{"id":3978,"date":"2009-01-06T17:14:50","date_gmt":"2009-01-06T17:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=3978"},"modified":"2022-08-22T12:27:05","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T11:27:05","slug":"american-rimbaud-an-interview-with-steve-richmond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/american-rimbaud-an-interview-with-steve-richmond\/","title":{"rendered":"American Rimbaud: An interview with Steve Richmond"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"steverichmondlori\"<\/p>\n

[Photo: Lawrence Robbin]<\/div>\n

“I wouldn’t want to be like anybody else, you know. If you can’t be original, do something else.”<\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Steve Richmond, Meat Poet, with more than twenty books to his credit, was Charles Bukowski’s best friend at the time of their greatest production. Letters back and forth between the two number almost two hundred. After forty years of heavy drug use, Steve has reemerged to claim his place as the writer of thousands of Gagaku poems, a form he invented, and America’s most important lyric poet since Emily Dickinson. I sat down with Steve recently along with an L.A. English teacher who was gracious enough to let us share his table and umbrella in the hot sun of Marina Del Rey. This is the first of three long interviews about Steve Richmond’s life and poetics.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Ben Pleasants:<\/b> You used to have a place up in June Lake or something? Didn’t your father have a place up in June Lake?<\/p>\n

Steve Richmond:<\/b> No, they used to take me up to\u2026Convict Lake\u2026 it’s in the Eastern Sierras, \u2026 close to Mammoth, you know.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> The Sierras are so beautiful. How would you compare mountain climbing to the adventures you had in the drug trade?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Very similar\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> \u2026 you could fall to your death\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> \u2026[laughing<\/i>] Aw well you know, we were all, in the \u201860s, you know we all, everybody, most people\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Yeah but there’s a difference, you were honest about it. You were one of the only people\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Why do something\u2026if you can’t be honest about something, it’s worthless. It don’t mean if you have millions\u2026 what’s the use?<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> You did have millions for a while\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> The whole criteria I found out, a couple of years ago, not to get a headache. If you are getting headaches, you know, and maybe, maybe is a one equation is the more money you have, the more headaches you get.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> You started your adult life very young, you told me about this woman who was like a dementive [sic<\/i>] who gave blowjobs to all the guys in the neighborhood, or something?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, there were a lot of those [laughing<\/i>].<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Do you remember that?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Most women are like that. But, you know, they keep it a secret.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> When did you start with drugs?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I started drinking in high school. Alcohol. Alcohol was a \u2026 the first night, the first night I had\u2026 remember those little cans of Country Club?<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Yeah.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Malt liquor? First night I\u2026 a guy took me to a \u2026 there were two girls living up in the hills in their rich parents’ house, \u2026 it was my first time. And the first thing that I did was I walked down to the door, she was standing in the doorway, talking on the telephone\u2026 and I put my hand right on her crotch, and I never did anything like that in my life. That was the inhibitions removed by the three cans of Country Club.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> They kind of go together actually. The ecstasy of drugs and alcohol and\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> \u2026maybe that’s why the alcohol monopoly keeps the\u2026 without alcohol, I guess there is no economy.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> [laughing<\/i>] When you first got into drugs, were you in college? Or\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah. Everybody got in before me, that I knew, you know.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Was it your fraternity?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> No, no that was just strictly\u2026I didn’t get in \u2018til I was about 23. Smoked my first joint.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> What was your fraternity? What frat were you in?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Phi Lambda Phi. Rafer Johnson [Olympic decathlon champion] was in it.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> No kidding. Do you remember any of those guys?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, I remember, you know, I never see any of them for 40 years now. I got in, and I quit, and then I got tossed back in. They had great parties. And it was a, Jesus\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Steve and I met at UCLA, and it was, you did your whole undergraduate at UCLA, right?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> And I went to law school at UCLA. Got a degree and I took my first hit of grass in my first year in law school so. That probably [laughing<\/i>] changed my direction.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> You read the law sort of sideways, directionally.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, law school it can be kind of, you know, it’s like teaching English, it can be kind of dry [laughing<\/i>]. Plus I didn’t have a good legal…I mean I could tell, these guys had, you know, some aptitude.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Did you get into it because your parents wanted you to do it?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, my dad is a lawyer; I had a position of, you know\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> And here’s a guy who didn’t hate his father, he actually loved his father.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, my father’s great. Taught me how to trout-fish, he wrote poetry, too, all about God. My dad, he’s a good man.<\/p>\n

My mother was great. They were married for\u2026 you know\u2026I had great parents. I mean, they were great Conservative-Republicans\u2026But they were landlords, I could tell when I was about 2 or 3 years old, money didn’t bring happiness, not that poverty did, but I’d hear him haggling with my grandmother about what she is going to do with the property…<\/p>\n

[talking with the \u201cother” diner (OD), complimenting one another<\/i>]<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> [talking about Ben<\/i>] Met him at UCLA\u2026I just started writing poetry and they were having a, he was running a poetry meeting in the student union, and uh, I showed up, you know, I had just started writing and it was an opportunity to read in the lounge, and uh, Jim Morrison<\/b> was there, he just got up with his poetry, before he was even making music.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> True, he was there. Uh, the thing about Steve though, he had done a book, and I got a lot of books and they were just shit, I mean really, really bad, but I looked at this book and I thought, \u2018My god, I’ve never seen anything like this.’ I mean his poetry was so original, this was the first of the poetry he ever did. It was like, putting it out there, you know, to test to see what people thought. He sent a copy to Bukowski<\/a>, who already was one of the most important poets in the country, and he wrote back right away, that this is really amazing stuff. This is 1964\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> That was ’64. Yeah, I got some poems accepted the first time I sent out\u2014I sent them three places: Kenyon Review<\/a><\/i>, you’ve heard of them\u2026 Wormwood<\/b><\/i>, you haven’t heard of Wormwood<\/i> probably\u2026and Partisan<\/i><\/a>. Two of them sent \u2018em back and one of them accepted eight poems\u2026 just\u2026yeah, you know, here I am, in my first year in law school and for the first time in my life, you know [laughing<\/i>], somebody, you know, somebody had related to my soul\u2026 I said, \u2018I got to do this for the rest of my life.’ This made me feel so good, I wanted to do it for the rest of my life, and I did.<\/p>\n

OD<\/b>: Strictly poetry, huh?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, I threw out prose here and there. I tried prose but, you know.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Steve is a lyric poet, that’s what he is. Just like the great Chinese poets who wrote short lyrical poems. And one of the things that influenced him, I’ll let him talk about it, was this incredible Japanese court music, called Gagaku<\/b>, and in my opinion anyway, his greatest poems are the Gagaku he writes<\/a>, I would say that in a sense, when he listens to this music, he’s\u2026 sort of intoxicated by what he sees in his mind. But I’ve never read anything like it. There is nothing in the English language like his poetry. It’s a lot like Bukowski and nothing like it.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I wouldn’t want to be like anybody else, you know. If you can’t be original, do something else. This girl I was seeing, excellent artist, took me to the UCLA music building, down below the studios, and there were these Japanese students\/musicians, they were rehearsing this Gagaku<\/b>, G-a-g-a-k-u, Shinto music, it’s imperial court music, so when Japan changes its emperor, over TV\u2026 that’s what they play, the Gagaku<\/b> music. And it’s available at Japanese record stores\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> And they were playing it at UCLA, for Christ’s sake.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, they play it all over now, if you go online, you see\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> No, I mean you actually saw them do it.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I saw them play, I heard \u2018em play, you know, I mean, and just her [Anna Purcell] and I, and these two chairs. She took me down there and they’re rehearsing, you know, they’re playing.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Ethnomusicology, the department of\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> The Department of Ethnomusicology, in the music building. And I started, you know, when you are really moved, you know, tears will come to your eyes. That’s happened to me twice in my life. For art, Goya<\/b>‘s glorious black paintings that I saw in Spain. Something so full of, you know, something there, that I found a connection with\u2026.if there is an essence, beyond words. So I got the music and I started writing to it. \u2026 I titled everything \u201cGagaku.” And I exorcised, I exorcised my demons, you know, I’d just pretty much come down and\u2026<\/p>\n


\n\"hitlerpaintedroses\"<\/p>\n

“Jim Morrison’d still be alive if he had stuck to poetry.”<\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BP:<\/b> And he also, attached to that his incredible interest in illegal substances, which really\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> You seem to go back to that topic.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> No, because\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, because I became a heroin addict for 40 years.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> But an explorer. That’s the difference. Heroin addicts are a dime a dozen, they’re all over the place. None of them\u2026wrote Gagaku<\/b>.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> But I got it right\u2026First, I was smoking grass, took a lot of LSD, but\u2026you know, writing is the core. And, or course, if you are high, plus it was a social device, I remember, this girl picked me up, you know, at Beverly Glen park, two girls took us up, to Topanga Sunraid Acres, you know, but as soon as she found out I hadn’t taken LSD, she just\u2026ice [laughing<\/i>] as a matter-of-fact, I had to hitchhike back\u2026so I thought, \u2018I’ve got to take that drug.’ For five bucks I got a double dose. I didn’t know it was a double dose, he [the dealer] said take the whole thing. Did you ever take LSD?<\/p>\n

