The Healing of Howard Brown opens in this purgatory — and some have said it’s one of the most honest, darkly funny, and quietly devastating portraits of family duty in recent American fiction. I wouldn’t know. I just watched and wrote it all down.

Of course my dad didn’t slam his heart into reverse, wake up and demand a Sierra Nevada pale ale and instruct me to go find my sister, like Howard’s dad does in the opening chapters. No, my dad died peacefully, a golf ball in his open palm and a putter across his chest (no way he was going to heaven without his clubs) as I sang “Angel” by Jimi Hendrix (listen below.)

I grew up in a family that excelled in self-deprecation, led by my dad. His favorite song was “Born to Lose” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, and he considered that loser characteristic to be a genetic trait passed on to my sister and I. Between him and my anorexic mom, the body-shaming was relentless and compliments were few and far between. So rendering my Dad’s physical frailty in his final years was fair game, though I never lambasted him directly.

Then there’s the writer’s credo, “show, don’t tell.” I have a semi-photographic memory, thus a somewhat cinematic writing style. My experience at the rent-a-bedside–the afternoon sun blazing through the window, the swamp cooler hissing, the finches at the feeder, the plantation four poster, the crusty white shag, the drugs on the dresser–etched vivid imagery into my neurons. Most if not all of my writing depends on these remembered scenes, even if the events that happen within the scene are entirely imaginary.

Have you ever found yourself laughing at a wildly inappropriate moment during a family crisis — and then felt guilty, and then laughed again? If so, you can relate to Howard. When you step into his weary, observant, chemically-fortified shoes, you’ll discover what happens when the dutiful son finally runs out of patience — and finds something unexpected waiting on the other side.

Angel came down from Heaven yesterday
She stayed with me just long enough to rescue me
And she told me a story yesterday
About the sweet love between the moon and the deep blue sea

And then she spread her wings high over me
She said she’s gonna come back tomorrow

And I said, “Fly on my sweet angel
Fly on through the sky
Fly on my sweet angel
Tomorrow, I’m gonna be by your side”

Sure enough, this morning came unto me
Silver wings silhouetted against the child’s sunrise
And my angel, she said unto me
“Today is the day for you to rise

Take my hand, you’re gonna be my man
You’re gonna rise”
And then she took me high over yonder

And I said, “Fly on my sweet angel
Fly on through the sky
Fly on my sweet angel
Forever, I will be by your side”

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Jimi Hendrix

Angel lyrics © Experi

“Being of service” is a popular credo. Some are born into it, never doubting their purpose. Others may never get there, not by any fault of their own but by being taught from an early age to take everything they can get, and get away with whatever they can, as a means of wielding power and influence. Howard’s desire to be of service to others, like mine, through these stories, is simply an effort to be his best possible self, a positive contributor to the quilt of human experience, and an effort to counterbalance his own self-loathing through service.

So Howard eventually shuts up lets his heart make the decisions. Not the greeting-card version of the heart — not the sentimental, soft-focus heart that shows up on Valentine’s Day — but the deep, irrational, occasionally terrifying heart that tells him to take in a broken stranger, forgive someone who doesn’t deserve it, or drive through the night toward a person who has made his life genuinely difficult.

This is the territory that I wanted The Healing of Howard Brown to inhabit most fully. Beneath the dark comedy and the pharmaceutical fog and the spectacular family dysfunction, something quietly radical takes place: the idea that wisdom doesn’t always arrive through logic. Sometimes it arrives through a buzzing in your chest, a pull you can’t explain, a decision that makes no earthly sense and turns out to be exactly right.

I call it the “heartmind,” as have many sages throughout history. Once Howard encounters the concept — delivered not as a sermon but as a weathered old man’s hard-won philosophy on a porch in Louisiana — it reframes everything that came before it.

Howard’s peace is not a product of wisdom, but of surrender. He arrives at it through exhaustion, through loss, through the accumulated weight of people who needed him and a heartmind that kept saying yes when his brain was screaming no. The heartmind isn’t a mystical concept so much as a name for the part of us that acts from love before logic has a chance to talk us out of it.

I trust that my readers can sit with that paradox — that the most foolish-looking choices can be the wisest ones, that grace tends to arrive disguised as inconvenience, that the heart knows things the brain will spend years catching up to. When has your own heartmind led you somewhere your brain would never have approved? That’s the question the work hopes to leaves you with.

The heartmind is just one thread. Pull it, and the whole magnificent mess unravels in the best possible way.

He felt like he must have smelled bad for months, maybe years. Or so it seemed. Despite hundreds of online job applications and dozens of video interviews he couldn’t land a job. He’d even started to wonder if he had a digital odor about him­–do my emails stink, or what?

Now, on the verge of an actual and extremely rare face-to-face interview, he had reason to believe he really did smell bad. So bad, he had driven all the way from San Anselmo north of the Golden Gate through a bone-chilling January mist with all the windows and the sunroof open, down 19th Avenue past San Francisco State University and onto 280, where he’d floored his dilapidated diesel Rabbit in hopes of generating a purifying hurricane that would leave him springtime fresh by the time he arrived in Foster City, and all the while chanting Please, God, don’t let me smell like shit. Please God, don’t let me smell like shit.

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Not every novelist has the privilege of using a physical deformity as a plot device, so I’m pretty lucky. Imagining this “suprasternal notch” as a portal wasn’t a huge stretch.

When Howard was a baby, his mother strolled him into the local Chinese laundry, where the proprietor recognizes the hole as a “Chown Hoon Dong” (can’t remember how I came up with that), and declares it a great honor, a conduit to the afterlife. For most of his life Howard considers the hole a curiosity, a physical oddity he regards with the same weary affection he extends to his other failing factory parts. Until his dad dies.

Then the hole begins to buzz. It becomes a kind of spiritual antenna, vibrating when Howard is in the presence of ancestral ghosts, when uncomfortable truths are pressing toward the surface, when the dead are trying to get a word in. It buzzes in Louisiana, surrounded by the dense, layered history of his Southern family. It buzzes when his cousin Eddie reveals uncomfortable truths. It buzzes, most insistently, when Howard’s father takes up residence in what a psychic informs him is his third chakra.

