First Proof: Issue 108, Summer 2009

Bomb’s Literary Supplement

FIRST PROOF

lou reed

Untitled, 2008, digital print, 16 Ă— 24 inches. All images courtesy of the artist and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.

lou reed

Untitled, 2008, digital print, 16 Ă— 24 inches.

contents

Frederic Tuten Fiction for Driving across America: The Bar on Tompkins Square Park 4

Tara Goedjen Wayward Sleep

8

12

Hildebrand Pam Dick Wandermoment

Colum Mccann This Is the House that Horse Built 14

Raphael Rubinstein Five poems from Dead Troubadours 20

Alan Gilbert Two Poems: Coolant System & Not Or But And 22

24

Adam Simon and Matthew Sharpe Seconds

on the cover: Lou Reed, Untitled, 2008, digital print, 16 Ă— 24 inches.

2

This issue of First Proof is funded in part by the Bertha and Isaac Lieberman Foundation and the Thanksgiving Fund.

Additional funding is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, and readers like you.

lou reed

Untitled, 2008, digital print, 16 Ă— 24 inches.

3

Frederic Tuten

Fiction for Driving across America Frederic Tuten The Bar on Tompkins Square Park for Eric Fischl Download and listen to a podcast of Frederic Tuten reading this story on BOMBsite.com.

“Let’s not stay much longer,” she said.

“Bored already? We just got here.”

“It’s tired here. It was tired from the minute we walked in.”

“You chose the place, didn’t you?”

“Sure, but that doesn’t make it any less tired, does it?”

She had straight brunette hair with a few flecks of gray. She had the jade green eyes of an Aztec tiger. She had white skin and full lips, red without lipstick. She had a creamy neck. She had narrow shoulders. I liked these and other of her features but that is not why I loved her.

“Okay, let’s leave then,” I said.

“Well, let me finish my drink, at least!”

I thought it best to say nothing for a while. She sipped her highball stuffed with fresh mint and ice. A summer drink, incongruous with the present season. She wore a thin yellow wool sweater with short sleeves.

I could feel the cold on her naked arms.

A blind man in his early thirties put change in an old jukebox then returned to his seat at the bar. He did not use his cane or his dog to find his way to and fro the bar, so you would hardly know he was sightless were it not for the round coal-black 4

glasses framing his very pale face or for the dog with his harness beside him on the stool.

“How are you, Harry?” I asked.

His dog picked up his ears and glanced my way, blinking. He often answered to his master’s name, though his moniker was Augustus.

“Not bad, Louie. Just sailing with the days,” the blind man said looking my way.

“Fair winds, then, Harry,” I said turning to her, who was gently pressing her glass against her cheek.

“Toothache again?” I asked her.

“Toothache for love, toothache for that root canal you promised me for my last birthday.”

“It’s considered unethical for a dentist to drill his lover—unless he bills her,” I said.

“Bill away, Bill. And please order my drink in the meanwhile.”

I motioned to the barman, whom I could see was not wanting to be bothered with work, filling in, as he was, little boxes with words in a newspaper he had spread across the bar.

Finally, I made a polite wave.

“What’s your desire, Marie?” He addressed her with a full smile of yellow teeth.

“The usual,” she said, “is my desire.”

And presently he filled a quarter of a water glass with amber stuff, poured out from a bottle with her name inked on the label.

“What about you, Louie?” he asked, with the weariness of a man who had woken that morning to find his life had taken a walk without him.

“Another Java, maybe in a glass this time.”

“Someone was asking about your paintings last week,” he said, giving a nod to a seascape of mine on the wall. Sailboats caught in a squall, masts heeling seaward, the sky pewter, the sun frightened.

“Asking what?”

“The same as always.”

“Did you remember to mention that I might be flexible about the price?”

“No. I said they were not for sale and that he could not afford them if they were.”

“Perfect.”

The blind man walked to the piano in the rear and began tickling the ivories, which soon got giddy with melody. Augustus remained by the stool, coolly guarding his master’s seat.

A blue horse walked into the bar and asked

for a beer, but since he was a known deadbeat and a flagrant non-tipper, the bartender pretended not to notice him and slid over to the opposite end of the bar, where, stashed in a white vase, a bouquet of sixteen white roses drooped, having seen better days weeks ago.

Snow began to press lightly against the window—a snow of bloody feathers torn from pigeons murdered in flight by the local hawks. But soon more snow fell, this time the glacial kind, forged by all manner of precipitation and atmospheric changes.

Flat gray sky, white snow flakes in a whirl describing the letter M. I ordered my third coffee, in a cup this time.

A couple walked into the bar. She wore a tight red dress and red pumps. Her hair was red, so, too, her expensive Italian leather handbag, made in Brazil. He was just a flat guy, you could hardly see him when he turned sideways. Otherwise, it is useless to describe him because you would forget what he looks like the instant you finished the sentence describing him. At least I would. He had voice of a rasp being tickled by straw. And in that voice he ordered a ginger ale with a water backer. She ordered the same but in reverse.

“Why couldn’t you just say you’d have the same?” He glanced at me to let me know he was irritated with her. As if to say, women from the time of Mother Eve to Madame Curie are irritating. They stir up trouble in gardens and ballparks, radiate grief and disorder in restaurants and bars. I did not return him a concurring look because to some degree I like trouble and grief and disorder organized by women. Intelligent women.

Witty women. Sexy women. Women who wear hats with half-veils at cocktail parties. Women who walk as if stalking a rose.

Women who, when you are about to take a long walk off a short pier, might say, “May I tag along?” Women: Marie.

“The order in which drinks appear is important to me,” the red woman said. “I like the water set down before the G. A.” “The G. A.?”

“You say B and B, so what’s the diff?”

He saw her point and backed down. I would have done the same, back down at her argument. I have always wanted to be reasonable.

The clock struck three. Then moved on to chew up another hour. To chew off another bit of my life. Chew up all the life about us, the hawks of Avenue B, the elm trees in the park, the worn oak wood of the bar, the

Frederic Tuten horse with his two missing front teeth, the woman in the red dress with half her finger poked in a glass of water, the man with the raspy voice nervously searching for some item in his left jacket-breast pocket. His anxiety infected me and made me search my pocket to be reassured that my little box of pills were still there—which they were.

The horse swung his mane impatiently. A few of us at the bar wished he would leave because he was always taking up too much air and space, even in a wide Monday afternoon. And always being glum and sending out currents of gloominess. But, for the moment, I felt sorry for the sorry nag and I said, “Send him a beer—float over a bucket, in fact; I’m buying.”

I was high on cash, but I could have put the bill on my tab. My tab was good anywhere, even in the Bronx, where the sky was very small, except on Sunday family dinners ages ago when I was a boy and my uncle Unberto magically plucked dimes from my ear. What made me think of that now? The Bronx and the dead. My dead piled up there in Woodlawn waiting for me.

The barman made a few polite swipes of his towel and settled a bucket before the horse.

Eddie, for that was the jade’s name, made a little bow my way before dunking his head in the bucket of suds.

Then Marie said sweetly: “Do you think we could go to the movies this evening?”

“And your husband?”

“I’m sure he’d join us if you asked.”

“He didn’t the last time.”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t want to go this time.”

“Right you are, why didn’t I think of that?”

We were just going through an old routine. She had no husband and she hated the movies. I like them all, from the Three Stooges to Last Year at Marienbad, especially the movies in which all the actors in it are dead. Ghosts on the screen, saying the same lines and doing the same deeds for eternity. A kind of afterlife which we the living share with them.

It comes at you quickly. One morning you wake up and find a hard lump in your throat, or you get a stunning headache that no aspirin can alleviate, or in a routine physical exam they find spots on your pancreas or insoluble fiber meshed in your lungs or cancer swimming in your blood, singing in your liver. One morning you wake to a death sentence without any hope of reprieve or pardon from the governor. And from that 5

morning on you are already dead in an ocean of the living. Platitudes, but nonetheless true.

The flat man came over, a little shy, a little cautious, a little smiling, a little stooped over in deference. Looking only at me, he said: “Pardon me for bothering you.”

“Don’t bother me, then you wouldn’t have to be pardoned,” I wanted to say, for the joke of it, but of course I didn’t say that.

“No bother,” I said affably. What does it cost, affability?

“My girlfriend wanted me to ask if your lady friend is an actress she thinks she recognizes from the movies.”

“Very likely,” I said. “Marie is a great star of the Bulgarian cinema.”

“Bulgaria. Where the Bulgars live,” Marie joined in, affecting a French accent.

“She’ll be happy to know she was right,” the flat man said, backing away to deliver the news.

I motioned to the barman, who reluctantly left behind the scratch sheet he had some while ago traded for the crossword puzzle.

“Send them over a round or two of whatever they’re having.”

“On your tab?” He wasn’t pressing me, just wanted to get the billing straight. He was one of the few left who did not care that much about money but cared about the form of things.

“No,” I said, “it’s cash today, and I’ll settle my account before we leave.”

I liked the manly fullness of saying the words, “I’ll settle my account.” I would have liked to have had the occasions to have said it more often and with such variations as “let’s settle our accounts,” or “let’s call it quits.”

“Who you betting on, Lorenzo?” I asked, with polite curiosity.

“On some losing nag or another,” he said with a little sigh.

The blue horse picked up his ears, flared his nostrils, made huffing noises. “We are not nags,” he said with equine dignity.

“And we do not enjoy talk about or reference to glue factories in our presence, should you ever have the mind of bringing up those dreadful places in immediate conversation.”

“I apologize, sincerely,” Lorenzo said.

“Please accept another bucket or two with my best wishes.”

The horse gave a nod and a little lift of his foreleg. “Okay. All’s Jake with us, all’s level,

L,” he said.

Augustus came by and gave me and Marie quite a sniffing. He always had favored Marie and took an extra whiff of her shoes, finding some world of interest there. Maybe it was some traces of Kublai Kahn’s pulverized bones that had drifted over the steppes, over oceans and deserts and amber time that he had smelled or maybe it was the dried urine of a man who, caught short of home one winter night, of necessity peed against a tree, an elm of great age and bearing, like the one in Tompkins Square Park diagonally facing my apartment window.

“Lorenzo,” I said, “Can you find Augustus a chunk of baloney in the fridge?”

“He doesn’t appreciate baloney,” Harry called out, giving the keys a rest. “But I do.”

“Fix Harry a sandwich, would you please, L,” I said, tiring of calling him by his full name and following Eddie’s earlier abbreviation. “On me, of course.”

The red woman came over to thank me for her drink. But she had her eyes on Marie.

“I’ve never seen a Bulgarian film, so that’s probably not where I’ve seen her.”

Time chewing up Augustus, too. Ticking away at his bones, at his dreams. Why is it I wondered, that there are speaking horses but no speaking dogs? And what kind of dreams did he have, that Augustus, a seeing-eye dog, responsible, always on duty, careful, cautious, bound to his blind man for life? Did Augustus ever dream of adventures where he ran wild, without leash, in streets and in parks with others of his kind?