OD:<\/b> No, too risky for my day.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, I mean I haven’t taken it for 30 to 40 years, too strong.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Actually, Morrison was also a great fan of Steve’s poetry. Morrison became a minor poet, but he was a great admirer of Steve, I mean he showed Steve a number of his works.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Oh, I don’t think he was a great fan of my poems.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Yes he was. Why did he come back over and over again to see you?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> It was, you know, because it was, he was a poet. He’d still be alive if he had stuck to poetry.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> He was very interested in your work. Are you kidding? He knew you were blowing down walls that nobody had ever tried to get into.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, if you can’t be original in your art, why do your art? Who wants to do something, somebody has done before?<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> That’s true. If you are a painter, you might as well be painting walls then, you know, if you are not going to do anything original. If you are a poet, it’s the same thing.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> You’re a poet. I mean that’s how we\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I’m just a scribbler; I wouldn’t use the word \u2018poet.’ I wrote for the L.A. Times<\/i> and, you know, all kinds of magazines. But I did get a chance to get out there, when nobody else was talking about this stuff and talk about it. I did and I’m very fortunate that I\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> You’re in up to your neck [laughing<\/i>].<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> But when you remember back to those early days, Steve lived in Santa Monica almost all of his life, had this little house on Hollister, you know where that is.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> My grandmother had all the properties in Santa Monica.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Steve actually was the rent collector. He’d have to go around, and Bukowski loved this, he loved to rag him about that\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, I had the Jewish guilt, I was raised in Hollywood, and before I knew it I was screaming at poor little ol’ drunks trying to live in their store front, and I was just, you know, hollering at them for their last dollar.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> But he lived in this really small, and beautiful little house, that he kept very very neat, by the way.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> It’s been torn down and turned into a piece of crap.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> While he was there, he did his work, did his art, his poetry, and he also did a number of drawings, paintings, and so on and so forth. I thought in a way, it was kinda like one of the great Chinese poets, like Han Shan<\/a> or Li. Po<\/a>. Steve Richmond was somebody who was like one block from the ocean. And Venice became a world for you. I mean he did a lot of very unusual things like \u2018Steve’s Candle Shop.’<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> There was this 5000 square foot vacant building, everything was vacant in the \u201860s\u2014down there, you know, all the windows were broken. And I read that the buildings were $150\/a month. I started, oh I had it twice: the first time I called it \u2018The Earth Rose,’ I wanted it to be a gallery\/bookstore, but people only bought zigzag papers [both laughing<\/i>]. It became a psychedelic store.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Now that<\/i> you know about [both laughing<\/i>]. And wasn’t there a woman who was doing bikinis or something?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, that was the candle shop. I got out of there after a year, and then I got back in though, two years later, for the same price, I had a\u2026I was on LSD one night at my little house, in my garage, I was making candles, I had a barrel of wax. Do you ever see people dip candles? I got this idea, maybe there was about 11 wicks hanging, and I had been dipping them in the wax, and they were about a half an inch thick, I got this idea, why don’t I weave them together. And then dip them, and then weave them together, and make three legs out of the wax, just form the bottom of the candle, and then when I’m through, tie off the wheel up here so that the candle is here and here is the barrel of wax. Put a cover over the barrel, heated wax, and form the three legs, lower the rope, so that the bicycle wheel comes out and the candle stands. I mean it’ll have to dry\u2026 let it dry over night, and snip the wicks off, and you got a freestanding woven together braided totally impractical [candle sculpture].<\/p>\n

[all laughing<\/i>]<\/p>\n

OD:<\/b> You mean these wicks are individually light-able [sic<\/i>]?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, you light them all. But the problem is, the wicks go all the way through the thing. Put out a lot of heat. Plus it just melts all over the place. And the flame is about this big, long, [laughing<\/i>] totally lethal, you know. But the first person to see it, the one I made, was a big bull dyke named BJ, nice woman, \u201cHow much? How much?” And she wanted to buy it. And I say \u2018Nine bucks, how’s that?’ And the cost, I figured it out, was about 11 cents worth of materials, things used to be cheap in those days\u2026And from there\u2026people saw the things and wanted to buy \u2018em.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> They were beautiful, they were multicolored, they were just incredible. Nobody ever saw candles like that before. They were completely unique.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> But I couldn’t write. I ended up having the same store, I had \u2018The Earth Rose’ there, I put the candle shop in there\u2026 there was a movie Mafisto’s Waltz<\/i>, Jaqueline Bissette<\/b>, and this guy, the director would come by and he had seen my candles in the shop and wanted them for his movie. But whatever I was putting in the candles, I couldn’t write any poetry. I mean I was a \u2018poof’ [all laughing<\/i>].<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> What was that great Greek film? Steve had a real going-out-of-business sale, like you never seen in your life.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Wow, Kathy King came by and some guy.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Zorba, the Greek<\/i>.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> \u2026I was totally womanizing\u2026all the women that came in the shop, that was half the reason\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> This was Venice, and the woman he was sharing the space with sold bikinis, so he had all these women coming in to get bikinis. So it was like the biggest pick-up place in the world. Right?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, no, well for me it was\u2026Fat candles, totally phallic, you know.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Right, it was male and female\u2014bikinis and candles.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Bukowski visited the place. He’d stay and watch the girls come in and look at the candles and say, \u201cGod, it’s like they are hypnotized.” But I got this girl\u2026Aphrodite figure, who happened to work in the Ethnomusicology department at UCLA.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Kathy King.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Kathy King, yeah. And she was, you know, I don’t know, the first time I saw her, I was playing chess in back, and all of a sudden this woman here, about 21, she wanted to buy a painting I had, a charcoal drawing I had of Adam’s torso from Michelangelo’s ‘Sistine Chapel’\u2026and I said that’s not for sale, and as she walked out the front door, about 50 feet away, the sun was shining right through the front door, the silhouette, the silhouette of her figure, was just\u2026<\/p>\n

