SPRING/SUMMER 2015 • smallprintmagazine.com
Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer
Robert J. Sawyer
Scrivener FFor or M Mac ac O OSS X aand nd M Microsoft icrosoft W Windows indows
Grow your ideas in style or Scrivener is a powerfful content-generation tool ffor writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the ffor ormatting, its ffo ocus is on helping you get to the end of that aaw wkward first draft.
first, unformed m idea all the way througgh to the final draft. Outline and structure your ideas, take notes, view research alongside your writing and compose the constituent pieces of your text in isolation or in context. Scrivener won’t tell you how to write—it just makes all the tools you haave ve scattered around your desk available in one application.
Your complete writing studio Writing a novel, research paper, script or any longform text involves more than hammering away at the keys until you’re done. Collecting research, ordering fragmented ideas, shuffling index cards in search of that elusive structure—most writing software is fired up only after much of the hard work is done. Enter Scrivener: a word processor and project management tool thaat stays with you from that
*T To redeem your discount use coupon code SM ALL Visit V isit us aat: t: hhttp://scrivenerapp.com ttp://scrivenerapp.com *M Macintosh acintosh ve version rsion pic pictured. tured. © 2015, Li Literature terature & La Latte, tte, LLT LTD. TD. A Allll rrights ights rreserved. eserved.
Editor’s Note SPRING/SUMMER 2015 Volume 3, Number 1 EDITOR
Identity
Steve Brannon NONFICTION EDITOR / EDITORIAL ADVISOR
Gene Wilburn
C R E AT I V E D I R E C T O R
Carole Brannon
BOOK REVIEW
Write the things that are uniquely yours with as much clarity and passion as you can, and trust, with seven billion of us on this dustball, that there will be thousands who will embrace the work that you alone can offer the world.
Raymond M. Wong
—R obeRt J. S awyeR
COPY EDITOR
Linda M. Au
CONTRIBUTORS
Matthew James Babcock Tim Bass Elizabeth Crowell A. Loudermilk Gene Wilburn Howard Winn Small Print Magazine (ISSN 2328-9449 print; ISSN 2328-9457 online) is published quarterly unless published as a combined issue by Brannon Publishing Services, Inc., P.O. Box 71956, Richmond, VA 23255-1956. Services and products do not carry Small Print Magazine endorsements. The views of the writers do not necessarily reflect those of Small Print Magazine or the publisher. Regarding works of fiction appearing herein: names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Small Print Magazine reserves the right to accept or reject advertisements and assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions. © 2015 Brannon Publishing Services, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of the publisher.
Subscription & Advertising
www.smallprintmagazine.com DIGITAL EDITION Click ■ at the end of each piece to return to Contents page.
t
his issue of Small Print Magazine features an excellent interview by Gene wilburn with award-winning science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. Rob, who has published twentytwo novels and three short story collections, discusses his writing process, the business, and offers advice for all writers. (Find more writing tips on Rob’s website: sfwriter.com/owindex.htm.) e short stories in this issue examine transitions, isolation, and loss. tim bass’s “Calls from Home” revisits the alienation of college campus life and family. In a. Loudermilk’s “Meaningless (times ree),” a search for identity, meaning, and connection is further complicated aer a personal loss. elizabeth Crowell and Howard winn’s poems find meaning in the nature of New england. e creative nonfiction in this issue is a new offering for Small Print Magazine—a longer “memoir in brief but in full.” Matthew James babcock’s memoir “boogaloo too” follows his entertaining and touching journey as he spins and pops through his childhood, which on occasion was, as he described seventh grade, “a time of exquisite, prolonged, and bewildering torture.” Raymond wong returns with a book review of e Lifespan of a Fact by John D'agata and Jim Fingal. Gene wilburn rounds out this issue with his review of the organizational soware Scapple, another writing tool from Literature & Latte, who also bring us Scrivener. we are again grateful for the talented artists who have contributed their artwork and photographs: Valda bailey, Carolyn Clink, Christina Frost, austin Granger, George Gray, tetyana Kovyrina, Ian Muttoo, Redroom Studios, David Rockwell, and Georgi tandashvili. Steve brannon editor
ISSUE 3 • v1.1
Follow Small Print Magazine at twitter.com/SmallPrintMag smallprintmagazine.com
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 3
Contributors
SPR I NG/ SUM M ER 2015 • VOLUM E 3, NO. 1
Matthew James Babcock’s (“boogaloo too,” p. 26) essays have appeared or will appear in e Fiddleback; War, Literature, and the Arts; Aethlon; and Atticus Review. “e Handicap bug” was listed as “notable” in e Best American Essays 2012. His fiction collection, Future Perfect, is forthcoming from Queen’s Ferry Press in 2016, and his literary criticism can be found in e Journal of Ecocriticism and Private Fire: e Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis (University of Delaware Press). He teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at byU-Idaho. Tim Bass (“Calls from Home,” p. 6) teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at wilmington. His work has appeared in Small Spiral Notebook, Fugue, Word Riot, and other publications. Elizabeth Crowell’s (“Concord,” p. 12) poetry has been published most recently in e Worcester Review, e Sheepshead Review, e Hollins Critic, and e Healing Muse. Her essay, “e tag,” won the 2011 Bellevue Literary Review burns
archive Prize for Nonfiction, judged by Jerome Groopman. an essay, “e twin we Lost,” was published in e Boston Globe in March 2013. A. L oudermilk’s (“Meaningless [times ree],” p. 13) poetry and fiction can be read in Carolina Quarterly, Gargoyle, Smartish Pace, and Tin House. His poetry collections are e Daughterliest Son and Strange Valentine. He is also a cultural critic at his own website, Quirky Cinema, and has essays in River Teeth, Journal of International Women’s Studies, and PopMatters. He teaches literature and creative writing at Maryland Institute College of art in baltimore, one of the country’s oldest fine arts colleges. He is originally from southern Illinois. Gene Wilburn (Inter view with Robert J. Sawyer, p. 20, and “Scapple: e Soware you Didn’t Know you Needed,” p. 46) is a writer, photographer, and computer specialist residing in Port Credit, ontario, near toronto. He serves as an advisor and nonfiction editor for Small Print Magazine.
Howard Winn’s (“Supermarket on the edge of Casco bay,” p. 47, and “Part-time Resident in Maine,” p. 25) fiction and poetry have been published recently by such journals as Dalhousie Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), Galway Review (Ireland), Antigonish Review, Literature Today, e Long Story, Pennsylvania Literary Review, Blueline, Chaffin Review, in Air Literary Journal, and New Verse News. His ba is from Vassar College. His doctoral work was done at NyU. He has been a social worker in California and currently is a faculty member of SUNy as Professor of english. Raymond M. Wong (booK ReVIew: e Lifespan of a Fact by John D’agata and Jim Fingal, p. 19) earned the eloise Klein Healy Scholarship and an MFa in creative writing at antioch University Los angeles. His stories have appeared in six Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies, USA Today, U-T San Diego, and San Diego Family magazine. He is an assistant editor at Lunch Ticket, antioch’s online literary journal. His memoir, I’m Not Chinese: e Journey from Resentment to Reverence, was published by apprentice House in 2014.
f CoNtRIbUtING aRtIStS & PHotoGRaPHeRS
Detail of painting by GEORGI TANDASHVILI, Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, Russia, on interior exhibit at a travel ticket desk.
4
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
Valda bailey.....................................5, 6 C arolyn Clink .....................20, 23, 24 Christina Frost .........................CoVeR austin Granger .................................26 George Gray ......................................25 tetyana Kovyrina .............................47 Ian Muttoo...........................................5 Redroom Studios..............................12 David Rockwell ....................13, 15, 18 Georgi tandashvili .............................4
smallprintmagazine.com
Contents
VALDA BAILEY
SPRING/SUMMER 2015 • VOLUME 3, NO. 1
CREATIVE N oN F iC T ioN 26 Boogaloo Too by Matthew James Babcock
13
PHOTO BY IAN MUTTOO
F i C T ioN 6 Calls from Home by Tim Bass Meaningless (Times ree) by A. Loudermilk
P oE T Ry 12 Concord by Elizabeth Crowell 25
Part-Time Resident in Maine by Howard Winn
47
Supermarket on the Edge of Casco Bay by Howard Winn
“…the tiny, character-driven bits, the quieter scenes, the epiphanies, are often what the reader remembers most; they’re the heart and soul of your writing…” — R o b e Rt J. S aw y e R
INTERVIEW 20
Robert J. Sawyer: Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer Shares His Process and Writerly Wisdom by Gene Wilburn
CRAFT&TOOL 19
BooK REViEW e Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal Reviewed by Raymond M. Wong
46
Scapple: e Soware you Didn’t Know you Needed by Gene Wilburn
smallprintmagazine.com
f
On the Cover Robert J. Sawyer Science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, author of twenty-two novels and three short story collections, has won all three of the world’s top science fiction awards for best novel of the year. He talked to Small Print Magazine’s Gene wilburn about his writing process, the business, and his advice for writers. Cover photo by Christina Frost.
See page 20.
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 5
Fiction
Calls from Home by Tim Bass
BETWEEN THE LINES by VAL D A B AI L EY
M
y college roommate stopped going to classes aer one week. Kyle lasted through Math 113 on the tuesday aer Labor Day. at aernoon, he slunk back to our dorm, bookless, and flung himself on the bottom bunk. “Polynomials can lick my log,” he muttered as he toed off his sneakers. “Me and algebra are done.” I stuck my highlighter into the gully of my chem book and leaned down to talk him through it. at’s what roommates were supposed to do: support each other, tackle problems together, soldier forth as mutual encouragers and the closest of friends. e Guide to Campus Residence Life said so, using those exact words, and our Ra had echoed them in our first hall meeting. at that point I had no reason to disbelieve them. I wanted to get along, and so far Kyle and I were doing fine. we had cleared the early hurdles: divvying up closet
6
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
space, splitting the fridge deposit, sharing laundry detergent. e easy stuff. Now that classes had started and the bona fide challenges would come our way, we needed to be there for each other. “bad day?” I asked. He showed me a math quiz, rotating the paper so I could see the grade as I hung over the top bunk. out of a possible hundred points, he had gotten nine. e number was scrawled in red and underlined twice. “Is there a curve?” I asked. “yeah,” he said. “e curve gets me to twelve, still about a thousand points from a D minus.” He closed his eyes. “Math sucks ass. I’m retiring from it.” is was the fih time Kyle had announced his retirement from a class. In the past week he had said english sucked ass. Psych sucked ass. Phys ed sucked bad ass. biology lecture was full of babes, but the lab ran three hours on Fridays with required attendance, so it sucked the worst
kind of ass in the worst kind of way. Kyle retired from all of them and sold back his books for twenty cents on the dollar. “you could get a tutor,” I said, just as I had suggested for english, psych, bio, even phys ed. “tutors suck ass,” Kyle said. I had run out of helpful-roommate suggestions. I hung there and watched him, hoping he would consider my position and rescue me by saying something like, “anks for listening. you’re a good roommate. because of your support as a mutual encourager, I’ll pull it together and soldier on with the best intentions for first-year college success.” Instead, he dropped off to sleep. He lay hunched against the block wall, mouth open, a hand pushed to an ear like he dreamt of a telephone call. I watched him. Maybe he had a direct line to his future, just a week aer leaving home and showing up on our hilly campus with its cavernous
smallprintmagazine.com
Calls from Home by Tim Bass
library, tiered lecture halls, and a million dreams of success floating across the grounds like the first thrilling chill of autumn. Maybe he had answered an atonal ring from e beyond and heard the news that this world reserved for him a special life, one with no textbooks, no pencils and paper, no classes, and no polynomials. or maybe he was simply the dunce he appeared to be. at 11 p.m. he rose and dug out the party-size bag of potato chips he kept under the bed, amid the dust bunnies already clustering on his unused typewriter and a copy of Watership Down. en he headed out with pillow hair to discover what college offered, besides books and a degree and hope for a decent job in a secure future.
S
“at’s your plan?” I asked when Kyle hit day three of his retirement. Impatient, I shied from Supportive Listening Roommate to assertive Reasoning Roommate. I jabbed a finger at him to emphasize the change. “at’s it? you’re going to not go to class anymore?” “what?” he said. “Class. you’re just going to not go?” “Jeremy,” he said, “you need to work on syntax.” “Maybe I do,” I said, surprised by his academic grasp of syntax. “but I’ll do it in english—english class. because I go to class. you know how this place works. you don’t go to class, you fail out. you fail out, you go home. Simple.” He bent over and reached for his big bag of chips. He said nothing more. I wish he had told his parents that in only a handful of days away he had learned to love everything about higher education except the part about classes, so he would now go to college but not to school. I wish he had told them what he told me: In one week he had mastered the freshman challenge of time management—when you get rid of research papers, Friday labs, and
smallprintmagazine.com
suck-ass algebraic expressions, your schedule is basically hassle free. I wish he had told his parents he intended to stay at the university at their expense. Maybe they would have done something, got through to him and stopped him from ruining his life. but he didn’t tell his parents anything. He le that to me.
S
a week aer quitting classes, Kyle joined a fraternity. He said there were two kinds of fraternities: academic and social. His fraternity was social, and that was important: no required study hours, no grade-point rules. “It’s a fraternity, but not officially, not right now,” Kyle said. “e guys
The first call from Kyle’s parents came a couple of weeks after he retired from classes. got a cow drunk at a party, so we’re kind of on probation. which is bullshit, because that cow had fun.” Kyle’s fraternity brothers renamed him Light bulb because of his last name: watts. ey embraced him with cult fervor and stayed in constant contact, calling a dozen times a day and dropping by our room at all hours to collect keg money and announce the latest changes to the latest plans for the latest party. I met the brothers— Smokey, Curly, boner, Felton, Scrote, Cheez-whiz, a quiet one they called G-Spot, and an endless parade of others, all with first names only. ey always wore neckties with bulky knots, but they refused to tuck in the tails of their oxford shirts—it was, they said, their fashion statement of contempt
for the dean who disciplined them and the snob academic Greeks who wanted to drum them out of existence. e wrinkled brothers adopted Kyle and gave him his new name and clung to him, and he to them. It was as if they rode together on some loud, rusty truck that might hopelessly break down any moment, so they would need each other to push.
S
e first call from Kyle’s parents came a couple of weeks aer he retired from classes. His mother said they had not heard from him. “I hope he isn’t sick,” she said. “No, he’s fine,” I said. “He’s just busy.” is was true. Kyle had indeed been busy for the past several nights: six hours of tV football with the brothers on Sunday, poker with the brothers on Monday, and on tuesday, something with the brothers called a bong-a-thon. at the moment, he was out with Spinner, Felton, and Runt, playing a game they called Putters and Peckers. Felton worked part-time as a night guard at a country club, and the brothers liked to sneak out there and strip naked and whack golf balls into trout ponds. ey invited girls as a cheap excuse to get their clothes off, and Kyle said it worked a few times. “He’s always kept a full schedule,” Mrs. watts told me. “He never stopped in high school. Go go go, all the time. band. Student council and honor society. Future business leaders. anything and everything.” She stopped, as if waiting for some word from me. “yes,” I said. “Here, everything and anything. He’s into that.” She seemed to understand me. “Good for him,” she said. “Good for Kyle. we want him to stay busy. what’s that they say about idle hands?” “ey’re the devil’s workshop,” I said. “yes,” she said. “e devil’s.” I could hear her breathing into the mouthpiece.
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
7
Calls from Home by Tim Bass
“Is he taking care of himself? Is he eating properly?” I spied the party-size chip bag crunched against the typewriter under Kyle’s bunk. “He likes potatoes,” I said. “at’s my Kyle. at’s my boy. He does love his vegetables. when he was here, I was buying ten pounds of potatoes a week. Ten pounds.” She paused. I heard her sniffle. “at’s a lot of potatoes, Mrs. watts,” I said. “Sharon,” she said. “Call me Sharon. you’re in college. you’re an adult now, a young man, just like Kyle. It’s all right to call me Sharon.” “at’s a lot of potatoes, Sharon,” I said. “Indeed,” she said with a small laugh. “a lot of potatoes indeed.”
S
ree weeks into his new life as a college non-student, Kyle and some of the brothers sneaked a bag of marijuana into our dorm room and rolled possibly the biggest joint in the history of recreational drug use. It looked like a burrito. Zizzy lit it, and in no time the room smelled like they had set fire to a car tire. is caught the attention of our baldheaded hall manager, also a member of the social fraternity. He was the brother they called Curly. He banged on our door. “Hey, Light bulb,” he yelled. “what’s going on in there?” “Cramming,” Kyle said. “Got a test in herb-ology.” He let Curly in. Stroker now had the joint, and he handed it over. Curly took a long toke. “you’re going to set off the smoke alarm,” Curly said. “Stuff some towels under the door.”
S
Sharon phoned again. I lay on the top bunk with my english book resting open on my
8
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
stomach. My professor called it a text on cultural literacy and empathetic inter-gender identification. I called it the red book, because it was red. e phone rang. I set the book aside, pushed back the covers, and crawled down, using Kyle’s mattress as a step. Sharon was on the line. I climbed back up to my bunk, pulling the spiral phone cord tight. “Is Kyle managing the workload properly?” she asked. “He’s not studying too hard, is he?” “I wouldn’t say too hard,” I said. “at’s good news,” she said. “Very good news indeed. I want him to enjoy himself, get his nose out of those books every once in a while and have some fun. College isn’t all about studying, you know.” Her voice held a hopeful tone, like the up note at the end of a bird’s song. I imagined Sharon watts as a helper, a nurse, perhaps, or an elementary school teacher, someone who made sure people had what they needed to get through another hour in this life. She spoke with a quiver. She said properly and indeed. Kyle never talked about his parents. He kept no photos of them on the window sill, where I’d set up my picture of Dad carrying Mom piggyback, my shadow angling toward them as I worked the camera. I envisioned Sharon as a person who understood the measure of other people’s burdens. “He’s having some fun,” I said. at the moment, Kyle was out buying whipped cream with Melon Head, wilt, and Spaz. ey had put a kiddie swimming pool in the bed of a pickup truck, and their plan was to fill the pool with the whipped cream and climb in and wrestle the girls from some social sorority while the truck cruised across campus. “Fun is part of what college is all about,” Sharon said. “I wish I had a nickel for every time I said that to Kyle.” “I’ll bet you’d be rich,” I said. Sharon gave a half-laugh, halfsniffle.
“Indeed I would,” she said. “but it’s true, you know. Having a little fun is good for you. Relieves the stress.” “Kyle doesn’t seem stressed.” “Good. at’s great. I’m glad to hear it.” I had no luck getting through to Kyle, but Sharon was a different story. Sharon talked to me, not around me. She listened. Knowing I could li her spirits, even if for just a minute, gave me a sense of purpose I had not found at college until now. “and what about you?” Sharon asked. “you’re having fun, too, right?” “yes,” I said, crossing the wavy line from half-truths to outright lies. “I’m having fun here.” “Fun with a capital F?” she asked. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Sure,” I said. “Fun with a capital F.” e truth was, I never le my room except to go to class and to eat, alone, at the dining hall. I missed high school, those uninspired buildings and the hordes of awkward teenagers, all of us enduring years of routine and common suffering. everyone had a place in high school, including me. I understood it now that I had pulled away and gone to college. a place. My place. Looking over my shoulder, I saw it in a fresh light against the dreary backdrop of boredom, restlessness, and constant dreams of escape. I wanted to reverse the march of time and return to high school, to the block schedules and the dress codes, the small, regimented, comfortable world where I knew the way things worked, where I knew what was expected of me and how to deliver it. weeks into college, I had not fully unpacked. I kept a suitcase zipped and ready for the road, which I intended to hit as soon as I worked up the nerve to tell my parents this experiment was over and if they acted fast maybe they could get their money back. I had heard little from them so far. ey sent a postcard
smallprintmagazine.com
Calls from Home by Tim Bass
from a road trip and said they had converted my bedroom into what they called a “social den.” In my mind, I saw my yearbooks and Red Sox posters stuffed into the attic, replaced by their Pink Floyd albums and wallpaper with flowering vines. ey didn’t call. “you need to be on your own for a while,” Mom told me on move-in day. “It’ll do you good,” Dad said. “you’ll have fun.” ey drove away smiling. I couldn’t tell if they were putting on an act to encourage me or if they were already celebrating my departure from their house forever. Lots of parents divorce as soon as their children get to college. ey figure the kids are grown now and can handle the awfulness of the split, or at least are sufficiently distracted by their new lives at school to spend much energy caring. My parents seemed to be going the other way, growing closer without me, happier, and that hurt as much as if their marriage had crashed and burned.
