Malibu-Hoo-Hoo…

Hello Everybody,

Last Thursday, I drove my friend, Karen’s car into Hollywood to spend the day with my friend, The Great Warrior. It was a beautiful day for a drive – late September had taken the sting out of the sunshine – so, with the windows down, I hopped onto Highway 101, into the fast river of traffic.

View from The Great Warrior’s throne.

The Great Warrior mixed smoothies for us as I looked over his resume in his office, which was cluttered with many boxes spilling out onto the floor. Last year, The Great Warrior lost the job he’d held for ten years, managing a TV production studio in Culver City. He’d spent the last on Unemployment, sifting through the countless boxes in the bungalow. It’d been a tough year all the around for The Great Warrior. After losing the job, he had to travel to Lafayette, Indiana to put his mother in an assisted living facility. She suffered from dementia and could no longer live alone. During this time, he also handled the sale of her house. He stayed in Lafayette until the house sold, packing up years of stuff and things that had accumulated over the decades into boxes, then shipped it all back to his bungalow in Hollywood. After making sure all was well with his mother and the house, he came back to Hollywood…where all the boxes were waiting for him. By then, “Get A New Job” was only a dimly lit sign way off in the back of his mind. But now, the Unemployment was ending – just like that, just as it always does – and “Get A New Job” was suddenly a bright and flashing billboard, with sparkles shooting off it and a deafening train whistle howling atop it.

He stealthily slid in between the boxes to hand me my smoothie – a concoction of some kind of protein dust and almond milk, among other things. I’m not generally a smoothie drinker, but you’re going to drink one, sooner or later, if you’re in California long enough. I slurped down the smoothie as I perused The Great Warrior’s resume – tweaking it here and there. After fitting nearly 20 years of work history into one neatly formatted page, bullet points and all, we saved it, finished the smoothies and headed for Malibu.

The afternoon traffic on Highway 101 was sleepy but swift. We made good time to Malibu Canyon, then took our time twisting and turning toward the Pacific Coast Highway. Somewhere along that curvy road, The Great Warrior asked, “So, are you gonna stay in LA, or head to Texas?”

For the last two weeks, I’d been on the fence about the subject. Money was running low and soon I wouldn’t have enough to do either. The anguish over deciding had led to near paralysis. I’d been staying up late at night, weighing the pros and cons of each choice, as I channel surfed from one news station to the next. FoxNews, MSNBC, CNN, back and forth, over and over. I still had no clue where I’d end up, but I was certain that not only was our nation’s mainstream media one giant, “stinking pile of shit!” I was certain no one loyal to any of these stations – Left or Right – had an accurate view of America. “These stations were specifically designed to corral viewers into fearful corners,” I cried. “TV’s a powerful tool and the f#$ck heads who control it have a huge responsibility for what they air. Suppositions or op-eds or speculation is all any of it is. No facts…only, ooooooh, what may happen if this or that might…or might not!!!…happen. It’s all a joke, a dangerous joke. Left or Right is a joke. But we’re corralled into one or the other, thinking it’s the way it’s always been…that you have to be either Right or Left…when the fertile middle where America really has a chance to grow is growing barren! Our only hope is to find that Middle America. And deep down we all know the America on TV is horseshit but the TV doesn’t want us thinking it just wants us to be scared enough to keep buying so we just–”

“Still don’t know what you’re gonna do, huh?”

“NO!!!…I’m sorry…I’ve been watching too much TV.”

“It’s OK,” replied The Great Warrior, squinting through the windshield. “Once I realized that I was not part of a conversation and only a witness to a raving diatribe, it became a very interesting spectacle.”

Not so clear…

It was around 2PM when we turned north onto the Pacific Coast Highway, at the giant Christian cross marking the entrance of Pepperdine University. The vast Pacific Ocean stretched out so far until it blended into the sky. Sun rays beamed straight down, spreading white-yellow streaks across the deep-blue water. To our right were harsh, cactus covered mountains with with semi-mansions nestled high on their ledges.

A few minutes later, just north of Malibu, I parked the car along the highway. We walked down the cliff to the beach and sat down just beyond the reach of the big waves crashing in front of us. A flock of seagulls milled about the beach for food. Surfers paddled out to the breakers, caught waves, rode them until they wiped out, then did it all over again. The surfers were like a pack of animals, communicating on a deeper level beyond words. They were never in each others’ way, nor were they too far apart from each other. They’d joined consciousness, I supposed.

“It’s a good time to surf,” said The Great Warrior.

“Why’s that?”

“Because the sharks feed throughout the morning, and won’t go at it again until dusk.”

“Oh.”

