California is a dry husk. Avoid it. New orleans is an oyster for the taking. It helps if you have some money, but California is a shit baking in the desert with a little sugar on top. Only a sucker of mass insane proportions would try to squeeze that crispy lemon again. Forget it.

-James T. Martin

It’s all good, it’s all new . . .

I got an actual job over this way, which is very exciting. I’ve spent the last two months just writing, putting in the time literally six days a week, and in the process I’ve generated an insane number of words. In my decaffeinated stupor, words come easy. But it’s hard to say if they’re the right ones. Anyway. It’s difficult to justify the writer’s life when you’re not necessarily doing it for the promise of incoming money. And when you’re flat broke, things can get wretched and lonely fast. So I worked this weekend, in my new job, and felt considerably more grown up and more emotionally stable than I have in the past while, basically ever since I got back to the United States from South American. I have the next two  days ahead of me, and the first drops are beginning to spill in the wide, vast, and nearly empty bucket that is my bank account..

I’m mildly considering the Bay Area for my future home . . . LA’s on the list, too, but I just don’t know about that place. First of all, I’d need a car. Same with Miami which I guess is number three. I suppose an honorary fourth would be any place outside of the United States. Costa Rica, Berlin, Barcelona, Rome, Malta, and so on. Pipe dreams, some might say . . . I’m trying to establish some sort of real career for myself, be it writing, be it writing-and (that’s like a coffee-and), and that’s hard to do when you’re not living in your home country. I could barely keep afloat when I was over in Peru - which was cool for the present but it does not take into account at all the future. And that’s where I’m trying to be.

Listened a Randy Newman album from 1974 on the way to work today . . . felt almost normal . . . god, I must have been walking around in a total swirl for the past several weeks . . . I get into such an alien, introverted, loserish state when I’m wrapped up in writing . . . it seems an awful way to live . . . why do I even want to go pro, if that’s what this life is like? I wonder what Pynchon is like as a father . . . or Vollman as a lover . . . William T. Vollman is probably frightening to sleep next to . . . he’s like a lizard . . .

I’m thinking Oakland, instead of San Francisco . . . San Francisco’s got the best girls - smart, big tits, glasses - but bad weather. I’m thinking Oakland’s cheaper, better weather, and hopefully they’ve got some girls over there, if not, I can come over the bridge.

California’s in such awful shape, I wonder why I even want to move there. But then, even in bad shape, it’s probably the best state we’ve got . . . it’s much better than the American South . . . which is where I am now . . .

It’s funny . . . I graduated from college ten years ago . . . in the fall of ‘99, I set out to drive cross-country to Santa Cruz. I had nothing but an ‘80 Volvo. No friends out there, no job. I wasn’t scared at all. I didn’t give a fuck. The week I got there, I got a job on a farm and found this funky-ass roommate who turned out to be one of the closest friends I’ve made in ten years. I wonder sometimes, did I have the luck around me then? Was it because I was young and open-hearted? Everything seemed to work out well for me then. The hippies called it “manifesting” . . . I would take ecstasy and go to an all-night dance party and, well, “manifest” a beautiful girl. I do think it had something to do with my age - it must have. I can take ecstasy and go to a club nowadays and I ain’t manifesting a thing. I’m really not. . .

Or maybe it was just luck. I had it rolling. Somehow I fell into producing porn when I was 23 years old. How was that even possible? The stars had to line up just right. I mean, certainly, I had the desire to do it - but then the actress in my first film got in touch with this guy Lew in Palo Alto who by chance knew Mike Horner in LA and then I meet Horner and he introduces me to Kelly Holland who tries to get me work with Max Hardcore and then eventually introduces me to a . . . well, who cares. Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s just a couple of good breaks, and maybe I still have some breaks to come.

Life moves on, and it’s good that it does it. It keeps things interesting. . . What in hell was I doing ten years ago, on October 11th? If it was a Sunday? I have my journal from that fall somewhere . . . let’s see if I can find it, maybe . . .