S
at four the next morning, Kyle stumbled into our room shirtless and leaning against a girl he called Champ. He flipped on the lights, and I saw splotches of dried whipped cream in their hair and down their arms. Champ wore a bikini. “See, he’s asleep,” Kyle said, even though I had my eyes open and looked right at them from my pillow. “oK,” Champ said.
S
I le notes for Kyle. Your mother called. Call your mother. Your mother wants to know if you’re OK. Call home. He called them once, in the middle of the day, when he knew they were at work.
smallprintmagazine.com
S one night I answered the phone and heard a man’s voice. “Kyle?” he said. “Good to hear your voice, son.” I interrupted. “is isn’t Kyle,” I said. “It’s Jeremy. Kyle isn’t here.” Kyle’s bedcovers were mounded against the wall. His chip bag lay on the bare mattress. “oh,” Mr. watts said. “you sound like Kyle.” I told Mr. watts that Kyle was out studying at the library. In truth, he was out mixing gin and fruit juice for the social fraternity’s luau. He had brought in an abused orange water cooler that day and spent half an
The lie burned in my stomach. it was so bad, and i wanted to tell him.
hour scrubbing at a coat of black gunk covering the inside. Finally he said, “Screw it. e liquor’ll kill the germs.” en he dug a Hawaiian shirt out of the dirty clothes and headed off with wordsworth and trouser Snake. “at Kyle,” Mr. watts said. “He’s a workaholic.” More like an alcoholic, I wanted to say. but I said, “He stays busy, that’s for sure.” Mr. watts lowered his voice. “between you and me and the lamppost,” he said, “Kyle’s mother and I are a little concerned. we don’t want to smother Kyle, but he doesn’t stay in touch as well as he should. He’s always on the go. we worry.”
I listened for a hint of suspicion in his voice, some sign that he and Sharon had caught on to Kyle, that they knew the real story and were ready to hammer him if they could get to him. but I heard only the lonesome tone of a powerless father ignoring his instincts and hoping for the best. “He’s on the go,” I said to Mr. watts. “No doubt about that.” “Just like high school,” Mr. watts said. “band, student council, honor society, you name it. e boy never stopped. Hardly had time for girls.” I thought of Kyle’s night with Champ, the squeak of the hinges on our bunk bed’s metal frame, the rhythmic wheeze of the springs. I had covered my head with my pillow, but still I heard Kyle grunting like an ox. “It isn’t so bad, Mr. watts,” I said. “Randall,” Mr. watts said. “you can call me Randall.” “all right,” I said. “It isn’t so bad, Randall.” e lie burned in my stomach. It was so bad, and I wanted to tell him. I wanted to say it’s so terribly bad, Randall, awful, worse than you can imagine. Kyle is wasting his life and your money and the college enrollment space that should have gone to somebody who would appreciate it, some kid who never sat on the student council or got an honor society invitation, and then had his application rejected in favor of your potatoloving Kyle, who at this moment is out wearing a dirty shirt and drinking toxic amounts of fruity booze with a cluster of other aimless idiots who are taking their own parents for a ride.
S
e next night, the social fraternity streaked through the dining hall. t-Dog, Pink eye, bigfoot, Hunch, Pie Face, Doctor blood—all the brothers, a hundred percent participation. Curly the hall manager. big Johnson and Little Johnson. Possum, Preacher, Furp, and the rest—including
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
9
Calls from Home by Tim Bass
Kyle, of course, who led the pack wearing only my rain boots. ey snaked in, hands high, clapping and punching the air and singing their social fraternity theme song, “we will Rock you,” changed now to “we will Cock you.” ey danced past my table and down through the middle of the room, then U-turned at the salad bar and rumbled back through, thrusting everything they had in all directions for the world to see. I nearly lost my mac and cheese. “How original,” I wanted to say to Kyle. “Didn’t your grandfather streak when he went to college in, like, the seventies?” I knew Kyle’s grandfather wouldn’t have been in college then, but I could not imagine his dad, naïve Randall watts, zipping through a public place naked and drunk and grinning about it. I wanted to ask Kyle about the brothers and the nudity. First the golf, then the wrestling. Now this. a bunch of guys who get naked together all the time? at’s how rumors get started. I had cooled down by the time Kyle showed up at our room. He switched on the late news and said, “Jeremy. Dude, check this out.” e tV station had picked up the streaking story. across the screen, a cafeteria security tape showed the naked brothers romping past gaping undergrads and half-eaten lasagna. I saw myself in a far corner. “a group of university students pulled an old college prank tonight,” the newscaster said in a lilting voice that barely suppressed laughter. “It’s called streaking, and apparently it’s making a comeback. ese young men paraded through the cafeteria wearing smiles and, well, pretty much nothing else.” e camera blurred the genitals, but the streakers’ faces appeared remarkably clear. as I watched the tV from the top bunk, I saw that the one at the head of the line, the one the brothers had named Light bulb, beamed with savage satisfaction.
10
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
e shot cut to the anchor, who leered at a monitor and said, “whoa, fellas. take it easy by those bunsen burners.” en he mustered a look of mock hard-news seriousness and added, “e streakers barely escaped before campus security arrived. No word on whether the university will try to get to the, uh, bottom of this.”
S
one ursday my dorm had emptied out, as usual, for College Night, the weekly cattle call to the downtown bars, where bouncers ignored the fake IDs and beer sold by the bucket. e dorm fell silent on ursday nights. Sometimes I spotted a bored campus cop making the rounds, or a work-study racking up easy hours at the front desk. Usually, though, it was just me. on ursday nights, the loneliness gripped me like a fever. I called home. when the phone reached eight rings, I nearly hung up. en I heard clicking sounds, as if someone were fumbling the handset. a man’s voice came on the line. “Hey, Dad,” I said. “who’s this?” the man asked. It wasn’t my father. I heard voices in the background. “Jeremy,” I said. “Germany?” the man said. “Jeremy,” I repeated. “Jersey?” He was shouting now. “Jeremy,” I shouted back. “It’s the name of a person. Me. Can I speak to my mom or dad?” e background voices erupted into laughter. I wondered if I had dialed into a practical joke and other people listened in at my expense. en I heard a glass shatter, followed by more laughter, then music—the first hypnotic notes of e Dark Side of the Moon. It was my house, all right. I pictured my dad, eyes closed, bottle in hand, announcing to the guests, “People, it’s the Floyd. e fucking Floyd.” e man coughed into the phone.
“we need more ice,” he said. He seemed to wait for a response from me. “I want to talk to my mom and dad,” I said. “Could you put one of them on?” a series of tones blared in my ear. e guy was pushing buttons on the keypad. He yelled into the room, “at was Jerry. He’s bringing ice.” en the handset thumped into the cradle, and the line went silent.
S
I answered a knock one day and found Sharon and Randall at the door, red-eyed and slump-shouldered. “Kyle around?” Randall asked. we sat in the cramped dorm room and waited for Kyle to return from wherever he had gone the night before. Randall fidgeted with his shirt collar. Sharon clutched a tissue. “busy ought to be that boy’s middle name,” Randall said. “I’ve always said that.” “He has,” Sharon assured me. “e boy tore through high school like a blur,” Randall said. “I’ve never seen a fellow pile so much on his plate.” “type a personality,” Sharon said. “He gets it from us, you know.” “and now he’s doing the same thing in college,” Randall said. “I’ll bet he’s into everything.” “He does do a lot of different things,” I said. “Like what?” Randall asked. I thought of the wrestling and the streaking and the gigantic joint. “Like athletics,” I said. “and art. and chemistry.” “at’s Kyle,” Sharon said. “ol’ Kyle,” Randall said. He slapped his knee. “type a all the way,” Sharon said. eir water y eyes roamed the room, over my books on the desk, across my family picture on the sill. Randall rubbed his hands together and looked at the floor. Sharon’s cheek twitched as she fought the urge
smallprintmagazine.com
Calls from Home by Tim Bass
For Writers
E-Book Resources to break down. She forced a smile, and I caught a hint of how she would look if she were happy. I saw the faint origin of Kyle’s delighted expression when he ran with the brothers.
S
Kyle didn’t show up that day. He seemed to possess a radar, some genetic scanner that helped him find college fun with a capital F while avoiding all accountability for his actions. Perhaps he was cleaning his cleats for another round of Putters and Peckers with Felton, worm, and Mister Jiz. Possibly, he was off rounding up beer and whipped cream for more kiddie pool wrestling with Champ. or maybe he was just around the corner from our room, building a fat joint with Curly and waiting for his parents to give up and leave. to occupy themselves during their vigil, Sharon and Randall changed Kyle’s sheets and straightened his side of the room. Sharon twist-tied the nearly empty bag of chips and stood it by his unplugged reading lamp. Randall set up a desk organizer, complete with a calculator and a rainbow of highlighters. Sharon thumbed through e Guide to Campus Residence Life. Randall worked the crossword puzzle in the student newspaper. we made small talk until we ran out of topics, and finally I pretended to read. an unbearable silence filled the room. at dusk, Randall shook my hand and Sharon hugged me, and they gave me a handful of cash and asked me to make sure Kyle got it. ey wrote a note saying they were sorry they didn’t catch up with him today but they knew he was a busy young man, and they were proud of him and loved him, and they hoped he would give himself a break from the pressures of college and have some fun. ey asked him to call home. I never saw Sharon or Randall again. ey kept calling, but Kyle was never there to answer.
smallprintmagazine.com
e semester drew to a close, a curtain sliding over the short days from Halloween to anksgiving, anksgiving to exams. I assumed Kyle’s grades, F top to bottom, arrived in the watts family mailbox just before Christmas. I imagined two scenes, and they stay with me still. In one, Kyle sprints naked down the snowy driveway to grab the envelope and use it for rolling papers before his parents can find him out. In the other scene, the more likely one, Light bulb rests on a chaise lounge in the Florida Keys, drinking mai tais with Skunk and Ripper and a dozen party girls, while back home Sharon treads warily to the mailbox and pulls out the university letter and carries it in, as heavy as her heart, and she and Randall open it together and read the sad news they have seen coming all along, and they cry tears of despair and relief, the way people do when a patient finally dies aer months on the breathing machine. I don’t know which scene happened, because I never again heard from anyone in the watts family. aer exams, I took my suitcase and books and picture, and I le that college in the deepest recesses of my memory. I moved back home and settled into the guest room. Sometimes at night, as I lie awake amid the noise of laughter and the Floyd blasting from my parents’ new social den in my old bedroom, I think of Kyle. He’s out there somewhere, a busy boy in berkeley or ann arbor or Chico or Chapel Hill— always a college town, the perfect place for a degree in fun with a capital F. bloomington, maybe. or Las Cruces. I think of Sharon and Randall at home by their phone, dialing numbers that connect all over the globe, searching, struggling to fill the empty space cut into the core of their souls. I wonder who will pick up on the other end of the line and listen to their aching, needy voices, and I wish it could be me. ■
WRITING FOR FUN & INSIGHT
Discover the type of writing best suited to your personality. Recreational Writing by Gene Wilburn explores journals and diaries, memoir, blogs, poetry and fiction, and nonfiction. It also explains how to turn your recreational writing into an e-book or printed book.
SIMPLE GUIDE TO MARKDOWN
Markdown For Writers is a practical new guide to using Markdown and MultiMarkdown for fiction and nonfiction manuscripts and the creation of e-books. For author Gene Wilburn, a writer and computer specialist, Markdown proved to be marvelous for his writing. He designed the guide for those who may not be as dedicated to picking things out of technical manuals.
Both available free at Smashwords.com
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 11
FOGGY FLIGHT by REDROOM STUDIOS on Flickr
Concord by Elizabeth Crowell e bristle of a scant and windy peace stirs in the dust of leaves in Concord woods. e breeze’s mutter fills with the last leaves and, like a thing never to be understood, a whip of starlings scatters out to spell the truth of some of what we meant to learn but explodes and spins again to settle in the feathery rig of empty limbs. on the pearly sky, a V of geese arcs and creaks, their hold on one another, though obvious, seems so like mystery, weaving in plain sight, nothing asunder no wing apart, none le back, no easy faith, to stay aligned for one another’s sake.
12
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
smallprintmagazine.com
Fiction
Meaningless (Times Three) by A. Loudermilk
INCOGNITUM I (TRIPTYCH) by DAVID ROCKWELL
I
tend to think in threes. or at least notice them a lot. Nothing sacred, really, but threes. I never trust my second guesses, but third time’s a charm. and it’s true a third party usually gets my vote, like a third option deconstructs a binary, like a third wheel makes us not just another married couple. For Louie if it’s ever threes, it’s threes because he grew up in the Catholic Church with Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. So maybe it’s threes for me because I grew up in a house with Mother, Dad, and Nanny aunt? also, just today, thinking in threes: thinking about Dansburg College where I forfeited three years of my life part-time. e department meeting debate that got me into trouble was over the five-paragraph essay with its intro, three-point body, and conclusion. at I defended this supposedly imagination-killing form
smallprintmagazine.com
meant no classes for me the next year. which is this year. a year of selling off inherited antiques just to get by, to feed our two cats and special-needs dog. yet another three. a bad year: a year divisible by three. rees aside, we manage well enough on Louie’s salary. I never have to go without my cave-aged Gruyére while he’s forever the coffee snob. and I’ve inherited so much furniture that even the attic is a sort of parlor. So our bad year is not so bad. Louie says I make everything sound worse than it is. what does he know? Making life sound worse than it is, it’s an art form, it’s what I got my degree in. My thesis committee said my problem wasn’t a dismal outlook, aer all, but an inability to judge my own characters. Since then, guess what? I started writing stories about Louie and have realized how easy judgment can be!
“you nailed me, ashlee,” Louie said aer reading my “Limo Guru” story a few months ago. I’d sent it to him, from my laptop to his, as we sat at opposite ends of the dining room table. “I mean I’m hardly that overbearing. and I’ve never had a swimmer’s body. but I can see me in this guy.” He laughed a bit, not his usual frothy laugh but sharp little breaths. “why this—this era of my life?” he asked, straightening his robe lapels. He liked to wear a robe over his clothes at home, as if to hide the fact that he’s always dressed for company or quick departure. “I guess,” I fake-pondered, “because I’ve heard you talk about it over and over.” one reason Louie makes new friends all the time is so he can tell his tales of driving a limo in Los angeles in the mid-1990s. He becomes almost philosophical, as if chauffeuring rich people allowed him endless rearview
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
13
meaningless (Times THree) by a. loudermilK
glimpses into the very heart of human nature. “you always say that job helped make you who you are today.” ough it’s impossible to discern how out here in the berkshires, in a town known for its potters’ guild. “Transformative, you said. Right?” Louie shrugged. “Changed my outlook. Disillusioned me. but I never totaled a limo.” “well it’s fiction.” “Fiction when it suits you,” he said, grinning. “Fiction when it suits the story,” I insisted, a checkmate if I do say so myself. He still doesn’t know I’ve written a series of Louie stories. He has a different name in each of them. In my favorite, called “wherever you are,” I made him come out as gay and we got along much better.
S
Goodbye to my grandmother’s fainting couch. e most beautiful thing in our attic. and it’s been in our attic because it didn’t match a single room in the house. e antiques dealer paid me $750 cash plus a piano bench I’ll repurpose and a lady-head vase with an adverse gaze that I’ll give to my aunt Lydia for Christmas. Lydia was my nanny from the terrible twos until sixteen kicked in. My parents called her nanny, but really it was all of us, even me, who looked aer her. Fragile, impressionable, shy until she got angry, aunt Lydia was everything I was supposed to be as the kid. aer all these years, thanks to a daily cocktail of meds, she’s rather condescending in her mental health. Makes me miss “Nanny Nutjob,” as Dad called her behind her back. I was rarely bored as a kid, that’s for sure. Not like I am now so much of the time. anyway, I had the piano bench in the backseat, legs up like a dead bug. e lady-head vase sat in the passenger seat, all the more bodiless. It was warm for october so I rolled down
14
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
both front windows. Lunch hour traffic inched confidently toward a fresh green light and I felt a sneeze coming on. Louie says my sneezes should be followed by aershocks, they’re so nuclear. “are your lungs bruised?” he’s asked in bed when I’ve let loose a sneeze. “Have you got any marrow le in your bones?” I felt the pre-sneeze tickle possessing my head, a not unpleasant little seizure that I gave into for just a second, maybe three. as abruptly as the sneeze convulsed my body, my car slammed into the car in front of me. Somewhere between knocked and slammed, my foot stomping on the brake
i pictured myself small-footed and vulnerable, wearing a cowl-neck sweater, standing there by my car in the middle of the intersection… as if it’d help while the lady-head tipped over to hide her face. Immediately, the security van behind me knocked-slammed into me, compelling the vase onto the floorboard with a gentle bounce. e sneeze had made my eyes water and as my vision cleared I saw her staring up at me. at’s when the driver of the van who rear-ended me called me an idiot. I’m sure she said idiot. It all happened so fast. She spat the insult at me as she rushed to the driver of the car I had rear-ended, an old man already checking the damage. He glared at me while pointing at a broken taillight. twin boys in matching outfits filed out of the backseat and
the van driver squatted like a hen to take the crying one by the hand. I should have been more concerned. a mere fender bender, I told myself, distracted by our being smack in the middle of the intersection. about ten or so people stood by watching, several of them having stepped out of a corner hair salon. I texted Louie, misspelling accident, which seemed appropriate. e van driver appeared suddenly at my window. “you okay then?” I looked up at her, looked into her wide, reddened face, and nodded. “I was just texting my husband.” Her face moved so close to my face that I thought she was going to kiss me. “I was just texting,” I started to repeat myself, flummoxed. “e officer will want to see proof of insurance,” she said, scanning the inside of my car. I wanted to push her face away but she retreated. a cop approached and she turned to shake hands with him like they’d gone to high school together. ey talked in low voices and when he came over to me, his first question was, “Ma’am, have you been drinking?” “with lunch,” I admitted naïvely. “Just a glass of wine.”
S
“ey talked together in low voices,” I told Louie that night, going over it all again while I folded clothes. “Looking at me like I’d killed somebody! His very first question was ‘Have you been drinking?’ and I was like ‘wellll’—because I’d had that little glass of white wine at ai time.” Louie watched the news, sitting up in bed with our dear old dog Stinker alongside him. If he was listening to me, he’d have accused me of never having just a little glass of wine. and he’d be right. I said louder, “I thought she wanted to kiss me but she was actually smelling my breath. So rude, huh?”
smallprintmagazine.com
meaningless (Times THree) by a. loudermilK
“Let me watch this, please,” he said. our cats benny and Joon tore through the room, hurdling a laundry basket full of colors, and I couldn’t help but saying, “Here we go!” It’s this way most nights. Louie spaces out and the cats spazz out. I just kept folding in silence, tempted to throw balled-up socks at Louie’s big nose. but what if he really was mad at me? Just as my brain tilted guilty, I martyred myself all over again. I pictured myself small-footed and vulnerable, wearing a cowl-neck sweater, standing there by my car in the middle of the intersection and thinking if glares were arrows, I’d be St. Sebastian right now. Downtown was noontime busy on a Friday, everyone aiming their arrows at me, at me as the cop made me touch my own nose, made me recite the alphabet backwards. as I walked a straight line heel-to-toe with no difficulty, feeling smugger with each step, I thought of it all as a story I’d type up when I got home. I guess it’s a coping mechanism because I was terrified of being hauled off to jail. Making it into a story before it even had a chance to be real life is my way of living through any awful situation. It’s what I got my degree in, aer all. and then, just as I’d sort of adapted to my humiliation, a man in my blind spot uttered my name with a question mark at the end—as he always did in the hallways at Dansburg where I used to teach. I knew his voice instantly. He approached me and asked, “are you all right?” “I’m fine, Raymond,” I answered, feeling like I’d been spun around and plopped down into the middle of a job interview. Perhaps this was because I did want to teach again at Dansburg, even as a lowly adjunct. So what I said next really mattered. and I thought it should be simple, no trace of any kind of confession. “Fender bender,” I said. “tiresome.” totally unflustered like that. “we saw the whole thing,” Raymond told the cop. I looked back over my car to see his partner Jim
smallprintmagazine.com
standing on the curb half a block away. He waved at me. “we were getting into our car,” Raymond said. “Sir, we’ve got witnesses,” the cop said. He handed me my driver’s license and concluded, “you’re in order, just hold on a few minutes.” and there I was, le alone with the only gay man I’ve never been able to relate to, a man who published a formalist poem-series about his spirit
animal, a man who never ate sugar or wore unnatural fibers or watched sitcoms. Nice but smug. It’s like he cancels himself out. I always suspected he was a tyrant in a past life. an ad for car insurance broke Louie’s nightly news trance and he deigned to speak to me. “anyway,” he said. “anyway,” I mocked. “anyway, what’s-his-name defended you, right? at’s good, right?”
