E.T.: A Tribute

And there were two young bros with smooth swooped hair and florescent sneakers walking in the parking lot and one of them pointed at this lady and said to the other, “Look, Elizabeth Taylor’s been resurrected,” and the second bro cackled and his shoulders bounced in laughter. The woman’s chestnut eyes, eyes she mostly hated and tried to conceal, darted at the bros. And in fact it turned out that the resemblance was not a coincidence at all and that the lady had been a lifelong devotee of Elizabeth Taylor and had only days before been shattered by the news of her idol’s death and only moments before been released from yet another soul-demolishing, rotten day of work at the County Clerk’s, so when she saw and heard the bros cackling and pointing she snapped and couldn’t restrain herself from running across the parking lot in slumped equine arthritic strides. The boys were laughing, their arms shriveling inward in half-assed self-protective glee at the lady’s running and the absurd bouncing of her treated spider-black hairdo. The lady had only her keys in her hand as she ran and she did not notice her empty cart begin rolling backward into the parking lot’s thoroughfare or, when a wheel stopped on a pebble, spin abruptly into a screeching BMW sedan, bringing the cart and the vehicle to a synchronous halt; the lady all the time galloped toward the boys with the sharpest key on her chain now sticking out obscenely from a cage of fingers until she finally reached them and began sobbing and screaming and jabbing, and the bros chortled at each other until she got one of them in the eye, and when he went down she mounted his chest and very deliberately got him in the other eye, and when the other bro grasped her by the shoulder she sprung up and punctured his cheek and then got him in the eye too but through the lid and he began clutching his spouting face with one arm and swinging around the other apparently hoping to strike the lady but clearly he couldn’t see her because he swung and swung and shortly tottered off and tumbled over. Finally the onlookers restrained the lady and later one senescent man lay his arm across both her shoulders as she sat on the curb and whispered,—splattered with bro blood, swaying, sobbing, waiting for the police and the ambulance to arrive—whispered “Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie,” through a mask of dripping cosmetics.

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.

Remorseless

Hey. I wrote a poem this morning. Here it is:

Remorse

When at the bookstore
my mind becomes a starving seal,
performing flips and tricks,
showing its zeal, beckoning
words into the fold to feed
the hunger of the heart.

After a technicolor
beach ball deflates upon
my peak, and my cheek feels
the plastic of purchase, I
leave with five or six
books, guiltless.

That's when I recall
the library
with the simple
sentence
of smell.

The Chirping Warzone 1

Blaine Hussein shoveled a tiny chasm into the earth of Gloryland National Park in Gloryland, Maine.

He was on a two-week vacation from the security company he worked for. He worked forty-two weeks out of the year. Most other weeks he took long trips to national parks, famous monuments, and aquariums with especially good reputations so he could see and experience the great country he lived in. He was barely ever home.

His security company, RSA Inc., stationed him in a country his home country was at war with. The country was called Barack. He liked Barack because he liked to bird there. The work he did for his company did not appeal to him much, but since his country’s army trained him to comfortably and effectively engage in sophisticated and modern combat and pre-combat scenarios, it was fairly easy for him and didn’t often affect his mood.

Most days, he stood on a clay roof in Samarra. It was a good place to bird. There was the obvious advantage of the height, but also he was stationed on the outskirts of the city where there were less people to scare the birds away.

***

It turns out some of his company’s administrators paid money to the government of Barack to repay them for the deaths of sixty-seven of that country’s civilians. The civilians were killed one morning in about thirty seconds.

The village was crowded and bustling. Twelve RSAs crouched on a roof where they could survey the town and make sure everything was happening the way it was supposed to. They didn’t really know how things were supposed to happen, but they pretended they did. They were convincing pretenders. This was their stealthiest skill.

They had a clear view of a busy street. There was a lot of buying and selling happening. Keeping close watch, they gripped their automatic rifles and eyed the activity below. The head of the crew, Merrick, a Jest Point grad who after being dishonorably discharged immediately joined RSA, ran his finger across the frayed and bent brim of his baseball cap. Oddly, this cap had the logo of a football team, the Maritoba Vikings, embroidered on its face. The simple irony of this struck one of his subordinates at the moment of Merrick’s gesture. It did not sway his poise. They were one. They all ducked low and pointed their rifles toward the street and stared down the barrels, squinting.

