NO TIME

Absence to presence,
Sun rises, filled with
Technical minutiae.
Overwhelming aberrations.
I cannot tell you how many times
This supposed love’s been put on trial runs
in sawdust
Airport hangars. Bay thirteen is
A good one some who fly say.
When desperation leaves its mark:
A branding.
And then there is nothing to brandish.
Except nothing, and a lack
Of focus, of poise, of interest.
A lack is not nothing per se.
The will to do nothing. To love no act
Except loving.
And NEVER has 'happy' floated;
Its weight my broadest burden.
And not even change the automatic
Capitalizations of the word processor,
Or the setting.
No time to focus on intentional
Indentations.
Or to separate feelings into
silly sorry stanzas.
No sun on the concrete.
Just setting.

VERY SHORT, INCREASINGLY HAIKUISH POEMS SCRIBBLED INTO A MEAD SPIRAL MEMO BOOK WHILE STANDING NEAR A GARBAGE CAN IN A DARK CORNER OF A NIGHT CLUB, DIRECTLY PRECEEDING A PERFORMANCE BY A PROMINENT AND QUITE TALENTED HIP-HOP EMCEE WHO HAPPENS TO BE A MEMBER OF THE MUCH CELEBRATED WU-TANG CLAN

Each person must create
a liking
of our own image.

The power pulses:
bass and snare drum combine,
all electronic.

A musical hoax
involves crowds of people
and chances for dancing.

People touch themselves
unaware of silence
and solitary forms.

A terrible wind
thanks you for your comfort
and finds someone else.

Social gatherings
can be lonely as hell sometimes—
depends on who’s there.

Death metal t-shirts
at the rap show shine brightly
like burnt celery.

Temptation parades
in halls as long as castles:
powder blue Times Square.

With table manners
you can never be too sure
within vague temples.

Underwear choices:
some prefer the comfort,
others like the choke.

Sounds on Biggy’s lips
make lots of simple sense
though after the fact.

The smell of ballpoint
means something mental has gone
and captured itself.

Sounds of strange verse
on pace to outrun this pen—
ballpoint’s lonely death.

School tomorrow seems
distant as Juneau or Prague:
sleep and dream and sleep.

MORE ON THE FETE'S THURSDAY (1b)

These two guys, both shirtless, one with an archipelago of acne along the top of his back and a tightly bandannaed head, the other with what looks like a Korn t-shirt hanging from the oversized pocket of his giant denim shorts and clutching a water bottle, walk astride our car for the next three hours or so. The heat sort of repeatedly clubs everyone with each grossly scorching gust, which gusts are frequent and carry none of the usual relief associated with breezes. These guys’ home-car, I imagine, is about twenty ahead of ours, and every time they get within eye shot of the AC and libations and company therein, the row pulls forward. The cars move sort of jerkily, stopping for seemingly long periods, then going great lengths in spurts that start to feel like free-falls off high mountains compared to the prolonged intervals of stasis. So the two guys aren’t really next to us the whole time or anything, but after a couple minutes of stillness following an exhilarating descent, they’ll again overtake us, telling us that ultimately we’re going the speed of these hunched and fatigued pedestrians, if not slower, but also telling us that they cannot ever catch up to the probable Freon and cold beverages of their home-vehicle, so we’re not, like, getting nowhere.

Surprisingly few cold water bottles are sold from the coolers strapped to the locals’ four-wheelers via bungee cords, especially given the excruciating heat and the amount of dehydrating liquids being consumed all around us. This water-bottle-sales business seems like it would be an insanely lucrative pursuit, even on a car-by-car basis, but during the whole interval I sit here, I see exactly zero takers. Four-wheelers and three-wheelers constantly buzz alongside the row of cars and trucks, and the locals seem to have territorial agreements concerning which areas of overheated passengers would entail their available customers. Their local meeting, which I picture as a circle of quads around a bonfire at dusk, must not have been too arduous or taxing given the extremely low population density in this area. People also sell hot dogs and other fried entrees off the steaming grills in their front yards, and again they are rounding up very little business. It becomes clear that this row of pilgrims is relatively well-stocked, provision-wise. I myself am shoveling as much salsa into my mouth per Tostito as possible to ensure completion of the salsa by the time we reach the gates, since no glass products are allowed on the premises.

At one corner, which seems to be the last commercial intersection before the long stretch to the venue, a group of officers stands and enacts selective blindness concerning the ubiquitous open alcohol containers. I hear one of them say, “saw someone with a tattoo on his” before I continue on, free-falling.

Things go slowly but they also go quickly. We drive quickly past a house in front of which twelve people are imbibing courageously from funnels—obviously not on their way to the spectacle, but residents—and hooting at the passers-by, telling them how far away they are from the venue in tenths of miles and contemplating out loud how many minutes that might translate into. People sell handmade quilts off their clothes-lines and there is a lot of old church memorabilia rusting away in everyone’s backyard. There are very few mobile homes on our trek that are devoid of an oxidizing crucifix or sign or steeple-post or frame for decorative glass. It’s like when a new church is built, everyone just takes a piece of the old one home with them and plants it in their backyard. It occurs to me that this may not be far from the truth.