THREE PHASES by DAVID ROCKWELL
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
15
meaningless (Times THree) by a. loudermilK
“but did he assume I was drunk?” I didn’t like saying the word. Usually I loved that word. “even if only at first?” Gently patting the dog’s back, Louie asked, “I thought you hated him?” I have said that, more than once, but I answered, “Hate’s a strong word.” “I hate to see what our insurance premium—” “okay, Louie. I get it.” “well sneezing is not the best defense.” I thought he of all people would understand. “It’s not the best year,” he said. “at’s what I’m saying, okay? Raymond had this glimmer in his eye when he said goodbye. It surprised me. Like he’d missed me or something.” “why not? Gay men love you.” “Usually,” I said. Just as I caught myself smiling, however, I figured I had it all wrong. I imagined Raymond and Jim driving home, speculating how much booze I drink every night while surfing braindead cable. Maybe that glimmer in his eye was schadenfreude? So I sat there folding, not hearing the tV, and recalling threes. one by one by one: ree vehicles. ree black stars on the breast pocket of the van driver’s jacket. at old man and his grandkids: ree. e sobriety tests: ree. e redyellow-green of each stoplight: rees. Meaningless tallies of three. I can’t help it. I barely did any damage to the old man’s car but three times I saw him rubbing his neck like he was laying the groundwork for a whiplash claim. Maybe those twin brats will have nightmares—or the same exact nightmare—and sue me over their identical distress. I didn’t tell Louie what the old man said to me right aer Raymond walked away. e one thing that old man said to me. His sunny day sensibility shocked raw, he walked up to me and he said, “I hope you’re ashamed of yourself.”
16
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
and I am. I’m ashamed of myself for so many things.
S
everyone here gets way too ecoserious about the holidays. as in: “Have a Green Christmas and a Sustainable New year.” Christmas used to be my favorite holiday. en Dad died on Christmas. I was home from college, my sophomore year, and I heard Mom cry out for Lydia. we spent the rest of the day at the hospital. e light outside was cold yet hazy and the world seemed too ordinary for symbolism.
“it’s so good to see you, Button,” she murmured before stepping from the foyer into the living room. she unbelted her coat and started to cry. e two months since the fender bender were hard for me and Louie. en the Saturday before Christmas, at a party thrown by Louie’s intern, I got bitchy drunk. I’d told him earlier that day about “Limo Guru” being accepted by New Modern, of all places, and every time I mentioned its imminent publication his mood soured. e thing is: I kept mentioning it. what’s more: I told everyone else and they kept mentioning it. but at last our being over was, as usual, over itself. Christmas eve was apocalyptic for other reasons. It was the last night of a visit from my grad school friend Jeremy and the first night of a visit
from aunt Lydia. I expected a toxic off-gas from their conflicting personalities, I really did. Jeremy is ironically queeny with a nihilistic streak, plump in clashing patterns. Upon meeting him, Lydia covered her eyes as if he were a bright light. It was the kind of oddball gesture I’d warned him about, though, so he bit his tongue—if not his tone—and said, “Nice to meet you too, Lydi-ha.” He offered to take her suitcase, smiling like a stewardess with a bomb under her skirt. Honestly, that’s his stewardess simile, not mine. once Jeremy was halfway up the stairs, Lydia hugged me. I could tell she was upset about something because she held on, trembling slightly. She’s wiry like Mom was, with the same long fingernails and competing jewelry, but she matured into a salt and pepper look while Mom, in her last years, dyed her hair auburn. “It’s so good to see you, button,” she murmured before stepping from the foyer into the living room. She unbelted her coat and started to cry. “oh no—what’s wrong?” “I killed a fox,” she said. “It darted right out in front of me. I barely had time to recognize it was a fox. a pretty little fox. I keep thinking about it.” I helped her off with her coat and, unsure what to say, offered her a drink. “Decaf?” I nodded, passing her a box of tissues. “Poor little fox,” I said as I le the room. Lydia’s husband, her second, was in Spain visiting his mother who must be ancient. His name’s al, remodeler of kitchens. Lydia’s a wannabe designer providing input on fixtures. ey’re cute, always sharing dessert, trying stuff like Zumba together. I met him only once and assumed he wrote me off as racist because I was surprised to hear he was from Spain. “you thought Mexico?” he asked, indignant. I didn’t answer, just apologized. I returned with the coffee tray and found Lydia tête-à-tête with Jeremy,
smallprintmagazine.com
meaningless (Times THree) by a. loudermilK
telling stories and teary. She must have told him her fox story and so he responded with his deer stor y— hitting a deer on the drive home from his mother’s funeral. He was in a coma for four days. “I was in a coma for four days,” he said to us both. “I came out of it and I was like the reincarnation of that little kid in As I Lay Dying—no joke—who says ‘My mother is a fish.’ Right? okay? but I woke up and kept asking about the deer and not remembering that my mother had died, that I’d been to her funeral. So my mother was the deer. I still link them in my memory.” Lydia patted his hand. “I believe that deer was your grief,” she said, her eyes steady. “you couldn’t avoid it.” She sipped her hot coffee and looked at Jeremy with approval. He cocked his head and nodded, unsure but hesitant to prod. “My fox was more guilt than grief, more sin—no, I’m not religious but I know what I mean. ere’s no swerving,” she said. “and here we are.” Jeremy looked concerned now, or uncomfortable, so I changed the subject to my own fender bender two months ago, tweaking it into a moodlightening anecdote with no significance at all. we finished our drinks right as Louie got home, not showing how tired he was. e four of us went to aubergine with its blatantly purple walls. e food is “dynamic” according to the local culture paper. our table was uneven and, with each wobble, I found myself more and more nervous that our wine glasses might tip over. I kept thinking whoever leaves here with a red wine stain will die. I even bumped the table on purpose once, to tempt fate. No wine was spilled, but Lydia took an overdose of sleeping pills later that night. Perhaps, half-dead and driven by memory, she climbed the stairs to the attic to be among my grandmother’s—her mother’s—old furniture. Not finding the fainting
smallprintmagazine.com
couch, which begs everyone to lie down and die, she removed the linens from an old cedar chest—also her mother’s. Handkerchiefs to sheets, she flung them all over her shoulders in a weak yet perfunctory manner. at’s how I’ve imagined her. we know for certain that she wrapped a tablecloth around her like a shawl and climbed inside the chest, shutting the lid with a fatal click. Jeremy’d le early to get home to North adams for Christmas brunch with his family. when Lydia didn’t answer my knock on her door around ten, I thought I was letting her sleep. Louie found her bed empty around eleven. we thought to look in the attic but didn’t really look when she didn’t answer us. we didn’t think she could be dead. “as soon as we looked again and I saw everything strewn about and the, umm, cedar chest—” I came close to crying and could only say, “well, it was a little before noon.” e police detective nodded and Louie told him about Lydia’s history with mental illness. I explained about the poor little fox, how upset she was. and no, we didn’t know how to get in touch with al in Spain. with our attic now a crime scene, Louie’s empathy hardened by the hour. He called Lydia’s suicide an act of sadism. “on Christmas day,” he said, holding me closer than he had in months. “of all days. For anyone. but especially for you.” He said we’d have to get rid of that chest now. “Give it away. we shouldn’t have it in the house, not even in the attic. I don’t want you reminded.” I nodded, already unable to stop imagining her locked inside it, the darkness thick with her own carbon dioxide. en abruptly, as if a trapdoor drops open, she’s falling through the darkness. a noble, velveteen darkness. I said to Louie, “bet we could get a couple of hundred for it.” Secretly I decided to keep the ladyhead vase I’d wrapped for Lydia in kitschy, silver-dotted paper. I thought,
as well, about the tablecloth. It was a kitchen tablecloth with yellow flowers embroidered at each corner. My mom loved that tablecloth. I wanted it back.
S
Snow hit hard on the twenty-seventh of December, keeping us housebound for two days now. we’re coping in our solitude with the dismaying news that al did not visit Spain, as Lydia claimed, but lay dead at the bottom of their kitchen stairs. Did she push him? en realize she couldn’t live without him? She le no note. I can’t help but think her story about the fox was a kind of suicide note. Maybe she didn’t even hit a fox, really. Maybe her husband was the fox. I’m now in the attic refolding all the linens, a task I’ve taken slowly this aernoon. It seems symbolic, though how I cannot pin down. I sip wine and watch our cats explore the usually dark corners now brightened by sunlight reflecting off the vast snow outside. a round window on the west side of the attic is lit up almost mystically. and my father is dead. My mother. My nanny aunt. I’m nobody’s button from now on. ere’s a funeral to plan and only distant relatives to attend. with the New year ahead, however, and clean, new snow covering the mountains, I feel more hopeful than forlorn. Raymond emailed me to let me know they need someone to teach a composition course next semester. Just one, though; I usually get two courses a semester. His secretary will send me details when she returns to the office on the fourth, weather permitting. My five-paragraph showdown with Raymond last year may not have been such a big deal. It’s pretty funny when I think about it now. or so I’m trying to convince myself. we were in an ordinary classroom with half-erased doodles on the chalkboard and Raymond led the department meeting as usual, throttling
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 17
meaningless (Times THree) by a. loudermilK
faculty in his hands-off manner. His tirade was clearly against teaching the five-paragraph essay as a default form, which makes sense, but his words made a case against the form itself, as if a three-point argument has always been and always will be damaging to students. and then he proceeded to offer us a three-point argument against the five-paragraph essay. I simply could not hold back my contempt. I pointed out his hypocrisy and
said, “you even started with an intro and summed things up in conclusion!” I did not deny the form’s limitations but suggested to Raymond, “Perhaps your snobbery isn’t allowing you to see how it can be useful without becoming a trap. you make it sound like other essays are a different species altogether. but really,” I continued, my momentum waning, “but really they’re not. I mean everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” e room was quiet enough to
FRACTURED FIGURE VIII by DAVID ROCKWELL
18
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
hear the heat kick on. My two friends in the department each gave me worried looks. is convinced me I’d said something true enough to be dangerous and repeatedly I thought: My trump. My trump. Mine. Raymond just smiled his cold-trying-to-seemwarm smile. “a champion of tradition in our midst,” he said to everyone while looking directly at me. “who knew?” e sunlight is fading in the attic and downstairs Louie is cooking dinner, singing ba-dee-da along to classical—a practice I’ve never understood. I’ve packed away the last of the refolded linens. a few of the tablecloths in this cedar chest belonged to my mother’s mother’s mother. I wash and iron them all once a year but rarely use them. Louie calls “Come get it!” up the attic stairs. He’s a dear man, loved by everyone who knows him. His interns at the office, who change every year, are always devoted to him. eager pups with coffee cups, I call them. His life at work is his real life, where he matters most. It’s not that he doesn’t matter here and to me. He does—very much so. I wonder nonetheless: He needs me to be here. I need to be here. ose two needs should mean the exact same thing, but what if they don’t? Not for a long time. aer dinner we’ll take the dog for a slow and careful walk in the snow. we’ll talk funeral plans. we’ll wonder why she did it. only he understands how alone I am in the world. “while it’s hot!” he sings from below. “I’ll just be a second,” I say, hardly loud enough to be heard. e cats stretch as one cat on a shared ottoman. Sniffing braised shrimp through the floorboards, they steal down the stairs. I rise to follow, looking at the repacked cedar chest. I can’t bear to close its lid. I just can’t. Maybe Louie’ll come up later and shut it for me. No, I’m not scared exactly. It’s getting colder and colder up here but it will never be haunted. ■
smallprintmagazine.com
Book Review
The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2012. Print.
the artist to be able to sell her handicras for extra cash.” D’agata: “tread very carefully, asshole.” at the end of this book, we get the full-fleshed philosophical arguments these two men are representing in a back-and-forth debate about the relative merits of their positions. Fingal believes the writer has a contract with the reader to uphold the tenets of journalistic integrity in giving factual information or there’s a violation of trust in the author/reader relationship. D’agata is not a journalist nor is he running for political office, so he
Reviewed by Raymond M. Wong
t
he Lifespan of a Fact is a battle of wills between a writer, John D’agata, of a submitted essay in which he has admittedly taken “liberties…here and there, but none of them are harmful” and the magazine’s fact-checker, Jim Fingal, a man obsessed with the accuracy of details in a work of nonfiction. what follows in this book is an engaging, humorous, and controversial philosophical fight that poses some difficult questions: How much flexibility and artistic license is acceptable in a work of nonfiction? where is the line drawn? what is truth—factual versus artistic? e book begins innocently enough, with Fingal questioning some of the initial facts in D’agata’s essay with the magazine’s editor. Fingal is told to check with D’agata on his source for the information, and the groundwork is set for the ensuing battle. Line by line, each fact in the essay is fact-checked for accuracy by Fingal, with scrupulous notes when he finds something awry. original passages from the essay are presented at the center of each page with Fingal’s confirmations and sources used to verify the facts printed in black ink. when there’s a discrepancy or question, the dispute is printed in red ink as is the subsequent email wrangling between Fingal and D’agata about the presentation of erroneous information versus the merit of creative artistic interpretation. e insights into the psyches of these two are fascinating as their duel devolves into name-calling and accusations of complete fabrication and falsehoods to the ruining of the essay with too much “nitpicking.” each is
smallprintmagazine.com
steadfast in his assertion of what is right: Fingal in stating that the trustworthiness and credibility of the writer and the piece must be maintained, with D’agata being adamant about his freedom to fulfill his artistic vision. each fact is magnified under a microscope of analysis as to its verifiability. Sources are tracked. Notes are referenced. at one point, Fingal even asks for contact information for D’agata’s mother to see if she really owns a cat, and Fingal makes a snide comment about a line in the essay in which D’agata states his mother earns extra income by beading jewelry. Fingal: “ough she must be quite
How much flexibility and artistic license is acceptable in a work of nonfiction? isn’t constrained by the same expectations for rigorous honesty to the public. He’s an artist creating the most resonant and affecting story he is capable of conveying, and his allegiance is to the emotional truth rather than the literal one. e arguments are compelling and go to the heart of the problems posed by the loose definition of creative nonfiction as a literary form. ■
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
19
INTERVIEW
Robert J. Sawyer Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer Shares His Process and Writerly Wisdom
PHOTO BY CAROLYN CLINK
By Gene Wilburn
I
met Robert J. Sawyer in the mid-1980s before he had published his first novel. at the time we were both writing for the same Canadian computer magazine. It has been my distinct pleasure to watch his career as a science fiction writer unfold with one prizewinning novel aer another. Rob is one of only eight writers in history—and the only Canadian—to win all three of the world’s top science fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo (Hominids), the Nebula (e Terminal Experiment), and the John w. Campbell Memorial award (Mindscan). Rob has published twenty-two novels, three short story collections, and has been a frequent 20
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
speaker at conferences and on tV and radio. His novel FlashForward was adapted as an abC television series of the same name, for which Rob was also a screenwriter, and his www trilogy (Wake, Watch, Wonder) and his novel Triggers are to be produced for the screen. In addition to his writing and guest appearances, Rob has frequently been a writing instructor and mentor, helping others advance their writing careers. Most recently, the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy association has bestowed on Rob a Lifetime achievement award and Rob has been inducted into the new Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. smallprintmagazine.com
inTer Vie W with r o B e r T J. s aW y e r
Gene Wilburn: Rob, you’re a very prolific and successful author and our readers would be highly interested in knowing about how you approach your writing, what tools you use, how you organize your materials, and any advice you might share with aspiring writer. My first question has to do with your choice of WordStar, a DoSbased, 1980s-era word processor for your writing. Why WordStar, and do you encounter any challenges running it on today’s computer hardware? Robert J. Sawyer: In its day, wordStar was the number-one wordprocessing program in the world, and although it hasn’t been updated since 1992, it still runs circles around word and its clones. First and foremost, wordStar was designed for ease of repetitive use, not ease of learning. Soware today is all about how quickly you can get up and running with it; wordStar was all about, once you know it, how quickly you can do things you’ll need to do a dozen times a day for the rest of your career. In wordStar, you never take your hands off the home typing row—not just input but all issuing of commands is done from there. e notion that a typist would take hands off the home row—the a, S, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, and semicolon row—is madness, but word and its ilk wants you to constantly do so to use a mouse, or to hit a function key, or to use the cursor pad. I’m not alone in my continued fondness for wordStar. George R.R. Martin uses it, too. you think he’s taking a long time writing the latest Game of rones book? I shudder to think how much slower he’d be if he was using word! as for using it under modern hardware, well, it is a DoS program, and the last version of windows that really got along with DoS was XP, so I still use that. but I run it with 4DoS.CoM—now free—as a
smallprintmagazine.com
CoMMaND.CoM replacement, and with tameDoS, a wonderful console enhancer. e combination works even better than wordStar did on a native DoS system, and flawlessly integrates with the windows clipboard, USb printers, and so on. I expound at length on the advantages of wordStar over wordPerfect, word, and other select-then-do bully-me-intoyour-way-of-working word processors on my website (sfwriter.com/ wordstar. htm). GW: Could you describe your general writing environment and daily writing routine for us?
“my year has more structure than my days, actually. each of my novels— i’m finishing up my twenty-third right now—takes me about a year to produce.” RJS: well, the beauty of having been self-employed for thirty years now is that I don’t have a daily routine; routine is what a 9-to-5 forces upon you. I go to bed when I’m tired, get up when I’m rested, and write when I feel like it. I actually have three workstations set up in my home: one in my office, one in my living room (so I can see the fireplace), and one in my sun room; they’re all sharing the same files through Dropbox, so I move about during the day as the mood strikes me. My year has more structure than my days, actually. each of my novels—I’m finishing up my twenty-
third right now—takes me about a year to produce. e first four months are devoted to research specific to that novel: full days of reading books, articles, and so forth on whatever I need to know for the current work. e novel I’m writing now is called e Philosopher’s Zombie, and is about the possibility of complex human behavior without self-awareness, so I’ve been digging into a lot of cognitive science. is is my favorite part of the process; I love research and learning new things. e next three months are devoted to the first dra. I try to do 2,000 words a day during that stage, and my books all weigh in about 100,000 words. If all went perfectly, I’d have a first dra in 50 days, but with the vicissitudes of life, and doing other interesting things on the side, it tends to take three months to get that done. So, that’s the first seven months of the year; the next four are spent polishing and revising—dra aer dra aer dra, honing, rearranging, cutting. and then the manuscript is sent to my editors—one in New york, one in toronto, and one in London—and I cross my fingers that they’ll all agree on what, if any, changes they want. e final month of the year is spent with a book tour and other events to promote the novel I’d finished a year previously, which will have just come out at this point. and then the cycle begins again. GW: you travel quite oen to conventions, awards events, speaking engagements, and consultations on screen adaptations of your work. Do you do any writing when you’re on the road, and if so, what portable writing tools do you use? RJS: absolutely! I’d be doomed if I didn’t write on the road; I’m very good at writing on airplanes—I love a nice four- or five-hour flight. I’m a huge fan of what are called netbook computers—a class of
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
21
inTer Vie W with r o B e r T J. s aW y e r
small, cheap laptop computers pioneered by asus, but also for a while with models from acer, HP, and Dell. Sadly, all of those manufacturers have abandoned that form factor. I own seven asus eee PC 1000He units, all bought used or refurbished off of ebay; they’re well under $200 a unit, and if one gets damaged, lost, or simply wears out, I swap in another. also, if I frequently travel somewhere, I keep an external monitor, ergonomic keyboard, and mouse in a friend’s closet in that city, and use them when I’m there; I have three such caches set up currently. GW: your novels are considered hard science fiction, based solidly on existing science and its projections into the future, and you’ve said a large portion of your time is spent researching and learning about the science that forms the background of your work. What tools do you use for note-keeping and organization? RJS: In my 30s and 40s, I managed to keep most of it in my head; now that I’m 55, I find it harder to keep track of it all mentally. I honestly don’t think our brains slow down much as we age, but evolution hasn’t given us the sort of optimized, scalable search algorithms that Larr y Page and Sergey brin came up with for Google: the more we know, the longer it takes to retrieve something. and so these days, I use evernote to manage a lot of my research. It’s about ninety percent of the tool I want it to be, and it does keep getting better. I’m a premium subscriber, mostly because I want to support them, but the free version is entirely adequate for most writers. I use so many computers that I simply refuse to incorporate any soware that requires per-machine activation into my workflow: evernote’s chief competitor is Microso’s oneNote, but that requires licensing per machine, and that is so last millennium.