A scuffle broke out between a teen-aged boy and an old man who ran a stand that sold fruit. The boy grabbed three pomegranates and started to run. He dropped one in front of him and stepped on it. The slip added to his inertia, pushing him toward a crowd. He tracked the crimson juice for his next three steps, just before he fell. The old man yelled something the RSAs heard but did not understand. Merrick made a loud noise they heard and understood. It was an order.

The government of Barack found that there was no viable reason for the massacre. They threatened to tell the RSA's home country, which would probably cost them their contract and get them into a heap of trouble with the 'people of their country'. RSA offered them one million dollars to keep quiet about the deaths, and the Baracki government accepted.

***

Months later, everyone on the planet learned about the deal. While Blaine Hussein camped in Gloryland, RSA lost its contract.

***

Blaine Hussein squatted over the chasm. Then he refilled it with the same dirt he dug out earlier, which he’d piled strategically next to the hole.

Trace Hawthorne

With a long stroke she licked the ice cream along the edge of the sugar cone. She drove west on a county road alongside farmhouses and pastures spotted with oak and birch, a trip she only afforded herself on Fridays. She adhered to a strict diet most days, but every Friday when it was warm enough she would take the back way home and get a vanilla cone from the farm stand to celebrate the end of her work week. Completion, the cone said to her, as she drove past straw spirals.

Autumn had appeared in recent days, but it had proven noncommittal. The ice cream demanded constant attention. She managed a hard bend, turning the wheel with her palm, and on the other side a doe stood just ahead looking peaceful and serene. Eyes focused and cone in hand, she swung the car into the left lane, the doe standing there looking peaceful and hollow and hollowly watching the car as it whipped past and on down the road.

She felt the ice cream on her hand. A couple drips of vanilla slid off the base of her pinkie and landed on the black skirt she had worn to work.

***

Her grandmother died when she was six, and at the funeral she wore a black dress that was laced all around with silk ribbons. She remembered the funeral sometimes while driving—her mother telling her that grandma was happy now, her uncle Rob, rubbing her shoulder in the parlor, that scary and disgusting place, her aunt Jodi telling her to go play with the other children outside. Since she didn't cry she took aunt Jodi’s advice and ran around with the other kids. Late that night, in grandma’s backyard, her and Robby hid behind the big willow together during a game of hide and seek. Robby said to her, “We’re not really cousins, right?” She could not recall a reply, but she remembered her black dress all muddy.

***

“Shoot...shit,” she said. She licked the dripping cone, wiped her skirt with fast food napkins, and kept the wheel steady with her knee. She planned on stopping at Friday’s before going home so she wanted to keep neat, but since her skirt was ruined she would have to stop home and change. She felt perturbed and somewhat swindled by fate or coincidence or whatever it was about having to stop home before her Friday wine. She considered going straight home and staying there, foregoing the Friday’s venture entirely since she wasn’t meeting anyone anyway, but she decided that instead she would go straight there, ice cream stain and all.

She reapplied lipstick in the parking lot. Her face was attractive though a bit round and she wore on it most times an utter seriousness akin to a goaltender before a penalty shot, eyes peering, lips pursed. Her large dark eyes were appealing enough—a handful would call them hypnotic and some would say seductive, but her appearance was not to go on trial for the crime of her loneliness. She thought it was the side of her that she inherited from her mother, her stubbornness, her boldness, her frightful honesty, that nudged the men away, but it was rather something else, something she’d developed on her own.

At Friday’s, she sat alone. She read the subtitles of CNN and The Weather Channel and sipped on her house Merlot, and felt a sharp aversion toward the three men across the bar. Why did they have to be so loud with everything they say? Probably couldn’t pull off the stupid algebra it takes to run a simple mortgage. Probably, they wander around bar to bar all night laughing too loud showing off how close of friends they are and how great a time they can have. Deep down they hate each other. There is no man in existence even remotely like Dad. One wearing a Red Bull polo shirt made his way around the bar toward her.

“What’s on your dress?” he asked, smiling. He pointed to her necklace.

“It’s not ice cream and it’s not Red Bull either. I keep a strict diet,” she said. Neither of them spoke. She thought she might have been harsh on him, so not knowing what to do, she continued. “Don’t you think it’s impolite to point out the imperfections on a woman’s clothes? Why must you assail these meager rags?” She tossed her left hand with a Victorian flourish, which surprised her. She felt like she was a character from a book she had read. She downed her Merlot.

He said nothing, but continued to stand in front of her, holding his pint. He looked perplexed, idiotic. The name ‘MARC’ was embroidered on his shirt, below the insignia.

