Pat Sugrue

Business

2015-08-22T20:34:00.001-05:00

I don’t have the stomach for writing poems anymore.

In the past 8 years,

my total income from poetry is $5.

Adjusted for inflation,

it’s closer to $5.50.

This puts me in an advantageous tax bracket.

I’ve also received numerous contributor’s copies

as payment

from journals that have published my work.

My accountant managed to get these written off

as gifts—the transfer of property

without expecting to receive

something of at least equal value

in return—

and they are tax deductible.

The other day I was charged $35,

an overdraft fee,

and in the morning I went to the bank.

The fee could have been forgiven,

the banker explained,

if it weren’t for your account’s tenureship.

Tenureship here meant

I hadn’t had an account for very long.

I told him, I won’t make $35 dollars for 56 years,

I’m a poet.

But the deduction had already posted,

and, sadly, at that juncture

an override was deemed

impossible.

Impossible.

Some people simply don’t believe in miracles.

A few days later a taxi driver told me

money is always coming and going,

coming and going.

And it is.

He picked me up at the airport

and immediately missed my turn.

My office is less than ten minutes from the airport

and I watched it glide by

as we merged onto

the highway.

I said,

you should have turned back there

and he told me about

Afghani vehicle preference—

how strong engines trump fuel efficiency

over there, because of the mountains.

I said I liked Indian food.

“That tikka masala. What a dish."

I was late for work and

he charged me $50 dollars

on what should have cost $15.

I gave him a $12 tip.

I don’t have the stomach for writing poems anymore.

I can’t afford it.

But every now and again

I find myself doing it anyway.

Opposite Person

2015-01-20T18:51:00.003-06:00

For the past two years I’ve lived in rural Honduras. I have an internet connection. I read the U.S news—too much of it, perhaps. I watch my teams, the Bulls and the Saints. I’m not off the grid, not like my uncle was when he did Peace Corps in Ethiopia in the 60’s. I’ve come back for the holidays, seen family, and besides the odd sensation that I’m driving by rows and rows of hotels, I’ve been saved from culture shock. But there have been these feelings.

The other day a Babe Ruth picture nearly brought me to tears. A far cry from the Yankee Bambino that drank beer between innings and waddled out of the dugout only to hit 410-foot home runs, this picture shows a different Babe. He sits in the stands, a quiet, concerned spectator wearing a three-piece suit. One leg rests over the other and his hands are folded in quiet respect on one knee. The seats directly around Babe are empty. Several rows behind him, a man reads a newspaper. In the next seat is a woman wearing a big, floppy, black hat. She’s laughing at something the man next to her has said. Nearby, a man with a scorecard and a beatific smile puffs on a cigar. It is easy to feel the weather in pictures like this—indeed, to feel the actual day. But it is gone and Babe is squinting over his shoulder. He is perhaps three years past his prime, not invisible, but clearly not bigger than the game. The game—perhaps he is realizing— will go on without him.

Another unexpected feeling grabbed me during an NBA postgame show. There was a white host and a black host. The white guy was a lifetime suburbanite, a college graduate with a degree in communications. The black guy was a retired professional ball player, one who grew up in a rough neighborhood in Chicago; one who made it, who perhaps saw friends and family killed, beaten by police. The topic during the postgame show, however, was basketball. The white guy asked the questions, the black guy answered them. One deferred to the other. They even joked around some. It was soothing. It seemed a nod to history, harmony. Black and white: America’s two hosts.

Then it happened again. I was watching Michael Jordan’s first NBA game online, a winning effort against the Washington Bullets. The video quality was poor, and the commercials had not been edited out. Surprisingly, the commercials were the most interesting part. Alka Seltzer. No matter what shape your stomach is in, when it gets out of shape, take Alka Seltzer. Better than any other antacid. Better than anything you can get without a prescription. Anything. Alka Seltzer. It’s the best. There was something refreshing about the language. It was bold, direct. There was another commercial, this one appearing to have been financed by the Arizona Department of Tourism. When hay fever pollen invades your sinuses, brings runny nose and watery eyes, take Dristan. Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona. Yes. Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona. When pollen causes hay fever misery, don’t wish you could be in sunny, dry Arizona. Just remember: Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona.

It was unequivocal, unashamed solicitation, not yet the post-commercial world where people try and make themselves appear to be everything—anything—but what they are. It was so...American.

Then a familiar face: Ronald McDonald. He wore a cheap, red wig and ran around hugging kids. It was simple, low-budget. Just a man in a suit, selling burgers. You could see the wrinkles under the face paint. He seemed genuinely happy, which was a relief. What scares people about clowns is their humanness, not the makeup— the emotions being concealed, the falsity. These days Ronald is largely absent. If anything he's a cartoon, or sometimes a life-sized, cardboard cutout waving goodbye by the door. Because McDonald's isn't trying to sell me hamburgers anymore; they're trying to sell me a lifestyle in which I would eat hamburgers. The commercials are measured, calculatedly slick and relatable, but always a little off, something like Arnold Friend in “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Babe, Alka-Seltzer, Ronald. What it boiled down to was an unexpected sort of patriotism. Unexpected because I've always disliked authority, always sided with the underdogs, and patriotism has always seemed a far too obvious choice. Plus, in the United States, it seems irrevocably tied to an anti-intellectual, conservative worldview, which is not in line with my upbringing. In the 8th grade I refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because I didn’t, and don’t, believe in God. Mr. Thompson, a bald and humorless math instructor who— for other reasons, I think—hated me, insisted that I read it. I confidently refused and I was happy, actually excited, when he sent me to the office. Surely they would side with me—with the Constitution—and force Mr. Thompson to abide my little rebellion. They did, and only now that I’m a teacher do I understand how truly vexing I must have been for poor Mr. Thompson. Only now that I’ve lived outside the country, where getting a quality education is a privilege and not a right, do I realize that it’s the America that would have told me to “shut up and read the damn Pledge” that I’m beginning to miss.

With all I've said in my life about being a liberal, what have I actually done? Sure I've complained, but I’ve never even voted. I was out of the country for the last presidential election, and out of my home state for the one before that, but surely if I cared I could have cast a ballot absentee. I don't appear to be any more prejudiced than your average person, but I sometimes I wonder: what if I’m much, much more? Perhaps I'm an Opposite Person.

Opposite People have fears that are so overwhelming that they're forced to display the opposite. There are countless models: the ladies man that's afraid of intimacy, the libertarian that's actually uncomfortable with people being free, the hippie: a person who cares so crushingly about what people think of their appearance that they forgo it altogether, and replace it with a sort of form. The greatest of all Opposite People, I think, are patriots: a group of individuals that are almost uniformly dissatisfied with their own countries. They say things like, “I’m damn proud to be an American,” yet don't acknowledge the authority of the federal government. They benefit inordinately from government relief, but often, on ideological grounds, refuse to pay taxes. A small, but outspoken minority of patriots (American and otherwise) consider the current, democratically-elected president a communist. More treasonous statements are uttered by self-defined patriots, I would guess, than any other one group. Why does this happen? Is it the love of something that’s no longer there, something that was never really more than an idea, that turns people screwy? Do we attack outward expressions of what we fear we really are? Perhaps it’s something about balance, the equalizing of some pressure that ensures we never do exactly what it is we want to do.

Maybe it’s wise to embrace the things you’ve spent your life opposing. Temperance prevents us from becoming monsters, but maybe it also prevents us from realizing the small truths that exist on our dark sides. Some people take drugs to experience their opposite sides. I did my fair share of that, but I had to stop. For me, drugs turned out to be just like the commercials. So now, I entertain the possibility that they’re right, all my opposites, and since then, the world has seemed much more sane. Because what if trickle-down economics is actually the best way? Why don’t I pull myself up by my bootstraps? What if we are liberaling ourselves into the ground? Here I am traveling, but why? What else could I be, in the end, but an American?

Did you hear?

2014-10-21T21:19:00.003-05:00

Did you hear?

Today they canceled science and history

and math

and filled the slots with silly time.

It was declared
that serious persons must commit

one gaff

or fall

or laugh

or write the word booger

one-hundred times.

It’s just that sort of day,

ovely,

dovel
lovely is what it is.

Did you see the news?

They found a WWII submarine

off the coast of Carolina.

A relic of a serious time--

but wouldn’t you believe it,

the crew was fine!

They were drunk actually

and the spectacled scientists felt silly
from their tentacled craft
as the submariner and his men
sauntered all over
the ocean floor.

I'm sure you've felt it before.

People always saying

there's something coming;

they feel the slow strings

quickening,
tightening.

But assholes always get it wrong, don't they?

Didn’t you hear?

Today they canceled science and history

and math
and filled the slots with silly time.

