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Self Portrait as Wikipedia Entry

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Posted on February 6, 2012 in

Dean Rader was born in Stockton, California during the Summer of Love. His sorrow is his own. He believes in star-sting and misnomer; he carries a toy whistle in his pocket. American by nationality, he was conceived in a Fiat near the Place du Châtelet. If asked, Rader will lie and say he doesn’t remember it, but his lazy eyes and hunched back give him away. His left pinky finger, broken from basketball, has never healed, which he attributes to the caesura of distance and longing. His heart, the size of a normal man’s heart, has been used as a model for a forensic mannequin. As a young boy, he once carried a small package to the river, but it was the wrong address. If asked to describe the river, he quotes van Heisenstadt (“die grenzen des wasser nicht vom errinerung”). Rader is not the little cricket. He is not a scissors for lefty. His soul, the size of a tiny condom, slides quickly onto time’s blind spot. In 2004, he was asked about time’s blind spot but responded only that “time, like a bandage, is always already wound and unwound.” Once, as a student in college, he grew a third sideburn. Darkness, his maquette, darkness, his morning coffee. Rader’s father studied to be a mortician; his mother was a therapist and, not surprisingly, Rader pursued both. His head, matted with crude sketches of benches, nipples, and flower petals is roughly the size of the Place du Châtelet. Strong at math from an early age, he helped develop what has come to be known as the Osaka Postulate, which proves that the square root of asyndeton is equal to the inshpere of trespass, skin-spark, and elegy. As for his own spiritual beliefs, Rader is silent, though one of his recent poems, entitled “The Last Day of 34” suggests an influence of Simone Weil (“community is work. // For all I know, God may be in both. / For all you know, God may be both) and Luigi Sacramone (“We want so much. // We only believe / in what we ask for”). Considered neither the lip blister nor the noodle wrenc, Rader has emerged, at least somewhat, as the repetitio rerum. In more recent work, he denies this (though indirectly) citing instead his commitment to interlocutory boundaries (bornage) through what he calls the “phatic interstice.” At present his voice, the pitch and timbre of a young girl’s, asks only for Tang. Consumed by his charity work with the NGO Our Uncle of Instrumentality, he has stopped writing entirely. When questioned about this at a 2007 fundraiser, Rader quipped, “Let my words say what I cannot.” Since then, a fragment of an unpublished poem attributed to Rader has started appearing on the Internet:

Line up and line out
says the moonwhittle.
Loss is the ring on our finger, the bright gem
compassing every step as we drop down.
Believe in what you know and you’ll go blind.

Experts doubt its authenticity.

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Variation Under Nature

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Posted on February 3, 2012

The slow loris dances
With the same strange detachment that
A philosopher argues, nonchalantly, non-chaleur,

Without heat, this pace, never an illogical leap
But always capable of
A quick rhetorical twist:

He says, We are not here to disturb the trees,
Only to win them over
With complete understanding.

The slow loris asks these questions:
Why do we need a resurrection?
Does the fruit fall or leap from the trees?

When I am sleeping,
Who are you, without my attention?
He answers,

The body is a fruit you can’t peel,
Life is energy organized
Into stillness.

Mostly stillness. The night room,
The fruit bats, the liquid giraffe,
The siamungs, the orangutans

Which are dangerous. The zoo,
Is not about hunger, but
About heat.

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Melinda, Doing Her Best

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Posted on January 26, 2012 in

“I think she’s a bad person,” said my friend Fred Hirsch, his face creased into lines of grief, failure to sleep, defeat. A graduate student with a decent job coming up, he was too early for those etchings and purplish bruises.

The person under discussion, Melinda Hopkins, seemed like a fairly standard California and Stanford beauty, except for the shy way she had of not meeting the eyes when you looked at her. The population tended to look at her. Flaxen hair with almost no wave in it; tennis shorts on campus or, for more formal occasions, white tennis dresses; an unusual smoldering thing going on in those eyes that did not meet mine and, according to stricken garrulous Fred, did not meet his, either, as he loomed above her or squirmed beneath her. He said she had a talent for computers, was working on advanced programs for import-export purposes. Even when she made love, or a kind of love, looking into the eyes of others, it was a distraction from her interior life. “Bad, bad person,” Fred repeated.

“She did harm to you, maybe,” I said, a true buddy, “but that’s because you chose to fall. Let yourself get done to.”

“Bad.”

“Hey, come off it. Let’s just say what kind of person she is has yet to be determined. Just, far as you’re concerned, it was a bad deal, okay?”

Closing out my buddy duties for the spring quarter.

Melinda, graduating on one of those glorious June days, kissed her dear ones goodbye, kissing Fred and then turning to me with the same lightning brush against the mouth.

Her father lived in Belgium (sometimes she saw him during the summers); her mother was an actress in New York. It wasn’t convenient for her parents to show up for graduation ceremonies. “They’ve been there, done that,” she explained. “Anyway, Mom is an ingénue, working at it in New York, still the ingénue.” She was smiling more than just at one corner of her mouth, enough smile to assure Fred and me that she saw the humor in her mother’s career. “But she’s not forty yet—well, maybe—so why shouldn’t she play twenty-two-year olds?”

I asked Melinda if she was interested in acting or modeling, and she said they were fifth and sixth on her list of interests, after sheep-ranching in Australia, running garage sales, knitting multicolored skull-caps for Hassidim, and—her serious talent—writing computer programs. “But that’s lonely sometimes,” she said. “So maybe I should get into the ingénue business, like Mom.”

Clever Melinda seemed to have some humor or at least irony. Sad young people often develop this as a useful device.

“I’d like it if you stayed in Palo Alto with me,” Fred said, ever the hopeless nerd. “We could get married?” It was a question. He wanted me as a witness.

She wouldn’t tell him where his idea could be found on her list of career alternatives, but she puffed out her cheeks in a throw-up gesture. She didn’t like it when Fred talked dirty to her, and as to tenure with an untenured professor — hadn’t been there, didn’t want to do that.