“May I help you?” she said. Nothing. “I need a drink.”

***

That night she knelt behind the big willow with Marc and they both had ice cream cones and they kept melting all over her dress. She sat on a soccer ball. Marc held his cone over the dress too and they spelled out both their names in ice cream, and using the ribbons of her dress they created a makeshift calligraphy and they made out special letters and had a special language that they used to convey secrets to one another, secrets too secret for normal words, symbols with no sound and only sense, symbols that pounded feelings directly into the heart, foregoing mind entirely, symbols that stripped a layer of culture from between them, and all the other people laid outside their circle, their system. From their vantage behind the tree, they saw the source of the smoke they’d been smelling all night. Grampa emptied his pipe, banging it rhythmically, one, two, one, against a hickory tree. They heard a rustling branch and saw Grampa point left. The night was darker. She looked at her dress and became disgusted with herself. She felt her face contorting, squeezing into knots. She looked at Marc and Marc saw her face turn blacker than coal. “I keep a strict diet,” she said, repeated, emphasized, screamed—and awoke Saturday morning.

“Mnmmm...wha?”

Secret, Profane, and...Starbucks?

My birthday this year was seasoned with delight by my receipt of the new Elvis Costello album Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane. This ration of sugared seasoning was enhanced by Mr. Costello's apropos mention of my hometown Poughkeepsie, NY, when in the track "Sulfur to Sugarcane," he spits: "The women in Poughkeepsie take their clothes off when they're tipsy." As a lifelong resident of the area, I feel slighted that I've never witnessed this phenomenon myself, but I assume his observation is accurate.

While listening through the album, enjoying its fine production (provided by legendary producer T-Bone Burnett) and stripped-down, bluesy shuffle, I found it to be one of the easier listens of Costello's recent releases, not that albums like The Delivery Man, North, or Momofuku are especially challenging, but this one plays through straight and smooth with little by the way of surprise, and with a steady hand in instrumentation that is uncharacteristic of the usually varied Costello productions. The songs carry all the charm and sophistication that we've come to expect, bundled up in a tasteful, inoffensive package that marks an alteration of sorts with its mellow sheen and unfailing consistence. Turning into my driveway, listening and mulling through such thoughts, I thought I'd sit and listen to another tune before turning off the power and walking inside. While listening I squinted at the small print at the bottom of the package, in accordance with habit, and found that Starbucks! is responsible for the release of this album.

I boiled over with the typical rage and indignation I feel when I discover art I enjoy is supported by amoral tyrannical corporations, but this subsided quickly, as I recall that I've never heard a note of Costello's music that hasn't been filtered through a major label, aside, perhaps, from the one time I saw him and the Imposters live, although even this is questionable, for the great amount of capital needed to produce a concert on that level needs the support of a fairly large business. Also, Starbucks is a corporation I know little about, though I have seen them put a number of small coffeeshops out of business, but not by undercutting prices, but rather partly because people like it and also because it seems that in the current cultural climate, in which PR reigns supreme in individual decision making, many people favor recognized brands over local or regional allies. But, as I like to say, corporate greed is redundant.

Then it dawned on me. What I was listening to was a soundtrack made precisely for play inside an actual Starbucks, to create the ambiance of a genuine coffeeshop amid the typical machinations of mass production, something Starbucks does remarkably well. And if anything is redeeming about this whole thing, it's that Costello is doing the same thing here that he did when he signed on the dotted line in the mid-70's--he's bringing his impeccable talents to where the most people are. The only regrettable thing here is that everyone crowds into a Starbucks while the locals' brew goes stale, and the songs of someone who I personally idolize has helped bring them there. Hopefully there's a kid, dragged in by his parents, who hears that entirely unique voice, and goes home, does some internet research, and pulls a dusty copy of This Year's Model out of his parents' record bin before it is devoured by fungi.

Somewhere In America Speaks

Lena does not care what is in her head; so she does not know. She does not often recall a morning in school when the teacher read her “The Jabberwocky” and she listened sincerely for the first time to her language. She does not notice in her head a morning when she was eight and she found ten dead butterflies and catalogued them by the marks on their backs, piling similar patterns on top of one another, and ordered them from left to right by their relative amounts of black, while waiting for the bus at the spot where her dusty street meets the paved road that leads to the river and to the school. She has no conscious recollection of the words “We’re all mad here” being read to her, or of the time when, while burrowed in bed, she heard her father quietly sing “It’s dreamy weather” from the kitchen and she felt tingles and her body connected to itself in a new formulation, so she could touch her toe to her finger by sheer will of being—without actually moving, she thought, her toe became her finger, and hence had touched it. But she does not remember.