Write the word booger one-hundred times

laugh

or make a gaff

or if deep down
you're serious like me

try to fall

in love.

Third World Explanation

2014-09-24T23:27:00.000-05:00

I can only explain the Third World like this: it’s like sleepaway summer camp. You sleep next to a fan. If you get sick, an adult who is not your parent takes you to the doctor. The roads are bumpy and unpaved. The cars are all old pickups that need paint jobs. Conditions alternate between dust and mud. The furniture is old and worn, even in places like insurance agencies or restaurants, and the padding will be popping out of the leather or there will be scratches or little drips of paint on it if it's wood. It's still comfortable, and functional, but it would never fly in the States. Someone would have said, “It’s time we got rid of that thing,” and that would be the end of that. New fuckin’ table. At summer camp everything and everyone looks a little grimy. But you get used to it, so much that when you leave the first thing you notice are the colors. There's such contrast between the white shirts and the red sweaters. Your eyes are adjusting. Then your mom says you need to take a shower before you go out to eat. You realize you're dirty as hell. Most people in the Third World are spared this rude realization because their camp session lasts forever.

We never had packs of wild dogs at summer camp though. One night around 2 a.m. I watched a street battle, a swirl of ribcages and muscle, in the cobblestone intersection below my balcony. I had a great view but I can’t say I enjoyed it much. When it was over, the one pack was charging up the hill, looking like a cavalry regiment after a successful raid, and the other gave a half-spirited pursuit before trickling back down the hill. One of their number, a thin and beautiful creature that looked like a wolf, was sitting like a sphinx in the middle of the road. His back leg stuck out oddly behind it and it from where I stood it looked like a ripped pillow. He made no noise but beat his tail and looked at the other dogs plaintively. They gathered around him and licked his face and whined after they’d smelled the oddly-bent leg. I returned an hour later to smoke a cigarette and the dog was alone and looking alert, listening to the sounds of the empty street. It was a starry clear night and he looked like a castaway. I don’t know what happened to him and I can’t think of a better outcome than not knowing. Maybe it’s the way dogs grin even when they’re hurt or dying that makes their plights such a concern to people. Of course many people don’t care, and anyhow it's not an actual grin.

It's No Joke Being Broke

2014-09-24T23:14:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I came to spend a few days in Tela, a city on the north coast of Honduras, before flying out of nearby San Pedro Sula. I’d paid half of all the money I had for one night in a hotel, and I was getting screwed. I sat in my room covered in sweat with a remote control to a dead TV. The fan wouldn’t spin, wouldn’t oscillate, and my lips were bleeding from eating unripe mangoes. The skin of an unripe mango is full of urushiol, the same kind of oil that makes poison ivy poisonous.

I went to take a shower. The towel was on the rack by the sink and had the words Hotel La Hacienda written on it in black permanent marker. There was no curtain or shower-head, just a tube sticking out of the wall. I turned the nozzle, half expecting no water to come out, and none did. I smelled smoke, a sort of burning plastic smell, and turned to see that the fan was on fire. I’d left it on and the internal gears were grinding themselves away.

In the morning my stomach was rumbling like crazy. I went down to the restaurant, which was on the second floor, to get the free breakfast. It was early and the room was dark and out the large rectangular window on the far side of the room I could see the main square and beyond it the grayish-blue line of the ocean. I felt better. The woman came out and I told her I wanted coffee. She pointed to the food on the counter. There was cereal and oatmeal. I emptied a bag of oatmeal into a plastic bowl and added some hot water. They were decent but not at all the way I remembered them. Halfway through the bowl I saw that I was eating maggots, little larvae squirming in the bowl. I finished the coffee and headed to the beach.

There was a bridge over a small river that emptied into a lagoon. Water from the lagoon flowed across the flat sand and met the onrushing water from the ocean and the currents made fantastic patterns. Palm trees lined the beach in neat rows and every so often there was a large blue garbage can next to one of them. A large ship loomed close to shore. It revved its engine and black smoke came out of it. I thought it was searching for something or practicing staying in one place because it did not leave an area within four bright orange buoys. The beach was empty but I still buried my wallet in the sand before getting in the water. There was nothing in my stomach but coffee and a few maggots. In the water I bobbed like an empty pop can. The ocean felt like forgotten tea.

Fish Girl

2014-09-04T00:15:00.000-05:00

There was a fish on the sidewalk.

“Hey! Hey! I like your sunglasses,” she said.

She was flopping alongside of me.

“You snuck up on me there.”

The sun slid a rainbow up to her pouting lips.

“What’s your name?”

A heave: “Mary.”

Mary was covered in flies.

“Where are you going Mary?”

“This way.”

“Well come on then.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Tennessee. Thirty miles south of Chattanooga.”

“So that’s eastern Tennessee.”

She stopped and looked very impressed.

“Baby,” she said.

I thought I saw a smile, the rainbows around her gills switching poles.

“Well, I live right up here by Morocco Street. Do you know where that is?”

“I do. I’m staying there with some friends.”

“What a coincidence. What are you doing in town?”

“I just got a job at Babes’ Cabaret.”

“So you’re going to be a stripper?”

“I start tomorrow night. You should be my # 1.”

“OK,” I said. “Take me home with you?”

“Sure thing,” she said. “Just pick me up.”

I put my hand around her

and she felt like old sandwich meat.

"Hm, maybe if I..."

Then I caught my finger on a spine.
"Ouch!"

"Sorry."

I tried my hand like a spatula

and one of her scales peeled off into my hand.

She was stuck to the pavement.

I didn’t want to go home with her anymore.

“Just wondering," she asked,
"do you have water or anything at your house?”

I looked down the street for the bus.

“Uhm. What they don’t have a fish bowl where you live? Or at least a cup of water?”

“No, they just say they love me.”

“Well that’s something. Hey, you want some beer?”

I had a half a can of beer

and I tilted it toward the button eye

and the sinewy mouth, which snapped open.

“That was good,” she said. “Hey, wait! Where are you going?”

“Five blocks this way, and two that way.”

“Oh, bye,” she said and waved her fin

sadly like a fan.

I put my hands on my hips
and turned toward the street.

The light was baking the shade,

just beating it up.

I saw legs moving from the bottoms of trellised porches.

The cats were starting to move.

“Good luck Mary,” I said.

Cabbies

2014-09-03T23:55:00.002-05:00

Two white gulls appear from the perfect blue and startle the water. It is 8:00 a.m., the start of a new day. The cab drivers’ voices rise and fall in time. They come to this parking lot every morning. There is a Dunkin Donuts, which opens early, and Value Pricing, an Arab store that sells dates, olives, and tea. On a good day there are twenty of them, with ten drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, watching the sun rise over the canal from foldout chairs around an ornate rug that’s stored in Horiya’s trunk. Four other men sit cross-legged on stools. The older men wear well-ironed gray trousers and pastel shirts that puff nicely near the waist. One has a tweed jacket neatly folded over one knee. They have striking mustaches and black hair that’s combed over dignified patches bare scalp. The others recline in their cars and close their eyes and do not talk except out their windows. They come to see men that look like their grandfathers talk to men that look like their fathers, letting the language drift in the open window...

“He received the...ah... Peace Prize in 1964 to make the world a better place. Then there was 1967, and ah...”

“—Whole new ball game?”

“Right,” the first one says. “Exactly.”

There’s a rumble in the distance that scares away the gulls. (What does Horiya, whose father’s business was destroyed three times by airstrikes, hear in the summer when the sky is dark and booming with rain?)

“I could drive cab for 30 years with no raise,” a young driver says. “Already I speak better English than Jerome, and he is the boss.”

“He speaks black,” another says. “‘Yo Yo.’ Right?”

“It’s an outrage.”

An older man with the folded tweed jacket raises his hand. “Outrage?” he says. “You not realize how bad it could be.” “Look where we are. The air is good. You are not questioned by the guards. You may go anywhere you like. It is a blessing.” His palm is flat, held from a bent elbow, like a frozen snake ready to strike.

“Yes, but we still must work,” – the other old man adds– “very hard.” The last two words carry the full weight of his breath, as if it were too early for them to be spoken, and they remind the men to be a little afraid. Two men roll up Horiya’s rug and carry it to his trunk. They finish their coffee, crush half-smoked cigarettes on the pavement, start their engines and drive away. Then the parking lot is empty. They hear it on their radios. The first plane hits at 8:14. The second at 8:22. If you hadn’t been there an hour before, you’d never know they were there.

Never Write Poems About Dreams

2014-08-31T21:14:00.003-05:00

In college someone told me,

Never write poems about dreams.

It's an excess,

a willful muddling of meaning,

a lack of conviction disguised as attitude.