Once we near the gate, everything happens a lot faster. The single line we’ve been in for the past four hours turns into eleven lines, one run by the police, who randomly, and perhaps disastrously, have people remove all their their vehicles’ contents onto the ground surrounding. The line we get on moves fairly briskly until the sudden and devastating downpour, which, coupled with the two inches of rain the area received yesterday, causes mud instantly to form, and most of the sedans struggle to get through and need to be pushed, not to mention the Volkswagen buses and the heavily Hendrix bumper-stickered station wagons, whose tires spin hopelessly until people get out and push.

The myriad flag people flanking each road ostensibly are there to make the ride in easy and stress-free, but for the most part these folks, young and probably volunteer, stand in the rain and blankly stare, their bright orange flags waving with the intensity and authority of heifers’ tails.

The rain subsides before we reach our parking spot, the flaggers at this end of the procession a bit more intense, probably due to the distraction of the drivers with whom they’re trying to communicate and the ever-increasing crowds of barely-clothed walkers swarming all around them, lunging desperately toward the Portable Toilets. The sun pours its lava down again, instantly beginning the evaporation process and filling the air with aa flows of humidity.

Settlement on Camp Clark Griswald, as I will later find out it’s called, is unrelenting and unexpectedly nasty. We’re flagged into a space aside a Mercury Sable with NJ plates. Before we even think about exiting the vehicle, a Ford F-550 or something as large parks next to us. One of its passengers, already positioned in the pickup’s bed before they park, in what I see as a sort of sneaky-veteran move, tosses tents and tarps and other enclosure-type materials onto the space behind their pickup. This alarms us. Larger than they appear, I see the two young guys on our right, maybe 18 and just having driven from NJ, pitching their two-person tent, leaving very little room. We are thoroughly flanked. Here we are, the suckers in territorial free-for-all.

I pop the trunk, unload our tent, and my collaborator and I pitch it with haste and high levels of stress, though of a different kind than the stress I’d just driven 774 miles to escape. We manage to fit our tent (which admittedly is a little overlarge for the two of us) between the two-man on one side and the small city on the other. These pickup people, with their OK-issued plates, are shaping up to be the kind of pushy self-important space-hogs you hate to sit next to on airplanes or get behind on buffet lines. A distorted sense of their own size or importance perhaps. Though I did not think drawing borders with pushy, offensively non-Hippie-type people would be part of this trip, here we were.

So we get the tent up, but part of it overlaps one of OK’s, who claim there’s no room on their other side even though I can see that there’s at least two feet between their tent and the van beyond. I try not to let this drive me completely bonkers even though this situation is high-stress and unprepared for. The NJ guys accommodate and nudge their tent dangerously close to the road to help us fit. I’m stricken with the inaccuracy and overall futility of trying to judge people’s attitudes or demeanors based on where they’re from. The whole thing feels a bit like some nineteenth-century scene in which the government has just opened up a bunch of free land to a large number of landless peasants, who, though comrades, instantly find themselves pitted against one another.

I suppose this is all part of the festival experience. I’ve never experienced a festival before. I’m trying to discover the spirit of the festival, which I thought on the way down would be vitally important, but now seems convoluted and fleeting and crass. So far my general expectations of utter personal freedom and zero-conflict have been challenged: the police-searches, the apathetic staff, the high-tension land rush.

Stress-inducing hubbub aside, our tent is pitched, our land is claimed, and now, finally, we can settle into our new home.

Reminiscences of a Creative Writing Assignment

The assignment was open-ended except it had to be exactly five sentences. It was the first assignment of the creative writing class. I didn’t know it then, but I had so many choices; I could have gone with Faulknerian serpentine subordination, or with the endless lines of parallelism, or with a mélange of adjectival or adverbial or parenthetical clauses, or with the simple declarative of the newspapers. Or simply a snappy fragment. Or I could have gone with some imagistic haikuish things, like “A sentence, at its core, is an abstraction.”

