Los Angeles 90042

Today was our first full day in our new community, which is not, according to most maps, quite Highland Park, nor is it Garvanza, which is two blocks away, across the street from Luther Burbank Middle School. It is simply Los Angeles, 90042.

We are quite comfortable in this tight-knit, working-class community (our neighbor, Martha, has already strolled across the lawn to introduce herself); Lela spent most of the day unloading boxes from our U-Haul truck, which is due back tomorrow with a gas refill that I fear will put us in severe arrears where our moving budget is concerned.

In the days ahead, I have three new California-centric writing grants to apply for: one is the California Arts Council’s Arts and Accessibility Technical Assiatance Program grant, which provides funding for travel to exhibit, showcase, or perform an original work within the state of California (with funding also provided for purchase of supplies, equipment, etc.); for that grant I am thinking of a reprise of my Kerouac show, The Ragged Promised Land, for Vesuvio Cafe in October of this year.

Next, the California Council for the Humanities has re-opened grantmaking for their California Story Funbd project, this year “for projects that address the meaning of democracy.” I’m still working on my pitch for them. As for the third grant … to be honest, at this late hour and as tired as I am after the long day and drive yesterday, I’ve completely forgotten what it is.

The point is that for years I have encountered writers who subsist on grants in order to complete and/or create projects and have always wondered how one gets a foot in the door. Now, thanks to relief grants from the Authors League Fund and the ASJA, I have grants to “build off of” for other grants and programs for professional writers. It’s time consuming but it’s a wholly creative (and about 40 percent business) enterprise.

We had dinner on our first night back in L.A. at Mando’s Family Restaurant on Figueroa Boulevard, two blocks from our new home; it’s a hole-in-the-wall dive with a menu of Mexican and American dishes, situated in a small strip mall with a thrift store, an excellent donut shop owned by a Vietnamese family, a check cashing and Western Union store, and an establishment that sells bottled water, baseball caps, and phone cards. The food at Mando’s was cheap — it’s a working-class neighboorhood, again, so their customers are pinching pennies — and damn good food, too. Lela had carnitas that was smoked and roasted and fork-tender. I opted for a traditional steak and eggs, also excellent, both meals for $6.99 apiece.

The living situation we’re in for the time being is unique: we will only be subsidizing half of the cost of utilities and no rent, which allows us to save money for the first time in five years so we can find something of our own; because of this unique offering, I will be in the position to repay, in full, any donations that may come our way to help defray the extra costs in our last-minute move from Las Vegas to L.A.

So far we are a little more than $200 in the hole and my monthly disability check does not arrive until May 3; the fuel refill for the truck tomorrow will bottom us out, leaving us with less than fifty bucks for the next ten days. If you can donate anything — a sawbuck, a twenty — let me know if you require repayment; it may take about three weeks but you will be reimbursed. Pay Pal is rodger_jacobs@yahoo.com and the U.S. Bank donation account set up for us in the wake of The New Homeless story for the Las Vegas Sun is still open.

Thank you.

POSTSCRIPT: As I glanced at my cell phone a few moments ago to check the time (12:58 AM) I realized that I also have to purchase for more air time; apparently, I’m down to five bucks; that’s a $15.00 minimum for air time and minutes, though I may switch over to a flat-rate plan of $60.oo per month with unlimited calls and texting (AT&T). So there you go … another expense rearing its head.

One Hell of a Beggar

Today I received a courtesy letter from U.S. Bank reminding me that my account “becomes ineligible for additional Direct Deposit advances after nine consecutive checking account advances.” They are referring to advances that I have taken against my direct deposit Social Security Disability for such extravagances as paying rent, phone, or meeting prescription co-pays; they go on to remind me that “U.S. Bank offers other credit alternatives to meet your short-term needs including: Home equity Line of Credit and U.S. Bank Credit Card, which requires credit approval.”

What form of stupidity is this? If I owned a home or a credit card, do they think I wouldn’t have found a way to liquidate those assets into cash for immediate needs before I availed myself of a direct deposit advance?

Last month I wrote an article for a medical industry trade mag that I am still awaiting payment on. I have pitches ready to go to paying markets at Smithsonian Magazine and History Magazine but this month I need a paying market right damn quick; we only have funds on hand for one more week of rent and then we have to avail ourselves of that direct deposit advance that U.S. Bank tells me is soon to end. And we still haven’t raised the extra $150 we need to get Lela a new eye exam and bifocals. (Her glasses were bent in a household accident two months ago and she is experiencing headaches and vision problems as a result … today she had to take a bus to the Welfare Department to reapply for food stamp benefits as her first six months has expired — without the EBT benefits we would be on the streets, no hyperbole there.)

Recently a longtime friend sent me what amounted to a kiss-off e-mail, telling me that he wished to sever all ties ( a line that I am accustomed to hearing from women in my life, not men) because he was unhappy with what he perceived as my heavy-handed moderation of his racist, misogynist, and off-point comments at this blog; in his closing comments he added that I was “one hell of a beggar”.