“I’m sure Stanford is a fine school with an excellent reputation,” she said. “And I love the architecture, too, all those beige buildings, that time in the computer lab, those rich kids with their fathers living in Belgium or someplace.”

 

Folks like Fred and many other young men tend to judge people by what they do, inadvertently or advertently, and what they look like, and how they happen to lock into the guy’s dreams. Fred made a mistake to set his sights on this high I.Q. campus belle with the programming talent; she was too much for him, her wildness searching to waste something more than a Fred. Personally, of course, well-warned and prudent, all I wanted to do was follow her to the ends of the Earth.

Instead, when Fred and she stopped seeing each other, and I was no longer on campus either, I lost track of Melinda. She ducked. She disappeared off my screen, but I imagined she was still on her own.

And then I heard she was in prison. It shouldn’t make a difference, but I especially disliked the idea of somebody like her doing time. The charge was smuggling cocaine in her luggage on a flight from Ecuador; what did she think, that the dogs and the narcs couldn’t meet her eyes and therefore would spend all their time trying to get Melinda to look at them? That they would spend their strength sniffing at her and not noticing that she was a mule? That a flight from Ecuador was safe because it wasn’t a flight from Colombia?

Her karma was that of a winner, not a loser?

Her Colombian boyfriend had given her such guarantee. “Just carry this, Me-leen-da, and you get twenty thousand nice ones and I get whatever the market turns out to be. I also am taking a chance, my sweet.” He, of course, took another flight.

The market held firm, so in general he won. Coke sales are more reliable than other forms of retail.

On the other hand, a tipster with problems of his own gave her up, so in specific Melinda lost.

The friend who called her Me-leen-da decided to head someplace where there was no extradition treaty with the U.S. to avoid all the time-consuming legal hassles. As to Melinda, sorry about that. Sheet happens.

Fred had given me the news and a few years later told me she was getting out, maybe hadn’t been raped by the matronly truck-driver population of her federal prison, and now what should he do? Surround her with caring, pay for therapy, woo her with his kindness into a new life program that might also include Fred?

“Stay away,” I said.

“Can’t,” he said (wailing).

“Then why are you asking me?”

As it turned out, it was I who had the chance to avoid contact with this bad-luck Melinda, formerly of Stanford University. She called from San Francisco, where I live, and said: “Beached here, man.”

Yes, I would take her to dinner. Probably I also wanted to see what twenty-two months in a federal prison looked like on this fresh-faced, shy-eyed young computer programmer.

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Get Lost

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Posted on January 24, 2012 in

Homeless Dude living in the alley across the street has found a creative way to keep warm. It involves a blowdryer and an industrial outlet near the dumpster. Dude spends half his day blowdrying himself. His dirt-gray tennis shoes with the toes sticking out, his shredded MC Hammer pants revealing a scabby pair of knees, his torn Hawaii sweatshirt with what I hope are ketchup stains all over the front. Being the friendless clinically depressed loser I am, I spend most of my free time watching him from my breakfast table three stories up.

“Dude,” I tell him on my walk to the bus stop Monday morning. “You’re seriously going to kill yourself if you don’t stop it with the blowdryer.”

“Why’d I kill misself?” he asks with a gap-toothed grin as he blowdries his armpits. The alley stinks like singed clothes and ancient sweat and the garbage bins he calls Home.

“Because it’s October, and the rain starts soon—” “Gotta cigarette?”

“No.” A lie.

“Gotta quarter?”

“No.” Another lie. I clutch my messenger bag tighter.

“I ain’t gonna kill misself.” He points the blowdryer at me, hot and nasty.

“Stop,” I say, pulling back my hair, which is everywhere.

“Warm, ain’t it?”

“Smells like burning.”

“I ain’t gonna kill misself,” he shouts louder. I hear someone from my building slam a window shut. “Wanna know why?”

“I need to get to work,” I tell him. I turn and walk up the street and regret the conversation.

“Cause I’m invincible!” he screams after me. “I’ll be invincible ’til I die!”

“Sure thing, Dude,” I say under my breath.

 

I can barely make rent lately. I’m a professional dogwalker. It was kind of my life dream to start this quote unquote business. My best friend Candy wants to sing the blues and I want to exercise pooches. We all have our calling, my father would say. He works for God. White collar. Black suit. He sends his regards in the form of a card once a month, cards with comic dogs on them. I miss him like hell.

I moved from Weed this past May with Candy, best friend since before my memory begins. We came to S.F. to pursue our dreams. There are a lot of nightclubs and restless canines in this city. But snap, I’m talking overnight, Candy fell in love with a man and eloped with the man and soon got impregnated by the man and left me alone in this crappy Tenderloin apartment where I can barely make rent. This was two months ago. I’ve been wandering around this stupid city with all these flashy signs and high rise apartments and hipster haircuts, wandering like a zombie with several dogs on several leashes. Confession: Candy left behind a pillow and I hug it to sleep at night. I never turn the light off, either.

I recently turned twenty-one and got drunk and sat in the back of a dark bar and listened to Candy sing a bunch of Dinah Washington and Nina Simone covers. I wore a fabric flower in my hair and cried into my greyhound. It didn’t start out that way. I was going to surprise her, but then the drunker I got, the more ridiculous I felt, and the more ridiculous I felt, the more I cried, and the more I cried, the more I drank, and the drunker I got. And the cycle, it repeated. Luckily she didn’t notice me. It was crowded. It was dim. I slipped out the back while she sang “Lover Man.” It’s been a month since she bothered to drop by the TL apartment and she hasn’t even invited me to see her new place. His place. I blame my clinical depression on Candy.

 

Oh I still call her, though, and inject fake-happy into my voice and act like everything’s just the best fucking thing in the whole world.

“Hi, Frankie,” she says. “I only have a sec. I just got my ultrasound!”