Bovine Hands

I read that to a cow some of them are like ice cream and others are like Brussels sprouts. Early this morning I found an envelope with an unreadable postmark stuffed in the mailbox the mailman never uses, and inside the bent envelope was a letter that coldly laid out her plans to stay in Switzerland another month, saying that her friends had a warm and furnished chalet available, that she’d seen the mountains, that they were nothing like the damn river-hills in Ossining or anywhere else in America, that she loved the parties, that she could breathe better in the cleaner air, that she had sex numerous times with her and her friends’ stand-up comedian hash dealer, that they were together now and he was lying completely nude in the next room with his six-pack making shadows like a series of little hills at sunset, that stand-up comedy in Swiss is just so funny, the double-entendres being so much more entertaining, that I had no idea, that I just wouldn’t understand how funny and beautiful it all was. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t differentiate Swiss from Belgian or Mandarin. Maybe this one is ice cream. It looks like it might be ice cream, to a cow. I know it’s maybe a little unsightly, but perhaps if some care were put into it, if it were just groomed a little, the grass in the sidewalk cracks would be more amiable on the eyeball. I didn’t know how long the letter had been stuffed in there, but I could guess. I should just take out those copper mailboxes and turn them in to the scrap yard. My fingers are getting dirty through the little holes worn through the tips of my cotton gloves. I don’t stop. I kill, kill, kill. These things have an incredible will to live. Some of their roots go so deep that when I pull them the whole cake of dirt wedged between the concrete slabs comes up, a quarter inch wide but a foot deep. Copper’s been down. The whole thing about the boyfriend was a little harsh. I can tell from her letter that she imagines my desire for her to be, like, astronomical. The mail is usually just sprawled on the floor, as if the slot vomited it there and didn’t bother to mop it up. Most of it is junk. We keep the recycle bin near the door and dump all the Pennysavers and Visa offers in there as soon as we get them. We’ve gotten a few notices from the city’s recycling wing telling us that they’re going to discontinue our recycling service if we don’t tie up our paper recyclables. Sometimes I don’t even get letters I’m expecting. They probably end up way down low in the recycle bin under Victoria’s Secret catalogs, promotional flyers, coupon circulars, various slips addressed to “Resident”, and are improperly recycled. This one is definitely Brussels sprouts. I can smell it. But that smell may be a good smell to a cow. How do I know what a cow smells? The sidewalk curves beyond my sight and there is greenery in every crease. It’s very healthy. All those girls she went there with—I should have known. They’re like implacable little urban weeds in her mouth. And she chews. Boy does she chew.

Migration? Exodus? Pilgrimage? (1): 1-A

The lights on the highway sign spell out orders directed at us. They tell us to take exit 127 instead of exit 112, the one we were told to use in the literature. The traffic ahead is intimidating in its size and it glistens, so we decide the sign’s order is for our own good and take exit 127.

We drive for maybe ten minutes on a country highway with large expanses of verdant farmland flanking us on both sides and very few stores before we follow the lead of the cars ahead, corroborated by yet another sign, this one permanent, telling us to use the shoulder if we are headed to a certain Event. A serpentine row of vehicles lies ahead beyond view, and framed in the tiny side-view mirror I can see a number of cars pulling to the shoulder behind us, piling up quickly until they are out of sight around a curve. After a few minutes it becomes obvious that we are not just moving really slowly, we’re not moving at all. It is clear that this fact is not lost on others in this line because passengers begin to exit their motor vehicles and walk down the shallow divot adjacent to the shoulder and sit shirtless together and crack cans of beer of various size and brand. An epicene-faced male wearing women’s sunglasses stands on the door of the SUV he’s riding in and smokes a cigarette. What looks like his little brother slides out of the vehicle and stands beside the door, wearing a standard-issue navy-blue bandanna and sort of marvels at his smoking epicene sibling. They exchange some words, and the younger brother is handed a smoke and a pack of matches, which he struggles with before finally lighting the end of the cigarette with a puff and a flare.

This dude with a tie-dyed bandanna hanging out of the pocket of his oversized black jean shorts is the first I see piss through the barbed-wire fence onto the soy crops. The cars move about thirty feet, so the pissing black-shorts guy becomes displaced, and by the end of his piss he has to walk a bit to catch up with his ride, as do all the others who sit along the highway guzzling from their cans. This type of movement happens regularly for the next twenty minutes or so, causing groups of pedestrians to congeal and disperse along the road side as they catch up with their home vehicles. At one point, the epicene-faced male ends up well behind his vehicle of origin and at the end of one interval of catch-up his brother greets him with a water bottle, from which they both drink. A lot of people piss and get left behind and have to walk pretty far to reach their cars. The heat that pours into the windows as if flung from five-gallon buckets has already gotten inside us, beneath our skin, and it presents itself as stubborn.

While stopped in front of a conventional brick-laden rural home, a large female wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt with a sagging neckline comes out from underneath a large spruce tree pulling up her pants at the waist, elbows back, and talks about what a congenial and private place the tree’s canopy is for a girl to urinate outside. She mentions that there is even a hole, as if the tree’s shade were meant for such a purpose. The commode she describes strikes me as dangerous, and if I had more motivation to move my lips in this heat I would say something to her listeners about snakes or rodents and their sordid interactions with human nether-regions. As a pair of shirtless males shuffles past our window, backs arched and glistening from the heat, I hear one with a shaved head mention that he’d lost all his money somehow and now he is left here this weekend with nothing but a ticket, six one-dollar bills, and three E pills. A lot of people are walking now, catching up with vehicles, drinking beer, pissing.

Sonnet of a Coffee Blitz

Disorganized as any line can be,
Faceless hands draw up half hazelnut,
Some reach for sleeves; the sugar bowl the rut,
But look aside and secret lines you’ll see;
Chaos vanishes for dance, for rows
Of half-awakened dim zombie thought
Shadows; enlivened from the scent we’ve bought-
Out from your hood, out juts the aft, your nose.
My navigating head now takes the wheel
Deftly, as if it were my idea for
You to grasp a stirrer, showing more
Of that bright deck- the cream you spill I steal.
For on the surface half and half like dew
Exchanges all of me for half of you.

