antonio muñoz degrain

It went like this, the tale of . . .

THE BRIDGE
AND THE TOWER

In the afternoon I paused my nonstop James Bond marathon and drove with McCune in the Heshmobile to Oakland to get to his pizza shop there. He told me to grab a salad from the walk-in freezer and I wolfed it down before the first customer even walked through the door. With many hours to kill until we’d be able to go home to Vallejo, I decided to walk from Jack London Square all the way up Broadway till I got to 20th, and then hook left onto Telegraph towards Berkeley to see how much things had changed since I had last seen it, which was only six months ago. With trepidation I went towards that fated place. Well, I’m here to tell you that I felt despair seeing what it had become . . . a few vape shops and dispensaries and personality-less restaurants that will be out of business by the end of the year were scattered around between sad and empty storefronts—storefronts that have sat empty since I stopped living in West Oakland nearly ten years ago. Burrito Express and Telegraph Beergarden remain, and John Waters and his friends have brought Stork Club back from the dead. I looked inside and I GOTTA SAY: it looked pretty cool. And of course the seemingly invincible Korean grocery store and the pool hall next door are hanging in there, but I expect them to still be standing even if California slides into the ocean like the mystics and statistics say it will. . . .

I kept walking. I got to the underpass at 34th and Telegraph near where Daphne and Emma used to live and saw that essentially all the businesses nearby had shut down and were now darkened storefronts with no promise of a new thing in the future. Oakland is all darkened storefronts anymore.

And even where there was light, it gave me an unsettling feeling. The CVS just before the underpass is now a heavily protected lot with an wrought-iron fence around it about eight feet high, and inside it is lit like the surface of the sun, presumably to discourage people from turning it into a Mad Max encampment. Affixed to the street lamps are flashing blue lights that ignite a little Pavlovian response in you as you walk by. You think: “The police are here. And if they aren’t, then they’re on their way.” It makes you want to get the hell away, which is exactly what I did.

There was no way around it: I had to walk through the darkness beneath the underpass, which I had done so many times before on so many bad nights. Even if I had taken an adjacent route, I still would have ended up beneath some other godless segment of it. At least this part I knew well. Once I was fully beneath the bridge, I scanned the shadowy corners of it for human life but found none. It was a desolate place of non-being, and filled with trash. It felt to me like a total summation of Oakland anymore. Somberly I passed through as though it were Purgatory:

And on and on I walked until being in Oakland made me feel sick with sadness. I could feel the city convulsing and choking and breaking under the weight of its own discarded dead, and I among them. On the bridge from 40th towards Bay Street in Emeryville, gazing out at the police state that Oakland has become, the high gates and fences and rent-a-soldiers lined up outside Starbucks and Best Buy and Target and all that other bullshit, I went ahead and admitted to myself that I just don’t like this place anymore and that I should probably stop coming here so often. I texted McCune and said as much. He said, “You’ve been replaced.” He ain’t wrong. I told him I missed how we used to get stoned and bring coffee to Target on weeknights IN OUR OWN MUGS and just walk around for the sake of the song . . . because it was something to do! He said, “O! Those halcyon days!” How could you recreate such a thing now? It would be like trying to throw a children’s birthday party at a war-torn Chuck E. Cheese guarded by multiple RoboCops. What a tragedy.

I wonder: WHO KILLED OAKLAND? Are they the same creeps who KILLED THE WORLD? (The answer is . . . yes! if even by proxy. We have entered the new Dark Age. Or didn’t you know? Spoilers: It’s Oops! All Turds all the way down. It is the final midnight which goes on forever, and maybe even longer than that . . .)

Thought I:

ALAS!
THAT THESE
DARK DAYS
SHOULD BE MINE.

