I, Continaut
Predator Press
[LOBO]
One of the greatest gags of nature and nurture ever played is the fact that I have been given just not quite enough talent to do most of the things I enjoy. Years of bands, countless hours of painting and sketching, hundreds of thousands of pages of science and philosophy ... indeed I have been a grotesque failure in spectacular multitude of platforms. The music was admittedly terrible, the art even worse. The clear critical thinking required of the sciences was always blurred in the pursuit of survival, the maintenance of ego and the shameless hunt for the content of the highest-cut skirts available.
But it was fun from time to time.
When I lived in Hawaii --roughly ten years ago-- I had a heyday of sorts. There was this broken down two-story building on Pauahi Avenue. While it was technically downtown, the neighborhood was rather dubious ... it bordered a strip-club peppered drug marketplace riddled with the worst humankind could possibly offer "paradise". This, incidentally, is the seedy side of Hawaii you don't see on postcards --in fact, you don't see it anywhere. Newspapers don't talk about it. Muggings and robberies and homicides [Oh My!] somehow never grace the television. Hawaii also had the worst homeless problem I've ever seen; mentally ill people, hygiene long since abandoned, wander freely in the mild weather to point and whistle into an empty sky, barking obscenities at unseen demons and occasionally spitting on the screaming pastel shirts of the unwary passer-by.
So in the evening, this particular building shut down quite completely; all the barbers and beauticians, photographers and souvenir stores, restaurants and tailors all locked up there tiny, crammed little shops and the place was left in hopes that the predatory denizens would once again just overlook the place --aside from the usual urinations and sleepers.
Tommy and I met by complete chance. I was struggling in my early semesters of college, enjoying the derision of a fierce feminist English teacher named Joan. Joan made it perfectly clear early on that I was not only "the worst writer she had ever had the misfortune of teaching", but I was also "so debauched and crude that [my] sanity borders on the deranged, completely devoid of even rudimentary literary skills taught in most fundamental junior high schools". She vocally --vehemently-- resented having to work with students such as myself as it was "virtually all remedial, and [we] had no business being in college".
So I need credits, and this bitch is really putting the spurs to me. I need something easy to balance the semesters workload.
It turned out I could pick up a few elective credits going through an apprenticeship program, and one that was offered was that of a jeweler. I figured, correctly, that I would spend a few months sweeping a jewelry repair store, taking out the garbage, et cetera.
Tommy, however, turned out to be something much more influential. He was most certainly a gifted jeweler, but this was completely eclipsed by his ability to play the drums. He was awesome. I had been playing guitar for years and we hit it off famously. Soon I was hanging around with him and his friends David and Reed --other custom jewelers who also worked in the same building.
The place was empty all night long. Within a month or so we had rented one of the vacant offices and shattered the still of the Hawaiian night, boozing and playing impossibly loud and awful music until dawn. He was a professional musician, and before long I was rubbing elbows with a myriad of musical talents. Of course Tommy eventually wanted to turn the rental office into a real recording studio, so a few of us ponyied up a modest investment to bring his brainchild "Split Second Productions" to it's fruition.
My role in this was pretty straightforward: I would pull in business whenever possible, monitor the bands, clean up and put away equipment when the allotted time was over and so forth. In return, I got "A"s for the semester and free access to the studio and equipment myself.
Reed was one of the most enigmatic characters I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Truthfully, I don't know if "Reed" was his first name or last. Six foot two and one hundred and seventy pounds soaking wet, he was a gangly kind of eccentric genius who painted in his free time and joked and pranked us incessantly. To pay the rent he made miniature gold tennis rackets and baseballs and sports-related bangles of all sorts. There wasn't always a market for the stuff, but when there was a market, the profit was huge.
Reed's "office" was on the second floor, and like the others, was crammed with tools, workbenches, display cases and so forth. We all suspected that he slept there because he was never absent ... there was no evidence of a bed or anything; the only obvious amenities consisted of a tiny little refrigerator full of whatever you feed a mad scientist like that. We would be rehearsing for some critically serious gig or recording, and right in the middle of the thundering bass and screaming guitars he would just burst into the studio with a trombone or a French horn from storage and start blowing crazy misshapen notes that would make us burst into hysteric laughter. He was just a naturally funny, brilliant guy
On the walls of his shop Reed hung his paintings ... paintings that never failed to mystify me. I loved them, and I would often mill about and admire them; the ranged from landscapes to nudes to surreal, and I would spot something clever and new in them every time I looked. During the ensuing months I tried to work up the courage to offer to buy one, but he was just so eccentric I could never figure out how to breach the subject. How much should I offer? Would he be insulted? Would he part with them at all?
And then one day Reed was gone.
We never saw him again. Poof. Curiously left his office completely intact as if it was waiting for him to return; rare metals, half finished projects, tools, everything was visible through the window in the door of his shop.
We waited.
After a week or so we found out he had been evicted. None of us knew exactly why, but theories sprang up like brushfires. The landlord found out he was living there. He was late on the rent. Whatever. Nothing ever got any confirmation.
One day after classes I wandered up to Tommy's office to do my usual cleaning, and realized that the landlord had hired a crew to dismantle Reed's office in order to prepare it for rental. The workbenches, the tools, the furniture ... all had been removed. Sheets were hung and paint buckets, rollers, industrial-sized brushes were strewn throughout a newly-painted powder-green room. Paint and plaster chips randomly covered the floor like shrapnel.
And in the corner, in a waist-high haphazard stack, a pile of bent and torn canvases lie, punched through with footprints and powder-green splashes ...