THERE IS NO POINT

in unfolding an argument
that proves itself with each word,
proves by the fact of its words,
and that comes to the conclusion
that conclusion is a myth.

And that is the point.

BYE BYE SNOW

Second Snow Song

The snow it harms you.

Before you have made it even half of the way
to self-evaluative frenzy,

the rotten door will begin to sway
from the pistol unloading ghosts

that were vanquished to the cellar
last Leap day.

You had Olympics, elections which both struggle
to manifest equally now.

Evenly,
with swift dark quiver, motionless
under the lack of lightning,
the procession unravels—
a cork, marching on the carpet,
an envelope, pale and sweet,
a cleaver, fresh from the market,
and an ice-cream cone topped with ground meat.

Your Father the Kidnapper the Criminal

Suburban small-town deli, furnished with white plastic lawn furniture—tables and chairs—for daily regulars. A nineteen year-old boy and an aging man named Tommy Greenberg sit, eating Bacon-Egg-Cheese sandwiches, no salt. The table has an empty umbrella hole at its center.

Tommy Greenberg:

I gotta tell you a story about your father. You probably don’t know much about your father when he was a kid but let me tell you…

Trails off. Looks up. Looks down.

I was fifteen and your daddy was sixteen and he’d just gotten his license. He drove this navy blue Econoline van to school and he’d always have five six people in the back—just bouncing around and everything. Now there were no seats back there and in the beginning your dad drove like he had pythons crawling up his pant legs so when he swung into the parking lot at school,—usually four five minutes late—got out, and opened the back door, a bunch of goons would all come stumbling down off the bumper, the straps from their book-bags all tied in with their shoelaces or something else equally as unruly. They’d run across the parking lot to the double doors for class, all disheveled and crooked-looking and tired already, and your daddy would walk in behind them smiling and laughing, carrying nothing, asking his shaken and stunned little brother Billy what he planned on doing with all them books.

Whaddaya plan on doin with all them books?

Well one Friday morning about 6:45 I stood at the bus stop waiting and hugging myself, cold with the shivers. My tooth was hurting and I was blowing into my hands to keep them warm when your father pulled up next to me in the big van. The exhaust growled and snarled and there was banging from the rear and Mott the Hoople blared from the cab. Your father sticks his head out the driver window and tells me to get in. Now I knew my mother was watching me out the window and I didn’t want her to see so I shook him off and off the van went with a big puff of smoke coughing and wheezing from the exhaust.

A couple minutes later the bus still wasn’t there but your daddy came around again. He asked me what I was waiting for and handed me a muffin. He says, “Breakfast?” Then he tells me he’s gonna kick my ass if I’m not at the bathroom window on the east wing of the first floor during second period. Your dad was always big, and I was scared, even though I knew he liked me. He and my brother had been friends a couple years. I remember it like it was this morning. “Eight-oh-eight” he said to me.

I really didn’t want to cut school and I was sort of scared of what we might be doing. Now I had a dentist appointment after school at 4:30 and I knew my mother would kill me if I didn’t make it back in time. My mom was crazy about dentist appointments. Still is, right ma?

So I went to school, to homeroom and to first period and come 8:07 I asked my history teacher Mrs. Schuster if I could be excused for the bathroom and out I went down the hallway. I almost fell over when I walked into the bathroom and right out the window stealthy as a damn spaceship that big Econoline grumbled like it was the center of the world, the center of everything, and right where the busses normally pulled up. Then, and kid, this is crazy—your daddy must have seen me or something because out swings the driver door and he comes running across the field right in front of the lawnmower guy and starts screaming through the window, waving his arms and yelling come on come on. He pushed up the window from the outside and told me to jump out. Now I was scared to friggin death. And I had a dentist appointment at 4:30.

He was halfway into the window when I decided to just submit to it, to go and have a good time. I think when you’re a kid that’s probably the only thing you really want anyways. Anything else you do out of fear. A little of that was mixed in too. So I jumped out the window.

Running across the lawn I realized I didn’t have my books. I started to turn around but your father kind of just grabbed me and threw me in the back like I was dumb and durable cargo. I came to myself and I saw Jonah Foster pumping a keg. In the back of the van. Sue Lynch and Meredith McGarreth sat with their backs against the shell of the truck, laughing at me with cups in their hands and beer spilling over the sides and running down their fingers. They had on these real short shorts that were coming into style and I remember thinking among other things that they must have been cold. Then a death pain shot through my mouth and I started looking for a way out even though there obviously wasn’t any. Over his shoulder your dad says to us, “Hold on to your seats, boys, we’re going to Jersey!” and Jonah keeps pumping that piston again and again, pumping, pumping and the girls are giggling and talking about how Dave Everheart puked yesterday 9th period and Jonah just keeps pumping.

“Shit...all foam,” he says, “the fucker.”

The talk about school relieved me slightly from the feeling that I was a child surrounded by people who weren’t children. They weren’t adults exactly and we were sort of peers, but it was more like they were my older siblings or something. Sue I didn’t really know well—I’d never hung out with her—but Meredith had been to my house a couple times when my older brother was dating her. One time, she bent down and talked to me like I was a toddler, and I took it even though we were close in age, just on the opposite sides of pubescence, because looking down her shirt gave me a strange feeling. You feeling ok?

