HANDS SHAKING

Mort Sahl was sitting in Starbucks
I held out my hand and he shook mine,
The handshake that men of a certain age do,
The hand you want to hold on to for ever,
The hand that you think, if you did, would lead you places, teach you things,
Hold- on-to-those-hands-for-the-rest-of-your-life kinds of hands,
Soft, firm.

Hands-that-have-done-things-hands and know how to shake another man’s hands without making him seem unimportant,
too important,
trying to get over on you,
insult you,
intimidate you,
overpower you.
Not too firm,
Not too limp,
Just-right-hands,
Trustworthy hands,
Believable hands,
Good hands. Mort Sahl’s hands.

Men of a certain age,
Men who look like twenty-five year olds in older men’s skin,
Like they could zip down and step out and go one-on-one,
Firm, still in shape,
Bodies of men who take care of themselves,
Make them last and
Make them count because it’s the only one we get and they want to go the distance.
Firm hands and steady eyes that light up with twinkle and energy,
Eyes that know things, could tell you things, could lead you to secrets and wisdom.
Eyes that see.
Hands that know,
Hands that read you,
Hands that aren’t afraid to hold another man’s hand, feel him, touch him, let-him-know-he-understands kinds of hands.
My hands were shaking, and then I was shaking hands.
The way I want to shake another man’s hands.
If I know anything.

OLD SCHOOL

Sign of the times? The new radio ‘ad’ for the Sugar Shane Moseley – Antonio Margarito fight Jan 24 at Staples; ‘Due to the unbelievably high demand for tickets, we’ve made additional seats available, at the low, low, price of only twenty dollars!’
Read; ‘we ain’t sellin’ no seats, dudes, come on down, get ‘em while they’re cheap’
These two fighters are outstanding, and have both shown abilities to excite crowds, take on fights as underdogs and win, and show the highest levels of courage and skill under extreme pressure.
Shane beat Oscar De La Hoya twice, Margarito wore down Miguel Cotto in a very entertaining fight this past summer. He didn't just beat Cotto, he mugged him in the alley. Nobody wants to fight Margarito because he’s just too tough. Shane is past his prime and is accused of using ‘juice’.
Is Oscar through? Probably. After what I reluctantly call an embarrassing fight loss against Manny Pacquiao, Oscar only needs to go to the counting house, stack up the coin, continue promoting fights for the good of the sport along with ‘good guys’ Goosen Tutor and be the bright face for the sport of boxing.
I’ll be checking out the talent and talking with John Bray at Fortune’s next week. John is training a team on The Contender and trains fighters and helps kids with his youth clinics and boxing exhibitions through the John Bray Foundation. Fortunes is a 50’s style gym in Hollywood. Might have to pull on the Everlast hoodie, take the train and hustle on in there.
Don't give up on boxing. We'll see how the economic conditions treat the newcomers to the fighting sports. Me? I see a return to brick, skylight and ceiling fans, the thump-thump of speed bags and the crunch of hard abs and the pain, man, the pain. Recession/Depression brings out the old school. Protect yourself at all times.