“I am like a ditch with a stream groaning through the rock and mud in its belly. I dream I am a lily that grows from the wall of the ditch, and reaches out, forever toward the canopy,” she says, not thinking, “heliotrope” or “we’re all mad here.”

“I am like the sun,” he replies, and thinks I am like away. It is night.

They wait for words but none come. The moon droops tonight and the fireflies in the yard and back by the sycamore show much more energy, exuberance, and gall than the sighing gibbous moon as it falls closer to the horizon in morbid descent. They live on a block of eight small houses, one of which loses a piece of siding or shingle at least once a day, the weather slowly but persistently devouring its vacant prey, grinding its various teeth deliberately and without mercy. But unlike some houses in such conditions, the yard does not overgrow—like all the other houses in the neighborhood, its yard is bare of vegetation aside from a layer of tan dirt. Next to it, in the corner of the nine lot square, lies a vacant lot in which grows a giant sycamore, its branches reaching both upward and outward with a mixture of zeal and confusion, branches twisting and soaring, its trunk (the children decided one day—this she does not remember either) the size of at least ten youths, its bark like the skin of an elephant, camouflaged and peeling. To the credit of the town planners, there is a house in the center, surrounded by houses and inaccessible by car except through the Watsons’ long driveway, but the Watsons do not park in their yard, so the path is always blocked. William Weber, inhabitant of the center house, usually parks on the street.

Lena wears red and pink Kellogg’s ankle socks; that is, ankle socks with a Kellogg’s insignia embroidered on each face and stripes of pink and red behind the embroidery. She had gotten them the week before out of a box of Frosted Flakes that her mother procured from Jacobson’s Market after passing the clerk a ticket. Dirt covers the bottoms of her ankle socks and dust darkens the lower parts of her otherwise blank shins, which connect to her pale translucent legs, exposed because it is only April and her shorts are very short still and her skin is still very modest, innocent. Every year around June the opaque cover would spoil over with a sheet of boiled lobster red, and for the next few months, the people would notice the red layers begin to peel as snakes, and proceed until two weeks later there resides again upon her legs a fresh layer of pale translucent tissue paper, born anew. For the rest of the summer she would wear light dresses of orange and red and smell of fresh cherries and banana peels, avocado and preserve.

Lena sits with John the Bartender on John the Bartender’s porch. John the Bartender had his sixteenth birthday party earlier today, and he bartended the event. He does not consider it work and in fact considers it a gift, because he wants to be a bartender. The porchlight illuminates little so John the Bartender laboriously scans the pages of Ulysses Annotated, barely making out the names of drinking songs and English translations of momentary pidgin upshots from transient combinations of Dubliners. Lena notices that the moon is closer to the chimneys than it was when they stopped talking.

“When does he come home?”

“Why do you care?” John does not look up and scold her with eyes but wants to. He reads of Chrysostomos’ golden teeth. He wants to talk but he is vanquished by the dual spires of resentment and jealousy.

Mitch had left the day before on a Red Cross mission in Khartoum. He was to fly into Cairo and proceed to Khartoum by boat. Before he left he had been a bartender at Sammy’s Pub, the only pub in town. He always knew how to joke with the old people, to become one of their own, to infiltrate the fabric of generations, and when he entered the circle of elderly folks, he always acted and spoke in a way that subtly conveyed reverence, respect, and a sense that he regarded these people as treasures. Everyone in town attended his farewell except John the Bartender, who, although he said his goodbyes earlier, still believed his absence from the gathering to be a statement of protest. John’s resentments were never so gloriously displayed, but big brothers anger little.

At Mitch’s departure party, John watched from a small basement window as Mitch made his way around, speaking to nearly everyone, incessantly smiling and shaking hands, exceedingly charming them all, in a straight line from one end of the street to the other, the entire length of the party. He guzzled four Budweiser cans on his journey. When he reached the end of the line he was surrounded by a circle of about twenty, all actively conversing amongst one another with words and hands. John could see and hear with ease from his window, a mere ten feet or so from the gathered group. Amongst many words pertaining to what good work Mitch was doing and what great work he would do and what a downer the pub will be in his absence, a voice, small but full of melody, spoke from just above the basement window. It was Lena. She spoke quietly and slowly, and another brasher but no less feminine voice answered back; it belonged to Jen Weber. The two spoke back and forth for ten minutes or so, at sometimes painfully gentle and at others in crescendo, and as they did, John, hearing every word, huddled into a ball and shook, enveloped within his own silence, and became John the Bartender.