We squeal. I am sitting at my breakfast table scribbling out a crossword puzzle with an ink pen. “How big is it?”

“Smaller than a finger!”

I draw a finger on my finger. “Wow, just a tiny little worm! What else have you been up to? It’s been days.”

“Things have been just so crazy. Jack’s parents came into town last week, total whirlwind. We just finally got the place clean again.”

I imagine some fancy apartment, one of those skyscrapery buildings that make me nervous with a view of all the bridges and the freeways and the sea of downtown lights. “When do I get to see it?”

“Like I’ve been saying: girl time, soon. I’ve just been so nauseous is the thing.”

I draw a baby on an envelope on the table. It has one eye.

“Did you get my birthday present?” she asks. She sent me a package in the mail even though we share a zip code.

“Yeah.” Pink fisherman’s hat. I love it. I wear it every day. “I’m wearing it right now.”

“Well, I hope you had a good birthday,” she says. I draw flames around the one-eyed baby.

“Yeah.” I wish I could tell her I heard her sing on my birthday, and that she sounded like velvet with a voice.

“Okay, well, hope you’re good.”

“I’ve been super busy,” I say, looking at my calendar, which I realize  is still on last month’s page: the dachsund. I flip it to the beagle and sit back down.

“How’s the apartment?” she asks.

“Same. You know. Watching the nonstop adventures of Homeless Dude through the window.”

“How is Homeless Dude?”

“He’s got a blowdryer and he spends his days blowdrying his smelly ass—”

“Jack’s home! Jack, honey, me and baby are hungry, do you want to make us a sam-wich?”

“To keep warm,” I say, not caring she’s not listening as I tear the envelope with the burning baby on it into tiny bits. “Dude does it to keep warm.”

 

Sometimes I browse dating websites and look at men and women and imagine dating them. I imagine waking up next to them with bedhead, I try to picture the smell of them. I shut my computer. I dated before, but that was back in Weed, where I knew everyone face to face, customers at the pizza parlor or friends of the family or whatnot. Here the people are closer and everywhere on the streets, but there are oceans of awkwardness and strangeness dividing us. If I could, I would live with a hundred dogs. Back home, dad has six golden retrievers. But here Candy picked the apartment that explicitly said no pets in the lease. And now she and Jack live with The Awesomest Dog in the Universe, a blue-eyed husky named Major Tom she sends me picture texts of. Cute!!! I text back while writhing alone in my jealousy. I walk rich people’s pooches in the urban tree-spotted streets of San Francisco. I dream my best friend moves back in with me and we share a bed, I dream I kidnap dogs. I’ve forgotten how to smile back at strangers. No wonder I’m suicidal.

 

On my twenty-first, I walked home drunk in my silver dress, crying my eyeliner down my rouged cheeks. Men woowooed at me out of car windows. Drug dealers offered me a sniff. I passed Homeless Dude curled up asleep with the blowdryer beside him and stopped by the corner market for a pint of Smirnoff and a small OJ. I said to myself, if the guy behind the counter doesn’t say happy birthday to you, then you’re going to go home and kill yourself. And guess what? He didn’t even check my ID or smile back. He looked at my chest and yawned and handed me my change. Little did he know my life was in his latex-gloved hands.

Clearly I didn’t kill myself that night. But I googled suicide and read about it for several drunken hours. Did you know that, worldwide, 30 percent of people commit suicide through the ingestion of pesticides? I found that really interesting and then spent some time Googling pesticides. I looked at firearms online and read about the proper way to slit one’s wrists. I was planning on taking a cab to the Golden Gate Bridge to jump, but ended up passing out on the couch and drooling all over my laptop instead. I’m glad I didn’t jump off the Bridge. It would have been too melodramatic and clichéd. I’m still looking for the best way to die.

 

Today the sky looks gray and ready to turn teary so I open my window to yell at Homeless Dude. I’m eating a PB and J and worried about electrocution again.

“Enough already,” I say. “Don’t you see the clouds?”

“What?” he screams up at me. “You talkin’ to moi?”

“I think it’s dangerous, what you’re doing.” I shake my half-eaten sandwich for emphasis.

“Whatchu just call me, bitch?”

“I didn’t call you anything—”

“Shut the fuck up, both of you,” yells a man from an upstairs window.

“Fuck you,” I yell upwards in his general direction, and it feels good.

“Fuck you,” Homeless Dude screams, brandishing his blowdryer.

“Fuck all of you,” I say. Feels less good the second time, but still good.

I slam the window shut. Make a mental note to self: say fuck you more often. Maybe call Candy and say, Hey, fuck you, Candy.

And that’s the extent of my human interaction today. Saturday. Day off.

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The Slippery Nature of Nonfiction: Q&A with Jackie Bang

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Posted on November 29, 2011

Jackie Bang (photo by Ahmed Freundlich )

Jackie Bang’s story “Silver Mailbox,” which appears in the Winter 2011 issue of ZYZZYVA, is either a heavily fictionalized piece of nonfiction or a heavily factual piece of fiction. Or perhaps something else. The story of a Washington couple — the Miner and the Collector — and the recently-arrived infants brought into their brood, it’s a stylized piece of writing that leaves you eager to learn of the fates of these strange but compelling people. We talked to Jackie Bang via email about her story and the larger work of hers from which it’s taken.

ZYZZYVA: “Silver Mailbox” is the first story from a work-in-progress of yours. Could you tell me more about this larger work?

Jackie Bang: Yes, “Silver Mailbox” is currently the first story in True Tales of the Incognito Circus, a nonfiction book I’m working on that hopscotches between my humble beginnings and my humble now; it is an anti-memoir (a memoir that challenges the general rules and expectations of memoir), a book that gives equal consideration to the faux-horror film Gremlins and to the origins of certain Mormon doctrine. I think aside from this humility (i.e., the being-poor aspect) what binds all these stories together is the recognition that absurdity might as well be grace.

