Reader's Block

by Janet Levine

Hi. My name is Janet and I am a biblioholic.

It started when I just a kid. My sister wanted to be a teacher. When she was almost 9 and I not quite 4, I became her first captive student.

She made me read. And I haven’t been able to stop since.

I’ll read anything. I prefer books, but if they are not available, I’ll read newspapers, cereal boxes, can labels. Once I even read a People magazine. I know, and I am ashamed.

Reading has kept me from more important things in life. Like TV. There was a time when I tried to read and watch TV, but I haven’t set my eyes on a sitcom since 1978. It’s bad enough that I didn’t see the Sopranos (is that too last year?) , but I’ve never even watched a reality show. I’m not sure I even know what a reality show is.

I don’t think I’m a bad person. Just addicted. But I do know it’s not my fault. My sister pushed me into reading. Then school continued what she started. It’s a good thing that our schools learned their lessons. My older daughter is as addicted as I am, but my younger son, mercifully, views reading as something you sometimes can’t avoid. I’m sure my grandson will not have even that problem. Schools have stopped teaching. I was going to say they’ve stopped teaching reading, but I realized that was too fine a point.

I did stop reading once. In a way, it was very liberating. There weren’t any new ideas to play with and get tangled up in. Not too many facts cluttering up my thought processes. But it was a bit lonely. There were no other people crowding my head. It was all what I did; what I thought.

In a very short amount of time I found that I was desperate for a fix. Words. Any words. As long as they were printed. I tried to ease back slowly; keep myself from constantly gorging on all those beautiful letters. I joined a 12-step program.

I then read the twelve steps and realized that I was doomed.

The reading was fine, but I don’t actually believe that there IS a higher power than words. And I can’t think of many better mentors than book. I do admit my addiction, but I just can’t fathom a life without weekly visits to the library, or evenings spent without a book in hand.

My name is Janet and I am a biblioholic.

The Girl in the Flatbed Ford

Joanie: I wrote this last summer in the wake of my separation from e, a slightly fictionalized snapshot of our life together... the wounds were a bit fresh back then for me to share it, but the fact that i was able to even get it down was probably an indication of recovery...

It indulges my obsession with the tiny burg of Winslow, AZ, as immortalized in the Eagles' song, "Take it Easy"... and the one thing that was - and probably always will be - a bond between me and my soon-to-be ex-hubby: rock and roll...

The Girl in the Flatbed Ford
Or
Why I Should Have Left You Standing on the Corner in Winslow, Arizona

by Joanie Harmon

My editor told me that you would be standing on the corner of 2nd and Kinsley in the town of Winslow. I remember seeing a sign by the road one summer on the way to the Grand Canyon that read, “Winslow, 2 mi.” I thought, it couldn’t be, not the town in the song. As a kid, I never thought of it as a real place, just a random word that could be forced to rhyme with “standing on the corner.” I also thought, what a loser the guy in the song was, shouldn’t he be the one driving around in the flatbed Ford?

I pulled off at the exit and followed the arrows. I saw rundown houses that looked like the ones in an R.E.M. video, kids playing on Slip N’ Slides on dry, yellow lawns. The rough pavement gave way to roads that were in slightly better repair. I had read your books and heard your show on K-DIK when I was just a 15-year-old in my dad’s Malibu. Now I was going to meet you, ask you all sorts of pithy questions and write the story that would win a Pulitzer prize, assuming the award committee was aware of periodicals like Turtle Bay Today.

I arrived at the four corners, which was apparently the center of the town. Conveniently located on two corners were a couple of souvenir shops, one of which was blasting an Eagles soundtrack. The third corner was graced by the Winslow Tourist Information office. Finally, I saw the “Standin’ on the Corner” park, replete with bronze statue of the aforementioned vagabond with a guitar slung across his shoulder. Behind him was a mural on a crumbling wall of a desert, some horses and a blonde smiling from the window of a pickup truck. You were sitting on the lone bench in front of the mural with your eyes closed, your hands lying palms up and open on your knees. Your eyes were shut and apparently you were meditating. Or asleep.

I nervously checked my camera battery and the microphone on my Ipod. I clambered out of the rental truck, nearly missing the running board in my self-conscious attempt to seem calm. I sauntered over to you and introduced myself. You smiled your indulgent smile and gazed at me with those aquamarine eyes. Yet, something was amiss, as if you had knowingly served me some pork tamales from Trader Joe’s whose serve-by date had expired.

