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Stuff About Knox Recent
- Riding The Wild Bubble: The HoneyBun Chronicles Part 5: The Gentlemanly Art Of Spanking
- We Now Take a Break From Our Regularly Scheduled Programming
- Riding The Wild Bubble: Porn Premiers and HoneyBun Hits Vegas—The HoneyBun Chronicles detour
- Le Bateau Ivre Show—Got the Poster, But Not the Gig - Yet
- Things To Do, Saturday, January 20, 2007
- Riding The Wild Bubble: The HoneyBun Chronicles Part 4
- Riding The Wild Bubble: The HoneyBun Chronicles Part 3
- Bopule Speaks To The Beezies
- Riding The Wild Bubble: The HoneyBun Chronicles Part Two
- Knox Bronson
- Riding The Wild Bubble: The HoneyBun Chronicles Part One
Thought
"Any man that thinks he knows what is going on in the mind of a woman is a man who knows nothing." —Producer Robert EvansSearch
| Riding The Wild Bubble: The HoneyBun Chronicles Part One |
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| Monday, 18 September 2006 | |
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The following is an excerpt from my next book, The Gentlemanly Art of Spanking (or Riding the Wild Bubble) (or the Honeybun Chronicles). In my old Oakland neighborhood, the sound of gunfire was most often accompanied by screams, tires shredding, more shouting and screaming, tears, rage, profound suffering, and, more often than not, the end of a life. At these times, one’s common sense informed one that it was always best to remain quiet and stay inside, on the floor if necessary, until the gunfire abated. Lying on the floor while guns go off outside is never boring. But one fateful January midnight in 2003, there was no further conflagration of alarums and excursions, to re-contextualize an old Gore Vidal quote, as a single gunshot pierced the blessed quietude of the street. It sounded more like a cap-gun than real fire-power, so I didn't pay it much mind. Hell, it could have been a firecracker, I told myself, or a car back-firing. But I knew it was a gunshot.
Lacking any
other elements common to hubbub of the dangerous kind, I simply let it
slide away as I concentrated on much more important endeavors.
I went right back to work. Still early, in the pocket of my evening work shift, the most productive hours of the day. O my brothers, this where everything, as the Brits say, went ass-over-tits. A few weeks prior, I had down-graded the mid-December self-publication of my novel, Flapping, with its accompanying soundtrack cd, the beautiful and bizarre "Flight of the Atom Bee," from the status of "business enterprise" to that of "art project." Years in the making, many thousands of dollars spent on illustrations, cd mastering, printing and binding, I had managed to place exactly fifteen copies of the book, on consignment basis, in two East Bay bookstores. Prospects for a monetary return on my investment were dim, clearly.Critical acclaim seemed elusive, as well. There comes a time in almost every artist's career where he realizes that it is time to sell out. Some get it early on, like Picasso and the Beatles. Others come to the realization much later in their careers, like Pink Floyd (whose sell-out album,"Dark Side of the Moon," is still on the charts after thirty years) and David Bowie (who has done an incredible job of catching up). Others never do, like Vincent van Gogh and William Blake and me, almost. I have come to understand that Flapping and Flight of the Atom Bee are not the most easy works to absorb, but that's okay.If I know anything, it is how the world operates. This knowledge sustains, nay, energizes and empowers me. At some point the artist matures and realizes he must meet the world half-way. When he humbles himself, subsuming his ego in a true genuflection to the Zeitgeist, a grateful culture awards him with his long-deserved success, and embraces his early works as the seeds and manifestations of the greatness to come.
