For the last two months I have been assiduously scribbling notes in a black basic journal for my new novel, intended for mainstream publishers, not the self-publication route. At the moment I write this, my sciatica is throbbing and an infected tooth is announcing its sinister intent so I have taken an extra prescription painkiller with a swallow of Chardonnay to summon the onset of a journey toward a painless train ride into the place where the waking life greets the subconscious life and all manner of happy mayhem ensues.
Lela retired to the bedroom shortly after ten o’clock after we enjoyed American Experience together on PBS. I read a few more pages of Terry Mort’s biography about Hemingway’s life in Cuba during World War II, The Hemingway Patrols, and another chapter of Joseph J. Ellis’s magnificent but troubling American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. 
I’m worried about money, that much we all know. I never fail to announce that neurosis in these pages any opportunity I get. But I cannot seem to get started on the book because I invest my waking hours in the endless — and fruitless, often — pursuit of paying gigs that will provide the nest egg I need to write my novel. But if that were true, the generous contribution from the Authors League Fund a few months back should have provided me with the backboard to rest on while I wrote the novel … instead, I wasted that time looking for support after the ALF funds would be spent and gone (and searching for suitable housing in Los Angeles, only to discover that the “affordable” rental market is a thing of the past).
But in less than two months the calendar will turn to my fifty-second year. I do not labor under the delusion that I will sell a manuscript for millions and hence strike a fatal blow to my financial woes — in point of fact, my fiction is marketed to the lit-fic market, which we know pays notorious pauper’s wages.
But tonight after putting aside Mort’s work on Hemingway and Ellis’s work on Jefferson, drowsing slightly while leaning forward on my knees on the living room sofa while Lela snored softly in the room next to me, I picked up the Bukowski poetry collection, Sifting Through the Madness, for the Word, the Line, the Way, and came across the following bit of wisdom from Hank:
excuses
once again
I hear of somebody who is going to
settle d0wn and
do their work,
painting or writing or whatever,
as soon as they get a better light
installed,
or as soon as they move to a new
city,
or as soon as they come back from the trip they
have been planning,
or as soon as …
it’s simple: they just don’t want
to do it,
otherwise they’d feel a burning
itch from hell
they could not ignore
and “soon”
would quickly turn into
“now.”
I don’t know what to say, but the cost of rent in cities is crippling us as a society in many ways. It’s crippling our vitality. And there are wildly different schemes for dealing with it.
I cited one such example at street-hassle today. Steve Jobs has a very inspiring life story. But if he had had to devote half of his income in his 20′s to rent…we probably would not be interacting with each other today.
Unfortunately, this is another issue where I believe Democrats are just as culpable as Republicans, maybe even more so, because Democrats control urban politics. Affordable housing is nothing but a scheme for handing developers property at a below-market rate and turning truly affordable housing into a lottery for the poor. We should know by now: after forty years of “affordable housing” programs, housing is costlier than ever.
We only have “rent control” in places where rent is locked into a high rate, not a low one. With affordable housing and rent control, ironically, there are fewer market inefficiencies, and artists and creatives relied on such inefficiencies to organize their lives. Who needs “rent stabilization” when rent is “stabilized” at a rate out of reach of low income?
There’s a reason for all of this, of course: the “generosity” of the top tier of the baby boom. These people now have kids in their twenties and are willing to subsidize their rents even through their thirties. Every single parent I know of an adult under thirty subsidizes their child’s rent. So what the market will bear is higher than it would be if they all did not do so. Unfortunately, it’s not going to change soon.
There’s another reason for all this: the price of land in cities where people actually want to live.
It’s really simple, Joseph: God or some fuckers make more people every day, but quit making more land (without filling in the bays and estuaries).
There’s a question which worries me: how do kids expect to repay their school loans? The only way out–other than having a rich uncle pay it–is to become permanently and totally disabled; then it’s wiped clean off the books. I know from experience. I borrowed a total of $1800 in loans to buy books. 20 years later I owed $3600. Disability kicked in and cleaned the slate. I say fuck’em; I learned nothing from those expensive books.
Rent control in San Francisco worked fine for 30 years. Mother moved into her apartment before the rent was controlled for 150/month. 30 years later her rent was $450. Same apartment today would be $2,000/month and the rent would all leave the country as the building & land are owned by Hong Kong Chinese.
You haven’t been to L.A. in awhile, Mack, (or even San Francisco): a lack of housing is not the problem. In long stretches of the San Fernando Valley, for instance, there are boulevards with literally miles and miles of sprawling apartment complexes, many of them sporting 365 units or more; same thing here in Las Vegas — in fact, in Southern Nevada there are more residential housing units than there are citizens .. and many of the homes are sitting empty due to foreclosure. On the street where we lived in Aliante (the home we were evicted from) there were three empty foreclosed homes. A lack of real estate is most definitely not the cause. There are 300-plus units here at the Budget Suites are only two-thirds full.
Joseph stated it correctly: there is a surplus of real estate in the urban centers where people want to live but the rents have been stabilized out of reach of the average worker bee. And, incidentally, the civic planners of New York City over the decades have proven time after time what developers can do when there is a minimum of land: you build up to the sky.