“You wanna surf, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Well, then, pay me $500 bucks a month for my spare room. Get a job, stay in LA and learn to surf. It’s that simple.”

Sunligh shone through the waves just before they would crest, illuminating them to an opaque torquis, the color of old glass telephone insulators. The salt air came in strong on mist from the crashing waves. Waves building, cresting, crashing. Seagulls feeding to stay alive. Surfers surfing until they wiped out. Everything seemed so simple, mechanical. Even The Great Warrior was a simple event – sitting next to me Indian-style, squinting out over the ocean, picking up his smart phone to snap a picture as if programmed to do so at that exact moment, then lowering his hand, and resuming the long stare. And there I was, hung up on stay or go as if it were some complex, multi-layered riddle.

Surfer’s in the wild.

On our way back to LA, we stopped to eat at a little shopping center in Point Dume. In front of a gourmet coffee joint, gray-haired men wearing faded blue jeans, flip-flops and fleece sweaters conversed with each other as a gaggle of school girls sat at another table, giggling in unison as they tickled their smartphones. Across the walkway, in front of a burger joint, two tired Latinos wearing dirty work clothes spoke quiet Spanish as if language were merely a tool to stay awake. They reminded me of Vladimir and Estrogon, the two lead characters in Samuel Becket’s play, Waiting For Godot.

“I can’t go on like this,” says Estrogon.

“That’s what you think,” says Vladimir.

A couple of tables down, sat a dirty, scruffy bum, about my age.

“YOU GOT ANY SPARE CHANGE!!!”

The bum and I were the same size and build, we even had the same hair color. I kept my eye on him, as The Great Warrior and I walked about the shopping center. He’d ask a few people for change in his aggresive manner, then disappear around a corner. After awhile, he’d come back, ask more people as they passed him by. Stay, then go, stay, then go…so simple. I looked for him after we ate, as we made our way back to the car. I didn’t see him. It’s time for him to hide, I thought. He’ll come out again. Then I thought, it’s no riddle, Todd. You’re not starving. Just make the damn decision.

View from Point Dume.

Later, as we wound our way back through Malibu Canyon, the traffic picked up. It was 5PM, rush hour had commenced and the primal instinct in the motorists was beginning to kick in. At the end of the canyon, the two lanes merged into one. As I began to merge, the pick-up behind me sped up and wouldn’t let me in the lane.

“It’s all about winning,” I said. “Everybody’s gotta f#$king win.”

“Not me,” replied The Great Warrior. “I used to be that way, but now if somebody cuts me off, or if they started cursing at me or flip me off for some reason, I just smile and wave and act like I recognize them. That usually creeps them out, or at least takes care of any hostility.”

Traffic was bumper to bumper on Highway 101, through The Valley into Hollywood, in both directions. I hung out with The Great Warrior at his place for a while until the traffic died down. At about 8pm, I got back on the 101. Traffic was no longer bumper to bumper, but  it was still going strong. And fast. Red headlights – beady red monster eyes – sped by me, got in front of me. I sped up just to keep up with traffic. That’s when I started to feel it…the need to win. Soon, it was me swerving across the lanes, cutting cars off, finding that spot…that little spot of freedom where I can speed on with no red eyes in front of me. I’d come up upon a car like a cheetah to a gazelle. Then I’d zip around the metal corpse, onward, further into the Dark Valley. I was the predator. I was winning. It was all so simple.

But traffic backed up at the Ventura Freeway merger. As if programmed, all the beady red eyes slowed, found a lane and fell in line. 15 miles per hour. Nobody was winning. Nobody even tried to win. There was only obedience. The beady red monstor eyes became lifeless taillights. Across the freeway, hundreds of pairs of equally lifeless white lights obediently went the other way. There we all were, trudging along, with no choice but to keep going further in the in the same direction we were already inclined to go. I had a vision, then. I imagined a vast prairie with hellish fires lighting up the horizon in either direction. The prairie was barren, inhabited only by the occasional tumble weed rolling across it. A sharp cold wind blew hard across the prairie, creating a low, hollow whistle…

Damn clear and simple.

The car behind me honked. The traffic picked up so I sped up, further in the same direction with all the drivers on my side of the freeway, in the opposite direction of all the drivers on the other side, seperated not by a vast empty prairie, but just a thin piece of concrete. I felt sad, then. Nothing complicated about it, Todd. The road was designed that way.

Be well…

Never Mind Where You Died, Elisha Pate

Hello Everybody,

Smokey Mountain Sunshine

“Say, are you related to Barry Pate?” asked the clerk at the car rental establishment in Asheville, North Carolina.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “But there’s a pretty good chance. My family used to live here, way back.”