I can see the logic in this,

but god damn.

I'm not particularly worried

about how I write a fucking poem,

I told the guy,

who was my college professor.

He had a fedora, a witty t-shirt,

thick-rimmed glasses, a mustache,

and he was wearing a scarf in New Orleans.

That's a lack of conviction.

Candidate

2014-07-30T22:04:00.002-05:00

I was at a gas station in Honduras

drinking coffee and reading

when I met the candidate.

There were three employees dressed in bright red vests.

One put the coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

Another fetched sugar packets

and a little red straw.

The last took a pile of napkins from the dispenser

and placed them neatly under the sugar packets.

I knew by his stature,

his perfect mustache, and cowboy hat

that he was someone important;

a wealthy rancher

or a member of the cartel.

He sat next to me and asked where I was from

and I told him, and he said he had family in Waukegan

and I told him what I knew of the place.

He said he'd lived in New Orleans

and then California,

where he’d picked artichokes with Cesar Chavez.

Knew him personally.

I nodded and noticed his face by my right elbow

on a stack of laminated flyers.

Mario Padilla, candidate for congress

running for the newly-formed leftist party, Libre.

Next to Mario is Libre's presidential candidate:

an attractive, dark woman

with thick black eyebrows named Xiomara Castro,

wife to former president Manuel Zelaya

who was ousted in a coup in 2009.

I told him I was a leftist too and then had nothing else to say,

so I motioned to the chaos of the street where the construction

of a four-lane road was underway.

“I heard it’s all for politics,” I said, baiting him. “They want it done by election time.”

“You see that?” he asked,

pointing to a boy sweeping dust from the street. “The poverty. It breaks my heart.”

Maybe a week later I heard an interesting story:

I was told Mario Padilla stole the gas station we'd been sitting in.

More precisely President Zelaya

had seized all the gas station in town

and given them to party supporters, like Mario.

Perhaps it's for good reason that people say

Libre is more of the same.

They had a shot at winning, but that was seven months ago.

In the mean time,

the new road was completed,

the Che Guevara memorial was demolished early on election day,

and Libre lost the election,

though their red flags hang from the tree stumps

and gutters in the poorer neighborhoods

where everyone with nothing to lose

somehow lost again.

The new president is conservative.

He promised: A Soldier on Every Corner

and now with the machine guns

there’s no fear of being robbed of your wallet,

there's just fear,

which is robbery of hope.

What it comes down to in Honduras is security

and that’s the way it is now: secure.

People with money like conservative politicians

because they buttress inequality,

giving you the choice between warm shit

or cold shit,

corruption or martial law,

poverty or crime.

Sooner or later we’ll say enough is enough.

There is hope, I know it,

because inequality is not a natural state;

it takes energy.

Imagine a hand shaking a snow globe

or sand agitated in water.

Gravity takes over

sooner or later.

Trivia

2014-07-23T22:11:00.000-05:00

I found myself playing trivia with a cute girl at the elbow of the bar. We hadn’t signed up to play, so we just called out the answers.

“Which John Steinbeck novel revolves around the characters Lenny and George?”

“Of Mice and Men!” we said.

“Which American novelist wrote the Rabbit tetralogy?”

“John Updike!” we cried.

We couldn’t miss. We were getting some good glares from the tables behind us. The host, a man-child who was halfway through his third Dr. Pepper, sat at a foldout table with a microphone and a laptop. He seemed very content and I didn’t see him pull his eyes away from the screen once.

“Who in the 1940s invented the Aqua-Lung?” he asked.

“Jacques Cousteau,” I said, “that one was easy.”

“And Emile Gagnan,” she added. I looked at her. She was wearing a black and white dress with diagonal stripes that turned horizontal below her chest.

The bartender walked over to our corner. “If you two keep calling out the answers you’re going to have to leave.”

“Give me two PBRs.”

“I’m serious, one more time and you’re out.”

“Sure.” I gave him a five and put a dollar on the bar for tip. The host was feverishly scoring the previous round. I turned to my teammate.

“I was under the impression that it was just Cousteau.”

“They were co-inventors: Cousteau was the rockstar, Gagnan was the engineer.”

“I didn’t think anybody spent more time on Wikipedia than me, except maybe the host.”

“Well that’s depressing.”

“I like it. What’s your name?”

“It’s a normal name,” she said, “It’s not interesting. What about yours?”

“My last name looks French, but it’s not. People say it’s difficult to pronounce.”

“I’m jealous.”

“You shouldn’t be. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind your name.”

She nodded, but seemed doubtful. The bartender brought the beers and I handed one to my teammate. She looked at me. She had big, dark eyes.

“Is there an interesting story behind your last name?” she asked.

“I’ve heard two. The first, which I heard from my uncles as a child, is kind of mysterious and romantic, but it hasn’t been substantiated by the internet. They said it meant People of the snow. I wish it were true. People of the snow. Isn’t that nice? The second story is that it’s a Gaelic translation of the Germanic name Siegfried, which means Victory. You know like the Nazis, ‘Seig Heil!’”

“My first name is Spanish for pillar.”

“Like a pole?”

“Like a support beam.”

I didn’t hear the next question of the next round, but apparently she did.

“Cheese!” she yelled, and there were some groans from the tables behind us. The host put his Dr. Pepper down loudly on the table. The bartender stood up from taking an order down the bar and pointed at us. “That’s it you two, out!”

We walked out to the street and I saw lights above the houses. It looked like a stadium, but I guessed that it was a port on the river. We were close to the river, but you couldn’t see the lights during the day and you wouldn’t know.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“With some friends on the couch. You?”

“With my mom, but just for now.”

I took a step forward and brought my lips to hers, accidentally imagining her mother: a woman with the same face, hair, and dress, but with more makeup, black stockings, and a larger bust. I pulled back.

“You know,” I said, “you’re the best trivia player I’ve ever met.”

“I’m an insignificant-information specialist.”

I asked her what she wanted to do, and she took me by the hand and led me down a street where quaint little houses and banana trees stood over a sidewalk made of brick. There was a bike with thin tires and a large seat locked to a stop sign. She unlocked it and I told her to straddle the front tire and walk and then jump up on the handlebars when I started pedaling. I took care to avoid the parked cars. It was damp and dark and brisk with her good-smelling hair in my face. The world of drunk bicycling is a wonderful world. It has to be at least as good as drunk driving, and it’s probably better, because there is less guilt and less danger of anyone but yourself getting killed.

We rode our strange vehicle for two blocks, and then the pedaling became incrementally more difficult. The back wheel was under-inflated. I told her to hop off when I hit the brakes, and she pushed off and her legs cleared the front wheel. We walked onto a street with a boulevard and large houses with wide, deserted porches. There was a heightened perception and an intimacy and measuredness to time that we’d not felt on the bike. The streetlights illuminated the lower branches of huge oak trees and on the ground the moist-looking roots pushed the sidewalks up from the ground.

We found a dark place along the side of a house and we kissed and I turned her around and pulled up the back of her black and white dress. I liked what I saw, maybe as much as I’d ever liked anything else, but there was also an unexpected feeling of familiarity, a sudden sense that I was participating in some ubiquitous and ultimately banal enterprise. Of course, this did not stop me and I was glad to find that once again we were of the same mind. I probed her every centimeter, exploring with my hands, growing more depraved with every passing moment, as she ducked, spun, and fluttered, letting me know her body in segments, engaging with pieces rather than the whole. What we were doing was more like watching professional sports than making love and it took great focus and encouragement to achieve anything substantial, but I finally did.

I walked home and forgot about her that night. I don’t know when I first started thinking about her again, but a week later I was back for trivia night sitting at the elbow of the bar. I couldn’t remember her face, so I sat and listened for someone calling out the answers. There was a pretty girl next to me. We looked at each other, but she didn't have anything to say and neither did I. It went like that all night, these looks. Finally I leaned over. “Your name means pillar in Spanish," I said. "Pillar, like a pole.”

“Like a support beam.”

She looked at me, smiling very large, and I remembered her eyes. She was more dark and wonderful looking than anything I'd expected to see that night.

“There are two stories about your name,” she said. “One your uncles told you. It’s mysterious and romantic and it’s the one you’d like to believe, but the other story is true."

I was in love.

"Do you want a drink?"

"No."

"Me either."

“Then let’s go."

She was the best teammate I ever had and we never played trivia again.

I Get Lucky

2014-07-19T21:37:00.001-05:00

We were listening to jazz on the patio of a bar in New Orleans.

It was a cool night and the band was passing around a solo.

The light was dim and everywhere there was a feeling of wellness

being edified by drinks. 

