the Bicycle Review # 30 by Jason DeSalvo

The Bicycle Review

Issue # 30 15 October, 2014 Poetry and Prose by: Anonymous, Jan Ball, John Bennett, Paul Benton, Luis Chavez, Kristen Clanton, Kurt Cline, Robin Wyatt Dunn, Lee Foust, Bill Gainer, Gary Glauber, Gina Goldblatt, Mitchell Grabois, Steven Gray, Elizabeth Green, Megan Hesse, Nicholas Karavatos, Eric Marsh, Kevin Ridgeway, Margaret Ries, Michael C. Rush, Claudia Serea, Larry Smith, John Sibley Williams, and Kurt V Wilt. Original Artworks by Seitaku Tak Aoyama. Photography by Andrew Stearns.

Bicycle Review # 30 Greetings cyclists! As we mentioned in issue # 29, our editorial staff has decided to replace the editor's note portion of the magazine with interviews and essays by our staff and guest columnists. We're currently in the process of conducting some interviews for future editions. For now, please enjoy this interview with John Domini, conducted by J de Salvo in 2011/2012. The focus of this interview was Domini's novel Talking Heads:77. We feel that this piece sets the tone for the kind of conversational (as opposed to Q & A, fill in the blank) interviews we're going to be publishing, where answers to questions generate the next question; a dialogue rather than a filled-in form.

Share the Road, the Bicycle Review Editorial Staff

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN DOMINI –by J de Salvo

Talking Heads: 77 is

one of those novels that only come around every so often, of which it can truthfully be said that the author has created their own literary form. There has never been a book written that is quite like it, and any attempt at imitation would be far too obvious for even the most unscrupulous plagiarist. It is the kind of book that makes other writers feel, if not jealous, at least less clever. Perhaps what is most impressive though, about TH77, is simply what an enthralling read it is. John Domini has accomplished, perhaps more effectively, what David Foster Wallace set out to do with Infinite Jest: find a way of presenting a fragmented text without disrupting the reader’s enjoyment of the story. I was honored to be asked by John to interview him about one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors. novel was published in print by Red Hen Press in 2004, and was re-issued as an Ebook by Dzanc Books in 2013. J: How did TH77 come to be? The format of the novel is something I’ve never seen done anywhere else. John: Like most first novels, mine had a complex genesis. I don't mind saying that some of my first grappling w/ the book's material came about the time the story's set, in '78 or thereabouts, when I was in Boston. Of course, it took another 20 years for me to perceive my mess of notes & drafts & such (stuff I picked at on & off while I was doing other projects & other books) as an historical novel – & more than that, about history. That really helped things cohere, seeing the story as a way to probe greater shifts in what mattered, & in our media for identifying what matters. The media was key, too, in how I got my mind around the novel. Kit’s underground odyssey found its map when I pictured the two documents w/in the document: the double-column newspaper-style stuff & the long dot-matrix printout from Kit's wife Bette. When I saw those two things contained, I saw the whole container. J: Can you explain the title for those who might not have read the book? That titular scene where Kit is kind of losing it, and he stumbles across the window display for the TH77 album by the band Talking Heads. Why that band? John: I liked a number of the Heads' hits – & love them still, I don’t mind admitting. In Boston, in the days when the novel’s set, no question I was exposed to them a lot. That scene where Kit confronts a window full of Heads LP covers, I imagine that happened to me at some point. It was a common form of advertising, & that brings us back to the media, doesn’t it? Still, in point of fact the musical heros for me, as a five-chord strummer, were more the singer-songwriters. Bob Dylan 2

& Elvis Costello, both get references, not-so-veiled quotations, in the novel. Still, you were asking about Byrne & the Heads, & I can say that, for this book, they took on a greater importance, a greater meaning, than any of my personal favorites. They were part of the distance I suddenly achieved in the late ‘90s, when the book asserted its shape & purpose. Byrne & the Heads embody the scene change, the dawning of a new perception, that I was trying to dramatize. J: That really comes across in the book. That scene in front of the record store and the part in the prison, where Kit goes in to interview Junior and things get extremely nightmarish are two of the big climaxes in the novel. There’s so much going on in this book: Kit’s ups and downs with Bette, which don’t really ever get resolved, all the stuff with Zia and inside Kit’s head about the Boston Punk Scene, Kit’s struggle to tell the story around “Monsod Prison”. There has to be some personal background behind all this. John: Lots of personal background, naturally. I wrote for a number of alternative newsweeklies, as they were called, back then. At the Boston Phoenix, between about '78 & '83, I rose up to something like "Regular Contributor," publishing, sheesh, at least 50 byline pieces, mostly on books & writers. Note, though, that my beat was culture, not politics. A lot of what my protagonist goes through, inTH:77, is entirely made up. Then there was my primary Phoenix editor, who's since come to be regarded as a behind-the-scenes master (w/ stints in NYC & LA, & he deserves the praise), & I ripped off his name – Kit Rachlis. But again, that Kit was nothing like my Kit, neither physically nor (especially) temperamentally. Also, in those same late '70s in Boston, I was in the first years of my first marriage, & some of the turbulence she & I experienced must've found expression in the novel. No point denying it. After all, one of the essential elements of the story is to have both those young people dig deep into themselves, confirm just what they're made of, & establish whether it can coexist w/ the person they've chosen as partner. Still, I've got to emphasize, the narrative at last fell into place long after I’d lived through anything even remotely like it – & I do mean remotely. The specifics of me & my ex just won't match up w/ Kit's & Bette's. The differences go beyond looks, tastes, or schooling. Drab old me & mine, we suffered no such drama, no confrontations on a winter beach on Nantucket. Our sex life was something else entirely, too. J: As writers, I think we can always find the nucleus of what we create in something we’ve experienced, however transformed it may be by the time it makes it to the page. There’s a kind of creative cause and effect principle at work. Continuing along these lines, I’ve always felt that there was something you hit upon in this book that most writers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole in a piece of literary fiction, but which you managed to explore with an impressively even hand. Punk, new wave, etc., were very often misunderstood as very scary, nihilistic things, not only by their critics, but also from inside. The reality was, of course, more complicated. Zia’s character feels very illustrative of the dangers of being seduced by that surface image. John: Look, in ‘77 & the years around then, for anyone over 16 & under about 32, the punk scene was everywhere. In the novel I tried to explore a bit the demographics on which it depended, & the dangers it could pose to a fragile sensibility like Zia's. I was part of the scene, sure, sort of. The radio DJ Oedipus – instrumental in exposing American ears to punk/new wave – floats above the novel, & occasionally lands on the text, & he's an actual person, & he became a friend because of 3

our shared musical tastes. I had brief encounters w/ Chrissie Hynde & others, nothing consequential. Human Sexual Response was a real band, its leader unusual for being out of the closet. But all that demimonde existed, of course, in nooks & crannies of more serious corruption, more damaging. Boston's an old city ruled by a destructive old cronyism, & building scandals like the one in my "Monsod Penitentiary" were forever coming to light. About 1980, I recall, the Phoenix & other papers exposed some particularly vicious web of cash for contracts. So too, the arson wave that concerns Kit, that threatens him over the course of the novel – I mean, there was one of those every couple of years for decades. J: So many great independent papers started or bloomed during that time, many of which have been consolidated or gone belly up, sadly. I think that TH:77 is a great document of a time when independent journalism had much more credibility. On the one hand, individuals have more access now, but that’s forced a lot of great papers to get blurbier, run more ads, shave word counts. I’ve always thought that the book was also a kind of defense of idealism, or at least (here comes that word again) a rejection of nihilism. Any thoughts? John: Okay, let’s say TH:77 came to me in a vision, 20 years after the fact of its fiction (sorry; couldn’t resist). Let’s say you’ll indulge me. Okay, then what the vision revealed was just the faceoffs & paradoxes you’re talking about. I mean I perceived the fading of reliable independent voices – here’s a salute to I.F. Stone’s Weekly, sacred of memory – their fading into the cacophony of the internet. If everyone’s his own newspaper, where’s the neutral, the synthesis, the touchstone? Plus I heard the uproar of the punks, shredded & damage-dealing far all the musicians’ personal fragility, or their dependence on Daddy’s station wagon & Mommy’s pasta. I saw them as callow youth, naïve as Zia is naïve, & mighty vulnerable, & yet I fell for their cacophony, giving it greater credence, somehow, than the rising white noise of self-replicating hardware & software of Mac & PC, even as I recognized that the Talking Heads, for instance, were themselves dependent on hightech, the woofer & tweeter & FM radio... & in that wobble & clang of contradiction I traced a story, & if that isn’t anti-nihil, I don’t know what is. J: Well, I think we can leave it there. Thanks John, it’s been an honor.

The Buzzkill The air in the sunroom at Colby’s parents’ house, which was really just a paneled carport with wood grain linoleum, crank windows with missing panes and no air conditioning, was pulpy from the humidity of morning and the stale smoke that gathered over the hours Colby rolled joints and chain smoked with Ryan and James. “Fuck Shyanne. There are other girls that come around,” Ryan said as he took a drag from the seventh joint Colby had methodically rolled. Ryan pulled his dishwater blonde hair away from his good eye so he could see the mouth of the cigarette. The iris of his bad eye was molded from too bright blue glass, and it replaced the original that was stabbed out by a palm frond when he was a child. “She’s a fox, but she’s a nut, dude.” “She’s not a nut, she just doesn’t trust anyone.” Colby stood up from the milk crate he was sitting on and dusted the ash from his jeans to the threadbare rug, which covered missing squares of linoleum. Colby had met Shyanne at a party. He gave her a bad tab of acid, and she was so out of her skull, she locked herself in a closet. Colby finally got her to let him in, and sitting on the floor, she chain smoked his cigarettes and pulled coats from the hangers, one at a time, to ash in the pockets. “Not true. That shit she pulled tonight was bananas,” James said, thumbing a postcard of Florida between his fingers, which Colby used to break apart the marijuana. Ryan laughed. “I thought she was going to kill Crystal.” James shook his head. “Colby’s right. She did give Crystal a chance to leave before she went full-on bananas.” “She didn’t know Crystal was going to be there,” Colby flipped the album of Springsteen’s Nebraska onto its B-side and moved the arm of the record player. “Well, Shyanne wasn’t supposed to be there either.” Ryan thought about Shyanne a lot. Some nights, after his grandmother went to bed, he sprawled out on the foldout couch, hand in his boxers, good eye closed. He imagined that party at the lake when he and James found Shyanne alone at the lakebed, smoking a cigarette and looking for fireflies in the dark. He imagined her whimpering the whole time James was on her, and how she was quiet when it was his turn. “Her grandma died yesterday. She had to get out.” Colby took the joint from Ryan. “I thought that was a joke,” James fumbled with the Florida postcard, collecting the shake that had scattered on the battered coffee table. “Like that Halloween we dropped acid and she said her cat died.” “It did. It got run over.” Colby leaned against the record shelf and stomped the mud from his boots onto the linoleum. He imagined Shyanne dressed as a black cat, her sadness blacking out her eyes and face and skin; her skin and hair glowing in all that blackness. “Well, she didn’t have to be such a buzzkill.” James steered the postcard through the words Anarchy and the KKK took my baby away, which were carved into the table. Ryan groaned. “I’d stay away from her, dude. She’s a bad omen.” “You’re an idiot. Her grandma’s kidneys were shot, and they were about to cut off her legs because of the gangrene, but she died before they could,” Colby said, running his hand through his dark, greasy hair. His black Sex Pistols tee-shirt fell around his body like a bell, giving his limbs the same spindly appearance of a palmetto bug’s limbs. “Well, she sure wasn’t missing grandma when she threatened Crystal with that pool cue,” James leaned back in the room’s only chair and put the Florida postcard over his eyes. He had hoped Shyanne would attack Crystal, rip the straps of her tank top, bite her nipples off, and spit them on the pool table in front of everyone. The image would’ve made him hard if he wasn’t so high. 6

“And she didn’t hesitate to dump you over it.” Ryan’s good eye was bloodshot under its heavy eyelid, but the glass eye was glaring at everything all at once, as if Ryan’s face were the highest point on a radio tower, blinking open and closed, on and off, over the room. “Fuck. I should never have told her anything about me and Crystal.” “Oh, God,” James laughed, “You didn’t tell her about that time we went to the woods with Crystal and Candy?” Colby nodded with the joint slack between his lips. “You’re an idiot,” Ryan laughed and shook his head. “I told everyone. Those girls are so hot in that trashy, hung up wet kind of way, and they do it all,” James imagined them stripping in the woods, their matching hot pink thongs. “That’s the only kind you can get.” Ryan hacked heavily from laughing, and spit into the corner of the room. James smirked. “You know better than that.” “She won’t answer the phone.” “She probably just went home, dude. Girls get boring when they get pissed. They always go home,” James took the joint from Colby. “Shyanne was pretty drunk. I doubt she rode that bike all the way home,” Ryan, still laughing, looked at James. “Yeah, she’s probably just sleeping in a ditch again,” James puffed on the joint. “Or she ended up like that cat.” “Fucking rat,” Colby mumbled. He pulled a cigarette from the pack of Marlboro Reds lying on a stack of vinyl albums next to the coffee table. “Crystal shouldn’t have been there. I shouldn’t have answered the phone.” “Shyanne is a bitch. She only answers when she wants to get high, but Crystal always comes.” “Again and again…” James absently ripped at the holes in the arm of his flannel shirt and continued to smoke. “There is nothing more boring than a girl you always have to fight it from.” “She hasn’t been herself for a while.” Not since that fight at the lake party. Not since he left her wasted at the lake with a fuck you, find your own ride home. “Permanent vacation,” Ryan said. “There is no such thing as a girl being herself. Shyanne dumping you is the best thing that could have happened to your summer,” James said. “Yeah, dude. Girls don’t like girls like Shyanne. Girls like girls like Crystal, and Crystal likes girls.” Ryan reached for a cigarette. “And turn this depressing shit off.” Colby walked to the backdoor and pulled back the burgundy shade, which was brittle and rotten from its years of facing the sun. He cranked open the door’s windowpanes and looked across the sunburnt lawn. The produce and meat trucks were lined up at the backdoor of the Cuban market, which was on the other side of the fence, “Eight a.m. and I can already smell the cabbage rotting in the dumpster,” Colby groaned again. “It’s not so fucking fun around here anymore.” “It was never so fucking fun,” James scratched at the large mole on the side of his face. “We just get distracted easy because there are all these easy girls to be distracted by.” The joint went out, so James lit another Marlboro. He tossed the roach into the yellow ashtray that Colby’s parents picked up on an anniversary trip to Vietnam three years prior. “We need girls that don’t want to do things,” Ryan said. “We need girls that are happy just being here.”

“We need girls like Crystal.” James imagined being on Crystal on Candy on Colby while “Highway to Hell” played on the radio of the Cutlass, how their bodies looked under the headlights, their shadows giant and vibrating against the trees. “I don’t want a girl like Crystal,” Colby said, “because I’m not even happy just being here.” “I would love to move back home for a girl that likes girls. I can think of three girls, right now, that I would move back to Missouri for, and none of them are like Shyanne,” James leaned forward and started to roll a joint with the Florida postcard. “We need to stop smoking this shake, dude, it doesn’t roll tight enough.” “You can’t afford three girls, and you sure as hell can’t afford anything better than shake,” Ryan said. He pulled the Buzzcocks’ Love Bites from the stack of albums on the floor. “I could afford them if they were strippers.” “You could afford better weed if they were strippers.” Colby shook his head. “Shyanne would never do that.” “You don’t know what Shyanne would do,” James said, looking at Ryan. Ryan leaned back on the bare mattress he had been sitting on for hours, “This mattress smells like cat piss, dude.” He closed his eyes and thought about Shyanne caked with mud, her mouth that tasted like gin and earth and ash. “I have to go find her.” “Don’t be so fucking hung.” James leaned over to grab the lighter that was next to Ryan on the mattress, knocking over the yellow ashtray with the leg of the chair. Roaches and old cigarettes dusted the linoleum, and the gray ash in the air made the room even more suffocating. “Fuck, dude. Get over it.” He leaned back in the chair, lighting the joint. “Go to Crystal’s and get it in. She doesn’t even need to be conscious to be fun.” Ryan climbed off the mattress and made his way to the record player with Loves Bites in his hand. Colby opened the backdoor and walked onto the porch. He headed towards the wooden gate, which was rotting and leaning into the yard. Shyanne’s house was less than a mile away, but Colby drove anyway. In his 1970 gold Cutlass, Colby took that mile as slow as he could without stalling out. Behind his aviator sunglasses, he stared at the cypress trees as he cruised along the street. Often, after arguments and parties, Colby found Shyanne asleep in the dense everglades, too drunk to ride her bicycle all the way home and too drunk to care about falling asleep in the swamp. He would saddle the bicycle in the trunk of the Cutlass, lay Shyanne in the backseat, and take her back to his house. Oftentimes during her grandmother’s sickness, finding Shyanne half-conscious in the swamp was far better than going to her house. Her grandmother would either sleep like the dead or writhe in pain in a hospital bed that was set up in the small living room. Usually, a fat nurse smoked and drank coffee in the kitchen, flipping through a copy of her grandmother’s Southern Living or Readers Digest. Whenever he and Shyanne walked through the front door, Shyanne would get upset. Sometimes, she screamed at the nurse to get off her ass and do something; other times, she cried because she imagined her father in the same exact set up not ten years before. “No fun, my baby, no fun,” Colby mumbled along to the Iggy and the Stooges song on the radio as he took a drag from his Marlboro and sighed. Drawing nearer to Shyanne’s house, he began to see ugly cars, cars that were piecemeal with mismatched parts, parked staggered and haphazard along the street. He slowed the Cutlass down and pulled it between a rust-worn Cadillac and an Oldsmobile with two spare tires on the rear axle. Colby listened to the rest of the Stooges song, finished his cigarette, and then he adjusted the rearview to look at his face.