I have this incredible stack of black notebooks. They all look identical. Here’s some first pages:

Monday, October 17th, 2005.

“I did it all for a reason. And that reason is long gone, belongs to another person.”

March 3rd, 2007

“In a coffeeshop called Grendel’s Coffee on NE 8th Ave and Burnside, in Portland, OR, at almost 1 PM. It’s not raining today, and the coffeeshop has a good vibe. I have a glass of water in front of me and a mug of coffee (”My Worst Day on the Golf Course Still Beats My Best Day at the Office”). My thumb hurts, most likely due to the beating it took over the last 4 days at Computer Technology Link, Inc, located in the Northwest Industrial District. My job there nets me $53 a day of take home pay . . . ”

August 15th, 2003

Murfreesboro, TN (Brad’s house)

“The home of the chain - Murfreesboro that is. Captain D’s Seafood, El Mexicano, Verizon Wireless Chick Fil-A, Dollar General, Sonic, Steak-and-Shake, Kroger Foods, Walgreen Drugs, They line the highways in an endless life-sucking monolithic skyline, dwarfing the humans, run by invisible robots.”

November 28th, 2003

“Today’s got a horrible feel to it. I feel ashamed of myself. I am making a vow never to ‘get rid’ of any pot that I might have by smoking it. It’s just so, so stupid. I felt like the most pathetic addict yesterday. I prove myself that I still have an active problem. I couldn’t say a word. All day. And I left MY GODDAMN PHONE in Santa Barbara”

9/8/04

“Porno is not tragic - it’s the people who are inside it who are tragic.

My God - two days ago, I was dropping acid onto my tongue. Lord God almighty. It’s so much . . . drier here. And so am I, so am I. It’s sad how it fades so fast. What do I have left besides a smattering of bizarre memories, a tobacco issue, and a tingling in my left hand?”

January 5th, 2005

“Silke

(323) 202-0606

Maybe I’ll move to Venice. I don’t think so but maybe it would work - reason why is it would be new . . . I don’t like Venice so that’s sort of dumb. It’s just near my therapist, that’s all.”

Okay, finally found it. Lessee . . . the best I can do is find 11/12/99.

