José Vadi is the author of the debut essay collection Inter State: Essays from California (Soft Skull).

He received the San Francisco Foundation’s Shenson Performing Arts Award for his debut play “a eulogy for three” produced by Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Living Word Project. He is the author of SoMa Lurk, a collection of photos and poems published by Project Kalahati / Pro Arts Oakland. His work has been featured by the Paris Review, the PBS NewsHour, the San Francisco Chronicle, Catapult, McSweeney’s, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartersnacks, Free Skate Magazine and Pop-Up Magazine. He lives in Sacramento.

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Formation

There are four stages of interrogation; the first is called Formation. Before the interrogation comes the need for it to occur and the mandate to undertake it. At this stage, the framework is established for how the interrogation may be determined, including the level of coercion that is permitted or not allowed.

What happened in the library?

My affair with California begins long before we meet. I am nine, tucked between stacks in the school library on the second floor. For years after, decades, I will have dreams about the second floor of this school. I will wrestle in my sleep to remember what the hallway looked like as it hooked a sharp right, to the farthest reaches of the building where only the sixth-graders went. I will smell the disinfectant wafting off the floors and hear the squeak of untied sneakers. I will remember, without knowing if it is real, a tide of anxiety about the girls’ bathroom—dirty stalls, cold tile, donut-shaped communal drinking fountain into which one could easily fall, or be pushed.

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Liska Jacobs. Her debut novel Catalina is available from MCD/FSG.

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My memoir: Gun Needle Spoon begins with the last years of my heroin addiction, my consequent descent into crime, primarily armed bank robbery, and my eventual incarceration. My final arrest was June 25, 1997, and I look back at the person that I was then and wonder who that person was. He certainly is not who I am today. Over the last 18 years I have worked hard to instigate such an internal psychological change. If you had told me then that I’d become a recovering drug addict, a published author and a college instructor, I would have laughed and told you, “no fuckin’ way, dude!” Heroin addiction’s mental and physical stranglehold combined with the junkie tunnel vision of procuring the drug at all costs, mentally altered me from the person I was meant to be and the direction I was heading. In 1977 I was an artistic kid at art school right as punk rock hit the radar and the music world exploded, flash-forward twenty years later, I was a semi-illiterate career-criminal facing a 25 to Life Sentence under California’s Three Strike Law, and wondering how the hell it had all turned out so wrong. Patti Smith said, “I never thought I was gonna make 30.” Well, I never thought I was going to make 21. It has been a long road to get to who and where I am now, and it makes me wonder what the “1997 Patrick” would have to say to the Patrick of today. 

Last Day

San Francisco, June 25, 1997

Chunks of the doorframe fly through the air and fall on either side of me. I stand there, immobile. A hundred cops outside, some in uniform, some not, guns drawn, faces and bodies tense. A tall, heavyset blonde police officer steps forward through the doorway and smacks me in the face with the butt of her shotgun as more cops push past her and into the apartment. I lie on the floor, a foot across my throat, a knee in my groin, a shotgun and a 9mm leveled at my head.

In Edan Lepucki’s California, a novel about life after widespread economic, political, and ecological collapse, a main character regards herself as a performer without appreciators. This character, Frida, lives in the woods after cities have crumbled due to all manner of human weakness, and she realizes that here, “No one was looking. Her audience was sucked away.” It’s one of the stranger promises of the end of the world: should you somehow survive it, no one will see you anymore. If, however, you’re inclined toward narcissism and an unmet craving for attention, you might already have experience with this heightened sense of yourself surrounded by little else.

In the winter of 1976, I committed the professional and personal faux pas of giving a poetry reading with Rod McKuen.  It took place at the Veterans Auditorium in downtown San Francisco and was supposed to be a benefit for the San Francisco State University poetry program. 

There’s no doubt that with the California state legislature passing a bill to ban therapies aimed at trying to “change” the sexual orientation of minors, “reparative therapy” is once again going to make headlines. I was in a form of reparative therapy in British Columbia, Canada, for six years, after which I filed a medical malpractice suit against my former psychiatrist, “Dr. Alfonzo,” for treating my homosexuality as a disease. If this new law in California is to be criticized, it is because the use of “change” therapies on people older than 18 should be prohibited as well. I was 24 when I met Dr. Alfonzo, 31 when I left his therapy, and almost 40 when the lawsuit ended in an out-of-court settlement in 2003.

At 3 a.m. on the morning before Independence Day, I drove six hours from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles on a mission to seduce my closest male friend. Nathan and I had been buddies in high school but drifted apart afterwards; it was only recently that we’d rekindled our connection. We’d spent the past year logging long hours in online conversations laced with a potent combo of flirty chemistry and neediness. Our chats were late-night confessionals on crushes, love, and sex; I was his virtual wing-girl. We were building a strong friendship too, but I knew I was falling for him when I wanted to stay up past midnight basking in the twin glows of my laptop screen and my newly minted role as Nathan’s confidante, instead of crawling into bed with my boyfriend of six years, who I lived with.