OD:<\/b> All of a sudden, your painting was up for sale, eh?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> No, I was thrown aside, I was \u2018God Damn’ you know, Aphrodite, who steals the wits and the wisdom of men, that’s what it was. I told the guy I was playing chess with, and he said, \u201cShe was studying you,” while I was studying my next move, he was watching her, she was studying me. And I said to him, I remember this, \u2018She’ll be back.’ That’s how confident I was in my young days [laughing<\/i>] and I had teeth. And she came back a week later, and I chased her on the beach, anyway, to make a long story short, you ever made love to a woman, you know, you’re moving you know, and then she puts her hands on your hips, and kind of beckons you to be still, and then she starts moving below you, and it’s just, and she starts singing like Circe, and it’s just, it’s otherworldly. It’s better than ‘Margot Fontaine’, the ballet. I mean it’s just, totally you know, metaphysical.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I’ve had similar experiences, and you never forget them. It’s the ultimate communication.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> It’s too strong for us. And of course, I tried to get back, and made a fool of myself, fell on her doorstep once, drunk, and she walked over me with some guy, and you know, I\u2026 so anyway, and she got out of the ocean with some other guy and I’m sitting in front of my candle shop and you know, I put a little sign out in front that says \u2018Free Candles’ and the whole neighborhood, just came in and grabbed these things, took \u2018em away.<\/p>\n


