There has also been this eerie strange experience I've had since first starting City of Angels blog back in Jan. 2007 (in spite of SNAP's obstruction, which I already wrote about here yesterday).
Not long into working on the blog, I'd have this experience, at first I noted it and kind of was left with this, what happened, feeling. When it happened 12, 15 times I began to really notice it and make note of it. Now it happens all the time, with about two exceptions.
I'm talking to a survivor somewhere in the US over the phone, we are getting along great. We make plans to talk again about this or that at a time in the future. I call that person when we are supposed to talk again, and they will not return my call, ever...
Okay, one of the very first times this happened was early in the life of the blog, I was talking to a survivor in New Mexico, his case was current so we could not post the details, but he talked to me at length. He told me he also was real active in AA as a sponsor.
He said, "If you ever need to talk to me about anything, especially these issues, call anytime, because I know how important that contact with another human being is, so I'll return your call no matter what I'm doing, as soon as possible."
Okay that's not a direct quote. Point is he emphasized he would call me back.
He also was very close and in regular contact with David Clohessy.
I called back when we had arranged, he would not return the call. I tried a few more times, then gave up, and took it personally. In early 2007 I was not the self contained person I am today even. Three years back i was barely able to get a sentence out of my mouth...
Okay. It happened then again in states and regions all over the country, the exact same pattern. When a survivor who I'm talking to is in the middle of working with me on a story for the future at City of Angels, or even we are just talking as I need human contact SO BAD in my life right now.
We'll be goign along fine.
Then there is that interaction on their end with SNAP.
From that time on, the person will not call me back again.
This has happened now so many times that what I do now is I wait and see how long it will be before it happens. It happens ALL THE TIME.
Either someone is getting to survivors and telling them not to talk to me, which I know happened in Los Angeles in 2006, SNAP leaders in L.A. have been quoted to me saying, "Don't have anything to do with that crazy lady in Hollywood" to most people in SNAP. I still am stymied by that as well...
Off topic.
At first when people stopped calling me back, I took it personally. Then it became obvious something was going on.
My favorite was on the SNAP cruise, where about six antagonistic people went to Ensenada and back in 2008, it was supposed to be a fund raiser but there was -- six people or so went.
This one guy, he spent two to three hours telling me his whole life story and how it was affected by serial sodomy rape by a sickening German surnamed priest who is among the L.A. perpetrators.
We had this long talk. Plus the guy was my age, educated, I thought we really connected. We sat there both of us crying on a chaise lounge on the cruise ship.
Then he goes off to do something with SNAP which I think had to do with money management, as it was mostly people who had just gotten settlements who were the target of the cruise.
I got to go on the cruise because someone gave me his ticket, he could not refund it, he'd already paid for it then had to work, so I got to go on the cruise.
Boy was I not welcome there, but I tolerated it to experience a cruise one time.
Okay.
That night at dinner I see the guy who had just poured his heart out to me, bonded with me on a shared serial child rape basis.
I say the beginning of one sentence to him and he turns his back, abrupt, says something like, I don't want to talk to you about this anymore, totally shines me on.
I sit there with this person near me at the dinner table who is bristling angry at me, and have no idea why.
****
The first time it happened and I knew I was not imagining it, was a phone call I was having with this one guy from Southern California in the 2006-7 settlements who was also real active in SNAP. We were talkign along, talkign along, making plans to meet soon, sharing our archdiocesical rages.
Then in the middle of a sentence he goes, "Wait, oh, wha- wait, you're that Kay, you're that Kay? Oh, hold on, I gotta go."
And he never spoke to me again.
Lucky for me, he was not good at subterfuge at all. It was so blatant that someone had told him not to talk to me. That is the moment when it became more of an experience than a hurtful thing. I could be objective.
But still to this day is this niggling feeling inside, what is wrong with me. My personality is so bad that 99 percent of the survivors I talk to who are involved with SNAP do not call me back after they talk to someone at SNAP about me?
Is it that I am so disgusting that no one wants to talk to me after the first time?
Or is it SNAP telling them to have nothing to do with me.
I mean which makes more sense to you. Or SNARL as I dubbed them in the Fiction piece over Christmas, and I hope now people who read this will start to understand how I came to the place where I started calling them SNARL instead of SNAP.
Actually look at the comments Bob Schwiderski put on the Sunday post at City of Angels 8. He is snarling right there in print, not much different from emails I used to get from Mary Grant.
The nudges are back.
********
Cut from opening:
Thing is as long as I feel this way about SNAP I can't function in the "survivor community" as 80 percent of survivors tell me they are having a good experience with them. I don't know what the criteria is for who gets treated well by SNAP and who doesn't, I just know that the line is definitely drawn, and a lot of people get this same, they don't want me around feeling that I used to get in 2006, I just am so persistent, and yes, it struck me as ... so counter intuitive, for an organization that is supposed to be empowering crime victims to treat some of the victims so bad.
In some cases we are the wildest weirdest ones, the survivors who don't look good on camera, as I was in 2006. Thing is now that I've been doing City of Angels for three years, I've turned into this confident person. In reality it's the most damaged, broke, half homeless ones who need the most support and attention, yet we are the ones who get snubbed the most.
I used to think it was about money, the survivors who get treated well are the ones who have active cases that are going to end up in big settlements.
I don't know that for sure, because EVERY TIME I've been in conversation with survivors who are heading for big settlements, this David Clohessy or Someone intervention takes place.
I doubt it's the Church intervening. Most survivors would not listen to what a representative of the Church tells them to do.
But they will enthusiastically and reverently do what Clohessy or one of the others in the SNAP regional heirarchy tell them to do....
All thish stuff I'm writing here is how I came to the conclusion that at the top, out of St. Louis, SNAP is run by the Roman Catholic Church, and the survivors have just been through years of Crowd Control, and News Information Management.
The only thing they screwed up with this plan is they did not count on the Internet, and survivors finding each other
IN SPITE of SNAP.
And me. I kept digging. And I kept trying to tell myself I was imagining it until it was SO RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FACE, I could not see it as anything else.
So when survivors are still in that place where they have given a kind of Saint-quality to the individuals who run SNAP, they cannot understand how I could bad rap them.
It's the ones who call me with this same complaint that stymies me, as the weird treatment of survivors by SNAP is almost the same in every city.
In fact, when I first wrote about that strange snub in Fall 2009, where SNAP held a Gus Krumm press event in Orange County without mentioning that City of Angels broke the story, I got several emails from people who have been around a long time, old Linkup Members, and phone calls too, telling me, honey, SNAP has done that to so many survivors, you are not all that weird, don't feel like the Lone Ranger
.
I do feel alone with it right now, as I'm still the only one of about three willing to say it in print, and use my name.
But right now there are so many survivors and advocates angry with me for writing this, that I can't even make a phone call to develop a story.
Thing is, as long as I keep researching, this niggling thing comes up. Something is wrong with SNAP and maybe I haven't figured it totally out, but there is definitely something wrong. And now that I've gone this far, I'm not going to stop, until someone looks into it.
There's more.
For those survivors who are already in a perplexed state like I was in 2006-2008 when I just couldn't figure out why SNAP does what it does, try this formula.
Take all your confusion about SNAP and add one element to the equation, that they are doing it on purpose, that they want to screw up press events and want to discourage survivors from continuing to participate.
Then all of a sudden all your confusion and questions are answered, as it all falls in place. If they really are counter-espionage, created by the bishops as far back as the late 1980s as a way to keep the lid on this story.
Add that concept into your experience with SNAP and suddenly- it's like reconciliation.
Everything falls into place.
Everything makes sense.
They left the survivors standing on a sidewalk with no one in washington and Florida? The way they tried to stifle me from covering L.A. Clergy Case hearings.
Just apply the idea that SNAP is really from the Church to your experience so far.
See if the same thing doesn't happen to you.
Suddenly it all makes sense, it all adds up.
And there was only one group of persons in the mid-1980s who knew how many crime victims there were, who knew they had to do something to keep us from really becoming a powerful force, who knew they had to insinuate themselves into the group of survivors who were already starting to find each ohter.
Only one group knew in advance how many of us there are and that they had to do something to contain us:
The US Conference of Roman Catholic bishops.
Stories at City of Angels could-
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
I am also, I will admit, going a little nuts. I don't just think David and Barbara are from the Church. I'm getting so every person I talk to on the phone or through email through this blog is an undercover agent from the church, or from David and Barbara.
Maybe if I just write here for a while and stop answering my phone...
Maybe if I just write here for a while and stop answering my phone...
From the spoils of human tragedy...
.
My job this week is for a show in production called AUCTIONEERS$$ about a new thriving business in America. When people lose their homes or businesses, I guess banks and insurance companies seize everything, business equipment. Then the Auctioneers aucion it off and a lot of people make a lot of money thanks to that family losing their home.
Also when people put their belongings in a storage facility and then can't pay the bill for two months in a row, they lose their belongings. It goes to the auctionners.
The Auctioneers$$ are the savvy capitalists who stand between the loser and buyer in these human catastrophes. They sell the contents of a storage facility without opening it, so it's like a party when after the sale is made, they pore over family pictures and such looking for hidden treasures they can later sell at whopping profits.
The same company that makes this show also produced Accidental Fortunes, where people find a thing in a trash bin, take it home and clean it up, and end up selling it at Sotheby's for half million dollars later. And that was a cool funny show, but it's a year later now and...
Now it's a show about people who sell the spoils of human tragedy... yee, it's getting a little weird. One box even contained teeth with gold fillings that someone's grandpa brought home from some war, 'nuff said.
I remember when Lizzy and I had all our stuff at Public Storage on Santa Monica and La Brea. (Highland?) On santa monica boulevard. We put our stuff there November 2003 because first month was only a dollar, and we knew it would only be a few weeks tops before we got into another home. It ended up being two years.
Meanwhile there were several times we came within hours of not making that payment on time and losing everything we owned except what was crammed into our car. The photographs, file cabinets, (I'm a writer and everything used to be only on paper so I have file cabinets.) not to mention clothes and those damn gold coins that I still to this day have never found...
Anyway
Often when we would go to visit the storage facility, as we were digging through boxes, tearing through bags, it was such a wreck in there after a few months- often when we went we'd hear the cries.
People wailing, calling out Pleeeease pleeease.
It would echo through the steel corridors of storage bins.
"Those are my family albums, just let me take those, please, please don't take everything, no one wants my family albums, pleeeeeeese pleeeeese"
Then you would hear the soft-spoken practiced corporate voice of the Public Storage guy, in an accent of indefinable country of origin, explaining, "No ma'am, this is our policy, if you do not pay by midnight on the date payment is due, you no longer own the contents of your unit."
"Pleeeeese pleeeease!"
Lizzie and I would shudder. We'd stop digging in the boxes and listen and shudder, especially after the first time we almost didn't make our monthly payment on time. It was something like 75 dollars a month and ... that's how bad it gets when you're homeless and your job requires you to work out of your home.
At least I kept my work equipment in the car as we'd carry a television with a VCR in it and my desktop computer and monitor up and down the stairs and into motel rooms when we could, where I'd work for a week, then we'd pay for two more weeks, then we'd run out of cash and sleep in the car for a week. It went on like that for 6 months then we got into a shelter, where we lived 11 months, then a transitional shelter for 6 months, then this apartment in a neighborhood where a lot of people have spent years of their lives in the same kind of chaos.
I fit in here. My clothes do not look shabby compared to my neighbors' clothes. This is the part of town where people who don't even hear about one-year window opportunities for lawsuits live, they are too busy working 12 hours a day and taking care of sick family or whatever to pay that much attention to the news.
