So after the much-lamented demise of the Blackwater Cafe (where Jim and I met and where I used to work; best damn minimum-wage job ever), Rob, the cafe's former owner, has put together a mailing list of sorts trying to keep track of people who used to work at or be regular customers of the BWC. And since the BWC was the epicenter of my social life for oh, about three years or so, I naturally had some interest in this project. I went over to Rob's site today to check out the ever-growing database of BWC characters and their current whereabouts, where I ran across this entry:
1993 * Mack Faamausili * City/state/info unknown
Which got me thinking. Back in the day, Mack and I were kind of fringe-friends; we never spent a whole lot of time together, but we got along really well. He went to the same high school I did, and we had sort of a nodding-in-the-halls acquaintance; he was friends with the unapproachably awesome Jenna Gouker, whom I always admired from afar but could never summon up the courage to talk to much. She was just so... well, perfect... and I was so bloody imperfect.
Mack and I happened to be in the same poetry writing class one semester in college (yes! I admit it! I wrote poetry... don't worry, I got better) and we discovered we had fairly similar views about things. Not at a particularly insightful level; mostly just stuff like "Dude... Republicans suck" and "Hey, I smoke cloves too." But we both had an hour's break after poetry class and before whatever our next classes were (I think mine was nutrition--obviously, that didn't exactly stick), so we killed a lot of time leaning against railings and talking very seriously about the essential meaninglessness of everything and smoking the above-mentioned cloves. And once the two of us drove from Stockton to Santa Cruz to see Elvin Bishop play at the Kuumbwa jazz club; the whole experience rather reinforced my dislike of bebop, but Mack seemed to enjoy it.
Mack was one of those anachronistic people who really should've been born in an earlier decade. I think he would have made an excellent Beat poet; he had the clothes, the cigarettes and the obscurely-worded verse down pat. But the modern world seemed unfriendly to him, and he gradually withdrew more and more into a private world of journal scribbling and (it is rumored) heroin, and eventually he just kind of dropped out of sight altogether.
So anyway... naturally, seeing that Mack's whereabouts were currently
unknown spurred me to Google him--and little to my surprise, absolutely
nothing of recent vintage turned up. But I did get a review of an issue (probably the only one, I would guess) of a zine he published back in 1995:
- Boat Issue 1 August '95
- Mack is a frantic journal writer. He takes notes wherever he
goes and dates them all to mark the passage of time. Some of them
are short messages of inspiration and others just explain his daily routine.
In this issue he digs up notes from as far back as January '93 and tells us about his travels around the SF/Bay area, smokin' a
big bowl, and a long date with "M." His thematic piece "20 Cigarettes, 20 Entries" was written over a couple days and seemed
to capture the essence of Mack's life: lots of cafes, slacking,
and taking life easy.
- Nothing more recent. Nothing.
And so I was wondering about the other people I've known and liked who've seemed to disappear into the sunset after a brief flowering of youthful glory.
Adam Spreer. That's a sad story. Adam was one of my oldest friends--we met when he was in fifth and I was in fourth grade. There was a quartet of nerdish kids--Adam, Richard Matherson, Joyce Wong (my best friend at the time, later to become my utter nemesis) and I--who loved spending recess playing Dungeons & Dragons and talking about the latest Stephen King novel we were all devouring. Richard disappeared after elementary school and Joyce and I fell out (that's a whole 'nother blog post), but Adam and I were friends right through high school and into college. We would spend whole afternoons hanging out watching MST3K and arguing about drug legalization and psychiatric treatment; then we'd walk down to Baskin-Robbins for chocolate raspberry truffle ice cream, which you can't get anymore either. And the mix tapes... God, the mix tapes... that's a dying art, no? "Mix CD" just doesn't roll off the tongue as well, does it? And "mix playlist" just sounds freakin' stupid.
Then he met Paula, Paula Nasty-ass, Paula Guys-like-me-'cause-I-talk-about- porn-all-the-time, Paula the Foul and Charmless. They hooked up and he dropped pretty much all of his former friends (especially me... she ha-ted me... can't imagine why) and his parents, too. Now I have no idea where he is; a Google search ("adam spreer," "spreer adam," adam spreer without quotes) reveals nothing relevant for him; and he's scattered to the winds, apparently, like so much chaff. Sic transit amicitia mundi. Shit.
But one cannot long ruminate on Mack and/or Adam without thinking of the bête noire of my high school days, my ultimate love/hate/confusion relationship, Dominique Monbureau. Strange, beautiful, incomprehensible Dominique, who used to send me letters written in subpar third-year French and who looked like a walking skeleton in his billowing Skinny Puppy t-shirts. And this is where this story really gets sad.
For I Googled Dominique, and lo and behold--he is an operations manager for a "remote corporate e-learning company" in San Jose.
An operations manager. For a remote corporate e-learning company.
Gone are the depressing-but-so-romantic dreams of squatting in San Francisco warehouse lofts, scraping together a living by selling poetry and drawings on the streets, counting oneself rich beyond measure if one could afford a bottle of absinthe and a fresh stick of eyeliner. Gone, the notions of touring the stinking closet-sized clubs of Europe with one's goth band. Gone, the lovely but impossible dreams of drifting through life giving nothing and taking nothing, attached nowhere and to no one.
An operations manager. For a remote corporate e-learning company.
Fuckin' adulthood. Sneaks right up behind you and smacks you in the head. And then you realize it's been there for a long time and you can't get rid of it and really, honestly, if you sit down and rationally evaluate all the positives and negatives, you wouldn't really want to give up all the delightfully mature things you've accomplished and your enviable settled lifestyle... but still.
Still.
So I cracked open the Denver Post this morning and saw the following two items:
