If you think you’re just going to read about Dim, you’re about to read the wrong article. Go somewhere else. Pack up your bags and exit the site. Go pay your five bucks and read the K Chronicles on
Salon.com. Otherwise, go grab a taco salad and stay; you’re about to read a long story, one filled with drama and literary rantings that are as warped and wrapped with novels, intrigue, music yesteryear and ghostly tales as you will ever read from me...
Friday night I entered Fishlips in one of the strangest nights I’ve ever had in the Bakersfield music scene. Why? What could possibly have been so crazy? When music meets literary characters and strange conversations in one of the most exalted literary evenings I could ever imagine, it can’t help but be strange. Never before had so many associations with so many works of N.L. Belardes literary endeavors shown up in the same room. The oddity? I was the only one who knew it…
I’m talking a decade’s worth of an assortment of characters and minor characters in N.L. Belardes novels and poems who all somehow collectively intertwined right in the same building on a historic night of literary memories.
The Citrus Girl circa 1998,
Thick White Crust circa 2003,
Country Songs to Live By circa 2001… a bunch of unpublished works with connection points on a night of music grown from Bakersfield yesteryear…
This was the night of the Dim reunion show. Ramon and Missy Barajas and company had come up from the California coastal lands of the distant south to see if their music could make a resurgence out in the dry Bakersfield bayou. Yes, for those of you kids who don’t know,
Bakersfield used to be a swamp. You used to be able to canoe from Bakersfield to San Francisco. Tell me that ghosts aren’t in swamps. Tell me the
ghost hunters of Oleander don’t hear squishy footsteps in the dark. I’ve seen old bayou horror movies and they’re as creepy as hell… but back to my story…
Matt Munoz and I had talked about Dim playing in Bakersfield again. They had been broken up for years. Matt was overjoyed to even mention the idea. He claimed he had the thought up his sleeve for some time. I was all for it, so I offered to make a flyer and provide emotional support. Of course I am old school Dim, from way back before they canned their drummer and bass player in the mid-90s. So many stories had gone around then—I think it was 1996. Rob Ruiz was their drummer. He later became a minor character named Pedro in the Bakersfield book,
The Citrus Girl. He was the guy I had been hanging out with in the parking lot of Showbiz Pizza back in the Big Hair 80s. His buddy’s trunk was open wide so you could hear his speakers as he said, “You haven’t heard this? You gotta hear this…” He stood with his backpack on—drumsticks poking out—and tapped his fingers on the hood of the car while “Shadows and Tall Trees” by U2 played. It was around 1983 or 1984. I had never heard
Boy. Ruiz, he was just well versed on the matter… He hung out with a group that included a bunch of Dead Generation do-nothings that included myself, a red-headed guy with no rhythm, a drop-out relation of mine, a one-time electronics thief, a pretentious tennis star, a geek, a janitor, a Big Gulp guzzler and a few other guys here and there… there were no chicks in this group. We weren’t good enough to get any; well, except for the tennis star. And most of us frequented Andy Noise Records. Later that group included a lonely philosopher, a meek guitarist and some others…
A few years later Rob Ruiz got into the band Jumping Trains. They were like Toad the Wet Sprocket, like an REM folk-rock band, only more exciting vocally than Michael Stipe’s help-me-I’m-dying vocals. That was the early to mid 1990s. Ruiz helped create the jangle-pop sound of that band with his killer off-time drumbeats. He threw it all away to play in Dim.
Dumping the Jumping Trains band was to no avail because Ruiz was a beer guzzling shleprock who happened to have a hell of a drumming technique though he never held a regular job. And I think his slacker generation habits became a bad combination for what Dim wanted/needed in a drummer, because that meant he depended on them for money and transportation. His beer drinking got the best of him and soon enough he was out of the band and went home where I hear he still is to this day: hiding out, dreaming of the bands of Bakersfield yesteryear like Jumping Trains and Dim, and wishing he had done something different along the way. He probably still asks himself: when Van Halen scouted him at a young age, what had he really done to nurture his musicianship? (At least I think it was Van Halen. I’m going by distant memory here). In one of my last calls to him he said, “I’m learning how to play bass…” That was a couple of years ago.
