The good thing about being in jail is that it gives you a lot of free time to think about what it is that's really meaningful to you, and also what's just a piece of fluff.

What I miss most about not being in jail is avocados.

Wait a minute! Did you hear that last statement? Did it catch your curiosity or make you laugh? When I uttered it, I knew what I meant by it but I wonder if you heard it as I meant it? Am I in jail and missing avocados, or, if you put the emphasis on the word "being," am I out of jail, reminiscing about avocados that somehow aren't available on the outside? Do me a favor and read the statement again.

The phrase, "not being in jail," means a condition of freedom from incarceration, when I'm not inside but outside and therefore able to do a little grocery shopping or restaurant hopping where avocados are readily available. If I say that I miss that freedom, then I must be speaking from a jail cell, where avocados are served rarely, if ever, and, resolving that question, we can go on with the story about why avocados are so important. But hold on for a moment and take another look at the original "missing avocados" statement. It has an Escher-like, reversing flip-flop quality to it. The phrase, "what I miss most," applies to the phrase, "about not being in jail," so therefore I must be out of jail and missing the special, if infrequent, way that avocados were available while I was inside. We just flip-flopped. Either interpretation could apply, the one or its opposite, so you have to be careful about what you say. You might be saying the opposite of what you mean; or, at least, someone you're trying to connect with might be hearing it that way.

Enough of this, let's get on with the story.

Missing avocados more than anything else might sound strange if you didn't know the history behind it. I loved them with a passion until one very hot summer day at lunchtime when I was six years old and, standing by a caroms board in the Stanford Avenue schoolyard, I bit into an avocado sandwich that my mother had lovingly prepared, and threw up. I guess the heat had gotten to it and made it go bad. However it was, it was so revolting that I couldn't get near another avocado for many years without feeling nauseated. The mere thought of one tended to turn me green. Not the rich, deep green of the Hass avocado, that's too dark a color, but more like the lighter green of those huge, tasteless, shinny ones you frequently find below the boarder.

I eventually came around to liking those dark demons again, at first by taking an occasional hesitant nibble out of some sort of awkward politeness to an esteemed host, but then slowly starting to actually find the green stuff to be a rather intriguing mixture of pain and pleasure with the pain part becoming less and less until it finally evaporated altogether. Ultimately, it was all pleasure as I joyously discovered the many and various delectable ways that avocados could be prepared and presented. I know it's probably a horrible analogy, but that whole saga makes me think of what a raped virgin must have to go through when she later finds tender friendship with a very virile man and eventually falls in love with him. You may think that that's a rather macabre metaphor but when you look up the etymology of avocado to discover that it comes from the Spanish word, aguacate, which in turn, comes from the Mayan Indian, Nahuatl word, ahuacatl, meaning "scrotum," then perhaps that comparison isn't so bizarre after all. There's a name for that kind of word development where a thing is named after something else that it tends to look like, but I'm not sure what it is.

That etymology may not be a complete justification for my simile but the comparison's still kind of intriguing to think about.

So here I am, rotting away in jail on a phony rape charge and all I can think about is avocados. Avocados, avocados relentlessly beating away on my brain! All I remember is going to a wonderful, festive, sunny outdoor picnic in Berkeley, tasting the most delicious guacamole I ever et, cornering the young lady who made it, and making this fleeting, earthly existence truly worthwhile by getting her to surrender her precious recipe.

I won't tell you the whole thing, but I'll tell you this much; keep half of your avocados in reserve, I'll tell you why later. After mashing the remaining half, the trick is to add a lot of garlic powder, she really emphasized the garlic powder, chopped onions diced to eighth-inch cubes or even smaller, lemon pepper, a little freshly ground pepper, preferably slightly coarse, a goodly sprinkling of dill weed (always remember to store your dill in the refrigerator where it stays much fresher), finely chopped cilantro, and a liberal amount of cactus salsa. A Korean vegetable-and-fruit-stand man once told me that there were nineteen different varieties of cilantro, sixteen of which are almost tasteless. So taste the cilantro before you buy it. And don't buy it if you can't taste it; there's never any point in making an empty gesture.

In the same way, some lemon pepper brands are far superior to others. I personally like Shoffeitt Lemon Pepper, but maybe it's just because those sets of double consonants make me think of the quick taking out of handkerchiefs and the funny looks on people's faces at the sputter they must create when the Shoffeitts say their name. It really is quite good though. And stay away from Lawry's lemon pepper, it tastes like stale Kool-Aid.