I fit in here.
None of my neighbors have a full mouth of teeth unless they spent a year and a half with an empty mouth and then got Medi-Cal dentures. I don't think Medi-Cal does dentures anymore...
Oh yeah, the TV show I'm working on this week. Just another reality filler between commercials on a cable channel, nothing to get excited about. Pays the rent for a dozen or so people in L.A. who get income out of it.
Works for me.
***********
(A few hours later)
Wow, just when I was about to give up on Humankind, this is the story I ended up working on today for the show "Accidental Fotunes." . I'm not allowed to tell what I learn on these shows that hasn't been in the media yet, but this story has blown me away today even renewed by faith in ... in ... in something.
With One Swing (of the Gavel), Ruth's Bat Hits $1.26 Million - Los ...
Babe Ruth's bat -- A photo caption with an article in Friday's Section A about the ... Stadium misidentified a man holding the bat as a worker at Sotheby's.
What was Babe Ruth's bat nicknamed? Answerbag
Dec 26, 2008 ... What was Babe Ruth's bat nicknamed? Darlin' is the most famous. ... wood bat sold for $1.26 million at a Sotheby's auction in December 2004, ...www.answerbag.com..
SportsCards Plus & Sotheby's To Sell Babe Ruth's Storied Bat - PSA ...
Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) is the world's largest third-party sportscard authentication service -- the experts in grading cards, .
Sportsview: Babe Ruth Bat a Treasure - Wire Services - Baseball ...
The greatest worry about the auction of the bat Babe Ruth swung to hit the ... as Sotheby's and SportsCards Plus believe it will at their joint auction in ...
Wait until you see this story in full in the show I'm working on now, Accidental Fortunes. I may rebound faster than I expected.
Not because of the amount she got for the bat, but for who she was and how she held onto it, amazing story. As I go through the file and hear the details, rushes of endorphins are flushes all over my body... thanks, nudges, for sending some respite.
My job this week is for a show in production called AUCTIONEERS$$ about a new thriving business in America. When people lose their homes or businesses, I guess banks and insurance companies seize everything, business equipment. Then the Auctioneers aucion it off and a lot of people make a lot of money thanks to that family losing their home.
Also when people put their belongings in a storage facility and then can't pay the bill for two months in a row, they lose their belongings. It goes to the auctionners.
The Auctioneers$$ are the savvy capitalists who stand between the loser and buyer in these human catastrophes. They sell the contents of a storage facility without opening it, so it's like a party when after the sale is made, they pore over family pictures and such looking for hidden treasures they can later sell at whopping profits.
The same company that makes this show also produced Accidental Fortunes, where people find a thing in a trash bin, take it home and clean it up, and end up selling it at Sotheby's for half million dollars later. And that was a cool funny show, but it's a year later now and...
Now it's a show about people who sell the spoils of human tragedy... yee, it's getting a little weird. One box even contained teeth with gold fillings that someone's grandpa brought home from some war, 'nuff said.
I remember when Lizzy and I had all our stuff at Public Storage on Santa Monica and La Brea. (Highland?) On santa monica boulevard. We put our stuff there November 2003 because first month was only a dollar, and we knew it would only be a few weeks tops before we got into another home. It ended up being two years.
Meanwhile there were several times we came within hours of not making that payment on time and losing everything we owned except what was crammed into our car. The photographs, file cabinets, (I'm a writer and everything used to be only on paper so I have file cabinets.) not to mention clothes and those damn gold coins that I still to this day have never found...
Anyway
Often when we would go to visit the storage facility, as we were digging through boxes, tearing through bags, it was such a wreck in there after a few months- often when we went we'd hear the cries.
People wailing, calling out Pleeeease pleeease.
It would echo through the steel corridors of storage bins.
"Those are my family albums, just let me take those, please, please don't take everything, no one wants my family albums, pleeeeeeese pleeeeese"
Then you would hear the soft-spoken practiced corporate voice of the Public Storage guy, in an accent of indefinable country of origin, explaining, "No ma'am, this is our policy, if you do not pay by midnight on the date payment is due, you no longer own the contents of your unit."
"Pleeeeese pleeeease!"
Lizzie and I would shudder. We'd stop digging in the boxes and listen and shudder, especially after the first time we almost didn't make our monthly payment on time. It was something like 75 dollars a month and ... that's how bad it gets when you're homeless and your job requires you to work out of your home.
At least I kept my work equipment in the car as we'd carry a television with a VCR in it and my desktop computer and monitor up and down the stairs and into motel rooms when we could, where I'd work for a week, then we'd pay for two more weeks, then we'd run out of cash and sleep in the car for a week. It went on like that for 6 months then we got into a shelter, where we lived 11 months, then a transitional shelter for 6 months, then this apartment in a neighborhood where a lot of people have spent years of their lives in the same kind of chaos.
I fit in here. My clothes do not look shabby compared to my neighbors' clothes. This is the part of town where people who don't even hear about one-year window opportunities for lawsuits live, they are too busy working 12 hours a day and taking care of sick family or whatever to pay that much attention to the news.
I fit in here.
None of my neighbors have a full mouth of teeth unless they spent a year and a half with an empty mouth and then got Medi-Cal dentures. I don't think Medi-Cal does dentures anymore...
Oh yeah, the TV show I'm working on this week. Just another reality filler between commercials on a cable channel, nothing to get excited about. Pays the rent for a dozen or so people in L.A. who get income out of it.
Works for me.
***********
(A few hours later)
Wow, just when I was about to give up on Humankind, this is the story I ended up working on today for the show "Accidental Fotunes." . I'm not allowed to tell what I learn on these shows that hasn't been in the media yet, but this story has blown me away today even renewed by faith in ... in ... in something.
With One Swing (of the Gavel), Ruth's Bat Hits $1.26 Million - Los ...
Babe Ruth's bat -- A photo caption with an article in Friday's Section A about the ... Stadium misidentified a man holding the bat as a worker at Sotheby's.
What was Babe Ruth's bat nicknamed? Answerbag
Dec 26, 2008 ... What was Babe Ruth's bat nicknamed? Darlin' is the most famous. ... wood bat sold for $1.26 million at a Sotheby's auction in December 2004, ...www.answerbag.com..
SportsCards Plus & Sotheby's To Sell Babe Ruth's Storied Bat - PSA ...
Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) is the world's largest third-party sportscard authentication service -- the experts in grading cards, .
Sportsview: Babe Ruth Bat a Treasure - Wire Services - Baseball ...
The greatest worry about the auction of the bat Babe Ruth swung to hit the ... as Sotheby's and SportsCards Plus believe it will at their joint auction in ...
Wait until you see this story in full in the show I'm working on now, Accidental Fortunes. I may rebound faster than I expected.
Not because of the amount she got for the bat, but for who she was and how she held onto it, amazing story. As I go through the file and hear the details, rushes of endorphins are flushes all over my body... thanks, nudges, for sending some respite.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Having the strangest experience.
It's over. I think...
I doubt I'll post another word at City of Angels.
I did what I came for. I identified the problem and wrote about it, reported it here.
Now, I can't hang around while almost everyone else working in this area is not only drinking the Kool-Aid but drunk on it.
If people prefer to believe what they are told instead of what they see, there's not much more I have to write on this topic.
I'm a chameleon, always have been, and it's real obvious, the way I feel, that another change is coming, and City of Angels is done.
I did what I came here for, identified the problem, and until the rest of us see and deal with the problem, I can't function in this "community."
City of Angels was run from the beginning on nudges. They're gone now. They left this morning.
There's nothing more to say. Until other people see what I see, there's nothing more I can say.
ke
It's over. I think...
I doubt I'll post another word at City of Angels.
I did what I came for. I identified the problem and wrote about it, reported it here.
Now, I can't hang around while almost everyone else working in this area is not only drinking the Kool-Aid but drunk on it.
If people prefer to believe what they are told instead of what they see, there's not much more I have to write on this topic.
I'm a chameleon, always have been, and it's real obvious, the way I feel, that another change is coming, and City of Angels is done.
I did what I came here for, identified the problem, and until the rest of us see and deal with the problem, I can't function in this "community."
City of Angels was run from the beginning on nudges. They're gone now. They left this morning.
There's nothing more to say. Until other people see what I see, there's nothing more I can say.
ke
I remember the moment, in Pershing Square, a vigil while the bishops held their national meeting in the L.A. Biltmore across the street. I was disheveled, bloated and fat and self esteem? None. This was my second time finding SNAP. First time I'd been a warrior, moved a hundred miles to be closer to a SNAP meeting in Oakland, started a second daytime meeting in San Francisco. Wrote letters, started printing things out that I found on this new thing the Internet.
Mid 1990s.
Now it was 2006, there had been a murder in my family so I hadn't done SNAP for several years, now I could come back, all the chaos and insanity in that part of my life was finally ending and I could start paying attention to this priest thing again.
Barbara Blaine who sat next to Mary Grant and I finally got a chance to talk to them. I was in awe of them, gazing up at them, probably looked pretty pathetic.
I said, "It feels so good to be able to send out a letter to the editor and sign it Kay Ebeling, SNAP Los Angeles."
Blaine and Grant looked at each other then looked at me, and said simultaneously:
"You can't."
Then they explained why I couldn't say I was a member of SNAP but I really don't remember what the reasoning was. Just that I gave them the authority, figured they must know what they are doing, so they must be right.
So, for all the people who tell me, just do something on your own and call it SNAP like they did, you are forgetting that you started that in the 1990s or early 2000s.
Apparently SNAP has changed since then, it's much more controlled from the top, there are a lot more secrets kept than were in 1995.
So as I said, I'm writing what my experience was. Not to whine or ask for pity, but to point out that no one in this movement deserves sainthood. Everyone among us deserves to be criticized if they are putting out false information.
Saying SNAP is a "support network" is two false statements. The support is not really there. And the network does not exist at all, it's a hologram.
I know people are rankled but as long as it's impossible to point out anything SNAP does wrong, they will continue to do things in "the way we've always done it," and the same mistakes get made.
NO ONE is above criticism.
Even me. I hear it and consider it when it's legitimate.
If SNAP told me lies, misdirected me, and I'm one journalist / survivor, it makes me really wonder how many other people were misdirected by SNAP, and why.
If anything, I know making these statements makes me look petty in some people's eyes. If it was about me-me-me, believe me, I would not have posted this story.
It's about me not wanting to see the same mistakes and screw-ups continue. It's about me saying, why doesn't someone go in and reorganize, update, and set genuine Goals at SNAP instead of just letting it continue in its constant state of disarray.
How is that whining or pity potting. One of SNAP's most vocal midwest spokesmen is hounding me now that I'm on a pity pot.
And my idea:
Set up a trust, a fund from donations from settlements, and let survivors who did not get settlements apply to the fund for grants.
What's wrong with that idea? how is that just caring about me-me-me and being on a pity pot?
I think it's a damn good idea, and something SNAP should have done and still couuld do.
But there's Mr. Snap from Minnesota screaming at me that I'm on a pity pot and all I care about is me-me-me if I say why not set up a trust for the rest of the victims.
Knee jerk reaction.
Nothing will improve until we fix the broken parts.
Mid 1990s.
Now it was 2006, there had been a murder in my family so I hadn't done SNAP for several years, now I could come back, all the chaos and insanity in that part of my life was finally ending and I could start paying attention to this priest thing again.