It was true. In 1703, a Thoroughgood Pate ventured into the North Carolina territory. He’d been run out of Virginia for skipping out on various debts, ran to the hills and was probably the first Pate to enter North Carolina. Years later – in 1782 – another Thoroughgood Pate (my 7th great-grandfather, and probably the earlier Thoroughgood Pate’s grandson, though there is no direct record of the relation) stood trial in North Carolina for treason after the American Revolutionary War. Although he publicly supported revolution, he was suspected of having secret loyalist sympathies and of aiding the The Crown. He was found “not guilty” but forced to take a public oath to the newly birthed United States. So, the Pate’s do have a long history in North Carolina. However, not long after Thoroughgood took the oath, my direct bloodline moved out west, evolving into modest farmers in Alabama.

I would be driving from Asheville to San Antonio – through the Deep South. I loaded up the rental car with my belongings, and with my greatest ally and most dangerous enemy looking at me from the rearview mirror, I started the engine and steered toward the Smokey Mountains.

A crumbling street in the South.

I drove the rental car up and down and through the ancient mountains that morning. I avoided the interstates – stuck to the highways to get closer to the beauty and grandure around me. The haunted ancients hills were quiet and fog loosely clung to them, barely hiding their nakedness. The rivers raced down the ancient grooves carved in the mountains, creating frothing white rapids. I turned the radio off, I wanted to hear the silence of everything around me. It rained off and on, and the dark skies brought about a natural gloom that I can’t even recreate in my mind because what I saw was only meant to be seen then, in that moment. Then the view was to be longed for, forever. Hallowed, haunted longing. That is the Smokey Mountains.

That afternoon, I squiggled out of the Appalacian birth canal and was delivered into the northern Georgia foothills. There, I passed billboards advertising guns, billboards advertising God, billboards warning about teenage pregnancy. Over and over. I kept my eyes peeled for a billboard advertising all three at once, as Georgia passed me by. But nope, didn’t see one. Before I knew it, I was in Alabama.

Broke Down American Pacemaker

“Man, there’s all kinds a Pates in Alabama,” said my friend back in New York, Alabama Patrick – called so for obvious reasons. “Shit, where I lived, you couldn’t walk ten feet without bumping into a Pate.”

I kept watch as I drove, should a Pate run out of the woods and scurry across the road. But none did, and I didn’t ask anybody at the gas stations if any Pate’s were around. I had a limited time with the rental car, so I couldn’t do any deep investigating. Besides, I was content to know they were out there, bumping into all kinds of people.

There is a truth that is easy to understand when driving through the South. It is that Led Zeppelin really is the greatest rock and roll band. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are lofted into their own mythic categories, they are institutions – but Led Zeppelin hovers just below heaven, in view of Man and their sound falls from the sky and runs like lightening through mortals’ bodies. Drive through the Deep South and keep the dial tuned to the two or three classic rock stations that are available. You will hear plenty of Zeppelin and experience their music in ways beyond the 6 senses. I am not f%$#ing kidding, they are the greatest rock and roll band. Plant, Bonzo, Jones and Page blend into some kind of many armed and footed creature – something like a sugared up cymbal pounding monkey crossed with a Druid priest then bred with an alien who crash landed in the Mississippi Delta – that plays the secret chords only heard in a morphine dream. I love the Stones, but Zeppelin pushed their sound through our dimension’s barriers. One more time, Led Zeppelin is THE greatest rock and roll band. South radio also decrees the Allman Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival and ZZ Top were true originals, too, and tells us that we should never forget Aerosmith, who rightfully deserves its place in rock legendom, for they flat out boogied in thier own nasty, sweaty way, at least until 1993. Listening to classic rock while driving through America is like earning a Masters Degree in Rock Criticism, but you’ll earn a Doctorate in it while driving through the Deep South.

The Greatest Rock and Roll Band

All the other radio stations seem to come in a little fuzzy in Dixie. So there’s really no other choice but to jam. Well, there is one more choice, and that’s to listen to the dozen or so religious stations. I took a break from The School of Rock to listen to one such station, as I wound my way through a secluded part of ‘Bama, off the interstate. The dj-preacher man said that the Bible’s New Testament is our proof that we’re supposed to work for a living. Hmm, well I don’t disagree, I believe in working for a living, let’s listen some more. “Let no man steal who can work with his own two hands.” Hmm, I agree with that too. “Our founding fathers lived by that testament” and it was their main focus to “create a nation of workers” and that “it is the Protestant ideals that our founding fathers brought to this country that has made USA number one.” He never mentioned anything about inherently wealthy landowners – like most of the founding fathers – not wanting to pay the high taxes or anything like that. Nope. “This country, this Protestant country was begat to be a nation of wage earners, and any help is welfare and welfare is anti-American.” By this point I’d forgotten I was listening to a religious channel.

