So earlier today, I was talking to ninth graders,
and sometimes, students--
I taught high school for over 20 years, and sometimes students
would say, we should read one of your books.
And I said, wow, it's like, I lived an r-rated childhood,
you can't read my book.
You have to wait.
So yeah.
All right, what else, what's next?
I should have asked for requests earlier
when I was sitting at the dinner table with people.
All right, but I do have my post-its,
so I'll be reading from those.
All right.
The basic-- one of the basic parameters for my project,
for my various projects is that, when I was growing up,
it was not clear to me at all that people of color
would be represented in literature
on the East side of Los Angeles, because we
live in the city of Hollywood.
Hollywood beams out the dreams and ideologies
of the entire planet.
It's colonizing the imaginations of people around the globe,
causing some of them to walk across deserts to get here.
And when I looked at all those movies growing up,
our people were not in there.
So part of my project was to document lives, voices,
and experiences of people in Los Angeles, which--
in East Los Angeles, which I considered
to be like the rain shadow of Hollywood.
And the rain shadow is that part of the desert landscape
where rain doesn't land because it hits the mountains first
and goes a different direction.
And so I felt like we grew up in the rain
shadow of the imagination where yeah, people become shadows,
people become extras.
So in Chinatown, the Chinese are in the background
in that movie.
All right.
What do we got.
All right.
Here's one about doing poetry.
Or trying to be a poet when you're working full-time,
teaching full-time, you're a department chair,
you're a union chair, you're sponsoring a teen writing
workshop after work, you're doing karate 20 hours a week,
you have three kids to raise, and you're writing books.
So this is about that.
This is that synecdoche of that experience.
"I was standing-- I was bleeding through the gauze
that I had wrapped around my palm
in the usual half-assed way.
But I couldn't wipe off the slippery steering wheel
because Jimi Hendrix was playing the star-spangled banner,
and 50 years dead Hendrix is still a favorite.
So I have to sing along and then slam on the brakes.
The kids' bike in the back of the van,
crashing into each other.
The kids screeching as I spin out of the lane
to avoid some jerk doing 45.
Craned my neck back.
Where the hell did you learn how to drive?
China?
But it's some beautiful girl putting on her false eyelashes
and driving with one hand, just like me.
As I note in the mirror, all my papers
flying around in the back.
Hey kids, that's my steering committee report,
I have to turn that in.
And my wife is confiscating a book of mine
that they're whacking each other with.
And all of a sudden, the van is back and forth
across the freeway, all over the place, fighting over the book.
Just let me see it, I'm whining.
But she wins the tug of war and the neighbor kids
will be talking to their parents about that.
Later, she flicks the book past my nose out the window.
Damn, no poetry on the freeway!
She yells, and turn that damn music down so I can think.
Neruda goes flapping down the freeway like a sad bird.
I'm wiping the blood off the steering wheel
with my sleeve cranking with the other hand,
because we're going to miss the exit if I
don't jump the divider that's all of a sudden upon us."
All right.