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Princess

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Posted on September 22, 2011 in

The secret to perfect crust is to touch it as little as possible. Jill washes her hands and then gathers the dough into a ball, rolling it out on the countertop. The dough presses into cracks in the old laminate, and she hopes it’s not picking up too much grime. She bought the marble rolling pin special for today, along with eight little aluminum pie tins and child-sized aprons, printed with strawberries and trimmed with eyelet, like something from the 1950s.

“How very Martha,” Liz joked, when Liam tried one on over his dinosaur underpants. “Why I need a skirt to cook?” he asked. He has never seen either of his mothers in an apron. Jill doesn’t wear one to cook, and Liz doesn’t cook.

For Liam’s fourth birthday, he wants a baking party. He loves to help Jill in the kitchen, flinging oily salad greens onto the table, lunging for onions as she’s slicing them, punching at the blender before she has secured the lid. The kitchen wall is splattered with dried pesto and smoothie. He is gaining independence, she reminds herself, borrowing a technique from a parenting book that advised reframing criticism in a positive way. Stubborn becomes determined; whiny is insistent; annoying is spirited. According to this book, children model what they see, echo what they hear, and perform to expectations. Jill and Liz have high expectations for Liam, although of course he can be whatever he wants. At the moment, he wants to be a bus driver or Batman, insisting he does too know who Batman is, although they don’t have a TV and he’s never been exposed to violent cartoons—not like the ones Jill used to watch as a kid, a relentless chase of predator and prey.

She surveys the kitchen, checking to make sure everything is ready for the preschool onslaught. She has rolled out the crust and cut it into circles, so the kids can press it into the little pie tins. The cinnamon, sugar, and butter have been pulsed to a crumb. All that’s left is to peel and slice the apples, which she’ll do at the last minute so that they don’t brown.

It’s hard work, giving little kids the illusion of being in charge, having to do everything for them while allowing them to think they’re doing it all by themselves. For a moment, Jill regrets having insisted that she didn’t need help with this party, sending Liz off to the med school library to study for finals. “It’s just eight kids,” she said, “Hardly brain surgery.” This is their new joke, now that Liz is a resident in neurology. “It’s the least I can do,” she said, meaning, at least I can do this. The truth is, Jill prefers being alone with small children. Only when she is by herself with them can she be herself with them.

“Is it time for my baking party?” Liam says, seizing her by the legs and peering up at her, flushed with anticipation. For the past two weeks, ever since he placed invitations in each of the cubbies at preschool, he has climbed into their bed every morning, asking, “Is it my party today? Why it’s not now yet? When’s it going to be now?” With expectations that high, Jill feared that he was bound to be disappointed, but Liz pointed out that so far, even when things don’t live up to his fantasies, he doesn’t seem to realize it. He’s still innocent like that, still their sweet baby. She leans down to lift the hem of his T-shirt, which says, “Boys Can Too Wear Pink,” planting her lips on his sticky belly. Before they had Liam, she found kids a little repellent, in a way she remembers like a fact but can no longer feel. Nothing about him disgusts her, not really, not yet. She wonders if it ever could.

The buzzer sounds and Liam bounds to the front door. All of the kids seem to spill in at once—Beckett and Kai, Oscar P., Oscar M., Jasper and Penelope—dutifully greeting her, hiliamsmama, before relinquishing wrapped presents on the hall table and chasing after him down the hall to his bedroom, or rather the room that is half his bedroom, half her office. One-quarter her office, if she’s going to be honest. Ten percent and shrinking.

Penelope’s mommy—her name is Nicole, Jill reminds herself—asks to use the bathroom, and Jill wonders if she should invite her to stay for coffee. She runs through the list of what she knows about this woman. Nicole is an endodontist (how is that different from being a dentist?), and a rabid Giants fan; she boasted that she didn’t take off the team shirt for the two weeks they played the World Series, although mysteriously it never seemed to get dirty. Her daughter, Penelope, is Jill’s favorite kid in the class, almost freakishly good at everything she tries, a butch three-year-old with the face of a middle-aged woman and a will of steel. She and Liam are best friends, when they’re not at each other’s throats. A toddler power couple.

Nicole trails after her daughter into Liam’s bedroom/Jill’s office. This morning, Jill got out a Mexican oil cloth, patterned with baskets of fruit, and laid it over her desk, covering it with finger paint and construction paper and Play-Doh, before changing her mind and putting everything away again, instead setting up a stack of the books she’s researching for her dissertation—some by her former grad school classmates—their intriguing titles facing out. She was aware of herself creating a still life: Woman as Scholar. Sometimes, at the preschool drop off, she sees the other mothers eyeing her in her yoga pants, and worries that they think she’s some kind of lady of leisure, some desperate housewife. Liz thinks it’s hilarious that she cares at all what “the other mommies” think, but Liz is going to be a brain surgeon. She never has to drop Liam off at school.

“That’s so cute,” Nicole says, smoothing Liam’s quilt, each square made from a vintage flour sack. “Where did you get it?”

“Actually I made it,” Jill says, not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed of her little craft project. She remembers piecing this quilt while Liz lay on her side in the last trimester of her pregnancy, on bed rest due to high blood pressure. Jill wanted to finish the quilt by the due date, but Liam came three weeks early.

“You’re such a good mom,” Nicole says.

“Thanks,” Jill says.

“I wish I had more time to make cute stuff.”

It’s hardly a criticism, but Jill feels prickly nonetheless. She wants to set the record straight, establish that she doesn’t spend her days doing needlepoint. For the past five years, she has been working on a dissertation on captivity narratives in early American literature, an irony that’s not lost on her. There is no expiration date on when she can file, but neither is anyone waiting with baited breath. Every few weeks, she opens the document entitled “work in prog,” and skims a few pages, marveling at how fluid and unfamiliar the language seems. She can’t remember having had those thoughts, shaped those sentences. They talk about “Mommy brain,” but Liz is the one who gave birth to Liam, the one who was flooded with hormones, who could have used this as a justification for slacking off, not that she ever did. Liz may be the biological mother, but somehow Jill became the wife.

