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.

- # # # -

SAVAGE STEW AND AMBROSE BIERCE FROM ACROSS CYBERSPACE: More Baseball, Yakking Cats, and How Communication Technologies Shape the World

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- She said she was just bored.

I'd wondered about the text message she'd sent, one of about five from the infamous 323 Area Code Thursday morning, a strange Happy Turkey Day!!! Gobble-Gobble, Jason! :P sent at exactly 4:48 a.m. Pacific Time - arriving here instantly, in Ohio, just after breakfast.

Bored outta my skull. If you're still alone today call me.

Bored in the City of fucking Angels, right smack dab in the middle of striking Hollywood and fire-riddled Malibu, a freeway away from Pasadena and an afternoon train from Santa Barbara.

Her boyfriend had flown back to his parents' house for the holiday, back to the rugged confines of the western Rockies. Her own family was on the road, somewhere, plans made long before an unavoidable work stoppage shut down Tinseltown.

A nice brunch in Beverly Hills would be her only holiday feast, with a girlfriend and an out-of-work set painter.

* * * *

It's funny how Americans like to pretend that the third Thursday in November somehow means something to the rest of the goddamn planet, how we pretend for a day that the Pilgrims and Native Americans really did get along in peace, liked watching football, and traded guns for corn until the advent of shopping malls 400 year later.

Chatting online earlier in the week, my texting actor managed to make Los Angeles sound like the loneliest ghost town in America on Thanksgiving, as if the city would shut down like some rural Wyoming village of a few dozen people.

Very melodramatic, but, well, she's in the drama business...

* * * *

I'd planned on spending the day by myself, reading and watching movies. I turned down several offers to dine with other people's families, in fact, to enjoy the solitude.

I even cooked myself a monstrous pot of turkey sausage stew, put some Calexico on the stereo and settled on a collection of Ambrose Bierce stories while the Limas and kidney beans melted into the meat, fresh sage, onion, and dill weed.

Calexico gave way to some documentary on public television as the stew reduced, public television beget dinner and a DVD, dinner beget dishes to the soothing sounds of Wendy O. Williams, NOFX, and Bad Religion. I cleaned up the stove and countertops to the tune of the Warren Zevon's "Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner"....

Just chillin'. Thursday, I was just thankful to be alive, alone, and without any sort of drama in my life. And I just chilled away an entire day, happy as a clam.

Just as I finished rereading the Bierce's anti-war classic, "Chickamauga," she sent yet another series of texts - again, bored in L.A. after brunch and already halfway through everything stored on her TiVo. Reading the last message, an apology for bothering me, I finally got around to at least beginning to make those follow-up holiday calls I'd been putting off all day.

Starting with the first text of the day, I called back a poor, not-so-starving actor trapped out in the 323, a thespian with nothing better to do on a Thanksgiving in Los Angeles than to subtly hint at the fact that she'd like to chat with a certain librarian/blogger/loner in Oxford Fucking Ohio...

* * * *

We spent the first two and a half hours talking mostly about baseball.

Yes, baseball. Off-season stuff.

Joe Torre, the new Dodgers skipper. Do the Chavez Ravine boys stand a chance, now that L.A. has once again stolen something from old Gotham, a Bronx manager to accessorize their former Brooklyn ballclub? And of another Joe, Cincinnati's Joe Nuxhall... did I get any feedback from the local Reds fans? Did anybody in Oxford Fucking Ohio say anything about it?

Besides being bored, she wanted to verify that, yep, the Zenformation Professional Jason was indeed the same Ohio Jason who'd finally sent his number - discreetly - through a mutual offline acquaintance. And to say she was shocked that we'd met once, at a Central Coast bistro a few years back, through that same acquaintance, would be an understatement.

"You know, dude, you go on these mini-rants where I have no clue what the hell you're talking about. You sound a lot like I imagined you to sound, like you write...

"...And I can tell you used to be in radio. You should try XM or something."

I tried to be entertaining, tried to be a good conversationalist. I've been slipping a bit, having spent a good portion of the last two months in serious dental agony, unable to even speak clearly without slurring or drooling for two weeks.

But, for the most part, I listened. When you're not accustomed to solitude, being alone on a silly holiday can make anybody feel as if they're the last human being on the planet - it's easy to forget things like telephones and the Internet when one is down on themselves.

And, yes, And she just wanted someone, anyone, to talk to her, like an real human being and not some - ugh! - girl from TV! One of her cats has been ill, hakking and yakking up scores of hairballs. Some creepy hippie at the organic market where she shops followed her to her car and almost got pepper-sprayed for insisting that the Burning Man must be followed, at all costs.