I’d seen these girls in school of course but school was big and there were a lot of people I didn’t really talk to and I was especially quiet around girls. The friends I had, except for your father, didn’t go out much or get themselves into trouble, so I didn’t really have a social life except the one I shared with my dog Sandy in the woods behind the bleachery.

So anyway Jonah hands me a cup and it’s all white foam. The van had no windows in the back, but from what I could make out from my view of the windshield, we were on a highway somewhere, which meant your daddy wasn’t bluffing. I didn’t think he was, but now it was confirmed. We were going to Jersey. I started to ask if we’d make it back by 4:30 but stopped. It was a stupid question. I looked down at the cup I held. I looked at how I held it. The dentist appointment was a goner. I took a sip, all foam. It tasted horrible—I fought with everything I had to keep from spitting—and as I dropped the glass from my lips, I felt some moisture on my nose. The girls laughed and pointed. I remember noticing they had their fingernails cut short and they wore no nail polish. My embarrassment raised the temperature a couple notches.

Jonah’s brown hair danced like a hippie on his head and he looked like a nutcase pumping that keg, balancing himself against the van with his forearm and spilling foam everywhere. “Let me show you a trick,” he says to me. “Here’s how you get rid of that foam.” He rubbed the tip of his pointer finger across where his nostril met the rest of his face with a scooping motion like he was trying to get the last bit of ice cream out of a container. “You see,” he says, “it’s the oil.” Then he stuck the finger in my cup and swirled around a few times. I was a little apprehensive of Jonah’s oil being in my drink, but it worked and the foam began to dissolve in the places where he’d put his finger and the rest followed until I held a three-quarters empty cup of beer. I took a big sip. I was relieved. It tasted better without the foam, but it still wasn’t that great. Jonah was busy pouring another beer. He handed that one up to your father.

You want anything? Anything to drink? No? I won’t put my greasy finger in. No? Ok.

Then Suzy asks me, “You like to party, Jonah?” Her eyes squinted like my grandma’s cat and I had the feeling she saw right through me.

“Yeah, I guess,” I says to her.

“How many times you been drunk?”

“Oh, a lot,” I says. “I always get drunk.” I says I says, “I go into the woods and get drunk with my….friends all the time.” I pictured Sandy, God rest her labrador soul, whirling the foam with her paw.


I was so drunk by the time we got to Jersey that when we pulled into the grocery store parking lot to pick up some things, I puked all over a lamppost. Your father just said, “good, good,” and walked on but the girls helped me back into the van and laid me down on some blankets. My head was spinning it was hot and I was thinking about my dentist appointment, feeling the acidity stuck to my teeth. I think that’s around when I passed out.

I woke some time later—it was getting dark now—and we were all in this room that was lit by these dim dusty old lamps. Everything was old. The dust on the molding looked permanent, like you couldn’t get it out of there if you had a chisel and a hammer. Little boxes filled with starfish and fake goldfish and nets and buoys hung on the wall across from the couch I was laying on and my. Head. Was. Burning. but your father was getting everyone riled up in the kitchen, so I had to pull myself together. The pressure to party was worse once they realized I was awake. “Tommy!” “Feeling better Tommyboy?” They were all drunk yelling. I saw the keg and smelled the beer, felt it in my stomach, and almost let loose again all over the sofa.

Before I knew it they had me by the feet, holding me upside down, and let me tell you Johnny, I thought I’d had enough, but that beer was flowing into my mouth and they started counting, shouting, “TWO—THREE—FOUR” and I’ll be damned if they didn’t count to twenty-three. And you gotta remember, I’d never even really gotten drunk before, and here I was, hundreds of miles from home, doing my first keg stand. I’d say your father had me doing things against my will, but it was like I had no will whatsoever. It didn’t exist.

They let me down and I stumbled against the wall and got caught up in one of those nets and almost tore it off the wall. The girls giggled all silly like they thought it was cute or something how messed up I was. I was turning red, but I wasn’t complaining.

Then they broke out the pot. Jonah had been working on this contraption in the bathtub all afternoon. He ran out at one point and grabbed some aluminum foil and went back in and slammed the door behind him. Your dad said something about him wiping his ass with it. I had no idea what he was doing, but when I went to use the bathroom he was in there with the tub full of water, and when he let me in to pee there was an empty two-liter cut in half floating like a dead sparrow. Rubber bands were scattered around. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

A few minutes later I was sitting on the couch with my head in my hands dizzy as a top and the girls came out of one of the bedrooms, giggling and laughing and carrying on and coughing with their eyes all red and squinty. I felt like hell, kid, but I really wanted to hang out. I did. I really wanted to, so I dared myself to be game for whatever, even though my face felt like it got slugged a couple times by Floyd Patterson and hell my brain too.

Dumb idea. Jonah yelled, and before I could even look up your dad had me in a headlock and was dragging me down the hallway toward the bathroom from where I could hear the girls’ laughter and the splashing water echoing against the tiles.

