"john, would you mind picking up a wheel chair at sanpablo and alcatraz, there is a
berkeley cop there waiting for you."


"sure, what is the clients name? is she wanting me to bring her chair to the hospital?"

"no, i am not sure, she lives in alameda some where but the chair is broken, maybe
you can just hold on to it for a while?"

"well, i guess i could, she has our number obviously, right?"

"ill make sure she does. "

when i was 15 i got taken to the Musée Mécanique.
i was changed forever by -...

my mom did a pretty good job of making
carousels the most exciting thing to see. she was so infatuated
with them that in our kitchen there were wood carving
peels on the linoleum getting stuck to my socks and swept into the carpeted living room from a wooden horse that she was cutting out of maple.
chiseling away at a wooden horse after diner in the kitchen.
she would talk about how beautiful carousel music,lights, the ride slowing down
at the end....she was like a little girl with her excited voice chipping away at the heavy wood.
we would get taken to see carousels like they were great works of art or scientific monuments
in the musee was a little carnival scene made entirely of toothpicks.
hundreds of toothpicks glued together making a Ferris wheel, people holding baloons, clowns
and a moving carousel. even the horses would go up and down, the mechanisms made all
out of toothpicks. it had to have taken years of work. the little typed out card simply stated
that it was made by a prisoner at the turn of the century.
i was 15 , totally emotional charged by this idea. it was such an investment, it had to
be made by a wonderful person, but here it said that he was a criminal. how could any one but
the most pure of heart devote so much of himself to such a machine? the man was obviously
totally obsessed with this innocent vision. so soft and child like, yet with the mechanical ingenuity to pull off a functioning clock like machine with his only resource; toothpicks and glue.
how was it possible he was in prison for some horrible crime?
it must have given him grief to no end. a painstaking, soft task in an unflinching
hostile hard environment, im sure he assumed that his creation would be crushed maliciously by
guard or inmate. the duplicity of criminal and gentile artist created a object that lasted over a
hundred years and left my 15 year old self tearing up in a museum. would he have allowed himself to create anything to such an effect had he not been committed?

my mom never finished the carousel horse. she got pretty far but got in a bad motorcycle
accident. she was driving her motorcycle to a P.t.a. meeting when the principal of the school
ran a stop sign and broke her back/arm/ankle. she was in a wheel chair for years and
was told she wouldn't be able to walk around any more.
i moved out a year later to go to collage. i think the horse is still in storage some where.