My girl said she had to go to the bathroom

and when she'd stood up

and went

the guy at the next table

leaned over to me and said,

“Mmm mm Mm! I wouldn’t mind going home with that every night!"

He had cut-off jean shorts and insane blue eyes

that I followed across the patio

to a thin and beautiful woman holding her purse

winding through the tables

in a silky green dress:

my girl. 

I leaned back in my seat

and remembered how it was to be driven mad

by the sight of women--

not love at first sight,

which implies a sort of serendipity,

but the indiscriminate sexual craving

that is like hunger

and has nothing at all to do with chance. 

Looking at him,

I felt no fire.  

I’d hit the jackpot

and forgotten how it was to be alone,

forgotten the old way,

forgotten my people,

perhaps even become arrogant,

which is the greatest sin.

If he was loneliness come back to visit me

I owed him something more nuanced

than knocking his teeth out.

Anyways, it was only a matter of time

before I was back on his team. 

“Sometimes I get lucky,” I offered and he nodded,

but he was thinking “Bullshit,”

and I thought he was probably right. 

I listened to the music

and thought of how to explain this.

The drummer had begun his solo.

He stretched it out, improvising.

Across from me, the empty metal chair

rattled from the bass.

And just when it seemed like noise,

he stopped.

I’ve never been much of a gambler.

More often than not

I put up more than I can afford to lose.

I never turn down a bet, especially when I’m hurting,

and I don’t care about the odds.

If that’s luck, then I’m lucky,

but I don’t think that’s it.

It’s recklessness,

and if you’re true to it

you better learn to enjoy the payouts.

So I bought us two drinks I couldn’t really afford

and made his a double.

Robbing a Priest

2014-07-06T16:37:00.005-05:00

The only thing Pablo could see were a pair of outstretched hands.

-Tell him to turn slowly, Concho said.

-He speaks Spanish.

-Turn.

The priest’s black garb rose and spread and fell and he turned. The lights of San Esteban were behind him and to Pablo he looked like a part of a starry sky with no stars. Concho motioned toward the priest with his lips, like a kiss in the air, and Pablo put the pistol into the waistline of his shorts. It had been tucked away there for hours while they waited, but now, in returning it, it felt very heavy and cold against his skin.

-Empty your pockets.

-Don’t turn around, Concho added.

-I don’t have much money, the priest said in English.

-Put what you have on the ground. Then walk to San Esteban.

-What did he say?

-You understand English, the priest said to Pablo. That’s good.

Concho took a step forward.

-What did he say?

Concho’s angular nose and feminine lips pointed at the back of the priest as he addressed him in a gentle voice.

-I am not as young as my friend, Father. Tell me what do you say to my friend?

The priest did not answer and Concho allowed the shotgun stock to fall from his shoulder into his hand.

-He was praying, Pablo said quickly. That we might not hurt him.
Concho nodded.

-Take thee home, Father.

Then the priest was down the hill and onto the road, passing through the shimmering leaves of the Munoz family banana plantation. Pablo did the math; in five minutes he would pass under the light of the farmacia. In ten minutes he would turn and begin the hill to San Esteban. In fifteen minutes he would walk past Pablo’s front door. He might look at it, or even knock on the door for help, but he would not see his house. Not in the way he should.

-What does Mayachusett mean? Concho asked. He was sifting through the wallet.

-It’s the name of a state.

-Yames Pahtreek Carney? Concho laughed. What does that mean?

-His name. Let me see?

-Maybe I could sell it for something.

-It’s not a visa. It doesn’t do anything.

-Then you keep it.

Pablo handed Concho the pistol.

-I’m going home.

They walked down the road. At the farmacia Concho pulled a bill out of the wallet and held it up to the light.

-It’s a shame to think we stole from poor people, he said, but at least it was already stolen.

-It was your idea Concho.

-Possibly this is your mom’s lempira. You can return it to her.

He held out the bill. The road was empty and still. The scattered lights on the hills above San Esteban looked like stars or lamps on docked fishing boats.

-Oh, let up.

-Forget it. She’d only give it back to him. We’d have to keep it in a safe place. It wants to go back, but we mustn't let it.

-You’re crazy.

-Sure. So you should keep it. Or give it to your sister—no, I’ll give it to your sister.

-She’d ask you where you got it.

-I’ll say your mother gave it to me.

Pablo started into the tracks of the priest.

-See you later, Concho.

-Already?

-Because my mother and sister are waiting for me.

Concho mumbled something that Pablo did not hear. Then he called out.

-Pablo!

-What? What is it?

-Feliz año nuevo.

-Happy new year, Concho.

-Let’s split the money now.

-Tomorrow.

-Tomorrow then. Go make your resolutions.

Pablo reached the bend in the road and when he looked back toward Concho, he was under the light shaking his head and looking at his hands. Pablo let his eyes adjust and saw that he was really just counting the money, passing the bills from one hand to the other. Concho looked up, saw Pablo was watching, then turned and walked down the road to the orphanage.

The Chess Ghost

2014-06-10T23:31:00.000-05:00

I was out on the balcony, teaching a ghost to play chess.

It began with a spiel,

just a general idea of the game,

and he interrupted me.

“I get it,” the ghost said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. No problem.”

He chose white and went first.

In five moves I had him in checkmate.

“Where’d you learn chess?” I asked.

“Where? From you.”

“No, no. You already knew how to move the pieces. I barely told you a thing.”

“I’ve been watching you play.”

“Me? When? I hardly ever play.”

“Your whole life.”

“No, every game?”

“Every game.”

“Get out of here.”

“You learned from a book with pictures. You read it in the bathtub.”

That was true. So, I had a chess ghost.

He looked around.

The downstairs neighbor’s kid was playing in the sandbox in the yard.

“Well, what can I do for you?” I asked him.

“Nothing really. I don’t have anything else to do.”

We decided to keep playing without the king,

and I finished him for real;

every straggling, struggling pawn,

one after another

with my queen and bishop,

until he had one piece left:

a solitary white horseman, a knight

in the corner.

The ghost looked over the board.

“And this,” I said, dragging the queen, “is checkmate.”

“Wait, what about here?” he said.

“No,” I said, pointing. “Check.”

“Here?”

I could see through his arm, which was nice.

“The queen,” I said.

"Fuck." He stood suddenly, as if he’d just remembered

that he’d left something cooking on the stove.

The little girl down in the yard was looking up at us,

her pudgy hands curled into fists at her sides.

“Whowuh awe youw talkin’ towuh?” she asked.

"Let's keep playing," I said.

“I want two moves every turn,” the ghost said.

I said OK

and whooped him five more times.

Then he said, “Let’s play without the pieces.”

He said he had a side full of knights.

I used only castles,

16 of them.

I barreled down like a wall.

Must have beaten him ten more times.

He seemed especially depressed for a ghost.

“What’s my record?" I asked. “I always wanted to know.”

“16 wins, 0 losses.”

"Not today. You know, all time.”

“Oh. Ghosts don’t have a special skill for remembering things," he said.

“Well, that’s probably why you suck at chess," I said.

He put his head down, but didn’t disappear, as I expected him to,

and I didn’t disappear.

The little horses didn’t start hopping around.

Then he said, “Let’s play without the board.”

I said, “Well, what the hell are you waiting for? Your move.”

Then he disappeared.

Opposite People: A Cure for American Psychosis

2014-05-25T16:03:00.001-05:00

Recently I’ve been feeling patriotic, which is strange. I've always disliked authority, always sided with the underdogs. Patriotism always seemed a far too obvious choice. Plus, in the United States, it seems irrevocably tied to an anti-intellectual, conservative worldview, which is not in line with my upbringing. Maybe I've spent too much time abroad.

The other day a Babe Ruth picture nearly brought me to tears. He’s sitting in the stands. The seats directly around him are empty and he’s dressed in a three-piece suit. A far cry from the Yankees Bambino that drank beer between innings and waddled out of the dugout only to hit 410 foot home runs, here is a quiet, concerned spectator. One leg rests over the other and his hands are folded in quiet respect on his knee. It's a picture of vulnerability: someone trying to witness and understand what bought him the seats he's sitting in, and the clothes, and the solitude. He looks so embarrassed you feel he really must love the game.

The same feeling grabbed me during an NBA post-game show. The white communications major deferring to the black analyst, the former player, the former food-stamp beneficiary. There was such ease in the exchange. Tell me your story, he seemed to say. It was a nod to history. Harmony. Two hosts.

Then it struck me again, this time as I watched the commercials during a Bulls game from 1986, Michael Jordan's rookie year.

Alka Seltzer. No matter what shape your stomach is in, when it gets out of shape, take Alka Seltzer. Better than any other antacid. Better than anything you can get without a prescription. Anything. Alka Seltzer. It’s the best.

