demon summer

The summer of 1995 was a weird time in my life. I broke up with a girl. Shree Ram was her name. No joke. This is totally beside the point but when I took a yoga several years later, all of the instructor's incantations were punctuated with what sounded to me like 'shree ram.' The turning inward into the self, the achievement of a heightened level of self awareness, is a practice that enables you to feel more connected to the world around you, shree ram.’ Or, ‘your body is a sacred gift and should be treated as the blessing that it is, shree ram.'
I wondered what the fuck was up with this shree ram thing. Was it some kind of practical joke being played on me, like they used to do on Candid Camera, and then at some point the actual Shree Ram would appear from behind a curtain? …Shree Ram was a good person. Very sweet. We just weren’t right for each other. I’m not right for a lot of people, but especially not for Shree Ram. When we first got together, she said to me, ‘the thing about the two of us is that we’re both very good catches. It’s why we’re together. We deserve each other...’ How can you possibly take someone seriously after they've said something like this to you? I hated being brought into her wildly inflated self-concept like this. I looked at her with a pained smile on my face. ‘I’m no catch,’ I thought to myself, ‘and if I’m not a catch then you’re definitely not a catch either. Maybe that's why we're together.' But if I felt this way, why did I continue being with her? I don’t know. These things tend to take on a life of their own. Shree always had a hard time with my innate cynicism. When in doubt, the most cynical answer is more than likely correct. I've found this to be the case, and so Shree was too earnest to live comfortably in my world. She was also a very spiritual person, whereas I'm a materialist and an atheist. Somehow I always end up with women who take spirituality very seriously. I find the ability to believe attractive, even if I don't share it. Unfortunately, my inability to believe and unwillingness to participate often get construed as mockery or contemptuousness. It reminds me of the way people close to me always think I'm joking, even when I'm dead serious. I give off a detached vibe, I suppose, one that makes it seem as if I'm privately making fun of the things I don't believe in. And since I believe in so little, it seems like I'm making fun of almost everything...

I met Shree when I first moved to California. I was adrift and uncertain about my future. I knew I wanted to go back to graduate school, but where and in what field? I had a lot of great ideas about the things I wanted to do, none of them particularly practical. Why is it that the things that appeal to me most are always so impractical? I wanted to be some kind of intellectual universalist – read: dilettante – with far-reaching knowledge in the areas of literature, social and political science, philosophy, sociology, history, economics.


I imagined myself becoming a latter-day Max Weber, or C. Wright Mills. I wanted to be a generalist at a time when universities were increasingly training specialists with specific training in very narrowly defined areas. I felt then, as I still often do now, as if there just wasn’t a place in the world for someone like me, and I didn’t know if I could make myself fit in. But moving to California so I could get into a program at a UC school seemed like a wise thing to do. California was running on the last faint fumes of its mid-century glory. The demographics were changing so radically. There was a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment swirling around. The feel was very similar to what we're going through in the present. The economy was bad, though not nearly as bad as today.…


Berkeley was my first stop on the West Coast. A family friend offered to let me stay in his guest house on San Juan Avenue in the Berkeley hills. Shree was the live-in babysitter for their young son, and she was very nice to me, driving me around town and showing me all the hot spots on Shattuck and Telegraph Avenues.

We were walking on Telegraph one night after dinner when a riot broke out in People’s Park. The one thing I hate about Berkeley is the way it refuses to let go of the 60s. It was 1991 and they were still rioting over People’s Park! For all I know, they’re still rioting over it today. I’m as nostalgic for the 60s as can be, just not the part where smelly middle class white kids live on the street with their mangy dogs, beg for change, and riot over the ownership rights to some shitty little park. Give me the Beatles. Give me the civil rights movement. Give me free love. Give me the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. But I can do without the smelly faux hobos starting riots.

During those first few weeks in Berkeley, Shree and I went to movies together, hung out, and laughed a lot. She got my sense of humor, and I developed a big crush on her. I felt understood. Understanding is a big turn on. But I lacked confidence, and she didn’t seem to like me in that way. Then summer turned to fall and she returned to college on the East Coast for her senior year. Eight months later, in spite of retard-level GRE scores, I somehow got accepted to UCLA’s graduate program in sociology and moved to Los Angeles, three days before the Rodney King riots…