“You should try seeing one the next time there’s a Bulgarian film festival. Bulgarian cinema is great and noble and generally under-lit, but to stunning effect.”

She smiled, graciously I thought, or graciously enough to make me feel foolish for having persisted in this lame joke.

“What would you like to hear?” Harry asked, throwing his voice in my direction.

“Choose something you like, Marie,” I said. “Whatever it is, I know I’ll like it, too.”

“I wish I had a guy like that,” the red woman said, nodding my way, to the flat man in a voice loud and wistful.

“See,” Marie said, “I always told you there’s a woman waiting for you somewhere.”

“Rather unwieldy title for a song, don’t you think?”

The snow was falling heavily in the park.

Perhaps elsewhere as well. The snow was

Frederic Tuten falling in thuds that I could not hear. The snow was covering the benches. The snow was, was white! Also a little purple because of the purple of the dying light. Also a little violet. Purple and violet, yes.

Marie went over to the bar and whispered in Harry’s ear. Harry smiled and spread his fingers percussively over the keys and soon the bar was filled with piano music of romantic distinction. First “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” followed by, as Marie had obviously also requested, “Just Plain Bill,” then concluding with “Louie, Louie.”

Not a dry eye in the house. Even Eddie shed a long tear or two down his great long face. Marie went to the loo to wipe the mascara off her cheeks but before she left she said with the warmest of smiles, “Don’t let that lady in red give you any ideas, Louie.

You belong to me.”

“Day and night,” I said. “Night and day.”

What a good end to the day; what more perfect way to leave it behind. To know that Marie also had a good time with me at the bar meant the world. Before long, I would send her home in a taxi and know she would soon arrive in her cozy flat some place over the Brooklyn Bridge and be there safe from the mounting snow and the bitter cold that bites the empty streets near rivers. I would take a walk through Tompkins Square Park, passing by the children’s slides and swings and find my way to a bench facing the row of brownstones on 10th Street, and look up to my lighted apartment window.

Eddie came over to me and in a very low voice said: “Louie, may I have a word with you alone?”

“Shoot,” I said.

It was a story about a horse he knew, who had told him a story about a horse he knew, a story about a race that was soon to happen.

“Okay,” I said, without too much enthusiasm. I had already heard the one about the horse who needed a cataract operation and was too broke to pay for it. I wished Marie would return soon to rescue me. She didn’t give Eddie the time of day in these philanthropic matters and would gently brush off any of his appeals and schemes.

“This horse I know knows a horse who is going to win at Aqueduct. It is certain.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “I hope you make a bundle on the bet.”

“Not just me, but you, too!”

Then he let me have it: He needed a loan.

The bet was sure sure sure and he’d repay me immediately plus interest. He insisted 6

on the interest.

“The odds?”

“That’s the beauty part. 30 to 1.”

“Does this winner have a name?”

“Lightning.”

“The greased or the plain variety?”

“Look, Louie, it’s a fabulous deal,” Eddie said.

“No question. I even like the odds.” I took the wad from my pocket and peeled off ten one hundreds under the counter.

“This is for you, Eddie.” Then I counted off another grand and said, “This is for me. But if I forget to collect the winnings, give them to Marie.”

Eddie gave me a long, thoughtful sway of his head. Touching in its duration. Then in a low, earnest tone he said: “I’ll be back here tomorrow at five with everything, Louie.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said, and I was.

Marie came back just as Eddie was returning to his place. He gave her a gallant nod. And she returned his salute with an affectionate pat on his shoulder.

“He’s okay,” she said when he left.

“What did he want this time?”

“He came to tell me how beautiful you looked today but he was too shy to tell you himself.”

She smiled. “He’s not bad looking but he could use some grooming.”

“I’m sure he’d glam himself up under the right circumstances.”

“Like you did,” she said, smiling, brushing her fingers over my face.

It was dark now. The snow was blowing about crazily under the streetlights. I knew it was freezing outside. I could feel it even in the quiet, mellow warmth of the bar. I thought it was getting to be time. I thought that even if I could sit there with Marie forever I could not. How could I keep on delaying and delaying?

“Let’s just have something here,” I said.

“I can’t face going out and looking for a place to eat. It’s so cold out there tonight.”

“Good idea,” Marie said. “Just something little, I don’t care.”

“Yes, let’s do that, then I put you in a cab.”

“Are you coming?”

“I’d love to,” I said, “but I can’t tonight.”

“I’m disappointed,” she said, making a disappointed face. Seeing her expression almost made me change my mind—not that it would have mattered.

We ate some heated-over tomato soup and kaiser rolls. A crummy dinner that put us in a down mood. Everyone at the bar

was in a down mood, reluctant to leave, tired of staying. But slowly they drifted out, the blind man and his dog, the flat man with the red woman, Eddie with a thick wool shawl over him that Lorenzo had found in the back room.

And we left too. I kissed Marie as I normally would, not too hard and not too passionately, as I very much would have wanted. I watched the cab stop at a light, the snow piling up the back window, where I thought I had glimpsed Marie waving at me.

Then the cab took off, grinding away down the snowy street until it disappeared into a whirling cloud of whiteness.

Frederic Tuten is the author of the novels The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Tintin in the New World: A Romance; Van Gogh’s Bad Café; and The Green Hour.

His short fiction has appeared in several literary magazines and art catalogues.

He is a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction and has been given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.

Tara Goedjen

Tara Goedjen Wayward Sleep She met him at the train station. She was reading the different clocks on the walls.

Sydney 2:15. Platform A. Stockton 2:23.

Platform B. Her suitcase was in her hand.

She was looking through her pockets for change to buy a ticket.

“What’s doing?” he asked, his lighter flicking open. “Where you headed?”

“To college,” she said.

“Uni? You don’t want to go to uni. I’ve been there. It’s a mosquito farm. Don’t go there.”

“Where would I go, then?” She hadn’t meant to be coy, but there she was—coy.

“With me,” he said. “Not to uni.”

He was tall. Tan from the sun and lean.

From his wrinkles she thought he was probably older.

“I need to go there,” she said. “It’s my study abroad. I’m registered. I already paid.”

“What do you study?”

“Biology.”

He shrugged. “Well, you’ll want a ride at least. I won’t charge, either.” He flicked his spent cigarette. It skipped across the pavement with its cherry burning and the tire of a passing vehicle ran over it and then screeched to a halt. A half-station wagon, half-truck alongside the curb.

“Get in,” he said. “We’ll drop you there.”

She shook her head and looked back at the clocks. Her wallet was stuffed at the bottom of her bag because she’d heard so much about theft.

“Get in,” he said again.

“I don’t know you.” But. “Maybe,” she said.

“Always heard American girls were decisive. No means no?”

She was tired of lugging the suitcase around. Of the heavy backpack that was making her shirt damp. She was hot and thirsty. Jetlagged. She’d been on a plane for sixteen hours. Gotten off and taken a twohour train to the town and sweated on vinyl seats. Now, she had to find the transfer route to the university.

“Say, you seen a kangaroo yet?”

8

“No.” “Cute little buggers. Vicious though.”

The ute was idling and she heard someone yell. “They’ll box you in the ears. Maybe you’ll cut one up in bio class,” he said. “I’m West.” He held out his hand.

“West?”

“The way you went,” he said, dropping his hand at his side. “And that,” he pointed at the driver, “is my cousin Crossy, aka Weeded Up Genius, and that’s Lara.”

He didn’t ask her name, but threw her suitcase into the bed of the ute. She wasn’t sure if she had nodded, or if her silence was interpreted as a yes. She opened the side door. Crossy saluted her, his blond hair slung over his brow. She took a seat next to the girl, Lara, who only stared. Deep-set eyes. Pale like she hadn’t been in the sun in a while. And here the sky so blue. A hard blue, the kind that made her squint when they dropped her off.

The university was exactly as West had warned. A haven for mosquitoes. She got out and scratched at her legs. Pulled her suitcase from the trunk. Overhead a black and white bird cawed from a branch and then dove at her.

“Magpie,” West said out of the window as she covered her head with her backpack.

“Don’t get too close to its nest.” She heard Lara laugh.

“See yous,” Crossy said.

She looked right and crossed the street as the van drove off. Before leaving home, she’d attended a presentation, hosted by the exchange program. She’d sat at the back and hadn’t recognized anyone. A good sign. You’re going to a country with the most poisonous creatures in the world, the speaker said. But you know how most Americans die? They die crossing the street.

Look right first. Right. He tugged at the collar of his Hawaiian-print shirt. A bulky camera dangled from his neck. And one more thing. Don’t look like a tourist.

She looked right. She followed the curving sidewalk to the office. Evatt Hall, the sign said above the door. The guy behind the counter eating Ramen noodles read her name from a book.

“Here you are,” he said. “Flat C, room 2.”

She took the key and found it. Opened the screened door and peered inside. No one was around. A bare kitchen, a TV room.

All of the doors to the bedrooms were closed and locked. She found her own room and lay down on the thin mattress. Tried to sleep and couldn’t, rare for her. Tossed and

turned. Thought of West. Thought of going back home. But where was that, anyway.

She blew dust off the shelves and unpacked half of her suitcase and then sat on the bed.

Somewhere a clock ticked and she waited for her flatmates. For anyone.

She flicked on the TV. The Simpsons and Jerry Springer. One more channel. Law and Order.

She watched for awhile and then left the room. Remembered the conversation she’d had on the plane. The fat man’s arm mounted their shared armrest. New South Wales? he asked. Why you want to go there? You ever been there? An attendant in a blue smock pushed a cart toward them. It’s like the ‘60s all over again. It’s like Birmingham, Alabama, you know what I mean?

Why don’t you tell me, she said. She unwrapped the package of headphones. Their foam earpieces. To let in noise, to shut it out.

Well, take the aboriginals. Back in the ‘30s they’d round them up and shoot them, run them down the valley like animals. Just line them up. Bam! Bam! Bam! She hadn’t expected this. The man’s arm quivered.

Someone would steal the sheep and then someone’d get murdered, then the police would get involved, and you know the police back then were all criminals. It was better for the ones on the coast.

The attendant leaned over her seat.

Chicken or beef.

Beef, the fat man said.

Wine or soda?

The man grabbed red wine and a Coke and took the lid off his tray. Poked his plastic utensils out of their packaging. They’d surf, clay some fish, throw it in the dirt, fry it up, smack it open, bam! Soft in the middle. Better than what we got here.

She bit down on a dehydrated carrot shaving from the side of her plate. Ornamental, hardly for eating.

The government tried to breed them out for good, the fat man said. On the corner of his tray he had a square of apple pie. Devoured it with two plastic forkfuls.

How do you know all of this? She put the earphones on. She thought of words like indigenous and aboriginal. I am indigenous.

My problems are native to myself.

Did some reading, the man said. His face became like gelatin.

She sat up on the bed. Had fallen asleep and not realized it.

Sunlight came through the window and

Tara Goedjen dappled the floor. Led her to the shady sidewalks outside the flat and over the bridge to the train stop.

