bi [sic] le

Alternate Title: Just In Time For The Ides Of March 2010, Let’s Flashback To My Finest Moment As An Acting Student With A Monologue From Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

I was a far better acting student than I ever was an actor. In fact, I’m not quite sure what drove me to study acting, other than it sounded like a fun thing to do and a fun way to meet people and it was something to do besides go to a real school and learn a real trade.

There was probably more to the story than that — like my secret desire to be a world-class movie star — but during the course of my days at the mouthful that was The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting – West, I never took acting nor the business of it too seriously.

The school can now be found in the space above the Hollywood Wax Museum, but the conservatory’s original home was further east on Hollywood Boulevard just south of the Walk of Fame on Argyle. Like many of the landmarks of my past it’s gone, bulldozed in the early ’90s for the Hollywood & Vine Red Line subway station.

The year was 1987 and I was 22. My technique teacher was a fellow named Arthur Mendoza, and I don’t think I could’ve asked for a better one. He was flamboyant, outrageous, outspoken and fully centered in his own universe, but he was also quite perceptive, motivating and intuitive, which are things a student wants from his acting teacher.

As to my fellow students, there was a bunch of talent there, but there weren’t too many names to drop from that class in particular — save one you’ll certainly recognize: Benecio Del Toro. Arthur referred to him as “Beno.”

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What a difference a couple decades makes. Nowadays if I hear a song on the radio, I simply open up my Shazam app on my iPhone point it in the direction of the noise and in a few seconds … well, SHAZAM I have the artist, the track title, and various links to listen and/or buy an MP3 of it.

Fast-backward with me tto one afternoon  in 1986. I was coming home from work driving north on Fulton Avenue listening to KKGO, then L.A.’s jazz station and the song being played was this rousing tune from some unknown big band that hooked me right from the toe-tapping start and featured an amazing dialogue of two tenor saxophones talking back and forth throughout. I was so entranced by the tight and hard-swinging number that when it was still going strong after I go to my apartment building I sat in my parked car listening to its end — and I’m so glad I did because it finished with a sax solo so effing JAZZ it gave me chills and I wanted it to keep going forever. But it didn’t, and when the DJ didn’t give me any info on it and instead went right into the next song, I sat in my car listening to that in its entirety with my fingers crossed that he would come back and give me some sort of clue.

My prayers were partially answered in that he did come back on air and quickly list the last several artists and what I heard for the second to last one sounded like “The Catearse Orchestra.”

You kids in the audience need to understand that in those dark days there was no running to a computer and extracting data from a search engine. Sure I could’ve dialed up a BBS at the blazing speeds my 400-baud modem was capable of and posted a question on one of the forums then waited around for an anwer, but the odds of anyone knowing were slimity slim.

So what I did in those analog days was start my car, back out of my parking space and roll a few miles to the nearest record store — in this case it was  The Wherehouse on Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Inside I went and asked the nearest clerk if he knew anything about the “The Catearse Orchestra.” Shaking his head he pointed me to a massive phonebook-sized reference, which apparently listed all albums currently in print and available on earth.

I dove in and dug through it, but found nothing. Bummed but not beaten I came back home and gave the station a call.  When someone finally picked up I told them my plight about hearing a great song but not being able to find any record of the band at the record store.

“What’s the name?”

“Something like ‘The Catearse Orchestra?’”

And the person on the other end laughed. “No wonder you couldn’t find them. It’s ‘Capp/Pierce!’ as in Frank Capp and Nat Pierce. And the song you’re looking for is called “Little Pony” off their “Juggernaut Strikes Again!” album.”

“How do you know?” I asked, writing all that down.

“Because I’m the one who played it!”

Now it was my turn to laugh and thank the DJ. Then I raced down to my car armed with those facts, drove back to The Wherehouse,  went straight to the jazz section and when I didn’t find it in stock I dove back into the book, found Capp/Pierce, found the album and  went through the motions of special ordering the platter.

A week or so later it arrived. I brought it home, through it on my Marantz turntable, reveled in  it, and my musical landscape was never the same.

And now through the magic of my wonderful USB turntable, I can share the song with you — and in case you’re interested the two tenors are Bob Cooper and Pete Christlieb:

Now, while searching for that Capp/Pierce album in my LP collection I’m amazed to have found another that is a huge aural touchstone of my childhood. So if you’ll excuse me I’m off to digitize the heavily-scratched tracks from Whitehall Records’ “The Sound Of The Confederacy,” by Col. Beauregard Johnson and the Volunteers, an album I absolutely cherish and have not listened to in perhaps 35 years and thought long lost.