Anyway: I bought a froyo cone at IKEA like I always used to, and then I went to Uniqlo and bought thermal tights. I walked through soulless Bay Street to get to my old Traitor Joe’s, which was essentially empty of food. And so saying, I took the 29 bus all the way to my old Traitor Joe’s by Lake Merritt and bought a bunch of fruit both FRESH and FROZEN to take back to my luxury bungalow in Vallejo, AS IS MY WONT. Another bus ride full of psychopaths later, I arrived at Hesher’s Pizza and sat down and began writing whatever this is. At 10 on the dot, McCune and I drove home and watched BERSERK, which we have almost finished. We have arrived at the most insanely dark part of the whole seri s.Have you seen or read BERZERK? It’s extremely good . . . one of my Favorite Things ever now!

That night I dreamt of Guts:

. . . and next day early I was greeted, as I am every morning these days, by my perfect baby nephew and future savior of the world, who is known by many names, but chiefly by his Christian one, being . . .

TOWER MCCUNE

Behold:

This guy loves biting and putting stuff in his mouth! He’s got four whole teeth now, which he proudly shows off, and they tell me he’s got a whole other row of them on the way. Who knew! Maybe that’s why he’s always chewing on stuff. Don’t they call that teething? And look at this kid’s big-ass head. His mother says Tower’s baby head is in the 99th percentile for baby heads . . . it’s that big! Well, seeing as how Tower is humanity’s last hope, it makes sense that he would need plenty of space for the super-brain he no doubt houses inside that prodigious skull of his. Now all we have to do is protect and train him as our species wades further into that dark future, that great abyss governed by almighty Death, so that the prophecy may be fulfilled—the one in which warrior-monk Tower McCune rises up from the nightmare ruins to triumph over eternal evil and push away the darkness forever, ushering in happier days not known since Eden. And then we will finally have peace in the valley, if such a thing can be got.

And if that day never comes?

IF THE DARKNESS BENEATH THE BRIDGE WHELMS THE LIGHT FROM THE HIGH TOWER?

Well then . . .

. . . meanwhile, i’m so desperate for any sort of purpose in life that if a complete stranger walked up to me in the middle of a grocery store and asked me to drive them to the airport or help them move, i’d do it!!!

Last time I traveled all around the world, which was a year ago, I found it difficult to write about it . . . namely because I was moving around so frequently, sometimes every single day, and so I often had no time to sit down and record any of the things I was doing. I did a lot. Problem was, half the time I was either asleep on someone’s floor or couch . . . or else behind the wheel of a god damn rental car!!

Right now I’m having too much fun . . . but I have been meaning to go someplace boring and lock myself in a cheerless room and fully write down all the things that happened in the six months I was completely itinerant, when I visited nearly 30 cities in over 20 states, and several cities in Canada, a long dark odyssey that I put myself through so that I would have a reason for being alive when I did not have one otherwise. After half a year of living nowhere and traveling many thousands of miles to see all my friends, I finally flew back to Berlin in the dead of winter, and I reckoned that would be the time to write whatever the thing was going to be. And yet I barely wrote anything about that time. I felt more compelled to sleep in my bed and take baths and go on walks and watch a bunch of movies and try to hang out with girls. Sorry, I’m human!

Anyway: Something that was clear to me in the six months I was back in Berlin was that I still did not have a reason to be alive. That thought followed me like a curse. It sat on my tail! I had not gone on that trip at the end of summer 2023 thinking it would somehow cure me of my sadness, nor did I think it would give me purpose, whatever that even means . . . I sustained myself simply by getting to the next place. I placed things for myself in the future. I had to stay alive to long enough to get to where I was going, and once I got there I’d just have to move on to the next place. That was my purpose, if any. Now that I was living alone in a high tower in Schöneberg and haunting my neighborhood at night, I had too much time to think, a dangerous thing for a complete idiot like me, and it didn’t take much thinking to realize that I was feeling increasingly suicidal again because I no longer had any reason to care about my life. I wasn’t moving anymore.

I guess I could have gotten more creative about it . . . but I reckoned the simplest thing to do would be to buy a plane ticket and go places again, even if many of those places were the same ones I had visited in the last year. Why not? As far as I was concerned, the prospect of seeing my all my friends again beat the hell out of eating a bullet, even if it meant sleeping on trains and buses and living room floors and in the trunks of rental cars. . . .