Barbara Blaine who sat next to Mary Grant and I finally got a chance to talk to them. I was in awe of them, gazing up at them, probably looked pretty pathetic.
I said, "It feels so good to be able to send out a letter to the editor and sign it Kay Ebeling, SNAP Los Angeles."
Blaine and Grant looked at each other then looked at me, and said simultaneously:
"You can't."
Then they explained why I couldn't say I was a member of SNAP but I really don't remember what the reasoning was. Just that I gave them the authority, figured they must know what they are doing, so they must be right.
So, for all the people who tell me, just do something on your own and call it SNAP like they did, you are forgetting that you started that in the 1990s or early 2000s.
Apparently SNAP has changed since then, it's much more controlled from the top, there are a lot more secrets kept than were in 1995.
So as I said, I'm writing what my experience was. Not to whine or ask for pity, but to point out that no one in this movement deserves sainthood. Everyone among us deserves to be criticized if they are putting out false information.
Saying SNAP is a "support network" is two false statements. The support is not really there. And the network does not exist at all, it's a hologram.
I know people are rankled but as long as it's impossible to point out anything SNAP does wrong, they will continue to do things in "the way we've always done it," and the same mistakes get made.
NO ONE is above criticism.
Even me. I hear it and consider it when it's legitimate.
If SNAP told me lies, misdirected me, and I'm one journalist / survivor, it makes me really wonder how many other people were misdirected by SNAP, and why.
If anything, I know making these statements makes me look petty in some people's eyes. If it was about me-me-me, believe me, I would not have posted this story.
It's about me not wanting to see the same mistakes and screw-ups continue. It's about me saying, why doesn't someone go in and reorganize, update, and set genuine Goals at SNAP instead of just letting it continue in its constant state of disarray.
How is that whining or pity potting. One of SNAP's most vocal midwest spokesmen is hounding me now that I'm on a pity pot.
And my idea:
Set up a trust, a fund from donations from settlements, and let survivors who did not get settlements apply to the fund for grants.
What's wrong with that idea? how is that just caring about me-me-me and being on a pity pot?
I think it's a damn good idea, and something SNAP should have done and still couuld do.
But there's Mr. Snap from Minnesota screaming at me that I'm on a pity pot and all I care about is me-me-me if I say why not set up a trust for the rest of the victims.
Knee jerk reaction.
Nothing will improve until we fix the broken parts.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
A Better Class of Homeless Walks Sunset Boulevard Today, Using Suitcases not grocery carts to carry all their belongings
.
One woman pulled two behind her, head down, beelining up the sidewalk. A mom and daughter not making eye contact with anyone each pulled a suitcase behind them. A man stood outside the Hollywood Dive Motel, fresh showered, half dressed, the handle of his suitcase on wheels in his fist. He looked up and down the boulevard, the look on his face said where do I go from here, then he took off walking, wandering aimlessly.
Suitcases.
Homeless people are pulling suitcases today, not the tacky grocery carts of last year. Today’s savvy L.A. homeless gal is pulling a faux Samsonite on wheels as she walks up and down Sunset Boulevard, looking for a place to wait out the night. No doubt it’s a sign that a better class of people is taking to the streets now than the grocery cart pushing tramps of the last couple decades.
Today homeless people have style. I lingered last night outside after the dark came, a time when usually I’m hunkered in my apartment in East Hollywood with booby traps set at the door and underneath the windows. If anyone tries to break in my home, they'll make so much racket, they’ll have to run off, that's my home security system.
Last night I decided to observe this new phenomenon of homeless people pulling suitcases with all their belongings in them instead of those shabby grocery carts we all have gotten so tired of seeing.
A woman stopped in front of the 99 Cent Store, dropped her pink flowered suitcase, stepped off the curb into the street, pulled her skirt up to below her knees, bent her legs, and urinated. I thought how considerate of her to step over to a place where the pee would go down a gutter and drain out to the ocean, instead of leaving it just in a puddle on the sidewalk like those guys who push the grocery carts do.
An approaching car on Sunset Boulevard honked at her to get out of the parking lane, it says no stopping 4 to 7 PM, but she couldn't move because the stream of liquid had not finished pouring out from between her legs onto the asphalt. Other than that no one reacted.
Homeless people stopping to pee and poop on the sidewalk is an ordinary thing to see on L.A. streets.
Pulling suitcases on wheels is the new trend!
The elegant peeing lady wore a bright pink ensemble from head to toe, including the pink flowered suitcase on wheels she pulled and the pink scarf wrapped tight around her head, doubtless to keep the lice from jumping out onto the heads of passers by.
Again, what a considerate homeless woman.
Her entire color coordinated ensemble worked so well, and she retained an air of dignity as she returned to her suitcase, pulled out tissue, reached up and wiped herself, then deposited the tissue in a nearby trash bin.
It’s nice to see the homeless starting to take better care of themselves, and I'm glad they are finally giving up the rattling shopping carts for these much more civilized rolling suitcases. It makes them look less. . . Homeless. Much more acceptable to the rest of us here on Sunset Boulevard in the 5600 block.
Leaning on a parking meter, I watched another glorious sunset, last night, then when I noticed there were more a lot more people out promenading than usual, I was glad to see it at first, my tunnel vision can be so bad. My first thought was, wow, a promenade. L.A. people are finally getting out of their cars and walking, becoming ambulatory…
It’s just a better class of people are becoming homeless today. Their last grasp of dignity is the suitcase versus the grocery cart. The suitcase means you still have a hairline connection with civilized life. You still sleep at least a few nights a week in a motel, your belongings are still folded and clean as you carry them with you everywhere you go. You're not down to the plastic bags of mildew covered treasures the hard core homeless guys carry around in their grocery carts. The new homeless would never even think of stealing a grocery cart, they can still purchase a suitcase, albeit flimsy and cheap, but it’s still a suitcase.
The mom and daughter were heading towards a shelter I know of for women and children. My own daughter and I stayed there 11 months in 2004, hope they could still get in that late. The mom gestured to walk faster, the girl's ponytail flew back and forth, she kept looking back. They were trying to get away from the lady in pink, who at first seemed to be with them. All around me, everywhere I looked last night, I saw clean working class people pulling suitcases after them on the sidewalks.
At least in L.A. you finally see other people when you take a walk. Used to be everybody in this town had a car, now. . .
One woman pulled two behind her, head down, beelining up the sidewalk. A mom and daughter not making eye contact with anyone each pulled a suitcase behind them. A man stood outside the Hollywood Dive Motel, fresh showered, half dressed, the handle of his suitcase on wheels in his fist. He looked up and down the boulevard, the look on his face said where do I go from here, then he took off walking, wandering aimlessly.
Suitcases.
Homeless people are pulling suitcases today, not the tacky grocery carts of last year. Today’s savvy L.A. homeless gal is pulling a faux Samsonite on wheels as she walks up and down Sunset Boulevard, looking for a place to wait out the night. No doubt it’s a sign that a better class of people is taking to the streets now than the grocery cart pushing tramps of the last couple decades.
Today homeless people have style. I lingered last night outside after the dark came, a time when usually I’m hunkered in my apartment in East Hollywood with booby traps set at the door and underneath the windows. If anyone tries to break in my home, they'll make so much racket, they’ll have to run off, that's my home security system.
Last night I decided to observe this new phenomenon of homeless people pulling suitcases with all their belongings in them instead of those shabby grocery carts we all have gotten so tired of seeing.
A woman stopped in front of the 99 Cent Store, dropped her pink flowered suitcase, stepped off the curb into the street, pulled her skirt up to below her knees, bent her legs, and urinated. I thought how considerate of her to step over to a place where the pee would go down a gutter and drain out to the ocean, instead of leaving it just in a puddle on the sidewalk like those guys who push the grocery carts do.
An approaching car on Sunset Boulevard honked at her to get out of the parking lane, it says no stopping 4 to 7 PM, but she couldn't move because the stream of liquid had not finished pouring out from between her legs onto the asphalt. Other than that no one reacted.
Homeless people stopping to pee and poop on the sidewalk is an ordinary thing to see on L.A. streets.
Pulling suitcases on wheels is the new trend!
The elegant peeing lady wore a bright pink ensemble from head to toe, including the pink flowered suitcase on wheels she pulled and the pink scarf wrapped tight around her head, doubtless to keep the lice from jumping out onto the heads of passers by.
Again, what a considerate homeless woman.
Her entire color coordinated ensemble worked so well, and she retained an air of dignity as she returned to her suitcase, pulled out tissue, reached up and wiped herself, then deposited the tissue in a nearby trash bin.
It’s nice to see the homeless starting to take better care of themselves, and I'm glad they are finally giving up the rattling shopping carts for these much more civilized rolling suitcases. It makes them look less. . . Homeless. Much more acceptable to the rest of us here on Sunset Boulevard in the 5600 block.
Leaning on a parking meter, I watched another glorious sunset, last night, then when I noticed there were more a lot more people out promenading than usual, I was glad to see it at first, my tunnel vision can be so bad. My first thought was, wow, a promenade. L.A. people are finally getting out of their cars and walking, becoming ambulatory…
It’s just a better class of people are becoming homeless today. Their last grasp of dignity is the suitcase versus the grocery cart. The suitcase means you still have a hairline connection with civilized life. You still sleep at least a few nights a week in a motel, your belongings are still folded and clean as you carry them with you everywhere you go. You're not down to the plastic bags of mildew covered treasures the hard core homeless guys carry around in their grocery carts. The new homeless would never even think of stealing a grocery cart, they can still purchase a suitcase, albeit flimsy and cheap, but it’s still a suitcase.
The mom and daughter were heading towards a shelter I know of for women and children. My own daughter and I stayed there 11 months in 2004, hope they could still get in that late. The mom gestured to walk faster, the girl's ponytail flew back and forth, she kept looking back. They were trying to get away from the lady in pink, who at first seemed to be with them. All around me, everywhere I looked last night, I saw clean working class people pulling suitcases after them on the sidewalks.
At least in L.A. you finally see other people when you take a walk. Used to be everybody in this town had a car, now. . .
Friday, January 29, 2010
New picture of me. Yikes! No wonder aging actresses feel they need plastic surgery
.
This is what I looked like last summer. Virginia Jones getting ready for next summer's Walk Across Oregon sent this pic. I cropped in to a shot that shows pretty much what I looked like then, I don't look like this now. I've been totally changing every few months all my life, it hasn't stopped. Suffice it to say getting off pharmaceuticals since last year has done wonders, but this is still sort of what I look like these days.
You can really see I didn't get much sleep on that trip too...
Damn chin, no wonder movie stars get plastic surgery. And that is the "hunters vest" I took to wearing in 2008-2009, in a state of confused identity. I still like the vest for carrying camera, phone, pens, pipe, everything you need at a finger's reach. And I mean, doesn't the vest make me look like a dynamic intelligent guy?
It's on this vest that I wear my Jupiter button also, a NASA souvenir from the Voyager Fly By for which I was a news spokeswoman for NASA describing the distant planet fly-by mission to reporters as it took place, from the JPL Newsroom, 1981, on loan from Houston. I was so messed up in those years... there was one radio interview I did talking about NASA's spacecraft flying past Jupiter, and I was on about three Valium to calm me down I had a hangover from days and days of drinking. I sounded like I was floating in space with Voyager...
I was so messed up in those years. You can tell by the way I look today. Live like that you carry scars.
Walk Across Oregon to End Child Abuse is in planning stages for next summer. Glad Virginia Jones found this photo, although now I see why my friends and daughter all say I gotta put more effort into how I look.