I heard the news via an unlikely source on January 28, 1986. I was in my Mazda GLC going from my apartment in Van Nuys to my job in the small business complex behind the gas station Barham Boulevard deadends into in the Cahuenga Pass. I was traveling on the gridlocked southbound 170 Freeway approaching the 134 interchange it passes under to become the 101. I was probably late.

I was listening to Rick Dees on KIIS-FM as I usually did, and coming back from a commercial break instead of launching into more of his usual shenanigans he spoke in a tone that was part solemn and part disbelieving in telling his listeners that the Challenger space shuttle had apparently exploded shortly after lift-off a few minutes earlier, reportedly killing all seven astronauts on-board.

To this day I’m not sure why the news hit me so hard, but I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach by it. Overcome with sorrow I burst into tears, and sobbed as I crept my car along with the slow flow of vehicles while Dees and his on-air cohorts discussed what they knew and what they didn’t.

Eventually they ran out of things to say and put on a melancholy, reflective song that was a hit back then. It was “Life In A Northern Town,” by The Dream Academy. And just as my waterworks started to dry up, the song got to the last stanza of lyrics that close like this:

And though he never would wave goodbye,
You could see it written in his eyes,
As the train rolled out of sight,
Bye-bye.

I didn’t know who or what the song had been written about. All I knew was that those last few lines spoke of someone’s death, and for me from that point on they became about the Challenger crew never getting a chance to wave goodbye, of the space shuttle rolling out of sight and the sad and slow byyyyyyyyyyyyye byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye reflecting mine and the country’s heartbreak and loss.

I can hear this song today without so much as choking up, but it never fails to transport me back to that moment of profound tragedy.

Later that evening President Ronald Reagan was to give his State of the Union address, but postponed it and instead spoke to the nation about the disaster, closing with:

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ’slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”

They were: Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik.

It was late 1986. I worked as a courier for a company that obtained travel visas for clients. I attended L.A. Valley College part time. I drove a Mazda GLC hatchback. “GLC stood for “Great Little Car.” I was 22. I was living in my first apartment. A second-floor single in Van Nuys. On Fulton — 6205 I believe, a couple blocks south of Victory. I don’t remember the apartment number.

I do remember how broke I was at the time. So strapped for cash I was forced to raid my savings, which was kept in a five-gallon glass water bottle and consisted of whatever spare change I’d spent seven years dropping into it.

On a Sunday afternoon, I could’ve put on a mask and gone down to the corner 7-11 to rob it, or I could’ve driven over to my mom’s and asked for her financial assistance. But instead I stayed home and poured the mass of coins out of the bottle clinkily tinkily onto the apartment’s carpeting to begin the time-consuming task of sorting them and then putting them into correspondening sleeves that I’d picked up from my branch of Gibralter Savings in Sherman Oaks a few days earlier.

“How many do you need?” The teller asked.

“A lot!”

It literally took all day to do and in the end my fingers the metallic smell of copper was stationed in my nostrils smelling vaguely blood-like.  I counted several paper and a paltry $53 in rolls of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters stacked up on my livingroom floor. Mostly pennies. But it was $53 I hadn’t had the day before, so I wasn’t complaining. There would be groceries. And cigarettes. And gas.

The next day I loaded all the rolls into a trashbag and shlepped them off to the bank, where of course I generated sideways glances from the security guard and customers when I walked into the place with a heavy Hefty bag slung over my shoulder. At the teller, rather than slip them a few at a time through the slot in the highly fortified window, I was directed to hand them over through the side door where a few random rolls were opened to make sure they were legitimatley filled with coins.

I watched this trying to imagine the cheap desperate bastard who would try to pass off two pennies sandwiching sand or slugs in order to make a profit of 48.

When eventually the teller was satisfied I wasn’t that petty I was told that I didn’t have to go through all the trouble of stuffing the coins. They had a coin counter that could have done the job in an hour.

And I said it would have been nice when I picked up all the empty coin sleeves if that nugget of enlightenment had been passed down to me.

“Well, for next time then,” the teller said, laying out two twenties, a ten and three ones before me.

I took the money and shook my head vigorously. “Oh there won’t be a next time.”

I can’t tell you whether the charbroiling burger smells that emanate from Carl’s Jrs are unique in their aroma, but I can tell you that when I biked by the one on the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue yesterday morning and got a good whiff in passing, I boarded the sense-memory express on a nonstop flight that took me and my olfactory system all the way back to when my age was in single digits and I made numerous trips by bike to that very same franchise location from where I lived at the time about a mile away in the slums of Beverly Hills.