She needs a new stylist, one who doesn't yap like a chihuahua about customers behind their backs. And her new Hybrid car doesn't sound right...

And her sick cat ... he yakked up something... while she was driving the I-405 freeway ... in the passenger seat... Oh God, the smell...

* * * *

Only non-relative I talked to all Thanksgiving Day, not counting an interview, via Skype, for a very un-librarian job in Glasgow, Scotland, at just past 2:30 p.m. GMT and an unscheduled online chat with an ex living just outside of Paris.

Hell, my sister was in Southern California herself when I called, my parents six hours up the coast, and my grandmother, back in Virginia and once again able to drive after her near-fatal accident, was making her way through Downtown Richmond traffic to dine with her boyfriend's kinfolk.

Small world, really. Damned thing just keeps shrinking like a wet sweater in a hot dryer.

But at least through our ability to adapt to our situations, to adopt and explore new technologies, and to look inside of ourselves, into our own abilities to share our experiences and to listen to the experiences of others, we're never really that alone in this brave new world.

Thanks to all the changes in our global information infrastructure over the last hundred years, we've witnessed changes so dynamic that the very fabric of humanity has become intertwined with the crackling pulses of electrified airwaves and the miles of cable beneath our feet. Not for everyone yet, sure. But for hundreds of millions of people, the greatest experiment in information-sharing the world has ever seen has already become a way of life.

Rarely are we ever as alone as we feel. When we feel the walls closing in, when we feel abandoned, when a solitary holiday seems like a prison sentence, there's almost always a good book waiting to be read, a community park open, a mountain to climb, a film to watch, or -

- Or somebody to talk to when you're just bored, even if they're on the other side of the world.

We should all be thankful for that.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: Shocking Tales From Dreamland! Murder! Drugs! Anal Sex! Librarian Attacks Hair Care Product!

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- The walls melted away as the sky outside turned dark purple, the sunlight replaced with the gloom of an afternoon thunderstorm.

And then the breeze kicked up, pushing through the windows, scattering everything in its path.

I was standing at the bathroom door, somewhere, in some strange old house.

As I stared from my omnipotent vantage point, the toilet came right up off of the mounting, the wooden seat and the porcelain flapping in the breeze like a wet shirt on a clothesline, laughing.

I heard her voice behind me, the sound of someone familiar, someone long gone from my life and almost forgotten.

Last I'd heard, she was wanted for all sorts of things out in Colorado, warrants issued and probation violated. I guess I'd heard wrong, since I could hear her voice behind me, garbled and soft.

I turned just as her knife dug a hole in my chest, down between the ribs, right into my beating heart. I waited for her to say something, anything, but she quit speaking as soon as she put the knife through me.

Instead, as I watched, helpless and at the moment of death, she pulled the blade from my chest and cut out her own eyes.

I used to stare into those brown Cherokee-Creole eyes at night, used to run my hands up from her cafe au lait skin... DON'T DO IT!

Terror.

Pure terror as I collapsed to the floor, blood squirting from my chest and blood shooting from her eye sockets, the toilet still flapping in the breeze.

Death had caught me. A creepy, floating toilet laughed at me as the world ended, pitch-black and whimpering nothing.

* * * *

The alarm clock went off just as I hit the floor, just as I was murdered.

Dream. Another stupid, goddamn nightmare.

Got up, went to the kitchen, and put on the coffee. Powered up the laptop and turned on the television. Adjusted the rabbit ears, compensated for the various atmospheric phenomena that usually interfere with good ol' airwave broadcasts.

"... A robbery turns deadly in Over-the-Rhine ..."

Great. Fucking great.

I have a nightmare about my ex-fiancee cutting out her own eyes after murdering my sorry ass, and the first thing I hear on the morning news is something about another murder down in Cincinnati.

At least there wasn't a floating toilet involved, I tell myself.

And I think the house in the dream was that old abandoned place out in Ault, Colorado, the one "Jada" and I once broke into during that hail storm, on the way back from Cheyenne...

I hop in the shower. The water's lukewarm, the building's boiler tapped out by my neighbors and still reheating. I debate hopping back out, letting the shower run empty for a few more minutes, to allow the old furnace time to recuperate.

Instead, I lather up quickly, wash my hair, and put in some conditioner....

Suddenly, I realize why I'd had the nightmare in the first place. And it wasn't the butternut squash ravioli or the cup of yogurt I'd had for dinner the previous night, either.

