HJ Brennan, A Work in Progress

Recent letter from old time and long lost art school friend, Bruce, aka Fang, and if there are living pirates, he’s one:

“Do you remember why we locked you in the bathroom that night?” He said I then squeezed out of the tiny, and thought-to-be-painted-shut bathroom window employing shampoo lube and Houdini moves and found myself barefoot and freezing on a ten-inch ledge seven stories up. He says he and a couple other buddies watched from his window as I climbed a steep slate gable end onto the roof of the building and disappeared. My recollection of that same night is eating popcorn and watching Star Trek on French’s TV. French wasn’t home, so his door latch broke.

We’re rollin across B.C. in the summer and the top down and the radio on and the wind and I can hardly hear a thing she says.

She’s shouting and trying to light her smoke and the wind is winning and she’s been trying to light this fat screw job of a spliff for five minutes. Three joints into the day, she gets it lit bending way under the dash in some weird-ass Cirque de Soleil pose, takes a huge pull and sits up. “Where are we?” she yells.

“B.C.!” I yell back.

“Where the hell”—The joint blows out of her hand.—“are we going?”

“B.C. It’s big!”

She holds up her fingers like she still has the smoke, then realizes she doesn’t. “Did I just have a joint?”

I pass her my Kool.

Guest writer, Howard Rappaport and remember that name. Writer extraordinaire, accomplished composer and fastidious gardener.

Notes from the Brazilian Embassy

            Flavio Feijoada

Yesterday I had the same dream where one of my classmates spits a spitball into my ear and I become quite deaf.

D. wants to have a baby next year. She criticizes me for my desires, says that I am capricious and that I desire silly things. But her desire to have a baby–this I told her–is also capricious.  It is a silly thing to have a baby, first, because it is economical suicide, plus, you must spend time with the thing, for it cannot fend for itself.

Maurilio makes orange juice for me most mornings.  Sometimes I just say “Hi, Maurilio, how are you?” and he laughs, waiting for my request.  Sometimes, though, I do not ask for anything, staring stupidly at him instead while waiting for him to react.  He usually laughs and says nothing.  Maurilio is a simple person.  Even while his boss yells at him during the lunch service to hurry up, Maurilio smiles, mostly.  Death to him, stupid guy.

Calm, I should remain calm.  But this is impossible.  I am anxious. I clench my teeth.  It is too hot here and all my suits are of thick wool. I drink two or three cups of espresso a day.  I gain weight.  I need a little dog.  I sense this. Not a child, but a dog.

D. is really getting to me. She wants me to decide my life and have a baby. I don’t buy this, I really don’t.

The other day I got into an accident.  On purpose.  People honking, cutting me off, flashing their lights and out to get me.  I have gotten into the habit of slamming on the brakes any time someone honks at me.  Indiscriminately.  Last week I made my first victim.  Bastard honked, didn’t know my policy, crashed right into me–wham!–breaking both his headlights, wrecking the front grill, the hood one big cave-in.  I stopped all traffic by getting out of the car and ranting savagely.

The problem:  I am in love with Hana.  She is young and beautiful and speaks only Czech, German, Swedish and Russian, languages I do not know.  She belongs with me, though, and not with her toothless, 83-year-old husband, Vladimir.

Meeting life’s challenges head on, I walk down the narrow embassy corridor, practically rubbing my shoulder against the wall, taking up as little space as possible, so as not to bother anyone.  Enter wide-shouldered, ‘I-work-in-the Minister’s-cabinet’ Bernardo moving towards me, not yielding an inch, even though I have given as much as is physically possible.  If I give way, I will have to flatten my whole body against the wall.  I will be humiliated.  He should give way a little.  Suddenly, I step away from the wall, strong and determined, right down the center of the corridor.  He is much taller and denser than I, my body bracing for the impact–then ramming against Bernardo’s shoulder with the intent to hurt, as he moves his shoulder slightly to lessen the shock of full impact and as I continue upon my way, not looking back, refusing to acknowledge the confrontation.

You remember when you were all about to change the world and what’s wrong with those old white guys in power and didn’t they get it?

Brennan’s sketch in the margins during a too-long lecture in art school.

Then you were in college and you were late for class because you were at the all-night vigil or you were hung over or you just met this guy and your roommate was a total shit and your face was friggin breaking out again. The ancient-lizard-wizened-turtle art history prof was lecturing in monotone and didn’t they even have stereo? His frequent coughs were like a sand storm trying to get off the ground and you wondered while he was droning on and on about zeitgeist if you shouldn’t just stand up, take off your clothes and dive out that third floor lecture hall window, and you made little sketches in the margins and they looked like this.

Tomas. First-gen Puerto Rican kid I met in West Chester, PA, and I was his art teacher, and he could draw like an old master when he was ten.

He and his friends showed up at our third-floor walk-up early mornings before school. I’d answer the knock—a toothbrush in my mouth. Tomas, the leader, would say, “We just like to watch you, Mr. Brennan.” They’d line up on the couch, the five of them.

I’d asked if I could draw him, he said okay, and I did—him sitting in the alley behind his house. I went home and painted a narrative portrait. When he saw it he asked, “Can I take it? Show my family?”

“Okay, but I want it back.”

“For sure.”

