Dennis McDougal

I thought I'd offer a little homage here to one of my early influences, the journalist, raconteur, man of appetites to beat the band, Stanley Leppard...

As life runs out, it's often sad
Men cling to memories
Of fame achieved, of laurels won
Of foes brought to their knees
Some may relive one childhood hour
As the petal fades and curls
But in my final ticks of time
I'll think about the girls.

The girls...
The bad girls, the good girls
The really-I-doubt-that-we-should girls
The dark girls, the fair girls
The any-old-thing-for-a-dare girls
The tall girls, the short girls
The what-makes-you-think-I'm-that-sort girls
The dull girls, the bright girls
The I'll-keep-you-guessing-all-night girls
The take girls, the give girls
The hell-with-convention-let's-live girls

They're all I will want to remember then
I'll cherish the thought that I knew them when
And I'll wish I could live just to love them again --
The girls.

Some will call back fleeting days
When masses hailed their name
And some may think one business coup
Worth all the ruddy game,
A few men even can recall
They once trod distant worlds
And kings may yearn for one more crown
I'll think about the girls.

The girls...
The cool girls,the warm girls
The bold girls, the quiet girls
The you'll-never-know-'til-you-try girls
The sober girls, the lushy girls
The two-drinks-and-I-get-all-mushy girls
The subtle girls, the direct girls
The mink-is-the-least-I-expect girls
The racy girls, the nice girls
The not-'til-the-old-shoes-and-rice girls

They were the name of the game, my friend,
They made it worth it, right to the end
And I wish I could live just to love them again
The girls.

I’ve been absent for a spell and I heartily apologize. Mostly I’ve spent the past five months traveling (L.A. twice, Savannah, Paducah, Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina), working on The Acid Chronicles (new DVD trailer finished along with a narrative script), scoping out my next book project (maybe another biography, maybe a chronicle of the troubles at the Getty Museum), and rewriting my Vietnam novel (The Candlestickmaker) and screenplay (Harbor Lights). The Last Mogul has been optioned for a proposed TV series, loosely patterned after The Sopranos and Peter Jones Productions is in the final stages of readying Inventing L.A., a documentary adaptation of Privileged Son, for broadcast next year over PBS.

So, I’ve been busy. No excuse, but I have NOT been idle.

Next week I head back to California to appear on a panel during a two-day symposium at the Huntington Library on L.A. moguls of the 1920s and 30s. From there, Sharon and I stop over briefly in Sacramento to visit five grandkids then we jet on to Toronto to see Leonard Cohen in concert for the first time in 15 years. Back to Memphis mid-June, hanging with Megan and Alex who will spend a couple weeks with us, then back to California July 1 to continue work on The Acid Chronicles.

Next entry won’t be such a resume/​travelogue, I promise. By then, I may have a new website: www.rosebudpublishing.com. But more on that later.

Those who still doubt the truth of global warming need only pay a visit to the home of the Delta blues this day before Thanksgiving. Temperatures were still in the 70s, and though a cold front was promised to drop the mercury 20 degrees by the time turkey is served, most leaves still cling to the trees and winter seems a hundred years away.

Not that I’d notice. Southern California still courses through my veins despite a slow and certain weaning from the eternal traffic jam on the 405. Warm weather 365 days a year seems as normal to me as pulling fresh lemons off the backyard bush at my old Long Beach homestead.

But even an L.A. native can’t help but sense that something’s amiss with the weather. There’s a warm thunderstorm outside my office window at the moment and the soundtrack from “I’m Not There” is playing on my iTunes hard drive (50.3 gigs or 98.3 straight days of music – some things about the ever-encroaching technology that dominates our consumer lives doesn’t entirely suck). The point and counterpoint of lightning and Bob Dylan puts an apocalyptic tinge in the air. If you stay glued to the Dow Jones, watching the subprime crisis mire the economy in a septic pit of trillion dollar deficit spending and $100-a-barrel petroleum, there seems little to look forward to beyond debt and doom. And, of course, there’s always Iraq – Vietnam with sand. Great way to greet the holidays, eh?

But hope does, indeed, die last. On my most recent visit to L.A., I spent the day at Disneyland with my two-year-old grand daughter who forced me to wear her pink mouse ears during four trips around the carrousel. I turn 60 next week and if there was a bigger fool in Fantasyland that day, I’d like to meet him. Dignity, vanity and all that other good stuff that goes into any good recipe for guilt, shame and fear doesn’t wash with a toddler. They prefer fools, which should be a lesson to all of us who posture and pontificate for a living. There’s more hope in a single two-year-old than there is in a hundred old farts like me. We’ve had our chance at bat, swung, missed, swung again, and connected enough times to get us around the bases a few runs before our final inning.

Children deserve our attention, not our lip service. L.A. may yet burn to the ground or shake and bake in an 8.1 Richter reading. Gasoline may push past $5 a gallon and Iran might get the bomb. But regardless of how it rolls, we really must leave no child behind – really, truly, and not just through the convenient lie of spending cuts and standardized testing. There will always be a grandkid to set things straight for us if we just let them put those ears on the backs of our heads. They are the future. All else is folderol, fluff and folly. The earth they inherit needs our attention. That’s where I’ll be aiming my prayers on Thanksgiving Day.