The moon droops further and the fireflies are out. John the Bartender leans in. She says: “This feels sour. I can smell the buds forming. The modern Mary is always knocked up by a boy.” She thinks I am not away. The branches in the great sycamore do battle, swords wielded by the wind. “I hear the Wapping,” she says.

Music Business

concerning my band...


Usually it is the shows a band plays that have the strongest impact on its members.

Back when all of us were most of When Dreams Die, we went through a grueling period in which we would play a few ‘showcase’ shows a month at the clubs of lower Manhattan, most of them on weeknights. The rides down were usually stressful; we had either Greg’s poor old van or my poor little Kia pulling a trailer over a sea of potholes and through the swarms of aggressive cabbies to a club that we’d been to before (or have we??) but could not find amid the myriad side streets. Once the club was located, we drove around for another thirty minutes to find a parking spot that would fit the vehicle and the trailer, which was usually about six blocks away from the club. My guitar cabinet has two broken wheels now, and I believe I rightfully trace their demise back to those shows and the many long commutes from trailer to venue. Incidentally, every show was on either a cold or rainy night.

On one such evening, while pushing my cabinet through throngs of local scenester/hipsters in the pouring rain over a sidewalk that seemed to resist my actions with the strength of the entire city behind it, I crossed the street directly in front of a turning taxi. It missed me, literally, by inches; luckily, the cab passed behind and not in front of me, so my cabinet was already out of the way. Either way, it was one of those moments you walk away from saying, “I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive” before berating yourself for not being aware enough and for almost dying a pitiful and painful death at the blame of your own stupidity. I was distracted by the task at hand. The show might turn out well. Look at all the kids everywhere. They’re out, even though it’s rainy. They must be going to the show.

They weren’t. From what I remember, that show wasn’t much of a success, but it’s hard to tell because all the shows we played during that run have melded into a somewhat vague memory, as if they all happened on a single dreary and soaked night. It is also easy to tell, because none of them were really successful at all—but then again there are many gauges for success, and the one I’m alluding to here, popularity, isn’t something we were or are heavily into. Upon the opaque pond of those shows, however, some images float: the rain and cold, of course; a restaurant through which we had to carefully navigate with hands and arms full of equipment, interrupting everyone’s good time and general feeling of comfort and relaxation; the great beers and hilarious conversations we had together after load-in; a dark staircase, whose walls were lined with countless photocopied fliers, all entirely filled with bands I’d never heard of nor would ever, lit by a single blue lightbulb hanging by a string at the top; a hasty, frowning door guy at the bottom of those stairs telling us that we are late, that we brought too much equipment and that there is no room for our merch; a moody, half-sloshed, and irreverent sound guy also telling us that we brought too much equipment and that things would really run a lot smoother if we used their drum set (weak and in disrepair) and their guitar amps (30-watt solid state combo), which was followed by our utter refusal of his suggestion and our explanation of what we went through to get the equipment there and how much it meant to our sound, and after that his response of a worse mood, further irreverence, and complete drunkenness; playing with bands that have more of a physical resemblance to us than a musical one—we were all human, after all—Jamiroquai comes to mind; the nearly empty rooms we played in; the very small amount we were paid; the very high levels of enjoyment and excitement we experienced nonetheless.

Apart from this mush of ten or twelve shows that were all very alike, one remains quite clear, and I do believe it was our final showcase in Manhattan. If I could label our music then as ‘not terrible’, I must also include that it was decidedly not marketable, despite whatever we may have thought at the time. However, we had a manager—our friend Alex from Self Decay—who was starting to become closely involved with the record industry in New York. He was responsible for getting us these shows, I suppose with the distant hope that some A&R person would show up at one of them and like us. At this particular show—I think it was at the Lion’s Den—Alex had arranged for a few industry people to come see us, including a well-established and well-known booking agent who had heard our music and was very fond of it, and some other people from reputable labels that put out releases near our aesthetic. This was quite exciting for us then, and as we packed our equipment into the trailer that day, we were childlike and giddy. As we pulled out of the driveway, we laughed and joked with each other and discussed how pumped we were for the show, now just hours away. It was our night. Our chance to finally prove ourselves and to get somewhere with our music was here.

