Has there ever been a writer so committed to the page and what went on it as Les Plesko? He believed in Art, in all its honesty and beauty. The only thing he loathed was that which affronted the Real—anything false, slick, self-serving. He was in rebellion from all that. In a time which applauds those values, he was purposefully anti-trend. You saw it in his unregenerate smoking, the mismatched socks, the wild head of straggly hair, his carlessness in vast, far-flung Los Angeles. From time to time, his students said, people dropped money into his coffee cup outside a favorite Venice Beach coffee house, thinking him homeless. It was all part of his High Beat Aesthetic, which was both a conscious embrace of his romantic ideal and an increasingly involuntary corner he’d lived himself into.
I met him in the early 1990s, in the days of the legendary Kate Braverman’s writing workshop held every other Saturday in her apartment on Palm Drive. There I saw him finish his first novel, The Last Bongo Sunset, and start the book that would become No Stopping Train. Even in those early days, his views on fiction became our mantras. “Don’t have ideas,” he’d say, which always made me laugh. What could that possibly mean? How could you write and not have ideas? It was only as I struggled with my own writing that the meaning—and the wisdom—became clear. It meant: don’t force the work into a shape. It meant: don’t lead with your head. Don’t know so much. Leave room to discover something.
Writing for Les was an activity of soul, of memory, of sound and dreaming, not an intellectual exercise, not a game. He shared so much with those around him—time, friendship, passion, a subtle intelligence, a wacky humor, but most of all, the flame of his purposefulness that this was the noble endeavor. His presence was a reminder to treasure the deep and the true.
But now he’s gone. Dead, by suicide, on a September morning in Venice Beach, at the age of fifty-nine. He had become a cult figure in Los Angeles literary circles, a writer’s writer, as Mayakovsky called Khlebnikov, “Not a poet for the consumer. A poet for the producer.” A brilliant teacher, he taught over 1,000 creative writing students across a twenty-year career at UCLA extension. Yet at
