After the ordeal of the my Uncle's angus ranch, including a stint in the dormitory at Santa Rosa Junior College, and even with the considerable artistic encouragement of my teachers, I became discouraged in the arts.

After my father died, I lived with an uncle and he used to say, "Why are you wasting your time on that? Shouldn't you be studying how the old masters painted in oils?"

To be fair, when I was eighteen he also sent me on a trip to see the great art of the world. A trip that included among other sites, the Louvre, the pyramids at Giza with no tourists (including being alone in King's Chamber with an arab man burning magnesium ribbon for light) and the Temple of the Gold Buddha in Thailand, for which I am eternally grateful. My painting hero however, remained Jackson Pollock. The problem with having Pollock for a role model was, that I had come to believe that in order to make it in the arts, I had somehow to "top" him. Or Picasso. To discover something new, almost like an explorer finding a new continent. Or at least, an island. By the late 60's, I was beginning to think everything in painting had already been found. How could I "top"Pollock's painting directly out of the can? This was an awful feeling because if I was too dumb to find something new, (which I was pretty sure I was) I would never be accepted into the "real Artworld". And if that proved to be so, I had nowhere to be. This was my nightmare.

My uncle's world trip whetted my appetite for adventure. When I returned I talked two friends I'd grown up with, Ken Benell and Bill Thompson, into dropping out of their respective colleges, then bicycling six thousand miles --- from home in San Luis Obispo to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. Arriba! Nothing obsessive about me. I'd read one too many adventure books. Ken and Bill's parents, no doubt, never really forgave me. And forget no bike lanes in the Amazon, not to mention, headhunters, crocodiles, anacondas, piranha and impassable mountain ranges. We'd make due by train. We figured there must be trains. Ha!

To skirt California freeways we shipped our new Italian racing bikes to Tucson, Arizona. Then uncrated them in the parking lot of the shipping company and took off. Ah, those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer --- July 1960 to be exact --- in the blazing heat of the Sonora Desert. So much for careful planning. The choice of "racing" over "touring" bikes played havoc with our journey about then too. Sitting in the blistering sun with no spit, trying to locate a cactus thorn in a racing tube was pure unadulterated holy hell.

Bill, and I began to fight over minor irritations.

Following behind me I'd hear, "Jesus, just stop it David! I can't stand it anymore! It's a derailleur, you don't stop peddling every time you shift a derailleur!"

"Hey, screw you Bill!"

"Oh yea, get off your bike right here!"

To our credit we made it through the Sonora Desert to the ocean at Guymas, where we took over a hotel beach cabana, covering it with parachute material to make a little house. And there we stayed, mostly drunk, for two months.

There was a singer at the hotel named Enrique. He preformed Mexican standards mostly. Watching Enrique rip into "Guadalajara" dressed in a suit of lights and a sombrero the size of an elephant ear, and with two shiny pistolas strapped to his sides, was ... impressive. On the beach however, in a pair of skimpy briefs, Enrique was not impressive. He came around our camp every day wanting to show us something down the beach and would always squat in such a way that his little balls fell out of his little swim trunks. We humored him because he struck us funny. One day, in a pitiful attempt to impress us, Enrique waded into the surf up to his knees. Then using his skinny arms, tried to show-off by doing standing presses with a boulder he'd picked up off the beach. At one point, the mossy rock slipped out of his hands, fell on his head, and knocked him out cold. We pulled him out of the ocean by his feet.

Finally, after weeks of begging, all three of us followed Enrique down the beach to see whatever the hell it was he wanted to show us. About a hundred yards past the hotel, he motioned for us to follow him up a sandy ravine, where he finally stopped under a railroad trestle. Enrique then turned toward us, dropped to his knees and said, "Pleeeze ... pez on me", while patting both hands around his head and shoulders.

I'd grown up in the "Boys Adventure Book Club," reading about Jivaro headhunters, anacondas eating children, witch doctors killing people with dark spells. Nothing however, had prepared me for this.

We looked at each other. I'll never forget the looks on Ken and Bill's faces."He wants us to piss on him," we said?

"Pleeeze ... pleeeze ... pez on me here ...," Enrique continued.

We turned to leave. The last I saw of Enrique that day, was a scene I'll will never forget. He was worming his way over bottom of the sandy ravine on his belly, slithering after us like one of those guys in a barren-desert cartoon, crying out in the most piteous voice imaginable, "Ple-eeze ... pez on me ... plee-eze ... jus pez on me right here ...!"

An amazon adventure to be sure. Hell, maybe we should have just lined up and whizzed all over Enrique right there on the sands of time. Of course, I would never have been able to pee. Well, that, and it only would have encouraged him.

Finally we ran out of money and hitched a ride out of Guymas and back to California with our bikes disassembled in the trunk of some Good Samaritan's car. I returned to my mother's house in San Luis Obispo, needing a job, confused. As mentioned before, I was depressed. Nowadays we call it that. Back then we just felt like crap.

I called the California Men's Colony, a prison housing a thousand sex offenders, inquiring to see if they had any openings --- for guards. I think I was trying to commit suicide. A personnel officer asked me a few questions then suggested I look elsewhere, barely containing his laughter.