This thing they had. This thing. The inventor of this thing should be jailed. It was the marijuana equivalent to the keg stand, and your dad had me briefed on its operation and hooked up to it in microseconds. Mic,ro,seconds. What you do is you pack the weed in the cap, which comes off, but first you put it down in the water and pull up while you light it, which creates a suction and the whole bottle fills up with this thick dense smoke, then you take the cap off and push down as you inhale, and it shoots the smoke into your lungs like it’s coming out of a fire hydrant.

I hit this thing and I’m done. I remember feeling really faint and hot and then I hurled again, right into the bathtub water. Meredith cackled—I can still hear her wild laughter as we speak—but after she helped me too. While everybody else was pissed about the water she told them to give me a break—she reminded them that they’d kidnapped me in the first place. How easy it was for them to forget.

I sat on the cold bathroom tiles and looked up, slowly coming to, and not feeling all that bad, considering. I felt like I’d just unloaded a bad piece of cargo, and the pot started reeling through my head and I looked up and your dad was blowing out this incredible puff of smoke, like the wind God blows into sails in cartoons, coughing and chuckling at the end when Jonah cracked a joke. He told me to get off the floor, so I did. I went back into the living room and sat there. Your dad followed and slugged a couple of beers and offered me one but I had to refuse at this point. I was having just enough fun where I was.

Then everybody left except your dad. Meredith and Jonah and Sue, they all left and your dad put on some music and we talked and I relaxed a little. Speaking of which I took the opportunity to ask him when the hell he planned on taking me home and to warn him that my mother was gonna serve him up for dinner. He didn’t seem too worried, so I says “Look. You don’t know my mother, I’m just letting you know beforehand…” and nothing. He tried to get me to play this drinking game with him but I refused. I mean, I was so high I couldn’t concentrate on anything for too long, I couldn’t even make sentences when we were talking, but your dad did fine, and he drank the whole time. He played the game by himself, something with cards or quarters, I can’t remember. We listened to Sabbath, that I remember.

Then Jonah comes back with a couple guys who say they’re vaqueros and they break out all this coke on the table as soon as they come in, right in front of me. I’d never seen anything remotely like it. They both looked like vaqueros too, plaid shirts, the boots, the hat, the blow, you know, the whole getup. They asked me about a key and I said no and I noticed how they spoke good English, natural. Then Jonah and your dad and them were doing lines and talking about Nixon, Watergate, the scabs building the strip mall down the road, their ages (the vaqueros were twenty-eight and twenty-nine and stalled when your dad announced ours all proud, but only for a second), Sabbath, Ozzy, Zeppelin, et cetera. I have a clear memory of your dad’s head lifting from the table and all the stuff being gone and the vaqueros sort of gasping.

After that the girls fell in the screen door, Sue’s halter-top hanging on by a thread, ooh-la-la, followed by two no three no four no five more girls, all of them smoking hot and smoking cigs, Budweiser cans in their hands. My jaw dropped. I was amazed. I thought I’d walked into a movie and that I was destined to lose my virginity that night. The dentist was long gone. Before I could blink the vaqueros had out more coke and they were all doing it in the kitchen and in the living room where I was. One girl mentioned the bars and then a bunch of them left and it was your dad still drinking from the keg with three of the girls and me on the couch. One of the girls came over to me and started asking me questions about my age and what grade I was in and how I ended up there. I told her and she looked up at your dad kind of lovingly. She kept talking to me and she was very nice, kept me calm, you know? As for the other two girls, your dad leaned against the kitchen counter and had an arm around each one. They were the prettiest ones there by far and they were melting all over your dad. Let me know if I go too far for you.


Boy:

You have gone too far.

Tommy Greenberg:

Ok. Tell your daddy I say hi.

Boy:

Will do.

A & E.

“Mmm. This is so good.”
“Oh yeah, this is it—paradise.”
“mMMMmm.”
“mmmMMMMMMmmmmm.”
“mmmmMMMAAAAAHHHHHHH.”
“Oh my —, I feel unbelievable. This is outrageously beyond any sensation I have ever experienced.”
“I’m soaring.”
“I’m floating in space, I’m beyond the spheres.”
“I’ve found my purpose in life.”
“I am eternal. Completely fulfilled, fulfilling, forever fulfilling.”
“My brain is an exploding swarm of ecstasy.”
“Mine’s dissolved into the shore. It is everything in its peace.”
“Feed me more. FEED ME.”
“OHHHH. UHHH.”
“AHHHHHHHHHH. Mmmmmm.”
“I never imagined anything could be so good. It’s amazing. I’m completely satisfied.”
“I could die in ten months.”
“I could die right now.”
“Thanks, little guy.”
“Why wasn’t this allowed again?”

The Show Unending.