Why is it that the first weapon people reach for when one is struggling to make ends meet  is to starkly remind that person, in often cruel terms, that they are in dire straits? Do you really believe we need that reminder? Do you think that beggar — definition: to ask for food or money as charity — is an epithet that someone with one foot in the gutter needs to hear? Shame on all who invoke such epithets. I cannot tell you how many people, in person and in e-mail, have thanked me for writing The New Homeless series for the Las Vegas Sun because they feel I have spoken for them, those who are too ashamed to admit their poverty to their friends and families for fear of the sort of backlash that I endured in the comments at the Sun. And now I must hear this same belittling from a man that I once considered a friend?

Sometimes it’s much too much.

Thanks for your generosity in the past, kind friend, but had I known it came at the cost of your denigrating me I would have respectfully declined. Shame on you. I hope you feel better now having kicked me when I am down but I suspect that the good feeling you received from typing those foul words was fleeting. Since you consider yourself a man of letters, I recommend that you give Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray another read:

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

That is what is haunting you, after all, the subject of your feverish late-night tremors and your rattlesnake venom at the world and your bitter racism.

Yet with your concise, cold and cutting words in a brief e-mail to me, full of bile and hatred, you have assured that I shall never talk about you again. And that, in the long run, will harm you much more than calling me “a beggar” because I can cop to begging money when I need it to survive, there’s no shame in that, but you have no excuse for your misanthropic ways; there is now one less person to sing your praises when you’re lowered into the ground, and to think that it was all at your own doing.

Such a damn dirty shame.

Of Books and Psoriasis

This afternoon I spent a pleasant forty-five minutes on the phone being interviewed by Anvi Bui, a reporter for the National Psoriasis Foundation (NPF), headquartered in Portland, Oregon.

Anvi recently read my New Homeless series for the Sun and “was truly touched by the adversities” I have faced; she and the editorial board of Advance, the NPF’s quarterly magazine,  feel that my “story would be a great way to raise awareness for people who are struggling with psoriasis.”

After the interview with Anvi I wrote a 600-word pitch for a feature article expanding on and taking off from where The New Homeless left off. From the pitch:

In the aforementioned work by historian Joseph J. Ellis, the author cites that “a persistent hostility to the fine arts is deeply embedded in American history.” I’m interested in writing a follow-up feature to “The New Homeless” with an emphasis on the ideas expressed in Ellis’s work as well as the works of Charles Bukowski (“Starving writers live worse than skid row bums”), Henry Miller in The Air Conditioned Nightmare, and George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London—the latter observing all the way back in 1933 that, in Western thinking, we calculate that “work, in order to be considered honest, has to be hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work” while dismissing writing and the creative arts as honorable professions.

Obviously I’m seeking a paying market in the lit mag genre. The first recipient of the pitch was Knight Landesman, editor of Book Forum, with a recommendation from Rudy Wurlitzer; but I cannot allow any editor to sit on the pitch too long seeing that we do not have rent for the balance of the month (the administrator of the Association of Journalists and Authors emergency relief fund promised me an answer on the committee’s final vote by 5:00 PM EST tomorrow — without an assist from the ASJA, or a big bag of money falling from the sky, we are truly sunk). Thankfully, Lela’s mom in California sent us twenty bucks yesterday so we could do our laundry — a psoriatic cannot be without clean clothing and linens for very long, for reasons cited in the 2005 short story, Trace and the Christmas Shoppers:

He decided to walk the ten blocks to the Glendale Galleria to buy a new bathrobe that December afternoon. That was the first mistake. The L.A. air was dry and he was suffering from a bronchial ailment brought on by the inhalation of the white flecks of dead skin that cascaded off his body every morning. When his psoriasis was ragingly acute – as it had been lately – he spent the first few hours of every day sitting at the desk, quietly surfing the internet for research on whatever he was working on at the moment and using an array of blunt instruments to scrape the dead skin from his legs and upper torso. He found that the bottom edge of a hard plastic Bic lighter worked best for this purpose. He stopped using a wooden fork years earlier after he suffered nerve damage in both legs from employing such a cruel implement.

“You just need to stop scratching so much,” a doctor once told Trace with a jovial smile and a hand clasp to the shoulder.

“And maybe you need to stop breathing so much,” Trace countered. “Telling a psoriasis patient not to scratch is like telling someone with TB they need to stop coughing.”

It wasn’t until he was two blocks away from the mammoth indoor shopping mall that Trace realized how close it was to Christmas. On the narrow residential streets adjoining the Galleria the vehicle traffic was heavier than usual, cars swarming like slow-moving sharks in the vain search for a parking spot. Trace soldiered on regardless. He needed that new bathrobe, something bulky and warm to wrap around his scarlet and scaly white skin in the cold and dry winter evenings and mornings.

I look forward to what Anvi comes up with for the magazine … and to the ASJA’s decision tomorrow.

Incidentally, I recently read a fantastic French graphic novel, Voyage into the Deep: The Saga of Jules Verne and Captain Nemo, by Francois Riviere and Serge Micheli, a vivid and beautifully illustrated “prequel that leads up to Verne’s writing of his masterpiece.” Worth mentioning seeing that today is Verne’s 183rd birthday, as noted by the artists and engineers at Google.

We Get Letters

Not all of the angry, caustic, or hate-filled responses that I received over my New Homeless series for the Las Vegas Sun in late 2010 came in the form of online comments; some people actually sat down and wrote letters that were forwarded to me by my editor at the Sun. Here is a letter from early December from a local named Deborah. Click images to enlarge.