She rode the eastbound train from the university to the city. The bar was called The Great Northern. On the glass above the door there was a picture of a train with steam shooting from its pipes. She felt that by going in she might be resigning herself to the tracks. An outsider. A sleeping maiden, tied and waiting.

She went in. The din hit her, smoke coiled about her face. West was at a table drinking a pint. Crossy sat across from him, blonde hair curling over the nape of his neck. Skin sunburnt.

“Fuck me dead I was stoned last night,” he said. His voice was louder than everyone’s around him.

“Back from uni, aye?” West was looking at her. “Told you you wouldn’t want to go there.”

“Fed my cat Baileys and milk and he was doing backflips,” Crossy yelled. Maybe he was slightly deaf.

“How’d you get my number?”

West shrugged. “Not many of you checked into Evatt today.”

“Cops, burnouts, maggotness, what a night.” Crossy slid off the bench and stood. Nodded at her. She felt as though he only saw her as a replica of something.

A dead foreign girl stitched and coated in chemicals.

“By ‘you’ he means ‘of the northern hemi,’” he said, and headed toward the bar.

West patted the seat beside him but she drew up a chair instead. “Told you you didn’t want to go to uni,” he said again. “You want to come with me. Up the coast.”

“I’m here to study wildlife. I’ve got classes.”

“All the more reason,” West said.

“We’re animals,” Crossy said. He didn’t smile. Set a mug of dark beer in front of her.

Part of it spilled on the table. The liquid redtinted as it ran across the wood.

“Mixed with raspberry, the way the girls take it,” West said. “What else do you take?”

She shrugged. Drank the beer and remembered the one before that had erased part of her memory. Made her curl in a ball in the bathroom. Made her heart race.

Made her speak in riddles. Don’t ever accept drinks from strangers, the nurse had told her the next day in the hospital.

9

She ran a napkin across the table and the beer left a trail of beads. A damp surface for her elbows to rest upon as she drank. Perhaps she’d feel better if she didn’t consider them strangers.

“No,” West said, “he’s taking the piss on you.”

Lara picked at her nails. “It’s from a worm,” she said, and yawned. Then she looked out the window.

She waited on the curb. At the corner of the parking lot. There was a meanness in the heat. A bright glare that yawned over the windows of the buildings around her. The same glare she saw from the plane when they were landing. The miles and miles of glistening ocean beneath. Waves lit up by the sun and the stretch of shore. Years from now she’d remember the glint. It would stay with her always—a bright pane of glass.

Soon an old van pulled up. Volkswagen make and rusted. Piping exhaust and a ratty mattress in the back that she eyed through the meager attempt at curtains. Surfboards were hitched to the top.

“Oi,” West said.

She opened the door. West was driving and Crossy was in the passenger seat beside him. It was unclear whom Lara, head leaning against the opposite window, was with. If she was with anyone. Lara’s narrowed eyes made it very clear, though, that she was intruding as she climbed in the van.

Crossy turned, holding a video camera.

“Say something with your accent,” he said. “Come on.”

“Hi,” she said. “Let’s go.” She didn’t want the guy from the dorm office to see her. She didn’t know if it was the kind of place that would call her home. Or the exchange program at her university.

“Let’s go,” she said again.

“A woman of many words,” Crossy said.

“Just like Lara.”

Lara didn’t say anything, silent even when Crossy squeezed her knee so hard his knuckles bulged. He released his grip when the van roared to life and soon the roof of the dormitories was lost to the tall white trees.

West pulled a hat on his head and appointed himself tour guide. “Our attractions here include our rainforests. The reef. The outback. The aboriginals.”

“In that order,” Crossy said.

“See those trees?” West asked. “Called stringybark. See how the lighter parts on the trunks look like letters?”

“We used to light a pipe and read them,” Crossy said.

“Really?”

“Come on, little precious,” West said as they climbed a hill. The van sputtering. Choking on its own fumes. Working so hard to move forward that she suddenly felt a kinship with the machine and wanted to cry.

“Come on, girl,” West said. He patted the dashboard. Pointed at the green canopy. The drop-off beyond the edge of the road. “Volcanoes formed that,” he said. The road weaved and curved and he went faster. “That’s why the soil’s so fertile. Good for avocados and macadamias.”

The land was a rich red. The color of a gash. She was reminded of the exchange program’s presentation. The students were divided into two groups. Industrialized and third world. Embrace the culture, they said and handed her a mug of tea. Notice every detail, they said. Try to acquire it as your own.

“Plenty of hot nuts for sale around here,” Crossy said, scratching himself. “It’s time for a feed. Anybody hungry for Maccas?”

“No,” she said.

“The Americans are infiltrating our economy,” Lara said.

“You don’t have economy,” Crossy said.

“You’re always broke.”

“In the outback,” West said, “the post office still pays for dingo hides.”

His pointing finger was long and directive. Soon they reached the inlet at the bottom of the hill and parked. West and Crossy strode through the sand, surfboards at their sides until they plunged into the ocean.

She watched them from a towel. Got up and read the signs stuck into the sand. Ran her hands over the shark pictures etched into the metal like Braille, so even the blind were warned. Whale shark, basking shark.

Oceanic white-tip shark. Dusky, leopard, hammer, great white. The sign listed their prey. They sometimes bite swimmers? she’d asked earlier. They’d just take a nibble, then move on, West said.

Lara lay on a towel a few yards from hers. A radio at her side.

“You want to go in the water for a little?”

No answer.

“Say,” she said. “You want to go in?”

“No,” Lara said. “I can’t be bothered. But

“Come on, little precious,” West said as they climbed a hill. The van sputtering. Choking on its own fumes. Working so hard to move forward that she suddenly felt a kinship with the machine and wanted to cry. if you want to get wet, go get wet.”

Their towels were beside a sand dune.

Trees in the distance. She remembered West’s shtick. Spiders the size of dinner plates in the woods. Their bites would make your urine turn brown. It was the passing of your muscles through your kidneys. Everything dissolved. That’s why it’s called taking a piss, Crossy’d said. She could never tell when he was joking.

She stood and brushed the sand off her legs. Walked until the sand underfoot turned soggy. Until her toes sank. West and Crossy were out past the sandbar. Yards upon yards out. Watching the swell. Straddling their boards and rising over waves that ran their course before crashing white on the sand.

The water was at her ankles. Cold. Then her knees. They waved for her to come deeper. “Oi! Oi, Alabama!”

They’d never asked her name, only where she was from.

A wave crashing on shore made her close her eyes. Salt in her mouth, in her nose. She thought of all the things that could kill her in the water. Take the male platypus. The pair of short spurs attached to his venom gland.

If struck, the pain was strong enough to induce vomiting. Or take, for instance, the blue-ringed octopus. Lethal. No antivenom available. And the box jellyfish? West had said that one sting from its tentacle caused cardiac arrest.

She was submerged halfway. Water lapped at her belly button. Then she was swimming out to them. Was diving under waves that felt as though they’d sweep her legs away. Break her in two. She swallowed water. Choked. Swallowed more water but kept going. Her muscles burned, but she was glad for it. Before she left, her psychologist made promises. Your perception will change. A novel memory will be sharper than an ordinary one. Her breaths sharp now. She finally made it to the boards.

“Thought you were going to spew,” Crossy said. “Hurl like a baby.”

West slid off his board. “You want a go at it?”

“She’ll break your board, mate,” Crossy said. “Crack it on the sand.”

“She won’t break it,” West said. “You won’t break it, aye?” He helped her slide on the board and its rough surface scraped her skin. Years later she’d remember trying 10

to balance. The board beneath her, and beneath the board, the waves. She’d remember scanning the horizon and watching the swell under the clouds. The blue rising to a crest. More threatening than the Gulf at home. She watched and waited for something bigger than herself to take her toward shore.

“It’s all in the timing,” West told her.

Then she felt his hands on her back. He pushed the board, sent her paddling. The force of the water behind her. The rush underneath. Timing.

“Now jump up!” West yelled.

“Fuck all, jump!”

Or maybe it was Crossy yelling. Either way she was swinging her feet up, swinging and almost but not quite there, not enough board for her feet. She teetered, clung to it, rode the wave for half a breath until the board tipped at the peak and then nose-dived. She felt the suck of the water as the wave crashed down. She crashed down with it and was forced under. A riptide. Her eyes were closed and it was like being in a funnel. Her body pulled in myriad directions. Sandy jet streams under her and over her and her mouth and nose and ears filling with water. The human body is 70 percent water. Here and elsewhere. Her lungs burned. Burning, as she tumbled again and again until she cracked her head against coral and went limp. Swept out with the tide.

When she woke she coughed. Spat sand. A mouth of grit.

It was dark out and she heard music coming from a tent nearby. Saw the flicker of a bonfire across the sand. She stood and swooned and then sat again. Lines on her skin from the fold-out chair.

She rubbed her temples and a shadow was at her feet.

“What fucking poor luck,” Crossy said.

The camera was a black circle pointed at her face. “Watching you drown was gold.”

He laughed and pulled at the bra around his chest. Restuffed his balloons as West walked up.

“You had a concussion,” he said. He wore pink bloomers and a wig. His long legs like sticks.

“West revived ya,” Crossy said. “Mouthto-mouth. Any comments?” He was still

pointing the camera at her.

“What are you wearing?” she asked, although she wanted to ask a different question. What? she wanted to ask. What happened? What more had passed during the hours from light to dark?

“It’s a drag comp,” Crossy said. “A wicked party.”

She allowed herself to be led to the tent. What else? she thought again. What else could she do? It was habit. She’d been sleeping too much at home. Hypersomnia.

Depression. She needs to go some place on her own, the doctor told her parents. A change of scenery, he said. She needs to interact more with her environment. Marine biology was a thought. Australia tossed around. Africa would be too hard, her mother insisted. Mexico too dangerous. All this sleeping, the doctor said. Isn’t letting her engage with life. Also, she should eat more protein. And then she was on a plane. Passing through white clouds.

As white as the tent she was under. A huge iron bowl of sangria in the corner. A sound system on a plastic table. An extension cord. People danced to techno music and Billy Joel. Costumed people with painted faces that looked at her own and then away.

“You, woman,” West said. “Drink up.”

He held up a glass and a spoon. Orange peels floated on the surface of the wine.

One bloated body of a mosquito.

“I’m keen as fuck,” Crossy said. He took the glass and batted fake eyelashes.

“I need some air,” she said.

She felt tightness in her lungs. Like she was still underwater, fighting for her breath.

For the first time, fighting. She’s so privileged, her mother had told the doctor. Everything’s been handed to her. Her place inherited at birth. Her whole generation, the doctor had said. Knows nothing of world war, of depression . . .

“I need some air,” she said again. The white tent like a cloud, a coffin liner.

“Then get it already,” West said.

Outside fire twirlers were spinning their batons. Flame tongues licking the air. She saw Lara in the shadows. Her mouth open, maybe in a laugh.

“Hey,” Crossy yelled at a group of people near their cars. “If you see me walking around stoned with the video camera, brake and accelerate at the same time to get my attention.” He lacked grace as a woman.

