Waiting for Bardo

“His creative temperature seems to oscillate between Emily Bronte at one extreme and Flannery O’Connor at the other. He doesn’t think like a male; he thinks like a woman who thinks like a male. On his easier days, he was Healthcliff. If you crossed him, he was the girl with the dragon tattoo. No matter how you twisted it, he was a funnel cloud. And nobody saw this. Nobody had a clue because he had always channeled it into some kind of creative work.

“I said to him one night in the mid-90s: ‘Know what, Boo Boo? These songs of yours are so incredibly tender. And way down there deep, you might be the single most bitter person I ever met.

‘He turned white and said in the coldest voice I ever heard, “Please do not ever call me that again because I’m afraid that one day I might lose it.”

I pitched a glass of flat Dr. Pepper in his face and said, “Who died and made you Edgar Allen Poe?”

It was the wrong thing to say because it turns out they have the same birthday, which happened to be that very night. To make matters worse, the criminals who worked from that vacant corner lot on La Break had scored a few crates of Moldavan absinthe and I bought a case.

That’s when we were living in the creepy house at the bottom of a dead end, two-thirds up the shifty hill that overlooked the Golden State. Birthday, absinthe, tormented childhood. I mean, ‘Hello fucking bardo.’

We found out later that three prior residents had gone completely mad in that place. It was an eccentricly built bungalow-ish thing built into the side of the hill, of field stone and local timbre, 1924 — a middling specimen of faux craftsman. It reminded me of a painting by an artist more determined than gifted, one who wouldn’t be that sorry to hear something go bump in the driveway on the way out. WTF? Was that the muse? So they throw it in reverse and back over it again.