I’m on the Far Rockaway A train on my way to the tracks. I’m in sad and lovely communion with the sounds in my headphones so the man’s rusty deep booming voice startles me. He says, I’m blind and I’m broke, any change you can spare will be very much appreciated. It strikes me that phrases like ‘very much appreciated’ seep so deeply into the minds of every person, even those of us who have nothing. I notice everyone looking back and forth at one another and at the blind man. The blind man taps his cane on the floor. The cane is made of aluminum and its bottom has been worn to an angle which he continues to wear upon while he stands there tracing some invisible infinity symbol on the floor. The cane is red and white and I think there must have been a holiday gag played upon him by cruel members of his family in a dusty room in some dusty era. A guy dressed like a vigilante commando, a hispanic guy with slick hair and swift movements, takes out a big stack of bills and thumbs through it. He rises sly and swift and grabs the blind man by the elbow as if by force and firmly stuffs a dollar bill into his hand. The little girl he got on the train with sits next to me watching him, dumbly staring upward. He wears sunglasses but we both can tell he makes eye contact with the girl as he retakes his seat. The blind man does not know how much he’s been given but he repeats the phrase very much appreciated two or three times while crumbling the bill and stuffing it into his pocket and the vigilante nods silently. The vigilante unzips and thumbs through his swede fanny pack and rezips it and lifts the strap to his messenger bag and glances in there for a second and then he is still. He has a lot of zippers on his pants and he wears all-black sneakers that look brand new. He looks combat-ready, a new A-team member. Another guy, he looks Korean, wearing boat shoes and black jeans, brings the blind man some change, shaking it on his way, apparently announcing something. I’d say thirty-two cents. I’d say one quarter, a nickel, and two pennies. Thank you thank you the blind man says, very much appreciated and the rapping of his cane stops momentarily. It starts again. He heads toward me, swinging his stick back and forth in figure eight against the feet of everyone in each row as if he were conducting a census. I feel an enormous pressure upon me to hand this man money. I take off my headphones and sort of fumble around, not looking for money really or anything else, just restless, aimless. My lines, my lines, I think. I’m feeling the heat of a magic lantern, as if it were inside me flashing everything outward onto a screen. I had decided a few minutes ago that I wasn’t giving this guy money if the only reason I would be giving it was because I was pressured to perform in some noble way by the people around me. The blind man hits the pole that stands directly in front of me with his cane, hard, six or seven times, and repeats his message for the new section. He leans his back against the pole and stands there collecting money. The Grant Ave. stop approaches and he asks someone what stop it is and they tell him and he gets off. I put my headphones back on in a dumb effort to shield myself from their silent appraisals of my performance.

An Asian guy wearing a leather jacket gets on at 80th St. He holds a stack of DVDs, the topmost of which I recognize as a title still in theaters. He walks slowly but his hands are swift as he flashes his goods silently, wordlessly egging us on. The zippered commando shoots him a mean look and shakes his head no, his disgust and contempt clearly drawn as if he were told to express such feelings by a director. I’m asking myself if this is more like a trial by jury, with our maintenance of the balance and cleanliness and comfort of our own minds having to play defense attorney, or if it is more like a play, with a hostile, judgmental audience guessing every motive while we play the actor and playwright both, the Shakespeare, calling the shots, working, improvising our bit roles, negotiating with the crowd like the craftiest and most subtle actors of the stage. The train stops at 88th St. and the vigilante and the girl get off.

Thinking back to Grand Central Station, it occurs to me that a huge amount of shrewdness must have gone into the construction of this city. That in the process of building that unique spectacle of commerce, with outrageous sums of money constantly produced and disbursed, someone counted to the penny, demanding deadlines, side deals, and threatening against past promises. It must have been a real show. There has been no curtain, no intermission, I’m thinking.

I walk through the overstuffed parking lot toward the tracks. I am backstage, rehearsing, running through visions and revisions, awaiting a cue from the lights or subtle strings, readying myself for the next scene, hoping to improve.

Used: A Section

They walked up the concrete steps to the back doors and entered. The silver door handle felt hot from the sun, but as Tom pulled it open a rush of cool air blew against their mouths and noses and cheeks, and Brandon’s thin blonde hair lifted in the breeze.

“Do you think they’ll have it?” asked Brandon.

“Probably. Check used first,” Tom said.

“Maybe I’ll just ask the people.”

A florescent light flickered. Neither Tom nor Brandon perceived the drone of the lights, masked as it was by the song “Creep”.

“They don’t know. We gotta check used first. All they’ll do behind the counter is try to get you to buy a new one for more money.” He walked faster down the aisle, past some t-shirt carousels and a broken-stringed acoustic guitar propped on an end cap. Brandon rushed to follow. “All they want is your money,” said Tom, pointing at a cashier, a big girl with acne who wore a big red shirt and a big silver name tag.

“I’d almost rather have a new one,” Brandon said.

“What do you mean by that,” Tom said, “almost rather?”

“Well,” said Brandon, “like, what if it’s scratched? Or if the liner notes are marked up or the jacket is ripped? I kinda like it new...” He put his hands in his pockets and turned his eyes down toward the scuffed fronts of his Converse.

“Good point,” Tom said, “I guess if you have the money and want to spend it.”

“Heh...yeah.”