Tara Goedjen “Clap for me later,” West said. His mouth was close to her ear. “Winner gets a tank of free petrol.”

“Well,” she said. “Nothing’s for free.”

His arms were around her and she heard the waves lapping against the sand. Saw the blackness of the ocean that could swallow her like sleep.

Days blended into nights. She started forgetting things. Perhaps she was falling in and out of sleep again. A casino. A cup full of coins. It was her money they were spending. The money her parents had given her for books, for sightseeing with friends. Then a carnival. The entrance the wide mouth of a clown. Red lipstick, yellow spikes for hair, and blue eyes that matched the sky. A roomful of mirrors and she could not stand to look at herself. She remembered home on the other side of the world where everything was upside down. When you return, the doctor had said, you’ll realize how good you have it. Buy Dramamine for the flight.

Try Wal-Mart. Then she was at a crocodile park. Hundreds of baby lizards sunning on cement as she had sunned over sand. Behind a chain-link fence, a fat man straddled a large crocodile. A cowboy hat for a crown.

The adult croc can outrun a horse. West’s unceasing lessons. West and Crossy unceasing. A terrible sense of smell they got, West said. So if they can’t see, they can’t get ya. Long snout, Crossy said, grabbing her nose and twisting it. Everything he did was forceful. The way he ate meat off a stick. Or meat pies wrapped in a croissant, bought at a stand along the beach. Me, I like lamb, he’d say. Biting down, always biting down.

Cooked to come apart in your mouth. He’d laughed at her salads. At her falafel. Take a predator out of the chain and the whole ecosystem crashes, West said. Maybe, she’d shrugged. You should know that, Miss Bio, he said. She didn’t know anything.

Nights they always managed to find caravans. Sometimes a party, sometimes not.

Still, they’d park bumper to bumper with other wagons, vans. Travelers roaming the coast. Sometimes Australians, sometimes Europeans. Asians. South Americans. We’ve been here for six months about, they’d say in English. Accents that she desired for her own. We work on the farms. Picking fruit most of the time. Then we head out again.

We plan to do the coast in twelve months.

Melbourne to Cairns.

West would pitch a tent or they’d all 11

sleep on the mattress together. In the van or pulling the mattress onto the sand when there wasn’t a chance of rain. During the night Crossy would disappear. Sometimes West. Lara. In the mornings they woke up salted and scratching.

Skin stung by sea lice.

She rubbed her eyes one day and they were on the far northern coast. The outskirts of a city—Cairns.

Dry, bleached air. Red sand. A giant prawn with glowing eyes at a roundabout. A small brown pony being led by an aboriginal along the highway. The man barely visible in the twilight. She stared at him, a ghost.

And this was their homeland first. Perhaps they should’ve thought of home like Crossy and West and her doctor did. In terms of possession.

West slowed as the van passed a large wooden sign with a color spectrum, each level indicating an increase in fire potential.

The needle was pointing to the far right.

Dead center in the red zone.

“Air’s ripe for a fire,” Lara said.

Even as she said it they could smell the trees burning. They saw it when the van rounded a curve. A glassy, carbon-coated lake. The land around it bright with flames.

She felt singed.

“Ignition comes from a flash of lightning,” Lara said.

“Or a tossed cigarette,” said West.

“I know,” she said, as Crossy flicked his out of the window and grinned. She stared outside. Past her reflection in the window to the flames beyond. The smoldering ash.

The smoke, heavy above the tree line. Her nose tingled. Her lungs, tight. Perhaps as the land burned, every place she’d lived before was burning from her body. And then she’d be on her own. Not packaged in cellophane to be traded by her university. My American for your Australian. Your Chinese.

Your German.

That night they parked near a railroad station. They smelled of fire. Of cigarette smoke. Crossy and West disappeared and brought back a box of Chardonnay. A box of Cab. Two boxes of Merlot.

“Bloody hell,” Crossy yelled. “That steal was off the chain!”

West ran back and forth across the tracks. Grass was growing through the rusted rails. They’d drink until they passed out dreaming. Perhaps she’d still be in one piece in the morning.

She was. Lara was standing over her.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Lara asked.

She was still half asleep. “I was wondering the same about you.” She hadn’t meant to be honest. But. “I meant on the mattress,” Lara said.

“What the hell are you doing on my side of the mattress.”

It was the most they had talked.

“Oh.” She sat up and saw Crossy was gone.

She stared at West sleeping on the other side. His eyelashes had crust on them. She stood and her shadow fell upon him. His bare chest, a charted territory. His slowrising lungs during sleep. It occurred to her that he might never wake. Not if someone were to come along and crush his windpipe.

Smother him with a palm over his mouth.

“He didn’t do anything, you know,” Lara said.

“What?”

“When you were gone. Unconscious.

Crossy wanted to take pictures. Sell them.”

“But nothing happened?” She was whispering now. Didn’t want West to hear.

Wasn’t ready to face him.

“Nothing. Could’ve, though.”

“But it didn’t.”

“He stopped.”

“Out of guilt?”

“Does a snake feel guilty about swallowing a rat?” Lara pulled a flattened box of wine out from under the mattress and squeezed a drink. “It’s survival.”

“And?” Her heart was fast in her chest.

“And I told them not to. I told them there’d be easier ways to get what they wanted. I was right.”

She looked at West again. He was lying on his side. His legs stuck out from under the end of the sheet.

“Are you telling me I should leave?”

“Jesus. I’m not telling you anything. Go wash your teeth.”

In the van’s rearview mirror—her teeth stained red from wine. Carnivore teeth. She grabbed her bag and nudged West awake.

Told him and Lara she was taking the bus home, wherever that was. Neither protested. Not really.

The bus ticket back down the coast cost more than just loose change. The bus was for tourists, for passers-by. She emptied her wallet and boarded. There were plenty of open seats and after she chose one a fat girl

HILDEBRAND PAM DICK crowded next to her. Perhaps she was so thin she was hardly noticed.

On the way the driver yelled trivia over the loudspeaker. He mentioned the indigenous problem. His words. He led a vote for what they would watch on TV. A documentary of kangaroos or a documentary on the interior. The home of the aboriginals.

On the screen, kangaroos jumped over houses.

Later there were competitions to pass the time. People stuffed Weetbix cereal down their throats and then puked out the windows. Then it was raw hotdogs. Someone chugged a gallon of milk. A British boy went up to the front of the bus and fucked an apple pie. Wide blue eyes and young.

Engaged with life, her doctor would say.

Her bag was tucked away on the shelf overhead. Her arms folded across her chest. A bitter taste in her mouth. She ran her tongue over her unwashed teeth. Unwashed. Lara’s words, not hers.

Their home, not hers.

Everyone clapped when the boy held up the apple pie.

Classes were ending soon. She’d missed them all. She shut her eyes. Tried to sleep but couldn’t.

Tara Goedjen has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama.

Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Agni, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, and Quarterly West, among others. She now lives in Alaska, where she’s at work on a very cold novel.

Hildebrand Pam Dick Hildebrand Pam Dick—aka Mina Pam Dick—is a writer, artist and philosopher. She lives in New York City. As Mina Pam Dick, she is the author of Delinquent, forthcoming from Futurepoem books in the fall of 2009. Excerpts from Delinquent appeared in the 2008 issue of Tantalum.

Wandermoment This dired out already.

I meant dried.

That’s because it was old to begin with.

But still pale green.

Also the fire escape. Iron vine.

No vine green in my thesaurus, only moss.

Moss means Moses or Moshe, i.e., son.

I had a burning bushy head of hair.

In case of fire, you should jump out of yourself.

Or climb down the iron tresses.

His hair was orange. I saw the crayon that the God-man wielded.

This tower is green, not yellow. Versus his.

This tower is hospital green, but that’s not in my thesaurus either.

The question of synonymy is philosophical and difficult.

I shouted, No interchange!

Flame red alias fire red, versus burnt orange.

Who made these rules?

The tower is a typewriter which is shaped like a rocket. Or three thousand ideas that come all at once.

Then Hildebrand was unmade in Switzerland.

Undo me nails.

They were long. That’s bad for typing but good for scratching orderlies in the ambulance/baby carriage.

Her hair was red. The crayon spied me. It had colleagues.

They spy on me!

I am not trying to destroy anything like a system!

Yes I am!

Ice along the park. Like clear nail polish, but more dangerous.

Don’t walk there, Hildebrand.

Twigs that are black.

Black, red, burnt orange. It’s hard to try to see yourself.

The other guy walked in rubber boots and spewed contempt for Polish plumbers. I smiled weakly, felt bad and mad.

I have a friend, his name is Ernest Room, and he takes care of me.

I had another friend, his name was Isaiah Sink, he made me be Ismael. Then we could be Izzy and Issy but stay in this notebook.

12

HILDEBRAND PAM DICK Like brothers holding hands. Instead of washing them of each other.

But my father gave me Switzerland. It was a gift. It came in a locket with a photo of a scratch. Or in a watch. It was a snow-capped mountain.

When the world dries out, then you have to scratch it until it bleeds.

Blood red. Blood orange. Blood orange orange. Crayon recursion.

slip: a strip or a loose-feinting address.

The sounds won’t leave me alone.

My sleeves were green leaves. Something about the divinity of nature. How it isn’t a straitjacket.

I will leave some loose-leaf paper when I go.

Then the carriage spits you out. Long live the typewriter!

Then the man shot his wife and their five children—three daughters and two sons, the daughters were with the father, the sons were with the mother. But strictly that has nothing to do with me.

But they lost their jobs, i.e., meanings. Meaning is use. I quit my meaning. I shrieked, No interchange! But the innocent children. The parents say, We shouldn’t leave them to strangers. I feel sick. That’s why they committed me to the hospital aka the typewriter. There’s ice by the park. Along the walk. It’s a thin sheet. It’s very dangerous.

You could slip and fall and break your neck. Then your head would loll like a tongue or a Taugenichts. It’s true that I don’t write like I used to. The people shake their heads. My room’s a hexagon. A hex is a spell. It gets cast in a fairy tale. You get cast into a fairy tale. Or in it, like an actor. Then you sleep. Or you talk, but they don’t get it.

It’s true that I don’t talk like I used to. The typewriter keeps sliding back. It’s tough to ascend the mountain. All of a sudden, you are sliding backward. The crayon does the drawing. Or we get stuck.

Then two choices: backspace or margin release. Is that only in the fairy tale? The fairy tale is violent like the novelette of the man with the gun with bullets and the family.

This is ending sooner than I thought. Therefore I am.

From my window, I see the Ernst River. Unless the Nestor. Earnest versus departer or traveler. Actually, it’s a rust red tenement building with a verdant green brassiere.

Is he faking, they whispered, while Hugh Dillon chewed on his fingernails.

Dillon means faithful one in Irish Gaelic. Irish people have red hair unless it’s black.

Some girls chew on their red or black hair, but it has to be long. Like a trellis. Mostly, it’s blonde.

If there’s a fire, you could speak from it. But only if you’re God. I cried, I am the God-man!