\n\"poetrybukstevelp\"<\/p>\n

“Almost everyone I know is dead\u2014overdosed, by the dozen.”<\/span><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BP:<\/b> You know the Zorba, the Greek<\/i> scene where they all come in and clean out the house? But there was a great article in the L.A. Times<\/i> in the magazine, I think it was West Magazine<\/i>, that did a whole thing on \u2018Steve’s Candle Shop’\u2014the beauty and the color of the candles\u2014so that’s there forever.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I never saw it.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Every opportunity that has been offered, and you didn’t show up.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I wanted to be, you know, if I was going to make any fame, I wanted it to be as a poet. Not as a candle-maker\u2026I was hiding out, I locked the front door, and I didn’t show up [laughing<\/i>].<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> But with Steve there is this collision\u2014of color, especially in his art, and in his paintings, and his poetry, and drugs. I’m coming back to the drug part because\u2026 it’s a very dangerous thing to play around with, it’s like teaching a 5-year-old to shoot a .45.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, almost everyone I know is dead\u2014overdosed, by the dozen.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> And yet, it really shattered barriers, like you’ve never seen before, I mean, you think of Rimbaud<\/b>, the great French poet, with alcohol, with\u2026they broke through barriers with the French language, Steve really did the same thing\u2026 So let’s go back to your second book, no let’s just go back to the Gagaku<\/b>: How many would you say you have written over the past 40 years?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Eight- or nine-thousand. You know, just put the music on\u2026about two weeks ago, I wrote no poems for three months, and then six in the last 14 minutes. They’re very short now.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I’ve always thought that the Gagaku<\/b> form is sort of sketching, in other words they are very short things, like a person who does a beautiful line sketch, like Matisse<\/b> or somebody like that, you look at it and think \u2018Wow, I couldn’t do that.’ And that’s my impression, of what your Gagaku<\/b>‘s mean, \u2018cause they are short. They seem to come in a massive wave, sort of almost like having a stroke, they just come flying out with all this stuff, and you get it all down, almost the way\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> That’s the way it used to be. Now it’s survival. I use it as a sort of last resort. When things really get\u2026 months will go by\u2026I got the music right next to me, it’s like math, it works. It’s just, you know, time to write\u2026usually lasts about 25 minutes. I don’t even submit \u2018em anymore, unless somebody asks.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> People do ask.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah\u2026this guy from Orange Tangerine<\/i>, in England, read the piece in Beat Scene<\/a><\/i>\u2026anyhoo, he sent me a great letter, said he’s doing this anthology \u2026sent me certificates for postage, I sent him seven or eight.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Where is he from?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> London.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Ok, that’s great. You know what, fuck the U.S. they never get it.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> They’ll come along, you know, after England.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> They’re always the last, you know.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> U.S. is just, you know, into the election.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Well, take a look at the publishing industry of New York City, it’s basically run by about five guys.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> \u2026Bukowski picked up on Ask the Dust<\/i>. You know, he picked up the soul and rhythm of the man’s voice and added\u2026and from there on it’s a\u2026you know, I was with you and Bukowski at his place once, I took you over to visit him. I remember Bukowski saying, \u201cAh, don’t mention the title, don’t mention that book.” I was half asleep, and you said\u2026I know he didn’t want me to read Ask the Dust<\/i> at that moment, because he knew I’d pick up on the fact that Bukowski was born in the Year of the Monkey, and \u201cMonkey hear, Monkey say,” he picked up on [John] Fante<\/a> and he took that, you know, it’s like me listening to Gagaku<\/b> music for the first time, Bukowski reading Ask the Dust<\/i> for the first time\u2026it gave him a voice. I mean a new<\/i> voice. Since Fante became a screenwriter, Bukowski had this great basic voice\u2026to work with.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> He reinvented poetry because he used the forms of prose that Fante gave him and he wrote them as poetry and that really changed the whole world.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> That’s what I mean. Which is great, which is great, you know.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Guys that do cement work have a Bukowski book in their backpack.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> That guy’s got like 20 million books in print now.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Everywhere, that’s right, and that’s because he stripped it down to clean language (not clean in the moral sense, but just as he always said \u201cthe line,” he got that line down there, this \u201cthe hard line” and he got it partly from D.H. Lawrence<\/b>, who he really admired a great deal, but was a little more fancy\u2026)<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> ‘The Prussian Officer,’ yeah. He loved the brutality of that story. He wrote that poem about never being glad he never had to meet D.H. Lawrence. He was a son-of-a-bitch, Bukowski.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> There was a great thing that Magid, my friend, did. He runs The Persian Book Review<\/i><\/a>, and he translated this poem, it’s called, ‘The Whore who Stole all my Poetry.” It’s the story about a woman who, you know, sleeps with Bukowski and then steals a stack of his poems [laughing<\/i>].<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Who Magid or Bukowski?<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> No, Magid<\/b> [Roshangar<\/b>] translated it.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> It’s a Bukowski poem?<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Yeah. On the left side of the centerfold of this review is the English, and on the right side is the Farsi, in that beautiful script. So he’s the one who’s kind of interested in doing a Richmond issue.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> That’d be great.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Well, let’s talk about one more thing, that I think is more interesting to me, um, which I hinted about and it’s really painful I think to talk about it but to go through the whole process\u2014when you inherited all that money, at the time you had your little house, and then eventually they tore it down or whatever, and then your parents died, and you inherited this money and had this big house. We both have the same publisher Al Berlinski<\/a>, so he showed me the photographs\u2014you had a pool in the back, you had a limo\u2026Did you have a limo?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I had<\/i> a limo, I woke up one morning, I had a million and a half in the bank, I woke up one morning (I was with Merisha), I said, \u2018Yeah, I want a limo,’ I went out and four hours later I had bought this beautiful, eight-year-old Cadillac. Got it in Beverly Hills, they had a bunch of old limos, just gorgeous thing\u2026 got it for $30- some odd, $32,000. After a year or two the frame dragged and I sold it for $3000 [laughing<\/i>]. It was fun. Beautiful.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> The house was where?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I showed you the house.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Well, tell me.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Euclid and\u2026 Hill\u2026it was an 18-room house, cost me $700 a month to keep the pool at 90 [degrees], my legs, each one of my legs weighed as much as I do now, \u2018cause I was full of poison, from all the toxic, you know, stuff\u2014crack and heroin I was doing, \u2018cause that’s all I did. I played a keyboard though, trying to make music.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> You did some Eric Satie<\/a>.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> There was a record of Satie’s solo piano, that is one of the nicest pieces of music I have ever heard in my life, I used to write to that. Beautiful, you know, I mean a, great minor key, very, I don’t know if you ever heard that, I had to go to this little record store\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I haven’t heard that, but I was much more interested in the music you were playing yourself.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Like any idiot, I made a disc and had a thousand copies made, and I haven’t had a\u2026 lost them all, I don’t know where they are. Berlinski has a copy.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I’m sure he has more than one. Al always files things away.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> But that house was, you know, if I had to do it all over again, that’s the one thing I wouldn’t have done. But I wanted to see what it was like too, you know.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> And what part did Merisha play in all of this?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> She had the uh, upstairs was the master bedroom\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Did you love her?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, but one day after 20 years together she told me, she says, \u201cI’m just with you for the money.”<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Geez, after all that.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> She’s an Aries, and Aries women\u2026will finally put their foot in their mouth. And as soon as she said that\u2026I asked myself, \u2018What am I doing with this fucking woman?’ [laughing<\/i>] \u2018Cause she was a hooker when I met her, you know, but a beautiful\u2026and she was a great painter\u2026<\/p>\n