22
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
GW: Do you use production/project management soware to manage your time? RJS: No, I use the old-fashioned method: guilt. I finally felt guilty enough about not having answered your interview questions, Gene, that I decided today was the day! Same with everything: the to-do list is always longer than I want it to be, but the triage is based on which things I can knock off the list that have been gnawing at me.
“…the tiny, character-driven bits, the quieter scenes, the epiphanies, are often what the reader remembers most; they’re the heart and soul of your writing…”
GW: is your approach to novel writing that of a plotter or a pantser (an organic, fly-by-the-seat-of-yourpants approach) and what tools do you use for organizing your plots? RJS: a traditionally published novelist’s career goes through three stages. at the beginning, the only way to sell a novel is to have written one: no publisher is going to buy an unfinished manuscript from a newbie. en you transition to getting contracts based on outlines: you have to have plotted it out, in some detail, to show the publisher you’ve got a viable notion—so, in mid-career,
everyone’s a plotter, whether it’s their natural inclination or not. en you reach the point where your publisher basically says, “Hey, how about another novel?” and you say, “okay,” and off you go. at that point, you can go back to being a pantser. I don’t like outlining, but I always regret not having done more of it at the outset. outlining is great for the big moments—the president is shot!—but hard to do for the tiny moments, and yet the tiny, characterdriven bits, the quieter scenes, the epiphanies, are oen what the reader remembers most; they’re the heart and soul of your writing, and they’re the least amenable to working out step-by-step in advance. So, call me a pantser. at said, I have long been a soware junkie, and I’m always looking for something to give me an edge. when I was a teenager, writing my first stories, before the personal-computer revolution, I plotted on 3x5-inch index cards, because that’s what the howto-write books said to do (and it’s still how most scriptwriting is done). I’ve looked for good soware solutions in that vein, but the problem is 3x5 index cards are inefficient, in the same way that the old dbase II database structure was inefficient: you had a fixed amount of space for each field—500 characters, say—and every field took up the same space, whether the actual content was just a single word or a whole paragraph. So, I like writer’s blocks by ashley Soware. Instead of fixed-sized blocks, it uses blocks that size vertically to fit the actual text, making better use of your screen real estate. e downside is that, to do that, you have to have your blocks organized in columns not traditional rows. but I like that program very much. I also have an iPad air, and on it I use the app prosaically called Index Card by a developer named DenVog. It is knee-deep in skeuomorphic design, which is an outmoded approach: ruled pink and blue lines on
smallprintmagazine.com
inTer Vie W with r o B e r T J. s aW y e r
its index cards, which look and behave exactly like the physical things. but it does a better job on the iPad than any of its competitors. GW: How important do you think it is for an aspiring writer to be well-read in the genre he or she is writing in? RJS: It is crucial, because your audience is well-read in that genre. every beginning science-fiction writer thinks their ideas are new and fresh. It was earth all along! eir names were adam and eve! every beginning mystery writer thinks, ha, I’ll show them all—I’ll write one in which the detective is the murderer, or in which the butler really did do it. you have to know the field you’re working in. If traditionally publishing, you’ll never get by an editor if you don’t, and if self-publishing, you’ll become a laughingstock. GW: Do you ever suffer from writer’s block, or do you consider writer’s block a myth? RJS: Not only is it a myth, it’s a pernicious myth that writers foisted upon themselves. we’re storytellers, and we sold the public on the story that, oh, you, there, Mr. School teacher, you have to work even if you don’t feel like it, and you there, Ms. Corporate Drone, you have to put in lots of unpaid overtime just to stay afloat, but, we, the writers, have this get-out-of-jail-free card. Sorry, can’t work today—or tomorrow, or this year—because I’m blocked; the muse isn’t with me. Come on! GW: When your works are adapted to screen, and you are involved in screenwriting, what tools do you use for formatting your work? RJS: Sometimes I’m involved, sometimes I’m not. For FlashForward, I was consultant on every episode and wrote one of the episodes myself; for
smallprintmagazine.com
Joseph Fiennes and Robert J. Sawyer on location in Los Angeles shooting the ABC series FlashForward, which was based on Sawyer’s novel of the same name. Sawyer served as consultant and Fiennes played Mark Benford in the series. Photo by Carolyn Clink.
the Triggers feature film that’s in development, I’ve written the screenplay; for the adaptation of my novels Wake, Watch, and Wonder, I’m attached to write the pilot and executive produce. e industry standard for scriptwriting is a program called Final Dra. It does an adequate—no better—job of formatting a screenplay, but it’s a terrible word processor, with only a skeletal set of features. I wrote my own scriptwriting macros for wordStar, and with them I can blast through writing a screenplay much faster than I can with Final Dra. ere’s a standard plain-text screenplay-markup format called Fountain, which, of course, to protect its market position, Final Dra doesn’t support. but a wonderful program called Fade In Professional does, and so I output from wordStar to that for final formatting of scripts. Fade In is usable on as many computers as you own, unlike Final Dra, which thinks Hollywood writers should have twenty cars and eight bathrooms but only two computers. In the end, if the producer
wants a Final Dra file, Fade In exports flawlessly to that format. GW: How do you track and organize the business side of your writing? (submissions tracking, accounts payable/receivable, contracts pending, scheduling, promotion, legal, etc.) RJS: Honestly? by doing none of it myself. For almost twenty years now I’ve employed my wife full-time as my salaried assistant. She does almost all of that stuff for me. I was losing two days a week to the administrative overhead of keeping my writing business going; now, I spend all that time actually writing. of course, I also have agents in New york and Hollywood, and lawyers in toronto, New york, and Los angeles whom I call on as the need arises, and an excellent accountant. GW: you’re a writer who relishes technology. i noticed at a few of your book-launch readings over the years, that you oen use handheld devices to read from, rather than
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
23
inTer Vie W with r o B e r T J. s aW y e r
path you choose—or a hybrid combination—the chances of success are, sadly, small. GW: Do you have any advice for writers seeking an agent? RJS: well, the easiest way is to get an offer from a publisher then phone or email your agent of choice and ask if he or she will represent you. but then there’s the catch-22 of getting an editor to read an unagented submission. So the standard career path is to establish your credentials—either through short-story sales, building an impressive online platform such as a popular blog, or being a recognized expert who wants to write in your area of expertise—and querying agents; it actually works. GW: Do you have any advice for writers negotiating a contract without an agent? Robert J. Sawyer hosted Supernatural Investigator on Canada’s Vision TV. The original series explored various so-called supernatural phenomena. Photo by Carolyn Clink, 2008.
24
from the book itself. What device do you currently use when giving readings?
next full screen of text—it has to page through the document, not scroll through it.
RJS: yeah, I’ve been doing that for over a decade, starting with reading from a Palm oS device. I like to gesticulate when I do public readings, acting scenes out, and you can’t do that if you’re holding a paper book in two hands. as for reading from a manuscript, with so many words on the page, most authors are afraid to look up at their audience, lest they lose their place. e small screen of a handheld is ideal for public readings. I export my novel manuscripts into ePub files and load them into ibooks, and read from my iPhone 5s. ibooks isn’t my favorite e-reading app—Kobo is—but for this particular application it’s a good choice. e key is to have a program that displays a full screen of text, then displays the
GW: Many new writers are considering self-publishing their work to try to build a following and to get noticed. you’ve always followed the traditional route of agents and publishers for your work. What is your opinion about self-publishing for a new writer starting out?
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
RJS: e landscape has changed enormously in recent years, and I have many friends and colleagues who are self-publishing now. e high e-book royalty rates are appealing, and the immediacy—finish a book this morning, have it on sale worldwide this aernoon—is likewise appealing. but discoverability is the problem: there is a flood of selfpublished material. No matter which
RJS: one word: don’t. e big-five publishers have different boilerplate for agented and unagented authors, and the one presented to unagented authors is rapacious in the extreme. also, you’ve got no clout; agents bring the clout of their ongoing pool of business dealings with that publisher to the table. GW: if there were a single piece of advice you could give to new writers, what would it be? RJS: tell your stories. Don’t worry about what the market is looking for, don’t write in somebody else’s universe, don’t do a knockoff of somebody else’s book. write the things that are uniquely yours with as much clarity and passion as you can, and trust, with seven billion of us on this dustball, that there will be thousands who will embrace the work that you alone can offer the world. ■ To learn more about Robert J. Sawyer, visit his website: sfwriter.com.
smallprintmagazine.com
Part-Time Resident in Maine by Howard Winn
THE BLUES, PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE GRAY, SCOTLAND
smallprintmagazine.com
a lobsterman lives in the house next door. traps are piled high in his back yard where tall grass untouched by mower reaches for the sky between wires. a small dingy retired from sea duty, and mounted like a wind sock, moves to mark the direction of sea breeze in his front yard. He fixes his roof when not tending traps. an auto mechanic lives on the other side, although a boat cradled in a trailer waits for some eventual launch that will clean the grease from under his nails. He needs to go to sea, if only for a vacation to feel the water roll under his feet and salt air fill his lungs, abandoning his cars marooned on the hydraulic liî‚?s. when the weather is right we three families hear the crash of surf that sounds like a distant train pounding over metal rails going somewhere. Landsman that I am, I am a stranger to the sea, but not to these neighbors who tolerate someone from away, as they say. I can smell the salt in the air, and watch the sea birds sail silently into the wind that keeps them still as they move.
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
25
Creative nonfiction
Boogaloo Too by Matthew James Babcock
FIGURE, FOREST GROVE, OREGON. Photo by AUSTIN GRANGER
e Nimbleness of a Dancing Master is not at all prejudiced by being taught to move. —Henry Fielding From 1983 to 1985 it seemed like every kid, no matter what age, race, religion, culture, nationality, or language was compelled to wear a nylon track suit (usually bright red), tennis shoes (Puma, Nike, or Adidas), headband with wrist bands, and throw a piece of cardboard on the ground to try and emulate the Powermoves that were performed by B-boys. —omas “t-bopper” GuzmanSanchez, Underground Dance Masters: Final History of a Forgotten Era
26
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
i.
when I was six, I took my first and last dance lesson at Juanita Mauldin’s Furniture & Dance in Jerome, Idaho. e building, a battered brick bunker, squats on Main Street, wisely rechristened Mauldin’s Dance Studio, between Impressions Hair & Spa and the banana-cream office with a monstrous red awning where my friend Danny Lloyd’s dad, Harold, ran his dental practice. I don’t know what my mom was thinking, trying to punch my ticket to Juilliard by smuggling me into a bumper-pool morgue that moonlighted as a shuffle-ball-
change clinic for kiddies, but there was no stopping her. aer I was married, I asked her why she made me take dance lessons—well, lesson. “e place said furniture and dance,” I said. “Didn’t that give you a clue? I was the only boy in a class of twelve girls.” “you had rhythm,” she said. So I could play my Goofy Greats record on my brother’s Fisher-Price turntable and tap my foot to Ray Stevens singing “ahab the arab.” was that reason enough to march me to the local ballerina barn, past the scabby aquamarine love seats and shotgunned Curtis Mathes televisions, and park me on the parquet to
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
watch me squirm like a nude model in a department store window? Rhythm’s one thing. what about credibility and reputation? If a joint hawks orphan umbrella stands and lambada lessons, shouldn’t you booty pop your business elsewhere? Swedish massage and cesspool service, maxillofacial surgery and vacuum repair while you wait—what’s more incompatible than furniture and dance? Imagine George balanchine warming up in a warehouse of elvis lava lamps. Savion Glover in Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Reupholstered Ottoman? I’m no Park avenue executive, but I’d wager that no entrepreneur outside southern Idaho considered for a downbeat that home furnishings and hoedowns might be the magic formula for making a living. but in my town, where Holsteins outnumbered people fiy to one, none of that mattered. e day of my dance lesson, I shuffled with my mom into Juanita Mauldin’s back room bazaar. I scuffed my feet to the middle of the floor, where my mother released my hand, and I froze. a worn pine barre, which I mistook for a medieval torture device, ran across one side of the room. Mirrors glared like my future—harsh, clear, unforgiving. on a row of metal folding chairs slouched a coven of stumpy mothers. ey clutched their purses like chainsaw-toting clowns fantasizing about trophy cups foaming with college tuition. I considered my reflection: my dishrag body in patched toughskin jeans and shabby Keds sneakers, my posture projecting all the unstoppable force of a snotty troll with a bad bowl haircut. all around me, pixies in toxic pink swarmed like fire-breathing butterflies, hair in French braids, waists cinched in cotton-candy tutus, all frilly and feminine and floofed, their stiletto tip-toes pirouetting them into statuettes of demonic grace on pedestals of barbed crystal. en I stalked in lead boots to a chair, clamped my hands on the
smallprintmagazine.com
sides, and tried to weld my butt cheeks to the seat. a teacher with a frazzled ponytail approached and bent at her waist. Her peppermint breath warmed my ear. “Matthew, would you like to join us?” I gulped sawdusty air, shook my head, and watched the teacher glide away across a diagram of imaginary footprints that promised to tango me out the door, past the grinning girl on an old Hires Root beer sign, never to return for an encore. I suppose it’s every parent’s wish to sire a star. a lady once offered George temple a “stud fee” to impregnate her
…not many years would tick away until, at another awkward stage, i would hustle back to embrace the very art form that scarred me as a youngster… with another Shirley. I confess, when my daughters dance in their recitals, I feel those same proud daddy surges of sunshine. but what I find most curious, when I consider my aborted dance career, is that, at the time, I couldn’t have known—wouldn’t have believed—that not many years would tick away until, at another awkward stage, I would hustle back to embrace the very art form that scarred me as a youngster, not because I felt I had talent, but because there was nowhere else to go. back then, not even Juanita Mauldin, with her tap shoes propped up in a maroon vinyl La-Z-boy recliner, could have foreseen the time
that, unbelievably to everyone but my mother, I would be known as one of the best dancers in town.
S
In the “yellow Pages Goes Green” directory, there’s a listing for a Fred astaire Dance Studio that “deals in the furniture industry” in Naples, Florida. one morning, I find myself wondering if Juanita Mauldin, in her dotage, rigged up a franchise or just U-Hauled her crappy rosewood settees to the Sunshine State for a new scene. when the person on the other end answers the phone, I hear laidback music, something sassy and slightly Caribbean bubbling through speakers in a rehearsal studio. “Fred astaire Dance Studios,” a woman says. “is is Stephanie.” “Hi, do you sell furniture and teach dance?” “No,” she says, cautious. “It says you do furniture and dance in the directory,” I say. “Is this the place on tamiami trail North in Naples?” “No, we moved.” Stephanie sounds eager to get back to cha-cha-ing the arthritis out of her roomful of retirees. “So you don’t sell furniture?” “Nope.” a piña colada lilt pools in her throat. “we could teach you to dance, though.” Obviously don’t know my history, I think. “Sorry to bother you. Just thought it was strange, a place that sells furniture and gives dance lessons. Kind of a weird combination, furniture and dance, don’t you think?” “yeah,” Stephanie laughs. “at is weird.”
S
e history of our planet could be described as one big dance craze. If we quick-stepped back and peeped through the serpent’s eyes, we probably wouldn’t be surprised to witness
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 27
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
the adam and eve bump and Grind, followed by the Homo erectus Stomp and bronze age boogie. e ancient Palace of Minos in Knossos was tricked out in wall hangings depicting trios of Cretans pulling off acrobatic bull dancing routines (not like bulls, with bulls). etruscans had their funerary conga lines, the tchokwe tribe of Zaire its stilt dance (are stilts furniture?), and australian aborigines the kangaroo cult dance-drama as well as, for women only, the slithering, magic-inducing djarada when the men were away. Dances have oen doubled as coded, erotic charades designed to freak out a puritanical status quo. Up until 1802, even watching the Mexican jarabe could get you two years in the clink, which didn’t stop anna Pavlova from winging her version into Mexico City, in 1918, once cultural restrictions had slackened. Not many years before, Nijinksy, assisted by Stravinsky’s toothgrinding, beatboxing score and Roerich’s primitive duds, ignited a riot at the opening of e Rite of Spring at the éâtre des Champs elysées, mostly because Nijinksy and his guardians of the avant-garde turned their toes in instead of out. en there’s the curious account of the “dance mania” that infected the tiny Saxon town of Kölbigk. on Christmas eve 1021, a parish priest excommunicated a wagonload of peasants in the churchyard of St. Magnus aer they broke out in a flash-mob frenzy that lasted a year. Some blamed the townsfolks’ nonstop shimmyshimmy-ko-ko-bopping on the diseased grain they ate. Church bigwigs were skeptical of the village dance-athon, however, even when some Kölbigkians danced themselves to death. In 1278, a similar outbreak of mass handjiving struck the hamlet of Maastricht, and when the crowd galumphed Gangnam-style across a bridge, it collapsed, dumping the revelers in the Moselle River, where they drowned. Clearly, being a cultural pioneer has its cost.
of course, no clerical crackdown on the Maastricht Mash or other dance disorders could quash the human race’s lust for rhythmic gyration. bohemian Victorians twittered and gossiped through their schottisches and mazurkas. In the twentieth century, americans drank too much and did the jitterbug and Charleston, smoked too much and did the Pony and Mashed Potato, shot up too much for pogo and slam dancing, and didn’t think enough about what the boss would say in the office Monday morning before they surrendered all personal decency to the electric Slide, Funky Chicken, and Pee-wee Herman “tequila” jig. we packed the yMCa for New york Hustle lessons then hustled to football stadiums for the “yMCa.” we walked like egyptians through whatever trouble we couldn’t Macarena out of, and for insecure folks the Safety Dance helped if someone tromped on your achy-breaky heart for the mambo number fih time, and you needed a little tush push to vogue through that next rough patch of cabbage patching. rough all the ländlers, tarantellas, and Cat Daddies, the dance disease has remained steady, though not unchanged. all dance fads fizzle then resurface in other forms, sometimes centuries later, thousands of miles across the globe. Case in point: the eerie hokeypokey nature of the Shaker “circleswithin-circles” dance, a visual nod to their cosmic theology, but a clear call to put your whole self in and Shaker it all about. Relief etchings in Sakkara show egyptians in busby berkeley symmetry, draped in the Ziegfeld Follies glamor of high-kicking, Rockette chorus lines. e watusi tribe gave us the watusi, which became the batusi for adam west, only to reappear in Pulp Fiction in the sultry, comeback moves of John travolta, who knew a thing or three about wiggling his can
on Saturday night. Check out the friezes in the Vatican Museum, and tell me if the flourishes and footwork of the nude gladiators getting down-andPyrrhic don’t match the bubbly, showgirl hipsway of Carlton’s living room tribute to tom Jones on e Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.1 even in black and white, any kabuki or bugaku dancer might as well be doing the bartman. Music hall mighty mite Harry Relph (a.k.a. “Little tich”) threw gravity-defying leans into his big boot Dance and, in doing so, slid across eight decades into the cantilevered choreography of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” video. even Little tich’s stage name mimics the street monikers—Li’l Pop, Sir wavelot, Kid Glyde—of those who got birdlimed in breakdancing, the granddaddy of all dance crazes, when every kid with too much time and too little fashion sense whirled like a wind-up dervish in pants as baggy as the bloomers donned by Ukrainian gopak flyers. I’m sure it’s my age, but I can’t help seeing remnants of the Sequined age of Urban Dance everywhere. Late Romantic etchings of quadrilles in Captain Gronow’s Reminiscences show men and women getting jiggy with Lady Jersey at almack’s, fingers interlocked, like a train of supple paper dolls. If I stare, the image goes fuzzy and morphs into Kelly, ozone, and turbo doing a wave chain. Paintings of Krishna multiplying himself to swing with as many honeys as possible in a rasa mandala recall the rings of breakdancers on street corners during the Reagan years, the face-off battles and practice of “turning out” opponents with hand insults and poses. t’ang Dynasty “sleeve dance” figurines channel the full-body voltage of bruno “Pop N taco” Falcon’s leg jolts and double-arm waves. bangladeshi Manipuri dancers could pass for “tutting” diagrams in alfonso Ribeiro’s Breakin’ and Poppin’, and on a limestone fragment from the
1 tom Jones, at the Chicago Playboy Club, once asked tick’n will Green (of the original electric boogaloo group) to teach him how to backslide. Green replied, “only if you pay me.” (See Guzman-Sanchez, Underground Dance Masters.)