You asked me if I wanted to talk over drinks at La Posada and I said, why not. So we jumped into my tourist-white rental and drove down the block to the rustically decrepit hotel. I don’t know if it was the wrought iron candelabra, the two mojitos or the chance to meet one of my girlhood idols, but I lost my head that afternoon. The bar proved to be too impersonal a venue, so we checked into the Douglas Fairbanks suite and the rest is history. I got the story, you got the girl. Everything was going to be great.

It’s hard to know when it started to go so wrong. There were so many times that I could have walked away, but didn’t. You lied to me about the strange sunglasses in the car, the night you didn’t answer your phone just minutes after we hung up when I let it ring about fifty times. If you were there, wouldn’t you have picked up and told me to knock it off? I didn’t know any better and thought that everyone with a drinking problem slurred his speech, danced around the room with a lampshade on his head and wove in and out of traffic when he drove. You never did any of those things.

You simply lost all civility if you didn’t have your first glass of sauvignon blanc by 4:35 p.m., stared over my bare and perfumed shoulders at the redhead behind me at the Brasserie on New Year’s Eve and jovially asked my old boyfriend if you could compare notes sometime. I nearly killed myself on the nights that our lovemaking was scheduled, driving like a madwoman trying to get home before your twist-top bottle of Australian syrah took away the possibility of marital bliss.

The most innocuous questions about where you were all night or why you didn’t answer your phone for hours would get me an angrily roaring response that I would try to quell unsuccessfully by backing down out of desperation. No one had ever gotten that angry at me in my life, about so little. I even stopped drinking my own measly glass of merlot, which I had taken up mainly to keep you company. I had started to think it was my fault and my amateur drinking caused the fights to get out of hand.

But the uncontrollable rage continued, as did my now-routine retreat and attempts to calm you by just backing down. The only thing that would end it would be your eventual collapse into bed, where you lost consciousness as soon as your head hit the pillow. The next morning, as long as I didn’t speak to you before rushing off to the gym and as long as you got to meditate before I got home, everything was back to normal, even great, until the following evening.

The only thing that held us together sometimes was the music. I thrilled to your stories at first, about your early days as a party DJ in the disco-soaked 70s, your distinguished career on K-DIK as “The Lone Pony,” the time you partied with Linda Rondstadt and Stevie Nicks. When I was falling asleep with my ear to my Fred Flintstone radio, you were doing god-knows-what to the same songs I dreamt my pre-adolescent dreams to.

We each thought we had hit the jackpot, you with a bright-eyed young thing who knew what the Summer of Love was, me with a charming and distinguished Pygmalion who thought everybody should Wang Chung tonight. But maybe time can’t be transcended that way. Maybe I was too young, you too old, and both of us unable to understand what lay under the chords that created who we were inside. A seemingly shared history of what passed over the airwaves couldn’t hold us together when you didn’t want to sing a new song with me.

Last summer, I went back to Winslow to cover the “Standin’ on the Corner” Festival. As I threaded my way through the beer-swilling crowds, I saw an old couple sitting on the bench under the mural. As they watched the revelers, they would occasionally turn and gaze at each other, heads bobbing to some internal rhythm. As I got closer and nodded a polite greeting, I saw that they were both plugged into the same Walkman with two sets of earphones. His eyes were an aquamarine blue and he held her withered hand snugly in his own.

Out the Window

Joanie: In my youth, I thought that a great writer had to live somewhere squalid in order to really suffer for their art... guess I'm making up for lost time... I read this at an open mike night at a local art studio last weekend... like the song goes, they all laughed...

Out the Window
Or
Don’t Look Up…

by Joanie Harmon

Having grown up in the suburbs, where one is shag carpeted and mini-malled to death, I longed to feel the grit and grime the big city and live in a place that didn’t feel like it was built 15 minutes ago. So the charming (old) and picturesque (dingy) apartment on Lime Avenue seemed just perfect. The three windows of the corner unit afforded a view of rooftops, telephone poles and palm trees straight out of an Edward Hopper painting. A faux fireplace graced a corner, while the rounded cornered ceiling and arched doorways gave the place a romantic retro feeling.

In the glow of that fall afternoon, I neglected to notice that below the shingled roofs and dormer windows lay an alley. The skyline that I had admired belonged to a series of bungalows and other apartment buildings, which shared two or three dumpsters below, peppering a calm Sunday morning or a quiet weeknight with the slamming of their lids.

Unlike the car chases through alleyways on “The Streets of San Francisco,” where suspension brakes and driving skills are put to the ultimate test, the cars that drive through the alley at all hours of the night are more like an endless stream of shuttlebuses, dropping people off and picking others up. At least, that’s what I assumed at first. Then my inner cynic kicked in and I surmised that the visitors were buying drugs. Or that they were selling and delivering them, through a kind of home shopping enterprise, perhaps with a snappy name like CannabisClub.com or CrackFinders.net.

