Hollywood to Vienna. Donald Ellis Rothenberg

found youth-and-innocence first taste. Our cheeks were flushed. Our “playing doctor” time was over.

      Are these true confessions?

      5.

      CALIFORNIA

      BEACHBOYS DAZE

      FRIES AND A TAN,

      OH MAN . . .

      The beach was always a way to look at the girls in bikinis and lay out all summer and get a California tan, play a little American football, throwing it into the water, and body surf, and hide the new “hard on” enlarging between swim trunks, towel, and sand as the foxes strutted by . . . The long hot summer searching for the waves, the pipeline of our dreams, Dick Dale in Huntington Beach playing with the Deltones to all the perspective gremlins and beach boys and sandy beach bums. “Rescue Remedy” wasn’t even in vogue then.

      Hearing Peter, Paul, and Mary singing Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” at the Hollywood Bowl. They said, “This song is by a young songwriter I think you will hear a lot from . . .” Was this 1962? Were we growing up on TV, eating those Swanson’s TV dinners? I got my pick of Salisbury steak or chicken when Mom and Dad went out. We ate our TV dinners on little TV trays right in front of the television, watching Ozzie and Harriet with little Ricky Nelson, his guitar and friends. Whatever happened to that boy with the baseball bat in his hand, pretending to look for blacks, going naively to the first Watts Riots. Later in Operation Bootstrap in South Central L.A., we saw and heard the white honky attitudes so prevalent in our great, free land, and somehow developed some compassion and reality, as the KKK rode again and four students later died—were shot—in Ohio.

      6.

      RUB

      A DUB

      DUB . . .

      Little Jessie, I remember when I was called that, a preteen, and “spin the bottle” and “seven minutes in heaven” were in vogue. If we were really lucky, we could “pet” or “neck,” and maybe even caress each other all over.

      In late teens, much later, I rubbed it between Gina’s legs. We didn’t make love, but we rubbed each other and she masturbated me till I came. I also rubbed her clitoris till she had an orgasm, usually. Sometimes we had it at the same time. She had red hair and red pubic hair and freckles on her face. She had cute little freckles on her lovely breasts, also. She was slim with these around 34 to 36 sized breasts and she was pretty. We couldn’t get enough. One night I was playing with her breasts and sucking the almost purple nipples. Anyway, we zipped each others’ zippers down, and I finger fucked her, and she expertly got me off in no time.

      Once we were there at night, overlooking the lights of the city below. Was this the date where Betty Katz, with the big boobs, would let me feel her up, touch and fondle her breasts, and I would get hard? Would I really get a good feel, and flick and twirl her nipples and even maybe get to suck on them? I couldn’t believe it when she let me, with no apparent opposition. She was eager and melted with my touch, while rubbing herself gently between her legs under her plaid skirt.

      Another woman I got fixed-up with was “doing it,”I heard. So there I was with this woman who never got enough, in the back of my first Volkswagen beetle, with the back seat down and us curled up, stuffed and squeezed in there . . . She most willingly gave me a good blow job, the first one I ever had.

      Now Jesse is recalling these sexploits, and the young lovers of yesteryear. What era are we talking about? These were not rapes or gang bangs or cocaine madness or being fossilized by plaster-caster groupies running after me shrieking with glee, thinking I was Eliott Gould or Albert Einstein, asking for my autograph in Westwood where I grew up. There were only the Fox and Bruin theatres, and no cinema movie house city as there is now, with at least thirty movie houses. It became a hangout, got the wanton city crowd looking for kicks on Sunset Blvd., Ventura Blvd., Whittier Blvd., Manhattan Beach, the Lighthouse, or Shelly’s Mann Hole in Hollywood – the first jazz sounds, Beat poetry and jazz in Venice Beach, the Troubadour, the Ashgrove on Melrose, which now has been reopened to trendy cityscape: the place to browse for deco, or fifties belts, or whatever.

      7.

      PSEUDO-HIPSTERS

      OR WHAT . . .

      Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where I was born, is now owned by Scientologists, and the Hari Krishna people used to have a place in Culver City where we went to get free dinners. O.J. Simpson used to play volleyball on the beach in Venice, right in front of where we lived. We had a place right on the beach, before the bike path made it chic and then became somewhat grungy. Gypsy Boots used to work out in front of the house, and the bikers used to have fights around at the corner bar. Running on the sand, the waves lapping at the feet in the early seventies. It was hip, you know what I mean? There were the jazz and Beat poetry hangouts down there, also. This Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, changed the frontiers of consciousness, altering our conscious states forever. Of course, psilocybin mushrooms have about the same chemical makeup as acid, I hear. It’s really been going on for thousands of years.

      We used to throw oranges and eggs, and whatever, at cars, when we were first young teenage pseudo-punks. We even made dummies that looked like real people and had them run-over, or fall off of ladders, with the recorded sounds of real people screaming in alarm when cars screeched to a halt. One mother thought we were carrying away her son in the market. This was innocent fun, wasn’t it? One night, in West Hollywood, L.A., which is now mostly gay, I drove my white ’68 Chevrolet convertible with the red leather interior up onto the train tracks and got stuck, in the middle of Santa Monica Blvd. How embarrassing! I was trying to impress my buddies.

      One late August night, Jimmy, Sue, and I decided we would rob this Seven Eleven of some candy and Seven-Up. We had planned to distract the cashier, and since it was so bright inside at night and no one was around, we decided to make some noise and start laughing and pretend to tell a joke, a Polish joke or a Jewish joke or some ethnic joke. And then we were too loud, and the manager started to get upset and asked us to leave, so we didn’t get a chance to take any bubble gum or Mars bars or M&M’s, or anything, maybe a Three Musketeers. We ran out of there and hopped onto our Flexi’s and didn’t stop till we were home. We climbed up into our treehouse the next day and had some potato chips up there, looking out onto the neighborhood below. We were only thirteen and exploring the excitement and limits of life, ever so innocently. It was after the war, the Eisenhower fifties, living the good life, trying to “keep up with the Joneses.”

      8.

      ONCE UPON A TIME . . .

      Just who is this Jesse, this guy who is asking these things, and writing and thinking up these questions from the inception of thought, unwilling to bare himself, hiding inside, while he cried for his lost son, the finite one, the child inside, the wordsmith, the programmed writing style, the poet deep within, the Rilke look-alike inside Western shoes, the Miami connection, illicit Hispanic traditionalist circumventing the government in patriotic fervor. There is this transition compulsion to avoid the pain and to run, shifting winds, confusing the mind and de-focusing what the psyche/mind wants to forget and face the music. You know what I mean, Bunkie. Jesse boy . . . don’t call me “man” . . . the arrogant rebellious younger son.

      The grandfather from Odessa, not Texas, the socialist, freemason, postmaster, speaker of seven languages including Yiddish, English, Russian, Spanish. This mandolin player, Yiddish theater actor, clothes designer, gentle one. The roots are there for the artist not to despair.

      Doing tai chi so far away from “home,” wherever that is, piecing together the cobwebs, the spider-made silk threads across the oceans from Jerusalem to Rome, Bombay, Calcutta — let ’em rip, let out those true confessions.

      I wish for the insight to become the new contemporary man, in touch with the dreams, the wild one inside, the feminine and masculine sides, balanced brain