Medium Desert Pepper brand of salsa is equally good if you can't get cactus salsa, in fact sometimes I prefer it. It's a combination of a lot of very tasty stuff including tomatillos. Cactus or Desert salsas have a lot more flavor than the ordinary hot jalapeno pepper salsas, and they have a more distinctive taste. They also don't burn your mouth out before you can taste all the other wonderful guacamole stuff you've so carefully concocted. A small spoonful of mayonnaise will add to the creamy texture but don't use too much. Now for the remaining unmashed avocado that you've been holding back.

When you've got the first part all good and mixed up, and added in whatever else suits your personal preference, like a little shredded lettuce, tiny diced tomatoes, finely chopped shallots or garlic, or whatever, then you dice the remaining unused avocado that you were holding in reserve—make sure that it's firm enough, that its not too mushy, but not too hard either—into little chunks about the size of Monopoly dice, and gently, very gently fold them into the earlier preparation. That way you can savor the pure avocado taste of the chunks along with the exotic taste of the mashed up stuff you've folded them into. A clever way to do the dicing is to cut the avocado longwise and pop the seed out but don't scoop the meat out of its skin until you've already done the dicing without piercing the containing skin. Then, when you scoop it out, you don't get your fingers all messy. Never will you not hear, "I've never tasted guacamole that was so good!" Or, "This is the best guacamole I've ever..." or words to that effect.

But this is a bit of a side trip from telling you about why I miss avocados so much. Besides the fact that they are so delicious, it really has to do with an always chuckling, freckled-faced, six-foot-one, two hundred and twelve pound, redheaded, Icelandic fellow named Joe Gudmundsson. He was my sidekick in college before he got kicked out when he got pissed off about something or other, and shot out a lot of the town's streetlights. He came back though, after a six months stint hitting the road with a bunch of hobos and finally ending up living on a deserted ranch in Tombstone, Arizona. A hundred years earlier Tombstone was the center of the Wild West and Joe said that when he was there, he could still feel the spirit of it. The first month that he was on the ranch, he shot a coyote whose howling had been keeping him awake, only to sadly discover that she had left a legacy of nine young unweaned pups that would have perished if Joe hadn't bottle-fed each and every one of them. Good old stubborn Joe, he thought he'd stay there for the rest of his life but people started hearing about the pups and would drive out to the ranch to ask for one. Joe was too kindhearted to turn anyone down but he told me with his big grin and a glint in his eye, " I always gived away the meanest one until there was only one a' them pups left. She was the sweetest, gentle little thing that you could imagine, so I decided to keep the little darlin'. But then she ran away. That's how it is with them wild creatures. After that there wasn't nothin' there for me to stay for, so I figured I might as well come back to college an' get some more learnin'."

He told me a lot of other stories about his adventures on the road and at the Tombstone ranch but I won't tell them to you just now. Joe always spoke with dubious syntax. I'm pretty sure he knew better and that he just thought taking grammatical liberties was a more direct, down-home way of speaking, and it worked well with his slow, rather low voice with its bighearted raspy tone. He liked to use phrases like "them ol' guys," which term he would apply to almost anyone, young and old alike, and with a hand to his ear, "How's that?" mimicking the creaky voice of a crotchety, slightly confused, old man with a hearing deficiency, when he didn't clearly hear what you said -- or else sometimes to let you know that he thinks what you just said is complete bullshit -- and I'll have to say his marvelous, rich use of inappropriate idioms and old saws was unparalleled in its accuracy. I'll give you an example.

Sunday mornings in the lobby of Wanberg Hall were a time and place of sloppy apparel, sprawled-out loafing and raucous swearing but with an overall, mellow, slow motion nonchalance. Most of us who lived there were passably decent people but one fellow living on the third floor was an absolute stinker. He screwed over everyone and every thing that came his way and then of course, went to church every Sunday always all gussied up wearing the fanciest clothes you could imagine. One Sunday when Joe had happened to drop in for a little morning poker with a few of us scroungy loungers, the stinker, on his way to his weekly heavenly conference, walks by the card table, wearing a big, yellow-silk bow-tie and all dressed up to beat the band. The sartorial comparison was humbling to the rest of us until Joe, slowly reaching for a new card, remarks, more to himself than to anyone else, "Hah! Ya can't sugar-coat a rotten peanut!" Throughout the lounge, ripples of gentle laughter ring out to mingle with chuckles and guffaws. After that, no one seemed to mind the stinker's ridiculous pretensions.

