Esmo’s phone manner was so hugger-mugger that I could be sitting four feet away and could not make out a single word. For all I could tell, he might have been laying fifty on a pony.
September 20, 2001
News & Stories
Reader writers tell funny stories about dead colleague, Steve Esmedina
Friends Forever
Steve Esmedina had the biggest head I had ever seen on a human being. He also had the biggest heart — one that became more corroded over time, leaking pain and despair. The droll demeanor, …
September 20, 2001
I Feel a Jam Coming On
Every time I invited Steve Esmedina to hang out at my place in the Clairemont–Pacific Beach area in the early ’70s when I first met him, he’d stare at me through curiously squinted eyes, smirking. …
September 20, 2001
Get Out and Get Drunk
That was Steve Esmedina almost six years ago. I suppose you could make a case for almost any random quote from almost anyone being prophetic after the fact of his or her death, but I …
September 20, 2001
Stumble, Stumble, Thump, Crash
“I remember exactly when I met Steve. It was at the annual Reader Christmas party in 1976, at the old location of the Athens Market restaurant. That was when they announced that I was the …
September 20, 2001
Better on the Music Page
Two earlier endings.… The drawback to asking Steve Esmedina to write a movie review in my stead, ostensibly to give me a break, was that it would then fall to me to edit it. A …
September 20, 2001
The Shadow Knows
In late January 1954, Dick Tracy found an infant abandoned in a tree. For more than a week the comic-strip detective searched for the mother. Suddenly, “as if dropped out of nowhere,” a Mrs. Catchem …
September 20, 2001
Student Steve
During the early ’70s, the war in Vietnam created upheaval at universities across the country. ucsd, where I taught, was no exception. Dissenters organized rallies in Revelle Plaza, committees of students met with deans to …
September 20, 2001
Cut to the Heart
Perhaps the best tribute I can pay to Steve Esmedina, my departed compadre and fellow music critic, is that his legacy truly lives on. Today, 25 years after first having read his work in the …
September 20, 2001
Slow Death
With this Melville-like utterance a 20-year friendship was formed between Stephen No Middle Name Esmedina and me; it was a friendship that would endure until his death on June 24, in this Year of Our …
September 20, 2001
Drunk on 163
Blubbo, oh Blubbo, where do I begin? You’re dead, gone, laid out rotting in a casket somewhere in the ground; and if that’s just your body, your corpse, your shell, God, I hope so, because, …
September 20, 2001
Trails at Sunset Cliffs Park
Visit Sunset Cliffs Park on Point Loma for tidepooling and brilliant sunsets.
September 20, 2001
Blubbo vs the Kaypro
I’d see Steve most often when the Reader was in its original home, a splintery firetrap at the corner of State and Market Streets. After the Reader moved out, the Marine Corps used the raggedy …
September 20, 2001
Blubbo Adrift
In the Reader’s scuffling days, Steve Esmedina was the staff’s Doc Holliday — erudite, enigmatic, and bedeviled by self-consumptive tendencies that seemed rooted in debilitating, unspoken discomfiture. For as long as I knew him, he …
September 20, 2001
A Critic Looks at a Critic
It must have been hundreds of years ago, that time of simplicity and innocence. It was before the electronic revolution had shackled us all in front of our screens. In those days, the Reader’s writers …
September 20, 2001
Blubbo's Secret Tongue
In front of my open garage, Monique Esmedina and I sit on the cold pavement. The fountains in her eyes seem to have shut down again, and moments of bitter silence are repeatedly punctured by …
September 20, 2001