\n\"santamonicarimbaud\"<\/p>\n

“The only thing Bukowski ever asked me for was that painting, but I was too fucking cheap and stupid to give it to him.”<\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BP:<\/b> Where did you meet her?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> First time I saw her, remember the Lafayette Caf \u00e9 on the Venice boardwalk?<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Vaguely.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> On Westminster and the boardwalk, back in the \u201850s and \u201860s. She was working, I walked in there one night, I had the candle [shop]\u2026went down there it was dark, nightfall, and there was nobody in there except the waitress and the owner, this old Greek guy, when I knew him\u2026and she was the waitress. She was striking, just striking, I mean just the way she moved, animated, you know, she was a\u2026 seductive black widow\u2026 just gorgeous. She was a witch. [laughing<\/i>] She read Lautreamont<\/a>, before I ever heard of him. And she lived at the top of this old three-story apartment house, it was like The Addams Family<\/i> house, \u2026almost to Santa Monica canyon, on Ocean.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I remember that. It was a beautiful house.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Morning Glories all over and it was magic.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> And she was on to a lot of illegal chemicals.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, she was\u2026main-lining\u2026took me a year to make love to her. Even though she’d offered herself to me for ten bucks at the beginning, but I just, you know, I was right next to her on her bed, and she had goose pimples, and I thought \u2018This girl doesn’t want to make love?’ She just wants to get high\u2026 and I wanted it to be more than that\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Because you sacrificed a great deal for her.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> She taught me to oil paint. I always wanted to oil paint, she told me to get a tube of zinc white, and a red, blue, get some primary colors. And she put down a big blob of the zinc white on a paper palate and just a tiny speck of red, cadmium red or something, and the whole pile turned pink, this little tiny piece of red makes the whole thing light up, you know, and that just opened it up to me, right there. I said \u2018God Damn,’\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> That picture you did with the unicorn was just a beautiful\u2026 I think it’s in Lory Robbin<\/a>‘s [Lawrence \u201cLory” Robbin] photograph. I loved that painting. I don’t know where it went, somebody took it obviously. It’s the one with the waterfall.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah\u2026 Bukowski\u2026the only thing he ever asked me for was that painting, but I was too fucking cheap and stupid to give it to him.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Well, it’s out there someplace. At least, there is a photograph of it because Lory got a very nice shot.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Is he still alive?<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Oh Lory’s fine, you know. He’s gonna pass on the photograph to this woman in Montreal. I’m in touch with Lory, you can contact him anytime\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> No, I’d prefer to talk to you, here for lunch once every, whenever you feel like it.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> That’s fine.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I told ya, I think, I was walking down to the little Santa Monica library and they had 15 different Bukowski books, and every time I went in there they had three more books\u2026and I just burst into laughter. My god, you know, all these things coming out, it’s just\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Well, I think what’s incredible: a lot of poets, while they’re alive they are great promoters and they are out there and everybody reads them, and then they kinda drop dead. Because he’s been dead for 15 years, for christ’s sake, and his books are still coming out!<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, I told you his wife said to me, his widow said to me, thanked me for what I was doing, it killed me. I don’t know what she was doing. I think it had to do with the Love Bukowski<\/i> play and opera and all that stuff.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Yeah, they were actually going to do a sitcom on Bukowski at home, or something like that. You can you imagine [laughing<\/i>].<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I think she murdered him [laughing<\/i>]. And I always figured, if I was the judge in her case (he was very difficult to get along with, I’m sure), I would hold her \u2018not guilty,’ \u2018justifiable homicide,’ you know.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> You’re the lawyer [laughing<\/i>]. There was one thing he did, that I think was very bad: he wanted to leave all of his money to his daughter\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, but his daughter married a black kid, and he didn’t like blacks, you know\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> He was from India. That’s right, but in the end he left her nothing. I think what happened partly is that originally it was 50-50, half of it was supposed to go to Marina, and half of it was supposed to go to Linda, and she slipped him a piece of paper and he signed it, and it said all of it went to her. Had it been 50-50, it would have been a real problem, \u2018cause both would have had to agree about anything.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> She met him at a reading; he was a holiday drunk genius, you know. And she was running a health-food restaurant. And she was a nice woman, I met her, you know.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> She was not a nice woman.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, to me she was. Sort of quiet.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> She was a vampire.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Of course she was, they’re all vampires\u2026The problem he had, he should have known, a woman who’d never heard of [Robinson] Jeffers<\/a>, was not a woman to marry. She’s after him for\u2026he didn’t care; he’s a horny old drunk, you know.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I think, actually, Linda King<\/a> was great for him in a lot of ways. I think she really cared about him.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> She tried to kill him. But out in the open, she tried to run him down on the sidewalk.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> When was that?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> You’ve read that, haven’t you? He writes about it all of the time.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I never believed anything he wrote.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Linda King was a crazy artist.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> She was a pretty good, really good sculptor.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, she gave me a sculpture once; it was a torso of ‘Venus,’ excellent thing. I broke it finally after a years of moving around\u2026plaster of Paris.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I never really knew her. I met her once\u2026and then she threw all of Bukowski’s stuff out onto the street. At Carlton Way.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> She threw all his stuff out, she beat up his girl, the girl he was with that night, she took his typewriter and threw it out into the street and stomped on it.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> I picked it up and carried it back in.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> She\u2026 tried to run him down while he was walking on the sidewalk. And then he\u2026called the cops\u2026there was a party she had at her house, about 50 guys\u2026 and about three or four women, and she was just flirting. Poor Linda King, she was just trying to make him so jealous, she was so awkward.<\/p>\n

