"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." (Caen said: "gee, I don't think Clifton likes Dave's poem ... ha!) No crap.
Old Merritt got one thing right though. I was a  lyrical bum in an alley.

When I was 19, with all the charisma of a flyswatter, I was so naive and immature for my age, if Henry Lee Lucas had offered to share a bottle of "Muskeydoodle", I would have followed him into some culvert under the Hollywood Freeway. 

FINAL CULVERT ––– The Movie.

And there's no getting around it. Believe me, I've tried. At one time I put together 23 sober fingers and toes. Then I drank and when I looked again, they'd grown into vulture claws. I'm sober again, and gratefully so. Emotional and mental illness ain't for sissies. See, because I absolutely know from experience, that living inside me in a dark cave is this quadriplegic squab thing, with pink skin, glowing red eyes, and splotches of hair in places I will never look. And this thing lives in its psychic culvert never getting enough of anything "it" thinks "I" need. It craves to "use" my arm to get a drink to my mouth. It will try any thing, whispering to me in a vocorder voice from Hades, " ... the State liquor store is just three blocks up Dave". As if I don't know that already. "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 Mad Dog 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. I was born with the tenacity of a kudzu vine. I must have been born with bulldozer genes. Thank you Creator for that. I made it because of you, and not because of me. Every psychiatrist I worked with over the years ended up saying the same thing. "David, you should be dead".

I will always be ashamed hurting people, wife, friends, strangers, even "playing" craven-artisté. A pompous ass, really. See, us old "back-when" homo-boho-hobo's writing poetry, painting, "burning the night alive," were mostly untreated mental patients housed in 8' x 10', pee-in-the-sink hotel rooms riddled with cockroaches. I can do without it.  I much prefer living in the Oregon countryside in a nice little square house made of ticky-tacky. Thank you Malvina Renolds. 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 redtail hawks.

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" of alcoholism at it's best 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 to reclaim just one more night like that. Temporary autonomy with no disapproving drones, where as total strangers we were closer than blood brothers.

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

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

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 brogan --- no doubt no doubt the work of some disgusted doctor. That wino had to hold his head to his shoulder when drinking, so as not to spill one sacred drop. And that half a bottle of Mad Dog, carefully doled out by its owner was worth more than any amount of money or fame. "Stitches" knew exactly when to bring the bottle from his jacket. You see, once a wino reaches a certain level of alcohol, only "short shots" are necessary to keep the "magic" going all night.

"Just a little now, 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 beast in me. Because there is. He never mentions the blinding sick hangovers, or broken ribs and marriage. And it never goes away. Months can pass, even years. Then I'll catch a whiff of acetaldehyde, the chilly solvent drunks exude, or pick up a line of Bull Durham mixed with "arouma of back-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. Yes!

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

I no longer entertain it at all. I have learned to hear the beast and laugh. Not at the funeral of my best friend, or Christmas Eve when other's are "getting a glow on".

Sufis say there are only "so many" sacred roles to go around. That when we leave one role for a new one, 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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