“Fucking horrendous,” Colby mumbled at the mirror. His green eyes were red slits surrounded by gray circles, and his skin was sallow. “You fucking rat,” he said, and hid his eyes beneath the aviators as he opened the car door. Colby left the windows down as he walked in the direction of Shyanne’s house and approached the rickety gate, which was unlatched and set slight from the numerous bodies that had walked between the gate posts that morning. He could smell the jasmine vines that grew along the fence and surrounded Shyanne’s house. A few summers ago, Shyanne wore a red bikini every day when she and Colby would span afternoons canoeing on the river. She made peanut butter and honey sandwiches for these trips and picked avocados from her grandmother’s tree. After a day on the river, swimming and watching alligators sunning along the banks, Shyanne would still smell like jasmine when Colby dropped her off at home. Leaning on the fence post, Colby watched the strangers wander past the picture windows of the yellow house. He could see the faces and the stacked casserole dishes crowding the butcherblock table in the kitchen, but he couldn’t see Shyanne or her mother. “Fucking hell,” Colby crossed the yard and knocked on the weathered front door. Though there were people on the other side of the lace curtains, talking louder than the clatter of plates and spoons, no one answered the door. Colby knocked three more times, but each knock was ignored. Stepping from the concrete stoop, Colby’s boots depressed the moss path that ambled through the gardens, which framed the house. The gardens were outlined by ancient oaks that preserved a silent world beneath their branches. He walked slowly down the shadowy path, navigating his way around pink bromeliads and birds-of-paradise, which perched between tropical leaves that resembled massive elephant ears. Rounding the side of the house, Colby saw Sawyer on the back porch, which gave the appearance of a life raft rotting into the earth. Each wooden board was warped and bearded in green mold, bending under the weight of Sawyer as he leaned on the rail. “Hey, dude.” “Smith, long time.” Sawyer said as Colby walked up the porch steps. The two had not seen one another since the party at the lake last summer. Colby had given Shyanne a handle of gin, and he left her to it while he went to the pool hall with Crystal and Candy. When Sawyer found Shyanne, she was passed out, facedown, in the lakebed— her dress destroyed and barely hanging onto her. Sawyer could hardly steady Shyanne on his motorcycle. Those few miles home, she shrieked and bawled, her body alternatingly rigid or limp as she shifted in and out of consciousness. After that, Sawyer stormed the pool hall and boxed Colby in the face. “Well, you’re still a damn giant,” Colby said. Sawyer nodded. Colby stood next to him and looked at the backyard. The garden was lush and blooming despite the house’s gloom and decay, and the hum of cicadas filled the atmosphere with a shrill song. “I didn’t even know you’d enlisted until you left.” Colby pulled a Marlboro from the box in the back pocket of his jeans, “Want one?” Sawyer shook his head. “I didn’t know much before that either.” Sawyer had been awarded a basketball scholarship to Mercer, but because of a motorcycle accident the night after the lake party, Mercer didn’t want him anymore, not even as a bench player, because he was too reckless. So Sawyer decided to enlist. “Is Shyanne in there?” Colby asked as he lit the cigarette. “In that madhouse? No way. She won’t come around today.” Sawyer shifted his weight and pulled a flask of whiskey from the front pocket of his Levi’s. He unscrewed the cap and took a long sip, then passed it to Colby. 9

“Jack Daniels, huh,” Colby said, taking the flask. “Grams liked it.” Sawyer turned and looked at the backdoor, then turned back to the garden. He pulled his fingers through his short blonde hair and his face went rigid for a moment before his mouth and eyes settled into their usual places. Colby took a mouthful. Beyond the density of the trees, the sun towered above the canopy, and the morning dew was burning away from the earth. “I don’t know what I’d say to her anyway.” Colby passed the flask back to Sawyer and took a drag from his cigarette. “She’s been so disconnected.” “When Shyanne was a kid, she had this kitchen full of fake cheeses and cartons of milk, pots and pans and things. She used the pots to catch lizards and frogs. She’d put them in the kitchen, but they’d always sneak out. Then she’d take eggs from the coop and build little nests in the oven, thinking she could keep the eggs warm.” Colby nodded. “It doesn’t seem like she cares about much of anything nowadays.” “Well, it got worse when our dad died, and it’s probably worse since I left—and now grams. When dad got sick, she was only seven, and she started hiding baby chicks and bringing home stray cats. Sometimes, she’d put them in boxes under dad’s bed and the Hospice nurses would find them scratching and bawling. They’d have to put the animals out when Shay wasn’t looking, or she’d become inconsolable. She was always trying to put things in places she’d thought they’d do better in, but they always ended up in the wrong place, and even worse off than before.” Sawyer took another sip and returned the flask to the pocket of his jeans. “So she cares about the wrong things.” “She cares about the right things, but maybe she looks for the right things in the wrong people.” “She’s probably out replacing me.” “Probably not.” Regardless of his motorcycle crash, Shyanne did not speak to Sawyer because he had beat Colby in front of everyone at the bowling alley. It wasn’t until Sawyer was boarding the bus to boot camp—a full three weeks after Colby’s eye had healed—that she finally told him to write her. “Yesterday morning, she called and asked me to pick her up. When I came over, she wasn’t here. I waited for an hour. I was so pissed, but I didn’t say anything. When she finally showed up, I drove her out to the Sponge Docks, but she wouldn’t talk or fish; she just chain smoked and stared at the water. I said some shitty things, and she cried and told me Susannah had died, and that’s why she was late. I felt like shit.” Colby shook his head and looked down at the railing. “That seems to be what you always do.” “It’s only because she doesn’t tell me anything. I thought she was done with me because I hadn’t heard from her for a while, so last night I set up something with another girl. The girl showed up when Shyanne was there, and Shyanne went nuts.” Sawyer shook his head. “You shouldn’t be telling me this.” “I can’t find her, and I don’t know who else to tell.” Sawyer turned and looked at the backdoor again. “I just don’t get her anymore.” “She doesn’t care about that. She cares about people being places when they don’t have to be. You should be looking out for her.” Sawyer spit into the garden then looked at his watch. “But she didn’t even show up to Susannah’s funeral.” Sawyer shook his head. He remembered the day his father died: a Sunday. And the months after, when Shyanne would only sleep under the kitchen table saying: it’s Saturday. This is what I do on Saturday. “It’s time.”

Colby nodded as Sawyer withdrew into the house. He imagined knocking on Shyanne’s bedroom window in the middle of the night, and how she tasted like sugar plums as she pulled him into the room. How she always fell asleep in the shirt he wore over, so he walked home bare chested in the humid air that rattled with the roll of cicadas and thought about her body, her bed, her. Navigating his way to the front gate, Colby saw Shyanne’s family piling into their cars, but he never saw Shyanne. He watched all the bodies, dressed in varying shades of black, leave together, like Dali’s ants carrying Gala away. By the time he reached the Cutlass, the procession had left, and the street was empty.

Thrift Store “You can’t go down on someone in a thrift store frock you don’t agree with,” Scud declares. Gradually, the colors of the leaves will change, until one year they just fall off green. It’s likely the doors will open tomorrow, just as they did today. “But what is the orange flashing light under the chair?” Through the thrift store window was simulacra in bras despite the rain. “There is no light under anything. Just concrete slab.” The sea is full of baby’s breath and discarded hatpins because we all need a big body of water to throw our proms into. “Isn’t it a shame our tuxedos never look like the mannequins’?” There is no space to hula-hoop in here. There is no space at all. And none of the window coverings match each other, so frustrating, in a small space. “I don’t like the smell of limos or ginger.” In a small space, Scud is a revolution. Occupy, occupy, occupy. And though she brought her home, she can’t go down on her in that thrift store frock, so she makes them black tea and pours vodka into the hot water, puts her feet on the empty place mats. “Well it’s good then, that I have neither here.” She thought it might feel like a cottage in the fixed up garage, in the house with her nana, almost like a place of her own. If there were a fireplace, maybe, but it only feels like a room. If the walls were wooden planks, perhaps, or there was a chimney to clean. She wishes there was a chimney. “We should try kissing.” The pinecones lining the windows will have to do.

On Crossing State Lines A Greyhound bus traveling south on an interstate, an interstate connecting states that are fly over tracts––moors and farms––cut apart by rivers that are dammed, and locked, when not free flowing. In the bus stale air is humid with breath. Through the windows pass harvested fields. If vestiges of corn stalks stand they are sparse. They are dried and broken. They are lone and barely vertical like a tried arm sticking up from a shallow grave bent at the elbow pointing back down at scorched earth. It’s been a few hours from the starting point. Some passengers are moaning under their breath to generate distress amongst the whole as though to be uncomfortable with others is better than to be so, alone. To board a bus for a long journey, comfort should not be sought. Bad feelings and times are the best to consider. Pessimism can land you sanguine, in a certain light, in a certain way. In a seat on a Greyhound. The driver has heard kin of every compliant. He’s teary-eyed––a hangover from boredom. He’s missing someone he no longer knows. He can drive, now, always away. Both distance and destination not of importance. And through his driving he will drive through, but he will always end up some prior place. People talk to him. They tell him things they don’t like. He assures he will pass it on to his superiors. And then he gets back to looking between the lines, to not colliding with vehicles–– commerce or leisure (though here it’s often the former). He knows the signs of a man with too much drink. He coyly notes this as people board the bus. Best to let the passengers be such; best that he himself not incite problems; best create solutions––this he does with silence. Like a doctor is, he wants his patients to be patient. He himself must stay calm and mostly quiet and in so doing hopes others will too be. These are days where the cheapest mode of travel is by bus. Gone are horses. Gone are the days a man is free to walk one hundred miles, unmolested. So, when he sees a man board, a man who’s drunk some, the driver will be wary and hope that the man will soon slumber. And just this has happened with a man who had boarded grumbling unintelligibly, his hips swaying and bouncing between the seats as he staggers down the aisle. He falls into a seat midway back and––taking up two seats–– pushes himself into a slouched position with his head leaning against the window. Soon he falls asleep. He had been asleep, but now he is awake and he is headed to the restroom in the rear of the bus. His balance and his coordination do not seem to have improved from him having rested. In addition to his hips jostling the seats he braces every other headrest to steady himself. The latter action is not indicative only of drunkenness, it’s a precaution many passengers take while walking up and down the aisle. They are walking on a moving vehicle after all. The passengers are fewer further in the back. The driver had been trying to twist the cap off of a hydrating sports beverage between his legs, using his inner thighs muscles and his left hand, his right hand on the wheel. But he had 15

noticed the commotion in the rearview and now watches as the man moves towards the back. He lets the beverage stay unopened. He has a skill for this––one eye watches the road while the other watches the action that occurs behind him. But he can only perform the feat for less than 30 seconds, which is long enough for him to see the man reach and enter the restroom. He stays in the restroom for upwards of fifteen minutes, and now a short woman with ivory white hair, with thin grey lines, woven into a sloppy bun, is waiting for it to free up. Her age makes her look innocent, as though whatever wrong she had done in her life has been lifted. She has tried the handle twice and has looked around a few times like she is searching for a more pleasing restroom or for an answer. The only answer anyone could give her is the question her actions ask. She decides to knock on the door. Her knock is returned by a muffled voice that seems to yell, but the words cannot be deciphered. A few minutes later the man reemerges. He looks for who was knocking but the woman has sat a few seats away. He stares at a few passengers none of whom make eye contact with him, and so he makes his way forward. His eyes so weary they seem to be loose in their sockets. Sheening skin from sweat that’d cooled and dried and then sweat again and then mixed on the surface. Grease through the pores from a deep-fried diet. He stands 6’4. His chest looks supple atop his belly––a half-sphere erect with bloat. It stretches his t-shirt. It’s a black shirt with feathers and some words screen-printed across the chest, but the letters are obscured by the cracking of the paint, from the protrusive, outward pull of his belly, by the sunglasses that he has looped around his collar. (He is not indigenous of what is now called The United States of America. He is not a Native American. He is not Chippewa; he is not Lakota or Dakota; he is not Navajo; he is a long way from the Apache. He is an Indian; if you must, he is an American Indian.) It could be that he had wanted to make eye contact with anyone. It could be that his sunglasses––tinted only faintly the pale color of herbal tea––serve too as his prescription glasses, and he would not have been able to tell that no person was making eye contact with him. But no faces had been facing his. He has chosen a new seat not more than six before the bathroom that he had exited with scorn. In the few paces he’d slowly made he had stopped twice, to find what may pose as a set of eyes looking at his, however they might. He may have been having fluctuations of thoughts and feelings about how to be. Many wars may have been fought within him in these fleeting increments. Whatever had happened there, it had past and he was back in motion and is soon sitting down next to the youngest looking lone passenger. He is a slim, healthy looking teenager save a cast that reaches from foot to femur. He wears a navy blue baseball hat with a strongly curved frayed bill, pulled low on his forehead, shadowing his eyes. The man falls into the seat with a motion that is of minimal alarm. Fellow passengers take notice of it. As he sits the seat makes a grinding squeal of a noise, it doesn’t altogether give, but something snaps. By this time, there’s a silent camaraderie amongst the passengers––they are them and the man is he.

At first the boy is excited to see his new seatmate but he is also troubled as how to react. He first acknowledged him––his body, his person––as a gift for his loneliness, more so his aloneness. It was the smell of the man that quickly made the boy weak with unease. From his mother the boy knows that only very large amounts of vodka can be detected on a drinkers’ breath. He had yet to learn how to subdue his fear in any stoic manner. He moves the music headphones back from his ears so that they grip just above them on the sides of his cap. He says hello to the man. A row ahead sits two punk youths. Their hair discolored, their clothes cut apart and sewn back together––this done poorly by hand. Idealistic, wordy patches (and patches of plaid and animal print) presents a façade of intrigue for a conversation it appears neither is educated enough to have. One in a denim vest, the other in leather motorcycle jacket, unified with metal studs punched through either material with thought and artistic intent but little geometric proficiency. It was their heads that most turned when the man fell into the seat. They had reading materials before them. Fanzines printed on bible-thin paper. They turned back and forth and talked under their breath to each other. They then stay quiet and listen to the boy tell the man the story of how he broke his leg. He was on his aunt’s ranch where he was helping her tame horses. One of the horses had bucked him off. This itself didn’t fracture his femur. The horse then stomped on the boy breaking a few ribs and his leg. The boy says this with both pride in that it is helping him into manhood––that he has sustained these injuries and that he has a very real, good story to tell about a situation that was bad but could’ve been worse, one he can tell with a sort of wisdom––but also some humiliation in that he let the horse buck him off, that his bones were able to break. The boy then yelped. The boy then caught up with his yelp and yelled. Distress followed by something more acute. When the boy yells one of the punk youths stands. He seems unsure in his rising. When he first gets to his feet his body is tense and he’s trying to recall as to how to react in a passive manner. His legs are stilted. His arms are slack in a way to evoke coolness. His body is ready to catch something that may fall; it’s ready to let what falls settle. But the weight he cannot know with his altruism, his naivety. Now as the punk youth is standing in the aisle, he sees that the man is jolting the boy’s cast leg around, asking the boy if it hurts. The boy’s face is red and his eyes are searching for help. The break is recent. The punk youth asks the man if he wants to come sit near himself and his companion. He asks so in an inviting way, not at all threatening. The man assures the punk that he will get to he and his friend, eventually. The punk youth then raises his voice a few octaves, his inflection clearer, he tells the man that now is the best time. He touches the man’s shoulder with a fist, more a rub than a punch. He leans closer to the man, his voice back to some drawl, and tells him that if he wants to play a little rough he should do so with himself (the punk youth) and his friend, neither of whom have a broken leg. He has no idea what will come if the man sits next to them, but he’s sure he can talk him down if he does.

The punk youth is not moving. He is not going to sit down again until the boy is left at peace. And this he has told to the man. The man has threatened the punk youth and warned him about what he will do if he gets up. The punk youth tells the man that none of what he threatens needs to be acted upon, but he says this as he straightens the man’s mesh baseball hat that had been mindlessly cocked since his slumber. The man says that that’s it and tries to pull himself out of the seat but he can’t. He falls back into it. The punk youth offers his hand to help the man up and the man takes it. The man is gripping the punk youth’s hand too firmly––he grimaces and his legs nearly buckle. This happens when the man gets to his feet. He releases the punk youth’s hand and then looses his balance and falls into the aisle. The punk gets behind him and lifts him by his armpits. He sits the man in the seat that he (the punk) had been sitting in and now the man is sitting next to the other punk youth. He talks to the man like a man talks to a man under a bridge where most people are scared to go. The man searches the new punk youth and discovers him quick. Even if the punk youth knows some lingo, some rogue street talk, he is still young and knows no humility, only what may rub off as thistle. The second punk youth’s biceps are twigy. His skin is paste on pale. He gets fidgety quickly and looses his blasé demeanor. His tone becomes whiny. He looks back at the first punk youth to see if he can help. The man pulls out a plastic pint of vodka. It’s near empty. The inside of the bottle has achieved some accumulation from being in the man’s warm dungaree pant pocket. The sun has come through clouds, but only for a moment, and the bottle is the only thing the light emphasizes. It sparkles. It’s crystalline; it almost makes an ethereal, noxious screaming noise. But the noise is only anticipated. The man drinks the last sip and sets it on the ground. It is heard tipping over on the floor, rolling and sliding up and around, hitting a few persons’ shodden feet. The man has pushed the second punk youth against the window he was sitting along side. He holds him there with his left hand around the punk’s neck, and has his right arm cocked back, his hand in a white-knuckled fist. Each finger has a generous size ring on it. Each ring looks cheap. But each one could do expensive damage. The second youth’s eyes cry something at the first’s, and even sometimes beyond the first to see who might next take on the burden. The man, holding the second punk youth, looks down at himself, surprised by his ability to do just such. The punk, despite his numerous spiked studs, is a pacifist––this inferred by his politically correct wordy patches. From the fear in his eyes, he is not going to attempt anything, not even attempt to pry the man’s fingers from around his neck. It doesn’t seem that he’s choking, he’s just being held there. He may get beat-up, that’s up to the man. But he will not make a first move. The man doubles him in weight and is conceivably much taller. A few punches from the man’s ringed fist will tear lumps of skin from the punk’s face.

The man, impressed with his prowess, is now shouting that he will kill everyone on the bus. All of them. He has a gun, he warns. Everyone is going to die, he announces. The first youth has fled to the front of the bus to tell the driver what has happened, what is happening, to make sure the driver is fully aware. The driver stays calm, he tells the youth that he will pull off when he can. He can’t just pull over and stop, he says, not there in the middle of the interstate. That that would only cause more problems. It is the driver’s wont to be calm in these situations. They are just moments that happen and pass. The man’s threat was met with unease and some alarm but not fear of death. Possible injury may come about but only to men who want to stand up to the man. Most passengers pretend to keep to their reading and daydreaming and one woman kept on knitting. A handful of passengers appear to be sleeping. Some are just listening with their eyes closed, creating their own interpretations of what is occurring. Asleep––the most passive way to be alive. Now, the first youth is back standing next to the seats where the altercation is taking place. The man who, when the first youth had left was threating a type a manycide, is now crying and hugging the second punk youth. The youth hugs him back. Then the man asks for a kiss. The second punk youth refuses this pass. The pass angers the man and he makes another fist but this time he refrains from grabbing the punk by the throat. The first punk is standing in the aisle beside the man ready to hold his arm back if he starts with the punching. Two or three of the more bold passengers are kneeling on their seats in a backwards manner––when considering where the front of the bus is and the direction they are heading. They have stern looks on their faces, contemptuous. It’s obvious that they are not trying to understand the man and the situation. They are perturbed and ready. The man begins to cry again and the passengers sit back down. The bus’s speed has not altered. It keeps in the direction it had started in. Time slowly slows. Two seats ahead sits a woman with short spiky hair in front and on top, and then longer hair in back. She has Oakley Razors Blades and a white, oversized Hard Rock Café sweatshirt on. It’s difficult to decipher which Hard Rock she visited because that portion of the text is folded between her breasts and her paunch. Still seated, she has swung her upper body around out into the aisle. She lowers her glasses on her nose so that they rest on her nostrils and then looks over them at the man. She stares him down for a few seconds. The man only watches, his mouth slightly agape, anticipating her words more so than readying himself to speak. Still staring at him she pushes her sunglasses back up, and then turns around and goes back to looking out her window. The man continues to watch her. He fights an urge to say something crude but ultimately stays wordless and glazed over. He turns back to the punk youth and after a short moment of silence––the man’s head lightly bobbing––he again asks the punk youth for a kiss. He accents the k in kiss and when he does involuntary spit sprays from his mouth and then his bottom lip stays slacken exposing his bottom front teeth and their early decay. The punk deflects the minor proposition by suggesting another hug. Their second hug lasts longer than the first had. The punk gentle rubs the man’s back and 19

then gives him a few quick pats––as much as a way to somewhat comfort him as it is a cue to think about wrapping it up. The man has grown bored with the punk. He is now trying to get back onto his feet. After ten seconds he is holding himself up in the aisle. The first punk is standing back a few paces, blocking the seat that the teenager with the broken femur has limped to. The man pays no heed to this and heads toward the front of the bus. A fear would be that he’d reach the driver and fall on him or physically assault him in some way, one that may cause the driver to lose control of the vehicle causing death to passengers as well as to occupants of other vehicles on the interstate. The state the man is in has rendered him mostly innocuous. If he did have a weapon he would have brandished it. He scans the seats and the passengers in them. He peers at each passenger in a tryingly intimidating way, though uncertainty looms in his visage. He moves by feel down the aisle not looking directly before him. His peripheral vision is inactive. He nearly collides with a squat young man built like a boulder––a wrestler returning to college––who is waiting for him, blocking the way. He wears a thick hooded sweatshirt embroidered with the acronym of the school he wrestles for and sweatpants to match. The man retracts and warns the wrestler that he’d better move. The wrestler doesn’t flinch when the man mocks a punch. He seems let down that the punch doesn’t receive him. Both seats to the left of the wrestler are open. When the man begins to again move forward and is alongside them (the empty seats), the wrestler flits beside him, and is like a phantom at his back. He puts him in an incapacitating hold: he sticks his arms beneath the man’s armpits, then around his shoulders, and then locks his hands together behind the man’s neck. The wrestler is more than half a foot shorter than the man, and the man bends backwards as the wrestler secures his positioning. The man’s back cracks. He first tries to stiffen and stand straight, then he flails some; then his body becomes languid. The wrestler deftly sits him in the window seat. He himself sits in the aisle seat like a wall of the quarry he has landed the man in. The man continues with his threats but the wrestler only listens with a wry smile that implies his love of violence. The man’s voice has grown horse and––vanquished as he is––feeble. His threats begin to veer more in a litigious direction––focusing on the physical action taken upon him. He tells the wrestler that he has broken his back. The wrestler stays mute save for an occasional throaty chuckle. He is more proud of himself than most others are relieved by what he has done. No passenger could deny that before the man reached the driver he needed to be repressed. The more passive approach that the punk youths’ had attempted––which proved futile––made a physical one feel imminent, but the pathos it has evoked was unforeseen and they wonder if there were a better way to have dealt with it. The air brakes levitate the bus just before the driver makes the turn in the direction of a gas station with a sky reaching sign. After having parked near the parameter of the parking lot, the driver asks over the intercom in a monotone voice, that everyone remain in their seats for a short time. A man two rows behind him is heard to ask in a pleading voice if he can sneak out really quick to stretch out his legs, and explains that one of his legs is really cramping up. He’s prone to getting leg cramps, he adds. The driver looks at him deadpan in the rearview. 20