OJ, WHAT I'LL REMEMBER

If you ever saw him pick up the baton, 205 pounds of muscle hurtling down the backstretch, smooth, controlled, fast, handing off to Fred Kuller who would give to anchor man Lennox Lewis, leadoff man Earl McCulloch and OJ standing on the infield now watching Lewis head for home, you wonder now, seeing OJ Simpson shackled in prison blues, trying to explain his behavior in a hotel room with a gun, how it ends up like this.
I do.
I’m no OJ Simpson apologist, I just happen to have a history with the guy, as a fan, back in the Bay Area, watching him play football at USC and run track, the most gifted two-sport athlete I think I’ve ever seen. Bo Jackson was a great three-sport athlete, football, baseball and track, but he was different, more power, less finesse, but yes, he could hit major league pitching. OJ, man,he was poetry. Simpson was the first back in my memory that was over two hundred pounds that combined enough power, with blinding speed and the slick hips and quick feet to move through holes and past linebackers so fast he was unstoppable in college. Gayle Sayers had beautiful style and great speed but he couldn’t take the pounding. OJ had it all. He combined Jim Browns ability to slip tackles and give you the wrong angle with the quickness and speed of the smaller backs. Gayle Sayers was Count Basie. Great style and a great band who played well with others. OJ was John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Elvis, Horowitz. Stand alone on a stage and do it. The full range of style, grace, power and touch, every run was a masterpiece, every hand-off a chance to score. He was that good.
Few athletes really excel at football, and track. There have been a few. OJ, Herschel Walker, Bo Jackson, Isaac Curtis, to name a few. OJ was part of a world record 440 yard relay team. World Record. That’s how fast he was. It’s hard to think of OJ as under-appreciated as a professional, but you have to wonder if he’d been in the backfield with say, a Joe Namath, or Bart Starr, how he would have been regarded. Yes, he’s in the Hall of Fame and held the NFL rushing record, but fans are quick to point out players like Emmitt Smith, Walter Payton, Jim Brown, Tony Dorsett and even Franco Harris when the discussion comes around to the great running backs. Don’t forget Juice.
And now, he’s infamous. Along with Pete Rose and Mike Tyson, undoubtedly the three most enigmatic athletes of my time. Great, all three, but tragically flawed. Unable to separate their athletic greatness from the innumerable flaws as humans. The same fine-tuned concentration and focus they use to become the best at their sports, they use to block out their flaws and quirks, allowing them to dominate their personalities to the point of destruction.
I don’t know what message there is in this most recent downfall. I don’t. He’s a criminal, clearly. Perhaps guilty of much more than armed robbery and kidnapping. Perhaps much more. We’ll never really know, but we’ll always have our suspicions.
But I know he was great, once. I know he was one of the first super-human gifted athletes who ran in trunks on a track where there is no hiding. He ran in college with the best and dominated on that field. As a pro he set records for teams that were average, extending his career beyond his greatness, perhaps the first sign of the vanity that would do him in.
But, God, he was beautiful to watch. I make no apology for bad behavior. I’ll always remember him after the murders, on trial, going free. I’ll always remember him in the court of public opinion, losing. I’ll remember the Vegas debacle and the trial and the sentencing, his last words a sham, a scam, nobody buying it.
But I’ll also remember him holding the baton, the way I’d never seen anybody run, and on the field, reversing his direction, after a sweep was shut off, cutting back, launching a pass into the end zone to beat Stanford, something no mortal could possibly do. But he did. He did once, he did. He did those things that no one else could do. I remember.

WHAT I MISS ABOUT BERKELEY

Memorial Stadium and Edwards Field; Telegraph Avenue, Durant Ave, Shattuck and Ashby, some of the best street names in the whole country. Grove Way, University Ave, Solano Ave, Dwight Way, Benvenue, where I lived for a year a block from the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Kleeburger Field where I played intramural soccer with the legendary ‘East-West’ team filled with Jamaicans and Americanos and big Don Ross guarding my ass when I was goalie. Kips, where I worked for three years and almost got fired for drinking beer one night before I was twenty one and someone told owner Joe Di Sano. He kicked my ass. Tower Records, Leupold’s Records; KLAX radio, that study in the failure of racial college politics but good training for my radio script writing, Sproul Plaza and the drum line on Sunday’s, the Edwards Field baseball complex in the spring when I cut class and almost flunked Econ 1-A with Professor Nadel; a couple of the girls at Kips, Nancy something who had terrific tits and tried to seduce me one night after a party at my house but she couldn’t quite swing it, me holding out for some damn reason; Sandy Browne, God bless her; Cody’s, the Coop market; REI, Ski Hut, North Face, some of the best outdoor shops in the country back in the early 70’s; The Big Game, Larry Blakes after a big Kennedy Games track meet when all the runners would show up and drink beer; Eddie Hart, Isaac Curtis, Wesley Walker, Joe Roth, Steve Bartkowski, Vince Ferragamo, Chuck Muncie, Dave Fishbaugh, Phil Chenier, Brady Allen, Dave Masters (these were the jocks that ruled Cal in the early 70’s); The Keystone, Freight and Salvage, the Berkeley Community Theater, the Jazz Festival at the UC Greek Theater and looking out over the stage and the columns when Miles Davis was in town, seeing the Golden Gate Bridge at night and the Bay Bridge and San Francisco and thinking it ain’t going to get much better then this and damn, it hasn’t, really; Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, George Benson, Carlos Santana; wondering, during the Viet Nam war era and the protests and the anger at the US botching a major foreign policy initiative that ended in a useless and deadly war, if the United States would ever regain enough honor to lead in any other worldwide conflict and you know, the jury is out on that and I don’t know if that qualifies as something I miss but it was sure a part of life then; my going away party when I moved to Jackson Hole Wyoming and the great friends and the wine and good food and the gifts; Cindy Greer and that’s all I’m going to say about you, my dear, you’re one that got away; my 1964 Karman Ghia convertible, and of course the lovely Nora Lindahl, who sat in that car many times and was she a sweetheart, or what?? Crappy little FM radio in that Ghia, but with the top down, who cared?