We were about twenty miles down the Thruway when the van started slowing under the weight of the trailer. There was a rest stop just ahead, and since we couldn’t get the van above 30mph, we pulled in. There we were, hopeless, stuck, with our chance at making music our careers at stake. For thirty seconds or so, we sighed forlorn sighs as our eagerness leaked out of us;

now to the moment at hand;

Jay, after a moment of resignation, swings the door open, slides out with a bit of a leap, slams it shut. He walks across the lot to the sidewalk and starts pacing. He pulls his phone out of his jacket pocket, presses buttons, puts it to his ear. He continues to pace, talking quickly, listening, talking. The phone comes down again—he presses more buttons, still pacing fervently. Passers-by visibly avoid the mad pacing lunatic. He talks again, rapidly, in a voice that is nearly audible to us from the van. He puts the phone back into his pocket and continues pacing, pacing, without a glance in our direction. He yanks out the phone again and talks, listens, hangs up. He approaches the van with a hint of a grin peeking through the determination stamped on his face.

Our friend Bones was coming with All Out War’s van. Although we were going to be late, we would make it after all. Nothing could stop us; fate would bring us there.
It was a bright and warm early summer evening, so we stood around outside making each other laugh by trading absurd and primarily offensive alterations of famous people’s names, and after about 45 minutes, Bones arrived with the van. We transplanted our gear and personal belongings and left. We were proud of our stubbornness, our indefatigable collective will; we would not flounder; we would persevere through any setback. Alex assured us on the phone that the people he expected had already arrived and eagerly awaited our performance. We were set to go on at 9 o’clock. It was 8:30 and we had about an hour’s drive ahead of us. Though we’d be a little late, there would still be time to play. Things were looking up.

We hit very little traffic. We’d become pretty well experienced in navigating the trek and we knew the efficient routes by instinct. By the time we’d reached Manhattan, the setting sun had been covered over by dark disorganized clouds and a drizzle formed, seemingly from the air in front of us. One street away. A quick load-in and we were on.

Not quite. We pulled up and saw Alex on a bench outside the club talking with a large man who had a goatee and seemed to have his feet unusually well planted on the ground beneath the bench. We drove ourselves parallel to their bench, at the same time trying to quickly eye down a convenient place to park. We looked over to them, probably with our excitement visibly swimming in our collective eyeballs. He shook his head. It was the bad kind—not up and down but from side to side. We stopped looking, pulled over, and put on our flashers.

“You guys can’t play. It’s too late.”

We already held certain opinions about the staff at this club, but this topped it. We didn’t bother parking. With our heads out of the windows, we talked to him for a bit and met his friend who we found out was a booking agent for national acts and was very disappointed that he didn’t get to see us. To him, a band missing a show must surely have meant its inevitable death. He was a booking agent, for chris’sake. And if he’d decided he liked us enough to book us, this is how we would repay him? Forty minutes late, two hours late for load-in. He’d already wasted the night coming out. A couple people from labels were there earlier, but Alex told us they had left after the club decided we weren’t playing. We said our goodbyes and our nice-to-meet-you’s and our sorry to be the main performers of a non-event’s, and turned the All Out War van around right in front of Alex from Self Decay and his friend.

It was a quiet ride home that night, but each of our heads was reeling. The drizzle was in our minds and on the windshield, but amid the haze of disbelief and disappointment, a reorganization occurred within me. So much was banking on this show; it was the culmination of all the nights of showcases and the only one of them all that would amount to a professional move forward.

As we got off the exit for Poughkeepsie, we slowly roused ourselves from our introspectiveness. I leaned against the bare steel wall of the van, quiet, and as my comrades began to pass jokes around and laugh and talk, I sensed a mild lingering strain of melancholy in their voices, but it was already nearly stamped out and soon it would be complete. Going over the night in my head, I decided it was a success and that none of it really mattered.

We did not rush while unloading our equipment that night. We moved in each part one by one, back to where it belonged, its home, our basement. And as we placed the cabinets into their positions, situated in front of the fungi growing on the walls and atop the platforms where the water couldn’t reach, they seemed to take on an air of relief. This was where the real work of the business of music-making would be done, the only aspect of the ‘music business’ that we cared about. We could be as loud as we wanted, use our own equipment, and create, without anyone else’s opinion of us to impede upon us as we grew, in harmony with the mushrooms on the walls.