Category Archives: Bakersfield
Beer Can Dan
In the spring of last year I was invited to a dinner party featuring about ten people from our high school class as well as a few spouses they’d later met. Eager to revive youthful experiences, I drove from Bakersfield more than four hours up the gut of the Central Valley to Sacramento where I […]
Also posted in Aging, Alcohol, Cancer, Friendship, Health, Sacramento
Dedicated ESL Teacher Retires
(I wrote the following announcement about the retirement of my friend and former colleague Gary Christiansen and, without byline, it was published in the Bakersfield Californian on May 24, 2019.) Long ago friends and colleagues of Gary Christiansen began to wonder how he could teach a four-hour English as a Second Language class five mornings […]
Also posted in Education, English, George Thomas Clark
Drink the Giant Orange
I rush into the art museum and within minutes feel thirsty and hot and dizzy. I spot relief in a painting called Giant Orange topped by a tall orange and black sign and staffed by a pretty young lady inside a huge orange ball below. “Whaddya got to drink?” She looks at me as if […]
Also posted in Art, Art Galleries, Paint it Blue, Painters
Discussing the Homeless
I’m Jeff, a police officer and unit commander eating pot luck in the community room of a middle-class neighborhood where residents must be fifty-five and most are a lot older. After lunch, I walk in front and, speaking without a microphone, ask if everyone can hear me. They can. I’m sure they also notice my […]
The Honor of a Lady
Soon after his wealthy father died, I married Truxtun Beale and we moved to Washington, D.C. where I spent much time alone in his mother’s elegant Decatur House, across from the White House, while he traveled to Central Europe and Siberia and other rough places he couldn’t take me. In two years we nevertheless managed […]
Also posted in Divorce, Edward Beale, Gold, Infidelity, Marriage, Mexican-American War, Mexico, Sex, Truxtun Beale, Ulysses S. Grant
Wild Child Plays Like The Doors
Tonight I decide to stay home and watch the documentary Muscle Shoals about many great singers appearing in a small Alabama town to record music. Down in the land of high humidity and slow-talking, Aretha Franklin enlivens everyone with pure and powerful vocals like those of Wilson Pickett and the Rolling Stones and others in […]
Also posted in Dave Brock, Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, The Doors
Guns in Classrooms
I arrive late to a packed board meeting of the Arid School District in your community and have to join others pressed against the wall and already listening to speakers address the five popularly-elected trustees of the school board who sit behind a long desk on the dais. “Guns are inherently offensive, not defensive,” says […]
Merle Haggard’s Boxcar
This hot dry expanse of land, now rich in oil and agriculture, used to be the wet floor of an ocean overlooked by dinosaurs in the Tehachapi Mountains to the east. In the nineteenth century people of European heritage settled here and named it Kern County, and today the regional museum is hosting a one […]
Also posted in Dinosaurs, Kern County, Kern River, Merle Haggard, Music, Redding
Young Cowboy Sings Country
Merle Haggard may have passed but he hasn’t departed. He’s enjoying this tribute to his life and work. On stage at the Bakersfield Music Hall of Fame, a sleek new place highlighted by polished wood floors, cushioned seats, and sharp acoustics, popular country singers from Haggard’s hometown and the Central Valley are delivering four hours […]
Also posted in Garth Brooks, George Strait, Horses, Kadin Hernandez, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Merle Haggard, Music, The Doors, The Rolling Stones
Money in the Bank
There aren’t any good jobs in L.A., and I’m sick of work anyway. I don’t even want to sell drugs anymore. I’ve got a better plan. Two friends and I are going to knock off a bank in Bakersfield. It would be too tough in L.A. In Bakersfield we’re dealing with hicks. I figure we […]
Also posted in Banks, Crime, Los Angeles, Theft
Kobe Decides
This story is in the collection “Basketball and Football”
Also posted in D'Angelo Russell, Jerry West, Jordan Clarkson, Julius Randle, Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Lakers, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal
Crazy Return to Golf