28
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
Ramesside Period, a spidery eban woman arches in the same backbend as Crazy Legs when he exits his backspin, whips off his sneakers, and freezes with them on his hands to end the battle between e Rock Steady Crew and New york City breakers in Beat Street. Lump together style, substance, and pure panache, and we could say all dances—the balinese trance dance, burmese makuta, and Disco Duck—evolved into break dancing, and that breakdancing spawned everything aer, from Da Dip and Da butt to the Harlem Shake, Stanky Leg, and Dougie. For those who battled puberty in the 1980s, breakdancing was more common than Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. all over the planet, it seemed as if alien deejays had hijacked the human nervous system. In movie theaters, breakdancing broke out like the bird flu in Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. Independent films, such as Style Wars and Wild Style, crashed into american consciousness by copping the camera angles, cropped scripts, and acting chops of bad martial arts movies. In a single year, one estimate claims, major studios had over fieen breakdancing movies slated before the fad flopped flat on its backspin. at the height of the poppin’ and lockin’ fever, however, break dancing was as ubiquitous as kudzu in Catoosa County. you couldn’t turn on the tV, glance at a magazine, or look in the mirror without sensing in everyone the animal hunger to bust out and start jerking like Howdy Doody in the throes of delirium tremens. but if breakdancing was a pandemic, it was also panacea. Poppin’ zits? No problem, just pop your chest like the monster fetus from Alien is bursting through your breastbone. Can’t get a date? Just tie your eighteenth multicolored bandana around your forearm. Simply put, in the ’80s, it was just not possible to be sad while you wormed your way across the kitchen floor under your mother’s confounded
smallprintmagazine.com
gaze. and there was plenty to be sad about: nuns shot dead in el Salvador, Lennon killed point-blank outside e Dakota months aer Chain Reaction melted the silver screen with their cholo-style crossover locking in Xanadu. ere was aIDS, the air-traffic controllers’ strike, e Hyatt Regency collapse, the pope and president gunned down, e Falklands, Grenada, walter Mondale. If the deaths of Princess Grace and the eRa weren’t enough, brezhnev’s eyebrows alone could make one weep. even when the Soviets bagged the olympics in Los angeles and Lionel Richie, in the closing ceremony’s breakdancing megaspectacle, tripped over a little floor rocking nipper and narrowly missed
is failure training for gratitude? Why love something you never master?
his chance to sue america, it still felt like a victory. any day of the week, VHS owners could zap the most stubborn bummer by playing back Paul “Cool Pockets” Guzman-Sanchez getting slinky and robotronic on a railcar in Rod Stewart’s “young turks” video. No matter the challenge, you could nix it because you could spin on your knee like an unbolted teeter-totter. No matter the personal roadblock, a tsunami of flamboyant posters, books, and commercials urged you to forget your pain by hopping into expensive sneakers, flailing to the point of blackout, and dressing as if you dipped your body in honey, rolled in Liberace’s cosmetics, then streaked with George Clinton’s hairdresser through a
Japanese flea market into Captain Hook’s pajama closet just to see what would stick. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—the things that didn’t stick for most not-so-hiphoppers were ability and awareness. “ere’s no stopping us!” ollie & Jerry sang, as saccharine as bubblegum. and truly, when I look back, there wasn’t, or didn’t seem to be anyone in my town who could have stopped our breakdancing, though clearly, somebody should have tried. Is failure training for gratitude? why love something you never master? when suffering becomes a performance, who hasn’t clung to technique, to routine, to memorized steps and rote drills just to skate through with the hope that you might emerge from that darkened practice room, accompanied by more than the uncertain applause of your own regret and wonder?
S
at the age of forty-three, I drive west on Highway 33 on a cool, cloudless Saturday in october. black cows grow drowsy in the sun. on every farm, windburned men and women in down vests and hooded sweatshirts straddle four-wheelers and grip pliers, twisting repairs into wire fences. e earth looks as if it will never know rain, the sky as if it will never burn out of blue. Idaho National Laboratories waits in a diluted haze amid blunt volcanic buttes, a tiny outmoded space station on an abandoned planet. In the creases of the ash-colored foothills, thin groves of aspen trees fork in rivulets of tart gold, dusky orange, lime. In Carey (population 604, give or take a Camaro on blocks), a ladybug sign on a weathered, mint-colored rambler says, “ban t. V. week! Read with your Kids!” In a scorched field between Richfield and Shoshone, beer and cooler bottles, amber and green and clear, unroll a reckless constellation for miles along the ragged edge of the road.
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 29
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
ree hours later, I cruise west into town and park outside Mauldin’s Dance academy. e late aernoon sun douses everything—masonry scaffolding, refurbished shopfronts, the old fire alarm silo (now a cell phone tower) in honeyed glory, purging the old farm town of its flaws. toward the intersection of Lincoln and Main stands a sturdy block of shoulder-to-shoulder businesses, some topped with upper-floor apartments, including the place where my friend, Jeff Van orman, lived with his mother, Sue (who taught me first grade), and his father, Lyle. e Van orman apartment, where I stayed up all night playing Intellivision with Jeff, now sits atop wild boy tattoo & body Piercing, formerly Van orman’s Sporting Goods. on the sidewalk, a downcast Max von Sydow look-alike slumps on an overturned bucket, his bloodless neck and arms bathed in an oil slick of inky chaos. e artist’s Mexican sidekicks form a supporting cast, crouching on either side in puffy baltimore Colts coats and duckbill caps as if preparing to hoist the man in the middle to some heavier level of happiness. Past wells Fargo, a backhoe hunkers in the gap of charred rubble between businesses where rowdies used to sit at the bar in wood’s Café and eat French fries, stirring thwarted desires into plates of ketchup. I step on the sidewalk, hands in pockets, lean forward like an out-ofwork broadway hoofer, and peer through the glass.
S
During the spring and summer of 1983, Ira Gershwin died, Carrie Fisher married Paul Simon for a while, e Monitor’s anchor was found off Cape Hatteras, egyptian divers photographed Napoleon’s sunken fleet, Michael Jackson moonwalked on the 25th anniversary Motown special, and people were using their videodisc players an average of 8.5 hours a week. before being dethroned by e Police’s
30
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
Synchronicity, the Flashdance soundtrack topped US music charts. walking to school, my friend, Charlie Skaug, turned to me as a group of screaming girls drove by in a red pickup, and said, “Man, I love the new Flashdance shirts.” “why?” I said. “ey’re so low,” he said. “you just reach in through the armpits, and mmmm.” “yeah,” I said, clueless as to why he was making yummy-cinnamon-rollswarm-from-the-oven sounds with his mouth. you could hear Naked eyes, Kajagoogoo, omas Dolby, and Duran Duran
i can’t recall these times without being reminded that seventh grade was for me, as it is for many americans, a time of exquisite, prolonged, and bewildering torture. and, if you were lucky, eddy Grant’s “electric avenue” and Midnight Star’s “Freak-a-Zoid” thumping in parking lots and roller rinks. is was the year bill Stepney, disc jockey for adelphi University’s campus station, wbaU, aired an interview with Run DMC and played “Sucker MC’s.” enamored of this track, e Kangol Kid and Dr. Ice—later of UtFo, or “Untouchable Force organization,” which included the educated Rapper and Mix Master Ice—popped and glided to “Sucker MC’s” on e Donahue Show, and before Dustin Hoffman could hire them to perform at his daughter’s birthday
party, my brothers and I captured the show on our VCR. Kid and Ice moved like greased gods of antigravity, even when the camera zoomed in on the acne candying their faces. ey wore sneakers with soles as fat as cake icing, white gloves, and lightweight suits of shimmery burgundy. Kid sported his hallmark white Kangol cap. Ice donned a futuristic headpiece—a sparkly string thing that partitioned his head into hemispheres, with a knot dangling in back—giving him the appearance of a Battlestar Galactica extra. at one point, Ice stretched out on his back, interlocked his fingers, and, by working his shoulder blades and heels, hovered across the floor like a magician’s assistant in a levitation trick. Halfway through the show, a lady called in. “is is what africans used to do,” she said. “It’s what africans used to do to the beat of the drum.” “yeah?” Donahue said, cocking his mic on his hip. “and so what?” when the show ended, my brothers and I rigged up our tripod and video camera and threw down our baddest corner of willis and 138th Street on the living room carpet. I wore blazing orange high-top Chuck taylors, puffy white pants zigzagged with zippers, and an avocado t-shirt with rainbow sleeves my parents bought me on vacation in Mexico. My brother, Mike, rooted the ompson twins’ “(Long) beach Culture” from his cassette tape collection, popped it on the stereo, and away we bopped down avenue Del Soul. Viewed today, our extempore foray into breakdancing looks less like a crew of funky-fresh jam kings coldcocking the cosmos with electroshock body rock and more like three epileptics fleeing an asylum in painful heels during an earthquake. Not once—and this still astounds me—did we consider the racial implications of our actions. breakdancing was slick, urban, black, Hispanic. we were white, suburban, potato-fed cow jockeys. breakdancing was Chino “action” Lopez.
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
we were Cheetos “aer School Snack” Loafers. breakdancing was about defending your “turf,” battling for “street presence.” ere is no street presence in a town with one stoplight, no turf when your back yard is an alfalfa field. without a single practice, with no regard for cultural boundaries, in our stocking feet and with our math homework unfinished, with nothing but the highoctane enthusiasm of the novice as our North Star, we launched ourselves onto the spangled stage of the age. and when we learned our church across the street would be hosting a fish fry for a neighboring congregation in Hazelton, we did the only sensible thing. we conveyed our Donahue videotape across the street, stuck it in the church’s rolling tVVCR stand, and, as the Kangol Kid and Dr. Ice reprised their pulsepumping set, looked on with ambassadorial pleasure at the snowy-headed strangers doing the Geriatric Slide past tables of breaded trout, coleslaw, fries, and root beer. Like abductees in a lab of horrors, the gentle folk in line cast shell-shocked glances at the tV and spooned graham-cracker-andchocolate-pudding dessert onto paper plates as “Sucker MC’s” rattled their dentures. we were, aer all, spreading the good word. breakdancing was the gospel, and angels in loose adidas with fat neon laces had called us to blast the newest testament’s intergalactic, heart-attack smack from our remote boom box to every dairy and community center on God’s turf.
S
I can’t recall these times without being reminded that seventh grade was for me, as it is for many americans, a time of exquisite, prolonged, and bewildering torture. I bore my allotment of angst and alienation with a blend of escapist pretense and redneck resolve, living each day under a psychological pup tent I
smallprintmagazine.com
propped up to suit the storm, a double life made three times as heavy, considering that I was overweight, I was bullied, and I never shared the true tenor of my life with anyone. on a trip to visit my uncle’s family in Salt Lake City, my cousin, who was a year older, greeted me by shaking my sides like a butcher sounding a slab of pork, and said, “your mom’s right. you are getting chunky.” People are talking about this? I thought. Up to that point, I had considered myself normal on all fronts, about as consequential as bowling shoes or Spiro agnew. but this spotlight on my pubescent pudge spurred me to join the football, wrestling, and track teams. I started jogging in a floppy red and gray-striped warm-up suit, every night, four miles from my house out to the pheasant refuge and back. on the recommendation of Maxine bell, our school librarian (and future state representative), I read a young adult novel about a strawberry-blonde girl who took up dance to lose weight (keeping this volume tucked in my jacket, lest anyone notice my literary tastes). Looking back, I’m sure I wasn’t alarmingly overweight, but walking to school every day I felt like a half-ton shipment of slaughterhouse offal, fearing that the courthouse would crumble when I passed, or the tanks in the armory might shake loose from their treads. e bullying started with dark echoes in the hallway. Laughing threats that lassoed my name. Shouted prophecies of bloody noses and compound fractures. I was Mouse Fawley dodging Marv Hammerman, Clifford Peache outwitting Moody. only when teddy Lopez accosted me in the gym and started giving me the “So, think you’re tough?” pec shoves, did things get physical, and not in the way I fantasized I might with olivia Newton-John. It was lunch hour, so I let Lopez get a few more shoves in, walked off, and when he bird-dogged me into the hall through a swirling
“My name is
Raymond Wong and I stoed being Chine at the age ve.”
Raymond wong spent his life running from his culture, his family, and himself.
i’M NoT CHiNESE: e Journey from Resentment to Reverence is the story of his trip back to Hong Kong and what happened when he was forced to stop running. is deeply personal memoir is full of heart, humor, and compassion.
Published by apprentice House baltimore, Maryland ISbN 978-1-62720-026-4
www.raymondmwong.com
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 31
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
subway-rush of students, I stood down a second round of his bluster with my back to the lockers before tim Matthews, our wrestling coach, spotted the budding brawl and dispatched us to class. For some reason, I was a constant target at all the un-policed moments: before school, in the hall, lunch, aer school. In my less-conscientious era of slack social codes, fights were legion. oen, I would be walking across the sunny recreation area aer lunch, and I would hear a pop—like a punctured tire, and a groan—and turn to see some poor sucker writhing on the ground, trying to hug the smashed struts of his ribcage back together as a trio of rock-headed goons stalked away. It was like witnessing a mob hit, or sniper attack, that missed you by inches. In my case, threats always preceded the assault, as if my enemies weren’t entirely sure of their cause. at times, I felt like a rookie dodo stalked by weekend poachers armed with fickle blunderbusses. Some kid would rush up to me and say, “ey’re gonna get you!” and I would improvise an escape, which usually meant standing next to one of the rec area monitors or loping behind the annex where our choir class rehearsed. why direct this Krakatoan rage at someone like me? Girls. at year, the eighth-grade girls descended on us like tiffany-winged sirens from Planet Pheromonetopia. at the beginning of the year, one of the bustiest, blondest eighth-graders, a girl named traci, ordained me her chosen one—or one of her chosen ones. while I was strolling to math, traci’s friend, Sherri, glided up in a diaphanous cloud of peach perfume and with the sultry diplomacy of an emissary from Paradise Island announced that traci wanted to “go with me.” Where do we go? I thought. Not wanting to flout junior high protocol and risk being branded a dunderhead, I agreed. traci was swallowand-look-again gorgeous, possessed
32
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
seductively wet eyes, Southern belle lashes, and pillowy curls of platinum blond that bounced to her shoulders. I couldn’t for a moment understand why she wanted me. but I didn’t question fate, just slipped in step. traci’s dri was, of course, to make the eighth-grade boys jealous, but I was unsophisticated enough in my thinking never to suspect such a Janus-faced tactic. I was too busy squeezing bubbles of love magic from my traci doll, letting our arms touch in crowds, deploying space probes from my eyes into the shag-carpeted star chambers of hers, too busy to see the rabid ranks of spurned eighthgrade ogres circling us in the gloaming at school dances. inking back now, I have to say I would have been jealous of me as well, the way traci and I acted like weasels in heat, as if we couldn’t wait to twine our bodies around each other wherever we wandered on school grounds. we never kissed, but we generated enough friction to boil water when we rubbed our cheeks together during toto’s “africa” on the dance floor. at home, I couldn’t keep my social coronation a secret. I confessed to my dad that traci, one of the most lipsmacking girls in school, was “going with me.” My dad turned from the tV, dipped his eyeglasses, and looked at me. “where do you go?” he said. I’ve wondered if the bullying I endured—its glockenspiel timing and lynch mob execution—didn’t stem from the misconception that my chub was actually muscle. I was short but stocky, but because of embarrassment, or in order to perpetuate the myth of my atlas hulk, I religiously avoided removing my shirt in any setting. My more sinewy buddies, eager to showcase their He-Man action figure physiques, would, once outside among the girls’ P.e. classes, fling their shirts aside like May Day revelers, even in November. During the cold months, we ran stair laps alongside the girls in our ancient
gym, a 1950s Hoosiers-style edifice, with wooden benches and bleachers nailed permanently in place. Four closed stairwells spiraled up the gym’s four corners, providing dangerous sanctuary for couples who wanted to make out, remove clothing, and—rumor had it—ride the risky tilt-a-whirl of love, if enough friends could be deputized as security. I don’t know which administrative ace advised our P.e. teachers to let sweaty, hormone-juiced junior high boys and girls run stair laps together, but that’s the way the cattle caroused. Many of the girls used this opportunity to expose themselves “accidentally,” in minor ways, to the boys in the stairwells, and traci, one of the most gymnastic cheerleaders on the eighth-grade squad, was notorious for turning cartwheels on the walk above the bleachers, thus giving us lacy glimpses of her bra. once I was walking home from school, and—bless my luck!—I happened on traci and Sherri in the South Park. I was an unchaperoned prince adri in the marketplace, and they were reclining like nubile amazons in the shady grass, waiting to cart me on two buck poles into the hedges and subject me to delightful rapine and plunder. I stopped, spluttered a spate of stupidisms, and professed a need to “get going.” traci mumbled something to Sherri then looked at me. “Do me a favor,” she said. Anything, I thought. “what?” I said. “take off your shirt.” Had I been the suave swashbuckler I fancied I was, I would have said: Shouldn’t I be asking you that? Instead, unaware of the double meaning in my reply, I patted my flabby saddlebags and said, “Naw, I’m too white.”
S
every aernoon in front of Smith’s Food King, the breakdancers of
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
Jerome (there were maybe five or six) unfolded a queen-sized sheet of refrigerator box cardboard, slotted a mixtape of Grandmaster Flash and Planet Patrol in somebody’s ghetto blaster, and threw down the daily repertoire of spins, locks, and poses—“repertoire” meaning a quickly spent bag of gawky moves shoplied from television. while nobody complained, silver-haired retirees in sunglasses the size of welder’s goggles oen shuttled their grocer y carts out and stopped, bunched their eyebrows, and stared as if debating whether to call the police or animal control. Smith’s Food King couldn’t have been farther from Queens than the Shah from Sha Na Na, but to us, it was a breakdancing Shangri-La, this heat-rippled parking lot of tar-filled cracks, gimpy terriers, and dust devils. a sleepy taco time skippered by a single blond woman in black sat in the far corner of the lot, as did Pizza Hut to the south, shrouded in hairy evergreens. across Lincoln avenue, which split the town in half and ran south to the golf course and the Snake River Canyon’s north rim, you could see strings of rainbow pennants flapping over Con Paulos Chevrolet, a huddle of mobile homes, soball fields, and beyond that, the cemetery, train tracks, and abundant blue sky above a scanty tree line. e store next to Smith’s, Ryan’s tshirts, sold custom-made shirts and other trinkets of style. Secretly, I idolized Ryan. I ached to be sultan of my own store, to live the life of the freewheeling bachelor, fending off stacked, dewy-eyed babes like a matador. Ryan was young, wore assorted torso-hugging t-shirts he had designed and tight, flare-legged corduroys or painter pants. He swept his dark blond hair in the feathered, bilevel cut of the times, which made him resemble Gary Sandy (andy travis on WKRP in Cincinnati) or Joel Higgins (edward Stratton III on Silver Spoons). Devoutly, I hoarded
smallprintmagazine.com
my allowance and lawn-mowing money, biked to Ryan’s to watch the breakdancing, and bought grape bubble yum and played the coin-op video games Defender and Pleiades. whenever I entered Ryan’s, a bell dinged, and he would emerge from the back room to service my petty purchases with a sublime smile. He always winked and grinned and, with a bartender’s seamless confidence, moved behind the counter in a way that made me think he knew something I would never be old enough to understand. Ryan’s secret back room
at school, the bullying had spiked. one friday, as classes were letting out, the usual flushed courier skidded up and delivered the “They’re gonna get you!” warning.
enthralled me, and somehow I believed he lived back there with a limber and docile harem of bombshells in bikinis, when it’s more likely he cozied up to a fuse box, mop and bucket, a flickering Magnavox tuned to Ryan’s Hope, and a mini-fridge stocked with ravioli and Mello yello. Ryan specialized in appliqué tshirts—fuzzy letters, peace symbols, rainbow unicorns, and Cheryl Ladd. when he draped a t-shirt on his steam press, he worked with the relish of a waiter dressing a table for a czar, slammed the spring-loaded handle down, let the press hiss, yanked it open, and flung the sizzling t-shirt to the customer like a chef
sailing a pizza to a sailor in port. when I bought gum or played video games at Ryan’s, I always told him when I saved more money, I’d buy a t-shirt, and he always thanked me for my future devotion. In reality, I hoped if I bought a shirt he would reciprocate by granting me a tour of his back-room sanctum of fantasies. I wasn’t breakdancing publicly at this time, just haunting the parking lot outside Ryan’s and horsing around in my room to Kurtis blow’s “e breaks,” trying to get down on it in private with Kool and the Gang. My dinky Sanyo cassette player let me nab songs when the occasional beat bomb sailed on national radio waves through George Strait and Def Leppard into our basement. at school, the bullying had spiked. one Friday, as classes were letting out, the usual flushed courier skidded up and delivered the “ey’re gonna get you!” warning. Hugging the vending machines, I scoped the scene through the scarred windows in the steel front doors and saw the entire eighth grade thronging the entry like Selma, alabama. I escaped out the back and didn’t stop running until I reached my driveway. Later that week, in our cramped student lounge, I clinked a quarter in the jukebox for Phil Collins’s “you Can’t Hurry Love” before a muscular mob of octopus arms dragged me to the floor and mashed Hostess Ding Dongs in my nose, ears, and hair. aer cleaning myself off, I loitered in front of the school, ogling traci and reveling in VIP chitchat with her salon of sweeties. Chris DeLucia, a Martian-faced kid with stallion teeth, started bouncing a basketball off a wall near me. aer a series of near misses, he reared back and fired the ball, slamming my head against the school. “oops!” DeLucia hooted. traci and her ladies-in-waiting shrieked. I tottered toward Chris, narrowing my eyes, as if my vision had blurred, trying to make a joke of it, but everyone could see I was rocked.