And there’s no way to shut the damn thing up. No amount of oxycodone can silence the Chown Hoon Dong. It is impervious to the pharmacopeia, responding to a different frequency entirely—one that requires Howard to be present.

Fortunately my own “soul hole” remains silent. At least for now.

Laurel Hill sits equidistant between St. Francisville and Natchez, Miss, surrounded by antebellum plantations: Rosedown, Wakefield, The Myrtles (a paranormal hotspot) and more, all inhabited at some point by my ancestors. Being named “Jeb” (a common nickname for John in the south, derived from rebel cavalry general J.E.B. Stuart), I get a squeamish sense of belonging whenever I visit–a Louisiana drawl inhabits my voice along with a distinct desire for mint juleps, JAX beer, Étouffée and chewing tobacco. The dense, dark woods, the alligator snouts poking out of the bayous, the moss dripping off the oak branches and the heavy, the violent thunderstorms and palpable atmosphere seem imbued with the ghosts of the antebellum south. Like Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins,” it is a place where weird shit happens.

For Howard, the landscape tells the truth about who he is: one is comfortable, the other uncomfortable. I wanted the dramatically opposing environments to goose Howard’s perspective of everything: land, people, family, food, love, foregiveness…

Which landscape feels more like home to your soul: the foggy coast where everything is softened and possible, or the dense, dripping forest where everything is tangled and real? When you read The Healing of Howard Brown you’ll find out which one Howard finally chooses — and whether the choice surprises you as much as it surprises him.

Wouldn’t wanna live in Laurel Hill, even if everybody already knows my name. But it is certainly a fun place to write about. My fourth novel, Chasing Byron, is primarily set in West Feliciana in 1945, and ghosts abound!

The “rock n’ roll star” obsession started with The Beatles on Ed Sullivan on Feb. 9, 1964. I was nine, splayed out on the kitchen floor in my jammies, agog at the Fab Four on the b&w TV. My grandma had bought me a copy of “Surfin’ Safari,” and my mom loved to dance to “Green Onions,” but The Beatles flipped a switch in my pre-tween brain and, like thousands of Boomers, I only wanted one thing: to be a Beatle.

Guitar lessons followed shortly thereafter. “Tom Dooley, “ “Blowin’ in the Wind” and–lucky me–“I Shoulda Known Better.” Mom frequently abandoned me on the curb after the lesson. I don’t know if she was gettin’ some on the side or what, but I practiced while I waited. I hit puberty around the same time “Fire and Rain” came out, and the girl serenading began.

Ironically, neither of my parents nor any of my known relatives had a shred of musical ability. Dad would caterwaul cowboy songs and strum his two chords after a bellyful of beer, and mom would dance to Sinatra, clapping on one and three like most white folks. Dad was a hotshot attorney in San Francisco while mom did what many suburban moms of the fifties and sixties suburbs did: golf, tennis, Junior League, babysitter management, and Swanson TV dinners.

I tried to juggle what was expected of me as a child of white-collar privilege–golf, basketball, good grades, short hair–while sneaking out to smoke dope and discover “the wonders of nature rolling in the rushes down by the riverside.” The garage band started in 8th grade, 1969, with a repertoire of CCR, The Doors, The Stones, Cream, James Brown, Wilson Pickett etc. etc. (chestnuts that I still play when the time is right). Eventually I switched to bass and started playing jazz from the CTI catalog and early-seventies funk. We named the band Bon Tempe after a local reservoir that was a favorite for surreptitious acid tests and illegal skinny dips.

I went to CU/Boulder from 73-78, played in a bluegrass band and a few rock bands, but mostly tripped out on the ski slopes. After a summer in Glacier Park, followed by a winter in Missoula where I played solo guitar at the Red Lion Inn, I got a call from Bon Tempe’s former drummer: a band in the East Bay, backed by the scion of local retail clothing chain, needed a bassist. So I fled Montana and returned to Marin County to substitute teach, dig ditches and play the Bay Area clubs. The “New Wave” had arrived: Elvis Costello, Blondie, The Cars…and the band, TYE–a bunch of upper middle class white guys–tried desperately to fit in. But it was an act, and it fell on its face.

I retreated to the San Geronimo Valley to make music with “The Sky Blue Band” in a little shack by Lagunitas Creek on the Dickson Ranch. We played jazz, blues and funk while snorting prodigious amounts of blow and guzzling warm Hamm’s. Except for the trumpet player, who usually showed up with a gallon of Gallo chablis. The music was predictably unpredictable, depending on the quality of the blow and the accompanying breakneck tempos. Still, we got dressed up, played weddings and parades on the back of a flat bed truck, and nobody died.

In 1982 I was recruited by a sound engineer in LA to join an Orange Country club band called “Mad Jack.” I moved down in the fall, and my girlfriend, Holly (now my wife of 43 years), along with our pup Mr. Jones, joined me several months later. The band’s first residency was at The Valley Imp at the corner Valley View and Imperial Highway in La Mirada, a popular watering hole with bikers and their skanks, complete with pool tables, Pac Man, and knife fights. Lovely venue. The club owners would hand you a set list: Foreigner, .38 Special, Loverboy, Alan Parson–long lost eighties rockers. We wrote originals, had an agent, made the demos, scoured Hollywood for that elusive record contract. All for naught, but just as well. I quit after six months, went back home to Marin and have eschewed commercial music ever since.

My eschewment took the form of “Call Me Bwana,” a dreadfully inappropriate name for an average white band, stolen from a Bob Hope movie. We played“blendo:” a mix of ska, country, rockabilly, surf and Tex-Mex, mostly inspired by David Lindley, Ry Cooder, NRBQ and old rockabilly classics. We released three albums with varying personnel, played the venerable Fillmore auditorium in SF and the Continental Club in Austin, and tore up the college radio airwaves.