Now I am in Los Angeles, sitting on my friend Cera’s couch near Koreatown and thus about a mile from Amissa’s place, and I realize it has been exactly three months since I started doing that thing again. Cera, who is a dominatrix, has let me sleep in her bed in exchange for practicing bondage knots on my hands and arms, so at least I’ve got that going for me. I’m so tired. Two weeks ago I was in New York, and afterwards I went back to DC to be alone for a few days . . . and after that, I rented a car and drove up through Maryland and Pennsylvania and into and across upstate New York and finally to Vermont in the middle of the night to get to Burlington where I slept in the trunk of my rental car on a quiet residential street . . . and in the morning I awoke and carefully exited the trunk so no one saw me, and ate breakfast downtown, where the barista recognized the PSYCHOMANIA pin on my lapel, the first person who ever knew what it was, and I told her so. Afterwards I bought and mailed some postcards from a little bookstore where the cashiers were discussing the Lord of the Rings, and continued driving north across the Canadian border into Montreal, where I stayed with Laura’s sister Helen, and next day I went west across Quebec to get to Toronto, where I stayed with Julia and Will and their roommate Sarah and cat Pastrami . . . and from there I drove many miles through the bleak rainy landscape of Ontario only to accidentally wind up at a forlorn pier where I took a ferry across Lake St. Clair and back into the United States towards Detroit, where I stayed with Kelsey and her cats Mimi and GG . . . . and on another rainy morning I drove around Lake Michigan to finally arrive in Chicago, where I stayed with Gayle and her dog Lolita. I saw my good friend Hali Palombo for the first time in four years, and along with Gayle we ate at a diner with Gayle’s new boyfriend, Jared the Juggler, as it snowed like hell outside. Next day I took an early morning flight out of Midway to get to LA . . . they had to de-ice our plane with a sort of green slime right there on the tarmac on account of the sudden snowstorm. I almost didn’t make it, but we shot through the stormy white skies bursting with wet snow and torpedoed west towards Los Angeles. I did all this in the span of six days . . . all told it was about 1,600 miles (2,600 km) of Hot Open Road and however many miles far above the ground below to get from Illinois to California. Sometimes people would call me while I was driving through the night and we’d talk for a long time . . . I gave Shaina some Relationship Advice when I was briefly lost in Schenectady, New York, which is secretly a very cool city. I pissed in dark fields beneath starlight and listened to dozens and dozens of albums and drank a ton of coffee. It ruled.

My dad called me just as I got off the plane at LAX. He said, “Where have you been? I was watching your location and you were going all over the place . . .”

I said, “I went all over the place, and now I’m exhausted.”

“Why do you do this then?”

“Because I like it!”

I did not say to him the other side of the truth, which is that I don’t know what else to do, and also if I stop long enough I really struggle to find any sort of reason to wake up in the morning. I suppose I will keep going as long as the paychecks keep coming, or until I stumble upon a Purpose or find True Love, or some such thing, although I am not optimistic about either. I will place my optimism elsewhere, and as soon as I know where that place is, you all will be first to know.

For now my purpose is to write here and to see my friends, OF WHICH I AM LUCKY TO HAVE MANY. The world is crushing in on me . . . but life CAN be beautiful! And so saying, the next place I will go is to Portland to stay with Monty and her family, the latter of whom I have not seen since the first pandemic fall . . . and I will watch over dear Bilbo the cat once they all head north to scope out Boise as a place to live next, on account of how much they hate living in Portland. I sympathize as I too once suffered that fate. AND THEN WHAT? Up to Tacoma to see Celeste, my oldest friend of 32 years, for god’s sake, and then finally to Seattle to see ol Jackson, who informed me this morning that he has a “big old memory foam mattress” with my name on it. Why not!

After that I do not know yet. You might say that is an exciting thing, to not know. It will be Christmas, and I’m going to take the whole week off to do god knows what, but as of now I am The Christmas Orphan. Who will be goodly enough take my cretinous ass in? I guess we’ll all find out soon enough!