Sweet and sour was a taste Joe always had a hankering for.When he returned from Tombstone, he had somehow acquired a trailer to live in rather than staying at Wanberg hall, the dormitory we lived in before he left. Joe had a somewhat perverse sense of humor and although he despised formal religion, he loved to listen to "The Rosary Hour." All you ever heard was a dumb bunch of "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys" with an occasional "Apostles Creed" thrown in now and then, and it droned on for most of the hour, but Joe seemed to dote on it and would always turn the volume up a bit when it came on. "Isn't it wonderful? Ah the ecstasy! Keep quiet and just listen," he would whisper, in such a deadpan manner that, in spite of what you knew about Joe, you could never quite tell whether or not he was spoofing you. Years later, he told me that when his girlfriend, Stevie, would visit him in his trailer, she always liked making love to the meter, pace, and duration of "The Rosary Hour" when it came on the radio. It was only then that I understood why he liked it so much.

Upon his return, our friendship reasserted itself right away and we put ourselves through college for a whole year by stealing avocados from local groves and selling them to roadside stands. We'd get drunk on hard cider, which isn't an easy thing to do, and then shinny up the trees at night using only one hand, the other hand holding a gunnysack. It was a dangerous job but we both thrived on it. One particularly dark night Joe fell out of the top of the highest tree that he had ever climbed. I was two trees away when I heard the "Ooooooh" sound and the dull "splat" that followed. I ran over to the pathetic, crumpled mass still covered by his bulky, dark green coat, yelling "Joe! Joe!" not even sure that he was still alive. The gunnysack filled with avocados was under the coat but Joe was nowhere to be seen. Laughter ripples out from the treetop. It's Joe's little joke. He reminds me of it almost every time I see him.

"Totemic" is a word that the great psychoanalyst, Carl Jung liked to use. Rumor has it that it's of Algonquin origin. We all know what a totem pole looks like, perhaps more than what it means. In the simplest of terms, a totem is a revered symbol. Anything can be totemic, including avocados. I rarely see one without thinking about all the mischief that Joe and I got into. Like the time that Joe and I decided to go into the lamp base business; I had nearly flunked out of my college sophomore year as a result of spending an inordinate amount of time producing a Tolouse-Lautrec-like dance extravaganza that we named "Le Bal des Apaches." Everyone remembered it for years. Carol, one of the apache dancers, was in her last college year and, two years later, when I happened to bump into her, she told me that she had opened an artifact shop called "Carol's Past and Present" in a very fancy area called San Marino. She always liked my paintings, perhaps she could sell some for me, would I like to exhibit some of them in her shop?... Of course!

My brother had recently returned from a two-year army stint where his job had been intercepting coded messages sent by friendly powers in Eritrea. He had been given a long leave that allowed him to travel to and take pictures of many wonderful, exotic places. Some of his photos were so stunning that I used the images for a series of impressionistic paintings. He particularly liked the paintings with lots of impasto. So did Carol. "My clients love the ones with all that texture, could you paint some more like that?" Joe grunted when I repeated Carol's request, left, and returned that evening with some gunnysacks, a gallon of hard cider and a gallon of shellac. By that time it was dark so I was prepared for anything. "Let's go," says he, where to I know not, but I could see that he had something definite in mind. We drive for quite a while and finally pull up to a high, wire mesh fence that had another three feet of barbed wire on top of it that angled out at you to make unwanted interloping more difficult. There must have been some valuable stuff on the other side for someone to construct such a formidable fence but all I could see was a pile of sand. Joe opens the trunk of his car, pulls out two short handled shovels, tosses them over the fence and then throws the gunnysacks over the barbed wire. I know better than to ask questions. "Come on," he says, and over the fence we go. He pulls two of the sacks off the barbed wire and hands me one. "Fill `er up!" he says, and he fills the other one. We tie the tops securely with some copper wire that he takes out of his pocket and heave the sacks over the fence. The second one bursts open so we have to do another, all the while looking over our shoulders to make sure no one's going to arrest us. "Joe! Why are we stealing sand?" He grins that freckled grin. "It's not sand, it's silicon!" is his whispered reply; "I used to work here during the summer a few years ago." "But Joe, what's the difference, aren't they the same?" He doesn't answer. Joe's like that.

When we get back to my room, Joe hauls up the two bags of sand, one over each shoulder and I carry up both the gallons. Joe immediately lays some newspapers down on the floor and drops a two-foot by four-foot piece of eighth-inch, tempered masonite on top of the newspapers, pours the shellac all over the masonite, pours silicon over the shellac, then more shellac, then more sand, then proudly states, "She wants more texture? We'll give her more texture! Pass the cider, I'm thirsty!"