I don’t really remember the circumstances under which I reconnected with Shree except that our paths crossed while I was visiting my family in New York after my second year at UCLA. We became romantically involved, but it was a long-distance relationship, Shree in Pennsylvania, working for some weirdo theater company, me in LA, working on a graduate degree in sociology. But long-distance relationships never work. They make the time you spend together way too fraught. After a year or so of long-distance lovin', Shree agreed to move to LA. She even had her stuff shipped to my apartment. But she got cold feet and never made it. She's one of those Bay Area people who hates the Southland. I can't stand the Bay Area, and I really can't stand people from the Bay Area who look down their noses at LA. Once Shree started to vacillate and express doubts, I put an end to things and cut her out of my life completely. I don't do well with ambivalence and ambiguity. I treat ambivalence towards me as a full-fledged rejection. I was actually kind of mean to Shree. She sent me letters, begging me to at least hear her out, but by then I felt like the toothpaste was out of the tube. I would never be able to trust her again. I did cruel things, like returning a letter of hers back to her with a red C- at the top of it. Something about her being uncertain about me brought out my nasty side. I didn't hear from her again until a few weeks after 9/11. She found my email address and wrote asking me if my family was ok. Like I said, she's very sweet. But she also wanted to engage with me, figuring that enough time had passed (six years) for us to now have a dialogue about why things went bad between us, or, more to the point, why I closed off communication with her in the midst of her uncertainty about moving to LA and having a life with me. I didn't really want to have this conversation with her at this point, so I wrote her back a terse note that made as much clear...

While my relationship with Shree was falling apart, so too were the 1995 California Angels. I had adopted the Angels as a kind of stepchild alongside my 'real' family, the New York Mets. The Halos were absolutely terrible during my first few years in So-Cal. I used to go to the Big A on Friday nights with a buddy of mine and there'd be less than 10,000 fans in the stands. The place was lifeless. But I didn't care. Put a baseball game in front of me under almost any circumstances and I bliss out. The season was cancelled in 1994 when the players' strike couldn't be resolved, but play resumed again in '95. The Angels that year had a very likable team and started playing well for manager Marcel Lacheman. I loved guys like JT Snow, Tim Salmon, Chili Davis, Troy Percival, Rex Hudler, Lee Smith, Mark Langston... Salmon in particular looked like some sort of Southern California Captain America Bible Study dude. Guys like that are at once repulsive and alluring to me in a way that I can't fully account for. You know they're probably religious simpletons with right-wing political views, and yet you admire them all the more because of it.. ...On August 16th of the '95 season, the Angels held an 11-game lead over the Seattle Mariners, but then they proceeded to go on two separate nine-game losing streaks and lost the division to the Mariners in a one-game playoff on October 2. It is widely regarded as one of the most epic collapses in the history of the game and was very tough to sit through. ...I have a recurrent dream in which I'm looking out the window of the apartment I grew up in, peering down at the New York street from 14 floors up. A station wagon is bounding down the avenue. My parents are in the station wagon. My dad is driving. From my perch I can see that he's about to accelerate through a yellow light. I know he's not going to make the light and that he's about to crash into a taxi cab. I can see the crash developing the split second before it happens, but there's nothing I can do about it. I'm powerless. This is how the Angels made me feel that summer. With each crushing defeat, and the lead in the AL West shrinking every day, I knew how the season would play out, and yet I watched and rooted for some reason.

One day, right around the time the Angels began to choke their season away, I was getting my Saturn polished at a car wash on the corner of Santa Monica and Federal in West LA. As I stood in line to pay, I looked up at a mounted TV tuned to one of the local afternoon news telecasts. The newscaster reported that Jerry Garcia had passed away at a drug rehab center up north. I felt my knees go rubbery and a knot tighten in my stomach. I paid my bill, put my sunglasses on, and stepped outside where two Mexican guys polished my car. I watched them but didn't really see anything. I was thinking about Garcia, in token rhyme suggesting rhythm. Shine through my window and my friends they come around. Across the Rio Grande-ee-oh. He’s gone, and nothing’s gonna bring him back... I don't think Jerry's passing in and of itself was all that shocking to me. He had obviously been living on the edge, chasing the dragon for many years. But how sad that a man of such soaring talents could never conquer his demons. He had it all. The love and adulation of millions, riches, a life filled with beautiful music... And yet it wasn’t enough to fill some emotional void way down inside. I think I identify with this a little, the feeling of having demons that will always be a part of me. ...I left the car wash that day and drove around the city aimlessly. Everything is transitory, shree ram. We all die eventually, shree ram. All things must pass, shree ram. Except for those demons. They're pretty damn durable. They seem to stick around even when everything else is dissolving...