Bwana hung it up around 1994, and a collaboration with the late Ted O’Connell, Frank Bohan and Kevin Hayes stepped in. We played instrumentals every Saturday morning at the Marin Coffee Roasters until my work with IBM (aka I’ve Been Moved) called me across the country in 1999, first to Indianapolis for a year, then to Ridgefield, CT, where I connected with the Old School Revue. The drummer, David Weber, had been in Copperhead, John Cippolina’s band after Quicksilver, while Roger Kaufman had a long musical history in CT. We played eclectic covers, from NRBQ’s “Puddin’ Truck” to Steely Dan’s “Home at Last”–I sang lead and played lead guitar, as I did with Call Me Bwana.

I returned to San Anselmo in 2005 to help shuffle my dying folks to the great beyond, teaming up again with the Coffee Roasters band and Bonnie Hayes, composer of “Have a Heart” and “Love Letter” for Bonnie Raitt, along with songs for David Crosby, and leader of the new wave sensation, The Wild Combo. We played the party circuit and a regular wine bar trio gig with “Bon’s Lil’ Jazz Thing” on bass. I also played guitar with a couple of Bwana guys and Ted O’Connell in “El Kabong” (Quickdraw McGraw’s alter ego), a 60s/70s garage rock revue that played many of the same songs I played when I was a teenager.

In 2010 the Coffee Roasters band made a CD, entitled “Treble Makers,” notable for Ted O’Connell’s distinctive “whammy bar bravura” and sultry grooves. Unfortunately, Ted died in 2015 from the flu, of all things, but the band soldiered on. We were joined by Tal Morris and Erik Schramm, both pedigreed Bay Area players, and continue to play the Coffee Roasters every Saturday morning, going on 30 years now. In 2022 I released a solo record, “Humdiddy,” featuring an assortment of Marin music royalty along with a contingent of Canadians.

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I have just returned from my Saturday morning Coffee Roasters gig: a raucous jam with Gary Vogensen of the New Riders, Tal Morris, Ronnie Smith and Freeway Frank Bohan. A photo of Ted hangs on the wall. It’s our weekly church, a worship service honoring the gods of guitar. We’ve seen babies grow up and have babies of their own as the older fans slowly die off. If we’re lucky, we’ll breath our last gasps over an Americano during “Song for My Father.” We’ll see.

It’s said there is no such thing as a quiet spring evening in the West Feliciana Parish of eastern Louisiana. The critters here - grasshoppers, crickets, frogs, chiggers, locusts, cicadas, mosquitoes, birds, ducks and other noisemakers - believe, like the local humans, that cocktail hour is a time for lively conversation. There’s chittering, chattering, croaking, quacking, honking, wailing, singing, buzzing, whining, and complaining; a deafening, bellicose cacophony surrounding the two-legged creatures sipping toddies on their porches in the pink Louisiana twilight.

On such a noisy, balmy spring evening, 23-year-old Wyatt Stirling Bowman was practicing short golf shots on the front lawn of the 100-year-old family plantation, Wakefield, ten miles up the road from the parish seat in St. Francisville on the Mississippi.

Wyatt’s mother Lucinda, known to the locals as “Boots,” sipped iced Kentucky bourbon and rocked steadily, the rotting floorboards of the decrepit porch squeaking in rhythm with the tree frogs in the camellia bushes. Dressed in black as she had been since her husband’s death decades prior, she kept one ear tuned to the war news blaring through the parlor window. She tuned her other ear to the sound of Wyatt’s chip shots, though she could hardly hear both over the creaking of the floorboards and the pulsing wail of the local fauna.

When I was writing *The Healing of Howard Brown* I intentionally avoided romanticizing the body. His dad’s dying decrepitude is ugly: the “snot perennially coalescing in the nostril fuzz,” the “lung butter” expelled during coughing fits, the translucent skin hanging off his arms “like a braised ham shank.” I avoided the gentle euphemisms of literary death scenes, opting instead for the raw, unglamorous textures of a body shutting down.

At the same time, I wanted the grotesque imagery to function as a comic coping mechanism rather than horror. Howard is not detached — he is deeply, painfully present. But he refuses to let the weight of the moment crush him into silence: he wisecracks, makes absurd observations, and turns death into a circus of sorts.

Juxtaposition can function like a joke. Jamming together elevated language–words like “pharmacopeia” and “imperturbable”–with crude, locker-room banter, like “booger factory” and “lung butter” is intended to mirror Howard’s own psychology: a retired English teacher who has read everything and still can’t stop himself from describing his father’s toes as evidence of alien possession.

I’ve never been known as a particularly serious person, adhering to the maxim: “Take your work seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously.” I see suffering and death as inevitable, as much as part of life as joy, love and milkshakes. When someone you love naturally reaches the end of their earthly assignment, congratulations are in order. My dad made it to 85, mom to 82. In my view, dying, after suffering the indignity of walkers, peg tubes, oxygen tanks and bedpans, is the ultimate relief. What better counterweight to grief than a good laugh?

When Howard and his retinue float down the Little Tensas Bayou toward Camp Serendipity, the landscape triggers primordial fears. The chartreuse duckweed blankets the black water. The bald cypress knees emerge from the shallows like prehistoric sentinels. The Spanish moss hangs from the live oaks in long, grey curtains. To Howard, it’s hallucinatory — he flashes on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, (the Kenneth Branagh audiobook is epic), the queen of the cannibals and Mistah Kurtz. The bayou is more of a reckoning than a setting: water moccasins strike in the dark. live oaks can explode in a lightning strike and burn alone in a fallow field like a signal flare from the past. I wanted the Southern landscape to push characters toward confrontations they have been avoiding for decades.

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Our ancestral plantation, Hazelwood, was built by my great grandfather, an Irish immigrant, in 1836. When I first visited in 1969, the dilapidated property was in sorry shape: the mattresses were stuffed with hay, the kitchen was a separate building out back, the porches were caving in and the slave quarters were still standing. Fields of sweet potato and cotton had given way to hardwood forest and thick stands of loblolly pine. A few miles to the west, Dylan’s iconic Highway 61 runs parallel to the Big Muddy, with Bayou Sara in between. The defunct burg of Laurel Hill, where many of my ancestors are buried in an overgrown postage stamp cemetery aside a tiny Episcopal church. The Black cemetery is a quarter mile west.