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 33
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
Days later, at lunch, a mob surged at me, pressed me to a wall, and started a game of Pummel-the-tubby-Kid until Craig ainsworth, our counselor, reached into the mêlée and pulled me out. a pariah of style, I tended to favor more preppie clothes, and one day in the hall, a mountainous Hispanic kid, Kirby, saw my pink seersucker with button-down collar and square-bottom red knit tie, cocked his fist, rolled his eyes like an incensed bull, and in a warning voice roared, “Preppie?” why didn’t I fight back? Inform the principal? e few verbal memos that dried my way from teachers and counselors suggested that, somehow, I had breached some unwritten code of conduct and, ultimately, was to blame for not “knowing my place.” anyway, I knew ratting would label me a whiner, a weenie, a wimp who couldn’t tough out the times. but how does one Spartan fight troy? Many of my tormentors were technically my friends, and only when they stepped on the illuminated disco floor of school grounds did they change into chuckling demons in a punch-drunk danse macabre. Some were the usual gutter scum vying for bigger fan bases, but some were in my boy Scout troop and camped with me in the summer. two of them sat next to me in church. even when they loaded me headfirst into an oil-drum trash barrel near the flagpole, I was shocked, when I emerged to claw banana peels and butterscotch pudding cups from my hair, that I felt no animosity toward anyone in the brigade of jeering, tikifaced headhunters. Inwardly, I raged against the bullying, but outwardly I stood like a mute spear-carrier in a melodramatic opera of surreal fatalism, unable to comprehend the script. I walked the same weary mile-and-ahalf to school every morning, past the rest homes and Circle K and towle’s Motel, under the same Jekyll-andHyde sun that keeps every seventhgrader’s shadow swaying down a cracked sidewalk of questions.
34
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
So I zipped to class, kicked Quaker State cans down weedy alleys, soaked myself in cologne for each traci tryst. as a gesture toward solidarity with Corey “Icey Ice” Montalvo and the rest of e bronx’s Floormaster Crew, I started wearing baggy brown zippered pants and my wrestling shoes to the dances. From the waist up, I was a Georgian page, from the waist down, astrophonic and dyno-ramic, the High Kommissar of Krush. Halfway into one dance, traci broke from my side to giggle with her coterie, and somebody tapped my shoulder and hissed, as expected, “ey’re gonna get you!” roughout the gym, strobe lights pulsed like a stellar migraine. teachers wandered back and forth with the dumb detachment of shooting galler y ducks. all around me, the crowd pressed in, assassins converging on a political rival. In the middle of the song—I can’t remember the group, a country tune or top forty hit—at the precise moment the Dobermans attacked and the ninjas leaped, I started breakdancing, nuclear-meltdown style. My body just went. My arms, my legs, my electric centipede spine. My head jerked side to side like a disconnected toy part. a loosey-goosey vibe shot from ankle to shoulder, spinning a rubber ball in the cylinder of my chest then firing a lightning eKG through my neck, out my other arm. People stopped dancing. a circle formed. teachers turned and gawked. e walls flashed red and blue and purple and gold, and for the first time I saw kids in the bleachers, ascending in loneliness—the geeks, the nobodies, the hooded lunatic fringe—disco lights spraying starry buckshot across their open-mouthed faces. with my brain on automatic pilot and a livewire in my shorts (and hoping the song would end soon), I glided in zero-gravity shoes, wormed across floor and ceiling, floated in lotus position, fired photons from my fingers, rolled a thunderbolt of liquid
gold love jones through my jelly bones like an uncontrollable totem pole of soul. en the song faded. Someone clapped. e crowd, afraid I might infect them with this rhythmic virus from Planet Spaz-Plazmo, parted to let me through. at the edge of the darkened gym, I sat on a bench, breathing heavily, one eye on the exit. “at was great!” somebody said. “where’d you learn that?” e next song passed, and the next. Dark bodies of students and teachers zigzagged across the kaleidoscopic floor, a two-way parade of silhouettes crashing in and out of a partner-less flamenco of near misses. I waited, scanning the floor for anything that resembled a pack of marauders. en I walked out and met my dad where he was waiting to pick me up in his yellow Sunbird. on the way home, I kept mute, but when we pulled into the garage, I let loose. “you wouldn’t believe it,” I said. “I was breaking on the floor, and everyone was in a circle watching me.” My dad stared ahead, lips puckered. e Sunbird’s headlights blazed on his cluttered workbench, a corkboard wall of screwdrivers and jumper cables and crescent wrenches on hooks outlined in black Magic Marker. “at’s great, son,” he said. He held his hand out as if smoothing a tablecloth of air. “but with you, you want to keep a low profile.” Monday at school, a hand clamped my shoulder and spun me in a whiplash pasodoble. It was Mike Corbett (traci’s former boyfriend, I would later discover), a swarthy eighth-grader in blinding white pants and royal blue Izod shirt. e alligator insignia on his breast glowed like a fiery pimento. “traci wants me to tell you,” he said. “you aren’t going with her anymore.” I nodded, shiing the load of binders and books in my hand. Kids shoved past us, angling their bodies
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
sideways to slip beyond the shoal of quick exchanges that Corbett and I formed in the two-way current. “you understand, right?” His hand made so chops in the air. “you’re officially broken up.” I shrugged. “yeah,” I said. en the slipstream of kids promenaded Corbett to the far end of the hall, where I dried like a dutiful page, planted my feet below the buzzing west staircase, and watched the stampede throng the upper floor where, with perfect synchronicity, Sherri and traci turned, smiled, and gave me the wave.
S
I press my hand against the door—the original—and tug the battered knob. Dirty white paint flecks come away on my palm. e traffic light blinks red, clogging Main Street with a hobbled bunny hop of cars. e air smells of diesel and chaff. an ugly white Ford pickup hauling chunky tires guns its engine. e walled-off furniture nooks that acted as display windows have been knocked out, the floor refinished. “Dance with Shari” in loopy plum script adorns the back wall and the sign that hangs from the storefront. Juanita’s daughter? another buoyant command trumpets: “Home of the elite Dance Force!” Faded portraits of obscure dancers and celebrities array the walls like a family saga of cheap glamor. e hardwood floor resembles an abused basketball court. Placid mirrors panel the east and west walls. other items speak of ordinary dreams lived large on the daily stage: a desk and file, computer, bulky sound system, whitewashed cubbies for backpacks, coats, and shoes. and trophies. Fat as tank shells. Slender as switchblades. Glittering scarlet, faded magenta, tacky orange,
and streamlined pink, each tipped with a golden dancer in an à la seconde turn or backbreaking firebird leap. Hundreds of tubular, glitzy awards packed and shelved like ordnance in a taliban bunker. apparently, I picked the wrong time to quit. Clunkers grumble past the bluepaneled Redemption Center, former home of Hamilton Drug, where, aer school, I ducked in and hid from my pursuers among the mirrored shelves of Smurfs figures, perfume bottles, and greeting cards before sidling into the candy aisle to buy Pop Rocks. a tubby family of four, all in spicy orange t-shirts and floppy white sneakers, squeezes out of a gold Chrysler and toddles toward Idaho youth Ranch. Gazing into the studio of my history, I see a prismatic overlay of eras: my younger self marooned in a horde of little harpies in leotards, the town behind me like stage scenery about to blow over in the wind, the traffic wavering through the reflected ghost of my adult self. My hand shades my eyes, a tired salute. I look like the kid who still wasn’t invited aer thirty years. a stranger who wandered into town, bandy-legged, dazed, and disoriented. Someone who stumbled out of a teenage barn dance, about to tumble on the rump of his past unless someone slides a high-backed wicker chair in to catch him before he falls.
Breakdancing: An Apology
P
urists will quibble with the use of “breakdancing” as a portmanteau word.2 as a remastered mix of cultural fallout, breakdancing reaches back to east oakland’s Larry ompson, founder of Pirate and the easy walkers and Castlemont High School’s mascot, doing the Skate, the Harold,
and Camel walk at halime. It sweeps back to Jerry Rentie in People’s Park, berkeley, worming, posing, freezing, creeping, and clocking at the outdoor concerts on Sundays. It’s Chuck Powell and the black Messengers posing hard like an eightarmed avalokiteśvara god at His Lordship’s Restaurant before stopping time as Mechanical Device in whiteface makeup on e Gong Show. It was kids mimicking the herky-jerky quirks of cartoons and movements of movie monsters. It was “Robot Charles” washington riffing off Robert Shields’s mime act in front of the Hollywood wax Museum and toni basil, Don Campbell, and Fred berry (Rerun on What’s Happening!!) hop-kicking and “Uncle Sam” pointing in fruity pastels as the Lockers. It was Granny and Robotroid, the Zulu Kings, Starchild La Rock, electric boogaloo, the Fantastic Freaks, the Pop o Matics, High times Crew, blue City Crew, Radio Crew, Ice Cold Crew, the Majestics. It was Soul boogaloo, Funk boogaloo. It was ticking and popping, top rock and floor rock, b-boying, gliding, the knee drop, sinbadding, doing the cyclops, the baby, the headspin, windmill, and twist-o-Flex. It was Mike “Deuce” Donley, James “Skeeter Rabbit” Higgins, “easy Mike” torres, Manuel “Mongol Rock” andujar, and Matthew “Glide Master” Caban. It was Reseda, oakland, brooklyn, the bronx. It was a harassed fat kid in Idaho. “I have breaking dreams,” one street dancer told Sally banes in her original Village Voice articles. “en I wake up and do it like I saw it.” Kip Dee, another dancer, told banes he dreamed of spinning on his chin. “but then I woke up and tried it,” he said, “and almost broke my face.” It’s Rick Moranis failing to woo Sigourney weaver in Ghostbusters.
2
See omas Guzman-Sanchez’s letter to the editor in Vibe Magazine in 2000. Guzman-Sanchez, who in 1984 played tino on the “breakdance” episode of Fame, exclaims, “ere really is no such thing as breakdance!”—“breaking” being the bent elbow move, or “break,” in the arms of Chain Reaction’s original generation locking style of street dance. In his landmark study, Guzman-Sanchez writes, “Dozens of fad groups were put together to take advantage of the break dance trend that was sweeping the nation. e names of these opportunistic trend groups usually ended with the word breakers. any group that had the break in [its] name was clearly created aer 1983.” smallprintmagazine.com
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 35
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
It’s Madonna cavorting with urban street urchins under an overpass in the music box intro to the “borderline” video. In 2004, it’s la danse hiphop in the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, according to Roberta Shapiro’s “e aesthetics of Institutionalization: breakdancing in France.” It’s part retro-demo and historical lecture at wave waikiki nightclub in Honolulu, says Halifu osumare’s “Global breakdancing and the Intercultural body” in 2002. according to a 2009 study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, it’s the cause of over 1,600 “acute musculoskeletal” injuries to teams who have competed in the “battle of the year world Final” in braunschweig, Germany, since 1990. In Jorie Graham’s poem “breakdancing,” it’s “the secret nobody knows like a rapture through his limbs, / the secret, the robot-like succession of joint isolations / that simulate a body’s reaction to / electric shock.”3 Graham writes that it’s the “pops, ticks, waves and the float,” the otherworldly whorl, the numinous news, the mountaintop ecstasy that jolted Saint teresa of avila in her epiphanic pas de deux with Jesus, the sumptuous pain of the seraph’s flame-tipped lance of gold jabbing her heart with the most heavenly, rock-solid rhythm. to a seventh-grade boy who groaned under the weight of daylight, it was poetry, religion, transformation. It was a way to unzip the sumosuit of his skin and fly like a flintboned phoenix of fire.
ii.
Meet the Smalltown breakers! a) bill Irish: high school senior, vulpine, sleek as a swimmer, whose specialties were grooming a salon-perfect mustache and mullet, hanging out with kids too young for him, resembling 3
36
Sean Cassidy, flaunting an almost grotesque twenty-two-inch waist, confiscating any money we earned from shows without telling us, and using breakdancing to lure as many women as possible into the nearest broom closet. b) Ryan Irish: affable, funny, spiky billy Idol hairdo, whose specialties were being somewhat heavier than I was (which made me feel better), crossing rooms in the knee-bouncing style of the Gamorrean guards in Return of the Jedi, and looking nothing like his brother, bill. C) Some kid named Chad: specialties were gliding, body popping, a mess of freckles, a curly sponge of orange hair on his head, and being some kid
in the high school cafeteria, i body-locked and sugar-popped to the gap Band’s “Party Train,” whipping up a whooping hullabaloo…
named Chad. D) Jamie Chapman: specialties were monastic silence and an itty-bitty French waiter mustache. e) Joe: my younger brother, whose specialties were a loose caboose, a humdinger of a cowlick, and a discolored front tooth. F) Me: specialties were swallowing aggression, glandular malfunction, and chronic daydreaming. e year the Smalltown breakers crystallized, Footloose, Breakin’, and Beat Street plowed through movie theaters like a caffeinated convoy of clown college dropouts. arnold Schwarzenegger became a US citizen without learning english; cops beat
Michael Stewart to death for graffiti tagging in a New york City subway; Vanessa williams became the first black Miss america for a while; the last hand-cranked telephones were pulled from service in bryant Pond, Maine; Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney released “Say, Say, Say”; the riller production held auditions; and United Street Force blew the dome off the Richter scale at the white House to the delight of Ronnie and Nancy Pants. on a Saturday morning, I was manning the hardwood entry to our house, aping some footwork from television, when someone rapped on the door. I opened it and beheld Dee Herfel, Shane Jund, and todd amundsen, three of the most popular, athletic guys in town, standing there like teleported Chippendales dancers. when I say popular, I mean these guys wore girls the way Mexican banditos wear bandoliers of bullets. I blinked, stepped back, smiled vacantly. “we heard you did some moves,” Herfel said. “we want to see.” with the gushing solicitude of a sycophantic bootblack, I ushered them in and without music demoed my measly wares, a few waves, body pops, and spins. Like too many quarterbacks in the huddle, they grinned and tried on the style, laughing and socking each other in the arms. It was heady company for a junior high kid. ey thanked me on the way out. “you got people talking about you at the high school, man!” Herfel said. Somehow, I got invited to the next high school dance, and I was told the jet set would expect me to unload a complete and unabridged bad-boy breakdown. In the high school cafeteria, I body-locked and sugarpopped to the Gap band’s “Party train,” whipping up a whooping hullabaloo among the boot scooters and cattle rustlers and inspiring the pegged jean, mousse-spruced, espritand-topsider elite to fold their col-
“breakdancing” from e End of Beauty by Jorie Graham. ©1987 by Jorie Graham. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
lars down, slip on their street feet, and get fantastic elastic, when in reality most of them ended up stumbling around like cross-eyed toddlers in cardboard pajamas. e weekend following my high school debut, my brother, Joe, padded up to me in the living room. “Some guys are making a breakdance group,” he said. “Someone’s letting them use a building.” I looked up from my Cracked magazine. “where?” “at dance place,” he said. “Mauldin’s, where there’s furniture. Have you been there?” “yeah,” I said. “I have.”
S
who can forget Fred astaire’s whimsical romp to burton Lane’s “Sunday Jumps” in Royal Wedding? In this sequence (before it became a Dirt Devil commercial), astaire flounces and flits around a cruise ship’s exercise room with a coat rack as an erect but elegant partner. astaire frolics with a pommel horse, parallel bars, and exercise clubs. “who do you think you are?” ozone asks turbo in Breakin’, as they lock up the store. “Fred astaire?” “who?” turbo replies before he steps on the dark street to perform his mesmeric floating broom dance in homage to Master Fred’s coat rack number, all to the synth-pop hypnotrack of Krawerk’s “tour de France.” Later in Royal Wedding, astaire, a towering inferno of love in his belly for anne ashmond (played by Sarah Churchill) warbles “you’re all the world to Me” and capers up the walls and across the ceiling, spinning a chair, bouncing off a couch, toetapping across a chest of drawers, even getting streetwise with a butt spin near a ceiling lamp. For this shot, the movie crew bolted the furniture to a specially designed room that tumbled slowly in sync with the camera so Mr. astaire could project the illusion that dance could conquer
smallprintmagazine.com
gravity, as well as the sturdiest drawing room ensemble. Using the same rigged room and rolling camera trick in Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, turbo, with a royal crush on charcoal-eyed, cinnamonlipped Lucia, floats and pops all over his rainbow-blown boudoir, up the walls and across the ceiling like a mercury-jointed, suction-cup footed Spiderman on overdrive. He worms across his bed, skates up and down a mirror, and knee-spins on a skylight with Mark Scott’s stripped-down studio cooler, “I Don’t wanna Come Down,” in the background. So maybe I was wrong about furniture and dance.
S
back at Madame Mauldin’s, by choice this time, I reveled in weeklong aernoon highs at one of the lowest points in my life. to the potgut dairy farmer shambling past Juanita’s to Ram Sporting Goods, we looked like a cage of lobotomized spastics, I’m sure, but inside we were freedom and redemption in motion. our rehearsals weren’t rehearsals per se, just a bunch of bums bulling around and doing our best not to topple a bundle of bunk bed parts or Smokey the bear dresser. e passage of time compels me to confess, shamefully, that I probably wouldn’t have mixed with any of my dance mates—my brother being the exception—if we hadn’t felt the need to restart our lives pulling us together like a tractor beam. we rolled from different parts of town but gathered for the same reason: rebirth, resurrection, a renaissance of rejects. even with my six-year-old cameo in Juanita’s bolshoi of terror behind me, I still found dancing for the big mirrors daunting. Doing a breakdance duo with your reflection as a stout seventh-grader is like jogging past a store window in your forties. (Note: I still work out, as if I’ll never exorcise my inner fat kid, the doughy
doppelgänger with whom I’ll be forever locked in a David-and-Goliath capoeira joust, a Highland dirk dance to the death.) back then, with my eyes on the ground, I could snap and pivot in the clouds, but if I flashed my eyes at the mirror, my most arrogant visions of myself crumpled like the bag of Fritos I chowed the night before. In my head, I was a breaklicious beat boy, His electric eminence in a spacesuit of northern lights with thousand-amp grooves, but when I glanced in the mirror, I saw a bubblebutt landlubber who couldn’t beat an egg for breakfast. even now, when I jog downtown, I’m thinking bruce Jenner (before the sex change), edwin Moses, or Steve Prefontaine— until I pass a tux rental place and in the glass I glimpse the image of a man lumbering like a three-legged armoire, a mastodonic montage of w. C. Fields, Fink from Meatballs, and oliver Hardy with bad ankles. but on rehearsal days, we gathered and breathed invention. Someone brought a boom box and mixtapes, “Jam on It” by Newcleus and Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” being our fave raves. Dance was our drug of choice for these free rides, and as we whirled away the daylight like unsupervised toddlers, it was easy to float for a while above the moments that threatened to crush us. During these unscripted hours, I added my own moves to my curriculum vitae of cool. one I called the “thumb wave”—a spin on traditional thumb twiddling. For this bite-sized bit, you interlocked your fingers, touched thumb tips together, and pulsed the wave through your thumbs, similar to turbo’s “smile wave,” where he sent the wave from one hand, through his smile, into his other hand. I also pioneered “e Frog”—stole it, from a television show about circus performers. For “e Frog,” you sprawled on your stomach, reached back and shot your clasped ankles heavenward, popping your stomach out and casting yourself, frog-like, into the air.