I longed to disappear over some mythic horizon, like Rimbaud giving up poetry for Africa. I figured I had one chance left at finding a job in San Luis Obispo. There was a place on the edge of town called The Tallow Works. It was set well back off a country road behind a row of eucalyptus trees. In childhood my father had explained the place as we drove past one day.

"It's where all the scrap from butcher shops goes", he said, "plus if a farmer's horse or cow dies they'll come out and pick up the carcass for free. I hear they even toss in dead dogs and cats".

The Tallow Works consisted mainly of a large barn of corrugated tin with all the dark charm of Buchenwald. Tallow, my father explained, was the rendered fat of animals and was used for making candles and cosmetics.

Dad took an almost perverse delight in dropping the occasional grotesque bit of information on us. You might say he nurtured our inner-vampire-children. I remember his ghoulish joy that day telling us about The Tallow Works' legendary horror machine, the dreaded, Dead Animal Grinder, a mechanical maw laced with steel teeth for ripping and mashing. With relish he said, "I'm told that thing will take a whole dog at once. Big one too. You just toss it in and 'zzzzzzzzzzzzt', dog-burger, bones and all."

Dad loved saying stuff like ... "Zzzzzzzzzzzzt, dog burger".

He said, "They have this big pot full of gore in there, like a pressure cooker or something, for rendering fat, and how anybody can work in a place like that is beyond me," he added.

At age twenty, possessing all the charisma of a folding chair, my hope in the arts shattered, a career in lard rendering actually seemed attractive. A step up. One reason I suppose, was that being rejected by the Tallow Works seemed somehow, out of the question. I could not imagine that they would turn down anyone, let alone a nice young chump like me, assuming The Tallow Works would readily hire any idiot, damn-fool enough to wander in off the street. I would give up art forever. My swan song would be, "so long, it's been good to render you".

As I drove to The Tallow Works that day I remembered Mr. Blodget, my junior high biology teacher, and our class field trip to a local slaughterhouse, a large building surrounded by holding pens and covered with corrugated tin. In fact, the slaughterhouse was not far from The Tallow Works. Blodget was pudgy, with a moustache and thick glasses that made his eyes look like a Japanese carp. He believed in "hands on" biology, and Mr. Blodget loved the slaughterhouse. In fact, he reveled in it. Leading a tribe of cringing students, this man would fairly dance over the bloody floors in high rubber boots, probing piles of viscera here, mounds of guts there, all with the heady excitement of a child opening birthday presents. I too had found the slaughterhouse intriguing, fascinating. And I took comfort in the memory of Mr. Blodget, ankle deep in steer livers, holding out a big one to the class, yelling, "Students, students! Gather round and see, it's our lucky day! Look here, --- liver flukes! Parasitic liver flukes!"

After all, I recalled, I'd been one of the few students to wade over to Blodget that day, to see the parasitic liver flukes. Actually, the actual flukes confirmed my suspicions once and for all, that life on earth was utterly hopeless. I identified completely. I felt like a liver fluke. Hell, I was a liver fluke. So with that sort of experience under my belt, grinding up dead animals all day would be a cinch.

Rounding a row of eucalyptus trees in my VW bug, I parked some distance from the buildings, next to a couple of red dump trucks with the words, "Tallow Works" painted on the sides. During my boyhood I'd often seen these trucks in downtown San Luis Obispo picking up mounds of trimmed fat and bones from butcher shops.

I walked toward the largest building and a wide open barn door in the front. I could see dark rusted equipment in the shadows inside. Just outside, several men in overalls sat on wooden boxes in front of the building eating sack lunches. My attention was on the men. I thought, "Well, this isn't so bad, I don't smell anything like dad said".

They watched my approach with puzzled looks, as if thinking, "Now what in Sam Hill ...?"

From twenty paces I called out, "I'm looking for a job ...".

Then it hit. Bad. A reeking stench so putrid it nearly felled me in my tracks. Calvin Klein - 666. I froze. The workers smiled, glancing between each other, then back at me. I simply could not breathe and began to wobble. They laughed. Suddenly, only a few feet away I noticed a pile of bloated farm animals mounded up in a pile in the hot sun. How I had managed to miss this mass of abject horror until then I will never know, this unholy heap covered with flies. The largest corpse was a brown horse, mouth agape, legs jutting over a grossly bloated belly. Guernica! I glanced toward the men.They broke up, joyfully slapping their thighs and pointing between them.

I panicked and ran. And the faster I ran the louder they laughed. Leaping into the car I roared back down the lane in dad's VW, hanging my head out the window gasping for clean air. I jammed the accelerator seven miles to Avila Beach, craving the clean sea breeze. Nothing helped. The ocean spray I normally loved, smelled like a rotting sea serpent. The stench of the Tallow Works layered the inside of my nose and lungs like wallpaper paste and stayed there, psychologically at least, for weeks. Even the roses in my mother's garden sickened me.

And the idea of making art didn't seem nearly so depressing. This time, I would go by myself to the city and live there as a painter.

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