I didn’t know whether to blame Jason Day or Davis Love so I rebuked both for casting a curse I thought would never return. Only in hindsight did I realize I should’ve blamed myself. I’d chosen not to write or go out and do something fun on a recent Sunday, and instead reclined on the […]
Also posted in George Thomas Clark, Golf, Marriage, Weather
Portraits on Glass
I’m a little nervous before talking to audiences about my work but usually warm up and tell part of my story and then am ready to improvise and answer questions. This morning they come nonstop from about a hundred visitors, quite a few for an art lecture, at Bakersfield Museum of Art, in the gallery […]
Also posted in Painters, Pasadena, Ray Turner
Drought is God’s Punishment
Until last week I thought the drought that’s squeezing California resulted from natural weather fluctuations, and didn’t want to be political or presume to have scientific insight so rarely mentioned climate change and then only as a relatively minor factor. I should’ve known there was a much simpler yet more ominous explanation, and Shannon Grove […]
Also posted in Abortion, California, Kern County, Kern River, Religion, Rick Perry, Sacramento, Texas, Weather
Art Appraisals
To an interviewer who asked Mick Jagger if he had any art, the slender septuagenarian said, well, I just have several paintings people have given me and a few I’ve bought, but it’s definitely not what you’d call a collection, and they (the bad guys) know that so they never bother coming to my place. […]
Also posted in Adonay Duque, Andy Warhol, Art, Art Galleries, Auctions, Bonhams, George Thomas Clark, Jerry Hall, Lucian Freud, Mick Jagger, Painters, Pasadena, Rose Bowl, Sotheby's, The Rolling Stones
Almost Missed Manny and Money
I realize most sports fans and other seekers of excitement planned to watch the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight at cool places like the MGM Grand Arena or packed sports bars or at least at big private parties enlivened by booze. My intention was far more mundane: I’d view the eternally-hyped showdown with my Philippine wife […]
Bakersfield Number One
Bring out the beer, boys, Bakersfield’s number one again. You see the report? We got the highest rate of auto theft in the United States. My buggy was ripped off last month. I love it. We also got the dirtiest air in the country. And as more of our teenage girls get knocked up we […]
Also posted in Crime, Education, Environment
Careful, Justin Bieber
I’m surrounded by lots of nasty newspaper and magazine articles and insulting letters and want you to understand this deluge on my doorstep is the same or worse than cyber bullying. Not many understand. I’m nineteen and make fifty million a year and fans love me and I’m doing things most my age would do. […]
Also posted in Alcohol, Calabasas, Cars & Driving, Drugs, Housing, Justin Bieber, Miami, Music, Neighborhoods
End of Suffering
Frankly, I don’t often feel well and really should say I never do. I don’t know what the problem is but try to feel better by smoking bath salts, not the stuff you use in the tub but a combination of chemicals that’re way stronger than amphetamines. This morning the bath salts hit me much […]
Also posted in Drugs, Families, Mental Health, Murder
The Right Room
First time in Puerto Vallarta I was hungover standing at basin, looking into fright, when woman popped from stall behind and said sir are you aware this is women’s bathroom. Years later long sober I stood in Bakersfield theater as two women entered and one said what’s guy doing here. Leaving quickly I forgot to […]
Also posted in Alcohol, Mental Health, Mexico, Puerto Vallarta, Short Pieces - GTC
Gold Rush
Poor guy farming hardpan back East hesitated and missed first California opportunity but rode fast and walked hard in eighteen fifty-five for Kern River Rush yielding most miners three, four, even five ounces of gold daily and up to fifty bucks per. Guy didn’t have many good days and following year wadded smart aleck newspaper […]
Also posted in California, Gold, Kern River, Short Pieces - GTC
Professor Party
He taught English or something at Berkeley and students called him Professor, admired clipped beard, and cheered when he entered parties. Students eventually said they didn’t know when professor asked, and he stopped anyway because they hindered drinking, and teaching too proved inconvenient before he lugged ragged beard into streets of Bakersfield.