I was on a mission: 1) to throw a pie in the face of political correctness2) to have a laugh, and lastly, but not leastly 3) to effortlessly rake in the phat bank I grew up in Big Time. Bronson men work hard, attain success, and then drink. Somewhere in there, they marry a beautiful woman. This was true for my grandfather Knox and his brother Dick as they built their Duchess Catering empire. This was true for my great-uncles Roy and Ed as they built one of the largest law firms in the country. It was certainly the case of my father, William, who at thirty published his first book, a history of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which stayed in print for forty years and is still considered to be the definitive book on the subject. Work, drink, and piss it away: the Bronson dharma. Being an observant and somewhat intelligent lad, watching these men hold forth at family gatherings, larger than life, from my earliest awareness, and then coming of age in the Sixties, I decided to simply bypass the work hard part and to just go straight to the good part. Which I did with the instant expertise of the true-born tippler. Twenty-five years pissing it away. I had to give it all up at forty. The alternative was to leave this mortal coil. However, this is not a recovery memoir—I am certain they will have lost their cachet by publication time—so for now, dear reader, just remember that genetic Big Time, the Bronson imperative, never left me. And I was way behind schedule by the time I got sober. So there I labored in the now-broken quiet of the night. HoneyBun, the vestibule through which I would re-enter Big Time, beckoned. The next shot echoed the few doors down to my building five minutes later. Again unembellished, unembroidered, unremarkable. But it was another gunshot, so I called 911, as I had so many times there over the years. Didn't think much of it. Just some drunk or high dumb-asses shooting off their guns. I had an amazing vantage point in my apartment. Not only did I have a clear view of three blocks of Telegraph Ave., from McDonalds to the south and well on up past the Bird Kage, a bar, the liquor store, and the Silver Lion, a bar, to the north, I could look out my back window and see the entrepreneurs on the corner of Shattuck & 47th, but best of all, I could see every room in the Maya, which was a two-story strip motel that stretched from Telegraph Ave. at the front to Shattuck Ave at the back, from the windows in my apartment. Sitting in a wing-back chair that was my Lutheran grandmother's before I was born, I could, for example, look directly across the driveway abutting my building and watch as, fifteen feet away, in broad daylight, a naked man and a naked woman tried to throw each other over the railing of the second-story walkway, both yelling for help. A Michelin guide to crack motels would have featured the Maya Motel as one of those lifetime, must-experience destinations in the late eighties and nineties. Oakland's Temescal district, as it is known, was mostly benign by day, but a scary and alien urban terrain after dark, a real night of the living dead, legions of crack-zoned zombies wandering in delirium towards the next hit. Focal point for the festivities, the Maya, where at least three crack parties rocked the neighborhood round-the-clock for months on end, attracted the A-list crackheads from all over the East Bay. Every so often I'd see a really nice car in the parking strip ... usually a salesman or mid-level executive from the suburbs who went out for a few drinks after work, to blow off some stress, deciding, on the way home to wife et famille, to score some rock, necessitating a detour off Hwy. 24 over to MacArthur to find a hooker to help him score (First rule of obtaining drugs in a new city: where there are hookers, there are drugs) and ended up partying at the Maya all night. (Note: These guys often fancy themselves as social drinkers who occasionally get a little carried away or just had a little bad luck. This happens more frequently than your average PTA volunteer might imagine.) Baba Patel, an Indian man in his seventies, owned the Maya, and ran it with the help of his son and his daughter-in-law. A hard-working family, they hailed from Bombay. They had arrived here and had purchased the Maya in the early eighties. Baba wore only white or pastel long-sleeved Indian suits, had a skin condition that gave him pale blotches on his dark skin, giving him a scary countenance that belied his gentle nature.. Shortly after I had moved in, he greeted me warmly, shook my hand, and introduced himself in his heavy, musical accent . His eyes shone with humor and intelligence and and he told me to call him Baba. I liked him immediately. Baba was wise, kind, funny, and fearless. Many times over the years I watched him stand-down an angry addict who towered over him, and demand the rent due, or that the man behave, within the spectrum of "acceptable behavior" at the Maya, or leave, always prevailing. I remember one afternoon when he strode toward me on the sidewalk I as I approached my apartment, waving his arms. —Knox! he exclaimed in outraged innocence —Knox! The police and the neighborhood groups are har-r-r-ESS-ing me! Har-r-r-ESSing ME! I do not know what people are doing their rooms! I do not know that people are taking drugs! I trust people! I cannot see through walls!" Out of affection, I did not laugh. Nothing happened in the neighborhood that he didn't know about: what he didn't see himself, he heard about. He wore a necklace with a picture of his guru in a small locket. I once asked him the name of his guru and he replied quietly —It does not matter: all the prayers go to the same place. From my apartment, I would often hear him chanting in meditation, cross-legged on the hood of his car, parked right off the sidewalk in the