I left Alabama without noticing. I was on a deeply secluded county road in Mississippi. The Deep South bestows another truth to the driver – the springtime there is completetly, utterly beautiful. Winding paths through lush green woods on easy rolling hills. The peace came in through the air-conditioner vents. My shoulders relaxed as I breathed in deep all that the city kills. The sun never hits you head on, just sneaks up to you and before you know it, there’s a bead of sweat on your brow. But so what, the cool shade will dry it right up.

Burned Out

Every now and then I would come to a little town, and see another truth – the Deep South is home to extreme poverty. On the outskirts of the towns, the poor – mostly black, but many whites – sat out on the porches of their crumbling homes that were little more than shanties. Then, the nicer houses came into view as you drove further into the town. Then, as I would drive out of a town, the shanties would appear again. A curious fact was that it was these crumbling houses that had “no tresspassing” signs posted on them, not the modern “plantation-deco” homes of the wealthier people. The poor people on the porches were either skinny or obese, with loose jaws and tangled eyes. The pale skin of the whites poked out of their shorts and shirts. Black or white, these poor people weren’t working. I guess they weren’t Protestant. I didn’t know how they could be Catholic, because there were no Catholic churches to be seen and needless to say, no synagogues either. And, though their blank stares could be mistaken for meditative gazes, I’d bet my firstborn they weren’t Buddhists. Maybe they were closer to Jesus than that dj-preacher – carpenters in a land where nobody’s building.

All throughout the South, I saw the white drifter. There he’d be, out in the middle of nowhere, two or three bags at his feet, waiting for Gadot. I tried hard to feel what that may be like. What if nobody went for it and picked me up? What then? There’s twenty miles of nowhere in both directions. How’d things end up this way for me? I’m sure that’s a hard question to answer, but if no one picks you up I guess you got the time to find answers to questions like that. I stopped trying to stand in the drifter’s footsteps when I realized I was just another driver in a car passing him by.

Mississippi River

In Vicksburg, Mississippi, I parked the car and walked around. Vicksburg is a pretty town on many rolling hills along the Mississippi River. 13 Pates where holed up there during the Siege of Vicksburg during the Civil War. They were all members of the Confederate Army, including my great-great-great-uncle Richmond Pate. The siege lasted from May to July of 1863, with the city ultimately falling to the Union Army. One Pate soldier, Elisha Pate, was killed during the siege. As I walked, I wondered where, exactly, Elisha took his last breath, wondered how he died. Did he die on the banks of the Mississippi, catching a bullet in the chest? Did he die instantly, or was his death slow and agonizing? I continued such thinking even after I was back in the car and driving out of town. Was he blown away during the shelling? Was it disease? At every red light, I tried to see back in time to find Elisha – watch him take his final breath and slump down. I wanted to be there the moment the ghost left his body, to see it float higher and higher until it joins that place the living can’t reach. On his dead face would be the expression of his last thought. How did things end up this way for me? Maybe that was the look. At a red light, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw three black men in an old dented work truck. They were laughing, sharing a carefree moment until the light turned green.

Jefferson Davis and his wife, looking on from the losing side of history.

I kept my eyes on the three black men as I rolled into the intersection. I, of course, didn’t know the fellows, but I’m willing to bet they were descended from slaves. They followed me up a hill then down the hill, these distant sons of men and women who were thought of as – and treated as – property. Their relatives were bought and sold, like the car I was driving, like the computer on which I wrote this blog. This computer is going to wear out someday, and I’m going to go to the store and get a new one, and never give this computer a second thought. I will not mourn it, bury it, or tell anyone I saw the ghost leave its body. Up a hill, down the hill. Property, just property. Up another hill. Property.

The three black men were no longer behind me when I reached the edge of town. There, I stopped wondering what the hell Elisha Pate might’ve thought when he died, and I decided to end this blog then. I’d planned to end this post by writing about Leon County in East Texas, where the Pates had nestled in for the last several generations. But nope. The blog would end just outside of Vicksburg. I crossed the Mississippi River into flat, flat Louisiana, my traveling companion right there in the rearview mirror, with a look of compassionate castigation. There we were, suspended over the Big Muddy – the culmination of patriots and traitors, loyalists and rebels, and of all the gods and devils. But none of that made me special, I was just a guy driving further into Louisiana. Poor, flat Louisiana was gazing across the river, wondering why Mississippi kept all those hills to herself.

A Crying Window in the South.

Be well…