But not for the food. For the drinks. Or rather the glasses they came in. I don’t remember the particular connection between the fast-food chain and Warner Bros., all I know is that in the early 1970s Carl’s Jr began selling glassware emblazoned with pretty much every Warner Bros.cartoon character you can imagine.

Mind you, these were not the cheap thin crap glass you get in promos nowadays. These were thick and sleek, with a heavy bottom from which the sides rose and tapered out and surrounded some 16 ounces of the beverage of your choice. And the artwork? Equally awesome. Whether it was Bugs Bunny or Sylvester or Tweety Bird or Yosemite Sam or Foghorn Leghorn or anyone else in the Looney Tunes cavalcade of cartoon legends, the images were authentic, the colors perfect and the paint thick giving it a bit of dimensionality off the glass — as if they’d jumped straight out of the TV and into real life.

Even at my unadvanced age, I knew these were well-crafted things I’d cherish forever.

Needless to say I saved my nickels and dimes and would make regular trips every weekend to that very Carl’s Jr I biked by yesterday morning, and I would march inside to the display at the front counter in high hopes that a new character glass had arrived.

If it was one I already had, I’d withdraw, bummed out. Maybe I’d bike over and hang out with the Dan the Miner statue in Carthay Circle, scuffing the grass with my sneakers in impatient frustration — in large part because I was playing catch-up in something of a gotta-get-’em-all competition with my best friend Randy, who lived in Van Nuys and was collecting them as well. In fact I’m pretty sure I only found out about the glasses during a visit to his house when he showed off the ones he’d already obtained from the Carls Jr near his house on Woodman Avenue and Burbank Boulevard. So envious was I that I’m pretty sure I contemplated stealing them from him. Instead from that point on the race was on.

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For no reason this morning I opened up a folder on my computer containing the thousands upon thousand of images from our African honeymoon that began four years ago next month. This is the first photo I clicked on of a solitary black rhino backdropped by the jawdropping vastness and grandeur of a mist-shrouded Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania (click for the bigger picture):

Susan and I have strung together a remarkable series of vacations beginning with this one in 2005. The following year we did our 4,500-mile Western states roadtrip, in 2007 we cruised all the way around Italy and visited Paris, and last year we explored the rich history of Central Mexico.

We hadn’t planned on a full-tilt vacation for 2009 primarily because of the work on the house (the last bits of which are being completed this week), and also in part because we’re going to Yosemite to enjoy the famed Bracebridge Dinner for Christmas with my mom thanks to her generosity. I also have hopes for a November excursion to Death Valley to bike the Racetrack Playa road and camp out on the dry lakebed.

But last night Susan wondered about doing something to get away. “I need some time off,” she declared imperatively.

Read ya loud and clear, sweetie.

So I’m thinking a couple options: a road trip up to Monterey and then a meander back down Highway 1 for stops at Big Sur and Hearst Castle. Or south for a long weekend in San Diego with a sidetrip to Tijuana.

Stuff to ponder.

I can remember the moment I first incurred debt crystal clearly. It was in the old The Broadway store in Sherman Oaks Fashion Square. It was April. It was 1985. I was 20 years old. It was a pair of sunglasses I didn’t need, but the lenses featured the latest in “blue blocker” technology that was aaaaaaall the rage back in that ancient day. Plus the arms had these flexing springs on them, which was cool. They cost $23.99.

In my bright red vinyl DayRunner organizer were the first two credit cards I’d ever posessed. An American Express card and one from  Broadway. How and why I was deemed worthy of them I do not really know. On an earlier lark I filled out an American Express card application. At the time I lived with my mom and my stepfather in their house on Sherman Oaks. I think I made $13,000 in wages that past year. I didn’t even have my own phone. I was working as a courier shuttling visa applications to the various consulates around town for clients. On the Amex app I wrote that my title was Senior Consulate Liaison. I blatantly lied about my salary. I mailed it in. I did the same thing with the department store’s card.

Though I harbored fantasies of my applications somehow being moved down the line unvetted, deep inside I knew better. And when the rejection letter arrived from American Express I was a bit crestfallen, but realistic.

Then, literally the next day, a credit card in my name from The Broadway arrived. It had a $400 limit. I was dumbfounded. And thrilled. I felt as if I’d been given a key to a kingdom I’d never thought’d available to me.