Oh, I don’t want to be sued for defamation. But that’s the rumor. I would say the chances are about two out of three that Bukowski was murdered for his royalties and that he deserved it.<\/p>\n

[both laughing<\/i>]<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Yeah, he would have been a very difficult person to live with.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> It’s a funny thing, the way he wrote. When he wrote about real people, he would lie, but his lies brought out the truth in a better way, you know?<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Well, you got it right when you wrote that thing,’300 Poems,’ where you said he turned the knife, he liked to do that.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, so did D.H. Lawrence. He got that from D.H. Lawrence.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Let’s go back to you. It’s interesting how Bukowski died; I guess we could interview the nurse.<\/p>\n

[both laughing<\/i>]<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> He’s probably living in Bermuda.<\/p>\n


\n\"gagakufortwo\"<\/p>\n

“When Bukowski wrote about real people, he would lie, but his lies brought out the truth in a better way.”<\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BP:<\/b> Yeah, that’s right, they paid him off. But tell me what happened with your house\u2026what did you buy it for?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> My grandmother left the house and all the property to the five grandchildren, and I was one of the five. I lived in the house on Hollister for 40 years. She let me move in there when I was 19, for $40 a m\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> No, I meant the big house.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Oh, the big house, I lived there three years. And, you know, basically it was a business\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> How much money did you inherit (if you remember)?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> A couple million.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> A couple million bucks, and so you bought the house, where was it?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Paid $803,000. Sold it three years later for $975,000.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Ok, what was it like living there?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> It was, you know, I totally screwed up\u2026the master bedroom was upstairs with a shower as big as my apartment now. But I’d lock myself in there with my Shar-pei puppy [laughing<\/i>].<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> What was his name?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Sweetie, it was a she. I ended up having to take her up to the Topanga Hills and just let her go, because she’d bite anybody that tried to…I loved that dog. It’s the last dog I’ll ever have, I can tell you.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Jeffers wrote the greatest poem I had ever seen about dogs, and I’ll send it to you. I specially printed it on a card, as a memorial for my aunt. So you lived in this house\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> And I had my girl, you know, she lived in the second bedroom, the second big bedroom on the second floor. And there was a hole, a closet between the two bedrooms. There was a wall, you couldn’t walk through it, but\u2026I put a hole through the wall, and I’d pass her outfits, you know [laughing<\/i>]. So we’d pass things back and forth, you know, and then she’d come over and knock on the door, it was kind of a \u2026she was a mistress, you know?<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Did you buy a lot of clothes, the two of you?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Ah, no, I bought a lot of\u2026what did I buy? I bought a lot of furniture, we had paintings all over the place, we had a huge living room, the whole second story was about, god damn.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> And you said the drug dealers moved in.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, a couple.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Do you remember their names, like first names?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> A guy name Nick. Nick was a poet, he’s a poet\/crack dealer. And he’s a good poet\u2026he was born in England, he came here, he lived in one bedroom downstairs. He’d pay us rent, $650 a month for the room\u2014pay it off in crack, you know. I ended up owing him $5000. He was arrested five times. And then Calvin was downstairs about 6-foot-5 [-inches], black guy, 250 [pounds], a killer from the war, he was in Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Special Forces. Very interesting guy\u2026he was like a brother. The closest thing I ever had to a brother was a stone killer.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Wow. But you liked him?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, yeah, but he died, God, he died last year\u2026 I wanted to get the hell out of there \u2018cause another girlfriend of Merisha, another crack-head, she starts screaming, at four in the morning, every morning, you know, just crazy. Crack-heads are crazy, you can’t get any peace. And I was just totally spending\u2026I was dodging\u2026I weighed about 350 or something, and my legs, one doctor said I had elephantiasis, it was just drug poison.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Were you writing much?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I wasn’t writing. I was making that music, and I don’t know how that is, I haven’t heard it for a couple of years. And it’s just instrumental, you know, I’d go get stoned and did crack, you know, it sounds like a New Wave music.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Techno.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I don’t know though, it might be very beautiful. Berlinski liked it. I sent him a copy of the tape and he said, \u201cGod, it’s beautiful.”<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> It must be out there some place.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, I’m sure he’s got it in his closet.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> So you lived there for three years.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, for three years, and I said, \u2018I gotta get out of here.’<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> What happened to all the money?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, I had the money for 12 years, you know, 12-, 13-, 14 years you can live pretty well for a million and a half, two million dollars, if you spend it well, probably $100- to $200 grand a year, $150 grand a year, until it was gone.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> \u2018Cause you had all these expenses\u2014these people who were living off you. Did you support Calvin?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, he drove me around and he was my bodyguard\u2026I’m just reading this novel by Elmore Leonard<\/a> called Freaky Deaky<\/i>.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Yeah, he’s a great writer.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, I’ve read about it. I got into his books about five to six months ago, and I’ve already read about nine to 10 of his books.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> He came along and said I’m the next big thing.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> The word \u2018Bukowski’ is in this novel actually, you know, yeah he’s great. He’s really great. Start off with Maximum Bob<\/i>, which is surprising, it was great. You know how it is when you are old, you come on a novel by a guy who has written 20 books, and you haven’t read any of them. I’d pick his books up through the years, but I couldn’t get into the lingo. Then all of a sudden I just, you know, got into Maximum Bob<\/i> first, and went right through it. The guy’s great. Great writer, plus, you know, he’s fabulously wealthy, I suppose.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Yeah, I’m sure he is. A lot of his stuff has been made into movies.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Yeah, every time I open a book, I say \u2018Wait, I saw this’ [laughing<\/i>].<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> So eventually, you blew all your money, and you went across the country.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Went up to Oregon basically. Northwest. I bought a Contessa, Beaver Contessa, three or four years old, it was like a big RV. Beautiful RV. That’s when gas was still reasonable. And I lived up in Bend, Oregon for six months in an RV place\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Was Calvin with you?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Calvin was, you know, driving the thing, and I’d sit there and shoot six needles a day and then fall asleep and wake up and then shoot another one, and fall asleep.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Did you get busted up there?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> I’ve never been busted for drugs, you know. Had some very close calls.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Never in your life.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> No, I was careful, you know. I don’t know if it can be done anymore \u2018cause they’ve really clamp down on, you know, crack and heroin everything, you know. But if you want to you can get away with it, if you’re very careful [laughing<\/i>] and you’re lucky.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> And if you have a bodyguard. Cops don’t want to mess with bodyguards. Especially one’s who have been killing people.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> So then I came back. Oregon, one thing about Oregon is all the dead deer on the road, it’s like [Jean Luc<\/b>] Godard<\/b>‘s Weekend<\/i> \u2026I just came back and traded the RV to the guy at that motel\u2014Sid Warshaw, you met him.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Yeah I did, nice guy.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> And he gave me three years for the RV, three years to have my own room. Turned out to be four months short, because he got busted, the whole place got busted, and they kicked me out, the cops. So I was there for two and a half years, just plodding around with the crack hookers and I started writing there. Writing Gagaku<\/b> again, so I was writing letters to that woman up north.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> So you were really reduced to one room? One room.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Oh, I loved it! One room, just a garret—no broiler, no stove\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> And this beautiful woman who was blowing you? What was her name?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Uh, Susie.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Describe her–inside, out.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> She moved like a swan. I just looked at her once (of course, I was on crack) and, you know, said to myself (\u2026tongue-in-cheek), \u2018She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.’ She said she liked to be with me because I made her feel pretty.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> So she was a poet too, huh?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> She wrote poems too, yeah, she was half illiterate\u2026but it was interesting\u2026<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> Did you write Gagaku<\/b> about the two of you?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Uh, yeah, I wrote a bunch of poems, called her Aphrodite. Every once in a while, a woman comes along. I figure she’s the new Aphrodite.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> She was in and out of jail for drugs?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Aw man, she’d get together with crack dealers, get mad at them, steal their car, and crash it. While we were at the motel, she crashed four different crack dealers’, I mean, you know, and the cops, she was notorious with the police. She’d ride around on her skates, you know, she knew everybody in Venice, she worked Lincoln as a hooker, she was 32 and I was 67\u2026so I knew I couldn’t keep her.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> But when you finally cleaned yourself up, you had to get away from these people.<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, when the police closed down the motel, my sister put me in a motel room for a night or two\u2026<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> And then I spent six months at Santa Monica’s City Shelter, that’s where I got clean.<\/p>\n