The next step is to figure out what the hell to paint that will look good on top of all the newly arisen mountainous territory he created. I thumb through a travel magazine and spot a black and white photo of nine Chinese coolies silhouetted against the sky, carrying water buckets dangling from poles stretched across their shoulders. It's a perfect theme for the painting. By this time we're as drunk as a skunk but I manage to give it a good start with very beautiful colors, thinking, of course, in my drunken state that it's a completely finished masterpiece. If I remember correctly, Joe even works on it a little himself. In the morning, it's not that great so I keep improving it during the rest of the day.

"Well, Carol, how do you like this one?" Carol was dressed in scruffy clothes, sitting on a giant-sized can of paint remover in the little yard behind her shop, removing old, flaking, white and gray paint from a strange looking wooden contraption that looked like a large basin with four stubby, curlicue legs and four differently diametered circles cut out of its flat top.

"Your painting's great. What a fabulous texture. I know my clients will love it! By the way, do you know what this is?" Alice giggles, but doesn't say a word. Joe puts his hand to his chin. Alice Dixon, a little kinky-haired blond thing with a voice that only angels sing with, has come along with Joe and me for the ride. Carol continues, "You'll never guess, so I'd better tell you. It's an antique Chinese crapper, designed to fit the whole family. Found it in a garage sale. I'm stripping it and then I'll paint it with black lacquer, put some nice plants in it, and sell it to one of my fancy customers as an antique Chinese planter. They'll never know the difference!" A light goes on over Joe's head but he reaches up and turns it off. I'd never seen him do that before. Joe was the most outspoken person I'd ever known. It never seemed to matter to him if someone was shocked, compromised, or upset by what he said; "Hey, what the hell, I always tell the truth, so what's the big deal?" was Joe's mock-innocent, confused response to the many outraged protestations rebounding from his loose-cannon comments. But that "truth" has gotten the both of us into a lot of difficult situations that I'd rather not think about at the moment. Contretemps, one of those very pointed and accurate French words that directly worked itself into the English language, literally means an inopportune or embarrassing occurance or situation. Our tiny French friend Yvette's well-deserved nickname for Joe was Monsieur Contretemps.

His bright idea finally surfaced late one night after Carol called me two weeks later to tell me that a lovely young couple, one of her best clients, had instantly purchased "Mister Texture" and that she assured them that I had indeed traveled to China wherein I had seen the scene that they had purchased. She also mentioned that they were dying to meet me and would I mind going along with her fiction and spend an evening with them at their new house? I hesitantly agreed, even though I didn't have the foggiest notion of what I could say about traveling through China. Since the texture thing was totally Joe's genius, I felt it only fair to invite him along, along with Alice who had by then become my girlfriend. On the way there I got a little worried that Joe might spill the beans about the fact that I had never been outside of California, or proudly rhapsodize on where the silicon had come from, so, shortly before arriving, I devised a desperate, last-ditch plan. As we were greeted at the door, I introduced myself, then Alice, then quickly blurted out, "And this is my good friend, Joe Gudmundsson, but he's Icelandic and doesn't speak English." So, thank God, Joe was forced to remain silent all through the evening, even when he noticed the spiffed up Chinese crapper with it's lovely, different sized plants set into it, flaunting itself right in the middle of their elegant living room.

On the way home, we stopped at a quaint little liquor store with a stone face that had ivy all around it, and purchased a ceramic bottle of a wine we had never before and never again tasted. I knew Joe loved wine and I thought his stalwart silence deserved something special. The label read Cream of Black Muscat but Joe always referred to it as Cream of Black Muskrat. It was a sweet wine and Alice didn't seem to like it much but she enjoyed Joe's twist. After one swig, Joe insisted that I stop the car at the nearest phone booth to call Carol to tell her of his new brilliant idea. She lived with her parents since her husband was away in the army, and although it was quite late by that time, they didn't seem to mind that much and cheerfully passed the phone along to Carol who by that time had been sound asleep. "Joe, that's a wonderful idea," she sleepily said, "but let's talk about it in the morning." But Joe insisted on saying, right then and there that if such elegant people would put an old toilet right in the middle of their nicest room, then why not sell them lamps with bases made of sewer pipes? "Yes, of course" Carol responded, "what a great idea and you could paint some of the pipes to match their wallpaper." We gave Carol an exclusive dealership and called the line "Islan Camoran Lamps" which, in Icelandic, meant Iceland Toilet. The fact that Joe had worked at a sewer pipe factory afforded us a very low cost basis and, for a while, we were quite successful until a lady who spoke Icelandic happened to walk into Carol's Past and Present at which point Islan Camoran became a thing of the past.

A long time later, the doctors said Joe's heart was too big so they put in a smaller one. After that we talked on the phone and exchanged letters for the next few years but then he stopped answering. I don't know why. Maybe he's dead.

Now you know why I miss avocados.

© 2003 __Muldoon Elder