You’re right about me not having been in LA for quite a while. The last job I had in LA, according to my Social Security print-out was Now Construction Company (1977). First day on the job they handed me a ticket to fly up to finish out a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant near the U.C. Davis campus but the pay scale was above Union, so I had to take it and leave my truck parked at an RV resort in Anaheim, across the road from Disney Land. When I finished the job in Davis, I came back to LA and arrived just in time for Disney’s special 4th of July fireworks display. I cranked the truck and moved it to San Bernardino where I finished out a restaurant for a local company at scale. Both towns were relatively new, having been in the former years a vast agribusiness spread and in the latter orange groves and the Roma Wine vineyards. Anaheim, Fullerton and most of Orange County was once ranches which I drove by on weekend liberty from Camp Pendelton and my first wife and I parked in the olive groves to make out which became that RV Park and Disney’s theme park. An old friend lives in one of those condo developments of “town houses” and just retired from TRW (or Boeing, or Ling Tempco Vaught) Those mergers kept him anchored until it became more profitable to move plants to Orlando, Florida and to Atlanta. His Spanish Tile roof is leaking at present.
My last visit in the City (San Francisco) lasted only a month–May, 2003. During that month I covered the area between San Jose and Santa Rosa, so I saw the conversion of agricultural land to housing developments, and pastures into grape vineyards.
During that span of time, from 1955 through 2003 there was a second major wave of migration, not only from the Midwest and south, but also from Asia, but mostly Anglo. Unable to afford those “middle-class” homes sprawling over the former grazing lands and citrus groves, they have become “Motel People.” Instead of picking grapes and plums they make transistors at minimum wages.
And then someone invented nothing-down financing to peddle the houses at inflated prices. Which resulted in the real estate mortgage bust, the empty and foreclosed houses and the whole fucked up world economy. I own lot 12 in Jasmine Gardens subdivision, a twenty acre hunk of the county on which thirty homes were built in 1955-57. Five are rentals now with absentee owners, six are vacant and in foreclosure and two are offices.. Lots 10 and 14 beside mine sold within the past 2 years for their 1995 appraisal value. But lot 16 has been owned by three generations and is now occupied by the grandson of the original owner who is in a nursing home. The present owner was a kid in high school and used to come to my place to watch me build a boat in my back yard in 1990; he just returned from Rota Spain, where for the past few years he’s been building on the U.S. Naval Base. All he pays are utility bills and property taxes on the home—or about $600 per month.
It’s the same story all over the country, except in the frigid lands of the Lakotas. Four hundred a month will rent a detached two story, 4 bedroom house in Dallas, SD. But that doesn’t include the price of heating an 80-yr-old house without insulation, or cost of the drive to Sioux Falls to guy groceries and drugs.
Yesterday I began going through a binder of typed stories. An envelope fell out with a family reunion photo sent in response to an article I wrote for the Tonkawa, Oklahoma News about the death in Korea of their pride and joy and the town’s football hero. It started a non-stop horror movie with sound effects provided by a line of thunderstorms.
Henry Charles Bukowski Jr.
The poem “excuses” moved me.
For weeks I’ve been making excuses for not cranking up my 1972 Ford Van. First off it was out of gas, so I took the can to the station and put fifteen bucks worth of Regular in it and came home with nearly five gallons with which I filled the tank on the lawn mower and then poured about four gallons into the Ford’s 45-gallon tank. The truck wouldn’t crank; the battery was drained. So I put the charger on it at 10 amps for an hour and then 2 amps for the next four hours. The engine turned over, but wouldn’t start. So I took the air filter housing off and sprayed some ether into the carburetor. Finally, I boosted the battery with 50 amps clamped directly to the starter solenoid, sprayed ether into the carb and cranked again. It started, ran raggedly until the fuel pump sucked enough gas from the tank to fill the float bowls, and then it ran like crazy. I disconnected the booster, put the air filter back on the carb and let the engine run while I checked the transmission fluid. The transmission fluid was thick as honey at first, but eventually warmed up. I had to rock the truck as if it were mired in mud to back it out I backed across the yard, shifted into first gear and moved forward. I had to hand shift up through the gears and move the truck back and forth to pack the sand loosened by our dog playing tag with our cat. When I finally parked under the tent shelter and shut off the engine, our pup began to race around the truck, creating another ditch six inches deep.
Buddy was just as happy as I was that the “soon had become now.” He was tired or running around in the same old ruts.
As soon as I recover from this depression, I’ll patch that hole in the hull of my boat and go sailing. It won’t be today, because we were out of coffee and sugar cooking oil this morning.
We drove to the store and got what we needed most and came home.
Writing this satisfied my burning itch. Maybe a surprise will come in today’s mail. A check or a pack of smokes would be nice.
I was feeling a bit better when I picked up A.J. at her house and drove to her dentist’s office at 0700. At the end of a two-hour wait–while I hand sanded the flaking clear coat off the hood om my twenty-year-old Volvo–I was handed the final dental bill for the work on A.J.’s teeth. It was only $6,800. I should have that paid off by next Christmas.
When she got in the car she asked for a cigarette. I didn’t have any and not enough money to buy a pack. She asked me to stop at a store. I did. She came out with a pack of smokes. “Two packs for $5.00,” she said, flashing those gleaming crowns as if she’d just won a prize.
When I got home, I started going through plastic tubs trying to find the original disk for my XP operating system. What I opened contained my entire “Official Military Personnel File.” Nearly twenty years worth of paper and all of it depressing. After shuffeling two inches of the ten-inch stack I started looking for a rope. I couldn’t find one sturdy enough to support my weight.
So I think I’ll go back to bed and nap until it’s time for C’s appointment with her shrink.