That’s why they locked me up.

No it isn’t.

I did not long for sentences, I longed for shreds of words.

I crumbled not to replace but to will shards.

We rose like hopes or temperatures.

We fell like languid governments.

I didn’t think we would end up like this.

But it’s time to play the piano now.

The keys are leaf green.

Shift or lock?

They gave me a shift: a slip or a loose-fitting dress. I gave them the 13

Hugh Dillon rode in a carriage. He cried and scratched himself. No, that was Hamish Lance; Hugh Dillon scratched the others.

Then we leapt onward.

So leapt a hymn.

So leap, err, hum.

I have to go now. My hair’s too dirty.

Tab Clear. Or Pepsi or Coke. Fanta: phantom orange!

All clear! I think we can sneak off now.

I might be trying to overthrow something. Like a symptom.

But they are keeping tabs on us.

Tab set piece.

Hermes synonym. Hermes antonym. Stone, typewriter, burning message.

If I used all of my fingers, then perhaps the words would not go astray.

Colum McCann

Colum Mccann This is the House that Horse Built They didn’t let me go to Corrigan’s funeral. I woulda walked the bakery line to get there. They put me back in the pen instead.

I weren’t crying. I laid straight out on the bench with my hand over my eyes.

I saw my rap sheet; it’s yellow with 54 entries. Typed up not so neat. You see your life with carbon copies. Kept in a file. Hunts Point, Lex and 49th, West Side Highway, all the way back to Cleveland. Loitering.

Prostitution offense. Class A misdemeanor.

Criminal possesion controlled substance 7th degree. Criminel trespass 2nd degree. Criminal posession narcotic drug, Class E felony.

Prostitution solicitation, Class A, Misdemeanor Degree 0.

The cops musta got a D in spelling.

The ones in the Bronx write worse than anyone. They get an F in everything except pulling us up on our prop’rties.

Tillie Henderson alias Miss Bliss alias Puzzle alias Rosa P. alias SweetCakes.

Race, sex, height, weight, hair color, hair type, complexion, eye color, scars, marks, tattoos (none).

Thirty-eight years old. There ain’t no prizes.

Hooking was born in me. That’s no exaggeration. I never wanted no square job. I lived right across from the stroll on Prospect Avenue and East 31st. From my bedroom window I could see the girls work. I was eight. They wore red high heels and hair combed high.

The daddies went by on their way to the Turkish hotel. They caught dates for their girls. They wore hats big enough to dance in.

Every pimp movie you’ve ever seen has them pulling up in a Cadillac. It’s true.

Daddies drive Kitties. They like whitewall tires. The fuzzy dice don’t happen so often though.

I put on my first lipstick when I was nine. Shiny in the mirror. My mother’s blue boots were too big for me at 11. I could’ve hid down inside them and popped my head out.

When I was 13 I already had my hands on the hip of a man in a raspberry suit. He had a waist like a lady’s, but he hit me hard.

His name was Fine. He loved me so much, he didn’t put me on the stroll; he said he was grooming me.

My mother had religious readings. We were in the Church of the Spiritual Israel. You had to throw your head back and speak in tongues.

She’d been on the stroll too. That was years ago. She left it when her teeth fell out. She said, “Don’t you do what I done, Tillie.”

So I done exactly that. My teeth haven’t fallen out yet but.

The last day they arrested us, Bob Marley was on the radio, singing, “Get up, stand up; stand up for your rights.” A funny-ass cop turned the volume higher and grinned over his shoulder. Jazzlyn shouted, “Who’s gonna look after the babies?”

I left the spoon in the baby formula.

Your first daddy, you don’t forget. You

14

I left baby Jazzlyn with my mother. She kicked her legs and looked up at me. She had the whitest skin when she was born. I thought first she wasn’t mine. I never knew who her daddy was. He coulda been any on a list long as Sunday. People said that he mighta been a Mexican, but I don’t recall no Pablo sweating on me. I took her up in my arms and that’s when I said to myself, I’m gonna treat her good all her life.

The first thing you do when you have a baby is you say she’s never gonna work the stroll. You swear it. Not my baby. She’s never gonna be out there. So you work the stroll to keep her off the stroll.

I stayed that way nearly three years, on the stroll, running home to her, taking her in my arms, and then knew what I had to do.

I said, “Look after her Momma. I’ll be right back.”

The skinniest dog I ever seen is the one on the side of Greyhound buses.

I never tricked until I was 15. I walked into the lobby of the Turkish hotel. Someone gave a low whistle. Everyone’s head turned, ‘specially mine. Then I realized they were whistling at me. Right there I began walkin’ with a bounce. I was turning out. My first daddy said, “Soon as you finish breakin’ luck, honey, come on home to me.”

Hose, hot pants, high heels. I hit the stroll with a vengeance.

One of the things you learn early on is you don’t let your hair fall down in the open window. You do that, the crazy ones grab you by the locks and pull you in and then they beat you silly.

I got a taste for supermarket cakes. You won’t find that on my yellow sheet.

love him until he beats you with a tire iron.

Two days later, you’re changing wheels with him. He buys you a blouse that makes your body go out and around in all the right places.

The first time I saw New York, I lay down on the ground outside Port Authority just so I could see the whole sky. Some guy stepped right over me without even looking down.

I started hooking my very first day. I went to the fleabag hotels over on Ninth. You can make a sky out of a ceiling, that’s no problem. There were a lot of sailors in New York.

I used to like dancing with their hats on.

In New York you work for your man. Your man’s your daddy, even if he’s just a chili pimp. It’s easy to find a daddy. I got lucky early on and I found TuKwik. He took me on and I worked the best stroll, 49th and Lexington. That’s where Marilyn’s skirt blew high. Up by the subway vent. The next best stroll was way over on the West Side, but TuKwik didn’t like it, so I didn’t go over there much. There wasn’t as much scratch to be made on the West Side. And the cops were always throwing their badges, strictly on a prop’rty basis. They’d see how long it was

Colum McCann since you was in jail by asking the date on your sheet. If you hadn’t been inside a while they’d curl their fingers and say, Come with me.

I liked the East Side, even if the cops were hard asses.

They didn’t get many colored girls on 49th and Lex. The girls were whiteys with good teeth. Nice clothes. Hair done fancy.

They never wore no big rings because big rings get in the way. But they had beautiful manicures and their toenails sparkling.

They looked at me and shouted, “What the fuck you doing here?” And I said, “I’m just doin’ here, girls, that’s all.” After a while, we didn’t fight no more. No more nails scraping flesh. No more trying to break each other’s fingers.

I was the first nigger absolute regular on that stroll. They called me Rosa Parks. They used to say I was a chewing gum spot.

Black. And on the pavement.

That’s how it is in the life, word. You joke a lot.

I said to myself, I said, I’m gonna make enough money to go home to Jazzlyn and buy her a big house with a fireplace and a deck out the back with lots of nice furniture.

That’s what I wanted.

I’m such a fuck-up. No one’s a bigger fuck-up than me. No one’s gonna know that, though. That’s my secret. I walk through the world like I own it. Watch this spot. Watch it curve.

I got a cellmate here, she keeps a mouse in a shoebox. The mouse is the best friend she has. She talks to it and pets it. She even kisses it. Once she got bit on the lip. I laughed my ass off.

She’s in for eight months on a stabbing.

She won’t talk to me. She’ll be upstate soon. She says I ain’t got no brains. Me I’m not going upstate, no way, I made my deal with the devil, he was a little bald man with a black cape on.

When I was 17 I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. Hot potato time. It was prime, no lie. Nothing in the wrong place. I had legs a hundred miles long and a booty to die for. Adam woulda said to Eve, “Eve, I’m leaving you honey,” and Jesus himself 15

woulda been in the background saying, Adam, you’re one lucky motherfucker.

There was a pizza store on Lexington. A picture on the wall of all these guys in tight shorts and good skin and a ball at their feet, they were fine. But the guys inside were fat and hairy and always making jokes about pepperonis. You had to dab their pizza with a napkin just to get the oil off. The Syndicates used to come around too. You didn’t want to mess with the Syndicates. They had a crease in the trousers of their suits, and they smelled ‘a brillantine. They might bring you for a nice Guinea meal and then you end up taking a dirt nap.

TuKwik was flash. He had me on his arm like a piece of jewelry. He had five wives, but I was wife Numero Uno, top of the Christmas tree, freshest meat on the stack. You do what you can for your daddy, you light up fireworks for him, you love him to sunset, and then you go strolling. I made the most money of all, and he treated me nice. He had me ride in the front seat while the other wives watched from the street, steaming.

The only thing is, but, if he loves you more, he beats you more too. That’s just the way it is.

One of the doctors in the emergency ward had a crush on me. He stitched together my eye after TuKwik beat me with a silver coffee pot. Then the doctor leaned down and kissed it. It tickled right on the part where the thread was coming through.

On a slow day, in the rain, we’d fight a lot, me and the other wives. I ran down the street carrying Susan’s wig with a bit of flesh still lodged inside it. But most of the time we were a big family, word. No one believes it, but it’s true.

On Lexington, they got hotels with wallpaper and room service and real gold paint on the rims of plates. They got rooms where they put chocolates on the pillows. They got businessmen come in for a day. Whiteys. In tighteys. They lift up their shirts, you can smell the husband panic off them, like their wife is gonna come out of the TV set.

The chambermaids put mints on pillows.

I had a handbag full of green wrappers. I left the room with green wrappers and

men already sweating out their marriage license.

I was strictly a lie-down girl, a flatbacker.

Plain screwing was all I knew, but I made them feel like no one else. Oh baby let me feel you. You make me so hot. Don’t take that bone to another dog.

I had a hundred little stupid sayings. It was like I was singing an old song. They lapped it up.

“Are you okay there, SweetCakes?” “Goddamn, but you make me feel fine!” (One minute 30, ace, that’s a record).

“Gimme some sugar, sugar.” “Awww, man, you’re too kissable to kiss.” (I’d rather lick the pipe in the sink).

“Hey girl, don’t I do it good?” “Oh you do it good, oh yeah, you do, so good it’s good, yeah, good.” (Pity ‘bout your little pork sword though).

On the way out of the Waldorf Astoria I tipped the hotel detectives, the bellman, and the elevator boy. They knew all the girls on the stroll. The elevator boy had a thing for me. One night I blew him in the walkin fridge. On the way out he stole a steak.

Slipped it in under his shirt. Walked out, saying he always liked it medium-rare.

He was a cutie. Winked at me, even if the elevator was full.

I was a bug on keeping clean. I liked to shower before every time. When I got the trick to shower, I’d soap him all over and watch the dough rise. You’d say to him, “Honey I want some’a that bread.” Then I brought him to the oven where he just about popped.

You try to get him finished after fifteen minutes most. But you try to keep him going at least two minutes or so. Guys don’t like it if they pop early. They don’t get value. They feel dirty and cheap. I never had a guy who didn’t come, never once. Well, not never, but if he wasn’t coming I’d scratch his back and speak real nice to him, never dirty, and sometimes he’d cry and say, “I just wanna talk to you honey, that’s all I wanna do, I just wanna talk.” But then sometimes he’d turn over and get all vicious and scream, “Fuck you, I knew I could never get it on with you, you black bitch.”