Also posted in Alcohol, Drugs, Education, Parties, Short Pieces - GTC
Women in Television News
In the vast and luxurious clubhouse of Seven Oaks Country Club, the League of Women Voters of Kern County hosts three female veterans of television news broadcasting in Bakersfield. Prior to their appearance the audience is treated to cashews and cake and a political history lesson: eleven states allowed women’s suffrage before the Nineteenth Amendment […]
Also posted in Civil Rights, Condoleezza Rice, Diane Sawyer, Media, Politics, Television
Kit Foxes in the Road
Four years little kit foxes, bearing the sharp angular look of underfed and downtrodden foxes, instantly scattered from the road as I reentered my neighborhood, interrupting asphalt gatherings that had followed their nocturnal dashes from dens to seek duck eggs, lizards, and insects. A few months ago the kit foxes began departing leisurely and, instead […]
Also posted in Animals, Foxes, Neighborhoods, Short Pieces - GTC
Bakersfield at the Movies
Legions of teenagers and adults march into theater carrying troughs of buttered popcorn and sodas large enough for elephants, and guffaw during previews of teddy bear wrestling man, creamed pants jokes, president slicing face open to reveal he’s bullet-dodging, axe-wielding “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.” Amid chomping and slurping, I wonder how many here have watched […]
Also posted in Abraham Lincoln, Food, Los Angeles, Movies, Short Pieces - GTC
Good News for Jesus at the Bakersfield Islamic Conference
At the sixth annual Bakersfield Islamic Conference, before a few hundred attendees in a hotel ballroom, crew-cut Joshua Evans, looking scholarly behind a long brown beard and matching brown glasses, delivered this information: you cannot be a Muslim unless you believe in Jesus, one of five great Prophets who brought about seminal changes. Islam also […]
Also posted in Islam, Jesus Christ, Mohammad, Religion
Saber-Tooth Cat Revisits Red Rock Canyon
Let me clarify this point: I like to be called saber-toothed cat. Do not call me a Smilodon, that pompous academic name thrown at us by humans who’ve lived such a short time compared to the millions of years various branches of my family survived and flourished in a world far more beautiful than the […]
Also posted in Animals, California, Cats, Central Valley, Elephants, Environment, Geology, Kern County, Oceans, Red Rock Canyon, Rhinos
Baseball Bat Killers Sentenced
Two years ago a murder story in Bakersfield haunted me and, despite uneasiness, I decided to view the crime scene. A forty-year old man, Patrick Matsuda, who lived in a neighborhood of new and expensive homes, had been killed by bat-wielding miscreants. For weeks residents had been complaining to each other and the police that […]
Also posted in Alcohol, Bodybuilding, Drugs, Housing, Mixed Martial Arts, Murder, Neighborhoods, Wrestling
High School Grades of Earl Warren
enter archives at bakersfield high school look left at long glass case displaying handwritten grade book note highlighted name earl warren read four years reports revealing history his best subject and three times earned his top grade in final quarter many students before and since doubtless had similar trajectories only didn’t become three term governor […]
Also posted in Earl Warren, Kern County, Racism, Supreme Court
The Right Room
first time on puerto vallarto tour quite hungover stand at basin looking into fright woman pops up behind and says sir are you aware this is women’s years later long sober at bakersfield movie women enter one says what’s guy doing in here leaving rapidly forget to say heat intoxication
Also posted in Alcohol, Mental Health, Mexico, Poetry - GTC, Puerto Vallarta
Sherlock Holmes Needs Straightjacket
new sherlock holmes movie maniacal high tech farce detective robert downey relentlessly overbearing bakersfield patrons quite pleased
Also posted in Movies, Poetry - GTC, Robert Downey
Wealth
This story appears in the collection “In Other Hands”
Also posted in Agriculture, California, Food, Fresno, Immigration, Modesto, Poetry - GTC
Bon Qui Qui at King Burger
I must’ve been beset by Baby Boomer inertia as I read about young comedian Anjelah Johnson coming to Bakersfield in a couple of days. She’s cute, I thought, and her act is probably funny and it’s cool she used to be a Raider cheerleader, but that was all until two hours before the show on […]
Also posted in Anjelah Johnson, Bon Qui Qui, Comedians, Interstate 5, YouTube
Criminal Justice in Islam
In blighted but affordable east Bakersfield old bank transformed into new mosque hosts annual Islamic Conference where keynote speaker Main Al-Qudah, PhD in Islamic law and imam at large mosque in Houston, steps to podium. He’s slim, stern, middle-aged, dressed in suit and tie, and resembles prosecutor as power points to screen bearing principles of […]
Also posted in Alcohol, Crime, Drugs, Islam, Jordan, Main Al-Qudah, Marriage, Middle East, Rape, Religion, Saudi Arabia
Betty Finch Transforms Gourds into Sculptures
I’ve long been collecting art with enthusiasm many call obsessive but confess to being indifferent when notified by postcard last month that the Bakersfield Museum of Art would be featuring an exhibition of gourd sculptures by retired police officer Betty Finch. What the hell is a gourd? I’d heard of people drinking from them but […]
Fantasizing on Highway 99
Pretty soon you’ve got to drive from Bakersfield to Sacramento. You are, of course, thankful you don’t have to start further south in Los Angeles and thus crawl up and down scorched and barren mountains that separate the city of glamour and poverty from the rest of the state. Your journey, instead, will take you […]
Also posted in California, Fresno, George Thomas Clark, Highway 99, Sacramento, Sports, Travel
Fear Not, California – Bakersfield Shall Save You
Have you been to Bakersfield? Ask that of most people in California and they’ll say, “No, but I’ve been through it.” They just kept on rolling over parched Central Valley earth en route to Los Angeles or the Bay Area. Why didn’t they stop? Perhaps they were startled or saddened by the eternal glare from […]
Also posted in California, Politics