I drove en route to a one-bedroom cabin set off a lonely road from a remote highway in the north Georgia mountains where I’d have no cell phone reception. The cabin came with a mini-fridge, a shower and kitchen sink, a twin bed, a desk upon which I’d perch my computer, and the chair in which I’d sit to write. The windows looked out on a swath of mixed evergreen and deciduous forest that, in the duration of my stay, would blend into a kaleidoscopic of green and the yellow, orange, and red of fall.

Karl Taro Greenfeld’s NowTrends (Short Flight/Long Drive Books) is worth reading simply for the exotic locations and unique settings, but there is much more going on in this collection. A layered sadness permeates these stories, often soliciting sympathy for the main characters. At other times, a sense of entitlement causes the reader to become frustrated and even angry at these spoiled people. And still other stories allow us to understand the uncertainty that life offers up, even amidst important events and epic moments, unsure of how to take these revelations, unable to change—even when willing.

 (The Merry-Go-Round is Beginning to Taunt Me[1])

1. Author As [not circus] Dog Trainer (Cris)

You can’t lie to a dog. Or you can’t lie badly. While training dogs, you need to be “telling” them, with both body-language and voice, that they are the center of the universe to you, and that what they do for you—and what you’re doing together—makes you happier, and means more to you, than anything else in the world. They can tell if you’re lying. If you’re unconsciously communicating to them that you’re disappointed or upset because you’re thinking about something else, something offstage—whether your life’s true dilemma or your most current disappointment—they take it on as stress. To dogs, it’s all about them. So the trainer has to be able to convince the dog of that, whether it’s true in the trainer’s larger life or not. Problem is, the dog can usually tell. A good trainer doesn’t have “a larger life.” It’s never “just a dog” and therefore easy to lie to.

For years I lived in fear of the monster that I believed emerged from a pond in the movie Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. I could hear the eerie song echoing in my head from some movie preview seen in childhood…visions and memory scent of the Grand Lake theater in Oakland or the Oaks in Berkeley…scenes and shadows seemingly cast on the cavernous walls of Larry Blake’s restaurant where everyone in the family ate salad but me. I see the old decaying house and the long spiralling staircase from the monster’s point of view as it climbs the steps, dripping leaves and mud…some awful shape of nightmare curiosity…

When I finally saw the movie all the way through many years later, I realized it wasn’t a pond, but a creek, and the monstrous shape I’d been imagining all that time was really Joseph Cotten. He and the crooked Olivia de Havilland are trying to drive Bette Davis mad. What I’d been seeing in my mind and dreams was a supposedly drowned Joseph Cotten come back from the dead.

Flashback to a summer night in Tahoe…

My father’s friend Bill with the deep smoky voice, his ballerina wife and their two children, Wade and Wendy, are there. Bill is going bald and his skin has a stained leather look. I think he has liver spots. The wife’s hair is pulled back tight into a bun, her body is slender and petite, her face vaguely Spanish looking. My mother never knows what to say to her unless they’re beating the men at bridge. She dislikes them because Bill and Dad disappear off to Stateline or Reno and gamble all night. Bill plays blackjack and has won as much as $5,000 in a weekend. Wade is a weird kid and Wendy wets her pants and cries. We go to the movies. The drive-in in South Lake Tahoe. (My God, there are still drive-in’s.) A Hammer horror film is showing, The Mummy’s Shroud. I cover my eyes throughout, only glimpsing up at the most terrifying moments which two decades later I realize are actually quite ludicrous. It’s a hot dark August night full of bugs thick like fog in the light, and far outside the glow of the giant screen and the cinderblock snack bar the stars are trembling.

I see now that it’s Bill I’m really afraid of. But back there in the car before the shining screen I don’t know why. I only sense it. A darkness taking shape. I think what I’m afraid of is his deep smoky voice and the curling lip of his laugh which I never know how to take-and the way he always says my mother’s name as if it’s a question. It’s not the colors of the movie that I close my eyes to hear…it’s the way he wants me to look, the way he likes that I’m afraid. The way he eats his Good n’ Plenty with methodical calm.

Wade whispers about penises and ladies’ things. Wendy sobs softly and the stars dissolve over the Sierras. The smell of popcorn and steamed hotdog buns fills the car and for years I’ll be afraid of a bad movie, not knowing why.

Please explain what just happened.

There was a Big Bang, Elvis died, and then Obama tripled the deficit.

What is your earliest memory?

My ears scraping across a birth canal.

If you weren’t an actor/writer/director/producer, what other profession would you choose?

One that pays.

Continued from here

The Place

We woke up early the next morning to check the surf. It was smaller than yesterday and all blown out.

“Looks pretty shitty out there,” Marty said. “And the tide’s low. Maybe we should head south and get our morning session in someplace down the road.”

I agreed. I’d break my neck on that reef if the waves any shallower than yesterday.