“My mom and dad have an old Leonard Cohen record that a person wrote all in. I read all about this affair these two people were having. At first I got grossed out because I thought it was between my mom and dad but then I saw it says ‘used’ on a yellow tag on the case. Anyway this guy bought this girl this record to thank her for some favor she did him. He underlines lines that have 'naked' in them and writes about how the lyrics are poetry about love and sex and beauty or something. He wrote in script all between the lyrics. Can’t get that from a new CD, can you, Brand?”

“I still like the new.”

*****

He squatted in the aisle of the school bus, brushing past arms and backpacks to the front seats. “Three for a dollar,” Brandon said to the girl in the second seat. She was a few years younger but Brandon knew she had a sweet tooth and that her mother stuffed dollar bills into her paws each morning as she shoved her out the door.

She looked into his eyes, they were blue and honest and caring. “Six please.”

*****

“Happy Days, I knew they’d have it new.” Tom watched Brandon fuss with the shrink-wrapping. He thought of a comic strip he’d seen that depicted a fat man in a lab coat whom a Satan figure took great pleasure in spiking from behind with his trident. Sweat flying off his head, the man struggled to unwrap CDs as they piled up at the end of a conveyor belt. The caption read, “The Inventor of Shrink Wrap.”

They stood facing the bulletin board. After boring of Brandon’s struggle, Tom looked up at the flyers. Yoga workshops, firewood for sale, lawn mowing, Lyme disease prevention. This was supposed to be a record store, yet this board never had anything to do with music. Probably because of the mall. Everything in the mall feels at least a little inauthentic. A bunch of ancients and space-eyed teens spending all their cash on whatever the mannequins happen to be wearing. The bulletin board was at least partly real. Whatever is up here, someone put here.

Tom fingered through the flyers, looking behind ones that hung over others. He pushed away an 18”x24” glossy proclaiming upcoming events at Bard College and found an expired basement hardcore show flyer that advertised the bands Deafening Silence, Dracularia, Stuck Pig, and Scatface. Every time Tom found a new bulletin board, he’d try to find the oldest event flyer he could. He liked when the layers added up. It became easy after a while because the people that worked there cleaned off the dated ones as the dates passed as long as they were clearly visible, but sometimes, if one was covered up, like this Deafening Silence flyer, he would unearth it. He took the flyers that had expired and taped them with scotch tape onto other flyers he’d already hung on his wall at home. Sometimes they fell off while he slept.

Off to the left, he noticed a photocopied flyer for a show at Flirty Bernie’s. The flyer said it was a show/dance party. There would be five bands and two djs. It was in three weeks, on a Friday. 21 and over, it said. 8 pm. This presented a number of obstacles, but none that couldn’t be managed. He took the flyer, folded it, and stuffed it into his back pocket. Maybe he would take Vinny. He could not perceive the drone of the florescent lights.

The power went out in the mall. Everything was completely silent. Eerily so. Tom noticed the quiet. “C’mon Brandon. Let’s leave.” They walked across the sunlit parking lot to the woods.

*****

They walked through the woods, looking for the abandoned garage Tom had sworn he had found. Brandon surveyed the land, occasionally holding his string of beads close to his eyes even though Tom knew the compass didn’t work and that Brandon was just pretending. Brandon claimed he always knew where he was in the woods and that he was never scared of getting lost. “Besides, these woods aren’t that big anyways, and at night, the mall lights up.” They walked along the valley where the stream used to be. Tom swung a hickory switch he found at passing branches of hemlock and white pine. Woodpeckers and sapsuckers flew among the trees. On occasion, they sang.

He charged an ambush. A neverending swath of soldiers, each of whom he engaged one by one, like a medieval guerrilla fighting to the death on principle.

Tom ran over to a hemlock. It had fallen into the crotch of another tree and split it. The hemlock trunk was jammed into a broken ash tree, leaving its dead tip half-jutted over the dell. He started climbing up the spires of rusty grey hemlock branches, the bark dropping off as he positioned his sneakers. He took it slowly, planting each foot securely into a crotch. Brandon followed. He pulled his CD out of his cargo pocket and placed it on a rock. Then he slid up the trunk on his stomach, only leaving the complete embrace of the tree to maneuver through the branches. Dipping through a pair of branches in this fashion, Brandon inhaled part of a spiderweb. He coughed but shook it off when Tom asked him if he needed help. As Tom reached the spot where the two trees had collided, he double-checked his footing and stood. He looked around him, but saw no one. He’d expected to see Dennis. Brandon edged himself further on his belly as a snail would. As Brandon edged closer, Tom started even further out onto the branch. Now he too was on his stomach, because there weren’t any limbs to get in the way and there was more open air around him. As Brandon made his way beyond the spot where the two trees collided, the hemlock slowly started to lift, as if the spirit of an ancient forest warrior had been haphazardly and mistakenly awoken. Brandon fell back before it got very far, but Tom could not move but in contraction. He became bodily attached to the tree, squeezing his chest against the trunk with his arms and legs. The spots of sweat on his green shirt enlarged into blotches, and he slowly slid down from the tip of the stick, saying “I’m cool…I’m cool, it’s cool” over and over again the whole time, more to himself than to Brandon.