Working on it... I'm working on it.
Here you go, just crop out the chin. Who needs plastic surgery, just snip the chins out of the pics, easy...
This is what I looked like last summer. Virginia Jones getting ready for next summer's Walk Across Oregon sent this pic. I cropped in to a shot that shows pretty much what I looked like then, I don't look like this now. I've been totally changing every few months all my life, it hasn't stopped. Suffice it to say getting off pharmaceuticals since last year has done wonders, but this is still sort of what I look like these days. You can really see I didn't get much sleep on that trip too...
Damn chin, no wonder movie stars get plastic surgery. And that is the "hunters vest" I took to wearing in 2008-2009, in a state of confused identity. I still like the vest for carrying camera, phone, pens, pipe, everything you need at a finger's reach. And I mean, doesn't the vest make me look like a dynamic intelligent guy?
It's on this vest that I wear my Jupiter button also, a NASA souvenir from the Voyager Fly By for which I was a news spokeswoman for NASA describing the distant planet fly-by mission to reporters as it took place, from the JPL Newsroom, 1981, on loan from Houston. I was so messed up in those years... there was one radio interview I did talking about NASA's spacecraft flying past Jupiter, and I was on about three Valium to calm me down I had a hangover from days and days of drinking. I sounded like I was floating in space with Voyager...
I was so messed up in those years. You can tell by the way I look today. Live like that you carry scars.
Walk Across Oregon to End Child Abuse is in planning stages for next summer. Glad Virginia Jones found this photo, although now I see why my friends and daughter all say I gotta put more effort into how I look.
Working on it... I'm working on it.
Here you go, just crop out the chin. Who needs plastic surgery, just snip the chins out of the pics, easy...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Strange things happen to you when you write a blog about Catholic priest sex crimes...
.
This morning, just after putting up a post that got LOTS of hits, the cable guy knocks on my door.
He's standing there with another guy, they stare at me. The one in front I recognize as he came to our house about a week ago for a bad modem.
They stare at me. "Didn't you have an appointment, your cable, is it out?"
"No."
I perked, wished I'd washed my face and primped up a bit this morning, but the door usually doesn't get knocks until afternoon.
They stared at me for a while, it was weird, then said, oh well must have been a mistake.
I closed the door, but then out walking just now, realized, it could have been a cop, undercover working for anyone, got the cable guy- who are not always honest characters, I know from experience- to help him come to my door, so then with a hidden camera in his clipboard or whatever,
They got pictures of me, even interior of my home through the front door.
Honest, they were peering into my apartment as I said, No, I don't have an appointment.
It could have been someone undercover working for anyone. Luckily, I got nothing to hide, everything I write comes from truth and integrity, it's the Church that has been telling lies for decades about the Pedophile Epidemic among Catholic Priests.
Still, it's strange. The cable guys always call five minutes before they come, always.
They never come in twos.
They hesitated way too long and peered too far into my door for me to feel right about their little visit.
It could have been, a PI paid the cable guy to let him dress up and look like a second cable guy and then he had a camera in his sleeve or collar and shot video of me squirming at my front door.
Hopelessly paranoid after a few years listening to and researching to the crimes of the Catholic Church
This morning, just after putting up a post that got LOTS of hits, the cable guy knocks on my door.
He's standing there with another guy, they stare at me. The one in front I recognize as he came to our house about a week ago for a bad modem.
They stare at me. "Didn't you have an appointment, your cable, is it out?"
"No."
I perked, wished I'd washed my face and primped up a bit this morning, but the door usually doesn't get knocks until afternoon.
They stared at me for a while, it was weird, then said, oh well must have been a mistake.
I closed the door, but then out walking just now, realized, it could have been a cop, undercover working for anyone, got the cable guy- who are not always honest characters, I know from experience- to help him come to my door, so then with a hidden camera in his clipboard or whatever,
They got pictures of me, even interior of my home through the front door.
Honest, they were peering into my apartment as I said, No, I don't have an appointment.
It could have been someone undercover working for anyone. Luckily, I got nothing to hide, everything I write comes from truth and integrity, it's the Church that has been telling lies for decades about the Pedophile Epidemic among Catholic Priests.
Still, it's strange. The cable guys always call five minutes before they come, always.
They never come in twos.
They hesitated way too long and peered too far into my door for me to feel right about their little visit.
It could have been, a PI paid the cable guy to let him dress up and look like a second cable guy and then he had a camera in his sleeve or collar and shot video of me squirming at my front door.
Hopelessly paranoid after a few years listening to and researching to the crimes of the Catholic Church
Thursday, January 21, 2010
This is what I always wanted to be doing, right?
.
When I finished writing the feature at City of Angels 8 about the Baselice family tragedy at the hands of Franciscans and the Philadelphia Archdiocese, it was classic Dashiell Hammett. I have this bottle of Jack Daniels in my desk, not because I nip at it all the time, but to keep it out of the reach of my daughter, so it doesn't disappear.
Writing the story of Arthur Baselice II and III, it wasn’t that it was difficult to put the words together, or even the visceral human emotion anyone feels, even a Catholic bishop, at the thought of a boy dying in his twenties without ever really having a chance at a life in the first place, because he was drugged and sodomized starting at age nine for years as part of his altar boy duties.
It wasn’t even the sob-gulp-shock that ran over me when I first saw the picture of Arthur III in court with his mother, so alive and young and vibrant and handsome.
Just somewhere in the middle of all that, the totality of what just this one priest did, one out of at least six thousand, it got to me, not just as words in a paragraph but the graphic image. This beautiful boy and the flagrante behavior of this priest going on for years.
The way Arthur II worded it, that the priest gave his son opioids so the sodomy would not be difficult to perpetrate, then the boy as an adult ends up with one whale of an opioid addiction. And dies young, the day the Pennsylvania legislature decides to create a law that favors the Church over its crime victims.
Right in the middle of that, I sort of became undone as a human and slipped into the computer screen, found myself in the middle of the paragraph living it. The horror, the defeat Arthur III must have felt that night, leaving for the NA meeting and going instead to get stoned and overdose and die. That decision you make when you decide to pick up a drug after being clean for a while, that helpless giving in to the craving and need.
This is what I always wanted to do, right? Be a writer, isolated, doing the quasi-mad thing you do to get totally inside the moments of the incidents you are writing, even if they are sick and horrible moments, you have to get inside them to be able to write them.
To someone looking at it from outside, I probably shuddered. When I finished and posted it, I know I said out loud, “Okay this is one where you do reach for the bottle of Jack at the end.” I pulled out Mr. Daniels from where he gathers dust between files and manila envelopes. Poured out a shot, sipped it, sipped it over a half hour and then threw out the rest, but still-
That story was a Jack Daniels story.
This is the image of myself I think I had when I was a kid, or maybe a teenager, whenever it was that I knew someday I was going to be in a room somewhere alone writing something, going a little bit crazy, but writing something I had to write.
I think as a teenager, the image of the writer included a bottle of whisky in the desk drawer. The image I have of myself inside is always that undercover reporter from central casting, sports coat and a pair of jeans, hat pulled over one eye, stepping into the shadows to strike a match and have a smoke. Bottle of Jack Daniels ever handy in a drawer.
After writing the Baselice story last week I lied down and cried a long time. I didn't have a hard time writing it because of the words, it was just finding the right way to put it all together.
Then it just came together. I wrote it, posted it, promoted it, then laid down and cried for a while.
Another day in the life of City of Angels, whatever this is.
.
When I finished writing the feature at City of Angels 8 about the Baselice family tragedy at the hands of Franciscans and the Philadelphia Archdiocese, it was classic Dashiell Hammett. I have this bottle of Jack Daniels in my desk, not because I nip at it all the time, but to keep it out of the reach of my daughter, so it doesn't disappear.
Writing the story of Arthur Baselice II and III, it wasn’t that it was difficult to put the words together, or even the visceral human emotion anyone feels, even a Catholic bishop, at the thought of a boy dying in his twenties without ever really having a chance at a life in the first place, because he was drugged and sodomized starting at age nine for years as part of his altar boy duties.
It wasn’t even the sob-gulp-shock that ran over me when I first saw the picture of Arthur III in court with his mother, so alive and young and vibrant and handsome.
Just somewhere in the middle of all that, the totality of what just this one priest did, one out of at least six thousand, it got to me, not just as words in a paragraph but the graphic image. This beautiful boy and the flagrante behavior of this priest going on for years.
The way Arthur II worded it, that the priest gave his son opioids so the sodomy would not be difficult to perpetrate, then the boy as an adult ends up with one whale of an opioid addiction. And dies young, the day the Pennsylvania legislature decides to create a law that favors the Church over its crime victims.
Right in the middle of that, I sort of became undone as a human and slipped into the computer screen, found myself in the middle of the paragraph living it. The horror, the defeat Arthur III must have felt that night, leaving for the NA meeting and going instead to get stoned and overdose and die. That decision you make when you decide to pick up a drug after being clean for a while, that helpless giving in to the craving and need.
This is what I always wanted to do, right? Be a writer, isolated, doing the quasi-mad thing you do to get totally inside the moments of the incidents you are writing, even if they are sick and horrible moments, you have to get inside them to be able to write them.
To someone looking at it from outside, I probably shuddered. When I finished and posted it, I know I said out loud, “Okay this is one where you do reach for the bottle of Jack at the end.” I pulled out Mr. Daniels from where he gathers dust between files and manila envelopes. Poured out a shot, sipped it, sipped it over a half hour and then threw out the rest, but still-
That story was a Jack Daniels story.
This is the image of myself I think I had when I was a kid, or maybe a teenager, whenever it was that I knew someday I was going to be in a room somewhere alone writing something, going a little bit crazy, but writing something I had to write.
I think as a teenager, the image of the writer included a bottle of whisky in the desk drawer. The image I have of myself inside is always that undercover reporter from central casting, sports coat and a pair of jeans, hat pulled over one eye, stepping into the shadows to strike a match and have a smoke. Bottle of Jack Daniels ever handy in a drawer.
After writing the Baselice story last week I lied down and cried a long time. I didn't have a hard time writing it because of the words, it was just finding the right way to put it all together.
Then it just came together. I wrote it, posted it, promoted it, then laid down and cried for a while.
Another day in the life of City of Angels, whatever this is.
.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Watching the film 'Taken' brings up the time I got kidnapped in Paris and they almost sold me to the Arabs. But I escaped thanks to a genuine miracle
.
I watched "Taken" and got sick for a week, then dug up this story from City of Angels 1:
It was 1966 and in California if someone had long hair and jeans you automatically identified them as a fellow traveler in the counter culture, a fellow hippie, a stranger who was not a stranger. I was 17 and thought things would be the same in Paris, France, so I may even have been the one who struck up a conversation with the two guys in the Left Bank bookstore. I did ask them if they knew where to get some LSD, as I had promised my sister I'd bring some acid back for her to try, when I left her apartment in Geneva, Switzerland.
The two guys said they knew where to get lalalalala, don’t remember the name of it, a drug they said was not LSD but like LSD, so I said, great let’s go.
Went off with them willingly and enthusiastically. Like the two girls in "Taken."
They explained to me as best my high school French understood that their house was out in the suburbs of Paris. I thought it was funny that Paris even had suburbs. We went to my hotel to get my stuff, then rode the train out to their house, this big empty house in a town a long way out on the train line.
1966 "suburban" Paris, a small quiet town, all the houses had huge fences, private.
We walked about a block from the train to this two-story brick and stone house surrounded by a 10 foot fence, and a yard with trees. You entered through a gate.