“Last night was another one, they keep getting stranger. This weekend was a set unto itself. I took Ecstasy on Friday night and had a bit of a trip . . . yes, I did . . . it was emotional as usual. In a way it was not as intense but in this odd, long-lasting way it was different than all other trips that I’ve had. It is a strange thing, ecstasy, but I felt I made some breakthroughs in terms of opening my heart. The odd thing is that the breakthroughs didn’t come when I was really in the throes of rolling, but rather they were in the aftermath, in the next day even. The next day (I am skipping ahead in my story - I am not a good storyteller, never  have plot lines mapped out, plotted, but there’s no way to get better without DOIN’ it) I was a little kitty, I did hardly a thing but stay in my bedroom watch (so happily!) the end of Zelig and then Game 1 of the Lakers-Celtics series from 1987. What a beautiful game. That was my team, you’ll remember. Why does it make me so so happy to see James Worthy score 35 points? It is a thing of extreme beauty, basketball is - and that Lakers 87 team especially. The Celtics were amazing too - Bird completely awesome, though not the MVP that he’d been the previous three seasons. Magic. Kareem. Robert Parrish. And even Pat Riley and K.C. Jones, it was neat to see them in an earlier stage of their lives. The interesting thing is that I’ve seen that game before - in 1987. But never mind. I wrote the letter I’m going to send to the Weiss’s, and Woodwyn said “I love you” when she was getting off the phone and I said back “I love you, too.” And it felt so great to say that, it made me so happy I felt like crying, or sighing, or something . . . and right after she said that I called Jemini . . who is completely another story unto herself . . . what is it with women and me? God is dropping them into my life left and right, right and left . . . I’m being a good boy and not having sex with any of them. This not-fucking on the first date rule is a good policy, no question about it. But yes, I’ve been very lucky with women since I moved here - three women have approached me, that was the way that it happened . . . and all had something to do with dancing. Many, many of the women that I’ve been with in the last three years have had something to do with meeting on a dance floor. Mina, of course . . . Deborah . .  that girl from Prato, Guya . . . you could even say (excised) and still be accurate to the truth. God, I need to get better at my writing. I’m for shit right now. The only way to do it, though, I feel, is to write and write and get all that shit out of my system - the only way I’m going to shit out the shit, is going to put it down on paper . . . I’ve got a little bit of fear that the porno isn’t going to be well-written. Perhaps a comedy-mystery? I’d like to see some drawing in it (drawings by me, of course . . . in later films we can feature artists like K. Reid, A. Flesher). I’d also like to see some dancing . . . I can’t wait until I make my porno. That’s going to be so incredible. I’ve got to remember that this is totally going to be a the learning experience, this movie that we’re making with LuAnn and Aaron. It’s a gift from God, another one (I hope I don’t look back on this journal in ten years and think all these “gift from God” phrases were serious . . they ain’t . . . meant to be taken in the jocular . . . jugular . . vernacular.) Santa Cruz, too, a gift from God . . Jemini, too, also a gift from God . . I gotta take a picture of her before she leaves . . she’s here, y’see . . . just took a bath. I slept at her house last night . . . how magic . . she’s my first goddess. A goddess is  a term that must be defined, I suppose. A goddess is often dreadlocked - she is spiritual . . . more often than not she is a vegan . . if not a vegan, a vegetarian . . if not a vegetarian, a very conscious meat eater. She does not eat at Burger King, let’s say. A goddess shops at the Farmer’s Market, Whole Foods, etc. Goddesses are frequently tall, or at least they appear tall. They cast a certain aura of confidence and sensuality as they saunter through streets. Goddesses rarely smoke tobacco. If they do smoke tobacco, you will not find them smoking Marlboro Lights, or Newports. No. Rollies, or American Spirits, are more their style. Goddesses often do smoke, however, marijuana. Godesses love to dance. They have underarm hair and toned arms. . ”

My that became quite the excercise in embarrassment, transcribing that! Who cares. The beauty of youth. The stupidity of beauty. And so on and so on. What was private becomes public. What was public becomes pubic. It’s all good. It’s all new.

Eight years ago I was living in Los Angeles in a small and fucked-up “apartment,” next door to a pet store where they used to make methamphetamine. On the other side of me lived a Mexican artisté. Our places were connected in back. He knocked on my door at about nine in the morning and said, “Somebody bombed us.”

I got on the phone and called my friend Jack in Ventura. He and I and his sister and his best friend all had to go to Sparks, Nevada, for a hearing: we had been arrested there two weeks prior on the way to Burning Man, for possession of marijuana, drug paraphernelia, and unlicensed prescription drugs. We had almost nothing on us, but still managed to incur five felonies between us due to the harsh laws that governed Nevada at that time.

We’d gotten cuffed and tossed into holding, which was an experience all on its own. Luckily we weren’t herded into big pens but rather locked in two-man cells. I got tossed in with this little red-haired kid who was smaller than me. I looked at him balefully and took the top bunk.

After about 36 hours we saw a judge, who luckily had a son who was going to Burning Man, too. “My son has been building a ROCKET SHIP for the last two months in our backyard!” He killed himself laughing. “I think we can let these nice folks go.” So he released us on our own recognizance and we went to Burning Man. Black kids our age who were being held on felony drug charges would not have been so lucky, I felt; nevertheless, I left.

We got to Burning Man on Thursday night and went bananas with crazed energy. We had missed most of the festivities and tried to make up for lost time by having sex standing up under the moonlight. I ate mushrooms right away and found myself unable to speak. It was a weird night. I danced the whole night, but sitting down on a couch. Couldn’t get up. Nor could I speak. Oh well.

