LETTERS FROM HOME: SISSY SPACEK, PLUMBER CAN'T FIX REVOLUTION LEAK

April 14, 1994

Dear Leslie,

A horn just sounded to tell me the morning paper has arrived. This isn't the daily procedure, but every week or so the woman who delivers the San Francisco Chronicle forgets that we're on her route. So I call and she drops one by with a little honk to show she does care.

Things sort of work that way here in Garberville. The town's only real video store categorizes its movies by the names of the actors and actresses that appear in them. If you want "Carrie," you find the hand-lettered sign for the Sissy Spacek section, which might be next to Dan Akyroyd's oeuvre. "The Great Escape?" Maybe Steve McQueen.

As compensation for spending a fraction of your life searching for videos, the store gives customers a free one after 10 rentals. Except on weekends, and except if the video has the number 1000 written on the bottom right corner of the box. If the number 1000 appears on any other part of the box, or if a different number appears on the box, the video is free. Except on weekends, of course.

It is a dysfunctional family-owned operation where you'd need a psychiatrist to figure out why things are as they are.

At first, paying for a video was an exercise in confusion as well. But once I realized my name was misspelled in the computer and considered the effort changing it might require, I began misspelling my name the way they do.

At the movie theater, the soft drink dispensers often produce only a gurgling noise. The person behind the counter just smiles when that happens. Fruit juices are the drink of choice here. But the broken-down seats are only $4.50. And a dog might walk up and down the aisle from time to time.

The movies generally arrive here after Eureka has exhausted them. "Schindler's List" is still in a holding pattern so we drove the 60 miles to Eureka to see it just before the Academy Awards. Eureka and Arcata, the little town on the other side of Humboldt Bay, are the destinations when old movies no longer will do.

Saw "The Paper" in Eureka Saturday and returned to Arcata on Sunday to hear Tish Hinojosa, a bilingual singer from Austin who has an Emmylou Harris voice. Sorry, I forgot I was writing one of those beings -- DC's one too -- who missed out on most of the music of the past three decades. It's a high, clear voice, like a desert night salted with stars.

Afterward at the Jambalaya we ran into John Ross, a poet, leftist, rabble-rouser and jugular-seeking sometime journalist I hadn't seen for 10 years. An an age when most folks are planning for their retirement, he's been in Mexico covering the Mayan Indian uprising in Chiapas. Seemed to be missing a few more teeth and might have mellowed only slightly from the old days, when he stood in the Jambalaya and recited, in his jazzy Beat Generation style, such poems as "The Revolution Is Not Like A Faucet," which ends with the lines, "The Revolution leaks all the time ... You can't call a plumber to fix it."

Despite my editor's warning that "He'll be back," I wrote a story about John when he left Humboldt County for the Bay Area a decade ago. Like most editors, mine was partly right. As a peripatetic disciple of the Jack Kerovac School of Writing, John returns to the scene of his crimes from time to time. But now he's headed back to Mexico for five more months. Hope he keeps his head down.

When he left that first time, John signed one of his poetry books for me. The inscription consisted of his thumbprint (I think he liked the idea that the FBI might have a file on him) and the words, "To Sam Blackwell. Journalism doesn't triumph."

Not the kind in "The Paper," certainly. But I always took John's words as a gauntlet thrown my way. When he asked if I am still "doing journalism," I nodded. He smiled, toothlessly.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian. He is currently on a leave of absence and living in Garberville, Calif.