I was a 17 year old girl hooked up and ready to party.
No virgin, a 17 year old Southern California natural blond tanned girl with an early anorexic body and Polish curves -- probably some kind of fantasy come true for these French guys, but I was really unaware of being sexy at that time. I was just natural in a sundress and sandals and little else sitting in this kitchen outside Paris drinking wine and eating something home cooked with these two French guys and then taking this drug thinking we would just party like the hippies in L.A.
. . .
"Hey, this isn't at all like LSD," is one of the last things I said before I just fell asleep. I woke up locked in a bedroom upstairs, groggy, and then for days they would come in and have sex with me, usually while I just laid there. Whether I wanted to or not, and they kept feeding me the drug.
Somewhere in the middle of the first night it segued from consensual sex to forced... I hate to have to admit that.
How this story ties in with the pedophile priest stories here at City of Angels is the lack of boundaries I had, at seventeen, going off with two strange guys in Paris France in the first place, my body already this thing that just gave in to sex, wherever or whatever.
Also, the way I escaped from these two guys is a direct tie to the experience, as it was a miracle.
A genuine miracle.
**************
A few days in, strangely, my door wasn’t locked and I heard men talking downstairs, so I crept to the top of, then tiptoed down a few steps to listen. In the living room the two guys who were drugging me were in an animated conversation with two men who looked and sounded Arabic. I crept down lower and peaked at them.
It was hard to understand the Parisian French but I understood enough to know they were describing me, how it felt to touch my skin, the Skin! They kept repeating it, “le peau le teint.”
And they talked about money.
I shivered there on the stairs realizing, “They’re selling me to the Arabs.”
And I freaked.
Got to get outta here.
I listened longer, understood a little more, enough to know the deal was done and I was going to end up someplace like a harem in Saudi Arabia in a few hours. (This was 1969.)
Then all the guys left, without even checking on me, which was weird. Looking back now, maybe they’d been up in the bedroom earlier while I was drugged and knocked out, and didn't realize they hadn’t locked the door when they left, and then they didn't want to make the Arab guys wait ...
So the French guys left without checking on me and I knew I had no more than a few minutes to get out of that house.
I had this big white suitcase with all the clothes a 17-year-old girl carries with them. I lugged that Samsonite down the stairs. In every room on the ground floor the windows were nailed shut. I ran to the kitchen and checked and all the doors of course the doors were all all locked, they had me locked in.
The windows nailed shut, all the doors locked except one, the door that led to the basement.
So I dragged the huge white suitcase (this was pre-plastic, it was HEAVY) behind me down the narrow basement staircase in that old French country now suburban house.
In the basement there were laundry tubs, huge vat-like sinks, and above one tub was one small window at ground level.
These laundry basins were huge, like they could hold sheets or curtains to wash by hand a century ago. I saw I could climb up the ceramic and then crawl through that one window. That tiny window. I climbed up and barely pulled myself through, then went to pull out the suitcase and get us to freedom.
But the suitcase was too big.
Remember I was a 17 year old girl from L.A. and I wasn’t going to leave behind all my clothes. So I pulled and pulled and pulled and the suitcase was just plain larger than the window. This was a stone mortar brick building, nothing was going to give but I kept pulling and pulling trying to get the suitcase through.
Then there was a BLLLLLLNNNNNNGGGG sound.
It came with the wind through the trees. There are even angelic voices in the sound as I remember it today.
Whatever, there was a BLLLLNNNNGGG and the suitcase came through the window. The solid 1960s pre-plastic quality Samsonite bulging suitcase came through the century old too small tiny window, which was surrounded by brick and stone wall surrounded by more brick and stone wall.
I was able to pull the suitcase through and get out of there. The too big suitcase came through the too small window and I got away.
It was a miracle. Looking back on it, that's the only way to explain it.
Then I had to climb a tree and throw the suitcase over the fence then jump down myself. I scrambled in the direction I could hear the train, and got to the station, got out of the block before the two French guys came back with the Arabs.
I got away.
If I hadn't gotten away I probably would have ended up like the teenage girls in the movie "Taken," sold as merchandise to some oil magnate shiek.
***********
The Miracle
Later in life I realized that while I was being "sexualized" by a Catholic priest at age five in 1953, God must have looked down and said, this girl is going to have a lot of trouble in life. So God or whoever that is dispatched a couple of extra angels down to watch over me. And that's how I got out of that house outside Paris where the two French guys were getting ready to sell me to the Arabs.
It's the main reason I say it’s a wonder I made it to age 19.
*****
But watching "Taken" last week made me sick. Good movie, but it made me sick.
Or maybe it was the Carl's Junior burger from the day before.
************
There was a man at the train station that day outside Paris, when I escaped, and I also now think of that man as some kind of an angel in connection to the experience.
I must have looked pretty disheveled, drugged, scared, shaking, but trying to act cool. This older French man sat next to me and he asked if I needed help. He asked something like well how much can you pay for a hotel and started reaching in his pocket. I reached in my suitcase and pulled out this wad of American Express checks I had with me and he was amazed, stopped reaching for his wallet and said, "Well then in that case you should go to the Hilton Hotel, the new Hilton they just built downtown, the Paris Hilton, it's just for Americans, to make them feel at home," and I thought yeah good idea.
I wonder why the two French guys who kidnapped me didn't steal the American Express checks. Maybe they were going to have me sign them later... I don't know, but all my checks were still in the white suitcase.
I took the train to downtown Paris, checked into the brand new Paris Hilton, where everyone was going overboard to do everything American, just like they portrayed on Mad Men Season Two a few months back ...
It felt so good to feel the American-ness of the Paris Hilton Hotel that day. On my way to my room I wanted to get a magazine. All I could find, or all I saw in English was an issue of Playboy.
I went to my room and luxuriated, and with room service a couple of nights, recovered from the “trauma” as we’d call it today. I was alone at age 17, achy in a hotel room from several days of involuntary sex, shaking but not really even thinking about the Arab guys. I already had developed practiced PTSD techniques and was using them now to rush away from the experience and not look at it closely.
As always, going faster than the speed of life, in order to avoide looking at it.
Don't think I ever even thought about the way I almost got sold to the Arabs again until soon after my daughter was born, in 1989 or 1990. Then I started writing it and writing it over and over trying to form it into a literary work. Like this time, yet again.
It was twenty years later when I had a baby that I slowed down enough to realize what had happened to be in Paris in 1966.
I got a trip to Europe for my high school graduation present.
After escaping, I found nurturing and comfort there in the Paris Hilton Hotel in 1969, diving into the pages of Playboy Magazine.
********
Considering I'm just one of thousands of adult victims of pedophile priests, I wonder how many other women ended up in dangerous situations
Even dead
due to sexual compulsions they would never have had, if they hadn't been aroused as a growing child...
And it's no leap of faith to say a lot of the victims did not make it far into adulthood...
.
I watched "Taken" and got sick for a week, then dug up this story from City of Angels 1:
It was 1966 and in California if someone had long hair and jeans you automatically identified them as a fellow traveler in the counter culture, a fellow hippie, a stranger who was not a stranger. I was 17 and thought things would be the same in Paris, France, so I may even have been the one who struck up a conversation with the two guys in the Left Bank bookstore. I did ask them if they knew where to get some LSD, as I had promised my sister I'd bring some acid back for her to try, when I left her apartment in Geneva, Switzerland.
The two guys said they knew where to get lalalalala, don’t remember the name of it, a drug they said was not LSD but like LSD, so I said, great let’s go.
Went off with them willingly and enthusiastically. Like the two girls in "Taken."
They explained to me as best my high school French understood that their house was out in the suburbs of Paris. I thought it was funny that Paris even had suburbs. We went to my hotel to get my stuff, then rode the train out to their house, this big empty house in a town a long way out on the train line.
1966 "suburban" Paris, a small quiet town, all the houses had huge fences, private.
We walked about a block from the train to this two-story brick and stone house surrounded by a 10 foot fence, and a yard with trees. You entered through a gate.
I was a 17 year old girl hooked up and ready to party.
No virgin, a 17 year old Southern California natural blond tanned girl with an early anorexic body and Polish curves -- probably some kind of fantasy come true for these French guys, but I was really unaware of being sexy at that time. I was just natural in a sundress and sandals and little else sitting in this kitchen outside Paris drinking wine and eating something home cooked with these two French guys and then taking this drug thinking we would just party like the hippies in L.A.
. . .
"Hey, this isn't at all like LSD," is one of the last things I said before I just fell asleep. I woke up locked in a bedroom upstairs, groggy, and then for days they would come in and have sex with me, usually while I just laid there. Whether I wanted to or not, and they kept feeding me the drug.
Somewhere in the middle of the first night it segued from consensual sex to forced... I hate to have to admit that.
How this story ties in with the pedophile priest stories here at City of Angels is the lack of boundaries I had, at seventeen, going off with two strange guys in Paris France in the first place, my body already this thing that just gave in to sex, wherever or whatever.
Also, the way I escaped from these two guys is a direct tie to the experience, as it was a miracle.
A genuine miracle.
**************
A few days in, strangely, my door wasn’t locked and I heard men talking downstairs, so I crept to the top of, then tiptoed down a few steps to listen. In the living room the two guys who were drugging me were in an animated conversation with two men who looked and sounded Arabic. I crept down lower and peaked at them.
It was hard to understand the Parisian French but I understood enough to know they were describing me, how it felt to touch my skin, the Skin! They kept repeating it, “le peau le teint.”
And they talked about money.
I shivered there on the stairs realizing, “They’re selling me to the Arabs.”
And I freaked.
Got to get outta here.
I listened longer, understood a little more, enough to know the deal was done and I was going to end up someplace like a harem in Saudi Arabia in a few hours. (This was 1969.)
Then all the guys left, without even checking on me, which was weird. Looking back now, maybe they’d been up in the bedroom earlier while I was drugged and knocked out, and didn't realize they hadn’t locked the door when they left, and then they didn't want to make the Arab guys wait ...
So the French guys left without checking on me and I knew I had no more than a few minutes to get out of that house.
I had this big white suitcase with all the clothes a 17-year-old girl carries with them. I lugged that Samsonite down the stairs. In every room on the ground floor the windows were nailed shut. I ran to the kitchen and checked and all the doors of course the doors were all all locked, they had me locked in.
The windows nailed shut, all the doors locked except one, the door that led to the basement.
So I dragged the huge white suitcase (this was pre-plastic, it was HEAVY) behind me down the narrow basement staircase in that old French country now suburban house.
In the basement there were laundry tubs, huge vat-like sinks, and above one tub was one small window at ground level.
These laundry basins were huge, like they could hold sheets or curtains to wash by hand a century ago. I saw I could climb up the ceramic and then crawl through that one window. That tiny window. I climbed up and barely pulled myself through, then went to pull out the suitcase and get us to freedom.
But the suitcase was too big.
Remember I was a 17 year old girl from L.A. and I wasn’t going to leave behind all my clothes. So I pulled and pulled and pulled and the suitcase was just plain larger than the window. This was a stone mortar brick building, nothing was going to give but I kept pulling and pulling trying to get the suitcase through.
Then there was a BLLLLLLNNNNNNGGGG sound.
It came with the wind through the trees. There are even angelic voices in the sound as I remember it today.
Whatever, there was a BLLLLNNNNGGG and the suitcase came through the window. The solid 1960s pre-plastic quality Samsonite bulging suitcase came through the century old too small tiny window, which was surrounded by brick and stone wall surrounded by more brick and stone wall.