And I’d kept all pouty like he broke my heart, then I’d lean real close and whisper to him that my daddy was in the Panthers

Colum McCann with lots of black dogs, and he wouldn’t like to hear that sort of talk, dig?, and then they’d pull up their trousers quick and get outa there lick lick lickety-split.

TuKwik got himself into fights. He carried a knuckle duster in his sock. He had to be knocked down before he could get it. But he was smart. He oiled the cops and he oiled the Syndicate and he kept all the rest for himself.

The smart daddy looks for the girl who walks alone. I walked alone for two weeks.

Ohio. O-hi-o.

I became a modern woman. I took the Pill. I didn’t want no new Jazzlyn. I sent her postcards from the office on 43rd. The guy behind the counter blushed when he saw me. Everyone was hollering at me for skipping the line, but I just went right on up to him, swinging my ass, and he slipped me some free stamps. I always recognize my tricks.

I found a new daddy who was a famous player. His name was Jigsaw. He had a flash suit. He called it his vine. He kept a handkerchief in his pocket. His secret was that inside the handkerchief he had a row of razor blades, taped inside. He could take it out and make a puzzle of your face. He had a little crimp in his walk. Everything perfect’s got a flaw. The cops hated him. They arrested me more when they knew Jigsaw was mine.

They hated the idea of a nigger making money, especially if it’s off a whitey, and it was nearly all whiteys on 49th Street. That was Chalktown.

Jigsaw had more scratch than God. He bought me a foxtail chain and a string of jade beads. He paid up, cash bonds. He even had a one-up on a Cadillac. He had a Rolls Royce. Silver. That’s no lie. It was old but it rolled. It had a wooden steering wheel.

Sometimes we rode up and down Park Avenue. That’s when being in the life was good. We rolled down the windows outside the Colony Club. We said, “Hi ladies, anyone want a date?” They were terrified. We drove off hollering. “Come on, let’s go get ourselves some cucumber sandwiches.”

We drove down to Times Square, howling. “Cut the crusts off ‘em, baby!”

I got the most beautiful things from Jigsaw.

16

He had an apartment on First and 58th. Everything was boosted, even the carpets.

Vases all over the place. And mirrors with golden edges. The tricks, they liked coming there. They walked right in and said, “Wow.” It was like they thought I was a businesswoman.

All the time they was looking for the bed.

The thing is, the bed came down out of the wall. It was on electronic control.

That place was flash.

The guys who paid a hundred dollars, we called them champagnes. Susie would say: “Here comes my champagne,” when a fancy car pulled up on the street.

One night I had one of them football guys from the New York Giants, a linebacker with a neck so big they used to call him Sequoia. He had a wallet, too, like none I ever seen, fat with C-notes. I thought here comes ten champagnes all at once. Here it comes, bubbly, the mighty G. Turned out he just wanted a freebie, so I got down on the ground, bent down, looked between my legs, said “HIKE!” and threw him a room-service menu.

Sometimes I just crack myself up.

I was calling myself Miss Bliss then, ‘cause I was very happy. The men were just bodies moving on me. Bits of color. They didn’t matter none. Sometimes I just felt like a needle in a jukebox. I just fell on that groove and rode in a while. Then I’d pick the dust off and drop again.

The thing I noticed about the homicide cops is that they wore real nice suits. And their shoes were always polished. One of them, he had a three-legged shoeshine box right under his desk. Rags and black polish and all. He was cute. He wasn’t looking for a freebie. He only wanted to know who iced Jigsaw. I knew, but I wasn’t telling. When someone buys it, you keep your mouth shut. That’s the law on the street, zip zip goes your mouth zip zip not saying a word, zip zip zip zip zip.

Jigsaw walked into three neat bullets. I saw him lying there, on the wet ground. He had one in the center of his forehead where it blew his brains open. And when the paramedics opened up his shirt it was like he

had two extra red eyes in his chest.

There was blood spatter on the ground and on the lamppost and on the mailbox too. This guy from the pizza shop came out to clean his passenger-side mirror of his van.

He was scrubbing it with his apron, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, like someone had just burned his calzones.

As if Jigsaw meant to leave his brains on the guy’s mirror! Like he did it deliberate!

He went back into the shop and the next time we went in the shop for a slice, he was like: “Hey, no hookers in here, get outa here, get your sellin’ asses O-U-T, especially you, you N-I-G-G-E-R.” We said, “Oh, he can spell,” but I swear to God, I wanted to twist his Guinea balls up in his throat and squeeze them into one and call it his Adam’s apple.

Susie said she hated racists, especially Guinea racists. We laughed our heads off and marched right on down to Second Avenue and got us a slice in Ray’s Famous. It was so delicious we didn’t even have to dab the oil off. After that we never went back to the place on Lex. We weren’t gonna give business to no racist pig.

Jigsaw had all that scratch, but he was buried in Potter’s Field. I seen too many funerals. I guess I’m no different than nobody else. I don’t know who got Jigsaw’s money, but I’d say it was the Syndicate.

There’s only one thing moves at the speed of light and that’s cold hard cash.

Couple of months after Jigsaw got scrambled, I saw Andy Warhol coming down the block. He had eyes that were big and blue and schizoid, like he just came from a day of token sucking. I said, “Hey Andy honey, you want a date?” He said, “I’m not Andy Warhol, I’m just a guy wearing an Andy Warhol mask, ha ha.” I pinched his ass. He jumped back and went “Ooohhh.” He was a bit square, but then he talked to me must’ve been ten minutes or more.

I thought he was going to put me in a movie. I was all jumping up and down in my stilettos. I woulda kissed him if he put me in a movie. But in the end he didn’t want nothing except to find himself a boy. That’s all he wanted, a young boy he could take home and do his thing with. I told him that I could use a big pink strap-on and he said, “Oh stop, you’re getting me hot.”

i was calling myself Miss Bliss then, ‘cause I was very happy. The men were just bodies moving on me. Bits of color. They didn’t matter none.

Sometimes I just felt like a needle in a jukebox. I just fell on that groove and rode in a while. Then I’d pick the dust off and drop again.

I went around all night, saying, “I turned Andy Warhol on!”

I got another trick I thought I recognized. He was young but bald on top. The bald spot was very white, like a little ice rink on his head. He got a room in the Waldorf Astoria. The first thing he did was he pulled the curtains tight and fell on the bed and said, “Let’s get it on.”

I was like, “Wow, do I know you honey?”

He looked at me hard and said, “No.” “Are you sure?” I said, all cutesy and shit.

“You look familiar.”

“No,” he said, real angry.

“Hey, take a chill pill, honey,” I said, “I’m only axing.”

I pulled off his belt and unzipped him and he moaned ohyeahyeahyeah, like they all do, and he closed his eyes and kept on moaning, and then I don’t know why, but I figured it out. It was the guy from the weather report on CBS! Except he wasn’t wearing his toupee! That was his disguise. I finished him off and got myself dressed and waved goodbye but turned at the door and said to him, “Hey man, it’s cloudy in the east with the wind at ten knots and a chance of snow.”

There I was, cracking myself up again.

I used to love the joke where the last line was: Your honor, I was armed with nothing more than a piece of fried chicken.

The hippies were bad for business. They were into free love. I stayed away from them. They stank.

The soldiers were my best clients. When they came back they just wanted to pop— popping was the only thing on their minds.

They’d had their asses handed to them by a bunch of half-baked slanty-eyed motherfuckers and now they just needed to forget.

And there aint much better to help you forget than popping with Miss Bliss.

I made up a little badge that said: The Miss Bliss Solution: Make War, Not Love.

Nobody thought it was funny, not even the boys who were coming home from ‘Nam, so I threw it in the garbage can on the corner of Second Avenue.

17

They smelled like small little graveyards walking around, those boys. But they needed loving. I was like a social service, word.

Doing my thing for America . . . Sometimes I’d hum that kiddie song while he scraped his fingers down my back. Pop goes the weasel! They got a kick outa that.

Bob was a pross cop with a hard-on for black girls. I musta seen his shield more’n I had hot breakfasts. He arrested me even when I wasn’t working. I was in the coffee shop and he threw the badge and he said, “You’re coming with me, Sambette.”

He thought he was funny. I said, “Kiss my black ass, Bob.” Still he took me down the pen. He had his quota. He got paid overtime.

I wanted to slice him up with my nail file.

Once I had a man a whole week long in the Sherry Netherlands. There was a chandelier surrounded with grapes ‘n vines in the ceiling and violins carved outa the plaster and all. He was small and fat and bald and brown. He put a record on the player.

Sounded like snake music. He said, “Isn’t this a divine comedy?” I said, “That’s a weird thing to say.” He just smiled. He had a nice accent.

We had crystal cocaine and caviar and champagne in a bucket. It was a blow date, but all he had me do was read to him. Persian poems. I thought maybe I was already in heaven and floating on a cloud. There was a lot of things being said about ancient Syria and Persia. I laid out on the bed buck naked and just read to the chandelier. He didn’t even want to touch me. He sat in the chair and watched me reading. I left with eight hundred dollars and a copy of Rumi.

I never read nothing like that before. Made me want to have a fig tree.

That’s long before I went to Hunts Point.

And that’s long before I ended up under the Deegan. And that’s was long before Jazz and Corrie rode that van to doom.

But if I was given one week to live, just one week again, if that was my choice, that week in the Sherry Netherlands is the one I’d repeat. I was just lying on the bed, naked and reading, and him being nice to me, and telling me I was fine, that I’d do well in Syria and Persia. I never seen Syria or Persia or Iran or whatever they call it. Some day I’m

going to go, but I’ll bring Jazzlyn’s babies and I’ll marry an oil sheik.

Except I been thinking about the noose.

Any excuse is a good excuse. When they ship you off to prison they give you a syphilis test. I came back clean. I was thinking maybe I wouldn’t be clean this time. Maybe that’d be a good excuse.

I hate mops. I hate sweeping brushes. You can’t trick your way outa prison. You have to wash windows, clean the floor, sponge the showers. I’m the only hooker in C40.

Everyone else is way upstate. One thing for sure, there aint no pretty sunsets out the window.

All the butches are in C50. All the femmes are where I am. The lesbians are called jaspers, I don’t know why, sometimes words are weird. In the canteen, all the jaspers want to do is comb my hair. I’m not into that.

Never have been. I won’t wear no Oxfords.

I like to keep my uniform short, but I won’t wear a bow in my hair either. Even if you’re going to die, you might as well die pretty.

I don’t eat. At least I can keep my figure. I’m still proud of that.

I’m a fuck-up but I’m still proud of my body.

They wouldn’t serve the food to dogs anyway. The dogs would strangle themselves after reading the menu. They’d start howling and puncture themselves dead with forks.

I got the key ring with the babies on it. I like to hang it on my finger and watch them twirl. I got this piece of aluminum foil too.