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Savior Gal

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Posted on September 22, 2011 in

There once was a baby born in a shoe, wedge, open toe open heel, Florida
balmy breezes, monsoons, then a single wide white trashed trailer, inauspicious
plastic laundry basket her manger in that backwater Bethlehem.

She grew out of place fast, had the twins, bought a rip-off Gucci bag
in Times Square, raised her kids in its deep pockets, leather and fringe,
no bondage buckles, ‘til they were grown and unemployable. They slept days,
trolled the nasty nights, kept their St. Christopher medals, she’d given, hidden.

She couldn’t find her post trauma Viet vet in the dark in the handbag,
but she threw him a PBJ every day. He left no crumbs. She’d had a baker’s
dozen boyfriends—leather, jeans, cigarette-burned tweeds. Done,
she got her testosterone fix from football nation and the bottom drawer,
but when Mr. Goodwrench got his gadget up her what’s it, she tossed
that rotating spinning vibrating chrome-plate piece of unholy.

She began blond, then blond on blond became a gray-root halo.
Something about her…They come to the diner because they want
to be near her, slinging hash, waitressing—old men “Hel-lo, Mr. Universe,”
women “Sunday got ya sweetie? Have biscuits. Two buck miracles.”

She brings home tips, puts them in the coin purse, curls up
around it, sleeps in heavenly peace (repeat) sleeps in heavenly peace.

She dreams—She’s on an empty city street, she knows if she waits long enough
the circus will come to town, and it does, clowns tumble out, and one clown
helps her find the joke, and she dies laughing,

and she speeds Wherever, in a big white truck like Daddy did—windshield
swipes, hound, chains, painted flames—wearing this cute black T, “Live fast
die pretty,” Garden of Eden tattooed on her inner thigh, no serpent this time
only apples amen.

Elizabeth Robinson is a retired elementary school teacher who lives in Phoenix, Oregon. “Savior Gal” is one of her two poems in ZYZZYVA’s Fall issue.

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Politics

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Posted on September 8, 2011 in

The strike began.  He went to the lobby with the intention of arranging a taxi to Patan Hospital, but none, said the concierge, were available. Literally, none. So thoroughly unavailable that, if you wanted to leave the country, you had to walk to the airport. And, in fact, a lot of people were doing that, with hired porters carrying their luggage. Nepal was shut down—no banks, shops, cars, trucks, no goods coming in or out of Kathmandu, nothing happening, nothing moving. “How long is this going to last?” he asked the concierge. “I have somewhere I have to go this morning.” But the concierge just shrugged and smoothed his eyebrows. “Outside is not good,” he warned.

He took matters into his own hands. His ex-wife, a journalist — technically she was still his wife because they hadn’t signed divorce papers yet — had been traveling in the remote east when the car she was a passenger in veered into a bus, killing 3 people and injuring 16, and now she had twenty screws in her pelvis. Her spleen had been removed, but there was concern about tetanus. Erring on the side of caution, he was going to have her transferred to a Level One Trauma Center in Delhi, and that was why he had to get to Patan this morning. Strike or no strike, he was headed there to fill out paperwork and start things moving. In other words, unlike a lot of the Hyatt Regency’s guests, he wasn’t in Nepal for a trek in the mountains, a rhododendron tour, or a bird watching expedition — but there was no point in telling the concierge this. So instead he found the “business center” — three battered Dells around a corner from the reception desk — and Google-mapped the shortest walking route to Patan. Seven-point-eight kilometers — five miles. Two hours at most. With a bottle of water, a hat, and sunscreen, walking would be his answer to this strike. He printed out the map, got his water, hat, and sunscreen from his room, returned to the lobby with these things in hand, and, waving at the concierge, left.

His map, he soon found, was misleading. He wanted, first, to get to the Ring Road — a straight shot, according to Google — but in truth the indicated route, beyond the immediate pale of his hotel, was a maze of muddy alleys full of flies, dog shit, mangy curs, garbage, and — most immediate of all — poor people. The area was called Boudhanath, and according to his guidebook it was full of Buddhist monasteries. Sure enough, he saw monks walking around. The big point of interest in Boudhanath was its gargantuan stupa, which, according to the guidebook, contained relics of the Buddha. That explained the many shops — right now, all with metal roll-doors down — under signs indicating that they sold things for tourists, like Buddha figurines, prayer rugs, prayer flags, incense, postcards, and thangka paintings. At the moment, though, they sold nothing, because of the strike. Instead of selling goods and wares, the merchants were sitting around, and so was everybody else, except for a few kids playing cricket in the street because — for once, he realized — there were no cars and trucks to stop them, except that on occasion someone blasted through on a motorcycle, taking, he supposed, a political chance. Young guys, reckless and cavalier, always with a passenger, sometimes two. As soon as they passed, things fell quiet again. It was a hot morning in early May — dogs asleep in the shade, garbage reeking. And beggars everywhere. Some were lame and sickly, immobile and imploring, but most were urchins who trotted along next to him trying to look and sound more pathetic than they were. Not that they weren’t pathetic. Half-naked, unwashed, they naturally and inevitably plucked at your heartstrings. But still, he wished they wouldn’t tap his hip eight thousand times in a row while saying “Sir, sir, money, money,” or otherwise, in their half-intelligible ways, pleading their insistent cases. He didn’t think of himself as uncharitable or unkind, but this — this insistence — this was too much. Not the proper context for giving, not the right way, too many unknowns, too invasive, too ambiguous. He decided to pretend these child-beggars didn’t exist, that he didn’t hear or see them, but that was even more infuriating, because it embroiled him, now, in self-examination, and in pondering the conclusion he was rapidly coming to — that you couldn’t win in a case like this. That no matter what you did, you were wrong.

