In 1991 I moved out to Los Angeles for two and a half years, give or take a couple of extended trips to Colorado. I'd gotten my MFA in Film/TV at Florida State University, as well as a divorce, and thought I'd go take Hollywood by storm––or, more likely, claw and worm my way into it the way I've clawed and wormed my way into everything else in my life. But I was ill-prepared for the rigors of either track, and instead my primary LA experience was that of the drunken coffeehouse poet.

I did the circuit. Its semi-official headquarters was the Onyx Cafe in Los Feliz, a stone's throw from where I lived most of my time in the city, and I read frequently at their open mics. (There's a fine requiem for the Onyx by Mark Ehrman here.) But there were dozens of other coffeeshops, too, that have since shut down. A couple times I read at a laundromat in Hollywood, and once we––a gang of us, at least thirty strong––occupied a train down to Long Beach and read poetry on each car, then had a big open-air reading at a little amphitheater. I read in South Central. Once with the L.A. Cacophony Society we did a Chinese New Year's pageant in an abandoned factory downtown (in which I played Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god) that got shut down by the fire department––and thus became a roaring success. 

We were Beatnik-wannabes, Charles Bukowski wannabes. (One of my biggest moments out there was being published fourteen pages away from Bukowski, while he was still alive, in a zine out of Wisconsin called Blank Gun Silencer.) Or at least I was a wannabe––maybe they were the real thing. There was a hell of a lot of good poetry out there. My favorite of the bunch, and a guy who influenced me quite a bit, was Eric Brown (a terrific poet who I can't find hardly anything about on the internet), who taught me to love the long line. It seems that you have to be in LA to experience his work, or come over to my place to check out the chapbooks of his that I kept from way back when. I played music stoned with spoken word man Jimmy Townes, a completely unique musician who died in 2004. S.A. Griffin was a leading light of that scene, and I vaguely recall being referenced in one of his poems as being "uptight" and having a "punk attitude." 

And we drank. Holy shit, we drank (though some, like Jimmy Townes, preferred ganga). If I wanted to find a party, I could find one, and I often did. I'd drink and nap in my car, or in a spare room somewhere, so I wouldn't have to drive the freeways drunk. I felt like such a piece of shit after the way my first marriage ended that drinking like a fish and treating my life like it wasn't worth anything seemed a completely reasonable solution. Sometimes I did drive the freeways drunk. Sometimes I walked through streets way too risky for me today because I had nothing to lose back then, and never got hassled because everybody else could see it, too. 

And the people in the drunken poet crowd could see something else: that I wasn't truly one of them. S.A. Griffin was right––I was an uptight guy with a punk attitude. I remember taking a girl home once and trying to get into her pants, and when I almost had she asked me 

Are you drunk?

to which I said

No

because I wasn't, not anymore. Once I said that, she wouldn't let me take those pants off and we just ended up messing around, sleeping together without sleeping together. What would her answer have been if I'd said yes? Would it have meant

I loathe myself too, so we might as well fuck each other?

Probably. It was one of my cues to leave and move on to fresh pastures again, where I would realize again that I'd never let this booze thing be easy.