We went home and my system was shot. I made a porn movie a day or so later in a Chatsworth motel room with a soon-to-be-forgotten actress named Misty Parks. She was a young-looking blonde who wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up and who had done three other scenes that day - this was her fourth. Her pussy was slammed and swollen and she wouldn’t let my actors have sex with her with any force or speed at all. They almost cried, they were so upset: she was really, really cute. We got some horrible unpassionate footage and I netted $425 from the shoot and I shipped the tape off and I thought I had the best job in the universe. But I still had to go back to Sparks for a hearing to deal with the charges and the date was September 12th. So I called Jack, in Ventura.

“Um, did someone bomb us?”

“Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center. We’re getting a bunch of ammo together. We have a place to go in the hills. Do you need a place to go?”

I rubbed my eyes. “I was thinking about calling the courthouse. See if court’s still going to be in session.”

“This is a lot bigger than court.”

As it turned out, it was and it wasn’t. I called the courthouse and they said get your ass here on time. Nothing’s going to be postponed. I drove to Ventura that day and we ate a late lunch at Jack in the Box and then we drove all night to get to Reno and then Sparks, listening to AM radio over the 10-hour jaunt which felt apocalyptic, indeed. I was driving with Jack’s best friend. He kept on hoping it would be a war and he would fight. He’d been expecting this for a while, he said.

We got to the courthouse on September 12th at about 6:45 in the morning. There was a light rain in Sparks and we had cigarettes in the parking lot. I brushed my teeth and spat out the paste underneath my car. They let us an hour later and we had our hearing. They knocked all the felonies down to a single misdemeanor for drug paraphernelia. I pled guilty to it and my friends chipped in to pay my fine. We walked out of the courthouse elated. None of us were going to war.

I get on the plane tonight, at precisely 11:30 PM.

But right now my soul is sitting in an internet cafe in Miraflores, the posh part of Lima, listening to a Grateful Dead show from 1984 on a crystalline soundsystem, my ears hurting from the tight metal of the headphones, Incan businessmen all around me but the show is spectacular and I´m marveling at its spectacularness, drinking a take-out coffee, running my tongue over my teeth, staring at the glowing radiation of a ViewSonic screen, trying to figure out how to best waste the rest of this long, bleak day, trying to figure out how to best waste the rest of my long, strong life…

My life will soon be one of North Carolinian texture. I´m going to have a couple of weeks in New York in August, but that´s just a reprieve … no, Sam is going home and he will be commenting upon the progresses of his book and the progresses of his life from within the confines of a room he used to inhabit while twelve years old - surely a plan that cannot withstand more than a month or so before crackling and exploding like a damned heathen in the fiery bowels of everlasting hell — yet just as surely a plan that cannot be avoided, and so must be undertaken, because this is what happens when you work without a net.

I am actually thinking of going back to school. I´ve been a diehard short-term man more or less my entire adult life. I got extremely lucky right out of college and something that I thought a rather far-fetched dream - to create my own independent movies and produce, edit, and distribute them myself for profit and for adventure - actually materialized, seemingly without any effort on my part, and despite an admitted lack of understanding in regards to the business side of things. That kind of thing simply doesn´t happen often, yet the stars aligned and for better and for worse it did, for me, in the very first business venture of my life. And of course that convinced me that all of the other far-fetched dreams and experiments would too blossom and burst open, simply because I desired them to. This was not exactly the case.