Beset this way, he came to the Ring Road. The Maoists had taken control of it, he could see, by clogging the intersection. In red shirts and bandannas they milled with restless zeal, listening to a speaker exhort them through a bullhorn. Except for a few motorcycles, some oxcarts, bicyclists, water trucks, and a couple of ambulances, the Ring Road was, for the moment, pedestrians only.  In a way, that was lucky; he wouldn’t have to dodge cars. Trying to look full of confidence, bold, he crossed the Ring Road and pressed on toward the hospital. Now his way felt clear and unimpeded. He’d left the tourist zone of Boudhanath behind, which meant fewer beggars, con men, and touts. Once, he saw an air conditioned bus coming at him with a large sign on its windshield reading TOURIST ONLY, as if that was a talisman that could thwart tossed rocks. As far as he could tell, the sign was working. The bus seemed to have carte blanche despite the strike. But then he saw that, behind the bus, there were two Jeeps full of soldiers in blue camo fatigues. They had weapons in their hands and slung across their shoulders. On he walked, with sweaty duress, bulling past the frowns of red-shirted teen-agers, some of whom brandished long, thick staves. Troops had taken up positions. Some kept watch behind sandbagged outposts, while others stood or crouched in the shade, or bounced past in fast-moving, canopied carriers. Well, it wasn’t his business, whatever was going on. None of this had to do with him. But then he came to what his map called a river — mud, plastic bags, garbage, shit — and the road he was on became a bridge blocked by Maoists. Fortunately they were letting pedestrians cross, except that, when he tried to cross, a caramel-skinned and gaunt, tense teen put a hand on his chest to check his progress. They stood like that, facing each other, the Maoist with his imposing stave, he with his sunscreen, water bottle, and hat. While other pedestrians passed in droves, the reality of his circumstances gradually became clear to him: he had to go back, he couldn’t cross.

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Lost Coast

by
Posted on September 7, 2011 in

He wasn’t difficult to find. For a time, in the small little world I inhabit, he was everywhere. These days all you need is six songs and some blog traffic to make people believe you might be a homespun genius, a blessed saint, a prophet of the unconscious. I got his number from his record label — press connections — and called him up.

“Well, fuck me, Walt.” His Midwestern twang was mixed up now with a California drawl. “It’s pretty fantastic to hear from you. I mean, shit, I was just thinking about you the other day. How the hell you doing? You doing good?”

“Not as good as you. You’re blowing up out there, aren’t you?”

“Aw, man, just a run of luck.”

I went on about how great the EP sounded, practiced in my art of inflated praise. He begged off, talked about his collaborators and how the spirit of the old lighthouse they’d recorded vocals in had infused the tracks with something somehow ancient, a kind of lonely vigilance.

“Shit, come on out!” he said when I mentioned I might be heading out west for a few days. To check out the SF scene, I said, maybe write about it for the website. “Stay with me and my girl. We’d love to have you. Man, it’s been too long. I can’t believe it, you and me, making it in the same business! This is cool. This feels really right to me.”

I knew that he was just about to start recording his first full-length album. I said I didn’t want to disturb him during the creative process.

“The first full-length anyone will actually hear,” he said, laughing at his own expense. Meaning all the rest had been ignored, but now that he was trading on his past, his story, he was finally getting some attention. “Nah, Walt, you gotta come stay with me and Vanessa. I’ve told her so much about you.”

Meaning, he’d told her about John.

“I’ll check into a hotel. Don’t want to put you and your girl out.”

But, then, just at the last minute, just as I was getting on my flight at O’Hare, I called him again, asked if I could crash after all. I hadn’t even booked a room, but I lied and said my reservation had gotten lost in the system. Keaton faltered for a moment, then said, “Sure, man, crash with us.”

That’s when I knew it would all go my way.

*

Keaton Wilding, the County B Submarine EP. On the flight, I listened on repeat, ten times or more. Stereogum: “An astonishing debut. Wilding’s tormented past gives staggering depth to songs that, on first listen, seem like simply more blissed-out California pop.” Popmatters: “Wilding assembles a ramshackle cast of San Francisco musicians to craft a sound that seduces and sucker-punches. If Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett had a love child, he would be named Keaton.” All the most fickle websites and magazines, the “tastemakers,” were falling over each other to herald his arrival. Only the site I wrote for, on which all the reviewers are anonymous, had tried to stem the tide: “Capable, but shallow. The kind of bleary-eyed confession that wears itself out quick.”

We were from the same small town. Keaton was two grades behind me. I’d known him through John; the two of them, along with their friend Mason, were hardly apart. I remembered Keaton playing Snowdaze, our winter talent show. Dressed in Birkenstocks and a ball cap, cradling a Taylor acoustic, he sat at the front of the school cafeteria and covered some god-awful song by Phish or String Cheese Incident or August Rawling Band, one of those jam bands still carrying the sputtering torch of the Dead. Keaton and John were always driving off to Alpine Valley or the World to see those late-night spectacles: thirty thousand people, each in their own private dream, twirling and weaving to twenty-minute guitar solos. It was the drugs, not the music, that snared John. And the drugs came from Keaton.

Keaton hit the last chord of the song; the cafeteria echoed with applause. At the senior table, my friends and I smirked — that bullshit stoner music was laughable to us. Back then I was way ahead of the game. All I listened to was free jazz, Bulgarian women’s choirs, Charles Ives, and the Residents (the early albums).

*

Keaton and his girl lived in an apartment way out by the beach. “We’ve got the best view in town,” Keaton said as he led me out the bedroom window and up a narrow ladder to the roof. He lit a Parliament, leaned on the railing, and stared out in the direction of the sea. You could only hear the waves. It was too foggy to see anything other than the tops of a few frumpy sand dunes.