* * * *

The conditioner was the same brand that "Jada" used to use. The same kind we used, back when I was strung out, back when we lived in that renovated former sorority house, back on 8th Avenue in 1997.

By accident, I'd picked it up from the grocery store. I saw a sale tag and grabbed the sucker without looking, in the here and now, 2007.

Ten years ago. Ten years? I've been drug-free for ten years?

And ten fucking years ago, my fiancee tried to kill me, tried to stab me in the heart with a very real steak knife. And back then, the toilet bowl didn't come up off its pedestal, and the wind didn't blow through that stagnant apartment, either.

But that smell was there, the smell of honey extract fragrance. Unmistakable. And that smell had filled my apartment as I'd slept.

I literally jumped out of the shower, ran to the window, pulled open the screen, and flung the whole bottle out onto the street below. I hung out the window, naked and gloating, as the plastic container exploded on impact.

A college kid, in flip-flops, preppy white shorts and Green Beer Day tee shirt, looked up and yelled something profane, something about the bottle almost ruining his pristine Rich Kid outfit.

"Kid," I yelled back. "Ask me if I give a shit!"

* * * *

We used to shower together, every morning, after that first taste of angel dust pulled us out of our hangovers, at the asscrack of noon.

And sometimes we'd get caught up, white dicks slapping against black asses in that shower, reaching for that conditioner...

Every time I smell that smell, that honey-flowery smell, I think of two things: fucking my ex-fiancee in the ass (she hated vaginal sex in the shower and liked the "feel" of the conditioner inside her), and the fact that the only things we had in common were sex, drugs, and malt liquor.

Both thoughts are but two sides of the same coin, different versions of the same memory. I was, yes, a junkie ten years ago, a reporter by night and a dope fiend college student by day. I did more blow than half of Colombia, smoked more PCP-laced weed than half of San Francisco.

Who you were in 1997 almost got you killed, you ugly sonofabitch! I told the mirror as I shaved that morning. Next time, read the fuckin' labels on the Suave bottles.

I don't need the perfume from some haircare product taking me back to that place, or filling my nostrils as I sleep.

* * * *

A friend of a different ex called last night from Los Angeles.

Some former boyfriend of hers was stalking her. He'd sent her flowers, despite a warning that she'd file a restraining order against him if he ever made contact again, ever so much as sent her a text message.

Her manager had called the cops on the guy a while back, after an altercation at a nightclub, after he'd left bruises on her arm and shoulders because he loved her. Her publicist had told her to just slap him with the order anyway.

She resisted, because, well, part of her liked the attention, the excitement.

When the flowers showed up, she freaked. The guy wasn't just love-sick. All of those nights when he'd stagger with her into clubs drunk, those nights after she'd gone to rehab, when he'd literally squatted in her house, all of those times when he'd just wanted her to go back to being a cokehead ...

He never hit me until I went clean. Fuck! I can't believe I just said that...

She's been holed up in her house for two weeks, sleeping on her couch, watching old movies that I'd recommended, her registered 10 millimeter next to the stacks of books and copies of various fashion magazines.

And last night, she just called to talk. She was lonely. She wanted to hear a bedtime story.

Against better judgment, I told her about my nightmare, about the ten-year anniversary of my attempted murder, about the bottle of conditioner I'd sent rocketing, accidentally, towards a preppy undergrad.

I expected my tale to go over badly. It was a horrible story to tell, a horrible PTSD flashback to share with someone coming to grips with their own domestic violence issues.

Los Angeles Girl just went quiet. And then she laughed.

Dude, right now, I just want to kiss you, just want you here. You or Lee Blanchard. I think you may be the only guys who get where I'm comin' from...

It took me a while to figure out who Lee Blanchard is - had to actually look the guy up on Google. Should've figured he'd be a character from James Ellroy's novels.

She's a huge Ellroy fan, loves noir literature and film. And she has a similar, sordid past to mine, too. I think that's why she likes to call when she's lonely - nice just to have somebody to talk to, somebody who gets the references to L.A. Confidential and Shaun of the Dead.

I figured I'd give her something else to read, a more print-ready version of the story I told her last night. It'll give her something to do, keep her off the streets.

Nothing like two former addicts swapping stories to make for one hell of a conversation.

This is the sanitized version.

Yep.

Ripped out eyeballs and anal sex. Cocaine. Even me describing my actual, almost murder at the hands of my ex.

Sanitized version.

- # # # -

* For those who've been there.
And for those trying to go clean.
Don't try. Just do. It's worth it.