And so now I am recognizing the need to get real. Will I continue to publicize my book and work like hell to get it out to an adoring public who wants nothing more than to read about modern-day pornography, the cultural artifact that resides alongside minor-league baseball as one of the more amusing tragicomic industries of our time? Clearly, I will. I love writing and I love blogging. I particularly like writing about sex, and I particularly love blogging about my lack of ever having sex. There´s just something satisfying about it. Is it because the act of writing about sex allows me to recall a time during which I partook of the pastime? Or is it because writing in general allows me to in some sense avoid or at least transmute many of the basic characteristics of life, which can often be painful, and, especially in North Carolina, excruciatingly boring? I´m not sure. But I do know that my writing path, pursuant to sex or no, can and in fact must be joined by a get-real path, which is to say, a man can go to school. And pursue a degree. Which will eventually lead to a job for which he is paid a grown-up salary.

I can´t go into my 40´s forever financially unstable, jaunting off to Lima at a moment´s notice because the road is paved with gold therein, and then panicking because my bank account has dropped into double-digits again. It´s not a good look, it´s not becoming. Not for me or for any man. I have much to offer the world. I need to figure out what that is.

In the meantime, I will continue to write about ten-inch penises, because That is What I Do.

My grandfather is a man from another era.

An ex-communist who went to hundreds of Yankee games in the Ruth-Gehrig era (including a good handful in the 1927 “Murderer’s Row” season), he was married to my grandmother for more than 50 years and spent most of his adult life as a purveyor of kosher chickens, selling Southern Fried rotissieres to the Jewish people of Queens and Astoria. He put three sons through medical school on chickens, sent me and my sister to camp on chickens.

I don’t suppose he especially wanted to be a chicken man when he was growing up. Or maybe he did want to be - I never asked him, really.

South America’s been an adventure, but I guess this one’s over. My grandfather’s sick, and I’m going to try to go see him before he dies. He’s paralyzed, has cancer, is 94 years old…it doesn’t look great.

The only question is when. As always, it’s hard to know when people are going to die. Part of me is saying go back right away. Part of me says wait till the beginning of August when I can stay in New York for a couple of solid weeks. If his condition remains stable, I think I’m going to wait.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I’m going back. And since I don’t have any money anyway, I figure I might as well stay in the United States for a while - kick it in North Carolina, maybe get a job. Make some cash and stack my chips. Feel real old and kinda weird, living with my folks. A man at home with his folks. A scary sight at age 32. It sure is.

But who the hell cares? I mean at this point… really? You still give a fuck about how people see you … really? I don’t know when I started being self-conscious, but it’s a habit I’m pretty keen to kick. I mean, I’m not proud, exactly, of being a major-league fuck up, but the fact is, everybody and his brother is out of work, changing their careers, “re-tooling” … I’m not the only one struggling, am I? If California can’t pay its bills, why should I be able to?

My grandfather was more than a chicken man. He was an electrician for a while, worked in the shipyards. He was well-read, a funny public speaker, and a fervent spokesman for his political ideals (which he remains, to this day). Nonetheless, he did chickens. To a certain extent, I don’t think it much mattered to him how he made his money. I gather he never thought of using his profession to fulfill some noble desire; rather, the goal was to be able to survive, and provide well for your family. Your family bestowed meaning upon your life. Not your job.

When my grandfather was my age, the year was 1946. My father was four and my uncle had just been born. The family was living in Brooklyn, he’d been married for more than five years, owned a house, had been through the Great Depression, was surrounded by a family of Orthodox Jews who were more observant than him. When he drove around on the Sabbath to deliver chickens, in the early days of his business, he used to crouch low in the seat to avoid being spotted …

And me? The only job I’ve ever held down for longer than six months is shooting large groups of black dudes overpowering a tiny little sex object, film it wrap it up and send it off. I’ve got nothing to show for my work but thousands of dollars of debt, a haphazard map of short-sighted international travels, complemented by a handful of broken-spoken languages, a massive supply of off-color stories, a small cluster of old girlfriends who must automatically shake their heads ruefully whenever they hear my name, barrels of thrift store clothing, ten million journals, 250 hours of carefully labeled Grateful Dead bootlegs, an unfinished documentary film, an unfinished comic book, an unfinished novel.

They bestowed upon me freedom and opportunity.