The most memorable episode featured the loud and inebriated voice of a man who yelled, “Heil, Hitler! Heil, Hitler!” while walking down the alley. Roused from a deep sleep, yet startled by his proximity and volume right under my window, I pictured him wielding a meat cleaver or some such instrument, although the yelling was brutal enough. I’ve been awakened by the screeching of mating cats and neighbors returning home from a night out, their stereos thumping away in the wee hours. This is accompanied by sounds of what is either the release of passengers from every door of the car and the trunk or the passengers exercising what we kids used to call a Chinese fire drill.

One Sunday morning, I saw an elderly woman in a pink jacket sorting bottles and cans into separate plastic shopping bags and hanging the bags neatly on the bar of the dumpster. I assumed this was for her more environmentally minded fellow street dwellers. I imagined her as someone who had perhaps slipped off her meds or had no one to take care of them, which was depressing. But I was heartened by her fastidious method of recycling.

When I finally locked myself out of my apartment last Sunday, leaving my keys on the desk, I went next door to our building’s manager to use his spare. As I waited outside his door for his wife to find it, I found out that the lady in the pink jacket lived across the hall from them. I saw her getting ready for a busy day, packing her bags and donning her pink jacket. I wondered if she went to church or visited anyone before her chores in the alley. I smiled guiltily as she passed me, thinking of the time I “spied” on her. But she had no way of recognizing me. When you’re in the alley, you never look up. I know I don’t when I walk through, keeping my eyes on the ground lest I step on something sharp, gooey or formerly alive.

Spring fever has hit the alley. What I first thought was a pair of amorous felines, turned out to be only one Miss Lonelyhearts of a cat in heat. I am tempted to place a personal ad for her manhunt, as she has been wailing for two weeks straight, with no prospects in sight. I have to admire her tenacity though, and wonder, as do many of my single girlfriends, where are all the men?

On any given night, I can hear sirens announcing the officers who are presumably protecting and serving our fair city, hordes of Roscoe’s diners, sluggish from too much fried food, moving slowly and often noisily toward their cars, and the comings and goings of my building’s residents, many of whom fell compelled to slam the metal screen door out back as hard as they could when they fling themselves into the alley.

But my favorite moment was on New Year’s Eve, when at the stroke of midnight, I had braced myself for a volley of traditional gunshots. This is the LBC, after all. Instead, the amplified chords of “Auld Lang Syne,” played a la Hendrix, twanged out tentatively across the night. I pictured a pimply faced teen, overcome by his abilities, thinking his performance was the ultimate homage to 2008 and the gods of rock. I hoped other people heard it and enjoyed it as much as I did. Evidently, he hoped so too, because he played it again five minutes later. And louder.

I think I’ve had my fill of big city grit and grime and will be a lot more observant when I pick my next apartment. I won’t be seduced so easily by a picturesque view. I can’t help but think that the alley has given me a new appreciation for the tranquility of the suburbs. But I will miss the microcosm of humanity below my window. And hope that my musical neighbor starts a new tradition and continues to greet the New Year with guitars, not gunshots.

- Long Beach, 2/08

A Meditation on Rejection

by Janet Levine

Stomach pains, a feeling a dread, the sense that everything is dull and dark. All the symptoms of gloom and doom.

I don’t do well with rejection. Most people don’t, I suspect, but while I can be empathetic about many things, rejection is just too personal. It is all about me, and it’s not a pretty sight.

When it happens, I try to remind myself that in a day or two, I will have gotten over it . Perhaps I will have recast the facts in my mind to make it feel less like a rejection of me, and more as if it were actually my rejection of it. Often, of course, it’s not that difficult. As rejections go, most are truly small potatoes. But still, when it happens, it hurts.

You’d think that someone who has spent most of her adult life asking people to do things they are most likely to trigger a response of no, would have a better perspective on rejection. Intellectually, I do. I spout all the clichés: If you don’t ask, you can’t get. No just opens another door. It’s not as if you lost anything…you didn’t have it when you asked, so a no just means you still don’t have it. And my favorite: It’s not personal.

But, you know, it is. It always is. I told you it was all about me.

It doesn’t generally stop me from getting out there and doing what I need to do, but it does take a lot of psychic cheerleading. And it has, over the years, caused me to take a variety of paths more to avoid certain things than to get somewhere I actually wanted to go.