“Vanessa apologizes. She’s over in Oakland with the guys from Silent Partner. She’s doing some woodcuts for their album art and a few show posters. You should review them. Their new record is gonna be rad.”

“I heard their last one, Deadly Silent. Reminded me of Secret Machines.” Not intended as praise.

“They’re such sweet guys, too,” Keaton went on. “They’ve really helped me out along the way. We’ve played a bunch of shows together.” He ground out his cigarette on the railing and turned to me, and for a brief moment we met eyes and I saw in his a question — What are you doing here?

We went back inside. He got us a couple beers and flopped down on the couch. The sandals and ball cap were gone, replaced by threadbare cords, a faded Members Only jacket, and, the latest in affectations, a pair of boat shoes, no socks. Clothes chosen as a parody of clothes. He still wore his hair long, but sheathed now in a week’s worth of grease. The Taylor was gone from sight; in the living room, the beat-up Fender Jazzmaster pictured on the cover of the EP hung from a peg. The burden he carried was more proudly displayed. It was there in every gesture, the way he narrowed his eyes when he took a drag, sighed when he cracked a beer. No more Keystone Light, the swill he, Mason, and John used to drink driving around in Mason’s Jeep. Out here it was Tecate with a wedge of lime.

“How’s it going with the website?” he asked me. “You digging it?”

“It sure doesn’t pay the bills.”

“You probably get a ton of free music though.”

“Everyone gets free music these days,” I said.

“Don’t I know it. That kind of shit doesn’t bug you until you get a record deal. I quit my day job,” he confessed, seeming embarrassed about it. “It’s cool, we’re more or less getting by. But it kind of puts the pressure on. To, you know, ‘succeed.’”

“The EP is doing great.”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “Man, we didn’t have a fucking clue what we were doing with that one. I mean — ” He hesitated, suddenly unsure of himself in a way that made him almost unrecognizable to me — “I was so fucking fried the whole time. What the hell were we thinking — recording in a lighthouse?” He sighed, popped another Tecate. “So, we’re booked for this session at Hyde Street Studios on Friday. Want to come with?”

Come with. He still had a little of the Midwest in him.

“I wouldn’t want to get in your way.”

“Nope. Come on down. It’d be cool to have you there.”

Maybe he thought I’d write about it for the website, get a little early buzz going. Maybe he wanted me there as a reminder of John.

“I’d be honored,” I said.

We drank beer and listened to records. For all the specialized knowledge we had in common, we ran out of conversation quickly, now that business had been taken care of. I said I was getting sleepy. Jet lag. He made up the couch for me. Just before he turned in, he made himself some peppermint tea. He said it helped keep his vocal cords loose.

*

I descend the staircase. Stand out in the street, trembling. A finger of fog drifts toward me, passes through my body. Am I alive? The Jeep “submarines” under the truck trailer. We speak, it seems so real. Didn’t I tell you? Don’t go with them. A foghorn sounds, very far away. Then I feel him, I feel him. He’s there, at the corner, waiting where the murk meets darker night. I quicken my pace. He grows more distant, a patch of dark gray against the dark. Headlights brush past me, a wall of air; I brace for the collision. Don’t go. Don’t go. And then the lights come on.

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O SHIRTWALKERS!

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Posted on September 6, 2011 in

Can you surrey? Can you picnic?
Surrey down to a stoned soul picnic…
And from the sky come the Lord and the lightning.
-from the song “Stoned Soul Picnic” by The 5th Dimension

They hit the streets, those
Single gents spilling out of the cleaners
All partnered up & promenodding
Escorting their dainties.

O You Shirtwalkers!
Drop her, she’s just a thin wire of feigned domesticity
Nothing but a clothes hanger.
The press and starch of your city life
Is blanding your manly.

Don’t you see me passing?
I want to slap my hands against your plackets &
Pop your buttons one-by-one.
Bite my canines down onto your stays &
Pull them full out of your collar.
(I promise you’ll not go floppy.)
I want to spill myself all over your chest like the reddest marinara.

You Over-Laundered Shirtwalkers!
Don’t you crave a whiff of underarm piqued?
It’s nature you’ve forgotten.
Can you surrey?
Can you picnic?

Don’t you know I want to be your little chicken pot pie?

 

Jeannette Allée is a Seattle poet and writer. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry series, Iowa Review, Field, and The Believer. “O SHIRTWALKERS!” is one of her two poems published in ZYZZYVA‘s Fall issue.

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Starting Over

by
Posted on September 1, 2011 in

I can’t not keep coming back
to this place that’s not a place,
its pepper trees, olive trees, lilac,
narcissus, jasmine, here with me
and mock orange and eucalyptus
and working words that fill in others,
an earthquake-enlivened rose bush,
pollarded plane trees and sycamores,
and cypress flat-topped by sea wind.
Here are Interstate concrete,
desert dust, hardpan,
here are cobblestones
and woven bricky streets,
Death Valley’s salt flats,
here are red granite domes
that cool at night and groan.
They are here. The imagination
rushes toward the world
in fear of forgetting anything:
witness and invent, it says,
and stay in motion in every
invented place. It tells me,
here you are the nothing
that is this place,
and all places are you,
none of them yours to keep.

 

W. S. Di Piero, who lives in San Francisco, is a poet, translator, and essayist. His latest works include the essay collections When Can I See You Again? (Pressed Water) and City Dog (Northwestern University Press). His forthcoming book of poems is Nitro Nights (Copper Canyon). “Starting Over” is one of his three poems published in ZYZZYVA‘s Fall issue.

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Sight Lines

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Posted on August 31, 2011 in

My mother has hardly any baby pictures of me, and when I once asked her why, she waved her hand vaguely and said I looked funny. Opening a shoebox, she pulled out a handful of small black-and-white photos with pinked edges. There I was, wispy-haired and dimple-kneed, your basic baby, except for the eyes. My eyes turned inward, especially the right one, as if trying to focus on a spot on the bridge of my nose. Or maybe as if they weren’t ready to see what was out there.