I was able to pull the suitcase through and get out of there. The too big suitcase came through the too small window and I got away.
It was a miracle. Looking back on it, that's the only way to explain it.
Then I had to climb a tree and throw the suitcase over the fence then jump down myself. I scrambled in the direction I could hear the train, and got to the station, got out of the block before the two French guys came back with the Arabs.
I got away.
If I hadn't gotten away I probably would have ended up like the teenage girls in the movie "Taken," sold as merchandise to some oil magnate shiek.
***********
The Miracle
Later in life I realized that while I was being "sexualized" by a Catholic priest at age five in 1953, God must have looked down and said, this girl is going to have a lot of trouble in life. So God or whoever that is dispatched a couple of extra angels down to watch over me. And that's how I got out of that house outside Paris where the two French guys were getting ready to sell me to the Arabs.
It's the main reason I say it’s a wonder I made it to age 19.
*****
But watching "Taken" last week made me sick. Good movie, but it made me sick.
Or maybe it was the Carl's Junior burger from the day before.
************
There was a man at the train station that day outside Paris, when I escaped, and I also now think of that man as some kind of an angel in connection to the experience.
I must have looked pretty disheveled, drugged, scared, shaking, but trying to act cool. This older French man sat next to me and he asked if I needed help. He asked something like well how much can you pay for a hotel and started reaching in his pocket. I reached in my suitcase and pulled out this wad of American Express checks I had with me and he was amazed, stopped reaching for his wallet and said, "Well then in that case you should go to the Hilton Hotel, the new Hilton they just built downtown, the Paris Hilton, it's just for Americans, to make them feel at home," and I thought yeah good idea.
I wonder why the two French guys who kidnapped me didn't steal the American Express checks. Maybe they were going to have me sign them later... I don't know, but all my checks were still in the white suitcase.
I took the train to downtown Paris, checked into the brand new Paris Hilton, where everyone was going overboard to do everything American, just like they portrayed on Mad Men Season Two a few months back ...
It felt so good to feel the American-ness of the Paris Hilton Hotel that day. On my way to my room I wanted to get a magazine. All I could find, or all I saw in English was an issue of Playboy.
I went to my room and luxuriated, and with room service a couple of nights, recovered from the “trauma” as we’d call it today. I was alone at age 17, achy in a hotel room from several days of involuntary sex, shaking but not really even thinking about the Arab guys. I already had developed practiced PTSD techniques and was using them now to rush away from the experience and not look at it closely.
As always, going faster than the speed of life, in order to avoide looking at it.
Don't think I ever even thought about the way I almost got sold to the Arabs again until soon after my daughter was born, in 1989 or 1990. Then I started writing it and writing it over and over trying to form it into a literary work. Like this time, yet again.
It was twenty years later when I had a baby that I slowed down enough to realize what had happened to be in Paris in 1966.
I got a trip to Europe for my high school graduation present.
After escaping, I found nurturing and comfort there in the Paris Hilton Hotel in 1969, diving into the pages of Playboy Magazine.
********
Considering I'm just one of thousands of adult victims of pedophile priests, I wonder how many other women ended up in dangerous situations
Even dead
due to sexual compulsions they would never have had, if they hadn't been aroused as a growing child...
And it's no leap of faith to say a lot of the victims did not make it far into adulthood...
.
Repressed Memory Scoffers lose in Shanley Case, Boston
Former Catholic priest’s bid for new trial rejected
Boston Globe, January 16, 2010 - The state’s high court yesterday upheld the sexual assault convictions of former Roman Catholic priest Paul M. Shanley, who claimed he was wrongly accused by a man who fabricated memories of being abused as a child. Shanley was a key figure in the ... *&@+^&^^S!!!X(%@& %*@^!
FABRICATED MEMORIES!!!????
Just wish people would stop to think-
HOW HORRIBLE
the experience must have been
for us as children
to have had to suppress it in the first place.
-ke
Former Catholic priest’s bid for new trial rejected
Boston Globe, January 16, 2010 - The state’s high court yesterday upheld the sexual assault convictions of former Roman Catholic priest Paul M. Shanley, who claimed he was wrongly accused by a man who fabricated memories of being abused as a child. Shanley was a key figure in the ... *&@+^&^^S!!!X(%@& %*@^!
FABRICATED MEMORIES!!!????
Just wish people would stop to think-
HOW HORRIBLE
the experience must have been
for us as children
to have had to suppress it in the first place.
-ke
Sunday, January 17, 2010
My first B--- J-- was on camera
,
(Story In draft stages)
Back then you had to go north of the city or east, into the desert, to get to the really hot dehydrating dry air. You'd step out of a car from L.A. and step into it and really feel the difference. Sniff the wind, brown brush and scrappy trees all around, sandy dirt instead of soil, but since you're still near the Oasis of L.A. there’s greenery.
And then the mansion. In the middle of this desert scruff of North San Fernando Valley in 1969, was a futuristic structure. Apparently no one lived there. It had two pools, we shot most of the shoot inside at the indoor pool, I think we took pills, drank, smoked "pot," as we did on all the shoots.
They would call Pretty Girl International on Sunset Bouleard and say, send over two males and a female, or female with two burly males...
In the lounge that was the PGI waiting area, would be males and females, thrust across couches and tables, waiting for a call to work. We'd be dispatched out of those Crossroads of the World offices throughout the day. You registered with them, then waited, either at home or in their offices, for jobs to come in.
Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard.
Right next door to Blessed Sacrament Church, in fact the architecture reveals the structure was probably once part of the church structure, earlier in the 1900s.
I think I worked out of PGI, with the church right outside the window*, every day for about six months, or almost every day.
And must have looked out the window and seen Blessed Sacrament Church and its tower. In fact, the priests in the church probably looked out their windows at all the people in the PGI offices waiting for pornography work.
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
The female and male in the party and I got more languorous as the day proceeded, as we performed our fake sex setups on camera, then took breaks to swim in the pool and drink cocktails, and smoke...
Somehow in the midst of it, you're convinced you're doing something luxurious and elegant, if not artistic. That's how a normal person explains doing porn. An adult victim of a pedophile priest alone in Hollywood age 18 in 1969 was responding to a different set of compulsions.
That was me.
The guy who’d driven us out to this ranch home north of L.A. at one point came out to the pool ready to do more work. He told the male and me to go outside so we could shoot something in the sunlight.
Off away from the house, Male and I were on this blanket doing “art” shots and then the driver-director gave me instructions.
“Put it in your mouth.”
“What?! Put it- what? I never heard of that. Did you ever hear of that?”
Male's response was a lot more enthusiastic than mine. "Uh, yeah, people do it."
I'd never even heard of oral sex before, maybe heard the word Blow job but wasn't sure what it meant. You mean it? Really? I have to do that? He said, yeah.
He aggressively said, yeah.
Then directed it. And I did what he said to do...
****
How did I end up doing porn when I was really a talented actor with potential for a real career, back then in 1969, when it happened, why did it happen?
I remember the scene that began it.
I was in a play, a kind of silly play, a musical, at a theater in Burbank, but I got good reviews. Then my sister, the older sister who is the other victim of Father Horne in our family, showed up for one of the performances. Afterwards she came backstage, came up to me and said,
“I don't know why you are working on a career like this, considering what we are.”
Or something like that.
She said something like that.
And I knew she was right. I knew exactly what she meant and she was right.
Next day in a kind of fugue state, I called the theater and cancelled, told them to replace me with my understudy, then called Pretty Girl International on Sunset Boulevard, because I'd seen their ads in Daily Variety, and I started doing the new X-rated modeling.
By the time I got to this photo shoot in what may today be Thousand Oaks or Agoura Hills, I was still in this kind of mesmerized state.
Whatever Patricia was referring to when she said, “considering what we are,” I got it, deep inside I got it, and next day I was performing in porn.
Ruined my career.
.
* As soon as it stops raining, going to head down Sunset Boulevard and get a photo of Crossroads of the World next door to Blessed Sacrament Church, to post here.
* I FOUND A PICTURE: HERE it is and video is coming
I remember, we sat in this upstairs waiting room, and when I went to the building recently to look at it, you can see that from that upstairs waiting room, you are looking out a window right at Blessed Sacrament Church. So I must have been listening to their belfry ring every hour and seen the priests and parishioners.
In this picture you see, the church tower and Crossroads Tower are right next to each other.
But swear to God, I do not remember ever seeing a church there, in all those days I would go to PGI right next door...
The quality of video is awful, still going to go back and get better footage. There is also a statue in the Crossroads that must have once been on the church grounds...
Part of history of mass produced pornography, Pretty Girl International casting agency, was in Crossroads of the World shopping center in 1969. Eerily for me as a pedophile priest rape survivor who became promiscuous and went into porn working through that agency, the Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard sits directly next door, even shares some architecture, with the Crossroads building.
I'm not saying there is a connection between the church and the porn agency, except in my story, as I must have been staring out the window at Blessed Sacrament Church while lining up pornography work in 1969 at Pretty Girl International agency in the building next door.
On Sunset Boulevard.
Strange.
(Took the videos down, they are SO BAD. Going to reshoot them, when it stops raining....)
(Story In draft stages)
Back then you had to go north of the city or east, into the desert, to get to the really hot dehydrating dry air. You'd step out of a car from L.A. and step into it and really feel the difference. Sniff the wind, brown brush and scrappy trees all around, sandy dirt instead of soil, but since you're still near the Oasis of L.A. there’s greenery.
And then the mansion. In the middle of this desert scruff of North San Fernando Valley in 1969, was a futuristic structure. Apparently no one lived there. It had two pools, we shot most of the shoot inside at the indoor pool, I think we took pills, drank, smoked "pot," as we did on all the shoots.
They would call Pretty Girl International on Sunset Bouleard and say, send over two males and a female, or female with two burly males...
In the lounge that was the PGI waiting area, would be males and females, thrust across couches and tables, waiting for a call to work. We'd be dispatched out of those Crossroads of the World offices throughout the day. You registered with them, then waited, either at home or in their offices, for jobs to come in.
Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard.
Right next door to Blessed Sacrament Church, in fact the architecture reveals the structure was probably once part of the church structure, earlier in the 1900s.
I think I worked out of PGI, with the church right outside the window*, every day for about six months, or almost every day.
And must have looked out the window and seen Blessed Sacrament Church and its tower. In fact, the priests in the church probably looked out their windows at all the people in the PGI offices waiting for pornography work.
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
The female and male in the party and I got more languorous as the day proceeded, as we performed our fake sex setups on camera, then took breaks to swim in the pool and drink cocktails, and smoke...
Somehow in the midst of it, you're convinced you're doing something luxurious and elegant, if not artistic. That's how a normal person explains doing porn. An adult victim of a pedophile priest alone in Hollywood age 18 in 1969 was responding to a different set of compulsions.
That was me.
The guy who’d driven us out to this ranch home north of L.A. at one point came out to the pool ready to do more work. He told the male and me to go outside so we could shoot something in the sunlight.
Off away from the house, Male and I were on this blanket doing “art” shots and then the driver-director gave me instructions.
“Put it in your mouth.”
“What?! Put it- what? I never heard of that. Did you ever hear of that?”
Male's response was a lot more enthusiastic than mine. "Uh, yeah, people do it."
I'd never even heard of oral sex before, maybe heard the word Blow job but wasn't sure what it meant. You mean it? Really? I have to do that? He said, yeah.
He aggressively said, yeah.