I wanted, for example, to be a writer. With great joy, I would sit at my typewriter (ah, those were the days) and create. Then with anticipation, I would slip my manuscript or query letter into a manila envelopment along with the requisite SASE and place it reverently into the mailbox on my street corner. Remember those? They’ve gone the way of the typewriter.

Acceptance would bring a happiness I won’t even attempt to describe. They liked it. My article or story would see the light of day. But rejection, ah, that was a different story altogether.

I don’t expect anyone to be overjoyed when someone says no to something they’ve done. I, however, would go into a blue funk and for weeks could not bear to touch my typewriter. I could think of nothing but the fact that an editor said no. No. To me. Even though I knew from experience that another editor might just as easily say yes. All I had to do was re-type any smudged or dirty pages, re-do the cover letter and send my precious piece back into the world.

First, however, I had to pick up the pieces. It got so, that I couldn’t bear the process any more. Besides, I reasoned, there were already too many words in the world. And so, with a logic that still eludes me, I became first a salesperson and finally a fundraiser. What was I thinking? Did I think that I would harden myself against rejection and learn to love the word no?

If I did, I have to report that it didn’t work. I still hate no. I’ve never gotten used to the fact that not everyone wants/likes/cares/needs me, my product, my organization.

But, still, I persist in putting myself out there. Probably because no matter how bad rejection feels, there is nothing in the world that feels better than when someone says Yes.

Size Matters

by Janet Levine

Moments before it happened we were in my car, sitting at a red light, discussing the relative morality of driving an SUV. Even a smallish one like mine. My passenger was of the opinion that I wasn’t a bad person, I was doing a very bad thing. She drove a much smaller car which left only a tiny carbon footprint.

I didn’t disagree with her. But I like being high up and able to see where I am going. And in a city where it is statistically probable that you will have more than one accident during your driving career, I find myself weighing safety against the environment.

But her little car is cute and a lot of fun to drive. Not to mention the much better gas mileage. Maybe I should look for a more eco-friendly car.

And then the noise, followed by the sensation and our bodies, even tethered by seatbelts, thrown about. Finally, the recognition that someone had careened into us. Hard.

I pulled over to the side and the behemoth Lexus SUV followed. The driver was young, newly licensed and terrified. She had been driving her aunt’s car, and it was pretty well beat up. The front was crushed, the hood all funny angles, and she couldn’t open the driver’s side door. More, there was something ominous leaking from underneath.

The rear of my car was not a pretty sight, but it was just the rear and the thing was clearly drivable. After we exchanged all our information and I called my insurance company, I pulled slowly away.

So, said my passenger, completely reversing her former position, maybe driving an SUV isn’t so bad. Her car, she avowed, would have been totaled. If a huge SUV hit her, she very well might have suffered a bit more than surprise.

Our Kids in Long Beach are Being Murdered

by Brenda Knepper

On a Halloween evening a little over a year ago, a close friend of my son’s was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting. Up until Richard’s death, I had been oblivious to how many of our young people in Long Beach were being murdered.

Did you know that the candlelight vigils honoring those who have been killed, are rituals that kids seem to know to perform, without deliberation, in order to begin to heal? I didn’t, until I went looking for my son a few nights after Richard’s death and found him and his friends sitting around a makeshift altar on the sidewalk in front of Richard’s house. They were clearly in shock, trying to process what had happened. Money that would usually have been spent on something else had been used to purchase altar candles at the 99-cent store. Was this not a plea for help? Instead of being angry with my son for not letting me know where he was, I felt compelled to drive to the 99-cent store and buy candles to join the group. Although I’m not Jewish, the term “sit shiva” came to mind, as we sat there by the sidewalk memorial honoring this young man whose life was too brief. These boys seemed to innately know what they needed to do to mark the tragic passing of their friend.

Did you know that the weekend car washes put on by teenagers around Long Beach are frequently held to raise money for funerals for friends or relatives who have been killed? I didn't know that -- until kids who knew Richard and members of his family quickly put together two car washes over the weekend following his death to raise money for his funeral and provide funds for his girlfriend who was pregnant at the time. One was held at the AutoZone parking lot on Atlantic in North Long Beach near my home. These Hispanic kids knew what needed to be done as soon as they heard the news, because they had probably been through it before. I hadn’t.

A couple weeks following Richard’s death, a car wash was held in that same AutoZone parking lot for a 24-year-old who had been found in his car in Compton, riddled with bullets. According to one of the girls that I spoke with who was helping at the car wash, the young man had fallen asleep in his car in front of a friend’s house, waiting for the friend to come home, and had been killed as he lay there sleeping. Okay, so he wasn’t killed in Long Beach, but his car wash took place in Long Beach. Close enough.Several times since then I've passed car washes as I drive through town and I've wanted to cry because, inevitably I find that it's for a young person who is no longer with us. I had never noticed. For some reason, I thought that most car washes were put on by church groups to raise money for youth retreats. As I passed corner lots with kids busily washing cars and soliciting donations, I had never looked closely at the posters tacked to nearby telephone poles, with their photos of slain young men.