Laurel Hill sits equidistant between St. Francisville and Natchez, Miss, surrounded by antebellum plantations: Rosedown, Wakefield, The Myrtles (a paranormal hotspot) and more, all inhabited at some point by my ancestors. Being named “Jeb” (a common nickname for John in the south, derived from rebel cavalry general J.E.B. Stuart), I get a squeamish sense of belonging whenever I visit–a Louisiana drawl inhabits my voice along with a distinct desire for mint juleps, JAX beer, Étouffée and chewing tobacco. The dense, dark woods, the alligator snouts poking out of the bayous, the moss dripping off the oak branches and the heavy, the violent thunderstorms and palpable atmosphere seem imbued with the ghosts of the antebellum south. Like Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins,” it is a place where weird shit happens.

Wouldn’t wanna live there, even if everybody already knows my name. But it is certainly a fun place to write about. My fourth novel, Chasing Byron, is primarily set in West Feliciana in 1945, and ghosts abound!

Disclaimer: I love Neil and Stephen and still do. Their music was my soundtrack for a long time, and now, sixty years since I first heard “For What It’s Worth” and “Mr. Soul,” the music is like a shot of Geritol. So it’s hard for me to throw shade on these guys. Nonetheless, we’ve all witnessed the waning of their brilliance (along with our own) making us perhaps wonder: Would it have been better to actually burn out like so many of their contemporaries? All I know is, watching a hero fade away is sad theater.

Seems every time I see or hear about Neil Young these days I’m reminded of that line from his punk inspired 1979 album with Crazy Horse, “Rust Never Sleeps.” His famous anthem, “Hey Hey My My” (or is it “My My Hey Hey”?) was a tribute to the angry punk rockers that eschewed the slick disco and epic rock of the mid-seventies in favor of raw, cathartic, often violent displays of youthful frustration.

Neil has always been in a chameleonic class by himself, putting his own spin on disparate genres from country to punk to folk to hard rock. (He loves major sevenths. Stills, not so much.) But this isn’t a compare and contrast essay, even if their musical differences are exactly what made them so good together.

Both Neil and Stephen have kept going long after their “sell-by” dates. Unlike Young, Stills burned out early, yet refused to fade away–a classic example of a fuse lit from both ends. After the second Manassas album he disappeared for a couple of years (rehab?), then teamed up with Donnie Dacus for a couple of really good records in the mid seventies. But the magic he’d achieved with Crosby, Nash, Young and Manassas was gone. “Thoroughfare Gap” and “Right By You” were, to me, unlistenable, if only because they didn’t live up to his brilliant earlier work.

Yet he soldiered on, running on fumes, and it makes you wonder if he ever stopped to assess the quality of his output. Perhaps he said to himself: “I was great, then, so I must be great now,” and his music biz posse backed him up. Stars of his stature are industries unto themselves, and the pressure to keep the doors open must be tremendous.

Neil refused to follow his own advice from “Hey Hey My My.” He may have burned out–most of his stuff from the couple decades is, to me, fading away personified–but he keeps doing what tiggers do best: he keeps writing songs, as he was put on the planet to do.

As any older musician will tell you (with the possible exception of Ron Carter), the muse may not burn out, but the body does. Arthritis sets in, vocal cords wear out, the lungs can’t push as much air, the hearing dims and the duende goes underground. Still, many players keep going, damning the torpedoes along with the critics. God bless ‘em, it’s all they know how to do.

(But then there’s Croz. He burned out, went to jail, had a liver transplant, got obese, then went on to make the best records of his solo career in his final decades. He rose from the ashes and flew into new musical territory, borne on the wings of young players in their prime like Jeff Pevar and Sarah Jarosz. His last album, “For Free,” might’ve been his best.)

Perhaps in retrospect Neil might want to amend his rock n’ roll manifesto to say: It’s better to fade away than to burn out. But then it wouldn’t rhyme. And the world looks a lot different at 34 versus 81.

Ain’t aging grand?

Whatever it was, I decided then and there it should be avoided. I bent over my massive midriff and studied my own toes in the crusty white shag. Aside from the yellowing, curled nails, they didn’t look unusually bent or knobby, at least not yet, but I feared that like many of the failing factory parts of my six/six, 240-pound frame, they would eventually join in the cacophony of inflamed and screaming joints that had accompanied me into my 60th year.

1 Trying To Die

I could tell he was trying to die ­– really trying, as if by the sheer force of his iron will he could command his heart to stop, like he had so often commanded me, my sister, my mother and a great many others to stop, to halt, to shut up, to do this or that. He was in that familiar state of stern, steely concentration, laid out on the rented hospital bed at the foot of great grandmother’s regal plantation four-poster, his knuckly fingers rolled into fists, his jaw clenched, his brow furrowed, and the afternoon sun illuminating his gnarled and knobby toes. What, I wondered, was responsible for their profound disfigurement? Was it the miles of fairways, tees and greens he had trudged across in his 85 years? Or was it the endless hours pacing to and fro in San Francisco courtrooms, trying to command the thoughts of judge and jury?

Whatever it was, I decided then and there it should be avoided. I bent over my massive midriff and studied my own toes in the crusty white shag. Aside from the yellowing, curled nails, they didn’t look unusually bent or knobby, at least not yet, but I feared that like many of the failing factory parts of my six/six, 240-pound frame, they would eventually join in the cacophony of inflamed and screaming joints that had accompanied me into my 60th year.

“There is a particular kind of novel that understands something most fiction forgets: that where a story happens is not backdrop. It is character. It breathes, it presses, it refuses to stay still behind the people moving through it.”

I try to incorporate this sentiment into all my work, if only because low barometric pressure makes my joints ache. And I wanted to write the kind of novel where the land itself has an opinion about the man stumbling across it.

Much of The Healing of Howard Brown was written in Stinson Beach, CA, where the fog is often referred to as “Carl,” as in poet Carl Sandburg. As Mark Twain famously remarked, “the coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco.” Most folks around here consider Carl, aka The Marine Layer, a welcome guest. And a good portion was written at the ancestral plantation in Laurel Hill, LA, as part of my MFA program’s “outside experience.”