And then a commercial which appeared to have been financed by the Arizona Department of Tourism.

When hay fever pollen invades your sinuses, brings runny nose and watery eyes, take Dristan. Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona. Yes. Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona. When pollen causes hay fever misery, don’t wish you could be in sunny, dry Arizona. Just remember: Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona.

There was something refreshing about the language. It was bold, direct, not yet the post-commercial world where people try and make themselves appear to be everything, anything, but what they are. It was unequivocal, unashamed. It was so...American.

Even the McDonald's commercial was fascinating. Ronald McDonald wore a cheap red wig and ran around hugging kids. You could see the wrinkles under the face paint. It was just a man in a suit, selling burgers. He seemed genuinely happy to do it, which was a relief. What scares people about clowns is their humanness, not the makeup. The emotions being concealed. The falsity.

Because McDonald's isn't trying to sell me hamburgers anymore. They're trying to sell me a lifestyle in which I would eat hamburgers. Ronald is largely absent. If anything, he's a cartoon, sometimes a life-sized cardboard cutout waving goodbye in the restaurant by the door, pushed one more dimension toward abstraction. "Bye!"

I felt like I was beginning to see America for the first time, and I loved it. Were my true colors starting to show? Had I been living a lie? With all I've said in my life about being a liberal, what have I actually done? Sure I've complained, but I didn't vote for Obama, either time. I don't appear to be any more prejudiced than your average person, but I really may be much, much more. Maybe I'm an Opposite Person.

Opposite People have fears that are so overwhelming that they're forced to display the opposite. There are countless models: the ladies man that's afraid of intimacy, the libertarian that's actually uncomfortable with people being free, the hippie, a person who cares so crushingly about what people think of their appearance, they forgo it altogether, and replace it with a form. And of course, there's patriotic people, a group almost uniformly dissatisfied with their respective countries. They say things like, “I’m damn proud to be an American,” yet don't acknowledge the authority of the federal government. They benefit inordinately from government relief, but often, on ideological grounds, refuse to pay taxes. How does this happen? Is it the love of something that’s no longer there, something that never really was more than an idea, that turns people screwy? Why do we attack outward expressions of what we fear we are? It must be something about balance, equalizing some pressure to ensure we never do exactly what it is we want to do.

I've decided it's best, even for a moment, to embrace those things you have spent your life opposing. Basic self denial prevents us from becoming monsters, but maybe it also prevents us from realizing the small truths that exist on our dark sides. Performed too vigorously, self denial will turn you into an Opposite Person.

Some people take drugs to see the other side and I did my fair share of that, but for me, drugs turned out to be just like the commercials. So now I entertain the possibility that they’re right, all my opposites, and the world seems much more sane. What if trickle-down economics is actually the best way? Why don't I pull myself up by my bootstraps? I find myself traveling, but why? What else could I be, in the end, but American?

IDs

2014-05-24T02:11:00.003-05:00

Spring

The DMV is like an electric church. The windows are some sort of black plastic that is reflective from the outside. Everyone is faced in the same direction. Heads twitching and twittering in the pews. Or maybe it's like a hospital: Everyone is missing something. Everyone gets a number. Everyone is waiting for their number to be called.

There is a system that’s visible to customers, though they can’t make any sense of it. A red scoreboard displays the counter and customer numbers and a voice, not a human voice, but a computer generated noise that sounds female, reduces these numbers to a vague, tentative concept. Almost a question.

Now serving customer: Zero. Zero. Nine. At counter: Nine. Teen.

The number nine floats out and away without seeming to end. Nineteen is not a buoyant little iamb, bum BUM, but two separate, emotionless noises. Nine. Teen. Like a church bell: BUM BUM. No inflection, no terminus.

Jones thought a lot about numbers. He said they were holes where the light of God shines through.

Summer

DMVs, like airports, are places where diverse groups of people wait together after being questioned about their identities.

Now serving customer: Two. Six. Nine. At counter: Nine. Teen.

A man, appearing as if he’s just clawed out of a mudslide, walks toward the counter with a briefcase trembling in one hand.

This is Joseph Makowski.

Joseph is skeletal, cranial, very frail. He needs a replacement drivers license to see an eye doctor. He has no passport and no Social Security card. His family was emotionally distant and had ties to the Communist Party.

Looks like he was dressed by his mother for a class picture.

“How can I help you,” Todd asks.

Todd had a bow-cut. It made for the remainder of his body a mushroom-shaped pillar of shade that distilled his other boyish qualities: bushy eyebrows, uncorrupted blue eyes, and a thin mouth that instantly betrayed anything he felt or thought. He wore solid, primary-colored dress shirts with large, milky-white buttons made of plastic. They were uncomplicated, an extension of the face. When he asked: “How can I help you?” he wanted to know the answer. He was upset when people had wasted their time; when they lacked a document to get what they needed. Proof of birth. Proof of death.

“I need to see the doctor. An eye doctor,” Joseph said. He’d tried to get a new license, but he couldn’t pass the eye test.

“If it’s just to see a doctor, you can get a state ID. Do you drive?”

“I’ve driven for forty years.”

Todd noted the vision restriction on his previous license, 1F: side mirrors.

“You’ll need to produce a piece of mail with your name on it and a Type 1 document: a passport, social security card, or a copy of your birth certificate.

“But I was born in Pittsburgh.”

“You can order a copy online.”

Joseph looked at Todd in bewilderment.

“Online?”

“Yes, online. It’s all electronic now.”

Like that, customer number: Two. Six. Nine. lowered his head and walked toward the black windows and out the black door.

Now serving customer: Zero. Zero. Two. At counter: Nine. Teen.

“How can I help you?”

Fall

In the fall, all the employees at the Glenbrook DMV are beset with definite ideas. Like Colombina who hides chicken feet between stacks of paper around her desk. And Evans the cashier who refuses to water the plants on his desk. There is nothing that makes it seem like they are not ex-cons. No sharp objects. Balding and losing his lower lip, Jones, a veteran in HR, was finally fired for wearing a Hawaiian shirt every day and lying about it.

“This isn’t a Hawaiian shirt,” he would say.

Jones had worked next to Todd for three years and usually confided in him that the office was hot. When they moved Todd from HR to reception Jones would walk to Todd’s desk covered in sweat and say, “Buddy, it’s hot in here.” The temperature is kept at a chilled and uncompromising 68.9. One could not say that 68 degrees is inhumane, but after being deprived of Todd’s enthusiastic listening skills, Jones had developed the habit of mimicking people.

One brisk fall day, Bob called Jones into his office. Bob was the boss. Bob came from a family with ample wealth. His choices had naturally carried him from minor successes to greater ones and lent to his character an aura of fatalism—the sort that did not provoke jealousy, but the faux feeling of prophecy one enjoys in re-watching a favorite movie. He was shy with women and feared that people did not trust him with their children. He had that skin disease that makes people white and black and splotchy at the same time. During the fall he looked yellow.

Jones sat down.

“Jones, I think you’re dangerous,” Bob said.

Jones leaned back in his seat and was quiet a long time. He put an open palm on the desk and made a little turkey out of sweat.

“Mr. Bob, I honestly think you’re dangerous,” he replied.

Bob looked through the blinds. “You’re fired.”

“But it’s Friday.”

“Sorry pal.”

It was Tuesday.

Winter

Todd enjoyed, most of all, the 16 year old kids coming with their parents to get drivers licenses. He also liked the near-universal smiles people wore after seeing the new pictures on their IDs. He didn’t have any definite ideas. That’s why Jones liked him.

He was not skeptical and had no sense of irony. He was good at his job. He had complete belief in people’s constructed versions of themselves and provided the solemness and respect their imagined authorities seemed to demand. It was Todd’s innocence that drove him toward older employees. They found encouragement in a young person that was also confused and embarrassed by the perplexities of modern life.

Todd ate lunch with Columbina and Radnitzer in the empty lunchroom. Most employees took lunch at one of the 15 or 20 restaurants that lined the busy road outside. Columbina, a first-generation Mexican immigrant, worked nights in an open-air market. She took whatever was going to be thrown away from the market and hid it in her desk. Sometimes there were half rotten pumpkins. There were always chicken feet. Feet are full of tendons. They make great soup. Radnitzer, a bespeckled raisin of a woman that outdated Bob, his predecessor, and the DMV regulation against decorating office spaces with personal items.

Todd provided Radnitzer and Columbina with a less-painful window from which to view the horrifying nature of the present world. They enjoyed watching Todd eat his healthy bagged lunches.

A typical lunch went like this:

“They only want hamburgers,” Columbina would say. “Hamburgers all day.”

“You can get three double hamburgers and a medium drink for four dollars from the dollar menu, but the meal costs five. It’s like an oversight,” Todd would say.