Maya driveway. One afternoon, I walked out my door, headed up the street. Baba was still on the car, but silent. He opened his eyes as I passed. I said —Hi, Baba, how's life? His eyes grew wide as he leaned forward in his semi-lotus position and exclaimed —Life ... is always mysterious! One night, he came up to me and got right in my face as I was opening my door and said, beseechingly, expectantly —Knox! Were you looking for God? Did you see Him? What did that R-r-rascal tell you? I often stopped to talk to him as he sat in front of the Arab deli next door to the Maya. We were chatting mid-day when Sasha the debutant junkie came limping by. As she went up the sidewalk, I said —It's hard to believe how some of these people stay alive." And Baba looked at me closely and said with great precision —It is very hard to die. And then he repeated it, still focussed on me —It is very hard to die. Baba once tried to sell me a motorized scooter. It was a nice one, but I didn't really need it. He kept pushing me by saying —Offer me anything, I don't care! —How much did you pay for it?" —Six hundred dollars. —Six hundred dollars! I said, aghast. He leaned forward from the waist, square coat-tails flapping in the breeze, eyebrows raised in that way only he could do, and said —I had to spend the money in my MADNESS! He saw me give a couple dollars to a panhandler once and waved me over. When I got close, he started going on about all the times he had saved me from a parking ticket and ... —you always never give me anything! And I replied —But Baba, you are not a panhandler. Without missing a beat, he leaned into me, a gleam in his eye, and said —I do not mind if you perceive me as a beggar. Beautiful Anne came to live with me for a time. Baba really liked her. She tried to help Sasha, letting her know that she had done her time in Hell, too, offering to take her to an AA meeting. She was a wonderful watercolorist. She was gorgeous, as I mentioned, and smart. Unfortunately, our respective insanities were not mutually compatible or self-cancelling as we both hoped they would be, but it was beautiful while the honeymoon lasted. O my droogies, conflicting issues wrought doom on the poem that was our love. The infuriating part was how hard we tried to approach the relationship, from the very beginning, like mature adults: for example, we did not have sex on the first date. And we waited until the second date, the next day, to move in together. She told me one evening that Baba had pulled her aside on the street and said —Anne, we have to watch Knox. We have to watch out for Knox or he will lose himself. One evening, he caught me as I was about to unlock my door. —Knox ... you cannot trust the five W's... he said in a conspiratorial tone and, when he was sure he had my complete attention, he continued, ticking them off with his fingers —Wine —Women —Work —Wealth —or the Weather ... [pause] —Like Women: They fuck the man ... and then, when he is sleeping, they run out of the room with his pants. I stopped on the sunny sidewalk in front of his table at the Arab deli shortly before I moved out of the neighborhood. He was, as always, watching everything and I said —Baba, why don't you go to the park? He asked —Why would I want to go to the park? —Because it's peaceful, and quiet, and there are birds. He said —When you go to the mountain, it is the mountain's serenity you feel, not your own. A small, but steadfast and tightly-knit, cotérie of white junkies, holdovers from the drugstore cowboy days of the eighties floated around the neighborhood and, occasionally, as finances permitted, converted a room at the Maya into a shooting gallery and heroin distribution center. Kenny, with a UC Berkeley master's degree, was the ring-leader. His wife, Sasha, also a UC grad, was, according to local legend, from a wealthy family somewhere: at one time gorgeous, blonde, and slender, but had been, a couple years prior to my arrival in the neighborhood, gang-raped in a drug-deal gone sour. Now over-weight, almost toothless, actually very sweet as she spent most of her time pan-handling up the street in front of the neighborhood liquor store. She made me very uncomfortable: she reminded me in many ways of my lost sister, Megan. Then there was Amy, who looked like more trouble than I could handle, and I, please accept my assurances here, do like trouble. It only took a couple years for the drugs and the Life to destroy her beauty. Others affiliated with the gang I knew by sight. One always knew when a particularly excellent shipment of smack had arrived. The thing you've got to remember about crackheads is that they are very focussed and mostly peaceful, and only a problem if (a) you are in the way of their next hit, or if, in any way, they perceive that you threaten their access to their next hit, which can be problematic, given the nature of the drug, its effect on how the crackhead perceives the immediate world zone energy flow in particular, or if (b) they believe you can help them get their next hit by, willingly or unwillingly, giving them money or relinquishing some private property they could then redeem for rock. I will never forget one beautiful afternoon when I looked out my window over the driveway to the second story walkway. The door directly across from me was ajar and I could see into the darkness of the room. All that was visible was the ubiquitous television set and, about four feet away, a stand-up floor-model crack pipe on the carpet and the Adidas-shorn feet of the room's occupant. Every so often, he'd reach down, pick up the pipe and take a huge hit. In the darkness, in the cave, in the prison of toke, huddled by the soul-chilling glow of the Broadcast. One rarely, if ever, heard laughter at the Maya. The main drug dealer at the Maya never left his tiny room. How did the drugs get to