Then directed it. And I did what he said to do...
****
How did I end up doing porn when I was really a talented actor with potential for a real career, back then in 1969, when it happened, why did it happen?
I remember the scene that began it.
I was in a play, a kind of silly play, a musical, at a theater in Burbank, but I got good reviews. Then my sister, the older sister who is the other victim of Father Horne in our family, showed up for one of the performances. Afterwards she came backstage, came up to me and said,
“I don't know why you are working on a career like this, considering what we are.”
Or something like that.
She said something like that.
And I knew she was right. I knew exactly what she meant and she was right.
Next day in a kind of fugue state, I called the theater and cancelled, told them to replace me with my understudy, then called Pretty Girl International on Sunset Boulevard, because I'd seen their ads in Daily Variety, and I started doing the new X-rated modeling.
By the time I got to this photo shoot in what may today be Thousand Oaks or Agoura Hills, I was still in this kind of mesmerized state.
Whatever Patricia was referring to when she said, “considering what we are,” I got it, deep inside I got it, and next day I was performing in porn.
Ruined my career.
.
* As soon as it stops raining, going to head down Sunset Boulevard and get a photo of Crossroads of the World next door to Blessed Sacrament Church, to post here.
* I FOUND A PICTURE: HERE it is and video is comingI remember, we sat in this upstairs waiting room, and when I went to the building recently to look at it, you can see that from that upstairs waiting room, you are looking out a window right at Blessed Sacrament Church. So I must have been listening to their belfry ring every hour and seen the priests and parishioners.
In this picture you see, the church tower and Crossroads Tower are right next to each other.
But swear to God, I do not remember ever seeing a church there, in all those days I would go to PGI right next door...
The quality of video is awful, still going to go back and get better footage. There is also a statue in the Crossroads that must have once been on the church grounds...
Part of history of mass produced pornography, Pretty Girl International casting agency, was in Crossroads of the World shopping center in 1969. Eerily for me as a pedophile priest rape survivor who became promiscuous and went into porn working through that agency, the Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard sits directly next door, even shares some architecture, with the Crossroads building.
I'm not saying there is a connection between the church and the porn agency, except in my story, as I must have been staring out the window at Blessed Sacrament Church while lining up pornography work in 1969 at Pretty Girl International agency in the building next door.
On Sunset Boulevard.
Strange.
(Took the videos down, they are SO BAD. Going to reshoot them, when it stops raining....)
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Soylent Green continues to come to life in L.A.
.
(Draft, not final, still in editing stages)
L.A. continues to bring the Soylent Green story to life.
It’s really strange to be reading the book “Make Room, Make Room” while living in a city where it seems to be coming to life. The book was the basis of the movie Soylent Green and describes a New York where it is always hot, people live on the sidewalks, there is a water shortage.
I entered the Carl’s Junior on Sixth Street in a state of somewhat hypnosis, having seen the ad for their new burger now maybe five hundred times in the past two weeks. I'm convinced I want to eat this huge double patty of beef, and when I reach the counter I realize, hey it’s only a little bit more to get the “meal deal,” with fries and a Coke.
Chewing the meal as I read.
The familiar ground meal, not much different from the first McDonald’s burger I ever ate back in the 1960s. Even then that young I marveled at the similarity to beef in the flavor.
Not really beef, just really a lot like beef.
I'm chewing the burger as I read the first reference to Soylent in the book Harry Harrison wrote in the 1960s, a book that seems to predict everything that's happening today, with over population, riots and shortages, and the heat- never ending heat like we have in L.A. in 2010.
The sci fi futuristic movie with those scenes I never forgot.
Chuck Connors as the Cop leaves his hovel of an apartment in the morning and has to step over people sprawled on the doorstep, humans living on the streets, even children. They're unbathed, unfed, thirsty, and the government supplies them with just enough food water and cash to stay alive at that horrible level of existence. Meanwhile all over the city, resources are running out.
When you saw the movie in 1973 the idea of people in the United States living on sidewalks was astounding, astonishing, something you would never see. Now walk down a street in the part of L.A. just east of where I live, and you see people who’ve set up housekeeping in alleys, behind bus benches.
And the heat. The heat that never stops in the movie, is also described in the book, the condition of living with a water shortage that prevents people from bathing, while the temperature never goes below ninety degrees so you are constantly sweating, even at night.
So you always have this layer of dried crust on your skin.
We're not too far from that living condition right now in Los Angeles, just a few years away the way things are going.
I put down the book so I could concentrate on my big treat lunch out. I’d gone to the courthouse a few blocks away for a hearing that was on calendar on the internet but off calendar when I got to the courtroom. I didn't want the entire trip to be a waste, so decided it was time to extend my frame of experience.
Time to go to the Clerk’s office on the third floor to get a copies of documents. The last year or so I’ve been so broke, even the fifty cents a page to get copies of public documents was out of the question.
Honest.
Hopefully those days are over now that I'm working all the time and I can even stop for lunch after the hearings. Apparently I’ve got a reputation for being the fastest transcriptionist in reality TV production, I seem to have almost more work than I can keep up with.
Honest.
I thought for a while that Cardinal Mahony had used PI’s and PR consultants or whatever and found out the company I work for, then found a way to steer mounds of work to that company, just to keep me so busy I couldn't keep on writing City of Angels blog. If so, Mahony didn't take into consideration my many manias, one of which is workaholism and an obsessive need to get a job done no matter what I have to do to do it.
Okay.
I'm in Carl's Junior chewing the ground meal, whatever it is, it has become a familiar part of the American palate. If you let the burger sit and get to room temperature then take a bite, you can taste the difference, the meal, and the beef flavoring added to the meal.
I'm cogitating the chew and listening to the babble of languages around me. Korean, Japanese, several dialects of Spanish, and even a few Americans, some with white trash mangling a conversation with an Ebonics speaker were just to my right, arguing over who spent the night last night with who and how much ketchup do you plan to use.
To my left are two very enthusiastic young men, Korean descent, inhaling burgers and fries with a practiced finesse, they know exactly where to put the ketchup in the little cardboard container, exactly how to fold the wrapping over the sandwich so they can take massive bites without getting paper in their mouth. In a Spanglish version of Korean and English they are barking back and forth to each other, barely have their bottoms in their seats, their level of energy is so high. They shove this greased protein down with salt and fries and run back out in the commission sales world in which these young Koreans thrive.
I wonder if people in Iraq eat mystery burgers, for package deals at five dollars a pop.
In the Carl’s Junior windowed room looking out on a parking lot and Sixth Street, the lot across the street advertises several services necessary in the neighborhood, such as “Bed Bugs? Call ----"
Okay, I'm this little old white lady who is the foreigner in L.A. today. Most little old white ladies moved to Burbank or Long Beach at least a decade ago. But I have this affinity with Sunset Boulevard and the way the hills roll in on each other. I don't want to get too far away from it. I thank god for the stretch of Hollywood Boulevard that runs parallel along just the parts of Sunset that a person doesn't want to walk on today, so you can take that detour, then return to Sunset at Fairfax, where the hills really begin to start rolling.
That West Hollywood section used to be the part of Sunset Boulevard to which I had the most affinity, but today it’s a strange glitch of metropolis.
There’s no freeway or transit going out to Beverly Hills on Sunset Boulevard, it’s like transportation froze in time with the original street that runs from downtown to the ocean. Sunset Boulevard winds and winds through the mansions of Belair, with no easy way to get there, other than to take the slow winding road, Sunset Boulevard.
As a result the West Hollywood area that used to be the Jiving Sunset Strip is now kind of decaying. The buildings have peeled paint, there’s a lot of trash, a lot of window sized “FOR LEASE” signs on the office buildings.
Plus for some reason the folding hills are working against the boulevard. You can’t get a breath of fresh air. The gazillion cars running within those square miles are all burning cheap gas and the exhaust is going nowhere, just sitting there folded into the hills. There’s so much gas in the air when you walk on Sunset Boulevard from Fairfax to La Cienega that you almost can’t even breathe.
Sometimes I don't know where to go. I just come home and go back to playing Space Station, just have food work clothes furniture - everything delivered and communicate with the other humans via electrons.
.
(Draft, not final, still in editing stages)
L.A. continues to bring the Soylent Green story to life.
It’s really strange to be reading the book “Make Room, Make Room” while living in a city where it seems to be coming to life. The book was the basis of the movie Soylent Green and describes a New York where it is always hot, people live on the sidewalks, there is a water shortage.
I entered the Carl’s Junior on Sixth Street in a state of somewhat hypnosis, having seen the ad for their new burger now maybe five hundred times in the past two weeks. I'm convinced I want to eat this huge double patty of beef, and when I reach the counter I realize, hey it’s only a little bit more to get the “meal deal,” with fries and a Coke.
Chewing the meal as I read.
The familiar ground meal, not much different from the first McDonald’s burger I ever ate back in the 1960s. Even then that young I marveled at the similarity to beef in the flavor.
Not really beef, just really a lot like beef.
I'm chewing the burger as I read the first reference to Soylent in the book Harry Harrison wrote in the 1960s, a book that seems to predict everything that's happening today, with over population, riots and shortages, and the heat- never ending heat like we have in L.A. in 2010.
The sci fi futuristic movie with those scenes I never forgot.
Chuck Connors as the Cop leaves his hovel of an apartment in the morning and has to step over people sprawled on the doorstep, humans living on the streets, even children. They're unbathed, unfed, thirsty, and the government supplies them with just enough food water and cash to stay alive at that horrible level of existence. Meanwhile all over the city, resources are running out.
When you saw the movie in 1973 the idea of people in the United States living on sidewalks was astounding, astonishing, something you would never see. Now walk down a street in the part of L.A. just east of where I live, and you see people who’ve set up housekeeping in alleys, behind bus benches.
And the heat. The heat that never stops in the movie, is also described in the book, the condition of living with a water shortage that prevents people from bathing, while the temperature never goes below ninety degrees so you are constantly sweating, even at night.
So you always have this layer of dried crust on your skin.
We're not too far from that living condition right now in Los Angeles, just a few years away the way things are going.
I put down the book so I could concentrate on my big treat lunch out. I’d gone to the courthouse a few blocks away for a hearing that was on calendar on the internet but off calendar when I got to the courtroom. I didn't want the entire trip to be a waste, so decided it was time to extend my frame of experience.
Time to go to the Clerk’s office on the third floor to get a copies of documents. The last year or so I’ve been so broke, even the fifty cents a page to get copies of public documents was out of the question.
Honest.
Hopefully those days are over now that I'm working all the time and I can even stop for lunch after the hearings. Apparently I’ve got a reputation for being the fastest transcriptionist in reality TV production, I seem to have almost more work than I can keep up with.
Honest.
I thought for a while that Cardinal Mahony had used PI’s and PR consultants or whatever and found out the company I work for, then found a way to steer mounds of work to that company, just to keep me so busy I couldn't keep on writing City of Angels blog. If so, Mahony didn't take into consideration my many manias, one of which is workaholism and an obsessive need to get a job done no matter what I have to do to do it.
Okay.
I'm in Carl's Junior chewing the ground meal, whatever it is, it has become a familiar part of the American palate. If you let the burger sit and get to room temperature then take a bite, you can taste the difference, the meal, and the beef flavoring added to the meal.
I'm cogitating the chew and listening to the babble of languages around me. Korean, Japanese, several dialects of Spanish, and even a few Americans, some with white trash mangling a conversation with an Ebonics speaker were just to my right, arguing over who spent the night last night with who and how much ketchup do you plan to use.