[ The plantation and surroundings are key characters in Chasing Byron.]

My neighbor in Stinson named his little beach bungalow “Cold Comfort,” a reference to a scene in “Taming of The Shrew” and an old English idiom. For my neighbor, it was a reference to the soft, damp grey blanket that covers the coast in the summer, rather than insufficient consolation. The fog can soothe the inflamed brain, cool chaotic emotions, and create a padded cocoon, free of sharp edges. Thus Carl Sandburg’s famous poem is really an ode to nature’s opiate.

Thus Howard Brown begins his journey in the cool, fog-threaded hills of Marin County, California, followed by a pilgrimage into the deep and humid tangle of West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Horses of different colors, to be sure, each with it’s own ability to alter the consciousness of the seeker. Juxtaposing these natural forces seemed custom made for Howard’s yin/yang dilemma. As he learns, you can run from your ghosts, but if you run into the swamp, they’ll be there, waiting for you.

I graduated from CU Boulder in 1978 with a BS in English Education, a standard copout for unmoored English majors seeking to avoid starving artist syndrome. But when I returned home to Marin, teachers were getting laid off left and right. So I subbed. The phone would ring at 6AM: “We need you to cover for the freshman PE teacher” or “the math teacher got beat up by a seventh grader” (Jeb + math = oil + water). Fortunately babysitting required little subject matter expertise.

In 1981 the Tamalpais Union High School District pink-slipped dozens of teachers, including the choir director at my alma mater, Redwood High School. Rather than see if he would get fired at the end of spring semester, the choir director bailed and I got called to cover for him. The music director knew I was a musician–I played bass clarinet in the school orchestra, along with bass in a popular party band, so he figured I could handle it.

I could, but not as directed. My notation reading was always shitty, I couldn’t play the piano, and choral music had never been on my playlist. But I needed the gig, so I improvised.

Thus, the Jeb Method was born.

In the early days of spring semester, most of the students (50 girls and two boys!) were crestfallen over the loss of their beloved choir director, and immediately set out to make things as difficult for me as possible. It didn’t take long for them to realize that classical instruction was out the window, and that I was a poser. All I could do was teach them what I knew about singing. Not choral music, but the blues, rock, pop, R&B, country.

After a few weeks the students dubbed my unorthodox approach “The Jeb Method,” and I wasn’t Mr. Harrison, or Jeb, but “Method.” Not Mr. Method. Just Method.

The approach was simple. Each girl could pick a song in whatever genre she liked and, accompanied by my guitar, perform solo for the class. “Love Me Like a Man,” by Bonnie Raitt was a favorite, even if it was a little racy for teenage girls. (I could only hope they weren’t singing “I want a man to rock me like my backbone wasn’t home” at family gatherings.)

But it was a choir, not a solo showcase. At the end of the semester we had to perform in the theater for the parents, at which time the substitute music emperor’s nakedness would be revealed. Like Robert Preston in “The Music Man,” I would be run out of town on a greased rail.

But, surprisingly, the Method was well received. I wrote multi-part arrangements for “In My Room” (Beach Boys), “Monday Monday” (The Mamas and The Papas), “634-5789” (Wilson Pickett), and the JT version of “Up On The Roof.” During the performance of “634-5789,” the girls surprised me by displaying numbered, hand-colored rotary phone dial cutouts, like card stunts at football stadiums, coinciding with the lyrics. I was gobsmacked.

I still have the cutouts, tucked into the 1981 Redwood High yearbook, along with the phone numbers of many of the older girls who wrote “If you need some good kissin, call on me.” I never made those calls, but it’s nice to know that there was a time…

The Jeb Method may not have prepped them for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but they sure got their ya-yas out. And if singing isn’t fun, what’s the point?

Until they try to eat you.

I was around seven when I first met a real bear, chasing my sister on a path around the Awhanhee Hotel in Yosemite Valley at dusk, just before the rangers pushed a few hundred burning logs off Glacier Point (the Firefall was real fire in those days). We rounded a corner and ran head on into a young black bear, maybe a couple hundred pounds. The memory is dim; suffice to say the bear turned tail before we could check his or her hiney for cleanliness.

For Sierra residents, black bears are a nuisance. They break into cabins, raid the fridge and tear up the furniture. They lay siege to campgrounds, break into cars, scavenge landfills and generally wreck havoc. Backpackers go to elaborate lengths to protect their food, roping bags to tree branches and banging pots and pans when the bears get too close.

Then there’s The Grizz.

After I graduated from CU Boulder in 1978, I took a summer job at Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park. It’s one of those hotels that doubles as theater: all the employees are musicians, singers, actors, or dancers that entertain the hotel guests over the short summer season. I was a bartender in the Interlaken Lounge overlooking Swiftcurrent Lake, so my days were free for exploring and, it turns out, hobnobbing with the grizzlies.

The first encounter was a case of coitus interruptus. One of the veteran barmaids liked to initiate the new recruits with a roll in the bushes above the hotel parking lot, and I was her lucky victim. We had our foam pads and sleeping bags and were getting hot and heavy under the stars when we heard a loud snuffle not 50 feet away. At the time, there was a theory that the smell of sex excited the grizzlies, so, needless to say, we whipped on our clothes and scrambled down the slope to the dorms. Luckily, Mr. Grizz did not follow.

Many Glacier employees got one day off over the course of the summer season– I spent mine on a solo overnight in a remote drainage west of Two Medicine Lake. Like most backpackers in Glacier, I adorned my pack with clanging bear bells intended to warn off the big hairy monsters. They may have warned off other hikers as well, since I didn’t see a soul on the seven mile trek. Except for Mr. Grizz. I was hiking through a dense copse of serviceberries when I heard a snort. A huge bear popped out of the bushes, and, standing on his hind legs, took one look at me a charged off into the woods. I hiked on, setting up camp near a gurgling creek and sleeping with one eye open.

A few weeks later I took an afternoon hike up to Iceberg Lake in the shadow of Mr. Wilbur. I packed a lunch and my fishing gear and, once at the lake, parked myself on a large flat boulder at water’s edge and fished. After it was clear that the fish did not want to meet me, I had a snack and took a little nap.