A few weeks after he was fired from Dim I remember sitting in the old Swing Café where TJ Maxwells is now. Rob Ruiz had been canned from the band and was sitting inside at the bar with
The Citrus Gal, lonely philosopher (now a lawyer), the janitor, and the meek guitarist. The just released Dim CD started to play over the sound system. They had canned him right after its release. I had gone to the CD release party… all I remember is a gay artist,
the citrus girl loving on me, lots of people and champagne. Rob was on all the recordings and so when he heard the music begin to play he about lost it, he was so disgusted. “I can’t believe they’re playing that in here. I’m on that album!” That was one of the last times I saw him. I called him a few times when I got back to town in 2001; but he was horrible at returning phone calls and I got tired of trying to keep in touch.
The old bass player, Heath—you can still see him over at Pizzaville USA on Oak Street. I talk to him once in a while and he throws me a free soda now and then for good times sake.
The ‘new Dim’, which is really an ‘old Dim’ and part of the tribute night last Friday night, was never what the original Dim was to me. Even though I couldn’t wait to see them, I remember their edge had gone for me a long time ago. Why? The questions circulated eight or so years ago: Had Ramon Barajas sold out to stardom by dumping old band mates for more aesthetically pleasing-to-the-eye musician folks? Or were these other members just not cutting it? Where was Dim headed that they needed to change out two of its members in such a jiffy? It wasn’t long after that I left Bakersfield and went to work on a novel in the great hinterlands of Ohio where the Hopewell Indian culture once flourished, and then for an animation company: new times, new places, new people to meet and adventures to be had. I soon lost sight of Dim. That whole episode became a music-filled episodic memory that I was to work into a 384-page novel. Only a few people have read about Bakersfield in the mid-1990s through my eyes in
The Citrus Girl, a story about counterculture love in Bakersfield, about my own dim moments crossing the country in a beat car; it’s a story that encompasses a confusing time—unanswerable even in the self-exploratory path of literary complexity—where I wonder about what I was to call a generation of “MTV-sucked rebellious youth.” That’s pure literary philosophy, man, and I take you far beyond music-writing and the surface of Dim as I explore the ideation of an entire Bakersfield generation in a case study of malaise-infected youth, a generation of kids who didn’t have the united feelings of impending doom that most American generations had. See, most American generations bond and survive through endless American wars upon wars… But in the Big 80s the Cold War was wrapping up…it wasn’t a violent war of generational upheaval like Vietnam, Korea, WWII, or WWI… you see, kids still have to rebel against something, even if it is propelled by MTV. All of that’s explained in the Citrus Girl, a case study of my generation…
Enter Fishlips, the land of the Fish Fry. A half an hour before Dim and Mento Buru were to play I saw a girl sitting by herself at one of the tables. Boy, had fate turned a trick. It was a gal who I knew from living in the
Huntridge Arts district in Las Vegas. I didn’t really know her, but she lived
two houses down from me and was the close friend of a crazed artist I knew. So I knew of her, had seen her at parties, had heard the tales of her woeful life. This artist guy who I worked with, who lived with her, was into collecting the macabre...
Our job as artists was to create art for the downtown
Las Vegas Big Top Show, The Fremont Street Experience, that 4.5 block long vault of lights that I would sit around and think kooky ideas for. I was the storyboard artist and creative writer. He was one of a few animation artists. But he had a self-serving vendetta against society, so he would think up ways to infect the audience with his dark brand of mythology in a sun-lit stream of cartoony moments reflecting his hidden world of the macabre. It was all so subtle. He would sit up all night in his
Freakling Brothers T-shirt and I would come in the next morning to work and there he would be sitting, creating 3-D characters using 3-D Studio Max, with his eyes all bloodshot and his fingers all pudgy on the mouse. Thank god there was free food in the casinos and a boss who let us all play games to fire our creative juices.
This
long-haired fair-skinned gal I saw at the Fish Fry was the main title holder of the house she rented. She drove an old Studebaker truck and listened to rockabilly and hung out with artists who dug alternative country music. The disgusting part? The artist I knew was so into his dark life that she allowed him to keep jars of dead babies on their living room shelves. Don’t ask me how he got them. I thought they were movie props until he told me what they really were. “Great movie props,” I said, grabbing one. He told me otherwise and I never returned to that house.