BP:<\/b> It’s not bad, was it?<\/p>\n

SR:<\/b> Well, you know, I got bad bug bites, but I learned, you know, and there was\u2026120 mentally ill\u2026and me!<\/p>\n

[Interview transcribed by Lisa Zucker & \u00a9 Ben Pleasants 2009]<\/p>\n

\"bensteve\"
\n[Photo by Frank Sullivan: l-r<\/i> Ben Pleasants, Charles Bukowski, Steve Richmond]<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER<\/b>
\nBen Pleasants<\/b> is a writer and the author of Visceral Bukowski: Inside the Sniper Landscape of L.A. Writers<\/a><\/i>. You can find more of Ben’s work here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ben:<\/b> That’s my impression, of what your Gagaku’s mean, \u2018cause they are short. They seem to come in a massive wave, sort of almost like having a stroke, they just come flying out with all this stuff, and you get it all down, almost the way\u2026
\nSteve:<\/b> That’s the way it used to be. Now it’s survival. I use it as a sort of last resort. When things really get\u2026 months will go by\u2026I got the music right next to me, it’s like math, it works. It’s just, you know, time to write\u2026usually lasts about 25 minutes. I don’t even submit \u2018em anymore, unless somebody asks.<\/p>\n

Ben Pleasants<\/b> catches up with Meat Poet Steve Richmond<\/b>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":4052,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112041,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions\/112041"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}