I never saw it again, and that’s okay.

On a Mission

It’s Friday night and everyone’s talking Spanish and you’re feelin the dance comin on and you’re in your groove and you’re owning the street and Tommy yells and flips the bird at a delivery truck and the black guy fryin up ribs in the trunk of his car laughs and you tell him you’ll catch him later and you pass the Indian place and Pancho’s Best of the Bay Burritos and you can hear the women inside chopping steak and chicken and the small Chinese woman herding a couple kids tells em to get out of your way and Brian says in his best-ever Elvis voice, “It’s alright momma, anyway you do.” He tips his hat and it’s an iconic jazzman’s hat and it’s alright. This is the last gasp of SF’s Mission District and the families and the cops and the hipsters and the drugged and the down and the gangsters and the artists and musicians and film-makers and poets and the gonna-be-poets and the long-term mental rental tenants wonder, “WTF?”

Sometimes it’s easy too look back and see where things went seriously and ass-over-tin-cups wrong.

On the way in from the coast, across California’s nearly deserted great savannah and on a wonderfully wide, smooth road surface, I’d become a bit full of myself and let the bike off leash. “Let’s see what this thing’ll do,” I said into my helmet. Within seconds, I was somewhere north of 130mph and leaned into a long right sweeper. The bike couldn’t have been more steady had it been on rails. Plenty of throttle left, I kept my eyes on the exit of the turn and the long straight ahead. I was figuring this fuel-injected, pushrod Italian V-twin would be somewhere in excess of 150mph on that stretch when the doomed rabbit darted under my front wheel. The bike and I launched out of that perfect arc, and I was shot like a hockey puck across the opposite lane and out into God’s great outback of sage and rocks. On its side, the red bike plowed a hundred-mile-an-hour furrow. I slid close behind bouncing off rocks and branches like a pinball, feet first and on my back. My mind sped. Friction between my leathers and the ground heated up. By the time June slowed, got her bike turned around and back to where I had abandoned plan, I was on my feet.

Off her bike, she ran down into the devastation. “Are you okay?”

I pulled off my helmet. “Kinda stunned. Maybe okay.” I checked my neck, fingers. “Armor and leather—good. Help me get the bike up?”

“You’re white. You’re shaking,” she said.

“No shit.”

The machine, so elegant and adroit in motion, looked awful on its side with its bottom parts showing. Damn heavy, too. We muscled it upright, pulled metal, plastic and gravel away from the wheels and pushed the beast back up onto the road’s shoulder. If I’m ever on a bobsled team, I want June as one of the pushers.

The right side of the bike was wiped out: front brake lever, mirror, engine guard, and rear brake pedal. Zero brakes. Otherwise, the electrics still worked, and the fuel injection somehow survived. We backtracked along the skid marks and found the sheared brake lever and brake pedal. I wedged them into my tank bag.

June grinned. “Ready to try it again without brakes, hotshot?”

Memorial Day

They were young and strong brothers and they were the men of their family when the country came under direct attack with lives lost at Pearl Harbor. They dropped what they were doing, left the mines in Pennsylvania, enlisted, were trained with young men from neighboring mining towns and villages, and they fought back the invaders. The costs were dear. Just twenty-five percent of my father’s platoon returned from the Pacific, and they were changed men. We remember.

One of the skaters’ little known truths is how screwed their feet get from hours of training and competition. Blood in their socks, mangled toes, crushed arches and toe nails falling out.

It started out as endurance racing in 1935. Then, in 1937, Roller Derby got to pushing-and-shoving and hysterically physical with teams competing in front of crowds of 10,000 people a day.

“Fans went wild for the derby. Fan clubs sprung up across the United States and thousands of fans subscribed to Roller Derby News, which changed to RolleRage in the early 1940s, to keep up with their favorite skaters. The roller derby appeared in over 50 major cities in 1940, playing to more than five million spectators.”  – National Museum of Roller Skating

It was my week to drive, we were late, and, technically, I was drunk. The Dodge wove between lanes and we were still an easy fifteen minutes from the Tyler parking lot, then another five-or-so to the painting studios.

“You okay?” Ron asked. He had to be drunk, too, having just dropped me off from a long Friday night three hours ago.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Kinda fast. They don’t care if I’m late.”

“My guy does. We have a model, and he locks the door.”

“Oh.”

“Fuckin ‘oh’ and we made the light.”

I grabbed my box of paints, brushes and the rest of the crap and a couple tablets. “Later, Ron. Lock the car.”

I pushed in through the building entry, charged the stairs, dropped a goddam tablet, went down after it, back up the stairs, down the hall and to the studio.

The studio is generally as quiet as a church when there’s a model. Inhibition may play as large a role as respect—but it’s quiet. I pressed the door latch softly, hoping, begging that it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t. I entered and tip-toed between crowded tables, grad students and easels with my supplies sticking out both sides like a tinker’s cart. The model, a blond young woman, my age, stood naked with a plant on an elevated platform in the center of the studio. There, in the far corner, a space. I turned sideways to squeeze in and my cargo exploded! Jars, metal boxes, about a thousand pencils, tablets splayed, and a chair toppled. All eyes on me, including the model’s.

From across the room, the professor said, “Beautiful, isn’t she?”