It’s not like a mirror, but you can look in it and you can guess that you’re still pretty.

It’s better’n talking to a mouse. My cell mate shaved the side of the bed in order to put the mouse in wood shavings. I read a book once about a guy with a mouse. His name was Steinbeck, the guy, not the mouse. I ain’t stupid. I don’t wear the dunce cap just ‘cause I’m a hooker. They did an IQ test and

Colum McCann I got 124. If you don’t believe me, ask the prison shrink.

The library cart squeaks around once a week. They don’t got no books I like. I asked them for Rumi and they said, “What the hell is that?”

In the gym I play ping-pong. The butches go, “Oooohhh, look at her smash.”

The roaches, they’re like judges and district attorneys and shit. They crawl out of the walls in their black coats and they say, Miss Henderson I hereby sentence you to eight months.

Anyone who knows roaches know that they rattle. That’s the word. They rattle across the floor.

The shower stall is the best place. You could hang an elephant from the pipes.

Most of the time, me and Jazz, we never robbed nobody. Wasn’t worth it. But this asshole, he took us all the way from the Bronx to Hell’s Kitchen and promised us all sorts of scratch. Turned out different, so all we done was we relieved him of the chore, that’s the word, relieved him. Just lightened his pockets really. I took the rap for Jazzlyn. She wanted back with the babies. She needed the horse, too. I wanted her off it, but she couldn’t go cold. Not like that. Me, I was clean. I could take it. I’d been clean six months. I was banging coke here and there, and sometimes I sold some horse that I got from Angie, but mostly I was clean.

In the station house Jazz was crying her eyes out. The detective leaned across his desk to me and said, “Look, Tillie, you wanna make things right for your daughter?” I’m like, “Yeah, babe.” He said, “All right, gimme a confession and I’ll let her go. You’ll get six months, no more, I guarantee it.” So, I sat down and sang. It was an old charge, robbery in the second degree. Jazz had jacked two hundred dollars from that guy and syringed that straight off.

That’s how it goes.

Everything flies through the windshield.

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, well at least in heaven his Spanish chick’ll be able to reach in and grab his heart.

I’m a fuck-up. That’s what I am. I took the rap and Jazzlyn paid the price. I am the mother and my daughter is no more. I only hope at the last minute that at least she was smiling.

I’m a fuck-up like none you’ve ever seen before.

Even the roaches don’t like it here in Rikers. The roaches, they’ve got an aversion.

18

Sometimes I bang my head off the wall long enough that I just don’t feel it anymore. I can bang it hard enough I finally sleep. I wake with a headache and I bang again. It only stings in the shower when all the butches are watching.

A white girl got sliced yesterday. With the filed-down side of a canteen tray. She had it coming. Whiter than her whiteness.

Outside the pen it never used to bother me: white or black or brown or yellow or pink.

But I guess the pen is the flipside of real life—too many niggers and not many whiteys, all the whiteys can buy their way out of it.

This the longest I ever spent inside. It gets you to thinking about things. Mostly about being such a fuck-up. And mostly about where to hang the noose.

When they first told me ‘bout Jazzlyn I just stood there beating my head against the cage like a bird. They let me go to the funeral and then they locked me back up. The babies weren’t there. I kept asking about the girls but everyone was saying, “Don’t worry about the babies, they’re being looked after.”

In my dreams I’m back in the Sherry Netherland. Why I liked him so much I don’t really know. He wasn’t a trick, he was a john, even with the bald head he was fine.

Men in the Middle Eastern life dig hookers. They like to spoil them and buy them things and walk around with the sheets wrapped around them. He asked me to stand by the window in silhouette. He positioned the light just so. I heard him gasp.

All I was doing was standing. Nothing ever made me feel better than him just looking at me, appreciating what he saw. That’s what good men do—they appreciate. He wasn’t

fooling with himself or nothing, he just sat in the chair watching me, hardly breathing.

He said I made him delirious, that he’d give me anything just to stay there forever. I said something smart-ass, but really I was thinking the exact same thing. I hated myself for saying something disrespectful. I coulda had the floor swallow me up.

After a moment or two he relaxed, then sighed. He said something to me about the desert in Syria and how the lemon trees look like little explosions of color.

And all of a sudden—right there, looking out over Central Park—I got a longing for my daughter like nothing else before. Jazzlyn was eight or nine then. I wanted just to hold her in my arms. It’s no less love if you’re a hooker, it’s no less love at all.

The park got dark. The lights came on.

Only a few of them were working. They lit up the trees.

“Read the poem about the marketplace,” he said.

It was a poem where a man buys a carpet in the marketplace, and it’s a perfect carpet, without a flaw, so it brings him all sorts of woe ‘n shit. I had to switch on the light to read to him and it spoiled the atmosphere, I could tell straight off. Then he said, “Just tell me a story then.”

I turned off the light and stood there. I didn’t want to say nothing cheap.

I couldn’t think of anything except a story I heard from a trick a few weeks before. So I stood there with the curtains in my hands and I said: “There was this old couple out walking by the Plaza. It was early evening.

They were hand in hand. They were about to go into the park when a cop blew his whistle sharp and stopped them. The cop said, ‘You can’t go in there, it’s gonna get dark, it’s too dangerous to walk around the Park, you’ll get mugged.’ The old couple said, ‘But we want to go in there, it’s our anniversary, we were here 40 years ago exactly.’ The cop said, ‘You’re crazy. Nobody walks in Central park anymore.’ But the old couple kept walking in anyway. They wanted to take the exact same walk they took all those years before, ‘round the little pond. To remember. So they went hand in hand, right into the dark. And guess what? That cop, he walked behind at 20 paces, right around the lake, just to make sure them people weren’t tossed, ain’t that something?”

That was my story. I stayed still. The curtains were all damp in my hands. I could almost hear the Middle Eastern man smile.

“Tell it to me again,” he said.

Colum McCann I stood a little closer to the window where the light was coming in real nice. I told it to him again, with even more details, like the sound of their footsteps and all.

I never even told that story to Jazzlyn. I wanted to tell her but I never did. I was waiting for the right time. He gave me that Rumi book when I left. I shoved it in my handbag, didn’t think much of it at first, but it crept up on me, like a streetlamp.

I liked him, my little fat bald brown man.

I went to the Sherry Netherland to see if he was there, but the manager kicked me out.

He had a folder in his hand. He used it like a cattle prod. He said, “Out out out!”

I began to read Rumi all the time. I liked it because he had the details. He had nice lines. I began saying shit to my tricks. I told folks I liked the lines because of my father and how he studied Persian poetry. Sometimes I said it was my husband. I never even had a father or a husband. Not one I knew of anyways. I ain’t whining. That’s just a fact.

I’m a fuck-up and my daughter is no more.

Colum McCann is the author of two collections of short stories and four novels, including This Side of Brightness, Dancer, and Zoli. His fiction has been published in over 30 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Paris Review, and other places. His newest novel Let the Great World Spin, from which “This Is the House that Horse Built” has been excerpted, is forthcoming from Random House. He teaches at Hunter College in New York.

19

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN

Raphael Rubinstein From Dead Troubadours Raphael Rubinstein’s most recent book is a collection of poems titled The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (Make Now).

He is a professor of critical studies at the University of Houston and lives in New York City.

Oblivion Playlist One day I’ll have to listen to the Dead Boys again and the first Blondie LP and Television and lots of Ramones and Lizzy Mercier Descloux and the Bush Tetras and so many other mid- to late-‘70s downtown bands, even The Dance and Buzz and the Flyers.

“Life is too short to listen to records” proclaimed Brian Eno, whose “Baby’s on Fire” Marc Penka played for me and Terry Berne, along with Talking Heads 1977, one Vermont afternoon in 1977 to make us realize that maybe it was time to start paying attention to rock and roll again.

Two years later, Terry and I were playing at CBGB’s (once) in a minor No Wave band.

Life has only gotten much shorter and the number of records or whatever the current technology insists we call them only more numerous.

So, what should I do?

Keep rereading Cavafy and Harold Rosenberg instead of spinning Marquee Moon and Road to Ruin?

But I’ve eliminated so much from my life including TV, live concerts, recreational drugs, exhibition openings and the ridiculous dinners which follow them, that I think I’ve gained enough spare time to fill my ears with more hours of guitars, drums, bass and snarling lyrics from once upon a time in New York City.

South & North Santiago, Chile, 1973: a few days after the coup, Victor Jara is brutally tortured, then shot to death.

New York City, 1976: Richard Hell scrawls “Please kill me” on a ripped-up tee-shirt.

20

An Unknown Troubadour Argh, I can’t remember the name of the guitarist who was living in this loft the first time I saw it (winter 1979).

He was rooming with the legendary Bob Mason.

Terry met him once at the big Josef Beuys show at the Guggenheim, hobbling down the spiral on a broken leg.

Wasn’t he in the Heartbreakers at some point?

Didn’t he O.D. years ago?

Career Opportunities Here is a vibrant folk tradition full of timeless melodies and unforgettable lyrics.

Destroy it. Enjoy it.

Here’s a brand new Gibson SG. Destroy it. Enjoy it.

Here’s the body of a teenage fan, breathless to do anything you want.

Destroy it. Enjoy it.

Here is a fancy hotel room paid for by your filthy rich record company.

Destroy it. Enjoy it.

Here is a bagful of extra-pure heroin procured by your shady limousine driver.

Enjoy it. Destroy it.

Nellcôte On the day that writers overcome their eternal envy of musicians and artists true poetry will die.

Here I am, shirtless and wasted in a high-ceilinged room in Villefranche-sur-mer, sprawled among Gibsons and needles, awaiting another devastating dawn.

If something’s wrong with this poem we can just forget about it.

Leave it alone.

Come back tomorrow and hope it has fixed itself.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN Who didn’t dream of Keithdom circa 1972?

Oh, maybe millions jettisoned later into some more cushy afterlife, million-dollar sad.

Remember: songs don’t ever translate and hangers-on inevitably meet a sorry fate.

But so do the (unlucky) principals.

Hi, Jim Brody.

Hi, John Wieners.

The wager of poetry, lost & won.

Hi, Jeff Wilson and Marc Penka, and all other forgotten heroin poet casualties whose manuscripts and memories I still cling to.

Let’s rendezvous one summer at some white villa of endlessness, piping our shaky songs into a mobile recording studio conveniently parked outside our erratic hearts, strumming immortal junkie ballads luxuriating in one last frayed masterpiece.

Never let me deny you.

21

ALAN GILBERT

ALAN GILBERT two poems Alan Gilbert is the author of Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight. His writings on poetry, art, culture, and politics have appeared in a variety of publications, including Artforum, Modern Painters, and the Village Voice; his poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, and Chicago Review, among other places. He lives in New York City.

COOLANT SYSTEM It’s not heroic, it’s broken. It’s the silent trip between unspokens. We recognize the architecture but don’t name it. We take a place amid the holes resembling pink dots inside our fathers’ hearts.

All the little words don’t even reach the doorbell.

