J.D.’s Columns

           Deadwood on Five Dollars a Minute (This was written thirty-some years ago and first published by my pal Babs, in her BORDERLINE magazine.)                I live on a windy knoll  in the Salmon River mountains, seven miles up a gravel road from Donnelly, Idaho,      “The City of Helping Hands,”  population 247, but I grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota, and my folks still live there, in the Black Hills. On October 1, 1989, casino gambling, with certain limitations, became legal in Deadwood. What follows is my set of notes from a weekend trip to Deadwood in March 1991. Day One At five in the morning I kiss Caty and Baby-in-Belly, (working title: Little Luna) scrape windshield ice from Bic, the disposable Chrysler station wagon, then shimmy down Highway 55 in the Payette River canyon toward the nearest stoplight, 93 miles south, in B...

                            The Executioner’s Fork  Cambridge, Massachusetts        Five of us lived in three bedrooms, a kitchen and one bathroom of a stout white house near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives shared a room with Beryl, who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.      I'd quit a tree-trimmer’s job in California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out and returned to California for six months to help Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness born in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my friends from college were dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. My room was in a leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it puked hailstones. There were brown roses on the wallpaper.  By pressing my thumbs on ...

Wyatt and Sylvia   Toole County, Montana      In the last year before school consolidation, before the farm kids were jerked out of the soil and sent to city packing sheds, I taught nine students in one room, way out on the hard red winter wheatfields of northern Montana.       In August I received a list of unfilled positions from Helena and applied by letter from California to School District 19, Toole County. “It’s a dead-end deal,” said Sam Black, the chairman of the school board, when we shook hands on the phone. “One year, then we fold the school and you are dismissed. I won’t lie to you. You are the only one who has called about this. We’ll take the chance if you will. Five thousand dollars and a place to stay for the school year. Plenty of opportunity for weekend work if you can handle equipment.”       There was no school bus. The children were delivered to the white frame building by wind...

Speed Kills Blue Mountains, Eastern Oregon  2001 (I heard this story from a big gentle guy who had the Harley bar  and shield tattooed across his entire back and had a bible close at hand. He told the tale while we were cutting firewood, after we'd known each other for a year. Will died ten years ago of Hep C complications.)      Before Jesus stepped in, I considered myself to be one big bad outlaw. I know now that I was nothing more than an addict, a thief, an armed robber, liar, fornicator, and money-hungry drug dealer. I broke all the Commandments but one. I never killed anyone.......... but I tried.      Speed does kill. Everybody I used to know is dead now, killed by crystal  meth and crosstops and booze and stupidity and greed. My little brother got me started on speed on the streets of Seattle when he was twelve and I was fourteen. We were walking down along Pike Street and he went...

TICK, TICK, TICK        OK, you just spent the afternoon adding to your guess-what-bird-I-saw-today list by walking a mile though the brush along the river. It was a hot day, so you are changing out of your sweaty duds and admiring your image in a mirror when notice a new mole just below your belly button. You move a little closer to the mirror, stand on your tippytoes, and realize that the mole has a silver-brown sheen and, aw Jeez, legs. The temple of your body has been invaded by a parasite and it is dining on your vital fluids. Tick alert! Quick, get the critter off your skin, but how?       First, a bit of soft science. There are roughly eight hundred types of ticks on this planet. A hundred of these can carry disease to warm-blooded critters, including humans. Not every tick carries a disease. Of the hundred types, five species will be found in the Pacific Northwest. These are the Rocky Mountain Tick, the American Dog Tic...

The Reintroduction of Kate Wolf Marin County, California       Five years before Kate Wolf died of leukemia, I was forty years old, living in a hired man's shack with an open fifth of Jim Beam and a Martin guitar that I could not really play. Across the hills of Marin County, big productive Holstein cows were being branded on their faces and sold for slaughter. The USDA had determined that there was a surplus of milk on this planet. I was wearing out my boots walking around pool tables. I believed that old drunks spoke the truth.      One Sunday morning came down awfully hard. I awoke with a flash of energy as the last of the double shots and slow dances with a woman who had a Jackson Pollack painting tattooed on her left breast blew through my nerve endings. Five minutes later, the goddess of excess smote me behind the right ear and I crawled back into the bunkhouse flannel with the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. ...

A SAD Story         Engraved on the chunk of plastic pinned to her blue grocer's smock was the word “Delphine.”  She was one of five clerks handling the pre-holiday crush in a grocery store with aisles wide enough to accommodate forlklifts. Delphine was not smiling the smile that  “mystery shoppers” have forced upon the unions.      She slapped the bacon down like she was squishing scorpions. She hammer-threw five pounds of spuds against the back boards. She scooted the catsup with enough force to score against a Canadian goalie, smacked that bottle with the maple syrup, bowled a strike on the orange juice with a back-handed grapefruit, then helicoptered a dozen eggs into the pile.       "That'll be nineteen dollars and thirty-five cents."       I've never wanted to become a grocery clerk when I grow up. Even a good union clerk doesn't draw enough o...