The rumble of the engine stays steady as it idles. A state trooper car circles the bus and stops near the door. Two troopers get out. They are wearing matching mirrored sunglasses that reflect the concrete sky, which almost matches the mirroring. The driver repeats that everyone stay seated, and then the hiss of the door opening is heard as he slowly rotates in his seat and then stands and walks down the steps, off the bus. The troopers and he talk for a few minutes outside as the passengers watch from their windows. The troopers are laughing but the driver keeps a poker face. He climbs back on the bus and walks to the wrestler and whispers in his ear. The wrestler nods. The two police officers walk on and ask the passengers around the man to step off the bus. Once they do, the officers stand before the seats surrounding the man. The driver then returns to his seat and asks if everyone can please exit the bus, now. The wrestler stays seated, as does the man. The driver stands outside the door and counts each passenger as he exits. In the gas station upbeat commercial music is playing. The old woman is asking the cashier where the restrooms are. The punk youths are at a rotating sunglasses display unit, trying on different sunglasses, imitating the state troopers. The teenager boy is on crutches coyly approaching them with a nervous laugh. A few other passengers are filling up large paper cups with fountain soda, selecting offerings of beef jerky and bags of preserved fried snacks. The only child who’d been on the bus is bargaining with his mother over how much candy he can have if he spreads it out over the rest of the trip. When the wrestler comes in a few people clap, but not the whole lot. And there are other patrons in the establishment who are not privy as to why applause should be granted. A greying wiry man with a hunchback, who had been on the bus, shakes the wrestler’s hand. The two exchange a few words and share a short laugh as they jovially shake their heads. The driver, mostly undetected, sneaks into the back of the establishment, near the restrooms. He’s on a payphone. He dials a number that makes a phone ring many miles away. The phone rings eight times and then an answering machine picks up. A woman’s voice is the voice giving the greeting. Her voice says that you have reached the Andersen’s and that they are not available to answer your call, right now. Please leave a message, her voice says. Since he had last talked to her in person, her voice has become more raspy, and it’s maybe even beginning to shake, but the tonalities are much the same. Even in the short greeting she clears her throat twice, in a polite feminine manner (this, something she’d always done––clearing her throat in a considerate way). The driver calls the number three times. His pocket is weighed down by quarters and it is no bother that each call costs him five of them. He only calls during business hours, knowing full-well that no one will be home to answer. But even so he wonders why the woman and her husband–– and maybe by now, even a few kids––why the family, herself namely––has yet to change their number. He wants to think that it is for him. That she wants to provide for him a number to call even if it’s not to talk. At some point the Indian has been moved from the bus into the back of the police car and has been driven away to a nearby holding facility. After the driver has walked down the aisle and counted heads, he gets behind the wheel 21

and releases the brakes. Back on the interstate the air in the bus is less stuffy than before. Passengers are talking to each other. The punk youths have moved a few seats back, across the way from the teenager. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re all donning headphones and passing cassette tapes between each other. The wrestler is in conversation with three other men around him. Their conversation jumps between baseball and football. On occasion the last names of professional athletes and names of teams are heard, and statistics, but relating only to sports. Once the bus has been at a steady pace for a safe amount of time, the old woman walks to the back of the bus, to the toilet. This time the restroom is unoccupied and she walks right in.

Because It Never Ends "Paul." "Paul," they say your name. On that evening, dark and drizzling, "Paul," they say. "Yes, yes," I say beneath the overcast sky, moving along, bicycle tires hissing, the world bending its own will into that time. "Paul," they say from the porch, the comfortable porch, "Paul," the voices sing, the day at an end, they have wine and a dog, they have a house with yellow walls, they lift their wine glasses, "Paul," the voices sing, the dog doesn't move at all, just sits there at their feet, a greyhound, tongue wiggling. "Paul": the word opens the air, "Paul," I am traveling through this space, this road of pot-holes, this world of holes, who are they? "Paul," they say, lifting their glasses, the world is almost night, the dog doesn't move, the street is wet, this is the song, "Paul, Paul, Paul."

Looking Up Old Friends Do you still have people you can talk with I asked & he said get off my property.

Punch Line

This is the story of a very great miracle that happened one evening during the first half of the century before the last. The weather that night was horrible. There was a torrential blast, full of lightning and thunder, which was extraordinarily unusual for this neighborhood that's actually famous for tranquility. Great and tormented souls have come from this land, but, if they were tormented, it wasn't because their bodies were buffeted by climatic adversity. I've seen knolls of grass here that looked posed and frozen in the sunlight. Such is the usual weather, that only the light dances. Each blade of grass is, as it were, statuesque. The clouds that do roll by are soon brushed away by the sirocco. Yet unremitting rain was already pounding against Dr. Mathez' cottage at a severe angle, so that the heavy tape his wife had used to seal the sills admitted thin continuous streams. Towels lay on the floor to absorb the moisture. Mathez smiled and nodded as if to say, "there's nothing more you can do." She settled into his arms for their nightly silence, which was better than sexual love had ever been. Their three children had gone out into the world decades ago. Two were living in the town, one a merchant and the other a merchant's wife. No one understood it, but the third was a seared sort of fellow, painfully shy and hard pressed to make his way. Fortunately, the local clergy were glad to help. They made a place in the church for the young man and, a few years ago, sent him off to a foreign place. "Do you hear something?" he asked. "Something not thunder?" A bolt of lightning flashed, forming, it seemed, a whole circle streaking around the house, and the thunder that ensued was so loud his wife didn't even try to make herself heard in reply. When the noise subsided, she nestled against his chest and corralled and caressed each of his fingers, one by one, as had been her pleasant habit for over forty years. Another sound, though, was certainly not thunder. It was a rhythmic thud repeated half a dozen times. "My word, a knock? Now?" she asked. His body tensed and she undid the embrace. The old man left the room and went into the small passage that led to their front room. She waited, bemused. Returning, his footsteps were just audible, like a rustle of silk under the din from outside. "I'm needed," he said, gray-faced. His white beard, cropped around the jowls, varied somewhat his sallow complexion. He'd had a bout with hepatitis some years earlier; it took all the color out of 28

his face. At that moment he seemed grayer yet, a little afraid of the weather outside and not at all confident about the chore ahead. His wife scurried to an antechamber and brought his bag: powders, the forceps, a knife, other instruments. She opened it quickly to check that his mask was also inside. Their eyes met a bit fearfully as he took the bag. "She began six hours ago," he said. "I hope to be back in another six or seven." He made his way to the carriage waiting outside. The reek of horseflesh was like fresh dung and merged sharply with the smell of the grass, which was likewise stunning and sharp in the wet air. It was unpleasant; Mathez, not expecting the stench, could have fainted. Just the thirty yards from his door to the road was enough to drench him to the bone. The umbrella, which was torn anyway, would not have been of much use against the rain that was blowing at angles of almost 45 degrees. Horribly, there was no roof on the carriage. It was completely exposed. "What is this!" he shouted at the stable hand who had come to fetch him. "Their other wagon broke an axle," said the boy. "Just this morning. I couldn't fix it." Mathez shivered as he accepted a thick cloth hood from the boy. He tried not to anticipate the trip ahead--it was many kilometers from his cottage to the town--and focused instead on the horse, whom he knew: a dark-skinned jumper often shown off around the town by his owner. This beast, although a local entertainer for some time now, neither sought nor got much affection. He often seemed ornery for no reason and Mathez was sure he'd be hard to handle in the storm. The stable hand was a thin bright-looking kid from a well-liked family in the town. He was known to be an adept rider, no doubt why he'd been asked to fetch the doctor in this dangerous weather. With a sharp lash of the crop he struck at the horse's butt and then repeated the stroke when the horse tried to pull back as if to rear away from the storm. They worked up a canter, but, as the ground heading toward the copse sloped downward (an easy enough curve in normal weather), the horse picked up speed, too much speed, skidding his hooves against the slick stones on the narrow road. The kid pulled back, too late, though, to slow the pace. The horse panicked and leapt, lifting the wagon almost a foot off the ground. The wheels landed without damage. Mathez was helping. He grabbed on to part of the rein and pulled with all his strength. It seemed a great long time but then the pace slackened. You could hear a thousand sharp raindrops bounce off the animal's head almost like hailstones. Once past the copse he'd be more than halfway to the town. The trees at their tops looked glued together in the air. Often at night you could make out their shapes in the moonlight. The copse was 29

actually a favorite haunt of his. Sometimes, if a mild breeze worked up, the high branches would sway as if in a slow waltz. But now they all hung together like a herd guarding some secret in their midst. In the further distance, other trees were alone, bending and shaking to the storm. It was a land of pines and cypresses. There were grapes and almonds and olives growing there too. Further off still rose the great mountain, and some smaller ones as well, with seedlings visible even in this terrible night. Many, though, would not survive the sidewise deluge. The water soaked through his underwear and Mathez was freezing. Worse, the underside of the cloth supposed to protect his head was also drenched, and the rain invaded every angle. When all was said and done, he grimly realized, he'd probably come down with fever. He was both flattered and resentful. Flattered because, although there were good doctors in the town, and no end of good midwives who'd arrive faster (not to mention more safely), he'd attended this family since their arrival in the province and they wanted no one else. But resentful, because their trust was exhausting and could even kill him. Up ahead was the town. Tonight he could barely see the stone houses, their soft rock wrung up from the ancient quarry nearby, yet the sound of hooves against cobblestone was clear even in the storm. One of the town's many fountains cast a vague shadow to his right where the church on the other side of the square was also visible. Ahead was their squat, two-story home. Like many of its neighbors close by, its shutters were newly painted, and the facade included a single caryatid abutting elaborate but not ostentatious ironwork. The top floor had been in disrepair for the last few months, though the roof was also freshly painted, a somber green. The boy tried to shield him from the rain as they raced up the garden path. Mathez smiled appreciatively and patted his shoulder as the gray door opened. "I'll need a large dry towel at once," he said to the maid as she admitted the two men. "And some privacy. Take my bag to the lady's bedroom. And have her pass as much water as she can." He was escorted to a small closet-like space off the kitchen and handed a dry cloth about six feet long, of very thick rough cotton. First he dried his feet. There probably wasn't enough time to strip and dry off completely, so he removed his waistcoat and hoisted up his shirt to wipe his chest and back. Like rope burns, the towel chafed his skin, which had gotten very soft in the last ten years. He winced. He didn't bother with his pants, although he could still feel the rainwater soaking through. The master of the house was standing in the middle of the kitchen as Mathez walked out of the 30

closet space. They nodded at each other. "She's in pain," said the man. "But I think there's still time. The stove is hot," he added, pointing toward the other side of the room where a short hallway was lined with cabinets, a small stove and sink. "Five minutes in front of it should help you." Mathez nodded again. The fire warmed his hands and feet but he couldn't escape the cold wet against his loins and belly. "Take me to her," he said to the maid after only a moment or two by the stove. She walked him through the corridor, past a small rustic sitting room, and into the woman's bedroom. Though he had been in the room on a number of prior occasions, this time it seemed smaller than before; the squall outside was shrinking the whole house. The woman was a mass of sweat lying on the four-poster bed, a small presence on a mattress that could apparently sleep three. She was panting at regular intervals, and around seven inches dilated. Her eyes blinked open and shut, and she almost smiled, comforted by Mathez' familiar, reassuring presence. Not a very big belly, considering such discomfort. As he caressed her brow and smiled, soothing her, he noted in his peripheral vision that her husband was standing just outside the door: stiff, motionless, not perceptibly very anxious but tense and dutiful. A light in the corner of the sitting room cast the man's shadow across the floor at the entrance to the bedroom. Mathez thought "husband," although he knew they hadn't yet married. Presumably, he would acknowledge and care for the child; otherwise, Mathez thought, he'd take it upon himself to consult the church for help. So far, all was well. Mathez felt her back in order to be sure that the baby wasn't sitting on the spine. Then, his ear to her belly, he listened to the healthy thump and nodded with a slight smile. The woman saw the smile, as he meant her to; she let out a happy grunt between the agonized yelps. Reaching out for the powders, he called for the maid to bring water. He mixed the sedative in a glass and his patient drank it down. He caressed her again, giving the potion a chance to take effect. Outside the storm rose higher and stronger. Sometimes miracles happen on the clearest nights of the year so that the stars can guide the visiting kings. But not this miracle, even though it was to be no less a miracle of the light than the birth of Jesus. The husband stepped into the room. For an odd second, he and Mathez faced each other as if in confrontation. There certainly was something angry in the man's round face; the cheekbones were folded in sharply toward the nose, and thick eyebrows lowered over his features. Neither man blinked. He glared at Mathez as if not trusting him with the responsibility--even though Mathez 31

was the one he chose--before returning to the entrance and waiting there, almost sullenly. Turning back to the woman, Mathez guessed suddenly what the man's problem may have been. Her nightgown was hiked up to her waist and her legs were spread. The full pubic beard and swollen lips were a sight this husband wanted to claim as a sole prerogative. In an ideal world, all doctors are blind and nothing ever intrudes on the conjugal stake. Maybe, thought Mathez, he had been brought here because a younger doctor could not be tolerated. Her braids hung in tatters down her cheek. Mathez saw the hips already spreading. She'd be a fat old woman. Maybe fat before then. Her cries now echoed around the room. An expensive gilt crucifix hung on the wall. Its Christ's eyes were shut. No blood on the walnut skin. She reached down to her hip; the bone was bearing the brunt of the pain. Maybe it was the rain outside and some intimacy engendered by it, but Mathez himself began to sweat in sympathy. Maybe the fever he'd been expecting was already coming on; as he began to massage the woman's abdomen, his own hips felt swollen and a leaden weight hung between his legs. She heaved terribly. An hour passed. Her cries were short yet sharp and came every five seconds until they were like a continuous exhalation. He felt older, and weak under the burden of her pain. Nothing was coming yet. In fact, the dilations had stopped altogether. He became worried. He thought about the knife but it had been years since he had cut, and he didn't want to do it now. Eventually, though, he'd have to do something. Another hour passed. In all the years, only a half dozen children had died in his hands. Yet the key to his legend was, not a single woman had ever died. When the first one does, he thought, will that be the end? If this one dies, do I die? His nose and chest were congested; he saw, with each gasp of the patient, a specter of his own death. Finally, stronger contractions, and, then rather quickly, full dilation. No fetus in sight, however; he nodded to the maid, who presented him the forceps. He'd pull something out or faint from the chill and his own mucous. Faint, God forbid, and she'd die, and he'd die. The head rested in the tongs. Mathez now saw a peak of bare cranial flesh between her legs. The maid fetched a small table from the sitting room and spread out the warm linen, then set down the knife he'd use to cut the cord. "Push," said Mathez. The maid, with remarkable aplomb, went behind the bed and reached out to hold high the woman's legs. But the mother started babbling. "Dozens of them," she kept saying. "Dozens of them." "Easy, my dear," said Mathez.