For now . . .

I got back to the Bay Area last night in order to fulfill my promise of house/cat-sitting at McCune Compound aka The Black Fortress up in bleak-ass Vallejo, California while the McCunes are chilling in Colorado Springs.

And so upon touchdown I fled the airport into the cold rainy darkness and took BART from Coliseum to 19th Street station . . . McCune said he’s scoop me up from Lake Merritt after he’d left Bar 355. As a childless and girlfriendless loser with nothing better to do with my life just then, I putzed around the lake and through my old neighborhood there, and ate a veggie curry wrap and drank a (free) cup of chai tee from Guru Curry House outside my old building, standing beneath the entryway to get out from the drizzle and mist. For two years I have been getting weekly calls from UPS and FedEx, the drivers trying to get buzzed into my old apartment, so I checked the call box outside and saw my last name still listed on apartment 3. I guess they never got around to removing it even though I asked them to a dozen times. When you are not paying a property management company anymore, they have even less of an incentive to fulfill your wishes than they would if you were actually paying them, which is saying something.

I took some pictures. See that lighted high-rise floating above the dark trees in the second picture? A bunch of rich people live there. I lived below it and to the right a little in a building where everyone was not rich. When I used to walk around the lake at night, which was pretty much every night, I would always look to that building and know that Dante was waiting for me in our cozy apartment, and I would quicken my pace to get back to him. Last night, knowing all that was gone now, our apartment and our life there, and him gone from the earth forever, I felt like drowning myself in the lake. I could think of no good reason not to until I remembered I had promised to take care of McCune’s cat.

Anyway:

I made my way to my old Trader Joe’s and stocked up on fruit. I did not recognize any of the employees and felt a little bit of a sadness . . . that small death of knowing you are no longer part of a place that was once yours. Outside I waited for McCune in the nearby parking garage where I had had a good-long phone call with Bethany a month ago. He showed up about forty-five minutes later smelling like a dude who had been at a bar. We rocketed onto the highway by Grand Lake Theater going 90 miles per hour, the road slicked with rain and the houses in the hills aglow in the darkness as we passed Emeryville and Berkeley and Albany and El Cerrito, booming across the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge and through the toll gate and not paying to get back to McCune Compound in Vallejo. Inside we were greeted by baby Tower:

Later, I received a series of truly transcendental text messages from my secret group chat:

McCune and I watched ESCAPE TO ATHENA (starring Roger Moore as a Nazi general), which blew my mind. Man! That’s such a good movie I want to scream. The house got cold as hell, so McCune went off to bed, and I ate a gummy and dropped off to nightmare world myself.

In the morning I found myself alone in the house. I got up and made coffee:

. . . and peed all over McCune and Joanna’s bed, as well as Tower’s crib. They had it coming.

. . . and hung out with Beezer the cat, whom I am the guardian of till Sunday:

It is a holiday week, or anyway it’s about to be one, so I down-shifted into Dad Mode and watched a bunch of Bond movies. Heaven help me, I still had Roger Moore on the brain. I put on MOONRAKER and saw my girlfriend, who is an austere French redhead who would probably be mean to me. Unfortunately it is implied she dies aboard the exploding space station at the end of the movie. Oh well. I’m mad at her for kissing another guy anyway. At least Jaws finds love.

Afterwards I put on OCTOPUSSY, which I had only seen once before. It is not very good, but like every Bond movie, even the especially bad ones, it’s worth watching anyway. Why not! Look at this:

Once the sun went down I drove to Target to get bagels. I made a mini playlist of songs about horses:

. . . and once home, I played the new remaster of DRAGON QUEST III. This is some shit I would say:

WELL!

My ass is tired as hell on account of all the nothing I did today . . . so good-night!!! ☆彡

“crash”, 1996
25 november 2024
los angeles, california

. . . She had figured out that the most pervasive American disease was loneliness, and that even people at the top often suffered from it, and that they could be surprisingly responsive to attractive strangers who were friendly.