Illuminaughty!

   Back to writing after a 5 year hiatus to deal with some big health issues, including a diagnosis of epilepsy, a lifelong condition that was misdiagnosed as depression amongst other things. I started this blog in 2018 to journal my search for "home." I took off and left a pretty decent gig in Nebraska, my birthplace, in an 86 Winnebago I named Jesse Pinkman. Jesse bit it in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and I continued on in a truck pulling a camper, following my interior GPS to find this place, a place I still get mushy about, because this place, in the mountains, with the music lovers and the music makers, the hillbillies, rednecks, and hippies... this is just the place I always dreamt of.

Now, for the things that led me to this moment, this home:

  Somewhere around 2004, I returned to Las Vegas, bedraggled by not seeing all my dreams come true, and started meeting people from there. Natives, if such a thing exists in Vegas. 

  I ended up with a friend watching a group of these people frequenting karaoke bars, doing karaoke so PAINFUL that the crowd would groan when any of them got up to sing. They were trying to pain the audience. They could sing. They all ran with the Killers, a band that mostly makes sense in Las Vegas, the way you can only understand Liz Phair in the context of Los Angeles. I could never get into her until I was riding around LA with a friend playing her REAL LOUD through Beverly Hills.

  What I got out of this bad singing, was the idea of social disruption, how incredible it can be. A few girlfriends and me got the idea there, to start a group of social disruptors called The Illuminaughty. Among the silliest things we did was to get bridesmaids and wedding dresses from Goodwill and run around to all the bars pretending the bride got left at the altar. We had so many free drinks those nights.

  The most illuminating and heartbreaking project we ever did was finding, photographing and befriending the women who worked the toughest streets in town. I learned from them how to laugh from the soul, because of and not just in spite of our collective pain. One of the women I met had been gang raped, beaten and cigarettes put out all over her body the day before we met. I never show the pictures of the green bruises or the scars, only the ones that show who she really is: an exquisite beauty, forever a child with joy and softness well earned.

  The lesson I learned from working at the Bunkhouse (my strategy for meeting these women who were fearful of cops, and anyone they didn't know taking their picture) was that we all make a choice about what we do with our pain. You see, all the regulars around my bar all day were Vietnam Vets, and it became clear that some of them had chosen to take that pain and make themselves more compassionate to every person they encountered. The others, the ones that had chosen bitterness and anger as a way to deal, they'd show up maybe once, then find a bar that suited them better. 

  Back then, working girls weren't allowed to go into bars, a fact made clear to me the first day of work. They'd sway men to go outside for just a minute, taking them from the poker machines in front of every seat, that's what the owner said. I called BS, and invited them all in. I just said, "Don't take anyone out of here, especially if they're playing, or I'll have to 86 you. You have your livelihood and I have mine. Don't step, and you're welcome here."

  The following images are from that group of work, re-edited to look directly at them, and have them look directly back at you. The first image is dear Ruby, the woman who had been beaten. I'm putting the second time I photographed her as the first image and the first time we met her as the second image, because it so clearly shows the power of friendship. When the women joined the Illuminaughty they started healing, started looking at themselves as fierce and cool, rather than devalued: the strategy pimps used to keep them working as long as possible.

  Diana, the second, then the first time I met her. Lady D was a force to be reckoned with, and won the whole bar over with her comedy. A man who once told me that I was "crazy for doing this, crazy for letting them come into the bar," sat and talked with her a while, laughed his ass off, then looked at me and said, "You were right; she's cool as hell."

  Gloria was a strikingly beautiful model. I only photographed her once, and she told me she'd been a Solid Gold dancer, something I have no doubts about.

  Miesha had a scar across her neck, where someone had tried to cut her head off, ear to ear. And several deep scars on her wrists. I never asked about them, how it all happened, because it's not okay to ask people about their scars, whether they battled these streets or the landscape of Vietnam. If they desire to tell you, they will. It's a listening thing, not an ask.

  There are more stories to tell, more photographs, but I'll get into it on another day. Today's the day for waking up to the beauty I now see, so I say a prayer for them, for all of us, all the vets, all the scars we can't see, and work towards expanding truth.

I been jammin' to John Craigie's "Rough Johns," a great song by an artist I'm just now studying. He's on point, and some of his words will melt you with their great truths. The one truth, the underlying truth in this song though, seems to me to be that the deepest cuts, the scars you can't see that lead one to get into a situation with rough johns, are made by those who were supposed to love you and take care of you. This was one of the many illuminations brought to me by doing this work. If you want her, #johncraigie see that. It's very winning information.