"All on the road. Dozens everywhere. Don't stop them, let them wash through, let 'em flow. Tumble each on each." "Easy, dearest," he said again, worrying again for her life. Then he remembered what he'd done with the Palissy woman a decade ago. He leaned over as if to whisper in her ear, but instead began himself to breathe with full, heavy and regular breaths. He furrowed all his concentration in his own breath; he covered the woman with those breaths. Even in her delirium, he'd get her to echo them and, with such breaths, she'd regain control of the moment, and ride over the unbearable pain and the unbearable incoherent visions. Legs way up. The head was out, and Mathez let the forceps fall from his hand. Just outside, the husband's shadow loomed large and crossed a foot or two into the bedroom. Mathez watched the top shoulder approach birth: an extrusion as slow as geology. Again, he worried: Had there been enough oxygen? "It's a boy," he said, finally. "A boy! A boy!" said the mother. The husband stepped closer to the bed. "Is he whole?" "He's whole, so far." "End it soon," he said, sounding more put upon than weary. "Finish soon, can you?" As if to oblige, the child's feet sidled out of the mother's womb. The woman's thighs were glistening with sweat, and she was almost blinded by the water dripping from her scraggly braids. But the ordeal wasn't over. There was no sound, not even a splutter of air, after the first slap. Mathez landed another, harder. The moisture on his brow turned cold and he felt it cling to his skin; he felt it chill and clammy inside his head. A third slap, and he heard what sounded like a faint cough, although it didn't seem to come from the baby. It sounded distant, like something lost out there in the storm. Mathez dared not look at either parent. He blasted, at last, the newborn back with the side of his fist, and a rasp of a cough broke loose. The infant began to cry but it was a cry Mathez in all these years had never heard before. Not a shrill cry, nor rising ululation, it was a low moaning call that harmonized oddly with the sounds of the rain beating against the windows. Only gradually did it begin to rise, until becoming at last the healthy sound of real life. Mathez himself could barely see through his own sweat as he counted the toes. "Completely whole," he said, and let the baby rest against his mother's belly instead of lying him down on the linen. Mathez cut the cord. The maid hurried over with towels to collect the afterbirth and sop up 33

the blood. As she leaned over, Mathez came close to her fleshy face and smiled. "You're a fine woman," he said, loud enough for her employer to hear. "This has been a very hard one. Thank you." "Thank you," she said with a self-effacing smile, still holding the cloth full of afterbirth. "You can get rid of that now," Mathez advised her. He checked the mother. No fever, no sign of infection. But her mouth was ajar, and she seemed insensate. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I was expecting it to be difficult," he said. "Bear the pain. It will pass." The maid came up with the swaddling cloth, and Mathez, stepping back, felt faint again, this time with exhaustion. He was too old for this, too old for such struggle. The father, impassive but no longer quite so stiff, approached him with the coins. "As in the past, we thank you for your considerable efforts," he said. "Send a message tomorrow with the stable boy," he told the man, "even if it's only to say she's resting peacefully." And to the maid he said, "Check her for any excessive redness in the morning. If she's too warm, tell the master. Any discomfort she mentions, have me informed." Mathez walked to the threshold and looked back at the woman. At last she was smiling, happily, as the baby rested on her breast. Outside, the vast pouring rain. As he surveyed the sky, he opened his mouth almost in awe, like he was about to call out to the world. He might have, had he had something to say to the rain. The boy brought the carriage over and Mathez hopped on, using another thick cloth over his head for whatever protection it would provide. The moon jumped out of the clouds in a sudden blur of bright white and illuminated the whole landscape ahead of him. Everything shone in unprecedented clarity. Never had he seen forms at midnight so well defined. Pieces of bark on the trees hung over each other in a sharply outlined quilt work. The world never looked like this. The distant hills ambled in the moonlight like clay gargantuas about to reshape themselves. Nature was playing with itself, and he felt like an intruder--as if he had caught the world unawares and was about to see its secrets. He glanced at the stable hand manning the reins. The boy seemed to be seeing something too, but both were quiet. Actually, the young man was in some pain. The rain was whipping his cheeks and neck, and he was wincing at every turn. The horse barreling resolutely over the land was behaving as if he were angry. Mathez imagined the horse's eyes: red and glaring, mad at the world for heaving up a child on a night like this. Or perhaps the apparent mystery in the air was unsettling the beast, who was bolting now and almost skidding down the road. But Mathez was less anxious than before, or perhaps he was just resigned to fate. 34

On the other hand, he wanted to see his wife again. Again, he reached over to help the boy rein in the wild steed. Suddenly they veered over the rim of a ditch, and Mathez heard a perilous sound of horse hooves scratching. He glanced downward as they passed and saw the mud flooded like a deep bog, crisscrossed on the surface by fallen branches. The whole carriage tilted as if to crash, and the two riders braced themselves for the worst. But two of the wheels hewed to fairly solid ground, and the trip continued. "I guess I don't want to die yet," he muttered to the boy, who didn't respond. Mathez thought of the man who was the child's father without quite resenting him, even though he lacked the common decency to offer a bed for the night or shelter until the storm subsided. Mathez would have accepted such an offer, of course, and perhaps should even have solicited so basic a consideration. Yet there was about this travail, this deluge of nonpareil clarity, something of a force of inevitability for him. "And I want to see my wife again," he added. This time the boy nodded in reply, almost sympathetically. Harder and harder they pulled on the reins as their steed charged on. Mathezâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; arm was throbbing and there was a slight gaseous pain in his chest. A heart attack wouldn't surprise. He knew his body was being racked. He knew such vessels as his own weren't fit for this. The mud saved them. The whole backside of the horse was lurching forward with great resoluteness but the momentum slowed as the wet mud rose ever higher along the road. Soon the beast was a veritable contortionist picking its way forward with exaggerated movements and grinding to less than a trot as his dark legs dug into the quag. The deceleration made for another problem, however: lightning. Streaks of it were everywhere; the air itself was a lodestone. The young driver was apparently troubled as well. Where just a moment ago he'd been straining to rein in the animal, now he was whipping it almost furiously. One bolt flashed just above their heads, in an instant illuminating countless raindrops for miles in the distance. Not only his own death, Mathez regarded the poor boy beside him who'd never had a chance to live. "I give up," he whispered aloud to himself. "I'm as good as dead." Yet as if nature were contriving to be merciful, the mud before them hardened and their pace picked up. Mathez glanced at the driver, who also looked relieved. They'd apparently gotten past a small network of streams that had swollen and badly swamped the road. Of course, the lightning could still kill them, or the horse once again accelerate dangerously, but at least now they didn't 35

feel as if they were just sitting still, waiting for their luck to run out and a thunderbolt hit. Mathez breathed even deeper when he realized that the copse was well behind them, so their destination could not be too far ahead. "You sleep in the kitchen tonight," he said to the driver, who nodded back with an appreciative smile. "You can put your horse in my neighbor's barn." "I hope my mother doesn't worry too much," said the boy. "I think we'll be all right as long as no tree falls down on us." That was actually a serious consideration. A few older trees hovering over the road were creaking in the wind and rain. But finally Mathez spotted it: the limey green-white facade of his cottage, no more than five hundred yards away. The other-worldly clarity that so affected him at the outset of the return trip had faded â&#x20AC;&#x201C; although, as they neared the house, and the garden by the front door, Mathez did see the bent heads of the white and red roses in their beds also hung in sharp, eerie outline. The gaslight inside fanned out through the front room. One hundred yards away now, he thought he could make out his wife busying herself about the room. She embraced her husband as the boy ran off to lodge the horse. Now the cold really afflicted him. Trembled, he peeled off his shirt and pants as his wife brought hot compresses. "I'll make more for the boy when he comes in," she said. He wrapped himself in a long white sheet and hunched up by the fireplace. He lost consciousness before the fumes, which had overpowered him but loosened the oppressive congestion in his head. He opened his eyes to find his wife standing beside him, and he rose to accept her sympathetic caress. Some time had passed, apparently. The stable hand was already settled inside with a mug of tea. "Tell me you'll be all right," she said as she poured him a cup. "I will," he said. The back of his head was heavy with indescribable exhaustion but his throat was just a little sore. Finally, they lay down together. "I've never seen you look so tired before," she said. "I've never felt so tired before." "It must have been a hard trip." "It was," he answered. "The delivery was hard too. It was all very hard." "Why?" she asked. "Because it was Cezanne. Tonight, I delivered Paul Cezanne."

In love again If age is beauty I am Helen And her beauty is like a sorrowful dirge, Wrecked like the end with a colon: Transmuted. In youth, what surge Is this, strapping and shaping its Current humors, current ills, Dreaming my end in pits Watching my eyes for spills Of Valium or Mercury Rage or Repentance, Vowels or surgery, Mixed in with regret. Tis fools in May December Come raging for our horror:

Hotel America “Did you pay Sage?” “Yeah. But he asked for my I.D., he didn’t seem to recognize me.” “He has a brain tumor, sometimes he just forgets things, but sometimes he goes crazy.” She has on a leopard print skirt and we bump and grind. Her hair is grey at the roots and when we sit on the bed I look and she looks and I brush off a bug and she says, “It’s OK,” but it’s not OK. I’m not OK and she’s not OK but for entirely different reasons.

O' Reilly's Menu MENU August 4th – 10th, 2014 Starters Tater tots

House salad

French Fries 5

TBM salad

Pickle tray

Mozz Sticks

Dinner Scallop Potatoes and Roasted Chicken

Eggplant Parmesan

House Burger

Crab Sandwich

Hangar Steak with Vegetables

Baked Macaroni and Cheese

Hot Wings (Mild or Hot)

About Us O’Reilly’s is thrilled to be the newest addition, to the Philadelphia restaurant scene. We strive to bring you the best downhome American food, just like your grandma used to make. Thanks for stopping in! -Owner Tom O’Reilly and Head Chef BJ Jo Johnson

Dessert Ice Cream (Vanilla, Chocolate or Strawberry)

NY Cheesecake

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Name: S. Holmes Birthday: 06/01 Anniversary: N/A Additional Comments Upon their arrival I could immediately deduce that these potatoes were undercooked, not by first eating them, for though it would have been the fastest way, it would have surely been the most unpleasant. It was instantly apparent that they were the only item not steaming – an elementary finding, however most people tend to erroneously dismiss the obvious. In addition, raw potatoes possess a rutted surface before being cooked, and these were rather pocked and punctuated due to a complete lack of heat. My dear man, I did not eat your potatoes not because I dislike potatoes, but because eating raw potatoes can lend one to bloating and overall digestive malaise. Something I am hoping to avoid tonight as a serious plot is afoot and I wish not to be lurking through alleyways, plagued by flatulence and giving myself away. Thank you for your feedback!

MENU August 11th – 17th Starters Tater tots 4 Hand-selected potatoes, fried to crispy perfection

House salad 6 Greens, olives, tomatoes, celery

French Fries 4 Hand-cut potatoes, fried to crunchy perfection

TBM salad 7 Tomatoe, Mozzarella, Basil

Pickle tray 5 Dill, Bread & Butter pickles arranged on a plate

Mozz Sticks 5 Mozarella, perfectly fried to perfection

Dinner Scallop Potatoes and Roasted Chicken 13 Chicken, roasted to be crisp on the outside and cooked sufficiently through on the inside. Potatoes are handselected and carefully scalloped. About Us Eggplant Parmesan 11 O’Reilly’s is thrilled to be the Eggplant and parmesan cheese – just the way Nana used to make it newest addition, to the (made by head chef BJ Jo Johnson) Philadelphia restaurant scene. We strive to bring you the House Burger 8 best downhome American Cooked the way you like it. (Cannot do rare!) food, just like your grandma used to make. Thanks for Crab Sandwich 10 stopping in! -Owner Tom O’Reilly and Seasoned Maryland crab on a bun. Comes with fries. Head Chef BJ Jo Johnson Hangar Steak with Vegetables 17 Steak so big it sags off the side of the plate! Bring your camera! With roasted peppers, asaparagus and handselected potatoes If you like us, tell your friends!

Baked Macaroni and Cheese 12 Macaroni and cheese, baked to crispy perfection.

Hot Wings (Mild or Hot) 10 These three-piece wings are so big you’ll think we pumped them full of hormones! (But we didn’t) Dessert Ice Cream (Vanilla, Chocolate or Strawberry)

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Name: Jekyll Birthday: No, Hyde Anniversary: No, Jekyll! Additional Comments I prefer cold, uncooked potatoes, so this was wonderful. No, cold uncooked potatoes are horrible, what is wrong with you? Me? You’re the screw up! I’m just along for the ride. I didn’t ask to be brought here. Yeah well you didn’t have to join me. I guess I didn’t. Aren’t there other things you’d rather do? Well…maybe I don’t like you eating alone. Wow, that’s…that’s actually very sweet, Mr. Hyde. I appreciate that. It’s not a problem. Thank you. You’re welcome. Thank you for your feedback!

MENU August 18th – 24th Starters Tater tots 4 Hand-selected potatoes, fried to crispy perfection

House salad 6 Greens, olives, tomatoes, celery

French Fries 4 Hand-cut potatoes, fried to crunchy perfection

TBM salad 7 Tomatoe, Mozzarella, Basil

Pickle tray 5 Dill, Bread & Butter pickles arranged on a plate

Mozz Sticks 5 Mozzarella, perfectly fried to perfection

Dinner Scallop Potatoes and Roasted Chicken 13 Chicken, roasted to be crisp on the outside and cooked sufficiently through on the inside. Potatoes are handselected and carefully scalloped. Eggplant Parmesan 11 Eggplant and parmesan cheese – just the way Nana used to make it (made by head chef BJ Jo Johnson) House Burger 8 Cooked the way you like it on an artisan roll with aeoli sauce. (Now doing rare!)

About Us O’Reilly’s is thrilled to be another great addition, to the thriving Philadelphia restaurant scene. We strive to bring you the best downhome American food, just like Nana used to make. Thanks for stopping in! Please fill out our customer satisfaction card but save the joshing for somewhere else. COME AGAIN SOON!! -Owner Tom O’Reilly and Head Chef BJ Jo Johnson

Crab Sandwich 10 Old Bay Seasoned Maryland crab on a bun. Comes with a side of our crispy fries. Hangar Steak with Vegetables 17 Steak so big it hangs off the plate! Bring your camera! With roasted peppers, asparagus and hand-selected potatoes If you love us, why keep it a secret? Tell your friends! Unless you are friendless.

Baked Macaroni and Cheese 12 Macaroni and cheese, baked to crispy perfection. Hot Wings (Mild or Hot) Three-piece wings. No GMOs.

Dessert Ice Cream (Vanilla, Chocolate or Strawberry)

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Name: Santa Birthday: Anniversary: Additional Comments Ho-ho-ho! You have been a very bad boy this year! Instead of coal in your stocking you will find lumps of uncooked potatoes! And this giant piece of macadam you call a rare hangar steak will be shoved so far up your butt on Christmas morning that you will be too busy spewing gravel to run this sled-wreck of a restaurant. Ho-ho-ho! Thank you for your feedback!

MENU August 25th – 31st Starters Tater tots 4 Hand-selected potatoes, fried to crispy perfection

House salad 6 Greens, olives, tomatoes, celery

French Fries 4 Hand-cut potatoes, fried to crunchy perfection

TBM salad 7 Tomatoe, Mozzarella, Basil

Pickle tray 5 Dill, Bread & Butter pickles arranged on a plate

Mozz Sticks 5 Mozzarella, perfectly fried to perfection

Dinner Scallop Potatoes and Roasted Chicken 13 The potatoes have no feelings and don’t mind if you don’t eat them, but the environment does. Uneaten food goes into the trash and contributes to our greenhouse gas emissions. If you don’t feel like eating the potatoes then don’t order them. Eggplant Parmesan 11 Now less rubbery! House Burger 8 Cooked the way you like it on an artisan roll with aeoli sauce. (Now doing rare!)

About Us O’Reilly’s is thrilled to be another great addition, to the thriving Philadelphia restaurant scene. We strive to bring you the best downhome American food, just like Nana used to make. Thanks for stopping in! Please fill out our customer satisfaction card with your real name and COME AGAIN SOON!! -Owner Tom O’Reilly and Head Chef BJ Jo Johnson

Crab Sandwich 10 Old Bay Seasoned Maryland crab on an artisan roll. Comes with a side of our crispy fries. Our most popular dish!! Hangar Steak with Vegetables 17 Please let us know if your steak is not done to your liking. The waiter shouldn’t have to suffer a poor tip because you have a hard time being assertive. Baked Macaroni and Cheese 12 Macaroni and cheese, baked to crispy perfection. Hot Wings (Mild or Hot) Three-piece wings. No GMOs.

We love our customers!

Dessert Ice Cream (Vanilla, Chocolate or Strawberry)

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Name: Thor Birthday: …. Anniversary: …. Additional Comments SCALLOPED POTATOS, FACE THY DEMISE! Thank you for your feedback!

MENU September 1st – 7th Starters Tater tots 4 House salad 6 Hand-selected potatoes, fried to crispy perfection Greens, olives, tomatoes, celry French Fries 4 Hand-cut potatoes, fried to crunchy perfection

TBM salad 7 Tomatoe, Mozzarella, Basil

Pickle tray 5 Dill, Bread & Butter pickles arranged on a plate

Mozz Sticks 5 Mozzarella, perfectly fried to perfection

Dinner Scallop Potatoes and Roasted Chicken 13 All I ate growing up were potatoes. I understand if you are not a fan, but you might as well run into the kitchen and slap chef BJ Jo Johnson in the face if you’re going to hide them in your napkin for the wait staff to find later. Eggplant Parmesan 11 Eggplant, like Portobello mushrooms, are the meat substitute for vegetarians. If you are a vegetarian then this is your dish! House Burger 8 Cooked with a sprinkle of aioli sauce and chives. You’re choice of adding avocado, olive spread or pate for an extra 3$. Crab Sandwich 9 Old Bay Seasoned Maryland crab on an artisan roll. Comes with a side of our cripy fries. Our most popular dish now cheaper! WOW!

About Us O’Reilly’s is thrilled to be another great addition, to the thriving Philadelphia restaurant scene. We strive to bring you the best downhome American food, just like Nana used to make. Please fill out a customer satisfaction form seriously, or we will never know what we are doing wrong. If you fill out the form you will be entered to win free mozzarella sticks delivered to your door by Executive Chef BJ Jo Johnson!! -Owner Tom O’Reilly and Exec Chef BJ Jo Johnson

Hangar Steak with Vegetables 17 Steak so big it hangs off the plate! Bring your camera! With We love you even if you don’t love us. Sound like roasted peppers, asparagus and hand-selected potatoes someone familiar? Baked Macaroni and Cheese 12 Hint: JESUS Macaroni and cheese, baked to crispy perfection. Hot Wings (Mild or Hot) Three-piece wings. No GMOs.

Dessert Ice Cream (Vanilla, Chocolate or Strawberry)

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Name: Yogsothoth Birthday: Before the dawn of man Anniversary: Long after I have feasted on your flesh and danced in your blood. Additional Comments As a Great Old One, I am not a huge fan of modern food, but your potatoes, which are uncooked for the most part, remind me of before the time of fire and so I find myself reminiscing. Your House Burger, a delight, was so charred that it was as if I were picking body parts scorched from the Hell Mouth itself – something I haven’t done in years, mostly because Cthulu is a total dick and thinks I stole his skateboard when I definitely didn’t, so he won’t let me down there, hence my decision to eat here instead. Since I like stuff that tastes like death and burning, beware! I will certainly rise out of the earth and patronize your restaurant at a later time. Thank you for your feedback!

**OUR LAST WEEK!** MENU September 8th - 14th Starters Nobody ordered this stuff ever so it’s off the menu. Dinner Scallop Potatoes and Roasted Chicken 8 If I never see another potato again I will die a very happy man. Eggplant Parmesan 9 Nobody really likes eggplant parmesan. It’s what you get when you have no other choice. I compare it with the time I had to go to the prom with the ugly sister because the pretty sister was sick with mono and bailed on me. About Us Thank you for giving us a House Burger 8 wonderful run at the What is aioli anyway? I asked BJ Jo Johnson but he was too impenetrable food industry. We high to give me a concise answer. I fear I will never know. learned a lot about how picky By the look of it, I honestly don’t want to know. Philly eaters are, and how spoiled you’ve all been by Crab Sandwich 9 Philly’s myriad five star This really was our most popular dish. Everyone loves restaurants. I guess no one likes crabs. Even vegetarians. Sometimes I think vegetarians downhome American food are secretly jealous of us. My ex-wife is a vegetarian and anymore. Unfortunately BJ Jo she’s always had a sour look on her face like she wanted Johnson doesn’t make sushi, bacon but couldn’t admit it to herself. Mediterranean or specializes in anything but what his Nana Hangar Steak with Vegetables 11 used to make. This is more a This was a really big steak but sometimes big doesn’t reflection on your snobby-ness necessarily mean good. than his limited culinary vocabulary. Baked Macaroni and Cheese 7 It has been less than a pleasure. It’s from a box and thrown in a stone dish and placed in Stop in this week to say the oven. My five-year old could make this. goodbye! -Owner Tom O’Reilly and Hot Wings (Mild or Hot) 10 Exec Chef BJ Jo Johnson Our “hot sauce” was just butter and cayenne pepper. Our “mild” was just butter and red Easter egg coloring. And in no way should chicken wings ever be that large. If you see them this large anywhere else, do not eat them, it is not natural. Dessert Ice Cream (Vanilla, Chocolate or Strawberry)

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Name: Jason, Paul and Tina Birthday: 9/13 ; 8/11 ; 12/9 Anniversary: N/A Additional Comments Cool place. Funny menu. Will definitely come back. Thank you for your feedback!

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Name: Greg Birthday: 4/15 Anniversary: 5/6 Additional Comments I’m sad you’re closing. This place was on the way home from work and the only food I could get that wasn’t overpriced. Now I’ll have to go back to that damn oyster place. Thank you for your feedback! 53

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Name: Jasmine, Terry Birthday: 7/21, 12/24 Anniversary: N/A Additional Comments Loved the atmosphere. Like a place that doesn’t put on airs. Don’t close!!! Thank you for your feedback!

