Years ago I submitted a poem to a snooty poetry magazine, and the editor went nuts on me, sending it back with this hand scrawled note:

"This stuff is the same drivel one can cull from any high school sophomore, any bored housewife making her dilettantish attempt to transcend diapers and vacuuming, any lyrical bum in an alley."

An elderly run-a-way. When I was 19, I was so naive and immature for my age, if Henry Lucas had offered to share a bottle of "Muskeydoodle" with ME, I would have joined him in some culvert under a freeway. Final Culvert.

Sketch of two pot smokers in Union Square
- San Francisco ©1987 Dave Archer

And there's no getting around it. Believe me, I've tried. At one time I put together ten sober fingers and toes.

Then I drank again, and when I looked they'd grown into vulture claws. I'm sober again, gratefully.

Emotional and mental illness ain't for sissies.

See, because I absolutely KNOW from experience, that living inside me is this fat quadriplegic squab thing, with pink skin and beady red eyes, and splotches of black hair in places that lives in a cave, and it can never get enough of anything "it" thinks "I" need. And it wants to "use" my arm to lift a drink to my mouth.

"It" wants me back at 33, in the early 70's, on a full moon night in an apple orchard in the Feather River Canyon in California where a couple of other winos and I hung all night, nursing a bottle of 20/20.

Under green, red apples and shooting stars, making half a pint last, we worked. Hunkered in weeds, not sloppy --- just so. Trading off on autoharp, singing folk songs: Black Mountain Blues, Gypsy Davy, Wild Mountain Thyme, My Young Love Came To Me. The particulars of my traumatic life are nothing to be proud of, and I am not. All this Kerouac-ing b.s. we hear today. Because I was there for the left-overs and believe me, it was no big deal, except the NEWS loved it. Beatniks were the deal. The only thing I'm proud of is that I survived, and that's nothing much to be proud of. That's existing. I have kudzu tenacity. Thank you Lord.

And I will always be ashamed that I hurt people "playing" the craven artisté art-world games.

A pompous ass, really. See, us old "back-when" boho's writing poetry today, painting, "burning the night alive," were mostly untreated mental patients, glomming off each other, housed in 8' x 10', pee-in-the-sink hotel rooms riddled with roaches. It was HORRIBLE. I much prefer living in the Oregon countryside in a nice little square house: all made out of ticky-tacky. Thank you. In my backyard I have a "private" swimming hole called Deer Creek. When I look out my kitchen window washing dishes, I see horses, sheep, cows, deer, geese, not to mention, American bald eagles, owls and redtails.

Talk about sweet.

In Malcolm Lowry's totemic novel of Mexico, "Under The Volcano," the protagonist, a drunk known as "the consul," describes the "feeling" to a friend:

"You misunderstand me if you think it is altogether darkness I see, and if you insist on thinking so, how can I tell you why I do it? But if you look at that sunlight there, ah, then perhaps you'll get the answer, see, look at the way it falls through the window: what beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?"

Sketch of wino on Market Street
- San Francisco ©1987 Dave Archer

A few lines later he adds, "How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning?"

That orchard was my old woman from Tarasco. And believe me, a wino will drink for five years for just one more night like that. Temporary autonomy with no disapproving drones around. And where as strangers we were closer than brothers, even though we weren't.

Sketch of a religious
man on Market Street
- San Francisco
©1987 Dave Archer

A wino house is made of stories. No roof, no walls, just one big window. Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry sang:

Winos drink on nicknames. One derelict had a broken arm from falling out of a boxcar. The other had a black eye and a split-lip laced up like shoe --- as by a disgusted doctor. That wino had to hold his head to his shoulder when drinking, not to spill. And that half a bottle of Mad Dog, carefully doled out by its owner was worth more than any amount of money or fame. The moon took its time. "Stitches" knew exactly when to bring the bottle from his jacket. Once a wino reaches a certain level of alcohol, only "short shots" are necessary to keep the "magic" going for hours.

"Just a little, make it last," began each round of sips.

Monkeyshines.

Just so.

Our smokes were rolled from a pouch of Bull Durham and no cigarettes ever tasted better.

And that's why I say there's a wino in me.

Because there is.

And "it" never goes away. Months can pass without a rumble, even years.

Then, wham! I'll catch a whiff of acetaldehyde, the chilly solvent drunks exude, or pick up a line of Bull Durham mixed with "alley," and a very strange thing happens. I go WOLF for five seconds while this terrible aching hunger hits me right in my poetic kisser: self destruction with an impartial witness or two.

Sketch of wino on Powell at Market
- San Francisco ©1987 Dave Archer

Yes!

No ... I just NEVER entertain it.

Sufis say there are only "so many" sacred roles to go around. That when we leave one role for another, we can never go back because someone else has already taken our place. A double depth-charge latté then, (with five sugars) to the wino who took mine.

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