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 37
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
our “practices” took on a serious tone, though, when bill announced a paying gig in twin Falls, across the canyon. Suddenly, we were all grit and game faces, chests pumping the blood of the big city, putting in longer hours at Juanita’s, sometimes until night sapped the orange glow from the crumbling sidewalk outside. For that first gig, we jammed at poolside at weston’s Lamplighter Inn on blue Lakes boulevard, for a business party or chamber of commerce confab, while traffic boomed in the background and slack-faced onlookers chatted over wine coolers and Swedish meatballs. our routine featured synchronized footwork and staged solos, a six-man roller coaster elbow wave, and a Frankenstein’s monster vignette, where I reclined on the “table” of my friends’ hands, and they slowly floated me to my feet, hands churning like cogs, until I stood upright, grimacing and gesturing like the monster shocked to life. is was pure plagiarism—lied, in toto, from a breakdancing tV show— but it went over like mediocre theater to people who occasionally turned from their punch and petits fours to squint at the nervous circus of teenage freaks near the folded towels.
/LH P/LHK P PU [OL U [ O L
6$ 6$1'
bill could raid the company kitty to buy condoms and cigs, or we may have simply sensed the end, but before that happened, we crammed into bill’s little copper-colored hatchback, tooled north to Fairfield, and set fire to the pantaloons of the rubes at the Camas County Fair. at night, we ripped through our routine on an eighteen-wheeler flatbed. e air was thick with the greasy, sugary smell of funnel cake, the rancid reek of hog pens. Small tornadoes of mayflies swirled under the lights that shone on tables of needlepoint pillows, God’seye weaving, and 4-H water conservation dioramas. Kids in cowboy boots scampered to the foot of the flatbed, gawked at us with snow conestained faces, then galloped away, laughing. an auctioneer stopped his spiel to announce our fabulous fare. “and for your entertainment,” he called in a yokel drawl, “we have the Japanese National Kung Fu team!” I had never imagined anyone would mock our art. e realization banged in my guts like a blacksmith’s hammer on a horseshoe. we looked stupid, and everyone but us knew it. Deflated, ashamed, and, frankly, dumbfounded that I would squander my life on something so silly, I fin-
we videotaped the show and decamped to our living room, aer midnight, crammed on the couch, and watched our set with a kind of estranged sickness. as usual, the vision in my head didn’t match our performance on tape. In my ramped-up imagination, we were Sheik Shazam and His Solar Flares. on tape, we were the village idiots someone forgot to chain to the wall of the reformatory. we sat on the floor like kids at Christmas and gaped at the grotesque spectacle of ourselves—Jamie, Chad, Ryan, Joe, and myself—while bill and his hottie girlfriend, betty, cozied up and ever so slowly tilted together until they were locked in a bodygroping battle of suck-face that could have shamed any Humboldt squid. we envied bill, of course. He was the only one in the group with a girlfriend, and betty looked like a Charlie perfume model, with her blond hair in feathery curls, skimpy silk track shorts, creamy calves, and baby blue ankle socks. before bill and betty started peeling off clothes, we packed up our tape and swapped notes for the coming weeks. as summer approached, the group dynamics grew frayed. we may have grown tired of performing so
3PUKH 4 (\
HUK V[OLY \UWVW\SHY WVZP[PVUZ
vicii u us circle publishing quirky books from a quirky author • viciouscirclepublishing.com 38
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
ished my pop-and-lock solo, and paratrooped to the ground, landing flat-footed on packed dirt. at the end of our show, nobody approached us. rough the mealy stench of chickens and sheep, I wandered around the fair, a grounded superhero in hick heaven, unable to hide the malice I felt toward myself, my fellow bozos, and our banal bop borrowed from brooklyn. Round men in overalls and silver crew cuts pressed like runt piglets against rickety wagons for caramel corn. Hunky jocks in navy blue and gold varsity jackets popped puffs of cotton candy into their girlfriends’ mouths. e spreading wound of the sky sank in feverish reds and purples behind the black towers of granaries, telephone wires, and wasted cottonwoods. at the Ping-Pong ball toss, a kid with a sleazy mustache slouched against his whitewashed pavilion, surrounded by day-glo posters of Jimi Hendrix and KISS, brightly feathered roach clips, and a gallery of melted and stretched soda bottles arranged to look like a flock of alien, wavy-necked waterfowl. Somehow, I found Chad. “we outta here?” I said. Chad flashed his goober chipmunk smile, half-embarrassed, halfaroused. “bill’s gonna take a girl to a room,” he said. I turned and saw bill and a girl in track shorts staring each other down, not ten feet apart. e girl’s two-tone shorts, three sizes too small, were a shimmery pistachio and pink, like a court jester’s tights. She wore a ketchup-colored tank top, arms crossed under her pointy breasts, and her chopped blond hair appeared to have been coiffed in a car wash. Her nose jutted out like a claw, and when she grinned, revealing her rack of braces, I wondered if bill had failed his most recent eye exam. e strange thing was the way they ogled each other, bodies angled magnetically away, like two storks in heat, vainly resisting the genetic urge to romp in the bushes. bill spoke like a
smallprintmagazine.com
man addressing the pizza he was about to devour, slice by slice. “She’s gotta lotta leg,” he said. at that moment the burlesque bell of the sledgehammer game clanged in my skull, and I saw my dance career as the comic opera it had become. I wanted to sprint a thousand miles from everyone without stopping. at home, I whipped off my Smalltown breakers uniform, balled it up, and chucked it in the closet. what sidereal shaman’s garments did I cast into the bonfire of my youthful past? a black crewneck sweatshirt with “Smalltown breakers” circled in cherry lettering (pressed at Ryan’s t-shirts) over the right breast. Fireball red Chuck taylor hightops. Hand-sewn pants designed by—you knew this was coming—my mom. altogether, my mom stitched six pairs of billowy black pants with parachute slits of rocket red down the sides, all on her little humming Singer. ough it never happened this way, I still imagine my mom whirling away at her sewing station in the basement, like Rumplestiltskin in a sunflower housedress, late into the night of her grandest hopes for me, stopping for a moment in a haze of sewing-machine smoke to call me in to check her work: “Is this def enough, Matthew?” as she strokes the fabric with her thumb, “Is this too fly?” because her boy had rhythm.
Boogaloo: An Etymology
F
rom the guanabana trees of Colombia and the piccolo trill of the ruby-crowned kinglets of Cuba came this sensuous, hip-rolling style of music, bugalú, which serpentined north through sun-smudged skyscrapers and settled in the colder, smoggier climes of 1960s New york City. Its savory smoke seeped into the fibers of padded recording studios, forever elusive in Mongo Santamaria’s “watermelon Man” and the Joe Cuba
Sextet’s “bang bang” (whose “aw, beat, beat!” chorus a ragtag team of mongrel wrestlers chants as they clap hands to rally their Latino teammate, Palumbo, to keep him from losing his match in the obscure edward Herrmann film Take Down). en in 1966, the Godfather of Soul, James brown, schooled the action Kids in boogaloo basics on abC’s Where the Action Is! on some invisible wavelength, James brown’s soul boogaloo wove its way into the misty breezes of the San Francisco bay area to give rise to the funk boogaloo generation, with tony Rome doing the Slide (grandfather to the Moonwalk) at the arroyo Viejo Center in 1967. Jump forward a decade, and we catch Creep’n Sid and tick’n will of electric boogaloo challenging Chain Reaction to contests in clubs like the ozone and McConahay’s in orange County. who knows why glam rocker Marc bolan of t. Rex repeated the word so frequently at dinner that Ringo Starr felt driven to commit his charming nugget of rock doggerel— “back off, boogaloo”—to vinyl? My favorite definition of boogaloo, according to Urban Dictionary, would have to be an “orgy by a group of island native midgets,” which is what may have kept Ringo always looking over his shoulder. From Fresno came boogaloo Sam, of the electronic boogaloo Lockers (later shortened to electric boogaloo). Michael “boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers (a.k.a. “turbo”) adopted the rhythmic sobriquet most publicly, and it was the word I heard shouted over the P.a. at the intersection of Main Street and Lincoln the summer of 1984, when Jerome, Idaho, held its only official breakdancing contest, sponsored by the local radio station, Z103. “and now,” Logan tusow, Z103’s deejay, boomed. “boogaloo two!” by then, I had defected from dance, and in my “black bandit” football practice jersey and sweatpants, I hopped on a tailgate to gaze over the heads of the crowd. Somehow, Z103
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 39
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
had bargained with the city to shut down the main intersection for the contest. Hundreds of people packed the center of town, straddling bikes and lounging on sidewalks in front of First Security bank and Prescott & Craig Insurance. e glossy black Z103 van throbbed next to a raised wooden platform covered with white linoleum, firing bazooka bombs of Herbie Hancock and Run DMC into the chests of spectators. Logan tusow, a dead ringer for Duane allen of the oak Ridge boys, perched on a corner of the stand, looking pinched in his leather pants, trying to tack commentary to the action. as oen as he could, he spilled a few nervous syllables into his microphone. en the next song sawed through the speakers, and my brother, Joe, and Ryan Irish side-stepped into a choreographed show, complete with hand slaps, timed spins, and parallel footwork. ey wore their red Smalltown breakers Chuck taylors, but they’d traded the team’s black garb for scarlet windbreakers and spacious white pants. “at’s boogaloo two,” tusow crowed, as they finished to raucous applause. one by one, my former dance mates shredded the platform surface. Some spider-legged out-of-towner in silver-studded pants pulled off a headspin, and then bill Irish threw his shoulders to the floor and whipped his eggbeater legs in a high velocity helicopter spin, or “windmill,” the move none of us had been tenacious enough to master. years later, I choked on envy and regret again in our dark auditorium when, as a junior, along with the rest of the school, I watched the Class of 1987 present its homecoming skit, in which Meg Harper, one of the varsity cheerleaders, read a tribute to her class, and Ryan Irish, dressed like a kamikaze samurai, bebopped on stage and dropped a megaton of electroplasmic pump-action satisfaction on the unsuspecting crowd, throwing down a space-age magazine of some
40
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
of the flashiest footwork I’d seen. en he spiraled into a flurry of kung fu floor rock, flipped on his red sweatshirt hood in mid-backspin, and popped into a proud back arch. as a high school graduate working the meat saw at bob’s IGa, around closing time, I saw bill Irish stride like a test pilot into the store and stalk through the cramped grocery aisles. I hadn’t seen him since leaving the group—five years. He wore tight Levi’s 501s, a sleeveless gray t-shirt. I wiped my hands on my apron and approached the cash register, where our only checkout girl, tilly, was working. rough the automatic doors, I followed bill into the parking lot, stepping around two lame shopping carts that rested basket-to-basket. a fanged hole marred the glowing red and white bob’s IGa sign—someone had lobbed a rock through its smoked-glass skin. opposite St. benedict’s Hospital, the old howitzer mounted in front of the log-cabin Moose Lodge fired ghost rounds into the lucid quiet. I breathed the brittle scent of sagebrush, the burned odor of curds from the cheese factory. on the highway, trucks sounded doleful horns on their endless migrations. I stood and watched bill mount a bMX bike, and with a jug of milk in one hand, he pedaled up the street to a block of apartments behind the store.
S
e boy stands in a shabby dance studio in an agricultural american town. His mother has skedaddled from his side—the way people flee from lit fireworks—in order to launch him into the galaxy of talented people, where she thinks he belongs. Skinny girls in hot-pink tutus gambol around him like lithe assassins. He fires glances around the room, face flushed, jaw strained. e desire to bolt for the door charges through his blood, but he remains cemented to the floor. He is six years old, but he has known for
some time that the world is a rigged audition in which any misstep summons the wrath of parents, God, and bleachers of monkey-faced rivals. He risks a sideways glance at the exit and sees a man standing on the street. e man looks like he could be his father, bent over, hand shading his eyes, peering through the dirty glass from the other side of a jumble of bookshelves and orange crates of mismatched doorknobs. e boy examines the man. e man gazes back. a beat of contemplation—about what has passed and what lies ahead—passes between them, as if a slipper-footed squad of extras in swan costumes has made a late entrance, a sweep of hurried steps from a choreographer long dead.
S
e first street dance battles were chaotic, unscripted, confrontational. opponents who wanted to swipe your sneakers and t-shirt colors, or chomp a chunk out of your turf, weaved vulgar, insulting, and violent gestures into their solos, with the sole purpose of castrating your mojo. Soon, breakdancing routines evolved into elaborately staged—and far less interesting and meaningful— bouts of unchained synchronicity, slick but canned compositions of sideby-side footwork, cookie-cutter power moves, tag-team body waves, and tandem hop-skip locking. In a matter of weeks, dancers le the street corners, where they once scrapped and jousted like tanzanian ostriches, and entered the world’s television studios to caper like caged birds of paradise with the polish of Rogers and astaire. a seventh-grade boy is a battle royal of body and soul. Desire and shame, rapture and loathing, elegance and raw aggression. every seventhgrade boy is two dancers warring under a street lamp on a sticky summer night. Dance is the body showing us what the spirit could do if we fol-
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
lowed its lead. Dance is the cry of the spirit to be freed from the clichéd choreography of the flesh. Dance is what my breath did in my chest, the fall of my freshman year of high school. Late august: I was slouching on the concrete floor, feet in football cleats, listening to the jubilant roar of dude-speak rolling down the yellow cinderblock hallway that led to the locker room. Like everyone else, I was armored in practice gear— helmet, shoulder pads, bad attitude— ready to churn the field to a cloddish mire with the junior varsity squad. rough the gray network of my facemask, I surveyed the scene, trying to snatch strands of meaning from the howling muddle, the trumped-up tales of sexual conquest and slaughtered bull elk my teammates continued to lob like sonic hand grenades. I counted a dozen guys who, months previous, had ganged up to guillotine my spirit before summer break granted everyone a social mulligan. one grade older, we sat like Navy SeaLs cocked and ready to leap from our transport, our hearts set on “kill.” en the door at the end of the hall clanged open, and in strutted—not our coach—but Mondo aragon, a known loner to whom breakdancing had bequeathed new popularity. He wore a sleeveless jean jacket, red headband, and fluttery black rayon pants with shiny tabs running down the sides. Gaudy as a Chinese pheasant in a hutch of mud hens, he hopped nimbly over the feet of the now silent ranks of jocks, a feather-footed reminder flitting through the tire drill of my recent past. My heart went stale when I realized he was headed for me. How he recognized me in my football gear—how he knew I was a former breakdancer, I’ll never know—but he squatted on his haunches, looked straight in my face, and said, “Can you do a omas twirl?” His question rang like a reckoning through the school. I dragged my gaze from his and spoke to the floor through tight teeth: “No.”
smallprintmagazine.com
as if pushing a “play” button, my answer cued the return of lusty chatter. e hall of wannabe men and their ship’s-galley rumpus dismissed aragon without hesitation, escorted him away, and with him, a throb of innocence that wandered out of me and tailed him like a rejected sibling, while I stayed behind, a wallflower guarding my spot in the brotherhood of betrayal.
S
traci stands on the basketball court, ensconced in her band of beauty queens. She flashes me a glittering braces-smile and turns to walk
i’m dimly aware of a stampede of eighth graders—thirty, forty, maybe more— thundering like spooked wildebeest into the boys’ locker room…
toward the girls’ locker room, her tight white pants and sleeveless magenta top making a giddy belly dancer do a seven-second “Dance of the Seven Veils” in my stomach. I’m so distracted that when a flabbylipped kid named tim rushes up and warns me of my imminent sandbagging, I barely hear him, transported, as I am, in e traci Zone. “ey’re gonna get you,” tim hisses. “In the locker room. I heard!” a piledriver of boredom drills through my shoulders to my feet. I sag against the wall, hands in pockets. e attacks, while bothersome, have become as predictable as key
changes in a barry Manilow song. on the basketball court, pickup games mimic prehistoric warfare. Kids lounge in the bleachers, chomping gum, nodding like beatnik philosophers. I’m dimly aware of a stampede of eighth graders—thirty, forty, maybe more—thundering like spooked wildebeest into the boys’ locker room, and when Steve aslett, Mike Corbett, and others corner me, laughing and advising me to go easily, I don’t resist, but surrender like a dime-a-dance girl to a pack of Russians fresh off the submarine. e locker room doors are kicked open. e mob shoves me through, as if to the gallows, cackling and hooting like fraternity brothers at the beach. “where? where? In there!” For a moment, I resolve to ascend the scaffold alone. but they hoist me on their shoulders, a troupe of gibbering natives conveying a virgin to Kong. I glimpse small dramas. water dribbling into a floor drain. Puffs of linty fuzz bumbling across concrete. Sunlight bleeding through bubbleglass windows, masked in cobwebs peppered with dead flies. Mr. Rutledge, one of the P.e. teachers, in lemon golf shirt and gray coaching shorts, strides past like a busy butler, swinging a clipboard, his muskrat’s mustache barely hiding a smile. In the closest toilet stall, they upend my body, as if to torpedo me down the sewer pipes. Like Lady Jane Grey, I am forced to assist in my execution, and my hands flail for the chopping block of the black toilet seat. one of the guys pumps the flush handle, and I watch the water spiral. “Do it! Come on, let go!” a manifesto of defiance builds in my lungs with geyser force, but when it blows, it wheezes out as a squeaky plea: “C’mon, guys.” My pitiful last words only stoke their passion, and they push my head in the toilet water—I let my arms bend—and they bang away through the locker room like orangutans fleeing a raid.
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 41
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
at weekend, I pedal my bike to Smith’s Food King, past Rod Lattin’s Mobile butcher truck, the frowzy chicken coops in bob Jackson’s backyard. at Smith’s, I coast to Ryan’s t-shirts and enter. a bell dings, and Ryan emerges from the presidential suite of his back room. He wipes his hands on a napkin and tosses a taco time wrapper in the trash, a perfect hook shot. “what’s up?” he says. “anything I can do for you?” “I want a shirt,” I say, as his eyebrows jump. “one of these.” From a circular rack of psychedelic bargain shirts, I select a custardcolored model with black stitching around the neck and sleeves. I place it reverently on the counter with my money. “anything on it?” Ryan offers. “Name?” Samples of iron-on numbers and letters hang behind Ryan, like little exotic patches from a hunting expedition, some peeling away in the company of silvery butterflies and happy-eyed Corvettes. one rainbowand-unicorns decal coos, “If you Love Something, Set It Free. If It Returns, It’s yours. If It Doesn’t, It Never was.” Some of the iron-on numbers and letters are big and black, some blocky, others chubby and fuzzy, red and white. I jerk my chin upwards, indicating a palette of black, hardedged letters. “Captain Swirly,” I say. Ryan smiles and nods as he places letters on my shirt like a chess master setting pieces on a board. “on the back.” e next week, I wear my shirt to school, walking up and down the halls like somebody who won’t leave the floor aer the last dance.