I had known, of course, that I was born with crossed eyes. Because of my crooked eyes, I not only look different, I see differently. And there are some things I don’t see at all. This dusty box of old photos was another reminder of what has been hidden from me.

 

About two percent of newborns have strabismus, meaning one or both eyes aren’t aligned. The muscles that control eye movement and position are imbalanced, so the eyes can’t focus straight ahead. Most strabismic children are born with inward turning eyes, also called esotropia. This is a problem.

Normal vision is “binocular” —both eyes focus on an object or scene, and each eye takes a two-dimensional picture from its perspective. Because of the spacing of your eyes, each picture is taken from a slightly different angle. The brain fuses the two images to create an image that, when interpreted by the brain, seems three dimensional. This fusion, known as stereopsis, creates depth perception.

With strabismus, both eyes take a picture, but because the pupils are off center, so are the images, and the brain can’t fuse them. This means that the brain “sees” two separate images. To avoid seeing double, my brain learned to suppress the picture from the more inward turning right eye.

When I was about a year old, the doctor had my parents put a patch over my left eye. The idea was to strengthen and straighten my right eye by forcing it to work on its own. It wasn’t a cute little pirate patch, but a big Band-aid colored one, secured to my forehead and cheek by a couple strips of white tape. (There aren’t many photos from that time either.) The patching didn’t succeed, so a year later I had surgery. My left eye straightened out pretty well, but the right one shifted from its inward gaze to a position slightly upward and to the right of center.

Without straight eyes, and despite many years of eye exercises as a child to force my right eye to cooperate, I never developed binocular vision. My brain continued to pay attention only to the image from my stronger left eye. I say stronger because it was straighter, but in fact, without glasses, my left eye was about 20/1000. My extreme nearsightedness was made worse by astigmatism—blurriness caused by an asymmetrical cornea. Even with glasses, the vision in my left eye is not very sharp.

* * *

It’s the first dance with the boys’ camp and I want to be pretty. I am twelve, with slim tanned legs and long straight hair, but all I see in the mirror are brown, thick, cat-eye glasses. So tonight I leave my glasses in the cabin and blindly follow the other girls into the dining hall decorated with crepe paper and lanterns. The boys stand awkwardly on one side of the room and the girls on the other. Now a boy is walking toward me—I think—or is he headed toward another girl? He passes her and comes right up to me and asks where I’m from. Up close I can see he’s really cute, with tousled brown hair and spirited eyes. Emboldened, his buddies cross the divide and crowd around me. I am in the center of a group of eager boys. The cute boy asks me to dance, Jim Morrison is singing “Come on baby light my fire,” the room is a blur except for the boy now looking into my eyes. I am Cinderella at the ball: when it is over, I will be able to see again, but he will ignore the girl in the cat-eye glasses.

* * *

Although my right eye sees remarkably better than the left (20/50), my left eye still does all the work. I think of my right eye as a passive participant in my vision; it registers what’s on the right side, but if I want to actually look at something on the right I turn my head so my left eye can interpret it. If I close my left eye, the right eye sees pretty well, but it moves slowly, tires quickly and reads at about the pace of a second grader. Eye doctors never bother to give me a corrective lens for my right eye, because it doesn’t matter.

What I see can perhaps be described as what others see when viewing a movie or photograph. But while my brain can’t perceive depth the way most people’s brains do, I do have some depth perception. My brain (everyone’s brain) uses many cues to judge depth, such as how fast objects move in relation to other objects or how they shift as I move my head. The scientific terms that describe monocular depth perception cues are evocative: kinetic, parallax, distance fog, converging at infinity. The words almost seduce me into thinking these tricks create for me a fully three-dimensional world. In fact, some scientists and doctors believe that people with my type of vision—monocular, one eyed—are only at a disadvantage when seeing things close up.

* * *

Mrs. Powell, my sewing teacher, frowns at me. I lick the end of the kelly green thread and try again. I hold the needle close to my face and slowly bring the thread toward the sliver of light at the needle’s eye; my eyes burn from the effort of focusing. The thread brushes past the needle like strangers passing on a narrow sidewalk. The other girls are sewing rickrack onto their aprons with tidy little stitches but I haven’t started because my needle and thread are in two dimensions and the needle is like a reflection, never exactly where I expect it to be.

* * *

I have always wondered about what normal people see. Take stereoscopes. When I look through one at, say, a photograph of the Eiffel Tower, I see it with my left eye, and I think it looks just like the real Eiffel Tower. When others look through the stereoscope first with one eye, and then with their two normal eyes, they say the Eiffel Tower is suddenly three-dimensional, poised in the space around it, real in a way that a two-dimensional photograph is not. Real is also the word my husband used when we saw a 3-D movie recently. To me, it looked like any other movie. So if the three-dimensional world is real, does that make my world unreal?

A few years ago I read an article suggesting an answer to that question. It was about a woman with strabismus and monovision. She had a type of strabismus in which neither eye is dominant; instead, the brain shifts rapidly between the image from the left eye and the one from the right. She began intensive vision therapy to train her eyes to work together; within weeks she achieved stereovision. Her descriptions of what she sees now versus what she saw with monovision are like the difference between seeing the world in color instead of shades of grey. Objects stick out in space, everything is more textured, sharp, colorful, nuanced. When she goes for a walk, each flower, each leaf she sees seems to stand out by itself. When it snows, she feels as if she is among the snowflakes instead of looking at a flat plane of falling snow.

Vision therapy won’t work for me because my right eye can never be strong enough to get my brain’s full attention: I will never walk inside that snow globe. Reading that article was like reading a travelogue from someone visiting a beautiful country I know I’ll never get to see. It’s a land of stunning vistas, glorious colors, gorgeous sights — but my passport is no good there. For the first time, I understood the enormousness of what I was missing.

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