When I awoke the sky was dark with thunderheads, so I packed up and started down the trail, hoping the rain would hold off. It did not. About a quarter mile down the trail the sky opened up–sheets of icy rain, accompanied by deafening thunderclaps and lightning bolts rattling the forest. So, hoping to find a sheltered spot beyond the reach of Thor’s wrath, I ran, eyes glued on the muddy trail in front of me.

Then I looked up and there he was: a young grizz with panda markings was charging up the trail, possibly blinded by the rain.

I stopped. He stopped. We stared each other down for what seemed like an eternity, frozen in our tracks. I began to remove my pack where a little food remained, and thought to toss it toward the bear–a peace offering of sorts. I hesitated, looked around for a tree to climb, knowing that grizzlies aren’t great climbers like their cousins because of their long, lethal claws. But those high altitude trees were too stunted. So I started to yell, hurling every epithet in my 22-year old vocabulary at the bear, waving my arms, jumping up and down. And it worked. The handsome young fella turned tail and went galumphing down the path.

I kept yelling, this time to warn other hikers that a beautiful young grizz was about to get up in their grill. I encountered a few hikers in the slackening storm coming up, but none had seen my four-legged buddy, whom I imagined had run back to his den to tell his mom that there was a two-legged lunatic on the trail.

I haven’t had any close encounters of the bear kind for the past fifty years, though we did see a couple of Cinnamon bears from a safe distance in Yosemite Valley last April. And I thought:

“I wanna live with a cinnamon bear

I could be happy the rest of my life

with a cinnamon bear.”

The stuffed variety, of course.

So I know what opioids feel like: within minutes, a coating of warm paraffin envelops the cerebral cortex, the knot at the base of the spine unravels. In Howard’s case, his brain parts “like the Red Sea,” with one half observing the other from a comfortable distance. Howard feels “imperturbable, as strong and solid as the redwood tree in the front yard.” Rather than bemoan the perils of addiction at this point, I wanted to be precise and honest: the drugs genuinely help. They create a buffer between Howard and the emotional gang rape of watching a parent die while a sibling self-destructs.

As “roman a clefs” go, the scenes in dad’s bedroom happened in a predictable fashion. In addition to being a trial lawyer and tortured golfer, dad was a great believer in better living through chemistry. His medicine cabinet was a pharmacy unto itself, especially in the late sixties and early seventies when the mantra was “turn on, tune in, drop out.” He had seconal (Reds i.e. “Living on reds, vitamin C and cocaine”), phenobarbital (Yellowjackets) and my favorite, Dexamyl, made famous by the Ya Ya Sisterhood. I surreptitiously shared his pharmacopeia in high school, embarking on a lifelong experimentation of better living through chemistry. So when hospice showed up I enthusiastically numbed myself from the deafening death rattle and the reality of my old man disintegrating in a hospital bed, worrying that his daughter had been disremembered and tossed in a dumpster.

And just like Howard, I got strung out, but not because of the horror show in dad’s bedroom. My downfall was spinal fusion surgery to correct a deformity, resulting in debilitating foot neuropathy. After trying a host of drugs, I settled on a daily regimen of methadone, oxycodone, duloxetine and tequila that lasted for eight years. Eventually I went cold turkey, except for the tequila. (Now I’m even too old for that, goddamnit!)

Don’t get me wrong. Someday human and artificial intelligence may walk hand in hand to benefit the planet and its inhabitants; a new artificial species, born of the collective wisdom of human existence, and serving the greater good for all.

But so far…

I get unsolicited emails almost daily from spoofed publishers, agents, book marketers, movie scouts etc. etc. The chatbots are slick in their deception, and I’ve been suckered into conversations more than once. The tone, the specificity of the responses, the very human voice–it’s fuckin’ creepy! The foil-stamped letters from Nigerian princes have given way to these digital thieves that will do anything to steal your money.

Fortunately it’s becoming easier and easier for the digitally savvy to spot the spoofs and scams. Having spent the majority of my career marketing technology, I’m one of those boomers that can imagine the process. Somewhere in Myanmar, or the Philippines, or young hungry folk are sitting in some warehouse with a few hundred colleagues are spoofing agents, publishers and the like, creating fake websites and fake email addresses. But one thing they can’t do: a zoom call. But that’s coming.

Science fiction has warned us about AI for decades. It was one thing to marvel at the famous bots of science fiction: Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and the screen adaptation leaps far beyond our primitive AI to a universe where bots have been eradicated, except, of course, for one. Then there’s the “synthetics” in the first season of “Picard” who have also been the target of a pogrom, a digital genocide, an ethnic cleansing. Then there’s Robocop.

It’s easy to forget all the positive possibilities of AI when you’re being hassled by scambots. It’s dangerous territory, perhaps a tipping point in the arc of humanity. The impact has been swift and pervasive, quickly creating tools that are being put to nefarious ends. Scammers, con men, charlatans, snake oil salesmen and other parasites will probably never go away. After all, their motto is “there’s a sucker born every day.”

[Check out the detailed chronicle of Litpalooza in Luteland]

I had intended to focus my creative thesis on a novel I had in progress, American Corporate. But my mentor, the esteemed Professor and Author David Huddle, wanted me to start something new. I had been considering making a story out of the unhinged events surrounding the death of my dad, and Professor Huddle thought the actual death of a parent would be a good start.

In parallel, I was studying the work of Saul Bellow for my critical thesis. Bellow was a master of the “roman à clef:” a novel in which real people or actual events are presented under the guise of fiction. In the Nobel prizewinning Herzog, the protagonist, like Bellow, is cuckolded by his wife and best friend. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow re-creates and fictionalizes his relationship with poet Delmore Schwartz. In my case, the family dysfunction surrounding dad’s death, particularly the disappearance of my sister, was already a B-grade horror movie. So I used it to set up a story that, once it gets beyond the opening chapters, is almost entirely fictional. I also used my Southern ancestry and various gap-toothed walleyed cousins to tell the story.

I had several mentors providing feedback on the evolving drafts of my creative thesis: David Cates, Jim Heynen, Stan Rubin and Rick Barot. I doubt The Healing of Howard Brown would have won the Independent Press Award without their gentle tutelage, and for that I’m grateful.

