sober one and the one most embarrassed. I laugh and discreetly slide out of the way-too-desperate girl's grasp. The first woman, too, bums a cigarette.

" We're kinda fucked up, sorry," The first woman says.

"It's okay. Happens. So's the world, if fact."

Again, I laugh. Another welcome distraction.

* * * *

The first woman and I chat - turns out she's been sobering up for hours as her now babbling friend had been getting more and more wasted - for a bit, over cigarettes, as the second woman rambles on, in fact, to the same telephone I'd been holding up before I'd surrendered it to her.

Also turns out that her father just found out he's being downsized after Christmas - hefty early retirement buyout from the sounds of it. He's been with the same firm since before she was born and, well, he's already put her on notice not to expect as much help with college expenses as she'd like.

So, she explains, she figured she'd better go out and get drunk with her whore of a roommate before the real world kicks her family in the ass.

* * * *

"Um, this is kinda silly, but can I try it on?" The first girl asks.

"Try what on?"

"Your hat. Looks Mexican or something. Like gunslinger, you know?"

I take off the hat, start to plop the soaking wet thing atop her head. And then, well, I don't know if it was the soaking wet hair, or the way her shivering skin shuddered beneath a cold street light, but I asked for something in exchange since I'd be giving up my shelter from the storm...

She didn't even hesitate. I guess, well, either I'm a good salesman or it was merely a good deal worth taking advantage of, when the money's getting tight.

And by kissing a stranger, yes, by even embracing and turning a peck into an impromptu make-out session, we were able to both share warmth and the brim of an old Stetson in the middle of a November rain. A hot mouth and a warm body beats shivering in the cold alone.

Drunk Girl No. 2? As the telephone pole proved to be too sober for her, she fell to her knees just in time to puke up all sorts of foul stuff, including what looked like semen.

Right in front of an ATM machine, down the street from a real estate office.

Land and liberty, General Zapata's fighters used to chant. There are, of course, still other things in life that are free, are open to better negotiation and barter and open free market exchange than our countrysides and our freedoms.

And yes, it is better to live and die on one's feet, even in the rain, than it is to live on one's knees spitting up a stomachful of vodka and jism.

Even in hard times, a fair trade in an open, honest marketplace, where each party uses the other for something in exchange for something, beats the alternative.

* * * *

Hey, chicks dig the hat. And the "cowboy stuff."

What more is there to say, really?

Really wish I'd bothered to catch the woman's name. Or to have given her mine.

That's a market where I'd consider investing again.

- # # # -

JUST A TYPICAL SUMMER IN A COLLEGE TOWN: Of Urban Hiking, Coppertone Patrons, & Why Your Campus Creeper's Really Scared of Librarians

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I'll go ahead and call them the Sunshine Sisters.

All summer long, on my "walks" (seven mile, average, urban hikes - a habit I picked up from the Italian Backpacker Fling), I pass by these two young women, a pair of undergrads who seem to spend every sunny, summer day bikini-clad out on their front lawn, drinking Natty Light and reading fashion magazines through overpriced sunglasses.

Three or four times a week, I pass by. And they're out there, always.

I could hike up their street blind, in fact, and still identify their house - the scent of tanning oil and baked skin whips down the tree-lined street, drifts in between the decaying Victorian homes and student apartment tenements. They've become a benchmark along my hikes, a point at which I'm able to estimate my time and distance, as familiar a landmark as any house or street sign.

They watch me like hawks as I approach, their gaze following me as I passed by. At first, I'd do the polite wave thing. That evolved into an 'D Afternoon, ladies or a stray weekend Mornin', girls.

And they'd just stare through their shades, no movement or acknowledgment whatsoever aside from above the neck, bearing witness to my half-naked, sweat-soaked sidewalk sojourn at the fringes of their lawnchair kingdom.

* * * *

I didn't recognize her at first.

I'd happened upon this wayward patron while searching for a monograph myself in the second-floor stacks. She looked lost, the scrap paper crumpled up in her hand covered in scribbled partial Library of Congress call numbers, so being a, well, librarian, I asked if she needed some help.

And I didn't recognize her, actually, because I'd never seen her in anything but a bikini. She looked naked without a copy of Vogue on her knees. And, well, I think she figured out who I was, sorta, about ten seconds after I did - I'm the half-naked hiker.

You'd be surprised how fucking awkward it can be when two strangers, accustomed to seeing each other in swimwear, meet fully-clothed in a library. Took a good and painfully graceless five minutes to find the books she needed for her essay, simply because, well... what does one say, really?

Finally, the ice broke, the inelegance gone when the books were found, and the discussion evolved from course-related, needles-to-the-brain reading to pleasure reading to, well, just enjoying the Great Outdoors.

"Uh, this is gonna sound weird, but what's with the walking thing?"

"Oh. Bad knee. Can't jog. Kinda a hiker anyway..."

"Nuh-uh! Shut up! You're hiking? In Oxford?"

The patron's eyes light up. She lifts her leg and plops her foot down on one of the library's step stools. Pointing towards a zipper-shaped scar just below her patella, she explains that she's been having problems with pain since her surgery a few years back - high school sports injury.

I'm really glad, sometimes, that the library's been unusually dead this summer. Not sure how I'd explain to the ol' Boss of Bosses how, exactly, I'm helping a patron when the patron's pushing my fingers into her scar tissue in between rows of European history.