Do you think that reporters from the local newspaper always know when someone from your community has been killed and will automatically report the story? Such as when an 18-year-old from Jordan High has been killed in Wilmington by someone wearing a wolf mask on Halloween night . . . wouldn’t you think that a young man being shot in front of his younger sister who was in the back seat, and his cousin who was driving, would be a newsworthy event? I thought so. I thought that the reporters closely monitored police scanners or logs, but after weeks of there being no mention of Richard’s death in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, I finally wrote a letter to the editor, because I wanted my son and his friends to know that the adults in the city cared that their friend had died. The young people knew that they themselves cared, because they were texting each other and paying homage to Richard on their MySpace pages (R.I.P. RICHIE! Ill nVr fGet U!). Without a peep from the adult community around them.What’s a boy to do? Seek revenge? I’m sure it happens -- when it seems like no one cares, or that nothing can be done.

As it turns out, no one had called the paper about Richard -- it's not that the editor didn't want to write the story; they were just unaware of the story. I think there's a lot of apathy in communities where drive-byes and murdered kids are a common occurrence. And unfortunately, three white girls in the Bixby Knolls neighborhood were beat up by black youths from North Long Beach that same Halloween night and you can be sure someone called the paper about that. That made headlines, even national news, for months afterwards.To their credit, the Press-Telegram did finally write about Richard several weeks after his death and they wrote a follow-up front page story when, unbelievably, Richie's girlfriend gave birth to the first baby of the New Year in Long Beach that following January 1st.

Do you think that the reason some of our teenage drivers recline their front car seats so far back is to keep their heads out of the range of a bullet? I didn’t think that -- until the bullet went through Richard’s head, causing his mother to have to make the awful decision to take him off life support two days after the shooting. He was made a vegetable upon impact, with no chance of recovery. After that, I not only worried about how vulnerable my son’s head was while he was out driving in his car, I also worried about my own head.

Have you ever thought about how the term "drive-by" waters down and minimizes what it really is? Murder or attempted murder. I mentioned this to someone recently and they said, 'yeah -- like someone was just out for a nice Sunday drive and whoops! shot your kid. They were just driving by.' My son visited Richard in the hospital before he was taken off life support, and you can imagine that Richie was not looking or feeling too good. In fact he was in a coma, with his face swollen and bandages wrapped around his head. What happened to Richard was not merely a drive-by; it was a violent, bloody act that not only ended his life, but ripped through and devastated the lives of his friends, his family -- many people, for many years to come.

His son will grow up without a father. And although he was young, Richard was really looking forward to being a Dad. And I'm really angry that, for my son, losing his friend in this manner was undeniably a defining experience in his young life. Something I would never have wished on him.

I know what you’re thinking: ‘She’s not talking about my neighborhood or my kids.’ But you're wrong. Long Beach is our neighborhood. Our kids in Long Beach are being murdered. They are being brought up in a war zone. And we just aren’t angry enough yet to stop it. But I’m getting there.

The Height of Perfection

by Janet Levine

When I was younger, my sister never failed to remind me that I should be careful of what I wished for. I might, she always said, actually get it.

I should have listened.

What I wished for most when I was young was to be “a perfectionist.” I thought that those were people who did things perfectly. And I so wanted to do things—any things at all—really well. No matter what I did, I didn’t think it was good enough.
And so my wish became true. I became a perfectionist. Hell, I was one already. I just didn’t understand that perfectionists don’t DO things perfectly, they just want to and, because they (we!) are such stickler’s for detail and so demanding of everything they do, they never, ever believe that they do anything well enough. I resemble that greatly.

The problem, of course, with perfection is that you can’t ever get there. From anywhere. It’s kind of like living at the tip of a promontory or high in the beautiful but distant hills. The bigger problem, however, is the fact that you continually have to motivate yourself to do things. Things that you just know will never be good enough. For you.

The other thing my sister always told me was that no one really pays that much attention to anyone else other than them. Or, as I frequently tell my daughter when she is freaking that she is not beautiful or smart enough (what? You didn’t believe that the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree?), to the degree that anyone is looking at you it’s not to giggle at your real or imagined flaws. They are not really thinking of you at all. They are thinking, “I wonder what that person thinks of ME.”