To my left are two very enthusiastic young men, Korean descent, inhaling burgers and fries with a practiced finesse, they know exactly where to put the ketchup in the little cardboard container, exactly how to fold the wrapping over the sandwich so they can take massive bites without getting paper in their mouth. In a Spanglish version of Korean and English they are barking back and forth to each other, barely have their bottoms in their seats, their level of energy is so high. They shove this greased protein down with salt and fries and run back out in the commission sales world in which these young Koreans thrive.
I wonder if people in Iraq eat mystery burgers, for package deals at five dollars a pop.
In the Carl’s Junior windowed room looking out on a parking lot and Sixth Street, the lot across the street advertises several services necessary in the neighborhood, such as “Bed Bugs? Call ----"
Okay, I'm this little old white lady who is the foreigner in L.A. today. Most little old white ladies moved to Burbank or Long Beach at least a decade ago. But I have this affinity with Sunset Boulevard and the way the hills roll in on each other. I don't want to get too far away from it. I thank god for the stretch of Hollywood Boulevard that runs parallel along just the parts of Sunset that a person doesn't want to walk on today, so you can take that detour, then return to Sunset at Fairfax, where the hills really begin to start rolling.
That West Hollywood section used to be the part of Sunset Boulevard to which I had the most affinity, but today it’s a strange glitch of metropolis.
There’s no freeway or transit going out to Beverly Hills on Sunset Boulevard, it’s like transportation froze in time with the original street that runs from downtown to the ocean. Sunset Boulevard winds and winds through the mansions of Belair, with no easy way to get there, other than to take the slow winding road, Sunset Boulevard.
As a result the West Hollywood area that used to be the Jiving Sunset Strip is now kind of decaying. The buildings have peeled paint, there’s a lot of trash, a lot of window sized “FOR LEASE” signs on the office buildings.Plus for some reason the folding hills are working against the boulevard. You can’t get a breath of fresh air. The gazillion cars running within those square miles are all burning cheap gas and the exhaust is going nowhere, just sitting there folded into the hills. There’s so much gas in the air when you walk on Sunset Boulevard from Fairfax to La Cienega that you almost can’t even breathe.
Sometimes I don't know where to go. I just come home and go back to playing Space Station, just have food work clothes furniture - everything delivered and communicate with the other humans via electrons.
.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Dear Charlie Sheen
I think you would get this story. Because you were raised in an oppressive Catholic family and then grew up to be a sex addict with other bizarre behavioral symptoms, I think you would understand the need to get the story told of the pedophile priests in the United States, by someone outside the Catholic Church or mainstream media. See I’ve been watching your performance in public, not as a fan, I'm more your dad’s age, but as one of the survivors of pedophile priest rape who’s been paying attention to the issue nationally. Charlie, you show all the signs of being one of us. I'm just waiting for you now to be clean and sober finally for two years in a row and experience the recovered memory that many of us have, of one of those Jesuits your dad hangs out with taking you around behind the altar one day and banging you. It usually takes a period of sobriety first before remembering something like that
I think you would get this story. Because you were raised in an oppressive Catholic family and then grew up to be a sex addict with other bizarre behavioral symptoms, I think you would understand the need to get the story told of the pedophile priests in the United States, by someone outside the Catholic Church or mainstream media. See I’ve been watching your performance in public, not as a fan, I'm more your dad’s age, but as one of the survivors of pedophile priest rape who’s been paying attention to the issue nationally. Charlie, you show all the signs of being one of us. I'm just waiting for you now to be clean and sober finally for two years in a row and experience the recovered memory that many of us have, of one of those Jesuits your dad hangs out with taking you around behind the altar one day and banging you. It usually takes a period of sobriety first before remembering something like that
Friday, January 8, 2010
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner.
.
(FIRST DRAFT)
My two aunts on the Ebeling side both had soprano speaking voices. Shrieking might be a better word for how they talked. Both of them were more effective than most females in families of the 1940s and '50s because they could send their words out like a sword, shrilly piercing over whatever other conversation was going on.
“If you sing before breakfast you'll cry before dinner, haven’t you ever heard that expression?” I had come down from the tower to the kitchen in the morning and found my mom and my aunt there, and I'd been singing all the way down the winding stairs--
Tower.
Yes, the house outside Bartlett had a tower, and a ballroom. It was this huge rundown mansion my dad bought, fixed up, and then flipped, then we moved again.
The tower had a winding staircase what would be three flights, you’d climb round and round on this staircase and at the top was my playroom. At the top of the tower with -Wow, as I write this I can even see it, sun like the Chicago area sun, always behind a layer of clouds, so the air has a gray glow. Look out the tower window and you can see the garage, the ground, in the back of the house, kitchen stairs where Father Horne stands-
Father Horne at the back door in regular man clothes, not priest clothes...
Side trip.
“Sing before breakfast, Cry before dinner,” my Aunt Ruth lilted an octave above high C. “Haven’t you ever heard that expression before? Haven’t you? Huh? Huh?”
She was trying to get something out of me. Probably “What's wrong with you, why are you acting this way,” because the previous day I’d been really weird…
Now I walked into this morning kitchen, and singing was a way to cover something else up, and I knew my aunt wanted me to bring it out and say the thing, but instead I… internalized. That's a big word, not the word I'd use back then, but the one I use now to describe it. It’s like folding over mud, packing a layer of mud down on something to bury it.
Bury it good.
My mom was standing to the side, straight stiff, and I stood with my mouth gaping open, not saying a word. For now I'd also stopped singing.
“Sing before breakfast cry before dinner, huh? Huh? Huh? What do you think that means, huh?"
She's reaching to me and I'm going away too fast for her to get me. The layers of mud are down now, packed, and I can’t budge. That morning must have been around the beginning of the buried memory. Because that house with the tower and the ballroom and the three-car garage, we moved from it into Bartlett, the town, when I was six-seven, then moved from there to Los Angeles the summer I turned eight.
*************
Sunset Boulevard was one of the first rides we took when we moved to L.A. in 1955.
“This is it, the Sunset Strip,” my dad gestured as we got to the 8000 and 9000 block of the road that starts downtown and goes all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
My dad put his hand back on the steering wheel then pointed again. “There's, Dino’s, the night club, see that’s Dean Martin’s place, Dino’s. Yeah, we're in the middle of it all now.” My dad and mom in the front seat, I'm in the back my nose to the window.
And what I see as we drive along Sunset Strip is a little girl, maybe thirteen, not an adult, a pre-teen aged kid. She’s wearing a long coat. Everyone is wearing coats. It used to get cold in Los Angeles.
Side trip.
She’s a teenage girl, wearing a Midwest style coat and hat, and carrying a suitcase, and she’s SINGING. Singing at the top of her lungs as she walks along the sidewalk, making heads turn, people are looking at her, people are laughing as she walks past them.
She’s walking down Sunset Strip about 13 years old, carrying a suitcase, and singing, singing as she walks, singing at the top of her lungs.
And dressed in a long coat like she’s from small town Illinois.
That was one of the first things I saw when I was eight years old in 1955 and we arrived in L.A. and took a drive down Sunset Boulevard.
*************
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner. An amazing bit of psychological insight on the part of my aunt, who was born in about 1913 and had yet to hear the word psychiatry in 1953.
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner.
That sums up my whole bipolar existence. The days I'm singing in the morning, I'm probly going to be wailing in the afternoon.
"Mom, you're bipolar," my daughter says to me.
"I know, isn't it wonderful?" And then I laugh out loud, this long rolling laugh that involves my whole body and usually ends with a rush of endorphins like you wouldn't believe.
A laugh so loud and deep, no one can argue with me.
.
(FIRST DRAFT)
My two aunts on the Ebeling side both had soprano speaking voices. Shrieking might be a better word for how they talked. Both of them were more effective than most females in families of the 1940s and '50s because they could send their words out like a sword, shrilly piercing over whatever other conversation was going on.
“If you sing before breakfast you'll cry before dinner, haven’t you ever heard that expression?” I had come down from the tower to the kitchen in the morning and found my mom and my aunt there, and I'd been singing all the way down the winding stairs--
Tower.
Yes, the house outside Bartlett had a tower, and a ballroom. It was this huge rundown mansion my dad bought, fixed up, and then flipped, then we moved again.
The tower had a winding staircase what would be three flights, you’d climb round and round on this staircase and at the top was my playroom. At the top of the tower with -Wow, as I write this I can even see it, sun like the Chicago area sun, always behind a layer of clouds, so the air has a gray glow. Look out the tower window and you can see the garage, the ground, in the back of the house, kitchen stairs where Father Horne stands-
Father Horne at the back door in regular man clothes, not priest clothes...
Side trip.
“Sing before breakfast, Cry before dinner,” my Aunt Ruth lilted an octave above high C. “Haven’t you ever heard that expression before? Haven’t you? Huh? Huh?”
She was trying to get something out of me. Probably “What's wrong with you, why are you acting this way,” because the previous day I’d been really weird…
Now I walked into this morning kitchen, and singing was a way to cover something else up, and I knew my aunt wanted me to bring it out and say the thing, but instead I… internalized. That's a big word, not the word I'd use back then, but the one I use now to describe it. It’s like folding over mud, packing a layer of mud down on something to bury it.
Bury it good.
My mom was standing to the side, straight stiff, and I stood with my mouth gaping open, not saying a word. For now I'd also stopped singing.
“Sing before breakfast cry before dinner, huh? Huh? Huh? What do you think that means, huh?"
She's reaching to me and I'm going away too fast for her to get me. The layers of mud are down now, packed, and I can’t budge. That morning must have been around the beginning of the buried memory. Because that house with the tower and the ballroom and the three-car garage, we moved from it into Bartlett, the town, when I was six-seven, then moved from there to Los Angeles the summer I turned eight.
*************
Sunset Boulevard was one of the first rides we took when we moved to L.A. in 1955.
“This is it, the Sunset Strip,” my dad gestured as we got to the 8000 and 9000 block of the road that starts downtown and goes all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
My dad put his hand back on the steering wheel then pointed again. “There's, Dino’s, the night club, see that’s Dean Martin’s place, Dino’s. Yeah, we're in the middle of it all now.” My dad and mom in the front seat, I'm in the back my nose to the window.
And what I see as we drive along Sunset Strip is a little girl, maybe thirteen, not an adult, a pre-teen aged kid. She’s wearing a long coat. Everyone is wearing coats. It used to get cold in Los Angeles.
Side trip.
She’s a teenage girl, wearing a Midwest style coat and hat, and carrying a suitcase, and she’s SINGING. Singing at the top of her lungs as she walks along the sidewalk, making heads turn, people are looking at her, people are laughing as she walks past them.
She’s walking down Sunset Strip about 13 years old, carrying a suitcase, and singing, singing as she walks, singing at the top of her lungs.
And dressed in a long coat like she’s from small town Illinois.
That was one of the first things I saw when I was eight years old in 1955 and we arrived in L.A. and took a drive down Sunset Boulevard.
*************
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner. An amazing bit of psychological insight on the part of my aunt, who was born in about 1913 and had yet to hear the word psychiatry in 1953.
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner.
That sums up my whole bipolar existence. The days I'm singing in the morning, I'm probly going to be wailing in the afternoon.
"Mom, you're bipolar," my daughter says to me.
"I know, isn't it wonderful?" And then I laugh out loud, this long rolling laugh that involves my whole body and usually ends with a rush of endorphins like you wouldn't believe.
A laugh so loud and deep, no one can argue with me.
.
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