S
e year the hull of my life threatened to burn and bottom out, my family took a California road trip. we spent a day at Knott’s berry Farm, where, not many years before, the
42
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
original Lockers competed in danceoffs at the Sopwith Camel and Cloud Nine Disco. In the switchback stanchions for the log ride, I was dreaming away the minutes, dreading our return to the potato fields of purgatory, when the rumble of an advancing riot shook my reverie. I glanced toward the ruckus and saw a tight phalanx of black men, each built like a linebacker, marching at a steel-jawed, militaristic clip through a mob of hysterical girls. In the center of the moving octagon of titans strutted a snappy figure in flashy sunglasses, much smaller than his protectors but whose light-footed gait drove the party through the hopping-mad admirers. our log docked alongside us in the sloshy current, and the staff ushered us aboard. From my seat in the log, I sensed a tremor in the air currents. a boisterous group had cut in line, bustled its way through the exit, and now waited where we had stood, anticipating the next log. “oh, boy,” my mom said. “Look at this.” I turned my head to the right. at eye-level, where I had placed my feet, I saw a glossy black loafer, glittery sock, and an ankle the color of creamed coffee. e ankle extended into a snazzy tuxedo pant leg. Like a dumb puppy, I raised my eyes—I didn’t have to look too high—into the face of the King of Pop. He was looking around, shaking his shoulders to some universal drum track. He didn’t return my gaze, even though he knew I was staring. with his sequined glove hand, he adjusted his Fedora, and a flash circled his hatband like a twinkling comet. He grinned like an excited kid, rolling his shoulders and shaking out his knees as if preparing to explode in a meteor shower of moves that would knock the earth from its axis. In a kind of drunken stupor, I realized his foot was close enough to grab, and for one woozy second my arm twitched and my hand reached out to grasp his ankle. I wasn’t thinking, of course, just sunning myself in
the solar wind of his planetary presence and hoping that some of his moon dust might rub off on me, hoping that if I made contact, a plasma bolt from his supernova of talent might ripple through the conductor of my arm and flood my life with power and grace. at the last second, a merciful troupe of winged cherubs in bear-claw earrings and hachimaki Rising Sun headbands telegraphed me a vision of a big black badass stomping on my forearm and snapping it like a balsa-wood airplane. So I raised my goofy gaze, waved, and croaked a husky, “Hi.” a grin split his face. He laughed at my antics, returned my wave, shoved his hand in his pocket, and chirped, “Hi!” en a chain hooked our log-boat, and we splashed ahead, clunking up the mechanical incline into the darkened maw of a fake mountain. we spent the whole ride craning our necks, whipping around to get a glimpse of the star-fueled log behind us. at the exit tunnel, white glare flooded our faces, and as we perched on the lip of the final plunge, we looked down and beheld the Promised Land of a ousand Dances. besieging the base of the ride was a bounding carnival of loons, a magical mystery tour of brightly dressed men, women, teenagers, unattended children, pets, park employees, runaways, and law enforcements officers, all jumping and gaping, pointing and clapping and flapping their hands, a woodstock-sized american bandstand run amok in a derailed rehearsal for the Red Shoes, all of them doing the time warp, the running man, the twist, the hitchhike, and the hippy hippy shake, each fanatic fan tripping on some dynamite dance drug and blaming it on the boogie. It was a faint notion, a weak pulsar in the womb of my heart, but as I gazed at the massive crowd, their wild assembly seemed to signify a swerve in my fortunes, as if they had mobbed the base of the log ride to cheer me on. I
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
couldn’t have known it then, but as we plummeted down the final drop, spray in our faces, I was mere months from the moment my body would decide to shoot up three inches to the point that I would tower over some of the schmoes who tried to kick my life to rubble. I would have been amazed to know that my body would leap ahead of my grief, that the very next track season I would run the third leg in the 4 x 100 relay and wonder, with everyone else, why anyone had called me a slug. at that moment of thrilling descent, this dormant clairvoyance still thrummed on low volume, however, a reserved gi to be claimed through waiting— sometimes in agony—for the song to end. as we bobbed and bonked around the final turn of the log ride, fanned by the euphoria of swooning cries, shiny balloons, camera flashes, swinging purses, pudgy babies, and hundreds of arms waving like peopleeating plants, I took the chance to forget myself and do what any rookie star would do. I smiled, raised my arms, and waved to my fans.
S
a flight of Leonard bernstein chords drops from the raers, and the boy, instead of retreating, draws himself to his full height, hoops his arms, and pulls a tour en l’air, and with baryshnikov agility sails across the room like the cow over the moon in a grand jeté. He skids an arabesque to the door, nose inches from the dirty glass. e boy and the man the boy will become examine one another, like agent and prodigy, breath fogging the vision between them. e fading sun sweeps a largo arm of cool orange light over a pendulum-less grandfather clock and tweety bird high chair. on the street behind the man, an australian sheep dog passes like a bored producer in the bed of a dented blue truck, tongue dangling.
smallprintmagazine.com
e man steps back, puts his palms together as if to applaud, then stops and squints. e glass stops him from speaking to the boy, who is poised to take his cue from the man, but the man with dramatic mummery and overblown expressions tells the boy to keep going, tells him that the only thing he can do is dump his costume chest of fear and failure on the floor and shatter the contents under his heels in a gleefully wicked sailor’s hornpipe. For evidence, the man points to the studio shelves. you can’t see them yet, he pantomimes, but those shelves will be stocked with trophies—love, pain, regret, a gallery of memories, rousing reviews and raw deals—a rack of prizes you’ll win, even though you’ll live out your days feeling as if they should have been awarded to someone more deserving, someone with more skill. e boy steps back, snaps into a regal fih position. e man bows, dusts his hands on his hip pockets, slips into his car, and drives away.
S
as if to spite me, God sends me four daughters, all of whom become limber, lyrical dancers—singers and actresses to boot. once more, the studio grows crowded. In an effort to connect, I audition with them and get cast in a series of semi-professional musicals at the Colonial eater, thirty minutes down the highway in Idaho Falls: Annie, Willy Wonka, e Wizard of Oz. we rehearse in a one-hundredyear-old church converted into a city council building in the one-horse, three-meth-lab town of Iona. e library downstairs is a barricaded room that tempts idlers with abused paperback romance novels for fiy cents a box. e whole building is an abandoned time capsule of armygreen carpet, warped floorboards, leaded paint, and radiators that hiss and knock. Dads with shaved heads
and spiderweb tattoos on their necks escort their daughters into the foyer and slink outside to smoke. one night, a kid with bleached hair brings a pellet gun and sends panicked munchkins and flying monkeys scurrying away in fright, clutching cell phones and half-eaten Hostess cupcakes. ree weeks into rehearsal, the director, a wonderful woman who unfortunately reminds me of a porky female Ronald McDonald, shows me the choreography for one of my numbers. “Now run it back for me,” she says. with Irene Cara on stadium volume in my head, I rip off the spins and flurries and hully gully like Gloria estefan on acid, then turn to face her. She gazes at me, eyes half open, elbow in her palm, forefinger across her upper lip. “Good,” she says. “Now, do it like a dancer.”
S
what am I to think when I read Curt Sachs’s 1937 study World History of the Dance? at his insights reveal anything new? “In considering peoples attached and peoples indifferent to the dance,” Sachs writes, “we have found a fundamental contrast between dances which are in harmony with the body and those which are not. Perhaps it is this contrast, wakened and somewhat obscured in the Hellenic world, which Plato referred to when he distinguished two types of dance, one ennobling the motions of the more beautiful bodies, the other parodying with distortion the motions of ugly bodies.” but, Curt, what about beautiful movements in harmony with attempts to hide the seventh-grade boy’s lard-bucket body? Sachs addresses what he calls “dances out of harmony with the body” and “pure convulsive dances” before continuing: “opposed to the meaning and nature of the body is the
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 43
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
out and out convulsive dance, as we found it in the arrow dance of the Vedda,” he observes, including “the Chukchi of northeastern asia” and “the secret society of the wayeye in Unyamwezi” that “meets under the full moon,” as well as the spasmodic grooving found in the Solomon Islands and Marshall and Gilbert Islands. In the category of “weakened convulsive dances,” Sachs observes, “e black man rattles, pants, and kicks like a steam engine.…For hours at a time his posterior springs up and down over his bent legs.…at the start the participants generally zigzag to and fro in short steps with their feet dragging, or walk forwards and backwards with short, stamping steps.… as yet they show no sign of fatigue. on the contrary, the tempo becomes more lively, the dance wilder and more passionate. From the circle of dancers a skilled artist now steps forth, comes to a stop in the center, and begins to make very convulsive contortions with the upper part of his body, bringing especially his abdominal muscles into play.” Following Professor Sachs, we swing swily to the period of urban american history that spans april and october of 1981. Martha Cooper, armed with camera, is doing the Shutterbug in the subway. Sally banes is slinging out Village Voice articles about the arrest of the High times Crew for “fighting” and “rioting” in the washington Heights neighborhood. at the police station, the cops, forced to admit their error, ask the High times kids to demonstrate a head spin, floor rock, and the baby before releasing them. banes sums up the moment, “white america has perennially turned to black america, especially black and Latin dance and dancing music, for revitalization in times of cultural exhaustion.” when I consider Rudolph Zallinger’s iconic “March of Progress” illustration from Early Man, I see a solo dancer rising from a pose or backspin, someone toe-gliding into the Robot.
44
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
but I also see someone, a bit slumped and tired—someone educated by failure, matured by time, someone tired of being a kid—walking off through the purple rain, desperately seeking Susan for some dirty dancing, someone weary of the old gig, a man who has evolved and moved on to the next trend of sorrows. I see somebody walking away. I see a man whose only grooves are in his forehead, someone prone to standing on sidewalks and gazing through the dirty studio glass of the past. I see him “standing there in wallpaper shoes” with “socks that match [his] eyes,” like an overgrown teenage boy pretending he’s tougher than he is, singing with Ringo Starr, “back off, boogaloo!”
S
on closing night, the joint is jumping as the cast throws down a Count basie-bottomed rendition of “e Jitterbug” in e Wizard of Oz. as the Scarecrow, I get whipped up in a frenetic ballroom flurry with a wild sorority of enchanted trees, flying monkeys, and girls in black body stockings. From the balcony and the rows of gaudy red velvet seats, the crowd sends their approval. e trombones blare at the climax like elephants doing the rhumba, and the stand-up bass kicks action into our average but inspired bones. Unable to restrain myself, I go mental in the moment and break from the assigned choreography. Dorothy, the Lion, and tin Man jitterbug away, and I start popping and locking and floating and freezing in the strobe lights, in a flash, transforming into Ray bolger of the barrio. e audience screams like a gymnasium of junior high girls.
Boogaloo Two: An Epilogue
J
oe tells me that aer I le the group, bill Irish phoned our house
one night. our dad was in the living room, watching tV, so Joe answered. “I’m through!” bill said. “I’m done!” apparently, a rival group had formed on the streets across the canyon in twin Falls. e trash talking had reached sorority girl levels, so bill and the Smalltown breakers, Joe included, were going to strike back like chain lightning in a dance duel behind the Lynwood Plaza. is historic contest between the unemployed riffraff from Jerome and twin Falls counties would decide which group deserved to be crowned Grand Masters of the No Loitering Zone, and which group would have to suck on second place in a bracket that contained the only two breakdancing groups in the state. Joe donned his dance gear and solemnly informed my father that he would be leaving to clash rhythmically with some juvenile detention escapees in an unsuper vised alley across the canyon. “okay!” my dad called over his shoulder. “Have fun!” Following the battle—supposedly declared a tie—bill told Joe and Ryan they weren’t good enough to stay in the Smalltown breakers, an executive order that produced the splinter group, boogaloo two. Joe also tells me he was so embarrassed at the Z103 contest in Jerome that he le the stage almost in tears, none of which I detected from my vantage point in the crowd, looking on, as I was, in awe of Joe’s performance, and berating myself for being a quitter. Hungry for history, I escape my buzzing home tonight—the lights in the house ablaze, my kids swarming computer and tV, my wife awash in projects—and hike down the soggy, leaf-strewn hill behind our home, hopping over sloppy shoals of March snow. In the thickening purple dusk, I shoulder into our musty garden shed where I’ve stashed my keepsakes, and amid the smell of old grass clippings and gasoline, I pry open a big blue Rubbermaid tub and rum-
smallprintmagazine.com
B o o g a l o o T o o b y m aT T H e W J a m e s B a B C o C K
mage through football cleats and spelling bee trophies to find my seventh-grade yearbook: 1983 Time of the Tiger. with the slim orange volume to my face, I flip pages. Papery poplar leaves from last season crackle under my boots. a car alarm wails, chirps twice, and goes silent. Somewhere outside, the neighbor kids squawk over who gets to be the boss of the next game of freeze tag. Near the end of the yearbook, I land on a page that shows a picture of traci. She’s wearing her so black-andorange cheerleader sweater, smiling at me through the crooked window of years. In swooping blue ink, her last words to me remain preserved, like a song or dance routine on endless autoplay: Dear Matt, I’m sorry for being a pain in the (crack) in the past. I’m sorry we didn’t have more time together. I still like ya, but it’s a little late, right? Well, maybe later we could become closer and maybe go together. Sorry for being so forward. High school is coming and I won’t forget the little people. Don’t forget when you’re a studly eighth-grader that I can still beat you up. at’s a laugh, right? Well, see ya later. Love, Traci. P. S. anx a lot for at least being a friend. (I miss you).
Boogaloo Too: A Rap, With No Apologies
S
torytime! No reason or rhyme, just a small-town kid big on hard times. a hometown Joe, from Idaho, yo! a tough-luck Chuck, with nothing to show. Uh, that’s right, rewind! take it back to find, you wake up in the world and—whoa!—it’s unkind. So, nothing’s changed, gone strange, deranged! Now, you’re runnin’ and you’re gunnin’ for unlimited range! Jump back, it’s a fact, you’re white, not black. Not beatin’ the dawn, just stayin’ late in the sack. you know, you just wanna blow. but mamma says no, you could take it all the way to a broadway show. Now, just stay sweet, don’t cheat, compete, but the prima ballerinas knock you off
smallprintmagazine.com
your feet. So, you say “No way,” ain’t time to play. I don’t need no Juanita with a capital J! Shazam, no, ma’am! I’m the chowder in the clam. I’m a Hubba bubba Chubba. I’m fatter than Spam. but the dream don’t die, I ain’t gonna lie. I’m heavy as a Chevy, but this kid’s gonna fly! Now, it’s a phase of malaise in my school days. I got ’em sockin in the locker room, rockin’ my ways. Uh, well, traci b., what do you see? Gonna be a rough ride with this kid called me. Gonna make it, don’t fake it, they gonna try to break it. ere’s a gang on my case, and I just can’t shake it. you don’t like the dance, won’t take a chance, gotta jump off the school just to fight in your pants. So walk away, you got nothin’ to say. you’re gonna bail, no sale, we’re D.o.a. but take care, don’t stare at my savoir-faire. I’m gonna rock you like a freaky-fab Fred astaire! I said Smalltown breakers, come blow your mind! Put your hands in the air, and shake your behind. ere’s bill walkin’ tall, and Ryan, his bro. and some kid named Chad, he’s a one-man show! we don’t take no guff, don’t dish no smack. Smalltown breakers like a big Cadillac, come rockin’ down the avenue, shakin’ town Hall, givin’ out what we’re gettin’, and havin’ a ball! we got Jamie and Joe, and me, I’m no slouch. when I move, I kinda groove like a secondhand couch. at’s hard to believe, but I was born to achieve. I said Smalltown breakers, gotta trick up a sleeve. In high society, of notoriety, can’t stand up to our soul variety. e ladies come callin’ (at least for bill), we got love from above, forever to chill. I’m M.J.b. I’m the older me. I got a wife, five kids, and a PhD. ey call me Doctor Rock, I don’t like to boast, but my story is the glory from coast-tocoast. My home’s Jerome, that’s where I roam, when I sink and need to think, I take the road unknown. I’m raw. I’m a geek. I’m flash. I’m chic. I’m tripledecker trouble très magnifique! Gotta think good times, gotta face the bad, from sad seventh-grader to full-time
dad. I missed L.a., I never saw Queens. I was a breakdancing fool in Levi’s jeans. So, call me a poser, call it all whack. try to shoot me down, but I won’t take it back. Leave the beat on the street, where the days were young, and don’t choke, don’t joke at the hard battle won. ’Cause the kids like me lived on to see that the world didn’t end in 1983. Don’t bleed, don’t fade, don’t say it wasn’t you. e dance goes on, and the story rings true. I said who can ever say why we do what we do? all I wanted to do was boogaloo too.
S
e night of dress rehearsal, I’m walking on stage, full makeup, costume. Crew members in black jeans and turtlenecks scale metal ladders like lethargic ninjas. e supporting cast loiters in the green room like clownish courtesans. Painted city scapes, archways, ornate gates, and backdrops hang in the flies, a huge guillotine of colorful plywood and steel framework suspended over our heads. e music director, a plump bearded pirate persona, futzes with his green silk pocket scarf then raps his baton on his music stand. “everybody ready?” e sound of a barnyard emanates from the orchestra pit. “Matt,” the producer calls to me. I turn to face her. She carries a messy clipboard of papers and wears a black stretch-knit dress suit over a silky peach blouse. She bites her lower lip as she chases me down, clonking across the battered black boards of the stage in sturdy heels. “Have you given us your bio sketch for the program?” “bio sketch?” “a little paragraph,” she says. “Some people like to dedicate their show to somebody.” “I don’t need to dedicate it to anyone,” I say, starting stage le. en I freeze, spin, and point to her clipboard. “wait. Say he dedicates tonight’s performance to Juanita Mauldin’s Furniture and Dance.” ■
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 45
Scapple The Software You Didn’t Know You Needed by Gene Wilburn
S
capple is a Mac and windows product from Literature & Latté, the folks who brought us the acclaimed writing tool Scrivener. It derives its name from the verb scapple, which means “to work roughly, or shape without finishing” as in stone leaving the quarry or the first hacks at a piece of sculpture. It’s a short leap to apply the word to the thoughts and ideas around a writing project, a chapter, or set of characters as you begin roughing out your ideas. Scapple could be called, variously, a free-form editor, mind-mapping soware, clustering soware, brainstorming soware, idea associator, or even thought organizer. Its purpose is to help you rough out ideas around plot or character or the topics of a nonfiction piece. I wasn’t convinced, initially, that this was the kind of product I’d relate to. My writing approach is decidedly “le brain.” I tend to start work with a structured outline, generally in Scrivener, then proceed to refine it. Scrivener provides the kind of organizational tools that I’m accustomed to. Scapple sounded perhaps a bit too “right brain” for my comfort level. Nonetheless, I was curious about it and decided to give it a go. at the start, Scapple presents you with a blank screen, a work area that functions like digital paper. you double click anywhere on the screen to write a single word or an extensive note. you connect one entry to another simply by dragging it over to the other and a line forms between them. Lines can be plain or have directional arrows. you can customize any of the entries you make, in terms of font style, colors, and boxes, ovals, or cloud
46
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015
shapes around a word or note. you can stack notes in columns and you can group notes with a separate box around the group. Scapple allows you to paste in graphics as well as enter words, and graphics and notes can be rearranged anywhere on the page by dragging them around the surface. when you have your worksheet complete, you can then simply use it as a guide, drag and drop it onto Scrivener for further refinement, or export it to a number of formats including plain text, rich text, oPML, PNG, and PDF. anything this open-ended and freeform may cause some hesitation at first, if you’re not used to clustering ideas on a blank piece of paper. Fortunately, you can download a fully-working 30-day trial of Scapple to determine if you like it. If you decide to purchase, the price is $15 US, making it one of the least expensive writing tools available.
Scapple changed my mind about this category of product. aer using it for a short time I started to think of it as “the soware I didn’t know I needed.” It seems to jog different parts of the creative process than does a formal outliner. If you’re involved with any kind of creative writing, you may find it well worth your time to try the free trial to see if it works for you. If it does, you’ll have added a useful new tool to your writing repertoire.
Requirements Scapple, $15 US, is available both for Mac oS X (10.6.8 Snow Leopard or later), and windows (XP, Vista, 7 and 8, 32- and 64-bit). It comes with a generous “household” license that allows you to install it on as many computers you have of the same operating system. Payment for Scapple is either by credit card or PayPal and you download the product to your computer to install it. ■
smallprintmagazine.com
TORONTO HERON by TETYANA KOVYRINA
Supermarket on the Edge of Casco Bay by Howard Winn e heron inspects the estuary while mallards float into the tide and frogs fall silent. e parking lot edging the water does not collapse into immobility as shoppers wheel crammed carts to fill the opened rear maws of SUVs and splendid trunks of proper suburban sedans, bMws, Mercedes, Priuses, audis, and an occasional Cooper Mini, or Honda Fit in black, some from “away” which is the ultimate sin. e parking is spiced with an occasional rusty pick-up truck of some authentic Mainer or an ancient Corolla. Shoving aside the detritus of a genuine lobsterman to place the bags and boxes, the resident shopper does not notice birds. e heron raises its head on the long neck, contemplating purchases not for him, and then plunges the beak into his natural market place for free groceries. e mallards rise and fall on the parodies of ocean swells that filter through the islands to lap at the rocks below the parking lot. ey seem unconcerned with shoppers and the heron is an alien creature to ducks and the gallery of the supermarket.
smallprintmagazine.com
SMALL PRINT MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2015 47
“ I C AN ANNOT LIVE WITHOUT BOOKS”
F ST I V FE VAL A L P OS O S T ER E R by P E T E R DE D E SÈ SÈVE
- T H O M A S J E F F E R S ON ON
SEPTEMBER 5, 2015 10 AM -- 10 PM at the WALTER E. WASHINGTON ON CONVENTION CENTER NATIONAL NA ATIONAL B BOOK FESTIVAL IV VAL BO BOARD ARD CO-CHAIRMAN Da David vid M. Rubenstein
CHARTER SPONSORS AARP AARP, P,, Institute Ins of Museum and Libr Library ary Services, The Washington Washington P Post, ost, Wells Wells Fargo PATRON P ATRON National Endowment for the Arts V Volunteer olunteer olun support pr provided ovided by the Junior LLeague eague ue of Washington Washington ash