**GRAND REOPENING!!** MENU September 15th – 21st Starters (Eat with caution. We are not responsible for consumption of uncooked foods and the consequences thereafter, including but not limited to: Starters, Dinner and Dessert) Tater tots

House salad

French Fries 5

TBM salad

Pickle tray

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Scallop Potatoes and Roasted Chicken 15 Hi, this is BJ Jo Johnson. I do most of the descriptions for food. If you have a problem with my grammer, or spelling, then kindly eat me. About Us O’Reilly’s is thrilled to reopen Eggplant Parmesan 13 due to neighborhood pressures The words egg and plant together as food sicken me. and the fact that we can’t end our Why do you order this when we have steak? lease until next year so we might as well keep this shit up. The food House Burger 10 is not farm to table but from The burger is called the house burger because it's extremely questionable sources. actually from my house. It sits between my pickle jar Do not ask Exec Chef BJ Jo and my wife’s breast milk before I bring it here. Johnson where your chicken came from. He uses large knives and Crab Sandwich 12 has a record. This is our best dish. Thanks for stopping in! -Owner Tom O’Reilly and Exec Hangar Steak with Vegetables 18 Chef BJ Jo Johnson I’m getting tired of writing descriptions. Baked Macaroni and Cheese 13 If you need me to describe this then you have bigger problems than I do. Hot Wings (Mild or Hot) 12 This will come back to haunt you later. *Freezers broken…no dessert this week.

My Kingdom for an Adverb

It’s my first day as a Spanish instructor. “There’s no need to know grammar to teach a language,” the supervisor says. “Oh,” I say. “We all speak our native language anyway, don’t we? And we don’t know its grammar. We just speak it.” “I will prove this to you,” he says. “Tell me what no is.” “No?” “Yes, no.” I have no idea what he's talking about. “Well, no is no, I guess.” “Yes, but what is it?” he says, “a verb, a noun, an article?” “It’s a negative,” I offer. “Yes, but grammatically, what is no?” I panic. First day on the job and I’m already flunking the test. “I don’t know,” I say. “See?” he says. “You don’t know. Hardly anyone knows.” I'm relieved to be in the majority for once. “No,” the supervisor says, “is an adverb.” “It is?” I say, duly impressed. “People use the word no all the time, don’t they?” he says. “Even though they don’t know what it is.” “I see.” “You have used the word no, haven’t you?” “Yes, a few times,” I say. But the truth is that I’ve had a hard time saying no. I couldn’t say no to my girlfriend, which is how I ended up here, in the States, living in San Francisco with no money, desperate for a gig, hoping to teach Spanish for seven bucks an hour, eight if I make it past the probationary period. “See?” he says. “You don’t need the grammar to teach a language.” Unable as I am to say no, I assent with my head. I leave the office feeling like a fraud, a grammar-less immigrant, posing as a teacher, working in a rundown building in the financial district with windows so cruddy they probably haven’t been cleaned since the Eisenhower administration. I grab my teaching materials; go to the classroom, to my first student, a pale man with glasses who says he wants to learn a lot of Spanish vocabulary. “I want to meet pretty Latina women,” he says. “Sounds like a worthy goal,” I say. “I want to learn lots of words, so I can talk to them.” “Have you taken Spanish lessons before?” “I’m from the Midwest,” he says, as if that should answer my question. “The Midwest,” I repeat.

“Yeah, it’s horrible,” he says. “Everyone there looks like me: pale, boring, all the same. Not like California. This place is like fireworks compared to Indiana, and there are plenty of pretty Latinas around.” So we go over words and expressions he thinks apply to women, such as Frenchkissing, mating like rabbits, and the missionary position. The man has a solid memory, quickly absorbing everything. “Está caliente,” he says. “She’s hot.” “I wouldn’t say that,” I say. “Why not?” he asks. “Because está caliente in Spanish means she’s in heat.” “Oh,” he says. “I’ve got to write this one down.” He repeats terms in Spanish over and over until he’s able to say them like a native. I congratulate him on his rapid progress. “You’re a fast learner,” I say. “I’m motivated,” he says. After class I meet with the supervisor again. “The student loved your class,” he says. “He said you taught him just the vocabulary he needs for his job.” “What kind of job does he have?” I ask. “Accounting,” the supervisor says. “He's such a gentleman. I would trust him with my own daughter.” “Sir,” I say. “I don't think I can do this, I don't have the training.” “Nonsense,” he says. “You have a university degree.” “A degree from the Third World,” I say. “Good only for cleaning toilets.” “Nonsense,” he says. “The student requested you. I need you here. Or do you have a better offer?” I don't, so I remain silent. “See?” the supervisor says. “This is the perfect job for you.” “I suppose,” I say. “Welcome then to the International Languages Success School,” he says. “You're officially a member of our team.” He smiles, and his resolve gives me a strange feeling of hope, a glimmer only, but such glimmers is all we have, they are the only guide we possess to finding our way through the obscurity of this world. I decide to give this job a shot. I shake the supervisor's hand and we close the deal. I have my doubts, true, but also I have never been good at saying no.

Shall I Submit a Poem to the 2013 Literal Latté Poetry Award? “I ask my husband, ever the literalist …” No. “We’re mostly couples of that age when people start …” No. “Consider how a kite struck from the sky …” No. “He plans to plummet …” No. “The hawk had a squirrel up in our eucalyptus …” No. “This is the trouble with visiting the past …” No. “Even this close we are constantly parting …” No. “On the far side of my family’s farm …” No.

When the Makos Came A cramp yanks up the log of your left half-leg with its horseshoe-sized staples from the bleached sheets lying like executed sails. The nurse bales eggs to your lips, which smile but wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t part. The Jamaican nurse grunts as she straightens the yoke of your noble shoulders in the bed, only to sigh like ebb tide when you lean back to the right, wedging your monumental head against the cold aluminum bars that prevent you from dragging your gangrenous torso home. Oh, Colossus of Rhodes, I was ten quivering years when we drove past the dome of the lunar-like satellite tracking station to our fishing spot and saw the gray whale, a washed-up continent, with stringy Bermudians trying to push it, lift it, pull its scimitar tail. When the makos came, the gray clenched its jelly jaws, listed its barnacled hull, and quivered its flukes in agony. But that was the last I saw before I hid my tears under your soft stone chest.

Feral Warm arms, warm arms holding, clutching grabbing tight, jostling movement through high, wet grass. Darkness sliced with pale light, shadows of green smudged, running, running. Stop. We are nowhere. Arms encircle, smell familiar, hoarse voice says over and over just wait here, I will find you. She is frightened and I am frightened because she is. Every part of her shakes. Just wait. I will find you. Arms are gone. Sound of bare feet against tall, tall grass. Cold. Too cold for tears. Just wait. Just stand and wait and don’t cry and running now, running after the sound of bare feet pounding against damp dew and we are nowhere. She is nowhere and I am here. Or I am nowhere. Just wait. She will find me. Cold. There was a face. There was a face with arms and it promised. Can’t see the face anymore, can’t picture it. Only green for ever and ever. Green turning red turning dead, dead brown. Still waiting. Find me. Promised. Hungry. Watch them, they are all teeth and growls and yelping and claws. Watch them sniff air, scratch ground, watch them run, bare paws against grass but makes no sound. Watch them leap, watch them tear at flesh. Red everywhere like the red that was once green. Red life leaks out of prey. No sound. Hungry. Crawl forward, slow. Slower. Teeth are bared, lips peeled, show my teeth and gargle sound in the back of my throat. Keep moving, so slow. Scoop at the red, tear at the flesh. Sniff air. Scratch ground. Run. Running bare feet hands clawing ground. Green back soon. Life back soon. Drink river, dark comes. Find safe. Into tree, have stick, safe. Safe. Sleep, have stick. Sleep. Hungry. Wait. Run. Tear. Claw. Red. Eat. Sleep. Paws, ground, green. Howling. Promised. Dark shape. Big. Big paws. Not paws. Not paws grab, encircle. Run. Bite, tear, claw, not paws, not fangs. Howl, howl and tear and run, not paws reaching far, bite scream, red. Red red red. Growls strange. Big not paws touch, prod, poke, makes noises. Wants noises back, shakes not paws, wants noise, yowl. Not right noise. Big eyes, big not paws, big arms, arms that encircle, not familiar, not right. Not promised. In place. Not green. No green brown red yellow blue. White. Took stick. Not cold. Hungry. Big gives food, no red. Eat, eat forever. Touches head. Gentle. Remember. Remember promise just wait I will find you. Cry. Big makes soft noises, arms encircle. She never came back. She never found me. Big found me. Learned from Big. No more stick, no more red, no more running bare feet against grass. No more tear, claw, bite. No more green. No more hungry. No more cold. No more waiting.

SBA Cheryl cuts her bangs writes demonic poetry all night about her vagina about how her vagina is a small business and she can’t afford health insurance for her employees She stops and cuts her bangs some more sends an angry e-mail to the White House about how Obamacare will create an insurmountable financial burden She writes more poetry on her laptop screen then hits the X and gets rid of it all Her vagina is a small business and she has not heard back from the Small Business Administration about her application for a small business loan She stops and cuts her bangs some more She writes another e-mail to the White House She writes that Obama must be a God because he can raise and lower the level of the oceans at will so surely he can help her get a small business loan There are no more bangs to cut so she shaves her head gets in her car and gets out on the freeway finds herself in gridlock It’s a hundred and forty degrees in her car The air conditioner died in a distant century She’s going to snap She gets out of her car Her door bangs the car next to hers Inside the air-conditioned cabin a fat lady rolls down her window and screams: My car cost a hundred thousand dollars You can’t touch it! My car is worth ten million dollars, Cheryl screams back as is my vagina You can touch it if you pay me but neither are insured 66

Cheryl looks off the freeway The letters of the Hollywood sign fifty feet tall grow to five-hundred feet as she watches She feels dwarfed She’s going to sink through the hot asphalt and down to Hell In 1978, the year she was born termites infested the wooden letters the ‘O’ tumbled down the mountain arsonists set fire to the bottom of the second ‘L’ Cheryl was born into the first ‘ell’ as the British say Born under a bad sign she sings to the stalled traffic I’ve been down since the day I was born In 1932, struggling starlet Peg Entwhistle dove off the top of the ‘H’ and killed herself Cheryl knows you can’t do that anymore The letters are made of baked enamel and there’s high-tech surveillance 24/7 If she tried to pull an Entwhistle a robot would pull her down and throw her into the Mental ‘Ell System Born hooked on crack and HIV well, maybe not crack maybe not HIV either but she likes to tell her customers that when they’re done puts a scare in them gives them a thrill Life and Death small business Obabmacare will ruin her She’s voting republican They will trickle on her She charges extra for that She really doesn’t just pretends she does Doesn’t have a small business just likes to say she does 67

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the ninetieth anniversary of the Hollywood sign and Cheryl knows theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re repainting it three thousand gallons of paint enough paint to cover every house in Watts fire retardant, anti-riot paint She leaves her boiling car where it sits in lane 2 walks off walks away

New Soil, Old Dawn We spent the summer breaking chains to reality, ripping down dance floors, slamming ourselves against walls. At first, people said we were lovely. We were good at that: keeping stuff nice and tight and pretty. But look under the bed and there, there’s all the stuff we couldn’t find places for. We held each other’s hands and watched the dawn of a new high break open. Stevie shoved needles in our veins, took us places where bananas were stars and we couldn’t eat them. And we said, “that shit hurts,” and we were talking about the come-down, when we were inside of each other still, but we were sticky and spent and the fun was old. That mattress popped up pockets of dust that blew apart and filled the cracked den light in hazes of living gray, and the graffiti sparkled as if the world were beautiful. We spent time in a bubble of burning nights and watched as they popped and left streaks like a splintered star over the face of everything we knew. We woke up mornings two days later and overstepped broken bottles, unable to distinguish shared needle tips filled with strange bloods. You let your hand unfold and we took it into chapped hands that were mine, dirty unwashed hands that knew the wetness of soil—inchoate dirt, before fertility, when it was just dead things. And the sun surprised us every morning we caught it. And what surprised us was that we saw it. What surprised us was that we opened our eyes along with every wild bloom offering yellow and blue from broken concrete. And the city breathed with us again. We remember when our eyes first met across a playground, when we were still untouched like the children, our little brothers, who we protected, who we pushed on swings or down slides. What was it you said to me? “You’re obviously a morning person.” But I wasn’t. Crusty eyes and cheeks cracked with saliva were the remnants of tortured sleep building in meanness. You showed me what a bully life was and then how to bully it back, how to bully ourselves. We were so busy we forgot about everybody, about our little brothers. Our families screamed that we were wrong, that love was blind and we had the worst kind, no eyes and too much action. They eventually said that we were pots too hot to hold, that we’d only glimpse each other in small yelps. But they were wrong. We saw each other in bawls. We stole ground from beneath ourselves, brothers in hand, and dropped them from our over-city flight, not looking where they fell, but taking each other’s eyes as signs of power traveling through sky. We rode the Ferris lights that threatened to wheel themselves into an ocean that didn’t want it, that kept us at bay with its vomiting waves throwing up salt in spits of green and silver, hiding away its secrets, hiding away all that space. We felt only the vibration of the sundown and the sunrise—each before they happened—and everything was in your eyes, those yellow speckled rings of chocolate melting in my hands from the heat, from all the energy. I licked you up and took you in me that first day we met. Wait...I want to remember things right. I need precision: I took you inside me the moment our eyes met and I was on the swing, no, no, I was behind the swing, and you wore a red bow on your left wrist because you like to be different, your feet unsteady on the slide’s fourth step, sunlight burning the sienna strands breaking your eyes, a fly singing on my hands when I forgot the swing’s chain, and you pushed your little brother down into the swollen wood chips, and gave me something to live against. We were on that Ferris wheel, shaking through our skins, when we said, “this is like the most powerful thing that… holy crap—like the most, like the strongest thing.” And we both agreed. 70

And we both took the salted rough air into our lungs and we didn’t cry when they were scratched. And then we knew, “fuck. Fuck yeah.” We became delinquents overnight. Then people said they always knew. That we were obvious, the quiet kids quivering with guns that shivered from misuse and too much youth. I know that those people had left similar things behind. And the ones who were spared wished for the affliction. But no one told us to our face that they wanted it, the power, the vibration, the knowledge that the world—no, no—that all experience had begun with us, from us—every baby particle clustered together and expanding, rarifying into the evolution of dots to whales to loves that can’t be sustained or self-contained and must bang apart and then go back to the start because they can only exist in circles, just like eternity. But no one knew our ends. We didn’t know. They started when you took me to that place. You didn’t even know where you were going. You just followed the wild flowers and knew that anything that remained untouched deserved faith and when we passed the giant hole where there was once a church but now there was just a puddle, giant and silent, dissolving old cars, you didn’t know, but you believed that we would see the man blowing up stars in the daylight and calling them rockets. We popped up constellations and gave them names. Urvenus. And then Urpenus. Remember, the man told us he only had one left and asked who wants it, and we said nothing, palmed it, burned it up together? We were living without history. No families. No little brothers we used to take to playgrounds, no little men to wake us up before we were ready, when we were still covered with snot and unable to wash ourselves because they had too much energy for waiting. We forgot them. They wanted the first swing, the first sun-struck slide, the first climb up the jungle gym made of red rope. We dropped them and they fell in darkness into a blank sky without even the dignity of failing light. Our families, they dreamed us at raves, covered in neon lights, they dreamed us sucking on pills in our ignorance until someone would tell us “they’re not really candy,” and they saw us take in the artificial and call it truth and they watched, in the little spaces of their minds that stretched and pulled with pain, how we goofed up cigarettes with too many at a time, and how we burnt the tips of our noses and our delicate lashes, and how we spit up rays of light and vomited rose petals like eruptions of ash from volcano mouths. We didn’t see how we burned up inside and broke apart in erosions from an invisible history everyone else remembered. We saw only darkness everexpanding and pulling us in, millions of strong dark hands grasping for our wrists and shoulders. Never our necks, we said, never our necks. And then you punched me. There was music in the air, a violin singing in swans. We were stupid. Because the world doesn’t end. It spins faster, then slower, falls to darkness, then lights up again. But it seemed this would be all we had, so I grabbed your face like an orange too big for my grip and I was determined to eat it. I stole your cherry, popped it with my teeth, pulled it from you and gulped, all the while the music was sobbing all over us in streaks of sick sweet red and you wanted it when I put myself inside you deeply and you breathed me like spurts of flaming oxygen. And you cried that I would never stop and you punched me again and I hurt you so deep you said you’d always keep loving me. We made marks on each other in indelible scars filled with blood and ink and darkness. Our families saw them even when our clothes were on. They were so obvious that they surpassed the physical world. There was no world, just our marks and the fact that we owned them—the fact that they owned us. And your mother screamed at me to get off her damn porch and we just stood there, statue-like, until your dad came with a bat and I ran in fits of giggles. I sang in giggles because I knew that you couldn’t but that you should. I sang for you, even when you were gone. I sang for us in fits of sand and salt and flight. Until then, we thought we had everything but then 71

we met Stevie and he showed us the breaking of the dawn, the first one, the first sun lighting up like rockets made by men who only exist in fields. So that was when I took you inside me. Now I’m being precise. That was when we stole each other’s lives and became only what we were together, when history disappeared, when we bled into all else and the needle came inside of us and took over our taped up souls, that was when, because it was the first beginning, not just a new dawn but the first one, the rough draft of a god too young to know its own power; that was when I took you inside of me and kept you there even when you evanesced in fits of ashes exploding from angry mountains, in fits of breaking light that were made-up constellations but still gorgeous like the first sunrise before we had decided that’s what it was.