him? At all hours of the night, I would see his mother, who also lived at the hotel, a stylish matriarch, come and go, always wearing a hat to compliment one of many outfits that any self-respecting Baptist lady would happily wear to Sunday services. She was always friendly, no matter what hour. There were couple of secondary outlets at the Maya, but they were small-time in comparison, and shifted from room to room. This then was the 4700 block of Telegraph Avenue, which for a decade was to be my home: a great Korean restaurant on the corner next door to me, a computer/pager/phone store downstairs, the Maya, the Arab deli, a black-owned beauty products store, a black owned barbershop, a mysterious doorway that I never figured out what was behind it, and a thrift-shop. The serendipitous and wholly accidental international village. I had a good relationship with the neighbors and a reputation for minding my own business. I was the white boy who made crazy electronic music at night, wore a suit during the day [I was at that time brokering corporate printing accounts, doing quite well thank you!] , and although that didn't quite jibe, I was left alone. Later, when we began holding voice classes in the apartment, and a number of beautiful girls showed up regularly, word on the street was that I was pimping. Inquiries were made through channels as to how interested locals might sample such wares. Word went back through channels that and error in perception had occurred. Raised in well-to-do Berkeley neighborhoods, in beautiful homes, in Big Time, I often reflected on how the apple may not fall far from the tree, but it can roll way down the hill. At the end of my time in Temescal, I had gotten too confident, too relaxed, maybe even cocky. Which was why no internal survival mechanism stopped me as I went out that night the guns went off to ask the cops what had happened. Less than a month before, I had been looking out the window at about 1:30 in the morning. Several hundred revelers were in the street, dancing, hustling, reeling about with drunken abandon, cars stopped in the street, rap music BOOMING: they had effectively blocked off Telegraph Ave. at 48th. And I was angry. The BirdKage had been bringing this gansta/playa crowd into the neighborhood a couple times a week for some time now. Always noise, fights, all kinds of trouble. But tonight was the worst I had ever seen. So I was on the phone to 911. I was watching out my window, which put me about 60 feet from the action. Right then, the shots began blasting out and the crowd parted, women screaming. A plate glass window shattered. The guy, the intended target of the first shots, who had fallen through the window in an effort to dodge the bullets, was miraculously unhurt and came back on the sidewalk and fired at the first shooter. Hundreds of partyers stampeded away from the epicenter of the gunplay. Screaming. And pimped-out rides blasting rap music sped off into the safety of the darkened sidestreets off Telegraph Avenue, back to East Oakland or West Berkeley. In seconds the area was almost empty of people and cars. Left in the middle of the street, a man down, a woman holding him, hugging him, as she knelt next to him, as if trying to hold his life inside him. But she couldn't do it. He was dead, blood black under dim streetlights, in his girlfriend's arms. Twelve hours later, the next afternoon, a Sunday, I was at a Presbyterian Church in the affluent suburb town of Orinda, listening to my aunt Patty's choir sing the Japanese poet Basho's haiku set to some beautiful 20th century music by the composer xxxxxxxxxxxx ... alternately wondering why the white guy who translated the haiku from the original Japanese had felt it necessary to destroy the traditional 5-7-5 syllabic count and make them into iambic pentameter - 2 lines of ten syllables each - and what it would be like if one of the well-to-do audience members jumped up from his pew, pulled out a Glock, and blew some guy away two rows back for blocking his membership at the country club or raiding his IRA accounts ... and then that image of the guy dying in the street as I looked down from my second story window would come into my head again ... Different universes ... ten minutes apart. And these thoughts of contrasting worlds, contrasting nights that spun through my head as I headed out my door to see what was up, what two dozen police were doing. And they asked me what I had heard and seen. I told them. They asked me if I would make a statement. And I thought, why not? No one had been hurt. Tonight was nothing. And a little voice inside whispered, —You are stepping right up into the fire. I didn't listen. I gave them the statement. About a month later, it became clear what I had set in motion for myself. Intermezzo 1 Part 2 |
I was working feverishly on the latest manifestation of my
entrepreneurial genius, on the surest ticket to riches I had yet
conceived, the amazing green machine that would at last set me and my
music free: the HoneyBun website, www.spankingcream.com, weeks away
from launch, a mere fortnight or two away from bags of easy internet
cash flowing into my accounts daily, nightly, torrential streams of
financial energy flowing into my very being while I slept, worked, or
played.
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written by TDrifter, November 29, 2006
quirky and loaded with imagery I easily relate to. Do you know TC Boyle?
want to continue on--but must say:
Knox, I'm really appalled,outraged, incensed, thoroughly Chalushisdicked over your utter disregard for common decency and respect for the fair sex's discreet integrities--
condoning this Honeybun fetishism.
-----BTW ---how many advance orders from Love Products stores would I need to apply to you for a franchise??
written by hud boondock, November 30, 2006
mr. tune drifter!