HALLOWEEN MOON

He was bent over. He looked okay, though. She didn’t.
I’d popped into Coco’s in Barstow after hiking in Owl Canyon north of town. It was a full moon. Hadn’t shaved in almost a week.
They always treat me good at the Coco’s in Barstow, usually after I’ve been wandering around the desert, rooting around in my Jeep, hiking, taking photos, trying to capture that eternal silence you only find in the desert. I’d found some, where you keep listening, waiting for something to disturb it like a pebble rippling a pool but it stays silent, pure.
I could feel them moving towards the counter where I was sitting. Moving, barely, so slow. They came closer, the woman holding the arm of the man. I turned and looked and saw a man bent over holding a cane and a woman with a sickly grin and no teeth, holding his arm and he looked at me with clear blue eyes, hunched over, and asked if there was room for two next to me.
Of course, I said. He smiled. She smiled. She had very few teeth yet kept her mouth open. He turned and leaned his cane against the counter and gripped the edge with his hand and I asked if he wanted me to hold the cane. He said yes, and I took the cane. It was warm from his grip and he leaned in to the seat and I pulled the cane back out of the way, my fingers curled around the black vinyl handle, holding something that had been in his hand for how many days? How many hours?
It was his back, he said, mumbling that he didn’t know if was the bed that was causing the pain, looking at me with the blue eyes framed with bushy black eyebrows. The woman stroked her chin and opened and closed her mouth, a row of incomplete teeth.
My back bothers me too, I said, working out, at the computer, writing. Locked up pretty good a few weeks ago, I said, putting the cane back in his hand. I needed more lemonade and held the glass up to the waitress who disappeared and came back with another one.
I study law now, the man said. I guessed his age between seventy five and eighty.
Like to become a lawyer? I asked.
He reached in the pocket of his white shirt, a blue turquoise bolo tie hanging around his neck. The woman stroked her chin, moving her jaw up and down, working it.
He handed me a business card.
Life & The Future as an ethical theory and a Philosophy of Law
It’s a philosophy that supports the future of life, he said.
They come to me, I thought. Let them speak.
Are you studying this? I asked. Developing this idea?
You tell one person, who lives it, the idea that all actions should support the future of life, and it influences another person, he explained. It could change the world.
My sausage and pepper fettuccine arrived.
I’m on board, I said, between mouthfuls of spicy Italian sausage and a salty marinara. It might need a little explaining, some developing, I said, to get the point across.
What needs explaining? He said. He gave the waitress his order. One order. Two plates. She scurried away.
Canals, he said. Build canals.
For what? I asked.
Develop desert property, grow crops.
We have canals, I said. The Colorado River is siphoned off to Vegas, Southern California.
He said China had canals.
He asked me if I would consider China successful, under this new ethical concept that supported the future of life, compared to the United States.
They’ve got a lot of people, I said. They’ve been at it a while. Three or four thousand years, I said. They had philosophers writing down theories of life in the fifth century, B.C. Earlier, even. Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Confuscius.
Well, they had canals, he said.
I’ll eat a bit, I thought, let the conversation breathe. I gulped lemonade, heavy on the sugar. Nice and cold. The waitress cruised by a couple of times, looking my way, asking if I was OK. Fine, I’d say. I probably looked exactly like what I was, a desert rat crawling out from a dusty trail, chowing down next to a local and his companion.
No difference between a child and an eighty year old man, he said.
Experience, maybe, I said. Judgement. A child is open but he lacks experience to find his way in the world. He needs guidance. An eighty year old has wisdom. Children have no wisdom.
I started a family worship when I was five years old, he said.
Did you grow up here?
Oregon, he said. What do you think of my idea?
Nice. Good stuff. Can’t go wrong with that, I said.
The woman hadn’t said a word. I’d seen women like that standing at freeway exits with shopping carts and black plastic bags and a cardboard sign scrawled with a plea for help and I’d probably driven by a hundred of them. She sat, patient, some relationship with this man who wanted to change the world.
Then I noticed the man’s hands. He had hair on his hands. Long hair, growing out of his fingers, at least an inch. Lots of hair, on the fingers, the spaces between his knuckles, on the back of his hands and on the wrist coming out of the cuff of his white shirt.
The waitress took my plate and asked if I wanted to have some desert and I waved it off, saying no, that was plenty. She left the check.
So what do you think of my idea, the man said again.
Good, I said. Good luck with it.
You think you can do anything to help me with it?
I gathered the check and the Daily Press: Victor Valley and the High Desert.
I’d like to, I said. I don’t live around here. I enjoyed talking with you. I shook his hand.
He smiled, his bushy black eyebrows giving way to wrinkled creases and he nodded his head. The woman smiled.
Maybe I’ll see you around, I said.
The cane leaned up against the counter between them. She hadn’t said a word since she’d sat down, that I’d heard. I wonder if she ever did. Wonder if she had much to say to the man. Maybe he did all the talking.
The cane was brushed aluminum with a black vinyl handle.
The big full moon was over the horizon, light dimming in the west. A young woman in nice jeans and a rust colored shirt walked across the parking area to a pay phone and put in some coins . She looked good in the nice jeans. Strawberry blonde hair almost matching the shirt, tied back in a pony tail. Neon signs were coming on at the restaurants and gas stations and motels on Main Street, Barstow. People, moving in and out of shadows and pink sunsets and the big harvest moons that shine over the desert, eating at café’s and putting coins in the pay phones. A man walked up and stood at the phone kiosk on the other side of the woman in the rust colored shirt.