[LOBO]
One of the greatest gags of nature and nurture ever played is the fact that I have been given just not quite enough talent to do most of the things I enjoy. Years of bands, countless hours of painting and sketching, hundreds of thousands of pages of science and philosophy ... indeed I have been a grotesque failure in spectacular multitude of platforms. The music was admittedly terrible, the art even worse. The clear critical thinking required of the sciences was always blurred in the pursuit of survival, the maintenance of ego and the shameless hunt for the content of the highest-cut skirts available.
But it was fun from time to time.
When I lived in Hawaii --roughly ten years ago-- I had a heyday of sorts. There was this broken down two-story building on Pauahi Avenue. While it was technically downtown, the neighborhood was rather dubious ... it bordered a strip-club peppered drug marketplace riddled with the worst humankind could possibly offer "paradise". This, incidentally, is the seedy side of Hawaii you don't see on postcards --in fact, you don't see it anywhere. Newspapers don't talk about it. Muggings and robberies and homicides [Oh My!] somehow never grace the television. Hawaii also had the worst homeless problem I've ever seen; mentally ill people, hygiene long since abandoned, wander freely in the mild weather to point and whistle into an empty sky, barking obscenities at unseen demons and occasionally spitting on the screaming pastel shirts of the unwary passer-by.
So in the evening, this particular building shut down quite completely; all the barbers and beauticians, photographers and souvenir stores, restaurants and tailors all locked up there tiny, crammed little shops and the place was left in hopes that the predatory denizens would once again just overlook the place --aside from the usual urinations and sleepers.
Tommy and I met by complete chance. I was struggling in my early semesters of college, enjoying the derision of a fierce feminist English teacher named Joan. Joan made it perfectly clear early on that I was not only "the worst writer she had ever had the misfortune of teaching", but I was also "so debauched and crude that [my] sanity borders on the deranged, completely devoid of even rudimentary literary skills taught in most fundamental junior high schools". She vocally --vehemently-- resented having to work with students such as myself as it was "virtually all remedial, and [we] had no business being in college".
So I need credits, and this bitch is really putting the spurs to me. I need something easy to balance the semesters workload.
It turned out I could pick up a few elective credits going through an apprenticeship program, and one that was offered was that of a jeweler. I figured, correctly, that I would spend a few months sweeping a jewelry repair store, taking out the garbage, et cetera.
Tommy, however, turned out to be something much more influential. He was most certainly a gifted jeweler, but this was completely eclipsed by his ability to play the drums. He was awesome. I had been playing guitar for years and we hit it off famously. Soon I was hanging around with him and his friends David and Reed --other custom jewelers who also worked in the same building.
The place was empty all night long. Within a month or so we had rented one of the vacant offices and shattered the still of the Hawaiian night, boozing and playing impossibly loud and awful music until dawn. He was a professional musician, and before long I was rubbing elbows with a myriad of musical talents. Of course Tommy eventually wanted to turn the rental office into a real recording studio, so a few of us ponyied up a modest investment to bring his brainchild "Split Second Productions" to it's fruition.
My role in this was pretty straightforward: I would pull in business whenever possible, monitor the bands, clean up and put away equipment when the allotted time was over and so forth. In return, I got "A"s for the semester and free access to the studio and equipment myself.
Reed was one of the most enigmatic characters I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Truthfully, I don't know if "Reed" was his first name or last. Six foot two and one hundred and seventy pounds soaking wet, he was a gangly kind of eccentric genius who painted in his free time and joked and pranked us incessantly. To pay the rent he made miniature gold tennis rackets and baseballs and sports-related bangles of all sorts. There wasn't always a market for the stuff, but when there was a market, the profit was huge.
Reed's "office" was on the second floor, and like the others, was crammed with tools, workbenches, display cases and so forth. We all suspected that he slept there because he was never absent ... there was no evidence of a bed or anything; the only obvious amenities consisted of a tiny little refrigerator full of whatever you feed a mad scientist like that. We would be rehearsing for some critically serious gig or recording, and right in the middle of the thundering bass and screaming guitars he would just burst into the studio with a trombone or a French horn from storage and start blowing crazy misshapen notes that would make us burst into hysteric laughter. He was just a naturally funny, brilliant guy
On the walls of his shop Reed hung his paintings ... paintings that never failed to mystify me. I loved them, and I would often mill about and admire them; the ranged from landscapes to nudes to surreal, and I would spot something clever and new in them every time I looked. During the ensuing months I tried to work up the courage to offer to buy one, but he was just so eccentric I could never figure out how to breach the subject. How much should I offer? Would he be insulted? Would he part with them at all?
And then one day Reed was gone.
We never saw him again. Poof. Curiously left his office completely intact as if it was waiting for him to return; rare metals, half finished projects, tools, everything was visible through the window in the door of his shop.
We waited.
After a week or so we found out he had been evicted. None of us knew exactly why, but theories sprang up like brushfires. The landlord found out he was living there. He was late on the rent. Whatever. Nothing ever got any confirmation.
One day after classes I wandered up to Tommy's office to do my usual cleaning, and realized that the landlord had hired a crew to dismantle Reed's office in order to prepare it for rental. The workbenches, the tools, the furniture ... all had been removed. Sheets were hung and paint buckets, rollers, industrial-sized brushes were strewn throughout a newly-painted powder-green room. Paint and plaster chips randomly covered the floor like shrapnel.
And in the corner, in a waist-high haphazard stack, a pile of bent and torn canvases lie, punched through with footprints and powder-green splashes ...
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