Yep, probably not the most professional of patron interactions. But it's a really cool scar.

* * * *

So let's fast forward, oh, five hours or so.

An unusually cool afternoon, partly cloudy skies, intermittent rays of good ol' summer sunshine tormenting my poor red back.

I hit the usual turn. No smell of tanning oil.

At first, I think I've somehow forgotten the street, the house. But, well, the landmarks are all the same - same rundown Victorian homes, same rotten student duplexes and triplexes, same slummy undergraduate upperclassman ghetto.

As I approach I notice there's no furniture in the lawn, the Who Dey! curtains gone from the windows, the inside of the house black as a starless midnight.

The Sunshine Sisters... moved? Without even saying goodbye? How the hell am I gonna gauge my time and distance now?

And I wonder if that chick got her paper turned in before five o'clock?

* * * *

So let's fast forward again, say, oh, another 36 hours.

Two in the morning, ten to twenty minutes until Last Call! for almost all of Oxford's Uptown bars. And I'm outside on the sidewalk on High Street, slightly inebriated and enjoying an unusually cool June night, walking past the main strip of bars when the ol' cell phone starts vibrating in my back pocket.

A text message from a strange number. The message read: Hey still awake? Are U Out or home??? I delete the text, figuring its just a drunk dial. Thirty seconds, later, same message. Not being too good at the whole text message thing, I simply dial the number back...

"Hiiiiii JAYY-sinnn. What's up, Mr. Librarian?"

"Um, not much. Who's this?"

"Izzahizz... I'm...hold on... SHHH! Shut up! I'm asking HIM... are, ah, you like somewhere near [my library]. 'Cuz I'm outside and its closed an' there's this CREEPY guy, like hanging out..."

Researcher Sunshine. Took me a moment to recognize the voice. Don't even remember giving her my phone number, actually.

But obviously drunk enough to have staggered to an expectedly closed library at two in the fucking morning. Normally, during the school year, we're a 24-7 facility. But during the dog days of summer, when the Local U. kids are mostly out of town, we operate like, well, a normal library with normal library hours.

"...Okay chica, tell ya what. 'Bout a block away. Stay right there..."

Another hike. Great. At two in the fucking morning.

* * * *

Turns out both Sunshine Sisters - former roommates - had staggered down to my library after one too many whiskey-diets.

Having just moved out of their summer digs, well, they'd sorta drank enough to sorta forget where they were temporarily staying until they could move into their new place. Still having the keys to their old house, and a few days left on that lease, they figured they'd just go back, crash on the floor...

And the other Sunshine Sister? Well, turns out she'd interviewed me for a class assignment a few years back, about my library's $6 million face lift and the distractions caused to our users by the construction. From what I made out in the Drunk Girl / English translations, that's how the idea to give me a call came up, for some odd reason...

Creepy guys following you, walks down dark alleys, and too much booze rarely mix well in small college towns. Wasn't hard to figure out who the creeper was - the guy was skulking beneath a street lamp on the corner, doing the drunken zombie shadowdance with lager-fortified urine running down the front of his pants. Kid couldn't have been any older than twenty, twenty-one...

You know, I've been blackout, fall down blitzed before, but I've never been so completely bombed as to wander around in public, covered in piss, hollering at female passersby about my prowess in the sack. And I've slept with enough women to know that, yeah, anything that would find such behavior, er, lubricating, is probably marginally able to identify itself as a woman.

Anywho...

All I had to do was to walk two intoxicated super seniors past a barely standing kid who was creepy, sure, but in no condition to pose any threat to three people without so much as a weapon, much less a quickly debuzzified 30-year-old male.

I mean, c'mon - it's only a quarter-mile walk, right? Easy enough, right? I told the two women to just keep quiet, walk past the guy, and let me deal with it if the guy decided to start following us.

Well, if you've ever had to deal with drunk women, you can probably guess that the best laid security plans of mice and men...

"HEY YA FUCKIN' STALKER!" Interviewer Sunshine hollered as we passed the obliviously wasted kid. "This IZZZAGENTLEMAN! BRINGIT ya bishassfuckin CREEPER!"

"Yeah, my librarian'll kick your fucking azz ya fucking azzhole!" chimed in Researcher Sunshine, before turning to the street and other late night passersby, hollering, "MY LIBRARIAN WILL KICK ALL YOUR ASSES!"

The creepy guy just stood there, staring for a moment as he swayed in some nonexistent breeze, then, well, just staggered off into the night with a Fuck you, bishes! of his own.

He even growled at me, flexed imaginary biceps. Growled. Not like a scary, rabid dog growl, either. We're talking yapping poodle growl here.

But what kinda guy bails when he hears someone threaten to have a friggin' librarian kick some ass? Seriously. Why not just get a tattoo that reads IMA PUSSY scrawled across your forehead?

By three in the morning, I'm heading down dark, familiar streets, being pulled along by two women who smell of familiar tanning oil towards a familiar house. Literally walking intoxicated Super Seniors like a pair of hyperactive cocker spaniels, with one woman tugging at one hand and another dragging me along by the other.

Oh yeah. I'm glad most of my colleagues aren't usually up that late.

Don't even want to know what they'd think.

Most definitely not the most professional of patron interactions. But I'm not exactly the most professional of librarians at times, either.

- # # # -