Excerpt from My Last Will and Testament I do bequeath my girlfriend my skull which she can use as a jewelry box or as something to kick around in the street with the neighborhood kids, the stray dogs watering and foaming at the mouth for a nice chew

LILITH She called herself Lilith when she used to hang out at the Deaf Club. That’s where you might have seen her, or at the Mabuhay, the Temple, or the Club Foot, pushing her way through the mobs of punks, taking everybody on, always talking to somebody, whether she knew them or not, ignoring or sneering at the paintings on the walls of the underground all-night clubs that kept springing up and vanishing overnight in those days. You’d always find her slamming or pogoing at the front, right up under the makeshift stage, complaining loudly about the bands that were too artsy for her taste in the middle of their quietest songs—those she didn’t know from her Art Institute days, that is—and parting the crowds with her powerful five-foot-two-inch body, halo of curly black hair, and loud sarcastic voice. My friends and I were too young to be hip enough for the A-Hole, though, the club that Lilith took us to the night that I first got to talk to her. It was, I remember, a Saturday night at the Mabuhay Gardens. I was with these guys from the ‘burbs—we were still in high school, but only just—to see the Dead Kennedys when she asked me for a light. I didn’t have one ‘cause I didn’t smoke then, but she kept on talking to me after she’d gotten a light from somebody else. Between sets, while Lilith and I were trading favorite local bands, Dirk announced that there was going to be an after-hours party at the A-Hole later on that night. He was still doing his MC shtick then, you know, where the audience yelled shit at him as he leaned out over us from that tiny stage, the roly-poly impresario with the slimy little Hitler mustache, throwing back the deadly quips while we all sweated in a leathery, hair-sprayed heap up under his nose, pressed against the stage, almost touching the low ceiling with our spiky hairdos. And you’d be thinking: Holy shit, man, in a minute we’ll all be dancing like crazy. I can hardly breathe now and I bet we’re all fucking killed when the music starts, trampled under each other’s feet… Then the Kennedys would come on, launch into “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” and everybody’d be up and going and it wouldn’t be like that at all, more like we’d been set free finally from standing around so long bored in our cages. Suddenly we’d all be careening through space, getting plenty of air and rolling affectionately off of one another, like a waterfall of people, everybody so light—unless somebody accidentally steps on your foot with their boot or something—helping each other up when we fall, and I’d be thrashing away right in the middle of it, feeling loved and happy for the first time in my angst-ridden teenage life—especially now, after Dirk had mentioned the A-Hole, because Lilith had asked me if I was thinking about going over there later on. Obviously I was thinking about it—totally into it in fact—and after a few songs I go find my friends who have the car we came in to tell ‘em about it and they agree to go over there after they see Lilith. So I’m thinking that, yeah, I’m hot shit, that this is it, that I’m in it now, the S.F. punk rock scene! But I’m worried, too, because Lilith doesn’t know yet that I’m from fucking Walnut Creek, only a weekend punk really. But now that I think back on it, I’m sure she could tell by looking at me ‘cause that was before I had cut my hair and I’d probably only blow-dried it up in a messy burr that night and I’m sure it wasn’t fooling anyone. Of course there was less of a punk uniform back in those days too. I mean, when I think of 1977 today, it’s the year that punk broke and the Pistols arrived but, at the time, I think that it was equally important to me that Peter Gabriel had just left Genesis. When the show was over, we stumbled out onto Broadway and down the ramp of the parking lot next door to squeeze sweatily into Jim’s two-door tomato-red Capri—I think this was the night that somebody got a “Mabuhay Gardens: Just Another One Night Stand” bumper sticker and stuck it crookedly across the side of the car—and off we go down Battery through the Financial District and past Market Street towards China Basin, right at the base of Rincon Hill, and to the A-Hole. Lilith was in the front seat, sitting in my lap, talking a blue streak and telling Jim which streets to take right after we’d already shot past the turnoffs. 76

We did find it, after a while, and were still like the first people there—except for those too hip to be at the Mab seeing the Kennedys in the first place. Jim parked on the deserted street across from the brick warehouse with the plywood sign “A-Hole” hung above the door. Somebody said, “This must be the place,” and we all went running up endless flights of stairs—too drunk now to have any accurate sense of time or space—and into the big, open half side of the warehouse or cannery or hay loft or whatever the building had been before the port of San Francisco moved over to Oakland and left it vacant. Well, what it was that night was fucking pretentious. There were a bunch of art school snobs looking suitably bored, leaning against the walls, holding beer bottles and cigarettes right at the tiny tips of their precious little fingers, pretending they were San Francisco’s answer to Andy Warhol’s Factory. “How were the Kennedys?” somebody on the landing asked me as I went in and “Fucking great!” I said without reservation, earning myself a few snickers. I went ahead and played up the Sid Vicious thing then, curling my lip and plowing unheeding towards the bar like some kind of infernal machine shaking itself to pieces. I had Lilith by the arm and yelled, “What is this shit?” into her ear, referring to the weird artsy music they were playing. That was about all the fun we had that night, my friends and I. One two-dollar Budweiser later we were bored out of our brains, falling asleep sitting up against the walls in a dark corner all by ourselves—only the embarrassment of the art punks snubbing us and the feeling of being totally out of place kept us there while I watched Lilith, done with me for the night, darting around the room like a fish in a tank, making friends with everybody she didn’t already know. The next time I saw Lilith it was like a year or so later. I came across her sitting alone in the sun on the grass in Washington Square one afternoon. By then I was living in the city, going to school out at S.F. State, and had cut my hair. I was still on my parents’ payroll though. Lilith had dark purple streaks dyed into her even larger and more viciously teased-out hair and the sun was lighting them up vividly as she lay on the grass reading Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye with her sunglasses on. She didn’t remember who I was but took my word for it that we’d met before, made me sit down, and we talked like old friends until her bottle ran out. She complained about her hair, how it was already the color that most people were dying theirs, like the Siouxsie Sioux clones—did I know Keira? No? Oh well, doesn’t matter—and how she didn’t feel punk enough sometimes because, you know, what can you do with curly hair? I thought she looked pretty good though. She was wearing a black crepe thrift-store mourning dress, a ton of plastic Mardi Gras beads around her neck, and was sitting on a trashed jeans jacket with some dinosaurs and something in Latin stenciled on the back. It goes without saying that she wore oversized combat boots on her tiny feet. She’d also added a nose ring since the last time I’d seen her. She showed it to me close up and told me how she wanted to get more piercings—how she’d heard that sex was amazing after you’d had your labia done. Then she wanted to know where we should go ‘cause it was starting to get cold. “I’m sticking around North Beach for a show at the Savoy Tivoli tonight,” I told her. “You know, the café with the patio over on Grant.” “They’re having shows there now?” “Yeah, they’ve opened up this big room in the back. You’re welcome to come with me if you want.” “Oh, I know—follow me,” Lilith said and I bounded along behind her up the side of Telegraph Hill. She took me to the little record store on Grant Street and showed me the Music From the Deaf Club LP because she was in one of the photos of people hanging out at the club on the insert, wearing a leather jacket with a bunch of buttons on it and smiling cutely. 77

“Your hair was shorter then.” “Yeah, I was trying to get it to lie down with about a ton of mousse. It’s so sad the Deaf Club’s closed,” she sighed, putting the record back in the rack. “It was my favorite place to hang out.” “Really, it’s closed?” “You don’t know anything.” “Well, I always liked the Temple Beautiful, and it’s closed now too.” That’s where I’d been to my very first punk show. My friends from out in the ‘burbs and I had seen an ad in the pink section of the Chronicle that a band called the Dead Kennedys was playing at a place called the New Wave A GoGo, and we thought that the name of the band was so funny we had to go see what they were like. We drove all the way into the city and out Geary and were amazed to find that the club was a stately old synagogue! They’d cleared out the pews and pushed them up against the walls to make a dance floor and they had put blue light bulbs in the Star of David on the ceiling and the bands played on the altar, which was all graffitied and shit. We, of course, got there super early—we always did ‘cause Walnut Creek closes up at six (if it were ever actually open) and punk shows didn’t even start until ten or eleven. When we walked into the cavernous space under the balcony (where people scored drugs and made out) there was hardly anybody there. The Bags, a band from L.A., were playing belligerently to the enormous empty space before them. I had never seen or heard anything like it. I walked right up to the altar and put my elbows on the stage and my adoring head on my hands and the Bags’ singer, Alice, dropped to her fishnet-clad knees and leaned right into my face with her dark eye makeup and bright red lipstick to scream the next couple of songs at me—until I got too self-conscious and walked back to the bar where my friends were hanging out. They were standing around, shyly wondering if they’d be able to get a beer without IDs. By the time the Kennedys came on, at around one, the place was packed. After the record shop, Lilith took me to the black-and-white-checkered punk and New Wave clothing store on Columbus Avenue, below Washington Square, where I stood around sort of bored and embarrassed while she held forth with the nerdy-looking ‘50s seersucker suit and slicked-back hair guy who worked there—she must have known him from somewhere. Lilith tried on like a hundred outfits, and then didn’t buy anything. Then she led me back across Columbus Avenue to the Italian market just off of the square, where we bought some beers, a couple of rolls, and a slab of cheese. We went down to the waterfront, then, to eat and watch the sun go down, Lilith leading me past Aquatic Park and up some stairs on that hill overlooking Fort Mason, to this little meadow that had been a gun emplacement aimed out over the bay during one war or other. She was talking about getting a band together. “I write all these great lyrics, and I’m sure I could sing if I found the right musicians. You don’t play anything, do you?” “No, I’m no musician—sorry to say.” “I wanna meet someone who can teach me the guitar so I won’t be one of those bimbo girl singers, you know. I want to fucking play! “So, who are we going to see tonight?” Lilith continued, changing the subject. “The Sleepers.” “Oh, Ricky’s band—that guy’s so wasted.” I was impressed that she’d actually met him. The Savoy was packed when we got in. They were between bands so the lights were up and Tuxedomoon’s “No Tears” was playing loudly over the P.A. The space in there was weirdly shaped because the café stuck into what would have been the square back room that they had made into a club, forming an open L-shape with another L nestled into it, giving the room two separate wings. The stage cut across the crux of the outer L in the corner. When the Sleepers came on everybody moved to the right-hand wing because Ricky Williams, the singer, had long stringy hair that hung down over 78

his face and you could only see his right eye peeking out between the curtains of hair on either side of where it parted. The Sleepers put on a great fucking show, totally intense, meandering along in a kind of heroin-induced psychedelic drift behind Ricky’s deep, sort of twisted David Bowie vocals. He had this amazing style that always sounded absolutely spontaneous, like he was making up the words as he went along, but when you compared the records with the live shows, every word came out in exactly the same pitch, rhythm, and intensity. I heard that he never wrote down a lyric either, that he was practically illiterate. And later, before his next group, Toiling Midgets, broke up, I saw him sing a set totally out of sync with the rest of the band. They would finish playing a song and he’d go right on singing without them. The band, unable to communicate with him, just shrugged and started up the next song while he was still singing. Then, after finishing the previous lyric, Ricky would start the next tune from the beginning even though the band was already halfway through the number. I guess he was hearing a different music somewhere inside his head. That night at the Savoy, though, he was perfect, not necessarily stoned, but beautiful, and Lilith was entranced. “He’s fucked-up, but he can really sing. He’s some kind of a goddamned genius. What was that one song called again?” “‘When Can I Fly?’” “Yeah, that’s the one. Fantastic.” We walked out onto Grant Street after the show, where they were stacking the chairs onto the tables on the outdoor patio of the café. It was about two in the morning. San Francisco always falls asleep at that hour, when the bars shut down. The whole time I lived there I don’t think I was ever awake past two-thirty or three in the morning. Lilith hustled me over to a liquor store to get a bottle before everything closed up and we went back to my flat to drink it. In those days I was living with two housemates way up on Mt. Parnassus, a little ways below the UC medical center on the edge of the eucalyptus grove underneath the Sutro Tower, which looms like an enormous steel insect, its feet dipped in fog, over that whole part of town. It was a long, twotransfer bus ride down to Market, out along Haight Street, then around the park, and up the Parnassus hill. Lilith filled the journey with her voice, talking and telling stories and—totally inspired by the show we’d seen—planning for the band she was going to get together. When we finally got to my flat she wanted to take a bath. “Come on, I feel all icky and sweaty from the club. It’ll do you good. Where’s the bathroom?” I pointed it out and she dragged me down the hall, pulled me inside and shut the door behind us. I was kinda worried about my two housemates, both women, who’d rented me a room in their flat thinking I was a lot older than I actually was and who resented me a little, I thought, because I was such a kid to them. I hadn’t lied or anything; they’d just assumed I was their age. One worked in an office and the other did social work. They subscribed to The Village Voice and it was from them that I first heard about feminism. Lilith took a long drink from her bottle, cringed, and set it down carefully next to the tub, which was already filling with hot water. She made me unzip her dress in the back and shucked it off over her head. “Hey, come on,” she said, yanking my T-shirt out from under my jeans. “Let’s go— you’re not going to take a bath with your clothes on.” I leaned over and she peeled the shirt off my back. Then she slid her panties down her legs and stepped into the tub while I sheepishly stepped out of my jeans. I got into the tub behind her, trying to hide my hard-on. “Oh, look at that,” she teased, grabbing hold of it. “We’ll see what we can do about that a little later.” She leaned back against me, making my blood rush, arched her neck and kissed me on the chin mostly—that was as far as she could stretch. Then she reached her arm up, took hold of my hair, pulled my head down and really kissed me, swiveling, pressing herself against me. 79

“Too bad you don’t have any candles in here.” She’d turned off the ugly fluorescent light and all we had was the glow of the city below reflecting off of the fog. Picking up the bottle from the floor where she’d set it down, Lilith nestled against me in the hot water, her hand still around the back of my neck, toying with the stubble. We lay there for a long time getting all shriveled up and listening to the foghorns low from across the bay. When she was ready for bed, we giggled our way down the hall, wrapped in towels, carrying our clothes. She jumped into my bed and pulled me in on top of her as I tried to go past her to get to the stereo to put on a record. We started wrestling across my dirty sheets and she pinned me, straddling me with her legs, running her hands over me, pushing me down when I tried to raise up to kiss her, grinding her crotch into me. Then she shimmied up to my face, split her vagina with her fingers and pushed it up in front of my mouth. When she was ready, she turned herself around, sat down on my cock facing the other direction. She had barely begun to rock back and forth when I came. “Oh, bad boy,” she said, slapping my thigh. But then she went on just the same until she came. I think I nearly fainted. I was right, my roommates weren’t happy about our noisy middle-of-the-night escapades, or the purple ring that Lilith’s hair had left in the bathtub. They weren’t happy in the morning either, when Lilith sat in our kitchen drinking coffee and smoking Camel straights until late afternoon, talking everybody’s ears off. And they were even less happy when she came back in the following weeks, when she rang our doorbell at three in the morning after having closed some club or show, when she sat on our phone for half the day, calling people who hardly ever remembered who she was, or when she and some silent green-haired bicycle messenger friend hung out at our place all day while I was at school, smoking a blue haze all through the apartment. By the end of the next month, with Lilith’s help, I’d found and rented a cheap studio at the back of a building on the Tenderloin side of Geary Street. Its only windows overlooked a parking lot with a view down Leavenworth’s ever more depressing slope—from apartments, bodegas, and dry cleaners to bars, flop houses, and porno movie theaters. Some call those two or three transitional blocks between Geary and Eddy ”The Tenderloin Heights,” others “Lower Nob Hill.” Whatever you want to call it, that’s where we spent the summer, where I learned to smoke, to drink the rest of the bottle in the morning in my coffee, and where I learned to keep from coming until Lilith had gotten hers. I got the night manager job at a used-book store in North Beach owned by a sleazy, red-nosed shyster who’d married an ambitious New Yorker, moved away to Marin, and always wore a rotting Greek sailor’s cap on his balding, devious little head. He spent most of his time adjusting our time cards in a downward direction and frantically searching for things for us to do during the night shift. This usually entailed, despite the many complaints of our customers, moving the “Sociology” and “Technical” sections aimlessly from wall to wall. That’s when Lilith started hanging out in North Beach, in the flophouse hotels that were the real remnants of the Barbary Coast—not Melvin Belli’s super-manicured hundred-and-fifty-year-old offices. Where Nick, the drummer in Ricky Williams’s new group, Toiling Midgets, took her when she ran into him in a café on Columbus Avenue. They were talking about her imagined musical future, so Nick decided to introduce her to Courtney, who was singing for a pretty popular S.F. band back then but was always looking for something better. Courtney was physically the complete opposite of Lilith: tall and fleshy, wide-jawed, her dirty blonde hair clinging close to her head. She came off as a surly cross between Stevie Nicks and Joan Jett, her pale blue eyes turning off and on, the opposite of Lilith’s dark eyes that couldn’t stop staring right into you. They were kindred spirits all the same who recognized each other from the very first moment they met. They were always trying to out-talk, act more obnoxiously, and cause more 80

trouble than the other—and get the better-looking boy to follow them home. The day Nick brought her ‘round to Courtney’s room, Lilith sat there pretending not to be amazed when Nick and Courtney tied up and shot some China White that Nick had scored from Cheryl, a dark-haired green-eyed half Sicilian who was dealing heavily in North Beach in those days, and who used to come into the bookstore to buy science fiction and decadent stuff like Poe and Baudelaire from me. I was also working with a couple of women who lived in those North Beach hotels and who were probably junkies too, but they didn’t trust me enough to say anything about it. Courtney lived up above Big Al’s, Broadway’s most famous strip joint, where the little red nipple-lights on Carol Doda’s neon effigy blinked in her bay window, kitty-corner from the bookstore where I worked, which was near Vesuvio’s bar and across the street from my favorite hangout, Specs. So, you see, we were all centrally located to act out our little dramas in the close confines of a street and an intersection that became our whole world as Ronald Reagan toiled ceaselessly to take the rest of our country away from us un-American degenerates. Lilith used to come with me to work in North Beach, spend the afternoon and evening hanging out with Courtney, or writing in her notebook in the cafés on Columbus Avenue, or in the park, then come into the bookstore around ten or eleven, grab a book and go upstairs to the office, where she usually fell asleep reading on the sofa. I’d come up after closing the store at midnight, wake her, and she’d pull me down and climb on top of me and we’d fuck ‘til we were sore before going off to meet Courtney at the Mabuhay or the On Broadway, or at one of the newer clubs out in the Mission, or some all-night party down South of Market. I have no idea exactly when Lilith started shooting drugs with Courtney and co. I mean, it’s not as easy to notice as you’d think, and nobody was saying anything to me about it ‘cause, obviously, I wasn’t into their scene. I must have seemed pretty innocent to this crowd and I guess they never really took me too seriously. They probably thought I was kind of stupid, or too naïve to be worth corrupting, or something. The women I worked with were always sending their boyfriends to the store with stolen remaindered art books that they wanted me to buy at inflated prices. I usually paid them what they wanted because I couldn’t have cared less, and, anyway, it was the boss’s money and I hated the boss and all of his bullying. But I’m sure that they thought, in their junkie delusions, that they were putting something over on me. Truth is, my mother had been a diet-pill popper when I was a kid and had pretty much beaten a healthy fear of drugs into me back then, so I wasn’t much interested in joining their club. Still, I wasn’t into morally condemning them either, so they put up with me for Lilith’s sake, and ‘cause I could drink, and ‘cause I’d sometimes buy pitchers of beer at Specs for everybody. This seemed pretty natural since I was the one working and since I didn’t have their extra expenditures. But when that summer ended I had to quit the bookstore to go back to school and Lilith and I began to have less and less in common. She’d still come crash at my place after the bars and clubs and parties (“These our revels”) were ended, but I’d already be in bed asleep a lot of the time and not very entertaining. I’d leave in the morning for school long before she ever woke up. One day I phoned her at the bicycle messenger service where she had eventually gotten a job as a dispatcher. They told me that she was busy and that she’d call me back later—but she didn’t. I called a couple more times in the next few days and got the same message. I knew that our little Eden was doomed to crumble eventually, but I hadn’t expected it to end so suddenly or mysteriously. I sat in my apartment trying to study, watching clumsy transvestite prostitutes giving pleasureless blowjobs to Johns no more than a paycheck from homelessness in the parking lot beneath my windows and felt pretty shitty. Everything was turning New Wave; it was suddenly the slick, New Romantic ‘80s. I wasn’t cool enough for Lilith’s crowd and I was still pretty much a freak out at the university with my self-inflicted haircuts, thrift-store clothes, and radical politics. I was reading a lot in those days and listening mostly to Crass. 81