Columbina would smile. “He’s a bad boy! He tricks McDonald.”

“Four hamburgers?” Radnitzer would say, astonished. “You don’t buy four hamburgers do you?”

“No, but you can.”

“He eats four hamburgers,” Columbina would say, smiling and shaking her head. She was like an aunt with no children. She was enamored with benign naughtiness. It made her feel like she understood what it was to be a parent.

“I don’t! Yuck!” Todd would say.

Columbina would continue. “He eats the four hamburgers with his friends,” she would say.

“I certainly hope not,” Radnitzer would say. But there was no way for her to know. “If Charlie knew it was going to be like this for me he would have taken care of himself.”

Her affection came a heavy dose of despair. Then Columbina’s voice would change.

“Mr. Rad died just for the hamburgers,” she would say.

And Mrs. Radnitzer would say: “Please be careful.”

And Todd would say: “I promise I will.”

All lunches ended with a dramatic mood swing: Columbina’s playfulness replaced by a quieted awe at the depth of North Americans’ struggles and Todd doing anything to cheer Radnitzer up. He did not like to see such an old, lonely woman feeling depressed.

Usually he promised something. One thing he’d promised many times was that he would stop talking to Jones.

Then on a Tuesday that fall Jones had been fired and replaced by Rick.

Spring

An upright 28 year old of Irish stock with black hair and a thin face, Rick groomed himself and wore bright, expensive clothing. It didn’t come off as contrived. He understood that good people wanted good things to come to others.

Rick liked to be happy, so he was. It was not linear in that way for Rick, but it was that way.He was of the most obvious elite: a willful attractive person with muted emotions. He did not judge people who lived darker, more nuanced lives. They simply confused him.

Evans and Jericho were the youngest people in the office after Todd. Short of talking to him, they found his presence a relief. Evans was a cashier that wanted to be a writer, like Tom Clancy. Jericho took ID pictures. He wanted to move to New York and occupy a vague, high-paying position on Wall Street. As long as Todd was there, they both felt like they still had time.

Then Rick showed up. He carried himself the way they imagined they would carry themselves if they hadn’t worked in the DMV. He was what they imagined themselves being in ten years.

The day he’d arrived, Jericho and Evans gravitated toward each other. Jericho found Evans’ neurotic sarcasm reassuring. Evans was on a roll.

He was talking to Jericho about the various depths of the Great Lakes when Todd and Rick approached his desk. “There’s a lake in Siberia that’s over 5,000 feet deep,” Evans was saying. “Superior doesn’t even crack the top 30.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Todd said, bowing with deep respect. “This is Mr. Surestaat.”

Jericho stood confidently behind Evans, looking bemused.

“Call me Rick,” Rick said. “I’m new in human resources.”

“You are human resources!” Todd cried, incorrectly repeating something Jones had often said: “I am human. Resources.”

Rick pointed at the plants behind Evans.

“Are those your plants?”

Evans half turned. The plants were dead. The pots were full of dead leaves.

Jericho blushed, feeling that he may have backed the wrong horse. He edged away from Evans, a slight but meaningful lean, like Judas in Michelangelo's Last Supper.

Two months earlier, Evans had realized that the DMV lacked a sense of hope and life. He decided to bring in plants to put around his desk. He would downplay it, pretending it was an easy, obvious thing to do. It would illustrate to his coworkers that it was them, in fact, that were not enjoying their lives. It would say: There’s a problem here. Now it’s yours.

He’d walked in the front doors with three plants, detached, hovering over himself, imagining the office around him: Todd enthusiastically nodding his head, Bob twitching in his office, eyes inches from the blinds, performing a professional reappraisa, and Gabriella, the spectacularly blonde Italian, was leaning over, asking Radnitzer “Who is that?” in a hushed voice. And Radnitzer was saying: “Name of Evans. An old fashioned type. Like my husband’s Navy portrait on the mantle. Quiet. With a man like that a woman doesn’t have to worry about being taken care of.”

Reaching his desk, barely able to keep himself from shouting something moronic to begin the orgy of recognition, he’d set the plants down as carelessly as he could manage and leapt into what he imagined looked like work, capitalizing on the spotlight he imagined was now focused squarely on him.

But it was not that way. He had underestimated people, in general.

His coworkers would not follow his example. Out of spite they resisted the urge to forge a close and lasting relationship with him. What was the saying? “The first reaction to all revolutionary ideas is fear.”

Weeks passed. He’s searched their faces, feeling his own existence, drooping, becoming yellow. Soon the plants had become a painful reminder, like bleeding gums, of a failure he could not bring himself to acknowledge. Watering the plants would surely signal some weakness on his part. If dead was the way they liked it, dead was what they were going to get.

Now here was Rick, whose sharp dress and easy smile served as another unwelcome reminder. Evans studied his face. Rick should just go back to the future, he decided. Maybe they would be friends later.

“That one looks like it was a rubber tree plant,” Rick said cheerfully.

Evans nodded.

“Why don’t you water them?”

“I’m seeing how they respond to adversity.”

“There’s no way we can know what that means,” Todd quickly reasurred Rick. “Evans and Jericho are artists.”

Evans swiveled pensively in his chair as Rick walked away. He watched the material on Rick’s suit fold and unfold like an accordion. The pinstripes intersecting. Brought together for a moment before being pulled back apart.

Rick’s replacement arrived in March.

Summer

His name was Wayne.

Wayne was an HR specialist from the downtown department who was dodging a debt collector named Joseph Freewater who’d been hired by the Riverboat casino to find him. Wayne had requested a transfer to the Glenbrook department. Rick heard the news and headed downtown.

Wayne was a gambler.

For March Madness Wayne started an office pool. He pooled all the money. For the first time at the DMV employees were talking to each other over the tops of their cubicles. It was a lot of fun. Bob watched from his office. Wayne made him fill out a bracket. Todd filled out a bracket too.

Mrs. Radnitzer commented that Carnegie Mellon won the NCAA National Championship when her husband was a student there, although in those days it had just been Carnegie University. Mellon was a women’s college at that time.

He was always thinking up ideas for office pools. He thought of other matters, the lower-order concerns like eating and bathing that all humans must entertain in order to tolerate the privilege of consciousness, only in short respites.

He talked about gambling all the time—even on first dates. “You can even smoke inside the Indian casinos,” he would say.

Wayne never learned any of their names. In October he looked at Todd for the first time.

“You don’t wear glasses,” Wayne said to Todd.

“No, do you?”

Wayne’s face fogged over and his eyes dribbled out the window. “I’m hungry,” he said.

People worried about Wayne.

Fall

One day, a man in a grey dress wearing a grey wig and red-tinted aviator sunglasses arrived and sat in the waiting area. The wigged man tried whispering something to Todd on the way out, but he was being handcuffed and Todd couldn’t hear him.

Todd knew it was Jones, but he played along, not sure of what would happen next.

As the police lowered Jones into the police cruiser, a gust of wind blew the front door open. A bird landed in the entryway and Jones shouted something out the cruiser window. There was the rattle of cartwheeling leaves.

Todd saw these things all at once. His bowl-cut went vertical and he screamed, "Fall has a welcome sensation!”

The bird cocked its head.

Bob was watching from his office window, hoping the winged little creature wouldn’t get stuck in the office. It was hopping along the open doorway in the curious manner animals of flight sometimes reject their unique gift. Then door was slowly pulled shut by the opposite end of the same force that blew it open. Todd screamed and lowered his head darkly as the bird careened away on a 45-degree angle. He felt he'd just lost something precious and vital, but couldn't figure out what it was.

Then the moment snapped shut. Bob closed the blinds. Columbina reshuffled some papers over her chicken's feet.

It was winter again.

Winter

It was almost November when Columbina walked in on Wayne bathing in the women’s bathroom. He suggested to her that Grand Cahokia was better than Pottawatomie and put a handful of soap in his pubic hair. Bob didn't fire him, but by December he was invisible; in January pencils on his desk sat like trees in snow.

Then it was spring.