And that’s when the really weird thing happened. About a week later another letter comes from American Express. Inside is their trademark green card with my name on it and a letter telling me something about “after a review of your application we have reversed our decision and now welcome you as an American Express cardmember.”

Doooooood! How? I didn’t care! All I knew was that I had fucking arrived and membership had its privileges! Remember, this wasn’t far beyond the crest of the yuppie craze, which I did my best to emulate — even going so far as to wear suits and ties to classes at LA Valley College. An Amex card was the perfect accessory to that faux lifestyle.

And so there I was a short while later in The Broadway coveting this silly pair of sunglasses and debating whether to just pay cash or put them on one of my various and newly established lines of credit. Of course I did the latter, and when I handed over my Broadway card to the cashier (after ripping open the Velcro closure of my bright red-vinyl DayRunner organizer and pulling the card from its slot, of course) I did so with a little trepidation expected her to slide it and then confiscate it with a “Did you think we would seriously give YOU a card? ”

But instead she just handed me the receipt for my signature and bagged my purchase and that’s the very first moment I went into debt. Oh sure, I may have paid that amount off the moment I got the bill — and I was smart and responsible with my American Express card as well — but then came the other cards. The gas cards and from other stores and Visa and Mastercard and Radio Shack and… well, you know the drill. It may take money to get money, but it doesn’t take much to get credit, and thus it didn’t take long to become burdened by a pretty heavy debt load that I carried around in silent shame like a bad tooth. And it kept getting badder.

Six years ago I owed roughly $17,000 spread out over various Visas and such. At that same time I took the big important step of putting the credit cards away and operated almost exclusively with my debit card. If I didn’t have cash in the bank to pay for something, I didn’t get the something. Amazing how much that helps.

Stopping the credit card usage was a good beginning, but in the two years forward from that, I hadn’t made much of a dent in the overall balance. By 2006 I still owed something like $15,000.

That’s when I got serious and a plan developed and amounts were consolidated and moved via various low-interest balance transfers. But paying that single amount down hit a huge roadblock when I began my  22-month period of unemployment beginning in November 2005  (broken up sporadically with bits of freelancing). A lot of those ridiculouly ineffective minimum payments were made through that stretch, with Susan blessedly coming in to help with several payments during the leanest of those lean times. Then in September of 2007 with the amount down to $13,000 and me starting to work full time, over the past year and a half since I’ve devoted pretty substantial portions of paycheck to paying the pest down.

Better that than my fouled up bottomless pit of a 401K.

Towards the end of 2008 I realized with much astonishment that I could be credit card debt-free by my 45th birthday in May — the first time since that figurative day in April of 1985.

Yesterday the statement from Chase arrived and today I ended things early and ahead of schedule, writing a check that got rid of the last $1,000 of it:

I almost wrote a check for $976.01 so that my final check next month could be the symbolic $23.99 I spent almost 24 years ago. But I said to hell with symbolism. Let’s be rid of this monster once and for all.

I’m doing some pre-spring cleaning/reorganizing and I came across a copy of the paper from the day my daughter was born in 1989, and for fun (and sadness) compared it in size to a more recent edition I saved for posterity as well.

The 1989 Times masthead for Thursday, September 7, 1989, boasts a circulation of “1,118,649 daily / 1,433,739 Sunday” and came in at 198 pages — all for the lowlow of 25 cents.

The Wednesday, January 21, 2009, masthead is decidedly less informative, foregoing any circulation numbers and only listing its total at 96 pages, and for 75 cents.

Way back in October 2001, the boss of where I worked at that time implemented a program wherein during the regularly scheduled monthly meetings he wanted his employees to give presentations. The topics could be about pretty much anything, so I was one of the few to actually volunteer for a time slot and then got to work putting my thoughts down in a paper I titled “Bicycling For Fun & Profit,” the first — and incomplete — draft of the narrative which I just accidentally stumbled on whilst diving around the archives on my back-up hardrive..

Some of it seems so quaint now: Gas at $1.50 a gallon. Me resolving to bike 1,001 miles in 2001. Pretty much the total lack of any so-called bike culture (at least in its current and evolving form) worth mentioning.

I remember boiling a lot of the info down into a bulleted, Powerpoint-style presentation and probably have that file somewhere, but anyway… if it’s your bag or interest, a glimpse of me prepping to preach the power of the pedal from the wayback is on the other side of the jump (replete with a photo of my old Raleigh mountain bike — still sporting a number from what looks to be an LA Marathon ride –  at rest on the L.A. River Bikeway around Atwater Village).

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I know this because I am keeper of both the receipt and the pipecase (and a really crappy scanner):