Partly out of loneliness and partly for nostalgia’s sake, I guess, I ended up going back to work at the same bookstore the next summer. I started working there again the very day after I’d only stopped in to say hello to my old manager. I pretended that it was fate that they’d asked me—even begged me— to come back. Probably I had courted it, subconsciously—had it in the back of mind when I’d “just stopped by to say hello.” Both the manager and the boss had been awfully glad to see me; the two junkies I’d worked with the year before had ripped the store off blind after I’d gone, when they’d been left alone nights to run the place. It was a while before I ran into Lilith again. Someone told me that she hadn’t been hanging out in North Beach, that she’d just disappeared a couple of months before. Courtney, too, was long gone— she’d moved to Minneapolis, I’d heard. I’d already stopped looking for either of them, so it caught me by surprise when I saw Lilith sitting at the counter of the Arab hamburger stand on Broadway, next to the Vietnamese noodle place where I was heading to spend my dinner break one rainy Tuesday night. Lilith forced a smile when she saw me, but she didn’t look happy at all. I went in and sat down next to her at the counter and asked how she was doing. Of course the whole thing was really about “why did you disappear?” But we meandered around through some meaningless conversation without getting to it. Somehow I just couldn’t be pissed-off or confrontational; I didn’t actually feel angry with her anymore. Besides that, she looked pretty bad there under the fluorescent lights, tired and worn out, her hair oily and shrunken. I would have felt like I was picking on her or something. Even her roaring, confident voice had grown breathy and ashamed. Then she started telling me how horrible her life had been that winter and I forgot all about my problems with her. She’d become a total junkie, she said, and had lost everything. She’d been thrown out of her apartment because she’d gone down to the corner with a friend who was buying. “That was even before I was shooting. But everyone’s so afraid of junkies, you know. My roommates threw all my stuff out on the street, and, since it was the Fillmore, heart of the fucking Western Addition, there wasn’t anything left by the time I got home. Home, yeah—well, it wasn’t home anymore, was it?” She’d lived here and there, with a girlfriend who was shooting, and they’d shot together. “We were always together and I started fucking up real bad and I got fired from my job.” Then she’d been raped. “I was walking alone way down South of Market, going to the Hotel Utah to see a band, and these three sailors pushed me into a van. It was funny, one guy was scared shitless and could hardly get it up and kept apologizing, but this other one was a total asshole and kept trying to shove things in my mouth and shit. Anyway, I’ve only been with women since then.” She was hitting the streets of North Beach for the first time in a while, but she didn’t say where she was coming from—seems like it must have been out of jail or a detox of some sort. She didn’t have much money and had taken a room at the biggest flophouse, the one on Columbus Avenue, across from Francis Ford Coppola’s copper-domed wedge-like office building that leans precariously over everything on the Columbus slope, marking the triangular meeting place of Chinatown, Telegraph Hill, and the Financial District: the beacon at the trivium. I don’t know—talking to me seemed to cheer her up a little. I don’t think she’d had much in the way of prospects that evening before I’d come along. I was willing to help her and told her she should save her money, ditch the hotel, and come stay with me as I had plenty of room. I hadn’t been able to keep my studio over the school year, ‘cause it cost too much, but now I was sharing a pretty big apartment on top of Nob Hill with my old friend James from Walnut Creek, he of the tomato-red Capri who had though that the Dead Kennedys was the wittiest band name ever and who’d been driving the night I’d first talked with Lilith at the Mab. The building where we lived had once been elegant but was now falling in around our ears—it was owned by one of Chinatown’s most notorious slumlords. It was up on top of Nob Hill though, at the corner of Clay and Leavenworth, on a lovely block with wide sidewalks, trees, better-kempt Victorians than ours, and a great view down the steep 82

slope of Clay Street and over towards the spires of Cathedral Hill. We lived in the apartment below the bass player in Toiling Midgets, I told her, and I’d even gotten to where I kind of liked to hear him practicing. Still, it was creepy to see Ricky Williams wandering around the halls of our building sometimes, stoned out of his mind, intense as hell as always. Lilith thanked me but didn’t want to come stay at my place. She might have been a little afraid that I’d expect her to fuck me or whatever, but I didn’t. Besides, she’d already paid for her room at the hotel and seemed to want to do things on her own. That was cool, and, as we talked, she cheered up and started going on about bands and how she was gonna finally get one together as soon as she got some kind of a job and a real place to stay and stuff. She was acting like her old self again, and I started feeling pretty good about seeing her, totally forgetting about asking her why she’d vanished out of my life so suddenly the year before, imagining it had been because of our distance back then, her crazy life of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll not mixing with my trying to get through school. I was getting pretty insufferably enlightened back then, after all, and I was probably a drag to be around. My major was International Relations and, as I went on with it, I was getting more and more politicized, listening to my new heroes Crass all the time (who Lilith hated) and drawing up plans for the Anarchist International, for the eventual cultural revolution. Looking at the clock up above the counter of the hamburger stand, I told Lilith that I had to get back to work, and she said that she was going over to Oakland to get some of her stuff at Michael’s. (Michael was her legendary boyfriend, who she’d been with on and off for years, way before she’d met me, and I guess after me as well, as she obviously had left what remained of her possessions at his place.) She told me she’d come by the bookstore when she got back to the city and that we’d go out for a drink to celebrate our reunion or something when I got off work at midnight. She was all smiles as she went off down Columbus Avenue, turning to wave at me, and I was happy and it was pleasantly nostalgic to have seen her again. Later that night Lilith came running into the bookstore crying and desperate. She had a black eye and was all bruised up. When she saw me she collapsed into my arms and told me that Michael had beaten her up because she owed him money and that she was lucky he hadn’t killed her. I was seriously pissed off at the motherfucker and felt bad for Lilith, who seemed to me to be right on the edge, trying to get her life together again after all the shit that had happened to her. “What a fucking asshole,” I said, taking Lilith up to the back room and sitting her down on the sofa, leaving Jeff, my co-worker at the bookshop, in command of the store. “What’s fucking wrong with that guy?” She cried for a while and I held her and we rocked back and forth on the old sofa where we use to make love and finally she said, “I don’t know why I came here, to you. You’ve got even more reason to hate me than he does.” “No I don’t, Lilith. I don’t care anymore that you walked out on me. I know that I’m not for you, that we have two totally different lives.” “No, that’s not what I was talking about. It’s why I walked out on you that you don’t know.” “What do you mean?” Amazingly she stared me down, stopping for a second before saying it as if to build a wall around us. “It’s because I was pregnant, and I knew you’d want me to have the baby and I couldn’t go through with it. I had an abortion and I was so fucked up... It took all the money I’d saved up from working at Quicksilver. And then, when I got thrown out of my apartment, I just went on, full speed ahead, doing all the drugs I could get my hands on. I mean, fuck it, what am I gonna do, work in a fucking café for the rest of my life putting the foam on people’s cappuccinos? Fuck that! I wanna do something real!”

Although the whole speech was more recited than said, and seemed kinda prepared beforehand, it floored me. I was disconcerted about it without really knowing what it was that I was feeling exactly. I mean, the bottom dropped out of my stomach and I got this sensation that I always get, that my whole life’s decided far away from me by other people and that I have so little to do with it I might as well not even be there most of the time. “Hey, that’s not fair—I would have been there to help you out.” “No, you wouldn’t have. You were totally busy with your school work and I didn’t want to have to deal with you, ‘cause I knew you’d want me to have the baby but I’d have been completely destroyed by it. Well, I sort of wanted it a little too, and I was afraid you’d talk me into it. But, come on, how am I gonna have a kid?” Lilith had always told me that she was sterile and not to worry about birth control and we’d never used anything ever. I stood there, stunned, thinking about that. “You know, like I was gonna ruin your life too. I mean, you’ve got things you wanna do, school and stuff.” She hugged me ‘cause she could see I was going away into myself, just sitting there staring, totally struck dumb. “But it would have been a smart little thing, huh? It would have been fucking smart, that’s for sure.” I looked into her dark eyes and they were right there, waiting for me like they’d always been, deep and enveloping, and I fell into them happily. I started bawling of course and I thought that she was right, that I would have wanted her to have the baby. “How did you know I would have wanted to keep it?” Lilith was always the center of attention and she talked so much you would have thought she was oblivious to everyone around her, but she wasn’t. She laughed and said, “I know you, that’s all.” Later, when my friends all assured me that she’d only told me this to get me to take care of her so she could rip me off ‘cause she was a fucking junkie, I had to wonder if this wasn’t Lilith’s coup de grâce, if I wasn’t a stupid sucker who believed everything she ever said, even when she told me what I was feeling inside myself. In my heart, though, I still want to imagine it was all true and that she never lied to me. Of course, it’d be a lot easier on me to decide she was lying then, that I never fathered a child, that she was using me, and that the only thing I did wrong was to trust her after this. I went back out to the counter and closed the bookstore at midnight while Lilith sat in the back room reading. We went out into the night and I bought her a bottle and she took me to her hotel room where the clerk was a total asshole about the key and more or less assumed I was a trick Lilith was turning. We finally got to her room and she took off her sweater and there was this ugly scar running across her throat. “What’s that?” I asked, incredulous. “Oh, you haven’t seen it yet, I forgot. I tried to hang myself a couple months ago. Michael found me and cut me down. I was super fucking depressed. I tried it with heroin once too. I was unconscious, alone in my apartment for about a week, I think, but I didn’t die. I’m practically indestructible, don’t you think?” She was already into the bottle, her hand shaking as she poured out shots. The little room was the definition of depressing; not artfully tattered or romantically kitsch like the lonely hotel rooms in movies, but so empty and worn that you could feel the thousands of well-meaning people who’d gotten stuck there, their lives having hit rock bottom. You could smell them, each and every one. I asked Lilith again if she wanted to come to my place. That flophouse hotel room had the same feeling as an old cafeteria, a hospital, or an old folks’ home, and I was afraid to let her spend the night there alone, drunk and beaten up. There was a pile of cigarette butts on the table and Lilith started opening them up, shoving the unburned tobacco guts into a leaf of rolling paper to make herself another smoke, and told me again that she’d be okay, that she liked being alone these days. I helped her get her clothes off and to climb 84

into bed, checked out her bruises and saw that she didn’t have any cuts or broken bones or anything. I kissed her goodnight, shut out the light and went home, taking my long nightly walk out of the lights and bustle of touristy North Beach up over the hill on Clay Street, breathless and weary. A couple of days later, her money almost gone, Lilith did finally give in, pack her only bag, and come to stay at my place. James pretended not to mind, but I think he was a little suspicious, considering the state Lilith was in. Things were okay for a while. Lilith was at least off the streets and I gave her a little money every so often, so she had some time to look for a job and get herself together. I was trying not to put a lot of pressure on her. I wanted Lilith to know that somebody cared about her enough to help her out. We had some fun too. One night the Dead Kennedys were playing at Bill Graham’s redone Fillmore West, right next door to the old Temple Beautiful. The Temple had been closed for a long time, had actually been Jim Jones’s headquarters for a while. Once I’d even heard some people had rented the place and were trying to get orgies going there, but that they couldn’t get any women to come. Maybe all that was before it became the New Wave a Go-Go. Who can follow the chronology of gossip? We rushed over to Market Street after I got off work and grabbed a 38 bus out Geary, but we arrived at the Fillmore pretty late and they weren’t letting anyone in anymore ‘cause it was packed full to the rafters. It was amazing how popular the Kennedys had become now that they were pretty much irrelevant. We stood around outside for a while, hoping that the bouncers would relent and let us go in when some people cleared out, but the DKs were on by then and nobody was leaving. Lilith took me around the corner then and said, “Let’s try to get in there through the old Temple Beautiful, you used to be able to get inside it pretty easily. Maybe we could find a way to get to the Fillmore from that side.” “Really? I’d love to see it again. It’s been years since I’ve been in there—I used to love that place. I sort of feel like I grew up there.” She led me around through the vacant lot in back of the Temple and, sure enough, the back door was closed but easily pushed open. We were a little hesitant to step inside at first as it was a totally black emptiness beyond the doorframe—there wasn’t any light at all. We took hold of each other’s hands, though, and started groping our way along the walls until we found some steps. “Do you think this goes up to the temple itself or to some offices or something in the back?” “I’ve been in here before and I sort of remember that these stairs lead to a door that comes out alongside the altar at one floor, and then they go on up to some other rooms behind the altar after that.” “When were you in here?” “It’s a shooting gallery sometimes. You lead the way, go on, and I’ll feel for the door when we get to the landing.” “Orpheus and Eurydice,” I squeezed her hand. “Up we go.” It was amazing when we found the landing. You could hear the thudding bass and drums from the Kennedys echoing all through the empty old synagogue, through its broken windows. Then, when Lilith pushed the door aside, the space opened up huge in front of us, filled with glare from the floodlights set above the fire escape side of the Fillmore. It was hot and overcrowded over there and lots of people were hanging out and smoking on the long, balcony-like fire escape, trying to get some air and still be able to say that they had been to the Kennedys’ show. We walked out into the enormous dance floor in the middle of the Temple, which was just as I remembered it, except dusty and shadowy now rather than smoky and nightclub dark. Without 85

people it felt even more vast, indifferent and blurred by the memories I had of being in that space with big crowds and loud music. All the windows and some of the pews were busted, broken up, shit written on them and the walls, and there were places where people had lit fires to keep warm in the wintertime. As a matter of fact, the whole thing burned to the ground a few years later one night when I was at the Hotel Utah seeing an American Music Club show. Lilith and I walked around a little, talking about the old days, getting noticed by the punks on the long fire escape next door, who started cheering us on to climb out the windows and come over to their side of the forbidding barbed-wire fence that divided the two properties. (It was a little like the no-man’s land between the trenches in a WWI movie.) We found an easy place to get out of the Temple, but it was quite a bit harder to get over the fence. We did it though, to the chanting and applause of our audience, who then gave us an arm up onto the fire escape, and we went casually inside the Fillmore to see the Kennedys. We heard only two or three songs before the show ended and it was still like the best concert I’ve ever been to in my life—the force of nostalgia and loyalty, I suppose. Lilith found some of her friends who told us about an all-night party South of Market, so we ended up going down there afterwards. When we got home, drunk and exhausted, we both fell into bed right away—it was a big double bed and Lilith didn’t seem to mind sharing it and having me nearby at night. We got a little cuddly, but I remembered that she’d been raped and didn’t want to push anything. She fell asleep then, pretty quickly, but I was cranked enough about the whole evening not to be able to settle down. Time seemed to be dragging on forever as I lay there not sleepy at all. I must have, finally, nodded off, but not very deeply; it was more like a trance of some sort, filled with weird dreams. And the next thing I knew we were making love. I sort of faded awake somewhere in the middle of it. And it was like it had always been, Lilith with her back to me, only tonight she lay facedown on the bed and was pulling me up on top of her this time. It was too late to stop by the time I was actually aware of what was happening, but I got kind of self-conscious as it went on and I came more and more to myself, and I regretted the whole thing before it was over. The next morning, after we’d been up for a while, Lilith asked me if we’d had sex the night before. “I think so,” I said. “I thought so too.” She kissed me, I guess to sort of tell me it was okay. Still, I felt bad about it, like I’d forced her, or manipulated her, like I’d made her pay her keep or something—although the whole thing had seemed pretty spontaneous on both of our parts. Consciously or not, I still believe I only wanted to fuck her because I loved her. I know I only let her stay with me ‘cause I wanted to help her get back on her feet, and that’s all. But Lilith couldn’t seem to make it in the straight world anymore. She got a job for a while in a croissant and coffee place in the Financial District, but she came home hyped up and ranting one afternoon, sick of the businessmen who were always treating her like shit or propositioning her— offering her money too. “Fuck it, I’d rather go out and walk the streets!” She took off her jeans, crying and banging around the bedroom recklessly. “What am I gonna do, put up with all this fucking shit for minimum wage for the rest of my stupid life?” She yanked a wrinkled-up Catholic schoolgirl skirt out of her bag and sat down on the bed, trying to pull a pair of torn fishnet stockings up her legs. I eventually talked her out of it, when she had calmed down some, and we went out and had dinner somewhere. I figured that she was shooting again when I gave her a hundred dollar bill one morning (I never kept my money in banks, and since I had access to a cash register at work, it was easiest to store my savings in hundreds). It was supposed to keep her going for a couple of weeks while she looked for 86

another job, but she came home that very evening crying, telling me she’d accidentally put the bill through the false pocket in the overcoat of mine that she was borrowing. “It must have fallen on the ground somewhere between here and the Caffe Trieste,” she claimed. “I walked back and forth between here and there all afternoon looking for it.” What could I do but believe her, or pretend to believe her, and give her another chance—and another hundred? One night I stepped on something on my bedroom floor, which turned out to be her needle. There it was, sticking into my heel. I sighed, pulled it out and gave it back to her. I mean, I was pissed to see it, but what was I going to do? I’m not at all the type to lay down ultimatums. And then, a few weeks later, James came to me, calm but serious. A bunch of his autographed CDs had disappeared. Lilith swore over and over again that she hadn’t taken them. I broke down and cried, begging her to cop to taking them and to tell me the truth so that I could go out and try to buy them back from whomever she’d sold them to. I had to kick her out of the apartment anyway; I’d already told James that I would, so what difference did it make to her if she admitted to stealing the CDs or not? At least she could have helped me to get my friend’s stuff back. I mostly wanted her to tell me the truth so that I could feel like she trusted me at least that much, after everything I’d done for her. But she never did. We cried and cried, holding each other, knowing that this was going to be the end of everything that’d passed between us. I couldn’t trust her anymore, so she couldn’t get anything more out of me. I didn’t think then that either of us would ever have anything to do with the other after she left the apartment. James found a couple of the CDs at a used-record store on Polk Street a week or so later, and the guy at the counter described Lilith perfectly as the seller. She went back to the North Beach flophouses after we threw her out, the Golden Eagle on Broadway this time, and got a job working the door of the Condor Club, underneath Courtney’s old apartment. Her ex-best friend and rival was long gone by then though, had even made a movie and was soon to marry the hottest singer-songwriter on the punk revival scene that was just beginning to hit it big. Courtney was probably a fucking millionairess by now. Lilith told me that she’d cut a deal with the owner of the Condor, that she only had to work the door as a barker, wearing a silly late-nineteenth-century bordello-type costume and banging on a tambourine. He’d told her she didn’t have to strip unless she wanted to. I was pretty skeptical, but glad that she had some kind of a job and wasn’t walking the streets. I thought Lilith might not do so many drugs, too, if she had to pay for them herself and if her life were a little less miserable than it had been. It was weird though, walking past her on my dinner break from work and saying “hi” while she stood there winking and flirting with the sailors and businessmen that she so despised. She came into the bookstore one afternoon, totally high, to show me a letter: Some of the translations she’d done of the Roman poet Catullus had been published in a review. She’d been a Classics major in college back East, where she was from originally, before dropping out and coming to San Francisco to start that band that she’d never been able to get going. The little journal hadn’t paid her a lot, but enough for a fix, I guess. It was sad because I knew she didn’t write much anymore, with all the shit happening in her life, and she’d shown me great poems and song lyrics when we’d been together before. I guess she’d lost most of her notebooks along the way. But she didn’t complain: It was probably too depressing to think about. Another time she came running into the store crying because her boss at the Condor had tried to force her to get up on stage and strip and she’d finally been fired for refusing. We went upstairs and sat on the couch and I tried to encourage her to get away from North Beach and the whole rotten scene there. It was bad in those days; there weren’t any clubs or artists or writers much anymore, just junkies, tourists, and sailors during Fleet Week.