Daffodils and dogwood – when each of these hardy perennials bloom, it’s a cinch that spring and/​or hay fever will soon follow and thus we Left Coasters learn the ways of the Confederacy.

California is a much tougher call. There are no clear cut signs that winter’s done. Roses are so confused they often bloom year round. There are no ground hogs outside of the San Diego Zoo, so who’s going to look for shadows? Unless you have a calendar handy, the Equinox is about as easy to track as those two new planets beyond Pluto.

But out here ‘neath the Mason Dixon line, spring wells up like a dragon and clobbers all who suffer sinus drip with a vengeance. Each time I see that Pepe Le Pew bee advertising Flonase on TV, I used to wonder who the hell would brave tumors, backache, dyspepsia, erectile dysfunction, sudden cardiac arrest or any of the side effects listed in the disclaimer just to clear their sinuses? Southerners, that’s who. There’s nothing like a Tennessee spring to remind those of us who like to breathe just what pollen, spores, and wind-whipped gunk can do to a nose – or an ear, for that matter. I paid my annual visit to the doctor last week for antibiotics and ear drops to vanquish my first atmospheric bout of the year.

And yet, despite ah-choos and allergic reactions, the tradeoff seems worth it. The buds are returning to the bushes and leaves to the trees, and whatever crap I inhale has got to be less lethal than the carbon monoxide billowing off the 710 Freeway at rush hour, which seems to be 24 hours a day judging by my last visit to SoCal. By April, I expect my place here in the Memphis outback to be a green bunker, surrounded by vegetation – and I’m not talking ice plant or those sad fields of Freeway daisies that CalTrans buys by the acre. No, the green that is west Tennessee is the living kind that breathes in carbon dioxide and breathes out oxygen … pollen-thick oxygen, perhaps, but oxygen nonetheless.

I spent a week in L.A. last month, driving from one appointment to another, and came away feeling all the worse about the home I left behind. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that I felt like one of the last passengers to escape the Titanic. Someone recently sent me a current snapshot of the cast of “Leave It to Beaver” and besides depressing the hell out of me, it made me nostalgic. I grew up in Lynwood about a dozen miles southwest of downtown L.A., and far from the broken inner city neighborhood that it has become, in the 50s and 60s, Lynwood was a blue-collar utopia. Wally Cleaver, Eddie Haskell and the Beave could have been my next door neighbors. I had a paper route and a mongrel dog named Mopsy after a cartoon character in the comic pages that I delivered each afternoon inside the Los Angeles Daily Mirror.

Five Easy Decades is finished and the editing begins. It’s been nearly a week since I typed “The End” at the bottom of page 689 – that’s right, 689, which is why the editing begins.

Editing is not writing, however, and requires a whole different mind set. It’s kind of like raising cattle your whole life and suddenly being asked to package steaks: you know the process and might even be able to pull it off, but it isn’t the same behavior, even if both involve meat. Editing and writing both involve words, but that’s about it. One is not the other and switching to the butcher’s block after two years on the range is a major pain.

That said, I do feel released. I’ll hit the road next week to resume work on The Acid Chronicles and a couple of freelance assignments: a week in San Francisco/​Sacramento followed by a week in L.A. I’d really like to just take a month off and catch up on my reading, but that looks like it’ll have to wait.

It’s cold here in Tennessee, but not impossible most days. The deer were back yesterday, foraging but not to the point of stripping bark from the trees. In fact, they looked well fed – not nearly so much as me, having porked up alarmingly during my sedentary year with Five Easy Decades – but certainly in good enough shape to handle the hard weather a helluva lot better than Bambi and his mom.

I had to take the car in to the dealer a couple days ago because the “check engine” light came on in the dashboard and ran into a nettling traffic jam on the way – the first I’ve had to deal with in months. By California standards, it was a joke. Fifteen minute delay because of road work on Walnut Grove Road. But it brought out the road rage in me and I flipped off the highway workers as I finally drove past, gnashing my teeth and snarling a couple of choice epithets. It wasn’t so much that I had to be somewhere and had been delayed as it was an unforeseen disruption of my predictable routine. It makes me ponder how locked in I am (we are?) to putting life into cruise control. Speed bumps make us crazy even if they’re made of gold bullion. What? Are you telling me to SLOW DOWN? Are you out of your mind?

Acceptance is the hardest imposition. “We want the world and we want it now,” said Jim Morrison, and look where it got him. He’s now the fourth-largest tourist attraction in Paris, and a big lot of good it does him. I think I don’t want to be a tourist attraction. I think I’ll leave that to Jim and Elvis, who is the first-largest in these parts. There’s a big blank spot in the upper left corner of my project board beside my desk, now that Five Easy Decades is done, and I think I’ll leave it blank for a little while. There’s plenty of other stuff to do – Paradise Square, The Candlestickmaker, Harbor Lights, maybe even a return to Professor Lyle Fields and another stab at detective fiction.

And then there are the far more important projects that don’t involve words at all. Spearheaded by Megan and Devin, my grandchildren are conspiring to force me to build a tree house out back. I haven’t done any serious research to see if this is even possible, but when the weather ratchets down (up?) to an outdoorsy temperature, I think I’ll have to scout for an oak or two that might support a floorboard. These things do take priority as tree house interest tends to wane with puberty and I’d hate to miss the window of opportunity. Words can wait.