This “How Howard Came to Be” blog series explores the various themes in the novel and the inner workings around the “roman à clef” approach. I hope it provides at least a temporary distraction from the decline and fall of western civilization.

Then one snowy spring day I read an article in the university paper that really pissed me off. I can’t recall exactly what the article was about, but I had issues with the social scene in general. And thus Baby Bingus came screaming out of my cerebral cortex and into a letter to the editor, declaring that a giant King Kong of a baby was going to descend on the frat houses and sororities and give them the Naked Lunch treatment. It was a vitriolic St. Vitus dance on paper, and believe it or not the editor ran it.

Baby Bingus was no flash in the pan. The Enfante Terrible appeared in handmade greeting cards and cartoons, along with his sidekick The Inflatable Baby Bingus, spreading his peculiar brand of nirvana far and wide. And he’s never grown up! He’s still that pudgy monster, whompin’ folks upside the head like a Zen master. Viva El Bambino Bingarino!

While Bingus was incubating in 1974, here’s what the Buff co-eds were spinning on the turntable.

Janis, Peggy and the Garden of Glass

Ever since we moved into our house here in Coon Hollow overlooking the mighty Pacific, I have been hearing things. Besides the constant crash and flow of the surf on Stinson Beach, the foghorns in the summer, the mysterious ghost moan coming from Bolinas and my very vocal pup Mister Boo, I've been hearing faint strains of Big Brother and The Holding Company. (In sixth grade I didn't quite get the double entendre of a "Holding Company", which had nothing to do with corporate subsidiaries in the Haight of 1966.) I'll find myself humming "looks like everybody in the whole wide world/is down on me" or "take it/take another little piece of my heart now baby", or, in particularly desperate states, just the "whoa whoa whoa" of Ball and Chain over and over.

I wore the grooves out on those first two albums, the only two legit Big Brother records, and I think of them as Janis’s truly inspired and beyond-compare efforts, despite everything that came later especially the travesty of Me and Bobby McGee and Mercedes Benz. That’s not to say that her singing wasn’t still beyond compare, but you can start to hear the fame and the money and the dope, especially the dope, in those later recordings when at first it was just this raw Texas orphan nerve snapping and sparking like a severed high voltage wire. There wasn’t anything like Janis and there hasn’t been since, and those that tried were only successful in mimicking the death by syringe scene and not much else.

We had heard rumors after we bought Coon Hollow that Janis had hung around the party cottage that originally stood on our property, but it wasn't until this New Years Eve while having rather comedic and borderline pathetic dinner at the Parkside Cafe that a guitar player named Milty suggested that we google Peggy Caserta. After trudging back up the hill to our Coon Hollow residence we logged on to learn that hippie boutique owner and millionaire Peggy Caserta and Janis Joplin were lovers right here at the original Coon Hollow cottage, right up to Janis's death by overdose in Hollywood.

In 1973, Peggy Caserta's book about her relationship with Janis: "Going Down With Janis", was published, but has since gone out of print. Too bad. There's nothing like a little gay junky depravity. But there's also something rather run of the mill and predictable about the fallen angels of the Summer of Love: the swirling vortex of junk, speed, psychedelics and every other form of dope, initially tuning in, turning on, and completely dropping out and off the face of the planet. The stories are all the same: archetypal, once married to H, you're married for life until death doth part you and corporeal world. In other word’s I’m not about to go drop $100 to get Peggy Caserta’s out of print book just to read about another H bomb, even if it is about a bixsexual rock star and her rather comely lesbian lover. As Peggy said in an interview with the documentary TV show, BIO, in 2009: 

“It worked for what it was. We had a lot of fun. We made a lot of love. It wasn’t a relationship that people think of or look at today as a ‘lesbian relationship.’ It was not like that at all. We were compatible and young and wild and interested in each other.”

Peggy Caserta

What’s curious about Coon Hollow and the inhabitants that preceded the razing of the falling down cottage in 1983 and the building of the spacious, wide open, high-ceilinged two story building we’ve called home since fall 2012 is...the glass. Shortly after we moved in around September of 2012 my son Jack was playing with Mr. Boo on a gopher 

ridden patch of the former lawn - just clumps of fescue that the gophers would methodically pull under their mounds, leaving fewer and fewer clumps - when he came back up to the top story where the living room is and said "we can't play with Boo down there. It's nothing but broken glass." He was right. An area about thirty by fifty feet was strewn with shards of glass: brown, green, mostly clear, along with broken ceramics or perhaps the household plates, bowls, cups and so forth, a few pieces of clay pots and some weird ribbed, white siding or some other composite. The pieces range in size from almost full-sized bottles (only one has been found intact) to big 4" x 6" pieces to tiny shards that glimmer in the noon sun.

The earth is not much more than dirty rocks alongside a spring fed creek. A run over the dirt with a rake churns up more and more rocks - mostly golf-ball sized but some big daddies - and more glass the deeper we dig. It's hard to imagine what the Buckleys, the family that built the current house, did once they cleared it of ivy, blackberries both regular and pricker-less/fruitless (aka The Luther Burbank Blackberry), scotch broom and other brambles. We've found some of the green netting that sod is grown in, so it's likely that they Buckley's simply covered up the rocks and glass with several yards of topsoil and a big sod lawn.

The following owners, who moved in around 1994, let the place completely go to seed, so by the time we got here the glass - Janis's and Peggy's glass - was practically jumping out of the rocks and dirt. It's not difficult to imagine cadres of stoned hippies showing up at Peggy's beach palace, sitting on what they might have imagined was a buried treasure under brambles ten feet high, so high the creek was a tunnel of water running through Coon Hollow, heard but not seen, and pitching their bottles into the brambles, listening to their delightful destruction on the rocks.

Not Peggy's cottage, but similar

It is an image of a big party and a little party, of times intimate between the lovers applying suntan lotion to each other's naked loins on the sun deck, completely hidden from prying eyes in the folds of the hollow,  hearing the surf crash on the beach below just barely masking the squeals of the kids - always the squeals of the kids drifting up the creek as if they were right in our backyard. Regardless of how ramshackle the original cottage was, there must have been some rip-roaring parties here in Coon Hollow.