She told me that she had fallen heavily for a woman at a party the weekend before, a beautiful lesbian she described as “a long cool drink of water,” who worked as a dominatrix. “She took me home with her, and I was so flattered,” she said. “Well, go for it, Lilith,” I told her. “You need a change of scenery. You’re mired in this shit around North Beach. Maybe she’ll let you stay with her while you get a fresh start. Where does she live?” “Over in Oakland.” “Go ahead and give her a call. Use our phone.” For the next few months Lilith was, as they say, out of sight and out of mind. I’d more or less finished school, leaving one course incomplete that I’d never make up, and was now working at the bookstore full-time, not sure what to do with the rest of my life, when a middle-aged man I’d never seen before walked in one afternoon and asked for me by name. He told me he was looking for Lilith, using her real name. “I guess she calls herself ‘Lilith.’ I’m her father. I’m here to take her home. You’ve got to help me find her.” I didn’t know what the hell to tell him—that I’d had to kick her out of my place for stealing from my roommate? That she was maybe living in Oakland with a professional dominatrix? That she was a notorious junkie by now with a reputation all over North Beach for ripping off her friends? (Missy, one of the women who’d worked at the bookstore that first summer I was there, had told me, even after her beating, that Lilith’s boyfriend Michael was a sweetheart compared to her.) Well, I ended up stuttering out the logistical facts: that I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months, and that she might have been living somewhere in Oakland. I gave him the names of all of the flophouses in North Beach and told him to ask around at the Condor Club—where she’d only worked as a barker, I assured him, not as a stripper. He went away disappointed, I think, that Lilith wasn’t still staying at my place, but hopeful that he’d be able to track her down, perhaps enjoying the detective work. A couple of weeks later, Lilith herself charged into the bookstore, all cranked up and high. She grabbed me, talking a mile a minute, happy and loud, dragging me off towards the stairs to the back room, to tell me good-bye, she said. “Hey, your dad’s been in here looking for you, you know.” “Yeah, I know. He’s out in the car waiting for me right now. But I wanted to stop in and tell you good-bye. He’s taking me back to Connecticut.” When she got me to the door of the back room where our old couch was, she couldn’t get in. The boss had locked it up when he’d gone home that afternoon and I didn’t have a key. The boss didn’t trust anybody anymore. Lilith pounded on the door, cursing, scaring me with her sudden strength and fury. Then she turned to me, holding me close, saying, “I wanted to say good-bye and give you a present for helping me so much.” She pulled me down onto the carpeted floor of the landing and unzipped my pants. “Come on, Lilith, what are you doing?” “Giving you a going-away present.” She pulled my cock out, bent over and put it in her mouth. I was actually kind of frightened and had let her storm through the store and lead me back here because I didn’t know what else to do with her, and had been embarrassed by the scene she’d made in front of all the customers. I didn’t know how to deal with people on drugs. Now I was petrified, lying there helplessly underneath her, totally freaked out and kinda weirdly touched too; it was the most affection she’d shown me since I’d had to kick her out of my apartment.

But I couldn’t deal with it. I tried to pull her off of me. “Lilith, you don’t owe me anything. Come on, it was never like that between us.” I saw the tracks on her arms, when I tried to lift her up by them, all the scabs and bruises. “Oh, Lilith,” I said pitifully, holding on to her, “look at you.” She stared up at me like a zombie, I thought, with the dark circles under her eyes, her tangled black curls, and her gaze eerily far away. “Oh, that’s nothing. I’ve been a good girl lately.” She giggled then, slipping her panties off, out from under her skirt, and sitting on me, painfully. I winced and she said, “I know it’s dry, but I just don’t have the patience to give a blowjob right now.” All I remember feeling by this point was numb fear and sorrow for Lilith, for my lonely fucking self, for the whole miserable world. I was in shock. I kept thinking that I didn’t want this, but I couldn’t seem to get out from under her. I felt sorry for Lilith but I loved her too and it did feel like some kind of intense last moment between us and I wanted her love still. It all happened so quickly and unexpectedly and was so intense that I felt like I didn’t have any time to react at all. I couldn’t make any sense out of what was happening to me. Then I just came. I was thinking about our baby, about her having been pregnant before, so I managed to pull myself out from under her. “No, Sam,” she said, grabbing my dick and pulling it back towards her as the cum dropped onto the filthy, old carpet. “What? Did you want to get pregnant again? That’s about the last thing you need right now. That’s what totally fucked you up before.” She sat back against the wall then and finally started to calm down. We said our good-byes quietly, promised to write, and she went out onto Columbus Avenue and I never saw or heard from her ever again. But I do see a lot of Courtney these days. I see her videos on MTV and I hear her songs everywhere. They always make me think of Lilith, of course, and I wonder if her father really was outside the bookstore that day, waiting for her in the car. It doesn’t seem very likely to me now. A couple of years later I caught a fever while traveling in Italy. I was in Mantua, which was basically built in the middle of a swamp, and I caught what Cellini, in his Autobiography, calls the “Guata.” It’s a kind of swamp fever you get from mosquitoes that’s particular to the city. It got so bad that they let me stay in bed all day long in the youth hostel. The woman who ran the place kindly took my money, went out and bought me lots of aspirin and eventually some antibiotics. During the hot summer afternoons the cleaning lady would come in, scrub the floors, open the windows to let out the ammonia smell, and close the green shutters up tight to keep the sun out. Lying there in the humid, summer heat and the artificial darkness, I went in and out of sleep and had fever dreams. In one of them Lilith and I were back on that landing in the bookstore and she was saying, “I only wanted to give you a present.” She was sitting on top of me and in the dream I suddenly knew that it was AIDS that she’d wanted to give me and that I was dying now, here in Mantua, where Virgil had been born, the city founded by the sorceress Manto, who’d cursed her own people by choosing this godforsaken swamp as the site for their city. When I got better I realized it had only been a dream, probably born of the guilt I felt for not being able to save Lilith from herself, but I went and got tested all the same, ‘cause it made me nervous to think about it. I guess I wouldn’t have blamed Lilith for wanting me to die with her. And that was probably because I sort of felt like I deserved to share her fate, or wanted to somehow— ’cause that’s the romantic way to look at it. When I got the results in the mail I sat down and asked Lilith, wherever she was, to forgive me. I’d done whatever I’d done because I loved her and because I hadn’t known any better in those days. The test was negative. 89

I hear Courtney’s songs on the radio now and they’re quite good, I think, and I wonder if Lilith hears them or if she’s dead or what. Courtney’s famous husband is dead: heroin again being the scapegoat for our whole generation’s implosion. I wonder if Lilith likes Courtney’s songs, or if she’s cringing every time she turns on the radio. And I wonder what Lilith’s songs would have sounded like if she’d ever gotten that band together and been able to sing them. And of course our baby, if it ever really did exist, what kind of a person would it have grown up to be? I can’t even imagine now, and it’s all supposed to have happened to me.

The Death of an American Poet Yeah, she might get pissed off, put a little ground glass in your salad, but thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just passion. Otherwise youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re really not that important. The truth is nobody cared enough to extend a good threat or drag anyone of us out into a cool Spanish night to enjoy the song of the rifles as we drop. The best we can expect is another plate of salad, her smile, the water in glass to tint red and old age to abandon its wait.

The Line The line in front of the store was so long it had a Line Committee and a Line Master who kept the Line List. What is the line for? someone asked. People shrugged: don’t know; whatever they bring. Oranges. Chocolate. Cheese. No, it’s for toilet paper, answered the boy in front of me. The Line Master consulted with the Line Committee and approved the Line List. There was a line to get in Line, which got even longer when the factory shift ended. The Line Master was very proud. He had an important job to do. Everyone was quiet and obeyed the Line Rules: no cutting, no pushing, and no telling political jokes. The president of the United States is meeting with his Chinese counterpart at a summit on human rights. “Do you have elections?” asks the U.S. president. The Chinese president blushes and answers softly: “Yes, evely molning.” It’s meat! the boy yelled, and the line rippled with excitement. I saw the truck! Large packages. Enough for everyone! The first Romanian astronaut leaves a note to his wife: “I’m flying in space on Soyuz. I’ll be back Friday.” On Friday, he’s back from space and finds a note from his wife: “I’m waiting in line for meat. Don’t know when I’m back.” Here’s 50 lei, the teacher said in front of the hushed first grade class. Go get me whatever they bring in that line. I hope there’s meat. What do the cannibal parents tell their children on Christmas Eve? “If you don’t behave, Santa won’t come this year, and we won’t have any steak for Christmas.” The light was dim. They announced they’d sell the meat through the back door. 300 people stormed to the back. The Line Committee was outrun. The Line Master fell and lost the Line List. Everyone yelled and pushed. Crushed bunions, sharp elbows, sweat. Don’t get in front of me, motherfucker. I waited in line four hours. The little girl cried. There was no meat. I walked back home with a necklace of toilet paper rolls.

SAM HILL Mr. Kalliope was bending by the stream, pouring mackerel in a bucket, when Vincent clambered out of the chicken-coop. There he’d slept the sleep of the long-since dead and decomposed while that thievin’ coyote name of Sam Hill made off with a barley sack of hens and some (in the process) slightly damaged eggs. “Where in Sam Hill ya been?” asked Mr. K. “I’ve been to the castle to visit the king,” Vincent replied, and pulled a pin-feather from the hole where his ear used to be.

Methuselahs Feel them sitting in quiet rooms, scowls framed with a patrician’s stern demeanor, the porridge of disapproval devoured slowly in measured silver spoonfuls, bite by bite. The dour expression says it, the bile behind that internal debate over what passes for clever, into some sour whey of infirmity, the firm realization that infinity is some innocent child’s pipedream, nothing more. Each new twilight brings silent fears of fate’s reprisals before the next morning’s light clambers to take hold. So old and unforgiving, and currently unwilling to yield to compromise, inching forward with each arthritic bend, every raspy breath taken as if seized in battle, the phlegm-filled rale echoes in the head. Lives extend like candles burning on, flaring ever brighter as that phantom wick disappears, but this harsh glare provides no illumination, no light shed on why this anger infiltrates like poison into this uneasy ongoing existence. In dark corners they sit, watching others below, passing pedestrians milling about, eager to be there, standing, when that last bus arrives.

pre-teen It wasn't a made-up childhood game of one, two, three o'leary or kiss-thegarage, running from the splintery back porch safe to the sewer cover and on to the garage kissing the gray paint the designated number of times, ritual in that little square of green between our building and the alley, while the dutch elms with their ragged elliptical leaves were chopped down one by one and Uncle Ralph's cars changed from a nineteen-fifty two Desoto to a seafoam green two-tone Ford and he helped to move our few possessions across the street to Alice who moaned in distress most nights in the bedroom beneath ours because she had a bad heart, she said, but really, it was probably gas, Mother observed, and the soft petals of adolescence fell on us at Alice's like the cherry tree blooming in the new yard we weren't permitted to use except to take out the garbage, in our first spring away from our first home, four rooms behind the butcher, when Paul Anka sang Diana and we saw Miss Sadie Thomsen at the old Northcenter Theatre then stood in front of the cleaners in the rain wondering if the emotions we felt were a sin and we never, ever kissed the garage again

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Critic Sometimes I feel I'm going sane, subterranean. I am adequately bermed like indolent endomorphs by my own pleasure-less leisure— it can't hurt if it doesn't hit— though few would thank me for the taint of my endorsement (best is not always most pleasant). Celebrations of correlation and conformity interrupt the unexpected hunt for charlatans— conspiracy of the arbiters. Even the insipid need insulin— goodnight, sweet prints.

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Critic 2 humans cherish the illusion of inevitability looking back at one's trail of crumbs temples and shrines of unknown origin of lost purpose subdivide the indivisible with missionary arrogance acquisition is an inquisition of value differences can be substantial and yet superficial a value of power requires its square of wisdom the opposite of the neurotic is a critic of the ecstatic restoration requires reflection as well as loss

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The Perfidy of Things Millie worked as a secretary at Cooper Insurance. She loved her job, and always strove to put her best face—and outfit—forwards. This entailed preparing everything she was going to wear the next day the night before: pressing her blouse and skirt into starch attention, buffing her pumps until they reflected her eyes. She only wore nude hose. As far as Millie was concerned, that was the only proper choice for a working woman. Wearing white, black or, God forbid, blue or pink nylons was up there with wearing white shoes after Labor Day or talking with your mouth full. Her bra and underwear were white for the same reason. She then laid her clothes out on her bedroom divan and placed her pumps on the floor next to it, facing the door and the new day ahead. Sometimes Millie had to work later than expected, and didn't have time for dinner before bed. That didn’t bother her. The clothes did, though. She couldn't skimp on preparation time. If she did, she couldn't sleep. The things would call to her from their chaos, making her toss and turn until she got up and attended to them. In the end, you never save time by cutting corners, she thought. Millie approached her work as a secretary with the same vigor. The i's were always dotted, the t's crossed, and she could type a letter for Mr. Cooper--with no mistakes--in under two minutes. She prided herself on the fact that she never had to resort to Wite-Out. He often clapped her on the shoulder and said to anyone who was listening, “If you need something done, give it to Millie.” The other secretaries, laughing over their tuna fish sandwiches and coffee in the lunchroom, said the same thing. But then one evening, something happened. Millie didn’t go to bed. The pressing took longer than usual. She couldn't get the seams in the bow of her blouse even so that she could then iron the strip crisp and perfect. This had never happened before. She kept trying, again, and again, and again, yet the fabric wouldn't lay flat. Or still. It seemed almost willful, the long bow twisting like a snake, just to spite her. She ironed all night to no avail, and almost missed her bus. The next night, it was her pumps, the low-heeled black ones with pointed toes. Polishing went fine, but not the lining up. There was a floor board, next to the divan, that she used. The tips had to be flush with it, not a smidgeon over or behind, but flush. She couldn't manage it. The minute she turned her back, the pumps moved. In her entire upbringing, no one had told her this. That objects have a will of their own. Again, she stayed up all night. It was difficult, if not impossible, to slip her concrete feet into the shoes, hard to drag them forward, to the bus stop. But Millie did. She had never missed a day of work in the 10 years she had been working as Mr. Cooper's secretary and she wasn't about to start now. What she didn’t imagine, though, was falling asleep at her desk. Not in a million years would she have thought something like that was possible. She didn’t even know how it had happened. One minute she was leaning over to get some letterhead out of her desk drawer and the next Mr. Cooper was gently shaking her shoulder saying, “Wake up, Millie.” She wiped her face. Her hand came back wet. Drool. She’d been drooling. In public. She looked at Mr. Cooper. He had that crease on his forehead, the cavernous one. She'd seen it before, when he was talking to one of his agents who hadn’t been performing, not like he thought they should. She had never, in 10 years, seen it on his face when he was talking to her.

Millie knew then, that she could never come back to work. She could live down the sleeping at her desk and the bout of drooling, but that crease of disappointment, as deep as the Grand Canyon, she didn't think she could ever get over that. His voice was ripe with concern. "Millie," he said. "I've clearly been working you too hard. Take some of that vacation you've been saving up." Mr. Cooper helped her out of her chair and into her coat. She didn’t lift her head because she couldn’t bear to see the crease of disappointment. His loafers were immaculate. Even the tassels seemed to have been brushed and polished. He sent her home in a taxi, giving the driver a wad of bills to cover the trip. When the taxi pulled up to the curb in front of her apartment building, Millie didn’t move. "This is it, ain't it? 37 Woodlawn?" She sat there for several more minutes. The driver was getting impatient. She could hear him rustling in his seat, fiddling with the radio, the dispatcher. "Come on, lady,” he said. “I got other fares waiting on me. Your boss didn't give me that much money." Finally, the driver opened the door and hauled her out of the taxi. She landed in a pile of dog do on the grass verge in front of her building. Now Millie really couldn't move. No one, not a neighbor, not a random pedestrian, was allowed to see this perfidy. And so she sat there. And continued sitting there, the shit spreading under her bottom. “I still don’t see what’s wrong with wanting to put your best face forward. I’ve always done things that way. Your shoes could use a polish, you know.” “I’ll be back tomorrow, Millie. We can talk some more about it then.”

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YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN NORTH BEACH There is a cold wind here on Mortuary Street, the funerals are refined. The recently deceased can finally get some dignity, it says so on the sign in front. I’m working at a parking lot across the street. A dirty and bedraggled man whose pants are his pajama bottoms shuffles by. There is a theater a few doors down with people waiting for a silly musical. He hits them up for change, and maybe is auditioning for the show. He tells me there is someone robbing parking meters a block away. A black man yelling, not all there, a black and white with flashing lights is pulling up. The man is handcuffed and insinuated into the backseat in about two minutes. He is gone with the wind. The wind is blowing through this city like it owns it. When the atmosphere is leaving town, it’s going to a warmer place, it makes you feel uprooted, not all there. When the wind is dying down you sink into the past like someone with foundations, but that doesn’t happen very often. Next to the mortuary is a gallery of punk bands from the 1970’s, when things were black and white. Was it the heroin or the amplifiers, when you are 20 and on fire with the low-down torque of dead-end working class conditions. One of the photos is a girl I slept with for a couple of weeks. We hitchhiked from Nevada City to Mendocino. A few years later I walked into a club on Broadway where the mutants and the screamers liked to go and there she was, the singer in a band called UXA. Her boyfriend overdosed a few months later. There are others who have bitten the dust. The photos are like headstones fixed in time.

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There is a woman being ambulatory, but it’s compromised by alcohol. I am sitting on a stool like I am part of the neighborhood. A Chinese woman walks up slowly with a cane and hands me a banana. I have no idea what she is saying, but she seems excited. People live above the mortuary. Must be quiet. I’m reading Steppenwolf. The book was in the little shack. It seems to fit the mood of working here. A lonely man who reads a lot and doesn’t fit in with the zeitgeist. God and country don’t make sense to him. He walks around while contemplating suicide as if it was a philosophical problem. The towers of the church are visible, a metaphysical tuning fork. Someone drives by with the radio on and one word floating through the window: HALLELUJAH. Then he must have turned it off. “Our whole civilization was a cemetery....”

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My California State ID Card the photograph looks like a David Crosby mug shot, and the confused look on my face suggests I wandered into the DMV randomly off the street and just stood in line until I was called up to a desk and logged into the system so that when they arrest me, they'll recognize the handlebar mustache and unmistakable layer of chins and when I buy cigarettes or want to drown in the ack of Night Train, they'll see the photograph of me on the do not serve list pasted along the bottom of the overhead cigarette trays and hand my ID back with their shit eating grins and send me on my way back into the wilderness of anonymity

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Charts and Graphs I understand we must live diagonally. Arrowing up from the intersect of what has been toward absence. A pre-plotted cadence a song of fluid integers.

Employing time to define what remains of our time when empty space limits, unpurposes, when our bodies feel like stolen acreage. To those who believe we are more than death I want to say yes and say yes to my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s broken compass, yes to my grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s crucifix hands, yes to the miraculous box of being and yes to ink and how it runs into lines that run parallel until. I understand we must live and perhaps that is enough to say yes as we angle toward the absence we fear.

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And It Makes Me Wonder “Who did you dance with during ‘Stairway to Heaven’?” A new high school was built and so the next fall I got to say, “Connie Paulsen,” one of the hottest blondes in 8th grade. she went to hers and I went to mine. In the spring of 1976 we’d had art classes together for two years. A few years later she was killed in a shooting. Late, at our last junior high school dance, she was sitting on the stage A jealous ex-boyfriend shot her. and I was leaning against it. The band wasn’t very good and we were just talking. After that I saw her in a dream but not like just another person. “Stairway to Heaven” began, always the penultimate song of the night The periphery was blurred like an old romantic film and we looked at each other and I asked, “Do you want to dance?” I surprised and there was almost a veil between us like gauze over a lens. myself. She bounced off the edge and led me to the center of the cafeteria. We both knew that she was dead. Arms around, we held ourselves to each other for 8 minutes I told her how I felt about her and in response to me she smiled slowly turning pressed together. After the song as we separated sweaty and ever since then has been gone. our long blonde hair stuck to each other’s and she giggled at our matting.

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The Bicycle Review #30 was edited and curated by Rhea Adri, J de Salvo, Robert Louis Henry, and Michael McCormick. Share the Road

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