Why I Love Mountains: Part III

2014-05-11T17:13:00.002-05:00

a mountain has an anatomy.

there is the neck, where the low-hanging clouds that bring the rain pass into the stunted trees. then the rain rushes down for the bottom, leeching into the soil before getting there. then mist that comes up from the ground blows between the trees.

there is the belly, where rocks that have fallen and been broken are collected and cleaned on the banks of the river in the valley, and higher up they are round and unbroken and covered in moss. still higher, where there is the humidity, the game trails skirt along the river, over the bent necks of plants, and through the packed dirt, sometimes crossing a long, flat section of rock where the tracks of the animals are dried by the sun until the next rain washes them away.

the heart of the mountain is nearly indistinguishable from the gut. the heart is where you get the feeling you came for, where you feel a communion with, and where you see the traces of everything that is hiding from you. usually it's by the river, or when suddenly the weather changes and the whole forest moves. the idea is to stop and find what's escaping you, but most people assume the sensation will grow the higher they go, and they keep going up.

the machinations of the mind can lead a person nearly anywhere, and anywhere is very far from the true desire of the heart.

every mountain has a highest point, and this, to take the metaphor to its natural extent, is the head. as you approach the head, the very earth narrows beneath your feet, depriving you of the opportunity for missteps. the world tapers until the margin between success and failure is as narrow as a single step. it is an overwhelming place. it is a human place. i have often found a feeling of emptiness atop a mountain, because it is not what i really wanted it to be.

there is the view, but with the view comes the knowledge of still more beautiful places left to climb, many of them very distant, and all of them, for the moment, unreachable. it is only the mind that could turn a success into the evidence for a new-found failure, but it does.

like the hands gathered around the planchette of a Ouija board, we tend to become unwitting participants in the ambitions of others. we trample past the places we really want to be, settling for the mean of our inclinations. sacrificing freedom for inertia, adventure for equanimity; someone whose lure is more mysterious for something that's easier to explain.

Migration

2014-05-09T22:37:00.000-05:00

I hate dull metals too much

for making children.

Seems absurd in winter

to think about children.

The snow melts.

It looks like fall to you. In the little pictures I send

I’m creaking away from this house,

towards you and toothlessness,

following stray dogs like a bear

that can’t stay or shake.

They look at me like I’m crazy

and wonder if I’m coming back.

If I arrive,

will you be kind?

And tell me what your mouth has been doing

so far from my ear.

Moonscapes

2014-05-07T22:08:00.002-05:00

But, I mean, I am enchanted by you

And in no full way am I planning on

Having any dreams tonight.

I know mathematically speaking I'll live

Until 2064. Long,

Enough to see the civil rights movement begin.

World war two will be over, Korea too (just wait for ho chi

minh, kids)

I'll tell my children to doubt me;

Calling a woman a flower is to

Say she isn't yours, and never was.

That's true.

I'll tell them to watch how I acted before they were born,

And to tell their mother too, that

All I did

Was make faces at the moon

And note how different people have pronounced my name.

Two Muhammads

2014-03-29T21:26:00.002-05:00

Do you know the saying: “No matter where you go, there you are.” If you tend to think too much, like I do from time to time, it’s not a good saying. I realize that it’s a matter of choice. One of the glass-half-empty or glass-half-full variety. To some it is a simple matter of geography: you are where you are. These are the people who sleep well at night who are not often thought of by other people during the night.

I believe that you are free to think of the world in any way you like, to the extent which your cultural and economic biases and subjective emotional responses to objective truths confine your ability to choose anything at all. After all, it’s a free country.

The world used to be big enough that you could find a place where what you wanted to do was acceptable. You want to maybe marry a 12 year old? You go to a place where it’s not only legal, but, in our sense of the word, correct. You want to watch 14 year old boys swallow semen? Sure thing. Go to Kunar province in Afghanistan and have a ball, guilt free.

It’s the Kunar-style bar mitzvah! Every burgeoning man imbibes that which ensures the continued existence of humanity. For that we go to doctors who give us medicine, but no matter. It is to live. To pass on virility. It may be hard to accept, but it’s not intrinsically wrong. Like debased currency and so many other things that are not wrong if enough people buy in.

So we have Muhammad in two places at the same time. A headline from the Kunar Gazette: "Muhammad passes into adulthood." And one from Township Times (Saginaw, MI) "Sexual Abuse Under Taliban Described as 'Institutionalized.'"

In the United States, Muhammad develops emotional problems. He struggles to achieve intimacy. His psychologist says its because he feels like people are taking advantage of him, but is reassured that these are only the ghosts in his head. He never has a wife or a child and he dies alone in Saginaw, Michigan. A lifetime gas station attendant.

Meanwhile, back in Kunar, Muhammad marries a first cousin, builds a home, and lives to have three children. The two sons are blown apart by a hellfire missile fired from a $14,000,000 dollar helicopter after being paid $5 each to drop a mortar into a tube. There is still the daughter. Prayer beads. Life is strange and Muhammad lives to see some unexpected things.

For instance, the Americans dig a well next to his home. It affords him hours and hours of time previously spent climbing up and down the ridge to the river. He lives to see his childhood home, where his uncle now lives, support goats. A dry, unforgiving slope turned green. His daughter marries an elder’s son. Then, while he is pumping clean, drinkable water from the American-dug well, he sees his wife, his uncle, his two cousins, his daughter’s new husband, the in-laws, and his daughter swept forever from the earth as a $27,000 laser-guided Mark 82 General Purpose Bomb falls through the roof of the home and detonates. Unexpected, like a handful of flour tossed into the wind. Poof.

As compensation for the error the Americans send a U.S. Army grief counselor with $10,000 in crisp, freshly printed bills and a letter of condolence from the president of the United States.

The grief counselor is from Saginaw, MI. His name is Dick. Dick asks Muhammad, through an interpreter, if he is an elder. The man with no family says no. Dick asks if he ever performed oral sex on an elder. "No!" the man says and looks in outrage at the translator, who is about the age his youngest son would be and indeed looks like him in the eyes. His son then utters the Pashto word for the male rite of passage and the man with no family says, “Yes, I am a man, but now that your mother and sister are gone I have nothing to show for it."

Dick hands the translator a canteen and directs him to the well. “Give us a minute,” he says. Dick doesn’t speak Pashto. Stands there. The translator returns to report that there is no water. Dick frowns, supposing habits of a thousand years are tough to break. But why let a well go dry? All it requires is a few pumps a day. Dick takes his canteen off his hip and hands it to the weeping man. “There you are."

Muhammad holds his hand in front of him after the canteen has fallen, reaching for something. The slopes turning brown. He sees the faces of his sons. The water dividing into tiny rivers in the ground between his feet.

Poetry

2014-03-23T21:01:00.001-05:00

I don’t get it!

It's supposed to be difficult.

It’s stupid!

A good poem will come just short of resisting your intelligence.

FUCK I DON'T GET IT

Keep reading.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Read it until you understand.

How will I know that I understand?

The same way you know when sex has finished.

What?

It's obvious to you, isn't it. But you can’t explain it to me, can you?

Not without being vulgar.

That's why some people write poetry.

Few people who understand poetry write it.

The majority of poetry writers are would-be poets,
who ask themselves: What is a poem?

And the answer is: Something that doesn't quite make sense.

So then they write something that doesn't quite make sense,

and the result is a lot of bad poems masquerading as good poems.

The difference is equivalent to that

between the feeling produced by internet porn

and the felt reality of human love.
Those unfamiliar with the latter

should steer clear of the former.

If you’re interested in understanding poetry,

pick a poem by a universally acclaimed poet

study it until you feel insane

and don't ever, ever give it up.

Focus, patience, and attention to detail

will make every poem laid before you seem beautiful.

Focus, patience, and attention to detail are what the poem asks for,

and unless you’re a selfish prick, you won’t feel satisfied until you’ve matched the effort of the poet.

But don't take my word for it.

People who need to be assured that they have a purpose

lead purposeless lives.

People who need to be told that there is a point to it all

rarely find a point in it all.

Because that's something you have to do yourself.

Most people don't know that the end of a poem

only occasionally comes

in the last line

of the last stanza,
and often it comes too soon.

Most people don't know how to end poems like these,

but I do.

The Voice

2014-03-23T02:29:00.001-05:00

I had always wanted to write pretty poems

and one day they showed up.

They made no sense.

Soon they were being published.

But it wasn’t really me writing them;

A little voice in my head

would

come along

and do them for me.

The only problem was that I had to wait.

Sometimes it took weeks.

Eventually I started writing them myself.

They don't get published.

I don't submit them.
They're not exactly pretty,
but neither are you.

It’s been two months

and I'm getting better every day

at ending good things

abruptly.

Why I Love Mountains: Part II

2014-03-22T20:17:00.001-05:00

In walking the hills around Juticalpa I have found it difficult to make myself climb over or under barbed wire fences. This is not for fear of getting hurt; the fences are short, the wire is loose, and one could easily break the posts in half. My city education has taught me that trespassing, particularly through barbed wire, is a way to be legally shot and killed. I realize now that the barbed wire is for animals, not people, but naturally, my sense of danger has translated to Honduras where the murder rate is famously high.