I can see the jittery, writhing, multi-colored 20-something hippies in their beads and stovepipe hats gobbling down and shooting up every drug imaginable, back when all the shit was pure as the driven snow: China White, Peruvian Flake, Thai Stick, Owsley Acid, Crystal Meth, orange barrels of Mescaline and Psilocybin Shrooms oh joy of joys! Boys and girls and girls and girls and boys and boys and girls and the little kitty cat going off in threes or fours to the back rooms of the cottage, a copy of Naked Lunch in hand, or in the main room on the overstuffed couches and bean bag chairs, watching the sunset while the back door was slammin’ and the kids were rammin’ n’ jammin’ on axes that would now be worth thousands - the ubiquitous Gibson 335s, the Country Gentlemans, Strats, Tellys, Les Pauls, Firebirds and SGs, Vox Continentals, Jaguars, the vibra-wiggling Farfisa, polished wooden Martins and Guilds ringing clear and true against the perpetual crash of breaking glass on the rocks below. 

Falstaff and Lucky, Busch Bavarian, San Miguel and Mickey Big Mouths - that’s what the Redwood high kids were drinkin’ down in front of The Castle on the beach in 1970 while Janis, Peggy, Pig Pen, Bloomfield, Butterfield - the bluesers - were shootin’ up in Coon Hollow, tossing bottles over their shoulders: Seagrams, Royal Gate, Beefeaters, Jack Daniels, Early Times, Hiram Walker and his brothers Johnny the Black and Johnny the Red, Jose Cuervo and the sweet syrupy nastiness that Janice was famous for drinking: Southern Comfort. I remember seeing Janis on stage with the Dead at Pepperland, playing Love Light for hours while she goosed Pig Pen and fondled Jerry with one hand and wielded her ever-present bottle of SC with the other. She sat in with the Dead,  but Janis sang the blues, played the blues, lived the blues, like Pig Pen.  Stick a loud Farfisa and slap a little tremelo on the ES 335 with a shuffle chuggin’ underneath and you got the San Francisco Sound.

All happening right here in Coon Hollow at Peggy’s little love getaway, next door to Cold Comfort, the name given to the house uphill from ours over 50 years ago, perhaps after Cold Comfort Farm, a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932 and made into a TV series by the BBC.  The phrase? Shakespeare, of course:

King John, 1595:

KING JOHN:

Poison'd,--ill fare--dead, forsook, cast off:

And none of you will bid the winter come

To thrust his icy fingers in my maw,

Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course

Through my burn'd bosom, nor entreat the north

To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips

And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you much,

I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait

And so ingrateful, you deny me that.

There is a curious connection between Shakespeare’s morgue vision and the silly, fatalistic parody of Britain’s country gentility in Cold Comfort Farm. Sometimes these hidden yet powerful ironies make the most sense in light of senseless death, like Janis Joplin’s. As Sam Andrew, her bandmate in Big Brother and the Kosmic Blues Band once put it:  

“Janis had a big appetite for everything: living, having a good time, everything,” he

recalls. “If it was food, she wanted the most and best of anybody in the room. If it was a good time, she wanted the most. She had a big appetite for drugs, too, and she had the opportunity and money to indulge it. Maybe if she would have had less of an appetite, it would have turned out better. She didn’t have a lot of caution at times.”

Peggy Caserta is still around, according to the available info, living somewhere in the Inland Empire of SoCal, clean at last after a long career with the needle. But Peggy’s a business person, not a musician. My theory is that the forces that drive the creation of truly inspired music - that yearning for complete catharsis and the accompanying mindless euphoria - are the same forces that can get a blazing heart and head to run for cover, shoot the moon, drink a case of Miller bottles and a fifth of Early Times and heave the bottles off the porch. 

I might have to give it a try myself, except that I've cleaned up all the rocks and am in the process of transforming the garden of glass into a field of grass. And let me tell it's just such non-stop euphoria and catharsis I can't hardly stand it.

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Looking for a new and interesting way to hack a little true romance?

I got your inspiration right here!

So

I mean WTF just happened? Between the untimely departure of many of my musical heroes and the complete demise of The American Dream, I feel like 2016 has been a non-stop gang rape of everything I believed was good and true.

Something about 2016 harkens back to 1915 and the Dadaists. It's not so much the art and anti-art that they created, or the anti-bourgeois sentiments. Rather, it's the complete absurdity of the socio-political environment, and the realization that our 250 year-old American experiment is fizzling and sputtering like a lab rat in its death throes. It's even worse to know that so many of our fellow-citizens don't give a shit about liberty and justice for all, and that they're perfectly happy destroying the planet so long as they can get a new truck, boat, snowmobile, motorcycle, RV etc. every couple of years.

Nonetheless, there are lessons to be learned. One is that the bubble we live in our here on the

Northern California coast really is a bubble, and a small one at that. Another is that the social media echo chamber in which some of us dwell is also a house of mirrors. And that the same is true for everybody: it's become almost impossible to discern opinion from fact, falsehood from reality, and if something enters our sphere that doesn't conform to the norms of our echo chamber, it gets vaporized like mosquito on a bug lamp.

I know this because many of us couldn't have been more wrong, and while we were telling each other how right we were, a revolt was underway. Who knew? Not the NYT, not the WP, not the SFC...Witness then the dangers of the echo chamber, topped with the foam off an orange julius.

So, what now?

First and foremost, we lost so FUCK THAT SHIT! As Tom Petty once sang "it's time to move on, time to get goin'." The federal government is shaping up to be a complete and utter train wreck for progressives, not to mention all the middle-class suckers that got conned by the Chump. So...to quote another song:

De do do do, de da da da

Is all I want to say to you

De do do do, de da da da

Their innocence will pull me through

De do do do, de da da da

Is all I want to say to you

De do do do, de da da da

They're meaningless and all that's true

Meanwhile, Merry Merry from the Hairy Family Singers. I suspect we'll muddle through 2017 one way or another.

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