Some people are awake in the middle of the night.

Some are at the bathroom sink rinsing and spitting.

There’s a PowerPoint presentation for just about anything, and a personalized ringtone to alert us when the war is calling—it’s the sound of beds being dragged across an orphanage floor.

The next ice age will fill the rivers with antifreeze.

It’s the midway point of a sugar packet’s half-life, spoonfed in timelapse with porn made to order.

I still briefly pause when I hear an airplane flying low. The police helicopters I’m more used to, as an ebbing river of concrete reveals a beach strewn with Mardi Gras necklaces hurled at the Superdome.

We change the sheets for the next set of guests.

We live with contradictions. At a benefit for eating off of plasma TVs, my gift bag contained a woman’s razor and chocolate-covered pretzels; yours was filled with Play-Doh and a snorkel.

Initial programming includes episodes of Pimp My Ride for self-propelled cyborgs randomly chosen for modifications after fending off drunks swinging gravy ladles and discounted wife-beater 3-packs.

Donkeys do well in semi-arid desert. Manny or Mandy? Who will heal the healers? Someone smeared a label warning Do Not Ingest. Clouds move quickly ahead of the front and a rush to close the windows. Normally, I’d say it was a good thing we were home, where worn-out shoes are left curbside with the other paper and plastic recycling.

22

NOT OR BUT AND Speed reading keeps the fact-checkers busy while sifting through piles of lick-’em-and-stick-’em, glow-in-the-dark stars that then get jammed in the printer, rushing right past the sentimental to reach the tragic, because playing nice is much harder than being nice, so I tuck my pant legs into my socks to keep the wind and rain off at the higher velocities, the simple yet fundamental mass-to-propulsion ratio, the simultaneous impact of recuperation and letting go.

A poet in this culture puts everything in the mouth, which isn’t the same as all-you-can-eat, whether dining communally or alone if the meds are interacting correctly and the paycheck hasn’t already been spent on a shopping-channel exclusive desktop sonar unit bouncing sound waves off the underwater mine-detecting dolphin’s fake-nose-and-mustache disguise worn to the test for identifying proper names, I call: Here come the bosses—look busy!

The extensive renovations next door dislodge the roaches and mice but not every Tuesday night’s PTA meeting concerns in the fragile ecotone you tried to show me as I wondered if the car’s heater would even work this winter from stuffing the vents with emergency provisions for the long drive home to the glue-factory warehouse with its brand of forgetting, unless, perhaps, it’s the slowly starving, search-and-destroy approach to food preparation and cruise-ship-waste dumping.

There were some feeble attempts to make a pile out of whatever mixed-up form loss and desire shape, as you dream of reaching up to adjust a façade like an oversized pair of sunglasses resting crooked against your face after a partially documented fender-bender with a wayward paparazzo got blogged about in an online police blotter before watching The Daily Show and Adult Swim, the microwavable nachos’ fluorescent yellow cheese sauce dripping on our jeans.

That’s when you leaned in and said, Let’s find a way to heal, to no one in particular, and the clouds floated backward without rewinding time, because all categories are fabrications, one side drops bombs the other brings down airplanes, and my arm briefly went numb from the inoculation, although I wasn’t feeling desperate yet, just outpriced by a neighborhood I moved into on the heels of someone else’s broken marriage, but first the nurse warned, This is probably going to hurt a little bit.

Adam Simon and Matthew Sharpe

Adam Simon and Matthew Sharpe Seconds Adam and I began our collaboration fifteen years ago in the production room of a mass-market magazine—such rooms have long been places where artists get paid for physically assembling the product and, not so ancillarily, start friendships around the work they do both in and away from the office. When we met, Adam had recently begun making paintings using stock photographs, which art directors of magazines and other publications use when they need depictions of people going about the business of living— working at the office, playing Frisbee, having a picnic, etc.—and I was writing short stories based on TV advertisements. Neither of us wanted simply to critique our source materials’ artificial construction of what sociologist Harvey Sacks called “doing being ordinary”; rather, we both wanted to preserve their emotional pull, and reinstate the intimacy and idiosyncrasy that had been drained from the images in the process of their mass production and dissemination.

Our first joint venture was a performance at Four Walls in Brooklyn, which Adam had co-founded; this consisted of me reciting a short story while Adam presented a slide show of stock photos that commented on the words, sometimes by working against them—i.e., Adam selected images based on my story. We promised each other that next time, I would generate stories based on the images. Seconds is the keeping of that promise. Our goal is for the stories not merely to illustrate the paintings, nor vice versa, but for each piece to amplify an audince’s experience of its cohort.

Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Jamestown, The Sleeping Father, and Nothing Is Terrible. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, The Los Angeles Times, Art on Paper, and elsewhere.

Adam Simon’s most recent exhibition was at Pocket Utopia in Brooklyn last March. He founded and co-directed the exhibition space and artists’ forum Four Walls and, more recently, the Fine Art Adoption Network (as part of Art in General’s New Commissions program).

above: Tandem, 2009, acrylic and enamel on aluminum, 48 × 45 inches. opposite: Gray Babies, 2008, acrylic and enamel on aluminum, 60 × 45 inches.

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page 26: Shrug, 2008, acrylic and enamel on aluminum, 60 × 45 inches. page 27: Double Dunce, 2009, acrylic and enamel on aluminum, 45 × 36 inches.

Adam Simon and Matthew Sharpe

ONE They had made out. Who does that anymore, at breakfast? He’d been seated at the table when she walked toward him from the counter with a coffee cup in each hand, about to ask him a question, or rather, her walking toward him with the sunlight behind her, elbows at her sides, coffee cups out toward him in almost a please-sir-may-Ihave-some-more posture was the question, but Please, sir, may I have some more? was not the question, the question was “Mine’s decaf, so don’t even start,” and someone who didn’t know them might have thought she was angry.

She sat, the sun in the window at her back, her hand inches from his on the table, sunlight in among the small hairs on her wrist. He, not she, seemed to be experiencing morning-time physiological anomalies, an outer-body experience, as someone had 25

called it last night on TV, else how explain his ability to see each speck of dust in motion in the slanted column of light above the pile of her dark hair, each loose strand of hair, each freckle in the left eye, each deviation of the eyeliner from its nearly perfect path?

“Hello?” she said, to indicate he hadn’t heard a word she’d said, and then they were kissing.

Time passed between them, and whoever had made the numbers on the digital clock in their kitchen the same color as the blood in their arteries must have been striving for a correspondence that would make life seem more like a painting than it was.

They rushed out the door. On the sidewalk he said, anxiously, “What will you do today?”

“Exchange the rubies in your mother’s safety deposit box for cocaine and spend the morning getting high in the park. You gonna keep at me like this for the next seven and a half months?”

She kissed him, they parted, and late that night, he sat in the waiting area of the emergency room. That there was even an old and dog-eared golf magazine to flip through in a place like this was a modest consolation against the loud TV, tuned to one of those talk shows on which people yell at one another in thrilled indignation, a portal from the world of the sick to the world of the damned. Didn’t anyone with proper authority see that only golf tournaments should be broadcast here? He had no feel for golf itself but found the soft speech of the men and the color of the fairways and putting greens slowed his heart and narcotized his mind, which must have needed it, since he wasn’t ordinarily the type to want to strangle the yellers on TV, and not to strangle but to make feel ashamed the whining toddler to his left, whom he envied on behalf of someone he had never met and now would never meet.

Adam Simon and Matthew Sharpe

TWO The meanness of the satirical essay you wrote hit me yesterday like a baseball on the chin. Those Sundays we lay curled up in each other on your hard futon kissing and discussing Marx eventually gave me serious lower back problems but at the time I was having like these day-long orgasms in my brain. You said, “Satire will be an important tool for the revolution,” and maybe it will but it also can be a place for someone to hide from the intensity of any real feelings he may have and also to transmute them into a very painful projectile to be hurled at the person he has them about.

It felt so good to be able to unburden myself to you re my inner conflict over my job at the ad agency, so then to see it lampooned yesterday on your blog in what was basically a “humorous” open break26

up letter to me—“I’m hoping my $10 million campaign for the US Army is offset by the fact that I buy only free-range organic granola”—made me feel, well, I don’t know, what does Marx say about how it feels to be betrayed by someone you lay naked next to for a cumulative total of fourteen months of your life, someone whom you let pull your hair—hard!—during sex because it gave him so much pleasure even though it really hurt you although you sort of liked it but only because of the obviously intense pleasure he was deriving?

Also, do you think those cool hand-printed signs in the window of your bicycle shop aren’t advertising?

After I read your thing I had a lot to say and even if you thought you knew what I was going to say and didn’t want to hear it from yet another person, it wasn’t fair to not let me say it, and the beautiful mixtape you gave me didn’t make up for that because if I’ve gained any knowledge from my time

with you it’s that beauty is one thing and fairness another.

You said, “The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law.” So you keep posting those satires of me on your blog from the back of that little storefront where you work and sleep, and I’ll climb up to the roof deck of my nice apartment building and advertise to the world till I’m hoarse that I loved you.

Adam Simon and Matthew Sharpe

THREE “What percentage of the annual revenue of the worldwide plastic-bag industry do you think comes from illegal narcotics trafficking?” He was supposed to have said something witty and mildly insulting to the marijuana dealer who had asked him that and who was his new friend’s best friend. “About the same percentage of your mother’s body that her fat ass is,” probably, he thought, would have sufficed, had he thought of it before this moment and delivered it with the correct tone and body language, but he knew now, walking home alone stoned along the narrow path through the woods as darkness grew across the sky from east to west, that a person who wondered later how he might have delivered it with the correct tone and body language was not likely ever to be able to summon those things when they were called for. Instead, he’d 27

waited for the next opportunity to insult his new friend’s friend in a way that would signal he was relaxed and funny and tough and mature and adequate, and though that opportunity did not come, he at one point said, “Okay, Cousin It,” in response to a remark by this guy that had no banter in it—“Man, I’m tired,” or something—only because the guy had been brushing his long blond hair out in front of his face. The guy, who evidently was familiar with the surrealistic TV show featuring the “Cousin It” character who was completely covered by strands of blond hair that grew from his head and ran the full length of his body, gave him the finger with his hair still down in front of his face, a gesture delivered with the supercasualness the insult it was a response to lacked, but not a friendly casualness, more of the Who is this idiot you brought with you to pick up your weed? kind.

In the park, at the mall, in school, at his job, even on the line at the supermarket he

had seen the way pairs or groups of guys behaved who were good friends, who reveled in one another’s company, whose lives were made unequivocally better by the existence of the friendship, but who betrayed no sign of making a big deal out of any of it.

Those moments went by too fast for him to fully take them in though. He wished there were a movie or TV show that was all about two new friends, one slightly older, confident, popular, happy—who knew how to live without having to think about it—and the other younger and almost paralytically self-conscious. If it existed, he would stop at the DVD store in the mall at the edge of the woods, buy it, take it home, and spend the night watching it to figure out how anyone would prevent such a friendship from going sour before it even really got started.