And then I came back to Bakersfield on September 12, 2001 and one day turned on the TV. And there she was… smiling… talking… and me, thinking, There’s the lady who had dead babies on her shelf she’s now a Bakersfield newscaster? I stopped watching the morning news because of the dead baby lady. I figured one day I would run into her or I would just email the TV station in disgust and write, “Will you take the dead baby lady off the air so I can eat my morning breakfast in peace?”
I approached her at Fishlips. “Hi, are you *************? I knew you in Las Vegas. You never remembered me every time I met you, but I remember you.” She didn’t. She was a lonely depressed soul in Las Vegas, wrapped up in her latest men, so she ignored all the rest, even if you weren’t after her; and you could see in her eyes, her feeling lost, as she often just sat on her couch in a fog. And every time I met her, whether at her house, or at a party, she would always say, “Have we met before??” She would remember me this time. I would see to that. Call me bad but I was out to embarrass her.
I had walked up. She looked confused. I was expecting that.
“Yes, I am,” she replied with the have-we-met-before stage-grimace on her face.
“Yes, and I’ve been to your house in downtown Las Vegas. If there’s one person who knows about you in Bakersfield, it’s me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I know they weren’t yours, but I was always so disgusted that you allowed dead babies to line your living room shelves.”
She played me off as nostalgia, as a joke of sorts. But I could sense the horror she felt that someone knew a hint of her dark secrets. Because, even if she wasn’t responsible for putting those dead babies on the living room shelves, it was her house. “Oh, do you still talk to *****?” she said with the same fake smile I had seen on TV.
I mentioned that I did hear from him in the past few months. He had found my website and emailed me. I told her that he was going to graduate school in Georgia. I didn’t admit to knowing much more than that although there’s more that I might share another time… Soon her boyfriend walked up. He resembled like the guy she dated in Las Vegas: dark hair, Latino, domineering... He looked at me with a contemptuous pouty lip and whisked her off to play pool.
Oh that artist I worked with. He was just as crazy and in love with some girl who would never have him. Here’s a few poems from
Country Songs to Live By. These poems illuminate where I lived near Gass and 3rd Street, the mad artist, and the Fremont Street canopy of lights:
The Mad City of Lights
1.
From Gass and 3rd Street I can see the daylight vault.
—silver machinery sky stretches between buildings,
right over the Christmas cone—plastic cone.
Night time lights hang on the tree smell of desert winds.
Grit blows through the immigrant city filter,
brings life to Gass and 3rd.
In the morning I walk to work.
The same wind sneaks through brown grass,
around trees—dead, and still gritty,
same as the first month of walking toward the metal sky.
At night again, Gass and 3rd hides a little brown desert house,
tucked away, stuffed palm inside a wide open
carpet vista to nowhere:
high priced desert land; the same land thirty miles away,
—far from the machinery,
far from the citrus valley.
From Here to There
4.
Suicide coffee, it's black dirt in Ken's glass.
Enigma, a café—Adam and Eve garden,
on crack, sitting and laughing,
talking about art and writing in their
free-thinking desert garden,
free-thinking depressed,
free-thinking still depressed,
and starry glaze eye of Artemis, mythological—no logic,
poverty-stricken, still no logic,
just dead generation virtuous in sleep,
in old thrift clothes and hateful.
Hateful of themselves with drug induced passion,
as their thoughts aren't even yelling to the nearby lawyers,
"The mongerers! The machinists!"
5.
Banana bread in an afternoon lunch buffet.
On the glittering street where artists madly gather
to break bread, thoughts,
and talk of chocolate pudding and creation.
The banana bread on my plate
is covered in butter, is moist,
is a section of the Las Vegas Street
foodland—sitting, uneaten,
covered,
in my expectation of conversation
and mad street-loathing:
of the mechanical canopy we work under.I went and sat down and spoke with
Matildakay after my run-in with the dead baby lady. Matildakay had just had some drama of her own when a local artist, who she hadn’t spoken to in a few years, walked in, one of several in the building from the cast of characters in my Chicano novella,
Thick White Crust. Bo Caballero was there too and a character based on him appears throughout.