I KNOW HOW JAMES DEAN DIED

I was fighting it, my lids heavy, eyes tired from getting up at three thirty, four o’oclock in the morning for a couple of days. I was snapping out of it, on the highway, out around Blackwell’s corner and the San Andreas fault and a lot of nothing out west of I-5 coming out of Paso Robles. Maybe it was the fish sandwich at Foster’s Freeze. The girl said the fish sand at McDonald’s scared her, no way she ate that stuff. ‘I make my own tartar sauce,’. Do it, I said. It was good. Maybe it was cruising Paso Robles looking for a Chevron station and settling for an Exxon. What’s the difference? Out past the wineries and vineyards and new housing projects silenced in mid-form, out into the dust and empty hills, heading towards Blackwell’s corner and Lost Hills. Didn’t want to do a James Dean. Didn’t want to find some chasm in the San Andreas and become a fossil for someone to pick up a million years from now and speculate. Hmmm…maybe he was driving one of those gas powered vehicles they used to drive. Right here, in front of the oil derricks pumping crude out of the ground, strung together with pipes and electric poles with cord running all through the patch and big steel locusts like insects sucking blood. Stay awake, stay awake.
Blackwell’s corner is in the middle of nowhere. No trees. No signs, no motels, a big steel warehouse, they’re putting in gas pumps and a big parking area on both sides. Air conditioned, snack bar, aisles of almonds in all sizes of plastic zip lock bags. Walnuts, pistachios. Roasted, raw, lightly salted, Cajun style, jalapeno, onion and garlic, get your almonds any which way and suck ‘em on down with a splash of your favorite soda.
From a distance the oil wells in Lost Hills look like a construction project putting up skinny frames of black steel, way off, a couple of miles maybe, just structure, an outline, low lying scatter in some early form of organization, and you’re looking for a sign or something announcing the development, for-sale, call this number for information. There are a couple of pickup trucks parked near the dirt road entrances, little white square signs announcing Chevron Field 29, guys sitting in the front seats behind the wheel with the door open wearing white hard hats, hell of a job, I think. No chance to take some photos without getting run off so I head on down the straight blacktop.
If you’re going to devastate a few square miles of land this is the place to do it, I’m figuring. Nobody tills this land, no one for miles. I don’t see any almond orchards in sight, no walnut trees, nothing, just dried grass making the land golden but it’s the crude that makes the dough, here. Not almonds and beer and gas stations. Lost hills is a stop light of two-story sand colored apartments and a bar or two and a Mexican restaurant and that’s the life, I guess, you go on in to Bakersfield for some real fun.
I wonder what it will be like when we drill in ANWAR. I’ll never be up there, I don’t think. I’ve been to Alaska and there’s a lot of open space but it’s pristine, majestic, mountains and streams and eagles flying off the trees next to the rivers in big looping beats of wings making their own wind, snow cap peaks and glaciers and there’s no room there for sucking the ground. I know we need oil. I know.
I pick up two one-pound bags of roasted, unsalted almonds for six ninety-nine, a couple of bucks cheaper than Von’s, and I’m good. Drinking a coke in the car to wake up and on down past the enclave of Lost Hills and I’m pushing out on to I-5 south with the trucks and cars and the funneling of effort down to the grapevine and the rush to get over the hills.
I’m back now, home. My sound system sounds better, the air conditioning cools down the house, I put away some groceries and steam some vegetables and eat some food and settle in. Out on the San Andreas the earth shifts, little by little, and we pull out what we think we need from down below. My air conditioner shuts off and I turn on the television. I need some ice in my drink.

HANDS HIGH

At the end of the first fight, the referee held up both fighter’s arms and the crowd cheered. We had cheered all through the fight. The fighters deserved our best. The boys had given it everything they had and we knew it. They were eight or nine years old.

When the bell sounded to begin the fight they stood together in the middle of the ring and planted their feet, and without moving their heads or their feet, they swung mighty punches at each other and hit each other and landed blows on their faces and their arms and their necks and chests and they didn’t back down, neither of them, until the bell sounded ending the fight after three two-minute rounds.

We clapped our hands until they were raw. We cheered and whistled and the trainers cut off the gloves and then the fighters went to the center where the referee checked both fighter's hands for his initials signifying that the taping had been approved before the fight, and he held both of their hands high.

Finally the referee held one fighter's arm high, the winner, and the fighter took a medal on a long ribbon and placed it around the other boy’s neck and I was moved by this simple act of kindness and sportsmanship in a rough sport that boys take up. He put the medal around the boys neck, and then he took the winner's trophy and held it over his head.