So, with this apprehension in mind, I walk down the bending roads toward the mountains and approached houses. To see if the land is private. To see if it is OK. Invariably, I am told that the land is not private and invariably I am told that it is OK. Me standing out front, soon the whole family is there. The little boys and girls with fingers hooked in their mouths. A grandparent hunched behind the screen window like a stuffed falcon.

Then, someone, a son or daughter says "Pass. That you go well. Straight ahead." But why is there barbed wire if the land has no owner? And how can you give me permission if you do not own the land? And if I ask them anything at all, I ask them their names. Names are like flags.

The dogs snap at me again, then I climb those fuckers and come back down covered in shit they didn't even know they owned.

One time I aimed for a solitary palm tree atop a ridge and was delighted when I found a trail break off from the barbed wire, lead up to a windy landing, and continue into the middle of a line of lush, leafy, rustling bushes that lay in the shade of the palm tree. Stepping first around a large snake hole and then into the clear air of the top, I stood in the temporary darkness of the palm tree where, no more than four feet away, a white pony jerked its head from the deep green grass and bolted across a hidden saddle, then froze, like in a film, at the base of a grassy peak that rose from where I was to a point of perfection.

That's Why I Live in a Car

2014-03-15T18:40:00.002-05:00

Being single is like subjecting your heart to the disorienting sensation that’s common when you are sitting in a car and the adjacent car begins to drive away. At first you think you are the one rolling away so you hit the brakes and then panic and look at a thousand things at once before you realize you had it right the first time. The sickening ripple of equilibrium returns you from the accident you thought you were in, but weren’t, to where you already were.

Eventually you start the car, put it into drive, and take off like an idiot. You stop at a gas station and talk to a homeless man for an hour. His puffy jacket reminds you of going to Sears with your mother to buy winter jackets when you were a kid, and the guilt of losing them. Mom checking the tags to see if they are down or not. Those were low times.

“Hell!” the homeless man says. “You’re just like me!” and you look at him, and look around, and yell out: “fill it up!” but it’s not that type of gas station. You’re walking toward the car.

“How come none of my children ask me to live with them?” he calls after you. A flash of lightning above. You get in the car and close the door. Starts raining. You settle back, noticing the gas tank is full. Smile as the muffled voice comes through the door, remembering your favorite part of childhood camping trips was being in the tent in the rain. The safe feeling of--

“Ahhhhh! ya!” SMACK!

It’s the homeless man. Smashing his cave head against the window.

SMACK! again. The suction-cup mouth. The tongue trying to find a way out, maybe to find the teeth. “AHHHHHHHHHHHH! Where are you going!?”

“Get the fuck off my car!”

“Ahhhhhhhhh ya!”

SMACK!

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh ya!”

SMACK!

“Ahh! Ow! Ohh. Wow. Haha.”

“Serves you right!”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh. ohhhh. Oooooo. Ok.”

Then he rears the head back, seeming, for whatever reason, triumphant.

“Ahhhhhh...”

“Hey!” you yell.

“…..ahhhhhh!”

“Hey!”

But it’s too late. He swings his solitary brain toward the glass, putting his hand out for the retractable side mirror, which retracts, and he falls, letting out a retroactive: “Ya!” He rises with a squeegee, no worse for wear, wiping the rain and blood from the window. He looks inside. Looking for a change. His face an ocean. You look into it, and at it, but..and he sees the change, and lunges for the door, which is locked, and he drops the squeegee and you drive away.

It’s fucked up. Some people have nobody.

So you drive onto a main street with lights and bars. An attractive woman is standing on the corner. You’re an OK guy so she opens the door and sits beside you and instead of telling you where to go she says thanks for the ride. And instead of asking her her name you drive without aim and pretend the car or the rain will go on forever.

“Hey,” she says, looking out the window, “is that blood?”

You look over your shoulder.

“No.”

“Well it looks like blood.”

You think, “Now what does that add to the conversation?” and then she says, “So! What do you want to do?” and you slow the car and ask, “Why do you care? Didn’t you just want to get out of the rain?”

Having been in love, you forget to tell yourself the little lies that make people want to have casual sex with you.

So then you’re parked again. Same spot. If only you could go back. That’s another thing that you forgot when you were in love: the importance of location. Single people always worried about locations. Why is that? You have nothing to do and you get finicky about time? Worried about wasting it I suppose. That’s a waste. Worrying. I'm single again and I'm loving it. That’s why I live in a car.

The Game

2014-03-07T18:51:00.005-06:00

I had a dream about you and I
We were playing a game.

I was walking ahead of you

on a Main Street on a long hill

that always curved to the left,
so one could not see around the corners.
The goal was for us to meet.

Like most dreams

this one was full of illogical rules

and they were followed to illogical ends.
I could stop, or turn into a store
on the left side of the street,

but I could not turn back.
You were behind me somewhere,
but I couldn't see very far
because of the curve in the street,
and I didn't know if we’d agreed

that you could stop

or turn around.

This made me anxious.

All I could do was continue living my life

and hope you were still playing the game.

Of course when I woke up I realized
this wasn't much of a life,

nor much of a game.

I rolled out of bed for a cigarette
and sat on the balcony.
I picked up my journal
to write something down
and realized I could have left notes
for you to find on the street.
I could have told you where to meet me,
and slept there without fear of missing you walk by.
I could have encouraged you to find me,
told you I loved you,
and if it was too long,
I could have told you
I quit.

Of course, I'd never know
if you'd read what I'd written.
But it's tough to play

with someone you've hurt.

Good Company

2014-01-25T23:53:00.001-06:00

Charles Bukowski

at seventeen i was a Marxist and an idiot.

i read the Beat generation because

everywhere i looked were rules

and the only alternatives I’d seen

were hobos.

then i found the literary misfits

the bad boys

burroughs kerouac whoever

they got it right

and they got right to it

for better or worse

usually worse,

like me

they had no patience

and didn’t love themselves.

reading them is a bit like drinking tasteless beer.

there’s no reason for it.

besides that it’s cheap

and once you’ve gone through two or three

there’s no reason to stop;

two or three just leave you tired.

so you burn through it all,

like the author

and come to the end of a living body

of work

unsatisfied.

so i took a chance

and tried my luck with a different crowd.

i started with Joyce

only to see what i was up against

then went to Baldwin because he reminded me of my mother

and finally settled on Hemingway, the father

i never had, who showed me

that great feat, the novel, could be done.

it became clear that the writers i'd sat around with

the poets

the bad boys

breaking silly little rules

were just like teenagers

who never stopped wearing silly shit.

they wanted desperately to do what the masters did

but never had the patience or bravery

to see if they had the gift.

i feel sorry for them,

but not too much.

sure, sometimes

i worry that i'm drifting to the right,

i'm drifting to the right.

so what?

i wonder how much farther i'll go.

anyway, i'm not afraid of living

any more.

because i met Bukowski.

thank god for Bukowski.

crude dirty old Bukowski.

i met him at the wrong time

and found him sort of juvenile.

i pictured Hemingway saying,

“Just capitalize the letters, Hank. If you have something to say, say it.”

and someone else, who never, God bless them, ever

wrote nearly as much as Bukowski saying,

“Acknowledging the authority of the oppressor in order to subvert their authority

is itself an act of subservience.”

which is

very good

horseshit.

Bukowski was unkempt

and like my old friends he broke the rules.

he began all his sentences with lower-cased letters.

but, what’s different about Bukowski, and what matters,

is that he wrote one hundred poems a night for fifty years

on a typewriter

perhaps if an ordinary man is to accomplish anything

he must cut corners.

so you feel like crying when an amateur mexican boxer goes down.

and you feel like murder when management changes the odds

at the last second of the 8th race

at the Santa Anita racetrack.

feel like cheering when the gamblers climb the gates

and management directs the jockeys to start the race

and a small moan comes from the crowd

as the men

who have nothing but their bodies

lay themselves down on the track

and glance over their shoulders

as the jockeys kick the horses into a gallop

and plunge the animals into them.

for once all the bodies are touching.

there is an exhale

then it's over.

writing thousands of poems

dozens of books

burning like oil

eighty years

whoring

and

gambling

and

pumping the iron.

Bukowski showed up.

if Hemingway’s metaphysic was the bullfight.

Bukowski’s was the horserace.

there were one hundred bad ones for every good one.

and every good one came at the price of ninety nine.

but unlike bullfights or horse races

you never see Bukowski’s bad poems.

after his death they published three books of his poetry

and they’re all good.

one is called

"girl in a mini-skirt reading the bible outside my window."

you can imagine what it's about,

but you'd be wrong.

another is called "art."

here it is:

as the

spirit

wanes

the

form

appears.

Bukowski was cheap

but he wasn’t tasteless.

sit with him.

fifty years at a typewriter

is as good company

as wine.