The artist, extremely controversial in the novella is entirely strange, with flamboyant tendencies to sit up late at night and create sperm seed paintings. No lie. Matildakay owns one of these. I asked her one day why she keeps it hanging in her living room. She said, “I don’t think of him when I look at it.” Whatever.
Like I was saying, this guy is flamboyant. Since I moved back he has had Matildakay and I questioning just how far south he was of being a metrosexual, while the Citrus Girl and I wondered years ago what kind of underwear he sported beneath that fake macho smile. My theory, based on stories presented in
Thick White Crust depict him as a passive-aggressive jealous lover of someone from Matildakay’s sordid past. Oh I bet you want to read the novella now, don’t you? You forget that I’m a super sleuth on the trail of questionable Bakersfield occurrences and people?
I wasn’t the only one who noticed the snubbing I received from this artist who came to worship the very ground of Dim. “Ramon this! Missy this!” Lala! Blah blah! Ug! He sat in the front row during their performance like a crazed lap dog. I waited for the opportune moment to say something really cruel after the show. But he wouldn’t look my way, and several people prevented me from causing a scene. He did speak to Matildakay, holding his glass of wine daintily, smiling through his large teeth and insecure plastic smile. He talked to her about wine, about her family; he pretended to care. But she said, “He stopped talking to me because I stopped talking to him a long time ago. Here he acts so concerned about my family, yet he gave up friendship because he got jealous of your writing.”
“Maybe he feels guilty for ******* your *******.”
I’ve heard enough stories. I can put two and two together. The
Lords of Bakersfield aren’t the only ones who give gay folks a bad name… there’s an artist in town with a dirty smile, a beguiling demeanor, a suave show of the hands, and an apologetic confidence who claims he knows the French, knows wines, knows a bit of everything… he reared his head at the Dim reunion… but I’m not fooled. Go read or watch
Before Night Falls. You might learn something of his character…
Dim did play. I thought they were a nice musical tour through the lost days of yesteryear, though I would have liked it better if Ramone sang on more than one song. I hadn’t seen Dim perform since the mid-90s. A few years ago my old girlfriend,
skinnygirlfatgirl took the Dim CD on her way to Chicago and left me with Dim’s former cassette of Green Lantern Co. She told me before the show, “If you see Ramon before the show, tell him I always wanted to **** him. Just to get a reaction.”
I’m not dumb. Way back then they both had eyes for each other. Only she kicked herself for making out with Matt Gooch and not Ramon. The poor girl. She had to settle for an adventure with me and have a book written about her. Tsk Tsk. Or maybe that’s a scary idea? I was too bashful to say anything of the sort to Ramone. I said hello and we shook hands… He teased and said my photo-flash made him mess up on the guitar… Matt Munoz never says I make him mess up, but then he’s the ska king of
skakersfield with his big socks and four trademark ska dances…
Dim’s music was a forceful return to Latino rock for Ramon and Missy Barajas. Missy has an exotic look; she sways like she’s hypnotizing you though she is somewhat of a monotone singer. She has the ability to mesmerize the crowd. Her deep voice resonates like she’s seducing you while the music is straight-forward rock. You tend to forget that her voice doesn’t fluctuate much because you get caught up into her movement, and her style of deeply engrossing vocals. I still preferred Ramone’s guitar-work and shot some photos of Ramon jamming to sounds that had really been ghosts themselves in the music scene for several years now. The resurrection was good; now Dim, write some all-new material, and show me what you can do in the New Millennium…
And I can’t forget: Mento Buru played the show too. Incredible as always. The people of Bakersfield were in force to see the ska kings croon to the crowd. The dancing was mad and the sexiness was en fuego! The ska kings sent me a demo of their hockey song that’s in the works. You gotta love these guys. Their music is one of the hidden gems of the Southern Valley and will one day be recognized with a café across the street from the Crystal Palace. It will be filled with memorabilia and ghosts, .75 cent tacos, Cervesas, chili relleno, and Dwight Yoakam’s old biscuit containers… but what would it be named?
